The Secret Lives of People in Love Read Free

Pierre-Yves lay awake, aware that he was dying. Beside his bed was a bowl of strawberries that he was unable to reach out and touch. Whenever he imagined their sweetness, he remembered her and shuddered. They were piled up in a heavy yellow bowl.
    Pierre-Yves breathed deeply in an attempt to bury the scent in his lungs, while outside on the street below he imagined taxis, filled with cigarette smoke, lunging between traffic lights. During his first night in the hospital, after falling over in a square populated by hundreds of pigeons, a memory brushed against him.
    As light visits an attic through a crack in the roof, turning the dustto stars, she had appeared, not moments before her death as in dreams, but as he longed to remember her—staring across the river, quiet and charmingly obtuse. He could have taken her to America, he knew that now.
    He observed how each raindrop united with its closest other and then, split open by its own weight, ran down the glass in one even corridor. Even after her family was killed, he did nothing—not one thing.
    Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible.
    As Pierre-Yves lifted himself into the past, he knew that he would not make it back to the present—to the rain and to the ward—but hoped he would make it as far as the garden, which wrapped itself around the cottage and trembled, as summer had trembled and pushed strawberries into the world.
    As dusk began to drift through the hospital and unmoor the world with shadows, he remembered when she had told him of her uncle who taught her to ride a bicycle down steps and of the flowers she used to keep in a basket strapped to the handlebars. She had told him this one summer, the hottest either of them had ever known. They had escaped the sultry, slow pulsation of Paris to a small cottage owned by her grandmother. It was the sort of house that appeared to have risen from the earth. Ivy curled across the stone walls in thick vines, and roses sang their way as high as the upstairs window.
    The Loire flowed coolly half a kilometer to the west and changed to a tongue of gold when the sun sank beneath randomly dotted haystacks in distant fields.
    One afternoon, beside the velvet slowness of the Loire, they had found a meadow and spread a blanket between fists of wildflowers.Pierre-Yves remembered how she had talked a great deal about when she was a girl. She had explained how when she was very young, she believed that when she stepped in a puddle, a wish was granted. For the slow, lugubrious years after the war, Pierre-Yves never forgot this and would close his umbrella in a rainstorm so he could cry freely as he negotiated a path home.
    At that moment, while the hospital ward was dipped in deepest night, he felt a duty to slip away from the meadow and again witness her final moments and the accompanying numbness. Though as the sound of soldiers’ boots began to echo, and the smell of burning stung his eyes, he suddenly became aware of a sweet scent, a compelling bouquet hovering around him. The image of the infamous rue de Vaugirard, which was riddled with bullet holes back then, suddenly withdrew, and she was asleep within his sleep, in the garden behind the cottage—a fan of her hair upon his chest.
    He watched the rise and fall, seduced by the mystery and delicacy of her weight against him. As the sky swelled and bruises drifted above the garden casting shadows, he picked a strawberry and held it below her nose. She opened her eyes and bit into it. He sensed something lingering and held her tightly.
    As the flowers entered the mouth of the storm and began to shrivel, so did Pierre-Yves. And in the early hours of the morning, as he stopped breathing, a recently married nurse who had been watching him since dawn took a strawberry from the heavy yellow bowl and gently slipped it between his lips. In a dull office overlooking the Seine, the nurse’s husband was thinking about her elbows, and how they make tiny hollows in the grass as