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The two of them had carried on an affair as passionate as it was destructive.

Their excessive consumption of alcohol (they had something like a ménage à trois, with whiskey as the third member of the household) had necessarily led to disaster.

They spent several nights in jail cells. Anne even got her driver’s license taken away permanently. She’s never told Victor anything. He thinks she doesn’t know how to drive.

Although disaster suited Max—as a writer, he made good use of it—Anne began to think about her future. At the
age of thirty-nine, she decided to settle down. She left Max and met Victor. Or maybe she met Victor while she was still with Max, nobody knows for sure.

Anne got pregnant pretty quickly. Melody and Lucy, gorgeous twin girls as blond as their mom, will be nine next month. The only times Anne saw Max again after her marriage to Victor were when she came to our house.

Victor finished his glass. Fred offered to refill it. We had enough booze to stay drunk for a week. In the darkness of the veranda, nobody complained.

Anne and Victor were on the sofa. I had the impression they were holding hands. Fred was sitting on the other side of the table. I thought about moving my chair closer to his so I could stroke him, but I spotted a second bottle of Scotch and poured myself another drink instead.

The stridulations of the crickets resounded from the garden. I saw shapes moving in the shrubbery. I listened. Silence fell amid melancholy and drunkenness. I thought we’d just achieved serenity. Was Max’s passing filling us with mortal thoughts? Putting the fugitive nature of life in the forefront of our minds? At that moment, death seemed to me no more appalling than the flight of a bird that seizes its chance when you open the door of its cage.

Suddenly Victor bawled out, “He didn’t look like it, your Max, but he clung hard to his scrap of existence, right?”

His voice sounded full of bitterness. I looked at Anne. Her body was rigid.

By scooting forward on my chair, I could see they weren’t holding hands. Their fists were clenched and their arms pressed tightly against their sides.

I remembered that during the interment, Anne hadn’t stayed next to Victor. She’d moved two steps behind him.

He spoke into the silence: “He gnawed on his little life like a bone, didn’t he?”

I expected to see Anne shrug her shoulders. Instead she buried her face in her hands.

Fred drawled, “Vic, it’s not very charitable to talk about a dead man like that.”

Vic had his legs crossed, and he shook his free foot like someone losing patience.

Anne made a clucking sound. “You know he doesn’t like to be called ‘Vic.’ ”

Victor said “Max” between his teeth, as though trying to grind up the name.

“Hey, Iris?”

“What?”

“Are you drunk?” Fred asked, searching for my eyes.

“No indeed.”

I stood up. Dizziness immediately overcame me. The floor was slipping away under my feet. I held on to my chair.

Then I turned on the lamp. When he saw the light, Fred cried out in relief.

Anne whispered to Victor, “You’re really an asshole. He never had anything against you.”

“How did he do it?” Victor lashed out in reply. “Why wasn’t he jealous of me? Because he had no reason to be, that’s why.” And he flung his glass onto the coffee table.

His black hair, which had taken a turn for the worse while we were sitting in the dark, was falling to one side of his head.

“No quarreling!” Fred said, reaching to stabilize a bottle he’d knocked off balance.

I steadied it before it could fall to the floor.

Anne had taken off her eyeglasses, a pair with an electric-blue frame that Victor had reluctantly ordered for her. She threw the glasses on the table. “What an asshole you can be! I mean, what an asshole!”

“My name is Victor,” he said. His cheeks looked scarlet.

“Did I say ‘Vic’?”

“Victor,” he repeated, challenging her with his eyes.

I moved past Fred to turn on the lights around the windows. They weren’t working. I must have shut off the current with the wall switch.

My legs wobbled. I’m not very big; two glasses of Scotch are enough to give me vertigo. I went back to my chair and sat down.

Fred turned to me. “Darling, would you mind getting us a pitcher of water? With lots of—”

He interrupted himself. He’d just seen the cage. His eyes were half closed. He squinted even more, and his mouth contorted bizarrely.

I thought,
What a stupid mouth my husband has
.

“Where’s Gottfried?”

It took me a few seconds to register the name. Then, in an excessively cheerful voice, I said, “I didn’t tell you what happened this morning? Gottfried flew off.”

“
Flew off?
”

“The bird’s name is Gottfried!” Anne said. “That’s hilarious.”

