Guys Like Me (12 page)

The weather was really nice now. It was easier for me to get up in the morning. As I waited in the station for my train, I'd smoke a cigarette and go over what I had to do. My colleagues in the office were vaguely in the know, and I'd started getting there an hour earlier than them in the morning, but I'd leave on the dot to get to Beaujon. The whole time, it seemed to me that I was being followed, or spied on. Like with Larrieu, I'd run into him on one of the floors or on the street and he'd ask me how I was. Or else the girl on the switchboard, over the past few years I'd gotten into the habit of joking with her, and now she was openly ignoring me, as if I was in trouble with the law. I had to get a grip on myself. Nobody's interested in a guy like you,
old chap
.
Anaïs had found the original expression in
Gatsby
, old chap. I hated that expression. But I was finding it difficult to put on a brave face in the office. I made a few mistakes, and on two occasions, a file I'd approved came back onto my desk, after going up three floors, with a post-it and some initials in red. I mustn't fall behind, they didn't say anything but there were a number of guys like me they were waiting to see make mistakes.

When I left work, I wouldn't stop to have a beer or a coffee in the bar at the end of the street, the way I used to, I'd go straight to Brochant on foot. I'd walk in the company of the trees as far as the darkness on the ground floor of Marie's building, to pick up her mail. The operation had gone well but she was extremely tired, quite apart from the treatment she was starting. She was worried, how was she going to stand it? Some friends of hers had painted a picture of it that terrified her, plus, what made her sad was seeing all these people alone in life, apparently. How to find the strength to get out of their ward in the hospital, to go where?

Two days after the operation, I went to help Benjamin put his things in storage. I stayed in the locker he'd rented at the port, I arranged the things as best I could to fill the space. Anaïs had marked all the boxes: their departure was very well organized. His mother and I had lived in Gennevilliers for two years, in my head it was still a place where I'd dissipated my youth, along with a few other places in the Hauts-de-Seine, with Marco most of the time. In the aisles of the storage facility, Africans with rap in their ears and sometimes betting slips from the horse races in their hands made the rounds, I also saw dogs with their handlers in the aisles. Behind the row of birches on the edge of the site, you could see the high fence of the port, and beyond that, a whole heap of places whose names I couldn't remember, but which I'd crisscross as soon as I had my scooter and Marie had recovered as I hoped she would. I could take photographs. They'd gone back to load the J7 with the last boxes and my son had suggested I wait for them, Anaïs had left with him. Right, so we'll see each other at the airport, then? She and I had kissed and I'd realized that it was almost as if I was grieving, in a small way, but it probably wouldn't be the last time.

They took almost an hour to finish loading and come back. I was exhausted after the last two weeks, dividing my time between the office, Beaujon, Marie's apartment, and mine. That was why I didn't look at myself too closely in the mirror, in the morning or at night, because I wasn't too curious to know what I looked like at such moments. Probably another guy like me,
old chap
. He was really fascinating, that man. He was a poor guy from the sticks, and when he reached the bright lights, he started to have his doubts, things weren't any better here than there. He messed up his life, without meaning to. There were probably millions like him on both sides of the ocean. Who could I talk to about that? Marc-André and I had supported each other quite a bit on the phone lately. His son had lost ten pounds in a month since he'd stopped his treatment. Marco was scared that he'd go back to his habit. Marie was very anxious, and Benjamin's leaving was weighing on my mind. I still bore just as much of a grudge against my life, in a way. For many years, you had to fight against the sensation of living for nothing, and then, when you thought you more or less knew why, the reason could disappear like that, and you realized you'd been tricked. How could you get over these things? Of course, Marco knew all this as well as I did and he didn't have the answer. Neither did I. When can we meet? We asked each other that every time. I'll call you when I can.

Aïcha always asked me to give Marie her regards, and then we'd call each other again two or three days later, to chat. The trips to Beaujon were starting to get on my nerves. I realized that one evening on my way there: since the birth of my son, I'd only ever set foot in there for bad news, a stay in the hospital when I was fifty, and two deaths.

Marie read a lot. When I arrived, she was often also asleep. As soon as she was able to get up after the operation, she started taking care of herself, she put on make-up, she didn't want to let herself go. I went to the cosmetics department of Printemps with a tube of lipstick, she wanted me to find the same one. I liked doing that a lot. She'd put on perfume, she could still stand Chanel No. 5.

“I don't smell of illness, do I? You wouldn't lie to me?”

Her girlfriends came to see her almost every day. I'd already seen some of them at her place, she'd talked about them for months on the internet, the others too, now I'd see them arriving with flowers or candy. When they left Marie would give it all to the nurses, and to the nurses' aides who cleaned the corridors and the wards. Little by little, seeing her living like that, almost furtively, I told myself that she was a real chance for me. She'd received a postcard from Benjamin and Anaïs. Show me, did you really? She would have to stay here almost another month, for short periods. Later, there would be outpatient radiation therapy, and then it would be over, that was what everybody hoped. Sometimes we actually managed to be alone for a while, she and I. She didn't know what had happened to the young woman she'd seen when she first came. It had been really depressing, hearing her get up at night, call for help in a low voice, then go and spew her guts out. In Beaujon, so close to the Seine, so close to where Marco and I both lived, you were already far from other people, from life as it goes on.

One time, I told Marie that when Benjamin was born I'd gone down to the emergency room to phone my parents who were asking for news. A hairy young guy button-holed me, he wanted to scrounge a little money from me, I told him to leave me alone, I had other things on my mind, I'd just had a child! He gave me a crooked smile and said: you've just had a kid and you don't even want to stand me a drink to celebrate? He turned around, genuinely disgusted. I'd never forgotten that, though I didn't really understand why it had made such an impression. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? Benjamin knew that story by heart, he'd always listened to it politely, as if to say, why did that memory matter so much to me?

“You should have had a drink with him,” Marie said, “that way you wouldn't have thought about it anymore.”

Then she asked me to sit down next to her and we stayed like that for a while, looking toward the other bank of the Seine. She didn't feel too bad. Most of the time she didn't feel anything. She spent her time not feeling anything. She was waiting. It was too hot in Beaujon. The last days of April and the first days of May, I was pleased that month was coming, with its long weekends and its public holidays. I was exhausted. I've never in my life been good at doing lots of things at the same time.

When I left Marie, she was tired.

“Do you need anything?”

She summoned up the courage to smile, and I don't think she was faking it. Well, maybe sometimes.

“Yes, I need you to get rid of my cancer, could you do that for me?”

She never asked me to leave. Whenever I went, she would turn her head toward the window of her room, sometimes she had to put on her sunglasses, and it was if she was waiting her turn in a detox center or something like that. But we were out of luck. All I could do was tell myself crap like that. I looked on the internet two or three times, I bought magazines with articles about breast cancer, but there were never any answers to the questions I asked myself. They were irrelevant, obviously. What did she think about during all those hours of waiting? Everything and nothing. She tried above all not to ask herself too many questions, she told me she was trying to stop wondering why. “Why” kills faster than any other word.

The doctors had told her she would lose her hair. She didn't know when. She didn't want to wait. She was going to have her hair shaved off and buy herself a wig the following week, when she left the hospital. I offered to come with her, but she wouldn't hear of it. She wanted to hear about the Brasserie Wepler, or for me to tell her about the boulevard, the trees on her street, she missed that, her life, her friends, her neighbors, and all those people she met in the clinic, her love of the night people, as she called them. She unwittingly came out with these grand but simple phrases. Damn Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald,
old chap
. We hadn't led the same life at all, she and I. They kept her in for a few more days after the first chemo, to see how she reacted. Then they let her go. Marie didn't have any family, she'd dumped them the day she turned eighteen, but that didn't mean she was alone. I liked seeing her surrounded by her girlfriends, and when I was there, they all looked at me in the same way, they all gave me the same slightly vague, slightly fake smile, a bit like, when you're hiring, you smile at the applicant as you ask him to sit down. But I was probably just imagining things.

I'd forgotten all about him. Marco heard from him from time to time, they weren't calls for help, although not far off, but he didn't see what more he could do for him. In any case, in his opinion, strange as it might seem, Jean had never really wanted to get back to work. He talked to him mostly about Adeline Vlasquez. He really would have liked to find her again. He was also thinking about his mother in Marseilles. How old was she now? Marco and I both remembered the concierge's lodge where we sometimes went to pick him up. Every year it was a little grayer in our memories when we talked about it. Maybe one day the color wouldn't even exist anymore? It was a bit further away also. But when it came down to it, he'd only left it temporarily, he was back on the ground floor looking out on a courtyard. He'd been born like that. He hadn't really suffered from his childhood, or maybe he couldn't talk about it? Marco would ask me how Marie was and I didn't know what to reply. Her illness was bringing her and me closer together. I had the feeling I'd known her for a very long time. Whenever she thought she was alone, she'd look out of the window of Beaujon, at the other side of the Seine, with her sunglasses. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? It was too hot in the wards. There were fans in the corridor, which were almost no use at all.

Once or twice we slipped out because she wanted to smoke a cigarette, which was completely forbidden because of what she had.

“You won't do it again, will you?”

Marie smiled at the nurse who came rushing to us as we stood by the elevators. In the end, the nurse shrugged and told her not to stay up too long, and then I left. Marco asked me casually what would happen when she finally left the hospital, and then when she had finished her treatment and recovered?

“We haven't talked about it yet, I don't know.”

I could tell he was smiling on the other end.

“What are you doing? Are you still there?”

“It's been a long time since you were last in love, if you don't mind me saying so.”

“Oh, really? Is that true?”

He laughed softly, of course it was true. I realized that yes, it was true. In the end, I'd only waited twenty years for Marie. We had to stop talking on the phone, we had to see each other at least. Otherwise life soon became nothing.

“Wait, I'll have a look.”

Marco whistled as he suggested dates. Apart from my evening visits to Brochant and to the hospital, I was alone, the dates were all the same to me, and I didn't really mind. Quite the opposite. I was pleased to realize it, we'd meet on Friday. Should I come to his place? Aïcha was leaving for another conference in Marseilles, we could eat out if you like?

I took my son and Anaïs to the airport. We were in the terminal, they'd already left in a way, we had no more time to lose. They'd spent the last night at my ex-wife's, she hadn't been able to get away, she would go to see them, but she didn't yet know when. It would have been easier if after our separation we'd learned to talk, but we hadn't. We'd been at each other's throats for years. He gave me their temporary address, Anaïs was at a newsstand buying some magazines. At first they'd be staying with a colleague who was also from Paris, they didn't have anywhere to live yet. I really would have liked to tell my son a few things at that moment, as if we were never going to see each other again, as if I was going to leave before them. Instead of which, we chatted as if he would be there the following weekend. He'd given me a little digital camera and had showed me how it worked, we'd both laughed and made faces, these last few days, between his lab and the office.