It was a disappointment. The campsite was deserted, so was the resort, there was nothing to do except go cycling in the dunes. The sea was still freezing and the beach hadn’t been cleaned. You had to watch out for the clumps of tar that had collected in the sand. In the end we went home one day early, relieved to be among company and laughter and noise. Or at least I was. I don’t know about Mathieu. He has always been very nostalgic about that vacation. He has often gone back to that stretch of coast. The only nostalgia I feel is for the moment of departure.
I could do it all over again today.
After all, no one is really expecting me. I disappear. My kids miss me a little, but mainly they are disturbed by the fact they don’t know if I’m alive or dead. So I send them a postcard to reassure them. They go on with their lives. They notice that my absence doesn’t make that much difference. At my work, they are concerned, then they react. Before long they brand me a deserter and I am fired. They find someone younger and more energetic to replace me, and who smiles more. In the meantime I’m up in the air and I land far away—in a place where the tumult of the world might still seem like just a faint whisper—Mongolia, Bolivia, a country like that, somewhere I’ve never been to. I had plans to travel. A lot of plans. And then, I don’t know, one thing led to another, work, marriage, children, divorce. Most of the time purchasing power didn’t go far enough. Neither did courage. I never made it very far. Spain twice, with the kids, to those concrete-covered resorts. Ireland, because Christine wanted to go there—I thought we’d find unspoiled nature and we’d be able to walk for miles without meeting another soul, and I found myself in the Mecca of European tourism. Florence, when I was young.
Until I was twenty-five, I crisscrossed France by train because my dad worked for the national railway so I had a hefty discount on tickets. But there wasn’t much of a discount once you crossed the border. And I didn’t have anyone to go with me. So most of the time I stayed in France. There was that trip to Florence. Another to London. And a week in Brussels. Not much to show. I’ve never even set foot in the United States, despite the fact that I used to go on about how much I wanted to see America.
I could start traveling now.
I could transform the Métro into the regional RER. Paris into Charles de Gaulle airport. Mathieu into the rest of the world. My head is spinning, sort of. Not what I expected when I left the house this morning.
Shit.
It nearly made me forget to get on the train.
Here I am, dreaming of escape, and I almost got left behind on the platform.
The doors slammed shut right behind my back.
That was a close one.
I love to hear the sound of the doors closing. It signals the beginning of an egocentric and self-indulgent interlude. For the next two hours, nothing can really happen to you. Everything is taken care of. You can decide to immerse yourself in a novel, or succumb to the trance of the music coming from your headphones. You can also vanish into the screen of your laptop, into emails, spreadsheets, numbers, reports, and establish a direct yet disembodied connection with the outside world.
I don’t do any of that. I daydream. Train journeys are rare opportunities to let go and lower my guard. Whereas in the Métro or the RER I can’t do that. I’m always on the alert.
The seat next to me has not been taken.
It stays empty.
The train starts to move.
I’m of two minds.
On the one hand, I’m relieved. It’s true that it’s a bit weird, the closeness you get in a railroad car. You’re only a few inches away from another person, another story, and you know that in the event of a crash, your skin will mingle with theirs. And then, these SNCF seats aren’t comfortable. A little more room would be great. Room enough to stretch out and doze off, if you feel like it, all the way to the Gare de l’Est—and catch up on lost sleep. We’re all trying to catch up on lost sleep. When you’ve got a neighbor, you have to sit up straight, almost like at school, and when the conductor goes by, you almost feel like raising a finger and saying, “Present.”
But another side of me wants to protest. Why am I the only one without a temporary partner? Am I giving off the sort of body odor that immediately deters any hypothetical candidates? Am I that ugly? Do I frighten them? Intimidate them? So here I sit, the only person sitting alone in the whole car—isn’t there even some old lady who could come and keep my thoughts from going round in circles? Or some vague acquaintance I could chat with about the weather or the passage of time?
