The 6:41 to Paris

~ ~ ~

Oh. My. God.

Philippe Leduc.

If only I had known.

I could change places. I’m one of those. The sort who can gather their belongings and stand up without saying a word, and who make sure they find peace and quiet for the rest of the trip at the other end of the train. In a restaurant, for example, I am capable of telling the waiter as he does his rounds to ask if everything is okay that, no, it’s a disgrace, the food is disgusting, and I would like to see the chef so he can taste it himself. I am the epitome of the difficult customer.

But this time I can’t. It’s impossible. It’s as if my feet were glued to the floor. I’m a tin soldier. It’s incredible. As if I were a teenager all over again. And it annoys me. Especially as I had planned to sink into the novel and enjoy the ride from Troyes to Paris as a sort of interlude, a long deep breath of fresh air before the turmoil of the week ahead.

It’s unbearable.

What I feel now is pure hatred. And that surprises me — because I’m not like that, particularly toward someone I haven’t seen in what must be at least twenty-five years. Twenty-seven, in fact. I can’t help but sneak looks at him. His profile. His build. My God. It’s incredible. He doesn’t look at all like he used to. Because although you might not think so, I still have a fairly precise memory of his features. Which is odd, because there are entire chunks of my life that I hardly remember, there are people who have mattered far more than Philippe Leduc, but I can’t remember their faces, whereas his I can see perfectly well. If I close my eyes — at the party, at the edge of the garden. Or in the loft, afterward. In a hotel room in London. They’re like snapshots. I have to get rid of them.

Then I open my eyes and turn my head slightly to the right — what a disaster. He is unrecognizable. Old, for a start. Wrinkled. Flabby. With sagging shoulders. A definite paunch. A scraggly beard. The kind of man who, above all else, inspires pity. Yes, that’s it exactly.

Well, well.

If I had known that one day I would feel pity where Philippe Leduc is concerned, I would have laughed out loud. Hatred, yes. But pity mingled with compassion, certainly not. If someone could have told me that’s how I would feel, it would have done me a world of good. When you break up with someone, you ought to be able to foresee even ever so briefly what the other person will be like years from now. In three cases out of four, you would stop weeping and feeling sorry for yourself. You’d laugh, and it would do you a world of good. Although I didn’t go around feeling sorry for myself. It was all a kind of a blank afterward. My feelings went numb. Into a fog. A redefinition of roles. And on the train taking me back to France, that sudden surge of hatred. A voracious feeling inside, the likes of which I had never known. A desire to tear everything to shreds.

And that’s what’s welling up in me now — but it’s not intact. Because it has been confronted with that slumping figure — what happened to all that brio he once had? My hatred is waning. It’s tinged with scorn.

Philippe Leduc.

If you only knew.

The last time I thought about Philippe Leduc, I had just met Luc. We were in his studio in the 18th arrondissement, at Lamarck-Caulaincourt, getting in each other’s way. We loved it. We had just spent the weekend by the Somme Bay. We were beginning to think that maybe living together, dot, dot, dot … And we’d finish the sentence in silence, each in our own fashion. Luc must have thought that I was replacing the dot, dot, dot … with a blue sky filled with white clouds, happy toddlers, and blissful motherhood — to be honest, there was some of that, but not only. There was, above all, a girl walking straight ahead and casting an ironic and somewhat cruel gaze at everything around her. Though I would never have admitted such a thing, obviously.

We were on the highway. Luc had his eyes closed. On the radio, they were playing Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” and suddenly I was back in London. Summertime London, with the windows open, the yellowed grass in the gardens and parks; it had been hot, very hot, it wasn’t like England at all, enlightened scientists were proclaiming that this was the beginning of global warming, the end of the human race, Armageddon. I walked through those London streets at night, and the paths I would take in the future were being traced. A London that Philippe Leduc had ruined forever. I knew I would never go back there because of all the sickening memories, and that’s what made me angrier than anything — to realize that a place I had liked was now off-limits. I have never been back. I have suppliers in Great Britain, of course — after all, that’s where the idea for the shops came from — but I have entrusted Amy to handle the business with them because she’s a native speaker, it’s only natural.

