The Thursday Night Men (20 page)

“I still don’t know if I’m a whore with a certain talent for ceramics, or a ceramist who’ll be a whore until the day she can live from her art.”

While Yves loved these three women for who they were, he loved Maud for who she was not. Right from the start she had made it clear to him that she was not a prostitute but an
escort,
and she claimed that she herself chose the men to whom she dispensed her favors, never the contrary. She thought of herself as high-class, a thoroughbred, a geisha, the noble fringe of whoredom. To hear her, you’d think she spent her days in luxury hotels, surrounded by the great and good who paid dearly for her company. Did she herself believe it, or was it enough for her to convince others of it? Maud was a counterfeiter. What a joy it was to see her arrive in her Chanel uniform, with her Dior glasses and a Jack Russell under her arm—the poor beast was used to waiting patiently on a rug in a corner while his mistress purveyed her services. Maud wore just enough makeup to look her best, and relied on a year-round suntan that was hardly the result of sun in the Seychelles, but rather that of exorbitantly expensive sessions on a sun-bed. She would sit sideways on the sofa, legs crossed, sipping a cup of Darjeeling with a spot of milk, always poured afterwards, not before, then she would tell him some story about a
mission
overseas that was virtually a state secret. Yves found her lack of self-knowledge touching: did it require the candor of an adolescent to see oneself as a courtesan in the new millennium? What was Maud’s backstory, to have reached this point? Perhaps it was nothing more than a summer spent on a yacht, with a millionaire persuading her to satisfy his whims; a summer that had lasted long enough for her to be introduced to other millionaires determined to have a taste of her youth. At the end of that summer, obviously unable to maintain the lifestyle, she had adopted Maud’s persona, never to leave it again.

Whatever you do, don’t get undressed!
ordered Yves before taking her standing up, in her suit and lace stockings. Oh, how talented Maud was at appearing respectable. Mannerisms of a dowager, a
demi-mondaine
’s erudition, the learned phrasing of a Lady Bountiful. Through her, Yves was fucking the schoolteacher, the lady of the manor, the wife of the mayor or the banker, not to mention all his inaccessible window clients in posh neighborhoods. How many Mauds had he visited dressed in his overalls, burdened with fanlights and soundproofing material? Almost all of them had offered him a beer and called him a
technician
to avoid using the word
worker
. He was amused by the way they would say
This is for you
as they slipped a bill into the hand of the laboring man. Wrapped in silks, with a whiff of Guerlain, rarely haughty but just a bit too affable. Maud incarnated them all. Enough to cure him most delightfully of his class complex.

Unable to find a rational explanation for the intruder’s presence, Denis was forced to reconsider his own mental health. After all, as he had never so much as touched or even grazed Marie-Jeanne Pereyres accidentally, he had no proof of her physical existence. She had appeared when he was in the depths of his depression: perhaps she was some emanation of his unconscious, sapped as it had been by five years of frustration? Plagued by a syndrome of delirium, his troubled mind had fabricated the obsessive image of a desire: Marie-Jeanne Pereyres did not exist. Had he been given more effective medication, she would never have materialized.

A grave symptom like this must have an entry in the big book of psychiatry, but there was still one reason to doubt the entire hypothesis of a hallucination. If Marie-Jeanne Pereyres was no more than a pathological projection, why had he subjected himself to such a lackluster fantasy? Why the stringy hair, the faint twist to her mouth, the boy-scout knee-high socks? Why not a figment of his dreams, a mirage of a woman, born of a thousand unfulfilled desires? He had been hoping for so long, he had sought her in his bed on waking, so many times he thought he had seen her in a crowd, had dressed and undressed her endlessly: that being the case, why had he shown so little imagination in his mental fabrication? If his projection had been one of dreamlike perfection, Denis would not even have tried to cure himself of it. On the contrary, in his madness he would have set up house with her and closed the door on the doctors and their pathetic therapies, to live in endless happiness, in love with an illusion—but then, weren’t all men in love with an illusion?

