The Thursday Night Men

by Tonino Benacquista

  “I was only sorry that my shell of misanthropy had formed around me so late in life.”

  And yet, when he reached the year of his fifty-fourth birthday, humanity reminded him of its existence in the person of Emma, a coworker the same age who had been living alone since she had become a widow and her children had left home. She wasn’t the talkative sort, she hugged the walls so to speak, and they must have passed each other a thousand times on the métro platform and in the company corridors and as they pushed their trays along in the cafeteria before they ever spoke. They met again at the theatre, and occasionally on Sundays at outdoor concerts, and over the months their conversations had become more refined, with nothing at stake, joyful for the most part, always serene, yet no doubt it was already too much: what if they became close? The following pages of the script would be as tragic as they were predictable, and in order to forestall the inevitable complications, he launched into a long confession.

  “I made up some story about a serious accident that had ‘altered my erectile functionality.’ I wanted it to sound like a euphemism . . . Since I knew the score by heart, I had no trouble gaining her sympathy. Contrary to all expectation, Emma seemed relieved. Her own libido had vanished along with her husband.”

  But she was reassured by the idea of spending her old age with a last companion. Retirement was around the corner, and their gentle friendship had evolved into a peaceful life together. Liberated from any pressure, for the first time he was discovering what shared intimacy meant, sleeping with a woman nestled up against his shoulder. Before long the sacrifice of so many years of sensual pleasure seemed far less cruel than having been deprived of these treasures of tenderness.

  “Alas, such happiness could not last. And God knows I had waited a long time.”

  The audience before him had been expecting a happy end to his sad story, but now he looked graver than ever: after a few first nights in their shared bed, he awoke in a frenzy, his cock standing upright against Emma’s thigh.

  “It was an order from my body, the first it had ever given me with such authority.”

  Every night his desire for Emma grew, and every night he hid his youthful hard-on, sidestepping the issue ever more resourcefully. To be sure, she would have taken his excitement as a late-blooming compliment, but how could she forgive such a pernicious, diabolically detailed lie—he had described his accident with such precision, recited word for word the doctors’ diagnosis, which left no hope that he would ever get hard again; he had even, with the help of a drawing, depicted the absence of blood flow to the cavernous hollows of his cock. This was the man who had said farewell to his virility, and had climbed into Emma’s bed claiming to be harmless, and now here he was, destroyed by the brutal self-confidence his member was bestowing on him at last. About to turn sixty, he had to admit as much to his brethren: he had a sexual problem.

  Saint-Jean watched him leave the podium to go back to his seat. Without such an astonishing reversal, that man would have taken his secret with him to his grave. Philippe was sorry the man had decided to come and tell his story just at that particular moment in his relationship with Emma, and not just after making love to her: it would have made an ineluctable epilogue, with its promise of unexpected descriptions.

  One last participant got up to read at length from the logbook of his relationship, as if he were the captain of an expedition and his wife was first mate. Denis Benitez had respected the protocol by resisting the urge to leave the room before the end of the session. His presence among the brotherhood no longer made sense. It wasn’t here that he’d find an answer to the great mystery of female evasiveness. At this point, his struggle against so much indifference had worn him out for good, psychologically but also physically; he needed some rest. He should go away somewhere, into exile, all alone and far away, but above all alone, alone, for Christ’s sake, a true solitude, one that he’d chosen and not a constraint, quality solitude, exceptional solitude, well up there among all the great solitudes of History, an absolute return to the self. Then they’d see, those women, all of them, that it was possible to exist without them.

  At nine o’clock sharp the men left the place for the very last time. Until the next meeting in the little museum god knows where near the Place des Ternes, Yves, Denis, and Philippe said a hasty goodbye on the street corner—no one suggested going for a drink. Denis disappeared into the métro, Philippe headed for the nearest taxi rank, and Yves hurried off on his scooter for the Place d’Italie. Of the three of them he was surely in the greatest hurry: he had an appointment at his house at ten o’clock, with a stranger.

  At nine forty, after he’d tidied the living room and made his bed, Yves put an ice bucket and some bottles on the coffee table. On the phone, Kris had asked him before anything else how he had gotten her number, then she told him her rates. She spoke to him the way he himself spoke to clients, careful to ensure there would be no unpleasant surprises. Their actual meeting, on the other hand, threatened to be more awkward: what do you say to a girl you know nothing about, except that she is blonde with dark eyes, and that she will do almost everything, according to a friend. It was something he’d never experienced, but he dreaded the scene of the call girl and her trick, all the clichés you found in the cinema, in literature, in the collective unconscious, and in guy talk in cafés. No matter how he tried to justify the oldest profession in the world, or pay homage to it, a woman was about to show up at his house to open her legs and go away again with 250 euros. Even if he did reject any notion of romance, it made the operation seem all the cruder.

  Christelle Marchand, past thirty, had been in the business long enough to know the necessary precautions she must take with a new client. She never had clients at her place, didn’t solicit in the street, didn’t agree to appointments in suburbs that were too remote, or if she was not sure she could get a taxi home after nine p.m. She recruited on the internet through carefully selected websites, and she’d built up a network of clients who steadily found new ones for her; an average of six a day enabled her to live without fear of failing to making ends meet, or unemployment, or the fallout from economic crises and stock market crashes.

