The Age of Reinvention (29 page)

A masterpiece!

ERIC DUMONTIER
¹

Shocking.

DAN SBERO
²

A great book!

SOPHIE DE LATOUR
³

A writer is born.

MARION LESAGE
⁴

An amazing story.

LÉON BALLU
⁵

1
. Eric Dumontier wrote this review in order to please Samuel's book publicist, an attractive blonde with whom he was in love.

2
. The renowned literary critic Dan Sbero declared: “My greatest success was, without any doubt, my interview with Saul Bellow, two days before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

3
. Sophie de Latour, thirty-four, aspires to edit the cultural section of the newspaper for which she works.

4
. Marion Lesage was also the author of a forgotten novel that sold only four hundred copies:
The Inconvenience of Being Dead
. She was recently fired from the editorial board of her newspaper—officially for economic reasons, unofficially because she refused the advances of the newspaper's managing editor.

5
. Although professionally successful, Léon Ballu, fifty-five, confided to his psychiatrist that his private life was a “complete failure.”

Samir hadn't called Nina for two weeks. She spent those long days prostrate, her isolation seeming to accentuate the gravity of the event, giving it a particular character, as if, by withdrawing from him, she was giving Samir enough space—a vast emptiness, she hoped—to make him realize how much he needed her, how pointless his life felt without her. And then, when she understood that he was never going to call her again, either because he was disgusted by her ultimatum and had decided not to see her anymore, or because he didn't love her enough to risk losing his family, she decided not to let things drift but to get back in touch with the few people she had met in New York—women she had encountered at the hair salon or in the gymnasium of a luxury hotel, one of those places where everything is organized to satisfy your every whim and where Samir had signed her up on his own initiative. How many phone numbers did she have in her address book? Three or four at most. She saw practically no one apart from Samir: he had made it perfectly clear that he wanted her to be available for him whenever he was free. So she had to match her movements to his. Once and once only, she had arranged to meet a woman she had met in the gym—a Frenchwoman—in that little movie theater near Fifth Avenue that showed French films, and she'd had to cancel at the last minute because Samir had reminded her that she had to subjugate her timetable to his—it was
the least she could do
. Their meetings always followed the same unchanging routine: he called her to tell her he was on his way. She had to make sure she was ready for him (i.e., hair nicely styled, makeup on, dressed to his tastes). When he appeared, he kissed her. (She
had
to kiss him. Once, he came in and found her on the phone—he had been furious and had stayed mad at her for hours afterward.) They made love, then ate lunch or dinner together. After that, he would leave, though always after checking that she didn't want for anything. She had given up everything in her life for him: first, her relationship with Samuel, which, while never perfect, nor very passionate (had she ever felt any passion for Samuel?), had suited her well enough that she had seriously considered having a child with him; second, her career, because while it was nothing to write home about and had never made her big money, it did give her a sense of pride to see her photograph in major store catalogues or on the posters that decorated the stores during promotion periods. She was a model—not a top model, admittedly; a model who worked in the world of supermarkets and food, not the world of catwalks and cocktail parties—but all the same, there was something cool about being regularly chosen to incarnate the French ideal: the healthy, well-balanced mother; the model employee; the smiling, devoted wife who would pose with the
sturdiest and most affordable
satchel, the
tastiest
ham, or the
most absorbent
diapers. Women looked at her and wished they looked like her; they saw her and immediately wanted to use the same products she used. While the job was not well paid considering the number of hours she had to pose for those photographs, or for all the time she spent making her face and body look desirable every day, it did have quite a few advantages: no two days were ever the same, and she could organize her time as she wished and was constantly meeting people who told her that she was stunningly beautiful. (And she was, of course, but her upbringing by a strict, paranoid father had drained her of any objectivity toward herself.) So, yes, for Samir she had given up this life that she had chosen for herself, and now—after a year—he was leaving her, without having given her the child she dreamed of having, without even having organized their breakup, without telling her clearly what would happen if he never came back. Her mother had abandoned her, and now Samir had abandoned her; her kindness, her beauty, and her other qualities had not been enough to keep their love; they had grown weary of her or had preferred other people to her—a man in her office, in her mother's case; his wife, in Samir's case, that rich heiress whose photograph Nina had seen on the Internet.

