Happy Are the Happy (2 page)

In the distant era of my marriage, in the hotel where we used to go as a family in the summer, there was a woman we would see every year. A cheerful, elegant woman with a sporty cut to her gray hair. She appeared everywhere, moving from group to group and dining at a different table every evening. Often, late in the afternoon, she could be found sitting with a book. She’d settle herself into a corner of the lounge so she could keep an eye on the comings and goings. Whenever she saw anyone who looked the least bit familiar, her face would light up and she’d wave her book like a handkerchief. One day she arrived with a tall brunette woman wearing an airy pleated skirt. Afterward, they were never seen apart. They had lunch on the lakeshore, played tennis, played cards. I asked who the tall woman was.
Une dame de compagnie
, I was told: a lady companion. I accepted the designation as one accepts an ordinary word, a word without a specific connotation. The two women appeared every year at the same time, and I’d say to myself, there’s Madame Compain and her lady companion. In due course, a dog was added to their party. They’d take turns holding its leash, but the animal clearly belonged to Madame Compain. We’d see all three of them stepping out every morning, the dog pulling the ladies forward as they strove to hold it back by modulating its name through all the keys, but without any success. In February this past winter, and therefore a
great many years later, I went on a mountain holiday with my son, who’s a grown man now. He skis, of course, with his friends, and I walk. I love to go on walks, I love the forest and the silence. The staff at the hotel suggested some trails I could take, but they were all too far away and I didn’t dare. One shouldn’t walk too far alone in the mountains and the snow. I laughed, thinking that I ought to put up an ad at the reception desk: Single woman seeks someone pleasant to walk with. Anyway, I immediately thought about Madame Compain and her lady companion, and I understood what it meant to be
une dame de compagnie
. My understanding frightened me, because Madame Compain had always struck me as a woman who was a bit lost. Even when she was laughing with other people. And maybe, now that I think about it, especially when she was laughing, and also when she was dressing for the evening. I turned to my father – that is, I raised my eyes to heaven – and murmured, Papa, I can’t become a Madame Compain! It had been a long time since I’d last spoken to my father. Since he died, I’ve been asking him to intervene in my life. I look up at the sky and talk to him in a secret, vehement voice. He’s the only person I can speak to when I feel powerless. Besides him, I don’t know anyone in the next world who would pay me any attention. It never occurs to me to address God. I’ve always thought you can’t disturb God. You can’t speak to him directly. He doesn’t have the time to get involved with individual cases. Or if he does, they have to be exceptionally serious. On the scale of entreaties, mine are, in a manner of speaking, absurd. I feel the way my friend Pauline did when she lost a necklace she’d inherited from her mother and then found it in some tall grass. As they were passing through a village later, her
husband stopped the car and rushed over to the church. It was locked, and so he started frantically rattling the door handle. What are you doing? Pauline asked. I want to thank God, he replied. —God doesn’t give a shit! —I want to thank the Blessed Virgin. —Listen, Hervé, think about the size of the universe, think about the countless evils on earth, think about all the things that happen down here. If there’s a God, if there’s a Blessed Virgin, do you really believe my necklace matters to them?… And so I address my father, who seems more accessible. I ask him for specific favors. Maybe because circumstances make me desire specific things, but also because – below the surface – I want to gauge his abilities. It’s always the same call for help. A petition for movement. But my father’s hopeless. Either he doesn’t hear me or he has no power. I find it appalling that the dead have no power. I disapprove of this radical division of our worlds. From time to time I attribute prophetic knowledge to my father. I think: he’s not granting your wishes because he knows they won’t be conducive to your welfare. That upsets me, I feel like saying, mind your own business, but at least I can consider his nonintervention a deliberate act. That was what he did with Jean-Gabriel Vigarello, the last man I fell in love with. Jean-Gabriel Vigarello is one of my colleagues, a professor of mathematics at the Lycée Camille-Saint-Saëns, where I myself teach Spanish. In retrospect, I tell myself my father wasn’t wrong. But what’s retrospect? It’s old age. My father’s heavenly values exasperate me. They’re quite bourgeois, if you think about them. When he was alive, he believed in the stars, haunted houses, and all sorts of esoteric baubles. My brother Ernest, despite the way he makes his unbelief a cause for vanity, resembles our father a little more every day.
