The Thursday Night Men (16 page)

Kris called Yves “the hauler,” as if it were his profession. She knew nothing about him, other than that he was not a hauler, or a boatman, but that he installed windows and he enjoyed it. If a few days went by and she heard nothing from him, she began to think of him as a co-conspirator with whom you’re dying to share the latest gossip. For someone as confident as she was when it came to dividing men—unpredictable little creatures that they were—into two or three categories, with the hauler she had lost her bearings. And God knows how many sick minds she’d come across since she started in the business, and not just sexual perverts, but also men whose hidden motives revealed the meanderings of a tortured spirit, all the more so if they prided themselves on their feelings. Her experience, acquired in pain, had taught her to flee from those who, sooner or later, would reproach her for the desire she elicited in them. She knew how to spot the ones who, for all their gentlemanly air, were on the lookout through their association with prostitutes for psychological degradation. She was also wary of the gallant knight ready to go on a crusade to
get her out of there.
Just as she dreaded the ones who insisted on kissing her on the mouth for the very reason that she wouldn’t allow it. Lehaleur did not seem to have any personal shame, or scorn for his temptresses; nor did he have a virgin’s romantic side; he asked for nothing extravagant but obtained more than the others did. He had a unique way of sussing out women, of observing them to know what made them tick, of complimenting them on an asset they were proud of, or taking them in his arms without it seeming out of place—this guy knew instinctively where the border between tenderness and intimacy lay. It was almost annoying, how gifted he was at drawing the map of emotions so precisely, as if it were the map of an empire carved up between ruling powers, each of which was seeking to preserve its own borders. She found him dominating, affectionate, curious about her, always elusive. Kris knew the power her sex had over men, who were feverish and prepared to accept anything to find relief, but that power didn’t work on Yves. His ability to go from one woman to the next and his perpetual need for diversity kept her from being unique in the eyes of the only man to whom she would have truly liked to be unique. She could, however, boast of having been the first, his original whore, the one who had given him a taste for all the others.

“This one’s on me, to make up for sending you the wrong girl,” she said. “Brigitte must have been having an off day, don’t hold it against her.”

“If I pay for girls it’s also for their mystery.”

Surprised by his firmness, Kris took it as fair warning. To calm things down, he added, “But as long as you go on sending girls like Agnieszka, I’ll do my best to forget about the ones like Brigitte.”

Reduced to her role as a pimp, Kris realized that henceforth she would have to hold her own in this procession of women. And she would not give up her position in that procession for anything on earth. Because now that she had slept in the arms of the hauler, she felt ready to take on all the brusqueness, resentment, depravity, malaise, and misogyny of a man in his prime.

Philippe was aware of his good fortune, being able to adapt his speech according to circumstance. The philosopher of the modern era had the resources to cloak himself in legitimacy for any occasion, a knowing combination of intellectual agility and bad faith, hard-won through his experiences with the media and their tendency to resemble a lions’ den. In some extreme cases, Philippe could hesitate between two perfectly contradictory arguments and decide on one or the other on a whim. One day, in an almost empty auditorium where he was supposed to be giving a lecture on the democratization of knowledge, annoyed at having attracted such a thin crowd, he launched into a celebration of intellectual elites. Conversely, on a radio program together with a young singer who had gone to the trouble to read his work, Philippe had shown enthusiasm for the lyrics of his song, even though they were singularly inept. In a major newspaper, he had praised an essay on language published by a friend, when only the night before he had described it to Juliette as an
extinguisher of semantics.

This evening, with his dashing bow tie, as he stepped onto the red carpet, photographers clicking madly away, he would need all his rhetorical skills to regain some of his legitimacy as a thinker. Mia and Philippe had decided to go public. In less than an hour, their idyll would no longer be mere rumor. For their first official appearance together, they had to choose an event that had nothing to do with their careers, in order to show that neither one was the consort of the other. Philippe had seized on the premiere of a blockbuster movie about the cultural explosion of Paris in the 1920s; they wouldn’t attend the screening itself, but would meet up at the luxurious reception given at the Hôtel Crillon. When Mia asked him why
that
event rather than another, Philippe gave several reasons. But he kept silent on the real reason.

