Viviane (8 page)

As it happens, not everyone thinks that Héloïse's personality is a wrench in the works for the company.
Jean-Paul Biron for example—who receives you in the fourth-floor conference room because painters are at work in his office—is proud of the contributions the young woman has made to the managerial style he envisions for the coming year, a particularly dynamic, enterprising approach that's more open to diversity.

And just what are you suggesting, Jean-Paul?

Oh, nothing specific for the moment, but I thought that with your new responsibilities . . .

Yes, Jean-Paul? you inquire in a murderous tone.

Well, we might hire this young, uh, what's her name again, Héloïse, yes, to help you out a little?

Help me out a little with what, Jean-Paul? With my work? My career? My life?

Okay okay, we'll drop the subject. She'll go on the dole like everyone else. Otherwise, I was thinking of moving you up to the top floor to be closer to me. What do you say to that?

Viviane, what do you say, you say nothing. In any case, it will still be footbridges and subway tunnels, traffic circles and highways, excavators and backhoes.

Come, I'd like to show you something, continues Jean-Paul, pulling you toward the elevator.

You go down to the first basement. Before reaching the general services department, which is a fancy name for some broom closets, you turn off toward a room that has been freshly refurbished. On something like a billiard table sits a miniature village with its main street, its church on the village square, its monument to the war dead. The details are rendered with an especially realistic touch, such as the baguettes with their ridged crusts on display in the bakery, the geraniums in the windows, the carafes on the bistro tables.

Yes? you say encouragingly, half wheedling, half prying, the way one deals with a patient suspected of having a serious personality disorder.

Héloïse did it, announces Jean-Paul, beaming. To show we don't just disfigure the landscape, that we also renew our national heritage. To present our policy of sustainable development in a good light, you see?

Frankly, you don't see at all. On the other hand, you get the idea someone had a lot of time on her hands, after you'd been careful to leave Héloïse with impressive stacks of files to keep her busy.

Well, hedges Jean-Paul, it's mostly for show, of course. Because we're not going to start sprucing up
villages for communities in financial straits. Those big tower buildings are still more profitable. But this is pretty, don't you think?

Magnificent, you say firmly, heading back to the elevator.

Then you tour the offices to say hello to your colleagues, collecting congratulations from the mothers, envious or sympathetic smiles from the young women, and polite indifference from the gentlemen. They've taken up a collection and present you with a big package wrapped in paper sprinkled with stylized infants. To yourself you exclaim what is this ghastly thing, to them oh how wonderful. When you solve the mystery it turns out to be a coatrack: the hooks are formed by the trunks of the elephants down at the base. You thank everyone again, kiss everyone again, and dash off to your office.

She's sly, Héloïse. She welcomes you all smiles and practically curtsies, with her blue eyes and silken curls. She's pleased to see you, tells you straight-out. You don't believe a word. You see that your ferns are still there—but luxuriant, glowing with health. They've been appropriated, lavished with care. A mother wouldn't recognize her own ferns. And it's even your slightest
talents that are thus devalued, to increase your feeling of superfluity.

Héloïse, let's go over my files, you announce without any more preamble. But of course everything is in order: not one e-mail unanswered, not one phone call forgotten. Show me my brochures, you say next. The young woman explains that they've just arrived from the printer's and there hasn't been time to unpack them. You slash open the blister packaging with a letter opener and feverishly scan the introduction in which Jean-Paul describes the relative merits of bituminous concrete, self-compacting concrete, fibrous concrete, prestressed concrete, and cyclopean concrete; at the twenty-second line you hit pay dirt:
grannulometric spectra
has an extra
n
. You collapse onto a chair, fainting with relief.

They suggest having lunch together, but you'd rather take a little advantage of your freedom. See you very soon, Jean-Paul; good luck with your job search, Héloïse. Your eviscerated gift package under your arm, you head for the Champs-Élysées where you pay brief attention to the Christmas decorations before noticing the crowd gathered in front of the Vuitton boutique. So over you go as well to see if there's something new in the
window. But the objects are stamped with their usual brand logo, and perhaps that's what the passersby have come to check on, to see if values still hold firm, that the International Prototype Meter still resides in Paris.

In the pocket of your raincoat, the phone begins to vibrate. After a moment's hesitation you fish it out and see the name Julien Hermant on the screen.

It's me, he announces uselessly.

I can see that it's you you reply, jostling your way out of the crowd.

How are things going, Viviane?

Not well at all, as you can imagine.

Julien clears his throat, says I spoke to the police.

I know, they told me.

I said that you were a wonderful person and that you would never have done such a thing.

Obviously I would never have done such a thing.

I insisted on the fact that you were a very good mother and very professional at work. That in spite of all our differences I still had complete confidence in you.

That's fine, Julien, you said what was needed.

Now I'd like you to take back the cat.

A little silence falls. Then you reply I took the child, you can at least keep the cat.

I don't want the cat, says Julien. I want my daughter, every other weekend and during the vacations.

You're not going to start all that again.

We have to see each other Viviane, we have to talk. That's what people do.

You think it over. You say all right, we'll see each other on Sunday. I'll go to my mother's to do a bit of cleaning, you can join me there.

I'd rather it be elsewhere.

I don't feel like arguing.

Okay then, replies Julien.

*
Throughout this chapter, the narrative voice addresses Viviane with the familiar pronoun
tu
instead of the formal
vous
.—Trans.

