French Leave

by Anna Gavalda

  It makes me sad to see her like that, straitjacketed by all her prejudices and incapable of tenderness. And then I remember that she was raised by the dashing Jacques and Francine Molinoux at the far end of a dead-end street in the residential outskirts of Le Mans and I figure that, all things considered, she isn’t doing so badly after all . . .

  The cease-fire didn’t last, and Simon was used for target practice.

  “You’re driving too fast. Lock the doors, we’re getting near the tollbooth. What on earth is that on the radio? I didn’t mean twenty miles an hour though, did I? Why’d you turn the A/C off? Watch out for those bikers. Are you sure you’ve got the right map? Can’t you read the road signs, please? It’s so stupid, I’m sure the gas cost less back there . . . Be careful in the curves, can’t you see I’m painting my nails? Hey . . . are you doing it on purpose, or what?”

  I can just make out the back of my brother’s neck in the hollow space of his headrest. That fine, straight neck, his hair cut short.

  I wonder how he can stand it, I wonder if he ever dreams of tying her to a tree and running off as fast as his legs can carry him.

  Why does she speak to him like that? Does she even know who she’s talking to? Does she even know that the man sitting next to her was the god of scale models? The ace of Meccano sets? A Lego System genius?

  A patient little boy who could spend several months building an awesome planet, with dried lichen for the ground and hideous creatures made of bread rolled in spiders’ webs?

  A stubborn little tyke who entered every contest and won nearly all of them: Nesquik, Ovomaltine, Babybel, Caran d’Ache, Kellogg’s, and the Mickey Mouse Club?

  One year, his sand castle was so beautiful that the members of the jury disqualified him: they claimed he’d had help. He cried all afternoon and our granddad had to take him to the crêperie to console him. He drank three whole mugs of hard cider, one after the other.

  First time he ever got roaring drunk.

  Does she even know that for months her good little lapdog of a hubby wore a satin Superman cape day and night that he folded up conscientiously in his schoolbag whenever it was time to go through the gate into the schoolyard? He was the only boy who knew how to repair the photocopy machine in the town hall. And he was the only one who’d ever seen Mylène Carois’s underpants—she was the butcher’s daughter, Carois & Fils. (He hadn’t dared to tell her that he was not all that interested.)

  Simon Lariot, a discreet man, who’d always made his own sweet way, gracefully, without bothering a soul.

  Who never threw tantrums, or whined, or asked for a thing. Who went through prep school and got into engineering school without ever grinding his teeth or resorting to Tenormin. Who didn’t want to make a big deal when he did well, and blushed to the tips of his ears when the headmistress of the Lycée Stendhal kissed him in the street to congratulate him.

  The same big boy who can laugh like an idiot for exactly twenty minutes when he’s smoking a joint and who knows every single trajectory of every single spaceship in Star Wars.

  I’m not saying he’s a saint, I’m saying he’s better than one.

  Why, then? Why does he let people walk all over him? It’s a mystery to me. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve wanted to shake him, to open his eyes and get him to pound his fist on the table. Countless times.

  One day Lola tried. He sent her packing and barked that it was his life, after all.

  Which is true. It’s his life. But we’re the ones who are saddened by it.

  Which is idiotic, in a way. We’ve got more than enough to keep us busy on our own turf.

  He opens up the most with Vincent. Because of the Internet. They write each other all the time, send each other corny jokes and links for websites where they can find old vinyl LPs and used guitars and other model enthusiasts. Simon made himself a great friend in Massachusetts, they swap photos of their respective remote-controlled boats. The guy’s name is Cecil (Simon can’t pronounce it right, he says, See-sull) W. Thurlington, and he lives in a big house on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Lola and I think it sounds really . . . chic. Martha’s Vineyard . . . “The cradle of the Kennedys,” as they say in Paris Match.

  We have this fantasy where we take the plane and then go up to Cecil’s private beach and we shout, “Yoo-hoo! Darling See-sull! We are Simon’s sisters! We are so very ahn-shahn-tay!”

