The Woman With the Bouquet (15 page)

The last one went into the room at four o’clock and came out a minute later screaming, “He’s dead! My God, he just died!”

Stéphanie rushed out of the office, ran up to the bed, grabbed Karl’s pulse, looked at the monitors and exclaimed, “Be quiet! He’s asleep, that’s all. He’s exhausted by all these visits. In his condition . . .”

The mistress sat down squeezing her knees, as if that would make her feel better. She bit the nail on her thumb which was long and red, then she fussed, “Those bitches, they did it on purpose! They wore him out so there’d be nothing left for me!”

“Look, Mademoiselle, you don’t seem to realize, this is a man who has just survived a very serious accident. All you can think about is yourself and your rivals, it’s indecent!”

“Who do you think you are? Are you being paid to take care of him or to lecture us about morality?”

“To take care of him. Therefore, I have to ask you to leave.”

“Fuck off! I waited four hours.”

“Right. I’m calling security.”

Grumbling, the supermodel yielded to the threat, and stalked off, wobbling on her high platform heels.

Stéphanie gave a mental shout of “Bitch!”, then devoted herself to Karl, raising his bed, plumping his pillows, checking his IV, not at all sorry to have him to herself again.

“At last I can get some work done,” she sighed. Not for a moment did it cross her mind that she had just reacted like a jealous woman.

The next morning, Karl greeted her with a smile.

“Well, did you have fun, yesterday?”

“What was fun about it?”

“Making those women who hate each other sit down and wait patiently in each other’s presence. Frankly, I was sorry to be in here and not in the waiting room. Did the fur fly over there?”

“No, but they did transform the waiting room into an ice box. Did you hear me send the last one away?”

“The last one? No. Who came after Dora?”

“A brunette on platform heels.”

“Samantha? Oh, I’m sorry, I would have liked to see her.”

“Well, you couldn’t.”

“What was wrong with me?”

“You fell asleep! She thought you were dead.”

“Samantha always exaggerates.”

“I took the liberty of telling her that.”

While she was attending to him, a thousand questions assailed her brain. Which of the six mistresses was the current one? Was there one he loved? What did he expect from a woman? Was it because he only chose them for their looks, without expecting anything more, that he bounced from one to the other? Did he only go for erotic liaisons, never any lasting relationship? Did he take the initiative with women? Did he rely for a large part on his own physical powers of attraction? What type of lover might he be?

As if he had sensed all the agitation in her brain, Karl exclaimed, “You seem to be somewhat preoccupied today!”

“Me? Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. A problem with your husband?”

“I’m not married.”

“Your partner?”

“No partner, either.”

“Your boyfriend, then?”

“Yes, that’s it, a problem with my boyfriend.”

To a man who thought she must be ravishing, she did not have the heart to confess to her hopeless solitude, so she decided to invent a fiancé for herself: at least here, in room 221, she could be a normal woman.

“What’s he done?”

“Hmm . . . Nothing . . . Nothing for sure . . . I wonder if . . . I wonder if he isn’t having an affair . . .”

“Are you jealous?”

Stéphanie didn’t know what to say. Not only was she not used to being asked such a question, but she just realized that she was jealous of Karl.

She said nothing. He laughed.

“So, you are jealous!”

“Who isn’t?”

“I am not, for one, however I prefer not to talk about it. Let’s get back to you. What’s his name?”

Stéphanie would have liked to reply, but all she could think of were names of dogs, Rex, Titus, Médor, Tommy . . . In a panic, she managed to blurt, “Ralf!”

Of course, that was also a dog’s name, a Doberman that she ran into from time to time, but she hoped that Karl would not suspect anything. Ralf, that could be a human name, couldn’t it?

“Well Ralf is a fool, if you want my opinion.”

Phew, he’d swallowed it.

“You don’t know him.”

“When a man meets a woman as gorgeous as you, who smells so lovely, the first thing he does is move in with her. And you’ve just told me you don’t live together.”

“Don’t blame him! Perhaps I’m the one who doesn’t want to . . .”

“You don’t want to?”

“That’s not it either.”

