Chapter 7 #2
“She can’t. She has a serious medical practice, tied to a teaching hospital.
She has an important job, although it pays almost nothing.
She’s in Public Health. Our life and the lifestyle she came to enjoy relied on me, and I’ve let her down.
Fortunately, we have an undemanding daughter who does the work of angels in a refugee camp.
The pandemic changed everything for most people.
It put everything under a microscope in the spotlight.
Whatever was wrong before is in question now, or has simply been thrown away.
A lot of things should have been. Relationships and marriages that had survived for years with accommodations and arrangements and were only a front for what lay behind them no longer make any sense.
“This is a time for truth and reality, not fakery and pretense. Brigitte and I never had a good marriage. We were a mistake for a good cause. We dated for a short time, were unsuited to each other. I’m a royalist, if you want to call it that, a remnant of a social structure that doesn’t exist anymore, a lifestyle and career built on capitalism, big showy jobs for big money.
The perks are nice, but a lot of what held that together was empty and has crumbled.
She’s an extreme socialist, which is the world in which she grew up and works now.
She believes in it profoundly. She hated everything I stood for, but the prestige and benefits compensated for having married the wrong man.
I thought I was doing ‘the right thing’ when I married her, and I was willing to sacrifice my own dreams for her and our child, and our daughter is an incredible human being.
She is the best of both of us, but she’s not here anymore.
She has her own life in Africa, which she loves.
And we are left to face each other and ourselves, and the lies we told ourselves that it would all work out. It didn’t, right from the beginning.
“She should have married a doctor, like her. It’s the only world she respects, and men like her father.
She has an insufferable brother, a big cardiac surgeon, but those are the men she respects.
The only thing she ever liked about me was my success.
Without that, she will resent me forever for the job I gave up, and the money I lost. Without that, I have nothing she wants.
I sold our rather grand apartment to put some money back in the bank, and we have that, and now she wants to do the same with the chateau.
But I can’t, and I won’t. The chateau is all about bloodlines and heritage and family.
It’s not about real estate or money. The decisions about its ultimate fate will be my daughter’s, and her grandchildren’s, not mine.
I owe it to her to preserve it for her.” He had deeply rooted family values, which touched Sabrina, and she was sorry to hear that he’d been through such a hard time.
She understood the dilemma and the reasons for the separate bedrooms now.
“By renting the chateau, you gave me a year of grace to figure out my future, and a reliable income to replace my job. That’s an enormous gift.
I’m sorry to tell you my sad stories. They aren’t really.
They’re technicalities, and details, but a lot rests on those details.
If I’m never going to be a CEO again, I need to figure out who I will be.
I’d love to do another start-up, but I don’t have the funds anymore, and I’m not sure I ever will again.
And I’d need faith in myself to do that, and I seem to have lost some confidence, for now at least. No one is going to invest in a man with poor judgment, who threw a golden job away, and who has already failed once. ”
“It sounds like the pandemic did you in, not poor judgment,” she said, touched by all that he had shared with her so openly and honestly.
“I didn’t want you to think that I was some snob with his chateau, swanning around and showing off. I’m really no more than a tenant there now myself. The chateau is valuable, but for much deeper reasons than my wife recognizes, or ever will.”
“Would you ever get divorced?” she asked cautiously, as it seemed to be much more part of the American culture than the French one.
“I can’t. The chateau is all I have now of any financial value. If we got divorced, I’d have to sell it and give her half. Technically, my daughter could oppose the sale, but she probably wouldn’t win. My wife deserves something for thirty unhappy years.”
“And what do you deserve, Xavier?” she asked him quietly. It was an important question, maybe the most important. She could see easily how guilty he felt about the job he’d given up, and the money he had lost, and felt a moral responsibility to pay penance for it.
“I certainly don’t deserve a reward for the mistakes I made.”
“You didn’t cause the pandemic.”
“I shouldn’t have risked everything on the start-up. I thought it was a sure thing, so I invested everything I had. That was a mistake. We probably would have made billions if the pandemic hadn’t hit. Instead, we lost it all.”
“You’re not the first human being to make that mistake, investing everything in something you believed in passionately. That’s how fortunes are made.”
“And lost,” he added.
“We all do something like it at some point in our lives,” Sabrina said kindly, “whether it’s a job or a marriage, or a house or a friendship. Life involves risk, and sometimes you lose.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said with a rueful smile.
“My wife and I had things worked out so we spent very little time together when I ran the ad agency. And she basically lived at the hospital during the first year of the pandemic. Now I stay down here to avoid her, and I only go to Paris for meetings for job opportunities. We rented a ridiculous apartment, which is more like a storage unit. It’s too small for both of us, and there is only one topic of conversation between us, selling the chateau.
I will never forgive myself if I do. And she’ll never forgive me if I don’t.
Actually she will never forgive me anyway.
She’s a hard woman. And she has strong family support.
They think I’m an idiot because I’m not a doctor.
They tolerated me as a CEO. That’s over.
I haven’t seen them in two years, and try hard not to. ”
“Do you have other family?”
“Not anymore. My parents died a long time ago. My mother died when I was at university, and my father not long after. He was much older than my mother. He came from a world where people of good breeding didn’t work.
They owned their land, thought commerce was beneath them.
My father was a banker, which was acceptable in his world.
He was always embarrassed by my job and my success.
He thought it was ‘common.’ I loved it. I find business exciting.
If the start-up had worked, I’d still be up to my ears in it.
I wish I were. I would take a much lesser job than the one I had, but people think I’m overqualified and would be bored and offended and wouldn’t stay.
I don’t want to retire, I want to work for at least another twenty years. ”
“My husband wanted to retire. He made the decision at fifty to retire at fifty-five, so we could travel. He’d been in a high stress job all his life, and he’d had enough.”
“What did he do?” Xavier asked. He wondered what kind of man she had been married to. He guessed a wealthy one. She had the quiet self-assurance of a woman who didn’t need to worry about money, although she didn’t show off and wasn’t pretentious.
“He was the head of a television network. It was a very high-pressure job, and when our youngest daughter left for college, he realized that he wanted time for us. He died before we could do it.”
Xavier was impressed by what she said. “Was it fun for you, his job?” he asked her.
“Sometimes. I never lived vicariously through his job, and I had been around Hollywood all my life, growing up. My father was a movie producer, and my mother was an actress when she was young. My father was older too.”
“That must have been very interesting. What kind of movies did he produce?” She smiled and didn’t dodge the question.
“Big ones,” she said simply, and reeled off the names of a few that had been global hits and that he would know. Xavier looked startled. He knew them all, they were some of the all-time greats of Hollywood.
“My God, those are all major movies. Do you have brothers and sisters?” She shook her head.
“No, I’m an only child like you. And my parents died fairly young too. My father had a heart attack in his sixties. I didn’t want that to happen to Malcolm, my husband. But in the end, it did anyway.”
“A heart attack?”
“No.” She explained about ALS, and he realized the hell she had been through, watching him rapidly deteriorate. She had had her hard times too, but their marriage seemed to have been solid, unlike his with Brigitte.
“Was it a good marriage?” he asked her gently. She looked wistful for a minute, and spoke the truth.
“It was perfect. He was the right man at the right time for the right reasons. We were incredibly lucky. It really was a perfect marriage, and now he’s gone.
I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life, and I don’t even live in the same city with any of my children.
I don’t want to encroach on them because I’m alone.
” He thought it was nice of her not to try to hang on to them, and he could see how solitary she was.
She was trying to forge her own way alone, in a foreign country, in a totally unfamiliar world.
He respected her a lot for trying to do that, and not just sitting at home, wrapped in her memories and feeling sorry for herself. She was a brave woman.