by Ketty Rouf
Half an hour later, saved by the bell, I linger in the classroom. A bit of sweetness has found its way into the chaos of my thoughts. I take the gift I found in my pigeonhole this morning out of my briefcase.
“How goes it, Madame la philosophe?”
Martin’s smile detaches itself from the door frame and brings me back to reality.
“Fine, and in a few hours it’ll be a whole lot better.”
“Want a coffee?”
“No sugar, thanks. And that’s two thank yous I owe you, actually. You remembered. I loved finding it in my pigeonhole—nice change from administrative memos.”
“Like a waft of sweet perfume amid the dusty smells of duty? I’m sure you’re going to love it.”
We head for the cafeteria. Martin’s given me Pierre Michon’s Rimbaud the Son. We keep our literary marriage alive with the devotion of young newlyweds. Every month we give each other a book, or a collection of poems.
I noticed him as soon as he started at the school—two years, it’s been, already. Like me, he kept his distance from everyone else, concentrating on a book or busily making copies. Some colleagues took him for a snob, another intellectual determined to guard his ivory tower built of culture and self-importance. One day I found a sheet of paper he’d forgotten near the photocopier: “I am the Dark One,—the Widower,—the Unconsoled, / The Aquitaine Prince whose Tower is destroyed . . .” When Martin came back to the empty computer lab at five o’clock to get the forgotten page, I was there, holding it.
“Gérard de Nerval, ‘El Desdichado.’ ‘My forehead is still red from the Queen’s kiss.’ This poem is incredible.”
“Glad you think so. Nerval is one of my favorites.”
We reach the teachers’ lounge, our too-hot coffee cups burning our fingers. Madame Louis’s voice rises from the big table next to the half-open window.
“. . .yes, but it’s better to preheat the oven to 180° C, and for the ingredients you need 250 grams of powdered sugar, 700 grams of flour, four eggs . . . oh, hi, Joséphine! Martin! Want a coconut snowball cookie?”
“Celebrating the next vacation already, are we?” Martin plays the sarcasm card.
“Oh, you’re too funny. It’s my birthday . . . I always make snowballs for my birthday. Don’t you remember? Last year . . .”
“And the year before that.” Hurley, the English teacher, hands us each a plastic plate.
“I don’t remember. Maybe I wasn’t teaching that day.”
I say hello to the French intern, and to the economics teacher, who barely acknowledges me, her mouth full. I try to smile at the earth and life sciences teacher, while Madame Louis drops into her chair. Wearily, she reaches for another snowball from the almost-empty bowl on the table. She smiles, chewing, and sighs, her eyes watering as if she’s just exerted herself greatly, or perhaps let out a fart. It’s as if some emotion is coursing through her soft, shapeless body, making it quiver. Madame Louis is a Jell-O salad on the verge of tears.
“Happy, eh?”
After aiming this rhetorical question at her, Stéphane, the young science teacher, explains to us:
“She had a class today.”
“She had a quiet class today,” clarifies Hurley.
“Oh, yes, I’m very happy. I had fifteen minutes of pure, religious silence. And when that happens . . . well, when that happens, you remember why you’re here, with them. You just have to hang in there, believe me; you just have to hang in there.”
“You’re so right, Madame Louis, our mission is to save lives . . .”
Martin looks at me, and we move away from the rest of the little group but don’t have any time to talk. The bell rings. I drain the dregs of my coffee and kiss Martin on the cheek. Sometimes I think our lips are getting closer without us noticing.
6
I’m almost late for my dance class. After staying behind to meet with a parent, I dash for the bus, the train, the metro, determined to get there on time, determined not to lose a single second. Friday evenings are the best thing in my life. I walk from the changing room to the studio with the exaggerated stride of a dancer, on my tiptoes, in my twelve-centimeter spike heels. They look pretty damn good, these shoes. They give you a pair of legs you almost can’t believe are your own. They make your chest swell with pride, with courage. They work miracles, is what they do. I’m marching off to war in this getup, and I plan to win. The mirror and I are finally on friendly terms with one another. It isn’t my best friend yet, or even my buddy, but we’re beginning to have a relationship. The mirror tells me about myself, and it’s starting to say good things. One day, it’ll love me. We’ll be happy together. I think the other girls in the class are experiencing the same thing. Before I could look at myself in the mirror, I used to look at them, all of them, from head to toe. I learned their bodies like you learn a poem. By heart.
