Fracture Read online

  * * *

  Outside of his normal working hours, Yoshie started to attend business meetings at cafés on weekends. At first, I would go with him. I’d sit at another table and read until the meeting was over. I noticed something he would do every time. He’d order two glasses of strong liquor, pay for them, and leave his own untouched. If the conversation became drawn out, he would order another round and repeat the same procedure. The other person ended up getting tipsy, while he remained perfectly sober. As soon as that person left, he’d ask the waiter to take away his own drink and bring him a noisette, which he downed in one gulp, as if it were medicine, before the next prospective client arrived. I soon stopped accompanying him and would either go to the cinema or wait for him at a restaurant.

  After he joined Me, we began to talk about moving in together. We both wanted to and yet didn’t want to. It seemed like the natural decision, and yet we feared upsetting the balance we’d established. We spent part of the week together. We rehearsed being what people call a serious couple. And we also continued to spend some days apart, which helped us make sure we wanted to be together.

  Then of course there was the question of money. Although by then he was earning a good salary, I wanted to contribute to our finances. I thought that my future family should be founded on shared responsibilities, which included earnings. If there’s one thing I regret after all these years of marriage, it’s that I ended up yielding on that point. Did I do it for myself, for my husband, or for my children? I don’t even know anymore.

  I started private tutoring and worked as a substitute teacher at a few high schools. The plan was to save up for a year or two, and then to look for our nest. Our dream was always a big old house with high ceilings, which we would gradually renovate to our taste. A house that resembled our relationship. During that time, I never actually moved in with him, or he never really insisted that I did.

  While we continued to make plans for our future home, he could finally afford to leave his loft. He moved into a small but pleasant apartment on Rue des Cordelières, in the thirteenth arrondissement. There we spent what I believe were our last truly happy moments. In the entrance hall was a black-and-white-striped rug that stretched halfway across the room, a housewarming present from me. I remember that it cost a small fortune, because, according to the antiques dealer, it had belonged to some Japanese imperial family. I fell in love with it. The day I brought it over, I held it up and exclaimed: Tadaima! Yoshie smiled, kissed me, and replied, Okaeri, mes amours! Those are the kinds of foolish things that remain engraved on your memory. I’m sure he has no recollection of it. He wasn’t sentimental in that way.

  I remember our Sundays at the Rue Mouffetard market. The street stalls. The brash colors. Those aromas you could almost taste. The smell of fish, like a beach in the wrong place. Cheeses vying with one another. Shiny pieces of fruit. Their different textures. Our hands squeezing them. Our fingers meeting. And in the background, the beloved walls of Saint-Médard church. The same walls where in the old days preachers, pilgrims, and hypnotists supposedly congregated, until the authorities expelled them. And where someone had left a delightful rhyme mocking the prohibition:

  In the king’s name,

  we forbid God

  to perform any miracles

  on this facade.

  Sometimes, while we were having breakfast in Yoshie’s apartment, we would imagine my furniture alongside his. We’d visualize all our belongings together, their shapes and edges touching, to see what they would look like. Interestingly, one of the things we disagreed over was the television set. He had installed an enormous Me television opposite the sofa. But I had always told him I would never, under any circumstances, want one in my house. I preferred to spend my time reading or listening to music.

  We also disagreed about cats. According to Yoshie, one summer when he was a child, he had fallen asleep with a sick cat in his arms, and he’d had such a strong allergic reaction to it that it recurred whenever he came into contact with one. As I was a passionate cat lover, to me this shortcoming felt no less serious than his reluctance to have children. We never really went into it. I suppose, in my heart, I hoped he would end up changing his mind. We weren’t in any hurry. We had time, or so we thought.

  * * *

  I remember our last summer. Coincidentally, it was also the longest vacation we’d spent together.

  For the first time since he began working for Me, I’d managed to persuade him to take a whole week off. He usually refused to leave his post. He felt more conscientious if he divided his vacation into small chunks, which meant that we were never able to relax properly. For me this was a triumph. Yoshie taking a break! I was convinced this vacation would be very important for us. My intuition told me we were about to make a commitment, take a decisive step. So much for my stupid intuition.

  There was so much sun, it seemed liquid. Summer was brimming over. The light enveloped us. We went by car, a cream-colored Renault Dauphine that Yoshie had just bought thanks to the raise he had received that year. I remember we drove via Montauban, along a road between Bordeaux and Montpellier. In those days there weren’t the magnificent highways we have now. It took ages to get anywhere, but that was half the fun. We simply accepted that moving from A to B was a fundamental part of the journey. Knowing that made you more patient, and that patience was enthralling.

  We smoked cigarettes out of the window. I think I’d switched from Gauloises to Chesterfields. The smoke came and went like time itself. That’s how I remember us that summer. We smoked because we were happy, we were happy because we smoked. The light flowed. The sun set the countryside on fire. We drove with the radio on, though we barely listened to it. We were too caught up in our own murmur.

  All of a sudden, the speakers made a different noise. We were invaded by a tumult of sound. We turned up the volume. It was, the radio announced, some young foursome who were causing a stir among music lovers in England and Germany. Yoshie and I had never heard of them. I suppose that goes to show how much life we still had ahead of us. We’d never heard “Love Me Do.”

