The next day, Marianne didn’t dare to go to Pascale and Emile’s as she had promised. She paced restlessly up and down in the Shell Room after her lunch shift. The orange-white cat sat by the window, observing her. Marianne took a quick look at herself in the curved mirror above the chest of drawers. She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t chic; she was merely an old woman among strangers. What on earth had happened there with…Yann. His name was Yann.
Something wobbled in her stomach when she thought of his face and the nice, full warmth of his hand. She’d never experienced this feeling—a sweet, nagging commotion, like bubbles bursting in her chest.
“What am I doing here?” she said to herself, letting the soft question hang there in the room.
Her original wish to die had turned into something different, something much more banal: she had run away, absconded. Wasn’t it time to ring Lothar? Hopefully Lothar thinks I’m dead.
What should she say to him? I’m not coming back? I want a divorce? And then? Was she going to spend her life as an assistant chef in a restaurant until she was too old to lift a cooking pot? With a friend who was a witch and forgot from one moment to the next who Marianne was? And yet it felt so good to hear and speak her own language.
Marianne longed to have a friend, one like Grete Köster had been. She deeply regretted the fact that she’d never shown as much trust in Grete as her friend had in her. But who knows: maybe friendship was the most patient form of love. Grete had never pried with Marianne; she’d accepted that Marianne never expressed how she really felt. She had appreciated Marianne as a listener, and had never attempted to talk her out of her marriage. “If someone suffers and won’t change, then they need to suffer” had been her sole comment on the matter. That had hurt Marianne, and she’d told Grete that it wasn’t so simple. She’d wanted to explain why she kept delaying the breakout from her self-inflicted misery from one year to the next. Soon, her explanations had begun to sound hollow even to herself.
She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt dry and wiry. She went over to the wardrobe and inspected its meager contents: a few T-shirts and cheap blouses from the local supermarket, two pairs of plain trousers and some no-nonsense underwear, a pair of linen shoes and two high-necked nightshirts.
She studied her face and the notches left by the years: the vertical line above the root of her nose; the crow’s-feet around her eyes and the creases at the corners of her mouth; countless freckles, of which she hoped very few were liver spots. And her neck. My God, her neck.
There was nothing she could do about it: she was an old woman. But did that preclude her from longing for a little beauty?!
Within the hour, Marianne was sitting like an excited schoolgirl in Marie-Claude’s hairdressing salon in Pont-Aven. She didn’t consider for one second that it might have been the strange feelings and sweet commotion that had brought her here.
Marie-Claude slid her fingers searchingly through Marianne’s graying long brown hair.
“If you could just give it a bit of shape,” Marianne asked timidly.
“Hmm, it’s more like reincarnation you need. Mon Dieu, you got here just in time,” the hairdresser muttered as she beckoned to Yuma, her assistant, and gave her some quick instructions that Marianne didn’t understand. Secretly Marianne hoped that she wouldn’t end up with the same red locks as Marie-Claude. The hairdresser looked identical to her lapdog Lupin, who was enthroned in an elegant basket on a sort of podium next to the till.
Marianne closed her eyes.
When she reopened them an hour later, Yuma was blow-drying her new hairstyle. Next to them Marie-Claude was busy picking nits out of the hair of one of the local farm lads. She was chatting to Colette, who was having her snow-white pageboy hairstyle trimmed in the next chair. The urbane gallery owner was wearing a salmon-pink suit, white python-leather gloves and white slingback pumps.
Colette raised her glass of Bellini to Marianne. “You look magical! Why did you hide it so well?” she called, then, turning to Marie-Claude, “she needs a drink.”
Marianne’s heart skipped a beat as she studied herself. Her mud-colored mop of hair was nowhere to be seen; in its place she sported a feathery bob that curved around to her chin and had taken on the color of young cognac. Yuma had arranged it to emphasize her heart-shaped face. Lisann had plucked her eyebrows too, although the unexpected pain of the tweaking had brought tears to her eyes, and the dyeing of her eyelashes had stung them.
Marie-Claude was now standing next to Yuma, examining Marianne critically through screwed-up eyes.
“Something’s missing,” she concluded, and motioned to Marianne to take a seat at the makeup station with Lisann. Marianne found this both ludicrous and wonderful. She took a long swig of the Bellini that Yuma had brought her; the champagne went straight to her head, and everything around her began to glow.
When Lisann had finished her work and passed her a mirror, Marianne realized that she liked her eyes. And her mouth. As for the rest…Well, she looked different from how she felt inside. Only a few weeks ago she’d felt half dead. Now she felt as if she were forty. Or thirty. Like someone else. And tipsy.
She questioned Lisann about possible remedies for wrinkles.
“Lipstick during the day, lipstick in the evening, and a lover at night,” Lisann piped coquettishly. “Or the other way around: two lovers and one lipstick.”
As Marianne was paying, Marie-Claude said, “Your admirer is going to be impressed.”
“My what?”
“Or your husband.” The hairdresser peered at Marianne’s ring finger, but Marianne’s hands were tanned from her daily outings and the white band had faded.
“Je ne comprends pas,” Marianne said hastily.
“Don’t you have a husband? Well, the way you look now, you could have a husband and a few lovers on the side. Probably not the youngest men, but there are enough gentlemen of an interesting age around here. Has anyone particularly caught your eye?”
“I don’t understand,” Marianne repeated, but she could feel the blood shooting into her cheeks. Marie-Claude noticed it too. Luckily she can’t read my mind, thought Marianne, who could still see Yann Gamé before her and still feel that touch in Pascale’s garden in her fingers.
“Colette, which lover could we recommend today?” Marie-Claude asked the gallery owner, whose presence made Marianne immediately feel dowdy once again.
Colette looked at Marianne with eyes like a cat’s. Her face was a maze of wrinkles, but Marianne was still very impressed by her slenderness and perfect ballet posture.
“We should ask Madame what she has in mind,” replied Colette. “Some men are good for life, but unsuitable as lovers. Others are good for sex, but are deaf to any difficulties or feelings.”
“Yes, and then there are those who can’t do either,” Marie-Claude summed up. “That’s the kind I’ve always had,” she added, sighing.
Marianne and Colette left the salon together and walked side by side down the steep lane. Marianne paused as they passed the fashion boutique.
“Please,” she began, “would you help me? I need…” She pointed to her clothes. “I need style,” she said simply.
“Fashion has nothing to do with style,” said Colette in her husky voice. “It all depends on whether you want to conceal or reveal who you are.”
She offered Marianne her arm. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of a woman is hiding inside you. And when we’ve met her, we won’t reproach her for having stayed out of sight all this time, d’accord?”
On the first floor of the boutique, Colette settled into an armchair with another Bellini and a cigarette, and shot instructions at Katell, the saleswoman. While Katell was away looking for the first items of clothing, from out of nowhere Colette suddenly related an anecdote about her former neighbor in Paris.
“Madame Loos was a woman who kept herself strenuously to herself,” she began, sorting the heap of clothes that Katell had brought into two piles with a confident hand. “She had made it through life well enough—in her marriage, with her children, at work. Always in the right place at the right time. Always nice, polite and inconspicuously dressed. Then one night…” Colette leaned forward to stare at Marianne, who was peering uncertainly from all angles at a delightful dress the color of ripe Mirabelle plums, “one night something happened.”
Marianne slipped into a soft, champagne-colored roll-neck sweater that showed her waist and her bust to advantage: she had never worn such a tight sweater before in her entire life. It further enhanced the glow of her new hair coloring. Then she pulled on a cool pair of dark jeans that Colette had laid out for her.
“Madame Loos banged on my door as if she’d gone mad. She needed my car, she said: her younger sister was at death’s door in Dijon. I gave her the keys, of course. She sped away, but she crashed into another vehicle on the Place de la Concorde, and amid all the excitement she slapped a policeman, fled the scene with a guy from Rennes, told him the story of her life, had sex with him, borrowed his car and arrived too late: her sister was already dead. That looks good on you, by the way. Try on these pumps with it.”
Colette got up and peered over Marianne’s shoulder at the mirror. “Madame Loos returned the car, spent a second night with the man and came back to Paris a completely different woman—by bus.”
She handed Marianne a fine-knit cardigan that draped itself lightly and softly around her body. When Marianne twisted to catch a glimpse in the mirror, she saw a woman who was perhaps no longer the youngest, but very chic and feminine. The only thing that didn’t fit this new image was her timid, doe-eyed expression.
“Madame Loos managed to emerge from her hiding place, get rid of her husband and his mistresses and set up her own tearoom.” Colette gently laid an amber necklace around Marianne’s neck.
“What about the man from Rennes?”
“Completely incidental.” She took off her sunglasses and placed them daintily on Marianne’s nose. “One might have to be a little ruthless to seize back control of one’s life, don’t you think?”
Marianne gave an uneasy shrug. She regarded ruthlessness as the most socially acceptable form of gratuitous violence. But hadn’t she herself acted ruthlessly by coming here? Her sense of guilt toward Lothar was growing ever more insistent. Did he not at the very least deserve some answers so as to know where he stood?
“How about something red? Red is your color,” suggested Colette and called for Katell again.