A Day with Mr. Jules. Diane Broeckhoven

She wasn’t going to have cauliflower today, and definitely not lamb chops. She tossed the meat package into the nearly empty freezer, shivering when the cold blew against her robe. Holding two greyish green fillets of sole, she hesitated, then exchanged them for a box of shrimps. Half a pound. She would eat those all by herself at lunchtime, she decided expansively. She would go to the supermarket a little later to get two big bright red tomatoes. Bulging shrimp-stuffed tomatoes, that’s what she felt like. To complete the meal, she’d make fries with homemade mayonnaise. Her mother had taught her never to beat mayonnaise or bake bread when she had her period because everything was bound to go wrong then. Alice laid her hand on her belly and smiled. Her mayonnaise would turn out well and taste of the past. And Jules wouldn’t spoil things by dropping a cheap jar into her shopping cart. He thought it was nonsense to stand there whisking yolks until your fingers cramped up just to save a few pennies. He explained there were salmonella bacteria in raw eggs, which could kill you. Jules knew everything. But today she chose not to worry about it.

      *

      Alice cleared the table. It didn’t take long, because the cupboards, the counter, and the table were all within two steps from each other. Meanwhile, her thoughts sorted themselves out in her head. First, she would get washed and dressed, put a bit of lipstick on her dry lips, revive her sagging hairdo with the tip of her comb. While she dressed, Jules always read the newspaper. In the past, that is. Yesterday. When she came out of the bathroom, she always circled the room with her duster, following a fixed route, her gestures those of a tired conductor. In the meantime, Jules read the events worthy of mention to her. Minor news and human suffering interested her more than political intrigues and war. His collection usually involved snatched handbags, petty theft, and a murder or two. The closer the scene of the crime, the worse Alice felt about it, and the more merciless her judgement was. Do you know what they should do with someone who breaks into the place of a defenceless old woman? Yes, Jules knew. He rustled the paper as he folded it, so he wouldn’t hear her torture practices.

      She decided to wear the same clothes as yesterday. A brown skirt with a rusty red woollen cardigan she once knitted herself. It was a bit tight around her bosom. She was so caught up in the prospect of a perfectly ordinary day that she suddenly stood rooted to the spot in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. It had completely slipped her mind that Jules was dead. He still sat there in exactly the same way as half an hour ago. Yet she noticed that while she ate breakfast the last trace of warmth had drained from his body. Along with the last flicker of animation. Perhaps it had registered with him too that life had escaped from all his pores.

      “Relax a bit, Jules,” she said. “I’ll fetch the newspaper in a minute.”

      It was part of his morning ritual, not hers. But today all the patterns needed to be broken. Jules never went downstairs before he had washed, dressed, and shaved. They laughed together about slovenly women emerging from other apartments in faded dressing gowns to go and fetch the morning news. About men with striped pyjama legs under their raincoats, the smell of the night surrounding them like an aura. People have no manners anymore, they would say to each other.

      With bent head she sniffed the smell of her own body, pulled the terry-cloth tie of her dressing gown firmly around her waist and sat down in front of Jules on the coffee table. She would have sworn he smiled.

      “I’ll put on my coat over my nightclothes and listen first for rumbling in the elevator shaft,” she reassured him.

      No one was going to notice that she, too, had lost her manners. She wouldn’t give anyone a chance to ask how Mr. Jules was.

      *

      His presumed smile took on a slightly worried twist. Did he arch his eyebrows for a fraction of a second? Or did it only look like that? She dismissed the thought of the supermarket. She would just imagine those tomatoes this afternoon. She shouldn’t go and walk around the store by herself. Everyone would ask after Jules. What was she to say then? That he was sitting, dead, on the sofa at home? He wasn’t dead as long as she told no one. He was alive for as long as she wanted him to be. She still had so much to tell him. It would all surely come to her as the day progressed. Everyone should leave her alone today.

      *

      She resolutely got up and, on an impulse, stroked his cheek. She froze. He was ice-cold, his skin had turned to marble. Life seemed to be draining away from her too. She dropped down on the sofa beside him and pressed her face against the rough tweed of his shoulder. A dog begging for warmth. An unmistakable chill had taken possession of his whole body and penetrated his clothes. His male smell had also vanished, and she missed that even more than his physical warmth. Soap, skin, coffee, familiar pet — it was gone. He sat there like a skillfully executed copy of Jules in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. Alice cried. Her tears dripped into his shoulder pads and fell on his yellowish right hand. When she stood up, she could feel his body briefly leaning towards her and then righting itself again.

      *

      She had better forget about the newspaper and lie down beside Jules, her head in his lap. She should start making phone calls. But she checked herself. If doctors, neighbours, and undertakers began to take charge of her husband, he would be lost to her in an hour. For ever. They would carry him out of the apartment within the hour. In a coffin, which they’d have her point out in one of those albums. She couldn’t let that happen, could she?

      She hurried to the side room and took a plaid blanket out of the closet. In a flash, she spotted the chessboard on the small antique table, with all the pieces at the ready for a game.

      David, she thought with a start. She had forgotten all about David. At ten sharp he’d be at the door for his chess game with Jules.

      The blanket. The newspaper. The time. David. The four subjects tumbled around in her head and gave her wings. She flew to the kitchen, saw on the clock that it was not yet a quarter to nine. The plaid blanket had once lain on the backseat of their first car, a stately Fiat 1400 with plump cheeks and a high back. She put it over Jules’s knees.

      “There you are, dear,” she said softly. “Otherwise you’ll get much too cold.”

      Now that she no longer saw his bluish white hands, with the network of stiffened veins beneath the skin, he looked less dead than he was. Next, she grabbed her navy blue raincoat from a coat hook in the hallway and slipped it on over her dressing gown. In the mirror, she saw three layers of fabric bunching up around her knees. I look a fright, she thought, remembering with a smile an expression of her youth. Girls nowadays didn’t say that anymore. She poked her head tentatively into the little hallway, where another apartment opened out on as well. A young working couple lived there. They would surely be stuck in some traffic jam by now. She pressed the worn-down elevator button, into which her finger fitted perfectly, and heard the mechanical sighing and groaning starting up. In the little cage, she whizzed down six floors. She clutched the bunch of keys in her coat pocket as if it were a life buoy.