12

All gangling limbs, Tony Boujon looks out at me through his too-long bangs: a young man whose story is easy to guess. From neglectful parents to keeping bad company, the natural faults of childhood confirmed by the pressure of toxic influences, he has developed the character of a little creep and inspires no sympathy. In the spring he followed a girl for several weeks before accosting her with a knife one day outside her school, but the intended victim just stared at him with her big round eyes until he backed down and put away his knife, all ardor squelched. He got three months in jail, a suspended sentence of two years, plus mandatory psychiatric treatment.

I called out to him at the Gare de l'Est at 8:31 a.m. as he was getting off the commuter train on his way home from his job. Tony Boujon works in a printing plant in Lagny-Thorigny. His shift begins at midnight and ends
at dawn. In the pale light sifting down from the glass canopy of the train station, I could immediately pick out his skinny form among the other passengers. I stepped in front of him with a big smile and said you're Tony Boujon.

He gaped at me like a carp.

I repeated you're Tony Boujon, I saw your photo in the newspaper, I think I can help you.

Help me with what, he snapped, I didn't do anything, and who are you anyway, I already talked to the police.

How about some coffee? I suggested while leading him gently toward an exit.

We chose a rather dark place on Boulevard de Strasbourg.

Tony chews on his ink-blackened nails while I stroke my glossy manicured fingertips.

My name is Élisabeth I begin, without getting him to look up. He makes a show of yawning, begins fiddling studiously with the seams of one of his sneakers and I press on saying I know, yes, I know that you were one of the doctor's patients.

The boy looks up in spite of himself.

He wasn't much help, was he? I add with a complicitous wink, and in passing I graze his knee with mine under the table. Tony straightens up like a shot in his seat,
his long bangs flopping limply down on his forehead furrowed with dismay. I say sorry, it's a reflex: we nurses are so used to touching people we don't even notice anymore. So he relaxes, his lips almost ready to crack a smile. A nurse, he's fine with that. He knows there's no reason to be offended by these kind and professionally maternal women: if they like you, it's from vocational bias.

After that, it's easy. I listen to him tell me all sorts of things I already know, he knows that I know them because I just told him I was the doctor's patient too, but he doesn't care. He tells me about his experience with the big zero, that's what he calls him, who swallowed his bullshit whole; what a sight the guy was, going all sympathetic and trying to catch him with gentleness when Tony respects only fists and cold steel.

The boy isn't used to having a friendly audience. He irritates me but I keep smiling and listening, and when he starts over on the same story for the third time, I interrupt him saying why don't we go to your place? He's startled, hesitates. Is going to refuse but changes his mind. I pay for our coffees, we walk to the métro station and take line 8 in the opposite direction from most commuters heading west to their office buildings. We get off at Montgallet, down in the southeast corner of Paris.

Tony still lives with his parents but they've left for work, and I learn that they're pharmacists. This surprises me because given his hangdog persona, I'd imagined his parents as drunks or incurably unemployed. Then I remember the facts I've read about crime, statistics in the newspapers showing that although parental maltreatment is more prevalent in the disadvantaged social classes, it can crop up anywhere.

Their home meets my expectations. The parquet floor in the hall is littered with pitfalls, craters between the loose slats and thickets of splinters at all the joints. I can see a living room and a master bedroom, furnished in mismatched functional things smacking of legacies from postwar houses in what were then modern suburbs. But you, where's your room? I ask Tony and he points down the hall to a door I'd assumed hid a closet. I set my lips in an expression of tender pity and observe you really don't get any breaks, do you.

Tony shoots me a nasty look then shrugs and leads me to the kitchen where he starts making coffee. I check out the sink with its reddish-brown crusts of crud and the shelves coated with greasy dust. Your parents, I remark, they don't seem to pay much attention to you, do they?

He clenches his fists; I twist the knife, adding it's obvious, one can see right away that you didn't get enough love, otherwise you'd never have done what you did in June outside the Lycée Paul-Valéry. The paper said poor girl, but right away I thought poor boy.

He drops the coffeepot that lands on the tiles like clashing cymbals

opens his fists

takes a step forward

I look at him

he looks at me

tensing up his silly-little-tough-guy muscles

he's so funny

he makes me laugh

so that I almost dislocate my jaw

then I've no idea what starts expanding inside me

I charge.

Lips on his trembling lips, impatience, edginess, bites, a swerve up to the ear, teeth attacking its outer shell, tongue against lobe, hands under the T-shirt, gooseflesh. Fingers that pinch, climb up the collar, grab the jawbone, and what a jawbone, so delicate, as if cut from crystal. Hand on the back of the neck, prey immobilized, completely pinned, tight grip. See what's
happening down below, if it's up, if it's sparking, gauge its potential, adjust aim. Strong turbulence in seismic zone. Flanking movement, pants in way, obstacle belt, buckle-fumbling fingers, new obstacle arises. Obstacle promising. Hands on hands, beneath layers of material, tips erect, redoubled vigor of obstacle. Pullovers tossed to floor, pants to follow, stuck on shoes, get shoes off, uncertain movements, counterproductive haste, shoes stuck worse but getting there, getting there. Majestic obstacle against white lace. Harpoon obstacle, insert. Obstacle quivers, fights for survival. But rout, retreat, useless struggle, enemy in flight, victory too easy, absence of peril, triumph without glory.
^*
New strategy. Rekindle the battle. Hands everywhere, flying fingers, introduced, flicker turns to flame, going to work, going to work. Another flop. Find something else. Imagination, imagination. On your knees, Élisabeth. Open wide, back in business. Prey sighs, relaxes, coasting along boulevard, gliding on alone. Rabbit in tunnel, run over. Gets up, gets stuffed. Rabbit up in arms. Lasso, whoosh, obstacle under control.
Obstacle furious, roars, spends everything, spent. Obstacle drowsy.