FOUR
It had been so long ago since I last did anything even remotely artistic that it almost felt alien to me to hold a pencil in my hand and move it over the sketchpad in my lap. My couch and the floor around my couch was filled with large sketches, they all had one thing in common, they all contained Delphine or a part of her. I’d been trying to recreate every detail of her in many different ways. One of the sketches focused on the way she her eyes started to spark whenever she laughed, another on the way dimples showed whenever she smiled, yet another focused on her biting her lip and the way she looked at me when she did, her eyes fiery and wide open. She was a beautiful person to sketch. It made me feel like some weird-stalker-person to be drawing her like this but even when I had tried to sketch a tree, it had become a scenery with her standing in front of a freaking tree.
When I heard the doorbell ring I frowned. I grabbed my phone to see if I had missed someone’s call in case someone had been standing there, knocking until their knuckles were blue. I played my music rather loudly, which had led to people complaining about me often. The police had showed up on my doorstep more than once, which hadn’t been fun. So I kind of hoped it would be a friend standing in front of the door. I grabbed the remote and turned down the music and again stared at my phone. Still, no one was calling me. People had so very often complained about me not opening my front door because my music was turned on so loud, I couldn’t hear a thing. Either that or I wore my headphones, which made it impossible to hear anything. So over the years people had become used to calling me or texting me before they came by, announcing their arrival.
I put away my sketchpad and got off the couch, made my way down the five stairs that divided my living room from my work area and opened the front door. The first thing I saw were her eyes, piercing brown and sparkling, intense as ever as they took me in.
“Hi,” I breathed.
“Bonjour, ça va?”
“I’m good,” I smiled. “You?”
She smiled in reply. “Bien.”
For a moment we stood facing each other without saying anything. Then I realized she probably wanted to come inside. “Would you like to come in?”
Delphine nodded. “Oui, s’il vous plaît.”
I took a step back and gestured for her to come inside. I knew why she was here, she wanted to talk about yesterday, she wanted to know why I was so incredibly tired and I couldn’t blame her for wanting to know. The moment Delphine stepped into my home she looked around her with big eyes, then back to me. “This is your house?”
“Yes.”
“It’s amazing,” she looked to the wall on her right, my art-wall that was almost fifteen feet high and almost entirely covered with sketches and paintings. “Did you do all these?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, most of them anyway, a couple are my mom’s, she’s an artist, as in, it’s her job, that one’s my mom’s,” I said, pointing at the portrait of me, before pointing at another one. “That one’s hers too and that one, the rest is all mine.”
Delphine put a hand on my shoulder as she looked up at the wall. “This looks amazing, this one is gorgeous,” she said and pointed to a painting I had done almost a year before, it contained a group of children, playing in the summer heat.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“They all look so happy, you captured their enthusiasm perfectly and it’s like they are moving on the canvas.”
I felt my cheeks flush red at her words and watched her for another few minutes as she took in my wall of art. Finally her gaze fell back to me. “Show me around?”
I gave her a tour of my home, first the rest of my workplace, then up the stairway that contained only five steps and led to my living area slash kitchen. My workplace and living area were actually one big room, dividing the two rooms only because of the different levels. When we reached my couch I suddenly realized that my sketches were scattered about practically everywhere. Sketches of her, sketches that would make me look like some sort of obsessed freak. I swallowed and waited for her reaction. I watched her kneel and pick up one of the sketches. She stared at it for a long time, while I stood there next to her waiting, feeling uncomfortable as hell, my stomach jumped up and down inside of me until she glanced away from the sketch and into my eyes.
“This is amazing, I thought you were a script writer?”
I shifted from one foot to my other. “Well, I am.”
“You’re in the wrong line of work.”
That made me chuckle. “I thought you liked my work.”
“I do but you’re a very talented artist, you captured me perfectly, can I look at the rest?” she asked, her voice filled with awe.
