The Anger Came as soon as she woke. All it took to put her in a rage was to think about the day ahead: so many things to do, so little time.
And yet Hélène was an organized woman. She drew up lists, planned her weeks. In her mind, even in her body, she knew the exact amount of time it took to run a load of laundry, to give the youngest a bath, to cook noodles or get breakfast ready, to drive the girls to school or wash her hair. She’d had to get her hair cut twenty times to save on the two hours per week it took her to care for it. And she’d saved those hours, twenty times over. Was that the kind of sacrifice she had to make—the loss of her long hair, treasured since childhood?
Hélène was full of all these counted minutes, these little scraps of daily existence that made up the jigsaw puzzle of her life. Occasionally she would remember her adolescence, the lethargy that you’re allowed at fifteen, the idle Sundays, and later the hungover mornings spent lazing around in a daze. That whole vanished period…at the time it had seemed to last forever, but as she looked back now it seemed so brief. Her mom used to bawl her out for the hours she wasted lying in bed when she could have been outside enjoying the sunshine. Nowadays her alarm went off at six every weekday morning, and on weekends, like an automaton, she woke at six anyway.
At times she had the feeling that something had been stolen from her, that her life was no longer really her own. Now her sleep patterns were in thrall to some higher power, the rhythm of her days ruled by family and work. Everything she did, and the speed at which she did it, was for the greater good. Her mother could rest content: Hélène, a mother herself now, was useful at last. She’d been dragged into the adult mire, and she saw the sun all day long.
“Are you awake?” she whispered.
Philippe was lying on his front, a solid presence beside her, one arm folded under his pillow. He might have been dead. Hélène checked the time: 6:02. Ugh, not again…
“Hey,” she said in a louder voice. “Go wake the girls. Hurry up or we’ll be late again.”
Philippe turned over with a sigh, lifting up the comforter and releasing the warm heavy familiar smell, the dense air accumulated from one night and two close bodies. Hélène was already on her feet, in the biting cold of the bedroom, hands searching the nightstand for her glasses.
“Philippe, come on…”
Her partner grumbled, then turned his back on her. Hélène was already mentally running through all the tasks she had to tick off.
She took a shower, her jaw still tensed, then checked the emails on her phone as she went to the kitchen. She’d do her makeup later, in the car. Every morning the kids would get her hot under the collar so there was no point putting on foundation until after she’d dropped them at school.
With her glasses perched at the end of her nose, she warmed up their milk and poured cereal into their bowls. On the radio it was those two journalists again whose names she could never remember. She still had time. The morning show on France Inter provided her with the same easy markers every day. For now, the house was still cocooned in that nocturnal calm, the kitchen like an island of light where Hélène could savor a rare moment of solitude. She drank her coffee, enjoying the respite like a soldier on leave. It was 6:20 and already she needed a cigarette.
She put on her thick cardigan and went out to the balcony. There, leaning on the railing, she smoked while gazing down at the city below, the first red and yellow lights of traffic, the scattered dazzle of streetlamps. On a nearby street a garbage truck was going through its routine drudgery, all sighs and beeps and blinking. A little farther to her left loomed a high-rise, its dark outline studded with rectangles of light and flitting silhouettes. There was a church over that way. To her right, the geometric mass of a hospital. The city center, with its cobbled alleys and fancy stores, was a long way off. She watched as the city of Nancy stretched and came back to life. It wasn’t too cold for a morning in October. The tobacco crackled and glowed and Hélène looked over her shoulder before checking her cell phone. A smile appeared on her face, highlighted by the gleam of the screen.
She’d received a new message.
Some simple words saying I can’t wait, I’ll see you soon. Her heart gave a brief jolt and she took another drag on her cigarette, then shivered. It was 6:25. Time to get dressed again, drop the girls at school again, lie again.
“Is Your Bag packed?”
“Yeah.”
“Mouche, did you remember your swimming stuff?”
“No.”
“You need to remember.”
“I know.”
“I reminded you yesterday, weren’t you listening?”
“I was.”
“So why didn’t you do it?”
“I just didn’t think.”
“That’s the point. You have to think.”
“Nobody can be good at everything,” Mouche replied, like a learned professor with her Nesquik mustache.
She had just turned six and she was changing before her mother’s eyes. Clara too had been through that phase of accelerated growth, but Hélène had forgotten how it felt to see her children suddenly becoming people. So she was rediscovering, as if for the first time, that moment when a child shakes off the torpor of infancy, stops acting like some greedy little creature, and starts thinking, making jokes, coming out with stuff that changes the mood of a meal or leaves the grown-ups agape. “Well, I should be off. Bye, everyone…”
Philippe had just appeared in the kitchen and he was going through the morning routine of tucking his shirt into his pants and running a hand under his belt, from his belly to his back.
“You’re not eating breakfast?”
“I’ll grab something at work.”
He kissed his daughters, then gave Hélène a peck on the lips. “You remember you’re picking up the girls tonight?” she said.
“Tonight?”
