Mon amie américaine (10 page)

Around six p.m. Tom comes to get me and take me to the grand salon, a room with wooden wainscoted walls, where about sixty guests are distributed around ten round tables. On the stage, a video screen and a mike are waiting for the participants. A best-of-Tina-Turner selection of songs
intended for you blares through old loudspeakers with a badly adjusted equalizer so that the bass makes the stemmed glasses tremble on the white tablecloths.

I'm standing at your table, waiting for you. I have checked out the names. You'll be seated with Peter, Paul, Tom, and some other colleagues, no one but people from the film world. Maybe this evening will inspire you to take up your former occupation again? I know that for now you're leafing through screenplays without reading them, that you aren't watching the DVDs they send your way, that you're only interested in box office results and evenings at the Oscars. That saddens Tom and anguishes me.

The room is almost full. The men are in dark suits, the women in cocktail dresses. For once, I'm grateful for the slightly provincial formalism of the Americans. In Paris for this kind of evening, the men would have dispensed with ties and the women would be in jeans. Here, everyone has made an effort to look elegant in your honor. I recognize most of the faces. The majority of your list responded to the invitation. Suddenly I'm conscious of the value of their presence. This really is
an example of your peers paying homage to you. I can feel a lump forming in my throat.

Tina Turner has disappeared from the amps. Peter and Paul are taking hold of the mike under the applause and are warming the room up. “Thank you for interrupting your work and weekend to be here on this last Friday in October. All of you know and appreciate the person whom we are about to celebrate. For us she's more essential than the sun, the moon, and the stars. It's for her that we're here this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, let's all warmly welcome Miss Molly B!”

The two leaves of the door open on the wheels of your chair. You're wearing a gold lamé jacket and black slacks, a bit too much lipstick, which hardens your face, and some eye shadow that is too dark. There are blond streaks in your hair, which looks good on you. Your father pushes you to the center of the room, right opposite the onstage mike. In close-up I can see your frightened eyes and half smile.

The speeches follow upon one another, and with them, the memories. They celebrate your intuition, your loyalty, your business sense.
Almodóvar has even recorded a video message explaining why he loves working with you. The trailers for the films you've bought begin playing. Most of them we acquired together. Regularly, your face caught on-screen by a video camera is replaced by photos. That alternation between your former face and the one you have this evening is almost too cruel for me to handle. When it's my turn to speak, I've completely forgotten my well-phrased congratulatory speech. I know only one thing: since the others have spoken of the past, I'm going to speak about you in the present. I take hold of the mike as if I was going to sing the blues, and I improvise, for you, as I look into your eyes:

“Molly, you are one of the people who mean the most to me, but as someone who loves ranking, you'll be sorry to find out that you're only in fourth place in my personal life. The winning position has been taken by force by my husband, Clara, and Benoît. Sorry …” The laughter in the room has warmth. You smile at me. You don't even seem surprised by my presence. I lean toward you. “Molly, you perform this profession with passion
and discipline. You're better informed than your competitors. Is it because you get up earlier, or because you go to bed later? I have followed you wherever you went for years to learn your secret, and I think I've discovered it. It's in your heart that it happens. You put more heart into it than all of us. The same goes for friendship. You put more heart into it than the others. That is why I'm proud to be in your life, to be your friend. Long live Molly!”

It's dreadfully banal and facile, but the Americans adore grand words like
heart, friendship, secret
. I go back to my seat to the sound of applause. I'm not proud of myself. I would have liked to speak to you more subtly, with more panache and style. But what does it matter, since you look happy. I drink a large glass of water. The people at my table congratulate me. The evening goes on.

An hour later, we've finished our appetizers and the main dish has just been served, but the tributes are still sounding from the stage. The heat is becoming stifling. The headwaiters perform their tasks while ignoring the speeches and toasts presented with forced enthusiasm by the participants, into a mike that is sending whistling noises
into the amps. I can sense that the evening, which began with a feeling of breeziness and warmth, is starting to flag. Your wheelchair has been pushed to our table. Now you're at my side. You don't eat anything. You confided in me that you'd had dinner before so that no one would see you struggling with your utensils. There's no straw in the champagne glass that you pretend to drink from. You're also faking your smiles. These tributes are like so many stabs of a dagger. All they are doing is reminding you of what will never again be. This gathering resembles a perfectly organized wedding to which they had merely forgotten to invite the betrothed. There is no reason to rejoice, nothing to celebrate, no hope on the horizon. The bride is in black, and this celebration is turning into a first-class funeral. That of your brilliant career.

Before dessert is served, the wire to the mike is pulled from the stage so that you can take hold of it without having to move. This is your moment to return the compliments. A small piece of paper has been placed in front of you by your father, who has taken it from his bag. It contains the list of all those you'd like to thank, something you do with grace and sweetness, with a word for each.
Your throaty voice is still a bit frail, and the emotion makes it tremble. All of a sudden, everyone has stopped eating, and the silence in which we are all listening is our most beautiful sign of respect. My name is not on your sheet of paper, but you thank me for having come and, as I did, improvise, turning to look at me.

“You thought you were going to surprise me this evening, but I knew you'd find a way to come. Besides, your perfume gave you away. I smelled it in the hotel lobby, my French friend. In your country, the flag is blue like the way you love to eat steaks, white like the movie screen before the film begins, and red like the heart of our friendship that will never stop beating.”

I hide my face in my napkin. It's the most beautiful thing you've ever said to me. Then you put down your paper and raise your glass of champagne, which is nearly full. “I thank all of you for coming. I loved this evening, as I have loved every second I have spent in your company. Soon we'll leave one another. I'll let you run all over the world, in the whirlwind of your work. As for me, all my life I've dreamed of taking an early retirement to go and live in Tuscany. This evening, as
you can see, I've already carried out the first part of my program.”

