The Thursday Night Men (10 page)

Later that night, Kris’s wariness had faded; she wasn’t dealing with a hidden sadist but with a guy who hadn’t made love in far too long. Counter to all professional ethics, she asked him why he had called a prostitute. Yves had no desire to go through all the various stages that had led to their being together in his bed, so he slanted his reply toward the future and not the past: he wanted to get to know
all
kinds of women. Tall and petite, voluptuous and slight, ladies and chambermaids, semi-virgins and old soldiers, of every origin, every skin color, not to mention all the categories he had yet to discover. How could a man like him, given his life expectancy, his salaried position, and the fact that he rarely traveled anywhere, expect to bring such a project to fruition without resorting to prostitutes?

Kris paused to think then conceded he didn’t really have much choice.

He glanced at his watch and decided to doze off at last. For the first time in so long he was going to have the pleasure of waking up next to a woman. Instinctively, he pulled her to him and put his arm around her waist the way he used to with Pauline. She misunderstood and thought she was being conscripted one last time: the client who wanted one for the road, to make sure he’d had his money’s worth. To make sure, she in turn had an instinctive gesture, slapping her hand onto his groin to check his erection.

Stunned that his surge of tenderness was met with such a degrading examination, Yves was overcome with a wave of fury: he’d been reduced to a limp sex, to the level of an animal.

He grabbed her by her armpits, lifted her up with all his rage, and thrust her so hard that she collapsed against the wall before sliding to the floor.

Kris sat there on the floor, unmoving, dazed.

In her life as a prostitute she had already been thrown out of bed, but never in quite this way.

Yves slowly regained his composure. Went over to her, holding out his hand.

She understood what had just happened: he had felt the humiliation that she herself had to endure when some lout indulged in the most odious kind of fondling. For once she was the one who’d committed an invasive gesture on someone else’s body.

Still trembling, he asked her to forgive him.

No, it was me,
she said.

Neither one needed to add anything. They had to let the awkwardness drain away from the moment, for it was a founding moment. A strange complicity had just been born from that brutal embrace; not from sex. Lovemaking was not the quickest way to get to know one another; the quickest way was this lightning war.

They lay back down, huddled together, still trembling.

In the early morning she said, “I can introduce you to Lili, a colleague of mine. You should hit it off. And Agnieszka if you want someone exotic. Don’t ever forget that a whore is as mistrustful of you as you are of her, so find a way to gain their trust, because if there’s a tiff, she’s got the upper hand. If she asks you outright what you like, the way I did, it’s to get rid of you as quickly as she can. If you want to spend the night with her, don’t pay in advance because she’ll wait for you to fall asleep and then she’ll leave on the sly. If I teach you how to negotiate, after a few nights have gone by you won’t be paying a premium anymore. And, if you don’t take revenge on a whore for all your little woes, she won’t take revenge on you for her hatred of men.”

In a bistro on the Avenue de Friedland, at ten p.m. on the dot, Philippe Saint-Jean and Yves Lehaleur were commenting on the session that had just taken place, for the third time, in their little museum. The last speaker had embarked on a panegyric in praise of married men, leaving the audience speechless. He had separated adult males into two clans,
them,
the husbands, and
us,
everyone else, and he included, out of hand, those hundred attendees who had no say in the matter.
They
were the norm, the natural way of things;
we
were the anomaly. In an era rife with disenchantment, unbridled consumerism, the abdication of ideology, and individualism raised to the status of a dogma, most men, he said, still believed in the commitment that had been their fathers’ lot and their fathers’ fathers’. Millions and millions of men had taken a woman’s hand in theirs and uttered holy vows in the church or at city hall,
to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part.
Any other life choice seemed dreary in comparison. Those who had made these vows included lunatics, wise men, torturers, victims, gangsters, believers, atheists, slave drivers, slaves, serial killers, misers, vagabonds. So why
them
and not
us?

Philippe had to admit the fellow had a certain chutzpah; Yves envied him for his charisma, something he wished he had.

“What I appreciated about the way got his point across,” added Philippe, “was that he set out the idea of commitment as a premise right from the start and not some sort of revelation that comes along when you actually meet someone. A touch of Pascal in his way of thinking. Faith first, happiness later.”

Yves was incapable of venturing into Pascalian territory, but he said he was sorry the man’s eloquent speech had not taken into account the evolution from one era to the next and the most recent threat to marital values, including the most dreadful threat of all: male strippers. For while the prostitute on her street corner had been a threat to marital cohesion from time immemorial, the go-go dancer was a very recent threat. The law, if not the biblical texts, needed a complete overhaul.

In a more serious tone, Philippe said he was concerned they hadn’t seen Denis Benitez for the last three sessions.

“Maybe he found the answer he was looking for,” suggested Yves.

The moment he got home from the clinic Denis fell ill; the illness had been faster than the ambulance. He left his bed only twice a day: first at around two and then again at nine in the evening, to make the only meal that didn’t leave him feeling sick to his stomach, a slice of gruyere between two pieces of white bread, tasteless and odorless but substantial enough to stave off the upset stomach caused by every handful of tablets. The rest of the time he slept, but it did not seem to make anything better. Denis was at a stage where the causes of depression had been lost along the way, but that way stretched on ahead, through zones of insalubrity and endless tunnels, to end up in an empty lot where he would stagnate for days on end.

In the beginning his coworkers stopped by to visit, always in pairs to give each other moral support.
We’re not the ones who miss you, it’s the diners.
Denis thanked them silently, then turned off the volume on the television as soon as they left, to fall asleep with the images of a world as disenchanted as his own.

In the days that followed Denis made a few attempts to get back to normal. The scenario was always the same: he woke before noon, an insane thought running through his head:
And what if this ordeal were over?
A burst of energy would get him going, he tore off his pajamas as if they were dead skin, put on some pants, picked out a T-shirt, not the red one or the green one, above all not the blue one; maybe the beige. And then, discouraged by the dust, a reflection in a glass of water, a moped roaring in the distance, he went back to bed.

One evening, however, when his friends had deserted him for good, when his entire body had attained a state of utter inertia, when the power of his surrender had triumphed over any sort of hope, he heard the doorbell ring.

He had been asleep, and initially he thought this was a death knell from some terrible nightmare. He sat up against his pillows, waited for a moment, heard nothing more then burrowed down in the bed again to search for gentler dreams. The bell went again, for a long time, a threatening insistence: whoever it was, they were not about to leave. Denis imagined one or two hypotheses, glanced at the clock, which told him it was seven p.m., headed in the half-light toward the front door, and looked through the spyhole.

He did not recognize the person who went on ringing so insistently, filling him with exasperation: it was as if the entire human race were out there. He was going to have to tell this person that he did not belong anymore.

He trampled over the mail that had been shoved under his door, looked for the light switch, and his immediate reaction was to put on the door chain. The glaring landing light, on a timer, hurt his eyes. He brought his face into the doorframe, made gaunt with sleep and weight loss, covered with stubble.

A woman in a gray raincoat stood there, her arms crossed, a faint smile on her lips. They looked each other up and down for a moment then he emerged painfully from his speechlessness, while she remained motionless and silent. Denis felt obliged to call on the powers of speech sooner than he would have liked.

“Are you from the clinic?”

“The clinic?”

“They told me about some sort of psychological aid . . . Something like that . . . But I haven’t seen anyone . . . ”

Her only reply was to shake her head slowly, still smiling faintly.

“You’re not a shrink? Or anyone like that?”

“No, I haven’t been sent by the clinic.”

“Then you must be the social security? Checking up? I’m on long-term disability. You should have gotten my papers.”

“No, I’m not from the social security, either.”

“What do you want?”

“I’ve come to see you.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Do we know each other?”

“No. At least I don’t think so.”

“You’re some sort of social worker? Caregiver?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you stop telling me what you are not and instead tell me what you’re here for?”

“Do we have to stand here talking on the landing?”

“Listen . . . I’m not very well, I’m going back to bed. So either you tell me what you want or you leave me alone.”

“Just let me come in, what difference does it make?”

“I don’t know you!”

“What are you afraid of? Do I look dangerous?”

“Has someone sent you? Someone I know?”

“No, nobody. I don’t think there’s anyone we both know. So just let me in, why don’t you?”

“You think I go letting strangers into my house?”

“We would look less ridiculous.”

“Do I look ridiculous?”

“Frankly, with your head in the door chain, like an old lady . . . ”

Denis was nonplussed. The woman waited.

“You’re selling things door-to-door, is that it? Tell me outright, we’d waste less time.”

“A door-to-door salesman, me?”

“If that isn’t the case, then what’s that in your suitcase?”

“My belongings.”

Denis didn’t know what to say.

“Come on, open the door, otherwise someone will come out of the elevator and what will they think?”

“This is all getting absurd, I will have to ask you to leave me alone, and above all, don’t go ringing the bell again. Thank you.”

He slammed the door, irritated for a thousand reasons: he’d been disturbed while he was peacefully feeling depressed; she’d thrown herself on him like a bundle of dirty laundry; and, above all, she’d called him a little old lady—he had forgotten that human beings were such a dreadful species that one single specimen could be the source of several irritations at once, with boundless, stubborn determination. And, sure enough, the bell rang again right away.

After splashing his face with water, he drank a few sips of a flat drink, put on a bathrobe, then went back to open the door, careful to remove the door chain.

“I’m not well, I think you can tell that. So for the last time, either you tell me what you are doing outside my door, or I call the police.”

“The police? You’d go that far? No kidding, you would call the police?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do in situations like this.”

Inwardly, he had to confess that situations like this tended to be rare.

“Go ahead, if it makes you feel better, but what do you think you’ll say to them?”

“You’re asking me that as if you intend to wait and find out.”

“I’m curious to hear you call. ‘There’s this girl outside my door, I don’t know what she wants but she’s won’t go away . . . ’”

“Am I mistaken or are you taking the piss out of me?”

“They’ll ask you to describe me, in case I’m some strung-out junkie, a delinquent, who knows. Above all, they’ll try to figure out how urgent it is, because I expect they have other fish to fry. ‘She’s wearing a raincoat, officer . . . ’”

But also a pair of old boots, half leather and half canvas, and a gray silk shawl all around her upper body.

“If I don’t open, will you stay there all evening?”

“If need be.”

What the—? thought Denis.

“Let me in. Oh, come on, it’s no big deal.”

“What have I done to you?”

“Nothing at all.”

“So what’s up? You don’t know where to go? You want some money?”

“Not at all!” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Who do you take me for?”

“Put yourself in my position.”

“In your position, I would have already let me in. What do you have to lose?”

Of all the things she had said thus far, these were the words that gave Denis pause. His stiff carcass, curled up day and night at the bottom of a ravine, obliged to swallow blue, white and green things to chase away the pain of anxiety, his joyless self, the way he was these days, with neither energy nor illusions—did he have anything left to lose?

“Maybe I’m a little groggy but I can still tell when a situation is completely wacko. I am going to close this door, but first you are going to promise me that you won’t ring the bell anymore.”

She paused, then said half-heartedly, “I won’t ring anymore.”

“Thank you,” he said, gently closing the door.

On his way to the bedroom he met a repulsive creature, and recoiled. That indescribable thing—hairy, bent over, rickety, slovenly, had suddenly appeared between a cupboard door and the entrance to the bathroom. Before going to lie down he forced himself to confront the monster in question and face the mirror.