She calls her few acquaintances and tells them what has happened—and none of them deign to see her. In New York, she is a woman without friends or any personal prestige, a penniless woman. Samir used to give her money on a regular basis, but for two weeks she's received nothing; she is surviving on what she has left. She doesn't know how long she'll be able to stay in the apartment. He hasn't officially broken up with her. Should she leave? Keep waiting? Where could she go? She can't afford to pay rent. Soon she won't be able to afford to eat. Suddenly she is afraid of losing everything, and she wonders if this is what he wanted to prove by not calling her: You are dependent on me. Without me, you are nothing here. She wants to resist, but how can she? What resources does she have? She decides to call Samir to ask him for help. This will be difficult—she doesn't want to do it. If she calls him now, she will be capitulating, giving up on the idea of having a child, a life together. But her existence is becoming increasingly precarious. She feels as if she is digging her own grave. Too pessimistic?
No, I'm just being realistic
, she thinks. And she calls Samir's cell phone, which goes directly to voice mail. If it just rang and rang, she would have come to the conclusion he was screening his calls, avoiding her, but every time she dials his number, she gets the same message. She tries three or four times in forty-eight hours, and then she becomes panic-stricken. What if he's had an accident? A medical problem? No one would inform her, because who even knows about her? She calls the local hospitals to check that he has not been admitted: this takes her several hours, but she gets nowhere—no patient has been admitted under that name. After another week has passed, she decides to call Samir's firm, as that is the only place she is likely to be able to obtain information about him without compromising their secret. The secretary's unpleasant tone
¹
immediately makes Nina uncomfortable and she is practically stuttering when she asks to speak to Mr. Tahar. “He's out of the office for a while,” the secretary replies. “Is he on vacation? When will he be back?” Nina asks. “I can't tell you that.” “Could anyone else tell me?” There is a long silence, then the secretary finally admits: “I don't know when Mr. Tahar will return. If this concerns an urgent professional situation, I can pass you to one of his partners.” “Yes, it's urgent and confidential,” Nina replies. “Hold the line please. Your name?” Nina hesitates, then says: “Nina Roche.” For three or four minutes, Nina hears nothing but a Chopin sonata, and then a male voice comes on the line: “This is Berman.” She introduces herself and Berman instantly realizes who she is. Samir has mentioned her to him; he absolutely does not want her asking questions on the phone. He could ask her to call him later, but he senses that she would be capable of contacting Ruth, so he agrees to meet her in a café close to the office: “I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Berman spots her as soon as he enters the café. He knows it must be her: she's like a diamond in a coal mine. There are plenty of pretty girls in this packed café, but a woman like her—so beautiful and deliciously sensual—stands out instantly, without any effort, without any aggressive exhibitionism, without the artificial paraphernalia of seductiveness (the usual battery of beauty care products—polished nails, styled hair, powdered face, black-lined eyes, skintight dress showing every curve of her body—and the usual sideways glances). She is simply there, without any affectations, with a beauty so pure that he envies Samir as soon as he lays eyes on her. He wonders if even he would have been capable of resisting her, then immediately answers his own question:
No, I would not be capable of resisting her
. He moves toward her, shakes her hand with excessive amiability, and sits down. He looks her over—he can't help it—but Nina is used to these moments of silence while men's eyes linger on her face, her body, and she waits patiently. Finally, he explains that he arranged to meet her because “there are things that can't be discussed on the phone.” He tells her she doesn't need to explain the situation: he knows who she is and why she has come. Nina struggles to conceal her surprise. Samir never told her that he had mentioned their relationship to anyone, and this fact reassures her, makes her feel more valued. She almost relaxes. Does he know where Samir is? Is he okay? She hasn't heard from him and she is worried: that's why she felt compelled to call his office. Berman's mouth tenses and she understands that something serious must have happened—probably something irreparable—because why else would he suddenly look so stricken? Why else would he touch her hand in a gesture of friendship when she doesn't even know him, has never seen him before? The world tilts toward horror. One of those appalling twists that life takes sometimes. She can feel her heart quiver violently in her chest, as if a torrent of blood were rushing through her veins, destroying the fragile edifice of her rib cage and transforming the slow pulse of ordinary life into a succession of jerks and jolts that betray her fear and anguish. She wishes she could force him to say everything now, right away: get it over with, just stick the damn needle in her and be done with it. But she says nothing, remains outwardly impassive and immobile, like someone who knows her turn is coming and that she must remain calm and mute before the fatal moment. For a long time there is silence between them. They are inside a bubble, indifferent to the shouting of the waiters and waitresses, to the hubbub of voices from other tables, to the ceaseless flood of words all around them, and suddenly Nina surprises herself by praying, silently, that Samir is alive, just as Berman says in a whisper that sounds like a monk's chant: “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I don't know how to break this to you . . .”

1
. It has to be said that Maria Electraz is something of a terror. Fifty-six years old, she is divorced, with three children, and has only one obsession: her job. Her rigorous screening of calls has led to Tahar nicknaming her Checkpoint.

What more could he have asked for, this man who had made his desire to write the driving force of his entire life? A man who had organized his professional, personal, and social existence around this vocation despite the fact that he had no training and no one had ever encouraged him—least of all Nina, who had never taken his writing seriously for a reason that remained obscure to him. Because, while she never read his work and never asked to read it, she would buy any and all novels that he recommended to her, reading them intently and commenting upon them with formidable seriousness—the kind of seriousness that only someone who considered literature the most important thing in their life would exhibit. (And how humiliated and jealous he felt, noting the contrast between her indifference to his own work and her fascination with that of other authors, some of them less talented than him!) So, yes, for a man like him, whose previous books had been rejected by so many publishers, as if every possible factor (human and situational) were opposed to the realization of his literary aspirations, what could be more exciting than to be accepted by one of France's biggest publishers and, upon publication, to be immediately consecrated as a great writer? All his life, he had thought of himself as a failure—because his parents, crushed by the tutelary intellectual figures that they kept choosing, had raised him to a position of inferiority and denigration, according to which a person is as nothing before his masters and before God. He had also thought about the day he discovered the truth of his origins, imagining himself the son of an alcoholic, a loser, a nutcase, because what other kind of father could have produced a being as spineless as him, a man who had experienced only one piece of good luck in his entire life: meeting a woman as beautiful as Nina and managing to keep her for twenty years, though even that he had accomplished only through blackmail and cunning. What a failure! This fact had been confirmed to him each time Nina had left him for Samir, each time he had read people's thoughts as they looked at him and Nina together: What the hell is she doing with
him
? Everything in his life brought him back to this contemptible self-image. He saw himself as a dull man, physically and intellectually incapable of wooing or keeping any desirable woman, incapable even of finishing the degree he'd begun. And what was he trying to prove by systematically and efficiently sabotaging any plan that fortune had enabled him to put in place, if not his own stupidity and incompetence? Yes, all his life he had felt mediocre, and yet now here he was being described as “brilliant,” “dazzling,” “talented.” Who were they all talking about? He wanted to tell them that they had it all wrong. His continual self-deprecation and self-flagellation was his way of justifying his failures—of protecting himself, essentially—and he had ended up finding a certain comfort in that marginal zone where no one ever deigned to visit or hold him to account. He was used to it.