“I don’t find it funny,” Victor growled.

He sounded so stuffy I burst out laughing. Anne thought I was laughing with her. “Hilarious …” she said.

She slid limply to the pale straw mat that covered the floor. Tears welled up in her eyes.

Fred got to his feet. “Iris, don’t tell me you’ve lost Gottfried.”

“It’s Max’s fault.”

“Aha!” said Victor, as if he’d caught him in the act.

“A dead man’s fault?”

“Frigging Max!” Anne whispered.

The effluvia of alcohol invaded the veranda. They made the air sticky. I suppose I was as red as Fred and Victor.

Only Anne, who was keeping her eyes fixed on the floor, looked pale. From time to time, mocking spasms shook her body. “Gottfried, where are you?” she trilled between hiccups.

Fred was waiting for my answer. “I thought about Max all morning.”

“What does that have to do with Gottfried?” Fred asked, his eyes flashing.

Anne squealed, “Gottfried!”

“Let her explain herself,” Victor said, as if we were in the midst of an interrogation.

“Look at this,” Anne said indignantly. “The men are ganging up on the women!”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Victor grumbled.

The glass Anne was bringing to her lips muffled her reply, which was “Shut up, Vic. Don’t let ’em push you around, Iris!”

Fred was still glaring at me.

“When I opened the cage to feed Gottfried, he was standing on his trapeze, stiff as a board. So stiff I wondered if he might be dead. I tapped on the cage, I flicked it—”

“ ‘Flicked it’?” Fred repeated, round-eyed.

“Dumb broads …”

“Don’t let ’em push you around, Iree.”

“I gave the bars a few taps to wake him up.”

“But he wasn’t sleeping! Gottfried never sleeps!”

“Gottfried was biding his time,” Victor said.

“In any case, he didn’t budge. At all. I thought maybe he’d wake up for food. I went back to the front of the cage, opened it, and picked up the bowl of birdseed. Then I shook the bowl through the open door.”

“
The open door!
”

“I must have been thinking about Max. Yes. That was it. I was remembering his poem about a nightingale. Or maybe a robin, I can’t remember. Anyway, just at that moment, Gottfried flew out and disappeared.”

“He has to be somewhere! He has to be somewhere nearby!”

Fred started turning round and round, as if the bird had just escaped.

“Come back, Free-dee!” Anne screamed at the top of her voice.

“You’ll never see him again,” Victor opined.

“My mother’s nightingale!” Fred was searching everywhere on the veranda.

Beyond the sofa where Victor sat, sipping his wine at brief, regular intervals, the garden was breathing the night.

That morning, without hesitating an instant, the
nightingale had leaped into the greenery. He hadn’t let himself be distracted by seeds.

I put my hand on Fred’s shoulder. I said, “It’s not so serious, my love.”

“Spoken like a dumb broad,” Victor said.

I shot a look at him. He smoothed his hair with his free hand and kept his eyes away from mine. With his other hand, he was shaking his glass and splashing drops of wine on his yellow shirt.
A yellow shirt for Max’s funeral
, I thought.

Fred’s moaning was beginning to exasperate me. “That’s enough, Fred,” I told him. “Your mouth is stupid.”

“
What?
”

“I’m sure she did it on purpose, that stuff with the bird. Yeah. I think she wanted to let it go back to nature.”

Anne struck Victor on the knee. He smiled broadly.

His words had inflamed Fred. He came close and jumped down my throat.

“You never had any respect for my mother! And now that she’s dead, you … you want to get rid of her things. You want to liquidate Mom.”

Hilda, Fred’s mother, had died in April. He wasn’t getting over it. As for me, I’d never felt much affection for her, a bitter woman who’d fire off barrages of reproaches with a satisfied smile on her face.

“Nice little trick,” Fred said, drinking straight out of the bottle. “With Max as your accomplice. Doesn’t surprise me.”

“I thought you were friends.”

“Max was my friend. But he was also a first-class son of a bitch.”

“Well said!”

Anne hit Victor again. This time he grabbed her wrist. They started to wrestle.

Fred went on, sounding groggy: “Who was proud to have him for a friend? A writer who put us in his stories, big deal. Proud he was mocking us, is that it?”

“He never mocked you.”

“Come on,” said Fred, no longer thinking about Gottfried. “I’m not the deceived husband in ‘Guess Who’s Coming to See Us’?”

“But no, it’s …”

I left my sentence in suspense.

The deceived husband in Max’s story was Victor. Max wrote it to avenge himself on Anne, who had just left him. But feature for feature, the husband in the story
looked
like Fred.

“Exactly,” said Victor, rising to his feet. “I have the honor to inform you that the deceived husband in ‘Guess Who’s Coming to See Us’ is me.”

He sketched an arabesque with his glass. Then he brought it to his mouth and drained it.

Anne was staring into space. I was surprised to see her get up, very slowly, spreading out her arms. Her open palms moved farther and farther away from each other, like she was preparing to catch a ball that kept getting bigger.

“Anne, what are you doing?”

She didn’t answer me. She was still staring into space. Then she clapped her hands and cried, “Missed it!”

I realized she was hunting a mosquito. Without any transition, she sat back down, turned to Victor, and said, “I didn’t know you read his stories.”

“Why wouldn’t I? They’re in our library.”

He said that in a neutral voice, taking us as his witnesses, Fred and me.

“
My
library. You don’t read anything but golf magazines.”

“Well, the items under discussion are in our living room.”

“Max’s books?” Fred asked, jeering.

I gave him a reproachful look. Why was he throwing oil on the fire?

“Wait, wait. It’s too funny. Victor, who never reads books, has devoured all of Max’s.”

“Fred, that’s enough.”

Victor explained: “I’m interested in literature that talks about my wife.”

“I’m not in ‘Guess Who’s Coming to See Us,’ ” Anne declared. “The character you’re thinking of is Iris.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Fred observed. “The girl dresses like Iris. With her high boots and her Bakelite bracelets.”

“Don’t be fooled, that’s a decoy,” Victor said. “The slut in ‘Guess Who’s Coming’—”

“I can’t believe it,” I interrupted him. “We’re fighting over who’s in one of Max’s stories!”

“He was obliged to put us in,” Victor said. “He had no imagination.”

“He used us,” Fred said, going him one better.

“Oh, go on. You’re ridiculous, both of you.”

“It’s pure jealousy,” Anne said. “You would both have
loved to have Max’s talent. He immersed himself in his friends.”

“He immersed himself in his friends but most of all in his booze.”

“I thought we were here to pay tribute to him.”

“
You’re
here to pay tribute to him. If it was up to me—”

“Fine,” Anne said. “Let’s get this settled once and for all.”

“Why would I pay tribute to a guy who banged my wife?” said Fred, sniffing the bottom of his glass.

“I
never—
”

“I’m sick of this,” Anne said, getting up again.

Victor grabbed her. “You’re not going anywhere!”

Anne’s foot struck the coffee table, knocking over glasses and bottles. This time I didn’t react. I just watched them all fall.

Fred laughed ferociously.

“Victor, you’re completely loaded,” Anne said, freeing herself from him.

She massaged her wrist and stared blackly at Victor. He shouted, “You’re not leaving before you say who the twins’ father is!”

We all froze.

Victor pointed a finger at Anne. With her lids half shut and her eyes brightened by drink, she withstood her husband’s stare.

“Now,” he added.

I observed Anne. A smile flitted across her lips. I knew her fondness for provocation. Under the influence of alcohol, that tendency could turn into perversity.

I looked at Fred, silently urging him to calm the other two down. But he was finding their quarrel delightful.

“The twins …” Victor said. “Are they mine? Or someone else’s?”

There was no bitterness in his voice. He simply wanted to know. To clear up a doubt.

Wine dripped from the wicker table onto the straw mat. Speaking softly, Anne said, “What makes you think—”

“Their eyes.”

“This is all because they didn’t get your eyes?”

“Melody’s and Lucy’s eyes are blue around the pupil and gray around the outer edge.”

“They have my mother’s eyes. As you well know.”

“Max’s eyes were like that.”

“No, they weren’t.”

“What do you mean they weren’t?”

“You should know, you made his glasses for him. Max’s eyes were gray around the iris.”

Victor frowned.

“Look at his pictures on the backs of his books.”

“They’re in black and white.”

“For heaven’s sake, Victor! Then get a paternity test.”

“I’d rather believe you.”