I swallowed and nodded before I watched Delphine gather the many sketches that covered the ground and couch in front of us. She sat down on the couch and started looking at the sketches carefully, one after another. There had to be at least thirty. While she went through the drawings I took a moment to collect myself, to get my heartbeat under control, taking this moment to turn on my LP player again. I had been listening to the newest record of ‘the Local Natives’, which was one of my favourite bands in the world. After the music was filling the silence that had been pushing down on me, making me nervous as hell, I calmed down somewhat, still, nervous thoughts were going through my head. Why wasn’t she reacting? Had all of the sketches freaked her out? I took a peek over my shoulder and glanced in the direction of my couch, she was sorting them, putting them into piles. For a moment I wanted to yell at her ‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WITH MY SKETCHES’ but decided not to be an ass and let it go.
After a long moment of hovering in my kitchen for no reason other than to quell my nerves, which didn’t work, I went back to Delphine and sat down next to her. She said nothing and stared at the small pile in her hands that only contained two sketches. The top one, the one she was staring at with tears in her eyes, was a sketch of her upper body and face, the emotion on her face was to be described as none other than exuberant. Her eyes seemed to spark of the paper, her smile was infectious, the way she bit her lip and lightly dipped her head was a combination of pure sensuality. She stood with her hands in her side, her arms bend backward and legs crossed. She had looked at me and stood like that the day before, on the balcony during our second smoke, it had been a moment in which I had thought she might kiss me but she hadn't.
"This one est magnifique," she said, her voice all choked up.
"Thank you, you can keep it if you want.”
She looked up at me and smiled a little as she nodded. "Thank you.”
"You can keep the other one as well if you like.”
Delphine put the second picture on top and stared at it hard, it was a so-called en-profil picture, showing off her beautiful curls, her high cheekbones and perfectly built jaw-line. It wasn't a beautiful picture per se but it was a strong one.
"I like this one too.”
"Keep the ones you like.”
"Thank you.”
I smiled a small smile. "Would you like something to drink?”
"Yes please.”
"What would you like?”
"Something warm.”
"Tea?"
"Yes please.”
I got up and went back to the kitchen where I made tea. In the meantime Delphine continued looking at the sketches and added another two to the pair she already kept in her lap. When after a couple of minutes I came back with tea she put away the sketches and turned toward me. Her eyes sparkled and she smiled a beautiful, gentle smile. She looked at me and took me in, like the way one might take in a lover, or so I've seen in the movies.
"Hi," she murmured.
I found myself staring back at her in the same manner and murmured a soft 'hi' back.
"How did you sleep?”
"Good, long.”
"Good to hear, so are you going to tell me what's wrong with you?”
The word 'cancer' bounced around in my head long enough for me to remember the way should would probably look at me if I told her. My stomach twisted itself into a tight knot it seemed and I was unable to bring forth an answer.
"Do you, like, have Pfeiffer or anaemia or something.”
Pfeiffer was as good an excuse as any and definitely a better answer than cancer so I decided to lie and go with it. "Yeah, I got Pfeiffer.”
She nodded. "is it a bad kind.”
"As bad as it gets.”
"So why haven't you told any of your friends.”
I shrugged. "Didn't want to bother them with it, I just need to sleep a little more than usual.”
"But this is not the reason why you haven't spoken to your friends in a while, am I correct?”
"You're quite curious, aren't you?”
Delphine grinned. "Oui, désolé.”
"It's fine, but it’s not just that. I guess I've just been doing a lot of thinking lately and I've found out that my priorities in life lie somewhere different than theirs.”
"And where’s that exactly?”
For a moment I thought about how to turn my thoughts into words that made sense. "I'm not the kind of person that needs to go out every weekend and get attention from whomever wants to give it to me, I'd rather stay in and write or paint, listen to some music.”
"Hasn't it always been like that?”
I bit my lower lip in thought. Yes, it had been like that before, but back then I didn’t have cancer so I hadn't really cared about it. What they did was their thing, it was their life after all but somehow, the way they got drunk every weekend, the way they smoked away packs of cigarettes a day, ate unhealthily, it just wasn't what I wanted my friends to act like. That wasn't fair and I knew it but it had been a big reason for me to stay away, not just because I'd been too tired to actually call them. This had been going on for a longer period of time, at least half a year. Long before doctor B. told me about my leukaemia.
