Nine o’clock and it was sparkling. The sun, eager to begin its day, was already bathing our bedroom in generous rays. David’s contact at the Weather Channel had kept his promise: it was a gorgeous day, not a cloud in the sky. That was my first thought, the morning of our wedding day.
I awoke much too late for such an event. Sleeping Beauty lost in eternal slumber (it had taken me a long while to find sleep after I had gotten home from the Hôtel des Charmes), I was waiting for the kiss of redemption from my sweet prince.
“Good morning, Mrs. my wife!” David beamed when at last I opened my eyes.
Seated at the edge of the bed, he was wearing khakis and a light-yellow polo. I could already hear the busy chatter of people bustling around the house, courtyard and garden included.
“In three hours, dear sir,” I echoed his playful tone, pointing to the shorter of the two steel clock hands. “Not before. For the moment, I am Miss your fiancée.”
“Whatever the missus wishes. Still, the mister would like to remind Miss his fiancée that she has just barely enough time to get ready.”
As he spoke, I noticed that the silk armband had changed color. It was usually pearly white, but now it was a light gray. The change was so subtle that, depending on the light and angle, it could easily be confused with the other version. I presumed, however, that this one matched David’s gray suit of the day better.
“You’re not dressed?” I asked.
“No. There are still a ton of things to do, and since it’s supposed to be hot, I don’t want to get armpit stains on my suit.”
There we were. Smiling, beautiful, happy. I spoke without artifice, trying to be as carefree and casual as possible. And yet I also had to remain extremely concentrated so as not to betray the fact that I had recently learned a lot of things about him. David the manipulator. The pervert. A man who was crazy or sad enough—the same thing, really—to devote seventeen years of his life to bag an ordinary girl like me. And then twist her mind and body to make her conform to his painful memories. One woman for another, but this time she fit his expectations so well that no sickness or accident could tarnish his prefabricated happiness.
“Okay. You’d better get going! I’m sure Armand has lots for you to do.” I tried not to force my smile.
“Oh, yeah. It isn’t work that’s lacking!” he cried as he left.
BEFORE DONNING MY CEREMONIAL GARB, and after being primped by the hairdresser and makeup girl, I threw on some gray sweats and went downstairs. The beehive of activity was impressive, exhilarating, even: each person seemed to be following an invisible thread tied tautly between the starting point and finish line. All the relevant trades were hard at work: hostesses, cloakroom attendants, laborers, gardeners, cooks, sommeliers, waiters and busboys, florists, laundrywomen, pyrotechnists, roadies and sound techs, and all manner of extras for particular guests and other functions; I had trouble identifying everyone.
“Hello, Armand,” I called to the majordomo.
“Hello, Elle. Best wishes for this magnificent day!”
“Thanks.”
His awkward formality made me uneasy, so much so that I hastened to change the subject.
“What are those people doing in the garden?”
I nodded discreetly in the direction of two elderly women, both wearing white cotton outfits, their hair wrapped in bright scarves. They were crisscrossing the space where the tables were set up. One held a clock, while the other raised a finger in the air.
“Oh, those are the feng shui ladies.”
“Feng shui?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes. I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but it’s a present from Louie: he hired some specialists to survey the reception space to ensure that your wedding unfolds under the best possible conditions.”
Question: Is there such thing as erotic feng shui? Can we influence the nature and quality of our encounters by arranging the space in which they take place? Would my clitoris be more sensitive depending on furniture placement and wall color? My anus more susceptible to dilate for those interested in exploring? Would my lover’s erection be harder?
My advice: Choose orange for multiple orgasms!
Handwritten note by me, 6/18/2009
FROM ANYONE ELSE, THE GIFT would have been surprising, but I recognized my future brother-in-law—a man devoted to places and their memories—in it. I wondered if he would take the same precautions with his new residence, Mademoiselle Mars’s old house. Probably . . . That reminded me of another question: When would he be moving in? When would the man who had subjected me to so much humiliation and distress over the past few weeks, the man who had also exposed me to such exciting intensity—when would he be our neighbor?
I left the old servant to his emergencies and continued my rounds. There was not a nook or cranny that had not been touched by the industrious army. Avoiding coatracks and platters, chairs and desks, zigzagging between tables and decorated trolleys, was a sport unto itself. I refrained from tallying the unbelievable quantity of provisions, all wrapped with incredible care. Some food items disappeared under silver domes or aluminum foil; others I barely had time to see. Amid this mountain of delicacies, I was reminded of the queen of foodies who could no longer enjoy sugared treasures, not even a crumb.
