A Secret Kept

  Early January, the no-smoking ban hits France. Funnily enough, submitting to it is easier than I thought. And there are so many people like me puffing away in the freezing cold in front of restaurants and offices that I feel I am part of a conspiracy. A blue-fingered one. I hear that Serge has returned. Lucas tells me he is home. I can’t help wondering if Astrid ever told him about us, about that night after Pauline’s funeral. And how he took it. Back at the office, Parimbert proves to be a troublemaker, just like his obnoxious son-in-law. Beneath the bland exterior and the beguiling smile, he rules with an iron fist. Negotiating with him is a punishing task that leaves me drained of vitality.

  The only bright light in my bleak existence was the surprise birthday party thrown for me by Hélène, Didier, and Emmanuel. This took place at Didier’s apartment. Didier is a colleague, but the difference between him and me is that we started out roughly at the same time and he has gravitated to another galaxy of success and prosperity. He never became bigheaded about it. He could have. The only thing we now have in common is that his wife left him for a younger man, some arrogant Eurotrash banker from the city. His ex-wife, whom I was quite fond of, became Posh Spice’s clone. Her remarkable Grecian nose now looks like an electrical plug. Didier is a tall, emaciated fellow with long, thin hands and a startling howl of a laugh. He lives in a spectacular loft in the twentieth arrondissement, near Ménilmontant, converted from a vast old warehouse tucked away between two dilapidated buildings. When he bought it all those years ago, we’d sniggered, hooting that he’d freeze his ass off in the winter and bake during the summer. But he ignored us and slowly transformed the place into a centrally heated air-conditioned glass-and-brick glory that had us all green with envy.

  I had not given much thought to my upcoming forty-fourth birthday. There was a time when, as a family man, it was endearing to receive presents from my children—those clumsy drawings and lopsided ceramic creations. But I was no longer a family man. And I knew I would spend my birthday evening alone. As I had last year. That morning, I received a text message from Mélanie and one from Astrid. And one from Patrick and Suzanne, who had gone off on a long trip east. I think I would have done just that if I had lost my daughter. My father usually never remembered my birthday. But surprisingly, he called me at the office. How soft and tired his voice sounded, I thought. Not at all the trumpetlike, bossy tone of yesterday.

  “Do you want to come over for a bite for your birthday?” he said. “It will be just you and me. Régine has a bridge dinner.”

  The avenue Kléber. The orange and brown seventies dining room with overbright lighting. My father and me, face-to-face at the oval table. His spotted, trembling hand pouring out the wine. You should go, Antoine. He’s an old man now, he’s probably lonely. You should make an effort, do something for him for once. For once.

  “Thanks, but I have other plans for tonight.”

  Liar. Coward.

  When I hung up, guilt took over. I should call him back, say that I could make it finally. I uneasily turned to my computer, back to the Think Dome. The Think Dome, no matter how it had made me chortle in the beginning, was taking up a lot of energy, but in a surprisingly motivating way. This was the first time in ages I found myself working on a project I enjoyed, that egged me on, that stimulated me. I had researched igloos, their history, their specificity. I had looked up domes, remembered the beautiful ones I had visited in Florence, in Milan. I sketched page after page, drew shapes and forms I never imagined I could think up, hatched ideas I never thought I could possibly conceive.

  A little beep signaled an incoming e-mail. It was from Didier: “Need your advice about an important business deal. A guy you worked with. Can you drop in tonight at around eightish? Urgent.”

  I e-mailed back: “Yes, of course.”

  So when I turned up on Didier’s doorstep, I was not expecting anything at all. He greeted me, let me in, poker-faced. I followed him into the huge main room, which I found oddly silent, as if a hush had fallen over it, and all of sudden, screams and shouts exploded from all around me. Bewildered, I discovered Hélène and her husband, Mélanie, Emmanuel, and two women I did not know, who ended up being Emmanuel’s and Didier’s new ladies. Music was turned on full blast, champagne was produced, pâté and tarama, salads, sandwiches, fruit, and a chocolate cake, followed by a shower of presents. I was delighted. For the first time in what seemed ages, I relaxed, enjoyed the champagne, enjoyed being the center of attention.

  Didier kept looking at his watch, I couldn’t think why. When the doorbell rang, he rushed to his feet.

  “Ah,” he announced, “the pièce de résistance.”

  And he opened the door with a flourish.

  She glided in, wearing a long white dress, an astounding dress for the middle of winter, just like that, out of nowhere, her chestnut hair tied back, a mysterious smile hovering on her lips.

  “Happy birthday, Mister Parisian,” she whispered, à la Marilyn Monroe, and she came to kiss me.

  Everybody clapped and cheered. I caught Mélanie and Didier exchanging triumphant glances and guessed they had rigged all this up behind my unsuspecting back. Nobody could take their eyes off Angèle. Emmanuel gawked and discreetly gave me a jovial thumbs-up. I could tell that the ladies—Hélène, Patricia, and Karine—were longing to ask Angèle about her job. I imagined she was used to this. She was most likely questioned like this every day. When the first timid question came, something like, “How can you handle dead people all day long?” she answered, without being flippant, “Because it helps other people stay alive.”

