The Thursday Night Men (2 page)

It had been terribly unwise of him to let her get away. Ever since, he had been feeling bankrupt, ashamed he hadn’t been able to hold onto the only woman whom fate had so clearly earmarked for him.

“If two people can get along because they think the same, then this was the woman for me.”

As the weeks went by he waited, hoped, even kept a lookout for her. She must live only a stone’s throw from his own place, and the only link he could count on from then on was the bottle bank. He went there as often as he could, knowing full well that chance, like lightning, would never strike twice in the same place, but nearby—at a local shop, in one of the adjacent streets, in the nearest park, and at the most unexpected time.

Those in the audience who had fallen in love in unusual circumstances silently wished him luck. He went back to his seat, and another man came to lean against the blackboard; he took a deep breath then launched into a confusing story, told all out of order, mingling objective information and personal points of view. He described himself as physically unattractive, rather gauche and irascible—something his listeners saw as the typical pose of a person who wants to produce the opposite effect. He said it was beyond his ability to avoid quarrels or power struggles, principally with women. Until the day he had met a certain Nadine, a sort of alter ego who, similarly, described herself as
ugly and not very cultured.

“We’re not in love, we won’t grow old together, but together we are irresistible.”

He made a comparison with two chemical components that are harmless on their own but explosive the moment they are mixed together. If anyone didn’t understand what he meant, he was referring to the mathematic principle whereby the sum of two negatives is a positive:
minus
plus
minus
equals
plus.
Driven by their bitterness and frustration, and a thirst for revenge, they formed a couple not so much to nurture one another as to devour everything around them. And as they were not fated to stay together in a relationship, and had nothing to build, they remained separate individuals, without any fear of revealing their shadow sides. She laughed at his fits of anger, he couldn’t care less if she was dishonest, and when they did happen to spend the night together, they would betray the secrets of their own sex while going on and on about the opposite sex. But that was not their favorite pastime. Left to their own devices, they turned into formidable predators. In public, this meant provoking, acting debauched and, if either one of them was attracted to someone else, the other partner would give instructions on how to proceed. Their victims were fascinated by the strange game this extravagant couple played, and fell all too easily into the trap.

Yves Lehaleur studied the speakers for inspiration, for the day he would feel ready. But how could you find inspiration among such atypical cases, when their logic, while it deserved to be exposed, only seemed valid to the interested party? Two seats over from him sat another newcomer, Denis Benitez, head waiter at a renowned Paris brasserie, a bachelor like so many others and then some. One evening when he was complaining about living alone, his brigade’s maître d’ hinted covertly at the existence of a
circle
he used to frequent, where
guys who have a story to tell
would get together, regardless of the nature of their confession, banal or extravagant. The maître d’ had since remarried, and no longer felt the need to attend, but he still felt a certain affection for those who’d been a part of it. Denis had decided to take the plunge, and now he was about to speak out, unafraid of being ridiculed—unlike Yves Lehaleur, after twenty years working at a brasserie he had no difficulty at all speaking to complete strangers. And God knows that what he had to say was irrational, and might seem like vain, absurd, disproportionate navel-gazing, or even just terribly naïve, to any other assembly. Except this one.

“Maybe everyone else here has a story to tell, but not me: I don’t have a story. I’ve been living without a woman for years now, which wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary if I hadn’t managed to figure out the reason why—and the reason
is
out of the ordinary.”

Denis had grown up to be a typical young man with a determination to enjoy life before he thought of settling down. He had fallen in love dozens of times, and he had charming memories of the many young women he had lured into his bed. But by the time he turned thirty, and finally felt ready for a lasting relationship, the women had begun to flee.

“At first I put it down to bad luck, since I’d been attracted to women who were married or engaged, or women who were in love and happy in their relationship and made that dead clear to me. I was careful from then on to avoid that kind of obstacle, but there were others barring the way. Right from the first date the woman would announce that she’d love to have me as the friend she’d never had, or she’d hand me her résumé as a barmaid, or she’d make it clear that
she didn’t want to get involved for the time being.
The list started to get long.”

