The Age of Reinvention (15 page)

“So you hired him because he's useful to the firm . . .”

“What the hell are you getting at? Yes, of course, I hire all my employees because they bring added value to the firm. All employers do that, don't they?”

Losing his temper, Pierre knocks over his cup, spilling coffee on the papers arranged on his desk.
Shit!
Samir gets up and helps him clean the fast-spreading brown stains from his desk. “It's fine, I can do it . . . I think you'd better go to your meeting.” Hearing these words, Samir grabs his coat and stands immobile for a few seconds, watching Pierre, not knowing what he should do. Then, finally, he mutters that he's sorry—
really
sorry—and walks away.

1
. Group Union Défense is the name of a succession of violent French far-right student political groups, founded in 1968 at Panthéon-Assas University (otherwise known as Paris II) by Gérard Longuet.

2
. The Union Nationale des Étudiants de France—Indépendante et Démocratique was a far-left French student union that existed between 1980 and 2001.

That evening, Samir arranged to meet Nina in a large Parisian restaurant situated under the alcove of an elegant townhouse with a view over a verdant garden. It's beautiful and chic, he thinks, the kind of thing that might impress her: that bourgeois minimalism, that well-ordered sobriety, that quietude provided by the feeling of being among your own kind—something he discovered quite late, mainly through his wife, who had never known any other world. Having asked the hotel concierge to reserve a small table set aside from the others, he arrived early. Even so, he has trouble concealing his excitement when he sees Nina enter the restaurant, shoulders slightly hunched in a defensive posture, wearing a little low-cut red dress that gives a glimpse of her opulent breasts. When she walks into the room, she is all that he—and every other man in the room—sees. He stands up to kiss her cheek, letting his lips linger on that soft square inch of skin close to the corner of her mouth, while his hands touch her arm, feeling her shape and warmth through the fabric. She turns him on—everything about her turns him on, even her perfume, a mix of mandarin, incense, and cedarwood—and he finds it hard to move away from her. It's physical: even if he takes a step back, lets go of her arm, looks away from her face, it is obvious that he wants her, that his body and mind are in turmoil; it is obvious that he wants to touch her, to keep her next to him, to take her. They sit side by side, their bodies close, looking out across the room, waiters scurrying past in both directions. Nina has never been taken anywhere so elegant before, she has never tasted such fine food. She is excited, nervous; he sees this and is pleased. He pretends to be surprised by her reaction. This is all perfectly normal for him. It is normal to be served, pampered, flattered. He enters the room and they give him the best table. Before he has even ordered anything, the waitress brings him a glass of his favorite champagne. He asks a question about the menu and the chef himself comes out to greet him. His aura of power is natural now. And he has acquired something else, through imitation, through contact with his wealthy wife whose every wish is granted: the false simplicity of people who have everything. We are together, we are having a conversation; I am a normal man, an accessible man; this surprises you, delights you; but look more closely, look at how I hold myself, listen to the way I articulate my words . . . can't you perceive the distance between us now? The extraordinary self-importance conferred by a privileged social position. Samir is there, at the center of everything, in complete control. And suddenly Nina feels pathetic in her little red dress that she borrowed and showed to Samuel with genuine excitement. She has the impression that her perfume—a copy of a Prada eau de toilette that she bought at the flea market in Saint-Ouen, not in a perfumery, because she couldn't afford to—is a little
too
intoxicating. Under the table, she hides the high heels she bought in a secondhand store, for fear that he will see them. Who are you kidding with your cheap fancy-dress outfit? Nobody. And certainly not a man like him, capable of spotting a designer brand at fifty feet. Leather? Nope, plastic. Satin? Nope, polyester—you sweat inside it, it's allergenic, it makes you itch like crazy. Cashmere? Nope, just acrylic—a fabric that pills, that soaks up body odors. It's obvious, embarrassing, your lack of money, of taste, and it makes him even happier: this social gap shifts the balance of power in his favor—it's erotic. Here in this restaurant, he is the dominant force—you sense that he has power, has money—but in a room, in bed, she will be the one with power over him, an authority that society denies her, a control beyond her capabilities in this place where she is afforded no influence, where she can only claim to belong at all because of her proximity to Samir. She feels unwell, ill at ease, and a confession bubbles to her lips: “Samir, I lied to you. I'm not what you think I am. I don't really work in fashion and Samuel isn't a company director . . . I'd prefer you to find out now, rather than later.” “I already knew.” He says it arrogantly, but does not reveal how he knew. He can't say to her: It's because of the way you both look, your clothes, the way you enter a hotel, the way you avoid the waiters' eyes, and above all—the most telling detail—because of your shoes: you, Nina, perched on worn-out high heels that make you wobble as you walk, heels with square tips when the fashion is for pointed tips; and him in his cheap leather, too-big shoes, with soles that squeak when he walks—
And for fuck's sake
, he thinks,
if you're going to buy a pair of shoes in a bargain store, the first thing you do is remove the damn price sticker!
He doesn't dare ask her what they really do/are, but she tells him anyway: “Samuel is a social worker in Clichy-sous-Bois. As for me, well, I do work in fashion—I really am a model—but only for department store catalogues. When the marketing team at Carrefour are preparing their summer or winter promotions, they call me. I always play the perfect mother in those pages devoted to barbecues or Beaujolais Nouveau or pork products or school supplies! And I don't even have kids!” She says this ironically, self-deprecatingly, and he is touched by it. “I really need to get hold of that catalogue. I can imagine how sexy you must look holding a pig's head in your hand.” And she laughs.

