The Thursday Night Men (18 page)

“You’ve asked me a hundred times if we’ve already met. And a hundred times I have told you the same thing. You are suspecting me of feelings that are just too strong. I’m not made of that sort of stuff. And, with all due respect, neither are you.”

“If you’re not crazy about me, then that’s all the more deplorable, you’re being purely calculating. Your true motive for butting your way in here is your fear of ending up alone. You want to hook up with someone, that’s normal for a woman your age. You spotted me long ago, maybe you live nearby, or some mutual friend told you that I’d be easy prey in my psychologically diminished state, and that’s when you decided to strike.”

“The fear of ending up alone . . . That’s the best one yet! Have you taken a good look at me?”

“What is it, then? Are you looking for a donor?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A genitor, a guy stupid enough to let a woman have a kid behind his back? We spend one night together, and then another, and you continue your siege until you fall pregnant. So you figure no one can resist Marie-Jeanne Pereyres? You actually believe your little ploy might work?”

“What sort of nonsense is this?”

“Why me, damn it? Do I look like someone whose genes are in good condition?”

“What makes you think I don’t already have children?”

“Do you?”

“No. I’m sterile, I found out very early on. At first it felt like a punishment, but over time I’ve come to terms with it. I have a whole tribe of nephews and nieces who adore me. And who knows, maybe some day I’ll adopt. There’d be no risk in taking me in your bed. Do you really think I’m after your body?”

“And why not? I’ve attracted other women, you know.”

“You can be sure of one thing: the night you stop coming home alone, I will disappear on tiptoes.”

Which she did now, turning around, her head down, to go to her sofa. Hurt, like any rejected woman who thinks that only men are meant to be rejected.

Denis now knew how to get rid of her.

After six weeks spent in the museum’s projection room—an ideal venue given its size, comfort, acoustics, and décor—the members would henceforth be meeting at the Rue de la Convention, in the fifteenth arrondissement, in the basement of a little apartment complex. It was a long, vaulted cellar, clean and heated, equipped with benches and recycled chairs, and had been set aside for the co-owners’ meetings, but was also used for parties and various rehearsals.

Very different from the usual solemnity of the Thursday gatherings, a silence reigned like a voiceless accusation against one of the attendees. As the brotherhood had neither spokesman nor chairman, no one was prepared to express their indignation, and yet everyone was looking stealthily at one of their number. For the first time Philippe Saint-Jean felt he was not welcome, and he prayed the session would begin at last so they would stop staring at him.

Three days earlier, his publisher, stunned, called to tell him that a photograph had appeared in the press showing Philippe arm-in-arm with a famous supermodel. Philippe’s family were the next to call, then a few friends who conceded they, too, had seen the magazine. After the fifth phone call, Philippe decided to go down to his usual kiosk, where his vendor was waiting for him, full of admiration. Back in his old threadbare chesterfield, Philippe was at last able to see the famous photograph for himself. He studied his image for a long time and found he was not as ridiculous as he had feared—almost handsome, in fact. He had even managed to look surprised, as if he were trying to overcome his natural discretion and was embarrassed at having to pose, thus preserving a certain dignity. Lesser-known acquaintances got in touch at the end of the afternoon, the same people who liked to remind him of their existence whenever he happened to be on television. All this solicitude ended up annoying him: if he happened to put his name to an article, whether it was about Freud’s Spinozism, the manifestations of the sexual revolution, or the impermeability of the middle classes, absolutely no one gave a sign of life.

Later that night, Mia called him from Montreal
between two shoots
to tell him how pleased her agency was about their relationship—far more efficient, as far as publicity was concerned, than an ordinary scandal. The next morning, he was woken by a press attaché who was delighted to relay the requests for interviews emanating from the various media who had just learned of his existence. The high point came when the proprietor of his regular dive treated him to an aperitif for the first time in ten years—a kir that Philippe bought dearly with his person by posing for the guest book. After gallantry, then annoyance, came bitterness: never had he been as popular as when he was the opposite of his true self.

