The Man Who Risked It All (2 page)

The future proved me right. My mother died several years later, just after my graduation from business school. I found myself alone, holding an MBA that I hadn’t really wanted, having spent my school years rubbing shoulders with young people whose tastes and aspirations I didn’t share. I was offered a job as deputy head of the suppliers’ accounts department of a large company. The salary was good, but the work soon turned out to be uninteresting. I wasn’t really disappointed, however, as I wasn’t expecting anything. My mother’s life had taught me at an early age that hopes were futile.

One more step …

After a few years of an empty, pointless life, I left for France, almost on a whim. Was it an unconscious desire to reconnect with my origins, or was I trying to undo the legacy of my mother’s miserable life by going in the opposite direction? I don’t know. At any rate, I found myself in Paris and decided to stay. The city is beautiful but that wasn’t the reason. There was something else: an intuition or a premonition that my destiny lay there.

At the time, I didn’t know that I would want to die there so soon.

I looked for a job, and got an interview at Dunker Consulting, a recruitment agency that searched for accounts managers for big companies. The interviewer told me I was unemployable in France, as French accounts were kept according to very different regulations than American ones. “You might as well start qualifying again from scratch,” he had said, laughing at a joke only he could see. On the other hand, he said that my overall knowledge of accounting, along with my American background, made me a desirable candidate to become a recruitment consultant in their firm. Their main clients were large American companies that would appreciate having their recruitment handled by an American. “Impossible,” I told him. “Recruitment is not my thing. I know absolutely nothing about it.” The interviewer gave me a knowing smile, like the experienced older man faced with the embarrassed young woman who admits at the last minute that she is still a virgin. “We’ll take care of that,” he said.

So I was hired and spent the first two weeks in intensive training, along with other young recruits who were going to contribute to the firm’s sustained development. Our average age was 30, which seemed to me extremely young to be practicing this profession. Evaluating the qualities and aptitudes of a candidate amounted to judging a human being, and I was nervous at having to assume such a responsibility. Apparently my fellow trainees didn’t share my fear; they obviously enjoyed slipping into the respected role of the recruiter. The shared feeling in the group was of belonging to a certain elite. Pride left no room for doubt.

For two weeks, we were taught the tricks of the trade: a simple but sensible method for conducting recruitment interviews, as well as a string of gimmicky techniques that I think of today as so much nonsense. I learned that after welcoming a candidate, you were to stay silent for a few moments. If the applicant started speaking on his own, you were probably dealing with a leader. If he patiently waited to be asked a question, his reserve fit the profile of a follower. We were to invite the recruit to introduce himself in a very open way—“Tell me about yourself”—without asking specific questions from the outset. If the candidate launched off on his own, it showed he was independent. If he asked us where we wanted him to begin—should he start with his education, for example, or go back in time from his most recent employment—then he lacked initiative.

We practiced applying the techniques in role-playing exercises conducted in pairs. One of us played the role of the recruiter while the other put himself in the place of the candidate, inventing a background and a career so that we could practice holding interviews and asking questions to expose the “truth” about the candidate. What was most surprising to me was the competitive atmosphere that prevailed during these exercises. Everyone tried to trap their partner, who was seen alternately as a liar to be unmasked or an enemy to be deceived. The funniest thing was that the trainer, a salaried consultant with Dunker Consulting, entered into the competition as well, taking particular pleasure in highlighting omissions or blunders. “You’re being had!” was his favorite phrase, spoken in a mocking voice, as he supervised the role plays, gliding among the pairs as we practiced. The insinuation was that he would have known how to handle the situation.

At the end of two weeks, we were pronounced fit for service.

