He guides me down the street, holding my wrist, not to keep me from fleeing, I think, nor for a chance to be close to me, but perhaps simply to protect me on this street that’s gone to such lengths to lead me astray, even if, I tell myself, on a street with no tram line I’m already at far less risk of an intentional accident.
I’m thinking of asking him if, as someone who rides it, he’s noticed the dark designs the tram has on certain people’s lives. I don’t. Why should I be confiding in him, why should I trust my ex-husband, a trust he would soon betray? Because I long for just that with all my being, because I so wish I could go back to those Fondaudège days, when neither of us could even imagine being wronged by the other, so much so that when I started lying to my ex-husband about Ange, I didn’t even realize I was lying, unconsciously convinced that I was incapable of duplicity, every bit as incapable as he was.
We walk through the cold, damp air, the persistent smell of silt that fills the city. My ex-husband lets out a surprised little laugh.
“Really,” he says, “I don’t see how you could have gotten lost. Look, here we are at the Place de Tourny, nothing’s changed.”
“That’s because you’re here with me,” I tell him, not backing down. “The geography only changes when I’m alone. It’s perfectly logical, don’t you see, if the point is to give me a sign. But it’s a sign I don’t know how to decipher.”
He coughs quietly, faintly uncomfortable. He’s not in good health, and I feel bad for him.
“Are you just going to keep getting fatter and fatter?” he suddenly asks.
“Really, now, that’s none of your business,” I say, offended. “I imagine the food will be healthier at our son’s.”
Eager to put a stop to any further discussion of my weight, I quickly add, “I’ve stopped getting my period; it’s menopause coming on.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am,” I shoot back.
“It could be something else,” my ex-husband says with a frown.
Just then, as we stood stopped by the fountain on the Place de Tourny, under the mist-shrouded bare branches of the linden trees, I spy Noget walking toward us. My ex-husband has seen him too.
“That’s Richard Victor Noget!” he says, amazed.
“You know him?”
He gives me an incredulous look.
“Don’t you?”
“I do now, now that he comes to our apartment every day,” I say softly, “now that he makes all our meals and looks after Ange like some sweet-talking jailer hovering over his prisoner. I’d never heard of him until he wormed his way into our life.”
I don’t dare confess to my ex-husband that when things were going fine for Ange and me we looked on our neighbor Noget with horror and contempt. I don’t dare reveal such a thing, foreseeing his skepticism, and then his dismay, because the timid stare he’s giving Noget overflows with respect.
Irritated, I ask him, “And how have you heard of this Noget?”
“Well, I don’t know! Hasn’t everyone? I think he’s written some books.”
“Then how is it I’ve never heard his name in my life, and why didn’t I know the first thing about him until he essentially moved in with us?”
My ex-husband turns to look at me. His gaze seems to turn away inside of him, to veil itself with a cloud of caution, uncertainty, or reticence, which brings a pang to my heart, because I know that look well. This man I so loved, now older and frailer, often hid behind a gaze grown suddenly opaque to tell me without having to say it that some question I’d asked was misplaced, or ridiculous, or foolish, and was in any case outside his sphere, and he didn’t even want to try to answer.
Nonetheless, he whispers, “The trouble with you is you only know what you want to know.”
“But it’s not as if I somehow went out of my way not to hear about this Noget,” I said. “I mean, really, it’s not my fault if my eye never happened to land on his name. Has he been on television?”
“Of course he has,” says my ex-husband, with a tinge of impatience.
“We don’t have a television,” I say.
“There’s your problem,” says my ex-husband.
“Well, too bad,” I say.
I trail off, perfectly aware that I’m being unreasonable. We fall silent, standing motionless, side-by-side (two separate, isolated halves of a single heart that was once enough for the two of us, now we’ve atrophied, both of us lost and alone, resentment and guilt the only feeble bonds we have left) until Noget saunters over to join us.
With a servility that sets my teeth on edge, my ex-husband gives a little bow.
“I’m so proud…so happy…to meet you,” he mumbles. “I’m Nadia’s ex-husband.”
“A pleasure,” says Noget, very warmly. “I was coming to look for you,” he says to me, “in case you were having trouble finding your way. But I see you have a guide already.”
The two of them chuckle, my ex-husband obsequiously, Noget derisively. I give the former a quick nod, then walk away without awaiting the latter.
Rue Esprit-des-Lois is in front of me, at the end of the Allées de Tourny, I can clearly see the sign of the hair salon that marks its beginning. Why, then, do I have the feeling, as impossible to ignore as a siren, that in a moment the street is going to slip away in front of me? That if I start down it alone, on my own authority, with no one leading me, then the street will know it and take steps to escape the grip of my certainty, perhaps fade away or contort or, like the infernal Fondaudège, grow endlessly longer and longer until I’ve been literally erased?
I race toward the street, hoping to catch it off guard. I hurry along, head high, eyes fixed on a distant point as if to limit the risk of exposure to my incomprehensibly (because I so love my city) fickle surroundings. And even as I trot along, falsely confident, feigning innocence, doing my best to go unnoticed by the street itself, I can feel the weight of the flesh squeezed into my cardigan, I can hear the clomp of my heavy footfalls. I smile a little, thinking: Look at you, butterball, trying to cleave the air like a well-honed blade!
