Hélène had Left that first date in a total daze, even if the date itself was probably not the main cause of her confusion. Anyway, instead of heading toward Nancy so she could go straight home, she had given in to old habits and had, without even realizing, ended up on the road to Remiremont, the one they used to take when she was a little girl going to see her grandparents. A few seconds of distraction had been enough for the memory of this old itinerary to take over. The past was quick to take over, given half a chance.
She made a U-turn as soon as she realized her mistake, but then she got lost somewhere between Dinozé and Archettes. Strange, because there were no surprises on that stretch of road. In the end, she stopped by the roadside to check her GPS, but she had no signal and finally, losing her patience, she got out to smoke a cigarette in the dark, leaning against her car. At one point, another driver slowed down to stare at this woman in skirt and high heels, smoking at midnight in the middle of nowhere. What was she doing there? Was she a whore? Hélène texted Lison: A disaster. I’ll tell you later.
To Start With, however, the situation had seemed fairly promising. Manuel looked like his photographs, which was in itself a pleasant surprise. Early thirties, plain shirt, New Balance sneakers, a slightly bewildered look, like a teenager who’d just been dragged out of bed, but he had gentle eyes and a flat stomach, which changed things. They met at a café terrace in the center of Épinal. They had a drink there and chatted about everything and nothing.
Even so, Hélène found it hard to relax. She didn’t like Épinal, and she couldn’t shake the fear of bumping into an old acquaintance. That was the problem with little dumps like this: they were always full of familiar faces, friends from another lifetime who could collar you without warning, how are you, it’s been too long, how are your parents? Not only that, but these acquaintances lived barely three kilometers away so they always found it a little odd that she had come to town without bothering to pay them a visit.
At first, she and Manuel went over, in person, several subjects that they had already discussed online, as if to check. They would finish each other’s sentences during this strange phase when every word felt like a sort of password. On the other hand, the somewhat risqué conversations they’d had online seemed never to have existed. Sitting face-to-face, they kept to a cordial respectability, making small talk about their work, that storm a few hours earlier, a movie they’d both liked—that romance with Vincent Cassel; on the other hand, he’d found the latest Tarantino annoying, too much dialogue, and she was happy to take his word for it. In any case, she didn’t really like that kind of thing: locked-room narratives annoyed her almost as much as stories based on misunderstandings.
More than once, though, Hélène sensed something disturbing beneath Manuel’s words, which left an unpleasant wrinkle on the surface of their conversation. For example, he did not think it was really so absurd that the British wished to withdraw from the EU. Not that he had anything against Europe of course. He also had a tendency to overuse the pronoun “they” to describe the media, lawmakers, and the occult forces responsible for weather forecasts. Hélène did not really take offense at this, but soon she began to feel uncomfortable, her skin warm, as if she were wearing one of those tight synthetic sweaters. She wasn’t sure if her discomfort was caused by the situation or by the sultriness left behind by the storm. She told him she was going to the bathroom to freshen up and, when she got in there, took a moment to stare at herself in the mirror. She examined her own face, noticing a wrinkle here, a few white hairs at her temples, maybe a slight sag in her cheeks…Her gaze, on the other hand, was steady, deep, sparkling. What the hell are you doing here, woman? she asked herself silently, then thought about that guy, wondering if he was worth it. In truth, she did not have any strong feelings for him. Maybe she ought to keep trying. No doubt that was the price of adventure.
With a confident, helical gesture she retied her chignon before going back to the terrace and ordering another drink—a spritz this time—which helped her better appreciate Manuel’s gray-blue eyes, his sexy forearms, and a thousand other details that had been invisible ten minutes earlier but had now becoming pretty tempting. A splash of prosecco and he had ceased to be a stranger.
Unfortunately, sensing this change in his fortunes, Manuel had imprudently grown emboldened and had started sharing secrets. This was how she learned that he had been preparing to try out for a spot on the Survivor-style reality TV show Koh-Lanta for the past two years, something he had not thought to mention before. He went running three times a week, and attended a gym near his home as often as he could to focus on cardio exercises. He had learned scuba diving, started yoga. On sunny days he went hiking in the Vosges mountains, and he fasted every month in anticipation of the hardships he might have to endure on the island. Hélène listened to his account of this toughening-up process with dwindling amusement. Next, he told her his body mass index, his maximum aerobic speed, and the comparative disadvantages of various immunity tests. But, all things considered, the most important thing was mentality. And he had nothing to fear on that score.
