The 6:41 to Paris (8 page)

Memories overlapping.

What an exhausting trip.

I didn’t need this.

The one thing I dream of, when we get to Paris, would be to find a hotel and sleep in an anonymous, comfortable room, where nobody would want anything from me. I would take the exit behind the Gare de l’Est, the one no one uses—Château-Landon—and book the first available room at the All Seasons, the elevator would be full of
Japanese tourists out for a good time, and I would collapse on the bed. And when I woke up I’d be another person.

I really would like to be another person.

I’ve always wanted to be another person. Less disciplined. More intelligent. Brilliant. A meteor. Someone you see whiz by in the sky and you talk about them to your kids years later, all starry-eyed. Someone like Mathieu Coché. And yet it’s
strange, when we were teenagers, you would never have expected anything like it. Mathieu was sort of my sparring partner. The guy who comes along with you to auditions to read you your lines, but who never gets chosen. I don’t know what made the difference. Adversity, perhaps. Nothing was easy for him back then, whereas for me, everything just landed in my lap—love, friendship, sex, it was all
dead simple. Cécile Duffaut was actually the first girl who
ever left me. How could she have done anything else?

I was unbearable.

I remember the end, in London. Don’t think I don’t. You might think you’ve forgotten everything, but that would be blatant hypocrisy. In fact, I’m convinced that people’s ability to remember is much better than they claim.

I wandered around, it was late afternoon.
At first I was glad to be alone. At that age it’s hard to explain to the person you’re with that you might need solitude, that you don’t want to be glued to them twenty-four hours a day. This was the first time we’d been together for whole days at a time. In a foreign city. I suppose it could have brought us closer if we had really been in love. But that wasn’t the case. I say, “I suppose,” because
the more time goes by, the more I wonder if I’ve ever been in love. It was as if I was wrapped in a thin layer of plastic that kept me apart from other people. But maybe it’s the same for everyone. Every human being must wonder what it means “to be in love.” What came closest, for me, was a desire to spend my everyday life with another person: morning breath, the coziness of a night without sex,
breakfast for two and then for four, X-Factor programs on TV on Saturday evenings. I know there’s nothing at all exciting about any of that.

In fact, I could easily have shared my everyday life with Cécile Duffaut. We got along well. It’s just that when you’re twenty that’s not enough. You dream about things that’ll blow you sky-high, full of incredible passion, you want to be beside yourself
with emotion and euphoria and pain, your heart beating wildly.
You’re convinced that unless you’re experiencing all that you must be heading down the wrong path, and the relationship is not worth the effort.

And then after a while you realize it’s not going to happen.

So either you become resigned, or you make believe. You waltz around like some nineteenth century heroine, sighing, moaning,
weeping—and you lie. And all around you, people call it love.

With Christine there was never any of that. No love at first sight. We hung out with the same group of friends. So we saw a lot of each other and eyed each other and circled around each other for months. I invited her to a party. We went home together. Everything flowed, it was all completely natural. Since then I’ve been thinking
of love as something that flows.

Did it flow between Cécile and me?

Yes.

There’s a woman in her thirties a bit farther down the car; she looks tired. A child asleep with its head on her lap.

Yes.

An adolescent nodding his head, listening to some music the other passengers will never hear, but in his ears it’s exploding.

Yes.

An older man muttering to himself while he reads a magazine about
the private lives of the rich and famous.

Yes.

And the two of us, sitting next to each other—we could have been a couple. We could have made believe.

But I’m not sure that Cécile Duffaut is the sort of woman who would make believe. She’s recognized me. She doesn’t want to speak to me. She’s right.

I was almost at the hotel. I could see her on the balcony. I didn’t feel like going in, explaining,
negotiating, arguing. I thought she would have packed her bags. I went to a pub on the corner of the street. I don’t remember the name, just the color. Red, with gilded letters.