Fanny has the heavy thighs and swollen ankles of pre-menopause. Her legs are like tree trunks. She was the one who said that to me: “I’ve got tree trunks instead of legs.” For months she wore pantyhose under her stockings. Fanny is funny. “We aren’t all born a size small with skinny legs,” she says, “no sense making a big deal out of it.” She smiles at the mirror when we dance, at the teacher when she’s explaining something, at me often. Last week, Fanny came to class without her pantyhose on. She looked at herself clinically in the mirror and murmured (but we all heard it), “You are my body, the only one I’ve got. We’re going to get along a lot better from now on.”
Jessica is perfect. Twenty-two, tall and slim with a few well-placed curves. Gorgeous ass, a dancer’s arms, high cheekbones in a rounded girlish face. She’s small-breasted, wears padded bras and has trouble with the nipple-tassels. “These 32A’s aren’t going to get me very far in life,” she sighs.
Aude is fortyish and has the face of a Raphael Madonna and a chubby, babyish, porcelain-skinned body. She moves weightlessly, like a cloud. Once, she said, during the silent pause between two pieces of music: “Sometimes I really want to kill my children.” She just came right out and said that, with no warning. Just spit it right out. We all had that idiotic look on our faces, the one you get when you’re pretending not to have heard something.
And then there’s Lucille, her belly slack after a difficult pregnancy. Desperate to get her pre-baby body—and her libido—back, she never takes off her waist trainer.
It was seeing their flaws that gave me the courage to look at my own. Our bodies are our history. We have to listen to our calf muscles, shriekingly tensed atop our dizzyingly high heels, our skin transfigured in that instant of forgetfulness that sweeps over us all, intoxicating us: “Tomorrow is the start of a new life.” We dance until we’re breathless; it’s like a race, a dance of women overtaken by their own bodies. And this stocking I’m peeling off? Lo and behold, it’s me, and it’s Fanny too, and Jessica, and Aude and Lucille.
Back at home, I put my stilettos on the nightstand and gaze at them while I sip a beer. The heel fascinates me, sharp as an exclamation point; an order and a promise at the same time. Drinking my beer from the bottle, watching those shoes like you’d watch a film, I feel a little bit masculine, and very feminine. Alive, plain and simple. It must be because of the endorphins. But the biological cause doesn’t matter. After class, my thoughts and actions slow down. I sink into a kind of languor in which something inside me gets activated. I take off all my clothes and lie down on the floor with my eyes closed. My body is my home. I see myself with new eyes in class. Maybe I’m not so bad after all.
It’s nine o’clock. I pick up my phone. If there’s no answer, I won’t leave a message. I roll the scrap of paper with Andrea’s number on it around my finger. Like a lock of hair.
7
The spitball ricochets off the yellow-green wall and hits me hard in the left eye. I drop into a chair, hands covering my face. To achieve that kind of velocity, someone must have
used a ballpoint pen casing as a blowgun. The tightly packed mass of my thirty-three students stops laughing and fidgeting. The spitball must have been a step too far. Silence. They’re squeezed together, sometimes three or four around a table, in a projection room designed for twenty students at most. I think Lény’s taking advantage of the situation to feel Wallen up. The girl is giggling, not even pretending to be shy about it. There are four students sitting at my desk and others on the floor, backs to the radiator. I could feel the wave swelling behind me as I fiddled with the DVD player, the rising tide, the threat of their imminent delight.
“Whoever did that, speak up now,” I say, my eyes still closed. “If nobody comes clean, the whole class gets penalized.”
Silence.
“Hadrien, go call the monitor, please.”