After numerous attempts he came to realize that the range of excuses was infinite—as if simply suggesting to a stranger that he’d like to see her again had become the most unnatural gesture on earth. What had happened to make women so evasive, to the point where they would give him a wrong number or never return his calls?

“And God only knows, as a waiter, I have the odds on my side. I would say that on average, fifty to eighty times a day, I ask my customers, on their own or in a group,
What would make you happy today?”

From his very first day on the job, he had entertained countless women with his joking manner, or flattered them with his attention. Very often, when clearing the tables, he found napkins scribbled with flirtatious messages:
Denis, I’ve got your number, here’s mine,
or
I’m coming back for dinner on Tuesday, alone this time
, or even, in English,
What a waiter!
He would share them with his brigade, then toss them out, and he never tried to contact any of their authors; a minimum of professional ethics held him back. Over time, his success faded, for no reason, as if he had lost some of his presence and charisma.

“So you try and persuade yourself that there are periods, places, opportunities that are more favorable for meeting people than others. I let my coworkers drag me along to bars and nightclubs because I was convinced that that’s what those places were for. But I suppose I was not as well cut out to be a hunter as some are . . . ”

That was precisely what a little man, scowling as he leaned against the radiator in the back of the room, was thinking. For Philippe Saint-Jean, like Denis Benitez and Yves Lehaleur, this was also the first session, and he was not at all certain that there would be a second one. To justify his presence there he had come up with several clever alibis, and he was almost disappointed when no one was interested in hearing them. He would have pleaded intellectual curiosity, he’d gotten wind of these mysterious secret meetings from his small circle of fellow thinkers. Even so, he had nearly turned around and left when he was at the door to the room for fear of exposing himself to others’ gazes: he was well known. Or at least so he thought, adding with a hint of modesty: he was
relatively
well known.

After his brilliant studies at university, he had obtained a PhD in sociology, then he’d ventured into ethnological research. His byline appeared frequently first in professional journals then in national dailies, but it was when he published his first book—
The Memory-Mirror, or the Dream of a Collective Consciousness—
that he carved out an excellent position for himself in the milieu of intellectuals. Judging from the number of laudatory reviews, he had graduated mysteriously from the rank of a sociologist to that of a
philosopher.
And what was more, he was an accessible philosopher, the kind a mainstream audience could understand, which meant he was a regular guest on literary forums or panel discussions requiring a seal of moral legitimacy or the type of palaver that even the lowest common denominator would be able to make sense of.

For the time being, he was trying to make sense of Denis Benitez’s confession, as someone who knows how to read into the speech of those who do not know how to speak. Philippe was impressed by the completely spontaneous way the fellow had of putting his solitude down to a conspiracy on the part of a rival clan. But Denis was adamant, he was sincere, at a complete loss, yet very rigorous as he enumerated the stages of his gradual exclusion from the realm of universal female desire.

“Then I began to rely on the people around me. I could bank on the simple notion that everyone must have a female friend who needs a companion, since I was her male equivalent.”

So Denis had publicized the erring ways of his celibacy, and he turned to his friends, who thought it might be amusing to make one couple out of two lonely hearts. And while he had not forgotten a single one of the women he met at their arranged dinner parties, what he remembered above all were the awkward moments when he could see he had failed the test, before they’d even started on dessert. There’d been the divorcée who, three days earlier,
had just met someone.
There’d been the embassy secretary, who’d come halfway round the world, determined to go back there
for good.
And the medical assistant, whose ex had just called to make up, now that she’d finally gotten over her broken heart.

As he listened, Yves Lehaleur was also wondering about this series of unfortunate coincidences, but he didn’t doubt them: he was a firm believer in adversity. Philippe Saint-Jean, on the other hand, saw them as so much equivocation on the part of a Manichean mind that lapsed on occasion into misogyny. Was such an image of The Woman really necessary in order to imagine a coalition of all of them?

