The Two Of them went on with their lives, stuffed to the brim and blinkered, punctuated with occasional what’s-the-point feelings. And now with this new thing that occupied the center of their existence: each other.
For Christophe, there were long days spent on the road, roaming the countryside, the interminable round of client meetings, the cold calls and the stupid sales conferences. And then, at eight o’clock, practice sessions at the rink.
When he had Gabriel, he would go to practice only on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He came to an arrangement with Marco, who would pick the boy up at school and take care of him until Christophe came to fetch him around ten, when he would often be asleep. The two men would chat for five minutes in the kitchen and Marco would tell him how it had gone: homework and ground beef with mashed potatoes. Christophe would give Marco a kiss on the cheek, then carry his son out of the house and put him in the back of the station wagon, wrapped up in a blanket, the softest he’d been able to find. Back at home, he would take the child up to his bedroom, undress him, trying not to wake him, then pull the duvet up to his shoulders. He would murmur I love you into the pillow, breathing in the smell of his son’s hair. For a moment he would stand there in the little bedroom and look at the pirate night-light, the collection of Star Wars figures, the tank with the broken cannon, the wallpaper where Gabriel had drawn ships in Crayola.
Charlie was moving in January, and Christophe still hadn’t told his father. The decline in the old man’s faculties seemed to have been on pause for a while, although that had not prevented him from losing his credit card again, nor from leaving the gas on under a saucepan for three hours the week before. And he kept having those terrible fits of rage that made him unrecognizable and terrified the boy, after which he would apologize profusely before retreating to watch TV.
For Christophe, things went on as they had before: nights of fitful sleep, days of physical exhaustion. Now and then he would feel as if the world’s makeup had run, exposing its true face, naked and horrifying. These brief moments of lucidity were like deep dives into memory, bringing back flashes of the past, often while he was on the bus with the hockey team, his forehead pressed against the window, the landscape blurring past his eyes.
He saw himself again as a little boy in the school playground, the blackboard with its round sponge, rules of French grammar and the big chestnut tree through the window. He remembered Jacky and Corbier, the Orinoco and the smell of clementines, playing the Atari console with his brother, riding his BMX, and Christmases better than armistices.
For a long time he had swallowed every lie, taken each curve in the road without blinking. Then, starting with middle school, his life had suddenly accelerated. He’d had to carry a backpack weighing ten kilos, be cool and check out girls, listen to his ever-more-boring teachers drone on as each year passed, shorter than the one before. There had been hockey and the illusions that went with it, Julien acting so differently, that whole farce of their dysfunctional family life, even if it was still full of love. Trips to the fair with Marco and Greg, the Tokaido Express roller coaster and the smell of hot waffles, holding Charlie’s hand in a city-center street one Wednesday afternoon.
And then the words that had cut his life in two: Mom is dead.
Everything had sped up then, until he reached the endurance race known as adulthood: the unending tiredness that nobody ever talked about, clearing one hurdle after another with another one always just ahead. Work, children, and—already—the hint of death, discreet but perceptible because it took him two days to get over a drinking binge, because sleep became a faint mist, blown away by the smallest worry, and because tomorrow it would all be over. This was how Christophe had realized that this life was not his. It had just been a bridge he had crossed, a pair of shoes he had borrowed, leaving him nothing from those first forty years but a string of blurred memories. Ultimately, all he had done was give his strength for a master plan he knew nothing about. The world had perpetuated itself through him, without ever asking him what he thought. When you looked at it objectively, it was enough to make you want to kill yourself.
Thankfully, from time to time, Épinal would win. And on the bus home they would sing and drink vodka until they blacked out.
As for Hélène, she had her hands full too. The uptick predicted by Erwann had occurred: Elexia was attracting new clients every week, and the forecasts were for a year of stupendous growth. For weeks, everyone at the company had been working under pressure, and twice employees had broken down in tears in the middle of the open-plan office. Some of them had even threatened to form a union, but such rebellion was confined to whispers by the coffee machine or via personal messages, and nobody truly believed it would happen. Jean-Charles Parrot and his innovation team, meanwhile, were coming up with innovative solutions, and you could hardly blame them for that. Thanks to Parrot, Elexia would soon be able offer inclusive management training, transition advice, behavioral design modules, cognitive system audits, and tools for environmental and collaborative forecasting. Erwann was ecstatic, and the two men spent hours on end in his mezzanine office, changing the world with a lot of arm-waving and visionary Anglicisms. Erwann was expected to make an important announcement at the Christmas party, which would be bigger than ever that year—a somewhat disturbing prospect, given that the previous year there had been vomit all over the walls and ceiling of the women’s bathroom.
