The Happy Marriage

There’s a woman next to me and she’s looking at me while I write. She leaned over and said: “How lucky you are, you’ve got someone to write to, someone you love, I suppose? I don’t have anyone to write to. My children have forsaken me, my husband is dead, and my friends are all in the hospice, having completely lost their memories. Well, say something nice to that man. Tell him that Gisèle sends him a kiss. So he knows that there’s an eighty-four-year-old woman out there whom he doesn’t know but who’s sent him a kiss. Thank you.”

There we have it, my love, my tree, my music, my greatest folly. It’s my turn to see the doctor now. Don’t forget, don’t allow anyone to compromise your integrity.

The painter had carried the memory of that woman’s unspeakable grief for a long time, without ever being able to share it with anyone. He could have lived with her because she’d given him an ensuring sense of serenity. She’d soothed him and loved him. Every moment he’d spent with her had been sheer bliss. They’d met when they’d attended a retrospective of Billy Wilder’s films. The painter loved films from Hollywood’s golden age, especially Ernst Lubitsch’s and Frank Capra’s. They’d spent entire evenings talking about the various cuts of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. If her illness hadn’t ended her life when she’d been so young, beautiful, and energetic, he might have spent the rest of his days with her. He told himself that in order to keep her memory alive. When he learned that her ashes had been scattered in Africa, where she’d grown up as a child, he’d been thrown into a state of panic and confusion. How could the body that he’d pressed against his own have disintegrated into ashes and been lost in the sands of a distant land? The idea of it tormented him. He put it out of his mind and focused on the image of her when she’d been most alive. He could still hear her sweet voice and peals of laughter. One day, her daughter had called him and said: “I dreamed of mama, she was so happy and she told me to call you, to tell you to take care of yourself and that she loves you!” He’d been taken aback, had lain down his brush and reread the letter she’d sent him that he kept hidden in a locked drawer.

She’d given him pride of place in her dreams, but wouldn’t be coming to see him. He struggled to remember her and was gradually forgetting her features, as usually happened to him whenever he experienced strong emotions.

Instead, it was Ava’s face that superimposed itself on hers in his mind. First with her bright gray-green eyes, her lioness-like hair, her impressive height, her naturally sensual voice, and that slender body of hers that always made his head spin, leading her to bust out in fits of giggles. Ava had entered his life a few months into his secret period of mourning, entering it like a storm or a burst of summer rain that made him marvel and kneel before her. An encounter right out of the pages of Nabokov or Pushkin, or even Gone With the Wind or Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, where his Ava could be played by Ava Gardner, except that his Ava wasn’t a femme fatale who sowed misery and destruction in people’s lives. His Ava stood for love, sweet madness, and adventure. She had an air of mystery about her and a solemnity in her eyes, but also a joie de vivre. He’d known they would have an intense affair the moment he’d met her. He’d completely changed the moment she’d sent him a note where she’d reproduced a drawing by Matisse by way of introduction. She’d written her phone number on the back of the note and had signed her name in the shape of a shooting star. When he’d called her, she’d answered with a burst of laughter, as if they’d known each other forever and had a shared past. She’d told him: “Your paintings break my heart! Life’s already left too many scars on me, and you don’t have the right to add any more!” Then she’d added: “Nonsense, nonsense …”