Happy Are the Happy

PLAYS

“Art”
The God of Carnage
Life x 3
The Unexpected Man
Conversations after a Burial

FICTION

Desolation

NONFICTION

Dawn Dusk or Night:
A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy

We were at the supermarket, shopping for the weekend. At some point she said, you go stand in the cheese line while I get the rest of the groceries. When I came back, the shopping cart was half filled with boxes of cereal and bags of cookies and packets of powdered food and other desserts. I said, what’s all this for? —What do you mean, what’s all this for? I said, what’s the point of buying all this? —You have children, Robert. They like Chocolate Cruesli, they like Napolitains, they adore Kinder Bueno bars. She displayed the various packages. It’s ridiculous to gorge those kids on sugar and fat, I said. This cart is ridiculous. She said, what kind of cheese did you buy? —A Crottin de Chavignol and a Morbier. And no Gruyère? she cried out. —I forgot and I’m not going back, the line’s too long. —If there’s one kind of cheese you have to buy, you know very well it’s Gruyère, who eats Morbier in our house? Who? I do, I said. —Since when do you eat Morbier? Who wants to eat Morbier? Odile, stop it, I said. —Who likes this Morbier crap? Implicit meaning:
besides your mother
, my mother had recently found a nut, a metal nut, in a chunk of Morbier. I said, Odile, you’re shouting. She gave the cart a jerk and threw three Milka chocolate bars into it. I picked them up and replaced them on the shelf. She flung the bars back into the cart even faster than before. I said, I’m out of here. She answered, get out, get out, I’m out of here is all you know how to say, it’s your sole
response. As soon as you run out of arguments, you say I’m out of here, you immediately resort to this grotesque threat. It’s true, I admit it, I often say I’m out of here, I’m aware I say it, but I don’t see how I can not say it when it’s the only thing I want to say, when I see no way out other than immediate withdrawal, but I also realize, yes, that I put it in the form of an ultimatum. Well, you’re finished shopping, I say to Odile, propelling the shopping cart forward. Or do we have some more stupid shit to buy? —Listen to the way you talk to me! Do you even realize how you talk to me? I say, come on. Come on! Nothing irks me more than these sudden mood shifts, where everything stops, everything freezes. Obviously, I could say I’m sorry. Not just once, I’d have to say it twice, in the right tone. If I said I’m sorry, if I said it twice in the right tone, then the day could restart and almost return to normal, except that I don’t in the least feel like saying those words, nor is there any physiological possibility of my uttering them when she stops short in front of shelves of condiments with that flabbergasted look of outrage and desolation. Come on, Odile, please, I say more gently. I’m cold and I have an article to finish. Apologize, she says. If she said
Apologize
in her normal voice, I might comply, but she whispers, she gives the word a colorless, atonal inflection I can’t get past. I say, please. I remain calm. Please, I say mildly, and I see myself driving down a highway at top speed, stereo turned all the way up, and I’m listening to a song called “Sodade,” a recent discovery I understand nothing of except for the solitude in the singer’s voice and the word
solitude
itself, repeated countless times, even though I’m told
sodade
doesn’t actually mean solitude, but nostalgia, absence, regret, spleen, so many intimate things that can’t be shared, and all of them
names for solitude, just as the personal shopping cart is a name for solitude, and so is the oil and vinegar aisle, and so is the man pleading with his wife under the fluorescent lights. I say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Odile. Odile’s not necessary in that sentence. Of course not. Odile isn’t nice, I say Odile at the end to indicate my impatience, but I don’t expect her to make an about-face, arms dangling, and head for the frozen foods, that is, for the back of the store, without saying a word, leaving her handbag in the shopping cart. I shout, what are you doing, Odile? I shout, I’ve got only two hours left to write a very important article on the new gold rush! A completely ridiculous declaration. She’s disappeared from sight. People are looking at me. I grab the handle of the cart and make a beeline for the back of the store. I don’t see her (she’s always had