The 6:41 to Paris (2 page)

I like trains. All the time you can spend doing nothing in particular. You get your bag ready for the trip—like with kids when they’re still small. You pack two paperbacks, some chewing gum, a bottle of water—you can almost imagine putting your security blanket in there, too. Everything you need to pass the time pleasantly. When you get to the station, you even linger at the newsstand, you buy
a magazine, preferably one about the rich and famous. It’s as if you were going to the beach—and like at the beach, you end up not bothering with the novels or the magazine, you don’t chew on the gum and you even forget to drink the water. You get hypnotized by the landscape rolling by, or the rhythm of the waves.

The only train I can’t stand is on Sunday night to Paris. When I was a student,
that train meant depression and uprooting. I would get to the Gare de l’Est feeling totally dispirited. Because my roots are here. I’ve always known that. I was like the rooster in the farmyard back here. In Paris I was nobody. But it was all so long ago. That doesn’t stop me hating the Sunday night train. That’s why I’m here so early this morning. I could have taken the 9:25 last night and slept
at Mathieu’s place, since I have the keys. But I didn’t feel like it. I would rather set the alarm and get up and head for the train station when it’s still dark. There are dozens of shadows like me on the way. Except that they do it every day. For
me it’s an exception. The later trains get into Paris too late—at 10:30, 11:30, the morning is already half over and you feel as if you’re showing
up in the middle of the party.

A day unlike any other.

Unique.

A break with routine.

I start at the store at 10:00 on Mondays and I’m at it until seven in the evening. In a while I’ll phone from Paris to say I can’t come in today. I’ll make up the hours; there’s a family emergency. I know the secretary on the other end of the line will be worried. In twenty years working at the superstore
I haven’t missed a single day—except when I had lumbago, four years ago. I’ll promise to explain when I get back, tomorrow. Because I will get back tomorrow. In principle. Otherwise I’ll have to find a doctor who’ll give me a few days off. I wonder if Jérôme could do that. Maybe he could, after all. It would be strange. But Jérôme is so kind. More than that. He’s a saint. A saint who took in my wife
and kids after the divorce. And since then, he’s been there to make sure they have a friendly environment, full of the comfort and warmth which were singularly lacking in their original family toward the end.

Except that, in fact, the divorce was because of him. No, that’s unfair. It’s much more complicated than that. Christine and I weren’t getting along very well. We got on each other’s nerves.
She felt like she was wasting her life. She began to spend her evenings on the Internet, reconnecting with people. Finding friends
from her teenage years. Her first love, whom she’d never completely forgotten. Jérôme, in other words. Who was divorced, too, no kids, a bit of a player but ready to settle down. They didn’t even need
Match.com
. It’s pathetic.

The kids were annoyed, but not actually
all that much. The atmosphere in the house had been unbearable. Jérôme’s dowry came with a much bigger house, and a sizable yard, where there was even some talk of putting in a swimming pool. He was kind and considerate, and he never said no to buying them magazines. He played video games. The perfect father. Manon was eight, Loïc was six. That was ten years ago. It all went very smoothly. For
them. And for me? I don’t think about it. I go on doing what I set out to do—except that I’ve kind of lost the purpose of the journey. I had a few promising but short-lived affairs. Of the kind that are good for your health. The months have gone by. The years. And I’m hardly likely to change the course of things now. I have my routine. The occasional phone call to Christine, as friendly as it is rare.
The kids every other weekend until this year, when they asked for greater autonomy, and they don’t spend their weekends with me or their mother, but with people we hardly know. As for half of the vacation this year, that could be a problem, too. Manon will be working at the outdoor sports center and her brother wants to take a sailing course for three weeks. I didn’t fight it. That’s not my style.
I wait for my kids to feel guilty. That’s my strategy. Needless to say, it’s pretty useless. Next year, Manon is moving to Reims to study to become a physical therapist. That’s what she wants to be. When I ask her why, she shrugs. She talks
about money, clients, combining business with pleasure, doing good—and besides, it’s a profession that should be safe from unemployment. She’s reasonable.
Can be a little cold. She’s into sports. She’s putting money aside so she won’t have to be totally dependent on her parents and stepfather next year. Irreproachable. What ever happened to the little girl I used to fling into the public swimming pool singing “
Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon
” while she burst out laughing? But I’m being unfair. I doubt she’s like that with her mother. Or
with Jérôme. It’s just something she has with her father. Loïc is headed down the same path. Only worse. He wants to be an orthodontist. What a magnificent dream for a sixteen-year-old.

Having said that, what were my dreams when I was sixteen? I didn’t have any. I just let myself go with the flow. I was seizing the day, as they say. I was fed and housed and watered, I went out with girls, I spent
time with my friends, and I thought life would always be like that.

I have to stop sighing.

I’ve noticed that I’ve been sighing more and more often. And that I get out of breath, and huff and puff. A bad sign. For a start, it drives others away, they get your number—a loser through and through. No one wants to talk to someone who sighs all the time, what if they start venting and go on for hours?
And then you see yourself in a very unflattering light. Particularly as I’m only forty-seven. I just had my birthday. I have at least three more decades to get through. Without sighing.
Are these other people on the platform sighing?

It just goes to show, all these people at this time of day. The town never recovered from the loss of the textile industry or the joys of outsourcing. They’ve been
trying to make the switch to the service sector—call centers, tourism, shipping—but the job market is tight and the jobs that are available are not very appealing. It’s better to work in Paris all day long and deal with a three hour daily commute to earn a decent salary rather than put up with a schedule from hell to speak to some caller on a hotline.

At the end of his life my father worked in
Paris. Promotion, career, money, prestige. He had it all figured out. He made his choice. He saw his wife and kids only two hours in the evening and two days on the weekend. It was just a question of months or a few years—and then they’d move south for their retirement, build a little house, it was all planned out, ordained, on course. But then one day he had a heart attack, when he was changing
Métro lines. Defibrillators didn’t exist back then. There were calls for help, people rushing over, gathering around, someone shouted, “I’m a doctor!” like in some second-rate TV show. But it wasn’t enough. For three years my mother was inconsolable, and then she met this charming bicycle salesman who had just gotten divorced. They went on long rides together.

I’m aware that history is repeating
itself.

I’m trying to fight it.

I figure that bicycle salesmen and doctors are not the same thing.

Or are they?

I also figure that I got divorced before, that I won’t kill myself working, and that I won’t end up dead in a Métro passageway. Unless I do today.

No.

I close my eyes while the ubiquitous female voice announces the arrival of the train in the station. I’d like to meet her someday,
that woman. I wonder what she’s like in real life. Does she spend her time recording messages such as “train number one thousand three hundred (pause) and fifty is currently delayed by (pause) five minutes?” How does she see her future? What does she like to do when she’s not at work?

Above all I wonder how long this recorded voice has been making its announcements to passengers. I remember a
day just like this. All those years ago. I took the same train—or its twin brother. I was seventeen. With Mathieu. It was the end of April, just like today. Easter vacation. We were leaving for Les Landes for a few days, to go camping. We’d been dreaming about our week on the coast for months. All the other students were green with envy. We were freedom personified. If I let myself go a little, I
can even feel the weight of the tent and the backpack on my shoulders. And the impression I had that the whole world was opening up to me.

It was a disappointment. The campsite was deserted, so was the resort, there was nothing to do except go cycling in the dunes. The sea was still freezing and the beach hadn’t been cleaned. You had to watch out for the clumps of tar that had collected in the
sand. In the
end we went home one day early, relieved to be among company and laughter and noise. Or at least I was. I don’t know about Mathieu. He has always been very nostalgic about that vacation. He has often gone back to that stretch of coast. The only nostalgia I feel is for the moment of departure.

I could do it all over again today.

After all, no one is really expecting me. I disappear.
My kids miss me a little, but mainly they are disturbed by the fact they don’t know if I’m alive or dead. So I send them a postcard to reassure them. They go on with their lives. They notice that my absence doesn’t make that much difference. At my work, they are concerned, then they react. Before long they brand me a deserter and I am fired. They find someone younger and more energetic to replace
me, and who smiles more. In the meantime I’m up in the air and I land far away—in a place where the tumult of the world might still seem like just a faint whisper—Mongolia, Bolivia, a country like that, somewhere I’ve never been to. I had plans to travel. A lot of plans. And then, I don’t know, one thing led to another, work, marriage, children, divorce. Most of the time purchasing power didn’t
go far enough. Neither did courage. I never made it very far. Spain twice, with the kids, to those concrete-covered resorts. Ireland, because Christine wanted to go there—I thought we’d find unspoiled nature and we’d be able to walk for miles without meeting another soul, and I found myself in the Mecca of European tourism. Florence, when I was young.

