Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  Mathilde was just five then, the age when children stop being little angels and become little people, they’re not quite so cute, adults find them less entrancing. Her grandmother went on looking after her with pleasure, but her real pride and joy was Thibaut, the first male child. The adorable, extraordinary, reckless, wilful, insufferable Thibaut. Claire was already in therapy at that stage: she was getting the feeling that at last she could take control of her life and would be capable of going forward alone, without her parents’ support. She had everything she wanted. A husband, two daughters, a very nice apartment. She’d spent ages studying interior design magazines, so that within the limits of their budget, their flat would look stylish. So that Christophe would be proud to invite his colleagues back, and be happy himself to return home in the evenings. She had thought how grateful she was for what life had given her in the nine years with him, every time she found herself chatting to a friend whose husband was unfaithful, or having problems with his career, or being difficult to live with. She had thought how grateful she was, every time she met former schoolfriends who still had no children and thought they could fill their lives with something else. As if you could do without that kind of love and not miss out on what life was all about. In return, she tried her best to take care of everything properly, writing herself long to-do lists that she never completely dealt with. She saw to all the family medical appointments, sorted out clothes for the different seasons, organized their holidays, supervised the children’s homework, thought of interesting activities for them, had plates that matched the tablecloth, found a good dentist, arranged fun birthday parties, paid the bills, drove the children to the swimming pool, bought new shirts for her husband before the old ones wore out, recruited a cleaning woman, located the best car insurance. She had never imagined that Christophe would underestimate the happiness they enjoyed, and his good fortune in having a wife like her at home. A wife who would help his children grow up, who wasn’t a big spender, who was always cheerful and took care of everything without complaint.

  One Friday evening, he had rung up at eight o’clock to warn her he had to work over the whole weekend and wouldn’t be home. Mathilde was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television and the little one was in the bath surrounded by Barbie dolls. A lump had suddenly formed in Claire’s throat. The previous times, no doubts had occurred to her, but a list had been building up, in her reason’s blind spot, of all the occasions recently when he had got home at two in the morning, of the conferences in the provinces, and of the meetings at weekends. And that evening, despite her unwillingness to understand, the pieces had come together. There’d been a lot of absences recently. He didn’t call home all weekend and on the Monday night when he got in, he wasn’t his usual self. Claire had started talking, an unconscious mechanism. Her mouth opened and words spilled out endlessly, because she sensed that as soon as she paused, he’d say what he had to say. It had worked before, she knew that without admitting it to herself. She just had to play for time for him to give up trying and say nothing. But that evening, almost as soon as the girls were in bed, he’d interrupted her. ‘I’ve met someone, another woman. And I’m moving out.’ It was ridiculous. She wanted to wipe out the words. It was a cliché. It couldn’t happen to them, it wasn’t like them. Before believing he was capable of leaving her, she was angry with him for saying the words. Their love would never again be intact. It would take her a few more years to admit that he had not said something he would later regret. Her great perfect love, he’d smashed it to pieces. And then, rapidly, she’d lost everything.

  Her mother’s pained tone when she telephoned, and the awful feeling that apart from her, everyone else had suspected it. The humiliating pity of other people. The ten years when she had been convinced that everyone she met was impressed by her happy marriage. And perhaps even jealous, since many people were unlucky in love, or had no children, or had to bring them up as single parents. Having to endure their so-called understanding, their self-satisfied pity, and their humiliating encouragement. People had all been very quick to expect her to get over it. As if their story had been one you put behind you, a love like any other. For a long time, Claire had hoped that life would prove them all wrong, that Christophe would come back and she’d be able to show them all what kind of love they had. A rock-solid love, invincible, a couple that nothing could separate. She had never been angry with him, not once. She had waited for him. Nothing that happened after he left could satisfy her, she just wanted her old life back, she didn’t want to take any aspect of the new situation seriously on board. Her friends’ unwelcome remarks, the hints uttered in falsely friendly tones to the effect that she should have realized long ago that he was unfaithful, that he was tired of her, and that he’d taken the right decision.

  She’d distanced herself from her former girlfriends. She didn’t want to be thought of as ‘a single mother’ of her two daughters, or as ‘unattached’, still less as ‘remaking her life’. She had nothing in common with all those losers, so they were wrong thinking she was like them. Even her relations with the girls were affected. At heart, she thought that the children ought to have made Christophe come back home. She felt they weren’t trying hard enough. They could have fallen ill, refused to see their father, been hostile to his new partners, failed to enjoy holidays with him, they could have insisted, taken their mother’s side, and found a way to get what she wanted for all of them: their old life back. Instead of which they’d grown up, immersed themselves in things at school. Mathilde had become coquettish, by nine years old she was wanting nail varnish, brand label clothes and lip gloss. Other things didn’t seem to matter to her. Elisabeth had begun learning the piano and liked gym. They didn’t apparently realize that all three of them had been badly hurt, cheated of the life they were owed.