I had not been away from my phone since I’d been awake but had been delaying a call to the nurse on duty. She concisely informed me that my mother had regained consciousness but that she was still very weak. My mother’s words, like her days, were numbered. From now on, she would speak parsimoniously, stripping every sentence down to the bare essentials. Listening to others also seemed to exhaust her. “I think she’s kind of saving herself for you,” the nurse said, making me feel guilty. At least she spared me the fateful question, the one I dreaded most: When are you coming to see her?
When it would be too late? When it would no longer be a question of days or hours but minutes? When she wouldn’t be able to recognize me anymore?
My wandering had at least one virtue: to clear my head. I floated through the different rooms and people, careful not to get in the way. When I got to the main tent, which the workers had finished setting up the night before, I approached a young man wearing a white shirt and black vest. He was laying out name cards on immaculate porcelain plates. He seemed very young, his guest list and seating chart in one hand, his eyebrows furrowing. His level of concentration made me smile.
“Hello. How is everything going?”
“Hello . . . ,” he replied, barely raising his eyes.
“I am . . . I’m the bride,” I said, feeling like I should introduce myself.
My clothing contradicted this assertion, so I pointed to my well-coiffed hair, twirling a finger around the high bun.
He interrupted what he was doing and straightened at once to face me, as though I had caught him doing something he shouldn’t:
“Oh, sorry! Hello, Madame! I mean, Mademoiselle. Congratulations.”
I almost burst out laughing, but instead offered a playful and what I hoped was a reassuring smile.
“Thanks. But I don’t want to keep you from your work.”
Then I noticed the tented rectangular card he had just set on the immaculate tablecloth, from which wafted the heady scent of freshly cut flowers. luc doré, it said. To the surprise of the young man, I quickly reached for it. But it wasn’t the name of the guest that made my chest tighten.
Luc Doré
No, it was the peculiar script. The very same handwriting as in my Ten-Times-a-Day.
“Excuse me,” I disturbed the young man again. “Do you know who wrote the names on these cards?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle. It was Monsieur Armand.”
“Are you sure?”
He puffed himself up a little, delighted to be asked about something more noble than where to place name tags, though he remained polite.
“Absolutely. I saw him do it earlier. The ink isn’t even dry on all of them.”
I shivered at this thought: Armand, ever Louie’s accomplice, taking dictation, writing out all the scandalous things I had read over the past weeks. What had Louie offered him in exchange that would have gotten him to accept such a disgusting and thankless task? A few extra bottles? A blind eye to his pilfering from the family wine cellar?
Or was Armand as perverse as the man who had been commissioning his services? Never trust seemingly innocent old men. You never know what kind of desires are crawling in their corduroy pants, or what kind of life lies anything but dormant under their cable-stitched vests.
I wonder if Louie also kept a journal of our encounters. Did he keep a record somewhere of what he’d felt at each of our meetings? Does he also have a Ten-Times-a-Day that’s even more hard-core?
He who holds his writing so dear, who wishes he could live off his pen. What words might he have found to express my turmoil, my body that hungered for him, my sex being penetrated by all those objects he had given me as a substitute for himself?
Handwritten note by me, 6/18/2009
OF COURSE, THE GUILTY MAN was nowhere to be found. Wherever I asked, I was sent to another part of the building. Ultimately, I didn’t care. I knew enough already.
The door rang incessantly, its perky chime announcing a parade of suppliers and deliveries: food, flowers, bottles, various dishes and fabrics, sound or pyrotechnic equipment, etc.
I was greeted by a different kind of package when I walked through the entry on my way to the bedroom:
“It’s me!”
Sophia, draped in the most scandalous dress I had ever seen, was standing there, her arms raised in a triumphant V, her hips swayed to one side in an alluring fashion.
“That’s right, hon. Jaw-dropping.”
She kept her pose, no doubt waiting for me to circle her a couple of times in rapture! The scrap of fabric was not only extremely close-fitting but also transparent in parts. It was shorter than any other miniskirt you could find in normal stores. Surprisingly, maybe because of its color—off-white—it wasn’t vulgar.
“Holy cow! Are you looking for a man?”
“A man, I don’t know . . . But I think I’ve found it!”
She didn’t need to specify. I knew her well enough—her and her obsessions—to know what she meant: her ideal outfit, the one that would make her irresistible to men. The perfect mantrap.
I nodded and made an exaggerated face in approval.