As if he'd waited for the end of your sentence to rush forward, a waiter comes toward you, trips on the microphone wire, and overturns his tray loaded with crèmes brûlées at your feet. God bless him. The overall hilarity his fall provokes keeps us from bursting into tears.

You signal your father, pointing out the door toward the restroom, but you also whisper in my ear as you place your right hand on mine, “This is too much emotion for me. I'm going to slip away without saying goodbye. What I said is true: I was sure you would come. The bit about the flag — I was thinking about it for three days. Not bad, huh?”

Since you have left, and because Peter, Paul, and Tom are going back to New York this evening, I decide to have a last drink at the hotel bar with Suzie. She lives a few blocks from your new apartment. She must be best able to tell me how you're coping from day to day.

I would have done better to go to bed early. According to her, you've become “difficult.” The
word makes my blood boil. Who in your place, condemned from one day to the next to go from hyperactivity to humiliating immobility, wouldn't become like that? You, difficult? Instead, I find you defeated, apathetic, resigned. Suzie doesn't at all agree. She gives me a portrait of you devoid of kindness. “Molly has changed a lot, and really not in a good way. It's as if the world owes her a living, and everybody has to bow to her needs. For example, she'll arrange to be with you and then cancel at the last minute without excuses. Or else when you've taken the time to come and see her, she'll get rid of you just like that, without even offering you a glass of water, just because she feels tired. She doesn't make any effort, leaves her TV on all the time, and watches it out of the corner of her eye even when you're with her. You can imagine how much fun that is. No, I can assure you, she expects a lot of other people, with the excuse that she's housebound …”

I'm shocked to discover that your American friends are slowly but surely dropping you. They're sick of your demands, which always include the need for some favor from them. They find your humor more and more wounding, your
company less and less pleasant. They think you've become rather stingy and that you're always talking about money.

Tom, whom I call the next day from the airport to tell him about this conversation, tries to soften the portrait, but does admit that you can sometimes be difficult. “She's not always perfectly nice, you know.”

I don't get over my anger during the entire trip back. And why should you be nice? Illness doesn't make people better. Living in a wheelchair hasn't transformed you into Mother Teresa. And I'm glad it hasn't. You're still the same, probably more acidic, more brutal, more curt, more radical, more impatient, more intransigent. I understand you. Now that you know you're condemned to passivity, you're fighting with the only weapon left to you: your brain power.

IT'S THE BEGINNING OF MARCH, AND NEW YORK IS ALREADY HAVING MILD SPRING WEATHER
. This time you've told me to come to your place. The building is welcoming with its silver canopy on the outside and its thick blue carpeting, as is proper for homes in the nicer neighborhoods.

The uniformed doorman bows as he opens the glass door for me; with the same gesture and without ever being discourteous, he inquires about my identity and goes to check the register to see if I'm really expected, then smiles and finally looks me in the eye. “I see, you're the French woman? I'm Mr. Dennis. Let me welcome you.” He walks ahead of me to the elevator, pushes open the heavy iron door, and presses the button for your floor, as if he were receiving me in his own home.

The heat that pervades the apartment attacks my throat as soon as the door opens on a stout
young black woman squeezed into a white T-shirt and sparkly red tracksuit. She shakes my hand without warmth before leading me behind her softly undulating backside to the living room, where she announces me in too loud a voice. “Molly, your friend is here.” She turns to me and adds incredulously, “Did you really come
all the way
from Paris?
I love French men, they're gorgeous!
” Exploding into laughter, she plants herself right there with crossed arms while you kiss me, moved as we are to see each other again, and while I whisper a few tender words into your ear. She ends up interrupting us. “I'm Dinah, want something to drink?”

I'm dying for a nice cold Coke, but I tell myself that tea will take the longest to prepare. She goes to work in another room, from which she emerges less than two minutes later with a tray on which she's hurriedly placed a kettle that is barely warm, a cup, and a tea bag. She puts all of it on a low table without taking the time to push aside a pile of magazines. She joins us quite peremptorily, standing there, her arms crossed, back leaning against a shelf. I know how much you love to steep your smoked Lapsang Souchong in a red stoneware teapot that you brought back from Paris, and I
wait for you to reproach her for her offhand way of throwing together my tea, but you say nothing. You seem resigned, or else you're too tired to notice anything at all. Dinah's presence doesn't seem to weigh on you, any more than the sound of the television whose volume I end up lowering with the remote, although I don't dare turn it off completely. You seem happy to see me, and as usual you ask me a thousand questions about the children, my parents, our friends in common; but you still seem to have trouble concentrating on my answers. Your voice sounds steadier to me this morning than it did that evening in the Hamptons, but your eyes look more extinguished.

At any rate, it's so warm that my head starts spinning, and I'm sure you're suffering from it as well. I suggest we open the glass door leading to the terrace. “She's going to expose us to a draft,” comments Dinah in a reproving tone. “She made me catch cold less than two weeks ago.”

That way of talking about you as if you weren't there immediately irks me. “You know, fresh air gets rid of germs,” I say in a decisive tone.

It makes you smile. “I see you've kept your fighting spirit, unlike me.”

I take hold of your chair and push it onto the terrace, nimbly shutting the door before Dinah has the time to venture outside with us.

I let out a loud sigh. “Say, does she stick to you that much all the time?”

You merely lift your eyebrows. “It's complicated, you know. Dad has a lot of trouble finding honest girls!” You start to tell me a sleazy tale of the previous nurse stealing a wallet. You admit that you suspect the one before her had a copy of your keys made; and besides that, you recently had the door to your apartment reinforced, which seemed way too expensive to you. “The worst are on the weekends, when three girls take turns. But you know, it's kind of them to spend their time with me. I wouldn't have that job for all the money in the world.”