The Thursday Night Men (14 page)

Denis sat down on the edge of a chair and stayed there for a moment, unmoving, hesitating between retreat and an assault that he didn’t feel up to. With an air of detachment she alone was capable of, Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had just summed up the last twenty years of her life for him, wondering all the while about the next twenty to come—with her, overseas had better watch out. In response to a question he had not asked she added, “It would be a big leap into the unknown.”

She seemed sincere, oblivious to any irony, forgetting for a moment that she had invaded the territory of a man she claimed to know nothing about. And as for Denis Benitez, there was nothing where he was concerned even remotely resembling a
big leap into the unknown
, he was not intimidating, he inspired no sort of caution, there was nothing mysterious about him, you could even set up your bivouac in his place without ever wondering whether there was a law against it. To be sure, he had never known any other life besides that of a waiter, the life of a waiter who, in any case, had never thought of going into business for himself, the life of an eternal waiter who would have liked by the time he was middle-aged to settle down with a companion, someone straightforward and not proud, his type of girl, someone just the opposite of Marie-Jeanne Pereyres. So why was this independent, determined woman, perfectly capable of breaking down barriers, still hesitating between a tropical destination and a rotten sofa, in the middle of a room in an apartment with no natural light, shrouded in Parisian gloom?

He decided against the tea and went back to his room, exhausted, ready for the next twenty-four hour ritual. As he was drifting off he saw himself as the poorest man in the world for having lost the only thing left to those who have already lost everything.
Oh, my solitude, sister of silence and mother of contemplation, I have been duly punished for having doubted you.

Philippe Saint-Jean did not treat Sundays any differently from any other day; as a matter of habit he would go down for the mail and come back up empty-handed, then make up his list of the day’s little pleasures and sacrifices: the Vietnamese café was closed, there would be the humorous column in
Le Journal du Dimanche
, he would go wine-tasting at the wine merchant’s, the streets would be deserted and the parks crowded, there was always a film on television at midnight on Sundays. But this Sunday, however, had been planned out long in advance in order to keep Mia as long as possible on his planet. He saw there was a rare Japanese film at the Champollion cinema, a funny, baroque sort of film, that he’d like her to discover. Then they would linger in the Jardin du Luxembourg to read in the sun, drink a tea at the
buvette
and have a laugh at the expense of the joggers going by. Late in the day he would invite her to the Closerie des Lilas to surprise her with a dry Martini prepared especially for her by his friend the head bartender, in order to show Mia that he too had his hideout, his ritual, and his cocktail. But to start with, Philippe would serve her a breakfast tray luxurious enough to compete with the fancy hotels’, and filling enough to keep them going until evening.

“You’re an angel, but take those croissants from my sight, I have a show in eight days and two pounds to lose.”

Philippe had not even had time to share his program with her before Mia suggested they have lunch with her parents.

“Are they in Paris at the moment?”

“No, they’ve invited us to their place in Provence.”

Philippe looked at her questioningly.

“I’ll call the agency and she’ll take care of everything. We’ll be back in Paris before midnight.”

“How long have you had this up your sleeve?”

Mia cuddled up to him, far too cuddlesome to be honest, already prepared to defend her whim tooth and nail.
I want them to meet you because you mean a lot to me.

What wouldn’t he have given, a few years earlier, to hear Mia’s proposal coming from Juliette’s lips? He had been the one to insist on meeting her parents at last, the old-fashioned way, like some future son-in-law who wants to be in his father-in-law’s good books. For Juliette, he would even have made a solemn declaration, his knee on the floor. He would have said
I do
in a church and run an announcement in
Le Monde.
And in all likelihood, his wedding gift would have been a short, fervent text written to celebrate the day when he had laid eyes on her for the very first time.

Yves had been awake since dawn, and for a moment he watched Agnieszka sleeping before he quietly left the bed. He put on a jacket and went for a good hour’s run in a nearby park, then came back to find his guest sitting watching a Polish channel on cable.

“Mamy taki sam internet. To jest program 451.”

Yves recognized the world “internet” and then she added, pointing to the full coffee pot:

“Pozwoliłam sobie zrobi´c kawe˛.”