Until I was twenty-five, I crisscrossed France
by train
because my dad worked for the national railway so I had a hefty discount on tickets. But there wasn’t much of a discount once you crossed the border. And I didn’t have anyone to go with me. So most of the time I stayed in France. There was that trip to Florence. Another to London. And a week in Brussels. Not much to show. I’ve never even set foot in the United States, despite the fact
that I used to go on about how much I wanted to see America.

I could start traveling now.

I could transform the Métro into the regional RER. Paris into Charles de Gaulle airport. Mathieu into the rest of the world. My head is spinning, sort of. Not what I expected when I left the house this morning.

Shit.

It nearly made me forget to get on the train.

Here I am, dreaming of escape, and I almost
got left behind on the platform.

The doors slammed shut right behind my back.

That was a close one.

I love to hear the sound of the doors closing. It signals the beginning of an egocentric and self-indulgent interlude. For the next two hours, nothing can really happen to you. Everything is taken care of. You can decide to immerse yourself in a novel, or succumb to the trance of the music coming from your headphones. You can also vanish into the screen of your laptop, into emails, spreadsheets,
numbers, reports, and establish a direct yet disembodied connection with the outside world.

I don’t do any of that. I daydream. Train journeys are rare opportunities to let go and lower my guard. Whereas in the Métro or the RER I can’t do that. I’m always on the alert.

The seat next to me has not been taken.

It stays empty.

The train starts to move.

I’m of two minds.

On the one hand, I’m
relieved. It’s true that it’s a bit weird, the closeness you get in a railroad car. You’re only a few inches away from another person, another story, and you know that in the event of a crash, your skin will mingle with theirs. And then, these SNCF seats aren’t comfortable. A little more room would be great. Room enough to stretch out and doze off, if you feel like it, all
the way to the Gare
de l’Est—and catch up on lost sleep. We’re all trying to catch up on lost sleep. When you’ve got a neighbor, you have to sit up straight, almost like at school, and when the conductor goes by, you almost feel like raising a finger and saying, “Present.”

But another side of me wants to protest. Why am I the only one without a temporary partner? Am I giving off the sort of body odor that immediately
deters any hypothetical candidates? Am I that ugly? Do I frighten them? Intimidate them? So here I sit, the only person sitting alone in the whole car—isn’t there even some old lady who could come and keep my thoughts from going round in circles? Or some vague acquaintance I could chat with about the weather or the passage of time?

I wonder what the other passengers think when they look at me.
They see a woman who is neither young nor old, fairly well preserved. A somewhat inscrutable expression, lips that could stand to be a little fuller, a deep line across her forehead, two others on either side of her mouth. Light makeup. Nicely tailored clothes. Discreet elegance. Relatively slim figure. Why isn’t she traveling first class?

For the simple reason that the 6:41 is a regional train,
where the differences in comfort between first and second class are minimal. And besides, the number of first-class seats has been so drastically reduced that the half-car devoted to first is often jam-packed, while there are still empty seats in second class. Well, usually. Today the entire train is jammed. All that’s left is the orphaned
seat next to me. A privilege I would not have enjoyed
in first class, where I would probably be stuck next to some corpulent senior executive reeking of aftershave, who would spend the entire time calling his superiors or his underlings, in spite of the notice requesting cell phones in sleep mode.

And besides, I like to travel second class. I feel like this is where I belong. My accountant laughs at me. He reminds me that
Pourpre et Lys
is one the
trendiest shops around. That with two stores in Paris, one in Bordeaux, one in Lyon, and projects to expand all over France, I should start getting used to the idea that I have become an entrepreneur. Someone who in the decade ahead will count for something in the business world. In spite of the crisis, or because of it, organic beauty products have a bright future—particularly when the prices
are still reasonable and the emphasis is placed on respect for regional traditions and on protecting the environment. Soaps that you cut yourself. Shampoo sold in reusable bottles. Ads printed on recycled paper. Clear, concise labels on plain brown paper, with the name of the product in black, and the ingredients below. Chic and sober. My brand.

