For the Christmas party, Erwann hired the services of the best caterer in the city. The buffet was a reflection of Elexia’s ambition and success. Vegetarian dishes with seasonal ingredients, more than fifteen varieties of cheese, oysters and exotic fruit, and a huge heap of elaborate petit fours that shared a table with piles of empty gift boxes, bottles of Burgundy, and bottled local beers half-submerged in bowls of ice.
But what Hélène and Lison liked best was the Ruinart champagne. Erwann had boasted of ordering twenty cases. Gifts for clients—and therefore tax-deductible.
“How long will this thing go on?” asked Lison.
“A while,” said Hélène.
Every Christmas party began the same way. In the open-plan office transformed into a dance floor, earnest discussions about the company’s activity would alternate with more lighthearted chatter. Now and then, someone would crack a joke and there’d be a ripple of laughter. Female employees who’d managed to get their kids to bed were already baring their fangs, determined to go a little wild. Later, they would be forced to take a taxi home, and the next day they would regret the excesses of the night; not that this would prevent them doing the same thing again as soon as they possibly could. A handful of men with vertical faces were discussing the future of hybrid cars or the monetary policy of the European Central Bank, incapable as yet of departing from their self-image of dry competence, while the junior consultants swarmed cheerfully, quietly joking like kids taking First Communion, but secretly determined to get smashed and, if possible, laid. Everyone was cheerful, tense, wary.
Because it always went the same way. There was this traditional get-together in the middle of winter, just before the holidays, when alcohol flowed like water and the pressure was momentarily lifted. Indiscreet revelations, shameful couplings, even just an act of clumsiness could ruin years of hard work in the eyes of your superiors. The more reasonable employees could foresee such missteps and promised themselves they would leave early. But the veneer always cracked in the end. After months spent working breathlessly, focused on deadlines, caught between their clients and their managers, they couldn’t hope to maintain that stoic detachment for long.
“Where did Erwann go?”
Lison, who that night was wearing an angora cardigan over a Ramones T-shirt, stood up on tiptoes to get a better view, but she could not see him anywhere.
“He’s up to something.”
“Hmm, that’s not a good sign.”
“No…”
Just after eight, the intern plugged her phone into a pair of speakers and pressed play on a playlist entitled “Turning Shit into Gold.” Within seconds, the atmosphere was transformed. The rising alcohol level in each body also did its work, and soon people were mingling more boldly, talking more loudly, and starting to dance. Out of nowhere, they were wiggling hips, touching arms. Even Parrot seemed to have abandoned his halo for the night. His facial expression was mocking, which made him look juvenile—and rather sexy, if Hélène was honest. She took the opportunity to approach him.
“So…?” she said.
Instantly, she saw wariness transform his features. His big grin shrunk to little more than a faint, ironic curl of the lips.
“So…what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hélène simpered. “We never talk. I was just wondering if you were happy. How are things going for you?”
Ninon Carpentier and Karim Lebœuf, two junior consultants notorious for following Parrot around like lost sheep in the hope of some kind of reward, exchanged a sideways glance and hid behind their glasses.
“Great, actually. We’ve done some pretty interesting things so far.”
“I heard about your idea. A premium offer for key accounts.”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds good. What will you give them, gold-plated PowerPoints?”
Parrot forced a smile, but behind this façade Hélène could practically hear the gears grinding.
“I just want us to be ready for the second semester of 2017, that’s all.”
“The presidential election?” Hélène asked, warily raising an eyebrow.
Parrot confirmed her intuition with a barely perceptible movement of his chin.
“And what are you expecting?”
“A surprise.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“We’ll see,” replied Parrot. “Whatever happens, the State is going to have to tighten its belt and focus on its sovereign powers. The nanny state is a thing of the past. Too heavy, too slow…”
“And too expensive, obviously,” interrupted Hélène, somewhat irritated by this deluge of truisms.
“Obviously. It’s all a question of resources. And finding a new balance. That’s where we have the opportunity to do something good.”
“Did your friends in the government tell you that?”
A brief frown. Parrot was finding it harder and harder to conceal his annoyance, and his two acolytes decided it was time to retreat to the buffet. To make himself heard over the echoing din inside the office, Parrot put his lips close to Hélène’s ear.
