Her girlfriends came to see her almost every day. I’d already seen some of them at her place, she’d talked about them for months on the internet, the others too, now I’d see them arriving with flowers or candy. When they left Marie would give it all to the nurses, and to the nurses’ aides who cleaned the corridors and the wards. Little by little, seeing her living like that, almost furtively, I told myself that she was a real chance for me. She’d received a postcard from Benjamin and Anaïs. Show me, did you really? She would have to stay here almost another month, for short periods. Later, there would be outpatient radiation therapy, and then it would be over, that was what everybody hoped. Sometimes we actually managed to be alone for a while, she and I. She didn’t know what had happened to the young woman she’d seen when she first came. It had been really depressing, hearing her get up at night, call for help in a low voice, then go and spew her guts out. In Beaujon, so close to the Seine, so close to where Marco and I both lived, you were already far from other people, from life as it goes on.
One time, I told Marie that when Benjamin was born I’d gone down to the emergency room to phone my parents who were asking for news. A hairy young guy button-holed me, he wanted to scrounge a little money from me, I told him to leave me alone, I had other things on my mind, I’d just had a child! He gave me a crooked smile and said: you’ve just had a kid and you don’t even want to stand me a drink to celebrate? He turned around, genuinely disgusted. I’d never forgotten that, though I didn’t really understand why it had made such an impression. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? Benjamin knew that story by heart, he’d always listened to it politely, as if to say, why did that memory matter so much to me?
“You should have had a drink with him,” Marie said, “that way you wouldn’t have thought about it anymore.”
Then she asked me to sit down next to her and we stayed like that for a while, looking toward the other bank of the Seine. She didn’t feel too bad. Most of the time she didn’t feel anything. She spent her time not feeling anything. She was waiting. It was too hot in Beaujon. The last days of April and the first days of May, I was pleased that month was coming, with its long weekends and its public holidays. I was exhausted. I’ve never in my life been good at doing lots of things at the same time.
When I left Marie, she was tired.
“Do you need anything?”
She summoned up the courage to smile, and I don’t think she was faking it. Well, maybe sometimes.
“Yes, I need you to get rid of my cancer, could you do that for me?”
She never asked me to leave. Whenever I went, she would turn her head toward the window of her room, sometimes she had to put on her sunglasses, and it was if she was waiting her turn in a detox center or something like that. But we were out of luck. All I could do was tell myself crap like that. I looked on the internet two or three times, I bought magazines with articles about breast cancer, but there were never any answers to the questions I asked myself. They were irrelevant, obviously. What did she think about during all those hours of waiting? Everything and nothing. She tried above all not to ask herself too many questions, she told me she was trying to stop wondering why. “Why” kills faster than any other word.
The doctors had told her she would lose her hair. She didn’t know when. She didn’t want to wait. She was going to have her hair shaved off and buy herself a wig the following week, when she left the hospital. I offered to come with her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted to hear about the Brasserie Wepler, or for me to tell her about the boulevard, the trees on her street, she missed that, her life, her friends, her neighbors, and all those people she met in the clinic, her love of the night people, as she called them. She unwittingly came out with these grand but simple phrases. Damn Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, old chap. We hadn’t led the same life at all, she and I. They kept her in for a few more days after the first chemo, to see how she reacted. Then they let her go. Marie didn’t have any family, she’d dumped them the day she turned eighteen, but that didn’t mean she was alone. I liked seeing her surrounded by her girlfriends, and when I was there, they all looked at me in the same way, they all gave me the same slightly vague, slightly fake smile, a bit like, when you’re hiring, you smile at the applicant as you ask him to sit down. But I was probably just imagining things.
I’d forgotten all about him. Marco heard from him from time to time, they weren’t calls for help, although not far off, but he didn’t see what more he could do for him. In any case, in his opinion, strange as it might seem, Jean had never really wanted to get back to work. He talked to him mostly about Adeline Vlasquez. He really would have liked to find her again. He was also thinking about his mother in Marseilles. How old was she now? Marco and I both remembered the concierge’s lodge where we sometimes went to pick him up. Every year it was a little grayer in our memories when we talked about it. Maybe one day the color wouldn’t even exist anymore? It was a bit further away also. But when it came down to it, he’d only left it temporarily, he was back on the ground floor looking out on a courtyard. He’d been born like that. He hadn’t really suffered from his childhood, or maybe he couldn’t talk about it? Marco would ask me how Marie was and I didn’t know what to reply. Her illness was bringing her and me closer together. I had the feeling I’d known her for a very long time. Whenever she thought she was alone, she’d look out of the window of Beaujon, at the other side of the Seine, with her sunglasses. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? It was too hot in the wards. There were fans in the corridor, which were almost no use at all.
Once or twice we slipped out because she wanted to smoke a cigarette, which was completely forbidden because of what she had.
“You won’t do it again, will you?”
Marie smiled at the nurse who came rushing to us as we stood by the elevators. In the end, the nurse shrugged and told her not to stay up too long, and then I left. Marco asked me casually what would happen when she finally left the hospital, and then when she had finished her treatment and recovered?
“We haven’t talked about it yet, I don’t know.”
I could tell he was smiling on the other end.
“What are you doing? Are you still there?”
“It’s been a long time since you were last in love, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Oh, really? Is that true?”
He laughed softly, of course it was true. I realized that yes, it was true. In the end, I’d only waited twenty years for Marie. We had to stop talking on the phone, we had to see each other at least. Otherwise life soon became nothing.
“Wait, I’ll have a look.”
Marco whistled as he suggested dates. Apart from my evening visits to Brochant and to the hospital, I was alone, the dates were all the same to me, and I didn’t really mind. Quite the opposite. I was pleased to realize it, we’d meet on Friday. Should I come to his place? Aïcha was leaving for another conference in Marseilles, we could eat out if you like?
I took my son and Anaïs to the airport. We were in the terminal, they’d already left in a way, we had no more time to lose. They’d spent the last night at my ex-wife’s, she hadn’t been able to get away, she would go to see them, but she didn’t yet know when. It would have been easier if after our separation we’d learned to talk, but we hadn’t. We’d been at each other’s throats for years. He gave me their temporary address, Anaïs was at a newsstand buying some magazines. At first they’d be staying with a colleague who was also from Paris, they didn’t have anywhere to live yet. I really would have liked to tell my son a few things at that moment, as if we were never going to see each other again, as if I was going to leave before them. Instead of which, we chatted as if he would be there the following weekend. He’d given me a little digital camera and had showed me how it worked, we’d both laughed and made faces, these last few days, between his lab and the office.