On A Day Like This (12 page)

At half past nine, Andreas was standing outside Delphine’s house. It took a while from when he’d rung the bell to the buzz of the door opener. In the courtyard, Andreas looked up, but he couldn’t remember which window was Delphine’s. Slowly he climbed the stairs. When he was on the third floor, he could hear a door opening above him. Delphine stood there on the landing. She was in her nightie, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

“What do you want?” she asked. She looked serious, but not hostile.

“You left your toothbrush behind.”

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Andreas, “about what I said.”

“And that means everything’s all right?”

Delphine looked at his suitcase. She smiled, and asked him if he was intending to move in with her. Andreas said he had to talk to her. Delphine let him in, and led the way into the kitchen. He sat down, she remained standing. She stood very close to him. He put
out his hands and grabbed her around the waist. Through the thin material he could feel the warmth of her body. She took a step away from him, and said she was going to have a quick shower and get dressed. While she was gone, Andreas poured himself a glass of water, and drank it in quick gulps.

“To see you sitting there like a poor sinner,” said Delphine, returning. She was wearing the same dress she had worn at their last meeting.

“Weren’t you going to go to the seaside?” asked Andreas.

“Not till the end of the week,” replied Delphine. “But I’m not quite sure whether I’m going yet. My parents are being annoying.”

She hadn’t found an apartment, she said. She no longer even felt sure she wanted to go to Versailles.

“I got my exam results last week. I passed. Now I’ve got a guaranteed job for life. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

Andreas asked her what else she could do. Delphine looked at him in a bored way, and said that was exactly what her parents were saying. She didn’t know. She felt too young to be tied down like that. She wanted to live.

“I’m going to Switzerland,” said Andreas. “Do you fancy coming with me?”

Delphine seemed less surprised by the question than he was. She asked why didn’t he go to the sea with her. He didn’t say anything. She thought about it for a moment, and then she said OK, she would come. She had never been to Switzerland. When were they leaving?

“I bought a car,” said Andreas. “I can go and collect it today.”

Delphine said she had to take care of a few things, and make some necessary purchases. They arranged to meet at four o’clock. Andreas said he would pick her up.

When Delphine saw the 2CV, she suggested they take her car instead. Andreas shook his head.

“My best friend had a 2CV,” he said. “When I was young, we used to drive to the lake in it.”

They rounded Paris on the
Périphérique
. The sun was high in the sky, the city swam in a milky haze. The sky and the buildings were one and the same color, only different in shadings. The roads were choked with holiday traffic. Delphine had opened the roof, and turned on the radio. They were listening to a jazz station, and Andreas tried to guess the titles of the standards they played.

“When I was pretty new in Paris, I saw Chet Baker in the
New Morning
,” he said. “He was incredibly thin and hollow-cheeked. He sat slumped on a barstool, with his trumpet jammed between his legs. Then he started singing, very quietly, and with a cracked voice. I can’t remember the name of the piece, ‘The Touch of Your Lips’ or ‘She Was Too Good to Me,’ but I can still hear his voice today. After a few bars he breaks off, and makes an angry gesture, and the band starts over. His performance was like the echo of an echo. Shortly after, he died.”

He said he preferred Chet Baker’s late recordings to his early ones. It was no longer a matter of getting the perfect sound. There were cracks, little mistakes and imprecisions. The music was more alive, failure was a possibility, even a certainty. Delphine asked him who this Chet Baker was. She said she didn’t listen to jazz much.

When they came off the
Périphérique
at the Porte d’Italie, Delphine asked whether they shouldn’t rather drive to Italy or the south of France.

“We can do whatever we want,” she said. “We’re completely free.”

Andreas didn’t say anything. It was a long time since he had last driven, and he had to concentrate on
the traffic. Delphine leaned back and looked out the window. Later, they listened to the cassettes Andreas had packed, rock music he had liked once, and chansons that Delphine thought were horrible. Andreas sang along to Francis Cabrel:

Delphine laughed and said her eyes were brown, not blue. Andreas said the music took him back to his youth. At the time he had written poetry when he was in love.

“Erotic poetry?”

“Sentimental would be more like it.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you capable of that,” said Delphine. “A spark of love within a frozen heart.”

She said it in jest, but Andreas was a little surprised, just the same. He had never thought of himself as a cold person, but it wasn’t the first time he had heard such an accusation.
C’était l’hiver dans le fond de son coeur
, sang Francis Cabrel. Andreas remembered how the song had moved him once, and how he had joined the singer in grieving for the death of the girl who kills herself on the eve of her twentieth birthday. Delphine said she couldn’t bear it, it was too mawkish. She pushed
the eject button, and pulled another cassette from the plastic bag at her feet. She put it in, there was a moment’s silence, and then a woman’s warm voice. Part seven: Reflexive pronouns.

Andreas wanted to take the cassette out, but Delphine put her hand over his, and they listened to the woman slowly and clearly speak the examples.

Then a man’s voice, equally warm, intoned:

The man’s voice had something strangely cheerful about it. It sounded as though he had yielded completely
to the course of such days and years, a destiny without subordinate clauses.

“I me, you you,” said Delphine, and then she repeated it, running it together like one word.

“You are the I-me,” she said.

“I-you,” said Andreas. He took the cassette out of the player, and the radio came back on. He asked her if she had understood the text. Most of it, she said, she wasn’t surprised no one wanted to learn German if that was how they taught it. Sausage for breakfast.

At Beaune, they left the Autoroute. A little outside the center, Andreas found an Ibis hotel, and parked.

“I imagined my holiday a bit more romantic than this,” said Delphine.

Andreas said he didn’t feel like driving into the town. Anyway, they had an early start tomorrow.

