Guys Like Me (13 page)

I don't like airports. It's never guys like me who are leaving, I'm one of those who stay. After a while, we're even the only ones who remember, and nobody much seems to care. My son … yes, my father? He talked like that when he was twelve, we always spoke to each other in the same way.

“My son will set the table.”

“Has my father made pasta again?”

I was filled with those words, and what else did I have, when it came down to it? The three of us went out to have a smoke before they left and there was a lot of noise.

“By the way.” Ben gave me a little package. “Here it is, open it when we're gone, OK?”

“For me? What is it?”

Anaïs was laughing and I put it in my pocket without having the slightest idea.

“It's nothing, a trifle.”

I must have made a funny face, I guess, but I don't know. They'd be in touch within a week, what the hell would they be able to do in that idiotic country? Eat fondue? Go skiing in winter? Carry suitcases full of fake banknotes? They weren't really happy to be leaving, but in an hour, if I knew them, they would have decided once and for all and Ben would keep it to himself. We went back into the concourse. Anaïs moved away to make a phone call, Ben looked at her two or three times out of the corner of his eye. Is everything all right, my son?

“Yes. She's really down. Leaving her mom and dad and her friends, plus she can't find a job … You know how it is.”

I wondered if he hadn't become a guy like me at that moment, watching her as she phoned home. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? No, father, what about you? My son, let's open it gently and look together at the landscape, I really wonder what this place is where we've landed. Are you all right? Yes, yes. I opened one eye. Your turn. It's hard to see, but wherever we go, I'm fine. Then we had to say goodbye.

They were already on the plane when I realized I hadn't managed to tell them I loved them, as I would have wanted. I hoped that, in the end, he'd never become a guy like me. He'd been lucky, he'd left in time, he'd gotten away from all that, at least I hoped so. I could feel the little package in my jacket pocket. I paid for the parking time at a machine, and then I noticed that I had lost my car, I went crazy, it took me a good quarter of an hour to find it again, in parking garage B2. I hadn't forgotten which row it was in, I'd simply gotten the wrong floor, well anyway. As I was leaving, just after I went through the gates, a plane took off just above my head, I closed my eyes without wanting to. I took my time going home. I felt sad and happy, as we all are, I'm talking about guys of my type, there are only a few million of us, I think.

I'd never been able to talk to his mother again. Ben has suffered a lot from that, I think. She sent the bailiff to me twice in a row, during a period of unemployment and depression, I've never forgiven her. All I could do was not let anything pass that would embarrass Benjamin, I don't even know if I managed that at least. We've never talked about it directly. Marco knew these things by heart, he'd held my head above water for months. I'd also been lucky, when you think about it. With the years, all the words I reserved for her had been drained of their meaning, and even the features of her face had gradually lost their sub-stance. The things I could have blamed her for, the failure of our marriage, none of it meant anything to me now. There was a big hold-up near Bondy on the A3, and then another one on the beltway. I found a parking spot under the trees at Louise Michel. It was pleasantly gray on my street. I lowered the blind in the living room and lay down on the couch, I tried to reason with myself but I'd had enough of being reasonable and I let myself go, it did me a lot of good.

But because of that, I looked really terrible in the bathroom mirror. I took a shower, as I usually do in such cases. I changed. Then I opened Benjamin's little package, it was a child's toy. He'd been ten years old. Maybe I was already dreaming of a scooter. It was his old red Vespa made out of scrap iron, I'd completely forgotten it. But he'd carried it around with him in his pocket for a good couple of years, as if he was saying to me, one day we'll both have one when I'm big. OK? Only it was all worn, the color had gone on the wheels and the handlebars. I looked for a place where I wouldn't lose it. I put it on my desk, just under the lamp. I sat down in front of it. I remembered those things. And that was it.

In the days that followed, I went to the office early. The weather was quite good. It was a pleasure to leave early, carrying my jacket over my shoulder. Sometimes it seemed as if I'd spent a long night, and the rest of the time I never stopped remembering. Marie and I hadn't talked any more about the summer, in theory, around July, she would have a few days' respite between chemo sessions, and if it was OK, she'd be able to leave. She had a friend in Trouville, who had a house by the sea. She could let us use it. Do you know Trouville? Yes, I've been before, I really like it there. I'd planned my vacation for July, one week, and another week in August, since Ben had stopped going away with me I'd always taken them in installments, because what would I have done with all that time, on my own, with nothing to do? He called me a week after his arrival, Anaïs was happy, she'd already found a part-time job … As for him, he wasn't sure yet. I didn't go to see Marie every evening. She was starting to be exhausted by it all. She'd started losing her hair after the second session, and she'd thrown up a lot. When they let her out, I saw her home. She wanted to ask them for a break from therapy, but they wouldn't let her. She'd see about it later, when she felt better. She was happy to be going home for a few days. I'd only been to Brochant to air the place out and pick up her mail, a girlfriend of hers from the boulevard also dropped by sometimes.

“Home at last!”

She was in a good mood, and we went for a meal at the Brasserie Wepler. She only picked at her food, to be honest, but she had a wonderful auburn wig now, she looked stunning. She was also happy to see the boulevard again: it was still just as ugly, noisy, and gray, all the way to Brochant metro station.

Several times I felt her looking at me out of the corner of her eye. In the end, I asked her what it was she wanted to tell me and couldn't, or was I imagining things? No, I wasn't imagining things. She'd have liked to be less tired and to show me another side of herself. She'd had too much time to think when she was in Beaujon. She'd never wanted to live with a man, not in a long time anyway. But we could see each other, if she wasn't too tired. In the evening, she cried a lot because she'd been very happy and very unhappy in her life, and she accepted that, but today she was scared that she wouldn't see the rest of it. She needed some time alone, she said.

“We have plenty of time ahead of us, Marie.”

It came out without thinking. She looked at me without a word, do you really believe that? And I was so sure of myself at that moment, in a way I'd rarely ever been in my life. So then she even wanted to go to the movies, just as she had hundreds of times, but there were too many people waiting in line, too many dumb films. It was hard for her to bear the noise and the gasoline smells. We walked back from the square to her apartment in Brochant, would I like a drink? No, thanks, I'm fine. So we just lay there in her bedroom, and then, when she was very tired, I left to go home and sleep. See you tomorrow?

“Yes, of course.”

“Can you let the phone ring twice so that I know you've arrived?”

“Sure. Call if you need me, will you do that?”

“Yes, sleep well.”

6

T
HERE HE WAS, WITH HIS VERY BLUE EYES, STANDING BY
the boxes. He hadn't finished, but almost. The window was open, like the first time I'd paid him a visit. The window of the apartment opposite was closed. I don't know why I remember that family so well, is it because of the two children? He'd already packed the boxes. His rolling tobacco on the carpet, which was gray like the carpets in offices that haven't been rented yet. Stains. Marks from the feet of the table, where he must have spent hundreds of hours waiting, without finding. He'd closed the door, I'd simply given it a push to come in, calling out: are you there?

“Come in, it's nice of you to drop by.”

I was a bit surprised because we'd agreed to meet, all three of us, to have dinner. His sense of humor was a bit of a problem sometimes, in his life. I watched him scotch-tape the boxes with great skill. He'd never been comfortable with words, but things like that he could do well, overcome that kind of difficulty. He didn't have many possessions. At a certain point, the window opposite half-opened and he took the opportunity to look up and offer me some tobacco. Just then, the image of his mother came back to me. He really did look like her, suddenly, lifting his head. How old had we been then?

“Do you want one? Help yourself.”

I rolled myself a cigarette. He had a few ready-made filters in the pack, but I didn't even try to put one in. He approached the window with a big smile. It was the same little boy as last time. He climbed over the sill and came in to take a look. Our eyes met for a moment.

“So you were at home, Akim? Are you OK?”

The boy nodded. “Where are you going? Are you going a long way?”

I recognized some things from when his mother had been a concierge.

“I'm going to Marseilles. By the way, tell your father to drop in, is he around now?”

“I don't know, he never says where he is. I'll tell him if I see him.”

I sat down on the radiator under the window.

“Good, I'll do the rest later, what time's Marc-André coming?”

He still had some pastis, if I wanted. Yes, why not? Without daring to admit it to myself, I was almost impatient for the evening to end, this thing that didn't mean anything, from way down in our past. The kind of thing veterans do, except there hadn't been a war. There had simply been a life together, side by side in the Hauts-de-Seine, so many years on the streets of Asnières, Gennevilliers, Clichy, and La Garenne, and then, for each of us, love affairs, plans for the future, successes and failures, but he, in a way, had specialized. I couldn't help smiling to myself, thinking about it. He looked in the closet, then in the refrigerator, which he was leaving behind for whoever came after him, if there was anybody. It would only be a temporary lease, obviously, they were going to demolish everything around here. There was also the TV set, which he'd bought quite cheap, but it worked perfectly, he'd give it to the children opposite. He liked the idea of giving them a present. He wouldn't need it now. Oh, really?

“Yes, my mother has one, and anyway I don't like it.”

“I'm like you, I never watch it.”

He took the bottle of pastis from the almost empty closet. Sorry, I don't have any ice. He seemed to enjoy putting on this performance for me, as if he hadn't felt so happy to be alive in years. He rolled himself a cigarette too. His things piled up in the middle of the room, like the last possessions of a guy who's about to disappear.

The watch on his wrist drew my attention: it was an old watch, I'd seen watches like that a long time ago, on the wrists of uncles and neighbors during my childhood. He saw what I was looking at, it was my father's last watch, he said. He'd gotten nothing from him except beatings, in his early years. He'd been very happy when he'd left, when he was about ten, and so was his mother. He was smiling as if to himself. It occurred to me that this wasn't the first time he'd told this to someone. Then, when he died, in some little town in Brittany, it was a long time since they'd heard from him, either his mother or him. Anyway, he'd gotten his watch, a few photos, his mother had never wanted to tell him who the woman was beside him in the photographs. In any case it was working well.

“They made things properly in those days.”

He said it as if it was a joke, and I had to smile again. He looked less weary than usual. He seemed happy to be leaving, I think.

“How about you? How are you?”

I'm fine, life's the same as usual. What could I really talk to him about? Marie? Of course not. He was one of those guys you can't imagine living for a long time with a woman, but who was I to think that of him? I told him that my son had gone away for six months for his work …

“Your son, oh, yes, what's his name again?”

“Benjamin.”

He nodded, with a big smile. He remembered the christening well, at Sainte Odile, near the Porte de Champerret. I haven't seen him since, he added. Does he look like you? Then, having shot his arrow, he put his almost spent cigarette back in the corner of his mouth without waiting for my answer.

“Could you help me, please?”

By the time Marco arrived, we were taking out plastic bags filled with garbage, things to throw away, unusable things he'd amassed in this apartment. He'd always re-cycled, even when he wasn't obliged to. You surrounded yourself with tons of things without knowing, and it was always the same, with each move you had a big spring cleaning. Marc-André waved to us and took out his cell phone, he had an important call to make. We finished transporting what he had to throw away into the courtyard of the building. The kids opposite were looking at us, kneeling on the couch, the TV set on behind them, although they weren't looking at it. We could also hear the noise of the boulevard in La Garenne-Colombes where we used to walk together, all those years ago. It was still us, it wasn't really our home any more. Marc-André was standing in the doorway of the inner courtyard.

“Hi, how are you? Why don't you have the light on?”

We shook hands. “Fine, and you?”

“Not bad. One more day gone. Right, shall we go?”

He hadn't had time to give it any thought, and Jean didn't know the local restaurants. Maybe we could take the car and go to the big pizzeria in Clichy? It wasn't far from Beaujon, on the way back I could go there and look at the windows on her floor. Was I more superstitious than before? What were we really afraid of, time rushing by and taking us to our end? Marc-André was looking around.

“So, this time it's true, you're really going for good?”

“Yes, this time I've had enough, I'm leaving.”

He smiled as if admitting defeat. And yet it seems to me something was driving him and it wasn't his failure, on the contrary, it was a desire to leave, a desire to be somewhere else, that was stronger than him. Somewhere else?

“I think it's better this way. And besides, my mother's eighty-two, I want to take advantage of the time she still has, you know.”

Marco looked tense. Several times lately, he'd told me he was fed up with his success. He was too tired to want any more of it. But he spoke about it with Aïcha, and then everything became possible again, because he was no longer alone in this life. You had to accept that there was a price to pay. Guys like him didn't get anything for nothing, when it came down to it, that was the case with most of us. I got in the back seat of Marc-André's car.

There were two red lights in succession, and we didn't say anything, all the time we sat there waiting. Guys with their windows down, their radios on or their cell phones in their hands, waiting for the lights to change. He held himself very straight, at one moment our eyes met in the rearview mirror. Marco turned to me.

“I'm fed up with these hold-ups. By the way, what about your scooter, do you have it?”

“Soon, yes.”

Jean turned to me. “Don't you already have a car?”

He smiled vaguely, as he often did. When we got to Clichy, a car was just pulling out and we didn't have to drive around looking for a parking space. Marco got out first, he switched off his cell phone. That way I can have a little peace and quiet. I've had a rough day. We sat down in the smoking area. The place had been refurbished two years ago and, in addition to the music, which was a little too loud, the lighting was also too harsh in the middle of the room. We sat down in a corner at the far end. Jean had brought his case with him. When they took our orders and served the aperitif, he told us he wanted to show us some photographs, to see if they reminded us of things. I thought that was weird, Marco was as surprised as I was. He'd kept everything. It was still in his case, he had never let it out of his sight. He'd stuck some of them in a school notebook, along with the dates, sometimes followed by a question mark. The oldest dated from 1976. The three of us were twenty, barely more than children. I recognized some of them, class photographs I must have somewhere at home, then he showed us others in which we didn't appear.

Several photographs in the courtyard of the building where he lived with his mother. He had the same eyes as her, the same way of looking with a slight lift of the head, the way people look under their glasses, except that he didn't wear glasses. Photos also of him when he was very small, that was my father, he said, pointing to a middle-aged man, who really seemed to be from another time, very distant even in the 1970s, and even further from us today. And then lots of photographs taken in Asnières, at the Bar des Trois Communes, where we sometimes went, and at Nazim's in Bois-Colombes, the one who had died only two months ago and had had a good life. We really had lived it up. We gradually relaxed. We even pushed away our plates, there was a kind of fire still burning in all this that went beyond our common memories. When the waitress brought us our meals, we left his photographs to one side. We told each other about long-gone things. There were our teachers and our parents. The injustices never swallowed, the hopes never followed by results. Then there were the stories about girls, love affairs we'd never forgotten. We realized we'd pretty much known the same girls in high school, and at Le Cercle near the station, we spent a whole lot of time there, and when we were alone, up until the early '80s, that was where we went. Generally, you didn't have to wait too long.

He was getting excited as he spoke, our memories were gradually falling into place, just like that, for no reason, he was putting our past together. We ordered a good bottle of red wine, we had to celebrate this, in the end it had been a good idea of his to make us revisit our lives. There weren't so many of us left now. We'd lost touch. And then almost nobody lived in our old neighborhood in the Hauts-de-Seine anymore. He had other photographs in a small brown envelope. Several times, he seemed hesitant to show them to us.

“Here, I have this too, if you want. I'll be back.”

He went to the toilets. Marco watched him walk away and shook his head.

“Are you thinking the same as me? I'm surprised he held out all this time.”

I opened the envelope. It was her, the girl he'd been harping on about all this time. Adeline Vlasquez. She was wearing a long flowered skirt on platform B of the station at Asnières, and in the sunlight the colors looked a little fake. They were already old, these photographs. In this one, he had long hair, he was wearing a shirt with a large collar, he had his arm around her shoulders and they seemed to be in love. Who'd taken the picture? Do you remember this girl? I had only a vague image of this Adeline Vlasquez.

“He's in a bad way, though, I wonder how he's going to pull through this time.”

I put the photos back in the envelope. He came back toward us with a big smile.

“Did you look at them?”

“Yes,” we said. “They're great. That was quite a time. Do you still hear from her?”

He'd looked for her for a long time, and in his opinion, all these last few years he wouldn't have let himself go the way he had if he'd been able to keep track of her, which was pointless, since she hadn't chosen him. Marco was looking around him, and then after a while he took off his glasses and massaged his eyelids.

“And what are you going to do now?”

“I'm going to see my mother, didn't I tell you?”

“Yes, but what are you going to do to earn a living?”

He shrugged. “I'd really like some dessert. How about you?”

We talked about other things. We were relieved that he'd finished showing us photos of his life, and also the life he thought had been ours. He seemed quite happy, though, that evening. But I couldn't be sure. Not far from here, there was this woman who might become mine, I hoped that very strongly, and I didn't know why, and then there was my son in Switzerland who called me from time to time. He'd suggested we contact each other via instant message. Whenever I got home, I switched on the computer and looked to see if he was online. He had a lot of work. I wrote more often to Anaïs, she'd started taking German classes, she'd be coming back to Paris from time to time, she hadn't yet decided what she was going to do. We stayed in the pizzeria for a long time. Maybe we wouldn't have many more opportunities? Marco would have liked to stop working, he was earning a good living, but it didn't matter anymore, Aïcha was advising him to do what he wanted, but what did he want? Over time, he'd forgotten what he liked. For lots of guys like us, nothing mattered anymore. He would have liked to do legal counseling for people with money troubles, defend widows and orphans, instead of which he handled corporate accounts, surrounded by guys … Jean was listening to us and smiling, as if we'd thrown a great party just for him. It was coming to its end now.

I found it sad, when I got home that night, but not really, it wasn't as sad as all that, to be honest. You just have to let yourself go from time to time. It doesn't lead to anything, with guys like us. He hadn't wanted us to drive him home. How was he going to manage with all those boxes? Oh, he'd ask Ahmed, the neighbor opposite, to lend him his station wagon. We weren't too worried about him. In any case, he'd try to be in touch before he left for Marseilles.