Once he was past the entrance, he was directed to a salon sparkling with white silk and pink champagne, where designer gowns of the sort only someone like Mia would truly have done justice to mingled with tuxedos that looked far more attractive on others than on Philippe. Under no circumstances, this time, could he allow himself to stand back as an observer or play at the sneering ethnologist: he was one of them. Feeling cramped in his worldly uniform, he was losing the right to decode the signs, interpret the gestures, decrypt the behavior; he had forfeited his grain of salt. This was the price to be paid for yielding to the glitter of the privileged classes. Seeking to strike a pose as he hunted for his girlfriend, he grabbed a glass of champagne in passing, then went to drink it out on the terrace, and enjoy one of the finest views there is: the Place de la Concorde, all lit up, and the entrance to the Tuileries with its Ferris wheel. No matter how marvelous it was, he still felt awkward and, until his little pest arrived, had to resist the urge to flee. This from a man who, years before, had visited an old people’s home in Bombay, wandering easily among the beds, witnessing the extreme poverty and watching people die, exchanging smiles and words with the patients; he had seen those dying people preparing for the great departure, and never had he felt more like a
philosopher
than that afternoon. This evening, to the contrary, he found it impossible to mingle with people he suspected of being intolerably futile. What was worse, he was ashamed of himself for recognizing so many faces—actors, presenters, demi-princesses, jet-set celebs—how on earth had all these existences managed to make themselves known to his cortex and mobilize so many precious neurons? He hardly ever watched television, and at the barber’s he read his own books rather than let himself be tempted, incognito, by the celebrity press. The question eluded the gauntlet of his fine analysis: how had this fringe element with their para-cultural activities managed to impregnate his mind and niche themselves among his pantheon of Greek philosophers, his catalogue of literary giants, and his cartography of so-called primitive people? How had he become the receiver of so many insignificant messages? As a sociologist, he could have made himself an ideal subject of study: to what degree could an individual bent on preserving his or her concentration as much as possible, creating an impregnable barrier to the ambient noise, still be invaded by a subtle capillary action? Philippe could not even claim to belong to that group of researchers who scrutinize the media, seeing it as a laboratory for decomposing ideas, so he had no excuse for knowing the name of that nineteen-year-old starlet who had just started a career as a singer, and was now stuffing herself on
bocconcini
.

As he walked into another salon he finally espied his fair lady, surrounded exclusively by men on the young side who all seemed perfectly at home in their bespoke tailoring, luxury leather and Swiss watches. Philippe stood to one side for a moment to enjoy the spectacle of the fuss they made over her and observe the posturing of a handful of predators. Among them was a mega-rich captain of industry, a good-looking playboy by vocation, all of which made him the likeliest pretender to a woman like Mia. Far from viewing him as a serious rival, Philippe, as a good entomologist of human behavior, identified him as an insect of the arthropod variety, which includes spiders but also crabs, creatures that move tangentially, qualified as
pests
for the environment. Philippe had always been fascinated by the spectacle of arrogance in action, for he found therein an absolute lack of self-doubt that summed up the contemporary era. He could just imagine the witticisms spouting from the man’s mouth, pathetic outbursts which, once they’d been stripped of the cynicism stolen from thoroughgoing sniggerers and insolent mediagenic posers, were proof of a rare vulgarity. Of a refined vulgarity, of the educated sort, knowing how far was too far, capable at any moment of brandishing the grain-of-salt card when an interlocutor verged on complacency. If Philippe Saint-Jean had ever been out looking for his perfect symmetrical counterpart, the obscene version of his
ego
, as of tonight he knew what he looked like.

