Delicacy (12 page)

But this charm was shattered when the issue of sex came up. Marilyn certainly had made a lot of effort, but the day when he tried to touch her wonderful breasts, she couldn’t control her hand, and her five fingers landed on Markus’s astonished cheek. He turned around to look at himself in a mirror and was stupefied by the appearance of red on his white skin. He would always remember this red and associate the color with rejection. Marilyn tried to excuse herself by claiming the gesture had been impulsive, but Markus understood what wasn’t being put into words. Something animal and visceral: he disgusted her. He looked at her and began to weep. Each body has its own way of expressing itself.

This was the first time that he cried in front of a woman.

He obtained the Swedish version of an associate’s degree and decided to leave for France. A country where the women weren’t Marilyn. He’d been hurt by this first romantic episode and had developed a sense of self-protection. Maybe he would follow some path in life that was an alternative to the world of sexuality. He was afraid of suffering, of not being desired, for valid reasons. He was fragile, but had no idea that fragility could be touching to a woman. After three years of urban-style loneliness, despairing of ever finding love, he decided to take part in a speed-dating session. He’d have a chance to meet seven women
and talk to each for seven minutes. An infinitely brief time for someone like him: he thought he would need a minimum of a century to convince a sampling of the opposite sex to follow him on the limited path of his life. But something strange happened: during the first encounter, he had the feeling of something in common. The girl’s name was Alice,
g
and she worked in a pharmacy
^h
where she was sometimes responsible for the beauty shop.
ⁱ
To tell the truth, it was a simple enough situation: both of them were so uncomfortable with the proceedings that they were able to relax with each other. As a result, their encounter was ideally uncomplicated. After the speed-dating sequence, they hooked up again to extend their seven minutes. Which became days, and then months.

But their story didn’t last out the year. Markus adored Alice but didn’t love her. Even more importantly, he wasn’t attracted to her enough. What a dreadful predicament: for once he’d met someone good, and he absolutely wasn’t in love with her. Are we always condemned to the incomplete? During the weeks their relationship lasted, he made some headway in learning about being a couple. He discovered its strengths and its capacity for feeling loved. Because Alice fell madly in love with him. It bordered on the disturbing for someone who’d only known maternal love (and not even that, really). There was something
very sweet and quietly moving about Markus, a mixture of a kind of strength that reassured and a weakness that melted your heart. And it was exactly that weakness that made him put off the inevitable—leaving Alice. But that is what he finally did one morning. The young woman’s suffering wounded him in a remarkably intense way. Perhaps more than his own suffering. He couldn’t resist weeping, but he knew it was the right decision. He preferred being alone to digging a larger pit between their hearts.

This was the second time he cried in front of a woman.

For almost two years nothing happened in his life. He’d begun to miss Alice. Especially during subsequent speed-dating sessions, which were especially disappointing—not to say humiliating—when some girls didn’t even make the effort to talk to him. As a result, he decided not to go to any more. Had he perhaps given up all thought of living with someone? He was beginning to see nothing interesting about it at this point. After all, there were millions of single people. He could do without a woman. But he was telling himself this as a rationalization, to keep from thinking about how unhappy his situation made him. He dreamed so much about a female body, and sometimes he wore himself out thinking that he’d always be denied it from now on. That he’d lost his passport to beauty.

And suddenly, Natalie had kissed him. His supervisor and an obvious source of fantasy. Then she’d explained to him that it hadn’t existed. So he’d just have to get used to it. It wasn’t such
a big deal, really. Yet he’d wept. Yes, tears had flowed from his eyes, and that had deeply surprised him.
Unexpected
tears. Was he that fragile? No, that wasn’t it. He’d taken a worse clobbering many times before. It was just that he’d been especially moved by this kiss; not just for the obvious reason that Natalie was beautiful, but also because of the madness of her action. No one had ever kissed him like that without making an appointment with his lips. That was the magic that had moved him to tears. And now, to the bitter tears of disappointment.

