Mon amie américaine (2 page)

In New York, the police car sirens are continuously vying with those of the ambulances. One of those must have taken you to the hospital. But you didn't hear it. You were already cut off from the world. Lost on planet Comma. That unknown land each of us dreads visiting one day and that you've gone off to discover alone.

I'd rather think you're away on some assignment, out covering a story; and that you can't wait to tell me about what you've found out as soon as
you get back. Are there sounds, colors? Breathtaking scenery? Is it a parched desert? Vertigo, a black hole? Stark night? A long nightmare? Apparently you're knitting your brow. You couldn't be suffering. The doctors promised that. But who can be sure? How can anyone know what you're feeling?

MOLLY, SWEET MOLLY, YOU WHO ARE ENCOUNTERING THE WORST
, you have to admit that you weren't really prepared for this. You, the city rat who'll startle at the slightest noise, get hysterical when an insect comes near; you, climbing onto a chair the moment you see a mouse. You, scared of the dark, heights, flying, bridges, and elevators. Shunning exercise, jogging, sports, the slightest physical exertion. You, the American who gobbles vitamins, never eating right, the confirmed frozen-food user, eating yogurt a month after the expiration date, worshipping the sun to an outrageous extent, forgetting whether you've had a tetanus shot, sucking down aspirin like it's mint candy, abusing cheesecake and chocolate milkshakes. You, doping yourself with one cappuccino or Diet Coke after another. Swearing like a sailor and whistling like a boy with two fingers
in your mouth. The most sappily romantic girl I've ever met, my incorrigible opposite, whom I've always found so wonderfully unreasonable. Acknowledge that, of the two of us, you were the less equipped to experiment with what has befallen you: this loss of consciousness, this diabolical heads or tails suspended in time, during which you spin indefinitely around like a coin that fate has tossed into the air without anyone knowing on which side it will fall, or even if it will ever fall back to earth.

I imagine you hanging on to that coin as if it's a saddle, like a cartoon pinup astride the atomic bomb, hair blowing in the wind and a wily smile, totally indifferent to that countdown that tolls the knell of her mount. Tick-tock, tick-tock …

I know it's ridiculous, but I still prefer imagining you with Bardot's voice in the Gainsbourg song, her breasts thrust forward, lips parted, vampish and
rebellious, rather than knowing you're flat on your back and mute, your arms pierced by IVs.

Do you know what I was doing while you were falling alongside your window on the eighteenth floor of your office on Madison Avenue? I was buying shoes. You, with your fifty-eight pairs. At least that was the official figure we came up with together four months ago. Since that time, there must have been a few sales and other promotions you certainly could not resist. And also, you hadn't let me include the sandals, flip-flops, espadrilles, and other beach shoes that a person usually keeps for the seashore. “Actually, those are vacation shoes, they don't count.” But if I added them, we'd be getting close to the hundreds, don't you think?

A hundred pairs of shoes. You would say I didn't know how to appreciate the beauty of them because I was a “shoe killer.” It's true that no matter what pair I buy, it's transformed, deformed, stretched out of shape; and in less than a week it looks worn out, kaput. But what's going to happen to yours? Did someone think of airing out the drawers in which you keep them arranged by
height and category? Do shoes go downhill when their owners abandon them? Maybe that's the reason why Benoît's Prince Charming went throughout the realm with his squirrel-trimmed slipper. Because he sensed that it felt forsaken, unhappy, utterly depressed, without its faithful other half.

If I were in New York, I'd go and slip my hand into each of them. I wouldn't try that with my feet because I'm two sizes larger than you are. Then I'd lay them on their sides on tissue paper, as you do in hotel rooms to which you always carried one more suitcase than I did because of your many pairs of shoes.