And I think of my ex-husband still living in the apartment that used to be ours, that’s now legally mine alone, though it gives me no pleasure or sincere sense of triumph, because a thing can be legal and still be unjust, and in this one case I can’t blind myself so entirely as to enjoy being right. I genuinely can’t, I tell myself, ever so slightly proud of my integrity.
To tell the truth, until my legs took me to that building I used to live in, I’d forgotten I still owned my ex-husband’s apartment, unless I’d deliberately banished that thought to some unvisited little corner of my memory. And whenever the pragmatic Ange tried to remind me the rent checks weren’t coming, I always hurried to answer, “Don’t even get me started!”—pretending to be so outraged at my ex-husband that I feared I might lose all control if Ange forced me to deal with it, when in fact all I wanted was not to think about it, out of remorse, or pity, or who knows.
And I think of my ex-husband still living in the apartment where, I like to believe, we spent the most harmonious years of our lives—him, our son Ralph, and me—and I murmur to Ralph, whose letter I’m fingering deep in my pocket: Would you ever dare say you weren’t happy on Rue Fondaudège, and happy in the most uncomplicated way? Must you really now play the aggrieved, ungrateful son, drunk on recriminations? I was an ordinary mother, reasonably conscientious, respectably affectionate, so why do you insist on forcing me into the role of an implacable enemy, and you the valiant foe battling with her year after year, aiming not to annihilate me or expel me from your life, but simply, oh, this is how it feels, simply to flaunt your struggles, to hold up your heroism for all to see? I suppose it makes you happy to imply that your mother is such a terrible person. But what did I do that was so awful? Or that can’t at least, after so many years, be forgotten? The possibility that my son still resents my leaving his father for Ange makes my blood boil.
And I think of my ex-husband still living in the apartment where, less than an hour ago, I found myself for the first time since I left him, sitting across from him in that living room now drenched in the atmosphere—his atmosphere—I so strove to eliminate or minimize when we lived together, which cannot be more clearly defined than by the words “provincial” and “proletarian.” Yes, I come from Bordeaux, I’ve never lived in Paris. Why should I look down on the provinces? That’s all I know, and it’s everything I love. But more than anything on earth I despise a certain kind of stodgy inertia, a staleness in the air, an obliviousness to new trends in interior design, and even ten-year-old trends, a clutter of pretentious gewgaws, idiotic furniture, a sickly mishmash of styles from all over the world, and those were my ex-husband’s tastes and habits exactly, which not untactfully I’d managed to banish from our married existence, and now I find them again in this apartment that used to be ours, as if when I left I’d unwittingly taken with me all the subtle transformations my influence had worked on my ex-husband’s personality, his upbringing, his ways.
I find that dreariness reigning over the place once again (thick drapes pulled tight over the windows, wooden chairs with flat cushions that tie to the uprights, a smoked-glass coffee table on a Chinese-style rug, Berber poufs, etc.), where it never dared show its face, intimidated by my intransigence, back when I lived there with my ex-husband.
How well I know those ways, those aspirations! No matter how I hate them, they still have the power to move me when they catch me off guard, which is why, just now in my ex-husband’s charmless living room, I was left mute by depression no less than by the irksome realization that his upbringing had ended up winning out over everything I’d taught him.
You know, I had the same upbringing you did, I often told my ex-husband back then, in hopes of persuading him that it’s never too late to clamber out of the abyss of ignorance and bad taste, as, to my mind, I had.
I never let him meet my brothers and sisters, or anyone else from my family. You wouldn’t like them, I said. But what I actually feared was the opposite: that he’d find them entirely likable, because they are, I believe. I feared that their pleasantly soothing company might reinforce my ex-husband’s commonplace tendencies, I feared that any time spent with those unrefined people might undo all the work I’d expended to elevate my ex-husband’s heart, his devoted but unformed heart, his rudimentary heart, and that deep in his childlike self he might see my connection to that family as a good reason to align his tastes with theirs.
My ex-husband was a simple, open-hearted soul. He never did quite grasp the cold hatred I felt for the environment I’d pulled myself out of, he never could clearly imagine such a thing, because he knew full well that in any case I’d grown up surrounded by thoughtfulness and benevolence.
Resenting parents who treated you perfectly well but whose lifestyle you hate: that he could not understand. My refusal to go anywhere near Les Aubiers, where I lived as a child, to go anywhere near those streets lined with crumbling sidewalks and public housing developments: that too he could not understand. Yes, for all my efforts, my ex-husband remained a simple soul.
And what can I do about that? I say to myself, half aloud, still fulminating at my son. Was I supposed to not mind his dismissiveness toward my work, like someone who sees teaching as nothing more than an agreeable pastime to fill up the long, empty days? Was I supposed to not mind that he spent every Sunday watching television, insisting that I sit beside him so he wouldn’t be alone, so he wouldn’t be laughing all alone at the comedies he so loved that he pouted and sulked when he saw that my lips never broke into a smile, that they remained tightly closed, pinched with disdain for those endless inanities?
Ange and I never watch television, I mentally tell my son. Are we supposed to be ashamed of that, are we supposed to be ashamed that we’re even a little proud of it? Really, my darling, really, my little heart, I don’t see why we should.
