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.”
“Ridiculous? By what standard? All amusements have something ridiculous about them.”
That really stung me. He who dislikes fashionable things as much as I do!
“But after all you only have to hear her talk for five minutes to realize that Noëllie is not an authentic person.…”
“Authentic? What is that supposed to mean? It is a word that has been so misused.”
“By you, to begin with.” He made no reply. I went on. “Noëllie reminds me of Maryse.”
“Oh, no.”
“I promise you she is like her—she’s the kind of person who never stops to look at a sunset.”
He laughed. “It doesn’t happen to me so often either, I can tell you.”
“Oh, come! You love nature as much as I do.”
“Well, I suppose I do. But I don’t see that everybody else has to share our tastes.”
His lack of candor disgusted me. “Listen,” I said to him, “there is one thing I must warn you of: I shall not fight with Noëllie over you—if you prefer her to me, that’s your affair. I shan’t struggle.”
“Who’s talking about struggling?”
I shan’t struggle. But fear touched me all at once. Could it conceivably be that Maurice does prefer her to me? The idea had never occurred to me. I know that I possess—all right, let’s leave that word authenticity out of it: maybe it is a trifle priggish—a certain quality that she does not. “You have real quality, my dear,” my father used to say to me, proudly. And Maurice too, in other words. It is this quality that I value above anything else in people—in Maurice, and in Isabelle: and Maurice is like me. No. It is impossible that he should prefer someone as bogus as Noëllie to me. She is “cheap,” as they say in English. But it worries me that he should accept in her so many things that I consider unacceptable. For the first time I see that a gap has come into being between us.
Wednesday 10 November.
I telephoned Quillan the day before yesterday. Oh, I’m not at all proud of it. I had to make sure that a man could still find me desirable. That has been proved. And where does it get me? It has not made me any more desirable to myself.
I had not made up my mind to go to bed with him at all: nor not to. I spent some time getting myself ready: bath salts in my bath and nail polish on my toenails. It was enough to make you weep! In these two years he had not aged but grown more finely drawn—his face is more interesting. I had not remembered that he was so handsome. It was certainly not from lack of being pleased with me that he asked me out with such eagerness. It could have been because of his remembering the past, and I was afraid—I was dreadfully afraid—that he might be disappointed. Not at all.
“So all in all, you are happy?”
“I should be, if I were to see you more often.”
This was in a pleasant restaurant behind the Panthéon—old New Orleans records, very funny funnymen, singers with a good line of songs, anarchistic—that kind of thing. Quillan knew almost everybody in the place—painters like himself, sculptors, musicians: most of them young. He sang himself, accompanied by a guitar. He remembered what records I liked, what dishes; he bought me a rose; he lavished little attentions on me, and I realized how very few I got from Maurice, nowadays. He also paid me those rather silly little compliments that I never hear anymore—compliments on my hands, my smile, my voice. Gradually I let myself be soothed by this tenderness. I forgot that at that moment Maurice was smiling at Noëllie. After all, I was having my share of smiles too. He drew a pretty little portrait of me on a paper napkin—I really did not look like something on the scrap heap. I drank a little, not much. And when he asked if he might come in and have a drink I said yes. (I had told him that Maurice was in the country.) I poured us out two glasses of whiskey. He never stirred, but his eyes were on me all the time. It seemed to me unnatural, seeing him there where Maurice usually sits: my cheerfulness left me. I shivered.
“You’re cold. I’m going to light you a huge fire.” He darted toward the fireplace, but so eagerly and so clumsily that he upset the little wooden statue I bought in Egypt with Maurice that I love so. I shrieked: it was broken!
“I’ll mend it for you,” he said. “It’s perfectly simple.”
But he looked dreadfully upset. Because of my shriek, no doubt—I had shrieked very loudly. A very little while later I said I was tired and that I had to go to bed.
“When shall we see one another again?”
“I’ll call you.”
