The 6:41 to Paris (4 page)

What am I doing?

Now I can see my hand on his dick, very clearly, twenty-seven years ago. And yet there he is right next to me and I’m pretending not to recognize him. It’s unbelievable, sometimes, the sudden turns life can take. It feels good to have that perspective. I’d rather not face him, confront what he has become.
I’d rather stay where I am with the colorful impression of his young body. With my head against the dirty windowpane of the train car. Do not disturb, I’m asleep. It feels gentle. So incredibly gentle.

London. It’s only normal that I would think about London. The first time I went there was with Cécile Duffaut. I had my discount from the railway, and she’d worked for them, too, the summer before we met, and she’d hardly spent a thing. That was her all over. Thrifty. Everything in moderation. Values you aren’t supposed to appreciate when you’re only twenty—they only gradually turn into values.
I still admire people who can blow their entire salary at a casino in one night, or who give up everything to start all over on the other side of the planet. Except that now I know I’ve never been one of those people.

I think I was the one who first mentioned London. I was studying English, but I’d never set foot in England, not even the year I was thirteen for the three-day school trip: two
days before we were due to leave I twisted my ankle during basketball practice, and I was left behind, frustrated as hell.

She said yes right away. A discreet little yes, her eyes glued to her shoes, but a definite yes all the same. I remember I was surprised. I thought she’d be one of those girls who’d rather go visiting villages in the Corrèze or the wilds of Provence so they’d be alone with
their sweetheart. She added that travel was vitally important to her. So she could broaden her horizons. And take a breather. I listened to her and thought how she was full of surprises.

We were growing up in an era when flying was still the exception, and to wake up in New York or Tokyo would have seemed beyond our reach. Computers were at the experimental stage, and no one could imagine that
one day we would no longer need phone booths. On the other hand, the future seemed wide open, and the planet, eternal.

She told me she would like to go to London, too, so we started planning. It was strange to be planning a trip for a whole week with a girl I intended to dump. But it wouldn’t be the first time I’d behaved inconsistently. And the thing that was disturbing about her was that every
time I decided I’d tell her enough was enough, she would sidestep me in a way that revealed some hidden part of her personality. She was unpredictable. And that wasn’t a quality I had often encountered. She might be ordinary, but she had nerve. It was refreshing.

It’s horrible to rationalize like this. I’ve never claimed to be an angel. But I do hope I’ve improved over time.

There’s less room
for surprise when you’re forty-seven. You’re caught up in a daily grind, a life beyond your control: relationships, divorce, children, work, social life, responsibilities. Only insomnia occasionally sets you free, by revealing the futility of everything you’ve undertaken. But I’m speaking for myself. I don’t know what sort of life she has. Other than that she visits her parents from time to time
and that to go home she takes the 6:41 train.

London lingers.

The London from back then. The early ’80s. Nothing
very inspiring. The punk era was over, Thatcherism was changing mentalities but hadn’t yet changed the life in the streets, the city was neither here nor there. It was neither the swinging London of the ’60s nor the business and finance showcase it would later become. It was looking
for an identity. Maybe that’s why I felt so good there. I used to love London. I saw a documentary last year about the new neighborhoods along the Thames: I didn’t recognize a thing.

Cécile Duffaut’s knee.

There it is again, suddenly.

On a double-decker bus.

We are on the top deck. You can still smoke, on the top deck. The sun, relentlessly beating down on the city. We’re somewhere north of
Regent’s Park, headed toward Primrose Hill. We’re on our way back from Camden. She’s leaning her forehead on the window. She’s totally absorbed by the streets, the buildings, the taxis, the bustle.

All I can see is her knee.

