A lovely three-bedroom with moldings and parquet floors, the apartment measures 915 square feet according to the prescriptions of the Carrez law determining effective usable surface area. The rooms branch off a central corridor enjoying an open view of a small paved square, southeast exposure. And if one were to lean out the window, braving the cold on this snowy Sunday, November 28—because it has been snowing for a week—one would see the Église Saint-Médard, surrounded by its tidy church garden. The net effect is charmingly postwar or opulently provincial.
You are not viewing the scene from outside the windows, however. Armed with a dainty watering can, you are refreshing the succulent plants that seem to thrive on a lack of regular care. No one is talking to them, or dusting them weekly with a soft moist cloth, and they keep growing. They must even be attached with adhesive tape to control their trajectories so that they stretch into the corners, toward the ceiling, along the interior stucco trim instead of overflowing their pots down to the carpet where they would blend into the design of vines and soon cover them up, vegetalizing the chevron-patterned parquet if you weren’t taking them in hand.
Then the objects on the television and coffee table are cleansed of their dusty film. One of these bibelots slightly resembles that object on the doctor’s bookshelves. This memory flits by you without pausing. You have no desire to meditate upon this relic, the history and provenance of which you know well. You also know the reason why it and not another knickknack sits there as a repository of special and arbitrary emotions, the legitimacy of which you do not challenge. You are sweeping.
Next you must open the bills, electricity, telephone, not the gas—cut off to economize and as a concession to reality. You check the columns of figures and put everything away in a trapezoidal writing desk. The clock says two thirty. Plenty of time left to vacuum the place before Julien arrives, which you do after closing the door to the middle room where the child is resting. At ten to three, you make a last tour of inspection, then go to stand at the window. He’ll be late, a habit of his, and in the end he is remarkably punctual in his delays. You begin your vigil at three on the dot, however, preparing—almost hoping—to be disappointed, because then events will be following the course you have anticipated.
How handsome he was, Julien, and that hasn’t changed since he left you. At three twenty, he appears in your launch window, creating an eclipse of memory: you imagine him coming toward you for the first time, naked, on offer, just as he presented himself three years earlier, free of all ties.
Your memory comes back. The breaches opened by the inevitable return to plodding reality, the pike staves that become lances, and you who couldn’t see it coming because you were expecting a child and the horizon was bounded by the circumference of your belly. The suspicions wiped away with the dust when business meetings began to last forever. The phone calls made behind the bathroom door, the hurt you kept inside on every occasion, for example the cocktail party at Biron Concrete in June when the newly recruited Héloïse cruised dangerously close to Julien and you had to struggle to keep yourself from blasting her whenever she crossed your line of fire.
He’s on the threshold of the apartment. He called up on the intercom and you buzzed him in. Standing perfectly still behind the door while he climbed up the three flights of stairs, you waited for him to ring and here he is in front of you. With locks of hair falling over his forehead. You could brush them back—after all, this man still belongs to you in the eyes of the law. You restrain your fingers just in time.
How are you he says while walking around you because you still haven’t moved, and he goes into the living room to sit in the deepest armchair, the leather one. Hands crossed on your lap, you sit in a rather uncomfortable chair with a seat upholstered in a navy blue plaid. Julien gives a quick look around and exclaims these plants, good lord, it’s monstrous, they’re going to invade us all. You notice that he said us. But then he adds what are those marks on your arms, Viviane, they’re awful. You roll your sleeves back down over your wrists now that you’ve finished cleaning and repeat meaningfully: invade us all, Julien? At first he doesn’t understand. Then he does. Invade the hall, Viviane, I said invade the hall. You shrug as you announce I’m going to make some tea, you’ll have some? Thanks he replies, which means yes or no, another habit of his.
While the kettle heats up in the kitchen, as you prepare a tray with two cups and watch the snow falling in the interior courtyard, you listen to the creaking of the parquet that tells you where your husband is. He seems to be roaming the living room, then advancing cautiously into the hall, gradually approaching the middle room. At last you hear the tiny squeak when he ventures a look inside at the sleeping child who is also his—it takes some effort to remember this but you concede the point.
The kettle whistles. Carrying in the tray you can see, through the now wide-open door, Julien bending over the baby. A wispy babbling reaches your ears. You study the teapot where the leaves are steeping. Not a very interesting sight but you often contemplate motionless things, waiting for them to reveal their secrets.
She seems to recognize me, he says in self-congratulation, plopping back into the armchair. Then he tries to talk about material arrangements, administrative procedures, rights and duties. What’s going on outside the windows suddenly absorbs all your attention. You consider the movements on the square, the crowd at the tables under the heated outdoor umbrellas at the brasserie, the snow covering the central flower bed, pocked with footprints and the depredations of children.
Are you listening to me, Viviane?
Not really, Julien.
You have to be reasonable, Viviane.
I don’t think so, Julien.
Then he invokes various responsibilities, and the welfare of the child. He knows you are a woman of good sense, you have always shown that despite differences of opinion, slight disagreements, and a few misunderstandings. For example, he goes on, it astonished me, that phone call from the police. I hadn’t known you were seeing a doctor. That sort of thing, isn’t it rather for people who are totally self-centered, don’t you think?
I don’t need you, you reply. What you take, you take away from me and I’m not going to make it any easier for you.
Julien murmurs God knows what in the direction of his lap but you would swear he said bitch. You exult in having managed so well to make him hate you now that love is gone. More tea? you ask, all smiles.
He shifts forward in the chair, sets his cup down on the tray, watches you pour the tea like a perfect hostess.
This isn’t the right way, Viviane. The law is on my side. And anyway you can’t manage all by yourself, you need help.
You stop serving the tea. The teapot tips toward the carpet and pours all the rest of its contents on the floor. When it’s empty, you let go of it with a loud laugh. The carpet softens the fall but the china is fragile and shatters into pointed shards that fly into every corner of the room. On the other side of the wall, the child has begun to cry.
You have no idea, you say now, what I’m capable of.
Viviane, he tries, it’s the stress, the emotional situation. You’ll recover, you’ll see things differently.
You reply fuck you and gather up everything on the tray, the cups, the saucers, the silver spoons, the sugar bowl, the milk jug, to throw it all at his face. He protects himself with his hands as he retreats, and you harry him all the way back to the front door. You expect him to beat it but he turns around one last time, looks you right in the eye and says it’s not going to be this way, you’ll see, I’m going to move into a new apartment with my new wife, we’ll gain custody of the child, and you’ll be left eating your heart out, then he clatters down the stairs while you stand paralyzed on the threshold.