Guys Like Me (2 page)

“Do you still smoke?”

I smiled, without meaning to.

Yes, even though I'm over fifty I still smoke, though less than before.

“Five a day, something like that,” I said, as if I needed to justify myself to him.

He didn't seem to be listening. But even though he didn't look as if he was listening, I had plenty of time to realize that he hadn't forgotten any of the things I'd said to him, or done for him. We smoked for a while in silence. A couple came and sat down in the booth next to ours, in the tinted light, which seemed to come from a fluorescent tube. The waiter took our orders. I was thinking about Benjamin, what was he up to right now? Sometimes, in all those years, I thought I was going to see him, turning a corner in Paris, without our having talked. And so, because I wanted it so much to happen, when he did see me it came at the right time, he'd been feeling sad, or he'd even been thinking about me. Not about his monthly check, or his cell phone contract, like when he was starting out in life, but about me, his father. He looked at the end of his cigarette and asked me if I'd ever been to Cuba. No, I'd never been to Cuba. Still haven't.

“You never liked traveling.”

He was the same as he'd always been, ever since he was a child, obsessed with traveling. I pushed him further on this. “How about you, still roaming?”

He shook his head. He looked toward the couple we'd seen come in when we'd sat down. “A bit, but after a while, you know …”

He made a broad gesture that ended in mid-air, just like that.

“Did you get tired of it?”

I wanted to set my mind at rest about his love of traveling, which had been with him since childhood.

“After a while, you know … You can't spend your whole life traveling, you need to set down roots somewhere.”

I nodded, I think. I have roots, I told myself later. But what could that mean to a guy like him?

“I'd like to be able to go back to Africa one last time.”

I immediately remembered the book in his bedroom when we were children.

“By the way, how's your mother?”

He didn't seem surprised by my asking him about his mother. In fact, he even seemed pleased.

“Not bad for her age.”

He leaned slightly in the direction of the bar. Outside, the noise of the crowd walking down toward Cour du Havre. The same noise for years. I've often forgotten it.

“I don't see much of her, she lives in an apartment in Marseilles, with a cousin of hers. But she's fine, I mean, she forgets a lot of things.”

“In Marseilles?”

“Yes, the rents are too high in Paris. She has a cousin down there, they share a small apartment. They're old now. Do you know what I mean?”

I said yes, of course I know what you mean.

I already knew that later, when I got home, other fragments of the story we shared would come back to me from time to time and keep me awake. I'd always liked his mother even though, like mine with me, we both knew they didn't need us in their lives, and that in some way we were like enemies because we'd been born. His mother was the concierge of an apartment building, and also worked as a cleaner. In the evening, sometimes, she'd go dancing with her friends in clubs in Argenteuil, La Garenne, and Paris. She loved dancing. He'd go with her, as soon as he became a teenager. I remembered I envied him that. Now the couple was embracing, what age could they be? When the guy listened to her talking, that little blonde with extensions, he'd look up at the ceiling, with a smile on his lips, his body strained toward her. My wife took the decision to get a divorce after reading an American book called
Mars Versus Venus
. Or something like that. She only ever read in bed, slowly. For three months, that book was on the coffee table in the living room. Benjamin also noticed it. I don't know why the scenes of happiness that I see, in cafés or elsewhere, always remind me of that book lying on the coffee table in the living room all that time, and I'm not able to wipe out the memory.

“Did you see Mom's book?”

“Yes, Benjamin, it'd have been hard not to see it.”

I must have given him some kind of awkward answer like that, it was already thirteen years ago.

“Why don't you talk to her? Don't you know what to say to her? Why?”

I remember I took it badly at the time. He was angry, he already knew what was going to happen. I asked him to shut up, and later, when the two of us were alone, my son and I, I tried to explain. But I couldn't find the words, and as for him, he was busy tapping away on his computer, he didn't want to talk about it anymore.

“You're right, it's none of my business.”

And so I didn't tell him.

When we finally stopped looking at each other and looking away, when he took another cigarette from the pack and, as if we were regulars there, I made a sign to the waiter to bring us another drink, yes, that's right, the same, he started to tell me. Yes, he'd lost his job. I should have suspected it; he didn't make a big thing about it, except that he was over fifty. I didn't ask him any questions, the whole time he was talking to me. Yes, the whole time he was talking to me that day, I don't think I came up with more than two sentences, because I'd immediately sensed how much he needed it. He really had given a lot of himself to the job. He'd followed all the technical changes, and he spoke German reasonably well. That wasn't an obvious thing for a guy like him who hadn't had much schooling. He quite simply hadn't seen it coming. Of course, you just had to switch on the TV to know, but he didn't think it would happen to him, not to him. The worst thing was, he hadn't put any money aside. He'd helped his mother with the apartment in Marseilles with her cousin, and now he was renting a really small ground-floor apartment. A man had a lot of debts in life, that's what life meant. He came out with two or three things like that, without knowing it. Without knowing it, he was painting a picture of a guy who could have been me, or so many others, but who was actually him. He didn't get worked up as he told me. He occupied his days as best he could, he'd asked all his acquaintances to keep their eyes and ears open, because at his age they were the only people he could count on. He called it being humanly alert. I remember that awkward expression, where had he dug it up? His last partner had left him, he'd become unbearable, she kept telling him, unbearable, that was the excuse she'd given, but in fact she didn't really care either way. She'd been with him out of a kind of self-interest, which she'd calculated pretty well, and seeing him unemployed had made up her mind for her.

“How old was she?”