In fact, the vast majority of the men gathered there that Thursday had seen the photograph or spread the word. Once they had recognized Philippe in the picture, they went on to find out that he was a sociologist, curious about human nature, but with few kind things to say about his own era. How could they help but see this mute witness as a threat to their occult community? In the philosopher’s eyes, would this handful of individuals not represent a subject worthy of study, a societal oddity? Should they not be afraid he was preparing a work on the bankruptcy of the male of the species? Was this brotherhood, founded on trust and sharing, not harboring a traitor?

While most of them found it hard to hide their concern, the more fatalistic among them admitted that sooner or later their cenacle was bound to lose its anonymity; it was even a miracle that it had been kept safe over the decades from journalists and other assorted sneaks. How could they have imagined, in this so-called era of communication, which encouraged self-promotion and keeping a close watch on others, had no regard for privacy, and violated what ought to be sacrosanct, that their little secret meetings every week would continue to prosper behind closed doors? It would be so easy to portray their existence in a cynical light! While there might be a hundred ways to revile the brotherhood, there was only one way to present it in all its simplicity, and it was to be feared that Philippe Saint-Jean might have chosen precisely that way.

And even if he had no evil intentions, how dare he sit among these men who were often distraught, frustrated, or disappointed—he who seemed so fulfilled in his professional life; he who, if one were to go by the photographs, moved in posh circles and, above all—and herein lay the ignominy—was going out with one of the most adulated women in the world? This could be seen as the height of provocation, and the unhappier members had the right to feel offended.

Philippe could discern the true message of this stubborn silence; he was being targeted, to be sure, but they were giving him a chance to explain himself, to reassure his peers. All he had to do was find the courage to abandon his insidious wait-and-see attitude and confess the true reasons for his presence there.

Philippe looked to Denis and Yves for encouragement; they were both already looking forward to giving him the third degree over a beer. They didn’t hold it against him for keeping Mia’s name from them, and they couldn’t care less about the brotherhood’s anonymity: this was their buddy sleeping with the girl who was showing herself all over town in her underwear. Not even encouraged by his companions, Philippe stood up to go and face an audience that was vastly different from that of his seminars, lecture halls and television studios. This time he had not prepared a thing, and he did not feel protected by any sort of argument or technique; he would do as all his predecessors had done and let one sentence lead to the next, even if it meant getting lost in digressions, repetitions, and contradictions.

“My name is Philippe, I’m a researcher in social sciences. Only a few months ago, I was still trying to recover from a broken heart. I’d thought I was cleverer than other people, I thought I’d be able to avoid the pain of missing someone by making it a subject for reflection. I reasoned that if I put it into perspective often enough I would be able to empty it of its melodrama, and see just how trivial and foolish it was, so I’d soon be rid of the pain. It didn’t take long before I had the proof that I was no better armed than the next man to fight against that pain. I began to despise the classics; they provided no answers. I hated language, I cursed reason, loathed dialectics. The essence of my conscious thoughts could be summed up in four words:
Juliette has gone away.
”

Philippe spared them those details which failed to portray him in a flattering light: the sleepless nights next to the telephone, the photographs he’d torn up, the spiteful insinuations he had made to mutual friends. But his spite was no more successful at putting her behind him than his great literature had been.

“That was when I found out about this . . . this circle—I may have baptized a few concepts in my life and given names to the most abstract forms, but I still don’t know what to call our assembly this evening. I remember very well my state of mind when I came to my first session: the analytical machine was plugged in and I was expecting the worst. How pretentious could I get, wanting to decipher the meaning of these meetings, when I myself didn’t know why I was attending? Since then I’ve listened as dozens of guys have told their stories, then disappeared. You can’t tell how a story will end when it’s being told by the main protagonist. Over the weeks I’ve been drawn by the intensity of these spoken words; it’s manna from heaven for a guy like me, so eager to define what constitutes a Human Being that he forgets the individual and the charge of reality each of us carries within. Oh, reality . . . irreplaceable reality, the way it defies the imagination and sometimes even understanding. It’s been a joy to witness the complexity of all the men who’ve trooped through here. There are those who dread truth far more than lies, those who prefer great sorrows to petty compromises, those who prefer to make a petty compromise rather than risk great sorrow, those who go from Greek tragedy to Italian commedia, those who sacrifice flesh and blood creatures to their mental creations, those who invent brand new feelings, those whose dick shows them which way is north, those who prefer hatred to indifference. In the long run, I forgot that the people speaking were actually men, they could just as easily have been women or extraterrestrials. The only thing that mattered was to be in contact with another way of seeing, however disturbing it might be. As I found myself actually enjoying listening to other people again, I began to take a second look at all my convictions about the principle of otherness, and I had to concede that my hostile feelings toward the woman I had once loved were exceedingly vain.”

