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 assistant 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.