Viviane (9 page)

So, says Tony, you came to wait for me in the Gare de l'Est just to do me a little favor.

We're lying on his parents' bed having a cigarette. Men's and women's clothes are strewn all around us. Ours are still lying on the kitchen floor.

I have a thing for tabloid news, I say without compromising myself.

Maybe, replies Tony with a trace of a smile, but you must not be getting nearly enough love. And since I wait for the follow-up he says at your age, I hope I won't still be consulting doctors, then he comes closer and I instinctively recoil.

What, he says with his naked savage smile, don't want to play anymore?

I'm out of bed in one bound but he follows me out of the bedroom, grabs my wrist and I realize I'm losing the match. I try to think but everything gets mixed up in my head and I can't figure out what attitude to adopt so I automatically defend myself, slapping him with my free hand. Tony lowers his head and rams into my stomach. I collapse against the wall, he comes on again, I
straighten up and rain slaps on him that he deflects with his fists. When he grabs me by the forearms I drive my knee between his thighs then run toward the kitchen to get my things, but he catches me by the hair, tearing out a whole handful. I fall to the floor, dragging him down after me; we scratch each other with our nails, punch each other's bellies, and I close my eyes tightly, thrusting deep into his scrawny flesh while he grabs fistfuls of my skin, twisting and biting it. Crawling over the tiles, I steel myself against his blows as I concentrate on recovering a minimum of my clothing and getting out.

This takes perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. I give up everything I can. I let him take possession of this body that I inhabit so briefly and intermittently, and at the same time I collect my things behind my back while still only inching my way along to allay his suspicions. Finally we're at the foot of the front door, I no longer know what he's doing to me but I raise a hand toward the doorknob as if from underwater. Calling on my strength, benumbed during all those minutes that have drowned in a parallel dimension of my memory, I shove him violently back to get out onto the landing where he doesn't dare follow me. I dress hastily, run down the stairs. At two on the dot I ring the babysitter's doorbell.

*
À vaincre sans péril, on triomphe sans gloire
. (To vanquish without peril brings a triumph without glory.) Pierre Corneille,
Le Cid
, act 2, scene 2.—Trans.

13

A lovely three-bedroom with moldings and parquet floors, the apartment measures 915 square feet according to the prescriptions of the Carrez law determining effective usable surface area. The rooms branch off a central corridor enjoying an open view of a small paved square, southeast exposure. And if one were to lean out the window, braving the cold on this snowy Sunday, November 28—because it has been snowing for a week—one would see the Église Saint-Médard, surrounded by its tidy church garden. The net effect is charmingly postwar or opulently provincial.

You are not viewing the scene from outside the windows, however. Armed with a dainty watering can, you are refreshing the succulent plants that seem to thrive on a lack of regular care. No one is talking to them, or dusting them weekly with a soft moist cloth, and
they keep growing. They must even be attached with adhesive tape to control their trajectories so that they stretch into the corners, toward the ceiling, along the interior stucco trim instead of overflowing their pots down to the carpet where they would blend into the design of vines and soon cover them up, vegetalizing the chevron-patterned parquet if you weren't taking them in hand.

Then the objects on the television and coffee table are cleansed of their dusty film. One of these bibelots slightly resembles that object on the doctor's bookshelves. This memory flits by you without pausing. You have no desire to meditate upon this relic, the history and provenance of which you know well. You also know the reason why it and not another knickknack sits there as a repository of special and arbitrary emotions, the legitimacy of which you do not challenge. You are sweeping.

Next you must open the bills, electricity, telephone, not the gas—cut off to economize and as a concession to reality. You check the columns of figures and put everything away in a trapezoidal writing desk. The clock says two thirty. Plenty of time left to vacuum the place before Julien arrives, which you do after closing the door to the
middle room where the child is resting. At ten to three, you make a last tour of inspection, then go to stand at the window. He'll be late, a habit of his, and in the end he is remarkably punctual in his delays. You begin your vigil at three on the dot, however, preparing—almost hoping—to be disappointed, because then events will be following the course you have anticipated.

How handsome he was, Julien, and that hasn't changed since he left you. At three twenty, he appears in your launch window, creating an eclipse of memory: you imagine him coming toward you for the first time, naked, on offer, just as he presented himself three years earlier, free of all ties.

Your memory comes back. The breaches opened by the inevitable return to plodding reality, the pike staves that become lances, and you who couldn't see it coming because you were expecting a child and the horizon was bounded by the circumference of your belly. The suspicions wiped away with the dust when business meetings began to last forever. The phone calls made behind the bathroom door, the hurt you kept inside on every occasion, for example the cocktail party at Biron Concrete in June when the newly recruited Héloïse cruised dangerously close to Julien and you had to struggle to keep
yourself from blasting her whenever she crossed your line of fire.

He's on the threshold of the apartment. He called up on the intercom and you buzzed him in. Standing perfectly still behind the door while he climbed up the three flights of stairs, you waited for him to ring and here he is in front of you. With locks of hair falling over his forehead. You could brush them back—after all, this man still belongs to you in the eyes of the law. You restrain your fingers just in time.