Recently I heard him repeat in his turn, “The stars incline us, they do not bind us.” I’d forgotten how much our father adored that slogan, to which he’d add, almost threateningly, the name of Ptolemy. I thought, if the stars don’t bind us, Papa, then what could you possibly know about the immanent future? I became interested in Jean-Gabriel Vigarello on the day I noticed his eyes. It wasn’t easy to spot them, given that he wore his hair very long and it totally concealed his forehead – a hairstyle at once ugly and impossible for someone of his age. I thought at once, this man has a wife who doesn’t take care of him (he’s married, naturally). You don’t let a man who’s pushing sixty wear his hair like that. And most importantly, you tell him not to hide his eyes. Color-changing eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, and shimmering like a mountain lake. One evening I found myself alone with him in a café in Madrid (we’d organized a school trip to Madrid with three of our classes). I got my nerve up and said, you have very gentle eyes, Jean-Gabriel, it’s pure madness to keep them hidden. After that statement and a bottle of Carta d’Oro, one thing led to another and we wound up in my room, which overlooked a courtyard with howling cats. Once we were back in Rouen, he immediately replunged into his normal life. We’d cross paths in the halls of the lycée as if nothing had happened. He always seemed to be in a hurry, carrying his schoolbag in his left hand, his whole body leaning to that side and his graying bangs covering up more of his face than ever. I find it pathetic, the silent way men have of sending you back in time. As if it was necessary to remind us, for future reference, that human existence is fragmented. I thought, I’ll write a note and put it in his mailbox. An inconsequential, witty note, containing a
reference to an incident in Madrid. I stuck the note in his box one morning when I knew he was there. No response. Not on that day, and not during any of the following days. We greeted each other exactly as before. I was assailed by a kind of sadness, I can’t say heartache, but rather the sorrow of abandonment. There’s a poem by Borges that begins,
Ya no es mágico el mundo. Te han dejado
. The world’s not magical anymore. You’ve been left. He says
left
, an everyday word, a word that makes no noise. Anybody can leave you, even a Jean-Gabriel Vigarello, who wears his hair like the Beatles fifty years after. I asked my father to intervene. In the meantime, I’d written another note, a single phrase: “Don’t forget me completely. Marguerite.” That
completely
struck me as ideal for dissipating his fears, if he had any. A little reminder in a jesting tone. I told my father, I still look good, but as you can see, nothing’s up, and soon I’m going to be old. I told my father, I leave the lycée at five in the afternoon, right now it’s nine in the morning, you’ve got eight hours to inspire Jean-Gabriel Vigarello with a charming reply that I’ll find in my mailbox or on my cell phone. My father didn’t lift a finger. In retrospect, I see that he was right. He’s never approved of my absurd infatuations. He’s right. You choose some faces from among others, you set out markers in time. Everybody wants to have some tale to tell. In former days, I launched myself into the future without thinking about it. Madame Compain was surely the type to have absurd infatuations. When she used to come to the hotel alone, she’d bring a great deal of luggage. Every evening she put on a different dress, a different necklace. She wore her lipstick even on her teeth, which was part of her elegance. She’d go from one table to the next, drinking a glass with one group and then
another with another, always animated, always making conversation, especially with men. At the time, I was with my husband and children. In a little warm cell, from which one looks out at the world. Madame Compain fluttered around like a moth. In whatever corners the light reached, however feebly, Madame Compain would appear with her lacy wings. Ever since my childhood, I’ve made mental images for time. I see the year as an isosceles trapezoid. Winter’s on top, a confident straight line. Fall and spring are attached to it like a skirt. And the summer has always been a long flat plain. These days I have the impression that the angles have softened and the figure’s not stable anymore. What’s that a sign of? I can’t become a Madame Compain. I’m going to have a serious talk with my father. I’m going to tell him he has a unique opportunity to manifest himself for my welfare. I’m going to ask him to reestablish the geometry of my life. It’s a matter of something very simple, very easy to arrange. Could you – this is what I’m preparing to say to him – could you put some lighthearted person in my way, someone I can laugh with and who likes to go on walks? Surely you know someone who’d keep the ends of his scarf crossed and smoothed flat under an old-fashioned coat, who’d hold me with a solid arm and lead me through the snowy forest and never get us lost.