a talent for vanishing, even from pleasant situations). I call out, Odile! I go to the beverage section: nobody. Odile! Odile! I’m clearly upsetting the people around me, but I couldn’t care less, I wheel the cart up and down the aisles – I loathe these supermarkets – and suddenly I spot her in the cheese line, which is even longer than it was a little while ago, she’s got herself back in the cheese line! I go up to her and say, Odile, I express myself in a measured tone, Odile, I say, it’s going to be twenty minutes before you get served, let’s leave and buy the Gruyère somewhere else. No response. What’s she doing? She digs around in the shopping cart and pulls out the Morbier. You’re not going to return the Morbier? I ask. —Yes I am. We’ll give it to Maman, I say, trying to lighten things up. My mother recently found a metal nut in a chunk of Morbier. Odile doesn’t smile. She remains stiff and offended, standing there in the penance line. My mother said to the
cheesemonger, I’m not the type of woman who makes a fuss, but for the sake of your longevity as a respected dealer in cheese, I must inform you that I found a bolt in a piece of your Morbier. The guy didn’t give a damn, he didn’t even offer to comp the three Rocamadours she was buying. My mother boasts that she paid without flinching, thus proving herself a bigger person than the cheesemonger. I stand close to Odile and say in a low voice, I’m counting to three, Odile. I’m counting to three. You understand? And for some reason, at the moment when I say that, I think about the Hutners, a couple of friends of ours who are curled up together inside a willed state of conjugal well-being. Lately they’ve taken to calling each other “my own” and saying things like “Let’s eat well this evening, my own.” I don’t know why the Hutners cross my mind at the moment when an opposite madness has come over me, but maybe there isn’t really a whole lot of difference between
Let’s eat well tonight, my own
, and
I’m counting to three, Odile
, in both cases the effort to be a couple causes a kind of constriction of the being, I mean there’s no more natural harmony in
Let’s eat well, my own
, no, not at all, and no less disaster either, except that my
I’m counting to three
causes a shiver to pass over Odile’s face, a wrinkling of the mouth, the infinitesimal beginnings of a smile, while I must absolutely refrain from beginning to smile myself, of course, as long as I don’t receive an unequivocal green light, even though I really feel like smiling, but instead I’ve got to act as if I haven’t noticed a thing, and so I decide to count, I say
one
, I whisper the word distinctly, the woman right behind Odile has a ringside view, Odile pushes a bit of discarded packaging with the tip of her shoe, the line’s getting longer and not moving at
all, it’s time for me to say two, I say
two
, openly, generously, the woman behind Odile practically glues herself to us, she’s wearing a hat, a kind of overturned bucket made of soft felt, I can’t stand women who wear that sort of hat, a hat like that’s a very bad sign, I put something in my look intended to make the woman back off a yard or so, but nothing happens, she considers me curiously, she sizes me up, does she smell disgustingly bad? Women who dress in layers often give off a bad odor, or could it be the proximity of spoiled dairy products? My cell phone vibrates in my inside jacket pocket. I screw up my eyes to read the caller’s name because I don’t have time to find my glasses. It’s a colleague with a tip about the Bundesbank’s gold reserves. To cut the conversation short, I tell him I’m in a meeting and ask him to send me an e-mail. That little phone call may prove to be a stroke of luck. I lean down and murmur into Odile’s ear, in the tone of a man returning to his responsibilities: my editor in chief wants a sidebar on German gold reserve stockpiling, it’s something of a state secret, and that call may point me to information I don’t have at the moment. German gold reserves, she says, who cares about that? And she pulls in her neck and draws down the corners of her mouth so that I can gauge the insignificance of the subject, but even more seriously, the insignificance of my work, of my efforts in general, as if there was no hope of expecting anything more from me, not even the consciousness of my own derelictions. Women will seize any opportunity to deflate you, they love reminding you how much of a disappointment you are. Odile has just moved up in the cheese line. She’s got her bag back, and she’s still clutching the Morbier. I’m hot. I’m suffocating. I want to be far away, I no longer
