And Their Children After Them

by Nicolas Mathieu

  “I’ll leave you, then. I still have lots of stuff to do.”

  Caroline asked Clem to say hello to her parents for her and went inside to pay the bill. She wasn’t walking very straight, but then again, she wasn’t seeing very well, either. Her car drove her, rather than the other way around. Steph and Clémence smiled as they watched her go, a talkative fake blonde with a dark tan and lots of gold bling. Before leaving, she gave them a last little wave goodbye.

  “So, what do you feel like doing?” asked Clémence.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, this place is still such a drag.”

  “Too true.”

  They were silent for a few more minutes, enjoying the three o’clock drowsiness and the effect of the wine on their heads and the food on their stomachs.

  “Still, you could have called.”

  “I haven’t stopped running around since I got here. My mom is dragging me everywhere.”

  “Yeah, okay then.”

  They decided to walk a little to stretch their legs. All the stores were closed, and the few restaurants were closing up. An occasional open window gave glimpses of modest interiors, a couple watching television downstairs, a teenager’s bedroom with Top Gun posters on the wall.

  Clémence started to talk about her life and studies, and about living in Nancy. After a failed start at the préparatoire in Lille, she’d switched to medical school and had just finished her first year. Overall, things were going pretty well, though she’d really suffered in her first semester. She had arrived in midstream, lost in the mob of 1,600 students before the cutoff weeding. The professors’ methodical contempt, the phenomenal amount of work—it was awful. Until March, one day had followed the next with neither light nor pleasure, a gray tunnel, not to mention the fatigue, the competition, and the city of Nancy, which was nothing but a string of pretentious buildings and pathetic bars. She wound up on Prozac. Since then, she’d caught the rhythm and had created a little gang of supportive, hardworking friends: Capucine, Marc, Blanche, Édouard, and Nassim. They all went to the library together, partied together, did some casual fucking. It built connections. Come August, Clémence planned to go camping with them in the Cévennes for two weeks.

  “So, do you have a boyfriend in all that?” asked Steph.

  “Not really. Anyway, we have so much work.”

  Then it was Steph’s turn to talk. She was evasive, though she and Clémence hadn’t seen each other since the summer of the baccalauréat. There was a lot to tell.

  After passing her bac with honors, Steph had a flash of insight: studying law was suddenly out of the question. She had sensed that for people like her, law school offered too much freedom, too many opportunities to lose your way. Part of this last-minute rejection had a touch of snobbism. She couldn’t see herself spending five years in enormous lecture halls, being just one of hundreds of other morons who’d wandered in from the bush.

  Unlike Clémence and their other classmates, who had been oriented toward attractive academic careers from childhood, Steph had never thought ahead. From elementary school to senior year in high school, she’d been happy to do as little as possible, and toward the end, her obsession with Simon had practically become a full-time occupation. So when the time came to make serious choices, she found herself at a loss. She regretted this, and blamed her parents.

  The Chaussoys had managed to build themselves a comfortable, petit-bourgeois life without too much culture, and hadn’t laid out any specific plans for their only daughter. Pierre had just made that single, eccentric demand, that she pass the baccalauréat with honors. After that, they supposed she might go into business, they would get her internships, a job, help her buy a couple of good local rental properties with garages, and she would gradually build her nest egg, as they had.

  But Stéphanie wasn’t about to settle for those modest aspirations. She now understood how things worked, even if she was a little late coming to the party. School functioned as a kind of classification yard. Some kids quit early, destined for manual labor in jobs that were underpaid and unfulfilling. True, one of them might wind up being a millionaire plumber or a rich garage owner, but in general, those career paths didn’t lead very far.

  A second category, about 80 percent of a given age group, passed the baccalauréat and went on to study philosophy, sociology, psychology, or economics and management. After the brutal first-semester weeding, they got mediocre diplomas that promised endless job searches, civil service tests taken as a last resort, and a variety of frustrating destinies, like teaching in a low-income school district or doing PR in the territorial administration. They would go on to swell that category of bitter citizens who were overeducated and underemployed, who understood everything and could do nothing. Disappointed and angry, they would gradually give up on their ambitions and turn to other outlets, like building a wine cellar or converting to an Eastern religion.