But what most annoyed Hélène was seeing Lison get caught up in all this nonsense. That little jerk Parrot had even given her a benchmark mission: to find out what other regions were doing to help local authorities facing mergers.
“But do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Hélène asked her.
“Oh, I’ll just surf the web. It’s not really that complicated: you start off by saying stuff like”—here Lison made air quotes—“ ‘Now that the stakes have been raised,’ and then you just use loads of words like ‘creative,’ ‘agile,’ blah blah blah.”
“Yeah, although that doesn’t really mean anything.”
“I’ll find a few examples, a bit of Rhône-Alpes here, some Aquitaine there, you know…Anyway, the main thing is coming up with a good triplet.”
“Huh?”
“The three Bs, the three Vs, the three Is. Doesn’t matter what it is, but there has to be a triplet or people start to worry.”
“And what triplet do you have in mind?” Hélène asked, gazing in amusement at her intern, who that day was wearing platform sneakers, boyfriend jeans, and an impressively oversized camel coat.
“I’m thinking of going with the three Cs. ‘Collective,’ ‘concerned,’ and…”
“ ‘Complex’?”
“Nah, too easy.”
“ ‘Creative.’ ”
“Too clichéd.”
“ ‘Cooperative.’ ”
“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘calamitous.’ ”
“That works too,” Hélène agreed. “Although personally I would go with ‘cretin.’ ”
“Yeah, and I’ll use a slide of Parrot’s face to illustrate it.”
Despite everything, Hélène and Lison had managed to make their Thursday meetings at Le Galway a regular thing. Philippe knew about them and would go home early to look after the girls. Sitting in the pub with a pint each, the two women would have playful, feisty, in-depth discussions. Hélène’s secret affair naturally took up a lot of the conversation. The day after she and Christophe had consummated their relationship, Hélène had proudly announced: “Well, it happened.”
“Really? Come on then, tell me…”
Hélène had pulled a face, but a few minutes later she had told her friend everything.
For Christophe And Hélène, the Hotel Kyriad had become an island in the raging ocean of their lives. They went there once or twice a week, meeting briefly in the mornings or afternoons, never getting enough of each other, always wanting more.
Christophe usually arrived first. Spotting his station wagon, Hélène would park at a distance away from it, out of some inexplicable superstition. The hotel staff were used to seeing them now. Everything had become familiar, automatic. She climbed the stairs and scratched at the door. Christophe opened it, barefoot, then grabbed her hand and pulled her inside. And there, still standing, eyes closed, they kissed. At first he hadn’t done it the way she liked, but they had gradually become attuned, finding their own style through trial and error. Hélène, too, had learned some new techniques. For example, unlike Philippe, Christophe was not a big fan of her being on top. He wasn’t especially keen on foreplay either. He preferred to just grab hold of her, unzip her pants or hitch up her skirt, slide down her panties, and fuck, without bothering to undress properly. The clothes would come off later, in the middle of their lovemaking, when they paused to catch their breath or drink from a bottle of water. And then they would get back to it, licking, sucking, avid for new sensations. Christophe would hold himself back to make it last, Hélène gripping his shoulders, hanging on to his arms, holding his thighs and pulling him into her.
When they first started, she would always lower the lights to protect herself. It had been so long since she’d been completely naked in front of a man, and the thought of it brought all sorts of unpleasant ideas to mind. Would he like my pubic hair, my belly? Had my pregnancies changed something—would I be tight enough, narrow enough, smooth enough, young enough? She’d wanted to ask him for reassurance about all these things but hadn’t dared. And sometimes, watching him walk to the bathroom after sex, observing the way he moved with the manly assurance of someone used to being naked in locker rooms, she would think: shit, I bet he never worries about this stuff at all, I bet he’s never even wondered if he’s fuckable or not. This thought made her angry. In that moment she wanted to hurt him, to grab a fistful of the fat on his belly, to yank out one of those hairs that grew from his back, and tell him: look, you’re flabby, you’re heavy, you’re changing, your skin is less elastic than it used to be, and look what a mess your hair is—you’re getting older too, so why do I obsess about it while you’re totally fine?
They would hook up in the morning, or sometimes the afternoon, and they would have sex, trying to take their time despite the inevitable stopwatch, despite the world waiting for them just outside the door. And then, doggy-style across the bed, or forehead to forehead, their bellies making toilet-plunger noises, dark-eyed and sweat-soaked, they would make love. Christophe did not think too deeply about it all. For him, this girl, like hockey, was from his life before, from the glory years that he still yearned for, and—as was his habit—he had let himself be swept along by the current. And now here he was. He could depend on those two special hours at the end of the road, the cocoon of their room, this woman who cared about him, and whom he found ever more beautiful, familiarity acting like the best cosmetic in the world.
