The Thursday Night Men

by Tonino Benacquista

  Judging by his opening words, Philippe Saint-Jean was afraid that his story would be interminable, so he allowed his gaze to wander out into the darkening schoolyard.

  “For five whole years, I was a married man. Her name was Pauline and she worked for a real estate agency run by Alain, who was a childhood friend of mine. He had introduced her to me because she needed some double glazing—that’s my job, I install windows for a major company—so I went over to her place for an estimate.”

  A woman like Pauline, single? That was a minor miracle that surely would not last, unless he were to outrun her other admirers. Their early years living together were just Bohemian enough for them to acquire some precious memories. But their work came before everything, because they were both working very hard to fulfill their dreams. They decided to start a family—two kids, no more, but no less—so they needed to find a little house in a quiet suburb, and that was Pauline’s job. In order to obtain a loan at the bank, Yves used his 87,000 euros of life insurance as collateral—everything he had saved since obtaining his vocational training certificate, plus a little early inheritance from his parents—and Pauline would borrow the equivalent of a third of her salary over twenty years.

  Yves did not spare his audience a single detail: even the financial ones, which were insignificant at first glance, had acquired a symbolic value that was a source of relentless torment to him.

  “With Pauline in charge, everything was bound to work out fine.”

  She was a petite little woman, bursting with energy, always smiling, and she never gave the impression that her heart was not in her job, or that she was going through a rough patch. Running a household, fighting with the administration to obtain what was owed them, negotiating with banks and carefully filing away every single credit card receipt, she managed everything as if it were a breeze. Nor had it kept her, after hours, from unearthing their Xanadu—in Champigny, on the banks of the Marne river, a stone house that had been restored. It had an open plan ground floor with a gigantic fireplace, no fewer than four upstairs bedrooms, a garden that was well-protected from outside gazes, and all of it less than fifteen minutes from the Porte de Vincennes. Happiness had an address.

  “We had an appointment to sign the sales agreement and the move was set for January. After that, Pauline planned to stop taking the pill so she’d get pregnant.”

  Philippe Saint-Jean couldn’t really see why all these details were necessary. His own fear of talking too much sometimes hampered his ability to listen. He did, however, find it interesting to listen to a story that so painstakingly described the sort of aspirations that were the opposite of his own. When was the last time he’d met a man who dreamt of starting a family in the suburbs? Ten years ago? Twenty? Had he ever even met one? The great dream of the majority, the one that went to make up a country and contributed to the durability of its values: a family and a roof.

  Philippe felt neither pride nor regret: he knew he was an exception, and it was pointless to turn to him to contribute to the survival of the species or to take part in a national endeavor. He wasn’t antisocial or a maverick, he wasn’t even rich, and yet everything that preoccupied his compatriots was of so little concern to him—inflation, public housing or transport strikes; none of it had any bearing on his lifestyle. Starting a family in the suburbs? He himself was a product of that very enterprise, his parents had never called it into question, at the time it was neither a choice nor a dream but a necessary passage in life. Nowadays, Philippe lived in a three-room apartment in the Latin Quarter, right at the heart of the Paris intellectual movement, a stone’s throw from the Sorbonne and the publishing houses. At the age of forty-one he somewhat pompously decreed he would never have children, now; the only woman who had ever made him want a child had vanished from his life as if he had woken too soon from a wonderful dream.

  “And everything would have been so very different if there hadn’t been that party on November fourth.”

  The agency that Alain ran was part of the biggest real estate company in the country, and to celebrate their annual results, management were inviting a thousand of their employees, selected on the basis of their performance. For the first time, Alain, Pauline, and their coworkers were going to be rewarded.

  “My wife called me at around one in the morning to tell me she was having the greatest time of her life. She’d been congratulated on her results, she’d been introduced to the company’s second-in-command, and she was drinking champagne in a sidewalk café on the Champs-Elysées. In short, she was in no hurry to come home. I congratulated her too and begged her to be careful if she’d been drinking. She told me that she was going to follow the crowd she was with, they would probably go on partying at a nightclub, and I could sleep easy, she wouldn’t take the car. Since I knew that my buddy Alain would have an eye on her, I fell asleep, reassured, and proud of my wife. When I woke up at around nine in the morning there was a text message that said, Dead drunk. Sleeping at Fanny’s. C U tomorrow. Love U.

