Guys Like Me (9 page)

4

T
HERE HE WAS, IN FRONT OF ME, SITTING ON THE STAIRS.
He was looking at his shoes, and I didn't know if he was really looking at them or if he was doing it to hide his embarrassment, a bit like a big child. He was the last thing I needed in my life right now, he was only a side issue. But I smiled at him all the same, and we shook hands. He didn't need to move, because of the height of the steps, when he looked up I knew what it was that struck me so much about his appearance: he had all his hair, and it was very brown, with hardly a single white hair. I remembered his mother, suddenly.

“I'm not disturbing you, am I?” he asked in a flat voice. “I was in the neighborhood.”

“Oh, really?” I replied good-humoredly. In his situation, I think I'd have thought up a better excuse. But I can't really be sure of anything. He stood up, I asked him to excuse me while I looked in my mailbox. In the past few years, looking in my mailbox has stopped making me anxious, I'm not paying alimony to Benjamin's mother anymore. For a long time, I only had to be a few days late to find the bailiff 's papers in the mailbox. Now I'm more scared of news you don't expect, news about people from the old days; we knew them and loved them, or we didn't know them well and didn't like them much, but they catch up with us and tell us they're dead, or sick, or alive and well and looking for traces of their past. Anyway, there was nothing in the mailbox that day.

“How are you fixed for time? Come up and have a drink.”

“I don't want to disturb you,” he repeated, and at that point, the desire to make fun of him came over me again, we waited for the elevator.

He looked through the window, then, from the buildings in the distance, he shifted his gaze to the end of my street, which was even livelier in April. I'd put down my briefcase and taken off my jacket, he turned toward me. For a brief moment, we looked at each other without saying anything. I think my mind was elsewhere. On the way home I'd had the idea of suggesting to Benjamin that he come for dinner one of these evenings. He was very busy with his preparations for leaving, and the closer it got, the less they felt like living in Zurich. Who wanted to be twenty-seven in a place like that, in the research lab of a big chemical company? That's why I think Jean's visit must have felt like an intrusion. Why had he chosen me, me rather than Marc-André, who'd actually found him a job? Was it because I live alone, and he doesn't?

“Don't just stand there, sit down. What's going on?”

He resumed the same vague air, as if worried by the drafty air, just like earlier on the stairs.

“I don't know. I won't stay long.”

I made up my mind not to let myself be irritated by his remarks. During all those years of being unemployed and on welfare, he'd always been idle, and maybe that kind of dialogue was the only kind he could bring off.

“Is it the job?”

He gave me a weary, slightly boyish smile. “Yes, they're real oddballs, things haven't gotten better with the years, from what I can see … Didn't Marc-André say anything?”

His tone just a little shrill, falsely mild, no, I don't know anything. He was the same age as us and he talked like a teenager, and not just any teenager. I handed him a beer, and he took the top off it as if he was scared that if he did it badly he might blow up the building.

“Do you want a glass?”

“No, thanks.” He stood up. “I'd like to talk to you. Tell me if you have something to do, you're not obligated to listen to me.”

All the same, he'd chosen me, he explained why me as he went along. We talked what, two or three hours, something like that? I confess I'd forgotten a lot of things from the old days, and even from the last few years of my life, but I remembered them completely thanks to him. Sometimes his voice was hoarse, sometimes it was only a thin thread. It began at school according to him, when he'd been moved to technical high school. Do you remember? Yes, I remembered. He'd spent a year in that school at Quatre-Routes, he'd been separated from us, Marco and me and the others, that was where he'd first been affected. He was speaking slowly too. That surprised me, because to be honest I'd have expected more vehemence on his part. He'd had a bad patch that lasted several months, he'd stayed in bed in his room, his mother was the concierge of an apartment building. Yes, I remembered.