  Finally, you had the hotshots, the ones with top honors on the baccalauréat and a solid-gold resume, a real launchpad to desirable careers. Those people would follow narrow tracks and, under pressure, go fast and climb very high. Mathematics was a major asset when taking those accelerated majors, but there were also a few tracks for abstract thinkers, historians, dreamers, artists, and clowns of that ilk. Steph wanted to be part of this third category.

  Given her resume, though, hoping to get into a public préparatoire school was unfortunately out of the question. So her father started looking for a backup plan. On the advice of a Reims Mercedes dealer, they settled on a private school that prepared students for the entrance competitions for the big graduate institutions like Essec, HEC, and Sciences Po. Problem was, the establishment in question was in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and cost an arm and a leg. A little more than three thousand francs a month, to which you had to add food, lodging, and transportation. So Steph was given an ultimatum: her parents would pay the freight, but she would be brought straight home at the least screw-up.

  In early September Pierre rented a little van to help Steph get settled in her studio apartment. They drove down together, for once just the two of them. Her father talked about his life and his youth. He even told her about some of his old girlfriends. At one point Steph asked if he still loved her mother.

  “Not much, anymore.”

  He said it without bitterness, and Steph was thrilled that they were dropping the pretense for a few seconds. She felt appreciated. And she was careful not to ask him why they stayed together, or stupid questions like that. Being an adult means knowing that there is more than having the love of your life, or the other bullshit that filled magazine pages: doing well, living your passions, being a big success. Because there’s also time, death, and the endless war that life wages against you. Being in a couple is clinging to a life raft teetering at the edge of the abyss. Father and daughter said nothing more about it. In the car, Pierre said he was proud of her, and Steph felt like a grown-up. They stopped at a McDonald’s in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, and she insisted on paying.

  Steph’s first fall in Paris was awful. She was attending a place called the École Préparatoire de Paris that was full of rich little snots who thought only of kicking back and doing X. Her class included the son of the ambassador of Benin, the offspring of a Thai minister, girls with hyphenated first names, and all manner of well-coiffed, stuck-up children of the rich. In the eyes of her new classmates, Steph was a total bumpkin. For example, they particularly made fun of her for wearing Achile socks, which in Heillange were considered classy. At her very first oral exam, the professor advised her to get rid of her accent, saying it would seriously hurt her at the competitive entrance exam.

  Besides studying, Steph had to shop, cook, and clean her apartment, though at 175 square feet, this didn’t take long. On weekends, when she wasn’t studying for classes, she treated herself to trips around Paris. She had always thought that she and the city
would have a great romance together. She was sorely disappointed. Of course Paris still had that quality of being like a chocolate-filled cream puff, with its roundabouts, its excesses, over-full and over-rich, at least in the central arrondissements. It was only there that you really had the feeling of being at the center of things. But Steph was forced to recognize that the city—with its flood of bodies, explosion of buildings, windows, and lights, glowing streams of automobiles, comings and goings in the Metro corridors, the beauty of the monuments and the ugliness of the streets—was completely beyond her grasp. A gap yawned between her and Paris. You had to have been born there. Or to succeed there. And succeeding is what Steph planned to do.

  She started studying like a lunatic. She hadn’t had any illusions when she arrived, but neither did she think she was slower on the uptake than anyone else. Yet from her very first classes, she had the feeling that she’d landed in a foreign country. References, vocabulary, expectations—she didn’t understand any of them. The first week, she cried into her pillow every night. Plus, she didn’t have a TV or a telephone. To call her mother, she had to go downstairs to a phone booth. She felt weary, and found the professors haughty and pretentious, and her fellow students semi-moronic. Steph, who’d never had trouble sleeping eight hours at a stretch, was now waking up twice a night, feeling sweaty, with her jaws aching. She popped her pimples in the bathroom mirror under the harsh neon light. When she was finished, her face was covered with red blotches. She thought she looked ugly, and her hair lost its sheen. Worse, she’d gotten into the bad habit of snacking while she reviewed her notes. Her ass doubled in size in no time at all, and so did her arms. At the end of December, the balance sheet was grim. She had screwed up all her oral exams, was scary pale, and the scales said she’d gained fifteen extra pounds.

  It was on a Saturday morning, during a six-hour written exam, that she came across this subject under general culture:

  The progress made by insomnia is remarkable, and exactly follows all the other kinds of progress.

  PAUL VALÉRY

  She felt her throat tighten. That naked sentence, that feeling of the undeniable.

  Steph was aware that up to now she’d been very lucky. She’d been born in the right place at a rather benign period in the history of the world. She’d never in her life had to fear cold or hunger, or even a hint of violence. She had belonged to desirable groups (well-off family, cool pals, students without major difficulties, a few hotties), and one day had followed the next with its dose of minor obligations and repeated pleasures. As a result, she had always viewed the future with a kind of relaxed indifference. So now that she was on her own and far from Heillange for once, she found herself completely out of step and ill-prepared, her only baggage being some naïve ideas from elementary school, and the pride and overly thin skin of a spoiled child.

  She reread the Valéry sentence and considered her three-part essay structure. Then, without a word, she got up to go to the bathroom. The proctor was used to this sort of thing. He’d gone this route himself, and merely smiled knowingly as he watched the girl with the loose chignon walk by. Upstairs, Steph locked herself in a stall and had a good cry. She was at the end of her rope. She found herself fairly seriously wondering which would be easier, to jump into the Seine or under the wheels of an RER train.

  Except that she went back. “Feeling better?” asked the proctor. “Yes, I’m okay.” Along the way, tight smiles and worries. Everybody knew they were more or less threatened by the same drama, sudden collapses were multiplying, the smartypants wouldn’t last much longer. It was time to buckle down and either hang in there or give up. For that first year, Christmas would be their Cape Horn.

  Steph hung in there.

  She even started acing her math tests. That wasn’t a total surprise, since she’d always been good at it, but still, what a breath of oxygen!

  After Christmas vacation, she kept up her steady pace. She stopped doubting herself, just did her work without reluctance, until one o’clock in the morning if need be. She spent less time making herself attractive. She looked at guys less. She took notes. She graduated to the second year.

  During the summer vacation she kept up her efforts, knocking off a good chunk of the reading that her professors had recommended. Race et histoire, Winock on the 1960s, Aron, L’Histoire des droites en France, even Robbe-Grillet and Giono. That said, she stalled on Proust. The whole business of flowers, stained-glass windows, the slightest oscillation of the heart…give me a break. Then she spent three weeks in Bristol, with a family who hosted paying foreign students. The house was vast, with carpets everywhere, even in the bathroom, which gave you something to ponder as you sat on the toilet. Most of the other guests came from Japan or Korea. They behaved like their stereotypes, polite and hardworking, and the girls covered their mouths when they laughed. They were forever nodding, as if they wanted to nail down with their foreheads every word they said.

  Steph got along well with the Asians. For them, being there was like being on probation. After spending a year visiting Europe and perfecting their business English, they would have to go home to become managers. Yuki, a boy she slept with three times, told her about his future as a “salaryman.” Each time, they had fucked right at six in the morning, having come back from a club. He had very stiff, dyed hair, which was apparently the fashion in Tokyo and Osaka. He worked so hard to make her come, it was touching. Big drops of sweat dripped from his forehead, and Steph had to close her eyes. Once, when she told him to relax, he promptly lost his erection. When it was over, they chatted. Yuki’s parents had invested a good part of their savings so that he could get the Japanese equivalent of the TOEIC English certificate. Everybody was counting on him. Soon he would have a good salary, responsibilities, fourteen-hour workdays, and a necktie. Basically, everything was settled for him. Steph told herself that in Europe you were still lucky enough to be able to disappoint the people who loved you.