Her knee, peeking out from under a red skirt. It’s not a woman’s knee. It’s a little girl’s knee, and it’s easy to picture it with scrapes and Mercurochrome and Band-Aids.
The kind of knee that has a special acquaintance with gravel, blacktop, and the curb of the sidewalk. A graceless knee. I’m getting annoyed with this knee. It is a distillation of everything I hate about her: her ordinariness, her lack of polish or refinement. The fact that I feel guilty makes me all the more irritated. I know I’ve been behaving badly over the last few days.
This little girl with
scraped knees: I’m ruining her life. Her memories. In advance. I’m mad at myself. And the madder I get, the more sure of myself I get. We have to break up. We should have done it a long time ago. I don’t know what came over me. In my memory, her knee is ugly. Lumpy. Knobbly. I wonder what it’s really like.

And now?

I should ask her to show me her knees.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I have
to stop thinking about all this stuff. And anyway, she’s asleep, in the same position as on the bus in London. She looks tired. I’ll bet her weekends with her parents are no picnic. I hardly ever see my mother and her bicycle salesman. They’re always gallivanting about. They belong to that generation I’ve begun to despise. The baby boomers who never really knew any hardship. Scarcely any memories
of the war—they were born in the middle of it or just afterward, and they grew up with their faith in the evolution of capitalism, an improved standard of living, comfort and health care, and full employment. Together they were marching in step toward a radiant future made of washing machines and refrigerators. A little bit too old for the unrest in 1968, but they welcomed the cultural and sexual
revolutions with open arms. They had their apartment, then their little house, retirement at sixty, a long life expectancy, they have their savings accounts, and now their kids are out of the house and they fly all over the planet and so what if they are destroying the environment. They know everything will go on getting worse after they’re gone—
and they don’t give a damn.

My mother and Cycleman
spend their weekends in Barcelona or Venice. They sign up for cruises and play Scrabble while they listen to some band playing their favorite hits from the 1960s. They take bus tours to Eastern Europe and exclaim, Oh, how hard it must have been for the East Germans, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Lithuanians, oh my God, how awful, can you imagine—and then they go back to their bargain luxury hotel
for dinner and complain because the staff don’t speak French.

I hardly ever see them. The last I heard, Cycleman bought a motorcycle—now that’s a revolution. They’re planning their first trip with their new vehicle, and they can’t make up their minds: Collioure or the Aquitaine?

I can see Mathieu’s back, as if it were yesterday. We’re eighteen years old, almost nineteen. The two of us on his
motorcycle. His parents just bought it for him, secondhand. I’m insanely jealous … as far as twowheeled vehicles go, I’ve never progressed any further than the metallic blue Peugeot 103 SP moped that got stolen after only two months, and which my parents refuse to replace. “You’ll just have to use your dad’s old Solex moped instead.” Mathieu is driving fast. He’ll be going to Germany for his military
service soon. He dropped out of school. He doesn’t know what to do in life. He’s been thinking of acting, but everyone keeps telling him it’s not really a profession. And recently an amateur theater director told him he didn’t have the looks for the job. He’s too pudgy. Too heavy. He’s at a
complete loss. It’s fall. We’re getting lost down country roads, Mathieu and me. It’s an interlude. Nothing
seems to matter anymore. I guess that when he comes back from Germany we’ll already be headed in different directions. This is probably the last time we’ll be this close. I’m convinced that something will happen—a puddle of oil, a truck inching into our lane, a collision, a violent crash and then—blackout.

Nothing of the sort.

Of course not.

No one ever warned us that life would be long.

Those easy slogans that make your heart beat faster, like “carpe diem” or “die young”—all that stuff was just nonsense.

No one told us, either, that the hardest thing would not be breaking up, but decay. The disintegration of relationships, people, tastes, bodies, desire. Until you reach a sort of morass where you no longer know what it is you love. Or hate. And it’s not as unpleasant a condition
as you might think. It’s just lifelessness. With scattered spots of light. One of them is going to see Mathieu this morning, after so much time has elapsed.

Ah-hah, Cécile Duffaut is sitting up.

Had a bad night, huh?

