Happy Are the Happy (7 page)

So I’m supposed to be what? I asked her. —An associate. —An associate? I’m not a lawyer. A journalist, Odile said. —Like your husband? —Why not? —With what newspaper? —Something serious.
Les Échos
. Nobody up there reads that. Later, when we got to Wandermines, Odile wanted me to park the car in a narrow side street behind the church square. But it’s raining, I said. —I don’t want to arrive in a BMW. —That’s the wrong attitude. You’ll arrive in the same kind of car the boss’s lawyer has, it’s perfect. She hesitated. She’d opted for an adorable look, heels higher than usual, power haircut. I said, you’re very chic, you’re
la Parisienne
, you think they want some left-wing activist type with clogs on her feet showing up to represent them? All right, she said. I believe the main reason she agreed was the rain. I parked on the square and went around the car holding an umbrella. She got out. Small, wrapped in a coat, a scarf tied around her neck, carrying a stiff purse and a briefcase full of folders. I started to have a feeling, I mean a real feeling, at that moment. As we were getting out of the car, in Wandermines, in the rain. The influence of place on our emotions doesn’t get its just due. Without warning, certain nostalgias rise to the surface. People change their natures, as in old tales. There in front of the church, which was half hidden in mist, in the square with the red brick buildings and the fried food vendor’s shack, I saw the asbestos victims’ leading
lawyer as a little girl, unsure of herself, who laughed – I adore her laugh – when she recognized the group there to welcome her. Amid that fellowship dressed in Sunday clothes and hastening to the mayor’s office to escape the raindrops, as I held Odile’s arm to help her cross the slippery square, I felt the catastrophe of sentiment. There had never been any question of that sort of foolishness before. I know her husband, she knows the women who pass in and out of my life. There’s never been anything at stake between us except sexual distraction. I said to myself, you’re having a fade-out moment, my boy, it will pass. In the municipal hall, Odile spoke before three hundred people, the workers and their families. At the end of her talk, everybody applauded. The president of the victims’ association told her, you just filled three buses for the demonstration next Thursday. Odile said in my ear, I was born to be a politician. Her face was beet-red. I nearly told her that politics requires greater composure, but I didn’t say anything. We left the general assembly hall for another hall, where a banquet was held. Three o’clock in the afternoon came and we still hadn’t made it past the sparkling wine aperitifs. A plump woman of about sixty, wearing a pleated skirt, directed the service. There was a sound system that had been cutting-edge in the 1980s. I struck up an acquaintance with a former worker in asbestos removal and demolition, a guy with pleural cancer. He told me about his working life, about cutting up the corrugated sheets, about grinding or sanding pipes with sandpaper and no protection. He described the asbestos room, the dust. He told me the asbestos was delivered to them in drums and they’d play with it like snow. I saw Odile dancing the Madison with several widows (she’s the one
who said
Madison
, I know nothing about dances) and a kind of tango with some men strapped to oxygen tanks. A woman called out, Odile, your hair looks like you used a rake on it, you need to get yourself a permanent! I thought, this is real life, tables on trestles, fraternity, dust, Odile Toscano dancing in a village hall. I thought, that’s what you should have done in life, Rémi, you should have been mayor of Wandermines in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, with its church, its factory, its cemetery. The servers brought out coq au vin in big cooking pots. My new pal told me that the number of recent graves in the cemetery was higher than the population of the village. We’re fighting, he said. I thought about the force of that word. He said, when my brother died, I had “Le Temps des cerises” sung at his funeral. My head was about to explode. When the end of the day finally came, I got behind the wheel to drive to Douai, but I was as loaded as Odile. Once we were in the hotel room, she collapsed on the bed. She said, I’m sloshed, Rémi, I can’t very well call the children in this state, do you have some aspirin? —I have something better. I took a bottle of cognac from the minibar. I was sloshed too, and the bewilderment I felt persisted. The way she was lying there, the way she pulled a pillow under her head, the way she knocked back the shot of cognac. Her laugh, her weary face. I thought, she’s mine, my little Counselor Toscano. I lay on top of her, kissed her, undressed her. We made love with incipient hangovers, which added just the right dose of pain. Around ten in the evening, we got hungry. The hotel clerk told us about a restaurant that would still be open. Before we found it, we wandered around Douai. We walked along a river called the Scarpe, Odile told me, I don’t know why I remember that
name. She told me other things about some of the buildings and showed me the law courts. It was pretty windy and drizzly, but I liked the opaque temperament of the place, the silence, the amusing streetlights, I was ready to stay and live there. Odile trod along bravely, her nose swollen by the cold. I had an urge to wrap my arms around her, to hold her close against me, but I restrained myself. There had never been any question of that sort of foolishness between us before. In the restaurant we ordered vegetable soup and ham on the bone. Odile wanted tea, I wanted a beer. She said, you shouldn’t drink any more alcohol. I said, it’s nice of you to look after me. She smiled. Those people impressed me, I said. I live a stupid fucking life. All the people I know are stupid, stupid and insipid. She said, not everybody’s lucky enough to be born in coal-mining country. —You too, you impress me too. Ah, at last! Odile said, making a gesture that meant I should develop this line of thought. —You’re involved, engaged, strong. You’re beautiful. —Rémi? Hello? Are you all right? —Don’t, I’m serious. You fight with them, for them. —That’s my job. —You could do it differently. You could be more aloof. The workers love you. Odile laughed (I’ve already mentioned that I adore her laugh). —The workers love me! The common people love me, you see, I really should go into politics. And you, my poor darling, you’re going to sleep well tonight. —You’re wrong to laugh. I’m serious. The way you danced and cleared away the plates, the comforting words you said, you made the day enchanting. —You didn’t think those pants made me look fat? —No. —You think my hair looks like I used a rake on it? —Yes, but I like it better than the helmet look you had this morning. And suddenly I thought, tomorrow we’ll be in Paris.
