Are you okay?”
Isaac looked like he didn’t recognize me.
“Yann, are you okay? Is everything all right?”
I don’t remember what I said to him. That I was tired, I think.
And it was true. I was tired.
Very tired.
Too tired.
It was myself I should have smashed. Too bad we only lived on the second floor.
“Here,” he said, taking my hand. “I peeled it off for you. As a souvenir. You can order some, if you like, before . . . well . . . it’s now or never . . . ”
My Isaac. My prince. I gazed at him for a long time, to calm myself down. He looked exhausted.
Even the wings of his bow tie were drooping.
It’s true, I did find him soothing, but in another sense he was way out of reality, too. Why had he brought me this now, really? As if it couldn’t wait. And what wine was I going to order? I had no cellar, no money, no Alice, no almonds, no cast-iron casserole dish, no little daughters, no spices, no tablecloth, no wineglasses, nothing. For a guy who said he could sense everything and had an unfailing eye, this wasn’t a very impressive performance.
To be fair, though, we’d drunk two and a half bottles of wine between the two of us. That can cause an error or two.
We stood on the landing since I couldn’t reasonably invite him in, and it was at that precise second, just as I was thinking that, saying to myself on the subject of Isaac Moïse, who had become my friend, my treasured friend, I can’t reasonably invite him in, that I finally grew up:
“Would it be all right if I came back upstairs with you, and borrowed Misia’s little Fisher-Price tape recorder, the one that’s in her bedroom in the middle of all the Barbies, if you don’t mind?”