Seoul, ten o’clock at night, I’m stationed in a hotel room on the forty-first floor of a tower that has just risen from the ground. I think I must be the first occupant. The workers who installed the carpet left their cutter here and the sides of the shower stall are still covered with protective film.

I arrived here from Toronto where for three days I had one interview after another, after two quick stops at production sites, one in Warsaw and the other in the outskirts of Vilnius. I’ve accumulated so many hours of jet lag in one direction and then the other that my biological clock no longer has a grip on any sort of reality. I’m holding on is all, holding on.

 

While hunting for a memo for an agent from Tao Tanglin, with whom I’m supposed to have breakfast tomorrow, I came by chance upon this file, Untitled 1, in the depths of my computer. I had no memory of writing those words and I even find it hard to believe I was their author.

I had just opened your gift. I was unhappy. I had been drinking.

Like a fish.

 

Louis.

I’m back.

Several months have gone by and here I am again today, calmer and not as coarse, but I’m still wondering the same things, you know . . . 

I’m wondering the same things and I still come to the same conclusion: I miss you, my friend.

I miss you so much.

 

I would never have imagined it was possible to miss you this much. It’s not an expression, I’m not saying “I miss you” the way I might come and complain to you about a lack of sleep, or sunlight, or courage, or time; I’m telling you this as if some part of myself had gone missing. The best part, perhaps. The only serene part, the kindest. The most watchful.

You are watching over me now the way you watched over me two years ago.

Two years, Louis, two years.

How can that be?

To have instilled so much life in so few days . . . 

 

Phantom limb, pseudohallucination, PATHOL. noun: Illusory and occasionally painful perception of an amputated limb. Pain revived by stress, anxiety, and meteorological changes.

 

That’s what I feel when I think about you. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

Ridiculous. You were not only my compass, now it seems you’d become my barometer.

The slightest thing goes wrong, the least little oscillation, and I pat myself and search my body for proof of your absence.

I keep looking for you, Louis. Your death is like a wedge someone’s rammed into my skull, and the slightest doubt, wham, a sledgehammer drives it in.

Wham.

I’ll end up split in two.

 

What nonsense I’m writing.

Nonsense, for fear of speaking nonsense.

Two years.

If that.

Such a short time.

Such a short time, and how I regret those lost years.

We could have met much sooner, but we were discreet, you and I.

Discreet, distant, busy.

So busy.

So stupid, in other words.

 

I have a thousand more urgent problems to deal with, but I wish I could be with you.

I wish I could speak to you, see you, hear you.

I wish I could live through those years all over again.

It’s the right time. I am, as I was saying, as lifeless as can be.

 

Louis . . . 

Don’t go anywhere.

I’m going to pour myself a glass of something and I’ll be back.

 

* * *

 

You were a lawyer, I was running a company—I still run it—and we were neighbors who shared a landing and sometimes met by the elevator or in the hallway of that posh building in the 16th arrondissement where we shared the top floor.

 

We sometimes crossed paths, but scarcely exchanged anything more than a distracted, tired nod, we were so stubborn—stubborn asses, we were, determined to become beasts of burden, each of us bending beneath the weight of our importance and the huge files we were dumb enough to bring into the circle of our private space.

(I had started to write “home,” “dumb enough to bring home,” and then I thought better of it. Did I have a home? Did you have a home? I replaced it with “the circle of our private space,” but that’s even more grotesque. The circle of our private space. What bullshit. Why not the circle of greyhound racing or a private dining club while I’m at it?)

If we shared any intimacy, it was no more than that of two members of a private club, however exclusive. Not for a lack of opportunity, but we didn’t have time, dear God. We didn’t have time. Neither for hunting nor golf nor power, still less for anything private, that might verge on intimacy.

Intimacy . . . 

The name of a magazine for hairdressers, don’t you think?

 

As for the word “household,” to me it was nothing more than a word used for tax purposes, to calculate the amount owing on my income, whereas for you . . . 

Well, you lived alone, so I don’t know.

Perhaps your evenings began not in a household, but in a lobby: theatres, operas, I imagine. Aisles, rows of seats, intermissions . . . 

You went out a lot and . . . No. I really can’t imagine. I don’t know.

You were so secretive . . . 

 

Often, when I was absent and had to catch an early-morning flight, I would run into you well before dawn. I noticed you, furtively, while my driver was hurrying to open the door to an overheated car, and there’d be this vision of you, so handsome, so pale, your hands in your pockets, your collar raised, your face blurred by the night and your nose half-buried in your scarf: that vision kept me company, for a long time.

My rides to the airport, my hours spent waiting, my battle plans, my troops to muster, my investors to reassure, my partners to win over, my moments of discouragement, their moments of discouragement, my doubts, and theirs, my reputation, my hardness, my fatigue, my headaches, my bellyaches, my ever-empty hotel rooms, my family always on voicemail, my never-ending jet lag, my combat medicine cabinet, my insomnia . . . all the trappings of the foot soldier to capitalism, an entire life of arm wrestling, fighting, passion, a life I chose, and fought for, a life I respect, even, but which exhausts me, and more than ever since your disappearance, my life, at those moments, depended solely on the memory of your elegant person.

Your person. You. Your freedom.

The memory of what I thought was freedom.

 

A woman of culture to whom I recently related our early-morning to-ings and fro-ings (I will tell you later the circumstances thereof), emphasizing the strange comfort they gave me, said mockingly:

“It sounds like Paul Morand calling out to Proust . . . ”

 

I didn’t react. I would rather be taken for a pedant than for an idiot.

There was no fooling her. She looked me straight in the eye for a long while, long enough to make me understand that I was, alas—no doubt about it, the proof being this long pause—a pedant of the worst kind: an idiot of a pedant and then, once this had been made perfectly clear, she moved her face closer to mine and added, in her lovely, deep voice:

“Proust . . . What sort of soirée do you go to at night to come home with eyes so weary and lucid? And what fright, forbidden to us, did you have, to come back so indulgent and so kind?”

 

Silence.

Her: Something like that, no?

I was silent.

Her: You won’t say.

 

I wouldn’t say, because . . . 

Wham.

 

Your kindness, Louis.

Your kindness.

 

Night has fallen. Pollution and the lights of the city pay no heed to the fact, but I who am so close to you, in my ghost room almost two hundred meters from the ground, you cannot imagine how happy I am at the thought of spending the evening in your company.

Like the old days.

 

* * *

 

It’s nearly midnight. I’ve just reread what I’ve written. 1535 words. Two hours spent scribbling and an entire minibar to produce 1535 words.

What a feat.

And 1535 words that don’t mean a thing, on top of it. That understand nothing, express nothing, that simply echo: Shut up, Cailley-Ponthieu, shut up, go to bed. You’re beating around the bush, dragging things out, acting the fine gentleman. You don’t know how to write. You don’t know how to express yourself. You’re incapable of expressing the least little sentiment: incapable. You’ve never known how. It doesn’t interest you.

 

Hard going, all that. Hard going, and pretentious.

“A wedge someone’s rammed into my skull” and why not a touch of Proust, while you’re at it? Come on, come on. Straighten yourself up, please.

Take your sleeping pills, knock the beast out, collapse.

 

A wedge someone’s rammed into my skull . . . 

 

But nothing stays in your mind, old man. Nothing. And even less in your flesh. So you see, even there. Even, there, you say “flesh” in order not to say “heart,” since the word makes you sick to your stomach. Heart, Cailley, heart. You know—that organ that is hard at work inside you. That pump. Motor.

Switch off the computer and go to bed. Go get some strength.

Go get some strength so you can go on pulling your wagons tomorrow morning.

 

Silence, up there, silence. I’ve been drinking, I am drinking, it will all work out. It has to. It has to come out. Like a blood-letting. I have to end things with you. I have to bury you, too. Whether I bury you or scatter you hardly matters, whatever you want, whatever you would have chosen, but I really have to put an end to this mourning which your discretion has deprived me of.

I have to bring you back to life one last time, so that at last I can say goodbye.

Say goodbye, let you rest in peace, and see if I can open your gift again now without crying like a baby.

 

* * *

 

I was saying, above, that we were restrained in our behavior toward each other, and only acknowledged each other with a courteous nod when we met in the common area of our building, but that’s not altogether true. Our shoes, Louis, our shoes were more flexible than we were, and it was our shoes, if you recall, that took the first step.

 

We shared this one guilty weakness: shoes, and it wasn’t just a way we could greet each other, it was also a furtive glance. No looking each other up and down, no, we would make the most of our stolen glances to verify that one thing, at least, in a world gone mad, was still as it should be: come rain, wind, or snow, the neighbor from across the hall would still be wearing shoes that had been styled and put together by a reputable house, and which were impeccably polished.

Now that was reassuring, was it not? Yes. So reassuring . . . a reassurance that is impossible to imagine for someone unacquainted with the early-morning pleasures of a heel slipping down the curve of a shoehorn, of a perfect pair of laces cinching up one’s soul as firmly as one’s leg, of the perforated trim on the toe adding a touch of fantasy beneath those suits that have none at all, of the double stitching which (in addition to being elegant) gives you the illusion it can never wear out, of a sheen that says more about you and your past life than you could ever possibly express on your own, or even of the wooden shoe trees that you cannot help but caress before you slip them into an exhausted shoe, and which immediately smooth out those creases on the uppers, on a day that has proven equally trying.

 

You and I both knew this and we were mutually grateful for the knowledge. For all that they were fleeting, our glances were no less appreciative. The knowing look of the connoisseur who recognizes his equal from his shoes, compounded with that of the reserved man awkwardly expressing his gratitude. The tiny smile hidden in the tiny nod, saying, more or less: Thank you, fellow believer, thank you. My blessings upon you.

 

The run-of-the-mill fellow wearing sneakers would no doubt maintain that I’m going overboard, but you, and a few others, will listen to me without batting an eyelash. A fine shoe, Louis, a nice pair, handsome Derbys, good-looking loafers, a shining buckle, an immaculate pair of bucks, box calf and leather saddle shoes, shoe trees made of alder wood, moiré calfskin suede, cordovan leather that squeaks when it’s bent, a sheen like Japanese lacquer, a polish made of carnauba wax . . . Ah. Dear God. What could be finer?

 

Given my obligation to dress like a boss, you’ll never see me shod in anything other than a pair of black Oxfords, with a straight or uniform toe, or in a pinch, an extreme pinch, on a Friday with no hassles in view, a perforated toe (what madness), but you, especially once I got to know you better, you have no idea, the thrill you could give me. Such a thrill. All our discussions. And animated debates. About this model over that one, this lack of taste rather than that one, a Hungarian bootmaker over a Viennese one, a Viennese one over a New Yorker; about an estimate, an impulse, a wise renunciation, a cobbler out in the back of beyond, the soft feel of an old rag, or the length of the hairs on a shoeshine brush. How many hours did they keep us enthralled, all these existential questions? How many hours? It seems to me we never spoke of anything else, just our shoes, our wonderful shoes—there to polish, to dream about, to get resoled—and that as we were talking we were exposing a great deal about ourselves to each other.

In a lifetime there are classmates, fellow students, army buddies, work colleagues, good friends, old friends, Holmes and Watson; and then there are encounters like ours. Which are all the more delightfully unexpected in that they are founded on nothing, no common past, encounters which, precisely because of that nothing in common you have in common, give free rein, under cover of something completely different (in this case, men’s footwear), to the greatest moments of abandon.

Nothing is said; everything is understood.

Or, the invisible plunder of contraband friendships.

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself, getting ahead . . . 

For the time being we are still in the entrance or the stairway, secretly spying on the tips of our shoes, whereas our first real encounter took place on our landing, and that evening I was standing there before you—reeling, in actual fact—in my shirtsleeves, barefoot.

 

* * *

 

It was a little over two years ago, at the end of December, when the days are so short, and the lack of light, along with the dread of year-end balance sheets, auditors, and family get-togethers, makes us all feel so vulnerable.

I’ve always worked like a dog, but even harder at that time of year. It was right in the middle of the oil crisis and I felt like that character in the Tex Avery cartoon who wears himself out trying to plug all the gushing leaks, running like a madman from one disaster to the next without ever managing to plug anything anywhere.

Business trips all over the place, endless meetings, and grim games of three-card Monte with talentless bankers, trying to patch things up. I won’t go into the details because you already know them, Louis. I’ve told you everything. I told you long after the worst of the storm was over, and you forced me, without ever obliging me in any way, to relive it, out loud, in order to understand.

To understand what had happened, understand what I had lost, and above all—again, according to you—understand what I had gained.

(To be absolutely honest, I didn’t really understand what you meant by that. It seems to me that, apart from our friendship, I didn’t gain much from any of that painful business, but never mind, it hardly matters. You always said: “Be patient, be patient.” Well look, how convenient, now you’re dead, I have no family life left and I work even harder than I used to, so, as far as patience goes, I’ve got plenty.)

 

I was supposed to fly to Hamburg, I’d gotten up very early, and Ariane came into the bathroom while I was shaving.

She sat down behind me, on the edge of the bathtub.

 

Because she was wearing a pale nightgown, and the sleeves of the cardigan she’d borrowed from me were too long and hid her hands; because she hadn’t buttoned it up but merely crossed it over her heart; and because she was hugging herself and gently swaying back and forth with her head down and her hair uncombed, I had a terrible vision: it was as if I were looking at the reflection of a madwoman. A lunatic in a straitjacket. But of course not; if she was holding herself like that it was to contain herself, to keep herself upright when at last she raised her head, and there was nothing neurotic about her gentle swaying, it was quite the contrary: she was gathering momentum.

(I often think back at how wrong I got it, Louis, and it seems that . . . that the ruin of my life is all there in that steamy mirror: I damage the people I love by reducing them to being even weaker than I am. There was nothing insane about Ariane that morning, she was merely silently gathering her strength to give herself courage. I never understand a thing. She was the one who was all-powerful; she was the one.)

 

I asked her if I’d woken her up and she replied that she hadn’t slept a wink, and since I didn’t react (had I even listened?) she added quietly that she was leaving me, that she was going to take the girls and move into an apartment two streets over, that I could go on seeing them whenever I liked, “Well . . . when you can,” she amended, with a bitter grimace, but that this was it, the journey was over. She couldn’t take it anymore, I was never there, she had met someone, a considerate man, who took care of his children and had custody every other week, she wasn’t sure she was really in love, but she wanted to give that life a try, and see. See if it would be sweeter, lighter, simpler. She had made the decision as much for the girls’ sake as for herself. Life here had become too difficult. I was constantly absent. Even when I was there. Especially when I was there. My stress had contaminated them all and she wanted Laure and Lucie to have a different kind of childhood. The concierge’s husband would be coming to pick up her boxes that evening, she would take nothing besides her clothes and the girls’, a few books, a few toys, and the key to the house in Calvi that I’d given her for her fortieth birthday. Divorce was out of the question for the moment, she would take Mako, the nanny-housekeeper, with her, but Mako would start her workday here, so it would be as if I were staying at a hotel, since I liked that so much, with my bed made and a clean bathroom every morning. She would go on using our joint account, but solely for the children, she had money and didn’t want me to support her, she would always be accommodating where the girls were concerned, I could have them whenever I wanted and for as long as I wanted but for this vacation—which, I surely hadn’t even realized, started that evening—everything was already planned: she would take them with her to spend two weeks in the sun.

I reached for a towel, dabbed my face, and when I finally turned around, she said,

“You know why I’m leaving you, Paul? I’ve leaving you because you didn’t even nick yourself. I’m leaving you because you’re the kind of man who can be told all this and come out of it without a single scratch.”

I was speechless.

“You’re a monster, Paul Cailley-Ponthieu. A kind monster, but a monster all the same.”

I didn’t respond. It was an old blade and I was already late.

 

I managed to stay on the phone all the way to the gate, but when I found out the flight was at least fifty minutes late (poor visibility), I hung up, switched the phone off, and collapsed in a seat, my legs like jelly.

 

A stranger roused me from my torpor.

“Monsieur? Are you all right?”

I apologized, pulled myself together, and left for Hamburg.

 

My driver dropped me off outside the house that same evening at around eight o’clock.

The front hall of the apartment was littered with cardboard boxes: Shoes Me, Girls Summer Clothes, Lucie Stuffed Animals, Ariane Underwear. Right.

I pulled off my scarf, my coat, my jacket, my tie, my watch, my cuff links, my shoes, and my socks, inspected the mail, poured a drink, and was running a bath when the interphone rang. It was Julio. The cleaner.

 

Of course I helped him. Not that I really wanted to, but I could not decently watch the poor guy carting off all my family’s dirty laundry without giving him a hand. And besides, as my wife would confirm: I’m a monster, but I’m kind, all the same. Kind.

 

Because Julio and I were monopolizing the elevator, you eventually decided to use the stairs and walk up six flights, at your own pace.

 

You were out of breath when you finally arrived. You were not young anymore and you had a lot to carry: two thick files under your left arm, and a wicker basket filled with food in your right hand. A basket bursting with branches of celery and leek. I recall this because it was so unexpected. I would never have imagined you doing anything remotely domestic. I don’t know why. I simply couldn’t imagine a man who wore derby buckle shoes making dinner. It’s idiotic, but the leeks completely threw me, I have to admit.

(In my defense, let it be said that I was down to basics in those days. The strict minimum.)

 

So there we were, face-to-face in the middle of my dejection. I was barefoot, you were wearing Aubercy, and we greeted one another in our usual distracted manner. You didn’t look at the elevator or my apartment even once, you just wove your way between two boxes and closed the door to your apartment behind you.

 

The efficient Julio had soon cleared the place out and the worst of it was that I couldn’t stop myself from giving him a tip. I didn’t even think about it, it’s second nature with me. I always say thank you, and I always thank people with money. I can hear the sentiment sycophants tut-tutting in protest all the way from here. I’ve been hearing them my entire life. The thing was, with Julio, it seemed to me that a fifty euro note slipped inside a little thank you would please him as much as a big verbal thank you slipped inside nothing at all. And his morality has nothing to do with it.

Nor does mine, for that matter.

 

All my life, I’ve been made to feel guilty for making money. And for using it as a shortcut with things and with people. For wanting to buy everything, above all proof of affection. I have never known how to cope. Honestly, I don’t know what to say. I know how to make money the way others know how to spend it, and I give it easily because I know how useful it can be, it’s as simple as that. Because of the price of our shoes, we’ve often touched on the subject (we never got into anything, but we touched on almost everything) and you always maintained that those right-thinking people were far more obsessed with cash than I was. “You are above all suspicion, my dear Paul. For you, money has no value,” you insisted, “since you were born with it. Those people are obtuse. Forget it. Forget those flunkeys. Drop it,” and when it was no longer enough to console me for being so misunderstood, you would always end up banishing the clouds by quoting Alphonse Allais:

“No need to take ourselves seriously; there will be no survivors.”

(Forgive me, my dear Louis, but I am making the most of this last night with you to pour out my feelings a bit more than usual.) (It must be the altitude.)

 

Julio cleaned the place out, as I said, and I closed the door behind him the way you had closed your own door a few minutes earlier.

This next bit is hard to tell. To give a fair rendering of things, I would have to use words I don’t know how to handle. I was never taught them. Or never wanted to learn them. Cowardly words, too corruptible and unreliable. Too easily handled, to be precise. And it was because I was this . . . inmate, this emotionally incarcerated inner self, this total jerk, that I had reached this precise moment in my life.

I was fifty-four years old, I was running a company my great-grandfather founded. I was the only son. My father had killed himself at the controls of his plane when I was ten years old; my mother, the regent, had finally abdicated and was wallowing in Alzheimer’s disease with delight, my first wife had taken our eldest son and gone to the United States, the second one had just left me, with our two daughters, for a “considerate” man (and the distance seemed even more terrifying), and the water in my bath was getting cold. There. That’s it.

That is all I had to say.

I don’t know how long I’d been standing dazed by the . . . I don’t know, I was in the dark when a knock came at the door.

 

I hastily threw on a more or less presentable mask in the shape of a face, but in my haste I must have put it on upside down because I saw you, the way your face fell for a split second before you got your wits about you, your impassive face, in other words, and you announced:

“Homemade soup. A 2009 Mission Haut-Brion. Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn.”

I was utterly speechless.

“Dinner in ten minutes. I’ll leave the door ajar. See you soon.”

And you turned on your heels.

 

Oh, thank you, Louis. Thank you.

Thank you, because your tone was so calm and peremptory that I immediately felt like a little boy who’s been told to go and wash his hands.

How simple everything suddenly became.

Dinner . . . 

I was being summoned.

 

So I headed to the bathroom and started by splashing my face with cold water and I . . . I am reluctant to relate these things. It takes so much out of me. And I . . . And it melted. The mask melted. Something in my hands melted. Someone . . . Anyway. Let’s move on. Water, water, everywhere, dixit the famous English poet.

I took off my shirt, rubbed my arms, chest, neck, shoulders, and navel; I eventually stood up straight and I recognized him. I recognized the little Cailley heir who did not have the right to weep in public. Enough, Paul, enough. Remember, life has been very good to you.

Beneath his crust, his rind, completely raw, I recognized him, in that very mirror that had witnessed his wife skinning him alive a few hours earlier.

Yes. Thank you, Louis. Thank you for having allowed me this: to strip myself bare at last.

 

* * *

 

Your apartment was plunged in shadows. I walked down a corridor, guided by the light of the candles you had arranged on a low table amid the jumble of bookshelves, books, files, loose papers, and piles of old newspapers that must have been your living room.

In front of a deep sofa, a table was set for two. Neat tablecloth, two soup bowls set on two plates, two silver soup spoons, two wine glasses, a bottle waiting to reach room temperature, a piece of cheese on a little wooden chopping board, and a basket of bread.

I heard your voice in the distance telling me to sit down, and you came out wearing an apron and carrying a steaming tureen of soup.

 

With the help of a big, antique ladle, you gave me a hearty serving, ground a bit of pepper over my bowl, then filled my glass.

Then you untied your apron, settled into the sofa next to me, sighed with pleasure, raised your glass to your nose, sniffed it, smiled, picked up the remote control, and asked me if I needed subtitles. I shook my head, you pressed play, Sabrina began, and you said bon appétit.

 

And so we feasted with the ravishing Audrey who, how appropriately, had just returned from the best culinary school in Paris.

Delightful. Delightful.

Violins, romance, we finished off the Beaufort and the bottle. You walked me to the front door in silence then wished me good night and invited me to come again the next day, at the same time.

 

I was so groggy I hardly thanked you.

Against all expectation I slept well that night. Really, really well.

(As things stand, I may as well confess to this solitary pleasure: I fell asleep thinking about your lovely slippers.) (Shipton & Heneage, Grecian slippers, you confessed, a few weeks later.)

 

Thank you, Louis. Thank you.

Thank you.

I don’t know yet how many times I’ll go on repeating myself, I’ll count them at the end. And there will be as many thank yous as handfuls of earth as it takes.

 

The next evening there was cream of pumpkin. And it was the next evening that I understood why I was there. After the same ritual as the previous day, you turned to me, remote control in hand, and asked, looking vaguely concerned:

“I thought we’d watch The Apartment, but I don’t want to seem tactless. Perhaps it’s a bit too soon, what do you think?”

What a beautiful smile.

“No, it’s perfect,” I answered, full of wonder. “Perfect.”

 

Louis. No one had ever taken care of me in this way. No one.

Did I remember to say thank you?

 

(Once, just once in my life I was nurtured in this way, with the same absolute toughness and tenderness, just once. It was Emilia, little Emmie, the Alsatian maid who worked for my grandmother at La Huchaude, a sinister house in the Nivernais where just after my father died I spent an entire summer left to my own devices. When I was alone in the “château,” as she put it, she let me have supper with her in the pantry and she made me French toast, dipping slices of a thick, four-pound, well-hardened bread into some curious batter of milk, sugar, and cinnamon.

(I will never forget the taste of that French toast. Never. It was the taste of kindness, simplicity, and disinterest. The type of dish I have not often eaten since.

(Yaya . . . Yaya would not let me speak when it was time for her serial on the radio. Yaya to whom I practiced reading, over and over, the passage in Jules Verne’s novel where Michel Strogoff is sentenced “never to see the things of the earth,” as he is about to be blinded by a white-hot saber. I practiced rolling my “r”s like the evil Ogareff so that his voice would sound crrrueller and even morrre terrrible. She loved it. A few months later I found out, completely by chance, that she had been dismissed, and when at last I dared ask my grandmother why (and to do so I had to show the same courage as the proud courier for the tsar), she simply answered that she, Yaya, “didn’t always smell very nice.”)

(Louis? Is this too much? Am I imposing on your eternity with my childish whining? If so, you only have yourself to blame, my friend, I didn’t even remember that I remembered Yaya, and were it not for you I probably never would have remembered.)

 

This ritual—soup, fine wines, and Hollywood classics—lasted until the early hours of the following year. Every evening you set our appointment for the next one, and every evening that followed, I would come back to our confirmed old bachelors’ tea party with an inexpressible sense of relief. (Inexpressible, adj. That which cannot be said with or translated into words due to its intense, strange, or extraordinary nature.)

Neither one of us made the slightest reference to Christmas or New Year’s.

Since you were so kind as to renew your invitation from one evening to the next and I was in no fit state to decline it, we went on living as if nothing had happened. Or rather, as if nothing had happened and I went on living. My son went skiing in Colorado with his mother and dashing stepfather as planned, while Ariane and the girls frolicked in their swimsuits by a coral reef (I didn’t try to find out whether the considerate man had gone with them, my apparent indifference would serve, I had decided, as an amiable gift I was giving myself) and you, without realizing it, became my only family and my only refuge.

 

What you thought about it, I don’t know. I was careful not to ask you if you had nothing more entertaining to sink your teeth into, during this holiday period, than the resident cuckold. No, I didn’t dare. And now, after all that’s happened, I no longer know whether to be sorry for my lack of tact or, on the contrary, to be proud of it. Of course I did not wish to be seen to the door, but that wasn’t all, Louis, that wasn’t all. I respected your silence.

And even tonight, you know, if I am allowing myself to speak so shamelessly, it is solely because I am writing to you from the ends of the earth and in a state that is closer to sleep-walking than mere insomnia.

 

On Christmas Eve you’d put Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life on the program.

“Not a very original choice, and I’m sure you’ve already seen it a dozen times, but you’ll see, it never gets old. And then this good little Clos-Vougeot will take care of the rest . . . ”

I did not dare contradict you (I had never seen it) and I was very grateful to you for leaving us in the dark for a few seconds after the angel’s final words. George Bailey’s fate was like a fist in the gut, and I was not feeling very valiant when the time came to go home. So far from valiant, in fact, that I came and rang at your door a few minutes later.

“Did you forget something?”

“No, but I . . . You know I, I too, took over my father’s business after he died and . . . ”

And as I didn’t know what else to say—well, I did, I knew very well but I did not know how to go about it—you put an end to my prevarication, waving it away with a burst of laughter.

“But of course I know, for goodness’ sake! Everyone knows! You are at the helm of a flagship French industry! Off you go . . . Time for bed. All this emotion has worn us out.”

 

At home again, sitting in the kitchen in my big, empty apartment, after the second glass of a superb whisky which one of my collaborators had given me that very morning, I was finally able to finish my sentence.

No one heard it, but what I was telling you went roughly:

“ . . . I too took over my father’s business after he died, and I too am acquainted with that solitude. That solitude, and the terrible fear of losing face. My enemy is not the despicable Potter, my enemy is the end of a world, of my world, the world I represent. My enemy is globalization, it’s Asia, where at this very moment I have wandered astray, it’s delocalization. My enemy has already beaten me. ‘Flagship French industry.’ My dear Louis . . . there has been no such thing as French industry for a long time. I am no longer expanding my company, I am simply avoiding its loss. I am saving the family jewels. Or selling them off cheap, rather. The feet of the colossus are made of clay, and . . . ”

And a few sips later,

“ . . . and I’m alone. Far more alone than George Bailey ever was, because I’ve never done anything good for those around me, I . . . I’ve never known, even fortuitously, how to make myself loved the way he did, because I’ve never known how to love, either. As cynical as it might seem, I’ve never had the means. I’ve often been told that I was born with a caul, but what sort of caul, for God’s sake? A spiked helmet? A leaden miter? I wasn’t born with a caul, I was born crippled. And at this time of reckoning, not only is my wife hardly raising the alarm to save me from drowning, she has gone off who knows where to toast her buns, keeping my kids from me on Christmas day. As for friends, what of them? What friends? What are we talking about? I don’t even know how a friend is made. Are they designed? Modeled? Tested? Copied at lower cost? Patented?”

Okay. I was drunk.

And because I was drunk, I was finally able to finish my sentence:

“ . . . no, I didn’t have time for anything. And I’m alone on earth. But this evening you are still here, my stranger of a neighbor who does not speak, who asks for nothing, who I always approach empty-handed, something that had never happened to me in my entire life, who I always approach empty-handed because I too am so empty, so empty, so disheartened and powerless that I don’t even have a nickel’s worth of politeness to offer, and . . . ”

And shit. Another sip:

“ . . . and . . . and it’s not my community that grabbed me by the collar one evening of despair by the parapet, it was you. It was you who saved me.”

I’m crying, Louis. I’m crying over myself.

 

Too much! Listen to this scoundrel, muddling your funeral oration! It’s a good thing that ridicule doesn’t kill us, either . . . 

 

Your soup has made me hungry.

Don’t go, let me put you on hold, just long enough to get room service.

 

* * *

 

Almost three o’clock, I gobbled down my bowl of bibimbap (rice, stir-fried vegetables, fried egg, red pepper paste) standing at the window.

 

Over ten million inhabitants and no one seems to be asleep. Offices, buildings, advertising screens, Seoul Tower, traffic, avenues, garbage trucks, bridges, it’s all twinkling. No, sorry, shining. No moon, not even a single star. From this high up and for as far as I can see, there is nothing that is not artificial. Everything shines. Everything blinks.

(I’ve noticed that the hotel rooms in these monster cities, whatever the continent, always act as an inner seismograph for me. When I’m feeling good, I admire the ingenuity of mankind and could spend hours studying its accomplishments; and when I’m not as valiant, like this evening, it all seizes me by the throat and I look away, staggering.

(What have we done? Where are we headed? How will it all end?)

Okay, hey there Mister holy moly preacher man, bring back Louis or go to bed.

 

Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, Stanley Donen, Vincente Minnelli: we made it through the Christmas break like kids in the finest candy store in the history of cinema and bit by bit, every evening, by dint of encountering the same old regulars in the same little neighborhood movie theater, we struck up a conversation.

Initially we started out in movie-lover mode. We’d comment on the directing, the screenplay, the producers, the on-set anecdotes, the actors and actresses (you were crazy about Audrey’s neck, everyone else was merely entertaining), and from one film to the next, one reel leading to another, we got around to us. Well, us . . . the guy version of us. Meaning words that didn’t have much to do with our selves. Subjects as diverse and varied as: our work, our career, our job, our work, our profession, our sector, our part, in short, our corporate name.

Corporate name which, in the light of the exciting little end-of-year soirées we were currently enjoying, could equally, easily also signify our reason for living, but oh well . . . we were too busy tossing confetti in each other’s faces and strutting along like idiots doing the Chicken Dance to dare to point this out to each other.

 

(The truth is that you and I were entrenched in our positions, observing the front line through the chinks left by Audrey, Shirley, Ginger, Marlene, Lauren, Jane, Cyd, Leslie, Debbie, Rita, Greta, Gloria, Barbara, Katharine, and Marilyn.

(You have to admit that as sandbags go, you’ve seen worse . . . )

 

We had each begun to turn to our neighbor in the next seat when the lights came back on, and as the evenings went by, and the wine got better and better, and the cracks in our armor began to show, and our tongues loosened, we screened our own, personal films.

Our Seven Year Itches, Roads to Glory, O. Henry’s Full Houses, Haves and Have Nots, Sunset Boulevards, Double Indemnities, Big Sleeps, and Aces in the Hole.

The more we kept our private lives at a distance, the more we revealed of ourselves—because our reasons for living, as hopeless as they might seem, said a lot about us in the end. Said everything.

Your gown, your specialization, your files, your cases; my toga, my background, my files, my worries; what more could we add to all that?

Nothing.

Our life. Those were our lives.

 

Hey, Cailley-Pompom, have you listened to yourself? All your pseudo-Hollywood metaphors, your lah-de-dah flights of fancy, your dashes and ellipses and semicolons and pretentious rhetoric? Can’t you talk a little plainer, dude?

 

Well, uh . . . okay, then . . . well, actually, Louie and me were starting to get real wasted so we started to come unbuttoned. And the more we waved our dicks around, the more we could see it was nothing to shout about and that it wasn’t even worth telling, specially as we were right in the middle of the holiday cheer and there we were two old farts eating our tapioca and watching movies we already knew by heart and . . . 

Hey . . . 

You see my index finger? You see how good it is at pointing the way to Santa Claus’s house?

 

I don’t know about you, Louis, I can’t speak for you, but for me, I’ll tell you straight out: this was the best break in my entire life.

And even. Even. If I dared. If I was really absolutely sure you were dead forever. Maybe then. Maybe I would say it: it was the break of a lifetime, my lifetime.

Christmas is never much fun when you’re an only child, and when on top of it you become an orphan, it really begins to smell a bit off—whiffs of slavery, imprisonment, that sort of thing—so if to boot you get saddled first with a traumatlantic divorce, then a separation as tough as a Christmas capon stuffed with dry, stale bread, and kids who allegedly have been contaminated by your stress, and a considerate lover . . . How should I put it? All that merry piping of the shepherd in the crèche, and the New Year’s resolutions, well, it all seemed better at your place.

More honest.

 

I have been a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad father, I know. It’s a fact. It’s factual. But . . . No. No buts. I’m not writing to you tonight to justify myself. So, no buts. But still. And. Therefore. It just so happens that.

It just so happens that I was brought up without love. I was brought up without love and you cannot imagine what it’s like growing up all alone, never having your fill of . . . I don’t know . . . your fill of embraces: you’re forever left with something hard and awkward.

I have been, and still am, a hard, awkward man.

And, therefore, it just so happens that I was educated, no, sorry, trained to ensure the continuity of a company that I did not found, but which ensured the room and board (and perhaps even, who knows? the care, education, peace—a certain peace, let’s say, the relative material peace) of thousands of people.

That, too, is fact. Bad husband, bad son, and bad father, but in the meantime, no one is going hungry. Everyone eats their fill. Everyone.

 

If I had boarded the plane as planned; if I’d had a better grade on my history paper, if I’d known who Pepin the Short was, what he founded, and who his son was, if my father had not punished me by not allowing me to go with him on the flight as planned, I would have died, too. I would be buried next to him in a ridiculous mausoleum, and those thousands of people I mentioned just now might not have been any worse off, but in the meantime, I’m the one who stepped up to the plate. Me. And no one asked me my opinion.

And everyone has food on their plate.

 

The rest I could not deal with. I didn’t know how to lead a professional life and a private life at the same time. I knew I was better equipped, and only equipped, for the former, and more or less consciously—depending on whether life seemed to distract me from it or not—I tended to favor my professional life.

These are details I am not proud of, and I alone am aware of them, but I know this for a fact: I know I favored my professional life because it seemed easier, more convenient, no, not more convenient, that’s not the house style—more feasible.

I favored hardness and awkwardness to transform these handicaps into assets. I favored whatever put me at less of a disadvantage. And . . . And so that was where I had ended up, that was what I brooded over, those nights after I left you and found myself freewheeling through despondency.

I realized that in your home, even though you lived alone, there was life, and life felt loved. At my place, there was no more life.

 

I still don’t know why you held out your hand to me, Louis; you never told me, but what I do know is that our winter respite did me a lot of good. “Eat your soup so you can grow up to be big and strong,” is what real mothers say and . . . Thank you for the soup, neighbor. Thank you for the soup, hearty or velouté—not to mention all your wizard’s gruel. I was already too old to grow up to be big and strong, alas, but you helped me stand up straight, straighten my spine, re-vertebrate me and make me taller by . . . what . . . a good little half-inch, maybe.

A little half-inch and the desire, the need, rather, the necessity of prolonging the cease-fire within myself.

 

Pepin the Short was king of the Franks, he founded the dynasty of the Carolingians and he was the father of Charlemagne. Right, and now that I’ve remembered, I can forget it again, can’t I?

Frankly, what the hell do I care about Pepin the Short?

 

Our New Year’s Eve was perfect.

The night before, I didn’t visit, and I was late that evening because I’d had to do the rounds to thank all the employees at headquarters and the French facilities for the year gone by. (I don’t like holiday wishes. Too pious; too worldly.) Tsk, tsk, bad father, but good paternalistic boss; I can hear the tongues wagging already. Yes. It’s true. Good, paternalistic boss. Visit the offices, distract them on each floor, tour the workshops, break the pace, go up into the watchtowers, look at faces, shake hands, look into their eyes, understand things, take note of them in a corner of my brain, don’t forget them, don’t forget anyone, go down to the parking lot and greet them there too, these people you never see, don’t make a big deal of it, don’t even make a deal at all. Just, here I am. I’m just passing by. I came by. I’m your good old long-suffering jerk of a boss, for sure, but in the meanwhile, see for yourselves: I came by. I remember that you do exist, that’s all. That is all I had to say to you: I remember.

 

I was late, I realized, and I hadn’t even bothered to change my shirt, whereas you had gotten out your best apron and you stood before the raft that served as our sofa, with a big tray in your hands.

On the tray there were two white bowls, each one topped with a dome of flaky pastry.

You set the tray down, cleared your throat, and announced, gravely, one hand folded behind your back:

“Tonight we have soupe à la truffe. A dish created in 1975 by Monsieur Paul Bocuse the day he was awarded his Légion d’Honneur, for a luncheon given at the Elysée Palace by Monsieur Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, President of the Republic at that time, and his wife, the vivacious Anne-Aymone.”

And there, I had to laugh. I laughed because your apron was imprinted with the trompe-l’oeil bosom of a sublimely vulgar and virtually naked creature (a few tassels at the most, a few tassels, a few bits of turquoise and a few eagle’s feathers) sitting with her thighs spread wide behind the handlebars of a Harley.

I laughed and you smiled.

That was our mistletoe.

 

You were in great spirits that evening, you had Singin’ in the Rain on the program, I think you’d had a little to drink while waiting for me and once the film was over, you murmured:

“I have a confession to make . . . ”

I hated the tone of your voice. I had no desire to hear some confession. I hated confessions. They terrified me. We had gotten along fine up to that point without lapsing into sentimentalism, so why go and spoil everything?