How are you he says while walking around you because you still haven't moved, and he goes into the living room to sit in the deepest armchair, the leather one. Hands crossed on your lap, you sit in a rather uncomfortable chair with a seat upholstered in a navy blue plaid. Julien gives a quick look around and exclaims these plants, good lord, it's monstrous, they're going to invade us all. You notice that he said us. But then he adds what are those marks on your arms, Viviane, they're awful. You roll your sleeves back down over your wrists now that you've finished cleaning and repeat meaningfully: invade us all, Julien? At first he doesn't understand. Then he does. Invade the hall, Viviane, I said
invade the hall. You shrug as you announce I'm going to make some tea, you'll have some? Thanks he replies, which means yes or no, another habit of his.

While the kettle heats up in the kitchen, as you prepare a tray with two cups and watch the snow falling in the interior courtyard, you listen to the creaking of the parquet that tells you where your husband is. He seems to be roaming the living room, then advancing cautiously into the hall, gradually approaching the middle room. At last you hear the tiny squeak when he ventures a look inside at the sleeping child who is also his—it takes some effort to remember this but you concede the point.

The kettle whistles. Carrying in the tray you can see, through the now wide-open door, Julien bending over the baby. A wispy babbling reaches your ears. You study the teapot where the leaves are steeping. Not a very interesting sight but you often contemplate motionless things, waiting for them to reveal their secrets.

She seems to recognize me, he says in self-congratulation, plopping back into the armchair. Then he tries to talk about material arrangements, administrative procedures, rights and duties. What's going on outside the windows suddenly absorbs all your attention. You consider the movements on the square, the
crowd at the tables under the heated outdoor umbrellas at the brasserie, the snow covering the central flower bed, pocked with footprints and the depredations of children.

Are you listening to me, Viviane?

Not really, Julien.

You have to be reasonable, Viviane.

I don't think so, Julien.

Then he invokes various responsibilities, and the welfare of the child. He knows you are a woman of good sense, you have always shown that despite differences of opinion, slight disagreements, and a few misunderstandings. For example, he goes on, it astonished me, that phone call from the police. I hadn't known you were seeing a doctor. That sort of thing, isn't it rather for people who are totally self-centered, don't you think?

I don't need you, you reply. What you take, you take away from me and I'm not going to make it any easier for you.

Julien murmurs God knows what in the direction of his lap but you would swear he said bitch. You exult in having managed so well to make him hate you now that love is gone. More tea? you ask, all smiles.

He shifts forward in the chair, sets his cup down on the tray, watches you pour the tea like a perfect hostess.

This isn't the right way, Viviane. The law is on my side. And anyway you can't manage all by yourself, you need help.

You stop serving the tea. The teapot tips toward the carpet and pours all the rest of its contents on the floor. When it's empty, you let go of it with a loud laugh. The carpet softens the fall but the china is fragile and shatters into pointed shards that fly into every corner of the room. On the other side of the wall, the child has begun to cry.

You have no idea, you say now, what I'm capable of.

Viviane, he tries, it's the stress, the emotional situation. You'll recover, you'll see things differently.

You reply fuck you and gather up everything on the tray, the cups, the saucers, the silver spoons, the sugar bowl, the milk jug, to throw it all at his face. He protects himself with his hands as he retreats, and you harry him all the way back to the front door. You expect him to beat it but he turns around one last time, looks you right in the eye and says it's not going to be this way, you'll see, I'm going to move into a new apartment with my new wife, we'll gain custody of the child, and you'll be left eating your heart out, then he clatters down the stairs while you stand paralyzed on the threshold.

14

Above the cradle, the lions and giraffes slow down and take off again, set in motion by a cord tied to the child's foot so that the slightest movement will bring the menagerie to life. For a good fifteen minutes now the baby has been trying to solve the mystery of causes and consequences. Left to yourself, you adjust the pleats in the curtains, wipe away some imaginary dust with the flat of your hand, pick up an object only to set it right down in the same place. Nightfall has finished blanketing the railway tracks, and the trains cutting across the window are stippled in white by the snow sweeping across the panes.

Your arms feel a little itchy. You roll up your sleeves, interrogating the long wounds running from the delta of veins at your wrists to vanish in the fold of the elbow and reappear at your neck. You try to recall how you
got them but in truth you are seeking a more ancient element that has fallen into a deep well, leaving you with only a pale reflection.

You still retain a rather precise memory of your marriage. Back then every moment was a delight, and the doctor's wincing expression seemed to say poor thing, you're twenty years behind. Yes, you had almost forty years under your belt and the feeling of walking on water. You were unbearable. The slightest occurrence was a pretext for rhapsodizing about how loved you were, and how loving. The doctor was chafing in agony but you didn't give a hoot. He was paid to listen to you and was going to hear every detail. He was biding his time.

The problems began, in your opinion, three months after the wedding. That's an approximation; Julien would doubtless have a different idea. Today he would say from the beginning, from the beginning things were going wrong, I don't know how I ever let myself get involved in this business. So let's say—after three months. It started with your cat. Which wasn't strictly speaking yours, it belonged to your mother. You inherited it. You hadn't made a mystery of that last point. Neither had
you made a big deal out of it. Raised in the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, you have a considerably reduced emotional range that you don't find at all inconvenient.