Ladivine (35 page)

“A doctor?” he echoed.

“He’s not in good health at all, not at all.”

“He eats too much,” he murmured, distant, bored.

“Oh, not that much, for his size and his age. Young people have to eat a lot, everybody knows that.”

“He eats too much,” he said again, now aware that he was annoying her but unwilling to promise to take Trevor anywhere. “Incidentally, I sold the Cherokee.”

“I know, you just told me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

Being an unaggressive, fundamentally generous woman, she chose to let the matter drop.

She gave a little laugh and patted his cheek, like a mother.

Her brown-dyed hair fell in waves around her full, opaque face, which was only itself, innocent and trustworthy.

And Richard Rivière was torn between the respect he owed that face and his yearning to see it fade away to reveal the other.

He spent the afternoon at his computer, studying the supply of available cars.

He regularly left his desk, when people came in and the salesmen were all busy, to keep the waiting customers company.

He offered them coffee, asked a few questions, affable, assiduous, informed, but his mind wasn’t there, and without even knowing it he summoned up memories of the hundreds of times he’d done this before—smile, ask questions, point the customer toward a salesman—because he was thinking about none of that.

His thoughts jumped from subject to subject, free of his control.

And perhaps because he remembered resolving to call his daughter Ladivine, he thought of the Cagnacs, and an unpleasant feeling started to nag at him, something dark and jealous that he wasn’t used to, that took him by surprise.

The Cagnacs were the only friends he’d made in Annecy.

They’d met at the dealership, five years before, and their Périgord roots had had far more to do with their pull on him than their quick, fuss-free decision to buy the most expensive car of the line.

The Cagnacs were in the restaurant business at the time, bored and wanting a change.

And Richard Rivière took them to that country he’d already visited alone several times.

He’d chosen it purely by chance, he told them sincerely, because at the time that’s what he thought, as he was searching the Internet for a sunny vacation spot one night, and everything he found there enchanted him, and not a year had passed since that he didn’t go back, and Clarisse never came with him, and never asked.

And it occurred to him, since his friends the Cagnacs were looking for a new direction in life, to suggest that they open a dealership there.

He’d seen to getting them settled, doing far more than a new friendship demanded, with a zeal and a generosity that even left the Cagnacs a little leery.

But they soon realized he’d take no cut from their profits.

Richard Rivière knew he was too scrupulous, too honest, he had too much confidence in his own integrity, for their suspicions to last.

Saintlike, never seeking to defend or justify himself, his devotion never flagging, he held fast to the strange joy of setting the Cagnacs up in their business.

He visited them regularly, rejoicing in their success as if it were his own.

And yet, once he’d left them, once he was back on the plane to Annecy, he couldn’t hold off a sense that the Cagnacs were not exactly letting him down but neglecting some vital duty, which he couldn’t define, to be sure, but which they should have grasped all the same, that they weren’t repaying him for everything he’d done and, in their disappointing insensitivity, never knew it.

What he wanted from them, he eventually confessed to himself, was an illumination.

About what? Oh, he didn’t know, he didn’t really want to know till the Cagnacs revealed all, both the subject of the illumination and the illumination itself.

But his friends’ indifference to his obsession now gave rise to that touch of rancor when he thought of them.

He envied them, he wished he could live in the clearing at the end of the rugged road, in that beautiful, brand-new house, on the edge of the forest no one ever ventured into.

He left the dealership an hour earlier than usual, claiming an important meeting.

The truth was that he wanted to call Ladivine without Clarisse around, not that she would have eavesdropped, not that she would have asked questions about Ladivine’s life, the two children, the German husband.

Such concern had her sons caused her, and still did cause her, so many reasons for sadness or melancholy had they given her, that she seemed to have prudently opted to express no opinion and endanger no affection by any involvement in Richard Rivière’s previous life.

She had thus learned of Clarisse Rivière’s murder with the same fleeting horror, the same somber, superficial sympathy, she felt for any victim of the horrible things she read about in the papers.

