THE LITTLE SATISFACTIONS in daily life – a cup of tea, the swirling snow, Christmas lights on a dim afternoon, a bird singing at the end of summer – can be unavailing if they take place within a crown of failure. As Jules Lacour was running out of options, Armand Marteau was running out of excuses. It was true that many potential clients would stay abroad or at the beaches well into September, and some – the richest, the oldest, the least anxious – even into October. Most people, however, even in the rarefied client base that he was assigned to serve, wanted to be and were in Paris shortly after the end of August.
August itself was full of hints of early fall, and by September the sun was low enough to make possible the ethereal blue sky that was characteristic of the city when the sun was not so much overhead as in summer, a kind of north light but in all directions. The air was crisp as often as not. Storms that blew in from Normandy and the west fought the blue with huge thunderheads rolling upward in gray and black. In the minutes before they arrived, the air they charged and their distant yellow lightning made Paris the most exciting city in the world. Everything that in summer had been an obstacle suddenly took on new life in air that was cool and promising.
The rich had gone home or to their offices and were in the mood to purchase and invest. Yet, having sold only one small contract in August, and although his co-workers were now as busy as ever, there was nothing for Armand Marteau at the beginning of September. He was so anxious about his job that he arranged for his wife to call him several times a day so as to fake sales conversations – “I would be happy, as you request, to contact you upon your return to Paris in October.” – and he spent hours tapping at his computer and carefully reading old dossiers that he had surreptitiously put in the red cardboard jackets that meant pending.
So much of his income was in commission that the corpulent pater familias and his wife had begun to eat less, and the whole family had given up excursions, movies, and dessert. They would do without almost anything for the sake of school supplies and decent clothes for the children. This was more than a matter of pride. For the Marteau children the only exit from the gray and dirty banlieue, where one could not safely venture out at night, was education. Had Armand gone on assistance he would have been allowed several hundred Euros a month more than he was taking in by trying to sell insurance to Parisians who would disappear in August. But no one in his family had ever been on the dole, and the dole seemed to him to be a kind of death.
His father, a farmer in Epaignes, thought that anyone behind a desk in Paris had an illegitimate lock on success and could by decree dictate prices and shares, whereas he himself was always at the mercy of the sun, the soil, and wind that blew in from the sea. Which is why Armand, who had been an unusually good student with a ready talent for math, had left the farm and now was on his way to a glass building in La Défense, a high tower in which the windows did not open and he didn’t have one anyway, although he could see some sky and some daylight across the floor and over the heads of a score of brokers bobbing at their desks.
The huge, pale place at the center of La Défense was like a desert. Armand Marteau would look down from the outside windows when he was near them in hallways and the offices of his seniors, and note that because the dominant color of dress in Paris was black – the color of retreat, protection, closing in on oneself, hardness, cynicism, hiding, and anger – the people moving across the windblown, open space seemed to scurry like ants. The speed at which they moved relative to their apparent size and the distance between him and them was undeniably ant speed. And as they were office workers like him, loosed momentarily from the giant ant hills, in one of which he himself was trapped, this was not a happy reflection, as tiny at a distance as it might be, of his whale-like self.
The morning train slowly filled up with people who, because they knew that other people thought they did not belong in France, looked at blond and blue-eyed Armand as if he were the enemy. He glanced back, convinced by what he saw that they, even if born in France, might choose to be forever alien. Were they friendly and in good spirits, it was easy for him to accept them without qualification. But so often they were oppressed, sullen, tired, angry, and in despair, just like him. And so often they seemed automatically hostile to him, a giant, ruddy farmer who would stare back at them in puzzlement. Their eyes seemed to burn, whereas his, he knew, were as cool and transparent as aquamarine.
At the office were plenty of North and sub-Saharan Africans, but they were kinder and friendlier to him than most of their “French” counterparts, who said that for Armand Marteau the best part of the day was the sandwich – a double cut, because of his weight and because he couldn’t afford to go out with anyone to a restaurant or even a café, which they did every day without fail. When he first heard the epithets he had heard many times since, such as hippo, whale boy, and elephantus, he had laughed along with them; but nothing followed, no flattery, sympathy, self-deprecation, or inclusion. It was deeply hurtful, for they sat by him all day, and they said these things with neither affection nor respect.
