Mon amie américaine by Michèle Halberstadt

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 noisesinto 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.
    â€œYou 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, asyou 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.” Theword makes my blood boil. Who in your place, condemned from one day to the next to go from hyperactivity to humiliating immobility,