She’d never met Ladivine, never spoke of wanting to, and not, he was sure, out of jealousy, because there was no one less possessive than Clarisse.

She simply preferred, insofar as possible, to take no interest in the matter, to invest no sentimental capital in that relationship.

That was fine with Richard Rivière. Nevertheless, he didn’t like knowing she was in the next room when he talked with Ladivine.

She might call out to Trevor or laugh aloud at something funny on television, as she had last time, and Richard Rivière would be so unhappy that he’d want to slam down the phone.

Because it wasn’t Clarisse Rivière laughing or calling out as he talked with their beloved daughter from their house in Langon, where they would have been happy, had he only found the way to let the real Clarisse Rivière appear, had he not, perhaps, frightened her off.

It was only Clarisse, a perfectly nice woman who didn’t deserve to make him feel so disappointed.

Whom or what had he frightened away?

Before what mystery had he shown a lack of courage or depth?

He turned into his building’s parking lot and found it impossible to park. The next car’s tires intruded so far into his slot that he would be trapped in his SUV, even if he did somehow insert it into such a cramped space.

He looked up at the windows, at once fearing and hoping he might see the bony face of the aged, baby-haired woman, no doubt watching for his return and now savoring her vengeance. Did he dare go up to her apartment, firmly ask her to please leave room for his car when she parked her own? A vague disgust held him back, a feeling that he couldn’t take on such a trivial problem just before calling Ladivine. He drove out of the parking lot and down the street until he found a free space.

The mountain seemed to have eased its grip just a little, no longer pressing down on his back with all its terrible might, though his spine was still aching, and when he started toward the building he realized he was walking like an old man, shoulders hunched, head bowed.

Trevor wasn’t there. He checked to be sure, opening the door to each room, even the little laundry at the far end of the kitchen, his weariness and heartache calmed by intense relief at being alone.

This was his home, picked out on his own and furnished to his own tastes, Clarisse and Trevor having moved in two years after he bought it, such that he always felt more as if he were putting them up than sharing the apartment with them.

But since moving back Trevor so rarely went out that Richard Rivière could almost never come home without finding him there, and that got on his nerves.

He took off his business suit, put on a T-shirt and sweatpants, poured a glass of white wine.

He was so grateful to Trevor for not being there, as if the boy had done him an exceptionally kind favor, that he made a solemn vow to drive him to the doctor’s, listen closely to what the doctor said, make it abundantly clear to Trevor, even ostentatiously clear if need be, that he cared.

He would help him lose weight, help him become once more the handsome, energetic boy he used to be—such would be his promise, as soon as Trevor came home.

As usual, his pleasure at being alone was slightly diminished by this vague, restless impatience to see Trevor again and make everything different, and the suspicion that everything would be just the same, the reality of Trevor’s cold, jeering face yet again shattering the illusion that he could force the boy to let himself be loved.

Suddenly upset, he downed his wine in one go. Then he dialed his daughter Ladivine’s number.

How long since he last called her? A year, a year and a half, more?

It was almost always on her initiative that they talked on the phone or met in a Paris café. “I’m coming down to see Mama,” she used to write him now and then, in an e-mail telling of nothing more than the dismal or wonderfully mild weather they were having this year in Berlin.

I’ll be in Paris myself, he would answer.

And Ladivine was convinced that he often had business in the capital, and he did nothing to suggest otherwise, though in truth he never set foot there save to see his daughter.

This was the only way they ever met. Leaving these reunions, he felt pathetic, unworthy.

He would gaze hungrily at the astonishing, adult, foreign face that was now Ladivine’s, sometimes touched by the shadow of an expression that fleetingly summoned up the very distant, aching memory of a little girl now gone forever, and neither this young woman he vaguely resembled nor he himself as this surprising, autonomous person’s father seemed in any way tangible.

