Stéphanie’s father had finally built his swimming pool.
It was rectangular and blue, surrounded by wooden furniture, flowers, and umbrellas—the kind associated with television personalities featured in the pages of Paris Match. Steph considered the thing from the terrace. Standing nearby, her mother awaited her verdict.
“Well?”
“It’s nice.”
“It is, isn’t it? Those chaise longues, they’re teak. Rot resistant. They stay outside, even in winter.”
Caroline was seeking her daughter’s approval. In vain. Steph remained hidden behind her sunglasses. She had kept her distance from her parents since coming home, barely speaking to them. Her mother was trying to do the right thing.
“Do you want to go swimming? I can get you a towel.”
“Maybe later.”
The two women were about the same size, with Steph maybe a little rounder. Her mother was dressed in white, and smoking a Marlboro. Each time she raised the cigarette to her lips the gold bracelets on her wrist jingled prettily. In the distance you could hear the steady hum of the pump. The light cast thin white reflections on the water. Nobody ever went swimming.
“I’m thirsty,” said Caroline. “Want to have a drink?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, I’ll take you into town.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll treat you to champagne. As a celebration.”
“What are we celebrating?”
Her mother made a funny little noise with her lips that might have sounded like a fart, and meant that they were sure to think of something. The response amused Steph. The more her father embraced respectability, the more her mother seemed to loosen up. With her daughter away and her husband hustling, Caroline found herself on her own, or with girlfriends. It didn’t bother her. She had decided to have fun.
“Where do you want to go?” asked Steph.
“Let’s go to Algarde.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, don’t be a snob. He’ll be happy to see you.”
She looked at her daughter with desperate eagerness. Since Stéphanie had come home, Caroline wanted to take her everywhere, to show her off. People were calling her “the Parisienne.” It was both flattering and annoying. They had even gone shopping in Luxembourg City. Anyway, Steph didn’t really have much choice. She had already cut her visit down to nothing, four days, and then was leaving with some girlfriends for Florence, Rome, and Naples. She hadn’t been home since Christmas. And her parents were still footing the bills.
She and her mother took the Golf to drive into town. Steph had mixed feelings about being back in Heillange. In spite of herself, she enjoyed seeing these places again, the Metro, the Commerce brasserie, the little shops that would close when their owners died—a milliner, a notions store, a tiny fruit and vegetable stand—and also the post office, with its 1970s furnishings, City Hall, which was decked out for the national holiday, pedestrian streets, the bridge across the Henne, and finally her old school. In this shrunken, permanent landscape, Steph felt proud of herself. She kind of wished people knew it, that there was something that could set her off, now that she belonged to other places. Her whole attitude said she was just passing through.
When they reached Algarde, the owner immediately left the counter to come greet them. One of those eternally youthful men, Victor had the latest sneakers, rolled-up sleeves, and gorgeous teeth, thinning hair but not a single wrinkle. He didn’t flash his money around, but he still drove an SUV accompanied by an updated wife, with two kids in the back who looked almost exactly like him, except they had hair with lots of gel on it. Caroline hung out at Algarde, which she’d made her headquarters, coming in for drinks with her girlfriends and eating there on weekends. She took Victor’s arm and gave him a kiss.
“So you brought us your Parisienne!” he said.
Steph smiled at Victor but was careful not to kiss him. He was giving her the eye with a little half smile, seductive but distant. His cheeks had that burnished luster you see on men who shave twice a day. He was attractive, but in an unsettling way.
He eventually led the two women out to the terrasse. The weather was beautiful. Victor asked them for their news. Steph’s mother answered playfully, without telling him anything in particular. He found them a table shaded by a big umbrella, quite far back from the street and the occasional passing car. They had some trees behind them to keep them cool, and a panoramic view of place Mortier, the handsomest in town, with its old houses, paving stones, and a fountain designed by some contemporary artist.
They chatted for a moment, out of habit. Basically, Stéphanie was at the center of a somewhat meaningless society game. Her mother showed her off, people pretended to be interested, and Steph played along. A kind of fake currency was being circulated that helped lubricate relationships. At bottom, nobody really gave a damn.
