A Fleeting Sorrow Read online

  Perhaps he should simply say nothing. Lie to them for their sake, not for his. Remain silent. But even as the thought crossed his mind he knew he would never be able to hold out for six months, that sometime down the road he would crack. And besides, one day they would learn the truth, and when they did they would think he had lied to them even about his own death. They would think that he hadn’t needed them, that he had not even trusted them enough to let them give comfort to him, even if they hadn’t been inclined to offer it on their own. . . . Paul thought of all the people he knew who were vexed or upset when someone failed to ask them a favor — even if it was a favor they would no doubt have refused. No, that would be pointless. In any case, murmured Paul the practical joker, Paul the womanizer, somehow managing to keep his sense of humor, one thing was certain: he would have to tell them both the same day. And he felt with a pang of sadness — or was it self-pity? — that having to repeat the same sad story twice in the same day would make the second telling less intense, less enjoyable. What a waste! But anyway, he would be too overwhelmed with a welter of conflicting emotions (for he knew he was bound to become very emotional) to compare the two versions.

  Besides, there was no point in trying to pretend or imagine another alternative; he knew there wasn’t any. Since this morning he had known that he was going to die and die soon, and his immediate reaction had been to inform both women in his life so that they could not only take pity on him but help take his mind off his fear. At his age he was not about to change his whole lifestyle, throw everything over and start anew. There was something called “personal code,” and something else known as “custom,” and he was not about to leave them behind.

  It was true that the worst part of this was not that he was going to die in six months but that he was painfully aware of it. And it was true that capital punishment was, for that reason, a frightful, unjustifiable punishment. It was also true that Dr. Hamster was a stupid little jerk.

  “What a stupid little jerk,” he murmured, and burst out laughing.

  “You’re talking to yourself now?”

  Yes, darling, he is. He was already becoming senile. It was high time to make his exit.

  “I have to talk to you,” he said all of a sudden.

  There, it was out! His duty done. For two years she had shared his life, his life and his bed, with what seemed to be unmitigated joy and pleasure. He couldn’t bring himself to sever his ties to her.

  “My poor darling,” he said.

  And suddenly the tears began to flow, and, his eyes closed, he buried his face in Sonia’s hair.

  “My poor sweet love!”

  And he looked at himself, with incredible distress and disbelief, crying for her, for himself. The trusting little boy, the vulnerable and open young man he had been, all these various Pauls, led only to this: this punishment, this pain, this barbarity. What spite! What cruelty! What utter stupidity! All of a sudden he was overcome with an uncontrollable emotion, an emotion that tore him apart, that tore his entire being the way something stuck to the skin has to be torn away. He felt his throat tighten; it was as if he were incapable of seeing or hearing. Something intimately related to him, more intimately than anything he had ever known, was suffering horribly inside him, was writhing convulsively against him. His entire body was in a state of revolt, terrified and deathly ill. It was a lonely pain, explosive and justified, that spread throughout his arms and legs, down to his hands.

  The shadows outside were lengthening. And he acknowledged in that moment of overwhelming emotion, that long and hateful sob, that intimate and unshareable separation of self from self, that he was yielding to the pain. That this pain would never be effaced. Even if he lived to be a hundred. That from this moment forward his life would be forever divided into a “before” and “after.” This moment, when for the first time he had faced up to the truth, had acknowledged with a mixture of rage and disgust and hate the strength, the force of his death, acknowledged with impotent fury and total despair that he would be subjected to “that”; this moment when he had opened the floodgates and let in a wave of conflicting emotions he had not known he possessed, emotions he had loathed and till now managed to repress. But suddenly these same emotions had welled up, taken over his being, forced him to recognize not only that they were his but that they would, for the next six months, be his sworn enemy. Suddenly Paul felt as if he were going to be sick; he moaned, “Oh, no,” as if he were about to give up the ghost. And he loosened his grip on Sonia, and as if searching for something to support himself, wrapped his arms around his own body.