Now I’m walking more confidently, I recognize every house I see from the corner of my eye, every shop I pass by.
Most importantly, I see them more or less when and where I know I should. Nothing has changed.
My fingers feel the corners of my checkbook in my other cardigan pocket. Yes, I half say for my son’s ears, as you see, I wrote your father a check, but I wasn’t happy to be doing it, I was put out, because I’m appalled by your emotional blackmail, and I have no reason to be giving money to that man, who owes me more with every month that goes by.
What I don’t admit to my son, not even in my thoughts, is that I’m finding it harder and harder to part with my money, even though I’m no longer young, even now that I’m richer than ever before. It’s got nothing to do with my ex-husband specifically. Besides, didn’t I take him for everything he had? I did, I did, I tell myself, with a tense little giggle, what’s the use of denying it now? That divorce settlement was a swindle, for my benefit alone. I’m slowly turning into a miser, I tell myself. Is it Ange’s influence? Can every change of character be explained by someone else’s influence? Oh, it’s such a hard thing to quell deep inside, in a petty old heart, that abhorrence of any dent made in the glittering treasure, however short-lived and miniscule, that ridiculous disheartenment at the thought that every fresh influx of money serves not to pile the gold ever higher but only to counteract the expenditures, that anxious little breathlessness I’ve begun to feel, and to recognize, when I have to decide for or against a purchase, and then the flood of warm pleasure radiating all through my body when I find some pretext to dodge or defer it.
In that way too, Ange and I are alike. Or did you think you had to become just like him? Ange only buys what he can’t avoid buying, and only after labyrinthine mental calculations, the need for that purchase vying with the deep joy he’d feel at forgoing it.
It’s the same thing with me. Ange and I understand each other so well. Because, although we never say so out loud, we both feel the same bliss at sacrificing a superficial, ephemeral pleasure for the kind of deep, lasting satisfaction that comes over us when we imagine our pile of riches. There’s real happiness to be found in doing without, I tell myself as I finally reach the front door of our building, when nothing is forcing you into it, when you do it purely by choice. I remember the two of us sometimes gripped by a sort of euphoria when, after we’d gone back and forth over something pretty to wear, a book for Gladys or Priscilla, a belt for my son—or, more often Lanton—we walked out of a shop with empty hands and full pockets, and of course how could I ever confess without blushing that at such moments we felt like the masters of the city, so perfectly in control of our longings, our reflexes, our whims that we could find in their very frustration a delight more meaningful than we ever could from their fulfillment?
All that is the absolute truth. And so, I say to myself, my angry mind still on my son, it was painful, writing that check for my ex-husband, more painful than someone who’s never known avarice could possibly imagine. He didn’t want to take it at first.
“It’s all right, I don’t need your money,” he mumbled, unconvincingly.
The apartment reeked of privation, of joyless renunciation. He himself, my ex-husband, had lost a great deal of weight. He told me he was thinking of trying to make a fresh start in Spain. His hand lunged for the check, as if he’d suddenly changed his mind. He took it without thanking me, and defensively muttered, “Still, this will help me get back on my feet.”
Finding my check snatched away just as, with some relief, I was about to stuff it back into my pocket, I felt like I’d been robbed. I furiously looked around at the yellow walls, the cheap blond-wood furniture.
My ex-husband hadn’t lost his lush hair, now gray, but still curly and silky. I pictured myself back then combing his hair with my fingers, tugging at the tangles to hear him complain, laughing—that was this very same head, these same curls, light chestnut at the time, it was this same broad, full-lipped mouth, which, I must concede, never spoke a word untouched by a kindness without affectation or self-awareness. Yes, yes, my ex-husband was the best person I’d ever come across back then. I loved to give him things, all sorts of things, all kinds of presents meant to make up for the vast difference between my kindly husband and myself, because even before I met Ange, when I still had a mind without secrets, a heart without guilt, I felt innately less honorable, less transparent than my ex-husband, as if I knew I’d betray him before I had any reason to consider doing so, as if my more knowing heart had foreseen that it was the fate of that kindly, simple soul to be mistreated, to be plunged into despair and disgust, as if, yes, there were nothing more burdensome and infuriating about someone we love than obliviousness to our fickle, sometimes wicked thoughts, our ambivalent feelings.
Standing there with him in his wretched living room, I said to myself: It made you so happy to buy him all the things he loved, and now here you are put out that he ended up taking the minuscule sum you’re so grudgingly offering him.
I was almost faint with shame. However disillusioned, untrusting, and hardened he’d grown, my ex-husband hadn’t seen my reluctance, hadn’t guessed the ugliness of my offering.
Because isn’t it a ridiculously small amount, chosen precisely so I won’t feel the loss, so it will be just like I’d never given him anything at all?
I pictured myself as I used to be, here in this same living room, which was cheery and elegant at the time; I pictured myself dazed as I am now, not by shame or remorse but by joy, by a fascinated disbelief at my tremendous luck at having this man I so loved as my husband, and as my son that charming little boy whose eyes, raised to mine, fluttered with terror at the mere thought that I might leave the room without his knowing it.