Mia spotted him at last and motioned to him to join her. With one furtive kiss on the lips, she decreed who was chosen and who was damned. Arrogance had changed sides. As he savored this rare moment, Philippe knew he had just avenged the little boy he once was, for the time when the prettiest girl in school only had eyes for the bad boys—and it was partly her fault if the shy boy he had once been turned into a contemplative soul. The dashing CEO found it difficult to hide his shock upon hearing the word
philosopher
, which delighted Mia. Thus, this creature with her divine measurements was sleeping with a thinking entity? Was this how the supermodel got her rocks off? With this egghead, this pinched intellectual? A guy who was neither loaded, nor dead handsome, nor world famous, but who had dreamt up a few ideas and published books that changed hands at the Sorbonne? Who would have believed it? Ordinarily, sirens like her swallowed the bait on the shiniest hooks and were easily reeled in from the side of a yacht. Not to lose his haughty stance altogether, the deposed admirer displayed a knowing scorn for all things written and thought. He was practically boasting about confusing Schopenhauer with a Formula 1 driver; he was lousy at spelling, but his two assistants, with their postgraduate degrees, could take care of that; he had not read Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness
but he would rent the DVD. When faced with ignorance that was flaunted as a banner of social standing, Philippe never hesitated to brandish his fists—he had wiped out bankers, speculators, self-proclaimed artists and
sons of
who were only too happy to follow in Daddy’s footsteps. This pinched intellectual boxed in a category that could knock out any arrogant jerk who even tried do battle by the word. His challenger, beaten before he’d begun, knew when it was time to throw in the towel.

A few photographers had been allowed into the salons, and when Mia spotted them starting to head their way, she led Philippe out onto the balcony, asked him to put her glass somewhere, adjusted the top of her gown and took his hand as she turned to face the cameras, with the Ferris wheel of the Tuileries in the background. The photograph would be perfect, and the moment was, too: a high point, no doubt, of the kind that leaves one, already, nostalgic.

At the Montparnasse stop all, of a sudden the carriage emptied out and then filled again just as quickly; Denis Benitez could not help but envy all those people who were about to go home for dinner and would be able to sleep peacefully, their minds at rest. The closer he got to his home, the more the image of Marie-Jeanne Pereyres in her nightgown took over, the woman more ensconced than ever, silent but ready to face a new onslaught of questions. What really got to him was the way she reversed the roles, acting patient, even kindly toward her host while she got in his way, to the point of seeming surprised by his mood or his eagerness for things to return to normal. And there was no way he could go to the police or file a complaint for forcible entry, he could just imagine the duty officer’s look, and his reaction as he wrote down the complaint:
This is really a very ordinary case you’re bringing us, Monsieur Benitez, me too I wake up every morning with a perfect stranger in my bed, the same one for the last twenty-five years, impossible to get rid of her, and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

A woman in her fifties came and sat down on the seat opposite Denis, glanced at him briefly, then opened her magazine.

She wears her hat as if it were a crown, and her gaze says, “I may be taking the métro but I have a life elsewhere.”

What use was this power of his to decrypt if the only woman he needed desperately to decode remained opaque? There must be a meaning to this mysterious irony, but what was it?

He saw a young teenage girl a short distance away, leaning against the door.

She’s pregnant but not flaunting it, her features are relaxed, she’s not sorry to be swapping her role as a girl for that of a mother.

Sometimes Denis wondered why none of the women he had known had seen him as a potential father. No doubt he didn’t inspire the trust and solidity that create that desire for fusion. Not one of them had been reckless enough to say,
Let’s make a human being we can be proud of.
Not one of them had wanted to embark on that adventure with him, even the ones who had loved him.

But what could one say about the intruder?

About her stubbornness of tempered steel? Her formidable talent for interfering? The way she could strut about on a dingy sofa? How stupid could he get, not to have thought of it earlier! It was as old as the dawn of time! It went round and round, like a biological clock. Why waste his time on the romantic hypothesis that Marie-Jeanne Pereyres was some passionate heroine, or even the more pragmatic theory that she was an old maid looking for an end no matter what? There was only one hypothesis that made more sense than all the others now: Marie-Jeanne had tried everything to get pregnant.