“What? Oh, forty-seven, I think.”

He seemed surprised by my question, as if it was of no interest. Then, just in his eyes, at that moment, I saw a boyish smile. Maybe he still loved her, or had never stopped? But no, not really. He'd gone to the employment court, not expecting anything from it. The guys who'd fired him were from the same generation as him, they were your age, he said. They knew perfectly well they were screwing him over, but getting rid of a few people like him might be worth it, they must have told themselves something like that. He'd been naive, and he'd been stupid, now he looked back on it, he really hadn't seen it coming.

He kept looking around us, around me, in the café. The booths had all filled up little by little, and there were more and more people out in the street, on their way to catch a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare. His case was full of papers, letters of confirmation, bailiff 's notices, résumés to be sent or ones already returned, current business. He had an envelope with those words on it. He put it down on the table. He didn't open it, as if he was still hesitating. I had the premonition, that evening, thinking about it, that something else would happen in his life, that it wouldn't end there. Was it because of the computer case, emptied of its contents, where he kept his papers? Or was it the owner of the café, that young woman with the clear complexion who didn't give any impression of youth or life? Guys like me often feel really sad when they look at other people. Since I turned forty, and especially since my divorce, four years after that, my only consolation has been my work, which allows me to keep such things at a distance. Since my separation, I haven't had a real love affair. I don't have the strength for it anymore, I kept telling myself. But why would I need strength? How the time passes … Quite often, my thinking stops there, and I try to sleep immediately afterwards, because I really don't know what's waiting for me if I keep thinking.

We saw each other a few times after that. What surprised me from the beginning was that thanks to him, because he also wanted to know about me, to know things about my life, to do part of the work and not be outdone, I started to understand my own life better, or rather to see the truth in the way I tell it to myself, on those bad nights when I know I won't be able to sleep and my apartment seems tiny and I feel as if I'm going to end up suffocating in it. He'd been unemployed for more than two years, I didn't ask him for details. When we left the bar on Rue d'Amsterdam, he handed me the résumés I asked him for. I glanced at them, there was his place of birth, near La Garenne-Colombes, that was our suburb before, his and mine, and lots of other guys too. His résumé, as far as I could tell, seemed plausible enough, except that he'd probably never be able to find anything again, because of his age. He never changed his mind about that. I even ended up asking him over the phone: what was the point of carrying on trying if, deep down, he was convinced that he'd never get out of this mess, that it was too late for him?

“I'll pass them around, and we'll see what happens.”

“Thank you.”

He was looking at me and nodding, like a child waiting for it to pass, as if that thank you wasn't addressed to me. How many guys like me had he approached, old acquaintances, guys he hadn't seen in years? Then he closed his case and folded his hands over it, and I didn't know if that meant he wanted to go, or on the contrary to stay, his hands placed on the top of his case, forever incapable of choosing between the outside and here, where he could stay. You never knew with him.

“By the way, how are things in La Garenne-Colombes?”

A wicked smile gradually lit up his face. “Oh, La Garenne-Colombes. There aren't many guys left who are still interested in La Garenne-Colombes.”

“Why do you say that?”

He smiled a bit more, I liked seeing him like that, he reminded me of that little boy in La Garenne-Colombes, near Place de Belgique, he never found his way back to school, but that was beside the point now.

“I went back there last year, well, maybe five or six months ago. I hardly recognized a thing, you know.”

“Why don't you go see for yourself? You aren't far, are you?”

I didn't reply.

He watched me put his résumé away in my briefcase, the briefcase of a man who was still whole. We both knew, maybe at the same time, how pointless it was, given his age. But then, when I read it again that evening, I wasn't so sure.

“Will one be enough?”

We were both still standing there.

“I'll make copies.”

He nodded. He showed me a flash drive he'd taken out of his pocket. It was red. That surprised me, coming from him, but after all why not? We were the generation of floppy disks in offices, and also of
Atomkraft? Nein, danke!
I suddenly remembered those little metal badges we carried on our school satchels and wore on the lapels of our jackets, bought from the flea market in Clignan-court or in fake American surplus stores. We all had them in high school. We'd walk along the streets of Asnières in our combat jackets covered with badges. He collected them, sometimes resold them, sometimes swapped them.

“Well,” he said, “it was great to see you again, even if the circumstances could be better.”

I couldn't help smiling. “Shall we have a bite to eat one of these days?”

He said yes, shall I call you or will you call me?

I didn't need to think too much, I said no, I'll call you, no problem, we can meet next week.

We shook hands before we left the bar. The young woman at the cash register said goodbye, her voice sounded dull and worn. Her hard features under her blonde hair, in a bar on Rue d'Amsterdam. He wasn't sad or depressed, that time, any more than the following times. Most of the time, he kept in good spirits. He was born like that, in good spirits. What was he doing that evening? He shrugged, one hand holding the empty case and the other in the pocket of his raincoat, as if he could have stayed like that for years.

“I'm going for a walk, I may catch a movie, now that I have the card.”

He still had his boyish smile, he meant his unemployment card, stamped so that he could get discounts.

“So long, I'll call you.”

Then I walked down the street without turning around. Anyone seeing us together might have thought that two old friends had just had a drink, and that these moments stolen from everyday life (work, a wife, the children already flown the nest) had been a sliver of pleasure in their lives. I mean guys who've known each other for more than thirty years, yes, that's it, much more than thirty years in fact. All things considered, I'd enjoyed seeing him again. Apart from that, I wasn't sure what else to think.