In the car that day I saw Luc’s profile and the shape of my life to come. Although in all that time I hadn’t given much thought to Philippe Leduc, because the images disgusted me, in the car that day I faced him, mentally. And I was neither as straight nor as sharp as I would have liked to be. Because a part of me wondered what had become of him and whether he ever looked at himself in the mirror and thought about London. And that same part of me was convinced that it had been a terrible waste. That in fact we could have gotten along. That he could have been sitting there where Luc was. That the men I met were interchangeable.

The very idea was horrifying.

I swept it away with the back of my hand, and Luc opened his eyes. He asked me what was wrong. I mumbled, “Nothing, I’m just feeling kind of sad, that’s all.” We pulled off at the next rest area and he took the wheel.

Now it makes me laugh.

I’m looking at Philippe Leduc out of the corner of my eye. I’m getting used to his new physique. The fact I recognized him right away must mean he hasn’t changed all that much. But for sure he has gone downhill. He looks drab. What was so attractive back then was that spark he had. Not just in his eyes, but in the way he moved. The way he laughed. The velvet texture of his skin. You told yourself that with a guy like that life would be one endless party. I don’t know where he got it — the absence of misfortune, perhaps. He was someone who at the age of twenty had never had any reason to complain. He was good-looking, his parents indulged his every whim, his brother was a good deal older than him and already out of his way, and he had more friends than you could ever hope for. No rough edges. No scrapes or scratches. There are people like that, who seemed to float their way through the years, and then along comes a first emotional or professional disappointment, or the death of a friend or a family member, and everything shatters.

He looks pretty shattered to me.

He was very popular at the lycée, Philippe Leduc. We weren’t in the same class, but I’d noticed him. Some of the girls in my clique would talk about him. Their comments were by no means all positive. Particularly on the part of a redhead who’d gone out with him: a total fiasco, she said. She shouted out for all to hear that he was despicable. We nodded, but deep down we thought she spoke that way out of bitterness. We were sure that with us it would be different.

I was only in the outer circle of that group. I never viewed Philippe Leduc as potential prey. I had no potential prey. I was realistic. I wasn’t all that attractive, I had brown hair that got greasy overnight and defied all my efforts to control it. An ordinary face. I didn’t make any effort, either. I had no desire to look pretty. I’d gone out with two boys you could refer to as lumps: losers of my own caliber. I parted with my virginity without too much pain but also without any pleasure.

I don’t have any good memories of the lycée. It was only afterward that I made real friendships. Along the way, two years after I’d finished, there was Philippe Leduc.

The last image I have of him. That angelic little mug of his: I felt like blowing it to smithereens. My entire body full of tension in the effort to seem calm. And snapshots from the previous days: the rope bracelet he wore on his left wrist. The fine muscles on his arms. His thighs. His butt. I can still see it all quite sharply. I’m biting my lips not to laugh. If he only knew, Philippe Leduc, how I am eyeing his butt from twenty-seven years ago, it’d blow his mind. I’m starting to talk like Valentine.

I don’t want to imagine what his butt is like nowadays.

I’ll bet it’s succumbed to the same fate as all the rest — sagging. Lassitude. I wish I could see myself in the mirror. To see whether I’m a similar disaster area.

That’s what I did the day after the party we went to together. I can just picture myself. Naked in the bathroom. Inspecting every feature, mercilessly. I couldn’t understand what he saw in me. Because I was perfectly realistic. When I was at the lycée, the girls there had really helped me. They thought I was plain. Not ugly, no, just plain. Nothing striking. A bug. I knew he’d had a lot to drink by the time we started talking out in the garden. That when we sought refuge in the attic, away from the others, he had alcohol in his blood. We thought it would be full of cobwebs and old toys and wardrobes stuffed with cast-off clothes, but what we found was a regular two-room apartment, with a bed and armchairs and a coffee table. We stood there for a moment, astonished. He was holding my hand. We wondered whether we dared violate this space that didn’t belong to us or even to the boy who had invited us, but to his parents. It was as if we had walked straight into adulthood.

And violate we did.

