The table is laid with a lavish array of delicate dishware that seems meant more for decoration than for use.
“Imagine daring to eat off such beautiful things!” I say to someone, slightly giddy.
In a luxuriance of bright lights and amber gleams (vast mirrors reflecting the gold of the frames, the crystalline glassware, the shining silver), I’m sitting across from that thin, austere man, the captain, by virtue of the custom that the ship’s master distinguishes between his passengers according to their prosperity and invites those in first class to share his table and the honor of his presence.
Oh, I tell myself—happy, lighthearted, almost untroubled—isn’t it nice to be favored, and how long has it been since any sort of privilege was bestowed on me?
Because the captain sees me. We’re sitting face-to-face, and he regularly sees me and smiles, the same formal rictus he shows all his guests, and so, I tell myself, almost drunk with relief, it’s as if other rules prevailed at sea, rules that don’t include recoiling in disgust from people like me, and who knows, maybe rules that don’t include bothering with or even knowing about the kind of codes that have governed Ange’s and my existence in Bordeaux all through the past year.
Because the captain sees me. I don’t look like anyone else at this table, but here I am, and those aged heads nod at me when our eyes meet, and I nod my drunken, laughing head back, my astonished, eager head. The profusion of lights hurts my eyes. Sometimes I close them to give them a break. And when I open them again nothing has changed, not the senseless extravagance of the countless dazzling lights, not the captain’s cold cordiality, not even the little nods of my tablemates’ heads, their pale faces sagging with excess, quivering, wrinkled flesh, discreet salutations making clear that we’re members of the same clan.
I have money, I tell myself, and here that’s what matters, it erases everything else. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that simple and just? How I now hate Nathalie with her pity and her rigid ideas about “people like me,” how amiable I find these old tourists around me, who judge nothing but the presumed abundance of my means. And so, I tell myself, whatever it is I’m supposed to be isn’t inevitably and everywhere visible, and a luxury cabin on a Mediterranean ferry can blind people to it, whatever it is that I still don’t see myself!
I feel slightly lost. A waiter sets a mayonnaise-slathered half lobster before me. The captain tells a joke. Everyone laughs. I can’t help blushing, my cheeks are hot and damp. I wish he’d give it a rest, but now he’s on a roll, and basking in his success. No one’s looking at me in particular, that’s not where the danger lies.
But my heart is uneasy, the side of my heart that’s still decent, appalled, and humiliated, but meek, so very meek.
I swallow some mayonnaise, and unlike Noget’s it tastes bitter and salty, like a concoction of tears and snot. Everyone around me is still laughing, their flesh heaving, excited. The captain tells a joke. It has to do with grotesque and odious people, intolerably ugly and stupid, and it’s about Ange and me, and my ex-husband and Corinna as well. The punch line is feeble, the humor crude. Oh no, it’s not funny at all.
Is Ange being punished for marrying me? Is he marked because he ended up becoming like me, just as people take on the traits of the evil thrust into them, which doesn’t frighten them, which they even take for a good thing?
It’s not funny at all, I’d like to shout, pounding my knife on the table. The captain keeps up his banter, so amused at himself that he bursts into laughter before he’s thrown out a new quip, leaving the crowd hanging on his every word, quivering with impatience, the forks in midair, the lobster forgotten, and sometimes the pent-up laughter rebels against its confinement in their jowls and erupts before its cue, in little belching blurts. My eyes fill with tears. But I’m here, protected by my money, anonymous in this exuberant illumination—I’m here, elegantly made-up and properly coiffed, and yes I’m too fat and slightly sweaty in the heat of the lights, but aren’t we all, around this table, overweight, sweating, and worn? I’m here, and delighted to be here in spite of everything, and then I suddenly hear myself adding my forced laughter to the salvo that greets the captain’s latest sally, and then my laughter strengthens, swells, dries my eyes. Mouth agape, bent over the table, I laugh so hard my throat feels ready to rip open.
I see Nathalie walk past the double doors that separate us from the ordinary dining room, left open because of the heat. She hesitates, then stops for a second, poised on one leg. I see her looking at my cackling face, my jutting teeth. Paralyzed by my demented joy, I’m incapable of acknowledging her in any way. Oh God, I ask myself, did she hear that last joke?