The Woman Destroyed (16 page)

Thursday 14 October
.

I am being manipulated. Who is guiding the manipulation? Maurice? Noëllie? Both together? I do not know how to make the maneuver fail, whether by pretending to yield or by resisting. And where am I being led?

Yesterday as we came back from the cinema, Maurice, speaking carefully, said he had a favor to ask me: he would like to go off for the weekend with Noëllie. By way of compensation he would arrange not to work these coming evenings so that we should have plenty of time to ourselves. I showed that my mind revolted against it. His face hardened. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.” He grew amiable again, but having refused him something quite overwhelmed me. He was thinking me mean-minded, or at least unfriendly. He would not hesitate to lie to me the following week: the separation between us would be fully accomplished.… “Try to live this business
with
him,” Isabelle said to me.

Before going to bed I told him that on consideration I was sorry for my reaction—I should leave him free. He did not look happy about it: on the contrary, I thought I saw distress in his eyes. “I know very well I am asking you a great deal: I ask you too much. Don’t think I don’t feel remorse.”

“Oh, remorse! What’s the good of that?”

“No good, of course. I just said it, that’s all. Maybe it’s cleaner not to have any.”

I stayed awake a long while; so did he, it seemed to me. What was he thinking about? As for me, I was wondering whether I had been right to give way. Going from one concession to another, where should I end up?

And for the moment I am not getting anything out of it at all. It is too early, obviously. Before this affair can go bad it must be allowed to ripen. I tell myself that over and over again. And sometimes I think myself sensible, and sometimes I accuse myself of cowardice. In fact I am defenseless because I have never supposed I had any rights. I expect a lot of the people I love—too much, perhaps. I expect a lot, and I even ask for it. But I do not know how to insist.

Friday 15 October
.

I had not seen Maurice so cheerful and affectionate for ages. He found two hours this afternoon to take me to the exhibition of Hittite art. No doubt he hopes to reconcile our life together with his affair. If it doesn’t last too long, that’s all right with me.

Sunday 17 October
.

Yesterday he slipped out of bed before eight. I caught a whiff of his eau de Cologne. He closed the door of the bedroom and the front door gently. From the window I saw him scrupulously polishing the car, delighted. It seemed to me that he was probably humming.

Above the last autumn leaves there was a soft summer sky. (The golden rain of the acacia leaves on a pink and
gray road, as we came back from Nancy.) He got into the car, he started the engine, and I looked at my place next to him: my place, where Noëllie was going to sit. He shifted the gear lever, the car moved off, and I felt my heart lose its rhythm. He drove off very fast; he disappeared. For ever. He will never come back. It will not be he who comes back.

I killed the time as well as I could. Colette, Isabelle. I saw two films: the Bergman twice straight off, it struck me so. This evening I put on some jazz, lighted a fire and knitted, watching the flames. Usually I am not afraid of being alone. Indeed, in small doses, I find it a relief—the presence of people I love overburdens my heart. I grow anxious about a wrinkle or a yawn. And so as not to be a nuisance—or absurd—I have to bottle up my anxieties, rein back my impulses. The times when I think of them from a distance are restful breaks. Last year, when Maurice was at a conference at Geneva, the days seemed short: this weekend is interminable. I threw my knitting aside, because it did not protect me: what are they doing, where are they, what are they saying to one another, what sort of looks do they exchange? I had thought I could preserve myself from jealousy: not at all. I searched through his pockets and his papers, without finding anything, of course. She must certainly have written to him when he was at Mougins: he went to fetch his letters at the post office, hiding it from me. And he has put them away somewhere at the hospital. If I asked to see them, would he show them to me?

Ask … whom? That man who is traveling with Noëllie, that man whose face, whose words, I cannot even picture to myself—do not want to picture to myself? The man I love and who loves me? Are they the same one? I can no
longer tell. And I do not know whether I am making a mountain out of a molehill or what I take to be a molehill is in fact a mountain.

I sought shelter in our past. I spread out boxfuls of photographs in front of the fire. I found the one with Maurice wearing his armband: how much at one we were that day when we were looking after the wounded FFI near the Quai des Grands Augustins. Here, on the Cap Corse Road, is the gasping old motorcar his mother gave us. I remember that night when we broke down, near Corte. We sat there motionless, overawed by the solitude and the silence. I said, “We must try to put it right.” “Kiss me first,” said Maurice. We held each other tightly, for a long while, and we felt that no cold or weariness or anything on earth could touch us.

