The Woman Destroyed (14 page)

So we can still; it is my anger that is keeping us apart—he will soon make it die away. He will ask me to be patient a little longer: after spells of furious overwork come the calm, easy days. Last year too he often worked in the evenings. Yes, but then I had Lucienne. And above all there was nothing tormenting me. He knows very well that at present I can neither read nor listen to a record, because I am afraid. I shall not leave a note in the hall, but I shall talk to him. After twenty—twenty-two—years of marriage one relies too much upon silence—it is dangerous. I believe these last years I was too wrapped up in the girls—Colette was so lovable and Lucienne so difficult. Perhaps I was not as free, as available, as Maurice might have wished. He ought to have pointed it out instead of flinging himself into work that now cuts him off from me. We must have it out together.

Midnight. I am in such a hurry to be at one with him again and to stifle the anger that is still rumbling inside me that I keep my eyes fixed on the clock. Its hands do not move: I grow irritated, all on edge. My mental image of Maurice falls to pieces: what sense is there in fighting against illness and suffering if you behave so stupidly toward your own wife? It’s indifference. It’s hardness of heart. No point in losing one’s temper. Stop it. If Colette’s analyses are not good, I shall need all my self-control tomorrow. I must try to go to sleep, then.

Sunday 26 September
.

So it’s happened. It’s happened to me.

Monday 27 September
.

Yes, here I am! It’s happened to me. It is
perfectly usual
. I must convince myself of that and strangle this fury that shattered me all yesterday. Maurice lied to me: yes, that too is perfectly usual. He might have gone on doing so instead of telling me. However late it is, I ought to feel grateful to him for his candor.

In the end I did go to sleep on Saturday. From time to time I stretched out to touch the other bed—its sheet was flat. (I like going to sleep before him when he is working in his consulting room. Through my dreams I hear water running, smell a faint whiff of eau de Cologne; I reach out, his body molds the sheet, and I sink deep down into happiness.) The front door slammed. I called, “Maurice!” It was three in the morning. They had not been working until three: they had been drinking and gossiping. I sat up in bed. “What kind of time is this to come home? Where have you been?”

He sat down in an armchair. He was holding a glass of whiskey in his hand.

“It’s three o’clock, I know.”

“Colette is ill, I’m racked with anxiety, and you come home at three. You haven’t all been working until three?”

“Is Colette worse?”

“She’s not better. You don’t care! Clearly, when you take the health of all mankind under your wing an ill daughter doesn’t amount to much.”

“Don’t be inimical.” He looked at me with a rather saddened gravity, and I melted as I always do melt when he envelops me in that dark, warm light. Gently I asked, “Tell me why you have come home so late.”

He made no reply.

“Were you drinking? Playing poker? Did you all go out? Did you forget the time?” He went on being silent, as it were emphatically silent, twirling his glass between his fingers. I flung out nonsensical words to make him lose his temper—to jerk an explanation out of him. “What’s the matter? Is there a woman in your life?”

Looking at me steadily he said, “Yes, Monique, there is a woman in my life.”

(Everything was blue above our heads and beneath our feet: on the other side of the strait loomed the coast of Africa. He squeezed me against him. “If you were to deceive me I should kill myself.” “If you were to deceive me I should have no need to kill myself. I should die of grief.” Fifteen years ago. Already? What do fifteen years count? Twice two is four. I love you, I love you alone. Truth cannot be destroyed: time has no effect upon it.)

“Who is it?”

“Noëllie Guérard.”

“Noëllie! Why?”

He shrugged. Of course. I knew the answer—pretty, dashing, bitchy, available. The sort of adventure that has no importance and that flatters a man. Did he need flattery?

He smiled at me. “I’m glad you questioned me. I hated lying to you.”

“Since when have you been lying to me?”

He scarcely hesitated at all. “I lied to you at Mougins. And since I came back.”

That made five weeks. Was he thinking about her at Mougins? “Did you go to bed with her when you stayed in Paris by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see her often?”

“Oh, no! You know very well I am working.…”

I asked him to be more exact. Two evenings and one afternoon since he came back: that seems often enough to me.

