My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  “Ange and I have the same tastes, the same opinions, and you know it,” I say softly. “Didn’t we invite you over more than once? We did all we could to build a friendship with you. We reached out to you, and you pushed our hands away.”

  I didn’t add how deeply I admired Ange, at the time, for his open-mindedness in trying to welcome and console my ex-husband, who from what I could see had fallen into hatred and despair all the same. Did Ange fruitlessly strive to befriend my ex-husband in hopes of proving his depression was feigned, or at least wildly exaggerated? That was the question I suddenly asked myself, all these years later, sitting on a floral-print futon in the vulgar, dingy place our charming living room had become thanks to my ex-husband’s unelevated mind and atavistic ways. Ange would have found it unbearable to sit all day in a living room furnished and decorated like this, I wished I could tell him, be irritated at him, at the overtness of his sorrow, and then add: life is more complicated than you think, oh, innocence is too easy a way out.

  And yet, I said to myself, and yet… I felt a resurgence of the stifled remorse that had tainted my new life of love at the time, the vague awareness that Ange and I had, in a way, debased my ex-husband, not really meaning to—or did we? I’d dimly felt that by deceiving and hurting my ex-husband, and then trying to draw him to us, into our discreetly luxurious apartment, we had—not without a certain pleasure—defiled something that was beyond us, something that irritated us.

  Which was what? A kind of saintliness? But Ange and I looked on such words with horror, and not just the words but everything they stood for.

  Nonetheless, I tell myself—standing at the front door on Rue Esprit-des-Lois, unable to bring myself to push it open and go back to our apartment—nonetheless, we turned my ex-husband into a bitter, mean person, capable, for example, of quietly working to alienate our son from Lanton out of pure self-interest, out of stupidity and intolerance, because he didn’t feel one way or another about Lanton. All that, I say to myself, as if the perfect kindness of someone you haven’t yet wronged can only turn into mindless cruelty, spurred by resentment and disillusionment, as soon as things change. Maybe, then, my ex-husband wouldn’t have turned so cruel if he hadn’t been so kind, I tell myself. Doesn’t that alone prove he was no saint? Because if he were, hurt or not, he would have stayed just as he was. His hurt and dishonor would in fact have made him even finer than before.

  “The only reason he wanted me in his apartment was to make fun of me,” said my ex-husband, speaking of Ange.

  “Certainly not,” I said, indignantly.

  “He wanted to show you I was an idiot, with the living proof right there in front of you. He must have thought you weren’t quite convinced. He would have asked me questions about all sorts of things that I wouldn’t have known how to answer, and so by his standards I would have been humiliated,” my ex-husband calmly went on, his voice steady, almost detached.

  He said this without accusation or blame, simply as an observation, almost unsurprised, and beneath his mask of sadness and premature age I caught a startling glimpse of the man he once was, his quietly radiant way. And that’s how he would have stayed, unchanging, if Ange and I hadn’t…

  As if in a last, desperate effort, even with nothing left to win or defend, I leaned toward my ex-husband on that hideous couch, sinking my nails into my palms, and whispered, almost pleading, “But you know perfectly well that… I mean, the whole thing was that…I stopped loving you!”

  He looked at his palms with a little smile, raised his head, and again I saw the man he would have been, should have been, if only we’d let him.

  “So?” said my ex-husband, smiling sweetly.

  Then his face suddenly jerked back to the present, closed up, shrank. He let out a sharp, manic, mindless little laugh.

  “So they kicked you out of your school, huh? What on earth were you two getting up to, that it came to that? Even the worst teacher in the world usually can’t get fired.”

  He clearly has no idea what’s going on, I thought, weary and surprised at the same time. I felt just as I do when I’m faced with a hopelessly backward student: I didn’t know where to start.

  “Now I understand: you don’t see what’s happening,” I said hesitantly. “You yourself, my poor friend… Who would ever want to hire you now? None of your tony downtown customers from the old days, I can tell you that. You’re marked, just like Ange and me. You think you chose to banish yourself because you didn’t want to be where you are, and you think you quit working because somehow that’s what you wanted or because you were supposedly so depressed you didn’t feel up to it anymore—you’re convinced you have your own reasons, in other words, but that’s not how it is at all. You’re one of those people no one can stand to see in the city anymore. So are Ange and I. Oh, ask Lanton if you don’t believe me. And I’ll tell you another thing.”