  “Paul, you’re not feeling well,” said Sonia, shrewd as ever.

  It was not posed as a question. She pushed Paul down onto the sofa, then sat down beside him, perched above him, her expression one of complete panic.

  “Paul, you’re sick. What is it, Paul? Tell me what’s the matter, I know you’re sick!”

  He gazed up at her. He looked at her lovely face, her beautiful eyes, her pretty nose, her ravishing mouth, her gleaming, perfect teeth. He looked at her, saying to himself what a pity it was he was not madly in love with her. Not only a pity but completely unfair. And convenient, too. For how would he otherwise have been able to resign himself to leaving this exquisite face? In his confusion he smiled at her, tried to calm her fears and reassure her, not so much about his state of health as about his feelings toward her.

  “Paul, you’ve got to tell me,” she said. “Please tell me what this is all about.”

  And suddenly she collapsed on his shoulder and began to sob. “I haven’t even told what it is and here she is crying on my shoulder,” Paul thought — or rather reproached himself. “I must look like death warmed over, and she having not the faintest notion what this is all about.” Of course, he was moved by her tears, but he would have preferred that before she had shed them she had dug a little deeper in an effort to find out the truth, or even refused to believe him. But he felt that he had to justify without further ado his own unconditional tears.

  “A lousy tumor on one of my lungs,” he said.

  She took a deep breath, sat up straight, and moved over next to him, her legs curled up under her.

  “I should have followed my instinct and left you,” she managed after a long moment, her voice shaking. “I bring bad luck. When you look back . . . Two years ago, it was my mother. Then last winter, Anne-Marie . . . And today, you.” She shook her head. “I can’t. . . I can’t bear it. It’s just too much.”

  And with that she burst into tears again. Aside from the unpleasant realization that she had just made him a member of a club he would have studiously avoided, whether he was in the best of health or deathly ill, Paul now saw himself as no more than one of the passive factors of Sonia’s grief, not as her only concern. “I can see that I’m going to have to console her,” he said to himself, and the thought irritated him no end.

  “I swear I never even dreamed of joining the souls of either your mother or your closest friend,” he said evenly. The next thing you knew, he was going to have to feel guilty.

  “My poor darling,” she said, “and here I was feeling sorry for myself. Are you in any pain? Tell me, sweetheart, tell me you’re not. . . .”

  “No,” he said, “I’m in no pain. And they tell me that for three months or so I’ll feel as good as ever.”

  “And of course chemotherapy and radiation and all those things are worthless,” she said bitterly, tossing into the garbage in one fell swoop the most recent discoveries of the cancer specialists as well as their hard-fought victories — some ephemeral, some lasting — that filled the pages of the newspapers and the television screens. No, she was ready and willing to admit, without further ado, that his cancer was of the most serious kind, untreatable, deadly. Her intimate knowledge of her lover’s taste for extremes must have convinced her on that score.

  “You’re right,” he said, “they tell me there’s not much they can do to stop it, or even slow it down. For the moment at lea
st . . .”

  “Anyway,” she said, “the very idea of seeing you bald, or thin as a rail and all yellow . . . no, I don’t think I could have dealt with that.” Her voice, he thought, was a shade too shrill as she slumped back into the folds of the sofa. “No, I couldn’t imagine you like that,” she said, and Paul felt both disturbed and flattered by the thought that, at least aesthetically, Sonia couldn’t survive the notion of Paul minus his hair and his healthy complexion.

  “I would have taken care of you, you know I would,” she sobbed.

  He looked at her, slightly embarrassed. Her face was swollen, her eyes brimming, tears were streaming down her cheeks, and her lips were trembling visibly. Not a very pretty sight, actually, when the chips were down. But then who was?

  “Are you sure there’s nothing they can do?” she asked, but he thought the question was asked more to put an end to the discussion than to seek real solutions, or even crazy ones. Sonia, who was no rocket scientist, had always opted for simple solutions and easy answers.