Today was the first time I’d asked for a different room; I wanted to give the students a change of pace today. And it wasn’t easy to pull off, either. The guy in the scheduling office wasn’t happy when I put in the request with only five days’ notice; I had to make excuses and sweet-talk the hell out of him to get him to do it. Normally we’re required to reserve TVs or video projectors and computer rooms a week or ten days in advance. The office is usually swamped; the line’s always busy, and there isn’t even any music that plays while you sit there on hold. You start to feel like you’re going deaf in the ear you’ve got clamped to the phone, like no one will ever pick up. Once your reservation is confirmed, you have to fill out the yellow form available in the student affairs office, but that slot in the rack is almost always empty. Teachers always snap them up as soon as the senior education advisor puts more out. I had to write my request on a sheet of blank paper. I got reprimanded for it. But I did manage to make enough of an argument for the educational value of this semester’s film for my application to considered “complete.” So my class on freedom now included watching several scenes from The Matrix.
The blue pill or the red pill? That scene gives us the opportunity to explore the question of choice, which is directly related to the question of freedom. There is no choice without freedom. I’d done my lesson-planning, proud of offering them something I thought was stimulating. There won’t be a next time, that’s for sure. No more films. Just philosophy, without pictures, and whatever happens, happens.
I leave the class under the monitor’s stern supervision, but not before giving them an assignment: “Write an essay at least one page long, on a standard sheet of paper, on the following topic: Why is a spitball a spitball?”
In the nurse’s office, they apply ice and warm water compresses to my bruised eye. I cancel my classes for the rest of the day. Down an eye, I’m on vacation. I cry discreetly. My heart is broken, and my legs feel like they are. I want to swallow an entire bottle of Xanax, and another one of champagne. Heartache is a defect; it turns us into dissolute beings. I thank the nurse and make my way to the principal’s office. With my eyepatch, I’m in a fighting mood. Informed by the student affairs office, he’s expecting me, for a meeting I requested as a matter of urgency.
“You’re aware of the incident that happened with my senior class today . . . I’d like to file a report. I think it’s my duty not to just let this slide, because . . .”
“I see, yes, very unfortunate. The fact is, though, you see, nothing like this has ever happened before, that I know of . . .”
“Things like this happen all the time, sir. The fact that we hardly ever report them, that we make do with a couple of compresses and day off to rest, means they’re not punishable offenses. But not disciplining them, not reporting it—it’s giving them permission to escalate. Next time, someone’s going to lose an eye or, who knows, an arm . . .”
“Forgive me, but I think you’re exaggerating. We don’t have any problems with our senior students, and I’m the one who’ll have their parents on my back if you decide to file a complaint—and it doesn’t look to me like we know who’s responsible. How can we be sure the incident happened the way you’re describing it? You need witnesses . . .”
“I have thirty-three witnesses, sir, and a monitor!”
“Thirty-three witnesses who will never testify, as you well know! You weren’t authorized to teach in that room. You put your students in an unsafe situation, which is a serious infraction. I mean, I understand; don’t get me wrong. But what can I do? Go home; take a day or two to rest. You’ll feel better. You need to rethink this thing when your head’s clearer. And . . . well, if I may say so, it’s also possible that you need to change your attitude toward your students. I appreciate your work, but I’ve also heard how demanding you can be, how strict. We’re not here to traumatize them; you know that. Indulge them a bit. Catch their interest with relatable activities. Philosophy’s a difficult subject. You may just need to adapt your approach and simplify it. That’s it—simplify. The whole idea is daunting!”
I bow out, just to avoid bursting into tears in front of him. All the things I wanted to say to him but didn’t whirl around in my head: Philosophy is not an “activity,” sir. Overindulgence is a crime. You’ve doubled my class sizes two years in a row now. I’ll be submitting a report on today’s incident. All of these words I couldn’t manage to force past my dry lips. My own powerlessness leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I even forgot to pick up the incriminating spitball. Maybe I imagined the whole thing; my eye must have injured itself. In truth, though, I don’t recognize how lucky I am. I work in a place where privilege means not having scissors and chairs thrown at you in class. That’s what passes for good fortune when you teach in Drancy, a Parisian banlieue that’s not exactly posh.