During the third drink the situation took another turn for the worse when Hélène recognized a girl on the terrace who had gone to the same middle school as her. Sonia Mangin, a blonde with pinkish skin, had lost her father at twelve, was already smoking in seventh grade, and had four older brothers, all of them completely crazy. Back then, the rumor was that she had done it with the entire subdivision. And now here she was, sitting only ten meters away, looking almost beautiful, or at least well-off, in the company of a tall guy dressed in a striped shirt and imitation suede loafers. Hélène sensed those prying blue eyes fastened upon her and she felt certain that Sonia had recognized her. In the end, the woman waved at Hélène and started trying to talk to her, in the middle of a clandestine date. All of this was so disturbing that Hélène almost forgot about her apprentice survivalist. Just then, he decided it would be a great idea to unbutton his shirt and show her his Maori tattoo. Hélène, feeling suddenly very sober, stared at him with wide eyes and burning cheeks.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Huh?”
“Stop it, we’re not that drunk…”
Her date appeared very upset by this reaction, his eyebrows sending several surreptitious distress signals before he quickly buttoned up his shirt.
“Chill out,” he muttered. “Who cares what other people think?”
It took him five long minutes to emerge from this sulk, while Hélène searched desperately for a way out, checking her watch, her phone, the sky above their heads. Philippe had not tried to call her, so that was something at least.
“I think I should probably get going,” she said.
“No, listen…”
He told her how sorry he was. Surely they weren’t just going to separate like that. He wanted to invite her to dinner, as friends, so they could end their date on good terms. Meanwhile, Sonia Mangin had started whispering and her boyfriend had even turned to stare on a couple of occasions. Hélène had to move quickly before her former schoolmate came over for that dreaded class reunion.
“Okay, listen, I’m happy to go somewhere for dinner, as long as it’s quick and simple.”
“We could try L’Étiquette.”
“I’d prefer somewhere quieter.”
“Oh, it’s really quiet during the week.”
“Less central, then.”
“Well, I’m not going to take you to Flunch…”
And as Hélène dropped her pack of cigarettes into her purse, Manuel played his trump card.
“Listen, I know where we can go. It’s really chill.”
And so they found themselves at Les Moulins Bleus, a chain restaurant that had the twin advantages of guaranteeing fast service and being fairly out of the way.
Inside, the Layout reminded Hélène of her open-plan office, with the islands of tables and the low dividers decorated with fake plants. The waitstaff hurried through their trajectories, flashing smiles and bursting through the swing doors that led to the kitchen, from which emerged a mixture of smells. As soon as they entered, Hélène began examining the customers, on the lookout for a face she knew, a profile liable to turn and smile at her. Then, despite reassuring herself that all these people were strangers, she chose the most remote table in the room. Screens high up on the walls showed a slideshow of photographs of the restaurant’s owner in the company of various minor celebrities: Michel Cymes, Frank Lebœuf, Véronika Loubry. The very long menu offered everything from pizza to grilled shrimp, not forgetting the inevitable café gourmand.
“Happy?” Manuel asked.
“I’m actually not very hungry.”
“You could get the carpaccio. Or the Caesar salad.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah what?”
“The carpaccio. That’ll be fine.”
After ordering, they found themselves alone with the undeniable fact of their failed date. He stared at her now like a basset hound anxiously inspecting its food bowl. She didn’t dare move. The conversation was like Morse code. Hélène took refuge in looking at the tables around them.
To their left, three middle-aged women were drinking cocktails and swapping tales from the teachers’ lounge. Behind Manuel were some tipsy men in loose suits—sales reps, she reckoned—who were ordering pitchers and taking turns to go outside to smoke. Farther off, a table of eight had already started on dessert. You could tell from the clothes they were wearing, and the children’s clean faces and neatly combed hair, that they had made an effort. This must be a special occasion, thought Hélène; someone’s birthday, perhaps. Elsewhere, she spotted a fiftysomething couple trying the veal Milanese, a girl with a French manicure being chatted to death by a boy who could hardly breathe in his fitted shirt, an elderly man with a flattened face who was eating kebabs with his son. And over there at the back, near the parking lot, a woman with attractive, regular features and yellow skin, having dinner with a man Hélène could see only from behind. She began to stare at this woman, fascinated by the nonstop flood of words that was bursting from between her lips, admiring her combative expression, and surprised by the way the man seemed to be simply taking it all. She was curious: What was going on between them? What was the cause of this simmering public storm? How much of it was love and how much rage?
The waitress came over to ask how their meal was and Hélène abruptly returned to reality. On the other side of the table, Manuel was scowling. They had been eating in silence. From time to time she glanced over at the couple again and saw the same attitudes: the woman pretty and imperious, the man’s heavy figure remaining motionless. Then, just before he stood up, the man turned toward her and Hélène’s heart split in two inside her chest.
“Something wrong?” Manuel asked.
“No, no, I’m fine.”
Within her, however, the scaffolding of adulthood had just collapsed. Hands trembling, she poured herself a glass of wine.
