WE MEET IN THE Café Foy. It’s like an empty railroad car with its bleak line of booths, its tables in the rear. The light of late afternoon fills it, the provincial calm. The patron is playing dominoes with a friend.
All alone, the day behind her, she walks back to where I am sitting and mechanically extends her hand. A single, downward shake which we are embarrassed by.
“Bonjour,” she says quietly.
“Bonjour.”
She sits with her eyes lowered, the bare table between us. It seems that the day is very white at the doorway, the white of clouded water. The traffic moves by without noise.
Dean was killed in a motor accident on the twelfth of June. There are only a few details. It was raining. It was at night. He was on his way to the country to visit his sister. Splinters of glass strewn everywhere, the rain thudding down. In each direction, waiting to pass, the line of cars, their headlights crowded, long lines, slow-moving like part of a great cortege. I could not believe the news. It seemed impossible, it seemed false, even if I’d expected it all along.
I feel I am looking at her endlessly before we speak—I am able to do it without her even noticing—and I see, as if nothing more had ever happened, the same girl who sat across the table at the Etoile d’Or, because suddenly she is the same, pale, uncertain, somehow resigned. It’s exactly as if we are meeting for the first time. I can’t think of what to say. It’s hopeless. I simply don’t know. Across from me is an ordinary girl, good-looking, not too intelligent perhaps. The silence begins to consume us. We sit in the narrow, empty room. I am facing the window, she the rear. I take her hand. As soon as I touch it, her eyes fill. She begins to cry. I look down. She knew it, she says. When she speaks the tears run down her face. She lets them. We sit without talking.
“Anne-Marie,” I say, “what will you do? Will you stay in town here?”
She shrugs.
“I don’t know,” she murmurs.
“Perhaps it would be better if you went home.”
“No,” she says.
“I see. Are you sure?”
She nods.
“Well… you know, I’m going to be leaving, myself. I thought you might not want to stay here, and if you needed help going somewhere else, well, I’d be very happy to…do whatever I can. I mean, if you needed money…”
She seems not to be listening. Merci, she says.
It’s very difficult. After a while I try to begin again. I ask about having dinner. She appears to consider it and finally shakes her head, no. I wait for her to talk about him, about herself, anything, but it never comes. The tears have stained her cheeks. She doesn’t wipe them away. And it’s here, in the Foy, that we say goodbye and then walk together to the door. Outside, the street is filled with shoppers. The cars are barely able to pass through. I watch her cross; she moves by people, not touching them, walking rather fast.
Perhaps—she is capable of this, I know—she will appear in the evening after all, down at the gare, coming along the wide street alone, descending, as if merely on a stroll. For in Dean’s life, if there were such a thing, she would come wherever he asked, no matter how far. She would not hesitate. She would arrive to meet him, I know exactly what she would do, how generous she would be, how natural. And how sweet their first exchanges in the language that she taught him.