They took a room, and went back out to pick up their suitcases.

“They’ve even got a pool,” said Delphine. “What have you got in that bundle?”

She tugged at the curtain, in which Andreas had wrapped the little statue.

“Don’t,” he said, and shut the trunk.

Delphine thought she would swim before supper, to cool off. Andreas said he would have a drink meanwhile.
It was not a large swimming pool, surrounded by a fence, and just a few steps from the terrace of the hotel restaurant. Andreas sat at a table at the edge of the terrace, and ordered a Ricard. It didn’t seem to bother Delphine that the diners could watch her as she climbed into the water and swam a few lengths. She came out, squeezed the water from her short hair with one hand, and dried herself. Then she wrapped herself in the towel, and came up to Andreas’s table. She sat down, and looked at the menu.

“Do you want to eat here?”

“Don’t mind.”

“Well, then, let’s go somewhere else.”

Andreas went up to the room with Delphine, and watched her as she got changed. She put on a little green skirt of rough cotton and a thin black cardigan. She went into the bathroom, and came back with pink lipstick on. Andreas had never seen her with lipstick on. He said she looked nice. He wondered what she liked about him, or what she had liked about Jean-Marc.

They walked along the main road, heading for the town center. They passed a lot of hotels, a shopping center, and roundabouts decorated with wine barrels and vines.
The old center was all done up. Every other house was a restaurant or a wine cellar. Delphine wanted to look at the cathedral. The nave was dark. If you pushed a button, some lights came on that lit up the altar and one especially noteworthy chapel. Delphine lit a candle. Andreas asked who that was for. No one in particular she said, just on account.

“Now God owes me.”

“I wonder what sort of miracle you’ll get for one euro,” said Andreas.

The town was full of tourists, they choked the streets and occupied the tables of the garden restaurants. It was all too noisy and full for Andreas. Finally he said they had passed a cafeteria near the shopping center. Delphine protested, but in the end she gave in.

When they were back at the shopping center, they saw that the cafeteria was due to close in half an hour. The woman behind the counter told them they would have to hurry. They picked up a first course at the counter, and ordered the dish of the day. Delphine chose a bottle of wine.

Not many of the tables were occupied. There were a few men by themselves, a group of Japanese tourists, and a woman with her three children. She took two of them to the bathroom. The third, a boy of about seven,
stayed behind on his own. He sat there very still, lost in thought. Suddenly Andreas felt enormous sympathy for him. He felt like going up to him and speaking to him or buying him an ice cream. Then the mother came back with the other two.

“Don’t you like it?” asked Delphine.

Andreas said he had been thinking about how they used to eat in restaurants like this one when he was a child.

“I could never decide what I wanted. My parents pressured me, and in the end I always ordered the wrong thing. I had been looking forward to going so much, and it was always a disappointment in the end.”

Delphine said going out to eat had always been a treat for her. It hadn’t happened often, and her mother wasn’t an especially good cook.

The hotel restaurant was shut. A group of girls were sitting in the lobby, talking in German. Presumably they were here on a school trip. They talked and laughed together loudly.

Andreas recalled the graduation trip for his class in high school. They had gone to Paris, four days of sightseeing, three nights in a cheap tourist hotel. For the
first time, he remembered Paris as he found it then—not the city in which he had spent the subsequent eighteen years. It was a big city in autumn. The air was as clear as glass, and yet a strange fog seemed to hang over everything, impeding your vision, and shading the edges of what you saw. People moved a little more slowly here, as though they were in an atmosphere that was heavier than air.

Their hotel was somewhere in the northwest of the city, a part Andreas hadn’t been back to since. He remembered the name of the Metro station, La Fourche—a line divided there. Their class teacher had been nervous, and hadn’t let the boys and girls out of his sight. Only rarely had they had an hour or two for themselves, after sightseeing trips and museum visits, and before supper. Then Andreas had set out on his own, exploring the quarter in ever-widening circles.

He remembered feeling extraordinarily happy to be standing in a bistro between two men stopping off for a drink on their way home, watching youths playing pinball, and women clicking rapidly past outside the big windows. It was the freest Andreas had ever felt.

He got the map out of the car. In the room he studied the route they would be taking tomorrow. Delphine was in the bathroom. He tried to imagine her as his wife,
the two of them newly married, and on their honeymoon. The fantasy both calmed and excited him.

Delphine came out of the bathroom in a short nightie of flowered terrycloth and got into bed. Andreas undressed, turned the light out, and lay down beside her. When he put his hand on her thigh, she said she would get a condom. He held her tight. What if I get pregnant, she asked. He didn’t say anything. They made love in the dark, more energetically than usual, and without exchanging a word. Then Delphine switched on the bedside lamp, and went to the bathroom. Andreas heard the faucet running, and then the flush, and then water again. When Delphine came back at last, he said they would have to be careful not to fall in love. Delphine jumped on him, and they wrestled together. She sat on his belly, and grabbed his wrists and pushed them down on the mattress.

“You are such an idiot,” she said.

He wanted to say something back, but she kissed him on the mouth, and bit his lip until he freed himself, threw her down on her back, and held her down.

“Stop it,” he said. “You’ll hurt me.”

She tried to free herself, but couldn’t. Her breath was coming hard, and she repeated that he was an idiot.

“All right,” said Andreas. “That’s enough.”
Around noon the next day they crossed the border into Switzerland. During the entire drive, Delphine talked about her childhood and teen years, about the police barracks she had grown up in. She had always lived in pretty reduced circumstances, and with lots of other families with children. It had been like a big commune. All the fathers had had the same job, and the mothers were in and out of each other’s apartments, drinking coffee and chatting. When Andreas asked her if it had been a happy childhood, she hesitated.