The world is full of men and women with souls like swallows and bodies like buffaloes, and, for no good reason, in the end it is much more likely that the soul will have followed the body than the body will have followed the soul. In between is the tragedy of happiness and delicacy sinking into a sea of slights. For a woman it is far worse than for a man, and had Armand been a woman he would have suffered even more or perhaps given up long before.
But giving up would mean many things, including a retreat to the farm, which in its present state could not support six. And he had no savings with which to expand it. A neighboring farmer had already sold out, and from their house the senior Marteaux saw not only plains of wheat and hay but, less than a kilometer distant, a truck park and warehouse (the distribution center for a hypermarket), with lights that blazed from dusk to dawn. Once there had been camps of Roman soldiers on the same spot, the berms still visible, and their lights had been oil lamps that would have been lovely as they flickered in the distance like fireflies.
Although Normandy was beautiful and was what he knew, and he loved the rain sweeping in from the sea and disappearing as it was chased by sunlight through sparkling mist, he hated the milking before dawn, the lowing of cows leaving for slaughter, the ever-presence of manure, hosing off his boots many times a day, the humidity, uncertainty, cold, and strain.
But the city, which his father thought was escape and relief, had proved in its own way just as difficult. His train whisked him past streets where he could not set foot for fear of his life. Salesmen at his company were not allowed to wear the relaxed, almost universal blue blazer of Paris, but had to spend the day in suit and tie, a torture for someone of Armand’s size and weight. La Défense was not like Paris anyway, but just a bleak machine fraying with wear. He hated it. Riding up in the elevator, he prayed for a client or any new business that would take him out into the trees or along the boulevards, into a room, a house, a mansion with a garden. It was becoming more and more unlikely. None of his colleagues referred business to him as they did to each other. Although he could not prove it, even the switchboard operator seemed hardly ever to route new calls to him according to his just share.
Long before, the director had come down hard on the saying of “Moo” when Armand appeared on the floor, but when the elevator doors parted and the salesmen glanced at him, turning their heads like a school of fish, he heard it even if it did not sound.
MAROON ACOUSTIC PANELS floated like spaceships above the work floor. For a Norman whose world had been open to the winds, maroon was a color as claustrophobia-inducing as black. Perhaps lurid purple, the paralytic color of death, would have been worse, but maroon had all the charm of dried blood.
It’s difficult to pretend you’re working for eight hours every day when there isn’t any work to be done, you’re in full view of forty or fifty hyperactive drones who don’t like you or who are at least made uncomfortable by your presence, and you are both very tall and fat, so that although your desk might conceivably hide behind you, you cannot conceivably hide behind it. The best part of Armand’s day was the forty-five minutes when he could bolt from the building and walk to the Seine to be near trees and water. There he would sit, his back to the massif of glass and steel behind him, and eat his lunch alone.
Lunch itself, his chief ally, was in the right-side bottom drawer of the desk, sending messages of friendliness, loyalty, and support. How often he would glance down at that drawer for comfort. He wished he had a puppy to hold. A stuffed animal might do, but he would never hear the end of it. Bathroom breaks were wonderful, although he couldn’t take too many or he would never have heard the end of it. Out of the presence of others, he could breathe. And before he went up to the office he would stand in the enormous train station beneath La Défense and stare at a fruit store. Inhaling deeply, he would imagine he was in the tropics, where no one hated him, and he was safe. When he tried to convey to his wife, a much more social person, the extent of his suffering in the office, she could not comprehend it.
“You exaggerate,” she had said over dinner in the little box within the horrid box of concrete warrens in which they lived, entombed in gray, smelling the smells of a hundred kitchens cooking, and hearing screams at night. “They can’t be thinking of you all the time.”
“Only when I move. They forget me when I stay still, I think. It’s like hunting. Anything in the forest that stays still almost certainly will be unnoticed.”
“Unless,” his wife said, “it’s shocking pink or international orange.”
“Quite so.”
“They have their troubles, too,” she said. “Why would they be thinking of you?”