When dinner is over, he asks her to come for one last drink at his hotel bar. He has hopes of getting her up to his room. He is desperate for her now. They sit opposite each other this time and drink tequila. He looks at her and finally says what he feels.
God, you turn me on, Nina. You're incredible
. But she immediately changes the subject, asks him to tell her about his wife. All right, he gets the idea. He shuts up. He doesn't feel like bringing Ruth into it, or his kids: he's alone and free in Paris, and he wants Nina:
Come upstairs with me
. This is not a suggestion or a request, it's an order. He wants her to obey—
Come
—to let herself be led,
Come!
but she rears up at this, digs her heels in: No means no, don't ask me again or I'll leave and you'll never see me again.
Tell me you don't want me, then. Tell me that and I'll stop
. They look at each other for a long moment with an intensity that rekindles old memories.
Tell me, and I'll stop.

Can't you understand? I'm scared
.

It is nearly eleven p.m. when she comes home, slightly tipsy, hair mussed. Samuel is awake: he is waiting for her, his face closed like a fist, standing in front of the bookcase. He looks like he's about to fall over. A cigarette trembles in his hand. The ashtray is heaped with butts and a smell of nicotine pervades the room. Nina does not say a word. She walks over to the window and opens it. A cold wind stirs the wreaths of smoke, clears the air. “So, did he fuck you?” Samuel asks while Nina closes the window. He is brutal with her, excessive in his black/white vision of the world. For Samuel, everything has to be true/false, good/evil, right/wrong; he has never been able to hold a more sophisticated view of things. His lack of ambiguity makes her despair; it's ridiculous, the idea that she should obey this desire for moral probity.
You're going to leave me aren't you tell me you're going to leave me and go back to him it's true isn't it admit it
. Look at him: cigarette trembling between his lips, bottle of beer in his hand, his body braced for the crushing blow.

I'm a loser.

I'm a failure.

I never even gave you a child.

The fatal trilogy.