  I leaned in so close that my breath grazed his face. He backed away primly, repelled and offended. So now I disgust him? And who is he to be disgusted by me?

  “Even the city,” I went on, “you’ll see, try it for yourself, even the city’s had enough of us. Either, I don’t know how to say this, either it contracts like it’s trying to expel us, or it dilates monstrously to make us lose our way, or else, and I’ve seen this with my own eyes, it reshapes itself so you don’t even recognize it.”

  My ex-husband stared at me in silence, dubious and uncomfortable. I could feel myself blushing.

  “Please,” I said, “don’t look at me like I’m crazy. Don’t tell me I must be tired, don’t tell me I might want to see a psychiatrist. Ask Lanton, ask Ange, you’ll see.”

  “Hmm,” he grunted.

  He tried to force his face into a neutral, vaguely indifferent expression.

  Thoroughly disheartened, I stood up and made for the door, very aware of my heavy, hobbled gait (my thighs slapping, my fat knees colliding, my belly compressed by the cardigan), but cold, uninterested in his opinion. My ex-husband caught up with me as I was reaching for the doorknob.

  “Come see,” he said, in a hungry, husky voice.

  After an awkward pause, he took my arm and led me to what was once our son’s bedroom. He threw open the door and stepped back, beaming with pride. Really, I say to myself as I finally open the door on Rue Esprit-des-Lois to go back to Ange, really, what a ridiculous man, how pathetic. My cheeks are hot again, in mingled shame, spite, and disbelief, and there in the entryway to our building I find I have to stop and rest until my heart, my scandalized, insulted heart, starts to beat a little slower.

  “It’s the perfect child’s room, isn’t it?” my ex-husband said.

  He seemed eager to hear my cries of wonderment, and he gently pushed on my back to herd me further into the room, our son’s bedroom for almost twenty years, which he’d decorated with all the many images of his successive idolatries, from Winnie the Pooh to Kurt Cobain, his beloved bedroom that he wanted left untouched even long after he’d moved out, where he didn’t hesitate to make love with Lanton, now and then, after they’d had dinner with my ex-husband, such that in the end he stopped inviting them, much to the relief of all three, I imagine.

  Really, though, I’d said to Lanton, amused in spite of myself, that’s just not done, you’re not supposed to screw within earshot of your father-in-law, and in a teenager’s bedroom, what’s more.

  Lanton had burst into that lighthearted, innocent laugh I so loved, blushing adorably. And as if to defend my son, he’d confessed, a little embarrassed but also vaguely boastful, that it was all his own idea, those trysts in the virginal bedroom after they’d choked down the food inexpertly prepared by the papa (as he called my ex-husband), that on his own my son would never have drawn anyone at all into that old sleigh bed of his, which in any case was too short for Lanton’s lanky frame.

  Now the walls were covered in pink wallpaper with fine tone-on-tone stripes, the floor carpeted in dark pink, the room filled with a multitude of stuffed animals, evidently ch
osen for their pinkness, which ranged from the palest rose to the deepest fuchsia. A little pinewood bed with a pink satin canopy sat under the window, through which I could make out the drab, fog-shrouded façades on Rue Fondaudège.

  “Oh,” I said instinctively, “don’t you know you’re never supposed to put a child’s bed under a window? Imagine the little thing standing up, pounding the window with her tiny fists, falling through it, ending up three floors below…”

  My ex-husband’s eyes widened in terror.

  “That’s true, you’re right,” he mumbled.

  I realized he was having to force himself, for his dignity’s sake, not to move the little bed away at once.

  “Shall we move it together?” I heard myself offer, astonished at myself.

  And so we found ourselves hoisting our granddaughter’s bed, meant for this Souhar I’d never met, so we could move it next to the wall without marring the carpet, which really was very luxurious, lustrous and thick.

  “That will take care of the little princess,” said my ex-husband, happy and relieved. “What do you think?”