“You won’t call me at all. Let’s make a date at once.”
I said a day—just any day. I shall beg off. He left. I stayed there dazed, with a piece of my statue in each hand. And I began to sob.
It seemed to me that Maurice looked as though he didn’t like it when I told him I had seen Quillan again.
Saturday 13 November.
Each time I think I have got to the very bottom. And then I sink even further down into doubt and unhappiness. Luce Couturier let herself be taken in like a child: so much so that I wonder whether she may not have done it on purpose.… This business has been going on for more than a year. And Noëllie was in Rome with him in October! Now I understand Maurice’s face at Nice airfield—remorse, shame, fear of being found out. One is inclined to invent hunches for oneself after the event. But in this case I am not inventing anything at all. I sensed something all right, because the going of the plane wrenched my heart out. One never mentions the disagreeable feelings and the uneasinesses that one cannot give a name, but that exist nevertheless.
When Luce and I parted I walked and walked, not knowing where I was going. I was stupefied. I realize it all now—I had not been altogether amazed when I heard that Maurice was going to bed with another woman. It had not been entirely by chance that I asked the question, “Is there a woman in your life?” Without ever being put into words the supposition had hovered there, fleeting and uncertain, half seen through Maurice’s absentmindedness, his not being at home and his coldness. It would be too much to say that I suspected it. But on the other hand I was not completely dumbfounded. While Luce talked to me I was falling, falling; and when I came to myself I was broken quite to pieces. I must look back over the whole of this year again in the light of this discovery—Maurice was going to bed with Noëllie. It is a question of a long-standing relationship. The journey to Alsace that we never carried out. I said, “I will sacrifice myself to the cure of leukemia.” Poor fool! It was Noëllie that kept him in Paris. At the time of the dinner at Diana’s they were already lovers and Luce knew it. Diana too? I shall try to make her talk. Who knows but what this business may not go even further back? Two years ago Noëllie was with Louis Bernard; but maybe she was a pluralist. When I think that I have to fall back on conjectures! And it is Maurice and I who are involved! Obviously all our friends knew what was going on! Oh, what does it matter? I’m beyond caring about what people think. I am too utterly destroyed. I don’t give a damn for the picture they may draw of me. It’s a matter of survival.
“Nothing has changed between us!” What illusions I built up for myself upon those words. Did he mean to say that nothing had changed because he had already been deceiving me for the past year? Or did he really mean nothing at all?
Why did he lie to me?
Did he think me incapable of standing up to the truth? Was he ashamed? In that case why did he tell me? No doubt because Noëllie was tired of concealment. In any case what is happening to me is perfectly dreadful.
Sunday 14 November.
Oh, perhaps it would have been better for me to have held my tongue! But I have never hidden anything from Maurice: at least nothing important. I could not bottle in the fact of his falsehood and my wretchedness. He banged the table. “All this tittle-tattle!” His expression shattered me. I know that angry face of his, and I love it: when Maurice is asked to make an unworthy compromise his mouth tightens and his eyes grow hard. But this time I was the object aimed at, or almost. No, Noëllie was not in Rome with him. No, he had not gone to bed with her before August. He saw her from time to time; possibly people may have seen them out together; there was nothing in it.
“Nobody met you together; but you told Couturier, who told Luce everything.”
“I said I was seeing Noëllie, not that I was going to bed with her. Luce has distorted it all. Telephone Couturier right away and ask him the truth.”
“You know perfectly well that’s impossible.”
I wept. I had promised myself not to weep, but I wept. I said, “You would do better to tell me everything. If I really knew the position I could try to face up to it. But suspecting everything, knowing nothing, is unbearable. If you did no more than see Noëllie, what was the point of hiding it from me?”
“All right. I’ll tell you the whole truth. But now you must believe me. I went to bed three times with Noëllie last year, and it really did not amount to anything. I did not go to Rome with her. Do you believe me?”
The Woman Destroyed Page 14