And that man was kindly and good and that child desperately in love with his mother, and my ex-husband’s handsomeness, like in the fairy tales I read our son, seemed to have been bestowed on him as an illustration of that kindness, a visible translation of the exceptional goodness he had in him and didn’t even know it. A little shard of unhappiness sometimes lodged in my young, slightly oppressed, questioning, timid heart when after an absence I rediscovered my ex-husband’s beauty. It literally shocked me, and I went to him in a fog of pain that must have made me seem cold and stiff.
My ex-husband had no interest in his own physical splendor, and no idea of it. He’s so unsophisticated he doesn’t even see it, I sometimes said to myself, shaken. But I knew that wasn’t true. Along with the gifts that had been granted my ex-husband, he’d been given an inability to judge them, as if to make them more wonderful still.
What’s left of all that now? I asked myself, sitting with him in his tacky living room. What’s left of that love, that long, loving alliance, all the things we said to each other, which could only mean, if they ever meant anything at all, that we’re still bound together to this day?
And the passionate love my son felt for me, what’s left of that?
I didn’t realize it at the time, I told myself, but Ange’s shadow was already very discreetly darkening this room where the three of us used to sit, happy and serene, it was already there, lurking in a corner, remaking our future, because, though I surely didn’t realize it at the time, my heart was beating at a slight remove from the two others, imperceptibly less innocent, less constant, less convinced.
Today my ex-husband is a hard, scruffy man. His good looks were taken away from him, it seems, when his kindness turned into sneering mistrust and blind belligerence. Meanwhile, I… Oh, I tell myself, I’ve turned out just fine. Unlike him, I’ve lost nothing, since I’m now married to the one man who’s like me in every way. I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy.
As a sour silence began to fall over us, I asked my ex-husband, “Did you stop working by choice, or…”
“Or what?”
“Or was it the customers who stopped calling?” I went on, squirming.
“And why would that be?” he said, with his gruff, stubborn air.
He doesn’t know, I thought, shocked. He has no idea how things are—or is he pretending?
“Strange things have been happening lately,” I said. “You must have noticed. I can’t see why you’d be spared. Ange and I had to leave the school.”
With those words, a gush of tears swamped my eyelids.
“Your problems at school are none of my concern,” said my ex-husband. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You know perfectly well why I stopped working after the divorce.”
My lawyer, with whom I’d become friends (he even came to the party in Souhar’s honor), had told me there was something desperately sad about my ex-husband’s attempts to move me or influence me by feigning depression and burgeoning alcoholism.
“You’ve got to let his tantrum run its course, just like you would with a child,” Ange had told me.
And I’d come to think exactly the same thing, buttressed by Ange and my lawyer, both of them thoughtful and perceptive men.
“Really, you can’t have been as devastated as all that,” I said, forcing an arch smile. “Just because I left you?”
My ex-husband didn’t answer. His eye absentmindedly landed on my (ravaged? bloated?) face, on my bust, which my slightly slumped posture must have made even broader and fatter, and I could guess at the thought, the astonishment running through his mind: Could this woman, this unrecognizable woman, really have made me suffer as I did?
Unable to hold back, I cried out, “You’ve changed a lot yourself!”
But he hadn’t said a word, so I seemed to be lashing out for no reason. He wearily rubbed his forehead with one hand.
“No,” he murmured, “I still don’t understand why you left. We were happy, weren’t we? But I don’t care anymore. That’s all over and done with, right?”
I briefly pictured the two of us sitting as we were at that moment, but in a life we’d gone on living together, simply chatting at the end of a workday, out of reach of Ange’s menacing shadow, in all the clarity of our identical, melded souls. Would misery have come down on our heads, would hatred have surrounded us on all sides, if I hadn’t gone off with Ange? But how would my ex-husband have protected us? With the impregnable halo of his goodness?
“Ange and I have the same tastes, the same opinions, and you know it,” I say softly. “Didn’t we invite you over more than once? We did all we could to build a friendship with you. We reached out to you, and you pushed our hands away.”
I didn’t add how deeply I admired Ange, at the time, for his open-mindedness in trying to welcome and console my ex-husband, who from what I could see had fallen into hatred and despair all the same. Did Ange fruitlessly strive to befriend my ex-husband in hopes of proving his depression was feigned, or at least wildly exaggerated? That was the question I suddenly asked myself, all these years later, sitting on a floral-print futon in the vulgar, dingy place our charming living room had become thanks to my ex-husband’s unelevated mind and atavistic ways. Ange would have found it unbearable to sit all day in a living room furnished and decorated like this, I wished I could tell him, be irritated at him, at the overtness of his sorrow, and then add: life is more complicated than you think, oh, innocence is too easy a way out.
And yet, I said to myself, and yet… I felt a resurgence of the stifled remorse that had tainted my new life of love at the time, the vague awareness that Ange and I had, in a way, debased my ex-husband, not really meaning to—or did we? I’d dimly felt that by deceiving and hurting my ex-husband, and then trying to draw him to us, into our discreetly luxurious apartment, we had—not without a certain pleasure—defiled something that was beyond us, something that irritated us.
Which was what? A kind of saintliness? But Ange and I looked on such words with horror, and not just the words but everything they stood for.
