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On Monday, Carol staggered into work. She was so tired. All weekend long she had worried that Gregoire would not live up to his word and keep her probation a secret. In the hallways at Trapèze, she looked in the faces of people she passed on her way to her office, but nobody gave a sign they’d heard the news.
Temporarily relieved just a bit, she settled herself down in her small office and opened the animated screenplay she was writing for Gregoire. As the story line came back to her, she was able to set aside her worries enough to work.
The film was about a flock of storks that accepted delivery of a bunch of babies from the south but can’t deliver them to their parents in Paris because it was so late in the year, and the chimneys they would have used for delivery were now too hot, with fires in the fireplaces. The storks found that they had to raise these humans themselves until spring. Amusing scenes of storks gently correcting young human behavior ensue.
Carol picked up a storyboard off her desk that illustrated the first five minutes. Daphné, one of the artists, and an office sort of friend, had captured the gray zinc roofs, chimney pots, wrought-iron balconies, and rooflines of Paris well.
“Obstacles to the protagonists’ goal” she wrote in her “quarry” notebook (a term she had stolen from George Elliot, who kept the facts she made up about her Middlemarch characters in one).
“Think!” she exclaimed out loud, and then slapped her hand over her mouth. Her office door was open. She hoped nobody had heard. She went back to work.
An ogre. Great obstacle! Let’s make him a flying ogre, no less. Let’s give him Gregoire’s hair, all over his body. Gregoire won’t notice. I’ll tell Daphné to illustrate it that way to make her laugh.
What’s next? The ogre spots the storks tossing the babies to each other, playing, and he’s jealous of their family happiness. The ogre is actually a prince, born in the days of the Franks and the Gauls, the victim of a spell, and a very irritable ogre indeed. Lovely! Oh, wait! He bullies the storks! A chance to right that bullying I did when I was seven.
Carol spent two hours tapping out scenes.
At 11:15, she decided to take a coffee break and stepped tentatively into the hall outside her office. Without the screenplay to distract her, her worry settled on her again like an iron cape. Nobody must know she was on probation. Success in the film world was all she wanted—the acclaim of her colleagues in the business. She’d get an Oscar or a Palme D’Or some day, and put it where Gregoire couldn’t help but see it.
Frédéric was in the kitchenette when she got there. He didn’t look at her any differently, Carol thought, just with his usual randiness.
“Bonjour, Carol,” he said. His tone of voice suggested they’d spent the night together.
She returned the greeting drily and bent over to get a paper towel from under the sink. She felt his eyes on her and looked down. Her blouse was gapping, he was getting a great view. She grabbed a paper towel and stood. Frédéric smiled broadly at her.
“A very beautiful morning, isn’t it?” he said.
Yes, yes, Carol thought. He was not a good bet for a good relationship. “Indeed!”
Frédéric finished brewing his coffee, leered at her, and left. Carol brewed hers and took the long route back to her office, past Gregoire’s door.
Amandine was just emerging. Carol flinched, then steeled herself to look carefully at the Parisienne for any difference in her attitude.
When she saw Carol, Amandine’s eyes lit up with a look of even greater triumph and superiority than usual.
“Hello?” Carol asked, hating herself for her insecurity, for making her sentence into a question, like an American.
Amandine walked past her as if she mustn’t associate with a leper for fear the problems might rub off.
Carol rushed back to her office and sat with her head in her hands. If Amandine knew, the whole office would know in five minutes. People would see her in meetings and know she was suffering and yet show no pity. If they did show pity, it would be worse.
Somehow, in spite of this humiliation in front of all her colleagues, she was still expected to produce a brilliant script. Damn Gregoire! What an idiot! So unprofessional to tell Amandine. But he was in authority and would not be brought into account. Frustrating.
Carol closed the door to her office, reminding herself that people could still see her through her window onto the corridor. She could not be seen crying, or even wiping her eyes. Chin up! she could hear a Brit voice saying. Never, never, never give up.
Maybe she had misinterpreted Amandine’s behavior. She couldn’t wait until her lunch break—she was too curious. She headed back to the kitchenette, for tea this time, the British panacea for all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Martine, the assistant who helped both Gregoire and Amandine, stood by the microwave. She was a young thing wearing a short blouse that revealed her belly button jewel, and black leggings that ingratiated themselves into every inch of her crack.
Carol thought, those leggings hug her so tight I can read the label on her thong. “Hello!” she said as brightly as she could.
“Oh, hello,” Martine said frostily and left on her impossibly long and shapely legs. Well, she was likely to know Carol’s secret, since she handled Gregoire’s paperwork. She would probably be discreet.
Daphné came in. She was statuesque and had long, wavy brown hair. It had sparkled in the sunlight the week before, when they had gone to lunch outside the office together. They had had some fun chats over the few years that Carol had been at Trapèze.
Daphné gave a start when she saw Carol. Was it a guilty start? She blushed a bit.
“I’m so sorry,” she said under her breath.
“For what?” Carol had to know if this was all in her imagination or not.
“I heard that—you must know—” Daphné stammered.
“What have you heard? Please tell me.” She wanted to know if the thing being whispered about her was accurate. Though she had no control over how the news would morph as people retold it to each other through a long chain.
“That you’re on probation?” Daphné queried. “I’m really sorry. I think you’ll pull out of it in no time at all.” She grabbed her lunchbag out of the refrigerator and left.
Everyone knew at this point, Carol thought, down to the people who empty the wastebaskets. At least Daphné gave me some support.
She straggled back to her office, passing two more people in the hall.
“Bonjour,” she said to one of them, who ordinarily would have said hello. Today he compressed his lips and did not.
Carol couldn’t help quietly crying in her office, all the while listening intently for footsteps out in the hall. If someone went by, she would duck as though looking for something that had fallen on the floor under her desk. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She felt desperate to talk to somebody. But who?
She fidgeted with the question, her sorrow demanding an outlet. John’s and then Philippe’s faces swam into her consciousness. John was a businessman with years of experience. Philippe, as some sort of vicar, must counsel people all the time. He’d be good at it.
She had both their emails. She tapped out a note to each of them, asking them if they would meet her in the next few days to advise her on a problem at work.