“In the months that followed, I re-evaluated my selection criteria. I didn’t have the impression I was leaning toward a certain type of women, but I was ready to extend the field of possibilities, to waive any distinction on the grounds of age, looks, culture, social class or skin color. In fact, I was ready to envisage
all
women, absolutely all of them, but it still wasn’t enough.”

Given the utter absence of women in his life, Denis would turn around to look at any skirt that walked by, and this had become a habitual reflex, a pretext to find multiple opportunities to make himself miserable. Philippe Saint-Jean knew that there was no need to have read the Romantics or the behavioralists, it was simply a matter of common sense: the more one desires, the more the object of desire recedes; the first lesson you teach any languishing adolescent. The guy at the blackboard was making the fundamental error of trying to pin a specific nature on women, to lump them all into one category and view them as symmetrical at best and contrary at worst. So Philippe was waiting for Denis to stop blaming his bad fortune and start questioning his own behavior.

“The problem was with me,
that
I could see, but what was the problem? Had I changed so radically once I passed thirty?”

He had been careful to keep in shape, to watch his weight and his appearance, and only rarely did he not find time to run or swim, or to ride around Paris on his bike. Moreover, he asked the chef at the brasserie to cook up some healthy meals for him. It had even become a joke with the entire staff,
Denis and his fussy food
—fish, vegetables, tea, and it wasn’t just some dietary obsession but a real preference. If anything, he had become more handsome with the years, and would reach his prime at the age of fifty.

“Had I become so boring that there wasn’t a single woman crazy enough to spend an evening or a night or a lifetime by my side?”

It must be that the rites of seduction had changed over time and he had not noticed. There was no shame anymore in
putting yourself on the market
, promoting yourself like a product, a consumer good, dependable, and available. Once he’d summed up his basic self in a few clicks, he signed up with a few online dating sites, eager to try this new means of communication that only a year earlier had seemed pathetic. He hid nothing, did not invent any qualities he did not have, and he eventually met a few candidates who had been drawn to his scrupulously defined profile.

Philippe Saint-Jean suspected that another series of fiascos lay ahead; if the fellow had only known how to see them coming, he could have spared himself many a lonely moment.

“They’d seen my photo, they knew about my job, how much I earn, whether I believe in God or not, whether I was up for a
long-term relationship
or not: how could there be any nasty surprises?”

While Yves Lehaleur was still wondering why the man seemed to labor under such a strange curse, Philippe Saint-Jean saw beyond the specific case to the syndrome of a more universal disarray among men. It had even become the bread and butter of a few essayists he knew: rampant cynicism affected even love relationships, modern men had lost their bearings, women had legitimately reclaimed their rights after millennia of servitude. What Philippe found fascinating about Denis Benitez’s account was the totally indecent way he described his ordeal, as if he were some veritable Christ figure on the path of the cross, already doomed to be crucified.

“One evening when I felt I’d really touched bottom I called all my exes one after the other.”

It was a ludicrous effort, bound to fail, nothing short of a bad joke, and yet he took out his old notebook and picked up the receiver, and didn’t miss out a single one of the girls he’d slept with. After all, he and Véronique had split on good terms. And Hélène must have forgotten about their quarrels by now. Mona had surely forgiven him. Maybe Nadège wasn’t married after all, or maybe she was already bored. Not to mention a few more, further back in time but who, with a bit of luck, might be going through the same rough patch as he was. In hopes of a minor miracle, he’d come up with a very simple opening line:
Hey, it’s Denis, Denis Benitez, remember me?
And he hoped to conclude with:
Hey, why don’t you come have lunch one day at my brasserie?
Alas, not a single one took him up on his offer, and some of them explained why, not without irony. Ever since that sad visit to the land of his lost loves—who were determined to remain lost—his speculations about women had become charged with anger and bitterness.