  We picture him wearing a navy blue blazer, with an old rose cotton sweater thrown over his shoulders, and off-white linen slacks. Straight out of a Ralph Lauren ad.

  When we threaten to dishonor Simon with our plan, he tends to lose some of his cool.

  “Hey, are you doing it on purpose or what?”

  “Well how many coats do you have to put on, anyway?” he says eventually.

  “Three.”

  “Three coats?”

  “Base, color, and fixer.”

  “Oh . . . ”

  “Be careful, and at least warn me when you’re about to brake.”

  He raises his eyebrows. No. Correction. One eyebrow.

  What can he be thinking when he raises his right eyebrow like that?

  We ate rubbery sandwiches at one of those freeway rest stops. It was revolting. I’d been plugging for a plat du jour at one of the truck stops but “they don’t know how to wash the lettuce.” True. I’d forgotten. So, three vacuum wrapped sandwiches, please. (Infinitely more hygienic.)

  “It may not be good, but at least we know what we’re eating!”

  That’s one way of looking at it.

  We were sitting outside next to the garbage dumpsters. You could hear “brrrrammm” and “brrrroommm” every two seconds but I wanted to smoke a cigarette and Carine cannot stand the smell of tobacco.

  “I have to use the restroom,” she announced, with a pained expression. “I don’t suppose it’s too luxurious . . . ”

  “Why don’t you go in the grass?” I asked.

  “In front of everyone? Are you crazy?”

  “Just go a little bit further, that way. I’ll come with you if you want.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll get my shoes dirty.”

  “I don’t think so, the time it will take you . . . ”

  She got up without condescending to answer.

  “You know, Carine,” I said solemnly, “the day you learn to enjoy having a wee in the grass, you’ll be a much happier person.”

  She took her towelettes.

  “Everything is just fine, thank you.”

  I turned to my brother. He was staring at the cornfield as if he were trying to count every single ear. He didn’t look too great.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” he replied, without turning around.

  “Doesn’t look it.”

  He was rubbing his face.

  “I’m tired.”

  “What of?”

  “Of everything.”

  “You? I don’t believe you.”

  “And yet it’s true.”

  “Is it your work?”

  “My work. My life. Everything.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Why wouldn’t I tell you?”

  He had his back to me again.

  “Yo, Simon! Hey, what’s going on? Don’t talk like this. You’re the hero of the family, in case you need reminding.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s kind of the problem . . . the hero is tired.”

  I was speechless. This was the first time I’d ever seen him in such a state.

  If Simon was beginning to have his doubts, where were we headed?

  Just then—and to me this was a miracle, although on the other hand it doesn’t surprise me, and I kiss the patron saint of brothers and sisters who has been watching over us now for nearly thirty-five years, and who has never been out of work, poor guy—his cell rang.

  It was Lola, who had finally made up her mind, and was asking him if he could stop an
d pick her up at the station in Châteauroux.

  Our spirits immediately revived. Simon put his cell back in his pocket and asked me for a cigarette. Carine came back, scrubbing her arms right up to her elbows. She immediately reminded her husband of the precise number of cancer victims who had died because of . . . He gave a limp wave of his hand as if he were chasing a fly and she walked away, coughing.

  Lola was coming. Lola would be with us. Lola hadn’t let us down, and the rest of the world could just go hang.

  Simon put on his dark glasses.

  He was smiling.

  His little Lola was on the train . . .

  They have this special thing between them. First of all, they’re closest in age, only eighteen months apart, and they were really children together.

  They were the ones who were always getting up to mischief. Lola had an irrepressible imagination and Simon was pliant (already . . . ). They ran away. They got lost. They got into fights, tormented each other, made up. Mom likes to tell us how Lola would needle him all the time, always going into his bedroom to bug him, grabbing the book from his hands or kicking something straight into his Playmobil. My sister doesn’t like to recall these acts of war (she worries she’s being lumped in the same basket with Carine), so then our mom senses that she’d better change tack and she adds that Lola was always eager for something new, she’d invite all the kids in the neighborhood and invent all kinds of new games. She was like one of those cool scout leaders who can come up with a thousand ideas a minute, and she watched over her big brother like a broody hen. She’d make all sorts of inedible snacks for him with mustard and Nutella and she’d come and lift him out of his Legos when Grendizer or Captain Harlock was on television.

