The Thursday Night Men (26 page)

Below them the hotel had disappeared, the surging breakers seemed to want to swallow the entire earth. Mia refused point blank to believe what she was going through: no one abandoned Mia, this was unacceptable! Where had all the
people
gone? And the emergency services? When she sensed that Philippe was incapable of reassuring her, she pushed him away in a rage and rushed to her cell phone, forgotten on the corner of the bed. Beside himself with this new display of absurdity, Philippe went back out onto the terrace, where a wave crashed at his feet with incredible violence. Mia was desperately fiddling with her cell phone, the object that answered all her desires, all her concerns, all her questions; it was her only true connection to the world, to her family, to her agency; it provided her with the most intimate sensations and dispelled her secret fears. Always within reach, it also guaranteed her independence, her freedom: it would not let her down, not now. Philippe could hear her screaming again, helplessly this time, and he grabbed the phone from her, then slapped her to shock her out of her panic.
We are safe here!
he shouted, over the crashing of a giant roller. He held her close, and without really believing his own words, described the natural phenomenon that had been unleashed upon them, its violence only equaled by its brevity. Sleeping on top of the hill had been their misfortune, but from now on it would be their only chance of survival: at dawn, not long after the first earth tremor, the unusually strong waves had alarmed the guests and staff of the hotel, and they had all fled before the coast was devastated—two or three minutes had been enough to reach the beach, go around the hill, and take refuge inland. They were surely calling at that very moment to send rescue to those who were missing. Tempted by hopefulness, she held back her tears, but a wave that was higher than the hill crashed against the guardrail around the villa, smashing it to bits, ruining Philippe’s fine words of hope at the same time. When he saw the water rushing in toward their bed, Philippe fell silent for good. What did he know, anyway, about natural phenomena and disasters? He had a few archival images in his mind, he vaguely remembered the testimony of a survivor, he had heard scientists on the news explaining the causes of earthquakes, cataclysms, typhoons, and cyclones, with supporting graphics, but he remembered nothing beyond the spectacle of absolute desolation, the hand of fate, planet Earth gleefully reminding man that she was all-powerful.

Mia fell to the ground, rolled up into a ball, whimpered long and loud like a battered child that refuses to accept she has been abandoned. She deserved better treatment than the ordinary tourist, and no one had the right to leave her to her own resources: she was the divine Mia, her effigy reproduced more often than any saint’s. Mia, who was welcome among royalty, a goddess on three continents. Her whims were commands, her reproaches were death sentences. She was the center of attention, pampered like a toddler, protected to the extreme. She knew that wherever she went, someone was waiting for her; her time was worth a fortune; she took a helicopter the way others take the bus. Such cruel irony, all those helicopters she had chartered to go shopping or to show her face at a party in Monaco: not a single one would come now to save her life.

Philippe, too, was prey to the cruelest of ironies: for what obscene reason was he about to die in such a place? One week earlier, when he had first discovered the beach of Nusa Dua, he had entertained himself with a list of idealized images of the desert island: the indispensable palm trees rising above the fine sand, the turquoise waters, the lovers cast away, far from civilization, for eternity. The cliché returned now like a slap in the face, with the violence of a breaker; their villa alone was their desert island, and he and Mia were the forgotten castaways. Here was a man who never left his tiny study for fear of losing his train of thought, and now he would die from drowning in this caricature of an Eden, and because of Mia’s fame the entire world would know about it. This was not at all how he had planned to bow out, it was not a death worthy of a philosopher, it was the death of a rich man, one who has always thought he was beyond reach, who’s gone soft in his cocoon of luxury, macerating in his swimming pool. The news of his disappearance would make the headlines, in a garish, malevolent press, and he would go down in history as the man who had perished on the arm of a famous supermodel. An entire life devoted to research, note-taking, reading, writing, concepts, symposiums, and the courses he’d taken and given—and all that would remain, erasing the entire bulk of his work, would be a sensational gossip column item. So often, all through his life as a thinker, he had wondered what humanity would retain of his work: even if they went out of print and were never reprinted, his books would stay on library shelves for a long time, ready to recreate their author’s ideas. But would his books suffice to preserve his place in the history of philosophy? What would these hundreds of pages represent, compared to a single concept throwing new light on the essential questions of the human condition? Had he ever had a single true idea, since he began peddling them? He still needed a few more years for his research—four, five, less than ten in any case—if he were to deliver his message in its most limpid form. He wouldn’t have asked for more, he would even have agreed to be shown the door on condition that he could leave feeling that he had fulfilled his task. If he were to die here and now, what would they write in his entry in the major dictionary of universal thinkers?
Philippe Grosjean (aka Saint-Jean), French sociologist, author of an essay on the collective unconscious,
The Mirror-Memory. Now they would have to add:
Vanished in tidal wave in Southeast Asia.
The thought of it seemed worse than death itself.