"Yes, it has but it never really bothered me before. To me it just seems like they are throwing their life away and to them, they are enjoying life to its fullest. I mean, there's a big difference in our visions on life.”
Delphine gave me an apologetic half smile. "I understand, I had the same thing a couple of years back.”
"What did you do?”
"I let go of my past and moved here.”
"Perhaps I should move to Belgium,” I sighed dramatically.
"Well, it will definitely be something different compared to living here, especially where I am from.”
That made me smile. "Wouldn't want to be found dead in Belgium, no offense.”
Delphine laughed aloud and shifted more toward me as she leaned in, as if telling me a secret. "I wouldn't want to be found dead in Belgium either.”
We both smiled.
“So, what’s your favourite board game?” Delphine then blurted out, making me frown at the way her question came out of the blue.
“Err, well, I enjoy a game of Clue any time I guess so that would be my favourite, haven’t played it in a long time though, the last time I actually played it was on a holiday with an Italian girl with whom I couldn’t communicate properly so I probably romanticized the game a little but still, I recall enjoying the game very much. Yours?”
“I enjoy Monopoly, I like the classics.”
“Monopoly is fun but it takes so fucking long, you always have to schedule an entire afternoon to play it.”
“C’est vrai.”
“I like it when you speak French.”
“Do you now? Why?”
“Because it’s a romantic language.”
“I didn’t take you to be the romantic type.”
That made me laugh. “Honestly, I just like the way it sounds.”
“Touché.”
About an hour later we went to the supermarket where we bought groceries, Delphine had invited herself over for dinner, telling me she would cook and that I would have to deal with it. I didn’t mind, I didn’t really enjoy cooking that much so if she wanted to cook, she could. When we arrived back home she forced me to sit at my dinner table and watch her cook, I was not to help her. She exclaimed she liked cooking too much but I expected there was something more behind it, she probably thought it was annoying to have to share the task and perhaps even that I wouldn’t cut the eggplant or mushrooms properly. She liked being in control, that much was obvious. So I sat down and watched her prepare pasta, which we ate about half an hour later, it was delicious.
After dinner we decided to watch a movie, a good-quality-and-preferably-classical-movie of course, because those were apparently the kind of movies she liked. When I told her what my favourite movies were she literally huffed and puffed all throughout my explanation. My list was ridiculous and she was going to do something about it, whether I wanted to or not. Not really caring what we would watch, I complied with her wishes and let her choose a movie. We ended up watching some Dutch movie. It was a movie that ironically enough was about a woman dying of a terminal illness. I kept quiet during the entire ordeal and Delphine noticed my facial expression turning more and more grave. By the end of the movie she asked me whether I didn’t like the movie and I answered truthfully.
“Movies about death depress me.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me realize death is inevitable.”
“So you don’t like movies about people dying.”
“Not particularly.”
Delphine smiled a little. “Well, at least we figured that out, next time we’ll watch a movie about rainbows and unicorns,” she said, her tone of voice light and teasing.
“That would be nice.”
For a while we merely sat on the couch, facing each other and kept looking at each other without looking back. Tonight apparently was a night of staring, if we’d be having a staring contest we’d both be strong contenders for the title of stare-winner.
Suddenly Delphine sat up and offered me her hand. “Come, we’re going somewhere.”
I frowned. “Where?” I asked cautiously.
“Outside.”
“Why?”
“Quiet whining and get your lazy ass off that couch,” Delphine grinned and she leaned in to drag me off the couch. I let her pull me up and followed her down the steps to my work area. She put on her jacket and threw mine at me.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to watch the stars.”
We went outside and into the park that was nearest to my house. We strolled casually, without hurrying, simply because there was no need to do so. We crossed a fountain that made me think back to the movie, it gave me a painful pang in the chest, a reminder of how I should enjoy life more. Upon that thought I realized I was enjoying life more and it had everything to do with Delphine. It was the little things, going grocery shopping and having her look at everything around her, my neck near broke several times because she had been pointing out things I needed to see. It were things I normally would have overlooked, an extremely elderly couple walking hand in hand, eating ice cream while looking very much in love, a child sitting atop someone who looked like her big brother’s shoulders, all smiles and giggles, a nest of young swans chasing each other with a beautiful, playful tenacity that brought a smile to my face.