Everything gets on his nerves. Opinions, things, people. Everything. We can’t go out anymore without the evening ending badly. I find myself persuading him to go out, yet on the whole I almost always regret it. We exchange idiotic jokes with our hosts, we laugh on the landing, and once we’re in the elevator, the cold front moves in. Someday someone should make a study of the silence that falls inside a car when you’re returning home after having flaunted your well-being, partly to edify the company, partly to deceive yourself. It’s a silence that tolerates no sound, not even the radio, for who in that mute war of opposition would dare to turn it on? This evening’s over, we’re home now, and while I undress, Robert, as usual, is dawdling in the children’s room. I know what he’s doing. He’s checking their breathing. He bends over them and takes the time to verify unequivocally that they aren’t dead. Afterward, we’re in the bathroom, both of us. No communication. He brushes his teeth, I remove my makeup. He goes to the toilet room. A little later, I find him sitting on the bed in our bedroom; he checks the e-mails on his BlackBerry and sets his alarm. Then he slips under the covers and immediately switches off the light on his side of the bed. For my part, I go and sit on the other side, I set my alarm, I rub cream into my hands, I swallow a Stilnox, I place my earplugs and my water glass within reach on the night table. I arrange my pillows, put on my glasses, and settle down
comfortably to read. I’ve hardly begun when Robert, in a tone that’s supposed to be neutral, says, please turn out the light. These are the first words he’s spoken since we were on Rémi Grobe’s landing. I don’t answer. After a few seconds pass, he raises himself and leans across me, half lying on me, in an effort to reach my bedside lamp. He manages to switch it off. In the darkness, I hit him on the arm and the back – actually I hit him several times – and then I turn the light on again. Robert says, I haven’t slept for three nights, do you want me dead? Without raising my eyes from my book, I say, take a Stilnox. —I don’t take fucking sleeping pills. —Then don’t complain. —Odile, I’m tired … turn off the light. Turn it off, dammit. He curls up under the covers again. I try to read. I wonder whether the word
tired
in Robert’s mouth hasn’t contributed more than anything else to our drifting apart. I refuse to give the word any existential significance. If a literary hero withdraws to the region of shadows, you accept it, but the same doesn’t go for a husband with whom you share a domestic life. Robert switches on his lamp again, extricates himself from the bedclothes with uncalled-for abruptness, and sits on the edge of the bed. Without turning around, he says, I’m going to a hotel. I remain silent. He doesn’t move. For the seventh time, I read, “By the light filtering through the dilapidated shutters, Gaylor could see the dog lying under the toilet chair, the chipped enamel washbasin. On the opposite wall, a man looked at him sadly. Gaylor approached the mirror …” Now who exactly is Gaylor? Robert’s leaning forward, his back to me. He maintains that position while he says, what do I do wrong, do I talk too much? Am I too aggressive? Do I drink too much? Do I have a double chin? Come on, let’s have the
litany. What was it this time? Well, you certainly talk too much, I say. —It was so damned boring. And disgusting. —It wasn’t great, that’s true. —Disgusting. What the hell does he do, this Rémi Grobe? —He’s a consultant. —Consultant! he exclaims. Who’s the genius who invented that word? I don’t see why we inflict these ridiculous dinners on ourselves. —You’re not obliged to go to them. —Yes I am. —No you’re not. —I most certainly am. And that dumb bitch in red, the one who didn’t even know that Japan doesn’t have the atomic bomb! —What does it matter? Who needs to know that? —When you don’t know anything about Japan’s military defenses, and who does, then you shouldn’t join in a conversation about territorial claims in the China Sea. I’m cold, I want to pull up the comforter, but it’s stuck under Robert, who inadvertently sat on it. I tug at the comforter. He lets me try to pull it out from under him without lifting himself an inch. I haul on it, groaning slightly. It’s a mute and completely idiotic struggle. In the end, Robert gets up and leaves the room. I turn to the preceding page to figure out who Gaylor is. Robert reappears fairly quickly. He’s got his pants back on. He looks for his socks, finds them, puts them on. He leaves the room again. I hear him in the hall, opening a closet and rummaging around. Then he goes back into the bathroom, or so it seems to me. On the preceding page, Gaylor’s in the back of a garage, arguing with a man named Pal. Who’s this Pal? I get out of the bed, step into my slippers, and join Robert in the bathroom. He’s wearing an unbuttoned shirt and sitting on the side of the bathtub. I ask him, where are you going? He makes a desperate gesture that means I don’t know, it makes no difference. I say, do you want me to fix up a bed for you in the living room?
—Don’t worry about me, Odile, go to bed. —Robert, I have four hearings this week. —Please leave me alone. I say, come back to bed, I’ll turn off the lamp. I see myself in the mirror. Robert’s got the bad lights on. I never use the ceiling lights in the bathroom, or if I do, I turn them on together with the spotlights over the washbasin. I say, I look ugly, she cut my hair too short. Much too short, Robert says. That’s Robert’s style of humor: half teasing, half disturbing. It’s supposed to make me laugh, even in the worst moments. And it’s also supposed to disturb me. I say, are you serious? Robert says, how can that jackass be a consultant? In what? —Who are you talking about? —Rémi Grobe. —In art, in real estate, I don’t know exactly what. —A dabbler with his fingers in everything. A bandit, most likely. He’s not married? —Divorced. —Do you think he’s good-looking? We hear a sliding sound in the hall, followed by a little voice: Maman? What’s wrong with him? Robert asks me, as if I knew, and in the instantly anxious tone that sets my teeth on edge. We’re here, Antoine, I say, Papa and I are in the bathroom. Antoine appears, dressed in his pajamas and practically weeping. —I lost Doudine. Again! I say, are you going to lose Doudine every night? You shouldn’t be worrying about Doudine at two in the morning, Antoine, you should be sleeping! Antoine’s face crumples in slow motion. When his face crumples like that, there’s no way of stopping his tears. Robert asks, why are you bawling him out, the poor kid? That question requires me to call upon my entire capacity for self-control. I say, I’m not bawling him out, but I don’t understand why he doesn’t put Doudine on a leash. She can just be tied up during the night! I’m not bawling you out, sweetie, but this is not the time to worry about Doudine.