“It looks like it. Short of melting fabric to your skin, I don’t see how it could get any tighter. Where did you find this marvel?”
“While Peggy and I were sorting through her old clothes. Can you believe it? She was going to throw it away!”
“But isn’t Peggy two sizes smaller than you?”
“Exactly! You think you’re going to turn heads by wearing clothing your size?” she argued cheekily.
“Well, when you put it like that . . .”
She smiled brightly, erasing the memory of the troubling events from the night before.
“Well, anyway. Don’t you have another dress to show me?”
On the way to my bedroom, she stopped in front of every half-open door to marvel at the sumptuous decor.
“When you told me about this place, I never imagined it was so luxurious!”
I shrugged, as if to apologize and signal that, like her, I was just a guest. In no way was I responsible for this abundance of refinement. Sophia looked like she was really going to faint when at last I took out the Schiaparelli from its impressive garment bag and carefully laid it on the bed.
When she got over the shock, Sophia said in a humorous tone, her love for me far greater than any sense of bitterness or jealousy:
“Remind me to marry a billionaire in my next life. Okay?”
“No problem.” I laughed. “I’ll remind you.”
“Will you put it on now?” she asked eagerly.
I stared at her for a second, as an idea, one worthy of our college days, dawned on me and a smile spread across my face.
“Just a second . . . I have an idea.”
Then I headed into the closet, where I found bobbins of thread, a pouch filled with needles, and several scraps of colored felt.
“Wait . . . You’re kidding, right?” Sophia said as I came back out.
She saw where I was going with this. She knew how much I loved to sew.
“Does it look like it?” I challenged as I threaded a needle.
“Crap, Elle, you can’t customize your wedding dress! Seriously!”
“Hmm . . . You’re right. It’s a little too serious for my taste.”
She was practically choking with indignation, her hand reaching toward mine to stop me from committing such blasphemy.
“No, seriously, do you know how much a dress like that costs?”
To be honest, I don’t know what had gotten into me. The simplest answer that came to mind was: I wanted to be myself.
“Yes, exactly . . . ,” I agreed. “That is exactly the problem: I know the price.”
And I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that I wanted to pay it, either today or any day. So then, why not make this silken burden more agreeable? Why not add a little color, my colors? Hopefully, then I could forget the woman for whom this dress had been a shroud.
Intuition: Our fantasies are like the scraps of fabric I use to spice up my dresses. You add them here or there, livening your real-life with color, breaking out of the monotony. You can use them to customize your sexuality.
Some examples: A mouth welded to my sex; a torso glued to my ass; a tongue licking my vagina from top to bottom, as though washing it . . .
Handwritten note by me, 6/18/2009
WITH A FEW SNIPS OF my scissors and some simple stitching, I made a field of wildflowers, purposely rough and haphazardly placed. I attached them to the dress with a topstitching that I tried to make as visible as possible.
Sophia didn’t know what to say or do to stop me from committing such carnage.
“Aren’t you scared of how David will react?”
“Scared? No . . . I’m not scared anymore,” I replied without one second’s hesitation.
As I thrust my needle into the fabric with rage, I told her about Armand’s complicity—this time there was proof—in the Barlet brothers’ detective-novel plots. Knowing that, I felt at liberty to plant a few seeds of fantasy and rebellion in their perfect little story line. They were so relentless I very well could follow in Aurora’s footsteps.
“Now I understand how Louie knew so much about me before we even met. Easy: he had two spies!”
“Know what, exactly?” Sophia asked.
“You wouldn’t believe it. Things that only come up in pillow talk.”
Sophia has a high tolerance for twisted plans. But even she has her limits, her morals. And respect for privacy is one of them.
“Do you mean David told him about how you fucked?”
“Based on some of the messages . . .”
I paused a second to take inventory of all the little secrets I had told David—if he wasn’t the source, then I didn’t even want to know where Louie was getting his information—which had later appeared in the notebook: the first time I had touched myself; how I liked doing it doggy-style; my abnormal sensitivity to intimate smells; my orgasms, how I screamed no instead of yes . . .
“ . . . There’s no other possible explanation.”
“Gross!” Sophia sneered like a teenager.
We giggled, covering our mouths with massive tufts of silk.
My alterations were soon finished. Sophia didn’t say much, since she knew I really didn’t give a damn if she cried murder. Then, like that time when David took me on the dining room table, the one time when he actually made me come, I stepped into that amazing dress.