Delphine took it all in with such a joyful look on her face that it made me long to be able to see those things as well, without her having to point them out. In a way it made me realize even more just how blind I had been to the world and how much there was to see. I had been blindsided, focussing on work only and though that was, in a certain way, beautiful too, it wasn’t the kind of beauty Delphine saw and relished in, but still, I created beauty and in one of the purest forms. It all came from my imagination.
I wondered whether my film scripts would change after spending time with Delphine, would I add more of the little things to my stories to make it more real, more personal even? It had been a while since I had written even one freaking sentence. Inspiration had been absent ever since I had started chemo. Luckily I had finished my work-in-progress before heading over to the hospital for my first round of induction chemo. It was what would pay for my hospital bills. Though most would be covered by the insurance, definitely not everything would be and I needed money, lots of it, to be able to pay for them. Life as a cancer patient didn’t always go as planned. Especially when you were going to be in and out of the hospital for the next several months. Even after, if I survived, which I obviously didn’t think I would, I was optimistic like that, I would be haunted by my cancer for the rest of my life. Regular checks-ups, unfit for life insurance, unable to ever get a mortgage again, the idea that, if I ever wanted to have kids, I very well might give them along the genes that would put them through what I was going through.
Before my cancer, I had never even considered the consequences of cancer but little by little, over the past weeks, I’d been figuring things out, finding out just how screwed I really was. Even getting a real job was a pain in the ass, I was lucky to be a freelancer, and a successful one at that. I’d get the money I needed, but what about all the other cancer survivors young and old who’d be scarred for life and not just physically but emotionally as well. After all they had gone through, they’d be denied the simple things in life like getting a job or a mortgage just because they’d been so lucky to survive cancer and then they’d have to face shit like that. Well lucky them huh!
After sitting at the edge of the fountain and guessing what kind of wishes people had been making ever since the fountain had been put there in the middle of the park, exactly ninety-three years, we headed over to a quiet and dark part of the park where no one ever came at night. I wasn’t easily scared but were something to happen, I wouldn’t be able to defend Delphine, or even myself, or run away for that matter, so I stated that walking in a park at night wasn’t the smartest thing to do at that point but Delphine just waved my comment away.
“Nothing’s going to happen, I come here so often and by myself, nothing has ever happened before, I hardly ever bump into anyone anyway so don’t worry.”
That took away only the smallest part of my worries but I was a little more at ease as I walked next to Delphine, occasionally leaning on her for support because the long walk was more tiring than expected. I felt like having a nap, which I did once we lied down on the grass, she hadn’t put a blanket into her backpack. Telling me she felt more connected to nature if she just lay flat on her back while strands of grass tickled her neck and arms.
When I woke up Delphine was staring up at the sky and for a while I watched her. She truly seemed to enjoy just lying there, like she didn’t have a care in the world and I felt more than amazed at how peaceful she came across. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d felt the way she looked. Probably never truly had. Ever since I was young, I’d been the restless kind of person, always needing to do something, anything, to keep my mind busy, work, watching movies or series, reading, going out, dancing, drinking. Never before had I taken a moment to stand still, let my thoughts roam wherever they wanted to go. While working or reading I might have looked at ease with myself, but that was only because I was focused on whatever was in front of me. Tunnel-vision was the thing that worked for me, otherwise, my own thoughts would just drive me crazy, going from one topic to another and back and to another that wasn’t even remotely related to the one before.
Finally, after at least ten minutes of Delphine staring at the sky and me staring at her, she turned her head toward me. The corner of her mouth turned her lips into a half smile.
“You’re awake.”
“Apparently so, enjoying the view?.”
“Very much, stop looking at me and take a moment to enjoy the view,” she said, like she knew I’d been staring at her for the past ten minutes.