It was starting to fill up with locals. I drank three or four pints. Enough to tear down the language barrier. I fraternized with a group of Brits my age who were planning a trip to France to go girl-hunting, because
it was a well-known fact, aah, those French girls, etc.

Jerks.

The kind you find in every country.

You find them mainly in bars, after office hours. Herds of guys, with their coarse laughter, spilling booze on their T-shirts, and saying they’ll do anything to get laid. I couldn’t understand half of what these guys were saying but it hardly mattered. I felt good. I was a jerk. I’m not saying
this out of bitterness. Or out of scorn. It’s just a fact.

One of them was making racist jokes about Pakistanis, and I laughed like an idiot. Laughed, maybe, but I was uncomfortable all the same, because back in France I wouldn’t have put up with intolerance. Later
that evening I spoke with this guy Andrew, who was quieter. He was getting drunk methodically, to forget that he hadn’t had a girlfriend
in over a year. The two of us went on to a nightclub.

It was one of those unlikely sorts of discotheques that you sometimes come across in Anglo-Saxon countries. A church turned into a dance floor. A place of worship, for the body, for appearance. The atmosphere was distinctly different, depending on whether you were in the chapel or the nave. In the nave, the music took up all the space and
the light was dazzling; it was crowded and it was hard to make your way to the bar. The bass was pounding in your ears and you couldn’t think straight. Andrew didn’t want to dance. He sat down on one of the wooden pews the designer had preserved. He guzzled beer after beer, staring into space. At one point, he vanished. I can still see his face, just as he was. I picture him married and divorced with
one kid, the manager of a mobile phone outlet in a London suburb.

If I saw him in the street I wouldn’t recognize him.

Any more than I’d recognize Kathleen.

Of course not.

Two days later I had already forgotten her. On the train to Paris I thought about the three days that had just gone by and I could not call up her face. Just her dyed blonde hair: you could see the dark roots. Just the opposite
of Cécile Duffaut. Cécile Duffaut would never have dyed her hair.

I wonder if Kathleen still feels embarrassed. If in a relaxed moment, say, when she’s at a barbecue with colleagues or in the car with her kids, she suddenly purses her lips and makes a face because her memory has swerved in that direction. Her husband, in the seat next to her, will look surprised. She’ll wave her hand as if to
say, it’s nothing. Something she ate. She’ll take a tablet when they get home. It will pass.

And what about me, did it pass?

Yes, it did. That’s the worst thing about it.

I made up a whole bunch of stories.

That in France I was studying to become a helicopter pilot, to rescue stranded mountaineers. That sort of rubbish. And the more lies I told her, the more I started to believe it. At last
I was becoming another person. Kathleen hadn’t lost that sulky look she had when I went up to her, but nor had she walked away. She couldn’t help but smile, sometimes, because of my accent. We were in the other room, in the chapel. It was much darker there, with red seats and dim lights. We could hear the music from the dance floor, muted, just the bass causing the walls to vibrate. Around us, only
couples in various stages of intimacy. A back room in a church. The England I had hoped to see. Not the one where tourist couples wander through rooms in a museum or stroll through parks pointing at swans and daffodils.

She wanted to dance.

She was wearing one of those black lace dresses that
were in fashion. With a leopard skin scarf in her hair. Bold red lipstick. A come-hither sort of attitude.
An ersatz Madonna let loose on the streets of London. One among thousands.

At one point she let out a graceless yawn, and I thought that was it, but she said it was just that she was tired, she’d had a rough week, she lived all the way on the edge of London, quite far away, there were no more trains or underground, the taxi would cost a fortune and in any case they would never agree to take her
way out there at that hour of the night, was I staying at a hotel?

“Yes.”

“Can we go there?”

“There’s just one problem. I … actually, I’m sharing the room with my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“Yes, we came to London together.”

“Ah-hah.”

“But she shouldn’t be there anymore, she was supposed to leave for France this evening.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“Right. Otherwise we can find a room in
another hotel.”