I know what she must be going through. Life is full of bad nights, once you turn forty. Your children’s health, your own, their future, your own, the litany of work still to be
done on the house, the electricity which still needs childproofing, the toilets have been leaking
for three months, the vacation rental needs booking, how do you clean the spots made by permanent markers from the table in the living room, the car is making a strange noise when it’s in neutral, above all don’t forget to get gas tomorrow morning otherwise you’re sure to run out, I haven’t read a
novel in ages, even though it’s something I used to love, reading novels, I have to fill out the forms for my younger boy’s upcoming school trip, lists, lists, lists, they start filling your nights—you get up, you go down the stairs, it’s three o’clock in the morning, you bump into the furniture, you shiver, you think about making a coffee but what sort of crazy idea is that, a coffee at this time
of night, so you go for a citrus herbal tea, you switch on the electric kettle, see your reflection in the mirror with the kettle in one hand and the citrus tea bag in the other, you hardly know who that person is.

But when Cécile Duffaut looks at herself in the mirror, her reflection must give her a bit more of a boost, after all. When we were dating, I’m sure people pictured what we’d be like
later on: she’d be a crotchety old maid and I’d be the philandering husband type, with three divorces behind me, but still in great shape. It’s mind-boggling when you find out how little you really know. When I was with Cécile Duffaut, I …

Just the thought of it, “When I was with Cécile Duffaut”: how weird is that.

This is ridiculous. I should introduce myself to her.

Oh, here comes the conductor.

It’s times like this that I realize how far I still have to go—and given my age, I’ll probably never get that far.

Normally, a businesswoman like me, at the age of forty-seven, would be traveling first class and then, when the conductor came, she would discreetly and efficiently open her handbag and take out her ticket—which would be tucked away in a neat little compartment designed specifically
for that purpose.

But we’re dealing with me here, me and those character traits I haven’t managed to get rid of, and which I try to accommodate as best I can.

I empty out practically my entire handbag onto the tray—I can see the conductor’s mocking smile and worse still, Philippe Leduc’s. I can imagine the typical comments going through their minds, about women’s handbags, and how we seem to
need to carry our entire lives around in such a little thing.

I keep on looking.

I try to maintain my dignity, to search methodically, with a detached and scornful manner. Above all without blushing or babbling. Without making up one excuse after the other, or telling stories. It’s an embarrassing moment. The conductor doesn’t want to rush me, so he pretends to be gazing around the railroad
car, as if some extremely important event were unfolding in the vicinity of the toilets. Philippe Leduc turns his
head to the right and acts absorbed in the monotonous landscape. We have just gone through Romilly-sur-Seine. And I wonder if he remembers the evening we spent there when we were together. I had friends who lived there, and they threw a party. We took the train. At one point we left
the smoke-filled house and wandered through the deserted streets—along the endless wall that runs down the main street. I said, “One thing’s for sure, I’ll never live here.” He answered with a cliché, about how there was no way we could ever know what the future held in store. I rolled my eyes, and I remember that because of his remark all of a sudden he went down a notch in my esteem.
Could do
better. Must work on repartee. Try to shine in ways other than good looks alone. Make an effort.
That was what I felt like saying. But of course nothing came out.

At the same time, stereotypes die hard, and above all, they do contain an element of truth. How could we have foreseen that over a quarter of a century later we would go through that town again, sitting side by side, pretending not
to know each other?

In the meantime, the conductor is waiting.

I take a deep breath.

I will not allow myself to be intimidated. I’ve changed. I’m a woman who is in charge. Who is sure of herself and of her choices.

And anyway, there it is, the ticket.

There are some habits you never lose. I think that if you’d mentioned Cécile Duffaut to me before this morning, the first thing that would have sprung to mind was the way she had to empty out her handbag every time she had to find something: a pack of chewing gum, cigarettes, a phone number, a checkbook. Or a train ticket. It’s reassuring. This loyalty to who you really are, in spite of everything.
In spite of the elegant clothes which must have cost a fortune. In spite of her looks, far more attractive than in the old days.

