Chantal Audouin
A man’s a man. There are no married men, no men who are off limits. None of that exists (as I explained to Doctor Lorrain the day I was committed). When you meet someone, you’re not interested in his marital status. Or his sentimental condition. Sentiments are mutable and mortal. Like every earthly thing. Animals die. So do plants. Watercourses aren’t the same from one year to the next. Nothing lasts. People want to believe the opposite. They spend their lives gluing pieces back together, and they call that marriage or fidelity or whatever. As for me, I don’t burden myself with such idiocy anymore. I try my luck with whomever I like. I’m not afraid of coming up short. And in any case, I’ve got nothing to lose. I won’t be beautiful forever. My mirror’s already growing less and less friendly. One day Jacques Ecoupaud’s wife — Jacques Ecoupaud, the minister, my lover — one day his wife called and suggested we meet. I was stunned. She must have been nosing around in his computer, and she’d come across some e-mail exchanges between Jacques and me. At the end of the conversation, before hanging up, she said, I hope you won’t tell him anything about this, I’d like it to remain strictly between us. I called up Jacques immediately and said, I’m seeing your wife this Wednesday. Jacques seemed to know all about it. He sighed. It was a coward’s sigh, and its meaning was, well, since there’s no way around it. Couples disgust me. Their hypocrisy. Their smugness. To this day I’ve been unable to do anything to resist the attraction exerted upon me by Jacques Ecoupaud. A lady-killer. My male counterpart. Except that he’s a junior government minister, a secretary of state (but he always says minister). With all the appurtenances. Cars with tinted windows, chauffeur, bodyguard. A restaurant table always set aside for him. Me, I started from less than scratch. I don’t even have a high school diploma. I climbed up the slope without anyone’s help. These days I’m in event decoration. I’ve made a little name for myself, I work in the film world, in politics. Once I dressed a function room in Bercy where a National Seminar on the Performance of Self-Employed French Entrepreneurs was being held (I can still remember its title; we stuck flags into the flower bouquets). That was the event where I met Jacques. The Secretary of State for Tourism and the Craft Industry. A pathetic title, if you consider it closely. The kind of no-necked, stocky man who steps into a room and scans it to make sure he’s caught everyone’s eye. The hall was packed with entrepreneurs from the provinces who’d come to Paris like visiting nobility, accompanied by their dressed-to-the-nines wives. During the event, a vice-president of a chamber of trades made a speech. I was at the back of the hall, near a window, and Jacques Ecoupaud came up to me and said, you see the guy who just started talking? Yes, I said. — You see his bow tie? — Yes. — It’s a bit large, don’t you think? Yes, it is, I said. It’s made of wood, said Jacques Ecoupaud. — Wood? The boy’s a craftsman, a framing carpenter, Jacques said. He made a bow tie out of wood and shined it up with Pledge. I laughed and Jacques laughed, with his laugh that’s half seduction and half electoral campaign. And you see the one with the velvet James Bond briefcase? Jacques asked. Do you know what his name is? It’s Frank Ravioli. And he sells dry dog food. The following day Jacques parked his Citroën C5 outside my apartment building and we spent the first part of the night together. Usually, where men are involved, I’m the one who leads the dance. I turn them on, I wrap them up, and I clear out just at daybreak. Sometimes I let myself go with the flow. I get a little attached. It lasts while it lasts. As long as I’m not bored. Jacques Ecoupaud pulled the rug out from under me. To this day I cannot understand what it was that made me so utterly dependent on that man. A no-neck guy who comes up to my shoulder. A standard-issue sweet-talker. He immediately presented himself as a great libertine. Like, I’m going to corrupt you, little girl, that sort of thing. He always called me little girl. I’m fifty-six years old and five feet ten inches tall, with an Anita Ekberg — type chest. Being called little girl moved me. It’s stupid. A great libertine, and you can say it again. I still don’t know what it means. As for me, I was ready to experience things. One evening he came to my house with a woman. A brunette around forty who worked in public housing. Her name was Corinne. I served aperitifs. Jacques took off his coat and tie and sprawled on the sofa. The woman and I stayed in our armchairs and talked about the weather and the neighborhood. Jacques said, make yourselves comfortable, my dears. We undressed a little, but not completely. Corinne seemed accustomed to that kind of situation. The girl with no emotions who does what she’s told. She took off her brassiere and hung it on a potted chrysanthemum. Jacques laughed. We were both wearing the same type of lingerie, designed to arouse a dead man. At a certain point, Jacques spread out his arms symmetrically and said, come here, both of you! We each sat on one side of him, and he closed his arms around us. We stayed like that for a while, giggling, stroking his big hairy belly, tickling his fly, and then all at once he said, come on, girls, get closer! That sentence still makes me feel ashamed. Ashamed of our position, of the bright light, of the way Jacques was completely lacking in imagination and dominance. I’d been expecting the Marquis de Sade, and I found myself with a flabby fellow who wallowed on my sofa and said,