Her date, tight-lipped, asked: “What exactly is the problem?”
Hélène had tried to distance herself from the past, through schools, diplomas, and good habits. She had left this town to become the woman of her own dreams, efficient and ambitious, a woman of consequence. And now, in a chain restaurant stuck between a cemetery and a parking lot, she had, like an idiot, experienced a hot flash at the merest glimpse of Christophe Marchal. Twenty years of hard work, all for nothing.
After that, she was incapable of swallowing a single morsel. Her adolescence had overpowered her, constricting her throat, filling her head with vague impressions of rules and laughter, tears over nothing, friends and boys, the skating rink on Saturdays, sheets of graph paper and folders that clicked shut, and those high-flown little words written on a desk between a chaos of insults and the drawing of a dick spurting cum.
“All right, maybe we should go.”
“What?”
“You look miles away.”
“I’m just a little tired.”
“Bored, more like.”
Manuel’s tone had turned abruptly cold and Hélène felt almost afraid. On the other side of the restaurant, Christophe Marchal was coming back from the bathroom. He didn’t even bother sitting back down at the table. He and the woman exchanged a few more words, probably logistical, although she sensed some dark emotion behind their eyes, and then they left without a backward glance. It cost Hélène an effort not to run over to the window to see if they were getting in the same car.
A little later, in the parking lot of Les Moulins Bleus, Manuel made one last attempt at reconciliation.
“Listen, we got off to a bad start. But we both know why we’re here. We’re not going to just leave it like this, are we?”
“Oh, yes, I think I’m done,” said Hélène, unlocking her Volvo.
Manuel grabbed her by the arm. “Who the fuck do you think you are? You’re not some twenty-year-old model, you know.”
“Asshole,” hissed Hélène.
And she was out of there.
Ten minutes later, the asshole in question was sending her abusive texts and messages on Tinder, calling her an arrogant bitch, telling her to go fuck herself. Hélène kept blocking him, without even bothering to slow down. Then she took a wrong turn and now she was smoking a cigarette on the side of the road, her mind overflowing with feelings more than two decades old. On her phone, she googled the name Christophe Marchal, but the signal was too weak and the information remained hidden behind a whirling circle. So she decided to go home, and if the inhabitants of that little Vosges village had not all been staring at their TV screens or in bed or just too old, they might have seen a black Volvo speeding through the only street in their village at close to a hundred kilometers per hour. Inside it was a woman high on crazy daydreams, anxious, in a rush, her heart full to bursting.
Back at Home, Hélène climbed the staircase from the garage to the first floor on tiptoe, high heels in hand. Philippe had left a note on the table. The babysitter had not been able to make it, so he had looked after the girls himself. An exclamation point signaled his pride at finally acting like a father. This was followed by some unimportant practical information and an affectionate sign-off in which he called Hélène “pussycat.” While she read this, she took a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge and drank several mouthfuls, before going upstairs, her skirt hitched high up her thighs to make it easier to walk.
She loved the quietness of the house at night, after everyone else had gone to bed. It was a building of sharp edges with an almost horizontal roof; the windows were large and somewhat exhibitionist, and to reach the second floor she had to climb black stone steps with no handrail, which always made her fear that she would fall and break something. It was, in other words, a house that a real-estate agent would undoubtedly describe as “modern.” Outside, the two family SUVs were parked on the gravel driveway, like a pair of static cows, sheltered by the perfectly pruned trees nearby with their sheep-like forms. There were houses like this in every town in France, their serenity inspired by Japan and the California hills, enclosing within them the secret of their possibility, the essential chaos of business and money required to pay for these monoliths of fake eternity. Comfort came at the price of blood and hours, but late at night, as it was now, with the town sleeping below, Hélène could enjoy being at home.
She took a quick—and very hot—shower, then went into the bedrooms to watch over her flock. Philippe was asleep, one arm under his pillow, and the girls were sleeping so deeply that they might have been dead. Hélène hurried back to the kitchen, in bathrobe and slippers. Less than a minute later, with her laptop on her knees, she searched the internet for this guy who had just reappeared in her life.
After typing his name into the search bar, she was bombarded with names, dates, places. She had not even taken the time to put on her reading glasses, so she had to lean down, her nose close to the screen as it buzzed with old memories. Now and again, a drop of water would fall from her drenched hair onto the keyboard and she would wipe it away with the back of her hand. Scrolling through a blog by some hard-core hockey fan, she came upon some old newspaper articles about the 1993 final. A photograph showed a cloud of black-and-white dots, and yet it was clearly identifiable as Christophe. The headline was a quote from Christophe’s postgame interview: “This defeat is not the end.”
