The Thursday Night Men (15 page)

Was the intruder one of those secretive lovers who sighs in the shadow of the man she adores? By knocking on his door, had she taken a step that no other woman would dare to take? Was it so impossible for a man like him to arouse immoderate, unshakable feelings? Why not picture Marie-Jeanne Pereyres as a passionate woman who had thrown herself on him, the living proof of her passion?

“Not long afterwards, I fell ill. I was in bed for several weeks, unable to react, drained of all my strength, incapable of saying a word. The doctors didn’t make a diagnosis, other than some sort of aphasia that was not the same thing as depression, and I was the only one who could know where it had come from. Deep down I knew that Manon’s presence in my life was going to drive out everything else, and it was this certainty that had made me ill. I am sure that many of you have gone to pieces over a woman, otherwise this brotherhood of yours would not exist.”

The rule in the audience was not to react, even if some of those present, including Philippe Saint-Jean, felt it concerned them. There had been a time when Juliette aroused feelings so intense that, like the witness, he had collapsed on the floor. A doctor had prescribed a series of tests, all of them useless, because to recover from such a seismic event in his life all Philippe needed was to feel Juliette’s hand in his—only the woman who had been the cause of the illness had the power to cure him. Two weeks later, when he had regained his speech and the use of his legs, Juliette moved into his place for good. Their first year together they were so intensely close that they dreaded being apart for even one hour, and went to their respective appointments together, until no one would even schedule an appointment with either of them. Philippe would never forget one morning when Juliette went out to do the shopping, on her own, and came back with a black eye because she had slipped on the tiled floor in a shop. He had drawn some very Freudian conclusions: Juliette had punished herself for this first separation, as she had punished the man of her life for having let her go off without him, and the guilt the incident inspired bore a disturbing resemblance to the shiner an abusive man can deliver. They knew too that other people could not stand to be around them—they were little cooing lovebirds, but they could not behave in any other way: they would only go back into the world once they’d had their fill of each other.

“Passion is a serious illness, a hard drug. After the first exultant moments comes the labor of obsession, then dependency. Manon the moment I opened my eyes, Manon when I laughed, Manon when I cried, Manon in my dreams. There was only one answer to all the questions, all the doubts: Manon.
What time is it?
Manon.
Would you like something for dessert?
Manon.
It looks like it’s going to storm.
Manon.”

Fortunately, Yves Lehaleur had rid himself of those devastating, exhausting emotions, which could leave a human being feeling neglected. He thanked the heavens for leaving him with peace of mind and a wandering cock. Furtively, he consulted his cell phone to see whether Kris had left him a message. He’d been trying to make an appointment since morning, not so much to sleep with her but to tell her in detail, with irony, about a calamitous evening he’d spent with a certain Brigitte.
She wore me out, your colleague, and not the way I would have liked. Call me back.
Before she’d even removed her coat, Brigitte had taken a call on her cell, excusing herself in advance:
I never pick up, but in this case I have to.
To be discreet, Yves shut himself in the kitchen, but could not help but overhear bits of her conversation.
Did the doctor come? . . . Her insurance card is in the dresser drawer, where else did you think it would be? . . . There are some fish sticks left for the little one, and you can make her some macaroni.
Yves came back in, his head full of scenarios that were anything but erotic: Brigitte working by day and prostituting herself by night because an unemployed husband can’t help her make ends meet. A husband who feels cramped wearing the costume of the passive pimp, but times are hard. And the little girl asking as she stares at her macaroni:
Why is Mommy never here at night?
No sooner had Brigitte put her phone away than she broached the financial question:
€200 for two hours, then I have to get going.
Of all the women he’d had at his place, she more than anyone gave him the impression that she was at work, convinced she had a power that she did not have, the power to excite the senses of a man who is paying her—and that was surely the most exasperating thing of all, her presumptuousness in calling herself a prostitute, as if all it took was for her to spread her legs. In spite of this, he reckoned that if they chatted for the first hour he would desire her enough to be able to give her a tumble during the second, but with every word they exchanged they sank further into reality, of the most pragmatic sort, that of time racing by as quickly as credit. Trying to act like a professional, she was dead offhand with him:
What d’you feel like, then?
For the first time Yves realized just how vulgar those simple words could sound. Tired of resisting, he offered her a deal: he would let her leave again without even having to get undressed, provided she came out and told him her story in depth.
What story? What are you talking about? You want to know why I’m working as a whore?
Yves had to rephrase his request: what circumstances could be so terrible that they prevented Brigitte from staying home with her sick child at that moment? Because only a heroine out of Zola could have such a tragic fate that she has to sell herself to buy medicine for her kid. Yves was annoyed because of his €200, and he expected to hear something grandiose—an ancestral curse, a childhood destroyed by secrets, a passionate love for a monster, a betrayal straight out of Dante. Brigitte merely mentioned child support that never arrived, a new boyfriend who was crippled with debts, and stubborn bailiffs. Then she left, a few banknotes richer, but unburdened of a pallid reality that no one had ever cared to worm out of her before.

