This Little Family

by Inès Bayard

  It’s time to go home. Paul hands Marie her coat and wants to help her put it on. She refuses his offer, not wanting him to touch her. She thinks about his penis, about how he might take Sophia. She pictures him examining his young patient, imagines her tortured, abused vagina, its flesh and nerves raw. Sophia hears her son crying and kisses Marie before hurrying upstairs to soothe him.

  * * *

  —

  “I’ve always thought it odd for a man to be a gynecologist. Seriously, it’s kind of weird looking at vaginas all day long, isn’t it?” The walls of the arcades by the Louvre Museum are so old, rising out of the ground since forever, solid as rocks. She’d liked to turn the steering wheel, for Laurent to hurtle into them, for the two of them to die instantly together, for him to shut up at last. He puts his hand on his wife’s thigh. She automatically pushes it away as if terrified. Everything seems so easy to him. “Are you sure you’re okay? You were a little strange over dinner.” Marie gives up, puts his hand back on her leg and slides it a little way toward her crotch. Laurent smiles again. She wants him to stroke her, she thrusts his hand inside her pantyhose and rubs his penis at the same time. He has an erection. It’s late. There’s very little traffic along the riverbank. The bright light of streetlamps intermittently illuminates the inside of the car. At night Paris is sparklingly beautiful. Laurent has taken a wrong turn. The Hôtel de Ville is deserted, its white stone illuminated by dazzling reflections from the Seine. His penis hardens as Marie rubs it backward and forward. Her hand accelerates. He sighs, moans, raises his foot from the accelerator. She makes him come in a few minutes. Her hand is sticky, cloying. She disguises her disgust, looks for a Kleenex in the glove compartment to wipe herself. “Oh, I think you have your period, honey.” His fingers emerge from her pantyhose soaked in blood. She tells him it’s nothing, just the remains of her last period. Actually, no, she was raped a day ago, her insides torn in places till they bled while he was enjoying a lobster at the Coupole brasserie with his client.

  He won’t try anything this evening. Marie can go to bed without worrying. She’ll let the time sift through her fingers. She knows that sometimes it will be tough, insurmountable, but she’s sure she can do it. A whole new day starts tomorrow. Laurent gets into bed, kisses her. He’s asleep already.

  Bois-le-Roi is a delightful place. The Forest of Fontainebleau protects its inhabitants, nestling them in a natural, leafy cradle of calm. The reddish facades of the large buhrstone buildings peep through the impressive oak trees that edge the old properties. Below them the Seine flows past. They can hear the sound of the water, the pressure of it. This is where they’ve chosen to have their picnic. In crisp beams of autumn sunlight Marie’s mother, Irene, is busy unwrapping the picnic basket she prepared this morning. A multitude of bread rolls arranged perfectly by flavor give the finishing touch to the bucolic mood of the scene.

  It’s nearly three weeks since Marie’s assault. Her vagina has stopped hurting. The pain inflicted by her rape has disappeared, taking with it the few precise recollections that clung to her memory. She has continued to make love with her husband. He still hasn’t noticed anything unusual about her behavior, just a few bad moods put down to stress and tiredness.

  Laurent is unfolding the fishing rods down by the river with his father-in-law, Gérard. They’re hoping to grill their catch this evening. Marie’s father, a retired pharmacist, has always exercised a kindly authority over his family. His wife, a stay-at-home mother who attentively raised their two daughters, showed no inclination to have a career. Being a mother was enough for her. Marie has never thought to ask her whether she was truly happy, whether having a child could fill the void that she sometimes feels opening up around her. “Children are life itself,” her mother often tells her. “When life is added to life, what more could you want to give meaning to everything else?”

  Marie is helping her sister change her baby’s diaper on the plaid blanket. He seems to like his aunt. She forces a smile.

  “How are things at the bank? I heard it was heating up right now.” The pitiful ordinariness of the questions Marie has to answer shoots through her head at the speed of sound. Is she such a good actor? How can this loving, affectionate, attentive family, this husband who’s so close to his wife, not see anything, how come not one of them has noticed the change in her? They’re uncorking the champagne, handing around petit fours on china plates. It’s absurdly cheerful. Marie feels like taking the big knife, snatching it from her mother and, in sheer desperation, driving it straight into her heart and slicing it down into her belly.

