The Woman Destroyed (18 page)

“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?”

“I don’t know. You have lied to me so much!”

He flung his arms out in despair. “What do you want me to do to convince you?”

“There’s nothing you can do.”

Tuesday 16 November
.

When he comes in and he smiles at me and kisses me, saying, “Hello, darling,” it is Maurice: these are his movements, his face, his warmth, his smell. And for a moment within me there is an immense sweetness: his presence. Stay there: don’t try to know—I can almost understand Diana. But I can’t help it. I must know what is going on. In the first place does he really go to the laboratory in the evenings? When does he go to her place? I can’t telephone: he would know it and he would be furious. Follow him? Hire a car and follow him? Or just find out where he is?
It is base: it is degrading. But I have to get some kind of an idea.

Diana says she knows nothing. I asked her to make Noëllie talk.

“She’s too clever by far: she would never give anything away.”

“You know about the affair through me. If you talk about it to her she will absolutely have to make some kind of an answer.”

At all events she promised me to get information about Noëllie—they have contacts in common. If only I were to discover things that would completely destroy her in Maurice’s opinion!

No point in badgering Luce Couturier anymore. Maurice will have had her told off by her husband. And he would tell Maurice that I had seen her again.… No, that would be a blunder.

Thursday 18 November
.

The first time I went to check on Maurice at the laboratory the car was in the parking lot. The second time it was not. I had myself driven as far as Noëllie’s house. I did not have to search for long. What a stab in my heart! I had loved our car: it was a faithful animal belonging to the house, a warm and comforting presence; and suddenly there it was, being used for betraying me; I hated it. I stayed there, standing under the big outer door, stupefied. I wanted to appear suddenly before him as he came from Noëllie’s apartment. It would only have sent him into a rage, but I was so bewildered that I had to do something
—anything at all. I took myself in hand. I told myself,
He is lying so as to ease things for me. If he eases things for me that means that he values me. In a way it would be worse if he were quite brazen
. I had almost succeeded in convincing myself when there was another stab at my heart—they came out together. I hid. They did not see me. They walked up the street to a big café. They went arm in arm, walking fast and laughing. I might have pictured them walking arm in arm and laughing a hundred times. In fact I had not really done so. No more than I really picture them in bed: I haven’t the courage. And anyway it’s not the same as seeing. I began to tremble. I sat down on a bench in spite of the cold. I trembled and trembled. When I got home I went to bed and when he came in at midnight I pretended to be asleep.

But yesterday evening when he said to me, “I’m going to the laboratory,” I asked, “Really going?”

“Of course.”

“On Saturday you were at Noëllie’s.”

He looked at me with a coldness that was even more terrifying than his anger. “You are spying on me!”

There were tears in my eyes. “It’s a question of my life, my happiness. I want the truth. And you go on lying.”

“I try to avoid scenes,” he said in an intensely irritated tone.

“I don’t make scenes.”

“Don’t you?”

Every time we have things out he calls it a scene. And immediately, as I protested, my voice rose, and we had a scene. I talked about Rome again. He again denied it. Was she really not there? Or on the other hand was she in fact at Geneva? My ignorance is eating me away.

Saturday 20 November
.

Scenes, no. But I am clumsy. I am bad at controlling myself, and I say things that vex him. I must admit that it is enough for him to have one opinion for me to have the other, imagining that he has it from her. In actual fact I have nothing against op art. But Maurice’s eager willingness to submit himself to this “optical sadism” annoyed me: it was obviously Noëllie who had told him about the show. I stupidly maintained that it was not painting at all, and when he argued, I went for him—did he suppose he was making himself younger by losing his head over everything that became fashionable?

“You’re wrong to get cross.”

“I get cross because you’re so desperately keen to be with it that you lose all sense of discrimination.”

He shrugged, without making any reply.

Saw Marguerite. Spent a good deal of time with Colette. But nothing worth recording.

Sunday 21 November
.

Talking about her relationship with Maurice, Noëllie—at least according to Diana, whom I don’t altogether trust—only uttered dreary commonplaces. The situation was painful for everyone, but no doubt a balance would be reached. I was an admirable person, but men liked variety. What kind of a future did she envisage? She answered, “Time will tell,” or words to that effect. She was on her guard.

Diana told me one story; but it is too vague for me to use. Noëllie was very nearly brought before the Bar Council
because she had won the confidence of another attorney’s client, an important man who took his business away and entrusted it to Noëllie. This sort of thing is thought very bad among the lawyers, but it seems that Noëllie makes quite a practice of it. But Maurice would only reply, “Tittle-tattle!” I did tell him Noëllie’s daughter complained that her mother neglected her.