No, nothing seemed to confirm the hypothesis of a projection. Unless there were a way to unearth an even deeper and more troubling truth in that projection. And what if, instead of representing the woman for whom he had waited for so long, Marie-Jeanne Pereyres was the shadow side of Denis Benitez, his obscure double? The reflection of his ego, more accomplished or more hideous, the side one does not dare to confront but which, one day, will prevail, either to hear our grievances, or announce a tragic fate. Denis could see his painful dialectic with the intruder as a permanent debate with himself, the perfect utterance of his desires to a hypothetical
Other.
But even there, why did he chose someone like Marie-Jeanne Pereyres to be a mirror to his soul? How could he imagine
her
as his malevolent twin? It was enough to dissuade you from the temptation of an alter ego! Why wear himself out trying to express his hidden truth to this vision in a nightgown, sprawled lopsidedly on a threadbare sofa? Even the most uninspired psychotic could do better.

He might as well face the facts: nothing confirmed to Denis the certainty of his own mental dysfunctioning. Besides, the moment he put on his waiter’s apron, he forgot the intruder’s very existence, and he lost himself in the deadening, incessant hum of the restaurant, the demands of a hundred patrons, all in a hurry, fussy, lonely, authoritarian or stingy: how could you stay on course in such an ocean of nervous commotion without seeing it as irrefutable proof of sound mental health? When a hundred times a day you had to reply to the question
Can I have green beans instead of rice?
and never tell anyone to go fuck themselves: was this not the sign of supremely solid nerves?

But for all that, Marie-Jeanne Pereyres remained one of those inexplicable phenomena that drive the most rational individual to venture into the tenebrous zones of the paranormal. Ever since she had made her appearance, Denis had revised downwards all his pragmatic certainties. No one liked to see strange manifestations appear suddenly in their life, yet one could not help but imagine the intruder as some sort of supernatural presence entering the physical world in the form of an ectoplasm, or even a phantom come to inhabit the mortal coil of a certain Marie-Jeanne Pereyres in order to carry out some obscure design. Several new hypotheses arose: if the intruder had moved into his house with no intention of leaving, could it be that the place of habitation was much more important than the tenant? Perhaps she was a wandering soul who had come to haunt the space where she had once experienced some dramatic event. If this were the case, it was pointless to hope he could get rid of her unless he set fire to the furniture, or waited until the ghost found her own deliverance. Unless the intruder was one of those phantoms animated by kindly intentions, whose mission was to bring a message from the beyond to a human in distress. A plausible premise, but then, for Christ’s sake, what was the message?

According to popular wisdom,
the best moment with a prostitute is when you’re walking up the stairs together
. Kris liked to turn the assertion the other way around: nothing could rival that short minute she spent climbing the two floors up to Lehaleur’s place. An appointment at her
big-hearted client’s
meant she was in for a calm, sincere moment, all simplicity, no haggling or struggling. When she arrived at his place she could make herself at home as if she were an old friend, she could sprawl on the sofa, drink from the glass he handed to her, and take off her shoes—
I spend my days in a taxi and yet my feet ache like some old streetwalker’s.
Then they would have dinner together like an old married couple, and according to their ritual Yves would tell her his latest experiences with her colleagues. She would listen, occasionally allowing herself to comment, but she wouldn’t let her anger show:
I cannot stand the way you talk to me about them, I’m discovering an unfamiliar feeling that frightens me, a whore doesn’t have the right to be jealous, it’s absurd.
After a tender night in his arms, Kris’s anger would flare again in the morning when she saw the money tucked on a corner of the table.

“I make so many others pay. Why should I make you?”

“You have to earn a living.”

“Don’t I have the right to make a gesture? To use my free will? Will I only ever be a whore for you?”