“I’m sure there will be some fantastic opportunities out there. Ministers are more and more suspicious of their administrations. The elite of the new generation don’t believe the system works anymore. Every time they need to manage a crisis, or implement a reform, or consult experts, they would rather go with small teams.”
“The age of the task force,” summarized Hélène, gazing into Parrot’s eyes in a vaguely flirtatious way.
Then she raised her glass to her lips, ironic yet serious.
“We should work together,” said Parrot.
“We’d be so innovative…” Then, after considering this for a second, she went on: “But what will we do with all this in the provinces?”
“That’s where most of the business will be. Relations between Paris and the regions are at an all-time low. The big regions have to invent everything. Their departments are upset because they get lumbered with the responsibility of reforming themselves, but they aren’t given the means to do it. The old regional administrations are on their last legs. Rivalries, shrinking resources, inertia, structural problems…it’s the biggest shitshow imaginable. There are cracks everywhere.
The guys in the ministries are flying by the seat of their pants. I’ve seen them do it. They need air traffic control to bring them down safely. They need us to give them the information and do the dirty work for them.”
“Yeah, the gray-matter mercenaries. But isn’t that what we’ve been doing for the past twenty years?”
“Of course, but this is the luxury version. Repackaged.”
“And more expensive?”
“Naturally.”
“Pretty smart.”
They clinked glasses.
Three Drinks Later, Hélène noticed the time and thought that, at this rate, her return home might prove complicated. She checked her phone. Philippe had tried calling her several times, and this fact convinced her to have another drink. At eleven, Erwann had still not been tracked down. The dance floor was packed now, and the impertinent intern decided to carry out an experiment. She played “Don’t Be So Shy” by Imany, followed by a few other, similarly horny and sensual tracks. Very soon, people hooked up and began to rub their bodies against each other.
“I wonder how many babies will be conceived tonight,” Lison said dreamily.
Hélène smiled. She looked at the tall, young intern, like something from a cartoon, and thought how beautiful she was. Her thrift-store elegance, her equine profile, her luxuriant hair, and the space between her eyes: everything about her was enviably unique. Though she wouldn’t have admitted it to herself, Hélène was proud to be friends with this girl who seemed to have her finger on the pulse of the age. Drunkenly, she stroked her shoulder and felt a faint urge to kiss her.
“Wanna dance?”
The intern briefly took her boss by the hand, and the two of them moved onto the dance floor. Since Hélène was wearing heels, she stood just as tall as Lison, and they began to undulate, putting on a show for each other, their eyes meeting now and then, evasive but laden with intentions. Hélène felt a desperate need to be desired.
And yet, since starting her affair with Christophe, she had been greatly reassured on that score. Of course she wasn’t stupid or alienated, and her existence did not depend on the male gaze. Even so, it made her feel good to see how hard his cock grew at the sight of her ass, to feel how fierce and gentle he became, to sense the weight of his broad shoulders, his sweat-glued stomach, his deep thrusts, when she was naked and her legs were spread for him. Ergo, she was beautiful.
Unfortunately, it made the return to earth—being with her family, the daily routine with Philippe—even more annoying in comparison. What might have been a mild irritation before was now almost unbearable. His late nights at the office and his business trips, the way he always sneaked away as soon as he was supposed to make dinner or give his daughter a bath. Suggestions that had once seemed harmless, like “You should call the Menous so we can have dinner with them,” had become triggers for Hélène. Inevitably, she and Philippe were fighting more than ever.
“What is up with you these days?” he would ask her sometimes.
Another question that drove her crazy.
Old loves, she thought, were like those tattered tapestries on the walls of castles. A thread comes loose, you pull at it without thinking, and the whole thing just unravels. In no time at all, you’re left with nothing but the bare background: your obsessions and neuroses are exposed; your dreams lie dying on the floor. And no shrink could help you put this mess back together again. There was no solution to the problem, unless you could somehow travel back in time, erase the twenty years of delayed truth that had just exploded in your face.
But the worst part was when they were with the girls.
