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“Don’t be inimical.” He looked at me with a rather saddened gravity, and I melted as I always do melt when he envelops me in that dark, warm light. Gently I asked, “Tell me why you have come home so late.”
He made no reply.
“Were you drinking? Playing poker? Did you all go out? Did you forget the time?” He went on being silent, as it were emphatically silent, twirling his glass between his fingers. I flung out nonsensical words to make him lose his temper—to jerk an explanation out of him. “What’s the matter? Is there a woman in your life?”
Looking at me steadily he said, “Yes, Monique, there is a woman in my life.”
(Everything was blue above our heads and beneath our feet: on the other side of the strait loomed the coast of Africa. He squeezed me against him. “If you were to deceive me I should kill myself.” “If you were to deceive me I should have no need to kill myself. I should die of grief.” Fifteen years ago. Already? What do fifteen years count? Twice two is four. I love you, I love you alone. Truth cannot be destroyed: time has no effect upon it.)
oh noooooooooo
Anger woke me early. How innocent he looked lying there, with his hair tangled over a forehead that sleep had made young again. (In August, when I was away, she woke up at his side: I can’t bring myself to believe it! Why did I go to the mountains with Colette? It was not as though she very much wanted to—I was the one who insisted.) For five weeks he had been lying to me. “This evening we made an important step forward.” And he had just come from Noëllie’s. I felt like shaking him, insulting him, shrieking. I took myself in hand. I left a note on my pillow: See you this evening. I was sure my absence would affect him more than any reproaches: there is no possible reply to absence. I walked through the streets, wherever chance led me, obsessed by the words: He lied to me. Mental images pierced me through—Maurice’s eyes set on Noëllie, his smile. I dismissed them. He doesn’t look at her as he looks at me. I did not want to suffer; I did not suffer; but I choked with bitterness. He lied to me! I had said, “I should die of grief”: yes, but he had made me say it. He had been more eager than I in drawing up our pact—no compromise, no deviating. We were driving along the little road to Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, and he pressed me: “Shall I always be enough for you?” He blazed up because there was not enough ardor in my reply (but what a reconciliation in our room at the old inn, with the scent of honeysuckle coming in at the window! Twenty years ago—it was yesterday). He has been enough for me: I have lived only for him. And for a mere whim he has betrayed our vows. I said to myself, I shall insist upon his breaking it off, right away.… I went to Colette’s apartment; all day long I looked after her, but inside I was boiling. I came home, quite worn out. “I’m going to insist upon his breaking it off.” But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him.
aaaahhhhh
His anxiety went to my heart, and I listened to him without hostility. Of course he had been wrong to lie, but I had to understand: the first reluctance snowballs—you no longer dare confess because then you would also have to admit to having lied. It is an even more impossible hurdle for people who rate sincerity so very high, as we do. (I admit that: how furiously I should have lied to conceal a falsehood.) I have never made proper allowance for untruth. Lucienne’s and Colette’s first fibs utterly flabbergasted me. I found it very hard to accept that all children lie to their mothers. Not to me! I am not the kind of mother that is lied to: not a wife that is lied to. Idiotic vanity. All women think they are different; they all think there are some things that will never happen to them; and they are all wrong.
I had too much to drink; but Maurice laughed and told me I was charming. It’s funny: he had to deceive me for us to be able to revive the nights of our youth. There is nothing worse than the daily round: shocks wake one up again. Saint-Germain-des-Prés has changed since ’46: a different sort of people go there. “And it’s another era,” said Maurice, rather sadly. But I had not set foot in a nightclub for nearly fifteen years, and I was delighted with everything. We danced. At one moment he squeezed me very tightly and said, “Nothing has changed between us.” And we talked of all sorts of things at random: but I was half-seas over, and I have rather forgotten what he told me. Generally speaking it was just what I had imagined: Noëllie is an outstanding attorney and she is eaten up with ambition; she is a woman on her own—divorced, with one daughter—with very free and easy ways, fashionable, very much in the swim. Exactly my opposite. Maurice had wanted to know whether he could be attractive to a woman of that kind. “If I wanted to.…” I had asked myself that question when I flirted with Quillan: the only time I ever flirted in my life, and I soon stopped it. Slumbering in Maurice, as in most men, there is a young man who is far from certain of himself. Noëllie reassured him. And obviously it is also a question of direct desire—she is appetizing.
Taking into account the number of evenings he spends at the laboratory and the number of lunches he skips, he is giving Noëllie almost as much time as me. I flared up. He bewildered me with calculations. If the actual number of hours is counted, all right, he is more often with me. But during a great many of them he is working, reading periodicals—or else we are seeing friends. When he is with Noëllie he gives himself entirely up to her.
In the end I gave way. Since I have adopted an understanding, kindly attitude I must stick to it. No head-on collision with him. If I spoil his affair for him distance will make it seem charming—he will regret it. If I let him “live it decently” he will soon get tired of it. That’s what Isabelle assures me. I repeat to myself, Patience.
Still, I must realize that at Maurice’s age an infatuation means a good deal. At Mougins he was thinking of Noëllie, obviously. Now I understand the anxiety in his eyes at the Nice airfield—he was wondering whether I suspected anything. Or was he ashamed of having lied to me? Was it shame rather than anxiety? I can see his face once more, but I cannot make it out properly.
nooooo girl
I was not watchful enough. I thought Maurice was aging, that he was overworking, that I ought to adapt myself to his lack of warmth. He took to thinking of me as a sister, more or less. Noëllie awoke his desires. Whether she has any sexual appetite or not she certainly knows how to conduct herself in bed. He has rediscovered the proud delight of fully satisfying a woman. Going to bed does not mean only going to bed. Between them there is that intimacy that used to belong only to me. When they wake up does he snuggle her against his shoulder, calling her his doe, his honeymouth? Or has he invented other names that he says in the same voice? Or has he found himself another voice? He is shaving, smiling at her, with his eyes darker and more brilliant, his mouth more naked under that mask of white foam. He appeared in the doorway holding a great bunch of red roses in his arms, wrapped in cellophane: does he take her flowers?
My heart is being sawed in two with a very fine-tooth saw.
“It’s not a very pleasant situation for her,” he replied.
Anger seized me again. “That’s the limit! She knew I existed when she went to bed with you.”
“She doesn’t forget it: indeed it is that which she finds so painful.”
“I’m in her way? She wants you all to herself?”
“She likes me.…”
Noëllie Guérard, that frigid little on-the-make climber, playing the lovelorn maiden—that was rather much to take!
“I can vanish, if that would make things easier for you two,” I said.
He laid his hand on my arm. “I beg of you, Monique, don’t take it like this.” He looked unhappy and tired, but I—I who go out of my mind if I hear him sigh—I was in no compassionate mood. I said coldly, “And how would you like me to take it?”
“Without enmity. All right, so I was wrong to begin this affair. But now it’s done I must try to manage things so as not to hurt anyone more than I can help.”
“I’m not asking you for pity.”
“It’s not a question of pity! From a completely selfish point of view, hurting you tears me to pieces. But do understand that I have to consider Noëllie too.”
oh god
And now, this evening, I tell myself that perhaps Maurice is in the act of repeating this conversation to Noëllie. How can it be that I had not thought of that before? They talk about themselves, and so necessarily about me. There are complicities between them, as there are between Maurice and me. It is not merely that Noëllie is a nuisance in our life: in their idyll, I am a problem and an obstacle. As she sees it, this is not just a passing thing: what she has in mind is a serious relationship with Maurice; and she is clever. My first reaction was the right one—I ought to have put a stop to it right away; to have said to Maurice, “Either her or me.” He would have been cross with me for a while, but then no doubt he would have thanked me. I had not been able to bring myself to it. My longings, wishes, interests have always been identical with his. On the few occasions when I have stood out against him it was for his own sake, for his own good. Now that I ought to rise up in direct opposition, I have not strength enough to enter into this battle. But I am not sure that my forbearance may not be a mistake. The bitterest thing about it is that Maurice scarcely seems to be grateful to me for it at all. I believe that with that splendid male illogicality he holds me responsible for the remorse he feels—holds it against me. Should I be still more understanding, more detached, more full of smiles? Oh, I can’t tell anymore. I have never hesitated so long about how I ought to behave. Yes, I have, though: about Lucienne. But then I could ask Maurice’s advice. The most staggering thing is my loneliness now that I am confronted with him.
LEAVE HIM
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.
We stopped at the same little hotel we had stayed at twenty years ago, and we had—perhaps on another floor—the same room. I went to bed first, and I watched him, walking to and fro in his blue pajamas, barefooted on the worn carpet. He looked neither cheerful nor sad. And I was blinded by the mental image—an image called up hundreds of times, set, but not worn out, still shining with newness—of Maurice walking barefoot upon this carpet in his black pajamas: he had pulled up the collar and its points framed his face; he talked nonsense, childishly worked up. I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him. That evening, for the very reason that the surroundings were the same, the old image, coming into contact with a flesh and blood man smoking a cigarette, fell to dust and ashes. I had a shattering revelation: time goes by. I began to weep. He sat on the edge of the bed and took me tenderly in his arms. “Sweetheart, my sweetheart, don’t cry. What are you crying for?” He stroked my hair; he gave me little fluttering kisses on the side of my head.