I wonder what the other passengers think when they look at me. They see a woman who is neither young nor old, fairly well preserved. A somewhat inscrutable expression, lips that could stand to be a little fuller, a deep line across her forehead, two others on either side of her mouth. Light makeup. Nicely tailored clothes. Discreet elegance. Relatively slim figure. Why isn’t she traveling first class?
For the simple reason that the 6:41 is a regional train, where the differences in comfort between first and second class are minimal. And besides, the number of first-class seats has been so drastically reduced that the half-car devoted to first is often jam-packed, while there are still empty seats in second class. Well, usually. Today the entire train is jammed. All that’s left is the orphaned seat next to me. A privilege I would not have enjoyed in first class, where I would probably be stuck next to some corpulent senior executive reeking of aftershave, who would spend the entire time calling his superiors or his underlings, in spite of the notice requesting cell phones in sleep mode.
And besides, I like to travel second class. I feel like this is where I belong. My accountant laughs at me. He reminds me that Pourpre et Lys is one the trendiest shops around. That with two stores in Paris, one in Bordeaux, one in Lyon, and projects to expand all over France, I should start getting used to the idea that I have become an entrepreneur. Someone who in the decade ahead will count for something in the business world. In spite of the crisis, or because of it, organic beauty products have a bright future—particularly when the prices are still reasonable and the emphasis is placed on respect for regional traditions and on protecting the environment. Soaps that you cut yourself. Shampoo sold in reusable bottles. Ads printed on recycled paper. Clear, concise labels on plain brown paper, with the name of the product in black, and the ingredients below. Chic and sober. My brand.
Valentine and Luc have begun to realize. Luc increasingly shuts himself away in his study. A sort of rivalry has arisen between us and he’s struggling, even though he’s known from the start that he’ll lose. Soon I’ll be earning much more money than him.
He’s been saying we have to move, we have to go back to Paris proper and leave our big house in the suburbs behind, the house with the garden where Valentine grew up. She couldn’t care less either way. She’s finishing her lycée and would rather stay with her friends for another year, but she’s already informed me that she intends to have her own studio in a lively neighborhood right in Paris next year. The forty-five minute commute to Sucy, no thanks. Luc also thinks I should stop taking the RER now, but it’s out of the question. My brand is also about reducing the executive personnel’s expenditure. Even if I know that sooner or later we’ll move back to the city; for the time being, the business is too precarious, and it could vanish in a puff of wind—poor management, competition, unrealistic ambitions. I don’t want to add private loans to professional ones. At heart I’m still a provincial banker. After all, that’s what I was trained to do. After two years of training in marketing techniques I found myself unemployed. So I got a vocational training certificate in banking. I pictured myself behind the counter in a branch in the town where I grew up. Sometimes life takes us a long way from the place we thought we were headed. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
It has taken me quite awhile.
That’s another of my character traits: I’m slow. But persevering. I thought about my project for years, when I was barely making ends meet as an administrative as
sistant in a financial analyst’s office, then in one of those multinationals that are all about new technologies, cell phones, computers, and consoles. I sat there watching while those gung-ho reps crushed their competitors. Then witnessed their fall a few years later. I learned how to be discreet and impeccable to a fault. To be the model employee. To serve whoever was boss: the aging ones who couldn’t keep up to speed and sat around dreaming of their retirement in the Sologne; the young ones who were working up to their first heart attack; they could be warm, icy, scathing, offhand. And I figured out how it all worked. I spent a lot of time reading, too. Books about business, accounting, marketing. Luc just laughed at me. He thought I was immersing myself in all that in order to get closer to him, to what he did every day. Because Luc is one of those aging, interchangeable, middle management execs—for a stationery company that is relocating by the hour. They don’t even have a production site in France anymore. Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland: it’s all concentrated in Eastern Europe.
Luc had his hour of glory when he was able to negotiate a schedule that would allow him to take Valentine to school every morning and pick her up in the evening, when she was small. He would chat with the other moms and with the primary school teachers. He was their darling, they were ecstatic to see a man looking after his kids. Those very same women who think it’s only natural for the mother to do it—that’s their role, after all, it’s only fair. I hate women like them—because they are mainly women; they’re the very reason clichés have such a long life.
And then, eight years ago now, everything changed. I came out with my plan. And I embellished it with an ultimatum to my husband: either you go along with it, or we split up. I let him call me every name in the book, but I knew he’d be there for me. Because he still loves me. Because he admires my combativeness. And because the project was unbeatable. The banks had already given their approval. The 2001 crisis was behind us, the 2008 crisis was still to come. And the banks felt like investing.
I have a good relationship with my husband.
Often difficult, but solid.
We’re a team.
We know each other inside out; we are perfectly acquainted with each other’s weaknesses and strengths. But we can still surprise one another. Last month, he suggested dropping everything in order to assist me if Pourpre et Lys really took off. That’s the verb he used, “assist.” With a smile, he pledged to be my vassal. I don’t know many men who are capable of doing that.
Well, by the looks of it I’m going to sit here by myself. I really don’t feel like consulting the latest figures or reading outstanding emails. I’ll go back to the book I bought at the station on Friday on the way down. Some sort of family saga set in northern Germany. Nothing great, but it’s restful. And that’s what I need this morning, rest. I’m on my way home from the weekend and I’m exhausted. It’s not a paradox. It’s my life.
Ah-hah, there’s a guy looking for somewhere to sit. He comes a bit closer. He stops. He glances at the seat. Hesitates. Keeps walking. Turns around again. I avoid looking at him. I can just detect his movement at the edge of my vision. For a moment I think I’ve won, that his desire for comfort is about to collide with the invisible wall of my indifference. No such luck. He clears his throat quietly, his voice is somewhat hoarse. “Excuse me, is this seat taken?” God, the idiotic phrases we say every day. I shake my head and sigh, just to let him know it really is a bother. I pull my bag out of the way and decide to look him in the face.
Oh. My. God.
Any more of my bullshit and I would have ended up standing for the entire trip—or sitting across from the toilets on one cheek.
Having said that, I did hesitate.
Because when I realized that the only seat available was next to Cécile Duffaut, I felt slightly dizzy, like the heroine of a nineteenth century novel, and I said to myself again, No, it can’t be, and I thought I’d move on to the next car.
I’m almost positive she didn’t recognize me. Because I’m hardly recognizable. The last time we spoke, it was twenty-six or twenty-seven years ago, something like that—downright prehistoric, and I wonder if I’d recognize myself if I ran into who I was back then. Last month when I was getting rid of stuff I came across some photos from back then, and I found it hard to “place” myself, so to speak. Let alone recover from the realization of how much I’d changed. I tend to forget that I haven’t always had this beer belly—even though I’m no beer drinker—or that my hair is not so much brown as gray, and I have a marked tendency toward baldness, not to mention this overall flabbiness which reflects a complete lack of physical exercise.
She’s changed, too, but—how to put it without getting annoyed—“for the better.” That’s it, she’s changed for the better, because Cécile Duffaut was very ordinary back then and now look at her, she’s a good-looking woman, as we say, and she doesn’t look her age yet at all. Maybe a bit on the stern side, headmistressy, say, but really pretty. In fact, she is absolutely no more recognizable than I am, except that I’ve kept up with her transformation from a distance. Over the years I’ve spotted her from time to time in the center of town—I’ve been careful never to catch her eye, even crossing the road or changing my route. I went unnoticed. If she saw me, she never let on. I kept track of her career. And I heard about it, too. Through a woman I met after my divorce, and who went to lycée with us. This woman—Lucile? Lucie?—her parents and Cécile Duffaut’s were friends. What I recall is that she’s in business. Married. With one daughter. But that was a long time ago, so maybe it’s all changed. Maybe she’s gone through three divorces and she’s a militant lesbian with eight adopted kids from Malawi and she’s the head of an online company that promotes female wrestling.
In any case, she comes home on weekends sometimes to see her parents. The last time I spotted her must have been last year. She was with a tall, slim man. They were at the market, picking over the melons. Ain’t life poetic, out in the provinces.
How awkward.
What are you supposed to do in this situation? Introduce yourself by saying something obvious like, “I think we’ve already met?” Or feign indifference and pretend to be surprised if the other person decides to make the first move: “Cécile Duffaut? I don’t believe it! I’m so sorry, I was completely absorbed in, well I mean I didn’t … well … you understand … that is …” and make some vague gestures with your arms and hands, make the most of your pauses so that the other person can fill them with bursts of “Of course!” “Absolutely!” or “I can imagine!”, all those expressions that serve no purpose, ever, I’m sick and tired of all those words that serve no purpose.
Or you can try the advanced Alzheimer’s scenario, I really do not recognize you, you don’t exist for me, you’re just some meaningless neighbor on a meaningless train which is starting to pick up speed, why should I grant you anything more than a polite inattentiveness?
Right.
Here’s what I’m going to do.
Act as if I don’t know her—which is true, actually, we dated for three or four months twenty-seven years ago, what does that amount to? Nothing, nothing at all. She hasn’t reacted, either. She doesn’t remember me. So much the better, in the end. I have to keep one thing in mind: most people have a “delete” key which they will press at a given time, when their brain is about to overflow after all the misunderstandings and betrayals, all the hurt and disgrace—and when that happens, entire chunks of your existence disappear along with faces, names, addresses, colors, everything goes out the window into the sewers of the unconscious. I’ve got to remember that. Cécile Duffaut has obliterated everything. She went on with her life, and she is fine. Which is a relief. I can’t see myself talking to her. It would be embarrassing. With London and all that. So this is fine. I have other things to think about. More important than Cécile Duffaut.
Problems that affect me directly. That I have to come to grips with. My brain has to sort through all kinds of stuff.
There’s Manon, for a star
t.
How can I explain to her that things won’t last forever with this boy she’s seeing? That she shouldn’t go building castles in the air? That she shouldn’t go thinking that once summer is over, with her in Reims and him back in Troyes, their relationship will manage to last? And so much the better, because he spends his time glued to his screen; he plans to study computer science, and a husband who’s a geek is hardly the dream husband for your daughter. Or at least not for me. But if I start interfering in her love life, she’ll get up on her high horse. She’ll start talking about the divorce again. And my love life since then. And the fact that she’s never criticized me. Then she’ll add that as far as professions go, TV and stereo salesman doesn’t exactly make for a dream dad, either.
Granted.
Keep my mouth shut.
That would be better.
And try to remember what it was like, when our parents used to butt into our love life.
Oh, my God.
My mother.
Whenever she met one of my girlfriends her face would split in two. The lower half was smiling, revealing her metal crown on the side, and she would chatter away, extremely pleasantly—too pleasantly, of course. With the upper half, she was examining, scrutinizing; a hard gaze searching for the slightest imperfection. And her eyebrows. That was what was most revealing: appreciation, disgust. I knew her body language by heart. It made me sick to my stomach.
And at dinner in the evening, her comments.
Or rather, her barbed arrows. Or how to stone someone with words. Comparisons. Better than the last one, not as good as the one before. I could picture the grades she was giving them in her mind. She had remained stuck on one of my first conquests, who wanted to become a schoolteacher, and for my mother, being a schoolteacher was the best possible job for a woman—it would ensure her of a certain independence, and it came with housing, and that was always a plus, and then above all teaching gave you the same vacation time as the children, which solved the problem of child care once and for all: “Don’t go thinking I’ll always be available to look after the children.”
The 6:41 to Paris Page 2