“I’m sick of this,” Paula murmured, distant and unhostile, as if to herself.
* * *
A little later, she asked the child to wait in front of the building, where there was still a vast playground. The sand was much dirtier and more meager than she remembered. Doctor Zaka felt the inside of her mouth go dry.
“You can play, but don’t get dirty,” she said with some effort.
Then she remembered: Paula had stopped playing in the sand long ago.
Lips oddly downturned, Paula told her she didn’t want to stay in this place by herself.
“When I was your age,” said Zaka, “I spent all day outside, right here where we’re standing.”
She kissed her daughter and walked off toward the front door, its cracked pane of glass patched with brown packing tape, here reflecting scattered pieces of stormy gray sky, the sign of a heavy, hot rain soon to come, there reflecting — or was she mistaken? — Paula’s face, imprisoned in a broken triangular shard, so creased and distorted by panic as to seem shrunken, crumpled around a gaping mouth that might, at any moment, open into a bellow of fear.
“I’ll call you when it’s time, and you can come up and join me,” said Zaka.
She hadn’t turned around. She was talking to the door, the reflection. Paula couldn’t hear her.
She walked into the lobby, still just as she remembered it.
* * *
Vador was so beautiful.
She’d traded her glittering glasses for a pair of tinted contact lenses. At first Doctor Zaka was stunned to see her with blue eyes. How could I have foreseen contact lenses? Poor Paula. . Then, like a small explosion, a certainty resounded between the walls of her throbbing skulclass="underline" the color of her eyes made no difference. Nor did it in any way matter that Vador had appeared in the doorway wearing a genteel, ladylike, longish, beige cotton skirt and a white, round-collared blouse with mother of pearl buttons. Her hair was tied back behind her neck, and straight bangs covered her forehead down to the two periwinkle blue marbles standing in (temporarily? Zaka hoped so) for her eyes, which were in reality of the same brown as Paula’s.
This was not the Marlène she’d so often seen, in her thoughts as in her dreams, welcoming her into her home, first surprised, then delighted, just as she was now. She’d imagined a Marlène whose tinge of vulgarity she’d have to try to overlook, her overeagerness to display her body — traits, Zaka reflected, that she might have shared had she stayed on and lived here.
Vador was so beautiful.
Today she’s middle-class and magnificent, Zaka told herself, intimidated.
“You kept your mother’s apartment.”
“Yes. Mama died here,” said Vador, as if that explained it.
“It wasn’t for Claude François’ sake?”
Zaka had leapt right in. To her immediate regret, a sort of titter escaped her. But Marlène’s thin face lit up, as if illuminated from within, from just beneath her fine, dusky skin.
She said to Zaka:
“I thought you’d forgotten him.”
“Why?” asked Zaka, slightly insulted.
“You went away. You live in Paris. We swore we’d stay here. But I’m the only one. The whole neighborhood’s forgotten Claude François.”
What could Zaka say, faced with those eyes? She went and looked out the living-room window. Far below, she saw Paula’s motionless little head, then thick drops of rain began to fall and the child’s head disappeared. A warm smell came up to meet Zaka, rising from the sand, from the dust in the steaming parking lot. She’s gone to find shelter, she told herself, vaguely concerned.
She was standing in Vador’s living room, and she recognized the furniture Vador’s mother had cluttered it with long before. Her first impression, that Marlène had kept everything just as it was, was oddly reinforced by the unexpected presence of a small round side table and a crushed velvet armchair that stirred up an aged layer of mud deep in Zaka’s heart. She ran one hesitant finger over the table’s varnished top.
“That comes from your place,” said Marlène.
She flashed a triumphant little smile.
“Your mother gave it to mine, along with the armchair and a bunch of other stuff I finally had to sell.”
Zaka smiled into space. What was Marlène trying to distract her from with this tedious talk of furniture? And how could she, Zaka, possibly have once lived with such furniture, and found it nice and even rather chic?
Rain was spattering against the windowpanes. Everything had gone very dark.
Zaka saw Marlène Vador’s artificial eyes shining. And all around there were dozens of similar pairs of eyes, some of them huge, on the living room wall, others more modest, in picture frames lined up on the sideboard, on the TV set, or, in close ranks, on two or three chairs sacrificed for their display. Zaka knew most of the photos. She’d helped Marlène cut them out, long ago, from magazines bought for precisely that purpose.
And today Marlène had given herself the same eyes as Claude François.
A lump clogged Zaka’s throat. She rushed to Marlène and embraced her. How long had it been since she last clasped a full-sized adult body in her arms? Oh, years and years, she thought. A sort of euphoria came over her. Vador’s torso felt bony and cold, but all the same, how wonderful to embrace a substantial body, on the same scale as one’s own!
She felt an urge to nestle her head against Marlène’s neck, inhale its open-hearted scent of soap, but she didn’t dare, though she thought she could feel her friend’s muscles relaxing — and she was indeed her friend, she’d known that all through those thirty years she’d pretended to forget it.
“You’re the best friend I ever had. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other from now on. Right? Right?”
“No, not a lot. I’m going to die soon.”
Zaka loosened her grasp. She pulled back, arms outstretched, to look at Marlène.
In spite of her refashioned gaze, Vador was so beautiful.
“And why on earth should you be dying anytime soon?” cried Zaka, frowning and jovial.
She sometimes addressed the doleful old ladies who came to her office in exactly this way.
“I’ve made up my mind to,” Vador murmured.
She motioned quickly toward the innumerable faces of Claude François. Her delicate nostrils clenched.
“In a month, it will be twenty-five years since he died. I don’t want to live any longer than he did. We made a vow about that, too. You remember?”
Zaka went back to the window and opened it in spite of the rain, which immediately began to spray Vador’s little living room and her own flushed face, her big, black-framed glasses. In a distraught voice, she called out:
“Paula!”
What good was her miracle now? What good, now, were her fearless life and her offering to Vador?
She closed the window and turned around to see Marlène calmly wiping raindrops from the pictures with a chamois. “That’s why I came to your office,”said Marlène in a low, gentle voice. “To ask for your help, because I don’t know how to do it.”
“My daughter Paula’s downstairs. . She’ll be up soon. . You’ll meet her. .”
“Oh, at this point, I don’t. . ”
“You’ll recognize her. . You’re my friend. .”
“What great friends we were, you remember?”
And Marlène let out a sad little laugh, giving Zaka, whose face was trickling wet from the rain, a glance of such tender, unexpected companionship that Zaka couldn’t hold back a surge of pleasure. Vador put the last picture back in its place, now thoroughly dried. She caressed Claude François’s cheek with one wrist, lovingly, reflexively, as, Zaka thought, she must have been doing for decades, every day, several times a day.
“In the end,” said Vador, “he will have been my only love.”