Page 228 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - Lili

“F l a u n t PREOCCUPIED, HE WAS BUSY FRAMING A PHOTOGRAPH,
HE LEFT HER FOR SOMEONE ELSE. HE NEVER CHEATED ON HER. HE TOLD HER THE MOMENT HE MET HER. HE HAD SEEMED
STRUGGLING WITH THE CLIPS OF THE HABITAT FRAME, SHE HAD SAID, “ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT SOMETHING?” HE HAD SAID, “THERE’S SOMETHING GOING ON BE- TWEEN ME AND KARINE.” AT FIRST ANAÏS HAD THOUGHT IT WAS A JOKE. THEY HAD NOT WATCHED GAME OF THRONES THAT NIGHT. THEY HAD SAT, SOBBING, ON THE SOFA.
She walks down toward Tuileries métro station. There was a brief sunny spell, but already the sky is clouding over and it looks like it’ll rain any minute now. It feels like autumn in Paris. Anaïs takes the steps down into the métro station, surrounded by tourists speaking languages she does not recognize. In the corridor, a violinist is playing a piece by Kreisler. She slows. She studied the piece as a girl. She never managed to play it without murdering it. Her parents insisted that she study music, and her sister played piano. But Anaïs had chosen the violin and had no talent for the instrument.
She has no desire to let her parents know what had just happened. It would only upset them. They were thrilled when she got this job. They had been disappointed when she and Kevin split. They had spent seven years together. Everyone around them was waiting for the patter of tiny feet. They had assumed they had lots of time.
On the platform, she has a searing memory of what it felt like being with him. When she walked next to him. She felt com- plete. They were a single, solitary unit. When she comes back to reality, she feels off-balance. Since he left she bumps into things, breaks things. It is all down to this feeling. The glacial emptiness beside her. She cannot call him to tell him what has happened. This is an idea she must get used to. For some time, he has been sending her text messages, like: “Search for the light deep in your heart, I wish you every happiness in the world.” And silly stuff. But mostly the kind of messages you get from a guy who’s moved on. When you send things like that to the girl who was the love of your life, it means: I don’t really care what happens to you. He contacts her to salve his conscience, so he can tell himself he is
a good guy. She replies: “Fuck off, Noddy, you’re bothering me,” and it takes her a week to get over it. Now when he sends her
text messages, he adds a :)—something he learned from his new girlfriend. Anaïs would never do such a thing. Emojis. Jesus fuck.
He left her for someone else. He never cheated on her. He told her the moment he met her. He had seemed preoccupied, he was busy framing a photograph, struggling with the clips of the Habitat frame, she had said, “Are you worried about something?” he had said, “There’s something going on be- tween me and Karine.” At first Anaïs had thought it was a joke. They had not watched Game of Thrones that night. They had sat, sobbing, on the sofa. She had woken up the next morning convinced that she had been mistaken. This could not be happening to them. He packed his bags that week. The new girl works in politics. With the UMP. It’s impossible. Everything about the situation is impossible, and still it keeps happening.
They are not together anymore. Anaïs opens the playlist
on her phone, scrolls down to Neil Young, and listens to “Big Time.” She knows it makes her cry. She wants to cry. How can she forget how they were together, the promises they made each other. For years they had been twin planets in the same orbit, and overnight, gravity had shifted—they had gone their separate ways. Anaïs knew that even if he were to come back tomorrow, he would not be the man she had trustingly loved for so many years. That love is dead. She is like an exile who dreams of her home country yet, when she can finally return, finds it unrecognizable: nothing is as she remembered it.
They had believed that their relationship was special. All lov-
ers do. Their relationship was different. The one that could with- stand anything. She had kept the apartment. The red and white checked oilcloth he had laid to protect the kitchen countertops is so worn that it is now white. She does not touch it. The freezer is still full of frozen vegetables he bought in bulk—he watched his waistline. She knows everything about him. She misses every- thing about him. She cannot believe that he does not miss their life together as much as she does. When life was fun—having dinner in the pizzeria across the street, going to the movies on Sundays, going to bed early and sitting up reading, bickering over whose turn it was to get up and make a hot drink. They were happy, for fuck’s sake. Why could Kevin not have honored that?
She has seen pictures of his new girlfriend online, in her huge apartment in the eighth arrondissement. A Haussmann building, high ceilings, impeccably furnished. Afghans thrown over the
sofa, everything exquisitely tasteful. Anaïs surveys her own place. The IKEA shelves, the stained, rickety white table they never had the money to replace. They didn’t give a damn about bourgeois comforts. And yet. You’re nouveau riche now, Kevin. Had he always dreamed of a double living room, crown moldings, French doors, and chic restaurants? Had he simply pretended to despise these things because they were beyond his means, or has he changed? She wondered whether he still drank Ricoré with warm milk for breakfast, or whether he drinks coffee like his new girlfriend.
Is it possible for someone to change so completely? He has become a stranger—she thinks of Kafka’s Metamorphosis—one day, her Prince Charming had begun to mutate into a louse. She had thought this was something that only happened in fiction. When they had moved to Paris together, they had both assumed that Kevin would become a great painter. Anaïs wanted to work in documentaries. They loved the films of Wang Bing, Chris Mark- er, or Watkins and Oppenheimer . . . They did not care if they struggled financially. Their parents helped them out a little. They had had to go without most things. They abhorred consumerism. When Kevin had started writing freelance pieces about contem- porary art for Libération, it had just been a little pin money now and then. Libé was the sort of left-wing newspaper Serge Daney accused of being bogged down in “private conversations.” Jour- nalists treated their readers as embarrassing appendages rather than readers, writing articles that were exclusively directed at advertisers, lobbyists, friends, col- leagues, editors in chief . . . But Kevin played the game. He was offered a job as a columnist on the film pages. She had watched as his wardrobe and his behav- ior changed. She was sometimes embarrassed when she heard him introduce himself, “I work at Libé.” He had become someone else. He would have dinner with the bigwigs from the newspa- per and would come home jubilant. The articles he was writing sounded less and less like him. And he had left her for a girl he had met at the fiftieth birth- day party of a photographer he knew from the paper. Anaïs had been at the party with him. It had nev- er even occurred to her to be wary of Karine. But ten days later, she should have suspected something when she heard Kevin say: “It’s old hat, the whole left-wing/right-wing thing. The only thing that matters these days is where you stand on globalization.” How could anyone say something so damn stupid? It is the kind of remark guys make when they are leaning toward the right. Two months later, he left. He had changed so quickly . . .
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