So it happened . . . you saw him again, you were impressed, you were turned on, all the old feelings came back, I get it. You know what? I arranged this because I wanted to test you, and you failed! You're just like him—an opportunist! A social climber! The two of you are pure products of a society that's rotten to the core. Succeed, succeed—that monstrous social ideal, that grotesque ambition. You gave in to it just like all the others! Not me . . . I've never been like you. I was raised by people for whom success meant nothing; people who placed faith, study, and neighborly love above all; people who were never obsessed by material objects. So what did you want me to do? Go over to the other side, with nothing but my own virtues, with the education that my parents gave me? But if you want to go over to the other side, you have to prove you are capable. It's a rite of initiation. You have to bite back if you're bitten, betray others if you're betrayed, be brutal if you've been brutalized—it's social, it's political—don't look so surprised—it's a struggle, a combat. To go over to the other side, you need luck, power, money, or all three. You can't wait for it to be given to you—you have to take it by force, with your head, your hands, your ass—am I shocking you? Yes, if you really want to succeed, you have to be ready to offer your ass up on a plate . . . The place you want, you have to take it from someone else. And who cares if they feel robbed, betrayed, hurt? Who cares, because you can be sure they'll do the same thing to someone else in turn, and that someone else—you can be certain of this—will take someone else's place through their greed for success, for power, for money. I thought I could, that I might be able to win without cheating, without lying. But that's as unrealistic, as absurd as thinking you can butcher a man without getting your hands bloody. It's as Utopian as thinking you can wage war without killing civilians. If you want to wage war, you have to kill . . . and you have to like it. If you want a foreign land, you have to conquer it, kill whoever it belongs to, have no qualms about wiping them out, one by one, bang bang bang! You have to eliminate them, see? But I'm one of those soldiers who never had the courage to desert nor the strength to shoot. I was never anything more than a lookout, sitting safely in the rear base, expressing my indignation at the horrors of war, whining from the comfort of my armchair. And you want me to feel proud of myself? Yeah, right—all I feel is shame. Shame! Resentment! Jealousy! Bitterness! Yes, I've become a jealous man, a bad man, a failure. I am the shit of society! A parasite! I'm telling you—I'm nothing!

He is lying. He does feel proud of himself. Being a loser, being perceived in that way by society, is a victory over the system, over compromised principles, over corruption. It is the proof that he has not given in to ambition and money, the assurance that he has remained a good man, a true man, faithful to the people and to social concerns—finding decent housing, a job, feeding the kids, paying your debts—not one of those champagne socialists who write newspaper columns defending the rights of illegal immigrants but send their children to the kind of exclusive private schools where you have to be nominated by someone more powerful than yourself, select establishments where, thank God, their progeny will not have to fraternize with
sons of immigrants
or
sons of concierges
who
bring down the level
and damage the schooling of their precocious, spoiled brats. He wants to be a magnificent loser, an obscure writer, a social failure—a pure concentrate of violence, he thinks. Contrary to what he tells Nina, he is hugely proud (arrogant, even—a feeling of superiority) of having
resisted
—this is the word he uses, this man who never even participated in a social struggle—whereas (so he says) Tahar has become the symbol of the worst of society's excesses: a smooth, aseptic lawyer; while he wants to be a writer of harsh truths, even if it means never being published, never being read.

He has never obeyed social codes. Showing his disgust, he was always
against
. He imagined himself a free man, but in truth there was never anyone so attached to company and comfort; he imagined himself a rebel, spitting on the class system and on capitalism, whereas he was actually spitting on himself. He disqualified himself, gave himself a red card. All of his pain is self-inflicted. In which case, he has no right to cry about it, but all the same he can feel the tears now, welling up inside like a river overflowing its banks, pearling on his lower eyelids, pouring down his cheeks.
Look at you, blubbering like a little kid! You're pathetic. Let's not forget that this was all your idea—you wanted me to call him!
Nina speaks but does not move, offers no consolation, and he sinks, slowly, like a body dragged down to the depths of a murky river by the lead weights tied to his ankles.

Samir's return has contaminated their life. They are sick now, and beginning to regret (without daring to admit it) ever having gotten in touch with him, ever having seen him again. He is so successful, so rich, and they have nothing.

“I don't want to see him anymore. Let's stop this now.”

“Out of the question.”