Tomorrow evening, Odile will be at home in her cozy cell, with husband and children. And me, I’ll be the devil knows where. Ordinarily none of that mattered, but since things had taken an abnormal turn, I thought, take your precautions, old boy. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket, said excuse me to Odile, and looked for Loula Moreno’s number. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, she’s desperate. Exactly what I need. I sent her a text message: “Free tomorrow evening?” Odile was blowing on her soup. I felt myself invaded by a kind of panic. A dread of abandonment. When I was a child, my parents would leave me with other people. I’d find a dark spot and remain there immobile, getting smaller and smaller. The screen on my cell phone lit up and I read, “Free tomorrow evening, my angel, but you’ll have to come to Klosterneuburg.” I remembered that Loula was making a movie in Austria. Let’s see, who else … Everything OK? Odile asked. Everything’s fine, I said. —You look frustrated. —A client postponing a meeting, nothing important. And then I put on an indifferent air and tossed out, what are you doing tomorrow evening? We’re celebrating my mother’s seventieth birthday, Odile replied. —At your place? —No, at my parents’ house in Boulogne. Having guests is good for my mother. Doing the shopping, cooking for everybody. I have a fear of my parents sitting around being depressed. —Don’t they do anything? —My father was a senior inspector of finances. When Raymond Barre was prime minister, my father was one of his advisers, and later he was director of the Wurmster Bank. Ernest Blot, ever heard of him? —Vaguely. —He had to retire from the bank because of a heart problem. Now he’s chairman of the board of directors, but it’s just an honorary position. He does a little volunteer work, he spins his wheels.
My mother does nothing. She feels alone. My father’s hateful to her, they should have separated a long time ago. Odile fished the slice of lemon out of her empty teacup and separated the peel from the pulp. One of the effects of emotional malfunction is that nothing gets passed over anymore. Everything stands for something else, everything’s in code and needs deciphering. I was unhinged enough to imagine that Odile’s last words contained a message, and so I asked her, have you ever thought about separating, you and your husband? I immediately covered her face with my hands and said, I don’t give a damn, forget I said that, I absolutely don’t give a damn. When I removed my hands, Odile said, he must think about it every day, I’m horrible. I’m sure you are, I said. Robert’s horrible too, but he knows how to make it up with me, Odile said, swallowing the lemon slice. I didn’t like that she’d chosen the same meaningless adjective for both of them, and I didn’t like that she’d said the name Robert, that Robert had barged into our conversation. That she could offer such a banal glimpse into their life together, about which I could not have cared less, irritated me. It’s foolish to think that sentiment brings us closer. It does the opposite, it sanctifies the distances between people. In the excitement of the day, in the rain, on the platform with a microphone in her hand, in the car, in the room with the curtains drawn, Odile felt near, her face in reach of my hand, of my kisses. But in that gloomy, virtually empty restaurant where I’d begun, against my will, to scrutinize her smallest gesture and the tone of her every word with feverish attention, she’d ducked away from me, she’d vanished into a world I had no part in. I said, if I had to live here, at the end of two days I’d blow my brains out. Odile laughed (I found
her laugh caustic and conventional). —You claimed the opposite ten minutes ago. You were enthusiastic about Douai. —I’ve changed my mind. I’d blow my brains out. She shrugged and dunked a bit of bread in the remains of her soup. I had the feeling she was on the verge of boredom. I was on the verge of boredom myself, permeated with the sullenness of lovers when nothing’s going on outside the bed. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I heard the rain return and start pattering against the window. Odile put on a look of consternation and said, we didn’t take the umbrella. I thought about the asbestos demolition worker who showed his thoroughly stained teeth when he laughed, about the chubby organizer in the pleated skirt that made her look even fatter, and God knows why, about my father, an auto body mechanic whose shop was on the Avenue de la Porte de Pantin, on the edge of Paris, and who used to complain bitterly about whoever had installed the leaky skylight. I was tempted to tell Odile that story, but the temptation lasted half a second. I scrolled through the list of contacts on my cell phone and came upon Yorgos Katos. I thought, there you go, my boy, you can sally forth and lose your shirt at poker. I texted Yorgos: “Need an easy mark at the table tomorrow night?” Odile asked, who are you writing to? —Yorgos Katos. Haven’t I ever spoken to you about Yorgos? —Never. —He’s a friend who makes his living gambling. One day, years ago, he was playing with Omar Sharif in a bridge tournament. He could feel a crowd of girls gathered at his back. He told himself, they know I play much better than he does. It never occurred to him for a second that they wanted to see Omar Sharif’s face. Odile said she was in love with the desert
prince in
Lawrence of Arabia
. As far as she was concerned, Omar Sharif wore a keffiyeh and rode a black charger, he didn’t sit huddled at a bridge table. I realized she was absolutely right. I felt lighthearted again. Everything returned to normal.

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.