Delicacy by David Foenkinos Read Free Book Online

understand.”
“It’s so hard to put in words what I’m feeling.”
“I know, Natalie.”
“But I think I can give you an answer: I’m not attracted to you. And even, I think, I’m not comfortable with your method of trying to seduce me. I’m positive there’ll never be anything between us. Maybe I’m simply incapable anymore of loving someone, but if I ever consider it someday, I know it won’t be you.”
“…”
“I couldn’t go home like that. I’d rather it be said.”
“It has been said. You said it. Yes, it’s been said. If I understand, then you’ve said it. You did say it, yes.”
Natalie watched Charles as he spluttered on. Words left hanging, snapped up one by one by silence. Words like the eyes of a dying man. She made a vague gesture of fondness: a hand on the shoulder. And returned the way she’d come. Left again toward the smaller and smaller Natalie. Charles wanted to stay standing there, and it wasn’t easy. He couldn’t get over it. Especially the tone she’d used. Completely unaffected, without the slightest nastiness. He had to face facts: she wasn’t attracted to him and never would be. He wasn’t feeling any anger. It was like the sudden end of something that had made him feel alive for years. The end of a possibility. The evening had followed the voyage of the Titanic . Festive at first, then shipwrecked. Truth often had the look of an iceberg. Natalie was still in his field of vision, and he wanted to see her leave as quickly as possible. Even the tiny speck she’d become was inordinately unbearable.

Twenty-eight

Charles walked a little, until the parking lot. Once he was in his car, he smoked a cigarette. What he was feeling was a perfect match for the jarringly yellow neon. He pulled out of the parking space and turned on the radio. The announcer was talking about a strange series of ties tonight in League 1 soccer. Everything was coherent. He was like the least interesting of all the sports associations, lost in the most unexciting part of the championship games. He was married, he had a daughter, was in charge of an excellent company, but he felt an immense emptiness. Only the dream of Natalie had the ability to make him feel alive. All of it was over now, obliterated, destroyed, ruined. He could string together a list of synonyms, but it wouldn’t change anything now. Then he thought that there was something worse than being rejected by a woman you love: having to come across her every day. Ending up near her in a hallway at any moment. He was thinking of the hallway for a reason. She was beautiful in the offices, but he’d always thought that her eroticism displayed itself more powerfully in the hallways. Yes, in his mind, she was a woman of the hallways. And now he’d just realized that at the end of the hallway he was going to have to make a U-turn.
On the other hand, to get home, you must never make a U-turn. Charles’s car drove along the street he took every day. You would have thought it was the subway, to the extent that the route radiated sameness. He parked and smoked another cigarette in the lot of his building. As he opened the door to his place, he caught sight of his wife in front of the television. No one would have guessed that Laurence had once possessed a kind of furious sexual energy. Slowly but inevitably she was slipping into the prototype of the depressed bourgeoise. Strangely, Charles was affected by that image. He walked slowly up to the television and turned it off. His wife protested, without very much conviction. He walked over to her and firmly took her arm. She wanted to react, but no sound came from her mouth. Deep down she’d dreamed of this moment, dreamed that her husband would touch her, that he’d stop walking past her as if she no longer existed. Their life together was a daily lesson in self-effacement. Without exchanging a word, they headed toward their bedroom. The bed was made, and suddenly it was unmade. Charles turned