remember what we’re doing here or why we’re doing it. I’d like to be sliding on snowshoes in western Canada, planting stakes and marking trees with my ax in frozen valleys, like the gold prospector Graham Boer, the subject of my article. Does this Boer person have a wife and children? A guy who confronts grizzly bears and temperatures of twenty-five below zero isn’t likely to put up with being bored to death in a goddamn supermarket at grocery rush hour. Is this any place for a man? Who can wander up and down these fluorescent rows, past this plethora of packaging, without yielding to discouragement? And to know that you’ll be back here, in all seasons of the year, whether you want to or not, hauling the same shopping cart, under the command of a woman who grows more rigid every day. Not long ago, my father-in-law, Ernest Blot, told our nine-year-old son, I’m going to buy you a new pen, you’re staining your fingers with that one. Antoine replied, that’s all right, I don’t need a pen to be happy anymore. There’s the secret, Ernest said, the child understood it: reduce your requirements for happiness to a minimum. My father-in-law is a champion of over-the-top adages totally out of keeping with his actual temperament. Ernest has never given in to the smallest reduction in his vital potential (forget the word
happiness
). When he was compelled to live like a convalescent after his coronary bypass operations, faced with relearning modest everyday routines and performing domestic chores he’d always avoided, he felt as though he’d been singled out and struck down by God himself. Odile, I say, if I say three, if I speak the number
three
, I’ll take the car and leave you here on your own, shopping cart and all. Seems unlikely, she says. —It may seem unlikely, but it’s what I’m going to do in two seconds.
—You can’t take the car, Robert, the keys are in my bag. I rummage in my pockets, a gesture made all the more stupid by the fact that I remember handing her the keys. —Give them back, please. Odile smiles. She slings her bag across her shoulders and wedges it between her body and the Plexiglas front of the cheese display case. I move closer, grab the bag, and pull on it. Odile resists. I yank the shoulder strap. She clutches it and pulls the other way. She’s having fun! I seize the bag by the bottom, I wouldn’t have any trouble snatching it away from her if circumstances were different. She laughs. She clings. She says, aren’t you going to say
three
? Why don’t you say
three
? She’s getting on my nerves. And those keys in her bag, they’re getting on my nerves too. But I really like Odile when she’s like this. I really like to see her laugh. I’m on the verge of relaxing and letting our struggle turn into a kind of teasing game when I hear a chuckle, and then I see the woman in the felt hat, giddy with feminine complicity, burst out laughing without the slightest embarrassment. All at once, I have no choice. I become brutal. I flatten Odile against the Plexiglas and try to get my hand inside her bag. She struggles, complains that I’m hurting her, I say, give me those fucking keys, she says, you’re crazy, I tear the Morbier out of her hands and heave it into the aisle, at last I feel the keys amid the general disorder of her bag, I take them out, I wave them in front of her eyes without letting her go, I say, let’s get the hell out of here
this minute
. Now the woman with the hat is looking scared. I say to her, what’s the matter, honey, you’re not laughing anymore? Why not? I pull both Odile and the cart, I haul them along past the shelves and the racks toward the checkout counters. I keep a tight grip on her wrist even though she’s not putting up any resistance,
there’s nothing innocent about her submission, I’d rather she forced me to drag her. Whenever she dons her martyr’s costume, I always wind up paying the price. Of course, the checkout lines are long too. We take our place in one deadly queue without exchanging a word. I release Odile’s arm. She pretends to be a normal customer. I even watch her organize the shopping cart, arranging things a little to make them easier to bag. Our mutual silence continues in the parking lot. Also in the car. Night has fallen. The streetlights make us drowsy, and I put on the CD with the Portuguese song, the one with the woman’s voice repeating the same word over and over.