Guys Like Me (11 page)

She'd gotten her bag ready in the hallway, we'd have more time tomorrow. I immediately liked that bag, because we'd promised each other we'd go traveling. It was stupid, obviously. We both sat down together, and now, after never telling me anything about the past, as if she'd wanted to live without it, she took out a photograph album. She'd promised me earlier, in the café. There was her name in red on the edge, she'd had that album for a long time. She smiled as she showed it to me. A couple of times, she skipped quickly over a page, that isn't interesting, I didn't ask her anything, because it seems to me that when you come down to it, I already knew. She'd lived in Spain, Morocco, Mali, and New Caledonia. Several trips to Canada. There you are, now you know everything. What do you mean, I know everything? I'd really like to go to Canada with you. I'd suggested that without thinking, it had come out by itself. Are you serious, do you want to? Yes, of course. We should also go and see Benjamin and Anaïs in Zurich, even though Zurich isn't known for its tourist attractions. We'll see.

We went into the bedroom. I was no longer a guy like me at that exact moment, I think. It was a long time since I'd last made love, with love I mean, it did exist after all. It was both very simple and at the same time, not enough. Marie had held out so far. Around two in the morning, she got up, as she usually did, I pretended to sleep in order not to disturb her. After a moment I got up. She was drinking a glass of water and smoking a cigarette, I went to her and we waited for morning together, in each other's arms on the couch. The shutters weren't closed. She'd never wanted to close the shutters since she'd left home the day she turned eighteen. I can understand that, I don't like closed doors in my apartment. We were like each other in some ways, she had breast cancer but apart from that, the prognosis was uncertain. She'd delayed a little too long, they hadn't found any secondary cancers. There are birds that sing around five-thirty in the morning, at the end of May, in the area of Place de Clichy. I thought about the song by Mano Solo that Benjamin had listened to endlessly, not so long ago, on Place de Clichy, he'd made me a recording of it. It had gotten into my head and I was unable to forget it. Since his childhood he must have made a dozen CDs for me. Over the years, I must have listened to them endlessly, in the car, in the morning, or in the kitchen when I was making something to eat, alone, on weekends. I took a shower, trying not to make any noise. She was asleep now.

I waited a little while longer before going down to find croissants for breakfast. It was very important for me to do that. I couldn't take her fear on myself, I couldn't take her tumor, but I could always go down and look for croissants for breakfast, and in a few hours, we'd both go by car to Beaujon. She'd asked me to pick up her mail. She'd also had money problems for a time, she'd almost lost this apartment, because she'd been negligent about the dates, things that are normal for guys like me, if nothing new happens to them that transports them elsewhere, like a big wave on the ocean. We left around noon. We stopped at the pizzeria in Clichy where I often go with Marco, but Marie couldn't swallow a thing anyway. It's a big hospital, Beaujon. She was walking just a little way behind me, I didn't want to turn around toward her. She'd pushed me in front when we got to the good wing of the building. Yes, she had all her papers ready. She handed them to the woman at the admissions desk, with a smile, as if none of this was about her. Marie was used to hospitals and clinics, people who are sick and also die, sometimes. There were no private rooms.

She insisted and I went to see if I could help, but no, nothing could be done, not for the moment. In hospitals, there aren't many private rooms, and they're reserved for the most serious cases. She'd been hiding her panic well, but now, without my knowing exactly how it had happened, I could feel it rising inside her. It was on her lips, but never spilled over. We finally came to an agreement with the admissions people. She could change rooms as soon as possible. In the meantime, she'd be in 115. She had no idea how long she'd spend there, only a few days at first, but afterwards? The woman in the bed beside hers couldn't have been older than thirty. But most of the others in the ward were distinctly older than Marie. She told me very soon, maybe two weeks after they started the treatment, that she couldn't stand the unfairness of it, suffering the same thing as people much older than her, do you realize, why is it happening to me?

When we got there, her neighbor in the ward was reading
Elle
, she nodded at Marie, that was all. From that floor you could see the wing of the great building added to Beaujon and behind it, toward the Seine, that was where I came from. Ever since I was born, I'd seen that hospital. Along with the Seine, it was part of my first landscape. Marie looked at the empty closet, and when she'd finished her inspection of that emptiness, she said can you leave me please? I said yes, all right. I looked for words I couldn't find, but a woman like Marie doesn't need too many words, especially at moments like these.

She was due to be operated on the day after tomorrow, she'd already seen the anesthesiologist. We said goodbye. She walked me to the door of the ward. I turned around to look at her as I waited for the elevator. She'd gone into the glass office at the end of the corridor, she was talking with the on-duty nurse she'd already asked about the private room. Was she already trying again? I took that for a good sign. I managed to tell myself that it would pass very soon, that she'd sail through it, and then later, outside, after the big admissions desk, there was all that green on the trees, and I told myself that I didn't know how to pray. I had always been against praying.

I walked toward the Seine to have a quiet smoke. Turning around, I searched with my eyes for the ward where she was, without being sure. When I got to the riverbank, I ran across the road. They'd just demolished the apartment block where I'd spent the first years of my life, my mother having quickly stuck me with a sitter because she'd found a paying job. But there are some memories you can't demolish as easily as that. I lit another cigarette from the butt of the previous one and sat down on the grass, taking care to avoid the dog shit and all the garbage that was there. Beer cans, supermarket carts, debris from all over the world, and sometimes, toward the far end of Clichy, near the Île Saint-Denis, syringes that reminded me of Antoine, Marc-André's son, every time. I was under the poplars on the riverbank. They'd always been there for me, straight and clear, not saying anything, watching and waiting. Opposite, there were barges moored, and behind them, the building where Marco's parents had lived, when was it they'd died? I talked to Ben too. Did he have any idea of all the time I spent talking to him, almost every day, without telling him?

I didn't feel like going back to Marie's place that evening. She'd have liked me to live in her apartment, she was worried about security and she was also scared of missing important messages. She didn't want to tell her patients that she'd be unavailable for a few months. She wanted to go back to work as soon as possible, they really needed her, she thought. Who needed me now? I decided to go back to my apartment, even if I went to sleep at her place afterwards. I often hoped that Ben would never love without being loved in return. At other times, I hoped a whole lot of other things for him. The Seine was heavy today. When

I stood up again, I decided to give him a ring to suggest we have a meal together, if he had time. They were going to move soon. The storage facility at the port of Gennevilliers was another of those old memories I didn't cherish. Just after the divorce, I lived all over the place, and sometimes, later, Benjamin and I even spent the weekend in a furnished room rented by the month in Bécon-les-Bruyères, because I know the landlord. I filled out his social security statements and the papers for his accountant instead of him, to thank him. He could have been one of those guys walking up and down the boulevard near where Marie lived. Or else a guy like him. I always felt better after a good quarter of an hour near the Seine.

At home I waited until evening. I called my son but it was Anaïs who picked up, how are you?

“Yes, we're exhausted, we're still packing. Ben's in the basement, he'll call you back, OK?”

He called back ten minutes later, was I still on for the storage facility the following Saturday, was it all right with me? I said yes, preferably in the morning. Then I don't know how it happened, but we started talking about scooters, and he laughed, I'd been wanting one for so long, it might be better if I gave up the idea, unless maybe I waited until winter? That was what decided me, I think. That and all these other complicated desires to go around the old places I'd known in my life. It wouldn't take me more than ten minutes to get to Beaujon if I had a scooter. To get to the office, I could always park near the railroad station at Pont Cardinet.

“How's Marie?”

“Not very well.”

I heard him stiffen at the other end, he must have made a sign to Anaïs— oh, those irritable signs his mother made, I remembered them so well—what's wrong with her? She has breast cancer, I told Benjamin, she went into Beaujon today for an operation. She should pull through. That was the phrase I'd heard more than once, it came to me like that without thinking. Benjamin was silent at the other end.

