Christophe Had Known from the beginning that this would be a complicated season, and in January the coach summoned him to his tiny office to update him.
“The club president is pressuring me to start you. He thinks it’ll be good publicity. His argument is that, given our results so far, it makes no sense to keep you on the bench. So…I’m going to give you a chance. But I need you to start taking this seriously.”
Christophe did not play dumb. He knew exactly what Madani was alluding to. Since the beginning of the season, he had missed several practice sessions and had not lost a single pound. He was still paying regular visits to Marco’s place for drinking binges, even more so since his son had moved away and his father had been put in a nursing home.
The old man had fought against it, at first. He’d even escaped, and they’d found him in his bathrobe three kilometers from Les Églantiers, on the road to Cornécourt. He’d survived with nothing worse than a heavy cold.
Still, the nursing home was very clean, his bedroom was fine, and he’d even been able to take some of his furniture with him. Christophe had had to fill out a lot of forms and wait a long time on the phone listening to Vivaldi before being accepted by the government welfare programs that would pay toward his father’s stay. But he wasn’t even sure that they would be enough. He would perhaps have to sell the house and empty his bank accounts, to squander everything on these final few years. It hurt to think of the forty years his father had spent working his ass off, saving all that money, just to trade it in for bed baths, yogurts, and rambling walks through the wooded grounds.
Worse, Les Églantiers had a no-pets policy, which came as a wrench to the old man. Christophe saw him weep when he learned that the cat would have to stay at the house. This man who had once been so tough and uncompromising…it was a cruel discovery to see his strength sapped, his iron will rusted by the ravages of old age. After a certain point, even the ability to control his bladder and bowels, to decide when and where he should fall asleep, to stop his hands trembling, became matters of almost insurmountable difficulty. And Christophe, watching his own hand on the steering wheel as he drove, spotting a new hair growing out of his ear, noticing the changes taking place in his skin—drier, less soft—thought to himself: this is it, I’m on the downward slope. I’ve barely even lived, and already it’s almost over.
The neuropsychologist had warned Christophe: generally, patients like his father went downhill very quickly once they were institutionalized, once they had lost their old markers and habits. They had done all they could to delay this moment, and for a long time Christophe had hoped that some sort of lucky accident would prevent the need to take the fateful step. But after his father had paid that visit to Kylian’s parents, he’d been left with no choice. In fact, the police were still planning to charge him with intimidation and threatening behavior, even if it was hard to imagine them arresting the old man in his current state.
To start with, Christophe had gone to visit him almost every day. His father barely reacted. After his escape attempt, he’d been put on tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and all sorts of other drugs that knocked him out. Even so, he fought to stay awake, looking like a baby bird that had fallen from the nest, with the hair around his bald spot growing shaggy and his lips continually murmuring under his mustache. Christophe sat facing him, next to the window. Outside, it was already dark. Agile, energetic women would come into the room now and then to check whether he’d eaten his soup yet. The son combed his father’s hair, cut his fingernails, watched him eat, hoping to see a little color appear behind that vast wall of old age. Each time, he left feeling slightly dazed. He’d called his brother so he could let him know what was happening, and ask him to help pay the bills, but that number was no longer in service. He’d searched for him online, all the social networks and so on, but in vain. He would have to deal with this on his own.
Then, in early March, he had found his father in a room belonging to one of the female residents. They were sitting close together, listening to a little radio, the volume turned down low, the two of them looking simultaneously concentrated and miles away.
“Hi, Dad.”
His father smiled. He looked better, less passive anyway. He said good night to this somewhat thickset old lady, who smiled back at him, and then his son led him back to his own room.
“Who’s that?”
“Who?”
“That woman you were with.”
“Oh, no one. She came to find me. I didn’t ask her for anything.”
It was impossible to get any more out of him.
The next day, he found his father in the same spot, next to this unknown woman with her hands crossed over her belly. This time, the radio was playing a little more loudly, a news debate show about the corruption scandal involving François Fillon and his wife. Christophe asked one of the nurses about the woman.
“That’s Madame Didier. She likes to have company.”
“And what do they do?”
“Oh, nothing special. They just pass the time.”