come on, girls, get closer. But in those days, I let everything pass. If men wanted to acknowledge a single quality in us, that would be the one. We rehabilitate them. We lift them up as soon as we can. We don’t want to know that the driver is a former customs officer, that the bodyguard is a yokel from the South who used to work in security for the department of Cantal. That the Citroën C5 is the worst of all fleet vehicles. That the great libertine had set out to corrupt us without even bringing along a bottle of champagne. Thérèse Ecoupaud — Jacques’s wife — arranged to meet me in a café near the Trinity church. She told me, I’ll be wearing a beige jacket and reading Le Monde. A fun prospect. I planned to get a manicure and to have my hair dyed the day before our date. The hairdresser made me an even more golden blonde than usual. I spent an hour choosing my outfit. I opted for a red skirt and a green crew-necked sweater. A pair of high-heeled Gigi Dool shoes. And to make the most of my arrival, a little putty-colored English-style trench coat. She was already there. I spotted her at once. Through the window, from the street. Probably my age, but looking ten years older. Slapdash makeup. Short, badly cut hair with visible roots. Blue scarf over a loose beige jacket. I thought right there, it’s over. Jacques Ecoupaud, that’s all over. I almost didn’t go into the café. The sight of the legitimate, neglected wife was much more lethal than all the disappointments, the waiting, the broken promises, the plates and candles set out for nobody. Her table was practically on the terrace, in full view. She had her spectacles perched on the end of her nose, and she was absorbed in reading her newspaper. Like a Latin professor waiting for her student. In her preparations to meet her husband’s mistress, Thérèse Ecoupaud hadn’t paid the slightest attention to her appearance. What man can live with a woman like that? Couples disgust me. Their reciprocal wizening, their dusty connivance. I don’t like anything about that ambulant structure, or about the way it cruises through time taunting those who are alone. Nevertheless, I went to the café. I extended my hand. I said, Chantal Audouin. She said, Thérèse Ecoupaud. I ordered a Bellini to get on her nerves. I unbuttoned my coat but didn’t take it off, like a woman who has only a little time to dedicate to the present obligation. She let me know immediately that she felt nothing but indifference. I hardly got a look from her. She was intent on rolling her coffee spoon between her thumb and index finger. She said, Madame, my husband sends you e-mails. You answer him. He makes declarations to you. You incite him. When you get upset, he apologizes. He consoles you. You forgive him. Et cetera. The problem with this correspondence, Madame, is that you think it unique. You’ve constructed an imaginary tableau, where on one side there’s you, the warrior’s safe haven of repose, and on the other his tiresome wife and his public service career. You’ve never imagined that he could be maintaining other liaisons at the same time. You’ve thought you were the only woman in whom my husband confides, the only one to whom he would send, for example, a message at two a.m., referring to himself as Jacquot (but I won’t dwell on such foolishness): “Poor Jacquot, alone in his room in Montauban, missing your skin, your lips, and your …,” you know the rest. The same text for each of his three recipients. That night, there were three of you who received that message. You were more eager than the others, you replied with great warmth and, how shall I say it, innocence. I wanted to meet you because it seemed to me that you were particularly enamored of my husband, Thérèse Ecoupaud continued. I guessed that you’d be happy to receive this information about him so that you could avoid falling from too great a height, the horrible woman said. I asked Doctor Lorrain, I said, doesn’t it seem normal to you, Doctor, that a person would try to kill herself after such a scene? Of course, the best solution would have been to kill the man. I applaud women who slaughter their lovers, but not everybody has the right temperament for that. Doctor Lorrain asked me how I felt about Jacques Ecoupaud now that I was getting better. I said, he’s a sorry little man. Doctor Lorrain raised his arms in his white coat and repeated my words, as if I’d just found the key to independence: a sorry little man! — Yes, Doctor, a sorry little man. But as you see, sorry little men can still fool idiots. And how does it help me now to see him as a sorry little man? The thought of that sorry little man degrades me, it does me no good at all. What makes you think confronting reality soothes the heart? Igor Lorrain nodded like a man showing that he understands everything and wrote I don’t know what assessment in my folder. After I left his office, I ran into one of his other patients, my favorite, on the stairs of the clinic. He’s a long-limbed, brown-haired young man with beautiful bright eyes, always smiling. A Québécois. He said, hello Chantal. I said, hello Céline. I’d told him my name was Chantal, and he’d said his was Céline. I think he believes he’s Céline Dion, the singer. But maybe he’s joking. He’s always got a scarf wrapped around his neck. I see him roaming the corridors or, when the weather’s good, strolling along the alleys in the garden. He moves his lips and says words you can’t quite hear. He doesn’t look straight at people. It’s as though he’s addressing a distant fleet, as though he’s praying on top of a rock, hoping to attract the ships he spies far out at sea, like someone in a mythic tale.