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after a pea jacket or a pair of heels. She completely understands how much fun it can be to max out a credit card then feel guilty as hell when the bill comes. Lola spoils me. She holds the curtain for me when I’m in the fitting room, and she always tells me I’m beautiful and no, not at all, it doesn’t make my butt look big. She asks, every time, how my love life is going, and pulls a face when I tell her about my lovers.
    Whenever we haven’t seen each other in a long while she takes me to a brasserie, Bofinger or Balzar, to look at the guys. I focus on the ones at nearby tables; she zeroes in on the waiters. She is fascinated by those dorky dudes in tight waistcoats. She can’t take her eyes off them, she imagines life stories for them straight out of a Claude Sautet film, and she dissects their perfectly trained mannerisms. The funny thing is that at some point you always see one of them going out the door at the end of his shift. And then she wonders what she ever saw in him. Jeans or even jogging pants in lieu of the long white apron, and an offhand shout to a co-worker as he takes his leave: “Bye, Bernard!”
    â€œBye, Mimi. You here tomorrow?”
    â€œNo way. Dream on, dude.”
    Lola looks down and traces patterns in the sauce on her plate with her fingertips. Another one gone . . .
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    We sort of lost sight of each other for a while. First boarding school, then studies, then her wedding, vacations at her in-laws’, dinner parties . . .
    We still knew how to hug, but we’d lost the art of letting ourselves go. She had changed sides. Teams, rather. She wasn’t playing against us so much as playing for a league that was, well, kind of boring. Some sort of half-assed cricket, for example, with lots of incomprehensible rules, where you go running after something you never see, and it can really hurt, too . . . some sort of leathery thing with a cork core. (Hey, Lola! I didn’t mean to, but I’ve just summed it all up!)
    Whereas we younger kids were still busy with a lot more basic things. A lovely lawn⇒yabba dabba doo! Heineken and neckin’. Tall boys wearing white polo shirts⇒honk, honk! The bat in your behind. Well, you see what I’m driving at . . . Not really mature enough yet for strolls around the Bassin de Neptune at Versailles . . .
    There you have it. We’d wave to each other from a distance. She made me the godmother of her first child and I made her the trustee of my first broken heart (and did I weep, a regular baptismal fount), but between two of these sort of major events there was not much going on. Birth­days, family luncheons, a few cigarettes shared on the sly so her honey wouldn’t see, a knowing look, or her head on my shoulder when we’d browse through old photos . . .
    That was life. Her life, at any rate.
    Respect.
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    And then she came back to us. Covered in ash, with the lunatic gaze of the pyromaniac who’s just handed in his box of matches. Plaintiff in a divorce that no one expected. It has to be said she played her cards close to her chest, the vixen. Everyone thought she was happy. I think we even admired her for it, for the way she’d found the exit so easily and quickly. “Lola’s got it all sorted out,” we’d say, without bitterness or envy. Lola is still champ when it comes to treasure hunts . . .
    And then crash bang boom. A change of program.
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    She just showed up at my place one day, and at a time that wasn’t like her at all. At bath and bedtime story time. She was in tears, apologizing. She truly believed that it was the people around her who justified her existence on this earth, and everything else—her secret life and all the little nooks and crannies of her soul—was not really all that important. What was important was being cheerful and carrying your yoke as if it were the easiest thing in the world. And when things got harder, there was