The Thursday Night Men (27 page)

And yet he had called her Annie. Maud would be able to negotiate.

Yves kissed her on both cheeks.
I was just passing through.
The mother served her daughter coffee in a cracked bowl with a yellow edge which probably dated back to childhood hot chocolates. Maud sought a reprieve during her short bitter sips, and managed to simulate the joy of seeing a friend again.
I’m glad you stopped by.
Yves did not seem to want to destroy anyone’s life, but no doubt he was going to ask her to pay the price of her felony. And she would pay, no matter the price. To fill the silence, Madame Lemercier told a story about little Nanou, one of those stories that overwhelm a mother with nostalgia and a child with shame. Annie threw her a look that seemed to say,
Don’t bother, Maman, he’s not some chosen one I’ve been hiding from you, there is no chosen one.

After she had quickly pulled on her jeans, a sweater, and a pair of espadrilles, Annie walked with Yves back to his scooter.

“Tell me what you want.”

“I got what I wanted.”

“To humiliate me?”

“Of all the superb whores I’ve met, you are the one whose other life I have most wanted to know about.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“No, not at all. I’m glad to have met Nanou. Commonplace, to be sure, but so much more believable than Maud.”

“We all play a part.”

“And of all the whores I’ve known, you are the worst actress. You lie to your parents, you lie to your clients, but the one you’re lying to the most is your own self. You dress up like a seductress, as if you’d been dreaming of some fairy costume. But you ought to know that the only mistress in you that anyone could enjoy is the schoolmistress. You think you can turn men’s heads, but all you have are clients like me who like to get your satin bolero jackets dirty.”

She did not answer.

“Make your peace with Nanou. Everything will go better after that. You’ll avoid any more rough spots.”

Yves put on his helmet, to ward off kisses as much as blows. He kick-started the scooter right away. Into the pocket of his jacket she slid Grandfather Horace’s flask. He looked into her eyes to say goodbye then pulled out into the street, rode around the town for a short while, and found the road back to Paris. Time to deal with the next one.

At eleven o’clock, Denis was finishing up setting the tables for lunch when his boss stuck his head outside to decide whether to use the terrace or not. In early autumn it was still debatable. A faint ray of sunshine was threatening to break through the gray veil of mist. They set up a few tables on the sidewalk.

Most of the brigade congregated on the terrace to share either the beef with carrots or the salmon cooked on salt, which was the
plat du jour.
Denis was more talkative than usual, displaying a systematic, biting irony. As was usual before the noontime rush, he had drunk only water, and yet his joyful misanthropy seemed to stem from a sudden drunkenness. Nothing was spared: the chef’s new menu, the bartender’s stress, the boss’s anal behavior, but above all the diners’ moods, and by diners you were meant to infer all of humanity, that drearily predictable mob, that catalog of noxious creatures. Denis drew up a long list of daily oddities, ludicrous whims, bottomless pettiness. Don’t even try to settle the score with people who are cantankerous or authoritarian, vulgar or bad-mannered; you can tell who they are the moment they sit down. Denis’s condemnation was aimed, rather, at the devious types, whose courtesy was more strategic than sincere. Polite people were often hiding their condescension toward servants. The friendly ones betrayed how uncomfortable they were with class differences. If they were generous, they expected to be treated like royalty. In sum, any individual who went into a place in order to have food served to him was suspect. All the waiters could recall certain regular customers or typical phrases, and they added their personal touches to Denis’s eloquent exposé. Yet Denis was not fooled by his own disingenuousness; as a good professional waiter working at a brasserie, he was no longer offended by the everyday lack of elegance. That morning, Denis Benitez’s bitter loquaciousness, enough to make him despair of his peers, was aimed straight at Marie-Jeanne Pereyres.

Weary of blaming her for her stubborn refusal to share any of her plans, all that was left was to take it out on other people, on everyone he could.

Yves drove past the Montparnasse cemetery along the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, and stopped his scooter outside a café where Jacek Kowalczyk was waiting for him. Ever since they had met on the construction site of a private villa in Saint-Cloud, Yves had been giving out Jacek’s contact information to those in need of a good electrician; Jacek never failed to thank him, but the opportunities to do it in person were rare. Yves was relieved to see him there, sitting at a table, but surprised to see he was not alone. Jacek introduced a little blonde woman with curly shoulder-length hair, chubby cheeks, and a worried smile on her lips.

“This is my wife, Ewa.”

Yves complimented Madame Kowalczyk, then shot a dark look at his colleague.

“I told you it was about a delicate matter.”

“Exactly! I brought her along to help. Especially with this sort of business . . . ”

Jacek’s blunder was compounded by his wife’s accusing expression: to be requisitioned for some sex scandal! Bound to be some crooked business, the way it always was. At opposite extremes from her concerns as a wife and mother and worker. Yves felt he was being judged by the woman’s gaze, and as the conversation progressed he began to feel more and more uncomfortable, and it only got worse when Agnieszka walked through the door. Since their last meeting, the marks on her face from the attack had vanished, but an invisible veil had tarnished the bloom of her features, and the spark of naïveté in her eyes had disappeared. Yves, in French, invited her to sit down, then handed it over to Jacek.

“Explain to her that for once I’m going to need a translator. Two, as it happens.”

Yves heard from Jacek’s intonation that he was trying to be diplomatic, then saw the relief in Agnieszka’s eyes, their shared delight at becoming acquainted in their native tongue. In Ewa’s eyes he read a mixture of curiosity and reserve regarding a woman who had chosen prostitution to earn her living. Had the girl’s obvious beauty had anything to do with it? Had both of them emigrated for the same reasons? Had Agnieszka suffered, as she had, during her childhood? What ties had she maintained with their country? Among their first words, Yves thought he recognized the word Kraków, then a few dates, and it all resembled a ritual between two immigrants from the same country: place of birth, date of arrival in France, profession. The dialogue quickly lapsed into easy chatter, and Yves no longer dared intervene. Ewa had let her guard down, and asked a question that made Agnieszka laugh.

“What are they saying?”

“Nothing,” answered Jacek. “Ewa just made a joke, you can’t translate.”

Yves gave a faint smile to join in the sudden conviviality then, as if giving a discreet call to order, he placed an airplane ticket on the table.

“Round-trip for Warsaw. Tell her the return is open but she doesn’t have to use it.”

Ewa translated in Jacek’s place, so mindful of accuracy that she even imitated Yves’s intonation.

“I’ve added €2,000 to make up for loss of earnings. Tell her to use the trip as a vacation, more than anything. To make the most of it to see her family.”

This time, after his wife had translated, Jacek added a detail that his wife immediately questioned, and which gave rise to controversy. Jacek was trying to get Agnieszka’s consent about a precise detail but Ewa would not let go, for that particular point required a sense of nuance that was lost on her husband. Yves wondered what he was doing there.

“Can you explain what is going on?”

“It’s nothing,” said Jacek, “but my wife wants to know how long it takes Agnieszka to earn €2,000.”

“What on earth!” exclaimed Ewa. “He doesn’t know how to translate ‘loss of earnings.’”

Yves began to feel a tug of annoyance; he had hoped, in a way, despite the strangeness of the situation, to keep it solemn. Now he was sorry he’d called on others; never, before now, had he needed anyone to convey even the most subtle argument to Agnieszka.

“Listen, you two. This girl has been having a rough time ever since she got to Paris—she may be brave but she’s in constant fear. Of the police, of being attacked, of her family finding out what she does for a living, and worse yet, she’s afraid her family might forget all about her. She takes it because she’s learned to take it, but sooner or later something pretty awful will happen to her.”

After what she’d been through, wasn’t it time for Agnieszka, who was still in shock and beset by doubt, to seize this chance to start over? Once she recovered from this attack, nothing—not the next attack, or the one after that, or any of the psychological or physical attacks to come—would stop her from following a destiny that was all mapped out. Now was the time to transform her misfortune into an opportunity, before her delicate skin grew tough as leather and her heart hardened until she no longer felt a thing.

“I get the impression your wife just asked her something, but I didn’t ask any questions!”

“Ewa asked Agnieszka if she had many clients who gave her gifts like this.”

“And what did she say?”

“That you were the first.”

Yves’s instinct had been right, his fair lady was homesick, and this joyful impromptu encounter with people
from back there
was ample confirmation of the fact. Ewa, vested with a solemn mission, wanted to be a loyal spokeswoman, but she could not help but exaggerate: she was burning with solidarity, mixing her story up with Agnieszka’s in a flood of words she could not contain. Soon the two women forgot their surroundings, an anecdote seemed to lead to a confession, a digression, and a host of childhood memories, for one in Lublin, for the other in Kraków. Yves looked at his watch again and fidgeted with impatience, worried he would not have his say.

“Now what are they saying?”

“Agnieszka has a sister who is studying in Kraków, in a neighborhood not far from where Ewa was born. They have found a place they both know, a little neighborhood bistro where they serve an onion salami. But they are wondering whether they might have met at the Christmas mass at the Polish Catholic Mission on the Rue Saint-Honoré.”

Yves was speechless.

Jacek took the opportunity, while the two women were lost in conversation, to lower his voice and ask, “Out of curiosity, how much do you pay for an hour with a girl like her?”

Even if he had wanted to, Yves did not have time to reply. As if she sensed her husband had said something appalling, Ewa rebuked him for never surprising her with a trip—thus, without realizing it, suggesting a much better way for him to spend his money.

“Why don’t you send me on vacation? Why not me?”

Yves gave Agnieszka one last look, and slid her ticket across the table to her. She leaned forward to kiss him, for the very first time, on the lips.

Then he left the table. Someone was waiting, clear across Paris.

Denis Benitez did not calm down, far from it; his spite intensified when it came in contact with thirty or more customers all smiling at his sardonic witticisms. Over half of them were women, and Denis did not neglect a single one, whether they were on their own or in pairs, and his preference was for tables of four or five, for that was where things were really difficult: how to make each one feel she was his favorite? With the help of his talent for deciphering, Denis pinned them like butterflies in an endless collection, wings spread wide, caught in full flight.

That one by the bar,
a chic sixtysomething, a former beauty who would give anything for one last ride on the merry-go-round.

And that one,
the arrogance of the woman who has never loved, she’s finally learning to lower her guard, but it’s surely too late.

Or that one,
with her voice of a former smoker, still likes her drink, laugh lines, no regrets.

And then
that strange little person, nearsighted, curly hair, enormous patience toward life, she’ll only ever love one man, not necessarily the right one.

Oh, if only he could have used this same power over the only woman who was undecipherable in his eyes. Afraid she might get fed up, he had foregone the basic questions—
Who is Marie-Jeanne Pereyres? Where does she come from? What does she want from me?—
to keep only one:
When is she going to leave me?
Every night he was burning to ask her, and every night he merely told her about his day and fell asleep at her side. The next morning, she was still there, a book in her hands, a mug of hot coffee on the night table. They would resume their exploration of each other’s body, trying to surprise each other before they returned to the motifs they both were fond of. Then Denis left for work, and the week went by without the slightest variation. On Sundays they might go for some fresh air by a canal, have a drink at a sidewalk café, talk about the past, but never the future, then Denis would suggest they head back so he could get some rest for his accumulated fatigue. The next morning it was back to his frenzied existence, his mind was nimble once again, he spoke to his female customers in a singularly casual manner, delivered his witticisms as if they were lines in a vaudeville comedy, and like a magician he performed the tricks he had learned in his twenty years as a waiter. Through the dozens of women he encountered day after day, it was Marie-Jeanne Pereyres he was seeking to entertain, tease, shock, and seduce. And, above all, to prevent from leaving.

As he was clearing the table before his break, he found a paper napkin next to a cup with the following handwritten message:
The pudding was sweet, and the waiter even more so,
followed by a phone number. Denis crumpled it up instinctively. Then smoothed it out again. Hesitated for a long time. And crumpled it up again.

Whenever Yves Lehaleur happened to enter the paved courtyard of a very old building, he liked to picture the way it was in bygone eras—the clothes people wore, and all the life that had been lived there and which gave the place its charm. In this quiet quartier of the Porte Dorée, in southwest Paris, an old stable from the 1700s had been home for over a century to various craftsmen who, when it came time to retire, transferred their lease to younger colleagues, who were ambitious, carefree, and ready to forge ahead with their careers while respecting tradition. The rectangular courtyard, where a gigantic cedar tree spread its branches over an uneven paving, gave onto the workshops of an upholsterer, a varnisher, a cabinetmaker, and a framer. Between the smell of varnish and the crackling of a transistor radio, Yves wandered aimlessly past the doors and glassed-in workshops looking for the space that had been recently vacated.