drive that morning — wasn’t that good news?
He decided to pay off one of his loans, the one he’d used to
replace the bedroom’s squares of white carpet with Burmese hemp. The carpet was only two years old at the time, but the traffic lanes had gone grey, and that daily reminder of his foolishness in choosing white for the floor so gnawed at Richard Rivière that, awakened one night by the mountain’s insidious growl, he sat down at the com
puter and ordered twenty square metres of Burmese hemp. He was much happier with it now, except that the hemp was so
rough and the weave so coarse that he and Clarisse had to forgo the
pleasure of going barefoot. He tried it at first, and his soles stung
for two days.
“Monsieur Rivière, I want a word with you.”
She had the fierce, despotic air of the pampered women who
seemed to abound in this neighbourhood and this city, a thin, suntanned face beneath pale, fluffy hair.
She knows my name, he told himself, surprised. He had no idea
of hers, though for the nine years he’d lived in that building they’d
been neighbours.
He stopped by his car, eyebrows raised in an expression of interest, automatically switching on his businessman’s smile. But she
didn’t even repay him with a tight smile of her own. Her lavishly
ringed hand lashed the air before her face, telling him don’t bother,
the time for feigned conviviality was over. He couldn’t recall the
slightest disagreement with this woman.
The mountain was pressing on his spinal column with all its
weight. Stifling a grimace, he leaned on the bonnet of his car. “I’ve been wanting to see you for at least a week, Monsieur
Rivière, but I never managed to run into you, and you’re not here
during the day, there’s only that boy, not very friendly, may I say,
not particularly well raised, if you understand me. In any case, this
isn’t about that.”
She inhaled mightily, with a sort of refined disgust.
Through the yellowish fluff of her hair, like a very young child’s, he could see the dull white skin of her scalp. Her face, her skeletal
hands, everything else looked as if it had been seared.
“It’s that four-wheel drive of yours, Monsieur Rivière. I believe
you’re allotted one single parking space, like the rest of us. Your
vehicle’s so wide that I can’t get into my place when there’s a car
parked on the other side. It takes me four or five tries, and all that
because you’re encroaching. And then how am I supposed to get
out without rubbing up against the car next door? I literally have to
extricate myself. I want it out of there, Monsieur Rivière, right now.” To his astonishment, he saw tears in the eyes of this flinty, authoritarian woman.
But she went on staring at him, bristling and unyielding. It was
he who turned away a little, rattled.
Could this be, that a tiny, unthinking act on his part had brought
someone to the brink of tears?
Suddenly he was ashamed to have forced that woman to let him
see her like this. He mumbled a few words of apology, then assured
her the annoyance was temporary, since he’d sold the four-wheel
drive.
“But you have to move it now, Monsieur Rivière, right now!” “As a matter of fact, I was just on my way to work,” he said, to
put an end to this.
The dealership was located outside the city, on the Val d’Isère road, so heavily travelled by cars laden with luges and skis that a sort of bad taste lingered in Richard Rivière’s mouth every evening.
It made him feel more exiled than ever, and different from his colleagues, not to mention from Clarisse, who’d been skiing since her earliest childhood, in a way that made him seem not just an outsider but a slightly lesser man.
He himself didn’t care, but sometimes he thought it must be annoying and embarrassing for Clarisse, as if he were forcing her to put up with an infirmity he’d kept secret, something no-one could seriously consider a grave failing, perhaps even legitimate grounds for regular teasing, but nonetheless, admit it or not, one that might well end up undercutting the fragile foundations of a couple come together late in their lives.
“I so wish I could ski with you,” Clarisse would sigh, melodramatically, to show she was joking.
And yet she did say it, he understood, because she couldn’t hold in that regret, and if there was one realm in which he could never begin to rival her children’s father, a real estate agent who in every other way wasn’t much of a husband, whom Clarisse had left almost as soon as Trevor was born, it was knowing how to ski.
Sometimes, when she couldn’t find anyone else, Clarisse invited her ex to go skiing with her. At this Richard Rivière felt only indifference.
He was simply unhappy for her, because he thought she must feel vaguely humiliated before her friends, before her ex, obliged to confess that she lived with a man who’d never strapped on a pair of skis in his life.
But she would say it without shame, he was sure, with that sweet, steadfast pride he so loved in her.
She was in the showroom, amid the cars, when he came in.
She was a saleswoman. She had a passion for her work, a way of ordering cars or dealing with sales contracts as if it were her calling, in return for which she asked neither salary nor thanks, but only the joy of knowing the customer was just as delighted as she was, and the other salespeople as well, for whom she was a staunch and sensitive colleague, never seeming to expect the same devotion from them, only wanting them to feel at home in her company, graciously making it clear that they could leave the heavy lifting to her, as well as the slightly exhausting late-afternoon displays of good cheer.
Less driven, Richard Rivière felt cynical next to her, slightly fraudulent, burned out.
He wasn’t, he knew. He was methodical, prone to anxiousness, particularly since his move to Annecy, where he couldn’t quite resign himself to the certainty that he’d never feel at home, where the fear of a mistake in figuring a customer’s loan sometimes knotted his stomach, because what would then be questioned and judged, he thought, was not his competence but his very essence.
Clarisse came towards him with her broad, hearty smile, her warm, encouraging gaze, a reassuring sight for customers worried they might have blundered into a stupid misadventure when they walked through the dealership’s door.
She was so helpful, so cordial, so naturally likeable that some of them hesitated to disappoint her by declining to commit to a purchase on the spot.
And sometimes, she’d noticed, not quite knowing why, they did their best to avoid her when they next came, to escape the barrage of an attentiveness so generous that it could be wearing, Richard Rivière had more than once thought, affectionately amused.