Come on, let’s go back to bed. We head for the boys’ bedroom. Antoine’s sniffling,
Doudiiine
, as Robert and I march down the hall in single file. We enter the bedroom. Simon’s asleep. I ask Antoine to calm down so he won’t wake up his brother. Robert whispers, we’re going to find her, little hamster. Are you going to tie her up? Antoine whines, not making the least effort to lower his voice. I’m not going to tie her up, little hamster, Robert says. I switch on the bedside lamp and say, but why not? We can tie her up at night in a way that will be very pleasant for her. She won’t feel a thing, and you’ll have a little piece of string, like a little leash, and you can pull on it when … Antoine starts to wail like a siren. Few children can achieve such an exasperating command of plaintive modulation. Shh, shhh, I say. What’s going on? Simon asks. —There! Now you’ve waked up your brother, bravo! —What are you all doing? Doudine’s lost, Robert says. Through half-closed eyes, Simon looks at us like we’re crazy. He’s right. I crouch down to peer under the bed. Since I can’t see much, I start running my hand all over the bottom of the bed. Robert’s rummaging in the comforter. With my head under the bed, I mutter, I can’t understand why you’re not asleep in the middle of the night! That’s not normal. When you’re nine years old, you sleep. All of a sudden, I feel her, jammed between the slats and the mattress. I’ve got her, I’ve got her, I call out. Here she is! Quite a pain in the ass, this Doudine … Antoine presses the stuffed animal against his mouth. —All right, beddy-bye! Antoine gets into his bed. I kiss him. Simon wraps himself up in his covers and rolls over, turning away like someone who’s just witnessed a distressing scene. I switch off the lamp. I try to push Robert out of the room. But Robert stays. He wants to compensate
for Mother’s harshness. He wants to reestablish harmony in the enchanted room of childhood. I watch him bend over Simon and kiss him on the back of the neck. Then, in darkness I’ve increased as much as possible by leaving the door just barely ajar, he sits down on Antoine’s bed, tucks him in, nestles the comforter around him, and wedges Doudine so she can’t escape. I hear him murmuring tender words and wonder whether he’s starting one of the stories about Master January’s forest. In former times, men would leave to hunt lions or conquer territories. I wait on the threshold, jerking the door back and forth from time to time to make my irritation known, even though the marmoreal position I’ve adopted should be sufficiently eloquent. Robert finally stands up. We traverse the hall again, in silence. Robert goes into the bathroom, I go into the bedroom and get back in bed. I turn over. I put on my glasses. “Pal was sitting at his desk. His plump hands rested on the dirty blotter. He was informing Gaylor that Raoul Toni had come into the garage that very morning …” Who’s Raoul Toni? My eyes are closing. I wonder what Robert can be doing in the bathroom. I hear a footstep. He appears. He’s removed his pants. How often can this particular threat be made in the course of a married life, this madness of dressing and undressing? I say, do you think it’s normal for a nine-year-old to still have a cuddly toy? Of course, Robert says. I still had one when I was eighteen. I feel like laughing but I don’t show it. Robert takes off his socks and his shirt. He turns off his bedside lamp and slips under the covers. I think I know who Gaylor is. Gaylor’s the guy who’s been hired to find Joss Kroll’s daughter, and I have a hunch Raoul Toni has appeared already too, at the raffle in the beginning … My eyes close. This thriller is
not thrilling. I remove my glasses and switch off the light. I turn so that I’m facing the night table. I notice I haven’t pulled the curtain far enough over, it’s going to let the light in too early. Too bad. I say, why does Antoine wake up in the middle of the night? Robert replies, because he can’t feel Doudine. We both stay where we are for a while, each on one side of the bed, staring at the opposite wall. Then I turn over, once again, and press myself against him. Robert puts his hand on the small of my back and says, I ought to tie you up too.