Utterly surprised by the way she had taken over the place, he tasted the coffee and found it was very different from the one he made. Then he took a long shower before joining her in the bed, nestling against her side, breathing in her warm odor, and he sat by her side watching the weather forecast.

“I understood
celsiusa
and
hectopascali,
” he said.

“Jest jeszcze chłodno, u mnie. 14º w Lublinie.”

She in turn took a shower, came back out of the bathroom in her peignoir and pointed to her clothes folded on a chair.

“Mam sie˛ ubra´c, czy tak zosta´c?”

“Get dressed? Yes, go ahead. Tak!”

Yves reached under the cupboard for another scooter helmet.

“Would you like to go and have it off outside?”

She stared at him.

“Outside.”

“Outside?”

She gave him a somewhat dubious look, fearful of some dicey plan. She’d been through too much not to dread the perverse imagination of her clients.

“Where, outside? Ja nie moge˛ sobie pozwoli´c na chryje z policjantami!”

He guessed she saw something depraved about him, and reassured her with a word he thought must be universal.

“Picnic.”

Denis slept for a long time, a daytime sleep, more guilty than it was pleasurable. He was assailed by a dense, disturbing dream, where his face was reflected to infinity, covering posters, on the front page of all the papers: people recognized him in the street and pointed at him.

When he woke up he tried to find the key to this jumble of images, and he pursued a new hypothesis for the intruder’s presence—a Machiavellian one, to be sure, but only too plausible in these morbid times where the spectacle of mediocrity fascinated the crowds. Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had chosen him as the subject of a reportage for a news magazine, or worse, as a guinea pig for one of those reality TV shows which transformed human drama into a prime-time program. Interference in other people’s lives was already on offer in any number of forms, but in the overall effort to constantly push back the boundaries of voyeurism, there were always new things to try. Cameras were hidden in the rooms of troubled adolescents, or of couples going through a crisis, or of families being wrenched apart, all of whom were seeking some sort of catharsis, all of whom were ready to sell their privacy at a discount, to put their daily life on stage in exchange for a brief moment of media glory. The true identity of Marie-Jeanne Pereyres? A special correspondent, a champion of the ratings, a reporter without scruples. She’d have a field day! Exaggerate the caricature, turn Denis into some sort of fairground monster, an empty creature in a life that was every bit as empty.
Denis Benitez: neither husband nor father nor lover: is he still a man?
She would shape the prototype of the contemporary male, an obsolete entity, incapable of making himself useful, creating far more problems than he resolved, doomed therefore to disappear before long.

“It’s all becoming clear: prime time! You’ve got hidden cameras in the home of a single man who’s in a rut, and you’re on the trail of his bad old bachelor habits. To go and look for misery wherever it hides, that’s kind of
trendy
, no? You’ve got hilarious jokes and emotional sequences planned for the
Benitez Show
, right? With a
best of
at the end of the week?”

“If there were such a program I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Instead of interfering and acting all mysterious, why don’t you put your cards on the table? Why don’t you just ask for an interview and stop hiding what you’re really on about? I’m prepared to testify, if you promise you’ll work in broad daylight and if it’s really the only way to see you get the hell out of here.”

“I’m not a journalist and I’m not planning to do any such thing. Besides, if I were going to do a portrait of you, it would be that of a man who can get along quite well without a woman. A man for whom household chores are not a problem, who doesn’t see women merely as some pleasant complement to his virility, and who could even, if he had to, bring up a child on his own. Exactly—what if you, Denis, were the man of the future?”

“Over there, in the clearing, at the foot of that tree?”

“Moim zdaniem tam jest za płasko.”

Agnieszka added to her hesitant pout an arm movement which seemed to indicate a more rolling landscape. Yves turned the ignition on the scooter and they headed north. In the end she was the one, five minutes later, as they were going through the forest of Saint-Cloud, who pointed to a forested hillside, totally isolated, irresistible. They found a spot at the summit, shared their sandwiches, each one chatting in his or her native tongue—perhaps they were sharing secrets which the other would never be able to give away. At the end of the afternoon he pulled her over to him, lifted up her skirt and entered her, their bodies open to the sun and the springtime breeze.

Taking her there, Yves experienced a moment of supreme harmony, something he had never known, a sort of fulfillment where forces of earth and sun fused within him. He was at the center of everything—of her, of nature, of the universe, and if the earth was still spinning, they were its pivot.

Vibrant with desire, pressing into the moist earth, protected by a tree and calmed by the sun and the breeze, the whore and her client re-created around them the lost paradise of virgins and innocents.

At 11:45 a taxi came to fetch them at the exit to the Avignon airstrip, and left them off thirty kilometers from there in the little village of Baux-de-Provence. In the shade of an old farmhouse, a family was impatiently awaiting the arrival of Mia’s new boyfriend. Philippe had been through far too many exams in his life to let himself be intimidated by this one. During lunch, he amused himself by playing the perfect son-in-law on Mia’s arm; she was far more nervous than he was. He was surprised to see how she reverted to being a little girl with her
Mamina
, how she allowed herself be teased by her older brother, and how she asked about everyone in the village, neighbors and shopkeepers, coming up with a childhood memory for each of them. She cast off her usual jargon, which was a mixture of cosmopolitan expressions, shortcuts from the fashion industry, and an untold quantity of useless Anglicisms. Surrounded by her own people, she lapsed back into the local accent, a language filled with Provençal turns of phrase and other purely idiomatic expressions that were part of her family heritage. They sat Philippe next to Roland, her father, who was eager to subject
the
philosopher
to a carefully prepared interview.

“Did you know Papa has read one of your books?”

On learning that his daughter was seeing a renowned intellectual, Roland had gotten hold of what the local bookseller said was the most accessible of Philippe’s works. With patience and concentration he sat down to
Prayer of Expectancy
, an essay on the passing of time, how modern man is wasting time because his desire to conquer it is too great. Roland praised Philippe for his theories—most of which he thought he had gotten the gist of—and Philippe accepted the tribute paid him by this unassuming man, who’d stuck with determination to his reading, even if what he retained was only the first pressing. To pay tribute to him in turn, Philippe began a light, courteous game of dialectics, letting the father dare to draw a parallel between
Prayer of Expectancy
and his own experience of the passing of time. Philippe, who knew how to place himself on the level of less agile interlocutors—he was constantly called on to do just that with TV presenters—emphasized the most important points and asked questions, and Roland, emboldened by the rosé, prided himself on being able to answer. In short, the other diners at the table witnessed an amiable verbal sparring match, where the man of books and the man of the earth exchanged essential truths about an eternal theme.

A short while later, while she was showing him the garden, Mia’s eyes misted over, and she threw her arms around her lover, to thank him for the most wonderful gift she could ever have dreamt of: Philippe had made a philosopher of her father, for the rest of his days.

Everyone knows that the devil’s first ruse is to wear the rags of modesty, candor, and abnegation. When Manon came into my office for a job interview, her resumé was that of an orphan in distress. But so willing, so much promise!”

For the last few weeks Denis Benitez, Yves Lehaleur and Philippe Saint-Jean had been sitting side by side, and they did not refrain from a nudge of complicity or a muttered comment during the confessions.

“As the months went by, she gained more self-assurance, and turned into an ally no one could resist, not even me. Add to the formula my shaky marriage and a mid-life crisis, and I fell into a trap as old as free enterprise, the boss who sleeps with his secretary.”

As he was neither boss nor secretary, Denis Benitez gave the cliché the benefit of the doubt, then allowed his attention to wander. Since he did not have the courage to stand up and reveal the presence of the intruder, he was hoping for an impossible miracle from these Thursday meetings: to come across a situation similar to his own. But how could he possibly believe for even a moment that his strange story might have a precedent? Who might possibly have suffered as he had from an unexplained presence between his walls? At first he had thought she was a ghost from the past come to make him pay for his sins, but the more time he spent with her—and she was both terribly present and terribly discreet—the more he leaned toward a theory that was the exact opposite. For what other reason would a woman move in with a man if not to see him, hear him, feel his presence, and be part of his life no matter what?