A Family Affair Read online

  A Family Affair

  A Family

  Affair

  Nadine Bismuth

  Translated by Russell Smith

  Copyright © 2018 Éditions du Boréal, Montréal, Canada

  English translation copyright © 2020 by Russell Smith

  First published as Un lien familial in 2018 by Éditions du Boréal

  First published in English in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: A family affair / Nadine Bismuth ; translated by Russell Smith.

  Other titles: Lien familial. English

  Names: Bismuth, Nadine, 1975– author. | Smith, Russell, 1963– translator.

  Description: Translation of: Un lien familial.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020019027X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200190288 | ISBN 9781487007027 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487007034 (EPUB) |

  ISBN 9781487007041 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8553.I872 L5313 2020 | DDC C843/.54—dc23

  Cover design: semper smile, Munich

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future,

  for our translation activities.

  And if that’s to be it, what has it pleased the Almighty to make families for?

  — George Eliot, Middlemarch

  Wednesday, August 10

  Mathieu,

  I can’t get over my fright at what happened to us yesterday. I thought we were going to die — that your housecleaner was a robber who’d broken in and was going to kill us. I’m traumatized. Can’t sleep or eat. Why didn’t you come back after your oral submission this afternoon? I waited for you.

  Waiting. It’s all I do. I understand your situation (despite what you think, I swear I do), but you won’t be the first family man to dump his partner. I know your daughter’s only five, but I’m sure she has lots of friends whose parents are separated and who live with joint custody without much need of psychiatry. You often tell me I can’t understand what such a decision involves for you because I don’t have a child. That’s a bullshit argument. With or without a child, everyone survives separation. It’s not cancer. We should know, with all the clients who end up in our office hoping that Trépanier will help them through their divorce. They look like they’re going to a funeral, then you see them a year later, unrecognizable, so much happier and more relaxed, even if it cost them a hundred thousand bucks in fees, which is not likely to be the case with you, as you and Magalie are only common-law and the condo is in your name.

  I wonder sometimes which of us is worse off: Magalie or me? I’m not sure she’d be happy to know that you’re still with her just because she’s the mother of your daughter and you find it simpler that way. A practical solution! And when I ask why you had a child with her, and you tell me it was an accident, that you hadn’t even been going out for a year when she got pregnant but her dad had died just before you met so she wanted to keep the baby and not “go against life,” to bring a little joy into the life of her grieving mother, well, I find that sequence of events super depressing. I don’t understand why you are incapable of leaving a situation you found yourself stuck in against your will, because unless you are not telling me the whole truth, that’s the impression I have. You don’t help anyone by acting like a coward, not her or me or yourself.

  Yesterday’s incident with the housekeeper guy would never have happened if we were a real couple, and I guess it’s just the sort of calamity I needed to make me realize that I don’t want to be your mistress anymore. I can’t handle the secrecy, the lies, the obscure code names on our phone screens when we text or call. It was arousing at first, but not anymore. I want to be with you all the time, Mathieu, out in the open, and this is what you must want too, since you say you love me. And it’s not just that. I’m thirty-three, and even though my mother says that’s young, I have established certain goals that I fully intend to meet in my life, and that includes having kids, even if when I hear you talk about that particular adventure, you’d think its sole purpose was to multiply the weight of human suffering twentyfold and deprive people of their free will. In any case, if you feel that you will never have the strength to leave Magalie, or if you believe that even if you leave her one day, you still won’t want to share your dna with me (it is, after all, strange that you insist on using a condom even when I assure you I’m in the safe time of the month), I’d like to know that right away, and we will stay friends. OK, not really friends, I wouldn’t be strong enough, but let’s say that.

  What’s more, you are not going to like what I am about to say. You hate ultimatums, but I’m giving you one anyway: Christmas. That gives you almost five months to get your act together. Katia thinks this is much too generous a time limit, and she is right. But since we’re expecting an absolutely crazy fall at the firm, and I will often be in London or Paris or Barcelona because of the Magenta merger, and because you’re under a fair amount of stress yourself with Fabrice and the Blue Bird signing, I’m ready to make this compromise to allow you to really think about it. I am aware this separation will upset your routines, Mathieu, and that you must manage things gently for your daughter’s well-being. Nevertheless, I cannot let this situation continue past that deadline: Christmas. Noël. Navidad. Capisce?

  I hope you understand, the same way I understand you and have been waiting for you for more than a year.

  I love you, my legal beagle.

  Sophie

  PS. My housemate will be at her parents’ cottage this weekend, come by when you want.

  PPS. Don’t stress about Katia knowing. She caught you grabbing my ass in the elevator on Friday and wanted to report you to HR, so I had no choice but to tell her everything, for both our sakes.

  1

  Magalie

  Monday, August 29

  How did I end up here?