  She came home at around noon, eyes half-closed, face puffy, struggling against the worst hangover in her life, and she rushed over to a tube of aspirin, then to her bed, without even looking at Yves. He let her sleep it off until evening, when she emerged to take a shower and drink some tea, until she regained the power of speech and was able to give Yves a rough outline of her evening: the nightclub, the vodka tonics, so many she’d lost count, until she could hardly stand on her feet and Fanny took her home with her at around five in the morning.

  “I remember thinking the whole episode was really ‘healthy,’” said Yves. All her hard work in the ranks, recognized at last, that was healthy, and the fact she’d met the big company bosses, that was healthy, too. And so was partying, and without me even more so. Let her get completely wasted for once in her life: that was healthy, too.”

  Yves was bringing out all the details he’d filed away in order, then examined, and commented on, and brooded over ad nauseum.

  “Monday morning life went back to normal. Until Alain called me at the end of the afternoon: Yves, I have to talk to you, but not on the phone.”

  At the neighborhood bistro Alain, his voice lugubrious, wondered whether he had the right to do what he was about to do. I adore Pauline, you’re my best friend, but either way I’ll be betraying one of you. That famous Saturday evening had started so well. Pauline, in her lovely gown, a cocktail in her hand, the Champs-Elysées sparkling at her feet. The big boss for the whole Île-de-France region had said to her, “So you’re the famous Pauline Lehaleur?” When the first guests had left, Fanny suggested they go to a trendy club on the Rue de Ponthieu, a short distance from there. To thank his team in person, Alain had decided it would be his treat. The kind of place you only ever see in movies: gold, silver, red satin, perfect lighting, several dance floors, music to set the place on fire, staff straight out of the pages of a glossy magazine and, above all, a stage with pole dancers.

  “Strippers who curl around a bar,” explained Yves to the hundred men hanging on his every word. “A show every fifteen minutes, the guys are blown away, the girls think it’s funny. But every third show the situation is reversed: it’s a guy who gets undressed. A go-go dancer. In less than a minute all he has left is a towel around his waist, and he goes down into the audience to wiggle his hips between the legs of young women who are squealing hysterically.”

  None of the women in their little group had been ignored, but the dancer lingered by Pauline, who was both surprised and amused to see a male specimen of the sort wiggling his athletic body not four inches from her face. The man had perfected his performance, and like any good professional he went off to the other patrons just before any kind of awkwardness had time to set in. Pauline had not made a show of it, she’d just played along in the presence of her colleagues and denied she’d had any sort of special treatment. To recover from her emotion, she drank her umpteenth vodka tonic, determined to go on with t
he party: tomorrow would never come. She started dancing, euphoric, as if to fill herself with light and energy before the winter came, until she herself was incandescent. Until all of a sudden, the eyes of all the women turned to see a young guy appear out of nowhere on the dance floor, a young guy wearing a pair of frayed jeans and a white shirt open on his chest. Pauline hadn’t recognized the go-go dancer straight off in his street clothes, now that he was once again a customer like any other—but then again, was he? He had a break for an hour, and sometimes he would start up a conversation, hand over his business card, and describe his private services, which covered part of his income: bachelorette parties, hen nights, birthday parties where he was the living present. Tonight, however, he was happy just to be dancing with a glass in his hand, making far less of a show of it than during his professional crawling number. He exchanged a few smiles with Pauline, then a few words, amidst the infernal racket. Then they started up another conversation, silently this time, and far more sensually, in the middle of the dance floor.

