The Thursday Night Men

by Tonino Benacquista

  A grave symptom like this must have an entry in the big book of psychiatry, but there was still one reason to doubt the entire hypothesis of a hallucination. If Marie-Jeanne Pereyres was no more than a pathological projection, why had he subjected himself to such a lackluster fantasy? Why the stringy hair, the faint twist to her mouth, the boy-scout knee-high socks? Why not a figment of his dreams, a mirage of a woman, born of a thousand unfulfilled desires? He had been hoping for so long, he had sought her in his bed on waking, so many times he thought he had seen her in a crowd, had dressed and undressed her endlessly: that being the case, why had he shown so little imagination in his mental fabrication? If his projection had been one of dreamlike perfection, Denis would not even have tried to cure himself of it. On the contrary, in his madness he would have set up house with her and closed the door on the doctors and their pathetic therapies, to live in endless happiness, in love with an illusion—but then, weren’t all men in love with an illusion?

  No, nothing seemed to confirm the hypothesis of a projection. Unless there were a way to unearth an even deeper and more troubling truth in that projection. And what if, instead of representing the woman for whom he had waited for so long, Marie-Jeanne Pereyres was the shadow side of Denis Benitez, his obscure double? The reflection of his ego, more accomplished or more hideous, the side one does not dare to confront but which, one day, will prevail, either to hear our grievances, or announce a tragic fate. Denis could see his painful dialectic with the intruder as a permanent debate with himself, the perfect utterance of his desires to a hypothetical Other. But even there, why did he chose someone like Marie-Jeanne Pereyres to be a mirror to his soul? How could he imagine her as his malevolent twin? It was enough to dissuade you from the temptation of an alter ego! Why wear himself out trying to express his hidden truth to this vision in a nightgown, sprawled lopsidedly on a threadbare sofa? Even the most uninspired psychotic could do better.

  He might as well face the facts: nothing confirmed to Denis the certainty of his own mental dysfunctioning. Besides, the moment he put on his waiter’s apron, he forgot the intruder’s very existence, and he lost himself in the deadening, incessant hum of the restaurant, the demands of a hundred patrons, all in a hurry, fussy, lonely, authoritarian or stingy: how could you stay on course in such an ocean of nervous commotion without seeing it as irrefutable proof of sound mental health? When a hundred times a day you had to reply to the question Can I have green beans instead of rice? and never tell anyone to go fuck themselves: was this not the sign of supremely solid nerves?

  But for all that, Marie-Jeanne Pereyres remained one of those inexplicable phenomena that drive the most rational individual to venture into the tenebrous zones of the paranormal. Ever since she had made her appearance, Denis had revised downwards all his pragmatic certainties. No one liked to see strange manifestations appear suddenly in their life, yet one could not help but imagine the intruder as some sort of supernatural presence entering the physical world in the form of an ectoplasm, or even a phantom come to inhabit the mortal coil of a certain Marie-Jeanne Pereyres in order to carry out some obscure design. Several new hypotheses arose: if the intruder had moved into his house with no intention of leaving, could it be that the place of habitation was much more important than the tenant? Perhaps she was a wandering soul who had come to haunt the space where she had once experienced some dramatic event. If this were the case, it was pointless to hope he could get rid of her unless he set fire to the furniture, or waited until the ghost found her own deliverance. Unless the intruder was one of those phantoms animated by kindly intentions, whose mission was to bring a message from the beyond to a human in distress. A plausible premise, but then, for Christ’s sake, what was the message?

  According to popular wisdom, the best moment with a prostitute is when you’re walking up the stairs together. Kris liked to turn the assertion the other way around: nothing could rival that short minute she spent climbing the two floors up to Lehaleur’s place. An appointment at her big-hearted client’s meant she was in for a calm, sincere moment, all simplicity, no haggling or struggling. When she arrived at his place she could make herself at home as if she were an old friend, she could sprawl on the sofa, drink from the glass he handed to her, and take off her shoes—I spend my days in a taxi and yet my feet ache like some old streetwalker’s. Then they would have dinner together like an old married couple, and according to their ritual Yves would tell her his latest experiences with her colleagues. She would listen, occasionally allowing herself to comment, but she wouldn’t let her anger show: I cannot stand the way you talk to me about them, I’m discovering an unfamiliar feeling that frightens me, a whore doesn’t have the right to be jealous, it’s absurd. After a tender night in his arms, Kris’s anger would flare again in the morning when she saw the money tucked on a corner of the table.

  “I make so many others pay. Why should I make you?”

  “You have to earn a living.”

  “Don’t I have the right to make a gesture? To use my free will? Will I only ever be a whore for you?”

  Yves preferred not to see the signs of her attachment, her questions that were too direct, her confessions—You can kiss me on the mouth if you want, but if you do, then you mustn’t kiss anyone else. While he had a great deal of respect for her, he did not love her enough not to pay her. Why take the risk of changing the slightest component of their equation, of endangering the fragile balance obtained through a transaction? The pecuniary aspect, far from seeming sordid to him, guaranteed both pleasure and detachment. Yves paid a prostitute with the same fervor that a prostitute put into being a prostitute. And it could have gone on like that for a long time had Kris not fallen into a trap that he had, involuntarily, set for her. From the moment they met, she had fought against any sort of feeling, seeking to repress him no matter what, to file him away, along with the others, in the clan of the weak or the wily. In spite of her best efforts, it was impossible to knock him out, to make him cry or beg; impossible to reduce him to a vice or a plea or a feeling of inferiority; impossible to despise him for his brutality, familiarity, or meanness; impossible to scorn him for his male arrogance; impossible to ridicule him for his childish whining; impossible to lead him around by his dick. Kris had been undefeated up until now, but this was one battle she had lost. Henceforth, whenever she felt those hands all over her body, whenever she had to tolerate male members in her every orifice, when evening came around it wasn’t an urgent need to take her body back for herself that she felt, but rather rush headlong into Lehaleur’s arms. You could have fooled her: the bastard looked like the companion of a lifetime.

  The more he saw her taking unexpected liberties, priding herself on a legitimacy she’d acquired who knows how, or claiming her status as initiator, the more Yves wondered whether their relationship ought to continue. He had been waiting for that evening to talk to her about it; he was concerned, wanted to understand what was upsetting her, and perhaps hoped they’d be able to go back to their good old routine. He did not have time to broach the subject. She did it for him.

  Lehaleur, I have to talk to you.

  She felt tired and vulnerable, lost in a way she’d never been since she’d started in this profession.

  I have to try and make some sense of all this. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks already . . . It’s gotten too difficult . . .

  Yves was sorry he hadn’t spoken up first.

  I’m not independent enough to go on by myself . . .

  Her speech was already disjointed, when she began to describe in detail her house in Ville-d’Avray, at the edge of the forest. Well-maintained, quiet.

  But it’s been way too big for me since my parents moved to the South.

  What came next was unbearable.

  No one has ever taken care of me the way you do here . . . We could make a good team, you and I . . . I earn a lot, you know . . . You wouldn’t have to work so hard anym
ore . . .

  And suddenly, silence.

  Yves was wearing the smile of the idiot who refuses to understand. Everything he had just heard reminded him of the failure of his previous life: talk about a roof, money, a couple, but coming from Kris, those words suggested another word.

  “I must not be hearing right. You’re asking me to play the pimp?”

  “Why do you go and use a word like that? I need a man to think about when I leave for work, I need to know he’ll be there in the evening, that he’ll heal my wounds, the ones you can see and all the others too.”

  What sin had he committed to find himself confronted with such a loathsome offer? Even to suggest such a corrupted image of happiness showed she had failed, totally, to grasp who he was. Something was pursuing him, choking him, making him feel completely nauseous, and he had to tear whatever it was to pieces.

  “I have a question for you, Kris. Is there something shameful about going with prostitutes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, sooner or later, you come up against the question of whether it is moral to pay for as many girls as I have. Do I even have the right to resort to women like you? A lot of people would say I’m a stupid jerk. They might see it as the ancestral domination of a man over a woman’s body, the centuries-old need to turn her into a piece of merchandise. There are other times when I don’t feel guilty at all: these women who sell me their bodies—or at least the ones I want to see again—don’t seem to be throwing away one ounce of their dignity. I treat them with a respect that they give me in return, and I don’t judge them for choosing to put a price on their charms. But no matter what, I will never be at peace with my conscience, and there will never be an answer to these moral issues, they’re as old as the world.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “I can try and understand what’s going on in the mind of a gangster or a murderer or a mercenary. Maybe I could get interested in the case of a psychopath or someone who’s mentally ill. I can try and go beyond my own taboos to understand another person’s way of thinking, even if it’s hideous. But if you put me next to a pimp or a rapist or a man who beats his wife, it makes me ashamed to belong to the male tribe. Guys who exploit or mistreat a woman’s body have forfeited any right to call themselves men: they’re beasts. The hatred I feel toward men like that is so strong it could turn me into the worst kind of torturer. And you are prepared to offer me such an abject arrangement?”

  Kris stared at him, speechless.

  “I have just understood why they sometimes call a brothel a house of tolerance: whores will tolerate anything.”

  She still said nothing.

  “You have wounded me in my dignity as a man this evening. And I’m afraid I will never forgive you.”

  “I hope you don’t mind, the concierge slid the mail under the door so I put it on the little console.”

  Marie-Jeanne fell silent, fearful she had already said or done too much. Denis was looking at her piercingly, ready to fight, praying he could be ruthless. This evening he felt strong enough to have the ghost’s hide.

  “Have you already lived here?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t make me repeat myself: were you already acquainted with this apartment before I made the disastrous decision to let you come in?”

  “No, never. I barely even knew your neighborhood.”

  “Did you suffer here, in another life? I’m ready to believe anything I hear.”

  “Suffered? In another life? Now what have you gotten into your head?”

  “Answer!”

  “Never in this life, nor in any other. Although, in this life, you’re not exactly easy all the time.”

  “Do you know what a poltergeist is?”

  “No.”

  “And a perispirit?”

  “A what?”

  “It’s the second body which the soul of a dead person inhabits.”

  “I have the sneaking suspicion you’ve been reading the dictionary.”

  “Do you like your mortal coil? Do you feel good in it?”

  Marie-Jeanne looked down from her torso to her feet, put her hands around her waist, and lifted up her nightgown to inspect her calves, no longer hidden because her socks had fallen down around her ankles.

  “Yeah, it’s okay.”

  “You don’t leave a single trace anywhere in this house—not a crumb, not a shred of tissue, not a hair in the tub, it isn’t human, especially for a woman.”

  “Sometimes I envy you, Denis. You live in this magical world where the most ludicrous details become fascinating.”

  “Do you eat? Do you wash? Do you even belong to the material world?”

  “Make up your mind. As a rule, you reproach me for being too present and too heavy, and you reproach me for having a body.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m going to tell you: you don’t exist. You are a projection of my sick mind.”

  “A projection? God, what wouldn’t I give to be some man’s projection! A fantastical creature, an ideal, with just that little bit of fatale to hint at perfection . . . Especially as whatever your projection is, it must be really hot.”

  “Unless you’re just some ordinary ghost, the kind you find in legends, rumors, old houses and country inns. I prefer the second hypothesis by far. You correspond totally to the way I imagine an ectoplasm. An invasive presence that has no reality; you’re just haunting me.”

  Marie-Jeanne suddenly felt powerless in the presence of so much fantasizing.

  “Alas, I am not pure spirit, but a creature made of flesh who needs her two thousand calories a day and often goes well over that. I like to take hot foot baths at the end of the day, I add coarse salt to the tub and I don’t really know what good it does, but my mother used to do it so I do it too, otherwise I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. I sleep in a white cotton nightgown that has almost the same consistency as linen; I can’t do without it, ever since that morning when I went to get the mail the minute I got out of bed and a neighbor said to me, ‘It looks nice on you, that little summer dress.’ I’ve got cellulite, not too much for my age, but I also have a bit of a spare tire on my stomach that seems to have settled there, sometimes I think about having liposuction but never in earnest. I do my laundry on Thursdays so that I can iron on Friday, but when the weather’s really humid I do the laundry on Wednesday so it has time to dry. I’ve had heartburn forever, I always have a blister pack of Maalox on me, and if I drink champagne I take two ahead of time. Apparently I snore when I’ve been drinking but I refuse to believe it. Another detail for when I’ve been drinking: I don’t have the strength to brush my teeth, and I go straight to bed and collapse. I hate cutting my toenails, I have to get into this ridiculous position, and all too often I wait for my tights to start running at my big toe, it’s not very feminine but that’s just the way it is. I remember going for a three-day hike once where I didn’t wash, and I have this nice memory of my sour smell. When I dye my hair with henna, I lock myself in the bathroom with a plastic bag on my head to wait for it to take. I wax my legs. I have a pin in my left knee. My stomach rumbles at noon sharp, especially if I’m on the bus. I know how to make spring rolls like a real little Vietnamese woman. It may not look like much but it’s not that easy, you have to get all the soybeans going in the same direction, then you sprinkle them with chopped mint, grated carrot, and angel hair, and you put the shrimp in an S, but the hardest thing is to roll it all tight with the corners tucked in so that the roll stays sealed. To get the knack, you need a lot of experience of the real world, of everyday life, of the physical realities that govern our little lives here on earth, you can’t live in some parallel world full of fairies and ghosts.”

  A creature made of flesh, she had said.

  Denis had doubted her, and doubted her still, and an irrepressible impulse compelled him to find out once and
for all.

  Marie-Jeanne was sitting on the arm of the sofa, her hands tucked between her legs, waiting defiantly for whatever came next.

  He wondered if this was the only way he could find out.

  She would not help him: he would have to find the proof his faith required.

  But wasn’t that proof going to cost him more than his doubts did? Did he have the nerve to risk seeing Marie-Jeanne Pereyres as anything but a dream, an essence, a specter—to see her, quite simply, as a woman, here and now?

  She would not help him. Perhaps he still saw her as a strange body.

  Denis had forgotten that silence.

  She smiled at him, like a friend. She found him touching, the way she found all men touching when they were prisoners of themselves.

  He held out his hand to her.

  8

  The Anatra suite in the Watu Hotel, on the Nusa Dua peninsula in Indonesia, had a 360° panoramic view of the ocean. The suite was actually a villa, set apart from the others on the top of a hill, made of little ochre walls and glass partitions that flooded the three thousand square feet with light. The infinity edge swimming pool skimmed the southern façade, extending into an enclave designed to cool the bedroom, where an immense bed, right on the floor, was level with the water. Spare furnishings in black wood created an illusion of separate rooms—living room, study, open-air dining room. Tall exotic plants stood out against the empty space, the indoor ornamental pond, and the terrace. On the northern façade, beyond the flower garden, a cubic construction of openwork wooden slats did not seem to have any particular purpose; it could be a play area for children, or a canopy battered by sun and rain, or even a purely decorative modern sculpture. A narrow path of teak planks led down a gentle slope to the main building of the hotel and the everyday bustle of tourists and servants. From there, one had access to a white sand beach covered in deck chairs, parasols, changing cabins, and bars. The waves seemed gentle as they came to die at swimmers’ feet, but in the distance a violent, continuous surf broke against the coral reef. The temperature for the month of June, still tolerable for a Western tourist, was 86 degrees, and the humidity 77%, and this would vary little until sunset, at five in the afternoon.