“Wow! Just: wow!” she exclaimed, wide-eyed. “I don’t know if mine says ‘fuck me’ . . . but yours definitely screams ‘marry me.’ ”
I was laughing my head off when my phone started vibrating. I had set it on the bed while sewing. I didn’t recognize the number.
Under Sophia’s concerned gaze, I entered into a conversation with an impressive number of monosyllabic affirmations.
“Was that the hospital?”
“Yes . . . ,” I whispered.
“It’s . . .”
The end. The limit. The conclusion. The very last breath. Everyone’s terminus, and for one woman in particular. Sophia had all manner of euphemisms to choose from, but in the end, she was speechless.
I put my phone on the bed, as though the thick comforter might swallow it up, together with all the bad news.
“No, it’s not over yet . . . but she’s asking for me. Apparently, she’s really insisting. I have to go.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“No . . . No, stay here with Armand. He’s going to need you if we have to delay things.”
“Okay. What time do the guests arrive?”
“Noon, for cocktails.”
I threw on the first pair of ballet flats I could find and headed for the stairs without saying another word. Sophia called behind me:
“Hey! Aren’t you going to tell David?”
“You do it,” I yelled over my shoulder.
“But he doesn’t even know me!”
Her powerless cry did not slow me down. I was already outside, running west down Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, my feet hitting the hot asphalt like a tam-tam drum. With every step, a muffled but skull-splitting vibration throbbed through my temples.
I made my way to the nearest taxi station, in front of the Église de la Trinité. A white Peugeot was waiting when I arrived, the black chauffeur spilling out the window, along with the sputtering sounds of the Formula One. He sped as fast as one of those race cars, making it to Max Fourestier Hospital in no time.
ONE COULD SEE DEATH’S DIFFERENT faces in the oncology wing: bald and emaciated, the pajamaed infirm dragging their drips like they were a thousand years old, exhausted nurses who didn’t look much better than their patients . . . Everyone was so out of it that no one noticed my eccentric outfit, nor even my entry into Mom’s room outside of visiting hours.
As for me, I only saw her. She was buried under even more tubes than on my last visit. Though it was weak, the blinking of her eyes told me she was still there, alert. I drew my chair up to her bed and leaned over her dying body.
“Mom . . . Mom, it’s me, it’s Elle.”
She blinked to show she understood. I didn’t need a doctor to give me the prognosis: she was out of her coma, but this was her last encore before the end. This time it was definitive.
We would never see America together. We would never have the chance to try for a miracle across the ocean. The adventure stopped here.
“I can see that you hear me, but are you able to speak?”
Her yes was so weak that it almost could have been confused with a timid gurgle from her drip.
“Come closer,” she mouthed, too breathless to say the words out loud. “It’s Louie . . .”
She was about to die, and her last words were of the man who had been torturing and exciting me. A man whose name she had never before spoken in my presence, and with whom she had been exchanging secrets.
“What is it? What did he do to you, Mom?”
“ . . . He gave me all this.”
All I noticed were two giant flower bouquets and a box of chocolate as large as her bedside table. But I knew she was referring to more than these trifles, and that she also saw him as an anonymous benefactor who had showered her with presents.
“I know . . . But how did you . . .”
She placed a trembling, bony finger on my lips, silencing me. As if to say that my questions were superfluous, that she had more answers for me than I questions.
“He came to deliver them . . .”
“Today, you mean?”
“No. Every time.”
“Louie? He came to see you in Nanterre?”
I never would have guessed that. Already the fact that they spoke over the phone was a surprise. But Louie visiting Maude at her little house on Rue Rigault . . . it was beyond comprehension.
She nodded.
“Did he come often?”
Then something strange happened. A smile slowly spread across her face, transforming its fading features into a beaming icon.
Nevertheless, the effort to speak still seemed colossal.
“Almost every day. And when he couldn’t come, he called.”
The famous phone calls Fred had discovered. Their memory seemed to tear her from the relentless pain that held her in its jaws like a bad dog.
There was no denying that, no matter Louie Barlet’s motivations, he had brought my mother comfort—joy, even—that I had been incapable of offering. It was absurd, unjust. I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep myself from exploding.
“Mom . . . I have something important to ask you: When did Louie start visiting you? Do you remember?”
“Yes, yes . . . I’m dying, not crazy!” she protested in a barely audible voice, a final surge before death. “It must be three months. Maybe more.”
