7
One March morning she emails to say she’s in the neighborhood of the school where I work and asks if we can have lunch together. I can’t. I don’t have time, I have too much to do, it would be awkward if my colleagues noticed. I say yes. I make my escape at the appointed hour, a peculiar happiness in my heart. It’s a beautiful day. She’s waiting for me at the Métro station. She starts talking straight away, very quickly, very loudly, gesticulating a lot. Her eyes shine. She walks in the street, apparently fantastically indifferent to the cars that could knock her down. I expect she doesn’t notice that I want to pull her back by her sleeve every five minutes because she seems so preoccupied, and I’m frightened there’ll be an accident. She’s alive.
8
In the Korean restaurant she talks so much that the waiter comes to take our order at least three times. She’s never ready. She says she can’t choose, it’s a problem, in life. She wants everything and nothing. She tells me how during the strikes that crippled France in 1995 she learned to hitchhike around Paris. She was fifteen that year. I gaze at her and I’ve already stopped listening to her, I watch her and wonder what she looked like, at fifteen, and what it must have been like, life then. Paris completely paralyzed, rendered mute without all those cars to buzz through the streets, or at least a little quieter, hoarse. Paris with a frog in its throat. And a fifteen-year-old Sarah in the middle of it all, probably with drooping eyelids already, probably with her violin case on her back already, teetering like a tightrope-walker along the edges of pavements in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, where she grew up, her thumb out, in the hope that someone would take her on her way. To school, to the conservatory, to her friends for music practice. To the ends of the earth. That’s what I imagine. At fifteen, Sarah hitchhiked through a voiceless Paris because she wanted to be taken to the ends of the earth. That’s what I imagine and that’s what I hold on to.
Later, when she walks back to the school with me, or maybe it’s during the same conversation, she describes the first time she drank beer with her father. It wasn’t very late in the day. I think I’ve got this right: as she recalls it, her father had come to pick her up when she’d been away somewhere for a week, or was taking her somewhere to catch a train. Anyway, there was a station involved. That’s how I see the scene in my mind’s eye. Sarah and her father together, sitting on the metal chairs of a station café. It’s daytime, broad daylight, that I do remember her mentioning when she told me about this memory. She’s a young woman, I picture her beautiful but I really have no idea. As for him, it’s difficult to say what he looked like. Fifteen years ago would he have had dark hair? Been full of smiles? And jokes, as he sat facing his teenage daughter? The apple of his eye, the light of his life, his little darling. She laughs as she describes the scene, I don’t know why but she laughs, in hindsight, years later, laughs uproariously about the look on his face when she ordered her first half, about the pride she felt, the assurance it gave her. I imagine her swagger, the unforgettable color of the first beer ordered so boldly, in broad daylight, sitting at a café, with her father. She describes the memory and laughs, she can’t stop laughing, so much so that it’s almost contagious. Nearly twenty years later, she laughs as she describes her nerve.
9
I ask her how she would define latency. She leans in slightly as I explain that this word is superimposed onto every image of my life, I can’t get it out of my head, I don’t really know why but I’m obsessed with it.
After a silence: “It’s the time between two major events.”
10
Days go by. Spring settles in, calmly, in no hurry. It’s a spring like any other, a spring to depress the best of us. Sarah settles in, settles into my life, calmly, in no rush. She invites me to the theater, the cinema. She smokes in my kitchen one evening when I ask her over for supper. She tells me a secret. She tells me she’s never told this secret to anyone. She doesn’t notice the turmoil I’m in. She gives me her string quartet’s latest album. A Beethoven collection. She doesn’t know that over the next few days I listen to it on loop. She doesn’t know that I read books about chamber music. She doesn’t know that I want to know everything, understand everything, be familiar with everything. She doesn’t suspect for a moment that I’m furious with myself for not being a better student when I was at the conservatory.
My partner’s amused by this sudden, instant, almost abrupt friendship. I don’t tell him that when I have the choice between spending time with him or with her, I choose her. He and I go together to watch her play at the string-quartet biennale at the Philharmonic Society. It’s on a Sunday afternoon. When we get there the auditorium is full, there are no seats left. I put up a fight with the man at the box office, make big eyes, beg and rage. My partner says it doesn’t really matter, we can listen to them another time. He says for goodness’ sake, come on, let’s have a coffee outside, in the sunshine. I refuse to give up. I cry with anger. He doesn’t understand what’s happening to me. I end up getting two tickets at the last minute. We have to sit on fold-down seats, a very long way from the stage. I screw up my eyes to see what’s going on. I can see the other three members of the quartet. When the four of them come onstage in single file, I’m so nervous I feel like laughing out loud. For the first time I see her with her hair done, looking elegant, distinguished. She’s wearing a disconcerting concert gown, very long, black, backless. They bow to the audience before they start playing. I can’t breathe. I almost clap after the first movement of the opening quartet. I don’t know the form. I don’t understand a thing. My eyes are pinned on her tiny figure, so far away, on the stage. The piece they play for the encore blows my mind. Someone tells me it’s a movement from a Bartók quartet, all in pizzicato. I don’t understand a word of what they’re saying. I clap wildly, very loudly and for a very long time, until my palms hurt.
11
She asks me what I do with my Wednesdays when I don’t have my daughter. I go to the cinema, alone. I write to let her know. I give her the name of the cinema, what time the film is on. I catch myself hoping she’ll be there at the end, waiting for me. The film is about casual affairs that make it easier to forget a great love. It’s in black and white. The heroine’s very beautiful. It reminds me of a New Wave film. I savor this time, alone, in a cinema. I wonder whether she’ll come. The film ends. I race outside. No one. It’s raining. I walk briskly, with my head down, watching my ankle boots stride out all on their own over the wet cobblestones of the rue de la Verrerie. My phone rings. It’s her. She asks where are you, and says I’m on rue de la Verrerie, I’m coming.
12
She tells me she’s thinking of me when, on a dazzling first day of sunshine, I go to the law courts. Later, over a glass of wine, she asks me how it went. She doesn’t take her eyes off me as I tell her about the waiting, the judge, my daughter’s father, the decision that he’ll have her every other weekend, the sun that made me far too hot, what with me being dressed all in black, in mourning for this lost love.