  Pity, as well as a lingering trace of affection for this man I’d so terribly hurt, stopped me from answering that I found his decorative choices appalling, from the posters of naked babies in fields of flowers or cabbages to the relentless pink everywhere you looked, and so I merely asked him, in a slightly pinched voice, “Where did you find the money for all this froufrou?”

  “It cost me everything I had,” said my ex-husband, so unguardedly that I was sorry I’d carped at him.

  After all, I asked myself, what business is it of mine? And then, in my pocket, my fingertips grazed my son’s crumpled letter. A surge of anger made me feel almost sick to my stomach. Oh yes, I snarled to myself, how easy it is to claim you’re broke when you’ve thrown away all your money!

  I stomped out of the room, sickened by such vulgarity, such mindless materialism.

  “I’ll bet you’re going to buy her her own television,” I barked.

  “Yes, that’s next on the list,” said my ex-husband, with the same almost beatific simplicity as when he talked about the child.

  I heaved a very audible sigh, noting that he seemed to have forgotten all about his move to Spain. We were back at the apartment’s front door. Just then I heard a rustle coming from my old study, a little room overlooking the courtyard, where I used to prepare my lessons and grade my students’ papers. How I loved that study, I remembered with some sadness. I slipped past my ex-husband before he could stop me. I threw open the door to my study, hearing his frantic cries behind me.

  And now I’m standing in the lobby of our building, wondering: Am I going to tell Ange what I saw in that room? Or would he not understand that sight’s implications, maybe not even care, in his deep indifference to anything that concerned my ex-husband? Oh, it’s not like it used to be, I tell myself, I can’t confide in Ange about anything—I have to worry about his health and be wary of him at the same time—there’s nobody left I can talk to. (So he was the only one? Yes, that’s exactly right, and didn’t that make us proud, as if our arrogant conjugal seclusion, our longstanding habit of hearing anything we were told with a deliberately inattentive, deliberately closed ear, so that no one’s little personal problems would linger in our memory, as if that cozy isolation had been won from some heroic struggle or expressed some special grandeur, when in fact, I suddenly say to myself, it might have been nothing more than a failing disguised as a choice!)

  No, I sadly think, I won’t be telling Ange that I saw Corinna Daoui after all these years, and especially not that I found the Daoui woman in a place I never dreamed she might set foot, never imagined she might dare, yes, to display her revolting, seedy, defiled self: the pretty, sober little room I once used as a study, off-limits to everyone when I was away, even to my ex-husband, such that our son long referred to it as “my mother’s sacred study.”

  Can you imagine? I would ask Ange if I could. All those years went by and I never once thought about Daoui, never felt a single sordid memory of Corinna flit past my mind, of Corinna or more precisely everything she represents in my Les Aubiers memories, and then all of a sudden I find her ensconced in my own apartment, on Rue Fondaudège, where I never, ever thought a Corinna Daoui might have the nerve to venture, so widely—when I lived there, at least—did the people of Les Aubiers fear and loathe the city center.

  Do you understand? I’d say to Ange, who would shake his head in honest denial. No, he would say, I can’t understand why the sight of this woman should upset you so, since very rightly you’ve never wasted your time wondering what sort of life your ex-husband was living, and who with, and in what room of your apartment. He would probably give me the same little smile he always does, kindly but distant, unintentionally condescending, when I bring up my childhood in Les Aubiers, he who grew up on Rue Vital-Carles in central Bordeaux and who takes a very plain, unquestionable, ineradicable pride in being a “true Bordelais.” I made sure never to take Ange to Les Aubiers, though he never asked. For him Les Aubiers simply doesn’t exist, no more than any spot outside the old city walls could claim to be part of Bordeaux, and to Ange that conviction has the serene, confident inflexibility of an article of faith, so he never tries to convince anyone of its truth, nor to discuss it in any way: he merely cracks an indulgent half smile and raises his eyebrows, superior and vaguely amused, whenever I unthinkingly speak of my “Bordeaux” childhood—you can be whatever you like, he seems to be saying, except, most certainly, a true Bordelaise.