8
Come with your hair and makeup already done. You won’t have time to get ready here.”
I answer in monosyllables, yes-no-yes, goodbye. Breathless, my heart in my throat, like those first few minutes of the school year in front of a bunch of smirking new students, until I get used to it again. I’ve bought a black dress, long and completely sheer. Fanny gave me the address of a boutique in Pigalle. It’s not expensive, and it’ll transform you, she said. I’m finding it hard to believe that the body reflected in the mirror is actually mine. Following the advice of the woman on the phone, I chose a dress that’s easy to take off. It’s like a blouse, but without buttons. Andrea has an English accent. She smiles when she talks. You can feel it.
It’s for this evening—Saturday—at 6:30. I haven’t told anyone. I’m not even sure what I would say, except that I’ve always dreamed of auditioning. Auditioning for anything. The word itself encompasses a whole world that I’d love to live in. Art, freedom, beauty, performance. I don’t feel the same about the word “competition,” that’s for sure. The oral exams were a bloodbath, and I was like a sacrificial lamb, but it wasn’t my throat that got slit. My uterus coughed up blood for ten days. They thought it was an internal hemorrhage.
I’ve been training in front of the mirror every day. “Training” means looking at myself without feeling that little stab of disappointment that sends me diving headfirst into the Nutella jar. I was tempted to cancel this appointment even just an hour ago—but here I am, in front of Andrea, who is blonde, very blonde. She greets me with a smile that makes me smile back and then vanishes through a door that opens into a room decorated in purple, a dreamy-eyed brunette thrusting her ass toward me from a framed photo on the padded wall. Andrea steps in front of me and opens another door. Chairs on wheels and low, chunky tables are arranged around a plexiglass stage with a pole in the middle.
“You can change in the dressing room, in the basement,” Andrea points to a flight of steps behind me. “You’ll come up from downstairs and dance onstage. Is there a particular piece of music you’d prefer?”
I have no idea. I pretend to be thinking of a title, a singer.
“I can dance to anything; I’ll leave it up to you.”
The dressing room mirror is framed with track lights that stare back at me
, emphasizing my dark circles and my dazed expression. It’s like in the movies, all those movies where you see performers putting on their makeup, or taking it off, in front of mirrors lined with lightbulbs, with or without congratulatory bouquets. I take my concealer out of my rather sparse makeup kit and apply a little more under my left eye, the one hit by the spitball. There are tweezers on the dressing table, foundation-soaked sponges, and tiny neon G-strings; I’ve never seen ones so small. There’s a box of Band-Aids, a rhinestone bracelet, some locks of false dark hair, and a stiletto heel that’s come off its shoe. Despite the silence and emptiness around me, the dressing room feels full of life. I put on my lipstick. Reflected above my head are rows of platform shoes for pole-dancing. I turn around. Black and red and transparent and multicolored heels crowd the blue racks like clusters of arrows sunk into the flesh of some martyr. The customers are the martyrs here, I think. The racks are labeled with names written on strips of masking tape: Crystal, Electra, Divine, Sharon, Sofia. Photos of nude women with no money, no honey scribbled on them. I slip my new dress on without looking at my reflection. I feel like maybe I’m going too far with this. I’d rather not think about my body right now, which I’m sure must look obscene. I deliberately ignore all the mirrors that rise up imperiously as I pass. The makeup mirror, the large one on the wall, the small round ones, the bathroom mirror. I don’t need them to make me feel like I exist. On the stage of my own wildness I can be anyone. The person I am in my dreams, maybe. Not myself, though, that’s for sure. But a woman who isn’t sad. Who isn’t ashamed.
I let the door slam shut behind me and walk down the hall, hardly breathing. My head is down, and I don’t know where I’m going, but my feet look fantastic in my new heels. I cross the leopard-patterned carpet in dimness barely relieved by the beams of the stage lights. I lift my chin, and Andrea smiles, the kind of smile that gives you confidence. Music. Pole. Twirl. Hair loosened to fall over my swaying shoulders. Look, look at my breasts. Beautiful, don’t you think?