That next day as I stood at the mirror in the bathroom, I kept my emotions in check. I told myself I’d been very lucky. But I shouldn’t get my hopes up. He wouldn’t call. It would be better if I forgot about him. And that was still my strategy when he came up to me the following Friday as I was on my way out of the technical institute. He wanted to talk to me. To apologize. For what had happened last week. I lifted my chin. I said, “Don’t worry about it. I wanted to. And anyway, I’ve forgotten all about it.” He was stunned. No one spoke to Philippe Leduc like that. He went on the attack. I’d nailed him. I hadn’t planned it. It would never have worked if I had. He took me by the arm. I turned to look at him. I was very solemn. I studied his face. I dissected him the way we dissected the company reports we worked on in our business classes.

He was the one who melted first.

We became an item — sort of.

I say sort of. Because apart from during vacations, we met only on weekends. I went to two or three parties in Paris that his friends from university threw. I stayed in the background. He was ingratiating. A lot of people wondered what we were doing together, but at the same time they didn’t really ask questions, and in any case, when you’re twenty, couples come and go. Before long we would be ancient history, too.

He was the one who wanted to go to London.

I remember how it came about. We were at the café, Les Trois Amis, not far from my parents’ place. I went past the place just this weekend, when I took my mother to the boulangerie that isn’t a boulangerie. It hasn’t changed. The same wrought iron tables outside, the same little gravel courtyard. The veranda has been painted green. You can just get a glimpse of the room at the back, a bit too dark. My mother followed my gaze. She delighted in telling me that the owners had recently put the café on the market, because they were about to retire. I waited for her to go on, to start annoying me and say how she hoped that this den of iniquity, of debauched youth, would be wiped from the surface of the planet, because there had always been problems, with noise and concerts and drunken customers, but she merely gave a little sigh and said she hoped the new owners would keep it as a bar. “It’s a good thing, it livens up the neighborhood, it’s fun to see all these young people.” I couldn’t believe my ears. My mother used to hate it when I hung out at Les Trois Amis.

I thought about old age. About change. About the boredom of repetition.

Maybe I’ll tell her that I was on the train with Philippe Leduc.

No.

She wouldn’t remember him. She saw him only two or three times.

And yet he made a huge impression on her. She thought, Well I never, for once Cécile has brought home an attractive young man. Who’s got presence. And manners on top of it. It’s true that Philippe was the perfect son-in-law. Smiling, relaxed, considerate toward older people, opening the car door for the ladies, well-mannered. He was studying English, the language of the future, but he didn’t brag about his abilities. He made friends wherever he went. He was the young man at family reunions who tickles the kids and makes the grandmothers laugh.

I thought he took it too far.

I knew what made me want to be with him: vanity. To parade around on the arm of a handsome man. To show other people that even when you’re insignificant you can still manage to do such a thing. I was perfectly aware that the relationship wasn’t headed anywhere and that it would end soon enough. But not the way it did. No, not like that.

I’m sure my mother also wondered what miracle had propelled us into each other’s arms — even if it was only for a few months.

Sex. That’s what I should have told her, just to see her face. And because it was part of the explanation. To him, I was reassuring.

In bed, Philippe Leduc was no longer quite so high and mighty. He was clumsy. More than once it was a near fiasco. And he was uptight, as well. He simply could not walk around naked. I never found out why he was like that. There was a time when I would have thought it could be interesting to get to the bottom of it, but we weren’t close enough for that. And then later on it no longer mattered anyway.

But I liked to reassure him. I would cling to his back without saying anything. I knew that talking would be the worst thing. So I would put my hand between his thighs and my lips on his shoulder blades and stay there without moving. I closed my eyes. I tried to imagine everything that was going through his mind — bits of conversations, locker room bragging, clips from porn films, and other dream-like sequences of drownings or fires or railroad disasters. And then very gradually the calm would return. Memories of a deep blue lake in the mountains. Walking along the ocean. Slowly, beneath my fingers, he would regain his vigor. I know that he liked this about me. My discretion. My patience. Then I would take over, still ever so gently. That’s what he needed, gentleness. That’s why our affair lasted for months and not days. That’s also why I was so angry with him afterward.

What am I doing?

Now I can see my hand on his dick, very clearly, twenty-seven years ago. And yet there he is right next to me and I’m pretending not to recognize him. It’s unbelievable, sometimes, the sudden turns life can take. It feels good to have that perspective. I’d rather not face him, confront what he has become. I’d rather stay where I am with the colorful impression of his young body. With my head against the dirty windowpane of the train car. Do not disturb, I’m asleep. It feels gentle. So incredibly gentle.