The Thursday Night Men (11 page)

So
this
is what he had become?

Ashamed to behold this shadow of himself, Denis shouted,
Would you look at yourself, for Christ’s sake!
and lavished on his shadow enough scorn for all the scum on earth. He was tempted to shave, couldn’t find the strength, and went back to bed, shoving aside any shreds of pride the way you shove aside a chore. What miracle had stopped this odd girl from being afraid of
that?

He nestled into his blankets, glad to be left alone at last. Indignation, shame, anger, too many feelings all at once for a sick man who was still a long way from convalescence. Never mind if that weird girl left with her mystery intact; for certain phenomena here on earth there were no rational explanations, as Denis was paying dearly to find out.

He groped across his night table, grabbed a tube, and swallowed several tablets before the usual time. He’d been disturbed in his retreat, he was still all feverish, it would take him a while to forget. He had thrown in the towel: why was someone coming to bug him? He used to feel so good on the planet, he used to make sure there was plenty of room for fantasy, he had loved his life and dared to say as much—so why him? Now he had to thank God for making him mortal.

What did the girl look like again? Shoulder-length hair, light brown it seemed, and then? And then nothing, an ordinary face, a figure in a raincoat, an insignificant character of the kind you meet in droves whenever you’re unwise enough to leave your bed.

Denis dozed off for a too-brief moment, then opened his eyes wide, filled with doubt. What if that insignificant person hadn’t taken her mystery away with her?

He left his bed again, rushed to the door, looked through the spyhole: she was still silhouetted against the darkness on the landing.

“You’re going to give me problems with the neighbors.”

“What do you mean, I just talked to a very nice lady, on the right here, she didn’t seem at all surprised to find me waiting. She said, ‘He must be asleep, he takes a lot of medication.’”

Denis stared at her wordlessly.

“Having said that, I’d give anything to sit down for a sec and drink a big glass of water.”

“Are you joking?”

“That’s all I want.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Marie-Jeanne Pereyres,” she said, rummaging in her handbag.

She handed him her ID card.
Height: 5’6”. Place of birth: Bois-le-Roi (Seine-et-Marne).
On the picture, her hair was slightly longer and she was wearing round glasses. Give or take a year or two, she was the same age as Denis.

If his antidepressants and anxiolytics had not inhibited his fear reflex, Denis would have wondered whether he was being smitten with a misfortune worse than his depression. This strange person might have come to tell him as much: he had to find out once and for all.

“So let’s suppose I let you sit here for a minute, will you finally tell me what you want?”

“Yes.”

At last she was allowed through the door, so she put her suitcase in the hallway and went on to discover a tiny, neglected space, furnished with an old sofa and a little console covered with various small boxes and containers.

“May I switch on the light?” she asked, while he ran a glass under the faucet.

Not waiting for his reply, she turned on the light, sat down at last, and gave a sigh of relief, massaging her ankles. She drank the water all in one go and thanked him with a smile. He cleared away the things that were scattered across the table and moved a few things into the hallway, restoring a semblance of tidiness.

“Don’t bother for my sake,” she said, unbuttoning her raincoat.

“Keep your coat on and tell me what it is you want so we can get this over with.”

Avoiding his gaze, she hesitated for a moment. But as she had committed to a reply, she was trying to find the fairest, least threatening way to put it. In the end she chose the simplest.

“I want to stay.”

“Pardon?”

“I want to stay.”

“What do you mean by
stay
? Stay here? At my place?”

“Yes, here. I don’t take up much room.”

“You are telling me that you barged in here to move in? That this is some sort of nightmare I’m having here?”

“Don’t get upset. That heavy medication you’re taking is probably affecting your judgment.”

Drained of his last remaining strength, Denis had to sit down next to her for a moment. The
heavy medication
was playing tricks on him. He must have made a mistake with the dosage, he must have confused the blue tablets with the white ones, must have taken too many green ones, he was already asleep and the nightmare would fade away as soon as he woke up. And yet the creature did seem to be made of flesh and blood.

“Before I throw you out of here on your ear, heavy medication or no heavy medication, I’ll give you one last chance to tell me what you mean by ‘stay.’”

“This living room is enough. I can sleep on the sofa. I won’t make any noise, I read a lot. Once a day for the bathroom will be fine. I can eat out.”

Suddenly Denis’s affliction was mingled with sadness, and the sadness brought on so many other emotions, all contradictory, all too violent for a man who was so weary. He could not restrain a sudden onrush of tears, and he began to sob and weep, like a child who is overwhelmed by the injustice of the world.

