Guys Like Me (10 page)

“Wow, I have to get going. Is it really two o'clock?”

I shrugged. I didn't feel like driving him home.

“You can sleep here if you like, I don't mind.”

He looked at me, his smile was ironic. It irritated me a little but it really was late, and I had a lot of things to do the next day.

“I get up early, all you have to do is pull the door shut behind you.”

By the time I left the bathroom, he'd rolled himself up in the blanket I'd given him, and the clearest image I still have of him from that evening, when he'd told me his whole life story, is the one of his big hand on the blanket when he said good night. And the name of that woman he'd loved badly all his life, Adeline Vlasquez. Goodnight. Yes, you too. I'll call you. OK. I thought about F. Scott Fitzgerald. All life is a process of breaking down, where had he said that? I set my alarm for seven. At night I don't have much time to look at my face and the damage it wears, or even the first brown age spots already appearing on my hands. Was he just skipping work, or had he called in sick? I hadn't asked him. I'd find out soon enough anyway. He didn't really seem to care. In any case, I wasn't short of work. You just had to be there, not let anything show, six more years of this pace and I'd be out of it.

I had some strange dreams that night. We were teenagers, Marco and I and our girlfriends, and we were doing séances, I'd always enjoyed that. I saw myself doing it. I fell asleep at Le Cercle, I think it was. I didn't see Adeline Vlasquez there. Then there were dreams that didn't make any sense at all, with big fish and funerals and things. I thought I saw him walking in his underpants along the hallway where my bedroom is, I never close my bedroom door. Later, I also saw a woman, probably Marie, creeping about in a park, was it the park of the organization near Beaujon? She must have been about a hundred and was carrying a big bloodstained knife in her hand and singing a love song,
India Song
. That woke me before seven. I'd seen that movie a very long time ago. Benjamin and I loved the song from it. I got up without making a noise, and when I switched on the light in the kitchen, I saw the blanket neatly folded on the sofa bed, he'd already left. I don't know what made me go to the window and look out. There he was, on the sidewalk opposite, sitting on the bench by the bus stop for routes 115, 341, and 207 A and B. I didn't need to imagine him in a dream, he really was a guy like me. It was weird, the way he'd come back into my life, as quickly as he was going to leave it now, but for how much longer?

I let the curtain fall gently. Why was he still sitting there? Was he waiting for a sign from me, like a runaway child or indeed a guy who was lost? I don't know. Neither did Marc-André when I called him from the office during the lunch break and told him about our evening. I hadn't been able to wipe out the image I had of him, early in the morning, sitting at the bus stop. Which one had he taken? The A went right through the middle of La Garenne-Colombes, I remember. Now he was nothing more than a guy filled with regrets, incapable of holding down a job. Especially as, and Marco knew this, he had a nasty temper. Does he really? I heard him laughing at the other end, gravely. You could say that. I know what I'm talking about. He'd called him to keep him abreast of his problems with his employer. He hadn't been too sure what to do, although he'd often had the desire to just hang up the phone, and that would have been the end of it.

“You never did it?”

“No, I thought things were getting better.”

Then we talked about something else. Did he remember a girl called Adeline Vlasquez? He thought about it, but no, he couldn't remember. It didn't mean much to Marco and me. Our memory wavers, it has no middle, like fishing lines on the cloudy surface of the water. Marco told me he had to go, unfortunately. Aïcha wanted to know when she could meet Marie. How does she know? I asked Marco.

“I must have mentioned her without meaning to. All right, then, bye, I really must go.”

In a sense it's always good, when we hang up on each other, because we could spend our whole lives making small talk about this and that, but I may be imagining things. We're always more alone than we suppose, I think.

I also think I was relieved, in the end, to see him leave my apartment. I'd invited him in, we'd done our best to help him get back on his feet, and now he really had to walk by himself. I don't like thinking these things, saying these words. They made me think of the father I didn't have. I never talked like that to Benjamin, or I would have had the impression I was someone else. I didn't say anything to Benjamin, to tell the truth. I regret it sometimes, obviously. There was a time when I often went for a walk during my lunch break over to his elementary school, then later to his high school, when the classes were coming out, on Fridays when I could wait for him. I'd keep myself at a distance so as not to embarrass him. I didn't intend it that way, but I was using him to give meaning to my life, after our separation. I'd forgotten exactly why we'd separated. I'd had affairs, and probably so had she, but I think more than anything that there were other things she wanted to do with her life, and she didn't think she could do them with me. I'd disappointed her too. I'd always hoped, I think. She suddenly came out with the idea of a divorce one Sunday evening, that afternoon we'd gone for a walk with Benjamin in the Buttes-Chaumont. We'd eaten ice cream on the square outside the town hall of the 19th arrondissement. I remember the flavors he chose, chocolate and lemon. After that, we weren't able to speak anymore. She'd already found a lawyer, she'd been planning it all for a long time, everything was worked out in her head. It took me several months to realize. What had I done to get to that point, were they all like me? It had taken Marco less than three months to decide to live together with Aïcha. All the same, my son and I had never stopped loving each other. He never blamed me.