  It’s a quarter to eight, the night of Charlotte’s first day at preschool, but instead of being with my daughter to share such a milestone, I’m listening to an obese man cough in a chair three rows ahead of me at the doctor’s. Behind the greasy glass that protects the front desk, the frizzy-haired secretary who registered me earlier has her eyes fixed on her phone. Its candy-pink case is the sole touch of colour in this grey and beige decor. She’s smiling and tapping feverishly at her keyboard, just as I would do if I was also around twenty-five, about to get off work, and making plans to meet my friends in a bar or restaurant. Either that or she is talking with a stranger with whom she has been matched by an app’s algorithms and whose photo she liked. The possibilities are infinite. Doubtless this woman leads a life that’s just as unpredictable, spontaneous, and frisky as her frizzy hair. This glass between us might as well be a concrete wall.

  All I can think about is the logistics that went into arranging this doctor’s appointment. Calling my mother, asking her if she could get a couple of hours free to take care of Charlotte because Mathieu was at a dinner with clients: “Sure, no problem, sweetheart!” Then, since mother’s car was in the shop until tomorrow for a tune-up, asking Mathieu to leave me his so I could pick her up in Ahuntsic after getting Charlotte at school, after my day at work at Penture: “Not a problem, I’ll take the subway.” B
ut in order to leave the office by five sharp at the latest, and to make sure I was not held up by endless conversations with indecisive people on the other end of town — among them, that guy who questions all his previous choices every time he has to make a new one — I needed to reschedule my afternoon meeting with our client on rue Notre-Dame and have it moved to the morning: “Okay, Madame Breton, I’ll expect you at ten instead of at two, thanks for letting me know. By the way, I’m wavering on where to put the microwave. If I hide it in the pantry as you suggest, it looks nicer, but I lose some storage space, so maybe I should sacrifice the stove hood and put some cupboards above the stove? What do you think?” And throughout all that, thinking about buying some prepared meals at the supermarket so I don’t have to cook, because that would take up the time I need to give Charlotte a bath before I leave her alone with my mother, who wouldn’t be up to the bath because of her recent tendinitis. All in all, one simple schedule change always spawns a multitude of adjustments, requests, forced collaborations. Now I almost forget the initial reason for all this upheaval.

  I am seated before Dr. Bédard. “So, what brings you in today, Magalie?”

  Her soft voice invites confessions. She squints behind her reading glasses, her eyes fixed on my records on her screen. Dr. Bédard must be pushing sixty. She has been my family doctor for about fifteen years, since the time when my parents, also her patients, asked if she could take me on. I feel a particular attachment to her, because of all the doctors who took care of my father in his illness, Dr. Bédard wasn’t the one who did the most clinical work — understandably, since she isn’t a gastro-oncologist — but it didn’t matter: she was the one who showed the greatest compassion for him and for us. From the first symptoms of his illness, to placate my mother, he had gone to Dr. Bédard. She had listened to his explanations — my father attributed his stomach pains to stress about his upcoming retirement. But after palpating his abdomen, she had sent him to Emergency for imaging. Throughout my father’s illness, whenever we were unable to reach the specialists at the hospital, we knew we could call Dr. Bédard at any time to have his medications adjusted or his prescriptions for anti-inflammatories or painkillers renewed. When it became clear that the treatments weren’t working, she encouraged him to join a research study — just in case, one never knew, there was a medical breakthrough, a miracle . . . like us, she had hope. In retrospect, I feel this partnership helped us a lot, even if she didn’t save anyone’s life. A few days after the funeral, Dr. Bédard called my mother to offer her condolences and find out how she was doing. Does she show the same devotion to other patients? I’m not sure. At any rate, I don’t think I’m wrong in seeing her casual approach with me as a sign of a special rapport.

  Dr. Bédard runs her hand through her short, greying hair and reads the last notes written in my file.

  “How is that sty you came to see me about at the beginning of the summer? Better?”

  “Yes. I used the cream you prescribed.”

  She taps on her keyboard with satisfaction. In the second that she’s not looking at me, I announce that I would like to get screened for STIs. She raises her gaze from the screen and looks surprised, but her tone remains matter of fact. “Do you have any symptoms?”

  Suddenly I regret having come. Really, shouldn’t I have waited for something to start hurting somewhere before I got worried? If Olivier was carrying some filthy virus, Isabelle must have had it too, and that I couldn’t imagine: the woman is too perfect, her body wouldn’t tolerate anything so base. But if Olivier did tell me the truth, that he really hasn’t slept with Isabelle for more than a year, then she could well be clean, which still doesn’t mean Olivier didn’t give me anything. After all, how do I know I’m the only girl he’s fooling around with? All this leads to confusion.

  “Rashes, lesions?” Dr. Bédard prompts.

  “I had another partner.”

  “Okay, I see,” she says, and while she continues to drum on her keyboard, she gently frowns. “You had one sexual encounter with him?”

  “Maybe more . . . maybe a dozen? We used protection every time — except the last, a few days ago. I just want to be sure I haven’t caught anything. To put my mind at ease, but also to be sure I don’t pass anything on to Mathieu.”

  Dr. Bédard nods, pensive. After we met, Mathieu also became one of her patients. Dr. Bédard even saw us together, the whole family, a little less than a year ago. Charlotte’s pediatrician was on vacation and Dr. Bédard agreed to take us on to examine my daughter, who was suffering from a severe stomach bug.

  “Does this other partner have any elevated risks for STIs in his lifestyle? Drugs, for example?”

  “Oh, no! He’s a work colleague.”

  Dr. Bédard widens her eyes. Sure, on the level of pathogenic micro-organisms, my associate must seem safer than a junkie. But she’s probably thinking that cases where sex and work get mixed up never end well, and she’s perhaps nervous to see me running a further risk — of perhaps damaging my professional life.

  I reassure her: “It’s really over.”

  “Okay, I understand,” she says. “Let’s have a look.”

  She gets up, changes the paper on the examining table, then goes back to her desk and asks me to go behind the curtain. I take off my flats, lift my dress up to my waist, remove my underwear, roll the green gown up over my hips, and stretch out. The paper crackles under my body. I look up at the ceiling with its cracking paint and I remember Olivier and me, last Friday, slipping out of the Penture showroom at the launch of Sous la dent, Isabelle’s recipe book. The guests were milling about and Romane was coming and going among all my model kitchens, laden with as many copies as she could carry. “This can’t go on,” Olivier complained, once he was in my office with his pants down. “I can’t anymore.”

  We’d had a lot to drink.

  “Me neither,” I assured him. “This is the last time. Did you lock the door?”

  I still had condoms in the secret pocket of my purse, vestiges of this relationship we’d vowed to end a few weeks earlier, before the annual summer shutdown of Penture. But I’d left my purse somewhere down there in the middle of the party, and there was no way I was going back to look for it. Olivier himself did not even seem to have noticed this hiccup in our routine. Usually he just put on the condom I handed him without griping.

  “Do you still have your IUD?” asks Dr. Bédard from behind the curtain.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Then I won’t do a pregnancy test.”

  She pulls on the fold of fabric, which must have been white in its prime. The cold sound of the metal rings sliding over the curtain rod reminds me of my shame: Charlotte has been through her first day of school, and instead of being with her, putting her to bed, tucking her in, and cuddling her, here I am in a clinic checking that I haven’t caught something quite unsuitable for a young mother. While Dr. Bédard prepares her instruments, I feel a need to explain myself. Staring at the ceiling, I tell her it was Mathieu who first strayed from the marriage, which left me in such a state of distress and disarray that I believed the only cure would be to reciprocate, as if betraying him from my end would allow me to control the part of our story he’d decided to write without me. I hear Dr. Bédard click her tongue disapprovingly, but as I can’t see her face, I can’t figure of whom she’s disapproving: of Mathieu, who cheated on me, or of me, who pursued a delusional remedy?

  “Have you tried couples’ counselling?”

  “Oh no, right now he doesn’t even know that I know he’s cheating.”

  “Really?”

  “I found out by accident. I’m waiting. If he’s not talking to me about it, then it can’t be serious.”

  “You’ll feel a little pinch now,” she warns me.

  I do. I feel something cold and close my eyes to push out the pain.

  * * *

  The apartment is spotless w
hen I get home to rue Saint-Vallier. Charlotte’s toys are back in the chest by the television, the knitted throw is folded on the arm of the sofa, the magazines are stacked neatly on the coffee table, the granite island and the counters are shiny. Through the French window, I can see my mother sitting on the patio in the glow of the Chinese lanterns. I go out to her. She’s drinking a glass of red wine and leafing through my copy of Sous la dent. On its cover, Isabelle is standing in the pure-white kitchen studio I designed for her and holding out a tray of her famous low-fat, no-sugar brownies — a recipe that so far has 120,000 views on the Penture website. She’s smiling, her head slightly bowed. Her golden hair cascades around her porcelain-skinned face. My mother gives me a hug, puts the book aside, and complains that she hasn’t heard of half the ingredients Isabelle uses.

  “Chia? Farro? Kimchi?”

  I tell her this is the new norm.

  “What norm? Complicating your life?”

  As is her habit, my mother launches into a detailed summary of the evening she spent with her grandchild: Charlotte was good, she seems to like Stéphanie, her kindergarten teacher, they have a terrarium full of snails, she ate most of her chicken couscous but didn’t quite finish her plate. “I sang to her instead of reading a bedtime story. I was afraid it might wake her up, but she just sank right into sleep.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’m sure Charlotte loved her evening. But you really didn’t need to clean up like this.”

  “I enjoy it. You’re so busy. I just allowed myself to give it a little sweep. It’s nothing much.”

  “I know. I have to find a new housecleaner.”

  “Didn’t you have a cleaner?”

  “We did. He ghosted us.”

  “He what you?”

  “He hasn’t answered my messages in three weeks. He evaporated without explanation. He has ceased to exist. A ghost.”