The Woman With the Bouquet (16 page)

“I’ll finish off, Madame Gomez, it’s okay.”

Once they were alone, she leaned over and questioned him gently.

“Sorry? Why are you sorry?”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, turning his head from right to left.

She wondered what was happening to him, and looked up and down his body and suddenly understood the reason for his distress.

His sex was standing bolt upright.

Stéphanie could not help but admire his solid member, sheathed in fine skin; such an erection was a tribute to him, and seemed to her both strong and gentle; then she went back to her chore, shook her thoughts from her mind, and understood that she had to reassure Karl.

“Don’t you worry. We’re used to it. It’s an automatic reflex.”

“No!”

“Yes, don’t worry, I know what it is.”

He responded angrily, “No, you don’t know what it is! Not for a second! And don’t say just anything: automatic reflex . . . When someone touches me below my chin, I feel nothing. When your colleague Antoinette looks after me, I’m relaxed, I don’t need to clench my teeth. Why? Because Antoinette and Madame Gomez don’t have the same smell as you do. I tried to warn you . . .”

“Oh go on . . . It’s no big deal . . .”

“If it’s not a big deal, then what is?” he exclaimed in a broken voice.

“Don’t be embarrassed, I’m not,” she lied.

“You’re not embarrassed? Thank you! Now I understand that I really am nothing more than an invalid!”

Stéphanie saw tears wetting the bandage on his eyes. She felt like holding Karl close to her to console him, but it wasn’t allowed. If she were caught like that, a naked man in the arms of a nurse, with him in that state! Not to mention that if she enveloped him in her smell, it would only get worse . . .

“What have I done, dear Lord, what have I done!” she cried.

Karl changed. His body began to shake violently. He was moaning. Stéphanie was going to call for help when she suspected what was happening.

“Are you . . . are you laughing?”

He confirmed that he was by continuing to shake.

When she saw that his sex was decreasing in size, proportionately to his growing hilarity, Stéphanie was relieved and, infected by his laughter, began to giggle uncontrollably.

She covered his body with a sheet and sat down next to him, just long enough to catch her breath.

When eventually he had calmed down, Stéphanie asked, “What was so funny?”

“The way you cried out, as if there were some catastrophe, ‘Dear Lord, what have I done?’ when in fact you had given me a hard on. Can you imagine how absurd the situation is?”

They laughed uproariously.

“Let’s be serious now. No more humiliation. No more bathing with you. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

In actual fact, Stéphanie was not sure she understood; what she had realized was that she had this power, this new power, this stupefying power to arouse desire in a man. What am I saying? To arouse desire in this man, this very man, this splendid man, this man whom women swarm over, the kind of man sublime mistresses fight over! She had such a power—a fat, ill-favored woman!

For the rest of the day she avoided room 221 because it seemed like her colleagues were on to something, because they were looking at her strangely. In spite of herself, she did feel different, she could not help but act more volubly, more exuberantly than usual, with a blush coming to her cheeks on the slightest pretext.

“My word, Stéphanie, are you in love, by any chance?” asked Marie-Thérèse in her cheerful singsong accent, rolling her r’s and drawling her vowels.

Overwhelmed by a flush of heat, Stéphanie did not answer, but smiled, and ran off to the pharmacy.

“She’s fallen in love,” concluded Marie-Thérèse, nodding her head.

And yet Marie-Thérèse was wrong: Stéphanie had not fallen in love, she had just become a woman.

That night, she got undressed. Far from hiding from her mirror, she stood right in front of it.

“You’re attractive! You can be attractive!”

She was announcing this to her body like good news, or a reward.

“This body can arouse a man,” she said to her reflection.

Her reflection didn’t look terribly convinced.

“Yes!” she insisted. “No later than this morning . . .”

She told her image what had happened that morning, relating in detail the power of her smell . . .

After she finished her story, she put on a bathrobe, had dinner, and dived into bed to think about it, and then think about it some more.

On Tuesday at dawn, as soon as she arrived in the changing room, she negotiated with Madame Gomez to get her to accept, in exchange for small favors—never suspecting a thing—to take care of bathing the patient in room 221.

And then, once Karl had been washed, she went into the room.

“Thank you for not coming,” he sighed.

“That’s the first time anyone’s ever said that to me!”

“It’s strange, isn’t it? There are some people around whom you couldn’t care less about being indecent, but others not. No doubt because you want them to like you.”

“You want me to like you?” she asked, her throat tight.

While waiting for his reply, she began to feel faint.

“Yes I’d like that. At least, I would have liked that.”

“You win! I do like you.”

She went up to him, and brushed her lips against his.

“Am I dreaming, or did you just kiss me?” he exclaimed.

“You’re dreaming.”

All day long, she kept the memory of that contact on her lips. How could it possibly be so good?

While she forced herself not to neglect her other patients, she did spend more time in Karl’s room—or was it just that time went by more quickly there. The moment she was over the threshold of room 221, she went through an invisible barrier and found herself in a different world.

At around noon, while Karl and Stéphanie were talking about trivial things, he broke off, and changed the subject.

“How do you dress when you’re not at the hospital?”

She crossed off reality with one bold stroke, thinking of her shapeless clothes waiting in the changing room, or her closets at home, and she decided to lie.

“Skirts.”

“Ah, so much the better.”

“Yes, skirts and blouses. Silk, if possible. Sometimes a skirt with a suit jacket. In summer, light dresses . . .”

“Ravishing. And in winter?”

Stéphanie blushed, thinking of the outrageous thing she was about to say.

“I like to wear leather. Not bikers’ leather, sophisticated leather, glamorous, do you know what I mean?”

“I adore that! What a pity I can’t see you.”

“Here we wear hospital scrubs for work. Not very sexy.”

“Even on you?”

“Even on me.”

“I doubt that. Anyway, you get your revenge elsewhere.”

“That’s right . . . I get my revenge . . .”

In the afternoon, on leaving the hospital, she decided to make true what only that morning had been a falsehood, and she headed for the department stores on the Boulevard Haussmann.

To get there she took the métro, which was something she rarely did, because Stéphanie liked to go places on foot. For years she had lived “behind the hospital.” A stranger to Paris would not understand the expression “behind the hospital,” because the Salpêtrière had two equally important entrances on the two boulevards that ran alongside the campus: how could one be in front and the other behind? To understand, you had to assimilate the singular geometry of Paris, a city built in a circle but which has a front and a back . . . anything that is turned toward the center, toward Notre Dame Cathedral, is “in front,” and anything facing the peripheral ring road is “behind.” Because she lived in Chinatown, in a studio on top of an apartment block, not far from the suburbs, therefore, Stéphanie lived “behind.”

To go below ground, and wedge her way onto an overcrowded train, and stew there amidst sweat and noise, and come back out to be shoved this way and that and affront an onslaught of people was already something of an adventure for her. After she had gone several times into the wrong building, because each building in the shopping complex was devoted to this or that product, she finally arrived, awestruck, in the “Women’s Fashion” department.

She overcame her shyness and managed to get help from the sales girls; after a few mistakes, she came up with four outfits that resembled what she had described to Karl, and to her utmost surprise, actually suited her rather well . . .

On Wednesday morning, Stéphanie rushed into the changing room in her leather suit; her colleagues were lavish with compliments. Blushing, she put on her usual scrubs, feeling rather different, intentionally neglecting to close the top two buttons.

In the head nurse’s office, Stéphanie was informed that Karl Bauer, the patient in room 221, would be taken into surgery for an eye operation.

When she saw Karl he was radiant.

“Do you realize, Stéphanie? I’m going to be able to see again at last.”

Stéphanie had some trouble swallowing her saliva. Let him see, okay, but see her? No doubt it would be a catastrophe, the end of the dream, the death of their relationship.

“Oh, oh, Stéphanie, do you hear me? Are you still there?”

She tried to put some cheer into her voice.

“Yes, I hear you. I will be really happy for you to get your sight back. Really happy. Happy for you.”

To herself she added, “not happy for me.” After that, she did her best to hide her bitterness and to go along with Karl’s naïve enthusiasm.

In the afternoon at four, she went off duty just as Karl, anesthetized, was going into the operating room.

On Thursday, after a night of broken sleep, she set off, with a heavy heart, for the hospital.

It was raining.

In the early morning, Paris was noisily emerging from its drowsiness. The streets belonged to giant things that hid during the day—trucks, garbage dumpsters. Vehicles splashed her with water as she went by.

The sun shone no brighter than the moon. Beneath the throbbing bridges of the elevated railway, she walked along, managing to stay dry, mumbling, “Never mind! Whether he sees me dry or soaked, he’ll be filled with dismay. No point making myself look any better.” With her eye glued to the shiny pavement, she thought that from now on she would once again be inhabiting her unattractive body, a body no one liked. Her beauty had just been a flash in the pan! A picnic in the grass! Her vacation from ugliness had been too short-lived . . .

At the same time she blamed herself for her sadness. What a selfish person! Instead of thinking about him, about his happiness, she was thinking about herself. An inconsiderate lover, an ugly woman, and an unprofessional nurse: she was really piling on the flaws. Besides, she herself was nothing but a flaw.

Limp, exhausted, she went through the hospital doors, her shoulders drooping, crushed by what seemed like an irreversibly discouraging weight.

The dark corridor that led to room 221 had never seemed so long.

Outside, the rain was slashing diagonally against the windows.

When she crossed the threshold, she immediately noticed that Karl was still wearing his bandages. When she approached him, he was startled.

“Stéphanie?”

“Yes. How do you feel?”

“I think the operation failed.”

The blood rushed to her ears. She was happy: he wouldn’t see her, ever! Now she was ready to devote her entire life to him, if he wanted her to. Yes, she would agree to become this man’s appointed nurse, provided that, from time to time, from deep within his blindness, he spoke to her of her beauty.

In the hours that followed, she was filled with inexhaustible energy, trying to boost his morale: the energy of a woman who, after a setback, has found hope again.

For more than a week, thanks to her flawlessly positive attitude, she was a great comfort to him.

One day—it was a Wednesday—he sighed.

“Do you know the worst thing about being here, that really makes me unhappy? Not hearing women’s shoes.”

“Those are the rules.”

“They’re keeping me from getting better with their rules! It’s not listening to the sound of slippers and clogs that I’ll recover. I need to be treated not just like a human being but also like a man.”

She was instantly afraid he would ask her, because she had the suspicion she would accept.

“Please, Stéphanie, couldn’t you just, for my sake, forget the rules for a few minutes and come to me wearing women’s shoes, not your work shoes?”

“But . . . but . . .”

“Would they fire you for that?”

“No . . .”

“I beg you: please give me that pleasure.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Stéphanie did indeed think of nothing else, particularly about which shoes she could possibly wear. If she went around in her usual tennis shoes, she wasn’t about to make Karl happy.

During her break she asked her most elegant coworkers for advice, and they gave her the names of a few stores.

As most of the nurses were from Martinique, when she left the hospital Stéphanie hurried underground, took the métro, and found herself in the north of Paris, in Barbès, the capital’s African neighborhood, where the shop windows overflowed with tight, sophisticated shoes, modestly priced.

She nearly went back the way she’d come more than once because it was blatantly obvious that some of the shops were intended for prostitutes: the outfits were so provocative and aggressive, with vulgar designs and flashy material.

As she had been advised, she went into the “Grand Chic Parisien,” a store that hardly deserved its name, judging by the neon lights and piles of boxes, and the sagging threadbare benches on patched linoleum.

Although she was determined to buy something, she was about as eager to try on high-heeled shoes as to go sheep-herding in the wilds of Transylvania. But the shop assistant encouraged her, and she managed to find a height where she didn’t wobble, and decided to buy two pairs.

“What do you think of these ones?”

Stéphanie walked back and forth with the pair in question.

“No, my husband won’t like them.”