“Why did you and Mom end it?”

He asked me that once, a few years ago. He hadn't met Anaïs yet, but had been dumped by the girl who'd been the love of his life from tenth grade to senior year, they'd just broken up. I liked the girl a lot too, the three of us had been on vacation together two years running, once to Brittany, and another time to the Baie de Somme, Marco had let us use a house he'd bought there. He was desperate, my son, and all the words I could have said, looking at his distraught face, I kept to myself.

“I'm not sure anymore, Ben. It happened gradually with your mother and me, we loved each other a lot.”

“Is that true?”

That time, his eyes had lit up, and then we quickly left the café where we were because he'd started crying again. He was heartbroken. He'd never see her again. He didn't think he could live without her. He didn't know what to do. And then in the end, obviously, he did know. He was twenty-one when they broke up. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? It was a nice story, but it wasn't always enough to pull it down. Sometimes, you had to go even deeper.

5

O
N THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, THERE WAS A LOT OF RAIN
. The Seine was very high. I could spend hours watching it when it's like that. I often went to Brochant, Marie was fairly well, I thought. We both knew what she was waiting for. It was always there between us. But we almost never talked about it. Sometimes, she'd drift off for an hour or two, sitting on her couch without moving, and it was good to be there next to her at moments like that. I took some extra days off that I was owed from the previous year, I really needed them. I was glad I could do that. I could live without my job for a week and concentrate on myself. The girl looked at the computer screen and even said: at last! I went to a whole lot of places, I did a lot of things, the kind of things you're always putting off until later and end up never doing. Most of the time it's as if these things are only there to make us think about them without ever going anywhere near them. I went to see Benjamin when he left his lab in Jussieu, we walked for a while along the Seine, it was brown or gray, and quite swollen. We were near the Gare d'Austerlitz, it seemed odd to me to be in a part of Paris where I almost never set foot when I'm not working. We walked for a long time without saying anything, after we'd talked about work, his move, his new job in Zurich, Anaïs, what did she think about it? She wasn't exactly delighted, but it'd be OK. They'd see, anyway. He'd reached a dead end here. There was only Switzerland or the United States left. That made me smile, I think. I'd have been incapable of studying the things he did. Was his mother gifted for that kind of thing? I couldn't remember. We had a drink at the counter of an Auvergnese café in the Gare d'Austerlitz. We played the lottery cards. Ben won one euro fifty. We had another beer, and then lost three times. We then crossed the Seine and walked to the Gare de Lyon, to take Line 14 on the metro.

That was where we had to say goodbye, I'd continue on to visit Marie, and he would go home by train. And then I changed my mind. I told him about her on the platform at the Gare Saint-Lazare. It was the right moment, I thought. For a long time, whenever I waited for him on Friday, at the end of the platform, I used to see lots of guys on their own also waiting to see their kids for the weekend. We didn't speak to each other, but we recognized each other in the end. The people on the opposite platform were just getting off the train when I told my son I was seeing somebody, her name was Marie. I don't know if I said it loudly enough or not, he said who? Marie? He read my lips and he just smiled, oh really, has it been long? No, we chatted for quite a long time, but we've really only been seeing each other for a month … I felt a bit stupid, saying all that. Will you get married again? My son had often asked me that when he was in his late teens. His mother didn't have any more children. She lived for a few years with a guy from Asnières, a dentist, also divorced. I don't know why it didn't work out. I'd have had other children, I think, if I'd forgotten more easily. Forgiven too. In these past few years, I'd had nothing but brief encounters. A woman on a street corner, with her indifferent smile and eyes. It happened like that, and it's nothing. An evening, a year. With Sylvie, almost two years. You don't have many real encounters in a lifetime. Night bars, flashing your debit card, and aspirin the next morning. Another guy's wife, the lies that are true when you tell them, and then you forget you told them. People are well-behaved on the train. Those who aren't using their cell phones all the time look out the windows, not many people talk apart from that. Ben sat down on a fold-up seat, his legs slightly parted. He hadn't said anything at all about Marie. Maybe because it had taken me all that time to consider living with another woman? Otherwise, I don't know. Maybe I was imagining things, because he'd be going soon and I'd be on my own, even though I didn't see him very much anyway. He gave a little sign with his hand, then he took his MP3 from the pocket of his bag and for a guy like me, a father every other weekend and for half of every vacation, that has to last two weeks, for years on end.