“So I’ll repeat what I said, Ralf is a fool. He doesn’t deserve you. To be apart from a woman with such a scent . . .”

Stéphanie panicked. What scent? In twenty-five years, she had never imagined she gave off any odor . . . Instinctively, she moved her nose toward her arm. What scent? She couldn’t smell a thing. What was he talking about? She didn’t use perfume or eau de toilette. Could it be her soap? And yet that vanished so quickly . . . Her washing powder? The softener? No, all the hospital personnel got their laundry cleaned by the same company. Her smell? Her own smell? Was it a good or a bad smell? Above all, what did it smell like?

She could only hold back for about thirty seconds, then she asked, breathless, “What do I smell like? Sweat?”

“Now you’re being funny! No, I have no idea what your sweat is like—and good job, too, it must be divine, I’d get too excited.”

“Are you joking?”

“I assure you, you have an intoxicating scent and if Ralf never told you so, Ralf is most definitely a stupid jerk.”

That evening, when she was back in her studio, Stéphanie tried one experiment after another.

After she had drawn the curtains, she undressed and, sitting on her bed, tried to smell herself. She put her nostrils up to every part of her body she could get at. Before taking her shower, she went into contortions, and then again afterwards. In vain.

Nevertheless, although she despised being naked, she didn’t get dressed again and tried, rather, another method: she endeavored to intercept her smell in her wake, by turning around quite abruptly; the moment she had taken three steps, she spun on her heels and hurried with her nose in the air on her own trace, with the impression that she was performing a ballet. And while she didn’t manage to capture anything at all, she found great pleasure in walking like this, with her thighs and her breasts in the air.

For dinner, intimidated by the pomp of plate and cutlery, she put on a bathrobe; however as she ate, she opened it somewhat, until finally she stepped out of it, hoping once again to snatch her smell.

Finally, she investigated her wardrobe, sniffing the clothes she had worn, comparing them with what she hadn’t worn, then going back to the first . . . She did notice something, but it was almost nothing, a subtle essence, evanescent, that escaped the moment she thought she had grasped it.

She decided to sleep naked. That way when she woke up she could find her smell in the sheets. But after an hour of tossing this way and that, and feeling herself, and checking her curves, she concluded that nudity was driving her crazy, so she put on her pajamas and gradually lost consciousness.

The next morning she went silently into the room and walked up to the bed without giving Karl any warning.

After thirty seconds, he smiled. A moment later, he mumbled, a note of concern in his voice, “Stéphanie?”

She would have liked for the game to last a bit longer, but a syringe rolled on her metal tray, revealing her presence.

“Yes.”

He sighed with relief.

“You were here?”

“For a minute. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I wasn’t asleep. Now I understand why I was obsessing about you.”

They chatted while Stéphanie examined her patient. She tried a new experiment. As she had noticed that whenever she walked up behind him, spreading her arms, he smiled, she came closer, put her breasts above his face. Victory! Karl’s features radiated with pleasure. She concluded that he wasn’t lying: she really did give off a scent that enchanted him.

She amused herself by trying again, going closer this time. At one point, her hair caressed his cheek. What would her colleagues think if they saw her bending over him like this? Who cared! She was so happy to see his superb face light up with joy.

At the end, when she told him, placing her décolleté beneath his nostrils, that she was going to look after her other patients, he mumbled as if he were in a swoon, “What bliss to have such a pretty woman looking after me . . .”

“You’re exaggerating, I’m no dream girl, far from it!”

“A dream girl is not the one a girl dreams of being, but the one a boy sees.”

On Saturday and Sunday she was off. She missed Karl. She went from one state to the next. On the one hand, she went on walking around her apartment naked to try to grow accustomed to something she’d never before been aware of: the good smells of her own body. On the other hand, she cried a great deal because a bold venture into a Chinese shop selling embroidered silk had destroyed her dream and brought her back to reality: nothing suited her, she was fat and ugly.

So to avoid the gaze of others she locked herself away, eating out of cans, talking only with her television set. Why weren’t other men as refined as Karl? Why did society continue to favor the sense of sight over others? In a different world, in the olfactory world, she was admirable. In a different world, she had the power to bewitch. In a certain room that she knew, she was “such a pretty woman.” She waited for Monday morning as if for a deliverance.