Victor was treating them to drinks, so they gave up the idea of champagne. Caroline ordered a kir; Steph had beer. It was almost eleven in the morning. They sipped their drinks slowly, looking around. It was crowded. For some time now, downtown Heillange was being pulled in different directions. Businesses were heading out to the periphery while the historic core, with its streets and buildings, was being renovated at great expense. The mayor was ambitious, and he had accommodating bankers. There were practically no factories left in the valley, and young people were leaving for lack of jobs. As a result, the mass of workers who once formed the majority in municipal elections and shaped the area’s politics had become the smallest share of the electorate. So City Hall was exploring new development approaches with the help of the regional and state councils. Tourism would spark a renaissance. After upgrading the campground, enlarging the sailing club and swimming pool, and creating a theme miniature golf course, the city was now multiplying pedestrian streets and bike paths and had announced a brand-new iron and steel museum for the year 2000. The surrounding area had lots of hills and trails, which attracted hikers. Moreover, several companies—local, German, and Luxemberger—had been persuaded to support the idea of an amusement park. The overall plan was simple: invest. The means: take on debt. The inevitable result: prosperity.
Steph’s father, Pierre, now a deputy mayor for culture, was totally committed to this laudable adventure, whose repercussions were yet to be felt. At the municipal council, people stuck to the official line. Priming the pump required time and effort, but once the machine was launched, we’d be set for a century of full employment. In the meantime, when a councillor was challenged by an inquisitive voter, a budding economist, or a reporter, he blamed the state or the previous administration, Communists who had brought the town to its knees.
“What they’ve done isn’t too bad,” commented Steph’s mother.
“Yeah.”
“Everything used to be gray in this town. It was ugly.”
“For sure.”
Buildings throughout the area had blossomed in light red, green, fuchsia, and baby blue. The fashion even reached the prefecture, which was now painted a dusty rose. Driving through town, you sometimes felt you’d stumbled into a Jacques Demy movie. Everything that remained of the old city—its steel mills, its memories of wars and their dead, its Republican mottos, and what remained of its Catholicism—was gradually disappearing under new paint. The urban landscape that resulted from these renovations gave the inhabitants the odd feeling of living in a theme park. But they accepted it in the name of that most tenacious of ideas, progress.
Steph was thinking about all this and much besides, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up. Clémence was standing right behind her.
“What the heck are you doing here?”
“Well, nothing,” said a delighted Stéphanie.
“Don’t you ever tell people when you come home?”
“I arrived on Tuesday. I’m leaving tomorrow night.”
“And I’m spending nearly the whole summer here,” said Clémence, with mock dismay.
“Oh, poor you.”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you leaving?”
“As soon as I can, in August. But I’m working all of July.”
“Where?”
“At the law firm, with my father. I’m subbing for the receptionist.”
“That’s nice.”
Clémence was still standing behind her and Steph was looking up at her, which made her friend’s face look strangely reversed. She was amused at having such trouble recognizing her old pal.
“Sit down,” suggested Caroline. “Have a drink with us.”
Clémence gladly accepted, and took a chair from the next table. The women began gossiping enthusiastically, like actresses in the limelight, speaking loudly or softly depending on the topic. Steph learned that their classmate Clarisse had twice screwed up her first year at medical school and was at the end of her rope. On top of that, her boyfriend, who’d been at Paris Dauphine University, was leaving for London for a graduate internship. It was the pits. As for Simon Rotier, he was loafing his way through a business school in the Paca area, where his main interests were windsurfing and electronic music. He was back home just then, and Clémence had run into him.
“And?”
“The same as ever.”
“A real douche.”
“There you have it.”
The girls laughed. Was Steph planning on seeing him? Clémence wanted to know.
“Not on your life!”
Still, just thinking about it made Steph feel funny, sort of weak. The two girls continued the roll call of people they knew. Rodrigue was studying law in Metz; nobody saw him anymore. Romain Rotier was a star in a sports physiology program. He’d started doing triathlons and was winning metals. Steph’s mother had seen his name in the paper a couple of times.