Philippe’s hair was thinner than it used to be, but he was still a handsome man: well-built and well-dressed, nicely scented, the gleam in his eye undimmed. He was still the boy who breezed through his exams without trying, the kid in the know. It was annoying.
“We’ve been talking about this for the past week.”
“Yeah, but I might have to bring some work back.”
“Call Claire then.”
“Have you got her number?”
Hélène gave him the babysitter’s phone number and advised him to contact her ASAP to make sure she was available.
“Okay, okay,” Philippe said, typing the number into his ph one. “Do you know if you’ll be home late?”
“Shouldn’t be too late,” Hélène replied.
“It’s a pain, though,” said her partner as he scrolled through his emails.
“It’s not like I’m out all the time. You got home at nine last night, remember? And the night before.”
“I was working. What do you expect me to do?”
“Yeah, well, I’m volunteering.”
Philippe looked up from the blue screen and gave her his usual thin-lipped, mocking smile.
Ever since they’d come back from Paris, Philippe seemed to think that nobody had the right to ask him for anything else. After all, he’d given up a brilliant job at AXA for her, not to mention his badminton buddies and, in general, the kind of prospects that simply did not exist in Nancy. And all that because she had not been able to handle Paris. Although it was debatable whether she was handling Nancy any better. That forced departure remained like an unpaid debt between them. Or at least that was how it seemed to Hélène.
“Well, see you tonight,” Philippe said.
“See you.”
Then Hélène rallied her daughters: “Okay, brush teeth, get dressed, let’s go. I still have to put my lenses in. I’m not going to tell you twice.”
“Mommy…” said Mouche.
But Hélène had already stalked out of the room on her long legs, hair tied back, checking her WhatsApp messages as she went upstairs. Manuel had sent her a new message, saying see you tonight, and she could feel it again: that delicious sting of fear in her chest that made her feel like a teenager.
Thirty Minutes Later the girls were at school and Hélène wasn’t far from the office. Automatically, she ran through her list of meetings for the day. At ten she was seeing the Vinci people. At two she had to call the woman from Porette, the cement works in Dieuze. They were planning layoffs, and Hélène had an idea for reorganizing cross-functional teams that could save five jobs. According to her calculations, she could save them almost five hundred thousand euros annually by modifying their organizational chart and optimizing the purchasing department and the vehicle fleet. Erwann, her boss, had told her this was a must-win situation: it was huge, symbolically, and she simply couldn’t fail. And then at four she had the big presentation at the mayor’s office. She had to check the slides one last time before she went there. Ask Lison to print files for each participant, on both sides to make sure she didn’t get crucified by some pedantic tree hugger. And don’t forget the personalized cover sheet. She knew the staff in places like that, the department heads, all those anxious, influential cliques that made up the ranks of municipal administration. They were always so thrilled if you printed their name on a folder or on the first page of an official document. After a certain point in their cluttered careers, lording it over their underlings, distinguishing themselves from their colleagues, became the most important part of their job.
And then tonight, her date.
From Nancy to Épinal, it was just under an hour’s drive. She wouldn’t even have time to go home and take a shower. Not that she was going to sleep with him on the first date anyway. Yet again, she told herself she should cancel, that this was a really bad idea. But Lison was already waiting for her in the parking lot, leaning against the wall and sucking greedily at her vape, her peculiar face hidden behind a cloud of apple and cinnamon smoke.
“So? Are you ready?”
“You must be kidding…I need you to print those files for the mayor’s office. The meeting’s at four.”
“I did it yesterday.”
“On both sides?”
“Of course. You think I’m a climate change denier or something?”
The two women hurried toward the elevators. Inside, as they ascended toward Elexia’s offices, Hélène avoided her intern’s gaze. For once, Lison did not look half-asleep. There was a gleam in her eyes, in fact, as though she were the one with a date that night. At the third floor, the door opened, and Hélène went through first.
“Follow me,” she said, walking across the vast open-plan office for the consultants, with its archipelago of desks, the narrow red carpet showing people which way to go, and the numerous green plants thriving in the deluge of daylight that poured through the high windows. Red armchairs and gray couches sat waiting for employees to chill out on with their colleagues. At the back of the room, a small kitchen equipped with a microwave allowed people to warm up their lunch and gave rise to arguments over food items left in the fridge. The only enclosed spaces were on the mezzanine floor: a meeting room known as the Cube, and the boss’s office. Hélène and Lison headed for the Cube, where they could talk without being overheard.
“This is a mistake,” Hélène said.
“No it’s not. It’ll be fine.”
“I’m acting like an idiot, checking my phone every five minutes. This is ridiculous. I have a job, I have kids. I can’t get sucked into stuff like this. I’m going to cancel.”
“No, wait!”
Lison sometimes forgot that Hélène was her boss and spoke to her as if she were a friend. Hélène didn’t mind. She tended to rely completely on this strange, comical girl with her Converse sneakers, her secondhand designer coats, her horselike face. Even those long teeth and widely spaced eyes were not enough to make her ugly, however, and in all honesty she had changed Hélène’s life. Before Lison turned up, she had long felt as if she were standing at the edge of an abyss.
