The Woman Destroyed (17 page)

Sunday 24 October

I am beginning to see through Noëllie’s little game: she is trying to reduce me to the role of the affectionate, resigned, house-loving wife who is left at home. I do like sitting by the fireside with Maurice; but it vexes me that it should always be she that he takes to concerts and to the theater. On Friday I cried out when he told me that he had been to a private viewing with her.

“But you loathe private viewings!” he replied.

“I love painting, though,” I said.

“If it had been good, I should have gone back with you.”

Easy enough to say. Noëllie lends him books—she plays at being the intellectual. All right, so I know less about modern writing and music than she does: but taken all in all I am not less cultured or less intelligent. Maurice wrote
to me once that he trusted in my judgment more than anyone else’s because it was both “enlightened and naïve.” I try to say exactly what I think, what I feel; so does he; and there is nothing that seems more precious to us than this sincerity. I must not let Noëllie dazzle Maurice with her showing off. I asked Isabelle to help me to get back into the swim. Unknown to Maurice, of course: otherwise he would laugh at me.

She still urges me to go on being patient; she assures me that Maurice has not behaved very badly and that I ought still to retain my respect and liking for him. Her saying this about him did me good: I have so questioned myself about him, so distrusted him and blamed him, that in the end I was not really seeing what kind of a person he was at all. It is true that during our first years, between his consulting room at Simca and the little apartment with the children bawling in it, his life would have been grim if we had not loved one another so. After all it was for my sake, she said, that he gave up the idea of a staff appointment; he might have been tempted to hold it against me. There I just don’t agree. The war had kept him back; he was beginning to find his studies exasperating—he wanted an adult life. We had both of us been responsible for my pregnancy, and under Pétain there was no question of risking an abortion. No: any resentment would have been quite unfair. Our marriage made him as happy as it made me. Still, it was very much to his credit to have been so cheerful and so affectionate in unpleasant and indeed even wretched circumstances. Until this business I never had the shadow of a complaint to make against him.

This talk with Isabelle gave me courage: I asked Maurice to let us spend next weekend together. I should like
him to rediscover a happiness and closeness that he has rather tended to forget—rediscover it with me; and I should like him to remember our past, too. I suggested going back to Nancy. He had the worried, harassed look of a fellow who knows there will be scenes elsewhere. (I’d very much like her to prove to him that sharing is not possible.) He said neither yes nor no—it depended on his patients.

Wednesday 27 October
.

He positively cannot leave Paris this weekend. In other words Noëllie is against it. I broke out in rebellion; for the first time I cried in front of him. He looked horrified. “Oh, don’t cry! I’ll try to find a locum.” In the end he promised he would manage somehow—he too wanted this weekend. That may be so or it may not. But what is quite certain is that my tears overwhelmed him.

I spent an hour in the visiting room with Marguerite. She is growing impatient. How long the days must be! The social worker is kind, but she cannot let me take her out without an authorization that does not come. By mere carelessness, no doubt, for I provide all possible guarantees as to character.

Thursday 28 October
.

So we go for Saturday and Sunday. “I managed!” he told me in a triumphant voice. He was obviously proud of having stood up to Noëllie—too proud. It means that there was a ferocious struggle, and it therefore follows that she means a great deal to him. He seemed on edge all through the evening. He drank two glasses of whiskey instead of
one and smoked cigarette after cigarette. He was too jolly and high-spirited by far discussing our route, and my reserve disappointed him. “You’re not pleased?”

“Of course I am.”

That was only half true. Has Noëllie taken up so much room in his life that he has to fight her so as to be able to take me away for a weekend? And have I myself reached the point of looking upon her as a rival? No. I won’t have any recriminations, schemes, false dealings, victories, defeats. I shall warn Maurice—“I shall not fight with Noëllie over you.”

Monday 1 November
.