After that, Christophe would find his father in this woman’s company almost every day, so he decided he ought to get to know her. She had worked for the tax office in Paris, then in Le Gard, and finally in Épinal, reaching a senior position, of which she was clearly still proud. Despite her monolithic legs, she was a stylish woman who refused to wear slippers and insisted on having her hair styled every week. Her family smiled from a series of silver-colored frames on her nightstand: fortysomething couples, teenagers, younger kids. On the other hand, there was no trace of a husband.
“But what do you talk about all day?”
“Oh, nothing special,” said Gérard. “How’s Gabriel?”
“He’s living with his mother—you know that, Dad.”
“Of course, of course.”
In fact, most of the time, Christophe’s father and Madame Didier just listened to the radio. They did not get up to anything naughty. Christophe was able to visit a little less often.
There Had Been some big changes in his friends’ lives too. Greg and Jennifer had decided to keep the baby, which greatly upset poor old Marco.
“You’re insane,” he lamented, thinking of the life that awaited his friend.
“Yeah, I know,” replied Greg, to annoy him.
The baby was due in July, and Jennifer organized their to-do list accordingly. Greg’s job was to find them a two-bedroom apartment big enough to house the entire little family, Bilal included, although the teenager was still unwilling to accept the new situation. Jennifer herself would take care of planning their wedding.
“What? He’s getting married too?” howled Marco, staggered by this sudden onset of madness.
Indeed, it was crazy to see just how quickly this man—who had, until that point, been totally irresponsible and spent most of his time living with his mother—was growing up. He was taking driving lessons, working nights to earn more money, and looking for a used car on Leboncoin. For the first time in his life, Greg was planning ahead beyond the next weekend, and—having once appeared to be the biggest slacker among the three of them—he was now the only real adult. Not that this was enough to help him find an apartment, given that he had never saved a single euro and he would have to pay a security deposit corresponding to two months’ rent.
“I can help out a bit,” Marco offered. “Even if I do think you’re making a massive fucking mistake.”
Greg turned to Christophe.
“Sorry, it’s complicated for me.”
This was an understatement, with his dad in a retirement home, his kid living in a different department, and a less-than-stellar salary. Greg and Marco made no comment. And then, following a somewhat clumsy chain of thought, Greg asked:
“What about your girlfriend?”
“What about her?” Christophe said.
“No, I just meant, what’s going on with you two?”
“It’s fine.”
“So she’s still leaving him?” Greg asked.
“That’s the plan.”
“But she’s not going to…?”
“Not going to what?”
Christophe could not help getting defensive when faced with questions like this. Probably because his relationship with Hélène had taken a strange turn recently.
At first, it had all been so simple. There were those afternoons at the hotel, the constant texting, the newness, fucking like teenagers, exploring each other’s bodies, the gradual aligning of wavelengths, finding the best fit, agreeing on the right tempo, switching positions, and the calmness afterward, the tingling of their lips when they kissed, the two of them lying there, stretched out and shattered on the sheets, words passing from mouth to mouth, legs tangled and backs glazed with sweat.
There were the hiding places and the whispers, waiting for each other, choosing a restaurant in a small village or a roadside diner with a good reputation. Later there were seafood platters, a night in a beautiful hotel in the Black Forest, a first argument, morning sex, eyes closed, not daring to kiss because their breath stank, but their bodies didn’t care. Learning to use the same words, thinking about her all the time because the world was full of signs that pointed in her direction, knowing her routines and her schedule, listening to her on the phone late at night after she’d had an argument with her partner or because Clara had given up trying at school and it was maybe her fault. Him murmuring no, no, you mustn’t blame yourself. Feeling the infinite softness within him.
And then, once Hélène’s relationship with her partner had started to disintegrate, Christophe no longer felt so sure. Was he going to have to get involved? Were they going to become a couple, live together, share a bedroom, a bathroom, their cars, vacations? The idea was enough to scare him shitless.
But the real problem lay elsewhere.
When he was a teenager, love had been simple. A girl walked past, you thought she was to die for. After that, every time you saw her, you got the same symptoms: you felt sick, your hands were clammy, you couldn’t string three words together, and soon that was all you could think about, total obsession. You would hatch crazy plans to talk to her. At night, under the covers, you would listen to music on your headphones and daydream about her. Finally you would ask her out and, if she didn’t shoot you down in flames, the two of you would move on to the next stage, finding things in common. Suddenly the world was full of coincidences, shared passions, identical pet peeves. You were amazed that you could have existed without each other when you were obviously such soulmates. You held hands, you looked for each other at the park, and with a bit of luck you ended up sleeping together. And then, in an instant, your bubble burst and all the desire drained out. Love was tragic and temporary. Lust was infinite but bland. After that, you belonged to a world made in your image.
Christophe had experienced all this for a long time—sudden infatuations, lingering obsessions—while Charlie had played an intermittent but clear role in his life, as his soulmate, at least until their separation.
But now he felt less certain. Something had changed. Maybe it was his age, maybe scars that had never properly healed. Whatever the cause, he wasn’t as emotional as he used to be. His urges were no longer so lucid. He moved slowly now, his desire like a plowshare. Everything about him had grown bigger—his shoulders, his waist, his need for women. The sharp radiance of the old days had been replaced by something vaguer, murkier, more disturbing. He looked at teenage girls and thought, shit, never again, and that loss stirred up dark feelings within him. He thought about their pert young asses, about the boys who would fuck them, about the beauty of their perfect skin and firm flesh and how he could no longer touch it. Gloomy passions rose through his chest at this thought, a quiver of unease at his throat.
For so long, girls had pursued him. They had chatted him up in bars. They had batted their eyelids at him, shouted his name from the bleachers. He had felt cute, wanted. He’d had his choice of them. He’d even been able to play hard to get.
And then, without warning, that moment was gone. Now their eyes passed over him without even seeing him, and whenever he stared at a woman in a store, or on the street, she would look away, embarrassed, disturbed. So it was that he’d become an old bastard, exiled from the paradise of youth overnight. For young women, he no longer existed. Often he would have to make do with the internet, with the meager relief of his own hand, like a fourteen-year-old. At least there was a lot more choice these days. But at forty, with a kid and an adult life, it was hard not to feel ashamed when you typed “hot redhead” or “mixed-race girls” into a search bar.
These changes left Christophe feeling bitter at times, but he didn’t let it get to him too much. That sort of demotion was just one more worry among others; life was full of them. The thing was, he no longer felt capable of saying “I love you.” Those words felt alien to him now. Maybe they’d died with his youth. Or maybe Charlie had run off with them. Unless he just felt too disgusting to even try, too sunk in failure, with his body that made cracking and grinding noises when he got up in the morning, an old man, not cute at all anymore. Maybe love was just like all the rest—a moment in life. Or maybe he was just afraid. Whatever, loving wasn’t easy anymore.
“Well, she’s welcome to come to the wedding,” said Greg. “We’d love to meet her.”
Marco almost choked: “Are you serious?”
That night, the three old friends were in Marco’s living room, with the TV on in the background, although none of them were really watching it.
“Of course,” said Greg with a smile. “The crazier you are, the more fun you have.”
“She’s got a partner, she’s got kids. What’s wrong with you?”
“But they’re separating, right? This could be the moment.”
“It’s an idea,” nodded Christophe, mainly to piss off Marco.
Apparently he succeeded because Marco ran a hand through his thick, curly hair before shuffling into the kitchen, calling back: “You two are unbelievable…”
He came back in with three beers and a new bag of chips.
Christophe looked at his watch. “I should take it easy. I’m playing tomorrow.”
“Just drink water, then.”
Marco handed out the beers, though, then collapsed into his chair and began flipping through the channels out of habit. That scandal involving Fillon and his wife was still headline news. Hearing the sums of money being mentioned, Greg said: “Wow, fucking hell.” Then Marco changed the channel.
Meanwhile, at Elexia, business was still booming. In January, several employees received five-figure bonuses. Not only that, but Erwann had been contacted by the new party created for the presidential candidate who had appeared out of nowhere, whose demise had been predicted many times but who now seemed to be gaining real momentum.
Emmanuel Macron’s rise had, moreover, led to a wave of people all over the country discovering a sudden vocation for politics and many last-minute changes of heart. Everywhere you looked, the ambitious and the impatient, disoriented socialists and centrists sick of the taste of defeat, human resources managers and minor local figures were ready to jump on this bandwagon, all of them good, sneaker-wearing people with modern attitudes, celebrities or regular Joes who had sensed a disaster looming for the traditional parties and who unanimously rallied around this refreshing new figure, a former banker, academically brilliant (and how the French love academic brilliance), impeccable in his tailored suits, untouched by the failures and ignominies of the past, who was being compared to Mozart and who contained within him, to a degree of concentration never seen before, the essence of the age: an obsession with efficiency.
In his speeches, he threw both the Left and the Right onto the scrap heap, dinosaurs blocking the onset of the future with their culture of opposition, their sterile ideologies, the whole farce that had, since the Revolution, been sapping the country’s energy, creating only divisions and stasis. Now was the time to be pragmatic, to face up to reality, to tackle the challenges to come, to liberate and innovate, and—of course—to open ourselves to the world. Though undoubtedly revolutionary in many ways, this new movement still seemed wedded to the old political obsession with infinitive verbs.
Anyway, these slogans won over vast swathes of the public who were already perfectly at ease with this vocabulary, since they spent all day at work hearing and spouting it themselves. At packed political assemblies, the objectives defined were essentially the same as those at strategic meetings, couched in the same management lexicon, with the same message of team building and economizing, the nation’s president as CEO of a company, a vision of France created by a sales team, the corporate spirit finally spreading through the Republic’s corridors of power.
Naturally, at Elexia, this world view was highly seductive. At last, they thought, this festering, gangrenous old country of striking workers and vested interests stood a chance of being modernized. Parrot, who constantly boasted about all his friends in high places, was now bragging about all the people he knew in the entourage of the man who appeared, increasingly, the favorite to win the election, particularly given the scandals engulfing Fillon and the traditional right-wing parties. And from everything Parrot had been told, this presidential candidate was very open to advice. They could pass on ideas to him, organize initiatives to help him win. The entire company was abuzz with enthusiasm about the future, each employee wondering how they personally could take advantage of the situation. As for Erwann, he had been approached to run for office in the upcoming legislative elections. In every district, the new party was looking for people like him, self-starters with broad shoulders, extensive networks, strong convictions, and suitable skill sets.
“If he makes it to the runoff, it’ll be a huge boost for us,” prophesied Parrot, eyes blazing as he stood in front of the Senseo coffee machine in the common room.
“Absolutely. It’ll be a massive wave.”
“And if he wins…”
Erwann grinned. He had a sixth sense for these things, and he could feel it coming. The growth curves spoke for themselves. A window was about to open for this country, and a whole generation would take the opportunity to rise to positions of power. The primaries had already demonstrated the plausibility of this theory, leading to radical choices, stark divisions that had moderates rushing into the arms of this new candidate. Erwann remained convinced that elections were won by the center. Once the extremists on both sides had stopped shouting, the silent majority would prevail. Except that, for once, this middle way did not pass through the soft underbelly of the provinces, with their banquets and socialism. Nor was there any question now of grand patriotic gestures or any of that Gaullist bullshit. The smart money was on a new kind of governance, like a supreme executive committee of young people, professionals, disciplined teams, with a chic, fun style reminiscent of Silicon Valley. It was an enticing prospect.
But this rosy vision of the future did not take Lison into account.
Ever since the Christmas party, the young intern had continued boldly texting the two horndogs in chief. Each of them believed he alone had the privilege of these seductive messages, and they had been lured into the realms of extreme imprudence. Erotic discussions gave way to widespread badmouthing. Erwann explained why he thought X was a complete dick, while Parrot opined on Y’s assholery. They insulted each other, of course, and it hardly needs to be said that they would both periodically send Lison photographs of their anatomy, to which she would reply with appropriate yum-yum messages and lip-licking emojis. She and Faïza laughed themselves silly over all of this, sometimes driving home their advantage by taking scary risks, yet somehow landing on their feet every time. The two men, blinded by their libido and incapable of imagining that a mere intern could be smarter than they were, threw themselves into it wholeheartedly.
This went on until March.
Then Lison took a number of screenshots, keeping the photos for herself as a sort of guarantee, and organized leaks using a mailing list that included not only Elexia’s employees but the two men’s wives, a few clients, and various important local figures, as well as a handful of regional journalists. She took care to delete her own name from all the screenshots, but of course Erwann and Parrot were not so lucky. Soon the two men were the laughingstock of the city, and Erwann’s marriage, already struggling, bit the dust. As for his political ambitions, they were well and truly over. He and Parrot hired lawyers and talked about pressing charges, but in the end they decided they’d had all the bad publicity they could take and quietly dropped the matter. As for Lison, she kept working at Elexia as if nothing had happened. Every time she saw them, Erwann and Parrot would glare at her and turn pale, but they wouldn’t say a word. They knew that the intern had plenty of other embarrassing evidence against them.
Finally, Lison was summoned to a meeting, and since she had the right to be accompanied by another member of staff, she asked Hélène to go with her. The meeting took place in a conference room on the mezzanine at nine in the evening. That way, there would be no witnesses. Hélène hesitated for a long time before agreeing to accompany her intern, fearing that it would look like she had been Lison’s accomplice, and as they climbed the stairs she was probably the more anxious of the two. Lison was wearing a miniskirt, low Docs, sequined socks, her leather jacket, and a silk blouse.
“Good evening, good evening,” she said as she entered.
Parrot was accompanied by Maître Bontemps, a fiftysomething female lawyer with a passing resemblance to Françoise Giroud: hollow cheeks and high cheekbones, with a spark of mischief in her eyes that clashed slightly with her straight white row of teeth. As for Erwann, he had come on his own, and he had a very specific idea of how the meeting should go.
“I wanted us to meet so we could get things straight.” Turning to Lison, he said: “First of all, I just want to say that what you did is one of the dirtiest tricks I have ever seen. Trust me, everyone will know what to expect from you.”
Unfazed, Lison placed her phone on the table to record the discussion and said soberly: “I think we should all address each other as vous.“
Erwann glanced at Parrot, then at the lawyer, who was no longer smiling. He started to breathe heavily and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. His shirt looked creased and his beard a little scruffier than usual. He gave off the vibes of a man prepared to leap over the table and assault someone.
“I think it would be better if we all remained calm,” said Hélène, trying not to show the amusement she felt at this circus.
The meeting proceeded smoothly. There wasn’t really anything to debate, in any case. The lawyer reminded everyone of the relevant laws regarding privacy and the secrecy of personal correspondence. Erwann explained that he never wanted to see Lison on the premises again and that he thought she had some nerve continuing to turn up to work as if nothing had happened. As for his partnership with Parrot, there was obviously no reason why it should continue. Then he turned to Hélène, and his words were like nails being hammered into a wall:
“I don’t know how involved you were in all this. But you should know that you will never be made a partner in this firm. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”
Hélène could have told him that she was not involved at all. She had played no part in their text exchanges, and she had not forced them to make themselves look ridiculous by trying to impress a twenty-year-old girl. But she preferred to remain silent, because she didn’t see why she should apologize or justify herself, nor why she should distance herself from an intern who, in her opinion, had done nothing worse than give these men what was coming to them.
After fifteen minutes, Erwann stood up and told everyone to leave. There were no handshakes, and the two men fled the building as if it were on fire. Hélène and Lison went outside to smoke cigarettes together for the last time.
“You know they came to see me too, to ask me to run,” said Hélène.
“For the legislative elections?”
“Yep.”
“You should have agreed,” said Lison, blowing long jets of white smoke through her nostrils.
“I know nothing about politics.”
“So?”
The intern was convinced that even a goat would win that election once the new savior had conquered the presidency—an idea that was, by then, widespread and causing mass panic among the deputies up for reelection. But Lison presented her case so adroitly that Hélène could find no objection. The young intern knew people—her stepfather, some cousins, some friends of her mother—who all inhabited that well-informed world of politics, publicity, the press, and she explained the ins and outs of the whole business with an assurance that was simultaneously evasive and irrefutable. Hélène nodded, and in the end she had to admit the truth: that she just didn’t feel any desire to get involved in such machinations.
“I don’t think I’m really that ambitious, to be honest.”
The two women didn’t talk for much longer. The babysitter who was looking after Mouche and Clara had to leave at ten, and Lison was meeting some friends at a bar in town.
“What will you do now?” Hélène asked her.
“Not really sure. I might do an internship at a design company.”
“In Nancy?”
“No, Paris.”
“So you’re going home?”
“Well, I’m leaving this place anyway. What about you?”
“No idea.”
Hélène knew that Christophe was not her type. And yet…after years spent searching for something so far from where she started, after years spent competing and hauling herself upward, there was something restful about going out with a guy like him. If someone had asked her to explain what she was up to, she would not have known what to say. Obviously it wasn’t love. But it wasn’t just sex anymore either.
When she got out of bed in the morning and thought about Christophe, her days seemed less oppressive. She was cheerful in a way she thought she had lost for good. She would chat and joke at the breakfast table, to the amazement of her daughters. On the drive to school she listened to music now, instead of the news. Songs by France Gall and Benjamin Biolay played loudly in the car, and sometimes her heart felt so full that she worried it would burst.
“Why are you crying?” Mouche asked from the back seat.
“I’m not crying.”
But her eyes were wet, and they were no longer tears of joy.
“Is Dad coming home soon?” asked Clara.
“Tomorrow.”
“Good.”
Hélène and Philippe had decided to give each other some space until they could come up with a more definitive modus vivendi. In truth, their daily lives had not really been altered by this resolution. Hélène realized that they had been living parallel lives for a long time. Philippe had told her that he didn’t care about the other man in her life. And that was probably true. He himself was no doubt screwing around too. They could come to an arrangement.
On the other hand, the next stage would likely be less amicable. The house, the mortgage, the cars, the bank accounts, the girls. Sooner or later, they would have to sever those fifteen years of connections, and she knew that Philippe would do all he could to ensure he got the best deal. The gloves would be off. Deep down, he considered himself better and more important than her, and the worst thing was that she had always pretty much agreed with him. He had been born in a bigger city, had gone to better schools. He was an accomplished skier and had spent a year living in the States. His business school was more prestigious than hers, and he was a man. In short, he outclassed her in every sense. None of this was never said aloud, of course. If he’d ever told her: “Shut up, I’m the boss,” Hélène would have laughed in his face, then crushed him underfoot. She had, after all, been given the formidable example of her own mother, who had always been so highly strung, so paranoid, the bringer of a storm going back twenty generations, an entire genealogy of good but hypersensitive people who could overturn a table or throw themselves into a canal over a single misplaced word. Then there was her father, the ultimate human time bomb, storing up all his hate and anger until the day when it finally exploded.
It was, no doubt, to these two forebears that she owed the reservoir of brutality on which she could draw whenever faced with an irritation or an obstacle, that sudden rush of rage that had served her so well on her path from Cornécourt to Paris. When people had told her, This isn’t for the likes of you, you’ll never succeed, she had bridled, had redoubled her efforts, hardworking not so much by nature as out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Her parents, each so disciplined in their own way, had filled her veins with this rocket fuel.
But that had not been enough to create a balance between her and Philippe. He already belonged in the world to which she aspired, so he was instantly in a more favorable position. Plus, obviously, he was a man. She remembered the way they’d looked, those boys coming out of the oral exams when she was a student, the arrogant swagger, the total self-belief, because ever since childhood they’d been venerated, convinced that the world was on their side. This disequilibrium existed in their relationship too. And while Hélène had always acted like an equal, if she was honest she had always felt like the minority shareholder. This had become more evident since she started dating Christophe, because, with him, the balance was inverted: she was the one on top.
Anyway, the net result was that Philippe made the rules. For example, he had told her right at the start of proceedings:
“What you do in bed is your business. But don’t try to get custody of the girls. I won’t let you get away with any bullshit. Same thing for the house.”
“What the hell are you going on about?”
“I’m just warning you, that’s all.”
Once again, she had blown up. She looked at him and thought how ugly he was, with his macho certainties, in the subdued light of their designer kitchen.
And yet it wasn’t exactly all-out war. The two of them still shared a sense of pride, the notion that they were above the fray. So there was no question of their yelling at each other in front of the children. Hélène and Philippe were merely cold, evasive, unnaturally polite at mealtimes: they were, in other words, managers. For example, they’d agreed on this arrangement—temporary, inevitably, but advantageous in many ways—of alternating shifts at home. This solution had the benefit of reassuring the girls, who could keep their familiar surroundings, and of delaying the thorny issue of the division of property. During the week, they cohabited—even if Philippe often slept in the spare bedroom—and on weekends one of them would stay with the girls while the other was free to do as they wished. It wasn’t that bad, really, even if, one Sunday evening, Hélène had found Mouche kneeling on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror, cutting her own hair with a pair of blunt-tip scissors.
“What on earth are you doing?”
She rushed into the room to disarm her daughter, so fast that poor Mouche burst into tears.
“Let me see!”
She made her daughter stand up so she could get a better view of the damage, her lovely thick hair chewed up by the metal blades, her bangs askew, total carnage. And that little face in the middle of it all, streaming with tears.
“How are we going to explain this to your father? Why did you do it?”
It was tempting, of course, to make a connection between this kind of behavior and their separation. But Hélène refused to do it.
“All right, put a hat on or something. You can’t let Daddy see you like this.”
“Why not?”
“Because. I’ll take you to the hairdresser tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to go to the hairdresser.”
“You should have thought of that before.”
Naturally, Clara showed up just then and laughed her head off, making fun of her sister for being a “freak.”
“I’m not a freak!”
“You’re a total freak!”
“No!”
More tears, more yelling.
“Stop!” Hélène barked. “That’s enough. No one says another word.”
The girls both fell silent, and Hélène offered them a deal.
“We can have a TV dinner tonight, if you stop fighting. I’ll defrost some Picard pastries, okay?”
The girls jumped for joy and hugged their mother, telling her she was the best mom ever.
“But you must keep this a secret. You promise?”
“Cross my heart,” said one of them.
“And hope to die,” said the other.
Mouche spat in her hand to seal the promise, but this time Hélène was too tired to yell at her. She decided just to walk away instead.
Hélène and Christophe saw each other more often, and in less secrecy. Sometimes at their usual hotel, sometimes elsewhere. Hélène would take charge of finding a nice place on Airbnb, and she would pay for it too. The sex was still good, which translated into sore spots, long sleeps, cystitis. Each was, for the other, a source of joy, an escape from reality. But one day, toward the end of March, Christophe put his foot in it.
“My friends keep pestering me. They want to meet you.”
“Oh.”
“Greg says you should come with me to his wedding.”
Hélène pulled a face at that. Once before, she had agreed to enter his world, and the memory of it was still depressing.
Christophe had invited her to the big house where he lived. He’d given it a spring clean, but somehow failed to rid the place of its ghostly, old-fashioned aura, which lived on in the furniture, the eighties wallpaper, the smell inside the cupboards. They had stayed in his bedroom most of the time, and the first night had been okay. They’d fucked twice, drunk some wine, and eaten croque monsieurs before falling asleep while watching a TV show on the laptop.
In the cold light of day, however, things had appeared less acceptable. Searching for the upstairs bathroom, Hélène had found herself in a little boy’s bedroom that had made her feel sick. Then they’d eaten breakfast in the kitchen, and that house had reminded her of others, with its tablecloth, its dresser, and those tiles under her bare feet. She hated the kitchen tiles.
Early in the afternoon, Christophe had convinced her to go for a walk with him. He’d lent her a pair of rubber boots, several sizes too big for her: she’d had to stuff some socks inside to make them fit. The sky was low that day, and the earth waterlogged, as it often was there. The Sundayish, countryside atmosphere weighed heavily on her spirits and made her want to go somewhere warm and noisy where she could eat soup and listen to other people’s conversations. Hélène and Philippe had done quite a lot of traveling before the girls were born. During the holidays, they would often spend a few days in Brussels, drinking very strong beers in brown-walled taverns. Those places were always full of laughter and people gorging themselves on medieval-looking meals. She and Philippe would go into all the antiques stores in the Marolles quarter. With full hearts and wallets, they would buy lamps, seventies furniture, and secondhand clothes, before walking to a cobblestoned square to eat waffles. Sometimes they would get too drunk and have an argument. The next day, they would hold hands and visit a museum together. It was an escape, a way of defeating December. But they didn’t go there anymore. When had they stopped?
“What’s the matter?” Christophe asked.
“Nothing, I’m fine,” Hélène lied.
And while they walked through the desolate landscape of Cornécourt, she thought about that previous life, when she and Philippe, still in their twenties, used to live in the twentieth arrondissement. It was their first apartment, between Télégraphe and Porte des Lilas: four hundred square feet at an eye-watering price in one of those old, prewar brick apartment buildings. They both used to work like crazy back then, before meeting up in the evenings, exhausted but happy. In her eyes, Philippe had been peerless, and when they went out at night to a bar she would see all the women looking at him and it would thrill her so much, it was ridiculous. They had everything—youth, money, good taste, a stack of Les Inrockuptibles in the bathroom, an expensive espresso machine. They found their clothes in little boutiques in Le Marais and she wore that perfume for men that he adored, Bensimon. On Sunday mornings they would walk to the market in Jourdain and buy a baguette, some cheese, organic fruit and vegetables, saucisson, a bouquet of flowers. She recalled their tartan shopping bag, Philippe wearing Vans, her in ballerina shoes…It was always springtime, at least in her memory.
Before going home, they would sit at a café terrace and watch the passersby. They both loved that neighborhood because it had retained its working-class roots, as they said to their friends late at night when they were drinking at Le Chéri or Le Zorba, those cafés in Belleville that were always packed full of marginally marginal and generally suitable young people. They would enjoy alcohol-drenched feasts together at Le Président, they would eat brunch, force themselves to visit the latest exhibitions, watch movies about which they were expected to have an opinion, go to concerts at La Cigale, Le Divan du Monde, La Boule Noire, to punk gigs at La Miroiterie. To de-stress from work, there was nothing better than those outings in Paris, the kind of thing you could tell your friends and colleagues about: the latest trendy new restaurant, the best bagels in the city, Japanese denim. It was a pleasure and a burden, trying to keep up with the cutting edge of fashion. Philippe excelled at that kind of thing, unearthing addresses and plans, little back alleys where you could find vintage clothing, a cool new bar, a perfect maafe. Same thing for travel. Zanzibar was better than Senegal; the Shetland Islands beat the Canaries. Barcelona and London were great, but only for a weekend. They would rent a minivan to explore vineyards in Bourgogne or the Loire Valley, with their best friends, Samir and Julie, who had also gone to business school, even if Julie was already thinking of changing careers.
Hélène had adored that era, when she felt she was exactly where she wanted to be, at an intersection of networks, in the place that produced money, fashion, ideas, the best parties, where the most beautiful people lived. And she was one of them, kind of. Well, she dressed the same way they did, anyway. She experienced the exquisite pleasure of entering a select spot, wearing skintight Acne jeans, a pair of sunglasses from Chloé perched on her nose. So many past slights and snubs were avenged in that way. All those crappy summers as a student when she’d had to work for a pittance to pay her rent, suburban life, and the endless drama of her high school years: that horrible little Versailles with its idols, its hierarchies, and its pitiful falls from grace…all of this had been redeemed in Paris, with Philippe.
All things considered, though, that period when the stress of work was compensated for in lounge bars and chic boutiques had not lasted long. Clara was born in 2004, the year Philippe joined AXA. The Parisian honeymoon had ended in that brief moment between her partner’s new job and the start of her maternity leave. As a consolation prize, Philippe had bought her a Goyard purse. Now Christophe was inviting her to a wedding. So much had changed between those two events that you might have believed a war had taken place. And, now that she thought about it, Hélène had absolutely no idea where she had left that two-thousand-euro purse.