Mon amie américaine by Michèle Halberstadt Page A

lulled by the music of a channel showing music videos. Around five o’clock your mother brings up twobowls of ice cream for us. We watch a US Open tennis match. I suggest we put on TCM, the channel devoted to the old films you used to love, but you explain that you don’t succeed in concentrating long enough to follow a story any more. There’s the hint of a smile on your face as you nudge me with your elbow. “You’ll like this: I can’t even finish an article in
People
magazine.” I burst out laughing. That dig is the old Molly coming to the surface. You lower the sound of the TV. “You know what? Nothing interests me. For weeks I’ve been sleeping. I don’t think of anything, and I especially don’t want to mull over things.”
    You turn your face toward mine, and for the first time since I arrived, I sense you’re about to break down. “You used to say I was a softie and a chicken? Well, you were right. I don’t even have the nerve to end it all. I could, you know. The drawer is full of drugs. But nope. I’d rather spend the rest of my life channel surfing in bed. That’ll be some rest, right?” Tears are forming at the corners of your eyes. “Somebody up there must have played heads or tails, and it ended up falling on me.”
    I take you in my arms, rock you gently. “Go ahead and cry, my Molly, let it out, it will do yougood. Don’t forget that they’re stuffing you with tranquilizers, sedatives. You’ve got to let some time pass.” I’m murmuring those hollow remarks you resort to when you’ve run out of arguments. You don’t let yourself be consoled for very long. You sit up to blow your nose, then fall back on the pillows that I’ve just straightened. You go back to your TV zapping and watch the channels go by.
    â€œYou don’t understand. It’s too hard. I’m about to turn forty-one. Who am I supposed to be fighting for? For the guy I don’t have? For the children I’ll never have? I’m tired. Could you tell my mother I’d like to have dinner?”
    As I’m getting up, the door opens on the nurse, a young perky blond woman in her thirties with a sparkling smile, who sticks a needle in the vein on your right arm without ever stopping her talking. “And how are we today? We’ve got a visitor from France? Oh, but we must be a
very important person
for somebody to come see us from as far away as that! Ah, Paris! Chanel! I’ve always dreamed about it …” Normally, that kind of creature would have aggravated you and we would have made fun of her together; but in this situation she seems tobe a distraction. She’s even soothing, unless it’s the immediate effect of the intravenous injection.
    Your mother serves you dinner at six thirty: a bowl of consommé and a plate of pasta that you eat in your bed while we watch the top twenty music videos of the week. “You see, they last around two and a half minutes, the ideal length for my brain. I think it shrank during my coma. It certainly is the only part of my body that lost weight, right? Are you sure you don’t want to stay and sleep over?” I should have said yes. It was easy to tell that it would have given you pleasure. I explain to you that your father has already dropped off my bag at the motel, a lousy excuse since it’s five minutes away and I could easily go back and get it. But I absolutely need to get out of that room with its pink wallpaper and immaculate carpeting — out of this house in mourning, away from this inconsolable suffering.
    It’s Sunday, and the weather is even more beautiful than yesterday. Dora has called me early to tell me that you’re going to come and get me by car, that you feel like getting some air. I went to getyou a bouquet of flowers at the supermarket on the corner, and I’m waiting for you at the side of the road, my face in