I think I can even see him in those days. I remember the big covered entrance next to the little record store on the square by the station where we used to buy 45s. I remember a woman with very white skin, and the black hair that she wore pulled back. He was fifteen, and he couldn't get out of bed. He'd lost the will to live. But that didn't mean he wanted to die, and although he couldn't explain it, all his life it had affected him from time to time. He'd finished his beer. I offered him another. I told myself that we were going to spend all night like this, if only I could find a way to cut things short, then, afterwards, I stopped thinking about it. He'd recovered without knowing why, that first time. He'd been to see several doctors in Paris, his mother had made inquiries. She was intelligent and very poor. He still loved her as much as ever. The doctors talked to them about adolescence, severe depression, attacks of melancholia. He told me that, attacks of melancholia, with a slightly self-satisfied smile. Melancholia. Not without hope, it seems to me, he repeated the word several times, as if it might make him more interesting. After a while, I realized he was talking almost in the dark, and I suggested we go into the kitchen, maybe he'd like to stay and have a bite to eat? I locked myself in the bathroom for five minutes and phoned Marie to tell her I had an un-expected visitor. I'd call her back later, how late would be OK? He'd taken up his favorite position, on a stool. He kept his arms crossed. When I asked him to take a stick of butter from the refrigerator, he noticed the drawings by Benjamin that I'd kept, some of them were almost fifteen years old. There'd been a time when my son always made a drawing for me when he left on Sunday night. It seems to me these drawings protect us, him and me, even though, in a way, it'd be better if I removed them. Under magnets, I also keep urgent notes, reminders of things to do, and tickets from the dry cleaner. He smiled as he looked at them, as if he didn't quite believe them. That's your son, Benjamin, isn't it? How old is he now?

He continued his life story in broad strokes, but, as always, he kept coming back to his childhood, his life with his mother, it was just the two of them. Then he told me about his first love, a girl he'd met at the skating rink in Asnières. Do you know it? Yes, I knew it. A vague smile came and died on his lips, once again, when I confirmed that yes, I knew it, I knew where it was, or I vaguely remembered some figure from Asnières or Colombes, La Garenne, all those places of ours from the old days. We'd been there together, in the old days. He hadn't heard from this woman in three or four years. In all that time he'd had more or less nothing but welfare to live on. His mother also helped him a little, as best she could, since he had told her his situation. He'd hung around. He'd stripped wallpaper, kicked his heels outside DIY centers hoping to be hired for the day. He'd learned the geography of night shelters, municipal baths, and food banks. It wasn't really new to him, his mother and he had always lived hand to mouth. I thought again about the ground-floor apartment he'd invited us to. The open window onto the inner courtyard. Those windows would have to be repainted almost every year. The family opposite, a couple and their two children, I remembered the little girl sitting on her tricycle, the clumsily paved-over cobblestones. He'd loved that girl. As only guys like me can, he said, and I filed his expression away in a corner of my mind to try to understand it. And what about me? I realized that he chose these high-flown phrases because he found it hard to explain things more deeply. I didn't dare interrupt him, he didn't stop talking while we ate.

Ben called me around nine, he wanted to know if I could help with the move. He was going to put some things in a storage facility, you know, the one at the industrial dock in Gennevilliers?

“Yes, listen, I have a friend here. I'll call you on Tuesday, OK?”

Jean was watching me, waiting for me to finish so that he could continue. So, what happened to that girl? He smiled, rather like the way an adult would smile at someone who doesn't understand because he lacks experience.

“Her name is Adeline Vlasquez, do you know her?”

I made an effort to remember, not so much at the time, but occasionally in the days that followed, even sometimes at work when I thought about his story or let myself go and escaped into the past. Did she also go to Le Cercle, the bistro in Asnières? He nodded, yes. They were in love, at least he'd known that in his life, he was already twenty-four when they met. At that time he was working at the FNAC, the megastore, he was one of their first employees, in the days when it still meant something to work at FNAC. He made me laugh without meaning to. They'd set up house together, they were lucky and even found a little house on the hill at Puteaux at the beginning of the '80s, before the property boom. They'd made plans for the future, and then, without warning, that fatigue of his had struck again. He'd had to quit his job. She thought he was doing drugs, or that he was cheating on her, she thought a whole bunch of things, and in spite of his efforts she ended up becoming tired of him, she'd left him two years after the election of François Mitterrand. By the time he was done, we'd finished dinner. He'd been talking for nearly two hours.