“After that everything started happening at once. I left my family to go and live in a furnished apartment. Manon was there with me in the beginning. We dreamt of a radiant future together, full of passion and power. I ruined myself to give her everything she wanted, went into debt to build the house of our dreams, of which she would be the sole owner—I remember insisting,
If anything were to happen to me, I want to be sure you’re taken care of.
At the office, she volunteered to take over the more routine accounts, then she lured me into a subtle chess game within the company. One day she handed me a file containing the equivalent of my death warrant, and I signed it without even reading it. Then she agreed to a promotion and began her incredible climb through the ranks. She ate out with colleagues most of the time, and then the bosses.
You have to forge alliances,
she said. She started coming home later and later, and when I complained, she found ways to silence me in bed. She kept coming up with various pretexts for postponing the marriage, and she assured me she’d stopped taking the pill. One morning I saw her sitting among us at the board meeting. The next day she left me.”

Yves didn’t believe these stereotypical stories where a man is ensnared by a venomous creature. The guy had to be making it up, for what would be the point of demonizing his mistress if it were not so that he could free himself of his original mistake? Why bother trying to convince his audience if not to rehabilitate himself in his own eyes?

Having burned with that same fire, Philippe did not doubt the man’s sincerity. He too would have signed any document on earth Juliette placed before him; he too would have laid everything he owned at her feet.

As for Denis, all he retained of the story being told were the elements that supported his thesis. How far can you go for love? If a man could ruin himself, abandon his family, and make himself sick, then couldn’t a woman force her way into the home of her chosen man? And, sooner or later, force her way past that other door, the one he never opened, the door to his entire being? Without a doubt, Marie-Jeanne Pereyres was laying siege, and he himself was the stronghold.

“And now I’m still living in that furnished apartment, alone. All the redundancy payments I get go to pay alimony and child support. My ex-wife hates me, my sons don’t want to see me. The few friends who’d absolved me for leaving my wife and kids have gotten sick of hearing me go on and on about Manon, and they’ve dropped me, too. I screwed up and it’s all my fault, and, although it may not look like it, I didn’t come here to complain, but to make an offer, if there are any among you who will help me obtain my revenge . . . ”

Everyone in the audience who’d been expecting a solemn conclusion or contemplative silence suddenly pricked up their ears at his last words.

“I suppose some of you have seen Robert Bresson’s film
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.
If you haven’t, well it’s the story of a woman who is jilted by a man she is passionately in love with. She decides to get her revenge by placing an irresistible young woman in his path. His turn now to know the suffering of passion and abandonment.”

