Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

The sink overflowed with dishes; I attacked the heap without worrying about the noise. The door to the bedroom slammed in retaliation. When I finished, I allowed myself a cigarette. Somewhere in New York, a woman my age was smoking the same cigarette while drying her nail polish. She was deciding what to wear to go dancing at El Morocco, still hesitating between two pairs of shoes. One by one, the windows around town winked out. Princeton went to bed early. I wasn’t tired.

* Pauli’s nickname, a pun on “Einstein” meaning “Einstein No. 2.”

Anna left Princeton early heading for Pine Run, determined to set the conversation back on a more professional footing. Sitting at the wheel, she felt a familiar sensation in the pit of her stomach. She was nervous. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and wiped away the excess blush; she had upped the dosage to make herself look healthy. In the gray morning light she looked like a corpse tricked out by the embalmer. Why did she have the feeling at every visit that she was on trial? Yet each visit had been like a day at the beach: she emerged with her muscles wrung out and her head clear, until the next sleepless night brought its onslaught of dark thoughts.

The previous evening she had looked at her gym shoes, which she hadn’t worn for months. She needed to get back to exercising; she couldn’t stand her little old lady’s body. The cat had looked at her with disdain before going back to the sofa for its nap. She had shut the closet door and flopped down beside it. If there really was a cosmic hierarchy, then a cat’s life was at the very top rung.

“ Kommen Sie rein! ” She hadn’t knocked yet, but Mrs. Gödel had recognized the sound of her footsteps. Adele was fingering her blanket, ignoring the current of cold air that rattled the window blinds.

“Where were we?”

“Let me take my jacket off.”

“And a good thing too. It’s repulsive.”

The young woman closed the window. The armchair had been pushed away from the bed; she sat in it without bringing it any closer, her face neutral and her back at attention.

“Elizabeth and Gladys are following your case very closely. For once we agree on something. You must have a man!”

Anna stifled a laugh, at the same time cursing herself for having dropped her guard so quickly.

“It’s 1980, Adele. The world operates differently.”

“You don’t want to stare at your belly button, so you find another belly button to look at. And the best thing for that is a fellow!”

“I don’t need anyone.”

“Don’t play Miss High and Mighty with me. It’s just us girls. There is nothing like a good orgasm to set your head straight.”

Anna laid her hands flat on her lap, intent on showing no emotion. She knew that Adele was susceptible to silence.

“You think that orgasms didn’t exist before 1960? That the sexual revolution, as they call it, invented a woman’s pleasure?”

“Do you think I’m a prude?”

“You are prudish in your emotions. I am no longer ashamed of anything. Who am I accountable to, unless it is to God? And he has sent me no private word on this subject. When was the last time you had pleasure?”

“I should tell you about the last time I got bonked to give you some spice in your sexual retirement? Don’t hold your breath.”

“Who else can you discuss this with? A shrink? He will just dig up unhealthy relations with the father and rivalries with the mother. All that baloney. There is nothing like experience. You will at least benefit from my mistakes. I don’t have time anymore for pretenses.”

She resisted the impulse to walk out on the old busybody.

“So now it’s blackmail.”

“Whatever comes to hand. Just give me something! I think that for my part I’ve given you quite a bit for your documentation.”

Anna twirled a strand of hair around her finger. She sorted through intimate facts looking for ones she could toss to Adele. Hadn’t that been the idea since the first meeting? A life for a life. And so far she had not paid her share.

At twenty-three, she had tried to disrupt her linear trajectory: she had walked out on William and gone to Europe. Her friends and family were flabbergasted and put it down to a delayed reaction to the death of her much-loved grandmother. Only Rachel saw it as proof of rebellion, the inheritance of her own temperament. Any psychological weakness on the part of her daughter was inadmissible: it would imply a flaw in her upbringing. Anna had never shown any signs of depression. True, she had always been a little secretive, but in her circles, discretion could pass for a mark of elegance.

The young woman had left the two families to cancel the caterer and unravel the mysteries of her character. No one doubted that her leaving had been due to jealousy. She herself hardly dared to admit it even now. On the day of Anna’s engagement, Leo had arrived fashionably late with a space creature on his arm, the sort of woman whose long list of talents one scrutinizes in order to uncover the ugly flaw. She had none. A medical student and part-time model, she was specializing in brain surgery. Anna had been unable to detect the slightest tinge of condescension in her compliments: she exuded kindness and good humor. Leo had introduced Anna to his stunning date as his childhood friend. Then Anna had gotten drunk and ended the evening vomiting, while William held her hair back so she wouldn’t soil her cocktail dress. At dawn, when the last guests had finally cleared out, she broke with him curtly. She, too, knew how to wield a scalpel.

“I’m not a hopeless case, Adele. I’ve even been engaged. But it didn’t work out. William was, let’s just say, too nice a boy.”

“Like you?”

Anna smiled; nice she wasn’t.

“I broke up with William on the night of our engagement. The next day, I freed up the funds that my grandmother had left me and took the first flight to Europe.”

Adele leaned in toward her to absorb her whispered confidences.

“I blew the whole pile in three years. It was money from the dead. The inheritance from my uncles, my grandfather. It wasn’t going to go toward a house in the suburbs.”

“Sit closer to me. My ears don’t work as well as they used to.”

Anna pushed the chair nearer the bed. She slipped off her shoes and rubbed her feet. Adele offered her the plaid blanket, which Anna wrapped around herself.

“When I got back, I was broke. I hadn’t finished college. I had nowhere to go. My mother wasn’t talking to me. My father gave me a place to stay and eventually persuaded his old friend Adams to offer me a job. He was eager for me to move out. He was in the midst of a honeymoon.”

“And since that time, no men at all?”

“I quickly get bored with people. I need to admire someone.”

“Maybe you are too cerebral, dear girl.”

“Did you admire your husband?”

“ Ach! We are back to being practical!”

“My life is an absolute platitude. Your turn, Adele.”

Mrs. Gödel was silent for a moment, then reached for a silver frame on her bedside table. She wiped it with her sleeve. Anna took the wedding picture and looked at it without daring to say that she had already seen it.

“I admired him the way you are fascinated by something that is beyond you, but I didn’t fall in love with his intelligence.”

“His illness must have been difficult for you, all those years when you lived far from your family.”

Adele took the photograph back roughly. “You have never loved.”

Anna remembered having read that memories are not the past but memory’s representation of the past. The Gödels’ story had not been so simple, nor their attachment so absolute. Adele might think she had a monopoly on passion. More truthfully she had a monopoly on self-sacrifice. But what would be the point of refusing her this last consolation? The old woman, her eyes staring into the distance, seemed exhausted. She drew an ∞ with two trembling fingers. The wedding band on her other hand, much too small, bit into her flesh.