“You must be fed up, I'm boring you with my stories.”

“Why do you say that?”

He'd been telling me the life story of a guy like me, when it came down to it, but one where every episode took place between attacks of what he called his fatigue. For several years now, since Germany, where he'd earned a good living in a factory making machine tools, he'd been scraping up money from wherever he could, he loved welfare. Without it, he'd probably be dead. He'd lived a totally useless life (big smile). Later, talking with Marco, I realized that he was inexhaustible on the subject, how to live on nothing, how to make do with only the basics for as long as possible.

I suggested we move to the living room. I made coffee and he waited, his eyes turned toward the lights in the odd-numbered houses, as if he was at the movies, a spectator of his own life. We all are, obviously. No, he'd never seriously tried to live with a woman again, he'd never forgotten Adeline Vlasquez. All the same, he'd waited several years before he tried to track her down. His eyes shone as they looked at the suburb outside, for no reason, just uttering her name. He had done it, one day. It was just before meeting us again, Marco and me. I was starting to wonder what he wanted from me, apart from talking. It hadn't been easy to find her. She'd kept the same name. She didn't want to believe him, after all these years that hadn't changed her one bit. She'd lived in England, after their separation she'd let herself be led on by guys for a while. Then, and he gave me his weary smile, too big and also too slow, she'd come back. She'd always had work, apparently. He told me that in a pensive tone. She was one of those women who search desperately for a man to have children with, but sometimes that takes their whole lives. Are you still angry? I asked him. He said yes, she asked me to stop harassing her. Harassing, he repeated slowly. Can you imagine? It was after midnight.

Now I wanted to get rid of him, I'd had enough of people like that around me in my life, I'd also had enough of my own memories. And yet, I don't really know what it was, something stopped me from dismissing him with the excuse that I had work tomorrow, or that I'd already spent all that time listening to him talking, about his failed life, about everything and nothing. Adeline Vlasquez. It's lasted my whole life, he murmured. He was smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with blue Samson tobacco, like when we were all together, during our years in high school.

“Will you roll me one, please?”

I held his hand as he lit my cigarette. His eyes were sad, seen from close-up. I decided I'd do what I could for him, if I could.

“And how's it going now with your job?”

He smiled again in his clownish way, his face still as weary. “You must be joking, I haven't been out in a week.”

I really think he wanted to laugh.

“You're the first person I've seen in all that time.”

He stopped speaking. He often had these pauses, long ones, as if he'd gone somewhere and gotten lost on the way back, and nobody knew the name of the place. I realized it was Adeline Vlasquez country. It was a long way away, somewhere in the past, but he'd never been able to tell the difference between then and now. I think I remembered that we were good friends in the old days, but he'd never forgotten.

In the days that followed I often thought about that, and even when I told Marco about it, I wasn't able to put a face to the name, even though I flatter myself that I never forget a face. Maybe it isn't true, then? He'd untied his shoelaces, he was sitting there stiffly, leaning back in the armchair. I bought two of them on a whim when I first moved into this apartment, I must have been forty-six, something like that. I bought them six months later, they looked exactly like the ones my mother had bought when I was fourteen. I never sat down facing her, in one of the two armchairs. In my place she would put linen that needed darning, shirts I'd lost buttons from, and more often still, papers to be sorted. My mother had a genius for sorting, and it really drove her crazy during my childhood years. It was as if she spent my childhood sorting it into files. It struck me it would be too late to call Marie. Sometimes, our lives accelerated, and then it took us years to stem the overflow. She would understand anyway. Would she sleep tonight, or else, like the last night we'd spent together, the previous week, would she wait for me to sleep and then get up and stand by the window in her kitchen for a long time, all by herself, without switching the light on? After a while, he seemed to realize that I was there, and he looked at his watch, conspicuously, like someone who wants you to know he's looking at his watch.