“Problem is, he’s gonna wind up working as a coach.”
“That’s right. The guy’s gonna spend the rest of his days wearing slipons in some smelly gym. The pits.”
Caroline giggled. She had already finished her drink and was having a very good time. She wanted another one and ordered a bottle of a very cold white wine that tasted like electricity. The mood was definitely excellent. Steph was happy to find Clémence the same as always, lively and desirable, with an extra something that was hard to define. It looked like arrogance, but maybe it was actually just strength. Whatever the case, it made her irresistible. Being there was delightful, and the three women intended to make the pleasure last.
“Let’s have lunch here,” said Caroline after a while, glancing at her watch.
It was almost half past. They hadn’t seen the time flying. Clémence said she was expected. Caroline insisted, Clem would be her guest. Well, in that case. Victor brought the menus. Around them, people were lingering over drinks. Thirtysomethings in T-shirts enjoyed the sunshine. Children ran to and from the big pool in the middle of the square. There were also a few old people with tartan cloth shopping bags, visitors eating sirloin steak and quiche. The two girls wanted salads; Caroline was inclined to salmon tartare. But they kept drinking and eventually wound up ordering pizza. The conversation flowed on, more and more lively, cheerful, unstoppable. Clémence had tons of stories about her father’s law office and the crazy people who passed through it. To hear her tell it, the waiting room had nothing on a medieval court of miracles. Alcoholics, pensioners, indigents, silicosis victims, the obese, varicose veins sufferers, people crippled or otherwise hurt, incomprehensible foreigners and French people who were hardly more articulate.
“One woman showed up, she had three children, they’re all handicapped. One, I can understand, but three, what the heck is that about?”
It was funny, though not really. Making fun of social misfits was pretty routine, and increasingly widespread. It was partly for laughs, but partly to ward off evil, the insidious tide ever rising from below. When you ran into those people in the street, they weren’t just local color anymore, a few wackos or inbreds out for a stroll. A bare-bones economy was being set up for them dedicated to the management of poverty, the extinction of a species, with housing, Aldi supermarkets, and health clinics. You would see the people wandering ghostlike from welfare office to ZUP housing project and from bistro to canal, carrying plastic bags, equipped with children in strollers, legs like posts, huge bellies, and faces not to be believed. Once in a while a particularly beautiful girl would be born to them, and you could then imagine things, promiscuity and violence. Still, she was lucky, because her body might serve as a passport to a better world. Those families would also produce incredibly tough guys who refused to accept their fate and lashed out. They would have brief, deviant careers and wind up dead or in prison.
There were no statistics to measure the extent of this collapse, but the number of hungry people fed by Restos du Coeur was growing exponentially as social services crumbled. You had to wonder what kind of life those people could be leading, in their shabby housing, eating fatty food, hooked on video games and soap operas, spending their time making children and trouble, lost, enraged, and marginalized. It was best to avoid asking yourself the question, or counting them, or speculating on their life expectancy or fertility. They were scum, hovering below the poverty line, tossed occasional scraps of welfare, destined to frighten and to disappear.
Victor suggested dessert, but the three women were full. They had shared a carafe of Côtes-du-Rhône with the pizzas and were feeling very relaxed, sleepy, and heavy. Steph’s mother announced that she couldn’t move, and the two girls were doing no better. Coffee came with the bill, and Caroline laid her Visa Premier card on it. While they’d been chatting and laughing, the terrasse had emptied out. Only an English couple who came in late remained, with some teenagers smoking Chesterfields and drinking a Monaco. In the torpor of this early afternoon, it was very pleasant to contemplate the emptiness of July.
“Hey, look!” said Clémence, pointing down rue des Trois-Épis.
Steph’s father was coming their way. His sagging belly hid his belt and stretched his blue-and-white checked Eden Park shirt. He strode along carrying a briefcase and staring at his shoes. He looked at his watch and quickened his pace. Steph’s mother stood up to wave at him.
“Hey, there!” she called, clinging to the back of her chair.