On the surface she had everything she could want: the architect-designed house, the important job, a magazine-photo-shoot family, a good-looking partner, a walk-in closet, even her health. But her existence was undermined by a sort of negative je ne sais quoi, an impossible combination of satiety and lack. The crack that ran through her entire life.
The condition had first come to light four years before, when she and Philippe were still living in Paris. One day, at the office, Hélène had locked herself in the bathroom simply because she could no longer bear seeing the emails pile up in her inbox. After that, withdrawal had become a habit. She would go into hiding to avoid a meeting, a colleague, the necessity of answering the phone. And she would sit on the toilet for hours, improving her score on Candy Crush, incapable of reacting, lovingly imagining her own suicide. Little by little, the most ordinary things had become intolerable. She had once burst into tears while reading the office canteen menu, for example, because there were grated carrots and dauphine potatoes for lunch again. Even her cigarette breaks had taken a tragic turn. As for work itself, she simply hadn’t seen the point anymore. Why bother with all those Excel spreadsheets, those endlessly interchangeable meetings? And, oh God, the jargon. She would practically retch every time she heard someone use the verbs “impact,” “empower,” or “prioritize.” Toward the end, she couldn’t even hear the note that her MacBook Pro made when she turned it on without sobbing.
She had started losing sleep, hair, weight. She had gotten eczema on the backs of her knees. Once, on her daily commute, catching sight of a man’s pale scalp beneath his comb-over, she had fainted. She had felt alienated from everything. She had lost all desire to go anywhere. She had fallen into the void.
The doctor had told her she was probably burned out, and Philippe had reluctantly agreed to leave Paris. At least there were a few advantages to living in the provinces: a better quality of life and the ability to afford a spacious house with a large yard, not to mention the possibility of obtaining a place for her children at a local day-care center without having to sleep with someone at the mayor’s office. Besides, Hélène’s parents lived nearby, so they could always help out from time to time.
In Nancy, Hélène had immediately found a new job thanks to one of Philippe’s friends. Erwann ran Elexia, a company that offered HR advice, audits, and recommendations, the same thing she had been doing before. And for a few weeks, the change of setting and the slower pace of life had been enough to keep her depression at a distance. But not for long. Soon, without falling back into the same bottomless abyss, she had started feeling frustrated again, out of place, often exhausted, sad for no reason, filled with rage.
Philippe did not know how to react to these black moods. They had tried discussing it once or twice, but Hélène had been left with the impression that he was just acting, trying to look earnest, nodding at regular intervals: exactly the same routine he went through when he was on Zoom with his colleagues. Deep down, Philippe’s instinct was to manage her, just like he managed everything else.
Thankfully, there had been a light in this fog of fatigue: one day she had received a strange CV and a letter asking for an internship. Normally, that kind of request did not reach her, or she would instantly delete the email. But this one caught her attention because of its almost ludicrous simplicity: no photograph and none of the usual inane padding—social skills, wholesome hobbies, driver’s license, etc. It was just a Word document with a name, Lison Lagasse, an address, a cell phone number, mention of a master’s degree in economics, and an incongruous list of work experiences. Léon de Bruxelles, Deloitte, Darty, Barclays, even a fishery in Scotland. Rather than passing on her application to the HR department, as required by the recruitment process, Hélène had called the woman’s cell phone out of curiosity. Because this girl reminded her of someone. Lison had picked up on the first ring, responding to Hélène’s questions in her clear, reedy voice, interspersed with brief bursts of laughter: yeah, no way, totally. She sounded amused and straightforward, not like someone trying too hard or putting on an act. Hélène had arranged a meeting with her one evening after seven, when the office was more or less empty, as if she had something to hide. Lison turned up at the appointed time, looking like a party girl the morning after: tall and ultra-thin, skintight jeans and fringed loafers, bangs of course, and that long face, with her lips almost constantly pulled back to reveal those dazzling, horsey teeth.
“You have a strange CV. How do you go from Deloitte to Darty?”
“They’re both on the same Metro line.”
Hélène had smiled. So Lison was Parisian…The girls of Paris had intimidated Hélène for years with their special, advanced elegance, the way they felt at home everywhere, their inability to put on weight, and that imperious, unanswerable attitude, their every gesture saying: the best you could do, girl, is to try to be like me. It was strange seeing one there, in her office in Nancy, at nighttime. Looking at her was a bit like receiving a postcard from a place where she had once spent a complicated vacation.
“And what are you doing here?”
“Oh!” she said, waving her arm dismissively, “I got kicked out of college, and my mother found a guy down here.”
“Are you acclimatizing?”
“Kind of.”