“I’m listening,” I said, stiffening.

“Well, can you imagine that this old fart here . . . Yes, yours truly . . . This rusty old beanpole hunched over here before you was elected best tap dancer at Harvard’s Fred & Ginger’s Club in the summer of nineteen hundred and . . . well, of his generation, in other words.”

“Really?” I said, relaxing.

“Don’t move.”

You stood up straight.

“I’d like you to know, Paul,” (he was a bit drunk), “to . . . to know that . . . that you weren’t the only person in favor of exporting all things French. No, no, no! I too took part in the scheme to promote our country, old man! I too hoisted the flag! Don’t move: let me show you how high a French froggy can jump!”

 

He came back wearing a pair of old red, white, and blue shoes.

 

“And now,” (drum roll of little spoons on his grandfather’s bronze skull), “ladies and gentlemen . . . Oh, no, damn—and now, gentleman only, for your astounded eyes only, the world-famous Froggy Loo-isss presenting his even more world-famous tap-dancing number!”

And then . . . 

The dancing lunatic.

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, all to myself. Slightly rusty, slightly tipsy, to be sure, but all to myself. The rattle of little metallic taps on Baron Haussmann’s parquet floor.

The clatter, click, song, melody, even, yes, melody of little taps on the old baron’s parquet floor, while we could hear the far-off muffled crackling of some fireworks set off who knows where.

From a distance (but I really was sitting way at the back of the sofa), there was a touch of An American in Paris about it all.

Then you showed me the technique for tapping to one beatcount, two beatcounts, three, then . . . Well no, you weren’t able to do the other combinations, you collapsed again next to your dazed and astounded audience.

 

Ah, Louis. It did come to a hell of a good end, that annus horribilis. One hell of a good end.

All the more of an ending in that when we parted, a few moments later, we made it clear to each other, without having to say a word, that now, gentleman and gentleman, lights out, the show was over.

Reels rewound and umbrellas snapped shut.

 

For the first time I shook your hand and, for the first time, you walked me back to my front door.

I said, a bit solemnly, I think: “Thank you, Louis. Thank you.”

You waved it away with the back of your hand, my surfeit of solemnity, and said, looking me straight in the eyes:

“You’ll be fine. You’ll see: it will all be fine.”

I nodded, just the way little Paul with his dirty hands would have done that first evening, and you went away with a charming tap tap tick-a-tock—a little Hollywood entrechat, of the made-in-France variety.

 

* * *

 

The next day, January first, I went to see my mother in her chic medical hospice.

Of course she didn’t recognize me. Any more than on any of the previous visits.

She gazed fixedly at the stranger sitting at the end of her bed and we had an Into-the-Void Staring Contest for a long while, until I eventually broke the silence.

“You know, I’ve made a friend.”

She didn’t react.

She didn’t react and it didn’t matter at all, it still did me good. At least for once in my life I will have managed to have some sort of complicity with her.

So I went on.

“His name is Louis, he’s very kind, and he tap dances.”

 

To hear myself saying such silly, simple, childish words, on a public holiday, to a woman who had at last become human—but only once her brain had turned to porridge, reflecting a more or less legible image of a mother to me at last: it made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

By then I didn’t know anymore.

I didn’t know. I was lost.

By then I was so clueless about everything that I stayed with her much longer than usual. It was quiet, I felt good, I was steeped in calm. I looked at her. I looked at her face, her neck, her long, useless arms, her hands, and I thought, Take a good look at her because you won’t be coming back. You won’t set foot in this room again. And she doesn’t know you, she doesn’t recognize you anymore, and now it’s like the business with the Carolingians, now it’s too late, there’s no point trying to remember anymore.

Look at her one last time and then do like Louis showed you. Shuffle, brush, step, and tap, transferring all your weight onto the tap. Make it ring out, Paul, make it ring out. Look at her one last time then leave this weightlessness behind you.

 

* * *

 

The hostilities started up again but it was no longer the same. Even if we saw very little of each other in the weeks and months that followed, I knew you were there, that goodness was there. It may seem a measly candle wick in a life as barren as mine, but I know what I mean. It was like in the awful antechamber where my mother was patiently waiting: the good was done, the good had been done. Suddenly all the rest did not weigh so heavily beneath the harness. The rest would follow. Everything had been changed. Audrey had been there.

 

As for Ariane, she never came back, but our relations were warmer. The pretext being, of course, the girls, the girls and their logistics, and it was a fine pretext. I’d been incapable of giving them a happy family life and I was still just as awkward, but they knew that already. They knew it and had learned to live with it. As a result, they took good care of their great lump of a dad. They took him every other weekend, the occasional Wednesday evening when he was around, and during vacation. They dressed him, went out with him, took him to the Jardin d’Acclimatation or the zoo at Vincennes. They showed him how to send balloons and fireworks and confetti via text message, they taught him how to decrypt the subtleties of emoticon language, how to watch makeup tutorials, play Harvest Moon DS, find Sprites, buy the teleportation stone, build a bird shed, save the harvest goddess, change his profile picture, unfriend fake friends, like funny Youtubers, stop going to the restaurant all the time, and slice coagulated overcooked macaroni noodles into equal portions.

Above all they showed him a path away from the path of guilt. Another path, a detour, a shortcut. An amnesty. Okay, he hadn’t done the job properly and some of his failings could never be repaired, but for now he was the one who’d gotten the miracle glove at the Harvest Sprite Casino.

 

No, you and I didn’t see much of each other anymore, until one evening, you got things going again. You saw us on the landing and you invited us to come to the cinema at your place.

O tempora, o mores, truffles had been replaced by sushi and Julia certainly was not dressed by Givenchy, but you loved Pretty Woman and the girls loved it with you.

A new cine-club was born: every other Saturday evening, if Louis was around, we would go to his place. You introduced them to Paul Grimault and they gave you Hayao Miyazaki in exchange. You gave them Buster Keaton, and they lent you Buzz Lightyear. You gave them all of Jacques Demy and they arrived with the entire Studio Ghibli in return. They loved coming to your place. They loved your mess, your canes, your Daumier prints, your paper cutters and your glass paperweights. They said, “Why do you keep all those old newspapers all over the floor?” and you lowered your voice and said, “Because there are little mice that live underneath, you see . . . ” and then it was ever so hard to concentrate on the movie . . . So, so hard . . . With one eye they wept for E.T. and with the other they were watching out for the least little rippling under the surface of those old forgotten issues of Le Monde.

 

But it all remained very tenuous, very sober. Both of us were unsociable, we had both received the same good upbringing, give or take, that teaches paralysis as surely as it does politeness, and we were always afraid we might be disturbing one another.

Particularly me. I kept my distance. You were a man of dossiers, I knew you worked at home a lot, and I was very scrupulous about such things. (Work! The God Work!) And then there were your absences. Your nights of carousing, you called them. Your nights of great murkiness. You led a complicated life, Louis, didn’t you? Well, complicated, perhaps not, but full of contrasts, let’s say, full of contrasts.

Because of all this—your dossiers, your solitude, your ellipses—I might have left things there, with the truce we’d established back then, and would already have considered myself lucky, but our shoes, once again, trampled all our good manners underfoot.

 

I can’t remember when, or how, or whose idea it was, but it became, in addition to our mouse and sushi sessions with the girls, our new confirmed old bachelors’ ritual. On Sunday evenings, when I was alone and you were “fasting” (that was the word you used) we would polish our shoes together.

 

Like those car trips that give you the illusion that the only thing that lies ahead is the road, or those steep hikes that require you to keep a close watch on your feet through the difficult stretches, or like snapping the ends off green beans when, between two abrupt little gestures, you have to look out for the string—like any manual activity you are performing together with someone at the same time, in fact, polishing shoes is a wonderful way to get to know the other person, without letting anything on.