  It was a wonderful evening. Angèle in her white dress, like a snow princess. The beauty of Didier’s loft, the skylight opening out onto the night’s cold darkness. We laughed, we drank, we even danced. Mélanie proclaimed it was the first time she had danced in a very long time. We all clapped again. I felt dizzy, a mixture of champagne and joy. When Didier asked me how Arno was, I replied flatly, “A disaster.” His hyena-like laugh burst out, which got everybody going. I then told them about the man-to-man conversation I’d finally had with my son when he was expelled from school. The talking-to I’d given him, my heart sinking as I realized how much I sounded like my own father, admonishing, rebuking, finger wagging. Then I got up and aped Arno’s languid slouch, his disgruntled scowl. And even took on his voice, raspy, drawling, immediately identifiable as that of a hip teenager: “C’mon, Dad, when you were my age, there was, like, no Internet, no mobile phones, you guys were living in the Middle Ages. I mean, come on, you were born in the sixties, what do you understand of today’s world?” This triggered another round of hoots. I felt elated, egged on by something I’d never experienced. I was making people laugh. I had never achieved that in my life. Astrid used to be the bubbly, funny one. She cracked the jokes, she had everyone in stitches. I was the silent onlooker. Until tonight.

  “You’ve got to hear about my new boss, Parimbert,” I said to my new audience. They had of course heard of him. He had just about plastered himself on every poster on every street corner, and you couldn’t turn on the TV or your computer without being confronted with his Cheshire cat smile. I imitated how he marched around a room, fists deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched up, and his peculiar grimace—which I’d mastered to a T—as if to convey how hard, how powerfully he was thinking, an old ladyish pout followed by the rapid intake of his upper and lower lip, making him look like a dried-out prune. And then his way of orally capitalizing certain words to give them emphasis, sotto voce: “Now, Antoine. Remember how strong the Mountain must be in your Back. Remember how each Particle around you is Alive, full of Energy and Intelligence. Remember that Purifying your Inner Space is Absolutely necessary.”

  I told them about the Think Dome, the nightmarish yet incredibly inspiring complication of the affair, Parimbert peering over my rough copies, too vain to wear glasses. He never seemed to be pleased or displeased by my creations, merely puzzled, as if they triggered colossal concern. I began to suspect
that he had no idea what the Think Dome was supposed to be. He just very much liked the idea of it. “Now, Antoine, remember, the Think Dome is a Bubble of Potential, a Liberating cell, a Closed Space that in fact knows how to set us Free.” They were hysterical with laughter. Hélène was wiping away tears. I told them about the seminar Parimbert had invited me to, where for an entire day, in a modern complex in the chic western suburbs, I had been introduced to his team. His associate was a terrifying Asian personage with a cadaverous mask-like face, whose gender was difficult to determine. All the people who worked with Parimbert seemed either about to collapse or on drugs, sporting glassy, intoxicated expressions. They all wore black or white. Some were very young, barely out of college. Others were seriously getting on. Nobody looked remotely normal. At one o’clock, stomach rumbling, I had been looking forward to lunch. But as the minutes ticked by, to my dismay, no lunch was announced. Standing at the head of the room, screens flashing behind him, Parimbert was droning on about the website’s success and how he was Expanding through the Entire World. I discreetly asked the haggard but elegant-looking lady next to me about lunch. She stared at me as if I had said “sodomy” or “gang bang.” “Lunch?” she repeated with a revolted whisper. “We don’t have lunch. Ever.” Distressed, I had asked, “Why not?” belly gurgling away all the more. She had not deigned to answer me. At four o’clock, green tea and bran scones were imperially ushered in. But my stomach balked. And I had spent the rest of the day feeling dangerously faint and had rushed to the nearest boulangerie as soon as I could to wolf down an entire baguette.

  “You were so funny,” said Mélanie as we took our leave. Didier, Emmanuel, and Hélène agreed. A mixture of admiration and surprise. “I had no idea you could be so funny.”

  Later, when I fell asleep, holding my snow princess close to me, I felt happy. A happy man.

  Saturday afternoon. Mélanie and I stand outside the enormous wrought-iron door that leads into our grandmother’s building. We telephoned this morning, informed the placid, good-natured Gaspard that we were coming to visit Blanche. I haven’t been here since before the summer. More than six months. Mélanie types out the digital code, and we walk into the huge, red-carpeted hall. The concierge peers at us from behind the lace curtain of her loge, nods at us as we go past. Nothing much has changed here. The carpet may look a touch more threadbare, perhaps. An iron and glass, surprisingly silent elevator has recently replaced the creaky old-fashioned one.