Denis, Philippe, and Yves looked at each other, intrigued by the strange turn this testimony was taking. Philippe had seen a connection between the guy’s story and some pre-war melodramas, but not with Bresson’s film, which he loved as he loved all Bresson’s films, and which seemed to him way off the subject. Denis had not seen it, but it was enough to hear
She decides to take revenge by placing in his path an irresistible young woman
for a new theory to come out of nowhere: the presence of the intruder as the instrument of another woman’s revenge. But in spite of his paranoia, this hypothesis did not stand up to even one minute of cold analysis: to make sure he fell into the trap, whoever it was would have surely chosen choose a femme fatale, and not such a . . . well, not this Marie-Jeanne in any case. Besides, the thought that anyone could manipulate Marie-Jeanne was simply inconceivable.

Yves didn’t remember the film at all, but the guy’s summary made him want to see it; this girl being shoved into the arms of the protagonist: was she a prostitute or not? What other woman would go along with such a ploy? What sort of talent would it take to make it work? Which of the girls he was seeing might have that sort of temptress’s power?

“I will offer a considerable sum of money to whoever will agree to seduce Manon, drive her crazy, and ruin her life the way she ruined mine. Together we’ll come up with an infallible conspiracy. I know all her addresses, her habits, her faults, her weaknesses, her deepest desires, I know the words to get through to her and the gestures to flatter her. In less than three months, she’ll be eating out of your hand. If one of you is interested, please come and meet me afterwards on the way out so we can discuss it in detail.”

From the day it was founded, the members of the brotherhood had seen all sorts of witnesses come and go, and while sometimes their stories overlapped, each one of them remained unique, complex, and worth listening to. But as far as anyone could recall, in all that time there had never been a single individual ready to recruit another in order to exact his revenge. The oldest members, furious that anyone might think they could stoop to such sinister manipulation, broke the law of silence to inform the interloper that he’d come to the wrong address and, while they were at it, they showed him the door.

Philippe Saint-Jean took a hasty leave of his companions at the intersection at the Avenue de Friedland, jumped in a taxi, pulled a bow tie from his pocket, and knotted it over his wing collar, thus adding the final touch to his brand new tuxedo, which no one had noticed during the session. In their usual bistro, no sooner had Yves sat down than Kris called him at last and accepted his invitation to dine after one last appointment—Yves imagined her trying to get her client to climax as quickly as possible so she’d be on time at the restaurant. Before long Denis was alone with his drink, and as he did not feel like going home, he ordered another one, at the risk of exacerbating the waitress’s bad mood—he himself knew how to cast black looks at customers who delayed closing time by twenty minutes with their last orders. Denis noticed from her quick, precise gestures that she was a professional, not one of those dilettantes who condescended to wait tables while waiting for their exceptional destinies. If he indeed had a talent for decrypting women, then this woman—thanks to their shared profession—seemed far more legible than any other.

After she’s set the table, tidied up the sidewalk seating area, done the register and mopped the floor, she’ll go back to her studio, where no one is waiting. She’ll take a shower to wash off the smell of burnt fat, and she’ll stretch out, her legs heavy, in front of the television, which has place of prominence at the foot of her bed. All her emotions transit through that box. It makes her laugh and dream, sometimes cry, it gives rhythm to her life, wakes her up but above all puts her to sleep, otherwise she’s good for a bout of insomnia, and that would be tragic, because sleep is her second passion. She says so herself:
my bed is my life raft.
Occasionally on a Sunday she’ll let herself drift on it all day, eyes on the screen, ready to doze off between two series. Sometimes she tells herself that there isn’t room for two on her raft, that no man would cast himself adrift with her. Sometimes she’s glad, too, that she has no children, all she has to do is watch the news to find ten good reasons for not conceiving. Her choices came naturally, as a matter of course. And they haven’t been such bad choices, have they?

Denis’s daydreaming was interrupted by a sudden revelation: how could he ever have imagined that Marie-Jeanne Pereyres might be driven by noble sentiments? Only her dread of living alone, getting old, and ending up alone could explain her determination. Plagued by an identical despair, he’d merely sunk into depression, with dignity, without harming a soul! Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had preferred to get ahead of her sad destiny and abandon a raft that was taking on water, to end up on someone else’s; and now, she was clinging to that raft like a survivor.