We removed the laces, cleaned, applied the polish, spread it, impregnated the leather, nourished, polished, rubbed, brushed, shined, sheened, and put the laces back in and, incidentally, fortuitously, during these various operations which provided us with a cover, since they monopolized all our attention, incidentally, as I was saying, we chewed the fat.

In the beginning we would always talk about the merchandise (our shoes, past, present, and future), then we talked shop (our work weeks, past, present, and future), and finally, we discussed productivity (God, Life, Solitude, Death; past, present, and future).

We spoke about our leathers at least as much as we took care of them, and our final strokes of polish often took us far away from our hidebound reality.

 

Shoe upon shoe, pair after pair, we learned to understand the other person’s mechanisms and his modus operandi, but as we were also very discreet, we neglected to . . . no, not neglected, not eluded, either, we respected, observed, rather, yes, that’s the word, observed, the way one observes a rule, a rite, a minute of silence, or a fast, precisely, we also, alas, observed their commandments and we never got our hands dirty.

We were familiar with each other’s mechanisms, but we knew nothing about the combustion, fuel, or wear and tear, and I regret that bitterly, now.

I regret it bitterly because the news of your death came as a terrible shock.

 

I didn’t know you were sick, Louis. I didn’t know that you’d been fighting your illness for years. There I was, living next door, I owed you so much, I would have done anything for you and I did not know a thing.

 

You were my friend of solitude, my late-come friend, my evening friend, my camp friend, my bivouac friend, maybe an imaginary friend, but my friend all the same. The friend I did not have time to get to know.

(I wrote love and then thought better of it, yet again.) (What a jerk.)

The friend I didn’t have time to love and appreciate. (What a jerk, as I said.)

 

Of course two years is not a long time and we didn’t see each other that often. All told, not counting the films, the girls, the movement of the brushes, and the merely polite pleasantries, our hours in each other’s presence did not add up to that many, in the end, and . . . 

And the news of your death was a terrible blow.

 

You often vanished. Sometimes for a long time. You were out in the country, or so you told the girls. You went to take your mice for a walk. And then one day you didn’t come back.

One day you didn’t come back, at all, and another day, Lucie, my youngest daughter, through Laure, her sister, through Ariane, their mother, through Mako, their nanny, and through Fernanda, our concierge, told me that there was no point waiting for you to watch Grave of the Fireflies, that you, too, were in heaven, that you would never come back again, that . . . but what would become of the little mice?

I learned of your death through a rosary of ladies.

 

I was your friend and I heard about your death from the concierge.

There’s a slap in your face, Paul, poor little rich boy.

A slap for the dominant male, distributor of Christmas envelopes, lord of the gratuities.

A whopping great slap, right in the face.

 

You see, you went on perfecting my education right to the end.

 

Then came the rumors that you had committed . . . that you had ended your own life. I wasn’t interested. I paid no attention to those rumors. I am grateful to you for this and respect you all the more for it. Suicide, too, is my imaginary friend. I merely lost my half-inch again, from bending to the weight of my remorse.

The thought that perhaps you reached the end of your suffering by inflicting yet greater suffering on yourself: it made me wretched. I could have, should have, helped you, would have liked to. In any way I could. In every way.

I could have obtained the details regarding your passing, but I didn’t want to know. You wanted to leave so you left, that was all that mattered. To me. That consoled me.

 

* * *

 

Louis,

One day you left for the country with your mice, another day a little girl in tears told me you were dead, and yet another day, much later, people came to empty your apartment, and that very evening a big boy smelling of sweat rang at my door and handed me a cardboard box. I recognized your handwriting on it: for the neighbor across the landing and, in the box, there was a wooden wine crate.

A Château-Haut-Brion crate, in memory of your first mission.

 

Since we’d drunk them together, there were no more bottles in the crate, but there were 2 horsehair brushes (one for light polish, the other for dark), 2 boar bristle brushes for shining, 2 little toothbrushy things in boar bristle for the welts and the sneakier spots, 4 jars of polish, 4 boxes of shoe wax to go with the polish, a nourishing milk, a suede brush, a suede block, some terre de Sommières stain remover, and a soft rag cut from an old shirt that I recognized. I’d seen you wear it. Maybe it hadn’t been even that old. But it was soft, that much was certain. It was soft and it acted as the farewell note that you hadn’t been able, or willing, to write.

It was so soft I blew my nose in it.

 

I took your departure very badly, Louis, secretly and badly. There, too, I don’t know which had it worse, my pride, or my flesh (my heart, moron, my heart), but for a long time I remained in the state I described to you at the beginning of this letter. What was it I said? A wedge. That’s right, a wedge. A wedge someone had rammed into my skull, all the way at the top, in the middle, where the fontanelle closes over.

 

I’ve always suffered from terrible migraines—and you knew this, because one evening you saw me completely out of it; you saw me lie down on your floor with my head in my hands, you saw me collapse on your bed of newspapers like a huge bundle of pain, you heard me beg you to switch everything off, to be quiet, to make everything quiet, shut everything up, turn off all the lights, make it completely dark, stop all motion, don’t move a thing, dip a napkin in ice water and put it on my face like a compress. Later, once the crisis was over, you heard me explain to you that it was like an enucleation, an evil spirit with a tiny but deep spoon with nice sharp edges was there behind my eye sockets using all his weight as a lever to turn the handle of his instrument of torture, first one way then the other, ever so slowly and conscientiously, to dig the eye out of its socket; and that these crises were so sudden, implacable, and violent that I could have blown my brains out a dozen, a hundred times, already—yes, I’ve always had terrible migraines and now, as if that weren’t enough, I’ve got your death rammed into my brainpan.

 

I’m going to take a shower. I’ll be back.

 

scorching water

for a long, long, long time

 

melted

drained

dissolved

scraped

liquefied

liquidated

 

Liquidated, the old man. Liquidated.

 

That’s better.

 

Daybreak. I have to hurry.

 

If I brought up these episodes of descent into hell just now, it wasn’t to make you feel sorry for me, Louis, it was to get myself back on my feet.

I don’t have time to go hunting for words anymore. I have to leave in less than two hours and I’m still in my bath towel.

I don’t have time for anything anymore, just to get myself back on my feet before I toss some ash on the embers and strike camp.

 

My feet, you remember, that’s—cut and paste—“a woman full of wit to whom I had just related our early-morning to-ings and fro-ings (I will tell you later the circumstances thereof), emphasizing the strange comfort they gave me.”

 

Yes. The same. The woman who would call out to Proust in the street and ask him if he was on the way home from the Duchesse de Guermantes’s place, or from a urinal.

It was because of her that we have spent this night together, you and I.

Because of or thanks to, I’m not sure which, but what is certain is that were it not for her—her irony and clear-sightedness and talent—were it not for Proust and his admirer Morand, I wouldn’t have done it.

I wouldn’t have gone rapping at the door of the dead. I would have gone no further than Untitled 1, and “you piss me off,” and I would never have said another word to you. Or as few as possible.

I’m not sure you would have gained much in exchange, but this time I won’t sign off with a coarse remark.

You don’t piss me off, Louis. You don’t piss me off at all.

 

So, the circumstances.

Let’s talk about the circumstances.

 

I was at an airport. Indeed. Fate. I was in a gigantic terminal at London Heathrow and I had a meltdown.

Noise, sounds, crowds, bright light everywhere, neon lights, voices calling, music, people, smells, engines, machines, metal detectors, beeps, colors, movement, waves, sirens, espresso machines, heating, air conditioning, the stink of airplane fuel, ringing, telephones, cries, laughter, children, I thought I would die from the pain.

 

I was standing behind a pillar, with my forehead on it, ready to step back and smash it open at last. Like an egg, a keg, a rotten pumpkin, a coconut: smash the thing, once and for all.

I was stifling, sweating, dripping, shivering, I peeled off layers of clothes, my teeth were chattering.

I came round in a hospital room.