His words would never be recorded anywhere. He was very pleased with the thought.

“Without a doubt, I owe my surprising recovery to these Thursday sessions, but I have since noticed a pernicious effect which means I will have to stop coming: an excess of empathy has dulled my critical faculty. Every testimony is admissible, every wild imagining is good to hear. In other words, I always agree with the last gentleman to have spoken, which is never a good thing for a philosopher . . . ”

Philippe succeeded in making a few listeners smile.

“I won’t come back next week, or in the weeks to follow, but I swear to you that in my work I shall never use a single word I’ve heard here, and I will never reveal anything about these meetings, except to someone who might need to attend.”

Contrary to tradition, the men applauded him, with the sense of relief only trust regained can bring.

“Will the two of you stop beginning all your sentences with ‘Is it true that’?”

“Is it true that she has a pet ferret that goes with her everywhere on a leash?”

“Is it true that she eats nothing but green seaweed available only in Japan?”

“Is it true that she gets $25,000 for one hour of posing?”

“Is it true that she has a ring in her clit, like in
The Story of O?”

“Where on earth did you hear all this rubbish?”

Denis remembered a television commercial where you could see Mia through a translucent screen rubbing cream all over her body; he had told himself then that perfection did exist in this world but that he would never see the shape of it elsewhere than on a screen. As for Yves, he still hadn’t gotten over the cover of
Elle,
where Mia’s insolent eyes seemed to be saying to him, “Lehaleur, I want you!”

“Is it true that some financial bigwig offered her a Ferrari just to have dinner with him?”

“Is it true that she’s had floating ribs removed to make her waist smaller?”

“Guys, look, this isn’t the jealous boyfriend talking, it’s the sociologist: where on earth did you dig up such exaggerated information? I’m serious, I want to know. In my essay on the memory-mirror, I examined the endemic impact of rumors. I wish I’d known you at the time!”

What did this intellectual have that they didn’t, that entitled him take a living myth into his arms? Just because they served
oeufs mayonnaise
or installed windows, did that mean they were not worthy of pleading their case with someone like Mia? He must have reeled her in with his fancy phrases! He must have come up with a whole slew of woolly theories to get her into his bed!

“What’s she like in real life?”

“I don’t know. With her, life is never real.”

As he refused to be judgmental where his friends were concerned, Philippe decided to sidestep the issue gracefully. If he was not always lucid with people he liked, it didn’t weigh on his conscience. And yet, he could not help but interpret the signals Mia sent out, and that endeavor left him nostalgic for the amorous blindness he had once known, that sweet distraction, that total lack of distance which compels one to paint another person’s faults as virtues. Did it mean he was not really in love if he could see through Mia so well?

He had noticed that she was very demonstrative in public, yet far less so once they were alone. At her parents’ place she fondled him to the verge of indecency. In the street she walked in step with him like some Siamese twin. Around photographers she clung to him as if to a life buoy. But behind closed doors Mia immediately asserted her need for personal space, and she even went so far as to make fun of self-sufficient little couples with their sappy kissing. He had observed the way she held back, giving only the absolute minimum, in order to keep her partner in a state of dependency—something Philippe referred to as
emotional Malthusianism.
He preferred to see this not as emotional self-restraint but as naïve calculation, in order to keep him with her as long as possible. A third clue, even more worrying, was Mia’s refusal to envision her future, the day when her approval ratings in the glamour world began to decline. Philippe had asked her,
Have you thought about afterwards?
Initially she had dodged the subject, convinced as she was that nothing could be as good as the life she was leading at the moment, and then she replied,
Have children, and then, we’ll see, maybe become an actress.