FRANCOISE, GUSTAV'S WIFE, WAS waiting for him at home.

"You're in a ugly mood," she noted from just looking at his scowl.

"Life," responded Gustav, "Life."

"Well, Andre came by," she said. "He wants to talk to you about something,"

"About what?" snapped Gustav.

"He didn't say. He was cautious but giddy, he wanted to know what kind of mood you're in."

"And you said ...?" Gustav was leading her on.

"Your mood is your mood, just as my mood is my mood, just as Andre's mood is his alone," replied Francoise with an empirical and ennui laden air.

Her hazel gaze held him. Does she know? Gustav wondered, about my young and bitter flower? Today, she wouldn't think so because he was returning home in a mood that was not symptomatic of leaving a lover's arms. One should return home happy like with the residue of an aphrodisiac--not sour and withdrawn--unless, of course, the extramarital affair has severed or worse ... turned pregnant.

Gustav strode over to the refectory table in the dining room where the five wine bottles in a row lay on their side. Angrily he grabbed one by the neck and opened a drawer and pulled out the cork screw. All the time, he was shivering with disgust at how Sophia was telling him it was going to be a Christmas baby. And again, Gustav retaliated that it was going to be an April abortion.

Again, Absurd and Alienating. His two big themes in his work and in his life never seemed to cease. He uncorked the bottle, drank from the glass, thirsting to be soothed.

Andre came over later in the afternoon.

"I received a cable from the States," he said.

"So?" said Gustav.

"The Saturday Evening Post is very interested in you." Gustav was more interested in dealing with the real matters at hand, the liver pate that lay between them and perhaps another opened bottle of wine.

It was dark outside and the temperature had dropped which only heightened the rain's ferocity.

"I am acquainted with The Saturday Evening Post," said Gustav wobbling his head with a haughty sneer. "It is utterly petite bourgeois periodical. Disgusting in its sanitized lies and sensibilities ... what would they want with a great thinker like me?"

"They want you to write an answer to Camus' Mythe de Sisyphe."

"And how is that?"

"They want an upbeat Christmas like ending to it," said Andre.

"Why me?"

"You are the most unhappy of the unhappy. To get an uplifting message from you would be as they would say 'dynamite!'"

"This is impossible. Camus is my friend!"

"All they want is three pages! And the amount they are willing to pay ... you could buy the place in Brittany!"

Francoise perked up. "Oh Gustav!" she said as if she were sweet, pliable, and young again. "A place of our own for August!"

Cold hard Francs were certainly what Gustav needed. For the Christmas baby and now a Christmas theme story to complement it. Gustav covered his face with his hands. This immediate darkness was refuge from what was swirling all around and inside him. He bent over in his chair, elbows on his knees, his nose wedged between his hands. He shook his head; no doubt, he looked like a subject from his friend Picasso's Blue Period. Picasso, a fellow artist, who could afford many summer houses.

"WHY AREN'T YOU SLEEPING?" asked Francoise.

"If you had to betray your integrity for a summer house," spat back Gustav. "You wouldn't be sleeping either!"

"Integrity," scoffed Francoise. "You sound like a college student!" Gustav wanted to furrow his ears in to the pillow. "For such a so-called 'Realist Philosopher' I would expect a more pragmatic retort!"

"Don't be so dismissive," hissed Gustav.

"That's what wives do from knowing their husbands so well."

"Please," pleaded Gustav.

"What's the matter? Is that over-intellectualized trollop you've been bedding giving you a hard time?"

How dare she be so sapient! thought Gustav behind his monumental forehead. "She's pregnant," he snapped. He'd said it. He hadn't planned to but he'd said it, nonetheless, as he was now operating on instinct alone.

"So abort it and be done with it and her," yawned Francoise.

"It's not that easy, she went on for an hour about how much death she saw as a child and now she wants life. She was surprisingly philosophical about it."

"Sentimental, you mean," qualified Francoise.

"Either way, she is adamant about keeping the baby. What a cruel thing to do to me. I am old enough to be the baby's grandfather!"