It’s odd. Does it mean something? All these pictures that rise up in my heart are more than ten years old: Europa Point, the liberation of Paris, our return from Nancy, our housewarming, that breakdown on the Corte Road. I can bring others to mind—our last summers at Mougins, Venice, my fortieth birthday. They don’t move me in the same way. Perhaps the more remote memories always seem the loveliest.

I am tired of asking myself questions and not knowing the answers. I am out of my depth. I no longer recognize the apartment. The things in it have the air of imitations of themselves. The massive table in the sitting room—it is hollow. As though both I and the house had been projected into a fourth dimension. If I were to go out it would not astonish me to find myself in a prehistoric forest, or in a city of the year 3000.

Tuesday 19 October
.

Tension between us. My fault or his? I welcomed him with a fine air of naturalness: he told me about his weekend. They had been in the Sologne; it seems that Noëllie likes the Sologne. (So she possesses tastes, does she?) I started when he told me that yesterday they had dinner and slept at the Hostellerie de Forneville.

“That pretentious, expensive place?”

“It’s very pretty,” said Maurice.

“Isabelle tells me it’s the kind of picturesqueness put on for Americans—stuffed with potted plants, birds and phony antiques.”

“There are potted plants, birds and antiques, real or false. But it’s very pretty.”

I did not go on. I sensed a hardness coming into his voice. What Maurice usually likes is finding a genuine little restaurant where you eat well, or an uncrowded hotel in a beautiful, remote situation. All right, I quite see that once in a while he might do it for Noëllie; but he does not have to pretend to like the vulgarities that delight her. Unless she is acquiring an influence over him. He saw the latest Bergman with her in August, at a private showing (Noëllie goes only to private showings or galas), and he did not think much of it. She must have told him that Bergman was out of date—that’s her only criterion. She dazzles him by pretending to be completely with it—up to date in everything. I can see her now at that dinner of Diana’s last year. She gave a lecture upon these “happenings.” And then she held forth about the Rampal case, which she had just won. A truly ludicrous act. Luce Couturier looked thoroughly embarrassed, and Diana gave me a knowing wink. But the men
listened, openmouthed—Maurice among them. And yet it’s not like him, to allow himself to be taken in by that kind of guff.

I ought not to go for Noëllie, but there are times when I just can’t help it. Over Bergman, I did not argue. But in the evening, at dinner, I had a stupid quarrel with Maurice because he would have it that it was quite possible to drink red wine with fish. A typical Noëllie line—to know the right way of behaving so perfectly that you don’t have to conform. So I stood up for the rule that says fish and white wine. We grew heated. Such a pity. I don’t like fish, anyhow.

Wednesday 20 October
.

The night Maurice spoke to me I thought I should have an unpleasant but clear-cut situation to deal with. And now I do not know where I stand in it or what I have to fight against or whether I ought to fight or why. Are other wives so bewildered in comparable cases? Isabelle tells me again and again that time is on my side. I should like to believe her. As for Diana, so long as her husband is kind to her and her children and looks after them, she does not care in the least whether he deceives her or not. She could not possibly give me any advice. Still, I telephoned her because I wanted information about Noëllie: she knows her and dislikes her. (Noëllie made advances to Lemercier, who would have none of it: he does not like women to throw themselves at his head.) I asked her how long she had known about Maurice. She pretended to be surprised and said that Noëllie had not told her anything—they are not at all intimate. She told me that when Noëllie was twenty she married a
very wealthy man. Her husband divorced her—no doubt he was tired of being cuckolded—but she got a handsome alimony; she forces him to give her splendid presents; she gets along very well with his new wife and often makes long stays at their villa at La Napoule. She has gone to bed with quantities of men—most of them useful in her career—and now she must be wanting a steady relationship. But she will drop Maurice if she hooks a richer or better-known man. (I should rather he took the initiative.) Her daughter is fourteen, and she is being brought up on the most pretentious lines—riding, yoga, Virginie dresses. She is at the Ecole Alsacienne with Diana’s second daughter, and she shows off unbelievably. And at the same time she complains that her mother neglects her. Diana says that Noëllie asks her clients outrageous fees, that she takes immense care of her publicity, and that she will do absolutely anything to succeed. We talked about the way she boasted last year. Foolishly enough this tearing of her to pieces eased my mind. It was like a magic spell: where you stick in the pins your rival will be maimed and disfigured, and the lover will see her hideous wounds. It seemed to me impossible that our portrait of Noëllie should not prevail with Maurice. (There is one thing that I shall tell him though—it was not she who argued the Rampal case at all.)