“I’m not a whore.”

“I never said you were.”

“Either we sleep at your place, or it’s
nyet.
”

“What,
nyet
?”

“Well, come on then.”

I remember our walk through the London night.
We didn’t talk. I didn’t even know her last name. And everything she had learned about me was untrue. Anyway, she was no fool. She felt like spending the night with me and, while we were at it, she’d have
a place to sleep. I prefer to think it went in that order.

While we were walking, I wondered if I could stop it right there. If I could explain and say, “Actually, Cécile and me, you see … I don’t know what came over me. It’s not right. Can we meet again tomorrow or another day? Really, tonight’s no good, but I would really, truly, madly like to kiss your breasts.”

But the words didn’t come.

It took us half an hour to walk from the cathedraltemple of the night to Cartwright Gardens, and I found myself praying to the Holy Ghost that Cécile really had left in the end, and everything would be easy, we could make it up back in France, I would grovel before her with apologies, I would make promises, and she would never find out a thing about Kathleen No-Name. Or maybe the aforementioned
Kathleen would remember a very important appointment at three o’clock in the morning, and she absolutely had to get back to her suburb, she would slip me her name and her phone number, and then she would say tomorrow, same time, and the next day at the same time I would be there, I would have dealt with the Cécile problem, Cécile would be gone, bag and baggage, bye now, air kisses on both cheeks,
no hard feelings, right?

Sometimes, when you’re twenty, you don’t really know how to deal with certain situations.

Sometimes, when you’re forty-seven, you’re no better.

I am sitting next to Cécile, and I wish I could tell her I am sorry.

Even if it is no longer the least bit important now.

Even if what is important, now, is that I am on my way to see Mathieu, possibly for the last time.

And that all these years are rising up before me on this innocuous 6:41 train which has just gone past the huge shopping mall at Rosny 2. The Paris suburbs, spread out before me there just beyond the window: I could never live here.

And yet maybe my life would have been better, here.

I cannot stop the stream of images. And yet how I wish I could. I’m worn out. The weekend with my parents was worse than expected. It was the first time I’ve ever found them old, really old, not just older than me, but on the threshold of everything inevitable—physical decline, retirement home, dependency, everything I haven’t wanted to think about until now, everything I have avoided by choosing
for a companion an independent man who has no family ties. He cannot imagine living anywhere but Paris, he needs the big city, the capital, the constant movement of crowds, the noise, distraction, anonymity.

And the same has been true for me, up to now.

I moved to Paris later than he did. But I was in the same frame of mind. I wanted to be swept up by the crowd, I wanted to choose the people
I met and no longer just put up with them because I had no choice—because in the provinces choices are limited and lives are stunted.

Now I’m not so sure of myself.

Valentine has become a Parisian adolescent, selfconfident, aware of what is at stake, clued in about which friendships to avoid and which ones to nurture; she’s learned the social codes, she’s street-smart—and above all she’s savvy,
really savvy. Compared to her, at the same age, I was a goose. A goose who got roasted in the oven and carved to pieces. I’m proud of Valentine.
She won’t ever be duped the way I was. I watch her. In her love affairs, her friendships, she’s the one who’s in charge. And I was the one, rather than Luc, who wanted her to be like that.

My mother trembles.

She didn’t use to tremble. Her head trembles,
when she’s fixing a meal, and serving the food, and she doesn’t realize, I would like to point it out, but I don’t dare. I wonder if she’s going to tremble more and more until her brain disintegrates. That’s what I dreamed last night. I woke up with a start: I had just seen my mother in bits all over the carpet in the living room, like a broken and bleeding robot.

That night, too, I woke up with
a start.