  As a result, she hadn’t seen any of her old Heillange pals during this studious summer. She kept to herself, afraid of interferences. She also didn’t want anyone seeing her wrestler’s thighs. She laid low.

  Second year was characterized by its flatness, a neutral expanse like gray Canson art paper. Steph had the feeling she was digging a tunnel through a Himalaya of work. She experienced the discouragement of this absurd task, but also the payoff of each foot cut through the rock. She knew that at the end she would find her Eden, a career. She would take her rightful place, and with a vengeance. She pinned some postcards above her desk, Sisley reproductions, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, a picture of Virginia Woolf, a bare-chested Belmondo in Breathless.

  She also found herself some pals, Renata and Benôit. From the very beginning professors had pushed working with others as a remedy for everything. There were all kinds of formulas for success, even sayings. One suggested that if you’re in a relationship, you’ll flunk out: if you couple, you’ll buckle. You had to make sure to get enough sleep, study with a partner, team up with the most driven students, set aside free time to decompress. Steph and her friends chose one approach: they wrote the titles of the chapters to be studied on little pieces of paper, put them in a shoebox, and took turns drawing them. On Saturday afternoon they played a few games of ping-pong in a little neighborhood youth club.

  Being organized gradually began to pay off. Steph’s grades were good, she was making progress in all areas, even in philosophy, and it was costing her less and less effort. Discipline had gradually seeped into her and arrayed her faculties in order of battle. She no longer woke up at five in the morning, could knock off twelve hours of work without complaint, and had lost weight, besides. The only shadow in the picture was a residual languor when she had a little free time, a kind of fog of anxiety, a why-bother worry. But she didn’t have that much free time, anyway.

  More than anything, her gift for math had come to the fore during this sec
ond year. In high school she never had any problem keeping up, in spite of her dilettantism. But in préparatoire, she came into her own as a math wiz. Not only that, but she didn’t have to work at it. Mathematics seemed to flow out of her in a quasi-miraculous way, like in those stories where heathens touched by grace suddenly start speaking in tongues. And in the world Steph was aiming for, math was practically the lingua franca. Mathematics not only made airplanes fly and computers work, but also ordered civilization, certified intelligence, and founded innovation.

  Monsieur Moineau, her economics professor, was the first person to give Steph a sense of how lucky she was. He took her aside after an oral exam, and they went for an espresso in a little café on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He asked about her study habits, the amount of time she spent on her homework. He wanted to be sure she wasn’t getting outside help. He also asked her what her parents did, and whether she was seeing anyone. He used the English word “boyfriend,” probably to minimize the intrusiveness of his question. The word seemed so out of character, it amused her. How had he come up with such an expression?

  Moineau was old-school, with a crew cut and rimless Affelou glasses, and casually dressed. He taught his classes with sarcastic detachment and wrote corrections in green ink. Rumor had it that he’d had a drinking problem. Apparently, he’d done Polytechnique and run the real estate department at BNP Paribas bank before his downfall. The tumble must have been a long one, because he once told them that he had twenty-five more years of contributions before he could retire on a full pension. And he was at least forty-five.

  On the day they had their coffee, Moineau wore a very handsome Scotch plaid jacket that made him look like a green woodpecker, and a blue knit tie that accentuated his potbelly. He seemed weary, as if he could use a sabbatical. Steph noticed tiny purple veins on the sides of his nose and thought she could never sleep with a guy who had that skin, that nose, or those yawning pores. If he ever made a pass at her, she would do her best to duck him. At worst, she was prepared to make a few concessions to keep up her average in economics—jerk him off or let him feel her up. She wouldn’t go so far as to blow him, however. Her sex life amounted to so little, anyway. But she was wrong about him. After a moment of intense thought, Moineau merely said: