Ladivine by Marie NDiaye

She didn’t know what to say, what to talk about, kept her mouth shut.
    When Richard Rivière called, she could scarcely summon the strength to murmur a response to his hello, and tears sprang to her eyes, trickled down her face and neck as she listened to his falsely cheerful chatter, against an indecipherable background of other lively, spirited voices that made her think he must live his life amid unending revelry.
    That didn’t hurt her. She noted it without interest, but the sound of Richard Rivière’s voice brought her ever-fresh torments. Her fingers convulsively clutched the receiver, she couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t listen, lost in dread of the moment when he would hang up and she’d be alone again in her house, the house that knew everything and never came to her rescue.
    Please, please, come back to the house, she would say, or think she was saying, since Richard Rivière never answered, and very likely she hadn’t said a word, though she couldn’t help thinking the house must have heard her and swallowed her plea in its walls.
    Nor, certainly, did she say, I love you so, but the words rolled around and resounded in her aching skull, making such a din that Richard Rivière could only have heard them, had he not striven so insistently to fill up the moment with his own harmless, lighthearted words.
    He did come back to the house, though, just once.
    Not, she thought dejectedly, and perhaps because for a few minutes she’d been foolish enough to think that it was, to surrender to her love and her sorrow, to rescue her from her quiet agony.
    He was coming back to the house because his father had died in Toulouse, and so they drove off to the funeral together in Richard Rivière’s SUV.
    Three years had gone by since his leaving. Clarisse Rivière found him more handsome than before, a little more filled out, and dressed with a very studied elegance, like a prosperous, fastidious, slightly anxious man.
    She threw herself against him as soon as she opened the door, and she found a certain taste for life tentatively coming back to her, slightly dimming her grief and bewilderment. She could feel his discomfort at having her in his arms. She didn’t care. She held him close, so happy to be seeing him again, nestling her face against his neck, thinking he might be uncomfortable because in his mysterious Annecy existence there was another woman who held him like this, but not caring, lost in her joy at rediscovering Richard Rivière’s smell.
    If he’d fled what she’d given him so generously, that alone was worth thinking about. What he’d fled to didn’t interest her.
    Richard Rivière’s mother looked at them with an almost hostile face. She seemed not so much stricken as infuriated by her husband’s death, or rather, Clarisse realized uneasily, by its circumstances.
    Without pleasure they drank a warm, syrupy
vin cuit
in the little apartment where Richard Rivière was raised, above the stationery shop that the parents were still running only the month before, when they’d made the decision to retire. The mother had gone off for a mineral cure in the mountains while the father took inventory.
    “The shop was locked up, the blind was down, and your father had the dog with him, that horrible dog,” the mother said accusingly.
    Richard Rivière swirled the sweet wine in his glass, looking around him in boredom and distaste.
    “Not that same dog you brought to our house?” whispered Clarisse, with a nervous titter.
    The mother almost roared in irritation. She tried to catch Richard Rivière’s eye, but he very visibly refused. She seemed bent on rebuking him and, unable to express her outrage in a shared glance, furiously shook her head. Clarisse remembered him telling her, one day long before, that his parents habitually blamed him for their every concern and sorrow.
    “No, of course not, a different dog, the first one died ten years ago at least. But it was the same breed, and they looked