The idea had been buzzing through his head all morning long. When he’d caught sight of her at the party, they had been together and he’d thought that was the case, but then she said he had not escorted her.
“He flirts with me but he has said nothing of the sort yet. He might. It’s difficult to know.”
“He’s not a bad man,” Hector said.
“An underwhelming endorsement,” she said.
He wanted to be fair in his assessment. He thought Luc Lémy volatile, movable, and perhaps lacking in imagination, but he had his positive qualities. When he wanted to, he could be a pleasant chap. To pretend otherwise would have been a lie.
“May I ask you a question that may seem indelicate this time?” she told him.
“You may.”
“You and Valérie—”
“I have no interest in discussing Valérie,” he said, cutting her off.
She grew serious, a frown upon her brow. “If there is a chance that we might be friends again, then we must be honest with each other. If you do not wish to tell me the truth, then I might as well leave now,” she said, sitting firm and straight.
“What truth do you want?”
“You love her still?” Her tone was neutral; she might have been asking about the weather or the time a shop opened.
“No,” he said with a similar coolness.
“She said you came back for her.”
“I did everything for her.”
“And yet she has vanished from your heart this effortlessly?” Nina asked. A flicker of emotion flashed in her eyes before she angled her head and he was not able to look at her.
The fountain behind them murmured in the language of water as he tried to find the right words. He spoke slowly.
“I have always loved artifice more than anything in the world. The painted backdrops and the lights on the stage, transforming the ordinary into a land of wonder. And it was like that with her. I met her in Frotnac, one summer. I had never seen anyone that lovely, of noble family, with fine manners, and I thought surely an exquisite woman would bring with her an exquisite love.”
He did not wish to elaborate any more, but Nina had asked for the truth and he had the feeling anything in half measure would not satisfy. He pressed on, certain he would sound like an idiot by the end of the conversation.
“She loved me, but I was penniless and we couldn’t marry. I left, determined to make my fortune. I gave her an engagement ring, and for a few months we wrote to each other. The letters grew scarce and then she told me she’d married someone else, a wealthy man.”
“Gaetan,” Nina said.
“Yes. It was like I lost my mind. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think. One evening in Zhude, I made the draperies in my room catch on fire and they tossed me out. It was cold.”
He could almost see himself, snowflakes in his hair and eyes shiny with tears, half-drunk with cheap wine, stumbling through the snow, his cap pulled down low.
“I got to the end of a street and I was near the sea and I stared at it. I thought ‘What is to stop me from sinking in it?’”
“What stopped you?” she asked quietly.
“I thought… I thought, ‘I’ll show her. I’ll get her back.’ And insanely, this thought kept me alive. That thought becameme.”
He wondered if she judged him an absolute fool, but having begun his tale, he supposed he should finish it.
“She did not love me as I loved her, she never did. I did not understand that then, too lost in flights of fancy, but I see it now. I was enamored of an illusion for years on end, living on memories half-remembered and half-fabricated. At Oldhouse, something gave away. Even a sleepwalker must open his eyes at one point.”
So many wasted days spent pining after a phantom. When he considered it now, he could hardly believe it. It had been madness, he thought. Like those men who would one day open the front door of their homes and step out and simply walk away for miles on end until they could walk no more, overtaken by a mysterious impulse that could not be explained. A “fugue,” they called it. Pathological.
“It was not effortlessly. It tore me apart, but the poison has bled out,” he concluded.