Nonetheless, I tell myself—standing at the front door on Rue Esprit-des-Lois, unable to bring myself to push it open and go back to our apartment—nonetheless, we turned my ex-husband into a bitter, mean person, capable, for example, of quietly working to alienate our son from Lanton out of pure self-interest, out of stupidity and intolerance, because he didn’t feel one way or another about Lanton. All that, I say to myself, as if the perfect kindness of someone you haven’t yet wronged can only turn into mindless cruelty, spurred by resentment and disillusionment, as soon as things change. Maybe, then, my ex-husband wouldn’t have turned so cruel if he hadn’t been so kind, I tell myself. Doesn’t that alone prove he was no saint? Because if he were, hurt or not, he would have stayed just as he was. His hurt and dishonor would in fact have made him even finer than before.
“The only reason he wanted me in his apartment was to make fun of me,” said my ex-husband, speaking of Ange.
“Certainly not,” I said, indignantly.
“He wanted to show you I was an idiot, with the living proof right there in front of you. He must have thought you weren’t quite convinced. He would have asked me questions about all sorts of things that I wouldn’t have known how to answer, and so by his standards I would have been humiliated,” my ex-husband calmly went on, his voice steady, almost detached.
He said this without accusation or blame, simply as an observation, almost unsurprised, and beneath his mask of sadness and premature age I caught a startling glimpse of the man he once was, his quietly radiant way. And that’s how he would have stayed, unchanging, if Ange and I hadn’t…
As if in a last, desperate effort, even with nothing left to win or defend, I leaned toward my ex-husband on that hideous couch, sinking my nails into my palms, and whispered, almost pleading, “But you know perfectly well that… I mean, the whole thing was that…I stopped loving you!”
He looked at his palms with a little smile, raised his head, and again I saw the man he would have been, should have been, if only we’d let him.
“So?” said my ex-husband, smiling sweetly.
Then his face suddenly jerked back to the present, closed up, shrank. He let out a sharp, manic, mindless little laugh.
“So they kicked you out of your school, huh? What on earth were you two getting up to, that it came to that? Even the worst teacher in the world usually can’t get fired.”
He clearly has no idea what’s going on, I thought, weary and surprised at the same time. I felt just as I do when I’m faced with a hopelessly backward student: I didn’t know where to start.
“Now I understand: you don’t see what’s happening,” I said hesitantly. “You yourself, my poor friend… Who would ever want to hire you now? None of your tony downtown customers from the old days, I can tell you that. You’re marked, just like Ange and me. You think you chose to banish yourself because you didn’t want to be where you are, and you think you quit working because somehow that’s what you wanted or because you were supposedly so depressed you didn’t feel up to it anymore—you’re convinced you have your own reasons, in other words, but that’s not how it is at all. You’re one of those people no one can stand to see in the city anymore. So are Ange and I. Oh, ask Lanton if you don’t believe me. And I’ll tell you another thing.”
I leaned in so close that my breath grazed his face. He backed away primly, repelled and offended. So now I disgust him? And who is he to be disgusted by me?
“Even the city,” I went on, “you’ll see, try it for yourself, even the city’s had enough of us. Either, I don’t know how to say this, either it contracts like it’s trying to expel us, or it dilates monstrously to make us lose our way, or else, and I’ve seen this with my own eyes, it reshapes itself so you don’t even recognize it.”
My ex-husband stared at me in silence, dubious and uncomfortable. I could feel myself blushing.
“Please,” I said, “don’t look at me like I’m crazy. Don’t tell me I must be tired, don’t tell me I might want to see a psychiatrist. Ask Lanton, ask Ange, you’ll see.”
“Hmm,” he grunted.
He tried to force his face into a neutral, vaguely indifferent expression.
Thoroughly disheartened, I stood up and made for the door, very aware of my heavy, hobbled gait (my thighs slapping, my fat knees colliding, my belly compressed by the cardigan), but cold, uninterested in his opinion. My ex-husband caught up with me as I was reaching for the doorknob.
“Come see,” he said, in a hungry, husky voice.
After an awkward pause, he took my arm and led me to what was once our son’s bedroom. He threw open the door and stepped back, beaming with pride. Really, I say to myself as I finally open the door on Rue Esprit-des-Lois to go back to Ange, really, what a ridiculous man, how pathetic. My cheeks are hot again, in mingled shame, spite, and disbelief, and there in the entryway to our building I find I have to stop and rest until my heart, my scandalized, insulted heart, starts to beat a little slower.
“It’s the perfect child’s room, isn’t it?” my ex-husband said.
He seemed eager to hear my cries of wonderment, and he gently pushed on my back to herd me further into the room, our son’s bedroom for almost twenty years, which he’d decorated with all the many images of his successive idolatries, from Winnie the Pooh to Kurt Cobain, his beloved bedroom that he wanted left untouched even long after he’d moved out, where he didn’t hesitate to make love with Lanton, now and then, after they’d had dinner with my ex-husband, such that in the end he stopped inviting them, much to the relief of all three, I imagine.
Really, though, I’d said to Lanton, amused in spite of myself, that’s just not done, you’re not supposed to screw within earshot of your father-in-law, and in a teenager’s bedroom, what’s more.