The ebb had lost none of its magnitude. The waves seemed to be blocking out the sky. Mia lay on the ground, unmoving, and began to envisage the impossible: a world without Mia.

Waiting for the extreme wave to swallow her at last, she wondered if she ought to resist the strength of the current or, rather, let herself be borne away to a shore that might, miraculously, have been spared.

Then she wondered how to lessen the pain of drowning.

Philippe would not let go of his anger: he had not fought against the absurdity of things just to have it all end like this.

Stronger than fear, his indignation gave him the courage to confront the onslaught of the ocean. He grabbed Mia by the shoulder, dragged her to the wooden frame of the canopy where he had learned to isolate himself from the world, and forced her to climb up on top of it to gain eight or ten feet in height: the highest point on the hill. It was here, in this final refuge, that death would come for them, if it must.

At that very instant, the face of the only woman he had ever loved appeared before him, as the finest reason not to vanish on the far side of the globe.

On that September morning, a fine mist veiled a brief return of summer, and already the light heralded the chilly rhythms of winter, the short days, the silence. People returned quietly to work, to school, in a long series of little sacrifices that some would call autumn. To any gentle meandering, a citydweller would now prefer the quickest route; he would no longer hesitate over which way to go, or whether to take a sweater; he would be surprised to see tourists, still, lingering at crossroads to marvel over nothing.

Early one morning, Yves Lehaleur was riding his scooter at the speed limit along a deserted freeway. He was sensitive to the autumnal atmosphere; he too felt he was in a moment of
after
. The time had come to put an end to that strange phase of his life that he had lived through like some long summer, troubled by unexpected encounters and the frenzy of sleepless nights. In less than a year, he had had enough extravagant experiences for an entire lifetime, far beyond the scope of any ordinary window installer. As he no longer had the means or the inclination to continue his experiences, they must now take their proper place in his memory. He would create a mosaic of the moments when he’d seen how he could go to any extreme, a vast fresco that would always remind him—now that he’d taken all those women into his bed, and listened to the tales of all those men—of how he had come to love the human comedy. He had worked it out: a single day, planned down to the hour, would suffice to put an end to the last convulsions of his debauched life, before it was time to invent the future of the new Yves Lehaleur.

He left the freeway at Palaiseau, and sooner than he’d expected he found the dry cleaner’s by the station with its orange sign, a relic of the 1970s. Through the tinted window he saw a woman in her sixties, wearing a dreary overall and waving a pole to reach the highest racks. He waited for the shop to empty, then went in and asked to see Annie—the real name of the villainous Maud, whose only known address, so hard to track down, was this shop in the outskirts of Paris.

“Who’s asking for her?”

“Yves. I’m a friend.”

How else could he introduce himself to a mother, whom Annie no doubt continued to call
Maman
?

“She’s still asleep. Do you mind waiting for a while? I hesitate to wake her up, she came in late.”

Madame Lemercier called to her husband, a little man bent over an ironing board, to introduce him to
a friend of Nanou’s
, and she asked him to keep an eye on things while she went to make some coffee. Yves found himself stuck with a cup in his hand between a Formica table and laundry driers spinning at full capacity; an aroma of Arabica mingled with the warm smell of steam.

“Annie has so many friends but I don’t know any of them.”