Yves preferred not to see the signs of her attachment, her questions that were too direct, her confessions—
You can kiss me on the mouth if you want, but if you do, then you mustn’t kiss anyone else.
While he had a great deal of respect for her, he did not love her enough not to pay her. Why take the risk of changing the slightest component of their equation, of endangering the fragile balance obtained through a transaction? The pecuniary aspect, far from seeming sordid to him, guaranteed both pleasure and detachment. Yves paid a prostitute with the same fervor that a prostitute put into being a prostitute. And it could have gone on like that for a long time had Kris not fallen into a trap that he had, involuntarily, set for her. From the moment they met, she had fought against any sort of feeling, seeking to repress him no matter what, to file him away, along with the others, in the clan of the weak or the wily. In spite of her best efforts, it was impossible to knock him out, to make him cry or beg; impossible to reduce him to a vice or a plea or a feeling of inferiority; impossible to despise him for his brutality, familiarity, or meanness; impossible to scorn him for his male arrogance; impossible to ridicule him for his childish whining; impossible to lead him around by his dick. Kris had been undefeated up until now, but this was one battle she had lost. Henceforth, whenever she felt those hands all over her body, whenever she had to tolerate male members in her every orifice, when evening came around it wasn’t an urgent need to take her body back for herself that she felt, but rather rush headlong into Lehaleur’s arms. You could have fooled her: the bastard looked like the companion of a lifetime.

The more he saw her taking unexpected liberties, priding herself on a legitimacy she’d acquired who knows how, or claiming her status as initiator, the more Yves wondered whether their relationship ought to continue. He had been waiting for that evening to talk to her about it; he was concerned, wanted to understand what was upsetting her, and perhaps hoped they’d be able to go back to their good old routine. He did not have time to broach the subject. She did it for him.

Lehaleur, I have to talk to you.

She felt tired and vulnerable, lost in a way she’d never been since she’d started in this profession.

I have to try and make some sense of all this. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks already . . . It’s gotten too difficult . . .

Yves was sorry he hadn’t spoken up first.

I’m not independent enough to go on by myself . . .

Her speech was already disjointed, when she began to describe in detail her house in Ville-d’Avray, at the edge of the forest. Well-maintained, quiet.

But it’s been way too big for me since my parents moved to the South.

What came next was unbearable.

No one has ever taken care of me the way you do here . . . We could make a good team, you and I . . . I earn a lot, you know . . . You wouldn’t have to work so hard anymore . . .

And suddenly, silence.

Yves was wearing the smile of the idiot who refuses to understand. Everything he had just heard reminded him of the failure of his previous life: talk about a roof, money, a couple, but coming from Kris, those words suggested another word.

“I must not be hearing right. You’re asking me to play the pimp?”

“Why do you go and use a word like that? I need a man to think about when I leave for work, I need to know he’ll be there in the evening, that he’ll heal my wounds, the ones you can see and all the others too.”

What sin had he committed to find himself confronted with such a loathsome offer? Even to suggest such a corrupted image of happiness showed she had failed, totally, to grasp who he was. Something was pursuing him, choking him, making him feel completely nauseous, and he had to tear whatever it was to pieces.

“I have a question for you, Kris. Is there something shameful about going with prostitutes?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, sooner or later, you come up against the question of whether it is moral to pay for as many girls as I have. Do I even have the right to resort to women like you? A lot of people would say I’m a stupid jerk. They might see it as the ancestral domination of a man over a woman’s body, the centuries-old need to turn her into a piece of merchandise. There are other times when I don’t feel guilty at all: these women who sell me their bodies—or at least the ones I want to see again—don’t seem to be throwing away one ounce of their dignity. I treat them with a respect that they give me in return, and I don’t judge them for choosing to put a price on their charms. But no matter what, I will never be at peace with my conscience, and there will never be an answer to these moral issues, they’re as old as the world.”

“What are you driving at?”

“I can try and understand what’s going on in the mind of a gangster or a murderer or a mercenary. Maybe I could get interested in the case of a psychopath or someone who’s mentally ill. I can try and go beyond my own taboos to understand another person’s way of thinking, even if it’s hideous. But if you put me next to a pimp or a rapist or a man who beats his wife, it makes me ashamed to belong to the male tribe. Guys who exploit or mistreat a woman’s body have forfeited any right to call themselves men: they’re beasts. The hatred I feel toward men like that is so strong it could turn me into the worst kind of torturer. And you are prepared to offer me such an abject arrangement?”