I wonder what defines me, now. What characteristics I had already ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago, and that I didn’t try to do anything about.

Like separating the soft part of the bread from the crust and rolling it into tiny balls, while continuing to talk with
someone, who would be transfixed, even concerned: he’s not going to go and eat those things, is he? Oh yes he is.

Like making sure the alarm on the clock radio is set at the right time, checking four times in a row, otherwise I have to start all over. In another life, I must have had many obsessive-compulsive behaviors; in this life, that’s the only one I have.

Staring at the ceiling whenever
I start feeling emo-tional; keeping my eyes glued to the paint, the color, the cracks.

Scattering coins all over the place whenever I get undressed—they go springing from my pockets and rolling
across parquet floors, waking everyone in the house. It’s easier now that I’m alone at night. I could never stand the idea of a wallet, that lump in your pocket. It used to drive Christine crazy. I suppose
that Jérôme knows how to behave. Or only carries bills. That are ironed. He knows how to get undressed with grace and dignity. Those are two words I’m not too familiar with, grace and dignity. For a while I enjoyed the illusion of self-confidence that comes with the energy of youth, but then it was gone.

I’m on edge.

From sensing her sitting there next to me. In fact, I ought to change seats.
Pretend to get off at the next station. Except that the train is nonstop from Troyes to Paris. But why do I need to give any explanation? I don’t owe Cécile Duffaut anything. I am nothing to her, she is nothing to me, and that’s all there is to it. So why do I stay? Guilt? A little, I suppose. In hopes that she might speak to me? Pathetic. Laziness?

I wonder what she remembers. Well, that is,
what she would remember if she had recognized me.

Going for drives in the Peugeot 204. I paid next to nothing for that car. It was white. The same one my parents had when I was a kid. I liked having the gear stick at the wheel. The seats still smelled of leather after all those years. Cécile didn’t have her license yet. We weren’t going anywhere in particular. We were wasting gas. We smoked,
with the windows cracked open.

The Peugeot 204 was my revenge for Mathieu’s
motorcycle. As I thought, I saw less of Mathieu after he came back from Germany. And when we got together he would always say how lucky I was to have a car. He had become a regular on the train, the RER, and the Métro; he kept going up to Paris to try his luck. He was having a hard time. Sleeping on friends’ sofas, on
mattresses on the floor, sometimes right on the floor. Sleeping out on the street, too, on those occasions when he didn’t manage to sponge off someone. He was losing his cheerful nature. I’m not really sure when things began to change for him. At one point, he almost disappeared from sight, but then when he reappeared he had landed himself a supporting role in a TV movie. But he refused to talk about
it. Then another long spell of silence. He had plunged into another world. I missed him. Even though I was struggling with my own demons, and the desire to make my own way in life, I missed him. I could have asked his parents for news. I was too proud. When I got my first real contract, at the superstore where I still work, he was the one I wanted to call before anyone else. But to tell him what?
To brag about how now I was qualified to sell TVs and VCRs? I didn’t want to hear myself telling him that. Even though I knew that this job was a lifesaver, since I’d given up studying English, and gone back to the town where I was born, and spent months looking for work; even after all the broken promises. No. I figured I’d call him when I found something else.

After that, I worked on other
friendships. There were colleagues. Christine. Christine’s friends. That was it.
Sometimes just as I was falling asleep I would think about Mathieu. I wondered what he was doing. I’d had news of him indirectly. I watched the TV movies he played in. And the feature films, where his tall, slender physique was becoming more and more visible. That was what surprised me more than anything: I had always
thought of Mathieu as plump. The guy whose screen career I was vaguely following didn’t look anything like him. Even his voice seemed to have changed. It was deeper.

Whenever I came out of the movie theater, I felt like calling him—and I never got up the resolve.

