CHAPTER 9

Madame Métier Confesses

Basking in Mademoiselle Objet’s new peacefulness, Madame Métier became more organized. Now every morning she came in on time to the workroom. Each day she had sort of a plan, an overview of what needed to be done. Rather than always running off, disappearing at noon in her red bathing suit, she attended to her work. She could attend to her work, she knew, because in the background hours after work, she was enjoying Monsieur L’Ange—walking and talking, waking and sleeping, making love with him.

In the midst of this, her newly acquired ability to focus, she was able, with Mademoiselle Objet’s assistance, to lay out an entire plan for the TeleVisions station, a series on the magical properties of plants. “We shouldn’t perhaps call it ‘magical,’” she said. “Someone might misunderstand. We should call it simply the ‘healing properties of plants.’” And so, not long after her program introducing the calla lily creme, she started filming a ten-part series on medicinal flowers.

Meanwhile, orders for all the original cremes kept flooding in. From time to time she still made visits to the Orphans’ Hospital. She had also started making speeches, to a variety of groups, about the healing power of plants and their electric energy and how to extract the power of light from living botanical foods.

In all she did, she now seemed more quietly, insistently radiant at the center. Day by day she had become surprisingly efficient; and Mademoiselle Objet, in her presence, had become remarkably calm. It was less interesting, less dramatic to be sure, the way they now passed the days, but to Mademoiselle Objet, it was heaven. She could now endlessly bathe in Madame Métier’s luminous presence, and she sensed that for Madame Métier, too, these days held a special magic.

“You’re happy, too, aren’t you?” she asked Madame Métier one afternoon, when as usual, after work they were sitting together and drinking tea.

“Yes. I am,” said Madame Métier dreamily, looking out the window. “I have always been happy by virtue of the miracle of having been chosen to be alive. And I have always been grateful for my work, for this exquisite relationship with the spirits of plants. I’ve been happy—in spite of our sometimes misfits of the past—that you’ve been here to help me so long. But I’m happy now because now I also have love.”

She stumbled a little as she said this, was aware of the tiniest clattering of her pale-blue teacup against its pale-blue saucer. Uncharacteristically, Mademoiselle Objet said nothing. In the pale-violet light of the late afternoon she waited, leaving a space in the air should Madame Métier choose once again to occupy it with words.

“I’m so fortunate,” Madame Métier went on, “to now finally, also, be loved as a woman.” She wasn’t sure whether, once having made this disclosure, she wanted to say more or if she preferred simply to let it stand as it was, a fact that was also a mystery, without elaboration.

“I’m in love,” she said finally, setting her teacup down like a period at the end of a sentence.

Once again, Mademoiselle Objet said nothing; then finally she couldn’t resist. She knew that Madame Métier had once been married to a handsome doctor, and her curiosity got the best of her. “You weren’t in love when you were married?” she asked.

“No,” said Madame Métier. She looked out the window, drifting. “I was young,” she said, “very young. I married for the wrong reasons. As you perhaps know, marriage just in itself isn’t always a guarantee of love. It’s a habit of the human condition, a way we have to go about living—and sometimes, for the fortunate few, it is also about love.”

She paused. She felt revealed in saying all this, like an open sardine tin with all its silvery contents exposed. She wondered, in fact, just why she was saying all this. Was she saying it for herself or of Mademoiselle Objet? She didn’t know. And yet she felt open, willing to speak for some reason, like a person, merely, a woman with a woman’s life, not as a maker of cremes; and it was from this new, this unfamiliar and vulnerable place, that she was choosing to say all these things.

“Personal love … that’s what I’ve never had,” she said, finally. “Love in the body. The love of a man for a woman.”

She listened to what she was saying. Each sentence seemed like a statement from a billboard, so bold, so huge was its message. She could feel the great silent complexities that each of her sentences contained, and yet she felt utterly unable to elaborate. Her skin sang. Her heart was full. That was all she knew at the moment. Finally, she said simply, “Thank you for asking. Yes, I am very happy.”