 

I’ll spare you the details, but it was a long assault course, which I navigated ingloriously, and at the end of it the insurance companies and the banks ordered me to seek therapy. To strip down. Let myself be strip-searched. Soul-searched. See what science would have to say. Audit myself, in a way.

And at each consultation, I found myself sitting opposite a woman.

That woman.

 

I had nothing to say to her.

I didn’t say a thing for two whole sessions.

At the beginning of the third one—which, we had both agreed, would be the last one, given my patent unwillingness to cooperate—she said:

“You know, if you don’t like the term shrink, or therapist, because it feels incriminating to you, all you have to do is view me the way those patients of mine who are most resistant to any form of dishonest compromise view me, those patients we refer to as mad, crazy, nutcases, weirdos, all those Napoleons and so on. You know what they call me?”

She was being such an imperial pain in the ass that I felt like saying Josephine, but didn’t dare.

“They call me the head-doctor,” she replied with a smile. “Remind me why you’re here, already?” (Eyeglasses, distracted look at my file.) “Ah, yes, your left knee . . . ”

Ha ha ha. Very funny. Madame psychoanalyzing a clown.

 

I didn’t respond.

 

She gave a sigh, closed my file, took off her pretty eyeglasses, and looked straight at me as if firing daggers.

“Listen to me, Paul Cailley-Ponthieu, listen carefully. You are wasting my time. So we are going to stop this session right now. Don’t worry, I will sign the papers and discharge forms you need to go back into battle. Yes, I will do that for you: I am sending you back to the front because it’s what you want, but since my professional conscience is just as rigorous as your own, I want you to take this.”

She put her glasses back on, typed on her keyboard, leaned over, picked up the prescription that emerged from the printer, and handed it to me.

“There. Fit for duty. You will find a pharmacy on your left on the way out. Check in with reception regarding payment. Goodbye.”

She stood up while I read her prescription:

Silistab Genu Patella Knee Brace x 1

 

She was on her feet. Looking at me.

I was seated. I was looking at my knees.

I was beginning to have a headache.

I felt like crying.

I was thirsty.

I was hot.

I began talking to her simply so I wouldn’t weep.

I would still rather open this floodgate than that one.

I would still rather die with my mouth open than shed even one tear in front of this stranger.

So I opened my mouth and said your name.

And then I . . . And then nothing.

She didn’t say anything either. Out of respect, I think. She saw me hopping from one foot to the other at the end of the diving board and refrained from giving me a shove from behind. That was kind.

After two or three long minutes had gone by, she gave me a little nudge all the same:

“Do you suffer from tinnitus? Do you have hearing problems?”

For a moment I was nonplussed. Then realized: your name, in French, is a homonym for hearing. Louis, l’ouïe.

“No,” I laughed, drowning in my tears. “No. Louis. My friend Louis.”

It was gushing out.

“Don’t move,” she said.

She left the room, then came back holding out a roll of kitchen towels.

“I’m sorry, that’s all I have.”

“Thank you.”

She sat down in the armchair next to me while I mopped my face.

 

Silence.

Then she spoke to me the way she had to speak to me. She didn’t say, “Yes . . . Of course . . . So, Louis . . . Louis . . . Your friend, you were saying . . . How interesting . . . But still . . . But how . . . But blah blah blah and how did you feel.”

No.

She looked me straight in the eyes and said, calmly:

“My next appointment is in forty-five minutes. What do we do?”

 

She spoke about procedure, schedule, efficacy. She put me back in familiar territory.

 

I don’t know exactly what I said, but I must have spoken about that way you had of being both intense and volatile at the same time, being absolutely present and yet always slightly elsewhere, both generous and stingy. About everything you had done for me, and the brutal way you’d died on me. The words of farewell I’d been deprived of. Your lack of trust. In me, in yourself, in our friendship. The nasty impression I kept getting, constantly chewing it over, that I had completely passed you by. Missed you altogether. Betrayed you. Betrayed myself. That I was a complete and utter failure.

Am a complete and utter failure.

 

Also, that I was an only child. That I had probably projected the image of an ideal brother onto you. I had dreamt you, invented you, made you up. It was not you I was weeping over, but my lovely hologram. I was weeping over a lot of deaths, in fact. Your death, the death of our friendship, of my father, of the adoring uncle you’d become to my daughters, the death of my fatherhood, of my filiation, of my childhood, my youth, and my own life, which had finally been taken from me and . . . And then I talked about your secrets, your absences, your silences, and what that morning vision of you inspired in me, when you were returning, as far as I could tell, from a world of liberty/tine/tinage, whereas I was on my way to wall myself up in a car that was as long and black as a hearse and which would take me to start my shift in a free-market liberticide world which I defended as best I could, while in fact in the space of a few years that same world had been destroying the combined efforts of four generations of men and women of good will, which included some bosses.

“Yes,” I said again, “that’s the image that haunts me. That vision of him, at dawn . . . So handsome, yet ravaged by the night, by illness, by solitude, by . . . I don’t know.”

“It sounds like Paul Morand calling out to Proust . . . ”

I didn’t react. I would rather be taken for a pedant than for an idiot.

 

There was no fooling her. She looked me straight in the eye for a long time, long enough to make me understand that I was, alas—no doubt about it, the proof being this long pause—a pedant of the worst kind: an idiot of a pedant. Then, once this had been made perfectly clear, she moved her face closer to mine and in her lovely, deep voice she added:

“Proust . . . What sort of soirée do you go to at night to come home with eyes so weary and lucid? And what fright, forbidden to us, did you have, to come back so indulgent and so kind?”

 

Silence.

Her: There was a bit of that, no?

Me: (Silence.)

Her: You have nothing to say?

I said nothing.

She looked at me for a moment longer, stood up, motioned to me to do the same, and walked me to the door.

 

“Let the receptionist know if you want to schedule another appointment or not, but in the meantime, allow me to say one important thing.”

I wasn’t listening anymore.

“Are you listening?” she said.

“Sorry. Yes.”

“People live, have lived, and die, that’s the way it is, and you . . . Are you still listening?”

“Yes.”

“People live, and the only thing we remember after they have died, the only thing that matters, that stays with us, is their kindness.”

I said nothing.

“Don’t you agree?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Rather than brooding over what that man didn’t give you, talk about his kindness.”

“Talk to who? To you?”

“To me, if you come back here, to him if you don’t.”

“But he’s dead.”

“He’s dead?”

I didn’t answer.

“No. Of course he isn’t. If he were dead you would have buried him already.”

“He knew how kind he was.”

“He knew? Are you sure?”

Silence.

“I don’t know how to write.”

“I didn’t tell you to write, I told you to talk about him. The way you did just now, but addressing him instead. As if he were sitting there across from you. No need to take it any further than that: just talk to him.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Talk to him and say goodbye.”

I was silent.

“I am not being as authoritarian as usual, but now I know you won’t come back here and I don’t want to send you back to the enemy—to yourself, in other words—without a laissez-passer in your pocket.”

What did she mean?

“Tell him everything you have on your mind and then let him go.”

“This all seems very esoteric to me,” I said, defensively, not managing a smile, “are you really a doctor?”

“No, but—”with a frank smile—“don’t tell anyone, will you? Let’s just say I’m making an effort to adapt and you, dear case number 1714, you have no business in a psychiatric service, you just need to express yourself.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You’re trying too hard, Paul. You’re only making things worse. Stop it. Keep things simple. Say it like it is. OK, I have to go. I’ve got work.”

 

I never went back.

 

* * *

 

I’ve just been informed that the driver is waiting downstairs. I have to get dressed. I have to go.

 

Louis,

You see? I’m back on my feet.

 

They told me you were dead. They asked me to bury you. I myself said just now that I would toss ashes on the embers before striking camp and . . . 

But I won’t. I won’t strike camp. I have no desire to bury you. None at all.

No kisses goodbye, no hugs; I don’t dare. I just—

 

Enough. Time to go.