“Are you all right?” asked Steph.
“Sure, sure. I’ve had it a lot worse.”
Caroline raised her hand, and her bracelets slid down her forearm and made their pleasant jingle. Her husband gave a quick wave and came over. He looked black as thunder, and immediately started telling them what was bothering him. The three women pretended to listen.
Pierre Chaussoy had just come from the American beach, where he’d checked on the final preparations for the festivities. The fireworks weren’t set up yet. The firefighters were giving him a hard time, and so were the municipal workers, who wanted triple-time pay because this Bastille Day fell on a Sunday. The mayor was waiting for him to report back. As he talked, he swiped pieces of pizza crust from his daughter’s plate. Steph watched him doing it. He won’t last long at that rate, she thought.
“You’re coming tonight, aren’t you?” he asked. “There’ll be a big turnout.”
Steph and Clémence played up to him. In fact they weren’t too crazy about the idea. Oompah music and fistfights really weren’t their idea of a fun evening. But he was so persistent that they wound up promising to come. Then he went on his way, pudgy, panting, briefcase in hand. The mayor was waiting for him, and, in one way or another, the whole town needed him.
“Okay then…”
Caroline and the girls didn’t have anything more to say to each other. The two avoided looking at her, and she got the message. She got to her feet and picked up the bill.
“Do you have a car, Clémence?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll leave you, then. I still have lots of stuff to do.”
Caroline asked Clem to say hello to her parents for her and went inside to pay the bill. She wasn’t walking very straight, but then again, she wasn’t seeing very well, either. Her car drove her, rather than the other way around. Steph and Clémence smiled as they watched her go, a talkative fake blonde with a dark tan and lots of gold bling. Before leaving, she gave them a last little wave goodbye.
“So, what do you feel like doing?” asked Clémence.
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, this place is still such a drag.”
“Too true.”
They were silent for a few more minutes, enjoying the three o’clock drowsiness and the effect of the wine on their heads and the food on their stomachs.
“Still, you could have called.”
“I haven’t stopped running around since I got here. My mom is dragging me everywhere.”
“Yeah, okay then.”
They decided to walk a little to stretch their legs. All the stores were closed, and the few restaurants were closing up. An occasional open window gave glimpses of modest interiors, a couple watching television downstairs, a teenager’s bedroom with Top Gun posters on the wall.
Clémence started to talk about her life and studies, and about living in Nancy. After a failed start at the préparatoire in Lille, she’d switched to medical school and had just finished her first year. Overall, things were going pretty well, though she’d really suffered in her first semester. She had arrived in midstream, lost in the mob of 1,600 students before the cutoff weeding. The professors’ methodical contempt, the phenomenal amount of work—it was awful. Until March, one day had followed the next with neither light nor pleasure, a gray tunnel, not to mention the fatigue, the competition, and the city of Nancy, which was nothing but a string of pretentious buildings and pathetic bars. She wound up on Prozac. Since then, she’d caught the rhythm and had created a little gang of supportive, hardworking friends: Capucine, Marc, Blanche, Édouard, and Nassim. They all went to the library together, partied together, did some casual fucking. It built connections. Come August, Clémence planned to go camping with them in the Cévennes for two weeks.
“So, do you have a boyfriend in all that?” asked Steph.
“Not really. Anyway, we have so much work.”
Then it was Steph’s turn to talk. She was evasive, though she and Clémence hadn’t seen each other since the summer of the baccalauréat. There was a lot to tell.
After passing her bac with honors, Steph had a flash of insight: studying law was suddenly out of the question. She had sensed that for people like her, law school offered too much freedom, too many opportunities to lose your way. Part of this last-minute rejection had a touch of snobbism. She couldn’t see herself spending five years in enormous lecture halls, being just one of hundreds of other morons who’d wandered in from the bush.
Unlike Clémence and their other classmates, who had been oriented toward attractive academic careers from childhood, Steph had never thought ahead. From elementary school to senior year in high school, she’d been happy to do as little as possible, and toward the end, her obsession with Simon had practically become a full-time occupation. So when the time came to make serious choices, she found herself at a loss. She regretted this, and blamed her parents.