  Alain was discovering a Pauline he’d never seen, yielding euphorically to her own frenzy. He was worn out by all the craziness, and offered to take her home, but she refused outright: I’ll get a cab! See you Monday! Alain walked back to his car, unsure what to make of what he’d just seen. Was she just a young woman enjoying an exceptional night out, or the wife of his best friend, dead drunk, trying to hit on a semi-gigolo? Should I leave her there? Or should I go back and keep an eye on her? Insist on driving her home? I did not know what to do, Yves, please believe me. On the one hand I figured she probably didn’t know what she was doing, and that she’d thank me the next day for intervening. On the other hand I thought, well, she is an adult after all, and it’s none of my business what she does.

  At the beginning of the evening Yves had said to him, jokingly, She’s in your hands! and now those five little words weighed heavily on his conscience. Alain turned back, determined now to persuade her to leave, even if he had to be abrupt about it, but it was already too late: the go-go dancer’s car had just flashed by, and Pauline was in the passenger seat, reaching over to turn up the volume on the radio.

  Denis Benitez was enthralled by Yves Lehaleur’s story, as was everyone else, and he knew that in this brotherhood he had found what he was looking for. His own story seemed anecdotal, and for the time being the only one that mattered was this stranger’s, so radically different from his own.

  “So that was where my friend Alain’s story left off; he was still there, though, with his elbows on the bar counter and a drained expression, and he knew he had jeopardized our friendship. If I had kept quiet I would never have been able to look you in the eye again. He insisted, mortified: Can you forgive me? His need for absolution seemed ridiculous in comparison with the shock I’d just had. I was astonished to hear myself say, Me, forgive you? If in twenty years you’ve given me a single true proof of friendship, then this is it. You did what you had to do, and I’ll be in your debt for life.”

  Before leaving, Alain warned him against misinterpreting things. What he had seen might not have been as bad as it looked, and it was easy to imagine other far less traumatizing outcomes to the episode. But were any of them even credible?

  “I went home—already it no longer felt quite like home any more—and poured a full glass of whisky and drank it as if it were spring water, while I waited for Pauline. That’s where my horror film began, with that image of her leaving the club in that guy’s car, the film I’ve been watching over and over for months now, and which still comes back to haunt me.”

  Of all those in the audience, Philippe Saint-Jean was probably more intrigued than anyone by the way in which this man was describing his wife’s infidelity, the terms he used to retrace the mechanisms of suspicion and, more to the point, the details he chose to tick off, or not. A long time ago Philippe had developed an entire theory about adultery among the working classes, a form of adultery that was far trickier and more complex than in the other classes. In culturally powerful milieus like his own, adultery was seen to be inherent in a relationship, a sort of inevitable derivative, a subject for debate, which one could relativize; you encountered the likes of Emma Bovary and Don Juan, and literature was often relied upon to lend legitimacy to a secret liaison. The grands bourgeois viewed adultery as a necessary evil, to be filed away in the same drawer as venereal disease: sooner or later you got it, but there was a cure. But for those who had no recourse to luxury or romanticism, there were complications, practical difficulties—how to find a place to harbor one’s lovemaking, how to juggle with a schedule that was often regimented down to the quarter of an hour. It was more than just adultery, too, it was cuckoldry, bringing with it shame and betrayal. Afternoon trysts became borderline Greek tragedy; lasting affairs, a crime of bigamy. Philippe Saint-Jean had always wondered why the phenomenon carried such a dramatic charge, when it was such an insignificant event.

  “Pauline thought I was very quiet, there with my glass in my hand, and she said, You’re having a before-dinner drink at a time like this? Then she added, Yuk, I’ll never have another strong drink in my life.”

