This Little Family

by Inès Bayard

  The nursery director makes her a coffee in her office. Marie sits in her chair as if about to have her final interview for the Mommy of the Year awards. The coffee scalds her lips satisfyingly. Brigitte Renate is bulky and imposing, a strikingly large woman. But after the first few minutes of their conversation everything falls apart. Her physical presence is erased by her moral weakness. Her big, overly obvious, hypocritical smile, her hands crossed ridiculously on her desk, her screwed-up eyes, and her fat cheeks encroaching over her lower lids. The woman has no subtlety whatsoever. She isn’t intelligent, and even less shrewd. She won’t do Marie any harm. “I’m so sorry but I’m only here in the mornings so it’s not easy arranging meetings. I’d just like to get to know you a little, know a bit about Thomas’s home environment. Find out if you have any particular requirements or needs, whether you’re satisfied. Some of the mothers say that maybe you don’t feel entirely comfortable here…What I mean is, you mustn’t be afraid to come into the nursery, you know…We’re here for you…”

  Marie interrupts her to say she’s always in a hurry when she gets here in the evenings and doesn’t have time to lie down on Thomas’s playmat or make a scene about him putting round balls into square holes. Her husband is a leading lawyer who works day and night on his cases. She takes care of Thomas alone, bathing him, feeding him, soothing him, putting him to bed. The director listens to her, makes a show of understanding her. She doesn’t express this very clearly, though, and perhaps that’s the worst of it, the feeling that this woman is demonstrating an earnest sort of condolence, which is in fact simply a profound contempt for the sort of mother Marie represents. In response to Marie’s abrupt and almost aggressive tone of voice, the director cuts short their conversation and shows her back to the door. She thanks Marie for sparing her some time and is available if and when she’s needed. Marie smiles by way of acquiescence. She opens the door and then thinks again. “Oh, and is Thomas okay?” The director assures her that he’s absolutely fine and has already settled in the playroom. Marie is making more and more mistakes.

  Marie knows that she now needs to get things under control. First her mother, then her sister, Mathilde, and the day nursery…and soon Laurent. The world of lies is closing in around her. She’s terrified and desperate, a slow-moving tension seeping into every corner of her mind. She finally recognizes that this is the thrill of an abnormal life.

  Marie acknowledges that it’s never a good thing for a woman to stop making love with her husband. It’s difficult and laborious but she’s decided to make the necessary effort so that he believes everything’s still possible. She caresses him slowly but he can’t get an erection. His limp penis curled on his thigh repulses her. Laurent always chooses the reaction most common to men, the one that works every time, arousing compassion and pity in their partners, who always feel responsible for the situation: victimization. He peels her away from his chest and sits up on the edge of the bed with his clenched hands at his temples and his head bent, heaving great sighs of despair—she isn’t spared any part of the performance. “I think I’m working too much. This case is driving me nuts. When it’s all over we’ll go away for a vacation. The three of us. Get away from all this.” Marie knows he’s been under a lot of pressure for several weeks. During the preliminary inquiries into the Ponce case he’s received almost twenty death threats at work, and ten of them were addressed specifically to him; he’s been sent big bags filled with cow brains with promises that next time it will be his brains inside, pigs’ trotters sent in parcels, and fake tongues in small boxes.

  But Marie’s instincts tell her this isn’t just about difficulties at work. For days now she’s felt the presence of “the other woman.” The mistress, the whore, the unmentionable, the bitch, the woman who destroys, lays waste, and undermines a married couple’s often shaky foundations. It’s always smell that betrays an unfaithful man. Laurent falls asleep quickly and Marie sniffs his body, licks the crook of his neck and studies his hair and his hands on the pillow. Nothing exists anymore except in her own imagination. She suddenly feels Laurent is defying her. He’s cheating on her with Julia, and lying to her too. They must both navigate these treacherous waters to the best of their abilities. Marie turns to the other side of the bed. The walls of her vagina contract painfully and her hips sway slightly from left to right.