Hélène hired Lison on the spot, handing her all the “reporting tools” that Erwann had made mandatory since embarking on his crusade against waste, his quest to “refine the process,” which effectively meant the obligation to justify every little trip, to note even the tiniest tasks on gargantuan spreadsheets, to scroll through endless drop-down menus in search of the cryptic title that corresponded to what had once been an unquantifiable activity, and in this way to waste one hour every day explaining how you had spent the other eight.
Against all expectations, Lison was brilliant at her job. After a week she knew everyone in the building and all the office gossip. The secret of her success was simple: everything amused her. She floated through the open-plan office like a bubble, efficient and indifferent, irritating but mostly well-liked, incapable of stress, giving the impression that she could not care less, never disappointing anyone, a sort of Mary Poppins of the service sector. For Hélène, who spent her time struggling, desperate to be made a partner alongside Erwann, Lison’s carefree attitude was utterly alien and enchanting.
One night, while they were having a pint in the pub next door, Hélène grew curious.
“Is there anyone you like at the office?”
“Never at work, that’s taboo.”
“But that’s mostly where you meet people, isn’t it?”
“I prefer not to mix business and pleasure. It’s too stressful, especially in an open-plan office. Afterward, the guys circle around you all day like vultures. And those dickheads can never keep it to themselves. They always have to brag.”
Hélène laughed at this.
“So how do you manage? Do you go out dancing?”
“God, no. Nightclubs around here? Ugh.” She shuddered. “I just do what everyone else does: internet dating.”
Hélène forced herself to smile. She was barely a generation older than Lison and yet she no longer understood anything about young people’s romantic habits. Listening to the intern, she discovered that the possibilities of hookups, the length of relationships, the interest shown afterward, the time between affairs, the tolerance for multiple lovers and overlap, the rules, in short, of fucking and feelings, had undergone massive changes.
The primary difference was in the use of messaging services and social networks. When Hélène explained to her intern that she had never heard of the internet until she went to high school, Lison had looked at her with frank astonishment. Of course she knew that a civilization had existed before the web, but she tended to think of that period as belonging to the sepia decades, somewhere between the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the moon landing.
“Yep, it’s true,” sighed Hélène. “I got my baccalaureate results on 3615 EducNat, or something like that.”
“Okay, boomer…”
Lison’s generation had grown up inside the internet. At middle school, she had spent whole evenings flirting online with total strangers on the computer that her parents had given her to help with her schoolwork, talking endlessly about sex with kids her own age as well as with fifty-year-old perverts who typed one-handed, people in Singapore, or her neighbor, with whom she would never have exchanged a single word if they’d been sitting next to each other on the bus. Later, she’d had fun carrying on long, epistolary relationships with dozens of boys she knew only vaguely. All you had to do was contact a hot guy from your school on Facebook or Insta—hey, hi there—and the rest followed easily. Through the digital night, conversations flew back and forth at dizzying speeds, annihilating distances, making waiting unbearable, sleep superfluous, exclusivity unacceptable. She and her friends always had three or four discussion threads on the go simultaneously. The conversation, trivial at first, begun in a bantering tone, would soon take a more personal turn. They would express their dissatisfactions: the parents who pissed them off; Léa, who was a slut; the science teacher who was a narcissistic pervert. After eleven, when the rest of the family was asleep, these interactions between peers grew more clandestine. They started to really heat up. Fantasies were expressed in few words, all abbreviated, coded, indecipherable. They ended up sending each other photos of themselves in underwear, erections bulging, suggestive low-angle shots.
“Ideally you’d take a picture where they could see your ass but not your face. Just in case.”
“You weren’t scared the guy would show it to his friends?”
“Of course. That’s the price you pay.”
Those images, taken in her bed, chiaroscuro selfies, erotica under some degree of control, were exchanged like contraband money, unknown to the kids’ parents, an illegal currency that brought into existence a libidinal market over which hovered constantly the threat of exposure. Because sometimes a dirty picture would find its way into the public domain and a half-naked minor would go viral.
“I had a friend in my sophomore year who had to change schools.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah. And that’s not the worst of it.”
Hélène feasted on these anecdotes, which, like potato chips, left her feeling vaguely sickened while continuing to want more of them. She also worried for her daughters, wondering how they would cope with these new forms of danger. But most of all, those stories turned her on. She envied all this desire aimed at others. She felt diminished by her lack of access to it. She remembered the permanent lust that had once been her normal waking state. She once told her psychiatrist: “I feel like I’m old already. All that is over for me.”
“How does that make you feel?” the shrink had asked, as usual.
“Angry. Sad.”
The bastard hadn’t even bothered noting this down in his Moleskine.
The time had passed so quickly. From her high school exams to her forties, Hélène’s life had taken a high-speed train, abandoning her one day on an unfamiliar platform, in an altered body, suitcases under her eyes, with less hair and more fat, kids hanging on her apron strings, a partner who said he loved her but who disappeared as soon as she asked him to run a load of laundry or look after the girls during a school strike. On this platform, men did not turn around very often to look at her anymore. And those looks that she used to hate, that were of course no measure of her value, she somehow found herself missing. Everything had changed in a flash.