In other words, probably before I first met David, during the period I now thought of as the “approach.” Once they had gotten a sense of the specimen that I was, the two Barlet brothers had patiently started acquainting themselves with the people—Maude, Sophia, Fred, etc.—who made up my circle of intimates. That way none of the people I loved would be against my entry into their family, and the infernal duo would only have to call on them to get to me.
But that didn’t exactly explain why Louie had gone to see my mother so often. The fact that she had been flattered to receive such attention was understandable. But what pleasure did that dandy take in seeing her? My mother was old, poor, unsophisticated—everything that ought to have sent that erotomaniacal aesthete running. Why play his role any more than was necessary?
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“He didn’t want me to. It was our little secret. Like the Stets.”
“You mean the States?” I corrected without thinking.
“Yes. He was supposed to come with me,” she said as proudly as her thready voice would allow.
I thought she was delirious, and that it was the morphine talking. The translucent liquid dripped through tubes into her veins in what were no doubt considerable doses.
“Are you sure?”
“Look in my bag . . .”
Her exhausted, clouded, and bloodshot eyes pointed to the coffee table on the other side of the bed.
Her tired leather bag did not contain much, and I had no trouble digging out a red, white, and blue envelope on which was embossed a lined planisphere. Inside, I found not one but two round-trip tickets for Los Angeles, dated June 20, in business class.
Her reluctance for me to join her now took on new meaning. It hadn’t been about selflessness, or the sacrifice of a mother for her child. My torturer and my mother were apparently so close that she had fallen into his traps all by herself. Thanks to him, she had been able to revisit what it was like to be twenty-one and taste the lightness and folly of youth. And for that I thanked him.
She breathed deeply, in a way I found concerning. Exhausted from our exchange, however brief, she added:
“I think he loves you a lot, too . . .”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I asked:
“Did he say that?”
She was out of breath and couldn’t utter another word. Instead, she nodded almost imperceptibly.
“When?”
Again, she used her eyes to point: the fresh flowers, the box of untouched chocolates . . . both things that had not been there the night before. The message was clear: today. This morning. Maybe even just before I got there.
Then her tired gaze noticed my dress, and she gathered what little energy she had left to take it all in and say:
“You are so beautiful. Louie must be so proud.”
I did not correct her on my fiancé’s first name. But maybe it hadn’t been an error. Perhaps it was her way of sanctifying a choice she’d noticed slowly growing in me. Of giving me her blessing.
I held her head in my hands and buried my nose in her neck, which was now a bony hollow, a swath of desiccated gray flesh. Despite the overwhelming scent of detergent and medicine, I still caught a whiff of her rose perfume. Or maybe I imagined it, I couldn’t say. I stayed like that for a while, taking solace in her touch. I couldn’t get enough of her—I, her daughter, who had already received so much and given so little. Even these past few weeks, busy as I had been with my false illusions.
During that time, Louie had been by her side. He had given her comfort and attenuated the painful side effects of her sickness. Her mouth must have felt less dry to her, her dizziness less affecting, her moments of weakness more surmountable.
He would forever be the angel of her final days.
Mom blinked several times, trying to catch my attention. Or was it simply a reflex, a muscular tremor announcing the end?
Her catheter clicked, releasing what seemed to me like a rather large dose of analgesic. The screen monitoring her heart remained unchanged. Still, I felt her go into a state of consciousness that I could not access. It was impossible to say whether or not she would be back again, maybe once more or even several times, before it was all over. My face was practically touching hers, but her irises avoided me. Her eyelids shuttered, and she kept looking left. What had she wanted to tell me?
I looked around the room as though I were seeing it for the first time. Everything was empty and jaundiced. Outside of Louie’s gifts, the only noticeable object was a little pink sweater that the good Dr. Poulain must have grabbed for Mom on their way out of the house to the ambulance.
The one and only closet was divided into hanging and shelf space and was half open. I almost fell from my chair when I noticed the package occupying one of its shelves.
A silver package. It appeared that Louie had left it there himself, for me.
My head was spinning, but I still managed to stand and collect the package from the dusty particle board. Impatiently, I tore the paper. At the bottom, I found just one card on which was written, as usual, a commandment:
9—Thou shalt marry his fantasies.
What fantasies? And more importantly, whose?
I placed the card on the yellow sheet, a pure little rectangle that contrasted sharply with its environs. I removed the tissue paper from the box. I was so surprised by what I found underneath that I did not move for several seconds. Then, with bated breath, I grabbed the little stack of photos and started looking at them, one by one. I struggled not to rush through them. I didn’t want to miss any details.
