The Thursday Night Men (3 page)

“And then you reach a point where your doubt begins to gnaw away at you. You go from one certainty to the next, and every idea and its contrary is just as good as the next one, so in the end you can’t even understand how you can function. One morning I was convinced I was being too direct and too offhand. I wasn’t giving them time to feel their desire, as if every gesture I made, every word I said was in order to get them into bed or, worse yet, into city hall. So it made me think: how would anyone
not
run away from a guy like me? Then just the opposite, that very same evening, I saw myself as incurably indecisive, lost in some procrastinating behavior from a bygone era, when you know that women like men who are enterprising and forthright. So again I had to think: how would anyone
not
run away from a guy like me?”

The very next morning, still more doubts came to banish the earlier ones, and so on down the line, until they all disappeared in the light of his utter dejection. Denis could see the specter of resignation looming, and he decided to ask for help.

“I went and saw a therapist. Someone had to help me get things in perspective, and maybe they could give me a key.”

Yves Lehaleur shrugged at the word “therapist.” Anything that began with the prefix
psy
inspired instinctive mistrust. In his opinion, why should one person be more gifted than the next guy at reading into another man’s soul? All those
psy
people were just charlatans who’d figured out that offering an attentive ear to another person’s woes was a rare commodity you could charge a lot for here on earth. When he had told his entourage that he needed a divorce, and quick, some of them had urged him to
speak to a specialist
before making such a drastic decision. Yves had told them to mind their own business: if someone needed a therapist it was his bitch of a wife, not him.

Philippe Saint-Jean, on the other hand, thought that Denis was rather courageous. Having gone through it himself many years earlier, he knew how difficult it could be to ring at a therapist’s door and entrust a stranger with one’s dysfunctional self. In his milieu, it was almost a rite of passage for anyone who presumed to penetrate the mysteries of the human mind and its hidden meanings. To avoid psychoanalysis would have been tantamount to professional misconduct. Nowadays, his friends who were in treatment far outnumbered those who weren’t.

“He listened patiently, then offered to help me
get the wheels of seduction rolling again.
Three sessions later I was surprised to find myself telling him a childhood memory, the exact moment when I realized just how fallible my parents were, after they . . . forgot me at a friend’s house one boozy evening. I dug deep in my memory and was able to describe the event as if it were straight out of a horror film: the distraught mother, the guilt-stricken father promising me a miniature car if I stopped crying right that minute. I could hear myself telling the shrink,
I even remember the model! A Dinky Toys Facel Vega, gray with a hard top, they brought it out in 1960,
and I wondered if this were the right way to get my
wheels of seduction
going again.”

Denis struggled to find his words, and for a moment everyone thought he had finished. In fact, this part of his testimony seemed less pertinent to him than the conclusion; as if this were an official announcement, there was something he had told neither friend nor brother nor psychoanalyst and which he was about to share with a hundred strangers.

“After five years of drifting and humiliation, where I was incapable of understanding why the entire female gender had deserted me, I had to accept the explanation I would have preferred to avoid: a conspiracy theory. As unlikely as it may seem,
they
have decided to assuage their age-old desire for revenge on
me
.”

A ripple of astonishment went through the audience; those who had been attending the Thursday meetings for a long time had heard all sorts of fantasies, but they always bore in mind that new ones could surface at any time. Yves Lehaleur, with his neophyte’s gaze, looked around him and met the eyes of his nearest neighbor, Philippe Saint-Jean, as much a neophyte as he was.

“Every time one of you, gentlemen, commits a crime of sexism, discrimination, loutishness, harassment, misogyny, domestic tyranny, or brutality, I’m the one who has to take the consequences.”

It was not enough for
those women
to ignore him,
they
had to have their revenge as well. Denis was being made to pay for all
they
had suffered at the hands of men since the dawn of time. To make sure he understood that he needed
them
more than
they
needed him,
they
had spread the word, and he could take his fine virility and stick it wherever he liked.

“I feel certain I have been chosen to inform you, this very evening, and to warn you: you will be next.”

Philippe Saint-Jean had already diagnosed a subtle form of paranoia, but he hadn’t been expecting this theory of a martyr sacrificed on the altar of deposed masculinity. With prototypes like this one among the brotherhood, there was a good chance he would be a frequent visitor. As for Yves Lehaleur, he would rethink his rejection of psychoanalysis, if it were to prove useful to someone like Denis Benitez.

Denis went to sit back down in the last row, where he was greeted with a discreet smile from his neighbors, Yves Lehaleur and Philippe Saint-Jean, both of whom were astonished by his performance, admiring not only his nerve but above all his outrageous imagination. Their expressions told him they had heard what he had to say.

Yves was tempted to climb up on the podium and come out with everything he had on his mind, too—if guys like Denis were allowed in, there was no reason why he, Yves, should have any hang-ups about telling his story. But it was getting late and he would have to keep his anger for another week. As for Philippe Saint-Jean, he would need another session before he could make up his mind about something he now viewed as a social phenomenon. He was curious about this group therapy without a therapist, this astonishing all-male confessional, this occult congregation you could adhere to without any co-optation or initiation rites or preliminary enquiry. He had come there fully prepared to pass judgment or share some savory sarcasm with his entourage. But in fact he had just witnessed a rare moment of tolerance, of the kind you could not label in any way, or subject to even the most woolly dogma. What he did not yet know was the real reason for his presence here. His intellectual curiosity had been satisfied, and it probably wouldn’t take long for his true motivation to surface, one of these Thursday evenings. Philippe was inhabited by absence, and nothing could explain away the pain—and he was someone who was greatly in need of meaningful explanations.

Before they all left the room, they were informed that the next meeting would be held in the same place. Some of them would not come back. Others would. Between now and then, life could go on.

Some men like to undress a woman with a single gaze; Denis Benitez indulged in a far more presumptuous pastime. He could wrench the hidden truth from every woman who passed him in the street. Since in their eyes he no longer existed, since he was no longer a physical presence in their world, he had discovered that he had a talent for invisibility which allowed him to brush by women like a ghost, to spy on them and steal their secrets.

Crossing a median strip on the edge of the Place de la Nation, a female figure suddenly appeared:
white flowered dress, her expression that of a mother for whom it has all gone too fast.

Another woman climbing into a taxi:
blonde, thirtysomething, slightly, but disarmingly cross-eyed, ready to proclaim her independence to whoever will listen.

With experience he had reached a point where not a single woman in his path was spared, and he only took their age, looks, or clothing into consideration if they provided a serious clue.

A jogger, all in a sweat, resting on a bench:
very dark eyes, slightly plump, full of a tenderness that no one returns.

In her newspaper kiosk:
thirty-five-year-old adolescent, displaying her breasts like medals.

Or that one, in thigh boots and suede:
straight, slow, blasé shadows under her eyes, she dreams more of laughter than of sex.

The saleswoman smoking outside her boutique:
haughty, classy, no one knows the operating instructions, not even she herself.

The girl climbing onto her scooter:
badly dressed, strict eyeglasses, ready to fall in love with a man as if he were the last one on earth.

And that one, standing next to her fiancé, who’s as arrogant as she is:
very modern, ready to elbow her way, and later she’ll say to her grandchildren, If only I’d known.

Or that one:
pregnant, lovely smooth skin, she knows who she can share her joy with, but not her fears.

Or that one:
tourist from the north, husband walking way ahead, she’s sorry she isn’t out exploring Paris with her girlfriends.

And that tall girl:
innocent, thirty-odd, looks self-conscious in her matronly blouse, burdened by complexes that will cause her to waste twenty years.

As he weaned himself off women, Denis discovered in himself an extraordinary male intuition. But this activity—obsessive, dangerous—was wearing him out, and to no good purpose; it merely fueled his bitterness. Just before seven o’clock he hurried toward the gate of the lycée that had been left open, found the same classroom as the week before, and nodded to Yves Lehaleur and Philippe Saint-Jean in the last row.

Yves had seen enough the previous week to feel confident: tonight was the night. He waited for the audience to fall silent, raised his hand, then headed up to the blackboard like the good pupil he’d never had the time to become.

“I’ll probably babble and repeat myself, so I’d like to apologize in advance. I will begin by telling you about my life the way it used to be. To be exact, my life before the fourth of November of last year.”

Judging by his opening words, Philippe Saint-Jean was afraid that his story would be interminable, so he allowed his gaze to wander out into the darkening schoolyard.

“For five whole years, I was a married man. Her name was Pauline and she worked for a real estate agency run by Alain, who was a childhood friend of mine. He had introduced her to me because she needed some double glazing—that’s my job, I install windows for a major company—so I went over to her place for an estimate.”

A woman like Pauline, single? That was a minor miracle that surely would not last, unless he were to outrun her other admirers. Their early years living together were just Bohemian enough for them to acquire some precious memories. But their work came before everything, because they were both working very hard to fulfill their dreams. They decided to start a family—two kids, no more, but no less—so they needed to find a little house in a quiet suburb, and that was Pauline’s job. In order to obtain a loan at the bank, Yves used his 87,000 euros of life insurance as collateral—everything he had saved since obtaining his vocational training certificate, plus a little early inheritance from his parents—and Pauline would borrow the equivalent of a third of her salary over twenty years.

Yves did not spare his audience a single detail: even the financial ones, which were insignificant at first glance, had acquired a symbolic value that was a source of relentless torment to him.

“With Pauline in charge, everything was bound to work out fine.”

She was a petite little woman, bursting with energy, always smiling, and she never gave the impression that her heart was not in her job, or that she was going through a rough patch. Running a household, fighting with the administration to obtain what was owed them, negotiating with banks and carefully filing away every single credit card receipt, she managed everything as if it were a breeze. Nor had it kept her, after hours, from unearthing their Xanadu—in Champigny, on the banks of the Marne river, a stone house that had been restored. It had an open plan ground floor with a gigantic fireplace, no fewer than four upstairs bedrooms, a garden that was well-protected from outside gazes, and all of it less than fifteen minutes from the Porte de Vincennes. Happiness had an address.

“We had an appointment to sign the sales agreement and the move was set for January. After that, Pauline planned to stop taking the pill so she’d get pregnant.”

Philippe Saint-Jean couldn’t really see why all these details were necessary. His own fear of talking too much sometimes hampered his ability to listen. He did, however, find it interesting to listen to a story that so painstakingly described the sort of aspirations that were the opposite of his own. When was the last time he’d met a man who dreamt of starting a family in the suburbs? Ten years ago? Twenty? Had he ever even met one? The great dream of the majority, the one that went to make up a country and contributed to the durability of its values: a family and a roof.

Philippe felt neither pride nor regret: he knew he was an exception, and it was pointless to turn to him to contribute to the survival of the species or to take part in a national endeavor. He wasn’t antisocial or a maverick, he wasn’t even rich, and yet everything that preoccupied his compatriots was of so little concern to him—inflation, public housing or transport strikes; none of it had any bearing on his lifestyle. Starting a family in the suburbs? He himself was a product of that very enterprise, his parents had never called it into question, at the time it was neither a choice nor a dream but a necessary passage in life. Nowadays, Philippe lived in a three-room apartment in the Latin Quarter, right at the heart of the Paris intellectual movement, a stone’s throw from the Sorbonne and the publishing houses. At the age of forty-one he somewhat pompously decreed he would never have children, now; the only woman who had ever made him want a child had vanished from his life as if he had woken too soon from a wonderful dream.