One Friday evening, when she was at Le Galway with Lison, Hélène finally came out with it.
“I find it depressing, hearing about all your men.”
“I like girls too,” Lison replied, pulling a face that looked at once jocular and satisfied. “They’re mostly just flirts, though. I probably only fuck about half of them.”
“I mean it pisses me off to think that my turn is over.”
“What? You’re crazy. You have so much potential. They’d go wild for you on Tinder.”
“Oh, stop it. If you’re just going to make fun of me…”
But Lison was serious: the world was full of lust-crazed guys who would sell their own mothers to get a woman like Hélène in their bed.
“That’s flattering,” Hélène said, heavy-lidded.
Of course she’d heard about that kind of dating app before. The internet watchdog sites that she consulted were always waxing lyrical over these new models that enslaved millions of singles, monopolizing the dating market, their algorithms redefining elective affinities and intermittences of the heart, their direct channels and playful interfaces appropriating everything from broken hearts to the possibility of love at first sight.
In no time at all, Lison had, just for a laugh, created a profile for Hélène using photographs taken from the internet, two shot from behind and the third a little blurred. As for the About Me section, she kept it minimalist and slightly risqué: Hélène, 39. Come and get me if you’re man enough. She then explained how the app worked.
“It’s simple. You see the guy appear on your screen: a headshot, two or three other pics. You swipe right if you like him. If not, swipe left and you’ll never hear from him again.”
“And they’re all doing the same with me?”
“Exactly. If you like each other, you get a match and you can start chatting.”
With their elbows on the bar, Hélène and her intern looked through the region’s collection of single guys and compulsive cheaters. This parade of poseurs mostly made them laugh; attractive men were a rare commodity. The men of Nancy seemed to consist mainly of fake gangsters taking shirtless selfies in front of their Audis, single men in rimless glasses, divorcés wearing soccer jerseys, real-estate agents with slicked-back hair, or gauche-looking firefighters. Lison’s thumb pitilessly sent all these poor fools leftward into hell, occasionally rescuing from the flames a guy who bore a vague resemblance to Jason Statham or some total misfit they could snigger over. No matter who she chose, she instantly got matched because, while girls could be picky, the boys on the site did not seem to turn their nose up at anything, casting their net wide and sorting through their meager haul later. At each new profile, Lison would make a stinging remark and Hélène, increasingly drunk, would laugh.
“Hang on, that one’s not even eighteen.”
“Who cares? You’re not a general election.”
“And look at that haircut!”
“Maybe that’s the fashion in New York.”
Lison, of course, had used Tinder in New York and London, which is why she’d had such amazing results. Because in places like that, with sky-high property prices and the pressure of competition, you had to work nonstop to keep your head above water, which left you with little time for stuff like buying groceries or dating. So people used online apps to fill their bed just as they did their shopping cart. A connection, a few words exchanged at lunchtime, an insanely expensive cocktail around seven, and before you knew it you were stripping naked in some minuscule apartment to have a fast fuck while thinking about all those urgent messages that kept filling your inbox. That was how those dagger-sharp lives were lived: quick and cutting, continually acted out on social networks, without tears or wrinkles, in the sinister illusion of a perpetual present.
Whereas here, in the small towns of northern France, it was obviously not the same.
“And you show your face on this thing?” Hélène asked. “It doesn’t bother you that someone might recognize you?”
“Everyone does it. If you spread the shame around, it doesn’t exist anymore.”
They’d been interrupted by a text from Philippe just then, killing the atmosphere. The girls are in bed. Where are you? Hélène had paid for the drinks, dropped Lison off at her place, and deleted the app before going home.
The next day, she reinstalled it.
She quickly got the hang of the system, expanding her search zone to a radius of eighty kilometers and embellishing her profile with actual photographs of herself, but ones that did not allow her to be identified. The pictures highlighted her long legs and her seductive lips, which sometimes, when she woke very early or when she was in a bad mood, made her look like a duck. Another shot of her sitting on the edge of a swimming pool gave a glimpse of her hips, her big, toned ass, her tanned skin. She had thought about showing off her eyes, which were honey-colored but turned a kind of almond-green in summer, but in the end she opted against the idea. Romance was not on the agenda.
Within days, she was spending all her days swiping photos of men, each match restoring some self-assurance, each compliment making her feel taller and more beautiful. And yet, all this anonymous desire did not assuage her anger. She was still left with that what’s-the-point feeling, that impression of being damaged goods. Now, however, she had these tiny, almost automatic compensations, and the satisfaction of knowing she had other choices. All these strangers wanted her, and their avid attentions put some color back in her life. She felt alive again and she forgot the rest. Even if, now and again, some poor over-polite, ugly guy would make her wince at her own behavior.
After a while, though, one of these men did manage to hold her attention. He was hiding too, but behind a panda mask. And at least his description dispensed with the usual bullshit. Manuel, 32. Seeking beautiful, intelligent woman to come with me to my ex’s wedding. If you’re right-wing and you wear the same perfume as my mother, that’s a bonus.