  She arrived on time, agreed to a small shot of whisky in a lot of Perrier water, slipped the folded fifty-euro notes from the tabletop into her handbag, and asked Yves if he wanted anything in particular. Surprised, he answered, No, just the usual thing. Relaxed, with her glass in her hand, Kris made small talk with her client about the approach of spring. She was wearing a thick black jacket that zipped diagonally, decorated with topstitching at the shoulders, a skirt that came mid-thigh, and thigh-high boots in black suede. He could see a certain innocence in her features, and a blonde brilliance that hinted at the child she had once been. She headed over to the bed, perfectly relaxed as she removed her clothes and tossed them here and there on the floor. Yves saw she was wearing panties that laced up at the back and a bra made of the same lace; her skin was light and smooth. He undressed like an awkward adolescent, sat down on the edge of the bed, then slid beneath the sheets and embraced the body he had been waiting for for too long, warm with their exhaled breath, a mingling of sweet and sour. He would have liked to take the time for contemplation, for emotion, to enjoy this return to basics, to find in a long embrace everything he had been deprived of, but his urgency to penetrate her betrayed him, and in spite of himself he was already forcing his way between her thighs. She got the condom business over with in a few seconds, and encouraged his too-feverish body to come inside her. Prisoner of her legs, incapable of resisting such an embrace, as if he were being sucked inside her, Yves was lured into a furious in and out, abetted by her hand clinging to his hips. She enhanced the movement even further with violent spasms of her vagina which forced him to come. While he lay on his side, restraining a moan, Kris had already put a knot in the condom which she dropped into a small bowl. Drained, mute, Yves watched her head for the shower, come back out a minute
later, and get dressed, validated by her sense of duty fulfilled, ready for her next appointment. He had the unpleasant impression that he’d been robbed of the best part of that sensual pleasure he had so looked forward to. No need to see me out, she said, satisfied that she had gotten the job over with in such a short time. You have my number.

  He was dismayed that his little business had been taken care of so nimbly. He lay in bed, vanquished, his cock drooping, and he already dreaded the terrible solitude to come. I got laid, he said out loud, laughing at himself. For a few minutes his body had been hostage to another, and that body, for all its contrived gentleness, had known how to dictate its requirements. Just the thought of it would curtail most of the loneliness that kept him from sleeping.

  As he was drifting off he had to admit that he too, at times, had used a woman’s body in that way.

  That same night, at two ten in the morning, Philippe Saint-Jean lay in bed mechanically turning the pages of a book. He had tried ten times over to get into the little book he had bought that afternoon, and ten times over he had lost the thread, absorbed in the memory of his first meeting with Mia, that dinner at a friend’s house, as snobbish as it was boring. For her aperitif she had asked for a mineral water that was totally unknown but very popular in Switzerland. All evening long she had involuntarily slipped Anglicisms into her conversation, saying “personalité” when she meant “character” or “insécure” when she meant “hesitant.” Convinced she must be an Anglophone, Philippe had asked her where her lovely olive skin came from, and she replied, Fifty percent Provençal, fifty percent Réunionnaise, and one hundred percent French. Later he had served her some arugula salad with shavings of parmesan, lovingly describing the countryside of Reggio Emilia where this little masterpiece of six years of age had come from; not even stooping to taste it, Mia had pushed the shavings of cheese to one side of her plate. To finish with a flourish she complained bitterly and at length about the treatment inflicted on a certain species of lemur that lived in the north of Madagascar.

  Today she had seemed far less superficial, almost authentic in spite of the circumstances that were anything but. A young woman who, once you removed the makeup and projectors, must be troubled by the same fears and aspirations as anyone. No doubt she was driven by her ego—but then, who wasn’t?

  Seeing Mia cross his path again like that might be a sign, but of what? He was such a thoroughgoing Cartesian, the resident rationalist, he could go on for hours about the difference between fate and determinism, yet he could not imagine this second meeting had been mere chance. What’s more, when he allowed himself to be tempted by a psychoanalytical reading of the minor events that occurred in his life, he gladly conceded that chance did not exist. Mia had not reappeared for no reason. Even if he never saw her again, he had to find the true meaning of what she had called a coincidence.

  At that same moment Mia climbed into a taxi that would take her back to the Ritz. After her endless day filming she had not been able to get out of a dinner with sponsors who had hired her at a premium. She was leaving first thing the next morning for New York, an initial fitting for a sportswear line that had commissioned the services of some major couturiers. She wouldn’t have time to see that intellectual who had made a much better impression on her today than the first time she’d met him. He’d been so overbearing that night, listening to himself talk, beginning all his sentences with As I am sure you are aware, lecturing about existentialism as if it were for dummies, zigzagging brilliantly between the theories of Kant and the cinema of Wim Wenders. But what would be the point, after all, of trying to keep a philosopher from reasoning; that was like trying to stop a greyhound from running after a decoy, or a salmon from swimming upstream. Today’s meeting had been a change from all those living nullities she met all year round, hollow people who looked good, all a bit cynical and apt to panic the moment they left their luxury hideouts. She was one of them, no doubt about it, but there were times when she tried to fight back. All she had to do was go and see her parents, near Avignon, to remember what a normal person’s life was all about.

  Her father was still running his trucking company, and her mother looked after the big house, empty now, where Mia and her brothers had had such a happy childhood. Whenever their famous little daughter didn’t cancel at the last minute, a family dinner would be organized in her honor. Her mother got cooking, her older brother rushed over with his wife and kids, Mia handed out presents. Afraid of putting on even a hundred grams, she wouldn’t touch the Creole pâté, or the pork curry with ginger, or the traditional sweet potato pie; she’d just nibble at a few shrimps wiped clean of their onion salsa. Then she’d be subjected to a thorough interrogation: I heard you’ll be doing the Dior campaign . . . You got in an argument with Naomi? Is that really you on the poster with the handbag, I hardly recognized you . . . You’re not with that English guitarist anymore? Where did they find it all? In magazines, on television, at the hairdresser’s? None of it was true, or it had been completely distorted, but there was no way could she say, I’m still your little Mia. Her parents had been viewing her as their totem ever since they, too, had been treated like stars in the neighborhood, for having brought into the world a creature whose measurements bordered on mathematical mystery. In the onslaught of questions, the ones Mia dreaded most were the ones about boyfriends. No, I’m not with So-and-So anymore. In general, she refrained from adding, How could I have wasted six months with such a jerk? An old married American TV network boss, or a Spanish tennis player who was definitely either too tennisy or too Spanish, but the worst of all had been Ronnie—Irish, not English, a bass player, not a guitarist. He couldn’t stand the fact that she’d taken the initiative to break up, and he’d had his revenge by declaring to the celebrity press that because she never ate anything, Mia secreted a gastric juice that gave her the breath of a fox terrier. For weeks, people had stood three feet back from her, sometimes with their faces turned to one side. She didn’t know how to respond to such bad faith, not even around her parents, who had read the nonsense. This was not the only nonsense they’d read since they’d started seeing photographs of their daughter in every getup imaginable. Gossip, hearsay, but also some direct attacks, like the ones in that prime time program where a columnist had been so tacky as to tell this joke in Mia’s presence: Do you know why models have one neuron more than horses do? It’s so they won’t shit while they’re on the catwalk. And everyone on the set had laughed their heads off. She’d put a good face on it until she left the studio, and then she’d burst into tears.

  She would have given anything that night to be able to seek refuge in a kind person’s arms, far away from the cliques and the posers, from fashion and snide remarks. When are you going to introduce us to someone nice? her mother asked repeatedly. Someone she wouldn’t be ashamed of, someone who wouldn’t be driven by his obsession with fame, someone level-headed and thoughtful and who, when he was at her side, would get all those mocking critics to shut up. But it didn’t seem likely that Mia would meet someone nice at any of her jet-set parties or in the idolatrous circles of the glamour industry.

  That someone was not likely to be Philippe Saint-Jean. But how could she be sure if she didn’t see him at least one more time?

  Late at night, unable to fall asleep despite his exhaustion, Denis Benitez decided to give his companions the slip until further notice. The time to take leave of reality had come. He swallowed three sleeping tablets from a box that had been past its sell-by date for several months now. He wouldn’t go to work the next day. With a bit of luck he’d sleep so long that the day would go by and he wouldn’t even notice.

  He must be headed for some unknown place, lost in the middle of nowhere. But where he’d be alone at last. And never mind if the place turned out to be sad and deserted. Denis was already far too weary to turn back.

  4

  In the room: a simple bed, a night table, a chair for visitors and overhead, where th
ere used to be a crucifix, a television that was never switched on. The setting wasn’t important—nothing was important, Denis slept most of the time. At worst, he drowsed between two visits from the nurse, suspended in weightlessness by medication that changed from one day to the next. On the rare occasions when someone roused him from his lethargy, a blurry image entered his field of vision, most often that of a meal tray, a white uniform, or a handful of tablets in a cup. When a hurried intern announced his presence with a booming How are we feeling today? Denis would wonder what was meant by “today.” When he was conscious enough to correlate two ideas one after the other, he tried to go back over the cottony sequence of events that had led him to this bare, silent room where he was no longer afraid of collapse. The rest was all forgetfulness, the real thing, the kind that snatches you up. His body felt none of the sensations, whether pleasant or not, that call you back to life, with one exception. When he woke up, Denis would turn his pillow over to feel its coolness against his cheek; the only moment of the day when his nerves flushed his skin.

  At the end of that afternoon, a psychiatrist sat by his side for a long time to try and unravel the origins of Denis’s depression. His eyes half-closed, his breathing calm, Denis answered the practitioner, who was no doubt a kindly man, but way off track. How could he share with a stranger a message too shameful for confession: living without love, he had gradually lost his faith in humanity. Then, in himself.

  They agreed on the word overwork, which avoided the need for any others. As soon as he was alone, Denis glanced at the fading daylight and all he had to do was close his eyes to lose himself in the darkness.