You showed up with your arms full: flowers, a cake, champagne, presents for the children . . . They were delighted.
Just delighted. Not because of the presents, but because you were there. This was the first time the outside world had ever invited itself into our home, the first time that someone had made the climb to come and see us; life returning.
You didn’t know that at the time, and you thought it was the Corolle doll, the bow and arrow, the stickers, the magical baby bottle, and the colored crayons that got them so excited, but you may recall that once all these treasures had been unwrapped all they wanted to do was take you by the hand to show you their room, their toys, their world, the ladder to their bunk bed, which was still a novelty to them, their class photos, the picture of their daddy, and of Toby, their former nanny’s dog, and all their charming clutter. What you had brought them in the way of happiness was not material, and you played the game so well.
And it was then, on seeing how moved you were, how curious and attentive, listening and learning by heart the names of all their stuffed animals, baby dolls, classmates, and Wigglytuffs and Jigglypuffs and Slowpokes and Psyducks and other Pokémon, each one more improbable than the next, that I understood you were dying for children the way I was dying of thirst.
We watched them eat their dinner, and then Alice insisted you help her into her nightie and undo her braids and brush her hair, at length, which you did, constantly remarking on how silky it was, how curly and blond, how nice it smelled . . . And you also read them a story, and then another, and then a third, until finally I stepped in to free you from the children and your distress.
It was while we were chatting, doing justice to a delicious risotto and your bottle of champagne, that you said how “chic” I was, and I rolled my eyes to the sky, to the ceiling, shall we say, the roof beams, and then we went into the living room, which meant we went to sit six feet further away.
(I’ll open a parenthesis here because I think it is important to mention our living room. Yes, it seems to me that what comes next in this story is in some way connected to the wizardry of my sofa, and without it, we would not have become friends that evening. Later, maybe, later of course, later for sure, but not that evening. Because I know what I’m like: when I love it’s for life, but I don’t love easily. Especially not in that period of absolute lockdown, for reasons of absolute security. This was not the time to let anything seep into my hermetic self. Even love. Especially love. No way. I was sealed off, absolutely watertight.
(The apartment we lived in came furnished, with all the depressing details that implies—heavy plates, flimsy cutlery, sagging beds, synthetic curtains, ludicrous tchotchkes (there was, and the children remember it, too, a stuffed piranha on a pedestal above the fireplace), chairs that were too high, and one sofa, dead ugly. Bit by bit I replaced everything—the time I spent wandering down the aisles of department stores was time not drowned in the bottom of a glass—but for the beds and the sofa it took a courage I didn’t have. I would have had to arrange for delivery, which meant fixing a date and planning something in the future, and that was out. It was too much to ask. But it just so happened that the week before your visit, the three of us went to the Marché Saint-Pierre to buy some fabric for the school carnival. Accommodate the future, no thanks, but dress up the present, doll it up, deny it, trick it by making costumes: with pleasure. Alice, would you believe, wanted a princess gown and we wallowed in clouds of tulle, gauze, chiffon, sateen, and Swiss muslin, whereas Raphaël, would you believe, wanted to dress up as a Pokémon. It was thanks to his lack of imagination that we came upon a tiny shop on the rue d’Orsel, a gold mine of fake fur. Mink, fox, weasel, chinchilla, rabbit, Pikachu, Chihuahua, we didn’t know where to look or how to carry it all and I had to call a taxi to the rescue to help us home with this lode of caresses stuffed into huge plastic bags.
(That very evening I transformed our awful sofa into the belly of Oum-Popotte. This wasn’t my brilliant idea, but Raphaël’s. Or rather, Claude Ponti’s, a marvelous children’s author who is a genius at imagining the silkiest, cuddliest fur. Thus far I may have reveled a lot in my own sorrow, but I have not evoked my children’s, and they had lost the funniest and kindest of daddies; in Ponti’s books there always comes a moment where a little hero with a rough, hardscrabble life finds refuge in an embrace of infinite softness. It’s impossible to describe. You have to read his books to understand what our new sofa meant to Alice and Raphaël. It could be the tummy of Oum-Popotte or of Oups’ parents or of Foulbazar, or of little Pouf. It was no longer a sofa, it was a big, placid animal that enfolded them when they came home from school or felt forlorn, and it cocooned them in endless cuddles. And those cuddles were all the more tender in that I’d made some huge cushions so that they could hold that big beast in their arms, too. Dust mites be damned, those yards and yards of fur were far and away the wisest purchase of our entire convalescence.)
So, as I was saying, we moved into the living room, and you immediately flipped off your ballet flats to curl up against our faithful friend’s midriff, folding your legs under you and surrounding yourself with cushions.
I was sitting in my favorite place, on the floor, in other words, and I watched as you surrendered to Oum-Popotte with the restful smile and cheerful face of a little girl who has had a very, very long day at school.
We looked at each other.
I offered you some herbal tea (alcoholics never drink) (and that is how you can identify them) and you asked me if I didn’t have, rather, some stronger stuff on offer (oh, dear), no, but uh, oh, wait, we’re in luck, I thought there might be a bottle of whisky here somewhere. What a godsend, really. I poured us each a good dose (since it was a furnished apartment I didn’t have any smaller glasses), and with our chamomile firmly in hand we leaned back again, you against the furry spread, me against the wall.
We drank.
The children were asleep, we were lulled by the laughter and shouts of the revelers downstairs, the candles made it cozy, the music on the radio set the mood, and we looked at each other.
We knew nothing about one another apart from the fact that we were both of a nature to shed a few tears at a zinc bar on a winter morning in Paris.
We looked at each other, sized each other up, appraised each other.
You were sipping slowly and I tried to do the same. It was hard. I was down for the count, clinging to my glass as if it were the ropes around the ring. You leaned back, placed a cushion on your stomach and asked,
“Where is their father?”