eighteen

That afternoon I experimented with Claude’s suggestions in the street. I decided to channel Audrey Hepburn. I tried out my brand-new smile on the men I passed, at the same time attempting to exude the alluring charm of a woman sure of her own worth. In honor of my role model, I made a great effort to combine confidence and elegance.

The results were surprising: four approaches in twenty minutes! The first two gentlemen told me I had a lovely smile. The third invited me for a coffee. The fourth gave me his card and asked if I’d like to go on a date. Needless to say, this did wonders for my self-esteem! I reveled in this proof of my powers of seduction. And I dropped a small positive anchor, to help me on gray days in the future.

At the office, my change of attitude did not go unnoticed either. For fun, I adapted my role model according to the situation. Sometimes I became Steve Jobs, which made me much more confident. At others, I was an athlete like Serena Williams, with a calm strength that could overcome anyone and anything. It became a game for me, and I was amazed at the effect it had on my mind-set and my office life. I was so much more grounded that it seemed to make my colleagues respect me, whereas before I had been the butt of their often sarcastic jibes. The effect was enhanced further because my transformation was accompanied by an unusual enthusiasm for work, which in recent months I had been finding boring, not to say nauseating. This change of course was thanks to more advice from Claude, who recommended that I adopt an attitude of “acting as if”: a psychological technique that consisted in acting as if this job was the most exciting in the whole wide world. “Get out of it everything that’s even the slightest bit interesting. You need to live life at four hundred percent instead of wallowing in your dissatisfaction and hoping that a solution will drop from the skies,” he had told me.

For several days I had worked my socks off, smiled right, left, and center, and my boss was among the first to notice.

“Camille, I haven’t seen you like this in ages. You’re full of energy at the moment, and I like it! Are you sure you don’t want to go back to working full-time? Think about it—it could be really good.”

I could hardly believe it. I was coming out of my shell and being praised to the heavens at the same time. Not only was I flattered, but I was triumphant. It felt like a kind of revenge against the boss who had been undervaluing me. And yet, was it what I really wanted?

Despite that niggling doubt, my increasingly positive attitude continued to spread through the office. Even Baldy was looking at me differently, and the idea that I had brought him up short after all the smart-ass comments I had had to put up with from him felt really good. But the new Camille did not want to waste time gloating. The new Camille had promised Claude to undertake all the exercises he was proposing, and one of them, as he reminded me in a text, was that I should look beyond appearances: “Everyone deserves a chance. You have to suspend judgment and any preconceptions. I challenge you to approach someone you’re not keen on and get to know him or her better . . .”

Really? I had about as much desire to get to know Franck better as I had to shoot myself. When I recalled how often he had given me a hard time, I felt more like keeping my distance forever. But getting to know him better was one of the boxes to tick in my Promises Notebook, and “not kept” was not an option.

So one Thursday morning I took the bull by the horns and went over to his desk.

“Hi, Franck. Do you have any plans for lunch? I thought we might get a bite together—it’d give us time to talk about things.”

I could feel a wave of amazement travel round the whole open-plan office. No one wanted to miss this. I saw Franck cast a sideways glance at our colleagues as though to gauge how they thought he should reply. In a wonderful display of solidarity, they all buried their heads in their screens.

“Ah, oh, yes, why not?” he finally managed to stammer.

And so we found ourselves eating lunch together. He had steak tartare, I had salade niçoise. The tables had been turned: he was shifting in his seat, visibly uncomfortable. Whereas normally he always tried to get one over on me and poked fun at me without the slightest qualm, he had now been completely floored by my unexpected gesture. Masks were coming off . . .

I tried to relax the atmosphere by smiling like a good friend and praising him for his talents as a salesman.

“I’ve never told you this, but I admire your technique. I’m not surprised you’re the number one in the team.”

This compliment made him blush. I’d never seen him do that before.

“Camille,” he replied in a gruff voice, “I haven’t always been very kind to you . . . and I’d like to apologize. You know how it is, you want to show off in front of your friends and you get caught in your own trap. I just want to say that I’ve always thought you were very brave, working such a high-pressured job at the same time as bringing up your son.”

Now it was my turn to blush. So our defenses were breached by a shared smile, and the rest of lunch was far more pleasant. Franck was passionate about model aircraft, and his eyes gleamed like a child’s when he spoke of making his own miniature planes. He also admitted that sometimes he felt fed up with work as well. He thought he had gone as far as he could but couldn’t summon the energy to look for another job. We ended up talking about our families, and to my surprise I learned that he had been divorced the previous year and how hard it had been for him, particularly being separated from his children.

“I’m sorry, I had no idea . . .”

“I haven’t told anyone in the office.”

It was my turn to see him in a new light, and I felt a bit ashamed that I had judged him so hastily and superficially. His sarcastic comments had probably been a way to shield himself and keep us at a distance, to disguise how raw his emotions were. It just showed how wrong you could be about people when you didn’t pay proper attention or take the time to understand them. Now that I had scratched beneath the surface a little, I found that this colleague whom I had always seen as a prickly hedgehog was in fact a sensitive and rather engaging guy.

We left the restaurant satisfied with our conversation.

“It’s been good to talk to you,” he said simply.

“Yes, I had a good time. Should we do it again?”

“Yes, let’s.”

He unleashed a broad smile.

This was another thing I saw for the first time that day: Franck’s smile.