“Maybe we could meet before Saturday, if you like.”

“Yes, if you like, how about coming to dinner?”

He whispered some things to Anaïs and then said no, we're busy, can you come here? That way you'll see the mess we have! Marie had switched off her cell phone. The message on it wasn't one she'd recorded herself, and since it bothered me that I hadn't been able to speak to her, I made a detour and went past Beaujon, just to wish her good night from the side where the windows on her floor were. I don't know why I had the impression that would help her without her being aware of it. After all, nobody would know apart from me, but anyway.

Marco did the same thing sometimes. When his son wasn't doing well, he'd go to the church at Porte de Champerret and light candles, like an idiot. He'd never set foot in there before he was forty, and he didn't tell anyone about it, not even Aïcha. Of course it hadn't cured Antoine of his addiction, he would always be an ex-junkie, with chronic hepatitis and a criminal record, but in his opinion it was thanks to the candles that he'd always had the courage to visit him in the hospital, in rehab, and at Fresnes prison, where his son had done six months, and to look him in the eyes. It was just a matter of finding places where guys like him and me could be alone and quiet for a moment, to do their black or white or blue or pink or whatever magic. I got to their place around nine in the evening. It was really nice to see them again, surrounded by all those boxes. When he came into the kitchen, Benjamin asked me to come and help him, and he told me that his mother had asked about me.

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes.”

He was handsome, my son, with his curly hair tumbling over his forehead and his eyes still like a child's, despite his job in the labs in Switzerland, and maybe later, in the United States. By the time he finished studying, he'd be over thirty.

“And what did you tell your mother?”

“Oh, that you seemed to be OK.”

“You said the right thing,” I told Benjamin.

Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? The previous week I'd read in F. Scott Fitzgerald's biography that he had short legs and was a chronic alcoholic and full of hang-ups, one night when he was drunk he took Ernest Hemingway into the toilet of a bar and asked him to tell him if he was normally endowed, and Hemingway apparently did nothing to reassure him. He even told the story, which just goes to show. I should have taken more interest in books earlier in my life. After my divorce, and even in the last two years of our life together, I'd been incapable of concentrating on anything. We finished eating. Anaïs started piling up books and papers from her classes. The edge of each colored folder had the year written on it. She had no idea what she was going to do in Zurich. She seemed quite down. She had a new tattoo on her lower back, which had hurt a fucking lot, as she put it, do you want to see? Benjamin turned to me with a smile, what do you think? It was worth it, I said. Benjamin laughed and shrugged, it was a blue and black eagle with its wings spread. She had a new one done every year, for her birth-day. This one had been a gift from Ben. I'd already seen some of them at the seaside in previous years. I didn't really know Anaïs well. They kissed, and suddenly the thought of Marie's illness hit me really hard, that shit. I'd go past the hospital again this evening, I'd have to ask her what time she went to sleep, so that I could call her without disturbing her. We carried the heavy things together, we pushed them into the hallway. I was sweating like a pig. They'd have friends to help them at the storage facility in Gennevilliers but I was welcome to come, when was I going to the hospital? Visiting hours are in the afternoon, aren't they, could you come in the morning? No problem, yes, I'll come on Saturday morning. I got back in my car at midnight. Anaïs gave me the rest of the apple pie, that was nice of her. I left a message on Marie's cellphone. I missed her a lot that night. There was no one on my street. I found a parking space straight away. I had so many things to do now. I was scared I wouldn't manage. I fell asleep trying not to think about it, not to tell myself anything about Marie's illness, but there was no point trying, with guys like me. I remembered some very old things too, I dreamed about my childhood. That doesn't happen often these days. It seemed quite beautiful now. Why? Maybe because I didn't have much time left? And then finally it all calmed down, as if nothing had happened, just like that, because it was the next day.