Meanwhile, starting with the very first snapshot—a picture taken on the steps of some town hall (in Dinard?) on David and Aurora’s wedding day—I had the feeling I was at last coming out of months of blindness. I was seeing things clearly for the first time. The evidence was before me, on that yellowed paper. It bored into my eyes. Would I have preferred not to have seen? Not to have known?
Picture after picture. I would have thought the effect would dissipate, become less striking, less flagrant. But the opposite occurred. The more I saw Aurora such as she had been, such as she had lived—here arm in arm with Hortensia by the sea, there lying on the beach in a polka-dot bikini—the more I could not deny the horrible truth, the implacable fact that was as cutting as the rocks that had killed her: I was her doppelganger. And she was mine. Twin sisters born two decades apart, both fallen victim to a common fate.
It wasn’t just a vague resemblance. We had the same curves, the same long brown hair, green eyes, and freckles over our noses and cheeks. In every way, down to the specific shape of our face, the fold of our eyelids, and the fleshy indecency of our lips, everything was the same.
“I’ll never be an Aurora,” I remembered promising myself the night before at the Hôtel des Charmes, with Louie at my mercy. And yet that is what I had been, ever since the second when David—or was it Louie or Rebecca?—had seen me in the Belles de Nuit catalogue . . . and in each moment after that: the miraculous night when David and I first met, his proposal on the boat . . . even during those times when I felt like a lowly ball in a game of racquets between the two brothers.
In the last three pictures, Aurora was wearing a little corolla dress that fell just above her knees. Its giant flowers and cut were strikingly similar to the one the girl in wardrobe at BTV had chosen for me to wear on my first show. Had David given her the idea? Or had it been a coincidence, as he had claimed, that explained his impulsive decision not to air my show?
Seventeen years to find her clone. No doubt David had rejected dozens of potential candidates. Until me. Until I appeared, the ghost of another woman, the palimpsest of a history that was not my own and that they wanted to thrust upon me.
But I wasn’t more perfect than Aurora, Aurora the madwoman, Aurora the untouchable, the frigid—no more than she had been before me. That’s where Louie and his mission came in: erase the pure memory of the saint and make me into a full and sensual woman with desires and orgasms, where the original had gotten lost in a world stripped of all pleasure, a place of suffering. That had been the reason behind every rendezvous: my sexual education. “All I do is reveal,” he had said in a moment of sincerity. Reveal to me the infinitely colorful palette of pleasurable options, while preserving me intact for his brother. That is why he had never penetrated me. That is why he had upheld the distance between student and teacher.
The last picture also came as a shock. It had been taken at the Sauvage Gallery the night Louie and I had first met. I hadn’t realized someone had taken our picture. We were facing each other. Looking at each other intensely. Both lost in that strange tension between us. It wasn’t the best memory I had of him. And yet it acted like liquid magic, exciting the silver salts of my memory: Louie who had watched over my mother; Louie who had given Sophia what she’d needed to survive in a time of desperation; Louie who had found a job for Fred; Louie who had written my name into the city . . . Louie who, despite his brother’s mission for him, had been like a guardian angel in these troubled times.
Louie who, to use Rebecca’s words, had done it all for me. Only for me. And in spite of his brother.
“Is everything okay, Mademoiselle?”
I was panting and lost like a little girl in my rumpled wedding dress, holding my stack of photographs. The nurse who ran into me in the hall caught me at my lowest. My sobs were long and uninterrupted, at once heavy and comforting. Before leaving my mother’s side, I had said my tender good-byes, kissing her forehead, then her cheeks. There was nothing more I could do. I could not bear to see what would come next. I had closed her eyelids, still warm and trembling, over her pupils, where the light was slowly dying, two little flames that death would soon extinguish forever.
The nurse asked again:
“Are you okay? Do you want to sit down? Or have a glass of water?”
What could I say? That I had lost a mother and gained a lover in the same moment? That I was leaving my mom’s deathbed to run into the arms of the one I loved? That at last my physical desires and my heart were in alignment? That I could finally give free rein to what I had felt during our promenades and also, though more fleetingly, when we’d met at the Hôtel des Charmes? And that the more the real Louie—who was so different from all the masks he wore and so close to the picture Rebecca had painted—showed himself, the more my doubts disappeared?
I could have said nothing. Or opted for something prosaic.
But I chose otherwise. Another angle.
I let a gentle smile spread over my tear-soaked lips.
“Thanks. I’m going to be fine . . . I’m going to be much better, now.”