They were the protagonists of a dream he was having in his Annecy bedroom, beneath the gaze of the hostile mountain, and when he woke his cheeks would be damp with tears because he would know none of this had existed, there’d never been a dark-eyed girl, he’d never had a child whose hand squeezed his own as they walked on the hill, behind a house by the vines.

He gazed hungrily at Ladivine’s face, and it hurt him terribly: in a moment he’d wake up, the mountain would be snickering, he’d be lost and alone.

“Berger,” said a little girl’s serious voice.

“Excuse me?” he said, caught off guard.

“Sie sind bei der Familie Berger,”
she repeated, after a few seconds of silence.

He stammered:

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak German. You must be, um…”

Unable to recall Ladivine’s daughter’s name, he let out an embarrassed little laugh. He didn’t dare say who he was.

“Ich verstehe kein französisch,”
she said curtly.

He heard the sound of a receiver being carelessly set down, then a brief conversation.

“Hello? This is Berger.”

The accent, like the voice, was gentle and slightly sad.

“Hello, this is Richard Rivière, Ladivine’s father.”

“Oh!”

The man seemed to come to life.

“Hello, hello, I’m very happy to…to hear you at last. It’s not true, you know, what Annika said, she understands French, she speaks it very well.”

“It’s perfectly all right,” Richard Rivière mumbled, since Berger seemed to be apologizing for his daughter.

“It’s just that she doesn’t want to now.”

Then he fell silent. Richard Rivière said nothing, unsure what to say, waiting for Berger to offer to put Ladivine on.

But a deep silence had settled in, peaceful, cozy, like the silence of a comfortable old married couple, and now it was already well past the point where two people can pretend they find nothing odd in each other’s muteness.

There was nothing to do, thought Richard Rivière, staring down the violet shadow-shrouded mountain through the kitchen window, but accept the awkwardness.

“How was your vacation?” he finally asked, feeling as if he’d come back from far, far away.

“Ladivine didn’t come home with us.”

“What do you mean? She stayed behind?”

“Yes,” said Berger in a barely audible voice.

Richard Rivière himself didn’t know if the cry that then burst from his lips was a cry of terror or joy or excitement, disbelief or eager affirmation of what he’d just learned. He understood only that concern had no part in it at all.

His legs went weak. He turned his back to the mountain, now fading into the darkness, and dropped onto a chair.

“But why?” he choked out.

“I don’t know. She disappeared.”

“Then how do you know she’s still there?”

“I don’t know anything,” Berger slowly repeated, as if utterly drained. “That’s what I think. That damned country swallowed her whole, you understand? You never should have suggested it.”

“You met the Cagnacs?”

“Yes. That’s where Ladivine disappeared, at their house.”

“My God, oh my God!” cried Richard Rivière. “And they have no idea?”

“No. It wouldn’t mean anything to them anyway. All they care about is selling their filthy cars.”

Berger’s tone was so desolate that Richard Rivière wanted to comfort him.

But realizing he’d forgotten this young man’s name, too, he dropped the idea.

The only name he could think of was Daniel, and he wasn’t sure it had any connection to Ladivine’s little family.

He fell silent again, pressing the telephone to his ear with all his strength as a hope full of terror and uncertainty rose up in him, and he found it at once exhilarating and shameful, because he couldn’t be sure Ladivine hadn’t freely chosen to bring him, Richard Rivière, who had for so long sought his way in the dark, the possibility of an understanding.

But what if she never came back?

In truth, he thought no such thing. He had faith in the instinct that had led him to settle the Cagnacs in that clearing, to work for their success, to want them to stay there forever.

But if it was true that Ladivine could get at what for him had always stayed hidden, he couldn’t be sure she was glad of that, that she hadn’t felt forced or cajoled into it by her father’s unspoken intentions.

What would she learn? What was there to learn? What was the place of Clarisse Rivière’s will in all this?

“Are you still there?” Berger asked.

“Yes, yes,” he whispered, starting, scarcely remembering whom he was talking to.

“I’ve made a website, haveyouseenladivine.com. I’ve got a lot of responses, but so far nothing I can take seriously.”