I didn’t comment on it though and followed her instruction, looking up at the sky that was a beautiful deep blue and covered with so many stars it was impossible to count all of them. It looked like the sky was littered with diamonds, ready to be taken from the sky by anyone who wanted to have some.
“Beautiful huh,” Delphine said after a while, breaking the peaceful silence in which I had stared up at the sky in amazement, feeling regret for never having taken the time to do just this. It felt so alien to me, yet at the same time it felt like I’d been doing it all my life, lying there, my head resting on Delphine’s shoulder. Somewhere during my moment of appreciation for what was above me, I’d looked for the comfort of, not just her presence, but her physical contact as well.
Everything about this situation rattled me, enjoying someone’s presence so much, enjoying this little moment in life that before meeting Delphine, I never would have. Yet, at the same time it all felt so natural I just went with it.
“Yeah, it’s more beautiful than I had ever thought it could be. You do this often?”
“Depends on the weather, sometimes I go three times a week, sometimes I don’t for a whole month. Sometimes I look up at the sky and realize it’s been weeks and then I just stand still for a while and take in the beauty.”
I nodded and even though she wasn’t able to see it, she took my hand in hers and squeezed it gently like she had.
What else I realized that evening was that we often spent long periods of time in complete silence and that those moments were not uncomfortable like I had always been afraid they’d be. If anything, those quiet moments were nice and peaceful and filled with appreciation of all things.
“What is your first memory” Delphine suddenly asked out of the blue.
Delphine had a way of asking things I did not expect and again came the realization that this woman had to be one of a kind. She never went for the obvious questions, she asked those that would truly determine the person I was, where I came from and why I had made certain decisions in my life.
I smiled as I thought that question over for a moment. Several came to mind but I had difficulties figuring out which one happened first.
“I guess, my first would be one of me and Sarah, we’ve known each other our entire lives and when we were toddlers, I was staying over at her place, she used to be my neighbour and our moms were pregnant around the same period. They were best friends and so Sarah and I were destined to become best friends as well.”
“Would have been something if you hated each other.”
I laughed out loud. “Yeah, that would have been disastrous. I wonder what my life would have looked like then, without her to include me in all of her social activities. I probably wouldn’t have had any friends.”
Delphine looked at me and I looked back at her, my head turned to the side, toward her. It was difficult to make out her facial expression in the dark, but I figured it had to be sad. I decided not to ask, if she wanted to tell me her thoughts, she would offer them. So, we said nothing for a while and I took that time to look back up at the stars. My heart was racing, making me feel tired. Delphine was the first to break the silence, making me jolt upward in shock. I’d been falling asleep.
“So, first memory.”
“Fuck.”
“What, were you sleeping?”
“I guess so.”
“Wow, that took you like two minutes, maybe we should get back to your place.”
“I can sleep here, just wake me when you want to get going.”
“I want to hear your memory first.”
“Ah, yes, so Sarah, Felix and I were getting undressed in her bedroom, this might sound dirty but it wasn’t, her mom Siobhan was running a bath for us.”
Delphine chuckled.
“So, we were all naked and her mom came into the room and chased us to the bathroom, we were running and her mom was yelling that this was the naked-butt show. That was it actually.”
Delphine laughed aloud, her clear, appreciative laugh.
“I can totally see it happening.”
“Yeah, well, it was fun. So what’s yours.”
She didn’t take a second to think about her first memory. “My first memory is of my mom and dad taking me to the forest, we were on holiday I guess.”
I smiled appreciatively, I wasn’t surprised. “How old were you?”
“Two, three years old I guess.”
“Was it fun?”
“Yeah, I got to run around nature and got to pet little bunnies and baby deer. My dad was friends with the forest keeper there so we got to see a lot of things the rest of the people didn’t, it was amazing.”
“Lucky bastard you.”
“I know right, it’s insane,” she laughed.
“Totally.”
“Wait, get up for a second please?” Delphine asked and I did without asking why. She moved her arm and pulled me close, I rolled onto my side and nuzzled my face into her shoulder.
“That’s comfy,” I murmured and fell asleep without hearing Delphine’s reply.