The Thursday Night Men (21 page)

Kris stared at him, speechless.

“I have just understood why they sometimes call a brothel a house of tolerance: whores will tolerate anything.”

She still said nothing.

“You have wounded me in my dignity as a man this evening. And I’m afraid I will never forgive you.”

“I hope you don’t mind, the concierge slid the mail under the door so I put it on the little console.”

Marie-Jeanne fell silent, fearful she had already said or done too much. Denis was looking at her piercingly, ready to fight, praying he could be ruthless. This evening he felt strong enough to have the ghost’s hide.

“Have you already lived here?”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself: were you already acquainted with this apartment before I made the disastrous decision to let you come in?”

“No, never. I barely even knew your neighborhood.”

“Did you suffer here, in another life? I’m ready to believe anything I hear.”

“Suffered? In another life? Now what have you gotten into your head?”

“Answer!”

“Never in this life, nor in any other. Although, in this life, you’re not exactly easy all the time.”

“Do you know what a poltergeist is?”

“No.”

“And a perispirit?”

“A what?”

“It’s the second body which the soul of a dead person inhabits.”

“I have the sneaking suspicion you’ve been reading the dictionary.”

“Do you like your mortal coil? Do you feel good in it?”

Marie-Jeanne looked down from her torso to her feet, put her hands around her waist, and lifted up her nightgown to inspect her calves, no longer hidden because her socks had fallen down around her ankles.

“Yeah, it’s okay.”

“You don’t leave a single trace anywhere in this house—not a crumb, not a shred of tissue, not a hair in the tub, it isn’t human, especially for a woman.”

“Sometimes I envy you, Denis. You live in this magical world where the most ludicrous details become fascinating.”

“Do you eat? Do you wash? Do you even belong to the material world?”

“Make up your mind. As a rule, you reproach me for being too present and too heavy, and you reproach me for having a body.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m going to tell you: you don’t exist. You are a projection of my sick mind.”

“A projection? God, what wouldn’t I give to be some man’s projection! A fantastical creature, an ideal, with just that little bit of
fatale
to hint at perfection . . . Especially as whatever your projection is, it must be really hot.”

“Unless you’re just some ordinary ghost, the kind you find in legends, rumors, old houses and country inns. I prefer the second hypothesis by far. You correspond totally to the way I imagine an ectoplasm. An invasive presence that has no reality; you’re just haunting me.”

Marie-Jeanne suddenly felt powerless in the presence of so much fantasizing.

“Alas, I am not pure spirit, but a creature made of flesh who needs her two thousand calories a day and often goes well over that. I like to take hot foot baths at the end of the day, I add coarse salt to the tub and I don’t really know what good it does, but my mother used to do it so I do it too, otherwise I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. I sleep in a white cotton nightgown that has almost the same consistency as linen; I can’t do without it, ever since that morning when I went to get the mail the minute I got out of bed and a neighbor said to me, ‘It looks nice on you, that little summer dress.’ I’ve got cellulite, not too much for my age, but I also have a bit of a spare tire on my stomach that seems to have settled there, sometimes I think about having liposuction but never in earnest. I do my laundry on Thursdays so that I can iron on Friday, but when the weather’s really humid I do the laundry on Wednesday so it has time to dry. I’ve had heartburn forever, I always have a blister pack of Maalox on me, and if I drink champagne I take two ahead of time. Apparently I snore when I’ve been drinking but I refuse to believe it. Another detail for when I’ve been drinking: I don’t have the strength to brush my teeth, and I go straight to bed and collapse. I hate cutting my toenails, I have to get into this ridiculous position, and all too often I wait for my tights to start running at my big toe, it’s not very feminine but that’s just the way it is. I remember going for a three-day hike once where I didn’t wash, and I have this nice memory of my sour smell. When I dye my hair with henna, I lock myself in the bathroom with a plastic bag on my head to wait for it to take. I wax my legs. I have a pin in my left knee. My stomach rumbles at noon sharp, especially if I’m on the bus. I know how to make spring rolls like a real little Vietnamese woman. It may not look like much but it’s not that easy, you have to get all the soybeans going in the same direction, then you sprinkle them with chopped mint, grated carrot, and angel hair, and you put the shrimp in an S, but the hardest thing is to roll it all tight with the corners tucked in so that the roll stays sealed. To get the knack, you need a lot of experience of the real world, of everyday life, of the physical realities that govern our little lives here on earth, you can’t live in some parallel world full of fairies and ghosts.”

A creature made of flesh,
she had said.

Denis had doubted her, and doubted her still, and an irrepressible impulse compelled him to find out once and for all.

Marie-Jeanne was sitting on the arm of the sofa, her hands tucked between her legs, waiting defiantly for whatever came next.

He wondered if this was the only way he could find out.

She would not help him: he would have to find the proof his faith required.

But wasn’t that proof going to cost him more than his doubts did? Did he have the nerve to risk seeing Marie-Jeanne Pereyres as anything but a dream, an essence, a specter—to see her, quite simply, as a woman, here and now?

She would not help him. Perhaps he still saw her as a strange body.

Denis had forgotten that silence.

She smiled at him, like a friend. She found him touching, the way she found all men touching when they were prisoners of themselves.

He held out his hand to her.