  “How much time did they give you?” she whispered into Paul’s ear, very softly, as if it were an obscenity or a secret that some evil god, hidden beneath her sofa, was prepared to redress or unveil.

  “Six months,” he said, “three of which should be more or less okay.” To his surprise, after the extraordinarily violent emotional reaction he had had a few minutes before, he now found himself slightly bored, interested in noting his mistress’s reactions more out of curiosity than emotional involvement.

  “During these months . . .” she said, and Paul wondered whether she was referring to the three good months or the three that were destined to follow, “we’ll be together, won’t we? Promise me we’ll be together. You’ll spend all your time with me, swear you will.”

  “Of course I will. Of course we’ll be together. Besides, I’ll have more time to myself now,” he said, not sure whether he was telling the truth or lying. He had the feeling that the hardest part was over, and now that they had gotten through that scene, life was going to resume its former course, exactly as it had been before in this well-appointed, sweetly decorated little apartment.

  “And will you be able to . . . will you be able to love me the way you used to?” she said, her eyes lowered.

  Although reassured — after Dr. Hamster’s buxom nurse had done a disappearing act this morning — that his illness was not going to turn Sonia off, Paul could not help equating himself at this juncture — and the analogy struck him as bizarre — to an ear of corn, with so many kernels left that Sonia intended to eat one by one, till there was nothing left but the cob.

  Paul felt that they had said all they had to say to each other and didn’t know which way to direct the conversation when Sonia blurted out: “But what am I going to do without you?” and she took Paul’s neck in both her hands and gazed fixedly into his eyes. But what he saw in her eyes were not the yellowed films of the past but the films of the future: those evenings she spent alone by the fire, those evenings when she went by herself to cocktail parties, those evenings when she came home alone and snuggled down under the covers without a man. . . . And so forth and so on. Improbable evenings, the more he thought about it, considering how pretty she was — and she really was pretty — but the mere thought that that could happen made his foolish heart soften. He acted as if he had not understood her remark and was doing his best to reassure her.

  “Don’t worry about your future,” he said. “I’ve taken care of everything. I have no intention of leaving you lost and defenseless in this vale of tears, darling. Of that you may be sure.”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong. I’ll be completely lost without you,” she said, sobbing. “You’re leaving me completely defenseless.”

  So self-interest is not her overriding concern, he said to himself with a kind of grudging recognition. No, she did love him for himself. She may have loved him poorly or well, but she did love him. And she really was going to miss him in her king-size bed, at least for a while. . . . Until such time as decency or desire allowed her to replace Paul with another man, someone as sensual and healthy as he, someone as smitten by her charms as he had been. No, although relatively modest and not overly pretentious, Sonia knew that her body was fully capable of sustaining her for quite a while; in this context, Paul was no longer a strict necessity.

  “You’re the one who’s leaving. I’m the one who’s left behind. Who do you think is going to suffer?”

  “Don’t forget me in the equation.”

  “You mean physically? I know what physical suffering is. It’s nothing compared to grieving. And besides, it’s not going to last very long. Three months, isn’t that what you said? . . . That’s something quite different.”

  “You’re right,” Paul said. “But still, it’s not what you might call a pleasurable experience. All I ask is that you let me know the moment you don’t love me anymore. . . .”

  “You didn’t have to tell me that!” (Sonia straightened up with an expression admirably close to wounded pride.) “Do you think I’m capable of pretending, my love? I can’t believe you said such a thing! Of course I’ll never pretend. And what about all our memories? Don’t they mean anything to you?”

  And the tears began to flow in even greater abundance.