You're the champion of baggage. You always have the latest when it comes to the wheels, outer coverings, always searching for something better in terms of size and ease of handling. But whatever luggage you travel with, you also have your very own gift for botching their aesthetic by rigging them out with your dreadful fuchsia-pink labels shaped like a heart, the height of bad taste. I never knew where you bought those eyesores. Never tried to find out, either. In fact, Molly, if I loved making fun of your fuchsia labels, it was especially for the pleasure of hearing you pronounce
your favorite French complaint about being pestered, with an accent so thick you could cut it with a knife:
“Tu me casses les pieds.”

Maybe it was your coming move that wore you out. You were so happy about your new neighborhood, going to a better-looking building with a terrace and a doorman in a uniform. The last shopping trip we took was to choose an extendable table for your future balcony, with its view over the Hudson. You were so looking forward to the dinners you were going to have there. I'd been planning to get you an umbrella with a gas heater made to look like a streetlamp, for dining outside. You were planning on having a house-warming party in the spring.

For three months, that's all you talked about, even though you dreaded having to get it all organized. Pack away your life in boxes. Itemize everything. Sift through memories. It can make you ill. Moving means having to listen to everything you own remind you of its story. There are the things you've inherited, those you bought on a whim, those given to you by people you were intimate with — friends, or sometimes former heartthrobs.
Coming back to you all at once. Smells you remember from childhood. Certain landscapes. Places where you used to live. Intense emotions, cries, laughter. The sound track that goes with an entire section of your former life. Memories that make you reappraise the present, and that throw a light on a future that isn't always positive. What have we gained, lost, since these objects, outfits, paintings, books, music became part of our lives? How many chances to be happy, to have been, or to have failed to be? All of it reevaluated in terms of the time passed and the years acquired. Enough to make you sink into a pit of melancholy.

Well, I'm talking about me. You yourself like to foster memories; you can even say it's the way you live. You've hung photos everywhere in your two-room apartment — on the walls, the furniture, even on the door to the bathroom and on the refrigerator. The ones of your family and friends are arranged haphazardly, in a patchwork that only makes sense to you. The snapshots of those you've been working with for the last twenty years are framed and prominently displayed. The fact that they're well-known personalities doesn't bother you. The opposite, in fact.

We talked about it countless times. “For once,” you'd say laughingly, “it's the French woman who's the most uptight of the two!” No doubt about that. It isn't such exposure that puts me ill at ease. Although that, too. You just don't show off your life in that way, flaunt the faces of the celebrities with whom you regularly rub shoulders. After all, our work life is no one's business but our own. You appear in each of the prints as if you were trying to immortalize that moment, the way the worst sixteen-year-old schoolgirl would. To accomplish what? For whom? For you? But you've lived that moment, it's inscribed in your memory. What makes you want to keep a tangible souvenir of it? Why do you need those photos? What do you have to prove? You'd say that your real calling was being a fan, that you'd wanted to work in film to become a professional groupie. One day you admitted to me that you'd stood in the rain for ten hours straight waiting to get Tina Turner's autograph. You put yourself in a position to get a continual and permanent high being around stars every day. You got a thrill reading fan magazines.

When a photo taken at the Oscars showed you with your arm threaded under Almodóvar's, you
bought dozens of copies of the magazine. No one could even see your face …

I never succeeded in making you admit that there was something dubious, immature about that stuff spread all over your apartment. You'd make fun of my inability to take things lightly. You thought my embarrassment about those photos was more suspect than the pleasure you took in living surrounded by them. I'd call you Miss Desmond, like the American actress played by Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
, who can't stand the fact that she isn't being worshipped as a silent movie star any more.

Now I feel bad about having made fun of you so often. Could it be that, down deep, you saw those shots as proof of your success? Since the work you did was your whole life? I'm thinking of your empty apartment, those photos of you, your radiant smile in each of them. All those traces of your shimmering life. Thinking of it tears at my heart.

MOLLY, YOU'VE BEEN IN A PRIVATE ROOM FOR EIGHT DAYS
. I'm not sure that's a good sign. After more than a month, it's now obvious that this coma is going to last.

I know that nurses come in and massage you every morning. Is it possible that you don't feel them at all? Or are you suspended above your body? Are you watching them doing their work with surprise? Curiosity? Indifference?

You're still hooked up to your machines. On one side are the ones that help you breathe and feed you; on the other are those measuring your vital signs. No one is allowed to come near you without being dressed like an astronaut: body covered with a layer of pale blue plastic, shoes, too. Apparently, only medical equipment can be in your room. No flowers, drawings, get-well cards,
objects, candles, tchotchkes. As you can imagine, I tried everything.

Around you, we're getting organized. You'd enjoy seeing your friends interacting. I don't know if you knew how jealous we were of one another. You certainly made connections all over the world. One friend from Rome, another from Berlin, a third from London; and me, the Parisian. Each of us was firmly convinced she was the closest to you. And in her own way, each of us was right. It's as if you'd divided your personality into four equal parts.

The woman from Berlin was your surrogate mother. You'd put yourself under her wing. She represented solace, the assurance of being understood without being judged. The woman from London was your neurotic twin, the head side of the coin to your tails. Bulimia belonged to her, diets to you. Both of you had the same hang-ups. The Italian woman was your exotic cousin, and you could admire her without being jealous; she's so different that it's not even possible to resent her for being beautiful, brilliant, and sophisticated. For you, an American born in Brooklyn, she was the embodiment of European culture at its most refined.

And what was I in all of that? I arrived last. You and I had the same profession, almost the same age, Jewish Ashkenazi culture, the same sense of humor, and a first name beginning with the same letter. Each of us was what the other could have been if the cards had been shuffled and dealt differently. Yes, I could have been that little girl brought up in Brooklyn by a housewife and a dentist father, inhibited by two cheekier sisters. I could have been that girl who fled the nest at seventeen to escape the narrow confines of a conventional petit-bourgeois family that respected the stifling precepts of Jewishness to the letter. I could have become a confirmed single and spent my life, like you, traveling the world, instead of starting a family.

You could have grown up in Paris in a less traditional family that was nonetheless just as taxing. You would have extended your studies a tad longer, would have a husband and children, would be living in Paris; and the pleasure of traveling for work would have been spoiled by feeling constantly guilty about deserting your family. And today, you would be feeling robbed of that other self stuck in a hospital bed. Like me, you would be feeling the frustration of not being able to speak
to her or hear her. You'd be living in anxiety and waiting, in futile questioning. You'd be spending hours on medical forums trying to understand what has happened.

There's no question that you'd be more rational, less impatient than me. You would definitely have filled one of those eternal, habitual tables of yours, divided into two columns:
FOR
and
AGAINST
. You'd say that it helped you think clearly. I've always thought it was a waste of time.

This time, if only for you, I do want to try it.

The pluses: you're in the prime of life, barely forty years old; you're a fighter and I hope you stay that way, even in the coma; you're rarely sick, never tired; you've always said you had strength born of despair. Now is the time to use it.

The minuses: your coma is lasting an abnormally long time, if I can believe what I've read about that on the Internet; you used to eat anything at all and I'm positive you don't have enough red blood cells, proteins, a lot of healthy stuff. What else? You smoke too much, obviously, but that harms the lungs, not the brain, as far as I know.

Now I know what I hate about that binary way of approaching a problem: it doesn't leave any place for the irrational.

Were you born under a good star, Molly? In the midst of all this misfortune, will you have any luck?

IT STILL IS USELESS TO INSIST
: only your parents and sisters have the right to visit you, just as they have for the last month and a half. I'll bet they're talking to you about personal things. They must be bringing up memories, regrets, maybe things they feel sorry for. I've never met them, but I figure they have your discretion and your reticence. I hope you're not being exposed to those maudlin scenes shown in all the American tearjerkers. Remember how we both used to snivel watching Debra Winger dying of cancer in
Terms of Endearment
? Or when Susan Sarandon, who was at death's door, forgives Julia Roberts for having snatched her husband in
Stepmom
? Molly, if you come out of this, I'll bring you the DVD collection of all the films that made us cry; but still, I'm not planning on rewatching a single one because they never end well for the character in the hospital.