“Do you realize what you are telling yourself, my poor Stéphanie? You’re nothing but a prime cut of meat for a paralyzed blind man. What a disaster!”

After joyfulness came despondency.

And so she spent two days hovering between lamentation and ecstasy, pathos and enthusiasm. Consequently, when the hospital called her on Sunday evening to ask her to come in early the next day, she eagerly accepted.

Just after dawn, teams met at the cafeteria to take over from one another around a cappuccino, the last one for some, the first for others, while the daytime caregivers replaced the nighttime ones. There was a vague moment, blue and gray, in the buildings, a moment like a suspended silence, and then the transformation took place: in the time it took for a bitter sip while exchanging a few words, suddenly it was daytime, with the noise of carts, doors slamming, shoes squeaking, the to and fro on each floor, vacuum cleaners humming in the stairway, admissions employees opening their desks on the ground floor. Another rhythm throbbed along the corridors, time to wake up the patients, to take their temperature, hand out their pills, the sound of cups and saucers banging.

At half past seven, fresh, alert and jubilant, Stéphanie rushed into Karl’s room.

“Good morning,” she said.

“What? You, Stéphanie, already?” said the man with the bound eyes, astonished.

“Yes, me already. One of my colleagues is sick—I know, people are always surprised when a nurse or a doctor has problems with their health. So I have to take over for her.”

“And I’ll take over for myself: I’ll play at being a patient. Apparently I do it quite well.”

“You do it very well.”

“Alas . . .”

“What I meant is that you never complain.”

“What would be the point?”

The morning fog still clung to the windowpanes.

Stéphanie wrote down his temperature, changed his drip, modified a few doses then gave him a shot. She stuck her head into the corridor to call the nurse’s aide.

“Madame Gomez, come and help me with the bath!”

Behind her, Karl objected violently: “You’re not going to inflict that on me, are you?”

“What?”

“Bathe me?”

Stéphanie walked over to him, not understanding.

“Yes, we are, why?”

He grimaced, annoyed, his face turning from right to left as if he were looking for help.

“I . . . I don’t like the idea!”

“Don’t worry, I’m used to it.”

As Madame Gomez came in, he didn’t insist. Assuming that she had reassured him, Stéphanie picked up a washcloth and a bottle of liquid soap.

Madame Gomez pulled back the sheet to uncover Karl, and Stéphanie could not help but be affected. She thought he was beautiful. Completely beautiful. There was nothing to dislike about his body. It all filled her with emotion.

Although he was injured and could not move, there was nothing to indicate that he was an invalid.

She looked away. For the first time, she thought she didn’t have the right to look at a man’s nudity without his consent; with hindsight, Madame Gomez’s movements to undress Karl, sheets raised quickly by an indifferent hand, seemed violent.

Where should she begin?

Although she knew the movements by heart, for having repeated them hundreds of times, Karl’s presence intimidated her. It was his thighs, his torso, his stomach, his shoulders that she was about to touch. Ordinarily, she would clean a patient the way she would wipe a sponge over a plastified tablecloth; with him it was different, he intimidated her. Without the pretext of the hospital, she would never have seen him naked. Even if he did attribute an exquisite scent to her, he would never choose her as a mistress, would he?

Without scruples, Madame Gomez had begun to scrub on her side.

Stéphanie did not want anyone to suspect how reticent she felt, so she set to work. However, her rubbing was softer, more enveloping.

“What are you doing, poor idiot?” she thought. “He’s paralyzed. Paralyzed! That means he cannot feel your hand. Whether you pinch him or caress him, the effect is identical: that is, there is none.”

Emboldened by the thought, she concentrated on details in order to complete the job; however, she was unwise enough to look at his face and she noticed that he was grinding his teeth, his jaws clenched, and shivering all over. Then, as she was massaging his neck, he murmured in an imperceptible voice, “I am sorry.”

She heard so much distress in his whisper that she ordered Madame Gomez to reply to the bell from room 209.