Forty-eight

That Friday evening, as he left, he was really glad to be able to take refuge in the weekend. He was going to use Saturday and Sunday as two thick blankets. He didn’t want to do anything, didn’t even feel like reading. So he put himself in front of the television. That was how he ended up witnessing the speech of the American candidate for president, Barack Obama, on election night in the United States. As Obama himself admitted, he hadn’t been the likeliest candidate. Compared to the other front-runners, he hadn’t much money behind him or that many corporate endorsements. It was the people, rather than the political machines, who were going to lead him to victory. And he had galvanized all of them with a simple statement: “Yes, we can.” What a fabulous statement, thought Markus. Obama went on to talk about the challenges, setbacks, and false starts he and his supporters would inevitably face. And then he began describing a 106-year-old black woman, born just a generation past slavery, who’d stood in line in Atlanta on election night and cast her ballot. Obama said that, like all of us, she’d seen heartache and hope. And then he repeated the same simple statement, “Yes, we can.” After that, he went on to mention all the trials and
challenges that his country had faced in the twentieth century, from the First World War to the Great Depression to putting a man on the moon, and he summed it all up once again with the simple sentence, “Yes, we can.”

Markus was captivated by the determination of Obama, who was willing to fight with extraordinary—if not to say supernatural—will. In the drive of this political animal he saw everything that he was not. And it was indeed on that Saturday night, absorbed in reports about the American presidential election, that he decided to fight. That he decided not to leave things as they were with Natalie. Even if she had told him that all was lost, that nothing could be considered, he continued to believe in it. Whatever it cost, he would be the president and commander in chief of his life.

His first decision was easy: reciprocation. If she’d kissed him without asking, he didn’t see why he couldn’t do the same. Monday morning, first thing, he was going to see her and pay her back in kind with his lips. To do it, he’d stride toward her with a determined step (the most complex part of the strategy: he’d never been very adept when it came to walking with a determined step) and would take hold of her in a virile manner (the other complex part of the strategy: he’d never been very gifted when it came to doing anything at all in a somewhat virile manner). In other words, the attack was promising to be complicated. But he still had all of Sunday to get ready. A long Sunday of the American Democrats.

Forty-nine

President Obama’s Remark at the Al Smith Dinner
Regarding the Issue of His National Origin

“Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-El, to save the planet Earth.”

Fifty

Markus was at Natalie’s door. It was time to act, something that plunged him into the most perfect inaction. Benoît, a coworker from his team, walked by.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Um … I’ve got a meeting with Natalie.”

“And you think you’re going to see her by standing stock-still in front of her door?”

“No … it’s just that we have a ten o’clock meeting … and it’s nine fifty-nine … so, you know me, I don’t like to be early …”

The coworker walked away feeling more or less the same way he did one day in April 1992. When he’d seen a Samuel Beckett play in a suburban theater.

At that point, Markus was forced to act. He went into Natalie’s office. Her head was buried in a file (114, maybe?) and she raised it immediately. He walked toward her with a determined step. But nothing can ever be simple. On the way to Natalie, he had to slow down. His heart was beating harder and harder, in a real Election Day symphony. Natalie wondered what was going to happen. In fact, she was somewhat afraid. However, she was well
aware that Markus was niceness incarnate. What did he want? Why wasn’t he moving? His body was a computer in need of debugging because of data overload. His data was all emotional. She got up and asked him, “What’s happening, Markus?”

“…”

“Is everything okay?”

He managed to focus on what he’d come to do. He took her suddenly by the waist and kissed her with energy he didn’t know he had. There was no time for her to react before he’d already left the office.

Fifty-one

Markus left that strange scene of a stolen kiss behind him. Natalie wanted to plunge back into her report but finally decided to go and look for him. She’d felt something complicated to define. As a matter of fact, this was the first time in three years that someone had taken hold of her like that. Without thinking of her as something fragile. Yes, it was strange, but she’d been shaken up by his hit-and-run, nearly savage gesture of virility. She walked through the hallway asking the employees she passed on her left and her right where he was. No one knew. He hadn’t gone back to his office. That was when she thought of the roof of the building. In this season no one went up there, because it was very cold. He had to be there. It was just as she’d thought. There he was near the edge of the roof, looking quite calm. He was making little movements with his lips—puffs, obviously. He looked like he was smoking, but without a cigarette. Natalie walked silently up to him. “I come up here, too, sometimes, to hide. To breathe,” she said.