Thursday 21 October
.

Maurice was on the defensive right away. “I can hear Diana from here! She loathes Noëllie!”

“That’s true,” I said. “But if Noëllie knows it, why does she go and see her?”

“And why does Diana go and see Noëllie? It’s a fashionable
acquaintance. And now what?” he asked me with a certain challenge. “What has Diana been telling you?”

“You’ll tell me it is mere spite.”

“That’s for sure. Women who do nothing cannot bear those who work.”

(Women who do nothing: the expression stuck in my throat. It is not one of Maurice’s expressions.)

“And married women don’t like those who fling themselves at their husband’s heads,” I said.

“Oh, so that’s the way Diana tells it?” asked Maurice, looking amused.

“Noëllie claims it was the other way around, obviously. Each has his own version of the truth.…” I looked at Maurice. “And in your case which of you started the flinging?”

“I told you how it happened.”

Yes, he did tell me at the Club 46: but it was not very clear. Noëllie brought him her daughter, who was anemic; he suggested that she should spend an evening with him; she accepted; they ended up in bed. Oh, I don’t care. I went on, “If you want to know, Diana thinks Noëllie is self-seeking, on the make, and pretentious.”

“And you take her word for it?”

“At all events she tells lies.” I told him about the Rampal case, which she pretended to have argued, whereas in fact she was only Brévant’s junior.

“But she never said she was not. She looks upon it as her case insofar as she worked on it a great deal, that’s all.”

Either he was lying or he had cheated with his own memory. I am almost certain that she spoke of her address to the court. “In any case she arrogated the whole of the success to herself.”

“Listen,” he said cheerfully, “if she has all the vices that you say she has, how can you explain my spending five minutes with her?”

“I can’t explain it.”

“I am not going to make a formal defense of her. But I do assure you she’s a worthwhile woman.”

Maurice will see anything I say against Noëllie as the effect of my jealousy. It would be better to say nothing. But I really do find her profoundly disagreeable. She reminds me of my sister—the same confidence, the same glibness, the same phonily offhand elegance. It seems that men like this mixture of coquetry and hardness. When I was sixteen and she was eighteen Maryse swiped all my boyfriends. So much so that I was in a dreadful state of nerves when I introduced Maurice to her. I had a ghastly nightmare in which he fell in love with her. He was indignant. “She is so superficial! So bogus! Paste diamonds, rhinestones! You—you’re the real jewel.” Authentic: that was the word everyone was using in those days. He said I was authentic. At all events I was the one he loved, and I was not envious of my sister anymore; I was happy to be the person I was. But then how can he think a great deal of Noëllie, who is of the same kind as Maryse? He is altogether gone from me if he likes being with someone I dislike so very much—and whom he ought to dislike if he were faithful to our code. Certainly he has altered. He lets himself be taken in by false values that we used to despise. Or he is simply completely mistaken about Noëllie. I wish the scales would drop from his eyes soon. My patience is beginning to run out.

“Women who do nothing can’t stand those who work.” The remark surprised and wounded me. Maurice thinks it
right that a woman should have a calling: he was very sorry that Colette chose marriage and being a housewife, and he even rather resented my not having dissuaded her. But after all he does acknowledge that there are other ways in which a woman can fulfill herself. He never thought I was doing “nothing”: on the contrary, he was astonished at the thoroughness with which I looked after the cases he told me about while at the same time I looked after the house really well and took great care of our daughters—and that without ever appearing tense or overworked. Other women always seemed to him either too idle or too busy. As for me, I had a balanced life: he even used the word harmonious. “With you, everything is harmonious.” I find it absolutely intolerable that he should adopt Noëllie’s scorn for women who “do nothing.”