  Lola and Simon grew up during the Golden Age. When there was Villiers. When we all lived out in the sticks and our parents were happy together. For them the world began outside the front door and ended on the far side of the village.

  They would streak across fields pursued by imaginary bulls, and creep into abandoned houses haunted by ghosts that weren’t imaginary at all.

  They rang the bell at old mother Margeval’s until she was ripe for the asylum; they destroyed the hunters’ traps; they pissed into washtubs, nicked the teacher’s dirty magazines, stole firecrackers, set off the ones called mammoth, and rescued little kittens that some bastard had sealed up alive in a plastic bag.

  Boom. Seven kittens all at once. You bet Pop was happy!

  And the day the Tour de France came through our village . . . Lola and Simon went and bought fifty baguettes and sold sandwiches by the dozen. With their earnings they bought practical jokes and gags, and sixty Malabar candies, and a jump-rope for me, and a little trumpet for Vincent (already!), and the latest Yoko Tsuno.

  Yes, childhood was different back then . . . They knew what an oarlock was, and they smoked creepers and knew the taste of gooseberries. And then there came the biggest major significant event of all, what a huge impact it had, and it happened right behind the door to the shed:

  Today Ar April 8 we saw the preist waring shorts.

  Then they went through our parents’ divorce, together. Vincent and I were still too little. We only really figured out what a raw deal we were getting when the day came to move house. But they’d been able to witness the entire show. They would get up in the middle of the night and go and sit side by side at the top of the stairs to listen to the “discussion.” One night Pop knocked over the humungous kitchen cupboard and Mom drove off in the car.

  While ten steps up from there they sat sucking their thumbs.

  It’s stupid to go on telling that side of the story: they were close for any number of reasons that, in the long run, meant more than the tough times. But still . . .

  For Vincent and me it was completely different. We were city brats. Less bicycling and more time in front of the box. We had no idea how to stick on a rubber repair patch but we did know how to dodge a subway fare or repair a skateboard or sneak into the movies through the emergency exit.

  And then Lola got sent to boarding school, and there was no one around anymore to fill our heads with whispered mischief or chase after us in the garden . . .

  We wrote to each other every week. She was my beloved older sister. I idealized her; I sent her drawings and wrote poems to her. When she came home she would ask me whether Vincent had behaved himself during her absence. Of course not, I’d say, of course not. And I’d describe in detail all the horrible things I’d had to undergo the previous week. At which point, to my supreme satisfaction, she’d drag him into the bathroom to acquaint him with the riding crop.

  The louder my brother screamed, the wider I grinned.

  And then one day, to make it even better, I wanted to see him suffer. To my complete, flabbergasted horror, I burst in to find my sister whipping a bolster, while Vincent bleated in time, reading his Boule et Bill comic book. A mega disappointment. On that day, Lola fell from her pedestal.

  Which turned out to be a good thing. Now we were the same height.

  Nowadays she’s my best friend. We’re sort of like Mon­taigne and La Boétie, for example . . . Because she is who she is, and I am who I am. The fact that this young woman of thirty-two years of age is also my older sister is totally beside the point. Well, maybe not totally, it’s just fortunate we didn’t have to waste time trying to find each other.

  She’s all into Montaigne’s Essays—she likes grand theories, the notion that one is punished for stubbornly wanting, and philosophy is just learning how to die. Give me the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude—infinite abuse and all those tyrants who are great because we are on our knees. She’ll take true knowledge, I’ll take tribunals. As the wise man himself said: “I was so grown and accustomed to be always her double in all places and in all things, that methinks I am no more than half of myself.”