"It sounds like the two of you are made for each other. An old fool coupled with a young fool!"

"I want you to know, Francoise, that I would never leave you," confessed Gustav

"I know you wouldn't." said Francoise, now too disturbed to sleep.

"Why wouldn't I?" barked back Gustav.

"If people saw the idiocy of your writing without me once going over it, dear, they would see you for the bilious imbecile that you are!"

Gustav said nothing. The rain had stopped. Right down the middle of their bed an invisible line, a silent armistice was now struck. Gustav inhaled and exhaled dramatically as a transition to talk.

"What am I to do?" said Gustav in a lost tone of one wanting a friend. "She is keeping the baby. She wants one for Christmas."

"It's really" said Francoise with a guttural sigh, "very easy."

"How is that?"

"Write six pages for the Saturday Evening Post so you double the money. Half for her and the baby and the other half for the house in Brittany. Now go to sleep."

Gustav could not sleep.

How was he ever going to face Albert again.

IN THE MORNING GUSTAV asked his wife. "How can I write what I have to write?"

Francoise stared at Gustav with a smouldering "Don't You Get It?" gaze. "Make Christmas an act of defiance!"

Gustav's forehead wrinkled: Christmas equals Defiance! "Whatever do you mean?"

Slowly Francoise wagged her head to and fro. "Everybody, even the biggest dolt, knows that life is sad, forlorn, and emotionally famished."

"Exactly! Those are the corner stones of my work!"

"That is true for all the days of the year except for Christmas," continued Francoise. "That's why people decorate."

"I hate that merde!"

"Even though you great thinkers don't appreciate the tinsel, the lights..."

"The lies!"

"Yes, the lies," conceded Madam Malrausse. "Those lights and lies are an act of defiance!"

"They are bourgeois!"

"They most certainly are, but they are, also, the inverse to the unspoken acknowledgment of how pitiful and pointless life is."

"Define terms!"

"The lights, the tinsel, are acts of defiance to how shitty life is, as it were. The decorations are the sugar on top of the shit of life."

"I like that!"

"Now go redress the Myth of Sisyphus so we can buy that property and you can establish a trust for your dim witted bastard."

Gustav was dizzy. He went to the study and lay on the day bed.

"WELL, WHAT DO YOU think?" asked Gustav clutching ever so dearly what he had written.

Francoise was patting a silk scarf she had planted around her neck. She stepped back from the mirror. The way the cloth and clasp wound around her throat reminded her of burlap winterizing those particularly fragile shrubs. Looking at her phantom image in the mirror, Francoise had to concede that she was old, yet, dignified with an apparently regal soul.

"Well?" asked Gustav Francoise to address what he had just read to her.

"It's fine, but, you have to ... how do those Yanks say it? Milk it!"

"Whatever do you mean?" said a confused Gustav.

"Squeeze that Christmas udder," replied Francoise with a jaunty little laugh.

"How?"

"You're the genius," she said.

Gustav returned to the day bed to precisely dream that.

"ABSOLUTELY NOT!" REPRIMANDED FRANCOISE. "Delete that last line. Keep the music but have him delight in the song and the snow!"

"Oh God!" wailed Gustav.

"Grow up and be a man! Make yourself a tad more marketable!" cawed Francoise. "Do what writers do. Take an editor's bad idea and make it work. Do what a real Existentialist does!"

Francoise was giving Gustav a headache. Cowering, he returned to the day bed.

"NOW WHAT?" SAID GUSTAV turning to his wife.

Francoise rolled her eyes back to almost where only white showed. She shook her head and stared at her husband. "What have I been saying?" she queried in a demeanour implying how thick-headed she thought Gustav was.

Intimidated Gustav said nothing shaking like the dunce in the classroom corner.

"Should I tell you?"

"Please."

"Decorate it!"

"The stone?"

"Oui."

GUSTAV PUT DOWN HIS pages and looked across the room as Francoise lay back in the chaise lounge. "It's good, but, there has to be more. Finish it," she said.