I found myself spending my days behind a desk listening to timid men telling me about their careers, their faces red with fright as they tried to make me believe that their three main shortcomings were perfectionism, too much accuracy, and a tendency to work too hard. They were miles away from suspecting that I was even more timid than they were and even more ill at ease. I was just a bit luckier than them because my role gave me an advantage that was far from insignificant: I got others to speak rather than speaking myself. But each time I undertook a search, I dreaded the moment when I would be forced to tell nine candidates out of ten that their applications didn’t fit the required profile. I felt like I was pronouncing a prison sentence. My unease increased theirs, which reinforced mine, in a hellish vicious circle. I was suffocating in the role, and the atmosphere within the company did nothing to lighten my mood. The human values on display were only a façade. The daily reality was tough, cold, competitive.

It was Audrey who allowed me to survive in this situation. I met her one Sunday afternoon at Mariage Frères on the Rue des Grands Augustins. I only had to set foot in this place to feel soothed. As soon as I opened the door, the first step on the old oak flooring plunged me into the refined atmosphere of a tea merchant’s shop in the days of the French colonial empire. I was bewitched by the mixed fragrances of the hundreds of teas stored in immense antique jars; their scents transported me in a flash to the Far East of the 19th century.

It was while I was ordering a quarter of a pound of Sakura from the young man behind the counter that a voice whispered in my ear that the Sakura Impérial was finer. I turned around, surprised that a stranger was talking to me in this city where everyone seemed to be encased in their own bubble, haughtily ignoring everyone else. Her exact words were: “You don’t believe me? Come and taste for yourself.” Taking me by the hand, she led me across the room, weaving through the customers and the displays of teapots from faraway places to the little staircase that climbed to the tasting room. Here the ambiance was intimate, elegant. Waiters in colored raw silk suits glided silently between the tables with a ceremonious attitude. In my casual clothes, I was an anachronism. We sat in a corner at a little table with a white cloth, set with silver cutlery and china cups bearing the Mariage Frères crest. Audrey ordered two teas, hot scones, and a coup de soleil, or strawberries-and-cream tart—the specialty she said I absolutely had to try. (I immediately enjoyed our conversation. She was a fine arts student and lived in a garret in the Latin Quarter. “You’ll see, it’s really nice,” she told me, thereby indicating that our meeting would not stop at the door to Mariage Frères.)

Her room was indeed charming—minute, with a sloping ceiling made of old beams and a skylight that looked out on a succession of gray roofs angled in every direction. All it needed was a crescent moon to be something straight out Henry James’s novel,
The Aristocrats
. She undressed with a natural grace, and I immediately loved her body, which had a delicacy I was not used to. Her shoulders and arms were exquisitely slender, nothing like those of American girls brought up on cornflakes and intensive sports. Her white, white skin contrasted with her dark hair, and her breasts—my God, her breasts were sublime, simply sublime. Fifty times during the night I thanked her for not wearing perfume, as I delighted in the voluptuous scent of her skin at every point of her body, intoxicating like a drug. That night will remain engraved in my memory beyond my death.

We woke up the next morning entwined. I ran to fetch croissants and breathlessly climbed back up the six stories to her room. I threw myself into her arms, and we made love again. For the first time in my life I was experiencing happiness. It was a new, strange sensation. I was far from suspecting that this happiness foreshadowed the fall from which I would not get up.

For four months my life was centered on Audrey. She occupied my thoughts during the day and my dreams at night. Her schedule at art school was full of openings that left her available. During the week, we would often meet during the day. I would use a client meeting as an excuse and spend an hour or two with her in a hotel room that we rented nearby. I felt a bit guilty. Just a bit. Happiness makes you selfish.

One day, I was in my office when Vanessa, the departmental secretary, called to say that my candidate had arrived. I was expecting no one but as my organizational skills left room for improvement, just to be safe I asked her to send the candidate up. I would rather see someone for nothing than give Vanessa proof of my lack of organization; my boss would have known in less than half an hour. I waited at the door to my office and nearly fainted when, at the end of the corridor, I saw Vanessa escorting Audrey, who was dressed as a caricature of an accountant, in a skimpy suit and metal-rimmed glasses that I’d never seen on her before, with her hair in a ponytail. A real cliché, borderline grotesque. As I thanked Vanessa, my voice stuck in my throat. I closed my door behind Audrey. She took her glasses off with a suggestive look, her lips in a slight pout. I immediately knew what she intended. I swallowed hard and felt a wave of fright pass through my body. I knew her enough to know that nothing would stop her.