  Our grandparents lived here for more than seventy years. Since their marriage. Our father and Solange were born here. In those days, most of the imposing Haussmanian building belonged to Blanche’s grandfather, Émile Fromet, a well-off property owner who possessed several residences in the Passy area of the sixteenth arrondissement. We were often told about Émile Fromet in our childhood. There was a portrait of him above a mantelpiece, an unyielding-looking man with a redoubtable chin that Blanche luckily did not inherit but passed on to her daughter, Solange. We knew, very young, that Blanche’s wedding with Robert Rey had been a grand event, the faultless union between a dynasty of lawyers and a family of doctors and property owners. A cluster of respectable, highly regarded, influential wealthy people with the same upbringing, the same origins, the same religion. Our father’s marriage to a rural southerner had probably caused a certain commotion back in the sixties.

  Gaspard opens the door to us, his asymmetrical face flushing with contentment. I cannot help feeling sorry for the man. He must be five years older than I am at the most, and he looks as if he could be my father. No family, no children, no life apart from the Reys. Even when he was young, he seemed wizened, shuffling about the place in his mother’s tow. Gaspard has been living here forever, in a room up under the roof, devoted to the Reys, like his mother, Odette. Odette had slaved for our grandparents till the day she died. She terrorized us when we were small, forced us to wear felt slippers so as not to mat the freshly polished parquet floor, urging us to keep our voices down, as “Madame” was resting and “Monsieur” was reading the Figaro in his office and did not want to be disturbed. No one knew who Gaspard’s father was. No one asked. When Mélanie and I were small, Gaspard did odd jobs around the apartment, errands of all sorts, and did not seem to spend much time at school. His mother died ten years ago, and he took over the upkeep of the place. It had given him a new importance he was proud of.

  Mélanie and I greet him. Our arrival is the highlight of his week. When Astrid and I brought the children in to see their great-grandmother back in the good old Malakoff days, he was ecstatic.

  As ever, when I enter this place, I am struck by the darkness of it. The northern exposure does not help. The 450-square-meter apartment never catches a glimmer of sun. Even in the middle of summer it harbors a sepulchral gloom. Solange, our aunt, is on her way out. We have not seen her for a long time. She says hello briefly, not unkindly, pats Mélanie on the cheek, does not ask about our father. Brother and sister live in the same vicinity, he on the avenue Kléber, she on the rue Boissière, five minutes away, but they never see each other. They never got along. They never will. It’s too late.

  The apartment is a continuous succession of great rooms with molded ceilings. Grand salon (which was never used, too big, too cold), petit salon, dining room, library, office, four bedrooms, two old-fashioned bathrooms, and the out-of-date kitchen far away at the back. Every day, Odette used to wheel a squeaky table laden with food along the never-ending corridor from the kitchen to the dining room. I can still remember the sound of those wheels.

  On our way here, we discussed how we were going to tackle our grandmother. We couldn’t exactly come out with “Did you know your daughter-in-law was having affairs with women?” Mélanie suggested that we look around the place. What did she mean? I asked. Did she mean to snoop? Yes, she meant to snoop, and her expression was so comical I had to smile. I felt oddly excited, as if she and I were embarking on some new and strange adventure. But what about Gaspard? I had asked. He watched over the place like a hawk. Mélanie had waved a nonchalant hand. Gaspard would not be a problem. The problem was where to look.

  “Hey, guess what?” she had said with a sprightly voice as I parked the car along the avenue Henri-Martin.

  “What?”

  “I met a guy.”

  “Another old lech?”

  She had rolled her eyes.

  “No. Actually, he’s a little younger than I am. He’s a journalist.”

  “And?”

  “And.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “For the moment.”

  The nurse on duty today is one we have never seen. But she seems to know all about us, greeting us by our first names. She informs us that our grandmother is still asleep and that it is not wise to wake her now, as she had a bad night. Can we wait another hour or so? Maybe have a coffee somewhere or do a spot of shopping? she suggests with a bright smile.

  Mélanie turns in order to locate Gaspard. He is not far off, giving orders to a cleaning lady. She whispers to me, “I’m going to snoop. Keep him busy.”

  She slips off. For what seems like ages I listen to Gaspard’s woes about the difficulty of finding the right staff, the soaring prices of fresh fruit, the new neighbors on the fourth floor who make so much noise. Mélanie at last comes back and spreads her hands, as if to say, “Found nothing.”

  We decide to return in an hour. As we head to the door, Gaspard says in a rush that he’s very happy to make tea or coffee for us. We can go sit in the petit salon and he’ll bring it to us. It’s cold outside today, we can stay cozily here. He seems so eager to have us stay that we feel we can’t refuse. We wait for him in the petit salon. A cleaning lady is dusting along the corridor. She nods to us as she passes.

  This is the room that brings back the most memories. The French windows looking out to the balcony. The dark green velvet sofa and chairs. A large, low glass table. My grandfather’s silver cigarette box is still there. This is where my grandparent
s gathered for their coffee or to watch television. This is where we played charades. Listened to the grown-ups talk.

  Gaspard comes back with a tray, coffee for me, tea for Mélanie. He pours out our cups carefully, hands us milk and sugar. He sits on a chair facing us, fists on his knees, his back very straight.

  We ask him how our grandmother has been recently. Not too good, he says, her heart has been acting up again and she spends most of her days sleeping. The medication knocks her out.