Amused, Hélène asked him what perfume his mother wore.
Nina Ricci, he replied.
Maybe we can come to an arrangement.
After that, they’d started chatting regularly. To start with, Hélène had adopted a distant and vaguely sarcastic attitude. Then Philippe went to Paris for a training course and she found herself alone for three nights. Their conversations evolved from playful banter to shared secrets and then to sensual insinuations. In the darkness of her bedroom, Hélène’s world was reduced to a blue-lit face, and the hours sped by silently. She experienced hot flashes, insomnia, and red eyes as she squirmed in the sheets of their endless discussions. When she woke the next morning, she looked a fright and her first reflex was to check her messages. Two new words were all it took to fill her heart with joy. An hour of silence and she would start catastrophizing. Her feet no longer touched the ground. At last she agreed to meet him.
But now that the time had almost come for their date, Hélène was getting cold feet. Inside the Cube, on the mezzanine, she felt the fear take hold of her. What if she ended up regretting this?
Lison remained upbeat: “It’ll pass. You’re just out of practice.”
“No, I’m going to cancel. This kind of thing just isn’t me.”
“Is this because of Philippe?”
Hélène turned to face the window. Outside, the overcast sky loomed miserably over the city and its motley swarm of buildings. On opposing railway lines, high-speed TGVs passed half-empty regional TERs between graffiti-strewn walls. Erwann had wanted offices with a view of the city. You had to build high, see the big picture.
“No, it’s not that,” Hélène lied. “It’s just bad timing. I’ve got that meeting at the mayor’s office. I mean, we’ve been working on it for three months…”
“Just wait. You can always cancel at the last minute. This guy doesn’t know where you are, he doesn’t know anything about you.”
Hélène looked at Lison. She was so young, her whole life ahead of her…Hélène wanted to hurt her, to avenge herself on all that possibility.
“You’re starting to piss me off with this thing. I’m not a kid anymore…”
Lison took the hint and disappeared without another word. Alone in the Cube, Hélène contemplated her reflection in the window. She was wearing her new Isabel Marant skirt, a pretty blouse, her leather jacket, and a pair of high heels. She had made herself beautiful for Manuel, for those idiots at the mayor’s office. She noticed the thinness of her chignon at the top of her head and was suddenly mad at herself. Had she struggled through her whole life for this?
This was the moment Erwann chose to burst into the Cube, tablet in hand, unshaved, ginger hair disheveled, his senatorial belly straining against the gorgeous fabric of a blue twill shirt.
“Did you see Carole’s email? They’re really screwing with us. Honestly, I forwarded it straight to the lawyer. Fuck them. Anyway, are you still okay for the big merger meeting tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I confirmed yesterday.”
“Cool, I didn’t have time to check yet. What about the mayor’s office—everything on track?”
“Yep, I’ll be there at four.”
“You’re sure—no problems at all?”
“Nope, it’s all good.”
“We can’t fuck this up. If we can just get our foot in the door, we’ll clean up. I had lunch with the service manager. They want a total restructuring. If we ace this one, we’ll be in pole position to bid for contracts in the future.”
“We’ll ace it, don’t worry.”
Just for an instant, Erwann stopped gazing intensely at his own navel and turned his small golden eyes on her.
At the ESSEC business school, he and Philippe had managed the student office together. Two decades later, they still bragged about how they’d siphoned money out of the treasury to buy themselves a weekend in Val Thorens. So Erwann knew all about Hélène, from her education to her Parisian burnout: her daughters, who prevented her working late in the evenings, her past glories, her past mistakes, maybe even some intimate details.
“I’m putting my trust in you,” he said.
“We need to talk at some point too.”
“About?”
He knew perfectly well what she was alluding to. Hélène did not lose her cool. Ignoring his fake ignorance, she said calmly: “You remember—my role within the company.”
“Oh yeah, yeah. We should review that. It’s absolutely one of my priorities.”
Murderous thoughts ran through Hélène’s head. She had been bugging him for months now to be promoted from the position of senior manager (which did not mean much at such a small company) to partner, and while Erwann had agreed in principle to this request, he had done nothing at all about it.
“Listen,” she said. “I’ve been working like crazy all month, and I know you want to sell up to a bigger firm. But I’m warning you, there is no fucking way I’m going to let myself be tossed on the scrap heap by a branch of McKinsey.”
“Absolutely not!” Erwann agreed, abruptly enthusiastic. “You know how I feel about that. Keep your best talent. You have zero worries.”
If he was bullshitting her, Hélène thought, she would punch him in the mouth. Not that she really would, of course, but just thinking it made her feel better. Still pulsing with aggression, she went back into the open-plan office, where other consultants were sitting at their desks, scattered across various parts of the room, wearing earbuds and staring at screens. All these people who earned between forty and ninety thousand euros per year and didn’t even have their own office. God, she had to get out of this swamp of mediocrity. She’d been telling herself the same thing forever. She had to succeed.
The Meeting Was supposed to take place in the basement of the mayor’s office, a windowless room with fluorescent strip-lights, composite tables arranged in a U, and a whiteboard. After getting there first, Hélène checked that the projector worked, connected it to her computer, ran through a few slides to make sure it all went smoothly, then sat there waiting, legs crossed, tapping mechanically at her phone. Manuel had sent her three new messages that all meant essentially the same thing. Can’t wait. Thinking about you all the time. Tonight can’t come fast enough. It was sweet, but pointless. She didn’t want him getting all worked up. She thought about writing a reply that would cool his passion but wasn’t sure what exactly she should tell him. Just then, two men entered the room, leaving the door open behind them. Hélène instantly got to her feet, all smiles. She vaguely knew the first guy, who was already bald despite being quite young and who wore a fitted jacket and a pair of Church’s. Aurélien Leclerc. He claimed he was the assistant communications director, but rumor had it he was actually just the communications director’s assistant. In any case, he had graduated from Sciences Po. Everyone knew this because he generally reminded them every ten minutes.
The second man was in his fifties, tall and sharp-eyed with an even smoother skull than the first. He wore a white shirt and a crewneck sweater, and when he thrust forward his hand, Hélène saw a Brazilian bracelet dangling from his wrist.
“David Schneider. I’m head of IT.”
“Ah,” said Hélène. “Pleased to meet you.”
Leclerc began churning out useful information. It would just be the three of them at the meeting. Monsieur Politi, who ran the communication and digital center, could not make it. He had a meeting with the prefect. But never mind, they could manage fine without him.
Hélène smiled again. Of course she understood. After all, it had only taken her a hundred fifty hours to straighten out this town’s appalling IT mess, a labyrinth worthy of a Russian novel, wasting money and energy in the ludicrously complicated decision-making process that involved no fewer than three distinct organizational charts. All the way through her audit, she had been amazed that this Tower of Babel was still standing. The ingrained idleness, the blurred hierarchies, the ancient hatreds between bureaucratic chiefdoms had given rise to a digital Chernobyl. To think that the city’s inhabitants entrusted their credit card numbers to this tottering, Soviet-style system so they could pay for their kids’ school meals or their residency cards…it was alarming, to say the least.
“We can do it without him,” Schneider agreed, utterly unruffled. “It’s not a problem.”
“Anyway, we’re just starting out on this project,” added Leclerc. “We can put together a methodology with a series of milestones that the director can validate afterward. That’s how we generally operate with our service providers.”
“Of course, but that’s not exactly what we agreed with Monsieur Politi. We’re already pretty advanced in the planning.”
“That’s how things work now,” Schneider said decisively. Hélène considered the two of them in turn: the self-satisfied assistant and the overconfident IT geek. She knew these types of men so well: they spent their lives showing off in meetings, carelessly managing bureaucrats with stagnant careers, dispensing municipal manna to a rotating wheel of subcontractors under orders, putting the pressure on whenever they felt like it, and giving empty speeches all day long.
“Okay,” she said, “we’ll do it your way.”
She began her presentation in the standard way, with the organization’s strengths and weaknesses, then listed the threats (four of which turned out to be critical for the entire system) before ending with the opportunities, which took hardly longer than a minute. She spoke in a composed voice, playing with the remote control and sometimes going over to the screen to point a finger at a particularly important detail. Her commentary was sprinkled with statistics not mentioned on the PowerPoint, figures that she had memorized for that express purpose, a method that was generally quite effective. After that, she dwelled on a few examples, did a bit of benchmarking, discussed the social elements of organizations. Leclerc and Schneider, attentive at first, soon grew distracted, forsaking her explanations so they could check their emails and send texts. At one point, Hélène even suspected that Leclerc was watching videos on YouTube. Just before moving on to her recommendations, she deliberately dropped the remote control for the projector on the floor. The back of the remote came loose and the batteries spilled out with a clatter of metal and plastic. The two men looked up, startled. Leclerc blushed bright red.
“What’s gotten into you?” Schneider demanded.
“We’re listening,” said Leclerc in a more conciliatory tone.
Hélène stood straight, a few meters away from them, her jaw tensed. She was calculating the pros and cons of submission versus conflict. She thought about Elexia’s turnover, about the close connections these two undoubtedly had with a number of their peers in various local institutions: the departmental council, the regional health agency, the board of education, and other local communities.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just an accident.”
She fixed the remote before concluding her presentation in an atmosphere of mutual reticence. Leclerc left before the end, saying he had an emergency to deal with. Schneider congratulated Hélène on her work but said he did not fully agree with her conclusions, which struck him as unnecessarily alarmist.
“We had an audit last year. Their recommendations were far less drastic. What matters in complex systems such as ours is to implement measures that enable a gradual improvement. You can’t just knock everything down and start over.”
“Of course,” said Hélène.
She had seen that audit. It had been conducted internally, and its deferential tone and specious arguments were reminiscent of something the police’s Internal Affairs department might produce: a complete travesty.
“Anyway, thank you,” Schneider went on. “I’ll go through this with my team. It’s good work, especially the overview. For the strategic recommendations, I think we can improve things.”
“Of course,” said Hélène.
When Schneider told her that they would have to arrange another meeting to review everything, without fixing a date, she knew the project was dead in the water.
She Rushed Out of the mayor’s office, walking quickly on the newly laid cobblestones, her head like a salad spinner. While she climbed the stairs to the parking lot, she checked her watch. It was too late to go back to the office. She thought about her daughters, the babysitter, Philippe. She would have to call Erwann and explain the situation. In reality, the decision had clearly been made prior to that meeting. Schneider had managed to sideline her even though that whole shitshow was his fault. For years he had been having endless conference call meetings, incapable of organizing his team, an omnipresent manipulator who intoxicated his superiors with technical jargon and showered his subordinates with disjointed directives that had no clear purpose and never achieved anything. He must have dealt with this particular problem over lunch with Politi or the CEO, between the sea bass and the fruit carpaccio, probably expressing a few polite reservations about the Elexia report and using the word “policy,” which in those circles could justify the most jaw-dropping inertia, the craziest convolutions, could paralyze good intentions in a second. Soon his gas plant appeared to be the result of a series of complex and necessary decisions that could be disturbed by the smallest movement, leading to considerable disorder, first among the staff, then from an operational point of view, and that would end up annoying the users—never a good idea, particularly since the press had just unearthed that story about embarrassing subsidies granted to religious charities that had taken over some abandoned allotments near Laxou. Executives like Schneider spent their time covering up the chaos for which they were responsible with sophistries incomprehensible to the layman, making their mistakes seem necessary, disguising their cowardice under a diplomatic exterior. He’d totally screwed her, in other words.
A few sparse raindrops speckled the asphalt. Hélène sped up, encumbered by her skirt and heels. Immediately she was drenched with sweat, the strap of her purse digging into her shoulder while her raincoat slipped from her arm. But she didn’t have time to make it back to her car. The rain lashed down on the city and she began running unsteadily through the suddenly empty streets, phone in hand, head lowered. Around her there was nothing now but the glistening ground, rain hammering onto car hoods and rooftops, the clean smell of the air and, above it all, the invisible sky.
Inside her Volvo, Hélène could only inspect the wreckage. Her long hair had taken on a wretched appearance, like a floorcloth or overcooked noodles. As for her clothes, they were sticky, waterlogged, too tight. With every movement she could feel them impeding her, and the skin on the underside of her thighs was sticking to the leather seat. She took some tissues from the glove box and tried to mop up the worst of the mess. Soon the windows were steamed up and she could see nothing outside but blotting-paper shadows. She was alone with her exasperation and the rumble of the rain. She couldn’t do anything right. In the rearview mirror, she caught sight of her makeup running down her face.
“Shit,” she groaned, tight-throated.
Desperate for some air, she pulled her blouse open and two buttons went flying. She’d paid two hundred euros for this floral-pattern silk blouse and now she may as well toss it in the trash. Seized by a crazy urge to smash everything, she gripped the steering wheel with both hands. Her lips were white. The rain was still pounding hard on the roof, filling the car with that constant drumming noise. Around her the city was just a vague pattern of greens and grays. She was alone.
So she pulled her skirt up over her damp thighs. She was breathing fast, on the verge of sobbing, her back wet and her neck hot. As soon as her legs were open, her right hand slipped beneath her cotton underwear and found the slick folds of her labia. She worked quickly, with two fingers, buttocks stuck to the car’s leather seat, pressing down and circling precisely on the swelling with stubborn persistence. Her pussy grew soft and loose, and soon she had that delicious feeling inside, like a bubble, the warm possibility moving through her belly. All it took was a minute. She sped up, sure of herself, determined as a child. She had been doing this for so long; over the course of her life, she had perfected it. It was her haven and her right. Of course, she loved sex with men too. Their heavy bodies, their hairiness, their smell. The way they flipped you over, wrapped you in their arms, made you feel all small, bursting with happiness under their weight. She loved that, and even the disappointing ones generally gave her some little thrill. All the same, she would not give up this—the manipulation of her sex, the easy activation of her pleasure, so personal, delicate, shameless—for anything in the world. She often touched herself, even when she was in love, or pregnant, or happy, in the shower, in the morning, at work, sometimes on airplanes…and in her car, if she felt like it. From time to time, the desire would seize her so strongly and unexpectedly that she was tempted to pull onto the hard shoulder.
In the sultry atmosphere of the car that day, she masturbated quickly, closing her eyes occasionally, watching out for possible figures through the steamed-up windows, mentally replaying a situation that always worked for her, and suddenly she came, a clear, precise pleasure that spread outward, anesthetizing, leaving her almost at peace, or a little less agitated anyway.
At least she would be relaxed for her date. Then, having pulled her skirt down, she started the engine and set off. She didn’t give a fuck anymore.