  Her husband has always liked her masturbating when they have sex; he likes seeing her play with herself for him alone. Doing this during sex has never given Marie any pleasure. Her husband’s hand was always over hers, encouraging her to rub herself. Her sexual activity as a teenager, even when she was a virgin, felt more independent than what she does now within her marriage. Like all young girls, when she took a bath Marie had gotten into the habit of turning on the shower and putting the showerhead up to her vagina. The water pressure was too weak but she would put her hand on it to create more pressure and make the water jets stronger. She would always achieve orgasm, with no help at all. Once a woman emerges from this solitary space—when she has little knowledge of sex between two or more people—her sex life rapidly grows more complex. With so much promise intensified by the erotic power of the sexual act between a man and a woman, the guilt of not achieving gratification is a depressing outcome. It was a genuine disappointment for Marie when she realized, on the first and many subsequent occasions, that a penis penetrating her didn’t give her as much pleasure as her showerhead in Bois-le-Roi. Male sexuality—with its lack of promise, originality, and scope—just kept disappointing her, from her marriage right up to her rape. Perhaps she even had some sort of fellow feeling for her rapist, who recognized the violence of sex and allowed himself to apply it deliberately to innocent women, thereby refusing to be trapped in the sexual routines imposed on him by his marriage. His penis was hard. Harder than her husband’s has ever been for her. She remembers him ramming powerfully deep inside her, bucking savagely against her back. Marie sometimes regrets that there could be no communion with that man, that she couldn’t experience a pleasure that would have been appropriate for their two suffering bodies, the one frustrated, the other subjugated. She could have become something other than his victim, and he something other than her tormentor. She mulls over all sorts of ambiguous ideas tonight, immoral considerations, sick introspection, titillating thoughts, dismissing and then reappraising them from every possible angle. Cars speed past on the boulevard outside, their tires thundering relentlessly over the road surface. And it’s his proud body that she feels quivering with every urge, his face she sees lying beside her.

  * * *

  —

  Little Thomas is sick, he’s quite a fragile child. He can’t cope with his mother’s abandonment. Marie has to stay at home with him. She sacrifices her one day off a month for him. He’s been screaming in his bed for several minutes and Marie has shut herself in her room so she doesn’t have to listen to his wailing. She’ll take his temperature when she gives him his bottle, killing two birds with one stone. That’ll be less effort, less time devoted to him.

  She’s lying on her bed looking for her cell phone. She’s sure she left it on the nightstand last night. There’s absolutely no need for panic. Now that her sister knows about things, she’s deleted the letter to Laurent from her computer, changed the access code on her cell, and wiped all the compromising messages she’s exchanged with Roxane. The screaming is more intense in the corridor. A strong smell of urine and excrement fills the living room. Marie walks past her son without a glance, obsessed with finding her phone. She spots it on the small shelf near the front door. She’s never left it there. She very clearly remembers checking her emails before going to sleep. Laurent has taken to searching, watching her, trying things out, putting his doubts into action.

  The child won’t stop howling. Marie consents to change his diaper and give him something to eat. There’s nothing she finds more disgusting than watching her son have his bottle. The milky smells—so sour and sweet an
d warm—make her feel permanently nauseous. She hasn’t drunk a single drop of milk herself since Thomas was born. He guzzles it down like a pig. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday evening.

  There are times when her negligence becomes apparent again. Marie may take care of Thomas for several consecutive days as normal mothers do and a routine is established. But the following week she lets him starve, flail in his own excrement, suddenly feeling an urge to make him eat it, to hurl him out of the window, thrilled and satisfied by the thought that she can finally get him out of her life. She wavers between the energy it takes to sustain her lie and the unbearable exhaustion driving her toward ending it all as soon as possible.

  After her rape, Marie always thought of herself as the only victim in this masquerade, of this fabrication that the whole world keeps afloat about the incredible enriching experience of motherhood. Despite how weak her body was when she gave birth, Marie did not fight for her son but against him. She didn’t completely abandon her body in the hospital. It would have been unimaginable for her to die bringing him into the world. As she struggled on that bed destined to see him born into suffering, she made a commitment to make him pay the price his entire life. If only one person could be saved, she would naturally have chosen herself.

  The bell on the intercom rings. Marie has fallen asleep on the sofa. The child is clinging to her leg, chewing on the fabric of her pants. Laurent forgot his keys. He’s home early. She won’t raise the subject of her cell phone this evening. She’d rather wait till she knows exactly how far his suspicions have developed over the last few days.

  Roxane does not intend to leave her in peace, picking away at her like a vulture with its prey. Waiting for her to snap. A dull clunk reverberates in the apartment but is smothered by her sister’s yelling.

  “What exactly do you want? The truth about Thomas? You think he can take it? I hate you, I can’t understand why you’re not on my side. My own sister and you’re betraying me.”

  The conversation becomes increasingly spiteful. The slats of the parquet floor creak underfoot. Marie is screaming with fury, she hurls the handset of the phone at the wall, then calls her sister back to apologize. A door closes behind her. Marie sobs, begs her sister not say anything to her mother or Laurent, asks her to understand her situation. Their voices subside, the intensity defuses. A second door closes discreetly. Marie stops talking, takes the phone from her ear. She steps slowly toward the corridor to check that no one has come into the apartment. Laurent has a business lunch today. The guy in the apartment below must be doing more renovations.

  * * *

  —

  Julia is an attentive coworker. “Where’s submissions file number eight? Don’t tell me you left it at home again.” Laurent has to drive back to the apartment before his lunch. His wife has stopped reminding him to take his files. He knows exactly where this file is: on the windowsill in the living room. He has just a few minutes to grab it before heading back to the restaurant near the Bois de Boulogne, where Julia and their client are waiting for him. The Ponce case is on the homestretch. This highly publicized divorce will guarantee him not only a promotion within his law firm, but perhaps also recognition among all the top Paris institutions in political, media, and legal circles.

  He comes into the apartment and hears his wife on the phone. As soon as he starts walking down the corridor a terrible sense of fear grips him, as if he can feel the first tremors of a huge earthquake under his feet. Marie’s harrowing ranting echoes around the apartment. He comes slowly toward the bedroom. The phone is thrown at the wall. There’s a few seconds’ silence before his wife starts whimpering as she tries to resume her conversation with her sister. He can see her through the half-open doorway, kneeling on the white carpet by the bed. Her every word pierces through his chest. The bitter acidic taste of his morning coffee rises up his throat, filling the back of his mouth and infiltrating his nose. He closes the door carefully and goes back down the corridor. He races downstairs, shouldering past the caretaker who’s sweeping the stairs. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t need to apologize for anything. There aren’t many possible lies when it comes to a man and his son. Thomas looks like him.

  The GPS in the car is already set and tells him the way. “Starting route to La Grande Cascade.” He stops listening to the automatic voice, gets lost in northern Paris. Makes a U-turn. First he wants to go see his son at the nursery but apparently they have an outing planned for the children today. Marie always gives him this sort of information at the last minute, as he sets off to work. His shirt is patched with acrid sweat, every fiber of his clothes clings to his skin, embedding itself in his flesh. His eyes roam over the paths through the Bois de Boulogne. The road becomes hazy, anger burns through his body like a slow painful electric shock. How could his wife cheat on him? He can’t believe Thomas isn’t his son. It’s just impossible. Only last week he and his mother were looking at photos and comparing his features to Thomas’s. His head feels heavy and his hands are losing their grip on the steering wheel. The car grinds to a halt by the roadside. He steps out, shaking feverishly with terror. He, the lawyer who specializes in tragic personal defense speeches, can’t stand being ill-prepared to confront an ordeal. His body gives way. Slumped against the car door, he stares absently at the far horizon of the woods stretching out before him. A few walkers eye him suspiciously from a distance. His phone vibrates in his pocket. It’s Julia. He needs to get to the restaurant right now and bring the file he forgot at home. Everyone’s there except for him. After the tenth call, still collapsed by the roadside, he makes up his mind to reply. He’s real close. It’s just that there’s an accident on the way into the woods. He’s lying, like his wife. A lie to defend himself, to avoid annoying people, to make them more amenable, more flexible, to achieve some sweet peaceful serenity until, someday, he has the courage to reveal everything. His suit is spattered with large patches of puke. Luckily, he has another one in the trunk of the car.

  Hey look, Thomas, Daddy came today!” Unlike his wife, Laurent didn’t think twice before putting on the blue plastic overshoes to go into the nursery’s playroom. The director is delighted to meet little Thomas’s father. They chat, discussing the child’s progress, his interactions with the other children, his ability to orient himself and his sense of space. When Marie gets home after picking him up, she lets him roam around the apartment alone. He rolls about, lies spread-eagle on all the carpets, trundles around between cushions on the floor, navigates alone and unprotected between the pieces of furniture in the living room while his mother reads in her bedroom or does something in the kitchen.

  Laurent can’t help scrutinizing his son. His big smiling green eyes, his little pink mouth grinning up at him, his tiny nose that twists from left to right. He can’t be certain anymore, the doubt is devastating. What if this child isn’t his? He needs to be sure. Laurent is a man of the law. He likes having tangible proof in front of him, real material evidence. He’s never pictured his life anywhere but grounded in reality. He has no problem with spending his nights cramming hundreds of pages of witness reports, inventories, minutes of meetings, lists, assessments of proof, and images of adulterous encounters. Even as a teenager he was already aware of powerful boundaries. While his classmates started going to discos, drinking, and experimenting with all sorts of drugs, he was shackled by his fear of the possible consequences. These heavy restrictions—which instigate justice and are in fact open to very little negotiation—have always been a source of comfort to him with their guarantee that nothing can ever be completely repealed or deconstructed. Only a civil war would be reason enough for Laurent to lose this equanimity. He has used lies in several of his cases but that was more a question of professional strategy.

  He moves away with his child in his arms. Thomas looks at him and then turns to look outside. Laurent assembles, reconstructs, and juxtaposes recent and older events. He comes very close, then backs away. Some things are inconsi
stent with the rest. The expressions that sometimes come into his wife’s face cast an unbearable ambiguity over moments from their everyday life. Past and present become intertwined. But he can’t seem to establish a possible link. He is so caught up in his own convictions that he can’t detect the initial tragedy.

  * * *

  —

  Marie has made the most of her free evening by going to the hairdresser. “Don’t you like it? You haven’t said a thing.” Laurent assures her that it’s a great success, sensibly limiting his compliments. He doesn’t have the heart to go into action but would rather study his wife’s behavior before making a decision.

  Marie is going to cook lasagna this evening. All the fresh vegetables are sitting on the counter in the kitchen. In their old apartment, before they were married, Laurent and Marie used to love cooking together. They would huddle up close and concoct a single dish between the two of them, then enjoy it with a lot of love and a good bottle of red wine. It’s things like this that still nudge Laurent toward believing in his wife. The lost memories, the buried passion, and the forgotten promises. But there is palpable doubt in the unbreathable air in this household. Something has been broken, as when the first fights break out. Love is fresh and happy. The man and the woman adore each other, make love several times a day, promise each other not only eternity but the impossible. Then comes the first raised voice, a tiny harbinger of separation in a flash of anger or a judgment. And the other person’s impetuous character is gradually revealed in all its vices and idiosyncrasies, the surface image is shattered. The lovers no longer have the same energy in their passionate embraces, they stop making love, distance themselves as much as possible from each other. It’s happening to them too. Laurent suspects his wife, Marie loathes her husband for not understanding anything even though she herself is doing her utmost to hide the biggest crisis of their lives.