Fame Read Free Page B

thirty minutes passed, and people were still boarding. When there was nobody left, she got up and boarded within seconds. Pushing her way down the center aisle, she sat down next to Leo.
    “You have no right to do that! I thought you weren’t coming. I was already working out how to stop them taking off, but I can’t make myself understood here, I can’t explain things to anyone.”
    She apologized.
    “No, really, it’s all exhausting enough as it is, I can’t cope with more … Did you see the two children up front, they’re weird. Particularly the little girl. Green eyes! They’re flying on their own, without their parents.”
    “Impressive,” she said.
    He took a long look at her. “I’m pathetic,” he said finally. “Aren’t I?”
    “Well, yes.”
    “I’m insufferable.”
    She bobbed her head.
    “I’d understand if you wanted to go home. Of course if you did, I’d fly home too. I couldn’t get through it without you. The whole thing was a mistake anyway, I should never have agreed, absolutely idiotic. Shall we just go home? Right now?”
    “Please. Give it fifteen minutes. Please, just settle down.”
    He fell silent. And he actually managed to get a grip on himself and keep quiet for the next ten minutes while the plane accelerated, took off, and soared into the sky.
    They had met six weeks earlier at a particularly boring party, and it was only after she’d been talking to him for some time that it dawned on Elisabeth that the strange but intelligent man who kept cracking his knuckles and staring at the ceiling was none other than Leo Richter, the author of intricateshort stories full of complicated mirror effects and unpredictable shifts and swerves that were flourishes of empty virtuosity. She had recently read his collection about the doctor Lara Gaspard, and naturally she knew his most famous story, the one about the old woman on her way to an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland. They had met again the next day, already that evening she went with him to his sparsely furnished apartment, and to her surprise, Leo in bed demonstrated a decisiveness for which she was totally unprepared. She had dug her fingernails into his back, rolled her eyes up under their lids, and bitten his shoulder, and as she was on her way home in the dawn after several hours that left her totally spent, she knew that she wanted to see him again and that perhaps there was room for him in her life.
    She soon discovered all the aspects of his personality: his anxiety attacks and neuroses, the sudden waves of euphoria that came out of nowhere, and the periods of total concentration during which he seemed to vanish inside himself and if she so much as spoke to him, he looked at her as if he had no idea what she was doing there.
    For his part, he was fascinated by her job. By her activities with Doctors Without Borders—had she really done parachute jumps, with a real parachute? In a real war zone?
    At this point, she always changed the subject. She knew that curiosity was part and parcel of his makeup and his métier, but there were things she didn’t wish to talk about. Anyone who hadn’t lived through such things personally would be likely to take it all as mere phrasemaking and anecdotage;words failed to capture the reality. What it felt like to amputate a man’s legs under inadequate anesthetic, to drag him across fields in the shimmering heat, only to lose him a few feet from the waiting helicopter, so that the entire effort was pointless, and then on the flight back to realize that entire portions of the previous days had erased themselves from your memory, that there were blank spaces, as if you’d had experiences that were so extreme and alien that they had no firm foothold in reality and were unavailable to the mind. How should she have described these things? As an old doctor had said to her years ago, people who have experienced nothing love to tell stories while people who have experienced a great deal