  Laurent comes back, swinging the half-full bag of fish from one hand to the other. He’s pleased. Marie finds him uglier by the minute. With his fishing rod, his blissful look of permanent happiness, and his perfect little life, she feels like spitting on him, ramming something right down his throat. Someone needs to focus on the details in this tableau that has no visible flaws. No one thinks to do that, preferring instead the smooth, supple contours of reassuring surface emotions. Whatever happens they wouldn’t want to make out the black stains, the dysfunction and the torment. Marie remembers how shocked she was when she first saw Magritte’s paintings on a trip to Brussels with Laurent. She’d always been fascinated by the precision of his work, the almost photographic mastery of his subject, his perfect grasp of the laws of perspective, but was terribly disappointed. Proximity can shatter everything in an instant. As she moved closer to her favorite work, The Castle of the Pyrenees, featuring a huge rock suspended in the sky with a small medieval town on its summit, she noticed the first imperfections. The irregular brushstrokes, the rough-hewn curves and contours, cracks in the paint…It was so disappointing, so far removed from everything she’d envisioned about this artistic perfection that she’d believed in since she first came across the painting as a child, on the glossy paper of a school book.

  The sun illuminates the scene. Its gilded beams light up the damp lawn, radiate through the air. Only Marie is surrounded by gloom. In total darkness. She has the same faltering feeling as in that museum. The veil is finally being lifted on her existence, crushing the idealistic lie. She longs for silence to think over what she can do to extricate herself. They all clink their glasses. Marie feels like snapping the tablecloth out from under them as they guzzle champagne and macaroons, she wants to topple them over like glasses, break the crockery and dump everything on the ground. She never wants to feel her vagina again. Neither the suffering nor the arousal that are destroying her day after day. No one will ever touch her again.

  “What’s this, then? Don’t you like champagne anymore?” her father says. “And I thought it would make you happy, it’s your favorite!” He puts his strong arms around her, squeezing her a little too tightly. Within a second she’s driven away her thoughts and buried her longings and is smiling at him. She eats and drinks, and kisses her husband, mother, and sister. She forgets the details, camouflages the flaws, ejects the pain, represses her disgust at the indifference of her loved ones. Their lunch is over. They need to go home, Roxane’s baby is getting cold.

  * * *

  —

  Marie clings to her Monday morning delay like a precious undying feature. Some things mustn’t change. Laurent found his file right away, he’ll be on time. He wanted to make love to Marie last night. She couldn’t refuse, she gave herself to him with complete abandon. She lost that game long ago. The memories are gradually being quashed in her mind. She puts her cup in the sink and suddenly feels dizzy. Then it stops. She’s not sleeping well at the moment and, when Laurent’s not looking, she takes a lot of sleeping tablets before bed. Maybe the pills’ harmful side effects are making her weaker than usual.

  She heads off to the bank on her new bicycle. Hervé’s happy to see her and shows her a picture on his cell phone of the turtledove he decided to buy on Saturday at a pet store on the banks of the Seine. “The look on Corinne’s face when she realized the cage had
a new occupant! I just saw that and I knew I was going to have the best weekend of my life!”

  Marie goes to her office for her nine-thirty meeting. She puts down her coffee and turns on her computer. Her stomach clenches, her eyes glaze over. Time stands still, the taste of urine comes back to her. Her vagina contracts, instinctively protecting itself. Her old cell phone has been placed in the middle of her desk. Marie can still feel it vibrating at her feet in that car. She remembers the configuration of the screen, the colors, the rhythm of the new message ringtone, her finger typing away on the keypad a few minutes before the attack. He has been in this office. He’s decided to come back into her life. She slowly picks up the cell phone. “Oh yes, the CEO’s assistant came by this morning. He found your cell after the last meeting, he wanted to give it back to you in person but you’d left already.” He’s lying to everyone too. She’s not the only one. She’s strangely reassured by this thought, it brings her closer to him in the intimacy of their shared secret. They’re in the same boat, perhaps even in the same dead end. When she’s plugged the phone in to charge it she switches it on, rereads Laurent’s messages, now finds them appallingly childish, thoughtless, almost indecent. Why did the CEO want to give her back her phone? There’s no evidence left now. He’s completely in the clear, it would be her word against his. No gynecological examination, no traces of violence, his car must have been cleaned from top to bottom the very next day, Marie threw her clothes into the dumpster. No one knows about it, it’s too late, the moment has passed.