After what seemed like an eternity he dried his tears on the handkerchief she held out to him. He let out a long sigh of exhaustion.

“I’m going back to bed,” he said, almost gently. “I’m sick. I’m tired. I am going to sleep for a very long time. Tomorrow, when I get up, make sure you’re gone.”

She didn’t say anything in reply, and watched as he vanished into his room. Denis collapsed onto his bed and fell into a deep sleep that lasted all night long, then all the next morning.

When he awoke, the woman’s face emerged from his memory. He rushed into the living room and found her stretched out on the sofa, a book in her hand.

She had stayed.

Once he had turned forty, Philippe Saint-Jean no longer expected to know the joys of secrecy. He had never committed to a woman to the point of swearing he would remain faithful, other than with Juliette, whom he would not have betrayed for anything. So he had never known the delight of stealing moments from respectability, or the sudden intrusion of romance into the monotony of everyday life, or the inventiveness required to create an intimacy that no one else would know about. Mia was handing it all to him on a silver platter, with neither the guilt nor the pettiness of adultery. At a time when everyone was in search of his or her fifteen minutes of fame, these two were rediscovering the meaning of ‘hidden,’ like Romeo and Juliet in an era devoid of all romanticism. But the secret of their idyll would not last: already rumors were circulating about the special friendship between the beauty and the thinker; people who had seen them together had jumped to their inevitable conclusions, and all it would take now was for someone to do some cross-checking for their liaison to become official. Until then, they would meet when they could, in gilded hideouts that left their anonymity suffused with light.

Philippe, however, found it somewhat baroque, the decoration of this balcony overlooking a sparkling blue Eiffel Tower. A midnight snack had been set out on a little circular table covered with red roses and purple carnations, a glass candlestick, a little bust of a marquise, and two little bowls filled with Iranian caviar that Mia was sampling as if it were yoghurt.

“It’s so nice to be able to eat outside,” she said, “you can tell summer is coming.”

“You’ve just come in from Vancouver and you’re leaving for Sydney the day after tomorrow. How on earth can you even tell that summer is coming in Paris? I’ve been waiting for it for months, I’ve seen it getting closer day by day. In February I was surprised it was still light out at five o’clock, and it put me in a good mood all evening. Not even three weeks ago I hesitated to take a coat and I went out with just my jacket and I wasn’t sorry. This summer is mine, I’ve been waiting for it, I deserve it.”

“That’s one reason I love to be in your company. All anyone has to say is ‘the weather is fine’ for you to get all worked up about it.”

The moment they entered the suite at the Hôtel George V, Philippe started commenting on a host of details that Mia had ceased to notice since her agency had started putting her up in the most luxurious hotels on earth. The place was more spacious than his own apartment, and it aroused his class consciousness—a delightful sensation he rarely felt: astonishment at how the truly privileged really live, bathing in pink marble, slouching on their Louis XV chairs, and slaking their thirst with a
grand cru.
In addition to the life in first class she was inviting him to share, he particularly enjoyed the precious time she devoted to him during her brief stays in Paris—given the cost of one hour with Mia, just to appear in public, he could consider himself flattered. And when she left him for a catwalk halfway round the world, he was surprised to find himself switching on the television to look out for a commercial where she was shown running half naked through the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

“Tomorrow evening I have a meeting with some designers; it shouldn’t take forever. Then I have to stop off at the inauguration of the Espace Guerlain. And I promised my agency I would have a drink with the head of a group who want me to be the face of their public image. But we could meet up after that?”

Just to make sure she understood that he too was a busy man, he answered, with a touch of mystery, “I’m never free before midnight on Thursdays.”

“Good evening. My name is Laurent. I’m a swinger.”

The man with the shaven skull who was introducing himself was dressed in a well-tailored blue suit and fine leather ankle boots, and he stood very straight, arms crossed, facing his audience. He had said it in a very natural way,
I’m a swinger,
and he clearly
wasn’t trying to surprise or shock.

“I’m fifty years old, I buy advertising space for a major food distributor, I’m married and have two daughters. For over twenty years, sex has been a central part of my life. A passion I share with my wife and my friends, one which fills all my free time, my evenings, weekends, and vacations.”

In the little projection room with its black walls and rows of red seats, you could sense a sudden rise in the level of attention.

“The way other people devote their time to making model aircraft, or river rafting, or politics, or fixing up their country house, I make love. For what it’s worth, let me point out that I am not a ladies’ man or a Don Juan. I don’t hunt, I don’t conquer: I consume. My wife and I go regularly to swingers’ clubs, but we also organize private evenings with various circles of friends, who have their own overlapping networks. In addition, we spend weekends with couples we find on the internet, and we go on vacation to specialized clubs where we find other like-minded people. No matter the context, my wife and I arrive together, and we leave together. Sometimes the evening might be planned so that it’s especially pleasant for me, and other times I arrange a session with Carole’s pleasure in mind.”

The men in the audience respected the tradition of silence, even though most of them would have liked to cry out, Give us examples, dammit!

“Yesterday evening we went to a club just outside Paris. Well acquainted with my taste, Carole quickly zeroed in on two women, and she was the one who approached them and served them to me. I spent the night with all three of them. Next Friday we are going to a private party where the ritual dictates that Carole will be at the center of a group of four or five men—I’m the one who picks them out and makes sure everything goes according to the rules—and in these cases, I’m just a spectator.”

This man who defined himself as a swinger was driven by a desire that most men would never know. He was consumed by a rare fever that compelled him endlessly to seek out new bodies, new experiences, new combinations, in a never-ending quest for ecstasy, which made him a blissful slave to his senses.

Like the others, Yves Lehaleur was dying to know how far the man’s escapades went, what limits he had set on what was taboo. But while he might admire the man’s frenzy, under no circumstances did he share it. To be sure, it would have been unthinkable not to take his pleasure from a body he was paying for, but he was not about to even think of giving pleasure to a prostitute, or trying to obtain any favors she reserved for the man she loved. Yves’s recently aroused need for variety was not in response to some voracious appetite: the more time he spent with these women, the more he realized that the real pleasure consisted in breaking through their tough outer shell, hardened by so many consensual rapes. More out of pride than out of the goodness of his heart, Yves tried to find the woman beneath the whore, and to relieve her, for a night, of the disgust her clients aroused in her. Yves Lehaleur thought he would be capable of finding the core of every woman he invited into his bed—her secret zone, somewhere between her head, her heart, and her sex, a place where the key to her entire being lay hidden.

“On the rare occasions when we have our experiences apart,” continued Laurent, “it is always by mutual consent. For example, I sometimes play the ‘sexual coach’ with women who complain of erosion in their relationship before it has even fully blossomed. I offer to spend a few afternoons with them until they have experienced all the different orgasms a woman can have. I make their inhibitions and taboos disappear, so that their pleasure will reassure and guide them, and so that they can return to their husbands and share that pleasure with them, foster it and experience it again and again. As a rule, I never hear from them again. As for Carole, she sometimes spends the evening with one of our friends who suffers from a distinctive feature that is all too rare among men: he is oversexed. The size of his member is enough to frighten off any partners he might have, and Carole is probably the only one who doesn’t run away.”

Philippe Saint-Jean refrained from taking his notebook to write this down. In his life, he had encountered any number of boastful guys who could not shut up about their performance, real males who needed to shout it loud and clear in order to convince themselves of the fact. Laurent the swinger didn’t belong to this category; his direct, prosaic way of speaking of his
passion
was not out to convince, and not for one moment did he give himself away by any ribald gestures or innuendos: just the opposite of a pervert. In Philippe’s circles, few practiced swinging but many tongues wagged; there were quotations from Restif de la Bretonne and Georges Bataille; the misfortunes of virtue were set against the prosperity of vice; Japanese erotic cinema was discussed; sometimes dirty jokes were told, but always in a tongue-in-cheek manner that made them acceptable. Like the others, Philippe had spent time in the circles of hell in his library, and he’d never quite made the return journey. In his essay on the collective conscious, he had included an entire disquisition on the persistence of taboos, a brilliant combination of Freudian theory and the seven parts of the
Kama Sutra.
But so many views from the mental perspective rarely passed through the filter of experience. So much literature, for hardly a frisson!—that was what he was forced to conclude that evening, as he listened to Laurent the swinger. He suddenly took the measure of how conventional his own lifestyle was, for in bed he was neither bold, nor very creative, nor even sure of himself, no more than any other man, no more than women were. But what was the point of worrying about it, after all? No one could be Laurent and Carole the swingers, ceaselessly driven by their boundless quest for pleasure. And nothing, not even the fantasy of ultimate ecstasy, could match the fantasy and lightness of the nights he spent with Mia. Right at the start, she had had a fit of hysterical laughter as she watched him studying every part of her world-famous anatomy—as he caressed her legs, he had said,
I already know these legs, I saw them in L’Express magazine.
The high point was when he rhapsodized over the “three ochres” of her sex, confessing to her that making love with a
métisse
was something completely new for him. In one night, Mia’s body had made him forget Juliette’s.