He liked going to the hotel, which she always paid for. He enjoyed the simplicity of the surfaces, the ergonomic efficiency of it all, the short distance between bed and shower, the absolute cleanliness of the towels, the neutral flooring and the television set hung from the wall, the plastic-wrapped cups, the precise click that the door made when it fell shut behind them, the Wi-Fi code printed on a little card next to the kettle, all this limited but unvarying comfort. To him, there was nothing anonymous about these interchangeable hotel rooms. On the contrary, they were a sort of refuge, a parenthetical setting where he and Hélène could fuck to their hearts’ content, yell if they felt like it, and wipe themselves on the sheets afterward, where they could talk about themselves without inhibitions. All things considered, it was perhaps the last of these that Christophe needed most, a confessional. He griped about not getting enough game time, about his father, who was losing his marbles, while Hélène complained about her job and her partner, who, maybe because he suspected something, was absent even more often than usual.
Having said that, when Philippe did deign to grace them with his presence—on weekends, for example—things weren’t much better. They slept in, spent a long time in the bathroom; the girls refused to go outside or eat lunch and instead spent hours glued to the TV. And she always had some work to finish up at home, as did he. Sometimes, sitting at the table, Hélène would catch her partner staring at her moodily, and with an aggressive jut of the chin she would ask him what his problem was. He never said anything. At bedtime, Mouche always wanted one more story. Clara had trouble falling asleep. It was probably just the accumulated fatigue of winter; the holidays would do them good.
All the same, Hélène did sometimes look at her daughters and think: What am I doing? In those moments, she felt like she was committing a crime. Then she checked her WhatsApp messages and found a short note from Christophe, and everything else faded into the background.
But Christmas was approaching again, and they had to plan their vacation. Hélène made her intentions clear.
“I can’t take more than a week off this year.”
“How come?”
Philippe was on the couch in his bathrobe, laptop on his knees. His hair was still wet from the shower. The girls were sitting on the rug in front of the stove, the elder one playing on the tablet while her younger sister waited her turn.
“Work is crazy at the moment.”
“Same for me.”
“I already explained all this. With Parrot around, I can’t afford to let my guard down. It’s as simple as that.”
“Which days do you plan to take off?”
“From the seventeenth to the twenty-sixth.”
“So we’re not going on vacation?”
“We could.”
“I don’t see how. And I’m going to be stuck home alone for a week with nothing to do.”
“You can look after the girls.”
Philippe glared at her.
“Well,” she said in a more pacifying tone, “we could get a rental place in the Vosges for a week. Saturday to Saturday. We could celebrate Christmas there. That way, we wouldn’t need to travel far.”
Hearing this suggestion, the girls pricked up their ears and awaited the verdict.
“The skiing there sucks,” Philippe replied.
“I’m just trying to come up with a solution.”
Clara and Mouche besieged their father then, and he finally gave way, though not without making a few unpleasant remarks. Hmm, the holidays should be fun, thought Hélène. Then she left the room and locked herself in the bathroom, where she wrote to Christophe:
Will I see you tomorrow?
Instantly those flickering dots announced that he was writing a response.
I miss you.
She smiled, her heart suddenly released from its knots of tension.
What time? Christophe added.
Eleven.
Can’t wait.
Me too.
I want you.
Your dick…, she wrote, grinning mischievously.
The dots reappeared and she stifled a giggle. It always worked.
Your ass, he wrote.
Your hands.
Your breasts.
Your shoulders.
Your legs.
She sat there for a moment, thinking, then slyly played an unexpected card.
Your BIG brain (with a heart).
More dots.
Now you’re just making fun of me, Christophe replied.
She laughed and quickly wrote a few dangerous words, which she deleted right away, seized by the irrational fear that he might have seen them.
With The Two of them swept along by the current of life, those brief encounters at the hotel became their raft. They clung to it and, in the process, learned about each other. Hélène discovered that he was gentle, a little cowardly, easily won over to her point of view, but at the same time there was within him a sort of black hole into whose depths she could not see. She was spellbound by this, the strange mystery at the heart of this apparently guileless man.