My heart was pounding. I became aware of it on the steps at Cour de Rome, after the escalator. I went and killed time at the FNAC in Saint-Lazare, waiting for seven o'clock, Marie wouldn't be back before eight, there was no point in hurrying. I looked at the books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I'd already read two of them. I didn't know which of the others to choose, and I didn't want to ask the assistants. At the snack bar on the second floor, people take what they've just bought out of their bags, or else they're waiting for something. I used to come here often a few years ago, to the FNAC in Saint-Lazare. It isn't an especially pleasant place, it's just there with the idea that, between purchases, people should take the trouble to talk to each other, because after all they live together, for better or worse. I don't remember why I went there so often, on the weekends when I didn't have Benjamin. I've spent a lot of time in that area since my teenage years. I used to wait for my son at the Gare Saint-Lazare, on Saturdays. Once, I'd spotted him and his mother on Rue de Caumartin, it was a sunny day, he must have been telling her one of those endless stories that came into his head sometimes, and he looked perfectly happy, without me. I remember I smiled like an idiot in their direction, and then, when I realized, I went and took refuge in the snack bar on the second floor of FNAC. There, women wait for their girlfriends so that they can go to the movies, notch up another one on their schedule, or, where guys like me are concerned, they drink coffee and wait for it to pass, and end up deciding not to approach their children when they see them on the street, on the sidewalk of Caumartin. It felt strange to me to be on vacation at this time of the year. I'm one of those guys for whom work has become a kind of blessing, it stops you from having to think, basically. Several times in the past few years, I've tried to calculate the number of hours I've spent in offices, receiving people, making phone calls, or reading files without the slightest interest, I've never been very good at counting. I didn't always think about Marie, far from it, but the nearer the time came for her to go into the hospital, the more I thought about things I'd like to do with her if she wanted. Sometimes, at night, I had obvious nightmares about her illness, and I was afraid she'd read them on my face when she woke up. In the end, I didn't buy anything, I got up and left.

I walked toward La Trinité, it was one of the places in Paris where I'd spent most time in my life, as a teenager, when I hung out with Marco, and later, during my divorce and my two years of unemployment. But without my realizing it, almost nothing from those days is still there. A few years ago, they even replaced the red Coca-Cola sign on the building at the end of Rue d'Amsterdam with a green Perrier sign. Am I the only person who's interested in that kind of detail? Passage du Havre, with its salesgirls and its prostitutes, has disappeared. It's been replaced by chains and franchises. You get straight to the metro through the shopping mall. On Rue Saint-Lazare, there's still that coffee merchant's, Méo, I used to be taken there when I was a boy, to buy good coffee. When I approached the store, I realized I was quite moved and didn't want to go home. Smells don't change. I hadn't gotten over it. I mustn't let Marie see me like this. It never lasts a long time, with me. I almost lingered in the Square de la Trinité but it was closed. The local homeless had settled on the steps of the church. I would never have burned a candle in that one, I realized that. I walked around the outside of the little park and then up Rue de Clichy, which is very gray and is really one of those streets in Paris where to be honest nothing happens except that time passes, nobody ever goes there except people on their own, with bags and newspapers and umbrellas. I'd told Benjamin again that I wanted a scooter, and he'd laughed. But I think he'd understood. If I didn't want to pull down the curtain too soon, it was becoming urgent that I get out a bit more. I felt a bit drawn to number 23 on that street. That was where my ex-wife and I had spent our first night together, in the apartment of a friend of hers. I still remembered it very well, from time to time. I turned around. I searched for her name in my head without finding it. I had to be careful, I didn't want to start rambling out loud, with a name on the tip of my tongue, and worn-out old images that were of no concern to anyone but me. I quickly got to Brochant.

