Natalie and François’s Future Travel Plans

Barcelona

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Miami

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La Baule

Eleven

Just breathe, and time will pass. It was already five years since Natalie had started working for her Swedish company. Five years of all types of work, going back and forth in the hallways and in and out of the elevator. Not far from the equivalent of a Paris–Moscow trip. Five years and 1,212 coffees drunk from the machine, 324 of which were drunk during four hundred meetings with clients. Charles was very happy about counting her among his close collaborators. It wasn’t unusual for him to call her into his office just to congratulate her. Certainly by preference he tended to do it in the evening. When everyone had left. But not in a crude way. He felt a lot of affection for her and valued those moments when they found themselves alone. Of course, he was trying to create a context favorable to ambiguity. No other woman would have been duped by such a ploy, but Natalie was living in the peculiar ether of monogamy. Sorry: of love. The love that annihilates all other men, but also any objectivity about seduction attempts. Charles had fun with it and thought of this François as a myth. Perhaps her way of never existing in a context of seduction also seemed like a kind of challenge to him. One day or another, he’d inevitably manage to create a dubious context between them, be it minimal. Sometimes he changed his attitude radically and regretted having hired her. Gazing at that inaccessible womanliness day after day was draining for him.Natalie’s relationship with her boss, which the others saw as privileged, created tensions. She tried to allay them, to keep away from the petty intrigues of office life. If she kept her distance with Charles, it was also for that reason. To avoid slipping into the old-fashioned role of favorite. Her gracefulness and the aura she created around her boss probably made it even more necessary. That’s what she resented, without knowing if it was justified. Everyone agreed that this brilliant, energetic, hardworking young woman was bound to have a great future with the company. On several occasions, the Swedish stockholders got wind of her excellent initiatives. The jealousies she aroused materialized in low blows. Attempts to undermine her. She wouldn’t complain, was never the type to moan when she came back to François in the evening. It was also a way of saying that the freak show of one-upmanship had no more importance than just that. Such a capacity for letting problems glance off her passed for strength. This was perhaps her most attractive talent: not letting her weaknesses show. Twelve

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