“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

He looked at me shyly, and with sorrow in his voice he said, “You used to say you would die of grief.…”

“One says that.”

Suddenly I wanted to cry: I should not die of it—that was the saddest thing about it. We gazed at Africa, a great way off through the blue haze, and the words we uttered were merely words. I lay back. The blow had stunned me. My head went empty with shock. I had to have a pause, a break in time, to understand what had happened to me. “Let’s go to sleep,” I said.

Anger woke me early. How innocent he looked lying there, with his hair tangled over a forehead that sleep had made young again. (In August, when I was away, she woke up at his side: I can’t bring myself to believe it! Why did I go to the mountains with Colette? It was not as though she very much wanted to—I was the one who insisted.) For five weeks he had been lying to me. “This evening we made an important step forward.” And he had just come from Noëllie’s. I felt like shaking him, insulting him, shrieking. I took myself in hand. I left a note on my
pillow:
See you this evening
. I was sure my absence would affect him more than any reproaches: there is no possible reply to absence. I walked through the streets, wherever chance led me, obsessed by the words:
He lied to me
. Mental images pierced me through—Maurice’s eyes set on Noëllie, his smile. I dismissed them. He doesn’t look at her as he looks at me. I did not want to suffer; I did not suffer; but I choked with bitterness. He lied to me! I had said, “I should die of grief”: yes, but he had made me say it. He had been more eager than I in drawing up our pact—no compromise, no deviating. We were driving along the little road to Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, and he pressed me: “Shall I always be enough for you?” He blazed up because there was not enough ardor in my reply (but what a reconciliation in our room at the old inn, with the scent of honeysuckle coming in at the window! Twenty years ago—it was yesterday). He has been enough for me: I have lived only for him. And for a mere whim he has betrayed our vows. I said to myself, I shall insist upon his breaking it off, right away.… I went to Colette’s apartment; all day long I looked after her, but inside I was boiling. I came home, quite worn out. “I’m going to insist upon his breaking it off.” But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him.

He took me in his arms, looking quite distraught. He had telephoned to Colette’s several times and no one had answered (I had jammed the bell, so that she would not be disturbed). He was out of his mind with anxiety.

“But you didn’t really imagine I was going to do myself in?”

“There was nothing I didn’t imagine.”

His anxiety went to my heart, and I listened to him without hostility. Of course he had been wrong to lie, but I had to understand: the first reluctance snowballs—you no longer dare confess because then you would also have to admit to having lied. It is an even more impossible hurdle for people who rate sincerity so very high, as we do. (I admit that: how furiously I should have lied to conceal a falsehood.) I have never made proper allowance for untruth. Lucienne’s and Colette’s first fibs utterly flabbergasted me. I found it very hard to accept that all children lie to their mothers. Not to me! I am not the kind of mother that is lied to: not a wife that is lied to. Idiotic vanity. All women think they are different; they all think there are some things that will never happen to them; and they are all wrong.

I have spent a great deal of today thinking. (What luck Lucienne is in America. I should have had to play a part with her. She would never have left me in peace.) And I went to have a talk with Isabelle. She helped me, as she always does. I was afraid she might not really understand me, since she and Charles put their money on freedom and not on faithfulness, as Maurice and I did. But she tells me that that has not prevented her from flying into rages with her husband nor from sometimes feeling that she was in danger—five years ago she thought he was going to leave her. She advised me to be patient. She has a great regard for Maurice. She thinks it natural that he should have wanted an adventure and excusable that he should have hidden it from me at first: but he will certainly soon grow tired of it. What gives this sort of affair its piquancy is its newness; time works against Noëllie;
the glamour she may have in Maurice’s eyes will fade. But if I want our love to emerge from this trial unhurt I must play neither the victim nor the shrew. “Be understanding, be cheerful. Above all be friendly,” she said to me. That was how she won Charles back in the end. Patience is not my outstanding virtue. But I certainly must do my best. And not only from a tactical point of view, but from a moral one too. I have had exactly the kind of life I wanted—now I must deserve that privilege. If I fail at the first little snag, everything I have thought about myself will have been mere vapor. I am uncompromising: I take after Papa, and Maurice respects me for it; but even so I must understand others and learn to adjust myself to them. Isabelle is quite right—it is perfectly natural for a man to have an affair after twenty-two years of marriage. It is I who would be unnatural—childish, really—if I were not to accept this.