I heard voices, two of them. His voice I recognized immediately. But the other one: female. English. Annoyed. Saying something about his sister. Philippe Leduc’s sister. I grasped the situation in instant. I sat up. I didn’t need to reach for the covers. I had fallen asleep with all my clothes on. He’d switched on only the bedside lamp. The girl was in the dark. All I could see was her
nightclub getup: an exact replica of Madonna in
Desperately Seeking Susan.
I thought about certain movies, saw myself as Rosanna Arquette in
After Hours
: the scene was insane, and the time of night was the same, according to the alarm clock: it was 3:30. I didn’t need a diagram. I never thought he would stoop so low, but clearly with Philippe Leduc he could always go lower.

A few minutes.

It
only lasted a few minutes.

I didn’t say a single word.

Today this surprises me. I could have told him off, ranted, humiliated him, foamed at the mouth—but all I felt was disgust. Yes, that’s what it was, disgust.

The disgust I felt when my grandfather, my father’s father, would hit my grandmother. I used to spend the weekend with them from time to time. He wasn’t even drunk. For him it was
just normal behavior. When I told my mother about it, she refused to let me go back there. My father didn’t insist. And yet the harm was done. My grandmother, cowering, trying to protect herself while I ran out to the barn for refuge.

The disgust I felt when I heard the father of my best friend and neighbor, Claudie, yelling insanely at his wife, a poor creature who was afraid of everything.
He called her a whore, a sailor’s slut, a chamber pot, there was no end to it. When I ran into Claudie, an hour later, we acted as if nothing had happened, but she knew that I knew, and she was filled with shame.

The disgust I felt toward that guy who was stalking me. I knew he had it in for me. At a party the previous month I had rejected his advances. I was at the lycée. The year before my
final year. I was going down the avenue that led to the center of town. He was on a motorbike. He stopped the motor. The swishing of his tires on the asphalt. I was focusing on the sidewalk. I had been told you shouldn’t look back, because it drives them crazy. I could feel my chin trembling, but I wouldn’t cry, I
would be strong. I had five hundred yards to go. His voice. My first name. The sound
of the kickstand. He was running. He grabbed my arm. I wanted to shout, “What?” but the words stuck in my throat. He tried to kiss me. I hit him. He raised his hand. A man who was passing by shouted, “What’s going on? Do you want me to call the police?” The guy’s hand stayed where it was. He stepped back. He stumbled. The passerby waited by my side. The motorcycle started up. The man said, “You
ought to report him.” As he rode by, the boy on the motorcycle spat and called me a whore.

All that disgust.

All the instances of disgust you experience simply by virtue of being a girl.

And that night, you added one more, Philippe Leduc.

A pretty significant one, too.

Never had I felt like such a burden.

Or so humiliated.

I started getting ready, in heavy silence. Outside, even London
was asleep. I straightened my clothes, splashed some water on my face, checked that I had my documents, my train ticket, the money I needed. Very professional. I felt like I was in a film, one of those black-and-white thrillers where the heroines sleep in motels and then disappear. I didn’t feel a thing, other than an anticipation of fatigue, because it was 3:30 in the morning and I had to walk all
the way to Waterloo Station, a long way, and the city at that time of night would be full of boys on motorcycles wanting to follow me. As I left the room I managed to call out, trying
hard to make my voice sound bright, “Have a nice evening!” but I knew that for them, too, everything had been ruined. The girl was acting blasé, but beneath her makeup and her getup, she was worried. About me. She
was wondering where I would go like that. She was drawing a kind of parallel between me and herself. A sisterhood. The word almost made me smile. As I walked by her, I whispered, “I’m not his sister, you know.” But she already knew that—of course she knew. She had figured it all out.

Suddenly I was out in the street.

It was balmy, a horribly pleasant night.

London in July. If I’d been a smoker,
I would have lit a cigarette.

I sat down on the bench across from the hotel and said, out loud, “Two minutes!”

Two minutes to catch my breath. Two minutes to change my life, too. And then, of course, I burst into tears. I was instantly annoyed with myself. I didn’t want to be the caricature of the girl who’s been dumped and goes to pieces. I didn’t want to be like anyone, anymore. What I really
wanted from then on was dignity and respect, and to be capable of insolence and determination.

