by Marie Ndiaye
“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?