Life, Only Better

by Anna Gavalda

  No. Not much. Still, it’s a kiss in three words, though. And the apostrophe looks nice . . .

  There aren’t many guys left who take the trouble to text apostrophes these days. Are they the same ones who imagine what it’s like to drown?

  I’m afraid the answer might actually be yes.

  Good God, I’m a sad sack tonight.

  Sorry.

  It’s been that way for a while. The discouragement, the lyrical/loserish flights of fancy, the need to confront other people—all other people—to muddy the waters. Mélanie thinks it’s because of the weather (late winter, lack of sunlight, seasonal depression) and professional stagnation (no sign of the promises that were made to me, lack of ambition, disillusionment). Okay. Why not?

  She’s lucky; she belongs to that category of human beings who find causes and solutions for everything: dust mites, the right to vote for immigrants, the closure of the drugstore on the Rue Daguerre, her dad’s warts, and my depression. I envy her, in a way. I’d like to be like that.

  I’d love for everything to be that simple in my head, that easy, that . . . materializable.

  Never to have doubts. Always to find suspects, culprits, guilty parties. To rush in, take drastic action, command, judge, hack away, sacrifice, and have the certainty that my la-di-da existentialist vapors will vanish when spring comes, and disappear completely with 200 more euros on my paycheck . . .

  Unfortunately, though, I don’t believe that for one second.

  I’ll be twenty-seven in June, and I can’t decide if that’s still young or if I’m old already. I can’t tell which side of the border I belong on. It’s very fuzzy, this whole thing. From a distance people think I’m a teenager, and close-up I look like an old fart. An old fart disguised as a high-school student: the same fake cheerfulness, the same Converses, the same jeans, the same haircut, and the same Chuck Palahniuk novels in the same battered backpack.

  A schizo. A stowaway. An early-21st-century young man, born in a wealthy country and raised by loving parents, a little boy who had everything: kisses, hugs, birthday parties, video-game systems, plenty of familiarity with the multimedia library, visits from the tooth fairy, Harry Potter books, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic cards, hamsters, replacement hamsters, unlimited packages, trips to England, trendy sweats, and all the rest, but not only that.

  Not only that.

  A little boy born at the very end of the 20th century, who has been told since he was old enough to throw his own candy wrappers in the wastebasket that nature is suffering because of him, that the forests are disappearing for the sake of the palm oil in his pains au chocolat, that the ice caps melt a little more whenever Mommy starts her car engine, that all the wild animals are dying out, and that if he doesn’t turn the faucet off every time he brushes his teeth, well, all of this will be partly his fault.

  Next, an inquisitive and well-behaved student who, his history books tell him, should be ashamed of having been born white, greedy, lazy, a colonizer, an informer, and an accomplice, while the geography texts harangue him year after year with alarming figures of global overpopulation, industrialization, desertification, shortages of air and water and fossil fuel and arable land. Not to mention the French books, which always end up making you hate reading by forcing you to screw everything up—Identify and arrange in order the lexical field of sensuality in this Baudelaire poem; boom, end of the line, the whole world loses its hard-on—with language, reminding you every year how much you were a Shit with a capital S; and the last year of high school, which is just a concentrated recap of all the other stuff, only even more implacable: Okay, you little floppy-dicked white nonentity, whose stupid accent is a joke to the rest of the world, identify and arrange in order the lexical field of the wastefulness of your civilization, please. You have four hours.

  (Hey, hey! Rough copy in the yellow wastebasket, please.)

  And when this anxiety-producing edification is finally ingested, digested, understood, repeated in exam books, and reported in the senior exam pass-rate statistics, before you know it I’ve added several years of study on top of that so you don’t get stuck too fast in the barriers of the future.

  And you, you poor schmuck, you do everything by the book: study sessions, exams, degrees, internships.

  Unpaid internships, non-remunerated internships, internships without financial compensation, internships for honor and internships for glory. CVs. CVs with a nice photo. CVs on paper and online and 3-D and video, whatever you want, voilà, anything. Cover letters. Cover e-mails. Cover videos. All that mumbo jumbo and hot air, where you don’t even know what to make up anymore because you’ve already stopped believing in it, you’re already so depressed by it, by fighting so hard, so early on, just to have the right to pay your dues like everyone else.

  But you keep going. You keep on, valiantly: career offices, job centers, job fairs, headhunters, classified ads, job alerts, recruitment platforms, codes to access your candidate space, subscriptions to job boards, false hopes, interviews lost in advance, Facebook-makers who won’t even assess you in your dreams, your godfather’s brother-in-law who’s going to talk to his friends in the Lions Club, the crazy ex-girlfriend, you know I still kind of want to tell you to go fuck yourself, but doesn’t your dad own a factory? Temporary agencies, inevitable string-pulling, half-assed string-pulling, crooked string-pulling, job sites that become more and more expensive to access and HR assistants who become less and less gracious . . . yeah, you’ve always insisted, you’ve never littered in your whole life, or put your feet up on the metro seat across from you, even when it was really late at night, even when you were completely fried; even when you were the only one in the whole train car, and you got your degree without causing any trouble to anyone, but . . . nope. No luck. There are no jobs. No work for you.

  No, there’s nothing. You can’t mean that; are you sure? I can’t believe that. You could still talk to your neighbor, the one that lives on your left . . .

  Hey! Boyo! Wake up! We’re in an economic crisis! Listen to the news instead of learning a profession; it’ll be less a waste of your time. What’s that? You don’t understand? Listen closely, sweetie, and don’t move, because I’m going to sum up the situation for you:

  You’re young, you’re European, and you’re a nice guy?

  You’re in for a hell of a rough time, my friend.

  People carp at you endlessly about your country’s national debt reaching a hundred thousand billion zillion dollars; your money will soon be worthless, and if you don’t speak Chinese it’s not even worth trying; Qatar is in the process of buying us all; Europe is finished, the West is kaput, and the planet is fucked.

  That’s all.

  Bread and circuses. This is it. We’re there.

  Believe you me, little boy, there’s nothing left to do but watch football while we wait for the apocalypse.

  Go ahead. Have a lie-down. Fly Emirates and shut up.

  And stop flailing around like that. Stop clicking and making phone calls and running around applying for jobs everywhere, please. It’s bad for the ozone layer.

  * * *

  I can’t feel my feet anymore. At the top of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, just after the Luxembourg Gardens greenhouses, a pair of cops are stopping distracted, exhausted drivers.

  As I pass them, head down and nose buried in my scarf, I hear them asking for the ID papers of a young woman in a blue down jacket. I don’t know if it’s because of the cold or the number of points on her driver’s license, but she looks petrified. She rummages nervously in her bag for her papers and drops a bunch of keys on the ground. There’s a baby sleeping in a car seat. She shouldn’t drive so fast, because her car is an ancient Mini. The old model, the one designed by Sir Alec Issigonis. That pure marvel.

  “No, but it’s so the heater will run,” I hear her say.

  “Please,” the junior officer says. �
��Turn off the engine right now. This won’t take long.”

  I go on my way, mystified.

  What has this country become?

  This democratic hole, where the forces of law and order have nothing better to do than set endless traps for its most harmless citizens? What does it mean, exactly?

  Are the coffers as empty as all that?

  And who are these guys, who do this job? Who get paid to go out and harass a woman at midnight on a Tuesday in February because one of her headlights is out or her license plate is a bit loose? What the hell is that? And when they insist that she turn off her engine when it’s -6° outside even though there’s a little one asleep in the passenger seat; what’s going through their heads?

  Is it that satisfying, to be a public servant?

  And what about you? What the hell is your deal? This outraged little shithead with your endless moralizing speeches, who isn’t even capable of coming to the defense of a pretty mother. A girl driving a Mini 1000, even. What kind of crap is that?

  Do you also have a ball that hasn’t dropped?

  Or maybe it froze . . .

  Diversion:

  By the time he designed the Mini, Issigonis had already delivered the Morris Minor and the Austin 1100.

  Not too shabby.

  When William Morris, the big boss, saw the Minor for the first time, he was horrified. Holy God, he said, a poached egg.

  The Minor was a considerable success.

  But Issi believed he’d never get his f***ing diploma in mechanical engineering, which he failed three times in a row because of the math part. It was design that saved him. When it came to design he was a prince. The rules and postulates and laws of physics and mathematics bored him to tears; and worse, according to him, they were the enemy of every truly creative man. Nor did he give a shit about commercial policies, predictions, business plans, market studies, and all those other precursors of modern marketing. He was a curmudgeon.

  He maintained that, to design a new car, the first rule was not to copy the competition. He was independent, free, and obstinate, and didn’t have much respect for anything that came out of the intense brainstorming sessions of research departments. It was he who coined the wonderful phrase: A camel is a horse designed by committee.

  I know all this because I took a university trip (that higher education dear to my heart and to my parents’ small economies) (which isn’t actually serving any purpose for me at this particular moment in time) to the Design Museum in London.

  Wow, what a lovely souvenir . . .

  Almost home. It’s so cold that the lion in the Place Denfert-Rochereau seems to have curled up in a little ball on its pedestal like a big, irritated tomcat.

  I’d chosen that route because I also drew well and—no offense to Sir Alec—I was good at math. I mean, not good enough to get into the top, top schools, but . . . and I was also curious. Curious about the arts and history and art history, and the decorative arts and technology and the industrial world, and industrial technology and ergonomics and morphology, and things and people and furniture and fashion and textiles and typography and graphic design and . . . well, everything, actually. Everything, all the time, and from every era. The only glitch was that I’m not talented. No, really, I’m not. I’ve learned that, too. Not talented, and absolutely not wired to have the pride or the genius to create something else. The university taught me that, at least—to understand both myself and the distance separating me from a Gio Ponti or a Jonathan Ive, for example. (I know, I know, it’s become very uncool to say nice things about the vice president of design at Apple, but being considered uncool because I piously and very humbly admit to the great respect I have for him, well, I’m fine with that.)

  I should have gotten a degree in documentary filmmaking and applied for a job at the Bibliothèque des Arts et Métiers or the library at ENSCI instead; I would have been very happy. My only talent is recognizing other people’s.

  A weakness of mine that was diagnosed during one of my countless job interviews.

  “Basically, young man, you’re a dilettante.”

  Shit.

  Is that bad?

  Clearly, I should have set my sights on a less cruel industry (because in the world of design, you’re either a visionary or you’re completely worthless) (I would have lost all my illusions in the battle, but not my ideals). Less cruel, and better suited to my dilettantism. But the saddest thing, the biggest shame, is that I was afraid—if I followed my natural inclinations—of not having a job.

  Ha ha! That Yann! He modeled his life a little too well . . .

  Like a camel, you might say.

  Start of the Rue Boulard. I’m warming up. Good thing, because icicles were starting to form on me.

  Where was I? Oh yeah. My destiny.

  So. So far, and to make a long story short, I have a degree from a design school and I’m . . . uh . . . what would you call it . . . a demonstrator. That’s it, a demonstrator of little Korean robots designed for domestic, recreational, and household use by domestic, recreational, and household classes.

  The little dachshund vacuum that goes back into its corner all by itself once it’s licked up all the dust; the light-up speakers that create different atmospheres depending on what kind of music they’re playing; the showerhead that’s also an intergalactic digital radio, and the intelligent refrigerator that tells you everything that’s inside it whenever it recognizes your voice: how much is left, expiration dates, number of calories in the food, combinations of ingredients, tips on how to use leftovers, blah blah blah.

  Isn’t that great?

  Gio Ponti would be floored.

  I have a permanent contract (yes, a permanent contract, the One Ring, the Black Lotus, the Holy Grail) (Hanenim Kamsa hamnida) (“Thank you God,” in Korean) in a kind of high-tech kiosk that presents these incredible marvels to a flabbergasted Europe.

  In other words, I’m a sales representative for Dartyyongg.

  But hey, it’s only temporary, right?

  Yes it is. Yes, it is. Yes it is.

  Go to bed, little Miko.

  Not only have I not killed the demons, you might say I’ve gotten them all riled up.

  What an idiot.

  After punching in the last code of the day, I wedge a piece of cardboard into the gap between the door and the jamb to keep it from closing and locking, and do the same with the hall door.

  If only, I sigh, if only the last bum in the neighborhood who hasn’t already made tracks at this time of night could have the good taste (and weakness) to come and warm up in my little setup here, it would be good for my ego.

  I go up the two flights of stairs at a run so as not to lose a toe, peel a banana and soak it in the last of the vodka, empty the hot water tank, and finally drop.

  THREE, THE CHAMONIX

  Today I finish earlier than usual, but I’m still a bachelor. Mélanie doesn’t get back until Thursday.

  I just talked to her on the phone: the hotel isn’t as nice as she thought it would be, the spa is closed, and her team is useless.

  Okay.

  (She’s a medical rep, and the lab that employs her regularly organizes remotivation seminars to help them overcome the major trauma of generic medications.)

  “Are you going to do the shopping?”

  Of course. Of course I’m going to do the shopping. I’ve been stuck doing the shopping for two years, I’m not going to pick tonight to revolutionize our life as a couple.

  “And don’t forget the loyalty card. The last time, you lost us at least sixty points. I figured it out.”

  Mélanie is an informed consumer. Sixty points is a lot.

  “No, no, I won’t forget. Well, I’ll let you go, because I have to go get little Woof-Woof out.”

  “Sorry?”

  “My little vacuum cleaner.”
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  “Oh . . . ”

  When she says “Oh . . . ” like that, I wonder what she’s really thinking. Is she distressed? Does she talk about me to her colleagues? Does she say to them, “My partner sells Woof-Woofs in various colors”?

  I doubt it. She thought she’d met the next Philippe Starck but she’s ended up with Overstock.com, I’m afraid. Plus I’m pretty sure she thinks I spend my days playing around with gadgets. If she only knew. It’s easier to peddle anticoagulants than it is a Frigidaire that breaks your balls every time you go into the kitchen. Well, whatever. I’m finishing earlier, but I’m not going to rush off to do the shopping at Franprix because I saw that there’s a Sidney Lumet festival showing at the Grand Action, and they’re playing Running on Empty at nine o’clock tonight.

  Thank you, life.

  I saw that movie with my cousin (probably even in the same theater) when I was fifteen, around the same age as River Phoenix when he played Danny Pope, and it affected me so much that I got run over by a bus as I was leaving the theater. It’s true. Four broken toes out of ten.

  Let’s just say that the prospect of seeing it again made my heart beat faster, because—and this is a secret Mélanie doesn’t know—I’ve been building up loyalty points in my own way, too.

  I decide to run by the house to change and eat something before finding a bike share.

  (Bikes are nice when you come out after seeing a great movie; the headlight is like a projector, and the most beautiful scenes light your way in the night.)

  When I get to my landing, a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and my uninteresting mail in the other, I suddenly find myself nose-to-nose with a huge piece of furniture. A sort of armoire in blue Formica. It’s sitting at a diagonal, blocking my way, and since I’m not armless I put my stuff down to shove it over a meter or so. As I’m doing this I hear a sharp little voice: