Before leaving the bistro, Philippe asked the other two whether they planned on being there the following Thursday. Denis nodded and Yves answered, Sure thing. Each of them left with the feeling that their trio would meet again.
3
Most of the time Philippe Saint-Jean got around on foot, living as if he were a surveyor of Paris, a solitary wanderer. His activity allowed him the time, and he put his hours in the street to good use. Besides, owning a car would have been counter-rational, anything but ecological, and downright vulgar. His itineraries might include a detour by way of a park, a church, the banks of the Seine or, like today, a secondhand bookstore. Every time he came to the Bastille quartier he would stop by the dusty shelves of a little shop on the Rue Saint-Antoine and await a chance encounter with a title, a forgotten author, or an irresistible foxed binding. His curiosity and patience had allowed him to unearth unusual little volumes which he would read straight through and mention in the course of his conversations. He leafed through a hardback with a gold and red binding that he had found in a tub of loose books, and it had just enough patina to entice him: With the Bathwater. A Little Linguistic Misadventure, by a certain Édouard Gilet. For five euros, this could be the day’s acquisition and his little bedtime treat.
He crossed the Place Bastille, headed toward Nation, then stopped, intrigued by a cluster of people outside a luxurious café next to the Opéra; a movie camera on rails, technicians waving their walkie-talkies, projectors, extras seated in front of fluorescent cocktails and, in the middle of all the hustle, an actress’s stand-in.
“What are they filming?” asked a voice in the crowd.
“A perfume commercial.”
Like many people, Philippe liked to linger in the presence of heavy cinema equipment, hoping to see a familiar face, a director whose work he particularly liked. At the word “commercial” he left the crowd of onlookers, acknowledging his total lack of interest in what some people considered an art form—in his opinion, advertising was the worst avatar of mercantile sublimation. But then he saw the figure everyone was waiting for, draped in an immaculate white which emphasized the golden brown sheen of her skin. The young woman took her seat with a professional ease, aware of how radiant she was, but just blasé enough to discourage any bores. Utterly surprised, Philippe recognized the girl’s face and tried to remember her name, something like Mira or Mina, an affected little mewing sound which suited her perfectly. Mia! shouted someone, to get the model’s attention; she granted a smile. Philippe had met her a year earlier during a society dinner organized by a media mogul who bragged that he had friends in every sector—Philippe had found his expression execrable, but he’d gone along anyway. During the dinner he had tried in vain to attract the girl’s attention with a great many abstract witticisms. As for Mia, who was used to being the center of everything, she thought this intellectual guy was verbose and pedantic, since he hadn’t shown the slightest sign of curiosity about her.
It was strange to see her again, here in this cocoon of light and celebrity, so distant. First came a sideways tracking, then she made a knowing gesture, tossing a splash of perfume into the air the way you splash your champagne into the face of an insolent lout. Then she left the café at a run, followed by an agile swoop of the camera which would allow you to see, in the background, the Colonne de Juillet on the square. Philippe would have already been on his way, but something kept him there, in the way of any simple curious bystander fascinated by luxury and pomp—which he wasn’t. He would have liked to go up to this Mia person for no other reason than to see if she remembered him the way he had remembered her.
During the sixth take she noticed him at last. Holding the train of her dress, she gave a faint smile, narrowed her eyes, and made a great effort to remember: he reminded her of someone, but who? She waved to an assistant to let Philippe come into the field of the camera.
“You remember? A dinner at Jean-Louis’s. A big duplex on the Quai Voltaire.”
“ . . . The philosopher?”
“Yes.”
“Incredible, what a coincidence! Just last week I was shooting in Johannesburg and that evening I switched on TV5 Monde in my hotel room, you know, the international French channel, and there you were! You were talking about your book . . . Something with ‘mirror’ in the title . . . ”
The rebroadcast of a news program where he had tried to promote his essay on collective memory. Mia had seen him and, what’s more, halfway around the planet. They exchanged a few pleasantries; he found the absurd situation amusing, while she was being assailed by the makeup girl in the middle of an audience, watching their encounter as if it were part of the script. Neither one of them experienced even the slightest twinge of the thrilling symptoms two individuals feel when under the spell of mutual attraction: their hearts did not beat faster, nor did their pupils dilate, nor were there hot flashes or a rush of adrenaline, and, in spite of everything, without knowing why, neither one of them wanted to put an end to their meeting.
“ . . . The director is asking for me.”
Philippe would have liked to get her phone number without having to ask for it, and Mia wanted to leave room for the possibility of a future meeting without having to take the initiative. Both of them had long ago left behind that stage of polite awkwardness where one feels obliged to stay in touch without really wanting to.
And yet the moment seemed to go on and on.
“I travel a lot, but I come back to Paris regularly,” she said, looking for something to write her number with.
“I never leave Paris,” he answered, producing a card where only his email address was printed.
Philippe shook Mia’s hand, surprised he hadn’t had to hold out his cheek, then left the scene, and its audience, to head down the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine with the Place de la Nation in his sights. Six–forty p.m., a Thursday.