  And now as they were growing up, Claire started feeling that her daughters were judging her. Not saying anything openly. But perhaps behind her back, when they were alone. As time went by, they looked more shifty. They seemed to be scornful of their mother. This woman abandoned by her husband, obliged to count her pennies, living on a derisory sum of alimony, since she hadn’t even managed the divorce successfully, having failed to select a ruthless lawyer, who would have got the maximum for her. At the end of every session, the therapist would explain to Claire that if her daughters listened to her less, it was simply because they were growing up, they weren’t judging her. There too she wanted her old life back: to be the idol of her children, the centre of their world. She wanted to feel their soft little bodies and their arms round her neck. For them to be little girls again, when she had always known how to make them happy and when she had had an answer for everything.

  Claire had also become distanced from her mother, who scarcely four months after the break-up was saying, ‘Come on, sweetie, get over it. And anyway between ourselves, he wasn’t God’s gift was he, your man, I know he’s the girls’ father, but let’s not kid ourselves, he was pretty much a philistine and very selfish.’ Claire hadn’t been able to hang up on her, or tell her how hurtful these words were. Long knives plunged into her heart. To realize that, for other people, their love hadn’t been stunning, her good fortune hadn’t been amazing. Just an ordinary couple, an ordinary break-up, life, like everyone else. She was shattered, flayed alive, and her shrink prescribed a course of anti-depressants. She lost fifteen kilos. Her weight started to obsess her, as it had in the past, and the transformation had been enough to make her feel better. Claire wanted people to think she was just fine. In the end, what she really felt didn’t matter. She was watching for signs of how other people saw her, interpreting their looks; and if she could convince herself that they thought she was on top of things and lucky in life, she felt better.

  She’d found a part-time job as secretary in an upmarket sports club, the girls were doing well at school, and she paraded them as if they were living proof that she was well-balanced; she brandished them in the world’s face, they were her Gra
de A in the great exam of wordly success. Women whom their husbands have left for a younger model after the age of fifty will often say, ‘I wish he’d gone earlier, then I could have rebuilt my life.’ They don’t know what they’re saying. There’s nothing worse than being left before you’re even thirty-five. You’re being left for what you are, nothing to do with age, and it deprives the children of a whole life with both parents, it means being left lying on your back like some stupid insect that’ll never be able to right itself again.

  The only female friends Claire could tolerate now were unmarried women her own age with no children. These were the only ones on whom she could look down, the only ones she could meet without fearing that the comparison would be unfavourable to her. But even women like that ended up making her feel nervous. Elise, her best friend for the last two years, was forty. Poor thing, she claimed she didn’t miss having children. Claire listened to her lying through her teeth, with the maternal patience of one who knows that the other dare not admit her sorrows. What it could be like, living your life as a woman without giving birth, without that basic centre around which all life is organized, Claire preferred not even to think about it, and she listened to Elise’s rants without reacting, displaying considerable benevolence. But even Elise wasn’t unfortunate enough to her taste. Last heard of, she was planning to go off sailing the world for several months with her latest lover, a chancer ten years younger than her, who was obviously using his older mistress to help pay the bills on his boat. And Elise was convinced that this was the call of love, she’d decided to give notice at work, let her apartment, and go to sea. In her head, over and over, Claire mentally rehearsed all the points against this decision, for her friend’s own good. She realized that she was obsessing about it and admitted as much on the therapist’s couch, acknowledging that there was some jealousy at the bottom of this anxiety. Forty wasn’t even too old for Elise to get pregnant. She didn’t want Elise to suffer. Just that she should remain in a situation slightly less desirable than her own.

  And then, after all, François had come along. Encountered in a first-class compartment of the TGV, on the way back from Lyon, where she had dropped Elisabeth off for a pony-riding holiday. Claire had been reading a book by Paul Morand, which she found boring, but since she had nothing else with her, she had opened it and tried to find some interest in it. The man sitting next to her had hesitated for a while before speaking to her. At first, the only thing that she’d found attractive about him was that he was interested in her. He’d managed to extract the number of her mobile from her before saying goodbye at the station, and had called next day with a pressing invitaton to have dinner.