That day the conference table became a piece of furniture that I would never see in the same way again. I was scared stiff that someone would find us. She was crazy, but I loved it.

When Audrey left me four months later, my life stopped at once. Without the slightest suspicion beforehand, one evening I took a little envelope out of the mailbox. Inside was one word, just one, in her very recognizable handwriting:
Good-bye.
I stood rooted to the spot in the hall of my apartment building, in front of the mailbox. My blood froze in my veins. My head was throbbing. I was nearly sick. I collapsed into the old wooden elevator, which discharged me at my floor, where I entered my apartment in a state of shock. Everything was swaying around me. I fell onto the sofa and sobbed. After a long while, I sat up and told myself it was impossible, quite simply impossible. It must be a practical joke or something. I grabbed my phone and tried to call her. I listened to her voice mail a hundred times and, each time, her voice seemed a little more neutral, more distant, colder. I gave up when her machine reached saturation point and stopped taking messages.

Slowly, a distant but familiar feeling emerged from deep inside me, gradually rising to the surface.
It was natural,
the feeling said,
quite natural that I should be left.
That was the way it was. You don’t fight your destiny, Alan.

It was at that moment that I realized my death was self-evident. It wasn’t an impulse. I wouldn’t have jumped under a train. No, it was just something obvious that imposed itself on me. I was going to pass to the other side, and everything would be fine. It was up to me to choose the place, the time; there was no hurry. It wasn’t a morbid, masochistic desire. Not at all. And it wasn’t just a desire to put an end to my suffering, however great that was. No, the beyond was drawing me, gently, irresistibly, and I had the strange feeling that my place was there, that my soul would flower there. My life on earth had no reason to be. I had had the conceit to cling to it, to pretend that all was well, and life had sent me Audrey to make me experience an unbearable pain and in this way to face my destiny at last.

The place was suggested to me by my memory, and it’s no doubt not pure chance that it had been kept there, in one of my memory’s mysterious compartments. Some time before I had read, in a magazine left behind by Audrey, a controversial article by someone named Dubrovski. In it, the author laid out his theory on the right to suicide, and his idea that, if you were going to commit suicide, you might as well do it properly. He described a suitable place for what he poetically called “the flight of one’s life”—the Eiffel Tower. It is totally secure, he explained, except at one point that it’s useful to know. You have to go up to the Jules Verne, the luxury restaurant on the second floor, go into the ladies’ room, then open the little door marked
Private
to the left of the washbasin. It leads to a tiny room that serves as a broom cupboard. The window in there is not barred and opens directly onto the girders. I remembered these details as though I had read them that very morning. Dying at the Eiffel Tower had something grand about it. Revenge for a mediocre life.

One more step …

I had to walk far enough along the beam to reach a suitable point where there was no metal structure below me to impede my fall.

I was leaving nothing behind me, not a friend, not a relative, not a pleasure, nothing that could make me regret my action. I was ready, in my head and in my body.

One last step …

That’s it. The
right place
. I stood still. Consciousness was already beginning to leave me. I took a deep breath and slowly pivoted on my heels to the right, toward the abyss that I didn’t look into but whose presence, whose beauty, I could feel.

I was on a level with the flywheel of the Jules Verne’s private elevator. Three yards of nothingness separated us. From where I was, I could see only the grooved edge holding the cable, as it circled the wheel, then plunged into the void. The void. The windows of the restaurant were on the other side of the tower. Nobody could see me. No noise from the restaurant reached me. I heard nothing but a gentle humming, the sound of the night. Those shimmering lights in the distance were drawing me, hypnotizing me. The warm, intoxicating air was flooding me with supernatural well-being. Most of my thoughts had left me. I no longer inhabited my body. I was no longer me. I was merging with space, life, death. I no longer existed as a separate being.
I was life
. I …