  In those days, there was an electricity around us young people that is difficult to explain. Everything had the feel of the first summer in a long time. We’d left behind the post–world war years. We’d signed the Évian Accords, after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Algerians. And the independence of our colonies was now a fact. We believed a better world was possible. Even capitalism pretended to care about the middle classes. It was in this climate of disconcerting happiness, of the yearning for postponed pleasures, that my generation moved from jazz to rock and roll.

  I clearly recall those days on the coast. The fresh fish we devoured with the hunger the sea gives you. The white wine illuminating Yoshie’s smile. His body moving in the sun on the beach at Palavas-les-Flots. His way of running with his arms by his sides.

  It was there that I snorkeled for the first time. We loved it so much we bought our own snorkels. One evening, as the sun was going down and people were leaving, we went skinny-dipping. We started to fool around, to fondle each other underwater. And in the end, we couldn’t resist the temptation. That was also, how could I forget, the first time I’d done it in water. I saw the whole world in slow motion, just before my life sped up forever. When he ejaculated, I dipped my head below the surface again and saw a medusa of semen float by and then gradually dissolve in the sea.

  During that vacation, we looked up at the sky a lot. The universe has always made me dizzy. I find its beauty overwhelming. And yet it reminded Yoshie that nothing mattered very much. Staring into the sky makes me think of distances impossible to reach, and that makes me melancholy. To him, that same vastness suggested that we are part of something far greater than ourselves. I saw my own finiteness. He saw the continuity of everything. I talked to him about urgency and longing. He talked of relief and patience.

  At one point during our discussion, I went to fetch the flashlight from the car. I switched it
on, and pointed it up at the sky. Showing him how the tiny beam of light vanished only a short distance above us, I cried, You see? We can’t get there.

  * * *

  A few months later, there arose the whole matter of the transfer. Me had been stepping up its operations in the United States for a while, and it was doing an increasing amount of business there. It was then that Me made Yoshie an offer, which, according to him, he couldn’t refuse. To run the marketing department, or something like that, at the new branch in New York. When he told me, I wept out of pride for him and fear for us. We argued about the move quite a lot. On the one hand, there was the company, and on the other, my students and my family. He couldn’t stay here, and I didn’t want to leave.

  Our farewell was so dramatic it makes me laugh now. We made all sorts of promises to each other. We planned when we would next meet. We kept saying that this challenge would only strengthen our relationship, bring us closer together than ever. It would be a trial period of one or two years, we told ourselves. If the new job didn’t work out, he would come back here. And if things went well, I could move to New York. Look for work over there. Or maybe we would get married: we’d have to see. After the initial shock, the idea began to appeal to me. I even started to study English.

  The first few months were filled with passionate letters and endless phone calls. Writing to Yoshie was the high point of my day. Sitting there, alone, I had the impression he was listening and could understand me. His absence turned him into the perfect interlocutor. When I read his words, composed with the grammar we had labored over together, I had a wondrous sensation of happiness mixed with yearning. That frantic method of communication breathed new life into our feelings for each other. Suffering for love, I admit, made me feel special. As if I enjoyed a more intense personal life than my friends. The distance made me start to remember my boyfriend as better than he was. His good qualities grew. His defects diminished. In a manner of speaking, I fell in love with not seeing him.

  After his departure, something strange happened to the city. I had difficulty recognizing the places we had walked together so many times. Every neighborhood, every street, every corner (Paris has a plethora of corners) seemed devoid of content. And that content was precisely our shared company, the sum of our gazes. Without Yoshie’s foreign perspective, I no longer knew how to look at my own city.

  During that time, I started to experience something unknown to me, which I would feel much too frequently after that. A sense of loneliness when I was alone. The sad realization that when I was alone, I wasn’t in the company of somebody interesting. Before Yoshie and I met, I’d loved going to the cinema, to cafés, to the park on my own. Once he left, those activities seemed wearisome and rather absurd, like a parody of what we had once been. In my girlfriends’ view, I had become a dependent woman and needed to readjust. I suspected they said this out of jealousy, because they’d never experienced a symbiotic relationship like ours.

  When we spoke on the telephone, Yoshie assured me he was still here with me. Just as I was always there with him. He insisted that my image accompanied him everywhere in the new city, and whenever he discovered a place, he would show it to me in his mind. He’d look at it for the both of us. He enjoyed collecting all the things that we would soon experience together. And he would ask me, in a hushed voice on the other end of the phone, to do the same. I believed him because I wanted to believe him. Maybe he believed it too. Perhaps we nourished each other’s faith.

  Finally the time came to organize my long-awaited visit to New York. Our plan was to spend the summer together. Save up all our days off and tour the West Coast by car (Red, it has to be red! I’d begged him excitedly). Imagining us on the California freeways, hair blowing in the wind, made me ecstatically happy. At first, Yoshie participated in all the arrangements with his usual attentiveness. But, as my plans and ideas became more elaborate, he began to leave all the decisions to me. Whenever my husband and I take a trip somewhere together, he accuses me of wanting to control everything. I find that very interesting, considering he could be accused of the exact opposite. Of living in a state of total apathy.

