“I don’t think it is,” Dunaif said. “It’s just that so few are touched by it that others have no choice but to call it so. It would be madness, however, and you would be mad, if what you’ve just told me were simply free-floating, and had no object.”
“It has an object,” Jules told him. “My daughter’s only child, a boy two years old, has leukemia. At first, he would scream and cry and try to wiggle away when they approached the hospital. Then whenever he was taken to the car. They had to tranquilize him. As things progressed, his struggle to get away would quickly tire him and he would sleep. Now, he no longer protests. I’ve prayed that I would die so that he can live, but it doesn’t work that way. I know, because I received that instruction when my wife died. But, if I could, do you know how easy it would be to give my life for his?”
“How far along is it?”
“Not that far, but the prognosis is not good. They soften it for the mother. Still, she knows. When he got sick, she had to leave nursing school. She knew the implications.”
“I understand.”
“I’m in good health. I’m seventy-four, but I want so much to join my wife. If what she knows – or doesn’t know – is oblivion, I’d like to know it, too. Why must I have the strength of a twenty-four-year-old, and this child be affected so? To see him with the tubes coming out of his tiny body …. He’s had so many blood draws he’s not afraid of them anymore, and he’s two years old. His mother and father …. His mother is my child. They’ll be destroyed. What can I do?”
“Perhaps nothing.”
“Yet again?”
“Yet again.”
“I blame myself because I have very little money. Were I rich, I could bring him to the United States, to Texas to the MD Anderson Center; or to Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic; or the Mayo Clinic; or Harvard; or Johns Hopkins. They’re the best. Kings, sheiks, and presidents go there. America has almost a lock on Nobel Prizes in medicine. When I was younger I just didn’t think that I should work to get money so that if something like this were to happen I’d have the means.”
“We have excellent medicine here. You shouldn’t hold it against yourself that the child is in France.”
“Not like there. And in a hard case it’s the margin that can make the difference. The fraction of effort, the new treatment, the inspired physician might be the saving grace. In medicine, I suppose, there’s also, as in music, a straining for perfection as if to call down the presence of God, or, if you have another nomenclature, beauty, mercy, and grace.
“But no, I was lost in music. It was enough for me. I never fought for position or cared about money, I didn’t even complete my doctoral degree. All I cared for was the music itself.”
“What, exactly, do you do?”
“I teach in the faculty of music, Sorbonne. Cello, piano. A Ma?tre, not a professor. I know theory but I teach to the sound and the emotion, which places me very low on the academic ladder. Not only that, but unless someone moves to adjourn, the committee meetings last until a bunch of skeletons are sitting around a table. I’m the one who always breaks first, and though everyone else is grateful that I do, it makes me the blackest of the black sheep. I can’t stand the bureaucracy and the politics, but I help my students become masters of their instruments and love the music. I’m paid poorly, and always have been. I compose, but my music isn’t modern and isn’t in demand – to say the least. The flock of birds all bent so easily and at once both this way and that. But I kept on straight, and now I’m quite alone. A failure is how I would put it.
“If I’d had the discipline to be even a professor – not a tycoon – I might now have enough to help the child. His name is Luc. I’ve thought of robbing a bank: I was once, and in some ways am forever, a soldier. I’ll bet I could do it. But what if someone were hurt or killed? And, soldier or not, I’m old.”
“Please don’t rob a bank,” Dunaif said. “It seldom works out well.”
“You needn’t worry. But this is my last chance. I really would do something like that. I would. He’s home now, but he was in the hospital for two weeks, and I couldn’t visit him, because of bone marrow transplants, and infection ….”
Dunaif nodded.
“The next time I was allowed to visit, a nurse brought him to us. His hair was gone, his face swollen, the cheeks very red. She held him aloft in her arms, and as she walked toward us he saw his parents and me, and he squealed in delight. Pure pleasure, joy, as if nothing were wrong.
The Insurance Salesman Armand Marteau
THE LITTLE SATISFACTIONS in daily life – a cup of tea, the swirling snow, Christmas lights on a dim afternoon, a bird singing at the end of summer – can be unavailing if they take place within a crown of failure. As Jules Lacour was running out of options, Armand Marteau was running out of excuses. It was true that many potential clients would stay abroad or at the beaches well into September, and some – the richest, the oldest, the least anxious – even into October. Most people, however, even in the rarefied client base that he was assigned to serve, wanted to be and were in Paris shortly after the end of August.
August itself was full of hints of early fall, and by September the sun was low enough to make possible the ethereal blue sky that was characteristic of the city when the sun was not so much overhead as in summer, a kind of north light but in all directions. The air was crisp as often as not. Storms that blew in from Normandy and the west fought the blue with huge thunderheads rolling upward in gray and black. In the minutes before they arrived, the air they charged and their distant yellow lightning made Paris the most exciting city in the world. Everything that in summer had been an obstacle suddenly took on new life in air that was cool and promising.
The rich had gone home or to their offices and were in the mood to purchase and invest. Yet, having sold only one small contract in August, and although his co-workers were now as busy as ever, there was nothing for Armand Marteau at the beginning of September. He was so anxious about his job that he arranged for his wife to call him several times a day so as to fake sales conversations – “I would be happy, as you request, to contact you upon your return to Paris in October.” – and he spent hours tapping at his computer and carefully reading old dossiers that he had surreptitiously put in the red cardboard jackets that meant pending.