Marie sits up painfully, her body burning, swollen, weighed down with the agony of her slack muscles and her taut compressed skin. The locks click open. She steps out of the car, her slacks still hanging down over the tops of her thighs. He grabs her arm firmly and pulls her back onto the seat. “If you talk to anyone about what happened, you, your husband and your career are all finished. No one’ll believe you, so you keep your mouth shut and everything can go on like before.” In the feeble yellow glow of a streetlight Marie surreptitiously notices the gleam of a wedding ring on the man’s finger. The car engine starts up. She climbs out and stumbles a few steps out of the car park. The door slams behind her and the car pulls away.
Marie doesn’t tell herself it’s over. She knows this is just the beginning. The entrance to her building is a little farther up the street, on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire. It’s not quite eight o’clock; Laurent is most likely having his dinner. He must have been on the way to the restaurant, joshing with his coworkers and his new client while his wife was being raped by her boss, penetrated in every orifice on the seat of a car. She goes into the building and meets the caretaker wheeling out the trash cans. “Hello, Madame Campan, how are you?” Marie keeps her head down and slips away into the shadows in the corridor, answering with “A little tired, but I’m fine! Good night” as she goes up in the elevator. She hopes he didn’t notice anything unusual. She knows already that she’s in the process of hiding the evil event, that she won’t say anything, that no one will ever know about the assault.
The apartment is shrouded in darkness partially diluted by the open curtains allowing light from the boulevard into the living room. There’s no one there. She’d like to call her husband to reassure him. Every step toward the kitchen is painful. The central corridor that leads to all the rooms in the apartment seems never-ending, almost ridiculous. She picks up the handset that she left on the sideboard this morning and dials Laurent’s number. She hopes he doesn’t pick up so she can leave a controlled message with no fluctuations or lurching in her breathing. He doesn’t answer. “Yes, it’s me. So I finally got home, one of the Métro lines was blocked…I’m going to take a shower and go to bed, I’m exhausted. I hope everything’s going well with your client. I love you.”
She hangs up, feeling absent, empty. She thinks this is best, and anyway, if she wanted to admit anything to him she wouldn’t find the right way to do it. He would always look at her differently, not only as his wife but as the victim, the woman who was raped, sodomized for the first time by another penis than his. Marie is suddenly aware of the smell of vomit on her. She doesn’t have the strength to take a shower but she still needs to. If she were single she would just take some sleeping pills and go to bed, but if she doesn’t wash now Laurent will notice this aftershave that isn’t his on his wife’s body, the sheets will be impregnated with the smell, and everything will fall apart all over again.
Standing in the middle of the bathroom she slowly unbuttons her blouse and painfully lowers her slacks with the shreds of her torn panties still clinging to them. Blood has dried on her thighs. Foul-smelling brownish marks trail over her stomach. Now completely naked, she catches her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She moves closer and makes out traces of dried semen at the corner of her mouth. One eye is slightly swollen where he slapped her, but that will almost certainly have disappeared by tomorrow. This vision of herself floods her with unbounded sadness. The anger is sure to come later. The scalding water runs between her breasts, washes over her stomach, flows down the nape of her neck and relaxes her muscles. She collapses against the wall, hunches over, limply holding the showerhead above her. Everything she does becomes an ordeal, as if she’s never previously noticed how difficult it is to perform on a daily basis—stepping out of the shower, wrapping herself in a towel, putting on her pajamas. She knows she won’t be able to get to sleep tonight, nor perhaps for days to come. She needs sleeping pills, but in a flash it comes back to her: after Laurent had a bad reaction to a drug past its use-by date, she decided to have a clean-out. She clearly remembers throwing out the last sleeping tablets. The clock in the corridor says it’s ten o’clock. The pharmacy will be closed and she would never be able to go out again anyway.
The bedroom is a mess. Laurent was looking all over the apartment for his files again this morning and he thought that maybe they were hiding under the sheets. Everything is upside down. Marie never berates him for anything but right now a diffuse anger spreads through her whole body. She was raped this evening, assaulted, attacked, and she can’t even have sleeping pills or her husband by her side or a tidy bed. She buries herself under the cold sheets, turns out the small bedside light, and waits with her eyes open for sleep to be so good as to take her.
* * *
—
She thinks it’s about midnight when she hears Laurent come home. She recognizes his footsteps, his stride, his rhythm. From the way he lumbers around the hall she can tell he’s had a little too much to drink. That’s good, he’s sure to sleep. Every creak of the wooden floor stresses her. She wishes she could open the windows and jump into thin air before her husband reaches the bedroom. He sidles up close to her, his body hot and naked. “Are you asleep, honey?” She immediately closes her eyes, relaxes the muscles of her face, slightly slows her breathing and gives a few soft grunts. Laurent eventually turns away. His body rolls to the other side of the bed, far away from her. He’s a happy, healthy, well-fed man full of drink and plans for the future, he can fall asleep in a matter of minutes. His wife on the other hand knows she’ll have to pretend to live and sleep for many days to come. Marie opens her eyes. The silence is interrupted by the sound of scooters on the boulevard. Her eyes don’t move, staring straight ahead. Deep in the night, facing the wall that she’s previously looked at while bowled over by pleasure, the trouble down below feels to her like fate’s revenge on a life it deems too easy.
Marie got up several times in the night; Laurent didn’t notice a thing. She thought he’d be very tired this morning after his long evening but he clearly isn’t. She watches in silence as he paces around the kitchen. “I’m sure I put it here when I came home.” Marie doesn’t react. “I’ll end up putting tracking devices on all my files so I can find them. I’m super-late!” Marie can’t remember a single day when she hasn’t helped him find his stuff. Her husband notices something different this morning. “You okay, honey? You seem miles away.” She spots Laurent’s green folder on the fruit dish. She doesn’t tell him, waits for him to fret a little as he watches the minutes trickle by. She’s just about to tell him when he sees it. “Ah, there it is. I knew it was in the kitchen! Okay, I’m off to work, Jean’s waiting for me. And don’t forget we’re going to Paul and Sophia’s for dinner this evening. They’re expecting us at eight. Love you!” He drops his cup in the sink, kisses his wife, and runs out of the kitchen.