  Her client arrives late and she asks for him to wait in the corridor. She feels like throwing up. She runs to the bathroom, flips up the lid, and spews out her breakfast. It’s too much of a shock. Everything’s getting more and more complicated. One thing leading to another. But life just keeps on doing the opposite of what she wants, and she decides that today must go ahead without a letup.

  A section of boulevard Voltaire is blocked because of a strike. The warm croissants will go cold. “You need to take rue Richard-Lenoir,” a policeman tells her, and she has an urge to retort that that was the street where she was raped and she doesn’t feel like walking along it, and, as an agent of the law, he should find another solution by way of compensation. She doesn’t say anything. The entrance to the car park isn’t all that wide, after all. It was dark, but Marie suddenly thinks it strange that no one saw anything. She pictures people turning away at the point where the deepest core of her parted company with the rest of her body, people happier to stare straight ahead than witness that disturbing sex scene. She doesn’t stop, quickens her step, gets away from the place by crossing the street. A furtive moment of suffering that stirs memories. She doesn’t remember the pain now.

  Laurent is only just waking. He went to bed late last night after finishing his defense. The trial starts soon. He gets up to kiss his wife. “How lucky am I to have such a wonderful wife…She brings croissants for breakfast. I didn’t even hear you go out!” She didn’t want to wake him and run the risk of being subjected to his morning sexual enthusiasm. She sets the table meticulously, arranges the five croissants on the large silver dish her parents gave them as a wedding present, and pours freshly squeezed orange juice into a jug. Laurent starts cooking eggs and bacon, filling the room with the smell of frying. “Can you open the window a little, otherwise the whole living room smells of it.” She gets up. Her stomach churns again. How many times has she thrown up in the last few days?

  Laurent looks at her. “Hey, are you okay? Are you sick?” She hurries to the bathroom and doesn’t have time to close the door. Laurent watches her through the half-open doorway and smiles.

  “What are you laughing at? Watching me on all fours, puking?” Laurent comes over to her but she pushes him away. She finds the situation disgusting and asks him to go back to the kitchen and finish making breakfast. It hurts deep down in her stomach. She can’t take any more of this aching. It’s always in the same place, as if the pain has made up its mind to keep knocking at the same door, reopening the wound with the same determination. Marie has nothing left to throw up, she’s spitting bile. The green liquid dribbles down the inside of the toilet bowl. She drags herself back to join Laurent. He’s sitting on a chair, slightly offended that she banished him so harshly. He gets the picture before she does.

  Marie sits at the table without a word, still wincing because of the acid that keeps rising up her throat. She can feel Laurent staring at her. She looks him right in the eye until he gives up and looks away. She doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking, doesn’t want to hear the words come out of his mouth. If she listens to his explanations she’ll scream, spit in his face, try to push him out the window at any opportunity or chuck the hot oil from the bacon in his face. “I’d rather stay at home today, I’m a little tired from the week I’ve had.” He was planning to go to an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, which Marie loves visiting on Saturday mornings before tourists get all overexcited about Paris. The light there soothes her; soft vaporous beams filter through the glass roof of this former train station, casting a heavenly protective halo over the large marble statues. He won’t go alone, he’ll get on with his work or go visit his parents in Melun.

  Marie returns to the bedroom to get some rest, burrowing back under the unmade sheets contentedly. Some days aren’t worth the effort of being lived anywhere but in bed. She can just see herself in her pajamas, slumped on her plump comfortable mattress, receiving clients, friends, and relations. The nausea is back, stronger than before. “Do we have any medicine for this? Something to stop me throwing up?” Laurent brings a pack of small red pills and a glass of water. She’d like to tear the smile off his face, peel off his skin, blot out any trace of satisfaction in him. He needs to leave, and plants a kiss on his wife’s forehead like an encouragement for what lies ahead. She’s going to sleep all day. Sleep at last. For a few hours she just won’t be here.

  Marie has never been particularly fond of her mother-in-law, Jeanne. She finds her too invasive, protecting Laurent like a persecuted little boy, studying every move he makes so she can then give her advice on absolutely everything. Marie hates unplanned visits, and even more so now. “She insisted, I really couldn’t turn her away!” Marie wanted to make the most of this week of vacation to get some rest, staying in bed to read and eat chocolate. Laurent is showering his increasingly fragile wife with thoughtful attention. Jeanne arrives at lunchtime with a large apple tart. Marie reflects that the woman must have spent more time in her life baking than taking care of herself. But she can’t see any similarities between Jeanne and her own mother, even though the rather broad status of homemaker—taking care of the house, cooking, raising children, and ensuring her husband’s happiness—is virtually identical for the two women. There are just different levels of submissiveness. Marie’s mother is less ridiculous in her duties than Jeanne. That’s just an aspect of personality, though, because her mother cultivates a more obvious elegance and restraint. Where would Marie be on this scale? At what point would she be capable of going against everything her environment has taught her?

  “Oh my, sweetheart, you looked tired! We should go out to get some air after lunch, go have some tea in the Luxembourg Gardens.” Jeanne’s perfume, an unrelenting combination of incense, sandalwood, and musk that Marie often recognizes in the street on older women, reawakens her nausea. She endures the meal with the same revulsion that she harbors for vaudeville: it’s too loud, the stage is overcrowded, and the laughter is exaggerated. She needs a pause in this torment so she slips away to the bathroom. The walls aren’t very thick and she hears her mother-in-law mutter something to Laurent. She can’t make out the words, almost certainly some criticism about the frozen quiche she’s served.

  When Marie returns there’s silence in the room. “I’m not really feeling up to going for a walk today, but you go without me.” Jeanne eyes her tenderly, looking her up and down, lingering over her figure and virtually undressing her. L
aurent purses his lips and nods his head approvingly. Marie finishes her slice of apple tart in silence. Sugary snacks are the only thing she can keep down at the moment. Jeanne and Laurent decide they will go out.

  “In case you have a problem, honey, I’ll have my cell. You just call and I’ll be here.” She thinks this comment stupid. She’d like to ask him where he was when she was being raped. Now he wants her reassurance over a simple stomach bug. What a farce. She gives Jeanne a peck on the cheek, keeping away from her like someone with the flu, then apologizes about the quiche and heads back to bed.

  * * *

  —

  Sunday is Marie’s favorite day in Paris. It’s the day she and Sophia go to the big market on the rue Mouffetard in the Fifth Arrondissement. She likes strolling around that street for hours. She knows all the traders and they know she’s a loyal customer. The small bakery stall is between displays of cheeses and fish. When it’s the season this is where she comes to buy her game, and then she makes a big steaming casserole of wild boar or venison stew for the whole family.

  She’s trying to put on her dress to go meet Sophia on the place Monge, but is having trouble doing it up. Laurent comes into the room and offers to help. “That’s strange, it must have shrunk in the wash. Or I’ve been eating too much at my mom’s house the last few days.” Laurent doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t want to rush his wife with his inane happiness. She never wears much makeup, just foundation and lipstick. Despite her efforts, her greasy skin doesn’t give her much option. Tiny red patches like insect bites are proliferating over her face. She looks terrible. Dark rings run along the curve of her eyes, deepening the green of her irises. Her brown hair, which she washed only yesterday, is lank. She’s distressed by her reflection. As she has done every time she’s been out this week, she puts a pantyliner in her underwear. She’ll be getting her period, it’s just a little late. She loathes the wet trickling feeling and not being prepared. Laurent comes into the room to say goodbye to her and kisses her neck. She turns away slightly, can no longer bear to be touched. The attentive gestures of those close to her are becoming a source of sadness and suffering worse than a disease. She feels as if she shouldn’t go out, but the sun is shining after endless rainy days, the bells of Saint-Médard’s church will ring at lunchtime, filling the streets of the old neighborhood with sweet nostalgia. Paris is holding its breath. She’ll feel unstoppable, carried along by the city she loves, reassured and grounded by the cobblestones on the rue Mouffetard.