The only consolation in all those years was my family. Christine. The girls. I waited anxiously for the day when Mathieu’s photo would
appear in some celebrity magazine with a gorgeous Spanish actress or Ukrainian supermodel on his arm, and the cryptic caption underneath: “Could that little bulge at the waist be the sign of an future joyful event?”

It never happened.

First of all because his love affairs never lasted very long. But above all because he never became famous. For a long time he was a familiar face, but in the
background. His career would have been completely lackluster had it not been for
Today’s Lucky Winners. Today’s Lucky Winners
was really a stroke of luck for him. He was well acquainted with the producer of the program, who was looking for an experienced host not too well-known to the general public. They did some screen tests. Bingo. There he was in one of the most popular programs on French
television: a pathetic game show, perfect for filling the lonely hours of the unemployed or housewives
under fifty, while they wait for the one o’clock news. His sense of humor, his handsome face, his easy way with people: in a few weeks, he walked off with the jackpot. Money was no longer a problem. It was 2004; he was forty years old. His future was all sewn up.

It was around then that Christine
and I got divorced. It was also around then that I stopped buying the
TV Guide.
I couldn’t stand seeing pictures of Mathieu anymore. I was only too aware of how our paths in life were heading in different directions. We had met at a time when he was merely a rough draft of the person he would later become, while I was at my zenith. He would keep on rising, whereas I had begun to sink gradually.
Every time I caught his face in a magazine, those were my thoughts. About failure. About destiny slipping out of your grasp.

I’m better now.

And I’m on my way to visit Mathieu today.

Gulp.

I’m not proud of myself.

And I know why.

He’s the one who got back in touch. I would never have dared. Not because I would have been afraid of disturbing him. But because I was afraid of being humiliated:
What if he could hardly remember my name?

I ran into his mother, just after my divorce. She was shopping at the store. She wanted to buy a new television.
She had just lost her husband—I hadn’t heard about it. We spoke for a long time. She invited me over for the following Sunday, a Sunday when I didn’t have the kids. She’d bake a cake. When I left the store that evening, I felt like crying—as
much over her solitude as over the way my life was going. I was going to be filling in for my erstwhile best friend. He had dreamed of being in my place; now I was taking his. I was stepping into the shoes of the man he might have been, the lonely man who visits his mother for Sunday tea.

One day, Mathieu found out. I thought it would make him angry. It was worse than that. He felt pity. And
it’s true, basically, that pity was all I deserved—a fortysomething guy taking refuge at the home of his childhood friend’s mother, talking about life, how lame can you get. But I liked going to Maud’s place. Peeling vegetables with her. Doing the sort of daily activities I had never done with my parents. What I liked was that Maud wasn’t judgmental. Even less so nowadays that she’s been diagnosed
with Alzheimer’s. I look back on those days and really miss them, almost more than any other time in my life. My dinners at Maud’s. My Sundays spent preparing tasty dishes while exchanging thoughts about life, neighbors, children. I miss her.

Mathieu and I started calling each other because of her. I had just found her in the parking lot of the store, distraught and completely disoriented. I
called the doctor. Then her son. I remember Mathieu’s voice on the telephone. And the voice he had as an adolescent. Nothing remotely like the grave, confident timbre he’d created for his TV movies. Nor like the exaggeratedly
cheerful self he’d adopted for
Today’s Lucky Winners.
Truth be told, he wasn’t very lucky that day. He had to rely on me. To ask me a favor. Maybe the first of many. He was
beholden to me.

That’s how we became friends once again.

Friends.

That’s saying a lot.

Let’s just say that it was saying a lot until recently. We would call each other. He would stop by from time to time. We only talked about his mother and his career. One day he did ask me, however, if it hadn’t been too rough on me, the divorce. In fact, I’d been through it already long before, so I was
able to smile and shrug and say, “That’s life.” I don’t know why, but it must have touched him, so he invited me to his place. In Paris. To his apartment. To a party with his Parisian friends.

It was an honor.