It was so like the past: I almost believed the likeness was going to bring the past to life again. We had driven through fog and then beneath a beautiful cold sun. At Bar-le-Duc and at Saint-Mihiel we looked at Ligier Richier’s sculptures again, and we were as deeply moved as we had been in the old days: it was I who showed them to him first. Since then we have traveled quite a lot; we have seen a great deal; and yet the “Décharné” astonished us all over again. In Nancy, as we stood in front of the wrought-iron railings of the Place Stanislas, I felt something piercing in my heart—a happiness that hurt, so unaccustomed had it become. In those old country-town streets I squeezed his arm under mine; or sometimes he put his around my shoulders.

We talked about everything, and about nothing, and about our daughters a great deal. He cannot bring himself to understand how Colette could have married Jean-Pierre: with her chemistry and biology he had planned a brilliant career for her; and we should have given her complete romantic
and sexual freedom, as she knew. Why had she fallen for such a totally commonplace young fellow—fallen for him to the point of giving up her whole future to him?

“She is happy that way,” I said.

“I should have preferred her to be happy some other way.”

The going of Lucienne, his favorite, saddens him still more. Although he approves of her liking for independence, he would have preferred her to stay in Paris; he would have preferred her to read medicine and work with him.

“Then she would not have been independent.”

“Oh, yes, she would. She would have had her own life at the same time as she worked with me.”

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion of them that the daughters have to conform to. Mothers accept them as they are. Colette needed security above all, and Lucienne needed freedom: I understand them both. And I think each perfectly successful in her own way—Colette so sensitive and kind, Lucienne so brilliant, so full of energy.

We stopped at the same little hotel we had stayed at twenty years ago, and we had—perhaps on another floor—the same room. I went to bed first, and I watched him, walking to and fro in his blue pajamas, barefooted on the worn carpet. He looked neither cheerful nor sad. And I was blinded by the mental image—an image called up hundreds of times, set, but not worn out, still shining with newness—of Maurice walking barefoot upon this carpet in his black pajamas: he had pulled up the collar and its points framed his face; he talked nonsense, childishly worked up.
I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him. That evening, for the very reason that the surroundings were the same, the old image, coming into contact with a flesh and blood man smoking a cigarette, fell to dust and ashes. I had a shattering revelation:
time goes by
. I began to weep. He sat on the edge of the bed and took me tenderly in his arms. “Sweetheart, my sweetheart, don’t cry. What are you crying for?” He stroked my hair; he gave me little fluttering kisses on the side of my head.

“It’s nothing; it’s over,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I was fine; the room was bathed in a pleasant twilight, Maurice’s hands and mouth were soft; I put my lips to his; and I slipped my hand under his pajama jacket. And suddenly he was upright: he had thrust me away with a sudden jerk. I whispered, “Do I disgust you as much as all that?”

“You’re out of your mind, darling! But I’m dropping with tiredness. It’s the open air—walking about. I just have to sleep.”

I buried myself under the blankets. He lay down. He turned out the light. I had the feeling of being at the bottom of a grave, with the blood frozen in my veins, unable either to stir or to weep. We had not made love since Mougins: and even then, that could hardly be called making love.… About four o’clock I dropped off. When I woke up he was coming back into the bedroom, fully dressed: it was nine or thereabouts. I asked him where he had been.

“I went for a stroll.”

But it was raining outside, and he did not have his raincoat
with him; he was not wet. He had been to telephone Noëllie. She had insisted upon his telephoning: she didn’t even have the generosity to let me have him all to myself even for one wretched weekend. I said nothing. The day dragged along. Each realized that the other was making an effort to be pleasant and cheerful. We both agreed to go back to Paris for dinner and finish the evening at the cinema.

Why had he thrust me from him? Men still try to pick me up in the street; they squeeze my knee in the cinema. I have fattened a little—not much. My bosom went to pieces after Lucienne’s birth; but ten years ago it stirred Maurice. And two years ago Quillan was wild to go to bed with me. No. The reason why Maurice jerked away was that he is infatuated with Noëllie; he could not bear sleeping with another woman. If he has her under his skin to that degree, and if at the same time he lets himself be dazzled by her, things are far more serious than I had imagined.

