The Reinvention of Love

say a few words, to join our discussion, he would talk right over her.
    He would do this with the children too, swat them away if he was busy proclaiming – but he would also, if he wasn’t occupied, bend down with them to examine an ant in the grass. It was then that I envied him, when he casually laid a hand on his son’s head, or looked with real interest at the drawing his daughter had brought to him. But he was cavalier with his family. He failed to recognize the gift they were and appreciated them only when it suited him.
    One day I walked round after lunch to return a book Ihad borrowed and I found Adèle alone with her young ones. She invited me to stay and I sat with her by the pond in the garden while the children buzzed around us. Without Victor’s presence, Adèle was more talkative, and I remember we had a very pleasant discussion about poetry. She invited me to come again, and so I started to visit in the afternoons when I knew Victor would be out, as well as in the evenings, when I knew Victor would be in.
    Adèle and I sat in the drawing room, reading to each other, or walked out with the children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, which was mere minutes away from her house. These were very pleasant excursions and I was content to cultivate my friendship with Madame Hugo at the same time that I was enjoying a friendship with her husband. I never thought of my relations with Adèle as anything other than chaste, until one day I came to her house in the afternoon and walked in to find her fixing the combs in her hair. She was standing in front of the big mirror in the drawing room and her back was to me. The combs weren’t staying in place. She was impatiently trying to stab her hair into submission when a comb fell out and her black hair cascaded down her back. It was that movement – that soft tumble – softer than water falling from a fountain, that released something in me. I cried out, just a small noise, as a child might make in her sleep. Adèle turned and saw me watching her, and it was as though we had just discovered each other for the first time. I cannot fully explain it. All I know is that I could not roll my feelings back up, twist them into position and secure them into a place of propriety. I was undone. Nothing could be the same.
    Later, we sat in the garden, side by side, watching the children play. Adèle was telling me a story about a ring her mother had given her that she always wore on her right hand. I asked to see the ring, thinking that she would allow me to hold her hand while I looked at it, but instead she removed it from herfinger and took my hand in her own. She slid the ring onto my finger. It fitted perfectly. We both looked down at it. After a few moments I took the ring off my finger and gave it back to her. She returned it to her own hand. We said not a word.
    I lingered as long as I could that day, but I couldn’t bear to have Victor return while I was there, and so I left well before supper. Adèle walked me to the door, then to the front gate, then out to the pavement. I turned and waved when I was halfway home and she was still standing there, watching me walk down the street.
    The next day I woke relieved that I had not declared myself. I valued my friendship with the Hugos and did not want it disturbed. I would simply live with my new feelings for Adèle. There was no need to tell her about them or acknowledge them in any way. Things would remain as they were.
    But I could not concentrate on my work that morning, and the moment I knew that the Hugos would be finishing their noon meal, I was hurrying up their front walk.
    I found Adèle alone in the drawing room, sitting with her hands folded on her lap, staring out the window. She leapt up when she saw me. I didn’t even have time to announce myself. She was at my side, her hand on my arm.
    “The children have gone to the gardens with Victor,” she said. “We don’t have long.” She led me up the stairs and along the hallway towards the bedroom she shared with her youngest daughter, little Adèle.
    It felt wrong to lie on the bed where she must have sometimes lingered with Victor, so we lay down on the carpet. The curtains lifted at the window. Adèle put her hands up to my face and traced my forehead, the bones around my eyes, the line from my nose down to my lips. I closed my eyes. I thought that I would die, or that I had already died. I am an ugly man. No one had ever touched me like that.
    Adèle