The Chaussoys had managed to build themselves a comfortable, petit-bourgeois life without too much culture, and hadn’t laid out any specific plans for their only daughter. Pierre had just made that single, eccentric demand, that she pass the baccalauréat with honors. After that, they supposed she might go into business, they would get her internships, a job, help her buy a couple of good local rental properties with garages, and she would gradually build her nest egg, as they had.
But Stéphanie wasn’t about to settle for those modest aspirations. She now understood how things worked, even if she was a little late coming to the party. School functioned as a kind of classification yard. Some kids quit early, destined for manual labor in jobs that were underpaid and unfulfilling. True, one of them might wind up being a millionaire plumber or a rich garage owner, but in general, those career paths didn’t lead very far.
A second category, about 80 percent of a given age group, passed the baccalauréat and went on to study philosophy, sociology, psychology, or economics and management. After the brutal first-semester weeding, they got mediocre diplomas that promised endless job searches, civil service tests taken as a last resort, and a variety of frustrating destinies, like teaching in a low-income school district or doing PR in the territorial administration. They would go on to swell that category of bitter citizens who were overeducated and underemployed, who understood everything and could do nothing. Disappointed and angry, they would gradually give up on their ambitions and turn to other outlets, like building a wine cellar or converting to an Eastern religion.
Finally, you had the hotshots, the ones with top honors on the baccalauréat and a solid-gold resume, a real launchpad to desirable careers. Those people would follow narrow tracks and, under pressure, go fast and climb very high. Mathematics was a major asset when taking those accelerated majors, but there were also a few tracks for abstract thinkers, historians, dreamers, artists, and clowns of that ilk. Steph wanted to be part of this third category.
Given her resume, though, hoping to get into a public préparatoire school was unfortunately out of the question. So her father started looking for a backup plan. On the advice of a Reims Mercedes dealer, they settled on a private school that prepared students for the entrance competitions for the big graduate institutions like Essec, HEC, and Sciences Po. Problem was, the establishment in question was in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and cost an arm and a leg. A little more than three thousand francs a month, to which you had to add food, lodging, and transportation. So Steph was given an ultimatum: her parents would pay the freight, but she would be brought straight home at the least screw-up.
In early September Pierre rented a little van to help Steph get settled in her studio apartment. They drove down together, for once just the two of them. Her father talked about his life and his youth. He even told her about some of his old girlfriends. At one point Steph asked if he still loved her mother.
“Not much, anymore.”
He said it without bitterness, and Steph was thrilled that they were dropping the pretense for a few seconds. She felt appreciated. And she was careful not to ask him why they stayed together, or stupid questions like that. Being an adult means knowing that there is more than having the love of your life, or the other bullshit that filled magazine pages: doing well, living your passions, being a big success. Because there’s also time, death, and the endless war that life wages against you. Being in a couple is clinging to a life raft teetering at the edge of the abyss. Father and daughter said nothing more about it. In the car, Pierre said he was proud of her, and Steph felt like a grown-up. They stopped at a McDonald’s in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, and she insisted on paying.
Steph’s first fall in Paris was awful. She was attending a place called the École Préparatoire de Paris that was full of rich little snots who thought only of kicking back and doing X. Her class included the son of the ambassador of Benin, the offspring of a Thai minister, girls with hyphenated first names, and all manner of well-coiffed, stuck-up children of the rich. In the eyes of her new classmates, Steph was a total bumpkin. For example, they particularly made fun of her for wearing Achile socks, which in Heillange were considered classy. At her very first oral exam, the professor advised her to get rid of her accent, saying it would seriously hurt her at the competitive entrance exam.