For his part, Christophe admired Hélène’s abilities, the places she had been, the three languages she spoke, her eloquence, and the opinions she had on pretty much everything. Not that he was especially convinced by them, but their existence was enough to impress him. As was her aggressiveness toward men in general, which added more value in his eyes to the sweetness she showed to him. That a woman as classy and well-paid as her, with such beautiful hands, gold bangles around her wrist and a five-thousand-euro watch, could take care of him the way she did…Christophe found this deeply touching. When her skin brushed against his, he had the impression that she was rubbing off on him, that a little of her worth became his. To have her in his bed, even for an hour, even for five minutes, was to step into that privileged world. He just regretted that he had to keep these incursions into the wider world to himself; he had once tried opening up to Marco on the subject, but his friend’s reaction had quickly cooled him off.
“Oh yeah, I bet she sucks like a Dyson.”
Christophe gave up then and there.
Hélène was also one of those women who feel compelled to try to save everyone around them. When she noticed that something was wrong—if Christophe replied too abruptly, for instance, glancing at his watch and becoming a grumpy, obtuse stranger once again—she would disarm him with a word, lasso him back before he went off on one of his epic sulks. She gave him advice that he rarely followed, wanted to change him for his own good.
Watching him struggle sometimes, she would think: yeah, men like him get no respite at all. They were always working, uncomfortable in their dysfunctional families, without enough cash to treat themselves occasionally. With their love of soccer, their big cars, and their fat asses, they had become the lowest of the low. After centuries of relative dominion, these poor guys suddenly felt ill at ease in this world that had once seemed to fit them perfectly. The fact that there were so many of them made no difference. They felt cornered, outmoded, fundamentally inadequate, insulted by the Zeitgeist. Men raised as men, basic and cracked, relics of another age.
When he told her about the evenings he spent with his friends, getting wasted and messing around with Nerf guns, or playing hockey at forty, she couldn’t help thinking of those poor fools who dress up to restage Waterloo on the weekends, or those middle-aged kids who love paintball.
Yes, Christophe upset her sometimes, and when that happened she would feel a terrible unease, a sudden shame. What was she doing with a guy like that? But he also made her feel almost unbearably tender at times. Maybe, ridiculously, he reminded her of her father.
“Guys are such a pain,” she would tell him. “We always end up playing nursemaid to you.”
“What are you talking about?” Christophe would reply, immediately on the defensive. “I never asked you for anything.”
But Hélène was a good listener. And, with her, Christophe dared to open his heart, expressing in a handful of words his meager lot of frustrations and impossibilities, punctuated with mirthless laughter: well, that’s life, you act like a dick and then you die, a great adventure my ass.
For example, he would tell her that his father called the kid Julien half the time.
“Why Julien?”
“Julien’s my brother.”
“You have a brother?”
He also talked to her about his friend who’d gotten involved with a home helper and was going straight from sworn bachelor to family breadwinner. The wedding was due to take place in the spring.
“It’d be funny if you came,” said Christophe.
“To the wedding?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re losing it, kiddo.”
But she gave him a kiss anyway.
Hélène was less talkative. Her meetings with Lison were probably enough to get her feelings out, even if she still preferred asking questions to confiding. That generation never ceased to surprise her. Maybe because they had grown up with the internet and social networks. Maybe because they were harbingers of the end of the world. Or, at least, that Hélène’s generation was being evicted from the conquered land of youth. In any case, that odd mix of prudishness and passion, of commitment and I-don’t-give-a-fuck-ism, of depression and total delusion still took her breath away.
Once, the two women had talked about that mindfuck of a contradiction that they found themselves trapped within sometimes, in intimate moments, when the great project of women’s liberation collided with their strange desire to be abased.
“What contradiction?” Lison had asked, instinctively dialectic. “They’ve got nothing to do with each other.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“You can’t be serious!”
They each finished their second pint of IPA and the intern, loosened by alcohol, naturally took on the role of teacher.
“Take me, for example: I love it when someone spits on me.”
Hélène’s eyes went big and round and she burst out laughing, before asking her friend to elaborate. What on earth was she talking about?
“I don’t know why, it just drives me crazy. I was talking about it the other day with my friend Robin—he’s gay, a quality engineer in something or other, Irish roots, you know, a really cool and beautiful dude, you should see his house, it’s gorgeous, plants everywhere, I don’t know how he does it, I kill them within days, anyway he’s a total slut—guys like that do anything and everything, I swear, the stuff they tell me, you wouldn’t believe it. So anyway, spitting…he’s totally into it, of course. But then there was our friend Laura. That chick gave me hell about it—it’s a lack of self-respect, a man spitting on you, it’s disgusting. She went on for ten minutes like that and I couldn’t take it anymore. I just rolled my eyes in the end. What are you gonna do? Anyway, nobody gets to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do in bed.”