One night the previous week, when Philippe was absent, Hélène had organized a TV binge. It was an old family habit. When Mom was bored, they could eat toast and drink hot chocolate and watch cartoons. Mouche had jumped for joy at this news, and Clara had unsmilingly declared that it was cool. So the three of them had ended up on the couch, which Hélène had covered with a blanket to avoid any mishaps with Nutella. Mouche had gotten upset over the choice of show, but Clara had refused to compromise. And so, for the hundredth time, they had watched the DVD of Madagascar.
“Again?” Hélène had groaned.
“Until death,” Clara had replied.
Which had made her mother laugh.
Clara had asked for a smartphone for Christmas. She was increasingly, inevitably being kidnapped by the outside world. When she got home from middle school, Clara was now allowed to hang out with her friends for half an hour, and on weekends her mother let her go on her own to a small park nearby where she would meet up with two or three other girls. Hélène had gone to spy on them once, a handful of prepubescents huddled together on a bench, all laughing, bare-ankled, not a scarf in sight, strangely cuddly and in a bubble of their own. Apart from that, Clara did some ice-skating and was top of her class in school, with an average grade of 18½ out of 20, and she never asked her mother to help her with her homework anymore. She had read all seven Harry Potter books at least three times and was now asking to buy her clothes on Vinted. In not much more than two years, she would be in high school. Then the baccalaureate, and it would all be over. Watching her daughters absorbed by the TV screen, Hélène wondered what on earth she was doing. What a terrible mess she was about to make. The days flashed past so fast, the weeks and the years, and in a snap of fingers their whole life together would be gone. Those children who depended on you so totally at the start that it drove you crazy, that their need for you wore you down, all that milk and sweat, and then one day they began to detach themselves, gradually becoming almost like strangers. Clara was twelve now; Mouche, almost eight. And their mother was having a secret affair. The tragedy was right there, within touching distance. Eventually, the whole thing would blow up and their lives would never be the same again. Hélène felt such a pang of anxiety in that moment that she had to take refuge in the kitchen to get her breath back. That was where she was when she received a new message from Christophe.
An emoji showing a pair of lips blowing a heart.
From the couch, Mouche shouted: “Mommy, come quickly!” and, with just a hint of resentment, Hélène put her phone in airplane mode. She rejoined her daughters, and Mouche curled up against her, unthinkingly fiddling with her own feet and bringing a finger to her nostrils now and then to sniff the sweet smell gleaned from the gap between her toes, a habit that disgusted her sister but did not bother Hélène. They passed the whole evening like that, the way they used to, in the cocoon of familiarity, the gentle warmth of hours replayed.
After the bedtime story, Hélène gave in to her younger daughter’s latest stratagem to persuade her mother to stay with her a little longer. She got under the covers and Mouche, staring at the ceiling, returned to one of her favorite subjects:
“I don’t want you to die, Mommy.”
“Me neither.”
“Or not for a very, very long time.”
“Exactly.”
“Like, in two hundred and fifty million billion years.”
“Okay, time to turn out the lights…”
Out of nowhere, her daughter asked: “Do you think zombie chickens exist?”
“What makes you ask that?”
The little girl shrugged, and her mother exited the room.
Back in her own bed, Hélène tried to read for a while, but her mind was elsewhere. Five novels on the nightstand, each started and almost certainly doomed to remain unfinished, were sufficient proof that this was not a new problem. So she picked up her phone and forgot everything else while she exchanged messages with Christophe. When she heard Philippe’s car in the driveway, she turned out the light and pretended to be asleep. Later in the night, Mouche had a nightmare and she had to get up to calm her down and make her drink some water. Hélène got back into her daughter’s bed and did not sleep another wink. She felt that warm, trusting little body pressed against hers. She thought about Christophe. About her daughters. That kind of thing just destroyed her.
“Ah, There He is…”
Erwann had just appeared, all smiles, majestic in his pointy shoes, this time wearing a shirt with cuff links under his puffer jacket.
“It’s almost one in the morning,” said Hélène, checking her ph one. “He’s not exactly making a big effort, is he?”
In the boss’s absence, the employees had let their hair down and the party had taken an alarming turn, with guests smoking in the office in defiance of company rules and bouncing aggressively on the makeshift dance floor, which was now sticky with spilled booze and covered with glitter, since one of their colleagues had facetiously thrown a few handfuls of the stuff during a Britney Spears song. You could see the glitter sparkling from men’s hair and women’s cleavages, and Lison had even stuck some to her cheekbones.
Erwann’s appearance caused a brief stir, but Elexia’s employees were too drunk to worry much and soon lapsed back into chaos. The newcomer made his way to the dance floor, where his Merovingian belly hogged the spotlight as he twisted from side to side on his leather soles. Hélène watched him from a distance, wondering what he was up to. At the first opportunity, she collared him:
“So…?”
“So…what?” said Erwann, beaming.
His beard was thicker than usual and gave him a somewhat disturbing hipster-like look.
“Where were you? We’ve all been waiting for your speech.”
“Ah, I’m sick of speeches!” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m giving up on all that.”
Lison hung back, her straw between her lips, ironic by nature. Erwann glanced at her quickly, then returned his attention to Hélène.
“I heard about your exploits at the regional health agency. Bravo, that’s great.”
“Thank you.”
“No, really.”
“Thank you, really.”
“Well…it’s hot in here,” he said, and took off his jacket, waving to Parrot, who was standing near the buffet with his entourage.
“Okay, I’ll leave you to it. Have fun.”
“What a dick!” hissed Lison.
“Take it easy. This isn’t high school, you know.”
Lison bit the inside of her cheek while continuing to stare at the fat man, who, champagne flute in hand, was ostentatiously dancing the jerk.
“I know why he doesn’t want to give a speech,” Lison said.
“Why?”
“Parrot’s going to become a partner.”
“What?”
“In January.”
“How do you know that?” asked Hélène, clinging to her glass as her legs turned to jelly beneath her.
“Everyone knows.”
It was like gust of cold air flowing between them. Hélène felt the effects of the champagne ebb in an instant, and every part of her that had been soft and available was frozen.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Lison added.
But Hélène wasn’t listening anymore. She was staring at those two men, the debonair ginger ogre and his ultra-stylish acolyte, Mr. Perfect with his smooth networking skills and his five-star CV. Her thoughts came in a rush. It had been the same old shit since her student days: the all-boys club, the testicular union, all those men sticking together and finding excuses for their behavior. She finished her drink and immediately grabbed another one. If she’d had a sledgehammer at hand in that moment, she would have smashed their knees to dust.
The next hour was somewhat incoherent. Continuing to drink, Hélène slipped into a happy, vindictive mood. Then she went onto the dance floor to join several colleagues who had taken off their jackets and were swaying like belly dancers, armpits dark and hair dripping with sweat. Finally, she set her sights on little Morel, a cute and remarkably harmless boy with long, curly brown hair, whose girlfriend had recently started work as a freelance naturopath. She flirted with him for a while, until she couldn’t stand it anymore and she had to go take a piss.
The women’s restrooms were packed, of course, so she went to the men’s, locked herself in a stall, sat down without even bothering to wipe off the seat, and pissed like a horse—a long, gushing waterfall of urine—while she stared at her panties between her ankles and gradually regained a little clarity. She sat there for some time, feeling bitter and numb, her head heavy between her hands, incapable of getting up. Afterward, she carefully washed her hands and straightened her chignon. She had to get away from this horrible feeling of futility, of having worked so hard for so little reward. She pursed her lips. And then Erwann came in.
“Oops,” he said, instinctively standing on tiptoe.
“Perfect timing,” said Hélène waspishly.
Erwann’s smile vanished instantly. He looked at her with his hard, hierarchical face.
“When were you planning on telling me?”
“Telling you what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me.”
After a second’s hesitation, her boss retreated into bland neutrality.
“I was waiting for the right moment.”
“Don’t screw with my head. Everyone knows!”
“What can I say? People talk. I can’t control that.”
“Explain to me what the hell I’m doing here.”
They kept their distance. They both knew that, despite the alcohol and the late hour, this discussion was purely professional. The words they exchanged now could be used against them later, could end up being reported to HR, repeated at a tribunal, even one day in a courtroom.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Erwann replied.
“I’ve been working at Elexia for three years. I’m the most senior executive here, the one who brings in the biggest revenue. I’ve never fucked up. I’m in the office every day, from morning till evening. So what is the problem, exactly?”
“Jean-Charles can pay the entrance fee, that’s all.”
“So this is about money?”
“Mostly.”
“How much?”
“A hundred thousand.”
Hélène had not been expecting such a big amount.
“I could do that.”
“That’s not what I was led to believe.”
There was a flash of pain in Hélène’s chest, and she felt her face turn hot.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you talk to Philippe about this?”
“No.”
But what other explanation was there?
“What did he tell you?”
“Nothing. I didn’t talk to him.”
She took two quick steps in his direction and had to grab on to the edge of the sink to stop herself falling.
“I want to know.”
“I have nothing else to say. Anyway, it’s not about the money.”
“Then what?”
Rage overwhelmed her suddenly, and tears rose to her eyes. Erwann smiled: her reaction confirmed his feeling.
“We’re not going to talk about this in the restroom. You can barely stand straight. I’ll see you on Monday.”
“Wait.”
Eyes closed, she took a deep breath. She refused to let herself yell or weep. All her life, she had battled against that, the logic of the quavering voice. The dam would not burst. In a calm voice, she went on: “I think you owe me an explanation. Parrot’s arrival is irrelevant. I can still become a partner.”
Embarrassed, Erwann rubbed a hand through his ginger mane, then across his face. He wished someone would come in and free him from this unpleasant tête-à-tête.
“I hate to say this, but I don’t think you’re in the right state of mind for this now.”
Hélène gave up then. She had heard that phrase so many times after her burnout. You have to take it easy. I don’t think you’re in the right state of mind. We’re going to take the pressure off you. That whole vocabulary of care and precaution, which was really just a way of sidelining her. If you heard those words, it meant you were no longer the war machine they expected you to be. Which meant you had a choice of the infirmary or a subordinate position. You were now counted among the fragile.
“Everybody wants the best for you,” Erwann went on pitilessly. “It’s nothing personal. But it’s obvious your focus is elsewhere.”
Erwann did not want to explain what he meant by that, and she ended up alone in the men’s restroom.
Later, She Went up onto the building’s roof with Lison to smoke one last cigarette. The night was drawing to an end, and the silent town below them seemed remarkably peaceful and untidy. It looked as if someone had been playing Lego and had gone to bed, leaving behind a plastic postwar landscape, a city hastily reassembled, where ugliness mixed with legacy, where the concern for beauty was scattered and everywhere dominated by the empire of immediate usefulness.
“What are you going to do?” the intern asked.
Lison had slipped into calling her tu again. It was so late now.
“I don’t know.”
“Will you talk to your partner about it?”
“I have to. I need to know what he told that fat fuck. I hate the idea that they were talking about me behind my back.”
“Do you think he knows?”
“Knows what?” asked Hélène.
“About Christophe.”
“Maybe. Although I’m really careful. I delete all his messages.”
“All it takes is something in your search history. Or to forget to close Messenger one time.”
“Yeah…”
“No one can hide these days. We leave too many traces behind.”
As she uttered these words, Lison made a strange little face, at once frowning and smiling, as if she were explaining to a child that the tooth fairy didn’t exist.
“What do you plan to do with that guy?”
“I don’t know. My head’s all over the place at the moment.”
Lison waited a few seconds before asking the question she really wanted to ask, the one that had been eating away at her.
“What about the other two, Erwann and Parrot?”
“What about them?”
“Are you just going to let them get away with it?”
“What else can I do? There’s no law against being an asshole.”
Lison said nothing, but she had an idea. She flicked her cigarette off the top of the building and the two women watched as the little dot—red, yellow, flickering—was swallowed up by the night.
When She Got home, Hélène woke Philippe, who grumbled about this for a while but did eventually listen to what she had to say. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she asked him three questions. Yes, he knew she was fucking someone else. Yes, he had spoken about it with Erwann—he was his friend, after all. And yes, he knew that Parrot was going to become a partner. Anyway, since her crack-up, he knew that things hadn’t been the same for Hélène.
They spoke for almost two hours, quietly so as not to wake the girls, and—for the first time in ages—tried to be sincere, without really succeeding, each sparing the other the gory details, coming to terms with the facts, less to salvage something than to ensure they would have an acceptable role to play in this comedy.
“Do you want to break up?” Philippe asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“So what do you want?”
“I want you to stop taking me for granted.”
Philippe had to admit that he spent too much time at work, and that he did it because he was bored by their family life. Yes, he struggled with chores and housework. All day long he was in charge of twenty people, managing hundreds of thousands of euros, so when he had to go home and tell Mouche a hundred times to put her shoes away, he felt like he’d been demoted.
“Whereas for me, that’s my level anyway, right?” Hélène said, deadpan.
“I didn’t say that.”
On the other hand, when she asked him if he was cheating on her, he grew as slippery as an eel. He twisted and wriggled so much that in the end she decided to just drop the subject. It wasn’t even that she found him irritating. His behavior made her uncomfortable.
For her part, she admitted that she’d been looking for an escape from the drudgery. She also acknowledged that she’d lied to him and came up with some rather pitiful excuses: the passing of time, his neglect of her, the way he looked at her, the feeling that she was just part of the furniture.
“I always supported you,” Philippe said. “I listen to you. The sex is still good. We talk about everything. We agree about everything. So what’s your problem?” As far as he was concerned, their conversation was becoming ever less comprehensible.
Hélène hesitated. Was it really such a good idea to drag all the skeletons out of the closets in the middle of the night? She weighed the pros and cons. Under her butt, the comforting give of the Simmons mattress pleaded for the status quo.
After that, the conversation turned into a negotiation. Each of them offered efforts in return for concessions, changes in return for promises. Hélène felt hollow, her heart dried out. This man meant nothing to her anymore. She no longer had any desire to touch him or talk to him. All the same, they had sex. A form of reassurance. And then, totally exhausted, they slept side by side. In the morning, Hélène found a Post-it in the kitchen with a little heart scrawled on it, and she hated herself.
Lison, Meanwhile, Went back to her apartment, where she found her roommate, Faïza, waiting for her. For some time now, Faïza had been working nights and sleeping during the day. This rhythm had taken over her life after five years spent writing a thesis with the title “Management and Compliance: In Defense of a Legal Approach to the Rules Governing the Distribution of Power Within a Company.” She only had two months’ work remaining on it, or so she claimed, and she did not want to risk becoming disoriented so close to her goal by resetting her working hours in line with everyone else. Plus, when Lison got home late, the two girls would drink tea together and spend a long time chatting, as if it were five in the afternoon. They talked about their days, the people they met, the books they read or wanted to read. They almost never talked about boys. Lison vaped nonstop. The words came out in a flood. There was talk of Marx, Edith Wharton, Mona Chollet, Emmanuel Guibert, of Asian cuisine and Ballast, a magazine to which Faïza had sold two articles, on Jhumpa Lahiri and Beyoncé. If Hélène had seen Lison at such moments, she would not have recognized her intern.
This time, however, despite their closeness, Lison preferred not to tell Faïza anything about the orgiastic office Christmas party, nor about her boss’s disappointments. Just after six in the morning, she announced that she was going to bed. After taking a shower, she slipped between the sheets.
There, phone in hand, she sent a WhatsApp message to Erwann, just a brief hello. She sent the same message to Parrot, who would not respond for several hours, but Erwann replied almost right away:
Hi…
You’re not asleep.
Nope. You?
I don’t really feel like it.
And, after a few seconds of hesitation, Erwann dared to write: Ah…so what do you feel like doing?
After that, Erwann began shamelessly chatting her up. Lison teased him playfully for quite a while, dodging his advances and stinging like a bee. This little farce started over again the next day and carried on through the days that followed. The same thing happened with Parrot, although he was a little more reserved, and less candid when it came to using social media. Lison asked both men not to tell anyone. She sent them photographs of herself in her bathroom, paid them compliments, shared secrets and fantasies, and gradually induced them to rise like big cakes full of yeast. By the end of the week, the two executives were in a state of constant arousal.