For more than an hour, she entertained herself stirring up the past with the churn of algorithms. On the website Copains d’Avant, other names resurfaced. John Morel. Magalie Clasquin. Virginie Comte. Jean-Didier Trombini. Marc Lebat. She had forgotten all of them, and here they were now, their class photos neatly lined up, revealing those ghostly features, those improbable haircuts, those big multicolored sweaters, that peculiar fashion where grunge met the French provinces and tried to find some sort of compromise. There was a chalkboard showing the year for each class, and there, in the last row, was that guy she used to think was so cute but who just looked like a jerk to her now. As for Hélène, she had always regarded herself as clumsy and awkward-looking, but in fact she looked pretty good with her long hair and that Oxbow jacket that had cost her three weeks of family negotiations. At the time, she would have gladly sold both her parents to wear that brand.
Her best friend, Charlotte Brassard, was right there next to her. The two girls wore the same clothes, more or less, the same hair clip; they even chewed the same flavor of gum—passion fruit. It was strange, seeing Charlotte again, with her perfect little face and her Benetton sweater. And yet the pixelated face on the screen did not match the one in Hélène’s memory. Curiously, it was the photograph that seemed blurry, and the memory quite precise. It was all there though: the decor, and the distribution of a moment when everything changed, a moment that still mattered even now—old friends betrayed, the new bestie, and the others forming the mild hell that she had wanted to escape, come what may. Ultimately, that photograph was merely a monument for the dead, a lie set in stone, the gravestone for her thirteen-year-old self.
She checked the Facebook profiles for various people to see what had become of them. Plenty had put on weight, the men losing their hair…some of the women too, in fact. They all appeared happy. They were accountants, bakers, assistant managers, visual merchandisers, English teachers, housewives and proud of it. Some had put together photo albums to show off their success. Each time, Hélène found the same children, the same vacations, the picture of a big motorcycle or a Labrador with a bandana around its neck. In the end, it was all rather depressing.
She concentrated for a moment on Charlotte, who had a LinkedIn account and now lived in Luxembourg, where she worked as a transfer agent. She had studied economics and management in Lille. But there were no recent photographs and no other details. She was not on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Hélène was reduced to guessing at her existence, somewhere on the other side of the border. To think that they had slept in the same bed, had even fooled around once—during a party at Sarah Grandemange’s house. She could still remember the wrinkled skin of her fingers afterward.
“What are you doing?”
Philippe had just appeared at the top of the stairs. He was wearing boxer shorts and his hair was disheveled.
“Nothing. Did I wake you?”
“It’s two in the morning. What the hell?”
She took care not to close her laptop, because that would have looked suspicious. Instead, she showed him the results of her search.
“I grabbed something to eat and then went down this rabbit hole.”
Philippe put his hands on Hélène’s shoulders and bent down for a better look.
“Look,” she said, scrolling down the page.
“What is it?”
“A website where you can find your old high school friends. It’s crazy seeing all those faces again.”
Philippe’s face lit up and reverted to his usual mocking expression.
“Oh yeah! I got sucked into this one day at the office. Wasted a whole afternoon on it. It’s a nightmare, this kind of thing.”
Shoulder to shoulder, they spent a while laughing at those ridiculous faces, the surprising transformations, the stories that people told, the whole drama of lives spread over social networks.
“Then again, we’re not much better, are we?”
“What do you mean?”
“We take pictures of our desserts. We show ourselves on the beach or on skiing trips. You did almost a whole album on our yucca.”
“True,” Hélène admitted.
Philippe went over to the sink and drank some water from the faucet.
“Shall we go to bed?” asked Hélène, closing her laptop.
“Yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.”
But she knew that he would spend ten minutes going through his emails before joining her. There could be a message from the United States or Amsterdam and he would answer it right away, as if he still belonged to that caste of twenty-four-hour people, the white-shirt tribe, mercantile princes using planes and computers to plot the invisible takeover of the world with products and services. Hélène had wanted that too once, a satellite life set to GMT, no longer having to lug the enormous suitcase to vacations in the Balearic Islands, but instead speeding through airports with her sleek, rigid Samsonite, catching planes the way others catch trains, knowing bars and hotels all around the globe, having a beautiful apartment that you hardly ever use, never complaining, never feeling tired, a super-productive proton surfing the waves of the Zeitgeist.
Instead of which she was thinking about Christophe Marchal.
Under the duvet, she wondered what he was doing, what his life was like, whether he had kids. Tomorrow, she would continue her little investigation. He can’t have been very successful, she thought, if he’s still living around here. He had probably married some local girl, failed his exams, and was now living a life pretty similar to his parents’ before him, a life of dignity, the life of a schmuck. Whatever, there could be no doubt that their positions in the great pecking order had been inverted. The champion was now a loser. The class dork had changed.
She didn’t sleep much that night, but her dreams were sweet.