  He was disconcerted by Sonia’s reactions, and even more upset by the fact that he was enjoying them. She was more egotistical than he had imagined, and less selfish. She was stronger and more optimistic. In short, she was less sentimental than he had thought, but tougher. In a word, she loved only herself. Herself and, for the past two years, Paul, because it suited her purpose to love him. There was no point in making it hard for her. Especially since she would be perfect till the very end. He was crazy, he told himself, his ideas were completely out of control, he was seeing everything as through a glass darkly, nothing was making any sense to him. Actually, he had quickly come to the realization that he was bored with her, but he didn’t want to admit it. It was not the time to become bored, that much he knew. And yet! And yet, since that convulsive moment a little while ago, which he was deathly afraid might come back to haunt him, since that crisis and above all since the period immediately following the crisis — if that was the proper term — when he had regained control of himself, become master of his own fate — a cruel master but nonetheless closer to the real Paul than the panic-stricken animal that had possessed him earlier — since that convulsive lapse of a few minutes ago, he had had only one wish, and that was to get the hell out of here as soon as humanly possible. And once outside, he wanted to take stock and see if that morbid, terrified, masochistic character had stayed back upstairs with her, whining and muttering tenderly with her about the terrible times to come. If the fretful robot he had become would only be born again in Sonia’s bedroom, in her arms . . . In which case he would never see her again. But perhaps that was no more than one of the inconsistencies of his short-term future. Perhaps it was one of his silhouettes he had encountered, one of his unconscious, solitary doubles, as embarrassing as they were embittered, which would emanate from his illness and stalk him relentlessly over the next few months.

  How many profiles would there be of him, how many imitation Pauls, how many poor copies? How many wrecks of himself would surface to fight, in a panic-stricken rage, amongst themselves, squaring off in the lugubrious, ridiculous ring of his remaining days to try to sort out the questions of life and death? Or was it death and life? In his mind he was already beginning to juxtapose everything in that kind of light. “Good lord, why in the world am I carrying on these endless one-voice dialogues in the first place?” he thought with a tinge of irritation. “I am me, Paul. I’m still alive. In fact, I feel more alive than ever. I’m not interested in this whole story. I can’t — and don’t intend to try to — make any sense out of it. The only thing I can say about it with certainty is that it’s the antithesis of everything I love. The opposite of life, of my life. I even accept the notion of suffering, if I can limit it to
certain specific times, but I don’t want to suffer randomly, whether it’s physical pain or one of these moments of panic or terror that should be the sole preserve of prepubescent girls.” And as he finished his train of thought he felt like slapping himself. Still, taking advantage of the fact that Sonia had gone into the bathroom to get a painkiller, he could not repress a moan, and he could feel his face contorted by a combination of embarrassment and rage.

  Sonia had gone to get the painkiller not for him but for herself, for the “scene” they had just gone through — like all their scenes — had, despite its extraordinary seriousness, given her a migraine. She was in the bathroom a full ten minutes, presumably looking for the painkiller, and Paul could not help wondering, in a sudden access of anger, how anyone could have a pain in a part of the body that was so seldom used. Paul, who till now had studiously avoided posing that question to her, suddenly felt that he had every right to.

  When she finally reappeared, he greeted her, in a learned tone, with: “You have to admit that your migraine cannot be the result of excessive use of your cerebral tissues.”

  His voice was so low-key and authoritative that for a second Sonia completely missed the anger and irony. Besides, it seemed to her that the situation was far too serious for irony — even from Paul.

  “You mean that I don’t make sufficient use of my brainpower, is that what you’re implying?” Sonia ventured.

  “Not at all! Let’s merely say that you recognize your intellectual limitations and you don’t very often force yourself to exceed them,” he reassured her. “The same goes for me, in fact. No point pushing your cranium to speeds beyond its capacity.”

  “In other words, I’m stupid and happy in my stupidity, is that it?”

  “No, darling,” Paul protested, his eyes bulging. “That’s not what I meant at all! You’ve got it all wrong. My darling” — forgotten the hamster, forgotten his ex-friend Robert, forgotten too the Zinc du Port and its dubious crew; his penchant for jokes, and the generous amount of white wine in his veins, had done away with all inhibitions — “my dear sweet darling. I meant just the opposite. What I mean is that you use the brains you were blessed with remarkably well, without — thank God — wasting your time on abstractions, which is all to your credit, because people who do are, purely and simply, pretentious asses.”