Besides studying, Steph had to shop, cook, and clean her apartment, though at 175 square feet, this didn’t take long. On weekends, when she wasn’t studying for classes, she treated herself to trips around Paris. She had always thought that she and the city would have a great romance together. She was sorely disappointed. Of course Paris still had that quality of being like a chocolate-filled cream puff, with its roundabouts, its excesses, over-full and over-rich, at least in the central arrondissements. It was only there that you really had the feeling of being at the center of things. But Steph was forced to recognize that the city—with its flood of bodies, explosion of buildings, windows, and lights, glowing streams of automobiles, comings and goings in the Metro corridors, the beauty of the monuments and the ugliness of the streets—was completely beyond her grasp. A gap yawned between her and Paris. You had to have been born there. Or to succeed there. And succeeding is what Steph planned to do.
She started studying like a lunatic. She hadn’t had any illusions when she arrived, but neither did she think she was slower on the uptake than anyone else. Yet from her very first classes, she had the feeling that she’d landed in a foreign country. References, vocabulary, expectations—she didn’t understand any of them. The first week, she cried into her pillow every night. Plus, she didn’t have a TV or a telephone. To call her mother, she had to go downstairs to a phone booth. She felt weary, and found the professors haughty and pretentious, and her fellow students semi-moronic. Steph, who’d never had trouble sleeping eight hours at a stretch, was now waking up twice a night, feeling sweaty, with her jaws aching. She popped her pimples in the bathroom mirror under the harsh neon light. When she was finished, her face was covered with red blotches. She thought she looked ugly, and her hair lost its sheen. Worse, she’d gotten into the bad habit of snacking while she reviewed her notes. Her ass doubled in size in no time at all, and so did her arms. At the end of December, the balance sheet was grim. She had screwed up all her oral exams, was scary pale, and the scales said she’d gained fifteen extra pounds.
It was on a Saturday morning, during a six-hour written exam, that she came across this subject under general culture:
The progress made by insomnia is remarkable, and exactly follows all the other kinds of progress.
PAUL VALÉRY
She felt her throat tighten. That naked sentence, that feeling of the undeniable.
Steph was aware that up to now she’d been very lucky. She’d been born in the right place at a rather benign period in the history of the world. She’d never in her life had to fear cold or hunger, or even a hint of violence. She had belonged to desirable groups (well-off family, cool pals, students without major difficulties, a few hotties), and one day had followed the next with its dose of minor obligations and repeated pleasures. As a result, she had always viewed the future with a kind of relaxed indifference. So now that she was on her own and far from Heillange for once, she found herself completely out of step and ill-prepared, her only baggage being some naïve ideas from elementary school, and the pride and overly thin skin of a spoiled child.
She reread the Valéry sentence and considered her three-part essay structure. Then, without a word, she got up to go to the bathroom. The proctor was used to this sort of thing. He’d gone this route himself, and merely smiled knowingly as he watched the girl with the loose chignon walk by. Upstairs, Steph locked herself in a stall and had a good cry. She was at the end of her rope. She found herself fairly seriously wondering which would be easier, to jump into the Seine or under the wheels of an RER train.
Except that she went back. “Feeling better?” asked the proctor. “Yes, I’m okay.” Along the way, tight smiles and worries. Everybody knew they were more or less threatened by the same drama, sudden collapses were multiplying, the smartypants wouldn’t last much longer. It was time to buckle down and either hang in there or give up. For that first year, Christmas would be their Cape Horn.
Steph hung in there.
She even started acing her math tests. That wasn’t a total surprise, since she’d always been good at it, but still, what a breath of oxygen!
After Christmas vacation, she kept up her steady pace. She stopped doubting herself, just did her work without reluctance, until one o’clock in the morning if need be. She spent less time making herself attractive. She looked at guys less. She took notes. She graduated to the second year.
During the summer vacation she kept up her efforts, knocking off a good chunk of the reading that her professors had recommended. Race et histoire, Winock on the 1960s, Aron, L’Histoire des droites en France, even Robbe-Grillet and Giono. That said, she stalled on Proust. The whole business of flowers, stained-glass windows, the slightest oscillation of the heart…give me a break. Then she spent three weeks in Bristol, with a family who hosted paying foreign students. The house was vast, with carpets everywhere, even in the bathroom, which gave you something to ponder as you sat on the toilet. Most of the other guests came from Japan or Korea. They behaved like their stereotypes, polite and hardworking, and the girls covered their mouths when they laughed. They were forever nodding, as if they wanted to nail down with their foreheads every word they said.
Steph got along well with the Asians. For them, being there was like being on probation. After spending a year visiting Europe and perfecting their business English, they would have to go home to become managers. Yuki, a boy she slept with three times, told her about his future as a “salaryman.” Each time, they had fucked right at six in the morning, having come back from a club. He had very stiff, dyed hair, which was apparently the fashion in Tokyo and Osaka. He worked so hard to make her come, it was touching. Big drops of sweat dripped from his forehead, and Steph had to close her eyes. Once, when she told him to relax, he promptly lost his erection. When it was over, they chatted. Yuki’s parents had invested a good part of their savings so that he could get the Japanese equivalent of the TOEIC English certificate. Everybody was counting on him. Soon he would have a good salary, responsibilities, fourteen-hour workdays, and a necktie. Basically, everything was settled for him. Steph told herself that in Europe you were still lucky enough to be able to disappoint the people who loved you.
As a result, she hadn’t seen any of her old Heillange pals during this studious summer. She kept to herself, afraid of interferences. She also didn’t want anyone seeing her wrestler’s thighs. She laid low.
Second year was characterized by its flatness, a neutral expanse like gray Canson art paper. Steph had the feeling she was digging a tunnel through a Himalaya of work. She experienced the discouragement of this absurd task, but also the payoff of each foot cut through the rock. She knew that at the end she would find her Eden, a career. She would take her rightful place, and with a vengeance. She pinned some postcards above her desk, Sisley reproductions, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, a picture of Virginia Woolf, a bare-chested Belmondo in Breathless.
She also found herself some pals, Renata and Benôit. From the very beginning professors had pushed working with others as a remedy for everything. There were all kinds of formulas for success, even sayings. One suggested that if you’re in a relationship, you’ll flunk out: if you couple, you’ll buckle. You had to make sure to get enough sleep, study with a partner, team up with the most driven students, set aside free time to decompress. Steph and her friends chose one approach: they wrote the titles of the chapters to be studied on little pieces of paper, put them in a shoebox, and took turns drawing them. On Saturday afternoon they played a few games of ping-pong in a little neighborhood youth club.
Being organized gradually began to pay off. Steph’s grades were good, she was making progress in all areas, even in philosophy, and it was costing her less and less effort. Discipline had gradually seeped into her and arrayed her faculties in order of battle. She no longer woke up at five in the morning, could knock off twelve hours of work without complaint, and had lost weight, besides. The only shadow in the picture was a residual languor when she had a little free time, a kind of fog of anxiety, a why-bother worry. But she didn’t have that much free time, anyway.
More than anything, her gift for math had come to the fore during this second year. In high school she never had any problem keeping up, in spite of her dilettantism. But in préparatoire, she came into her own as a math wiz. Not only that, but she didn’t have to work at it. Mathematics seemed to flow out of her in a quasi-miraculous way, like in those stories where heathens touched by grace suddenly start speaking in tongues. And in the world Steph was aiming for, math was practically the lingua franca. Mathematics not only made airplanes fly and computers work, but also ordered civilization, certified intelligence, and founded innovation.
Monsieur Moineau, her economics professor, was the first person to give Steph a sense of how lucky she was. He took her aside after an oral exam, and they went for an espresso in a little café on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He asked about her study habits, the amount of time she spent on her homework. He wanted to be sure she wasn’t getting outside help. He also asked her what her parents did, and whether she was seeing anyone. He used the English word “boyfriend,” probably to minimize the intrusiveness of his question. The word seemed so out of character, it amused her. How had he come up with such an expression?
Moineau was old-school, with a crew cut and rimless Affelou glasses, and casually dressed. He taught his classes with sarcastic detachment and wrote corrections in green ink. Rumor had it that he’d had a drinking problem. Apparently, he’d done Polytechnique and run the real estate department at BNP Paribas bank before his downfall. The tumble must have been a long one, because he once told them that he had twenty-five more years of contributions before he could retire on a full pension. And he was at least forty-five.