  She found him on the plump side, a bit old for her, with tired features: his stumpy reddish hands had something of the peasant about them. More full of himself than charismatic. But she had liked it when he paid her compliments throughout the three-hour train journey, even if she was well aware of something a bit pathetic about the situation: chatting up your neighbour on a train wasn’t exactly high romance. He had said he was a writer, and had repeated his name on the message he left on her voicemail. When she had googled him though, her feelings had changed. Inwardly, she had mocked herself: ‘All it took was three good reviews and you find he’s worth seeing after all… at your age, acting like a groupie, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ Then she had called Lucette, her manicurist, who was a great reader – she and Lucette had become quite friendly, the manicurist stayed for a cup of tea after doing her nails and they gossiped about this and that. Lucette had a son and a daughter, but neither father had recognized the children or even stayed round long enough to see them. She had money problems, a family that gobbled up all she earned, and what with everything it was entirely relaxing to be friends with her, especially since she had a sense of humour and was quite witty. Lucette read a lot, trying to drown her sorrows by escaping into books. When she heard the name of this new man on the horizon, she’d reacted very satisfactorily: ‘Mata Hari in My Dreams – fabulous novel, haven’t you read it? Oh, I’ll lend you it if you like. You actually met him? No!’ Her reaction had made Claire feel like accepting the dinner date.

  During which she had been rather bored, although she appreciated the impressive place he took her to, a fancy seafood restaurant, grand surroundings, good wine, huge bill. It had been quite easy to keep to ‘not on our first date’. She had let him hold her hand in the taxi going home, inwardly convinced that this wasn’t going to come to anything. When he wasn’t talking about himself, he was ranting about literary prizes, how journalists could publish terrible books but still get good reviews from all their colleagues, about authors who were translated without deserving it, and other examples of unjustified success. But François had been persistent: next day he called her about going to the theatre to see a play based on a novel by some friend of his.

  She’d accepted, thinking she might back out at the last minute. Nevertheless, in her local bookshop, Claire had found a paperback of Mata Hari in My Dreams, with on the cover a detail of a Botticelli painting, not all that exciting. And that afternoon, lying fully dressed on her bed, she’d fallen in love. She’d slipped into his power, as she read page after page, description after description. An almost painful desire had taken shape deep inside her, a desire to belong to the man whose hand had written those lines, a desire to be the object of his gaze, to be penetrated by his lucidity, taken limb from limb, exhibited, seen, re-transcribed. The writing had authority. Every sentence became erotic because it had been framed by the power of the man who desired her. She’d never before read a novel thinking physically about the novelist who’d written it. Some particularly aggressive pages aimed at women had triggered in her a wild sexual desire.

  She spent the whole afternoon on the bed reading. It was more thrilling than really sleeping with him. Her daughters had hardly got in before she left them alone and made a dash by metro to the Virgin Megastore that stayed open until midnight, to find two more novels by him, one hardback, one in paperback. Locating books with this man’s name on the cover, in that immense shop, had been the final touch, propelling her into an insane erotic trance. She had hardly slept, plunging into their pages with the feeling that she was truly alive, a sensation she had long forgotten. She even liked the bits that seemed rather puerile, like the way the narrator always had the best lines, even in situations where it was clear he wasn’t very successful. François always had to twist the scene so that it came down to the level of his narrator’s character, then he could dominate it. But even that she ended up liking, the childish side, the suggestion of fragility, an aspect of him that she could protect. His novels whispered, to a corner of her heart, that she had met a man she could love.

  In practice, when they had actually gone to bed together a few days later, it wasn’t like in his books. François was a lot older than Christophe.

  Say what you like about pornography, it had had the merit of telling men of his age that you don’t make love lying flat out on your partner without even looking up from time to time to see how she is reacting. François wasn’t a bad lover but he was from a different age. He rubbed the parts of his body he thought relevant up against her, giving the impression of taking advantage of what she let him do. But then Claire wasn’t a woman who expected to enjoy sex. It sometimes happened, perhaps inadvertently. She didn’t find it all that interesting. All the same, a little sensuality, a minimum of foreplay, wouldn’t have come amiss. She had always secretly thought it must be the same for everyone and that other women were like her. They were playing with words when they talked about orgasms. Except for sickos of course. But normal women, women like her, liked the climax, feeling that their partner was having pleasure and that they were making that possible. In fact, it replaced orgasm as far as she was concerned, her liking for another person’s skin, penis, pleasure. That, she thought, was woman’s true enjoyment of sex. This sharing.