grave, it was she whom he suddenly looked down at with his moved, loving gaze, his tanned, full face marked with hollows and wrinkles but to her still the same as the shy young face she’d first beheld in Le Rainbow, some twenty-five years before.
Did she not have every reason to ignore the grim thud of that all-too-familiar bell as she huddled against him in the biting wind and he patted her back with one hand to say, Don’t worry, everything will be fine?
Maybe that baleful bell hadn’t noticed all this, its every ring counting off the dreary, dark days of loneliness past and future—Richard Rivière’s fingers brushed her hand, he turned his face to hers, no longer intimidated, no longer young or smooth, but, she thought, just as overflowing with inexpressible love as the face looking up at her when she came to take his order, long ago, at Le Rainbow.
—
Over and over her memory would replay those moments in the cemetery, the brief hour of perfect accord and loving harmony that had let her hold the reverberations of despair at a distance, almost inaudible.
She was convinced that she’d felt and understood that moment accurately, hadn’t made too much of it. Her imagination hadn’t run away with her; she was of course happy to see Richard Rivière again on the morning of his arrival, but she hadn’t been hoping for anything.
He took her home, and their conversation in the SUV was untroubled, though she noted his refusal to talk about his father and the dog when she offered a thought on the subject and saw him grow silent, his lips suddenly gray and tight.
He pulled up to the house and didn’t want to come in. He hugged her, climbed back into the car, waved a final farewell, and Clarisse Rivière had a powerful feeling, so horrible and absolute that it was almost an icy relief, that she would never see him again.
—
It had been years now, with Richard Rivière gone, since Clarisse’s heels last clattered boldly and efficiently over the tiles of the pizzeria, where she oversaw a staff of four and still waited tables herself.
Not that her heels were never heard striking that hard floor, but it was an incidental noise, indifferent, with no resonance of contentment and innocent pride.
Sometimes, not realizing it, she dragged her feet. Then, a moment later, the horrible shuffling sound snapped her out of it, reminded her of the need for some semblance of dignity, and she made what felt like a heroic effort to walk properly.
Everything meant boredom and weariness, except perhaps for her visits to the servant, when, as she sat in her bronze velvet armchair listening to her mother’s morose chatter, she forgot that she was Clarisse Rivière, or couldn’t recall who that Clarisse Rivière was, that woman whose husband had left her for Annecy, whom everyone thought humiliated but who was only ashamed of her own failure.
The pizzeria’s manager had planned a party at the restaurant and invited Clarisse with such insistence that she felt obliged to accept, despite her deep dislike of gatherings, high spirits, and pleasantries.
She bought a violet jersey dress that clung to her slender frame and hung down to her ankles, with pumps to match. She didn’t care about being pretty and nicely dressed. She only wanted to honor the sincere kindness of the man who’d invited her, who’d urged her to come, hoping it might lift her spirits.
When she got home, some three hours later, Freddy Moliger was with her.
She stopped on the square in front of her house and pressed her back to the chestnut tree, listening, with an almost violent attentiveness and concentration that surprised even her, to the detailed, meandering, alternately lyrical and chillingly bleak tale of a life of grim poverty that wreck of a man was recounting.
Clarisse Rivière felt the fog parting inside her, the thick, dully buzzing cloud that kept her safely walled off from the rest of the world and filled her gaze with the gently frightened,
Did she not have every reason to ignore the grim thud of that all-too-familiar bell as she huddled against him in the biting wind and he patted her back with one hand to say, Don’t worry, everything will be fine?
Maybe that baleful bell hadn’t noticed all this, its every ring counting off the dreary, dark days of loneliness past and future—Richard Rivière’s fingers brushed her hand, he turned his face to hers, no longer intimidated, no longer young or smooth, but, she thought, just as overflowing with inexpressible love as the face looking up at her when she came to take his order, long ago, at Le Rainbow.
—
Over and over her memory would replay those moments in the cemetery, the brief hour of perfect accord and loving harmony that had let her hold the reverberations of despair at a distance, almost inaudible.
She was convinced that she’d felt and understood that moment accurately, hadn’t made too much of it. Her imagination hadn’t run away with her; she was of course happy to see Richard Rivière again on the morning of his arrival, but she hadn’t been hoping for anything.
He took her home, and their conversation in the SUV was untroubled, though she noted his refusal to talk about his father and the dog when she offered a thought on the subject and saw him grow silent, his lips suddenly gray and tight.
He pulled up to the house and didn’t want to come in. He hugged her, climbed back into the car, waved a final farewell, and Clarisse Rivière had a powerful feeling, so horrible and absolute that it was almost an icy relief, that she would never see him again.
—
It had been years now, with Richard Rivière gone, since Clarisse’s heels last clattered boldly and efficiently over the tiles of the pizzeria, where she oversaw a staff of four and still waited tables herself.
Not that her heels were never heard striking that hard floor, but it was an incidental noise, indifferent, with no resonance of contentment and innocent pride.
Sometimes, not realizing it, she dragged her feet. Then, a moment later, the horrible shuffling sound snapped her out of it, reminded her of the need for some semblance of dignity, and she made what felt like a heroic effort to walk properly.
Everything meant boredom and weariness, except perhaps for her visits to the servant, when, as she sat in her bronze velvet armchair listening to her mother’s morose chatter, she forgot that she was Clarisse Rivière, or couldn’t recall who that Clarisse Rivière was, that woman whose husband had left her for Annecy, whom everyone thought humiliated but who was only ashamed of her own failure.
The pizzeria’s manager had planned a party at the restaurant and invited Clarisse with such insistence that she felt obliged to accept, despite her deep dislike of gatherings, high spirits, and pleasantries.
She bought a violet jersey dress that clung to her slender frame and hung down to her ankles, with pumps to match. She didn’t care about being pretty and nicely dressed. She only wanted to honor the sincere kindness of the man who’d invited her, who’d urged her to come, hoping it might lift her spirits.
When she got home, some three hours later, Freddy Moliger was with her.
She stopped on the square in front of her house and pressed her back to the chestnut tree, listening, with an almost violent attentiveness and concentration that surprised even her, to the detailed, meandering, alternately lyrical and chillingly bleak tale of a life of grim poverty that wreck of a man was recounting.
Clarisse Rivière felt the fog parting inside her, the thick, dully buzzing cloud that kept her safely walled off from the rest of the world and filled her gaze with the gently frightened,
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