Lanton had burst into that lighthearted, innocent laugh I so loved, blushing adorably. And as if to defend my son, he’d confessed, a little embarrassed but also vaguely boastful, that it was all his own idea, those trysts in the virginal bedroom after they’d choked down the food inexpertly prepared by the papa (as he called my ex-husband), that on his own my son would never have drawn anyone at all into that old sleigh bed of his, which in any case was too short for Lanton’s lanky frame.
Now the walls were covered in pink wallpaper with fine tone-on-tone stripes, the floor carpeted in dark pink, the room filled with a multitude of stuffed animals, evidently chosen for their pinkness, which ranged from the palest rose to the deepest fuchsia. A little pinewood bed with a pink satin canopy sat under the window, through which I could make out the drab, fog-shrouded façades on Rue Fondaudège.
“Oh,” I said instinctively, “don’t you know you’re never supposed to put a child’s bed under a window? Imagine the little thing standing up, pounding the window with her tiny fists, falling through it, ending up three floors below…”
My ex-husband’s eyes widened in terror.
“That’s true, you’re right,” he mumbled.
I realized he was having to force himself, for his dignity’s sake, not to move the little bed away at once.
“Shall we move it together?” I heard myself offer, astonished at myself.
And so we found ourselves hoisting our granddaughter’s bed, meant for this Souhar I’d never met, so we could move it next to the wall without marring the carpet, which really was very luxurious, lustrous and thick.
“That will take care of the little princess,” said my ex-husband, happy and relieved. “What do you think?”
Pity, as well as a lingering trace of affection for this man I’d so terribly hurt, stopped me from answering that I found his decorative choices appalling, from the posters of naked babies in fields of flowers or cabbages to the relentless pink everywhere you looked, and so I merely asked him, in a slightly pinched voice, “Where did you find the money for all this froufrou?”
“It cost me everything I had,” said my ex-husband, so unguardedly that I was sorry I’d carped at him.
After all, I asked myself, what business is it of mine? And then, in my pocket, my fingertips grazed my son’s crumpled letter. A surge of anger made me feel almost sick to my stomach. Oh yes, I snarled to myself, how easy it is to claim you’re broke when you’ve thrown away all your money!
I stomped out of the room, sickened by such vulgarity, such mindless materialism.
“I’ll bet you’re going to buy her her own television,” I barked.
“Yes, that’s next on the list,” said my ex-husband, with the same almost beatific simplicity as when he talked about the child.
I heaved a very audible sigh, noting that he seemed to have forgotten all about his move to Spain. We were back at the apartment’s front door. Just then I heard a rustle coming from my old study, a little room overlooking the courtyard, where I used to prepare my lessons and grade my students’ papers. How I loved that study, I remembered with some sadness. I slipped past my ex-husband before he could stop me. I threw open the door to my study, hearing his frantic cries behind me.
And now I’m standing in the lobby of our building, wondering: Am I going to tell Ange what I saw in that room? Or would he not understand that sight’s implications, maybe not even care, in his deep indifference to anything that concerned my ex-husband? Oh, it’s not like it used to be, I tell myself, I can’t confide in Ange about anything—I have to worry about his health and be wary of him at the same time—there’s nobody left I can talk to. (So he was the only one? Yes, that’s exactly right, and didn’t that make us proud, as if our arrogant conjugal seclusion, our longstanding habit of hearing anything we were told with a deliberately inattentive, deliberately closed ear, so that no one’s little personal problems would linger in our memory, as if that cozy isolation had been won from some heroic struggle or expressed some special grandeur, when in fact, I suddenly say to myself, it might have been nothing more than a failing disguised as a choice!)
No, I sadly think, I won’t be telling Ange that I saw Corinna Daoui after all these years, and especially not that I found the Daoui woman in a place I never dreamed she might set foot, never imagined she might dare, yes, to display her revolting, seedy, defiled self: the pretty, sober little room I once used as a study, off-limits to everyone when I was away, even to my ex-husband, such that our son long referred to it as “my mother’s sacred study.”
Can you imagine? I would ask Ange if I could. All those years went by and I never once thought about Daoui, never felt a single sordid memory of Corinna flit past my mind, of Corinna or more precisely everything she represents in my Les Aubiers memories, and then all of a sudden I find her ensconced in my own apartment, on Rue Fondaudège, where I never, ever thought a Corinna Daoui might have the nerve to venture, so widely—when I lived there, at least—did the people of Les Aubiers fear and loathe the city center.
Do you understand? I’d say to Ange, who would shake his head in honest denial. No, he would say, I can’t understand why the sight of this woman should upset you so, since very rightly you’ve never wasted your time wondering what sort of life your ex-husband was living, and who with, and in what room of your apartment. He would probably give me the same little smile he always does, kindly but distant, unintentionally condescending, when I bring up my childhood in Les Aubiers, he who grew up on Rue Vital-Carles in central Bordeaux and who takes a very plain, unquestionable, ineradicable pride in being a “true Bordelais.” I made sure never to take Ange to Les Aubiers, though he never asked. For him Les Aubiers simply doesn’t exist, no more than any spot outside the old city walls could claim to be part of Bordeaux, and to Ange that conviction has the serene, confident inflexibility of an article of faith, so he never tries to convince anyone of its truth, nor to discuss it in any way: he merely cracks an indulgent half smile and raises his eyebrows, superior and vaguely amused, whenever I unthinkingly speak of my “Bordeaux” childhood—you can be whatever you like, he seems to be saying, except, most certainly, a true Bordelaise.