On the day they had their coffee, Moineau wore a very handsome Scotch plaid jacket that made him look like a green woodpecker, and a blue knit tie that accentuated his potbelly. He seemed weary, as if he could use a sabbatical. Steph noticed tiny purple veins on the sides of his nose and thought she could never sleep with a guy who had that skin, that nose, or those yawning pores. If he ever made a pass at her, she would do her best to duck him. At worst, she was prepared to make a few concessions to keep up her average in economics—jerk him off or let him feel her up. She wouldn’t go so far as to blow him, however. Her sex life amounted to so little, anyway. But she was wrong about him. After a moment of intense thought, Moineau merely said:
“Good, good…In that case, aim high, Mademoiselle Chaussoy. Aim high.”
In May, Steph was able to visit the HEC business school campus with a little group of her classmates, as a way of getting a feel for the place. She saw brightly lit offices, well-tended flower beds, high-tech equipment, and professors who were lively, prophetic, and better paid than marketing directors. Steph’s attention was especially drawn to the students. They were as lean as athletes, devoted to power, and beautiful, just by knowing they were the best.
For Steph the visit served as confirmation. This was exactly what she wanted to do. This was exactly how she wanted to be.
She’d always had the feeling that outside of Paris, people only led second-class lives. Seeing this caste of hungry young people reinforced that impression. They alone knew; they alone were properly trained to understand how the world worked and how to move its levers. Everything else was crap, and the physicists, social sciences hotshots, agrégés, politicians, philosophers, lawyers, movie stars, and soccer players were all blind, impotent jerks. The people who intimately understood the machine and spoke the language of their time, those who embraced a perpetually accelerating era, exponential by nature, all-devouring, infused with light, speed, and money, they were here, the economics princes and future business leaders in their blue shirts, with their smooth, sleek bodies, their terrifying drive.
Steph took her entrance competition exams in the spring and got her results in early July. The letters arrived one after the other. She was accepted at Lille, Lyon, and Essec. There it was: the launch pad. She could relax.
Acting blasé and without a smile, Steph only told Clémence that she’d succeeded in the entrance competition for Essec.
“Bitchin’!” exclaimed Clémence.
“Yeah, gotta admit.”
“When I think that you didn’t do jack shit at school.”
“That’s right. But it seems so long ago.”
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to come back here. I’m never coming back.”
“You amaze me.”
“There comes a time when you just gotta go for it.”
“Yeah, too true.”
“I don’t care. I know what I want, and I’m not ashamed to be successful.”
They walked a little farther to the white Peugeot 106 that Clémence drove when she was in town. It was her parents’ utility car, insured for liability only, dented but sturdy. Her father sometimes took it to the woods, hunting. The rest of the time it sat moldering in the garage. The seats gave off an unpleasant smell of mildew. The girls rolled down the windows for some fresh air.
“Where are we going?”
“I dunno.”
“There’s a pool at my place now,” said Steph.
“Well, that’s it.”
“Cool.
Steph was happy. In the last two years she hadn’t experienced this kind of relaxation, the feeling that nothing needed to be done. She had nothing to study, no daily obligations to meet. Her parents had even stopped pestering her to clean her bedroom or wash the dishes. The future looked complete, ideal. She could just coast until classes started. She was enjoying this unaccustomed state of weightlessness when she said:
“You know, the timing of this dance is actually pretty good.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause it’s been months since I’ve gotten laid, girl.”
Clémence slapped the steering wheel and laughed.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I was working like crazy. And the guys in my class, forget about it. Rejects.”
“Yeah, but still.”
“I dunno. I didn’t even want to anymore. My libido completely vanished.”
“So it’s back now?”
“Fuck, yeah,” she said with a leer.
Clémence laughed again.
“But still, on a Bastille Day in Heillange, who are you going to get it on with? Some army private? A gypsy?”
“I don’t give a damn,” said Steph. “Even your father, if worse comes to worst.”