Yasmina Reza - Happy Are the Happy

We were at the supermarket, shopping for the weekend. At some point she said, you go stand in the cheese line while I get the rest of the groceries. When I came back, the shopping cart was half filled with boxes of cereal and bags of cookies and packets of powdered food and other desserts. I said, whats all this for? What do you mean, whats all this for? I said, whats the point of buying all this? You have children, Robert. They like Chocolate Cruesli, they like Napolitains, they adore Kinder Bueno bars. She displayed the various packages. Its ridiculous to gorge those kids on sugar and fat, I said. This cart is ridiculous. She said, what kind of cheese did you buy? A Crottin de Chavignol and a Morbier. And no Gruyre? she cried out. I forgot and Im not going back, the lines too long. If theres one kind of cheese you have to buy, you know very well its Gruyre, who eats Morbier in our house? Who? I do, I said. Since when do you eat Morbier? Who wants to eat Morbier? Odile, stop it, I said. Who likes this Morbier crap? Implicit meaning: besides your mother, my mother had recently found a nut, a metal nut, in a chunk of Morbier. I said, Odile, youre shouting. She gave the cart a jerk and threw three Milka chocolate bars into it. I picked them up and replaced them on the shelf. She flung the bars back into the cart even faster than before. I said, Im out of here. She answered, get out, get out, Im out of here is all you know how to say, its your sole response. As soon as you run out of arguments, you say Im out of here, you immediately resort to this grotesque threat. Its true, I admit it, I often say Im out of here, Im aware I say it, but I dont see how I can not say it when its the only thing I want to say, when I see no way out other than immediate withdrawal, but I also realize, yes, that I put it in the form of an ultimatum. Well, youre finished shopping, I say to Odile, propelling the shopping cart forward. Or do we have some more stupid shit to buy? Listen to the way you talk to me! Do you even realize how you talk to me? I say, come on. Come on! Nothing irks me more than these sudden mood shifts, where everything stops, everything freezes. Obviously, I could say Im sorry. Not just once, Id have to say it twice, in the right tone. If I said Im sorry, if I said it twice in the right tone, then the day could restart and almost return to normal, except that I dont in the least feel like saying those words, nor is there any physiological possibility of my uttering them when she stops short in front of shelves of condiments with that flabbergasted look of outrage and desolation. Come on, Odile, please, I say more gently. Im cold and I have an article to finish. Apologize, she says. If she said Apologize in her normal voice, I might comply, but she whispers, she gives the word a colorless, atonal inflection I cant get past. I say, please. I remain calm. Please, I say mildly, and I see myself driving down a highway at top speed, stereo turned all the way up, and Im listening to a song called Sodade, a recent discovery I understand nothing of except for the solitude in the singers voice and the word solitude itself, repeated countless times, even though Im told sodade doesnt actually mean solitude, but nostalgia, absence, regret, spleen, so many intimate things that cant be shared, and all of them names for solitude, just as the personal shopping cart is a name for solitude, and so is the oil and vinegar aisle, and so is the man pleading with his wife under the fluorescent lights. I say, Im sorry. Im sorry, Odile. Odiles not necessary in that sentence. Of course not. Odile isnt nice, I say Odile at the end to indicate my impatience, but I dont expect her to make an about-face, arms dangling, and head for the frozen foods, that is, for the back of the store, without saying a word, leaving her handbag in the shopping cart. I shout, what are you doing, Odile? I shout, Ive got only two hours left to write a very important article on the new gold rush! A completely ridiculous declaration. Shes disappeared from sight. People are looking at me. I grab the handle of the cart and make a beeline for the back of the store. I dont see her (shes always had a talent for vanishing, even from pleasant situations). I call out, Odile! I go to the beverage section: nobody. Odile! Odile! Im clearly upsetting the people around me, but I couldnt care less, I wheel the cart up and down the aisles I loathe these supermarkets and suddenly I spot her in the cheese line, which is even longer than it was a little while ago, shes got herself back in the cheese line! I go up to her and say, Odile, I express myself in a measured tone, Odile, I say, its going to be twenty minutes before you get served, lets leave and buy the Gruyre somewhere else. No response. Whats she doing? She digs around in the shopping cart and pulls out the Morbier. Youre not going to return the Morbier? I ask. Yes I am. Well give it to Maman, I say, trying to lighten things up. My mother recently found a metal nut in a chunk of Morbier. Odile doesnt smile. She remains stiff and offended, standing there in the penance line. My mother said to the cheesemonger, Im not the type of woman who makes a fuss, but for the sake of your longevity as a respected dealer in cheese, I must inform you that I found a bolt in a piece of your Morbier. The guy didnt give a damn, he didnt even offer to comp the three Rocamadours she was buying. My mother boasts that she paid without flinching, thus proving herself a bigger person than the cheesemonger. I stand close to Odile and say in a low voice, Im counting to three, Odile. Im counting to three. You understand? And for some reason, at the moment when I say that, I think about the Hutners, a couple of friends of ours who are curled up together inside a willed state of conjugal well-being. Lately theyve taken to calling each other my own and saying things like Lets eat well this evening, my own. I dont know why the Hutners cross my mind at the moment when an opposite madness has come over me, but maybe there isnt really a whole lot of difference between Lets eat well tonight, my own, and Im counting to three, Odile, in both cases the effort to be a couple causes a kind of constriction of the being, I mean theres no more natural harmony in Lets eat well, my own, no, not at all, and no less disaster either, except that my Im counting to three causes a shiver to pass over Odiles face, a wrinkling of the mouth, the infinitesimal beginnings of a smile, while I must absolutely refrain from beginning to smile myself, of course, as long as I dont receive an unequivocal green light, even though I really feel like smiling, but instead Ive got to act as if I havent noticed a thing, and so I decide to count, I say one, I whisper the word distinctly, the woman right behind Odile has a ringside view, Odile pushes a bit of discarded packaging with the tip of her shoe, the lines getting longer and not moving at all, its time for me to say two, I say two, openly, generously, the woman behind Odile practically glues herself to us, shes wearing a hat, a kind of overturned bucket made of soft felt, I cant stand women who wear that sort of hat, a hat like thats a very bad sign, I put something in my look intended to make the woman back off a yard or so, but nothing happens, she considers me curiously, she sizes me up, does she smell disgustingly bad? Women who dress in layers often give off a bad odor, or could it be the proximity of spoiled dairy products? My cell phone vibrates in my inside jacket pocket. I screw up my eyes to read the callers name because I dont have time to find my glasses. Its a colleague with a tip about the Bundesbanks gold reserves. To cut the conversation short, I tell him Im in a meeting and ask him to send me an e-mail. That little phone call may prove to be a stroke of luck. I lean down and murmur into Odiles ear, in the tone of a man returning to his responsibilities: my editor in chief wants a sidebar on German gold reserve stockpiling, its something of a state secret, and that call may point me to information I dont have at the moment. German gold reserves, she says, who cares about that? And she pulls in her neck and draws down the corners of her mouth so that I can gauge the insignificance of the subject, but even more seriously, the insignificance of my work, of my efforts in general, as if there was no hope of expecting anything more from me, not even the consciousness of my own derelictions. Women will seize any opportunity to deflate you, they love reminding you how much of a disappointment you are. Odile has just moved up in the cheese line. Shes got her bag back, and shes still clutching the Morbier. Im hot. Im suffocating. I want to be far away, I no longer remember what were doing here or why were doing it. Id like to be sliding on snowshoes in western Canada, planting stakes and marking trees with my ax in frozen valleys, like the gold prospector Graham Boer, the subject of my article. Does this Boer person have a wife and children? A guy who confronts grizzly bears and temperatures of twenty-five below zero isnt likely to put up with being bored to death in a goddamn supermarket at grocery rush hour. Is this any place for a man? Who can wander up and down these fluorescent rows, past this plethora of packaging, without yielding to discouragement? And to know that youll be back here, in all seasons of the year, whether you want to or not, hauling the same shopping cart, under the command of a woman who grows more rigid every day. Not long ago, my father-in-law, Ernest Blot, told our nine-year-old son, Im going to buy you a new pen, youre staining your fingers with that one. Antoine replied, thats all right, I dont need a pen to be happy anymore. Theres the secret, Ernest said, the child understood it: reduce your requirements for happiness to a minimum. My father-in-law is a champion of over-the-top adages totally out of keeping with his actual temperament. Ernest has never given in to the smallest reduction in his vital potential (forget the word