When I left Isabelle I did not feel much like going to see Marguerite; but she had written me a touching little letter and I did not want to disappoint her. The sadness of that visiting room and of the oppressed faces of those girls. She showed me some drawings—not bad at all. She would like to take up interior decoration; or at least be a window dresser. Work at all events. I told her about the judge’s promises. I told her about the steps I had taken to be allowed to have her on Sundays. She trusts me; she really likes me; she will be patient: but not indefinitely.

This evening I am going out with Maurice. The advice of Isabelle and of Miss Lonelyheart’s column—to get your husband back, be cheerful and elegant and go out with him, just the two of you. I don’t have to get him back: I have never lost him. But I still have masses of questions to
ask him, and the talk will be easier if we dine out. Above all I don’t want it to look like a formal summons to confess.

There is one idiotic detail that nags my mind—why did he have a glass of whiskey in his hand? I called out, “Maurice!” Since I had been awakened at three in the morning he must have guessed I was going to question him. Usually he does not slam the front door so noisily.

Tuesday 28 September
.

I had too much to drink; but Maurice laughed and told me I was charming. It’s funny: he had to deceive me for us to be able to revive the nights of our youth. There is nothing worse than the daily round: shocks wake one up again. Saint-Germain-des-Prés has changed since ’46: a different sort of people go there. “And it’s another era,” said Maurice, rather sadly. But I had not set foot in a nightclub for nearly fifteen years, and I was delighted with everything. We danced. At one moment he squeezed me very tightly and said, “Nothing has changed between us.” And we talked of all sorts of things at random: but I was half-seas over, and I have rather forgotten what he told me. Generally speaking it was just what I had imagined: Noëllie is an outstanding attorney and she is eaten up with ambition; she is a woman on her own—divorced, with one daughter—with very free and easy ways, fashionable, very much in the swim. Exactly my opposite. Maurice had wanted to know whether he could be attractive to a woman of that kind. “If I wanted to.…” I had asked myself that question when I flirted with Quillan: the only time I ever flirted in my life, and I soon stopped it. Slumbering in Maurice, as in most men, there is a young man who is far from certain
of himself. Noëllie reassured him. And obviously it is also a question of direct desire—she is appetizing.

Wednesday 29 September
.

It was the first time Maurice spent the evening with Noëllie, me knowing about it. I went to see an old Bergman film with Isabelle, and we ate
fondue bourguignonne
at the Hochepot. I always like being with her. She has preserved the eagerness of our teen-age days, when every film, every book, every picture was so immensely important: now that my daughters have left me I shall go to shows and concerts with her more often. She too left off her studies when she married, but she has kept up a more vigorous intellectual life than I have. Though it is true that she has only had one son to bring up, not two daughters. Then again she is not hung about with lame ducks as I am; with an engineer for a husband she has few opportunities of coming across any. I told her that I had easily adopted the tactics of the smile because I was sure that in fact this affair had not much importance for Maurice. “Nothing has changed between us,” he told me the day before yesterday.

To tell the truth I was much more affected ten years ago: the reason why he had fresh ambitions, the reason why his work at Simca (unexciting, run-of-the-mill, poorly paid, but with plenty of free time—a job that he carried out with immense conscientiousness) was not enough for him, was that he was bored at home and that his feelings for me had weakened. (Later years showed me that this was not the case. Only I am sorry that I no longer take any part in what he does. He used to talk to me about his patients; he told me of deserving cases; I tried to help them. Now I am
shut out from his research, and the people in his outpatients’ department do not need me.) Isabelle helped me at that time, too. She convinced me that I ought to respect Maurice’s freedom. That meant giving up the old ideal of which my father was the embodiment and which remains still alive in me. It was harder than turning a blind eye on a passing piece of nonsense.