  Racked by doubt, Yves went straight to the crux of the matter: You didn’t sleep over at Fanny’s—where were you? Pauline acted the girl who is completely taken aback, but with so little conviction, and so fearful of discovery, that she gave herself away. What on earth have people been saying . . . And Yves, unflappably, dousing his inner flames with great gulps of Cutty Sark, put her on the trail without the slightest irony: Dead drunk in a stripper’s car at five o’clock in the morning, I’d love to hear what happened next. She tried everything—indignation, anger, her utter disgust with malicious gossip, particularly when that gossip came from people you were close to; it was so pernicious. Yves did not relent, but asked the same question over and over, indefatigably, so calmly it could only portend the worst. An hour later she cracked and confessed to her only crime: Yes, I was drunk, yes he asked me to go with him for another drink, yes I told Fanny to cover for me, yes, yes, yes, but I didn’t sleep with him, I beg you, believe me! How could she dare to think that the man she’d spent the last five years of her life with would be satisfied with so little? Another drink . . . Shouts replaced sobs, but Pauline didn’t give anything else away, if anything the opposite: how could this man she loved, her husband, refuse to believe her? All the more so when she had just confessed to such a petty crime! She’d had a stupid drink with a stranger, who’d gotten it into his head that he’d take her home with him, but despite her drunkenness she’d stood her ground. Besides, she didn’t even fancy him, that studmuffin with his muscles bursting out of his shirt, what a caricature!

  “She was so convincing, so precise, that for a second I had my doubts. She described the ridiculous way he had of hitting on her, and the place they’d ended up, an ‘after’ she called it, in English, a bar that opens when all the others are closing, she even described the guy’s mates they’d run into, and all those cool dudes into their good-natured boozing until noon. To be honest, I would have preferred to let that scenario keep playing. But Pauline had lied to me once already, why should I believe her this time around?”

  There would be no time for a second confession that Thursday. An hour had already gone by, but no one had looked at their watch. Those who had planned to speak would just have to come again the following week.

  In spite of his ultimatum, Yves did not manage to get the true version of how the night ended: Pauline would not change a word of her version from then on. In deathly silence, he put on his parka and slipped the bottle of Cutty Sark into his pocket. Almost nauseous, he left the apartment without even looking at her and went off to a little hotel on the Rue de Tolbiac, where he locked himself in and, with his glass in his hand, lay on the double bed and stared at the cracks in the ceiling. His Pauline had become that bitch Pauline; never again would he refer to her in any other way, and soon he would not need to refer to her at all
. But before he envisaged the final episode of their life together, there was one thing he had to be sure about.

  “ . . . I don’t know what came over me, at around three o’clock I saw the red numbers flashing on my clock radio on the night table and I told myself that the sooner I was sure, the sooner I could start a new life without that bitch. A stripper, at that time of night, must be hard at work . . . ”

  Philippe Saint-Jean sat up: would this guy telling his sad story of ordinary jealousy have dared do something that extravagant? Corner the Chippendale who’d slept with his wife? No one, in his milieu, would have ever been able to do such a thing, but they would all have dreamt of it! Yves Lehaleur suddenly rose in his esteem.

  “I know it’s ridiculous, and ridiculous isn’t even the right word, it’s the stage beyond ridiculous, like some pathetic farce that is trying to be funny to no avail: Pauline had slept with a stripper, a guy who does bodybuilding, as oily as a chicken on the spit. The woman I’d been living with for five years had walked right into the trap.”

  In fact, the word he was looking for was “grotesque.”

  “What sort of fantasy was it? Was he the exact counterpart of some vulgar female stripper with tons of makeup, a real turn-on, the type we men like so much? Was it the same thing? Did Pauline want that?”

  Even if he did not look like one of the club’s usual customers, the bouncer let him in, this guy in his parka, terribly silent and slow and so absent from the world. Yves watched Sabrina and Marcy perform, and then over the mike they announced a show by a certain Bruno.

  “I was overwhelmed with hatred the minute I saw him. I so rarely feel like that, it was like a sign of proof: this was him. Pauline had left with him that night.”

  As he watched the way the stripper moved among the women, Yves imagined how his wife, like the women around him, must have followed the guy’s every move. How had she reacted when he grabbed her hands to place them on his butt? When he shoved his crotch into her face? Had she given a silly smile, like the others, or blushed with shame or excitement; had she felt bold or ill at ease, did she want to run away from her unexpected attraction, or let herself be overwhelmed by it? Yves asked to meet Bruno by telling the barman that he was the boss of a club that was seeking to hire talent from the fashionable bars in the capital. Ten minutes later, the artist bounced up to him, hastily dressed, streaming with sweat.