The classroom, with all its windows open, was already filled with a hundred contemplative men: these were its last days before demolition. An administrative decision had finally been implemented, coming as a surprise to all the hierarchy: the west wing of the building would be demolished in order to build a sports complex. The guidance counselor opened the meeting to inform all those present: they were going to have to find new premises by next week. All kinds of ideas were put forward until the security chief of a small private museum with a projection room offered to host the upcoming meetings. A few weeks, maybe more, would go by before anyone would ask him for an explanation. Everyone voted for this solution.
Denis Benitez and Yves Lehaleur saw Philippe Saint-Jean come in just before the doors closed. Yves whispered the address for the next meeting to him while a fellow charged up to the podium.
“I’ve been coming for a few weeks and I’m not sure this is really the right place for what I have to say, but I haven’t found anywhere else. If this seems off subject to you or inappropriate in any way, I’m asking you to excuse me in advance. I imagine that most of the people here live on their own, which is not the case for me. My life is the kind everyone aspires to, where love is shared.”
Philippe had already stopped listening, as he was still troubled by his meeting with the inconceivable Mia, there in the spotlights, dressed in platinum, surrounded by a crowd chanting her name. Nothing fascinating—simply unreal, a cinematic moment. From this experience, Philippe could have drawn the preface to a book on the imaginary world of money, and yet despite his position as a sociologist he had been the involuntary actor in the film.
“First I have to tell you something about Émilie. She starts the day with a smile and goes off to sleep saying something funny. Émilie loves life, life loves her, and I don’t know if the word even means anything anymore these days: I think she is happy.”
Philippe Saint-Jean had his doubts about just how fascinating someone like Mia could be. Her impeccable beauty had not moved him today any more than it had the first time. W
hen he got home from that wasted evening of a dinner, Juliette had asked him, Is she as beautiful in real life as in the photos? And he had launched into a long speech about the only true beauty, which is unconscious. To be sure, she had plenty of assets, but none of them would hold up to two hours of non-conversation with a spoilt child who was convinced her life was far more thrilling than that of ordinary mortals. In response to Juliette’s question Philippe had said, The girl is a monster of symmetry, but that in no way constitutes beauty; what is beauty? You are.
“And yet there’s a cloud on the horizon. Émilie and I don’t love each other at the same rhythm. It’s not so much a difference in intensity as in style. I am passionate; Émilie is pensive. I anticipate the moments that lie ahead; she enjoys the present moment. I call her ten times a day; she thinks that words become drained through repetition. I like knowing everything she is doing; Émilie never asks me a thing. I want to get to know all her friends; she encourages me to party with my own crowd. I use never and always all the time; she thinks there’s no such thing as an absolute. As the months go by I have begun to wonder if so much disparity is not a sign of something deeper. Won’t these differences crystallize over time and creep into our relationship until they begin to contradict everything that brought us together? I was well aware that I was creating the problem just by formulating it, but instead of feeling reassured by Émilie’s trust in me, which favors the right to be different, and which knows how to make things relative the way they should be, I began listening for the sour notes, even causing them sometimes in order to prove my conclusions. I reproached her for not being as attentive as I am, for never losing her self-control no matter what, for never letting go. I started getting impatient, irritable, unfair, more and more often. Until one morning when I overdid it and Émilie stopped believing in our future together. You will tell me I got what I deserved . . . ”
Slumped on his chair, his fists in his jacket pockets, Denis Benitez was sorry he had come. Ever since he woke up that morning, an unexplained weariness had made him question his every gesture, even the very thought of work. But a guilty nagging feeling made him put on his white shirt and black apron and set untold numbers of plates down in front of diners who were hungry, or not, and for the hundredth time he would explain how the cod had been prepared, and put up with the shouting in the kitchen, and the criticism in the restaurant, and the invectives of the boss. During his three o’clock break he looked up thalassotherapy sites on the internet, convinced his fatigue was a result of burnout, and that a little bit of hot water would do him a world of good. At six thirty he took the métro to Nation and wondered why. After all, he’d already spoken his mind in front of a bunch of strangers—what was the point going back there? To subject himself to the moaning of some guy who dared to complain about his wife’s affection?
“The fear I might lose Émilie calmed me right down. No more embraces? No more luxuriating in her scent? No more devouring her like a lamb? No more letting her play the wolf from time to time? Never to know the children we would have? And all because I measure attachment with a double decimeter? For five or six months following her ultimatum, I acted the perfect partner, a model of understanding and tact. At least on the surface, because nothing had changed; other than that; I kept my anxiety to myself from then on, since it was getting more and more severe and unfair. Why isn’t she here with me now, right away? What better things does she have to do? Why doesn’t she say she loves me when I ask her? Why is she so cautious when we talk about our plans for the future? I knew our relationship would not survive a second crisis over such absurd complaints. I had to learn to leave her alone, whatever the price, to let her live and love me the way she saw fit. So I came up with a solution, a terrible solution . . . ”
Denis thought this testimony was a disgrace. That guy could leave the room whenever he liked to go and find his Émilie and keep her company and have children with her or fight over the remote, and yet he went on sitting there splitting hairs and quibbling about mindless details in a relationship when there were so many little moments of harmony that had no need to be analyzed or put into perspective.
“ . . . A terrible solution, but ever so effective: I am cheating on my wife. I am sleeping with another woman once a week. An act that doesn’t mean much in and of itself, only afterwards, when I get back home. I feel pitiful, I am ashamed to have to find a pretext to take a shower the minute I get home, to destroy any trace and to lie about the way I spend my time. That’s when I realize I’m living with this wonderful woman who has no idea how base I am. When I take her in my arms, knowing that another woman has just left them, I can evaluate just how unfounded my reproaches truly are, and I stop looking for problems where there aren’t any. What I used to take for indifference now seems like trust and respect. I have stopped trying to find out every detail of her time without me, I now know that she needs to find fulfillment on her own, and not live through me, or because of me or for me, and that’s the Émilie that I love.”
Who the hell is this twisted idiot! thought Yves Lehaleur, exasperated. Since he had begun coming to the Thursday club he had heard some hard cases, but never this hard. Cheat on your wife to keep from harassing her . . . How far does a relationship have to degenerate for you to have to resort to this kind of stratagem? Having seen his own love destroyed by adultery, Yves could not tolerate the idea that it could be a solution for anything whatsoever. In his opinion, complicated psychological intriguing as a response to a rocky love life merely hid other causes of unrest. He had not resorted to any vicious subterfuge in order to cherish Pauline. She had been there, in plain sight, and that had been enough for him.
The witness left the professor’s seat and another one replaced him, eager to spit it out and get it over with right from the start: he was impotent. A disgrace he had known all his adult life, he said, emphasizing the word adult. At the age when those who have done it lorded it over those who are about to do it, he waited for his turn, and it seemed it would never come. In spite of his exceptional shyness, which left him absolutely tongue-tied in the presence of a girl, he had sworn he would be cured of his adolescence before he hit twenty. But one summer had followed another, as icy as winter, and his rare efforts—fear in his guts, a flaccid member, evasive glances, confused logorrhea then the silence of the dead—had led to nothing more than early mornings filled with shame, which condemned him to silence—how could he speak of his infirmity when it had become the supreme insult for anyone who wanted to hurt the male of the species? Alcoholics and reformed criminals could assume their botched lives in public, but he could not. What was more, he felt excluded from a universal culture where love in general and sex in particular had the starring roles; he would frequently put down a book when the author started to describe how a man and a woman became acquainted, the cycles of charm, feverishness, and entanglement, just as he would look away whenever, on screen, a passionate lover pushed his partner down onto the table.
Lehaleur also looked away, as he would have gladly turned off the sound if he could have; this testimony was making him feel ill at ease. Imagine yourself deaf? Mute? Both at the same time? A trifle. One-armed, paralyzed? Anything, but not that. Like so many men, he could not imagine resigning himself to a handicap that was so much more degrading than any other. That was what he thought already when he was still living with Pauline, and even more so nowadays, at the threshold of a great career of debauchery. But the witness went on, implacably: after revealing what must be the height of misfortune, worse was yet to come. Once he was past thirty he no longer committed the error of judgment of yielding to an attraction to a beautiful young stranger—he imagined she would immediately grasp the meaning of his avoidance behavior, and make herself scarce; nor did he find a bunch of friends to hang out with: sooner or later, they were bound to wonder why he never said anything about his love life, why he did not seem to enjoy talking dirty. In the absence of any effective treatment, and by virtue of never pu
tting the mechanics of desire in gear, his libido had vanished.
A sudden anxiety roused Denis Benitez from his lethargy: every sentence he heard sounded like a foreshadowing of his own future. His life as a shameless rake seemed far in the past, and he too felt a loss of desire which seemed irreversible. To be sure, he could imagine that between a man who has always been impotent and one who is about to become impotent, there must be the same difference as between someone born blind and someone who has lost their sight. But Denis would have been incapable of saying whether nostalgia for a past life gnawed away at one as much as the lack of something one has never known.
“When I turned forty I made a resolution.”
He would turn his pathology into destiny: he would no longer be an impotent man but a virgin. A profession of faith which, traditionally, was better suited to women, but which would allow him to legitimize an entire life of abstinence. Thus, in his virginity he had sought a mystical significance which would transform the agnostic into a believer. But the revelation was a long time coming; no doubt he was not made of that particular cloth.
“So many years spent feeling less than human weren’t about to help me find God or the path to a monastery . . . ”
When he turned fifty, he gave a different twist to his exceptional status: to be sure, he had never known the pleasures of the flesh or the transcendence of love, but this life of his spent isolated from human passion, exempt of any commerce with his peers, had enabled him to reach a degree of absolute, almost perfect egoism. This never-ending cohabitation with his own self, to the exception of all others, had made an urban hermit of him—civilized, incapable of empathy for others, peaceably inured to the misfortunes of his own kind. He had spent those years as if he were the last individual on earth, full of a silent scorn for all normally functioning men, and all those women whom he had not penetrated.
The Thursday Night Men Page 5
