On A Day Like This (7 page)

“Come here,” he said, “I’m not that sick.”

She said he ought to be careful. She pulled the T-shirt over her head, and scooted over to him. Her body was soft and warm and sluggish. I don’t love her, thought Andreas, I don’t even want her really. Delphine sat on him, and slowly began to move. They were both very calm and quiet. Once, Andreas almost fell asleep, he dropped into a dream for a moment, and then he opened his eyes and saw Delphine, still sitting astride him and moving in a very concentrated way, as if in a slow dance.

“You almost fell asleep,” she said with a smile.

“Don’t stop,” he said.

The next day Delphine went to Versailles to look at a few apartments. In the early afternoon she was back. She was carrying a sports bag with a few clothes.

“Are you planning on moving in?”

“Would you mind?”

“Well, if it’s just for a few days.”

Delphine said he needn’t worry. She was going away on vacation at the end of the month anyway.

“The end of the month!” said Andreas, with mock-horror. “And what do I do then?”

“Come and visit me if you want. I’ve got my own tent. And my parents are nice people.” She grinned and said her parents were about his age.

He said he had intended to go to Brittany to stay with Jean-Marc.

“Don’t worry,” said Delphine, but then she didn’t say anything else.

Andreas was less tired than he’d been the day before. They took the Metro down to the Seine, and walked along the banks. The sun was shining, and there were a lot of people out enjoying themselves, with dogs and bicycles and rollerblades.

“Sometimes I think Paris is one gigantic stage set,” said Andreas.

“Have you ever tried that?” asked Delphine.

“Rollerblading? I’m too old for that. I can remember a time when skates had four wheels, like cars.”

“Did cars even exist back then? Have you got a thing about being old?”

Andreas asked her how old she was.

“When you were born, I was in the middle of puberty,” he said.

“So?”

He didn’t often think about his age, said Andreas. He had never had the feeling of being old; he thought of himself as somehow ageless. Perhaps his cough was getting to him a little bit.

On his fortieth birthday he had had a little party, largely because Jean-Marc and Marthe had forced him to. But he had never understood the fuss about those so-called round-numbered birthdays. The only thing that had bothered him then was that he wasn’t too sure whom to ask. He got on all right with most of his colleagues, but he would never have described them as friends, and he certainly didn’t feel like celebrating his birthday with them. He couldn’t invite Sylvie and Nadia together, and various other ex-girlfriends he was still in touch with weren’t really guest material either. In the end, it was a small gathering, a dinner party, not a party. And Jean-Marc and Marthe needed all their persuasive powers to make Andreas go out dancing with them afterward.

“Do you have a bad feeling about the result?” asked Delphine.

They had sat down on a bench, and watched people strolling by.

“I don’t know,” said Andreas. “I try not to think about it.”

“Then let’s go and do something. Let’s see a movie.”

He didn’t feel like it, he said. He just wanted to sit here a bit and look at the people and enjoy the sunshine, like cats, or like old people. “Did you notice how many old men stand around in the city, on corners or in front of building sites? Always standing around, with frightened-looking expressions on their faces, watching their time go by.”

They walked on. Later they ate in a restaurant near the Tour Montparnasse. Delphine said she had never been up the tower. Did he feel like going up with her? Another time perhaps, said Andreas, he was tired after their walk.

“Did you know there was a rue de Départ here, and a rue d’Arrivée?”

“Of course,” said Delphine, “and in between is the Place Bienvenue.”

“That I didn’t know.”

“And I’ve only been living here for a year,” Delphine said proudly.
Three days later, Andreas got a call from his doctor’s office. The assistant said the hospital had sent the results, and asked him to drop by. Andreas asked whether the results were positive. The assistant said that, even if she knew, she wasn’t allowed to tell him. He asked if he might come over right away. In half an hour, she replied. Delphine was off in Versailles again, looking at more apartments. He left her a note, saying he had gone out and would be back soon.

On the way to the doctor’s, he told himself a hundred times that the result, whatever it was, didn’t change his condition, that it was already decided whether he was healthy or sick. Even though he walked slowly, he started to sweat, and felt a little nauseous. He could hardly make it up the stairs.