For a moment Yves was afraid that this tranquil, tired lady might, by friends, mean precisely the very men who were hardly likely to be found in her daughter’s company.

“With her job,” she continued, “it must be so hard to choose.”

He was equally fearful of what might be implied by the word
job.
She launched into a long summary of her lovely Nanou’s activities, which were fascinating, but complicated. She still did not altogether understand what that job consisted of, nor its purpose, but it had thrust her daughter into a whirlwind of responsibilities. To be in touch with so many individuals, from many different milieus; to have to remember all those names, and keep track of their contact information, and recognize every single face. It was not surprising that she came home so late, exhausted. But despite everything, that is what she was cut out to do. A gift. Already as a little girl. She was the one who organized the parties, the soirées, the year-end festivities. And she’d kept on with it, but now she was employed by big companies and big bosses, to look after their public image. After a childhood spent in their modest shop, you had to wonder where she had learned so much class, so much know-how.

Public relations? Why not, after all. Literally, that’s how you could sum up Maud’s career. Yves was curious to hear about the various stages that had driven a girl called Nanou, a lively, joyful child, lacking nothing, born to devoted parents, to prostitute herself by creating Maud. From the little her mother had told him, he could imagine this Nanou, first prize in the friendship category, a socialite before the term was even invented, more attentive to her social calendar than to her school notebooks, aware that she was pretty, and popular, but bitterly ashamed to see other families’ dirty laundry being washed by her own.

“I’ve become a specialist in cleaning cocktail dresses and Chanel suits. Sometimes I like to tell myself that if she always looks so impeccable, it’s partly due to me.”

Yves had to acknowledge his guilt for having crumpled not a few of those dresses himself, thus causing good Madame Lemercier to work overtime. Obviously she had to take care of numerous other household tasks, but looking after her little girl was, despite her age, a sweet obligation. And anyway, Annie paid her share, in her way; she may have had to spend recklessly at Hermès or Balenciaga—the job called for it—but she had plenty left over to give her parents presents.

“Sometimes she helps out in the shop.”

Twenty years later, Maud and Nanou were sharing the same roof. After renting out her sex until late at night, Maud went back to the Pressing de la Gare in Palaiseau and straight to sleep, exhausted by her double life. Nanou woke up late, rested after the previous night’s indiscretions, ready to reinvent the previous evening for her two greatest admirers. They were partial to names and details, and Nanou knew how to give them plenty. Their beloved daughter was on a first-name basis with television celebrities, and some of them invited her to their luxury hotel suites. Papa and Maman often wondered why, for all her Parisian high life, she had not met Mr. Right—they wanted so badly to have grandchildren. She was beginning to behave like an old maid averse to leaving her cocoon.

Yves understood by this that neither Nanou nor even Maud, despite her hundreds of lovers, had ever fallen in love.

Madame Lemercier sensed a faint trembling that would be inaudible to anyone else.
She
was about to appear. Yves saw Nanou coming down the stairs, her features still puffy with sleep, brown circles under her eyes, a smudge of mascara in the corner of her eyelid, her hair disheveled. Wearing a flannelette nightie so threadbare it was practically transparent, her feet in white mules she’d brought back from a luxury hotel, she closed her eyes with a final yawn. She opened them again on Yves Lehaleur and suddenly let go of the banister.

“Hello, Annie.”

She was speechless.

He could have just left them there without even saying another word. Just savoring Maud’s considerable discomfiture was revenge enough for Yves: she was ashamed to have been found out as Nanou, straight out of bed on top of it.

How many years of hiding had led to this moment, how many years of living life against the grain, patching makeup in nocturnal taxis, finding runs in her seamed stockings, stopping off at pharmacies after hours, so many sordid moments to overcome? She had managed so carefully to keep her dark secret from her parents, from the other neighborhood shopkeepers, and from her childhood girlfriends who still lived nearby. Now Yves had her at his mercy, in the palm of his hand; all he had to do was squeeze, and twenty years of depravity beyond suspicion would be reduced to nothing. He prolonged as best he could that spark of terror in her eyes, Maud the full-time whore and small-time thief.