It was ridiculous. She wanted to wipe out the words. It was a cliché. It couldn’t happen to them, it wasn’t like them. Before believing he was capable of leaving her, she was angry with him for saying the words. Their love would never again be intact. It would take her a few more years to admit that he had not said something he would later regret. Her great perfect love, he’d smashed it to pieces. And then, rapidly, she’d lost everything.
Her mother’s pained tone when she telephoned, and the awful feeling that apart from her, everyone else had suspected it. The humiliating pity of other people. The ten years when she had been convinced that everyone she met was impressed by her happy marriage. And perhaps even jealous, since many people were unlucky in love, or had no children, or had to bring them up as single parents. Having to endure their so-called understanding, their self-satisfied pity, and their humiliating encouragement. People had all been very quick to expect her to get over it. As if their story had been one you put behind you, a love like any other. For a long time, Claire had hoped that life would prove them all wrong, that Christophe would come back and she’d be able to show them all what kind of love they had. A rock-solid love, invincible, a couple that nothing could separate. She had never been angry with him, not once. She had waited for him. Nothing that happened after he left could satisfy her, she just wanted her old life back, she didn’t want to take any aspect of the new situation seriously. Her friends’ unwelcome remarks, the hints uttered in falsely friendly tones to the effect that she should have realized long ago that he was unfaithful, that he was tired of her, and that he’d made the right decision.
She’d distanced herself from her former girlfriends. She didn’t want to be thought of as “a single mother” of her two daughters, or as “unattached,” still less as “remaking her life.” She had nothing in common with all those losers, so they were wrong thinking she was like them. Even her relations with the girls were affected. At heart, she thought that the children ought to have made Christophe come back home. She felt they weren’t trying hard enough. They could have fallen ill, refused to see their father, been hostile to his new partners, failed to enjoy holidays with him, they could have insisted, taken their mother’s side, and found a way to get what she wanted for all of them: their old life back. Instead of which they’d grown up, immersed themselves in things at school. Mathilde had become coquettish, by nine years old she was wanting nail polish, brand label clothes, and lip gloss. Other things didn’t seem to matter to her. Elisabeth had begun learning the piano and liked gym. They didn’t apparently realize that all three of them had been badly hurt, cheated of the life they were owed.
And now as they were growing up, Claire started feeling that her daughters were judging her. Not saying anything openly. But perhaps behind her back, when they were alone. As time went by, they looked more shifty. They seemed to be scornful of their mother. This woman abandoned by her husband, obliged to count her pennies, living on a derisory sum of alimony, since she hadn’t even managed the divorce successfully, having failed to select a ruthless lawyer who would have gotten the maximum for her. At the end of every session, the therapist would explain to Claire that if her daughters listened to her less, it was simply because they were growing up, they weren’t judging her. There too she wanted her old life back: to be the idol of her children, the center of their world. She wanted to feel their soft little bodies and their arms around her neck. For them to be little girls again, when she had always known how to make them happy and when she had had an answer for everything.
Claire had also become distanced from her mother, who scarcely four months after the breakup was saying, “Come on, sweetie, get over it. And anyway between us, he wasn’t God’s gift was he, your man, I know he’s the girls’ father, but let’s not kid ourselves, he was pretty much a philistine and very selfish.” Claire hadn’t been able to hang up on her, or tell her how hurtful these words were. Long knives plunged into her heart. To realize that, for other people, their love hadn’t been stunning, her good fortune hadn’t been amazing. Just an ordinary couple, an ordinary breakup, life, like everyone else. She was shattered, flayed alive, and her shrink prescribed a course of antidepressants. She lost thirty pounds. Her weight started to obsess her, as it had in the past, and the transformation had been enough to make her feel better. Claire wanted people to think she was just fine. In the end, what she really felt didn’t matter. She was watching for signs of how other people saw her, interpreting their looks; and if she could convince herself that they thought she was on top of things and lucky in life, she felt better.
She’d found a part-time job as secretary in an upscale sports club, the girls were doing well at school, and she paraded them as if they were living proof that she was well-balanced; she brandished them in the world’s face, they were her grade A in the great exam of wordly success. Women whose husbands have left for a younger model after the age of fifty will often say, “I wish he’d gone earlier, then I could have rebuilt my life.” They don’t know what they’re saying. There’s nothing worse than being left before you’re even thirty-five. You’re being left for what you are, nothing to do with age, and it deprives the children of a whole life with both parents, it means being left lying on your back like some stupid insect that’ll never be able to right itself again.
The only female friends Claire could tolerate now were unmarried women her own age with no children. These were the only ones on whom she could look down, the only ones she could meet without fearing that the comparison would be unfavorable to her. But even women like that ended up making her feel nervous. Elise, her best friend for the last two years, was forty. Poor thing, she claimed she didn’t miss having children. Claire listened to her lying through her teeth, with the maternal patience of one who knows that the other dare not admit her sorrows. What it could be like, living your life as a woman without giving birth, without that basic center around which all life is organized, Claire preferred not even to think about it, and she listened to Elise’s rants without reacting, displaying considerable benevolence. But even Elise wasn’t unfortunate enough to her taste. Last heard of, she was planning to go off sailing the world for several months with her latest lover, a user ten years younger than she, who was obviously using his older mistress to help pay the bills on his boat. And Elise was convinced that this was the call of love, she’d decided to give notice at work, rent her apartment, and go to sea. In her head, over and over, Claire mentally rehearsed all the points against this decision, for her friend’s own good. She realized that she was obsessing about it and admitted as much on the therapist’s couch, acknowledging that there was some jealousy at the bottom of this anxiety. Forty wasn’t even too old for Elise to get pregnant. She didn’t want Elise to suffer. Just that she should remain in a situation slightly less desirable than her own.
And then, after all, François had come along. Encountered in a first-class compartment of the Train à Grande Vitesse, on the way back from Lyon, where she had dropped Elisabeth off for a pony-riding vacation. Claire had been reading a book by Paul Morand, which she found boring, but since she had nothing else with her, she had opened it and tried to find some interest in it. The man sitting next to her had hesitated for a while before speaking to her. At first, the only thing that she’d found attractive about him was that he was interested in her. He’d managed to extract her cell phone number from her before saying goodbye at the station, and had called next day with a pressing invitaton to have dinner.
She found him on the plump side, a bit old for her, with tired features: his stumpy reddish hands had something of the peasant about them. More full of himself than charismatic. But she had liked it when he paid her compliments throughout the three-hour train journey, even if she was well aware of something a bit pathetic about the situation: chatting up your neighbor on a train wasn’t exactly high romance. He had said he was a writer, and had repeated his name on the message he left on her voicemail. When she had googled him though, her feelings had changed. Inwardly, she had mocked herself: “All it took was three good reviews and you find he’s worth seeing after all . . . at your age, acting like a groupie, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Then she had called Lucette, her manicurist, who was a great reader—she and Lucette had become quite friendly, the manicurist stayed for a cup of tea after doing her nails and they gossiped about this and that. Lucette had a son and a daughter, but neither father had recognized the children or even stayed around long enough to see them. She had money problems, a family that gobbled up all she earned, and what with everything it was