After explaining his new case in detail for an hour, Laurent doesn’t seem to have noticed her turmoil at all.
“You know I saw my sister today, darling. That little Guillaume is so adorable. Wait till you see him, he’s grown again!” Laurent is receptive but makes no connection with their own circumstances and keeps eating. Confronted with this dead end, Marie decides to state her case openly. “I want a baby. I think it’s the right time, I think we can start our family now. I can feel it, I’m ready.”
Laurent lets a piece of veal fall from his mouth. He’s stunned by the news, his face drains of color. It hadn’t occurred to him. Or he hadn’t had time to think about it, at least. Silence settles over the room. Marie holds her breath, waiting for his reply before she can breathe again. Laurent smiles, gets up from his chair and kisses her full on the mouth. “My darling. I want to! Of course I want to have a baby with you!” Marie’s body relaxes, flooded with intense relief and happiness. She thinks she’s never felt so weightless, every corner of her being is intoxicated, blissfully shaking off all tension. She feels like screaming from the rooftops of Paris, calling her parents, her sister, her colleagues and clients to tell them the big news before she’s even pregnant.
After their blanquette of veal this evening, Laurent and Marie will lie in bed arm in arm, pressed up close in the elation of their plans.
The decision to have a baby with Laurent has put Marie in a permanent good mood. As she pedals along the boulevard du Temple she has a sudden realization how very lucky she is to be this person. She loves her work, lives with a husband she adores, wants for nothing, and will soon be welcoming her first child into the world. She can picture family meals at Bois-le-Roi with Laurent and the baby. The new photos she’ll be able to put on her desk and show off to her clients. The long walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, the pride she’ll feel pushing her buggy toward the large central pond. She’ll be a loving, attentive mother like her own mother. All at once she notices she’s seeing more children than usual. There’s a constant to-and-fro of buggies and little figures everywhere around her. Hurrying and alert, mothers resolutely perform the first stage of their marathon: taking their children to school, kissing them goodbye, and waiting to check that they get inside the building.
Marie arrives at the bank on time. She knows that this Tuesday will be harder than usual because there’s the quarterly sales results meeting. She’s not a very good salesperson and during these committee meetings her immediate boss always opts to praise her understanding and analytical abilities rather than her head for business. This afternoon she’ll be introduced to the Paris-based company’s new CEO for the Tenth Arrondissement. He’s made a point of attending such meetings to encourage his teams. Everyone at the bank is fretting at the thought of being reprimanded for poor results.
Hervé, the other asset management adviser, is particularly anxious. He knows he hasn’t made the grade during this first trimester and Marie feels bad for him. She can tell that this man, pushing fifty and coming toward the end of his career, is especially despondent about his work, his clients, and the pace imposed by the company’s new diktats. He’d like to give up but has no choice. He needs to pay the mortgage, provide pocket money for his thankless teenage daughter, support the wife with whom he hasn’t been able to picture a loving future for years, and keep a little money for his passion, ornithology. Hervé is fascinated by wild pigeon species, turtledoves in particular. In a drawer of his desk he keeps a secret file of all the articles he’s found on the subject. He’s very proud of it. After a difficult appointment with a client or sometimes simply for the pleasure of it, he takes out his file and spends the rare moments of peace in his life leafing through these yellowed photographs of birds gliding through the air. Hervé is endearing but deeply unhappy.
Marie sits herself at the meeting table, laden with a pile of files that she hopes will be adequate in her defense. There’s a deathly silence in the large room except for the crackling of a fluorescent light with a loose connection. The branch manager gets up to switch it off. Marie has always been awed by her crisp manner and authoritative stride. When the two of them are alone in her office, Marie keeps her head down, trying to avoid eye contact. Colette Sirmont is a strong, willful, demanding, and almost oppressive career woman. Marie sees nothing of herself in any of her characteristics, either in her professional or her personal life. When Marie has meetings with her clients alone she’s relaxed, at her ease, and sometimes even surprisingly amusing. Her work at the bank allows her to play the part of someone else. With Laurent she can’t seem to establish her identity as anything other than gentle and restrained, just as she already was with him and his friends ten years ago. All around the room people eye their coworkers, studying them in an effort to determine who’s in the worst position.
The CEO arrives and slams the door. Faces screw up, hands don’t know where to put themselves, throats constrict politely. He’s tall, imposing, a rather attractive man. The women have noticed. With the sharp eyes of someone accustomed to managing other people, he quickly takes up his position at the head of the table. And is happier staying on his feet.
Marie watches him from afar. While his assistant starts up the overhead projector, he begins his talk, saying that he won’t have time to discuss things case by case and would prefer to analyze individual results in one-on-one meetings over the coming week. There’s a ripple of relief around the room. Marie is asked to speak about her experience selling the new life insurance package. She stands up, eyes lowered, and walks over to join the CEO. He stares at her intently, appraising her. Marie can smell his scent. A powerful combination of eau de cologne, leather, and sandalwood. She never wears perfume, Laurent doesn’t like it. When Marie has finished her report she walks back to her seat, under the satisfied gaze of the CEO. A coworker congratulates her, saying she argued her case well for her marketing methods. After an hour the CEO brings the meeting to a close and everyone leaves the room to return to work. Hervé is relieved but he knows it won’t last and that he has only a few days’ respite before receiving his sentence. As she leaves, Marie catches the CEO’s eye, and he smiles and nods at her. She has three more meetings this afternoon. She gets on with her day.
* * *
—
It’s six thirty. Marie has finished helping the day’s clients understand financial codes of practice and can leave at last. Once outside, she finds to her surprise that she still has that effervescent feeling. She’s so calm, level, moderate, and patient, Paris gives her a buzz, brings her alive. She always felt slightly wrong living out of town as a teenager. Granted, Bois-le-Roi isn’t far from Paris, but she was frustrated by the journey she had to make on the transilien train every weekend to meet up with her friends in the city. She always knew she’d live in Paris later.
The October night is closing in and she thinks the rue Meslay feels darker than usual, perhaps one of the streetlights isn’t working. Marie doesn’t remember exactly where she left her bike. Maybe outside the little Turkish restaurant where she likes to have lunch on Thursdays. The street is as good as deserted, with just a few pedestrians hurrying home. The tall buildings are lit up with warm lights. She’s always liked looking into apartment windows when she walks through the city’s streets. Discovering people’s intimate lives, their taste in interior design, seeing children playing and parents chatting on the balcony or cooking. She suddenly wonders whether other people do this too, whether anyone watches her walking around her apartment. Under the weak glow of the streetlights she can make out her bicycle in the distance. It’s tipped onto the ground, the front wheel horribly twisted, one tire gone, and the frame broken. Horrified, she runs over, tries pointlessly to stand it back up against the pillar, but quickly realizes she won’t be able to ride it. She feels helpless. This is the first time in her life she’s been the victim of an act of vandalism. She casts around for some form of help and reaches into her bag for her cell to call Laurent. She knows that he won’t come over for such a small thing and is bound to tell her to catch the Métro home, but she needs to hear his voice, to be reassured. He picks up on the second ring.