No, no, I tell myself, paralyzed in the dark lobby, not yet ready to go upstairs and face Ange, there’s no point bringing that up with him, no point even mentioning that I recognized Corinna at once, even after all these years, precisely because of the expression on her face, the look in her eyes, which, to someone like Ange, without his even knowing it, would immediately rule out any pretentions to Bordelais status. I’m sure he sometimes sees that same expression on my face, that same look in my eyes, I’m sure he can spot them, unconsciously sense them, I’m sure he goes right on seeing them when I myself am convinced that, by dint of experience, habit, and assurance, I’ve rid myself of them forever.
Today I’m a respectable middle-class woman, always carefully dressed, coiffed, and made-up, and my speech is fast and slightly high-pitched, with only the briefest of pauses between sentences. But to Ange, I know, I’m not fooling anyone, and I also know he doesn’t care, since, despite his innate fondness for distinguishing the true Bordelais from the rest, he’s no snob—snobbery is in fact a vulgarity he despises. And so he could easily take a liking to Corinna Daoui, might even find her attractive or funny. But he would never forget where Corinna comes from, and that difference would be one of those differences that definitively separates two distinct species.
To be sure, Ange loves me, he chose me, we’re married. Still, I’ve often thought he married me because he already had a marriage behind him, because his children had been conceived and carried by the right sort of woman, and so, his duties fulfilled, he could now permit himself to marry the woman who simply appealed to him, knowing there were no consequences to fear. It was about pleasing himself, nothing more—not a family, a neighborhood, a whole race of authentic Bordelais. I also know Ange has no idea he feels like this. That way of thinking is the very stuff he’s made of. And so Ange is always kind, because he’s at peace with himself.
Oh, is Ange really kind? Isn’t what he is the very opposite of kindness?
Sitting at a computer, Corinna turned her ruined face toward me.
“Hello, Nadia!” she cried, in a burst of unfeigned pleasure.
She stood up and quickly took me in her arms, an American-style hug, professional, brief, and distant, accompanied by a very light pat on the back. She gazed at me, smiling, her head tilted a little to one side.
“Say, you’re looking pretty good, you’re as plump as a little baby.”
She had that Les Aubiers accent I know so well, the piercing voice, the jagged pronunciation, the unflowing, unmelodious way of putting the words together, the uneven, excessive highs and lows. It had been so long since I last heard that accent so close to my ear that it made me flinch, like a revolting smell. Even my ex-husband stopped talking that way once we left Les Aubiers together and moved to Rue Fondaudège.
“You’re wondering what I’m doing here, aren’t you?” said Corinna.
“No, no,” I murmured, horrified at the thought of Corinna Daoui telling me one word about herself.
I backed toward the doorway, though I couldn’t help taking a quick look around. And, I would tell Ange (but I’m not going to tell him anything at all, there’s no point), what really drove a knife through my heart was that my study was still just as I’d left it, with nothing to betray the presence of a Corinna Daoui, even though, as my ex-husband told me a little later, she’d moved in long before. Daoui had quietly taken my place, discreetly curled up in my armchair, bringing with her only a computer and the almost physical brutishness of her accent. Daoui’s face was worn, she was painfully thin. She was wearing a sort of mauve satin dressing gown, with a dragon on the back. My ex-husband gave me a nudge and nervously said to me, “All right now, we should get going.”
Unkindly, just to needle him, I changed my mind.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “there’s no hurry.”
I went to Daoui, now sitting at her computer again.
I asked, “You’re working?”
“This is how I set up my appointments,” said Corinna.
With a wink that wrinkled one whole side of her face, she went on: “You know what I do? Did he tell you?”
I turned to my ex-husband. Miserable, sheepish, he mumbled, “She’s a sex worker.”
“Still? At your age?” I cried.
“Hey, we’re the same age, me and you,” said Corinna gaily. “Besides, that’s not at all what I used to do.”
I sniffed resolutely, in the manner of someone who knows better. But deep down I had no wish to get into a debate about whether Daoui’s activities back when we all lived in Les Aubiers were strictly speaking sex work or not, particularly because at the time I found it entirely reasonable that Daoui should do what she had to do to get by, given that she’d never had much luck in school.
“I can’t accept that you brought her here, that’s all,” I said to my ex-husband on our way down the stairs.
He stopped, a faint smirk on his lips, and murmured, “So what am I supposed to live on?”
“You’re living off of her?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not taking the time to think, I indignantly added, “I don’t want one more month’s rent from you, if you were ever thinking of sending it. I don’t want any money from…from Corinna Daoui’s ass.”
“You didn’t always feel that way,” he answered.
“Oh, that’s ancient history!”
I was so outraged that my words came out in a screech.