  No, no, I tell myself, paralyzed in the dark lobby, not yet ready to go upstairs and face Ange, there’s no point bringing that up with him, no point even mentioning that I recognized Corinna at once, even after all these years, precisely because of the expression on her face, the look in her eyes, which, to someone like Ange, without his even knowing it, would immediately rule out any pretentions to Bordelais status. I’m sure he sometimes sees that same expression on my face, that same look in my eyes, I’m sure he can spot them, unconsciously sense them, I’m sure he goes right on seeing them when I myself am convinced that, by dint of experience, habit, and assurance, I’ve rid myself of them forever.

  Today I’m a respectable middle-class woman, always carefully dressed, coiffed, and made-up, and my speech is fast and slightly high-pitched, with only the briefest of pauses between sentences. But to Ange, I know, I’m not fooling anyone, and I also know he doesn’t care, since, despite his innate fondness for distinguishing the true Bordelais from the rest, he’s no snob—snobbery is in fact a vulgarity he despises. And so he could easily take a liking to Corinna Daoui, might even find her attractive or funny. But he would never forget where Corinna comes from, and that difference would be one of those differences that definitively separates two distinct species.

  To be sure, Ange loves me, he chose me, we’re married. Still, I’ve often thought he married me because he already had a marriage behind him, because his children had been conceived and carried by the right sort of woman, and so, his duties fulfilled, he could now permit himself to marry the woman who simply appealed to him, knowing there were no consequences to fear. It was about pleasing himself, nothing more—not a family, a neighborhood, a whole race of authentic Bordelais. I also know Ange has no idea he feels like this. That way of thinking is the very stuff he’s made of. And so Ange is always kind, because he’s at peace with himself.

  Oh, is Ange really kind? Isn’t what he is the very opposite of kindness?

  Sitting at a computer, Corinna turned her ruined face toward me.

  “Hello, Nadia!” she cried, in a burst of unfeigned pleasure.

  She stood up and quickly took me in her arms, an American-style hug, professional, brief, and distant, accompanied by a very light pat on the back. She gazed at me, smiling, her head tilted a little to one side.

  “Say, you’re looking pretty good, you’re as plump as a little baby.”

  She had that Les Aubiers accent I know so
well, the piercing voice, the jagged pronunciation, the unflowing, unmelodious way of putting the words together, the uneven, excessive highs and lows. It had been so long since I last heard that accent so close to my ear that it made me flinch, like a revolting smell. Even my ex-husband stopped talking that way once we left Les Aubiers together and moved to Rue Fondaudège.

  “You’re wondering what I’m doing here, aren’t you?” said Corinna.

  “No, no,” I murmured, horrified at the thought of Corinna Daoui telling me one word about herself.

  I backed toward the doorway, though I couldn’t help taking a quick look around. And, I would tell Ange (but I’m not going to tell him anything at all, there’s no point), what really drove a knife through my heart was that my study was still just as I’d left it, with nothing to betray the presence of a Corinna Daoui, even though, as my ex-husband told me a little later, she’d moved in long before. Daoui had quietly taken my place, discreetly curled up in my armchair, bringing with her only a computer and the almost physical brutishness of her accent. Daoui’s face was worn, she was painfully thin. She was wearing a sort of mauve satin dressing gown, with a dragon on the back. My ex-husband gave me a nudge and nervously said to me, “All right now, we should get going.”

  Unkindly, just to needle him, I changed my mind.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “there’s no hurry.”

  I went to Daoui, now sitting at her computer again.

  I asked, “You’re working?”

  “This is how I set up my appointments,” said Corinna.

  With a wink that wrinkled one whole side of her face, she went on: “You know what I do? Did he tell you?”

  I turned to my ex-husband. Miserable, sheepish, he mumbled, “She’s a sex worker.”

  “Still? At your age?” I cried.

  “Hey, we’re the same age, me and you,” said Corinna gaily. “Besides, that’s not at all what I used to do.”

  I sniffed resolutely, in the manner of someone who knows better. But deep down I had no wish to get into a debate about whether Daoui’s activities back when we all lived in Les Aubiers were strictly speaking sex work or not, particularly because at the time I found it entirely reasonable that Daoui should do what she had to do to get by, given that she’d never had much luck in school.