The assistant told him he would have to be patient a little longer, and asked him to take a seat in the waiting room. He thought she was looking at him rather pityingly. The waiting room was bare. There were chairs along the walls, a table in the middle of the room, with a few tattered magazines on it. A woman was sitting on one of the chairs. She had a child on her lap whose face was half-covered with a purple birthmark. The child was whimpering. The woman spoke to it quietly, and promised
it chocolate if it was quiet. Andreas had taken a magazine off the table, a Catholic parents’ magazine. He read an article on the advantages of breast-feeding, but without being able to concentrate on it. The assistant came out and called a name. The woman got up and took her child by the hand. It started to scream, and clung on to the chair with its other hand.

“Always the same fuss,” said the woman, with an apologetic look in Andreas’s direction.

The assistant unclasped the child’s hand, finger by finger, and together the two women dragged the screaming child out onto the corridor. Andreas stared at the wall, which had a faded Chagall poster on it, from an exhibition he had actually been to many years ago. At the time, he had liked those pictures; now he had no use for them anymore. He took a couple of deep breaths, then he got up and left the room.

The assistant was standing with her back to him in the doorway of the surgery. The mother and child were not to be seen, though the shrill screams of the child were clearly audible. Andreas crept to the exit. He left the office and shut the door after him.

He stopped for a moment at the top of the stairs. Then he heard someone coming up the stairs, and he
started to panic. He felt as though no one must see him here. He climbed up a flight of stairs and waited until he heard the door open and shut downstairs.

He left the building, and walked briskly down the street. He asked himself how many people knew about his condition. It alarmed him that there was a file with his name on it, and that there were photographs of his insides, and somewhere some tissue samples that had been taken from him. Someone had made a diagnosis and come to certain decisions about him, someone he didn’t even know. He had no choice. The machinery was in motion. We’ll take a tissue sample, the doctor had said. It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t even a command. You didn’t bother issuing commands to a victim, you just got on with it. The doctor who had performed the little operation had shaken hands with him and introduced herself. He couldn’t remember her name. The nurse and the anesthetist didn’t have names, just their functions. They were as anonymous for him as he was to them.

Andreas walked on and on in a straight line. He wasn’t going anywhere, he just wanted to get out of the neighborhood. He was running away from the disease that was his life, his work, his apartment, the people he called friends or lovers. Here on the street no one recognized
him, he was just a pedestrian like a thousand others, who passed him or whom he passed. Here he had no past and no future, only a fleeting present. He had to keep walking on, he mustn’t stop, mustn’t linger, then nothing could happen to him.

The sky was overcast, but it was warm. Andreas was sweating. His body felt strange to him, unresponsive. It moved somehow independently of him. Onward, ever onward. He reached the Seine, and followed it west. He saw the Eiffel Tower loom up, and left it behind. He was on the narrow Swan’s Island, approaching the little Statue of Liberty, the model for that other one that the French gave the Americans to celebrate their independence. He had often come here during his early time in Paris. When he was sad and alone. After Fabienne had left for Switzerland, and later, when a woman had finished with him, he had come here, and stood under weeping willows and watched the freighters, and surveyed the ugly office blocks on the south bank. It was one of the few parts of Paris that wasn’t beautiful, one of the few places that didn’t have that silver patina, the patina he adored when he was feeling good, but that he couldn’t stand at times like this.

Andreas imagined how he would tell Delphine about his illness, or Nadia and Sylvie and Jean-Marc.
Isn’t it hot today. How was your vacation? Oh, by the way, I’ve got cancer. Everyone would get to hear about it, his colleagues, the school administration, the pupils. Maybe they would have to operate on him and give him radiation treatment. He would have a course of chemotherapy. He pictured himself in the school with no hair or a silly cap. Everyone staring at him, knowing the situation, pitying him. They would presume to discuss him and his “case,” his tragic case. They whispered behind his back. When they talked to him face to face, they would pretend nothing was different. But he would be a patient in everything he said and did.

He lit a cigarette, but it didn’t taste good, and he dropped it disgustedly in the river.