“Because I’m an irritation, a recreation, a work in progress, a source of constant entertainment. My desk is directly under a spotlight and in the center of the floor, so I loom above them like a fountain in Las Vegas, or a giant butter sculpture. I’m telling you, there are eyes upon me, and twitters. There’s hardly anyone I can talk to. True, not all are hostile, but except for a few no one is kind. They’re like the men in the trading pits, who make jokes about the handicapped, the Holocaust, and plane crashes. We all compete with each other like gladiators. If you don’t meet the quota you’re out, and if everyone meets the quota they raise it. With the economy as it is they’re shrinking the department. Everyone is afraid of losing his job. It’s a bunch of snakes.”
“We can go back to the farm.”
“It won’t support six.”
“Still,” Madame Marteau said, “clients will come. You’ll see. You’ll have clients.”
“YOU HAVE NO clients,” said Edgar Auban, Armand Marteau’s chief and the director of the division. Auban was polite. Everyone was polite, with an edge. They mocked him, but not for nothing had they named him hippopotamus and elephantus. Everyone knows that when the poor, ungainly, pathetic hippopotamus finally becomes enraged, as he runs at you, fat shaking, steam-shovel mouth open, log-stump teeth arrayed, there isn’t much you can do. So, although you cannot dismiss from your mind his muddy ugliness, and your very expression as you behold him is a taunt, you are always made anxious by his powers, and you keep your distance. In Armand’s case, it was a resentful politesse.
“Well,” said Armand, staring over Auban’s head the way boys called into a headmaster’s office stare at something – their feet, the floor, a pencil sharpener – as they are reprimanded, “I have some clients.” He was staring not at a pencil sharpener but out the window at the rising terrain of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the distance.
“One.” Auban held up his right index finger like a cop stopping traffic. “In August. The next-worst associate had five. How can you have one? You know, there’s no law against selling insurance in August.” Auban shuffled some papers on his desk and looked up. “Or in the summer. In June and July you had three, total. Three? Gilbert went to Nice in August. He had a very nice time. He told me. He went out on yachts, slept with three beautiful women ….”
“At the same time?”
“I don’t know. That’s irrelevant. He swam, he ate glorious seafood, got a tan, and sold twenty-three contracts!”
“Well, he’s our best performer.”
“Do you understand that he doesn’t sell so many contracts because he’s our best performer, he’s our best performer because he sells so many contracts? Do you comprehend the difference?”
“It’s subtle.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Maybe not.”
“Look,” said Auban, “I’m forced to this.”
Armand knew a blow was coming, and felt very sad. All he could think about was his children. He mustn’t fail them, and yet ….
“Your August performance was the absolute minimum. A five-hundred-thousand-Euro contract, with an unusually small premium.”
“He was young and ridiculously healthy, like a saber-tooth tiger.”
“You’re a contract employee. If in September you don’t meet the minimum, you’ll go off salary in October. You can stay through the end of the year – commissions only – but if you don’t sell enough to go back on salary by the thirty-first of December, I’m afraid we’ll have to give your desk to someone else.”
“Oh,” said Armand, lips trembling.
“Marteau, they want me to reduce the size of our shop. They specifically identified you. What I got you was four months of probation. There’s a lot of pressure on us. You know, they got killed in trading derivatives. The government bailed them out in America. There’s so much blood on the floor there, you can’t even imagine.”
“Who are ‘they’? Who identified me?”
“London, New York.”
“But we’re one of so many subsidiaries. They concern themselves with an individual salesman? With me?”
“They have long reports and people who go blind going over them. Probably there were many lists, and probably someone took twenty seconds to look at one and flicked with his pencil a line or check next to your name, without either looking at your name or knowing your name, but just taking in, for a fraction of a second, the numbers to the right.”
“Just like that? Someone flicks his pencil and I, my wife, my son, my daughter … are cast to the waves – with the flick of a pencil?”
“Monsieur Marteau, all life is like that. Someone checks his watch, his car veers across the line, and a family is wiped out. A mechanic applies the wrong torque to a nut, which insufficiently tightens the seal, which allows fuel to leak, which starts a fire that crashes a plane and kills three hundred people. God flicks his pencil, a cell goes wrong, and the story of your life ends. This is just a job. Granted, other jobs are hard to find these days, but they exist, and, who knows, you might just get lucky.”
“You mean while I’m still here?”
“Yes. There are sixty-six million people in France, each and every one subject to the flick of many a pencil, each and every one potentially in need of life and disability insurance. Sell it to them! That’s what we do.”