There I was in that milieu where I didn’t belong, among people who drank too much and laughed very loudly, among tired-but-bubbly wives, and catering staff who walked around with finger
food and refills. Mathieu simply introduced me as, “Philippe, a childhood friend.” They all stared at me with a big smile for ten seconds or so and then the conversation would continue, without me. I melted into the décor. It wasn’t hard. I felt like I was in a bad TV movie. I recognized a few faces I’d spotted on the TV screen, but I couldn’t put a name on any of them. The big shots had promised
they’d come but at the last minute they called to cancel. Or didn’t
call. And Mathieu really didn’t mind at all. What was radiant about Mathieu’s place was Mathieu himself.

Also radiant that evening was a woman twenty years younger than him, lively and witty. Who worked as an usher at a theater to pay for law school. Totally on top of things. Her name was Astrid. Even at the very heart of the
party she was true to herself. She would drift toward Mathieu and then away again, perfectly natural and nonchalant. I envied her. I envied Mathieu, too, of course. They’d been seeing each other for a few months, but she had no illusions. Sooner or later their affair would end, she would get tired of playing the gerontophile or he would find a woman who was more docile.

At one point the volume
went up a notch, and she and I ended up in the huge kitchen. The caterer and his assistants had left, they’d be back in the morning to clean up. It was very late. She found a bunch of black grapes, and began to eat them one by one.

“You know, Mathieu often speaks of you.”

“Oh. In flattering terms, I hope.”

“I wouldn’t know. At the same time, it’s fairly recent. Out of the blue.”

“Blue moon.
As in, once in—that’s how often we’ve seen each other.”

I tried to change the subject. I got the feeling it was headed in a direction that might prove unpleasant.

“It’s because I was looking after his mother.”

“Or his mother was looking after you. Well, that’s how he put it.”

“Sometimes human relations go both ways.”

“For a while, people were making fun of you around here. All these people
you see here, they’d slap their hands on their thighs whenever they heard one of Mathieu’s stories about Philippe making apple pie with his friend’s mom.”

“I’m not sure I really want to hear this.”

“Wait. It’s not as bad as it sounds. And in life, truth is the greatest asset, don’t you think?”

I imagined getting to my feet with dignity—it wouldn’t be hard, I had drunk only two glasses of champagne.
Something had prevented me from drinking more—the fear of making a slip, of feeling nauseous, of making a fool of myself. I imagined walking across the kitchen and through the crowd in the living room, picking up my coat, going down the stairs and, whistling, making my way to the Gare de l’Est, where the first trains would soon be departing. I imagined disappearing.

Yes, I saw myself doing all
that, but I am an actor only in my dreams. In reality, I nodded and poured myself a glass of water.

“Gradually it changed. You became a … what should I call it, yes, a kind of character witness. He refers to you as if you were a character witness.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He’s come in for quite a lot of criticism lately. Let’s just say that he behaved badly with certain individuals. And people
began saying that he was forgetting where he was from, that he was getting bigheaded. He had to get things back on an even keel. He was antagonizing everyone. So he did a lot of soul-searching. And you are part of that. You allow him to show that no, he hasn’t
changed. That he’s had the same friends for years. That he’s stayed close to his roots. That the things he was being accused of were unjustified.”

I poured myself some strong booze. Over ice. I swirled the ice cubes in the glass. None of this came as a surprise. What did astonish me, however, was that I didn’t feel more offended. I was past all that. I shrugged.

“I’m sorry if this comes as a blow,” she said.

“I’m past feeling any blows. I’m already on the ground.”

“I like you a lot, you know.”

“Do you need a character witness as well?”

I looked up at her from under my brows. For a moment she didn’t know what to say, then she burst out laughing.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“With what?”

“With what I’ve just told you.”

“Nothing at all. He’s taking advantage of the situation. So am I. It’s not exactly as if I’m swamped with invitations. And then when I get home and go into work I can always casually mention the fact
that I spent an evening with Mathieu Coché. Everyone finds their misplaced vanity where they can.”