  And yet we are very different . . . She is afraid of her own shadow; I sit on mine. She copies out sonnets, I download samples. She admires painters, I prefer photographers. She never tells you what is in her heart, I speak my mind. She avoids conflict, I like things to be perfectly clear. She likes to be “a little bit tipsy,” I prefer to drink. She doesn’t like going out, I don’t like going home. She doesn’t know how to have fun, I don’t know when it’s time to get some sleep. She hates gambling, I hate losing. Her embrace is all-encompassing, my kindness has its limits. She never gets annoyed, I’m forever blowing a gasket.

  She says the world belongs to early risers, I beg her to tone it down. She’s romantic, I’m pragmatic. She got married, I flitter and flirt. She can’t sleep with a guy unless she’s in love, I can’t sleep with a guy unless there’s a condom. She needs me.

  Ditto.

  She doesn’t judge, she takes me as I am. With my gray complexion and my black thoughts. Or my rosebud complexion and my buttercup thoughts. Lola knows how it feels to lust after a pea jacket or a pair of heels. She completely understands how much fun it can be to max out a credit card then feel guilty as hell when the bill comes. Lola spoils me. She holds the curtain for me when I’m in the fitting room, and she always tells me I’m beautiful and no, not at all, it doesn’t make my butt look big. She asks, every time, how my love life is going, and pulls a face when I tell her about my lovers.

  Whenever we haven’t seen each other in a long while she takes me to a brasserie, Bofinger or Balzar, to look at the guys. I focus on the ones at nearby tables; she zeroes in on the waiters. She is fascinated by those dorky dudes in tight waistcoats. She can’t take her eyes off them, she imagines life stories for them straight out of a Claude Sautet film, and she dissects their perfectly trained mannerisms. The funny thing is that at some point you always see one of them going out the door at the end of his shift. And then she wonders what she ever saw in him. Jeans or even jogging pants in lieu of the long white apron, and an offhand shout to a co-worker as he takes his leave: “Bye, Bernard!”

  “Bye, Mimi. You here tomorrow?”

  “No way. Dr
eam on, dude.”

  Lola looks down and traces patterns in the sauce on her plate with her fingertips. Another one gone . . .

  We sort of lost sight of each other for a while. First boarding school, then studies, then her wedding, vacations at her in-laws’, dinner parties . . .

  We still knew how to hug, but we’d lost the art of letting ourselves go. She had changed sides. Teams, rather. She wasn’t playing against us so much as playing for a league that was, well, kind of boring. Some sort of half-assed cricket, for example, with lots of incomprehensible rules, where you go running after something you never see, and it can really hurt, too . . . some sort of leathery thing with a cork core. (Hey, Lola! I didn’t mean to, but I’ve just summed it all up!)

  Whereas we younger kids were still busy with a lot more basic things. A lovely lawn⇒yabba dabba doo! Heineken and neckin’. Tall boys wearing white polo shirts⇒honk, honk! The bat in your behind. Well, you see what I’m driving at . . . Not really mature enough yet for strolls around the Bassin de Neptune at Versailles . . .

  There you have it. We’d wave to each other from a distance. She made me the godmother of her first child and I made her the trustee of my first broken heart (and did I weep, a regular baptismal fount), but between two of these sort of major events there was not much going on. Birth­days, family luncheons, a few cigarettes shared on the sly so her honey wouldn’t see, a knowing look, or her head on my shoulder when we’d browse through old photos . . .

  That was life. Her life, at any rate.

  Respect.

  And then she came back to us. Covered in ash, with the lunatic gaze of the pyromaniac who’s just handed in his box of matches. Plaintiff in a divorce that no one expected. It has to be said she played her cards close to her chest, the vixen. Everyone thought she was happy. I think we even admired her for it, for the way she’d found the exit so easily and quickly. “Lola’s got it all sorted out,” we’d say, without bitterness or envy. Lola is still champ when it comes to treasure hunts . . .