I was sick and tired of being the ant.

I thought I’d try to find a place to spend the rest of the night—go to a park, walk through the damp grass,
find refuge in a bush or under a tree, spread my towel for a mattress, use my backpack as a pillow, curl up and hope no one would approach me or attack
me, and try to relax while I listened to the birds’ waking song.

But once I started walking, I knew it wouldn’t work out like that. As I walked through those London streets everything began to make sense. That girl’s expression for a start, straight out of an American movie; then Philippe Leduc’s, downcast, eyes averted. It was ridiculous. I sensed that I had to take it from there. That moment
would be the sandbank—or shoal, rather—on which I had run aground, and now I would have to kick my heel against it to rise back up to the surface.

I built myself a future.

First of all, I would finish my studies: I’d been on the verge of letting them drag on and on, or of dropping them altogether, and they would have led nowhere. Now I would start learning, and then I’d learn some more. I would
stop being the student who just scrapes by with average grades, and about whom people said, when they looked at the list of students who’d been promoted, “Huh, she actually passed?”

I would change where I lived, too—I’d move to a big city, where opportunities would be real and careers didn’t lead down some dead-end street. To a place where I could still meet people by chance.

And above all,
I would never allow myself to be impressed.

No matter the age, gender, history, or social position of the people I met, I would immediately treat them as
equals. Human beings with the same genetic heritage—vulnerable to viruses, prone to sudden illness during a romantic weekend in Amsterdam, capable of humiliating a girl by bringing another one up to the room, and probably concealing a secret
life, full of inadmissible vices, moments of distress, grimaces in the mirror, and disgust.

Then there were my looks, obviously.

Change things: a concession I had never wanted to make until now. Start using the makeup kits I sometimes bought but rarely opened, as if they weren’t meant for me, as if I didn’t deserve them.

Go to the hairdresser’s. Get one of those boyish cuts that were suddenly
cropping up in the photos in hairdressing salons.

Do something about my wardrobe.

Oh yes, my wardrobe.

Throw out anything shapeless, all-purpose, beige, brown, sea-green, gray, or blue. Start trying bright colors, accentuate the red, yellow, and orange, learn to stand out.

If I close my eyes, I can still see those London streets, that sweltering July night.

Of course I passed a few night
owls, but they didn’t notice me. Just wait a few years, I thought, and then they’ll turn around when I go by. At one point I got lost on my way to Waterloo. I went in circles for a few minutes. Twice walked past the only store whose display windows weren’t protected by iron shutters. A boutique that sold herbs, and face creams made from plants,
and makeup that was one hundred percent natural.
It seemed ever so amateurish, like some holdover from the seventies, people living in communes—completely out of sync with the triumphalist eighties, a rotten tooth that needed pulling. It suddenly occurred to me: if I were in charge of that store, I would organize everything differently, make it modern, make it popular. No, not popular, better than that. Trendy. Upmarket.

For thirty seconds
or so I saw through to my future—and then the door slammed shut. It took me more than fifteen years to open it again. They weren’t lost years. It took me that long to come to terms with everything I was feeling that night.

A desire for revenge; pride, determination, and even a sort of feverish joy. A joy that vanished the minute the sun came up. A joy which, on the train home, gave way to that
electrifying hatred. Which spread all through my body. A hatred which left a lasting trace. A hatred which, much later, only Luc managed to extinguish—even though, in the beginning, all I wanted was to seduce him, the better to drop him not long afterward. To leave him reeling. Gasping. Needy. Like all the others, after Leduc and before Luc, whom I had unceremoniously dumped.

I never went back
to London. I’ve visited half the planet, and I’ve always taken great care to avoid the United Kingdom.

Would I be ready to go back there now?

Would I be ready to forgive?