A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
you all about me, too?”
“He told me you were a quite talented poet.”
“Ah, no, I am shattered. ‘Quite talented’? Bah! Look, there’s my heart, it’s lying there in shards on the floor. In the military hospital, the chief surgeon gave me two cyanide capsules, he said, ‘We’ve done all we can, if life ever becomes unbearable for you…’ They’re in the drawer, fetch them for me, would you? I thought I could endure anything—pain, paralysis, isolation—but faint praise, that I can’t abide. Go, go, the top drawer, right over there—”
“She doesn’t know you are teasing her,” Jacques said.
Joë fluttered his long-fingered right hand above his heart, a gesture that might have been cribbed from the repertoire of an actress in a melodramatic film, and declared, “I am not joking.”
“Come, come, Joë, the poor girl is on the verge of tears.”
“Perhaps suicide isn’t the right course of action here. I think instead that I ought to challenge you to a duel. Yes, at dawn, in the grove just past the duck pond. ‘Quite talented!’ Did he tell you, Simone, my love, that my father’s head man has rigged up the most wonderful contraption for me, a combination bicycle and bath chair. I turn the pedals with my hands?” He began to mime the motions he made while propelling his device, counting, as if measuring off paces, “One-two-three—what’s the customary number of paces one takes before drawing one’s weapon? Is it five or ten? Simone, you’ll be my second, won’t you?”
“I don’t—I really don’t see what—”
“Joë, I warned you, she really is an innocent, a child, she’s not used to the monstrous egos of poets. And anyhow,” Jacques said, holding up his two hands as if surrendering, “I didn’t describe you as a ‘quite talented poet.’ She just doesn’t understand the subtle gradations.”
“I’m not a child,” Simone protested. “I have two children. I have traveled to Istanbul. Twice. I have overseen a villa with a considerable staff. I hardly think it is fair to talk about me in this manner.”
“Ah, Simone, Simone, you must forgive me. I’m simply terrible. I create these little dramas—here, let me put my head in your lap”—and Joë leaned forward, grasping hold of his legs and shoving them to the side—“yes, there we go, now stroke my head as if I were your puppy, your bad little dog. You forgive me everything, don’t you? I rather treat this little room as my kingdom, or perhaps my laboratory—”
“Jacques told me, he said that I must know, that you didn’t have any truck with small talk, no how-was-your-journey and I-hope-the-weather-will-be-fine-during-your-visit. That, well, you didn’t know how much time you had left, so you lived your life, conducted your relations, with great urgency. But I expected you to be—well—”
“Saintly?”
“I thought illness—your condition—would have—I suppose this sounds naive—ennobled you. That suffering would have—”
“Ah, suffering,” Joë said. “For a while, it is interesting. And then, like everything else, it becomes boring.”
Jacques, meanwhile, was leaning back in his chair, with the air of a critic watching a drama staged for his benefit.
Joë gave a solemn nod in Jacques’ direction. Jacques stood and washed his hands in the sink in an open anteroom.
Simone heard the sound of a cabinet being opened, a faint clatter of metal and glass.
“On account of my condition, I am granted surcease from pain…” Joë said. “As a student…before the war…I sought out that substance Homer refers to as nepenthe, frequenting back alleys and the docks. I was forced to strike some dark bargains to obtain it…But I won’t shock you by telling you all that. When I was wounded, my body was on fire and at the same time, I was so cold—the ambulance ride, each bump and jolt an agony—and finally, a nurse with the face of an angel saying, this will help with the pain, and in that moment, my whole life became utterly clear to me: I was destined to have this wound. Indeed, this wound existed before I did, and I was born to embody it.
“I’m like a man besotted with love, who bores everyone with endless babbling about his beloved…I love my wound—not a simple love, mind you, its mixed with hatred and resentment,” he gave a wave of his hand, “as all real love is.”
Jacques set about preparing an injection from a rubber-stoppered glass vial. Then, tying a tourniquet around his friend’s arm, he slapped his flesh until a vein stood out, blue-black beneath the pale flesh.
“In English, they use the word ‘painkiller.’” And here he made his right hand into the shape of a gun. “I rather like to imagine an American cowboy”—those last two words in English, the word cowboy repeated for the sheer pleasure of saying it. “He strides through the dusty town, spies the pain—a black blob, slithering about on the ground between the saloon and the horse rail, takes aim and fires. But in truth, this drug doesn’t actually remove the pain, it’s scarcely dead, only one is now able to observe it from above.”
Jacques administered the injection and Simone, feeling faint, looked away. So this is what the room of a poet looks like, she thought, taking in the rows of books surrounding Joë’s bed, the magazines printed on cheap newsprint scattered on the floor. The cover of one showed a photograph of a woman wearing a horned Viking helmet with her tongue sticking out, the cover of another proclaiming DOWN WITH ART! She wondered if later on she would be able to get up the nerve to ask Jacques, “What does it mean? Why is the woman wearing a Viking helmet and why is she sticking out her tongue?” and “Am I hopelessly old-fashioned because I believe in art?”
“Ahh,” Joë said, as the needle entered him. “I would be a poor host indeed if I traveled to a distant shore and left my friends behind, waving to me from the dock.”
Jacques drew another dose into the syringe.
“Oh, half of that. Half,” cried Joë, “she’s slight and this is her first time.” Then, cocking his head to one side, “It is your first time, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Simone murmured. “I’m a bit—what will it be like?”
“Ah,” Joë said, “we are going to a place where words cannot follow.”
“I am going to—demur.”
“Very well,” Jacques said, filling the syringe, and wrapping the tourniquet around his own arm, using his teeth to tighten it.
Joë worked his lips and tongue. “Ah, the taste of bitterness in my mouth! It lets me know that my beloved morphine is entering every pore and orifice of my body. What is it that the Bible says? ‘In bitterness we find the sweet?’”
“What book of the Bible is that from?” Jacques asked.
“The Gospel According to Joë.”
“Bitterness,” Joë said, and then fell silent. A few minutes later, he said, “Our minds are acutely tuned to bitterness because poisons are bitter. The brain awakens in its presence. Chefs will tell you…”
“Chefs will tell you what?” Simone finally ventured.
“Hmmm?” Joë asked. “What did you say?” and lapsed into silence. After a while, a long while, he said, “Has he told you yet that he is Egyptian? Your Jacques?”
“Yes.”
“And that his spirit is a tortoise. He’s told you that, am I right?”
“Yes, he’s told me that.”
Simone wondered if she was one in a line of women who had been brought by Jacques to kneel before the altar of this demigod.
“When