They would start to avoid him. He remembered a colleague from a few years back, a French teacher, who had a brain tumor. He had gone out of the man’s way himself. He hadn’t even turned up for the little drinks party the colleague had given for his leaving. He left some pathetic excuse. When they had a collection a few months later, for flowers, he put in far too much. Now he would be the one to whose health they would drink, whose grave flowers they would collect.

There had to be another way. There was always another way. Perhaps the patch really was just the scarring
from some old tuberculosis, or it was a benign tumor. Even if the results were bad, nothing was certain. The lab could have made a mistake. The samples could have gotten mixed up with someone else’s. It was a tiny chance, but there it was. Andreas didn’t want to know. They couldn’t force him to know. As long as he didn’t know anything, nothing could happen to him. He had to get away from here. He had to begin a new life. That, he thought, is my only chance.

His decision spurred him on. It was as though he had got back control over his own life, as though, maybe for the first time since going to Paris, he had his life in his hands again. He would heal himself of his past life, which hadn’t been one. From now on, he would determine things himself. He would make his own decisions, and leave them all, one after another, and, last of all, himself. He called Nadia, but she wasn’t home. Sylvie was in a rush, as always. He asked if she had any time tomorrow. “But tomorrow is Saturday,” she said, “you know, family day.”

“Just very quickly,” said Andreas. “I’ve got something I want to say to you.”

Sylvie laughed. They agreed to meet tomorrow afternoon, somewhere near her apartment. Half an hour, she said, not a second more.

In the apartment, Delphine was waiting for him. She had been worried. She asked what had kept him so long. Andreas was irritated by her question and the way Delphine had taken over and claimed he owed her an explanation. He looked at her in silence.

“What’s the matter?”

“I got my results,” he said. He reflected for a moment, and then he smiled. “Everything’s fine—couldn’t be better.”

“Really?” asked Delphine, as though she couldn’t believe it. Then she flung herself at him. She kissed him on the mouth a couple of times, and said now they had to celebrate. He felt suspicious of her joy, looked for signs of disappointment in her eyes. Most people—and here he didn’t exclude himself—preferred the misfortune of others to ordinary dull day-to-day life. But Delphine seemed to be genuinely happy. She wouldn’t stop hugging him, and rubbing his chest with the flat of her hand, as though giving him some kind of first-aid.

Andreas took her to the Vieux Moulin, a restaurant that was only a short distance from his house, though he didn’t often go there. The food was expensive, and the staff were moody, because the place was usually half-empty. They ate oysters and some main course the waiter recommended, and they shared a bottle of wine.

“I thought you were a vegetarian,” Delphine said.

Andreas replied that he wasn’t a vegetarian, he just didn’t eat meat all that often. But now he felt like it.

“I’m a new man,” he said, and rolled his shoulders. “I’m going to start all over again.”

“And do everything differently,” laughed Delphine.

“And do everything differently,” said Andreas.

“Right. And now we’re going dancing,” said Delphine.

Andreas protested, but it was no use.

It was very loud in the discotheque. They bought drinks at the bar, and watched the dancers for a while. Then Delphine took Andreas by the hand and led him out onto the dance floor. She went on ahead, dodging through the mass of people. She walked on light feet, like a cat, or a model, he thought. Andreas stared at her bottom, then she spun around, pushed his hand aside, and drew him against her. She beamed, kissed him on the mouth, laid her other hand on his shoulder. She seemed to be unaware of the rhythm of the music, until Andreas took over. When that happened, Delphine laughed, a silent laugh that the music drowned out. Her head went right back, and Andreas thought either she’s drunk or she’s happy,
it doesn’t matter, comes to the same thing. He too was drunk with the wine and the loud music and the flashing lights. And perhaps he was happy as well, or just excited, he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t sick, for a moment he almost believed it himself. He turned his head this way and that while he danced, he looked at other women, but it was only Delphine he wanted to dance with, who held his face in her hands to make him look at her, and then let him go again. A strobe light cut the movements of the dancers into individual stills, and then the colored lights came back on, and everything gleamed in red, and blue, and red again. Delphine spun around Andreas’s hand, lost the beat, and hugged him clumsily, while the other couples jigged up and down around them.