Later, Hélène shared this anecdote with Christophe, who was pretty turned on by the idea.
“We should try it.”
“Okay, but I’m the one who spits on you.”
He grinned. Their relationship wasn’t so bad, really. They were close enough that their boundaries became blurred and sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, a dangerous declaration would make its way through.
One Night, Hélène got a call from Christophe while she was driving. She answered right away, assuming something terrible must have happened, because normally he just messaged her on WhatsApp.
“Hi.”
“Are you okay?”
“I had a little problem. Car accident.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t really know. Must have fallen asleep at the wheel. Anyway, I crashed the car. I’m two or three kilometers from Saint-Dié.”
“You fell asleep?”
“Yeah, it’s possible. I’m so tired these days.”
The night before, practice had gone on until eleven, and work was always a nightmare at this time of year. He’d had to drive to Saint-Dizier and then Commercy, followed by an industrial zone near Metz, before going back down toward Lunéville, Baccarat, and lastly Saint-Dié.
“You’re going to kill yourself at this rate.”
“Yeah…that’s not why I’m calling, though. I’m supposed to pick Gabriel up from school later. Nobody can do it. Marco’s at work, so is Greg. And there’s no point even thinking about my father.”
“Okay. So?”
“I was wondering if you could go…”
Hélène was spellbound for a moment by the rhythmic ballet of the windshield wipers. She was stuck in the six o’clock traffic jam, watching the lights turn red then green then red again without advancing a single meter. She was trapped.
“I’m not your wife, you know.”
A heavy silence. She began looking through her purse for her cigarettes, but of course they weren’t there. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.
“I understand,” said Christophe. “I’ll figure something out.”
He hung up and Hélène found herself alone inside the car. The rain was falling, as soft as snow, and the red taillights of other vehicles snaked in a long line ahead of her. She raised her index finger to her lips and bit off a flake of dry skin. Oh, fuck it.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, okay. I can pick him up. But it’ll be at least an hour before I can get there.”
“Oh my God, thank you! I’ll call the school. You’re saving my life here.”
“And what am I supposed to do with your kid?”
“Take him for a Coke somewhere. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’m waiting for the tow truck. The garage is going to lend me a car. Then I have to get home. It won’t be long.”
“All right…”
“Thank you,” said Christophe.
“Yeah, yeah,” Hélène said, trying to sound cold and casual.
But they were both happy.
HE WAS A little boy with pale eyes, a round face, grime under his fingernails, and—like most kids in winter—a runny nose. He was about as normal-looking as a little boy can be, except maybe for the glasses he wore, which made his eyes look enormous and perpetually surprised.
“I’m a friend of your daddy,” she told him outside the school.
“Okay,” he replied, not looking particularly bothered either way.
Since he didn’t ask for any more details, she explained that his father had had a problem with his car but that he would be there soon. Her name was Hélène. There was nothing to worry about.
“I’m not worried.”
He held her hand and followed her, the hood of his coat pulled down over his face. She felt slightly intimidated and could not think of anything else to say until they were inside the café.
“Would you like a Coke?”
He thought about this for a moment.
“A Fanta, please.”
She had chosen the first café they’d come across, a small place with bathrooms at the back of the room. The kid sat facing her and did not bother taking off his coat. His eyes were immediately drawn to a television screen showing a soccer game.
“You like soccer?”
“It’s okay.”
The café owner brought over the Fanta and a cup of tea. Hélène checked her watch, then looked at the boy.
“What grade are you in?”
The kid, absorbed by the images on the screen, did not reply. He had placed both his hands on the table, fingers interlaced, and this posture, and his serious expression, made him look disconcertingly grown-up. Hélène smiled.
“Do you have any homework?”
“No,” he said.
“Could you look at me when I speak to you, please?”
He turned toward her and forced himself to smile. Then he drank some of his Fanta.
“So you’re Gabriel, right?”
“Yes.”
“I have two daughters.”
“Oh?”
He did not seem particularly interested. She decided her attempts at conversation were going nowhere, but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. So she grabbed her phone and began looking through her inbox. There were four hundred seventy-six unread emails. Many of them would probably never be read.
By the time Christophe finally turned up, the little café was practically the only lit-up building on that quiet street. He stood outside on the sidewalk for a moment, taking the time to look at them—Hélène and his son, alone in the café, as in a display window, the walls behind them decorated with plates and pennants. What the hell were he and Hélène playing at, he wondered.