Marie was waiting for me so that we could go out. She wasn't too tired. She'd made herself look beautiful tonight. She'd put on all her bracelets. She simply wanted to walk along the boulevard one more time, do you mind? I took her hand, of course I didn't mind. She'd had a phone call from the department where she was going to be operated on. They were expecting her tomorrow, in the afternoon. Now that she had told me the news, she simply wanted to walk as far as Place de Clichy, where we were already kind of regulars at the Brasserie Wepler, a secret just for us. People had their favorite tables, and it was always a kind of victory—but over what, death? The chestnut trees on the boulevard were in full blossom now. She smiled whenever she turned to look at me, but when she looked away, I saw only a beautiful woman with her arm through mine, with hundreds of things in her head she didn't feel the need to tell me, not me, not anybody. There were lots of people on the boulevard, because of the fine weather. At one point she stopped to talk to a guy, he'd recently been taken care of by her organization, he was all pretty and sparkling, if you can say that. In his fancy dress, he'd be starting work in a few hours, he blew a kiss at her. Marie smiled at him. Yes, see you soon! The chestnut trees smelled almost too strong on the streets around the square. When we'd had enough of walking, we went to the Brasserie Wepler, she squeezed my hand with her fingertips.

“Are you all right, Marie, what are you thinking about?”

She looked at me and her smile froze, even though she'd been making a big effort to put a brave face on it.

“I've really liked it here, all these people. I've really liked my life here.”

I kissed her to shut her up. I told her to stop talking nonsense like that, especially on Place de Clichy, in the brasserie where she'd been a regular as a single woman, and then I told her that with her I was getting back into the idea of living as a couple, being together, for better or, in this particular case, from tomorrow anyway, for worse or something like it.

We were lucky: we found a good table. She asked me to tell her about my life that evening.

“My life?”

I told her that Benjamin was leaving soon. She looked at me closely, I don't know what expression I had on my face, telling her that. It soon got dark, we chatted for a long time. Did I have photographs? I had several of him, but for a few years now there had been fewer opportunities. Marie told me she would really like to meet him, I said he'd like to meet her too, and I'd like it too, I really would. I don't have photos of myself as a child. Marie only asked me the right questions that evening, I think. Afterwards we tried to make plans for the future in the Brasserie Wepler. We were near the ATM in the corner, and with each person that withdrew money, we wanted to ask how they'd been doing in their life, day by day, all this time?

“He has your smile, he does take after you.”

“Benjamin?”

“Yes.”

I took her hand, and without saying anything, I made a personal vow, the kind that only guys like me make, not to dump her during the treatment or when she came out of Beaujon. The evening before, we'd had a few drinks with Marco and Aïcha. They'd gotten along well, Marc-André had made us laugh, everything was fine. In passing, he told me about Jean. He'd simply quit his job without warning. Thanks to Langinieux, they'd waited a while to see if he'd come back, but by now he'd almost certainly been fired. He wouldn't get any severance payment, obviously. Since then nobody had heard from him. Then Marie and I also talked a little about Marco and Aïcha, I liked telling the story, how he had met her at the clinic at work, how he'd realized a whole lot of things all at the same time, and hadn't looked back since, and neither had she. There we were, the two of us, in the noise of Place de Clichy. Marie didn't want to leave. To talk, to keep talking, until tomorrow. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

“Would you like something else, Marie?”

“Yes, how about champagne, what do you think?”

We celebrated that night. And also tomorrow. No, later than tomorrow. Not too late in any case. We had already drunk several times together, she liked drinking, and besides, nobody would celebrate for us if we didn't, so we might as well get on with it ourselves. Marie likes living at night. I understood now the strange hours she kept when we'd met on the dating website. After a while, she stopped talking and lit a cigarette, the guy brought us our glasses. He looked a little like Jean. Lots of people were coming out of the Pathé multiplex, we watched them walking away. I don't like that theater very much. I'm used to small movie houses, the ones you enter and leave furtively, because you go there on your own, that was in the old days, you don't want to disturb the images you keep to yourself, they keep us warm for a while before they're forgotten.

“What are we drinking to? Shall we drink to us?”

To you, to us, to our … We didn't say anything more. She finished her glass, it wasn't very good quality champagne, but never mind, we were fine that evening. Fewer people on the streets. And then the first guys like me.

“Shall we go, Marie?

We set off on foot, slowly, to the Brochant metro station, right on the corner, a very attractive, heavily made-up brown-haired guy stopped next to her and gave her a big kiss, then hugged me before disappearing into the night, toward La Condamine. He didn't seem drunk, though. Do you know him? Yes, Marie smiled, he's a patient, look! He's better now.