I can’t share in her vitriol because despite everything he’s done, all the pain he’s caused, my feelings haven’t changed. I still love Frederic. I wish I didn’t. I wish these feelings would go away, but beneath the layers of pain and anger I can still feel my love for him.
“What’s going to happen about the book?” Mona asks.
I wince. I’d forgotten about the book. The unfinished manuscript is languishing on my laptop and the contract is filed with the publisher, promising that I’ll complete it. “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll get canceled after what’s happened.”
“Good,” mutters Therese. She looks angry, but Mona seems like she hasn’t made up her mind how she feels about things yet.
She chews her lip for a moment, and then says, “Dad says he was in denial about the whole thing. That he never came to terms with the fact that his voice wouldn’t recover, which is why he ploughed on when he should have stopped. What do you think, Evie?”
It’s hard to disentangle my feelings about Frederic with the things that he’s done. I remember the hours he spent at the studio in Paris and at the piano when he wasn’t recording. Did he use me as just another way of avoiding what he wouldn’t face? I want to hate him like Therese does, and put down his actions to his selfishness and villainy, as if he really is the Gothic antihero he was so good at portraying. But remembering how tense he was those last weeks, how haunted, I realize he was afraid. Who would he be if he couldn’t sing? Like Rochester in his manic need to marry Jane, Frederic was driven to villainy by his passions.
&
nbsp; “Yes, I think he was in denial. But it doesn’t matter if he meant to hurt people or not. He did, and now he’s gone.” I stand up, brushing the torn blades of grass from my pajama bottoms and heading for the house, my feet dragging as I go. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?”
* * *
“Evie! Telephone.”
I peel myself off the garden chair and slink inside, wondering who on earth could be calling me on the house phone. It’s Thursday and I’m exhausted, having spent three days fielding plaintive questions from undergrads about their essays and stern questions from my supervisor about my thesis. I haven’t turned a corner with it like I had planned to; in fact I feel on the verge of packing it all in. The only thing that’s stopping me is the knowledge that everything seems a hundred times harder because of the Frederic fallout. I’ll push through it to the other side and things will start to get easier again.
I will push through soon, won’t I?
Taking the phone from Mona, I hold the receiver to my ear and hear a heavily accented voice say, “Allo? Mademoiselle Bell?” It’s a woman’s voice, somewhat familiar but I can’t place it.
“Yes, this is she.”
“Ah, Dieu merci, I ‘ave been at my wits’ end wondering what to do, and then I thought, Mademoiselle Bell, she is the one who can fix this.”
Suddenly I recognize the emphatically French voice. It’s Sabine Montrechet, Frederic’s former mentor. Fear clenches my belly. “What’s wrong? Is it Frederic?”
“Oui, c’est Frederic. He’s fallen apart.”
Even after all these weeks of cold silence it’s upsetting to think of Frederic suffering. My waking thoughts are always of him, first to wonder how he’s coping with the loss of his voice, and then to question how he could have kept such a secret from me. I vacillate between sympathy and bitterness, each swing more tiring than the last.
“I ‘ave never known him to be like this. He won’t see me. He won’t answer my emails or text messages.”
“I’m sorry, but Frederic and I aren’t talking either.” We talk a great deal in my head. Or rather, I talk to him. I rail at him, scream at him, tear at him with my nails. I take great delight in clawing him because I know how he hates to be clawed. At other times I’m calmer, though no less miserable, and I ask him why he kept something so important from me at the same time he was making me feel so important. So cherished. Loved.
But he never said I love you, did he? He was careful that way, staying within the boundaries of your agreement.
Sabine’s voice goes up about an octave, becoming shrill. “‘E had the surgery on Monday. I am so very worried about him.”
I clutch the phone tighter. “Surgery? What surgery?”
Sabine explains that the edema on Frederic’s vocal cord grew so pronounced that he had to have microsurgery to correct it. I hear a clicking noise on the other end of the line as if she’s chewing her nails. “We won’t know for weeks how the operation went. He’s not able to speak a word while ‘e heals, but it is not like him to withdraw like this. He is a singer who can no longer sing. I am afraid for him, suffering alone. You are so close to ’im these days, can you not do something?”
I protest that we’re not close at all these days, we had a falling out and we haven’t spoken in weeks. “Besides, I’m in London. What can I even do?”
Sabine lets out a gusty, hopeless sigh. “I just thought... Oh, well, as you say, then. Au revoir.”
I put down the phone, a sick, heavy feeling in my belly. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it, to leave Frederic alone with this? No, of course it is. He has plenty of friends in Paris to worry about him. He’s made it very clear from his silence that he neither needs me nor wants me.
I turn away and see Mona hovering in the doorway, having listened to the one-sided conversation. “What’s happened? Is it Frederic?”
I give her a CliffsNotes version of the conversation. “So, yeah, he’s gone into hermit mode. Convalescing or something.”
Mona bites her lip. “She’s right, he might talk to you. Well, not talk, but you know what I mean. Have you even texted him or anything since the play closed?”