  The vacation drew near, and Yoshie’s behavior became odd. He would alternate between extreme thoughtfulness and bouts of silence. Sometimes he took ages to reply to my letters. On other occasions, he sounded too effusive, unnaturally eloquent. I myself veered between euphoria and anguish. There were days when I recognized instantly his old affectionate voice, and days when he sounded alien to me, like someone imitating him. I was never sure which of my two boyfriends I was going to find on the telephone.

  He explained that his new job required a degree of commitment he hadn’t anticipated. That his responsibilities were more onerous than he had imagined. And that he was doing his best to get ahead with his work in order to free up the summer. To free up the summer, he said. As if my arrival were another item in his calendar. He seemed worried that I might be suffering. This condescension was new, and alarming. Occasionally, I would ask him certain questions, and he seemed to avoid answering them.

  Fool that I was, it still took me a while longer to understand (but not forgive) the reason for his ambivalence. I imagine he was afraid to hurt me by telling me the truth. And to keep my hopes alive by saying nothing. I don’t know why we seek complicated explanations for obvious problems. Now that my bedroom has witnessed so many secrets, I see that the real problem isn’t the lie itself. The terrible thing is the chain of secrets, cover-ups, and omissions that are necessary to sustain the first lie.

  Only when my departure date was imminent did Yoshie tell me the truth. I felt I was dying, and at the same time, liberated. I remember that contradiction clearly. He suggested I come to New York anyway, that we end things calmly, face-to-face, and that I allow him to pay for my trip. I angrily refused. It seemed to me the most humiliating flight in the world. I preferred to break off all contact with him. I stopped answering his calls and letters.

  For a while, I couldn’t say for how long, he made an effort to keep in touch. But this pretense that we were friends seemed to me cowardly. Things hurt less if they’re clear. I continued to ignore him until he gave in. I went through the necessary suffering and got on with my life. I never spoke to him again.

  * * *

  To what extent could my story with Yoshie have influenced the speed at which all things happened afterward? I met my husband eight months before we married. We moved in together straightaway, riding a wave of recklessness that we called love. I felt that the pinnacle of happiness was the ability to stop thinking about each step. I didn’t want to plan the future anymore. I chose to plunge headlong into it.

  Our three children arrived almost one after the other. This may sound strange, but for me, that was the only possible way to be a mother. As a very young girl, I’d had so many reservations, excuses, and mistaken prejudices about it, that there was no other way for me to commit to having a family. I neutralized my doubts through action. I overcame my fears by ceasing to focus on myself. If I’d known how much relief there is in caring for others, to what extent our own lives become clearly defined and ordered thanks to the lives we make ourselves responsible for, I would have had them sooner.

  Yoshie had no wish to make a serious commitment. To some extent, that immaturity makes sense to me. How much worse it would’ve been for him to get to the end and then run away. It’s ironic how politically active men of my generation found it hard to commit in other areas. Their personal lives somehow refuted their politics.

  To be honest (am I being honest?), sometimes I worry that my daughter Adélaïde’s indifference to motherhood isn’t just an ideological position, more or less inspired by the education we gave her about her freedoms as a woman, but also a rejection of the type of mother I’ve been. According to my husband, I have a tendency to be overprotective. He thinks this has had negative effects on our two daughters. The younger one has turned out rather submissive, and the older one is extremely independent. One
obeyed me too much. The other is forever contradicting me.

  Adélaïde is so busy with her lectures and conferences that we hardly ever see her, except for those perfunctory Sunday visits. We feel more like part of her tutoring roster than her parents. Muriel doesn’t seem able to tear herself away from that sleepy town where my son-in-law’s parents live. The views are charming, and I don’t deny they grow excellent vegetables. Apart from that, what the hell is my daughter doing there? And what can I expect from our son, Jean-Pierre? Since his separation, the poor boy falls in love every year. His main activity seems to be starting relationships and breaking them off. And so his concerns are always elsewhere.

  To top it all off, my granddaughter, Colette, just got married. That was the biggest shock. When did we grow so very old? I realize that from now on she will hardly ever come to see us. At least not until she has children of her own.

  It hurts to be told that I’m needy. I feel this description simplifies who I am. I’ve always tried to be there for my children, to be a help, not a hindrance. Have I failed in that? Or is their father mistaken when he judges me? Young girls these days seem slightly overwhelmed by family life. As if they’ve suddenly noticed the sort of burdens that their grandmothers and mothers had to bear. I try to remind myself that we aren’t to blame for this.

  When such thoughts torment me, I call Adélaïde and she reassures me. As she rushes about all over the place, she insists I’ve been a wonderful mother to all three of them. That her decision not to have children is a personal choice and in no way reflects upon us. What’s more, the reason she hasn’t started a family, among other things, is because she realizes she will never be as good a mother as me. It pains me to hear this. As if I’m being punished for mistakes I don’t know about. Whenever I talk to my kids, I end up feeling they know more about me than I do. Precisely the things I most need to know.