Wednesday 3 November
.

I find Maurice’s kindness almost painful—he is sorry for what happened at Nancy. But he never kisses me on the lips anymore. I feel utterly wretched.

Friday 5 November
.

I behaved well, but what an effort it was! Fortunately Maurice had warned me. (Whatever he may say I still think he ought to have prevented her from coming.) I nearly stayed at home; he pressed me—we don’t go out so very often; I ought not to cheat myself of this cocktail party;
my absence would not be understood. Or did he think it would be only too well understood? I watched the Couturiers, the Talbots, all those friends who have been at our house so often, and I wondered just how much they knew of what was going on, and whether Noëllie sometimes asked them with Maurice. As for Talbot, Maurice is not intimate with him: but obviously since that evening he made the gaffe on the telephone he has guessed that something is happening behind my back. As for Couturier, there is nothing Maurice hides from him. I can hear his collusive voice: “I am supposed to be at the laboratory with you.” And what about the others—have they their suspicions? Ah, I was so proud of us as a pair—a model pair. We proved that love could last without growing weary. How often had I stood up for total faithfulness! Shattered, the ideal pair! All that is left is a husband who deceives his wife; and an abandoned wife who is lied to. And I owe this humiliation to Noëllie. It scarcely seems believable. Fair enough, she might be thought attractive; but really, quite objectively, what a phony! That little sideways smile, her head rather leaning—that way of lapping up the other person’s words and then suddenly her head thrown back and the pretty, silvery laugh. An able woman, and yet
so
feminine. With Maurice she was exactly as she had been last year at Diana’s—remote and intimate; and he wore the same look of silly admiration. And like last year that fool Luce Couturier looked at me with an air of embarrassment. (Could it be that Maurice was already attracted by Noëllie last year? Was it obvious? I had noticed his wonder-struck appearance, certainly, but without thinking it meant anything.) In an amused voice I said to her, “I think Noëllie Guérard delightful. Maurice has good taste.”

She opened her eyes very wide. “Oh, you know about it?”

“Of course!”

I asked her to come and have a drink at the apartment next week. I should like to know who is aware and who isn’t, and since when. Do they pity me? Laugh nastily? Maybe I am mean-minded, but I should like them all to drop down dead so that the awful picture they have of me just now might be done away with for ever and ever.

Saturday 6 November
.

This talk with Maurice has left me quite at a loss, for he was calm and friendly and he really seemed to believe what he said. Talking over yesterday’s cocktail party, I told him—and I was speaking in all good faith, too—what I disliked in Noëllie. In the first place I thought the lawyer’s profession odious—for money you defend one fellow against another, even if it is the second who is in the right. This is immoral. Maurice replied that Noëllie ran her practice in a very agreeable way; that she did not accept just any case; that she asked high fees from the rich, certainly, but that there were masses of people she helped for nothing. It is untrue that she is self-seeking. Her husband helped her buy her practice: why not, since they have remained on excellent terms? (But has she not remained on excellent terms just so that he should put up the money for her practice?) She wants to get to the top: there is nothing wrong about that, so long as one selects one’s means. At this I found it hard to remain calm.

“You say that: but you have never tried to get to the top.”

“When I made up my mind to specialize I did so because I was sick of stagnating.”

“In the first place, you weren’t stagnating at all.”

“Intellectually I was. I was not getting nearly as much out of myself as I was capable of.”

“All right. But at all events you did not specialize out of vulgar ambition: you wanted to make intellectual progress and help toward the solving of certain problems. It was not a matter of money and career.”

“Success for an attorney is also something other than money and reputation: the cases they deal with grow more and more worthwhile.”

I said that in any case the social side counted immensely for Noëllie.

“She works very hard—she needs relaxation,” he replied.

“But why these galas, these first nights, these fashionable nightclubs? I think it ridiculous.”