Because we used to be friends, Corinna, my ex-husband, and me, back when we were teenagers, and since Corinna, who’d dropped out of school, was the only one with any money (and because she’s also a considerate and devoted and good-hearted person), she thought nothing of paying for our outings to the pool (she has a young boy’s narrow, long body and slender, strong limbs) or skating rink. And she might have given us presents, too, she might well in fact have lavished all sorts of clothes and trinkets on us, and even books, even spiral notebooks and pens, since unlike her we were still in school. We accepted these things with pleasure but without gratitude, because we felt no real esteem for Daoui. Where did she get that money? She didn’t have to tell us—we knew. It would have been unthinkable for the reserved teenagers my ex-husband and I were to talk about such a thing with anyone, and Daoui herself never brought it up.
We didn’t grasp the depth of her kindness, we were too young. We felt no real esteem for Daoui, no. Today, now that I can appreciate her thoughtfulness and stoicism, I can be sorry for our dismissive condescension toward that very young woman, our blind, selfish, high-school stupidity, yes, I can look back on all that with remorse. Which, I’d like to explain to Ange, in no way implies that I have to see the fifty-year-old Daoui, scrawny, cheaply dressed, probably a smoker, living in my apartment on Rue Fondaudège, as anything other than the sordid incarnation of a thing I’ll have to flee for as long as I live, a thing I must never surrender to, not even out of compassion, a thing I must even trample underfoot should it, should that detestable past, ever dare cross my path.
“You managed to get away, and now here it is coming back to haunt you,” I said to my ex-husband.
“You’re mean, Nadia,” he answered quietly.
He asked if I’d ever met up with Corinna in the thirty-five years or so since Les Aubiers.
“No,” I said, “this is the first time.”
“You sure about that?” my ex-husband prodded me.
I didn’t answer. He then told me what Daoui had told him, that we’d run into each other six or seven years before, as she was on her way out of La Rousselle station, where she’d been locked up for a day and a night, and I, Nadia, was on my way in, presumably to call on Lanton (explained my ex-husband). And according to Daoui she felt so bereft at the time, in such physical and emotional pain, that she couldn’t help clutching my arm and begging me to take her to a café somewhere, or at least, since I immediately refused, to give her a little money, because she didn’t even have the bus fare to get home. I pulled away (as Daoui put it, nonjudgmentally) and hurried into the police station, giving her no clear sign that I’d recognized her, but she felt certain I had.
“Is that true?” asked my ex-husband. I admitted to nothing. I merely said it was possible, I couldn’t be expected to remember my every chance meeting with some long-ago acquaintance in Bordeaux (which actually never happens, since I live in the heart of the city where not even my brothers and sisters, not even my elderly parents, ever venture from their distant outskirts). But in fact I do remember that encounter, yes, and Daoui’s poor, grimacing face, which I later saw again several times, terrified, in my dreams. Even if she promised not to say a word, not to tell me a thing, it would have been beyond my abilities to drink a cup of coffee before such a face.
But why didn’t I stuff a ten-euro bill into her hand? Too miserly? No, no—so why? Obviously to avoid prolonging the moment, even minutely, to avoid creating any bond between Daoui and me and so run the risk, for example, that she might try to find me on the pretext of paying me back.
How, after that, how I feared I might find Corinna waiting for me outside the school! Latching onto Ange, striking up a friendship, wangling an invitation to our apartment, and then explaining to him, why not, just how much I owe her, Corinna, who made my life in Les Aubiers so much more comfortable! Corinna would have said no such thing, because she had no sense back then that we owed her anything at all.
Or else, thinking she was doing the right thing, she would bring up my parents, those two old people living out their lives where they always had, and so Ange would learn that they weren’t dead at all as I’d claimed, and to be sure he wouldn’t give a damn that those people were still alive in their Les Aubiers project, but he’d fault me for my lie, and then I would seem a strange and ignoble person.
Because I never think about them, I’ve forgotten their faces, I’ve almost forgotten their last name, which hasn’t been mine for so long, thanks to my marriages.
“I don’t want to talk about Corinna anymore,” I told my ex-husband as he walked me homeward down Rue Fondaudège.
But I couldn’t help it. The words came out of my mouth, impossible to hold back, as if pushed out by my troubled heart, my jealous heart.
“Doesn’t it bother you,” I said, “that Corinna’s doing her work right next door to the princess’s little bedroom?”
My ex-husband didn’t deign to answer. I sensed his embarrassment and unhappiness. A suspicion came over me.
“She’s not playing grandmother, I hope?” I said. “I’m assuming she never so much as comes near the child?”
“Nadia, that’s none of your business,” my ex-husband answered.
He was holding my arm. I could feel his anger vibrating in my flesh.
“Don’t worry, I won’t say a word about Corinna to Ralph,” I said. “I’m not going to tell him you have an old girlfriend turning tricks just through the wall of the bedroom where you so lovingly look after your granddaughter.”
I could see that his lips were pinched and white from the effort he was making not to answer me. More gently, I asked him, “Incidentally, remind me what Ralph’s wife’s name is? The child’s mother?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No,” I said.
“Yasmine.”
“So who’s Wilma? Do you know her?”
He thought for a few seconds.
“Wilma, no, no idea,” he said.
I let out a little “oh” of surprise.
He didn’t notice. That was when we caught sight of Noget under the fog-shrouded linden trees on the Place de Tourny.