Valentine and Luc have begun to realize. Luc increasingly
shuts himself away in his study. A sort of rivalry has arisen between us and he’s struggling, even though he’s known from the start that he’ll lose. Soon I’ll be earning much more money than him.

He’s been saying we have to move, we have to go back to Paris proper and leave our big house in the
suburbs behind, the house with the garden where Valentine grew up. She couldn’t care less either way.
She’s finishing her lycée and would rather stay with her friends for another year, but she’s already informed me that she intends to have her own studio in a lively neighborhood right in Paris next year. The forty-five minute commute to Sucy, no thanks. Luc also thinks I should stop taking the RER now, but it’s out of the question. My brand is also about reducing the executive personnel’s expenditure.
Even if I know that sooner or later we’ll move back to the city; for the time being, the business is too precarious, and it could vanish in a puff of wind—poor management, competition, unrealistic ambitions. I don’t want to add private loans to professional ones. At heart I’m still a provincial banker. After all, that’s what I was trained to do. After two years of training in marketing techniques
I found myself unemployed. So I got a vocational training certificate in banking. I pictured myself behind the counter in a branch in the town where I grew up. Sometimes life takes us a long way from the place we thought we were headed. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

It has taken me quite awhile.

That’s another of my character traits: I’m slow. But persevering. I thought about my project for
years, when I was barely making ends meet as an administrative assistant in a financial analyst’s office, then in one of those multinationals that are all about new technologies, cell phones, computers, and consoles. I sat there watching
while those gung-ho reps crushed their competitors. Then witnessed their fall a few years later. I learned how to be discreet and impeccable to a fault. To be
the model employee. To serve whoever was boss: the aging ones who couldn’t keep up to speed and sat around dreaming of their retirement in the Sologne; the young ones who were working up to their first heart attack; they could be warm, icy, scathing, offhand. And I figured out how it all worked. I spent a lot of time reading, too. Books about business, accounting, marketing. Luc just laughed at me.
He thought I was immersing myself in all that in order to get closer to him, to what he did every day. Because Luc is one of those aging, interchangeable, middle management execs—for a stationery company that is relocating by the hour. They don’t even have a production site in France anymore. Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland: it’s all concentrated in Eastern Europe.

Luc had his hour of glory when he
was able to negotiate a schedule that would allow him to take Valentine to school every morning and pick her up in the evening, when she was small. He would chat with the other moms and with the primary school teachers. He was their darling, they were ecstatic to see a man looking after his kids. Those very same women who think it’s only natural for the mother to do it—that’s their role, after all,
it’s only fair. I hate women like them—because they are mainly women; they’re the very reason clichés have such a long life.

And then, eight years ago now, everything changed. I came out with my plan. And I embellished it with an ultimatum to my husband: either you go along with it,
or we split up. I let him call me every name in the book, but I knew he’d be there for me. Because he still loves
me. Because he admires my combativeness. And because the project was unbeatable. The banks had already given their approval. The 2001 crisis was behind us, the 2008 crisis was still to come. And the banks felt like investing.

I have a good relationship with my husband.

Often difficult, but solid.

We’re a team.

We know each other inside out; we are perfectly acquainted with each other’s weaknesses
and strengths. But we can still surprise one another. Last month, he suggested dropping everything in order to assist me if
Pourpre et Lys
really took off. That’s the verb he used, “assist.” With a smile, he pledged to be my vassal. I don’t know many men who are capable of doing that.

Well, by the looks of it I’m going to sit here by myself. I really don’t feel like consulting the latest figures
or reading outstanding emails. I’ll go back to the book I bought at the station on Friday on the way down. Some sort of family saga set in northern Germany. Nothing great, but it’s restful. And that’s what I need this morning, rest. I’m on my way home from the weekend and I’m exhausted. It’s not a paradox. It’s my life.

Ah-hah, there’s a guy looking for somewhere to sit. He comes a bit closer.
He stops. He glances at the seat. Hesitates. Keeps walking. Turns around again. I avoid looking at him. I can just detect his movement at the edge of my vision. For a moment I think I’ve
won, that his desire for comfort is about to collide with the invisible wall of my indifference. No such luck. He clears his throat quietly, his voice is somewhat hoarse. “Excuse me, is this seat taken?” God,
the idiotic phrases we say every day. I shake my head and sigh, just to let him know it really is a bother. I pull my bag out of the way and decide to look him in the face.

Oh. My. God.