The Anatra suite in the Watu Hotel, on the Nusa Dua peninsula in Indonesia, had a 360° panoramic view of the ocean. The suite was actually a villa, set apart from the others on the top of a hill, made of little ochre walls and glass partitions that flooded the three thousand square feet with light. The infinity edge swimming pool skimmed the southern façade, extending into an enclave designed to cool the bedroom, where an immense bed, right on the floor, was level with the water. Spare furnishings in black wood created an illusion of separate rooms—living room, study, open-air dining room. Tall exotic plants stood out against the empty space, the indoor ornamental pond, and the terrace. On the northern façade, beyond the flower garden, a cubic construction of openwork wooden slats did not seem to have any particular purpose; it could be a play area for children, or a canopy battered by sun and rain, or even a purely decorative modern sculpture. A narrow path of teak planks led down a gentle slope to the main building of the hotel and the everyday bustle of tourists and servants. From there, one had access to a white sand beach covered in deck chairs, parasols, changing cabins, and bars. The waves seemed gentle as they came to die at swimmers’ feet, but in the distance a violent, continuous surf broke against the coral reef. The temperature for the month of June, still tolerable for a Western tourist, was 86 degrees, and the humidity 77%, and this would vary little until sunset, at five in the afternoon.

Philippe Saint-Jean left the villa as little as possible and used the phone to order his meals, which he took most often on the terrace, facing the endless blueness. Ever since his arrival in paradise, he had been trying to feel at home—mostly in vain, for he was convinced he had become part of the furniture, not very useful, not even matching. The worst ordeal, by far, had been learning to dress lightly. To free himself of the weight of cloth. To let go of his
petit Parisien
get-up in order to survive in the tropics. Into the wardrobe went the tweed, velvet, and plaid. Philippe had to uncover himself, and uncovering oneself always entailed surprises, as the philosopher in him was well positioned to know. How far back did he have to go to find his last confrontation with his own nudity, other than in the semi-darkness of the bed or the narrow confines of a bathroom? Since he viewed aging merely from the perspective of the mind, and he viewed his mind as his primary asset in the charm department, for fifteen whole years he had forgotten his body. Now, he was thousands of miles from home, there for all to see in the harsh light of the sun, and the naked truth was glaringly obvious: folds, sagging, gray skin, liver spots, flabby muscles, spare tires.

How could he have so ignored his own body? Why had he treated his old bones as little more than a vehicle? He had celebrated
the living
with so much eloquence, and now he was obliged to remind himself at last that he was made of flesh and bones. So what if he had always admired those wrinkled faces that had been through so much, with their slow, bent, infinitely touching bodies: his own reflection now showed him nothing but negligence. So what if he had always tolerated other people’s physical disparities and imperfections: now he pinched his skin the way one inspects an overripe fruit.

When she was unable to find anything in Philippe’s wardrobe suitable for minimal coverage in ninety degrees in the shade, Mia raided the trendy boutiques: short-sleeved shirts in Egyptian cotton, brand-name Bermuda shorts, leather sandals, boxer short swimming trunks, and a light linen jacket for the evening. No sooner had they arrived than she was already caught up in work, so she said,
Enjoy your time, darling.
He replied,
That’s the worst thing you could ask of me.
Enjoy? It was a verb he despised, as he despised any injunction to pursue pleasure. And yet, he had harnessed himself to the task under cover of an entirely new experience: he would seek out the subtle sensations linked solely to the pleasure of existing. His living organism, back in its original bath, the sea. Once again he would be a naked aquatic creature, his skin wearing nothing but a faint tan; he would swim among his fellow fish. He would disregard his desires, fears, and questionings, to attain the age-old dream of the ancient Greeks: that point of equilibrium and harmony. He would find humility among the elements once again, he would be satisfied with the horizon without seeking beyond it, he would venerate the sun as the atheist’s only god.

But to attain that old dream, he would have needed the courage to confront the infinitesimality of his being, to consider himself as a simple organic entity, infinitely fragile, emptied of thought, gregarious. He would have had to go against his nature, cease to invest himself, and accept the feeling it induced; he would have to restrain his mental machine until he found it ridiculous and vain. Leave aside the fear that nothing had any meaning. Forget everything and nothing, to have the physical experience of everything and nothing. Accept that the supreme stage of consciousness consisted in denying one’s consciousness.

But how could he stop being Philippe Saint-Jean, even for one hour? Where could he find the necessary detachment to become relative to his own self? From the moment he became stuck in Bali, the good old Cartesian
I think therefore I am
had been taking on an entirely new meaning. In the early morning, once Mia had left to join her team, he began to wonder how he would spend his day and, feeling guilty that he had no idea, he clung to one principle:
I think therefore I do not “enjoy” and I am content merely to resist.
At the end of the morning, after a quick perusal of the international press, he dipped up to mid-thigh in the blue water in hope of stimulating his entire body and finding an entirely new energy to draw on. As a rule, one lap around the pool was enough:
I think therefore I paddle joylessly around a private swimming pool.
At the end of the afternoon, and there was no glory in it, he would compile the list of the day’s activities prior to Mia’s return, for she would be providing him with the detailed narration of an infinity of minor events. And then he would feel just that tiny bit more excluded:
I think therefore I exist as a thinker in a world which often discourages such individuals.
Late at night, when she went off to sleep, he would at last, on the terrace, have a taste of suspended time and of the spindrift carried by the winds.
I think therefore the life of ideas is my only rampart against insignificance.

He found himself stuck at present in a picture postcard décor, and that was just too much for someone who, whenever he received a postcard, never looked at the picture but only read the text; an unconscious mechanism which spoke volumes about both his need for self-expression and his lack of interest in places and landscapes, even at the other end of the world.

And so it was there, on a deck chair in the antipodes, in his Bermuda shorts, that he could see as clearly as a furrow drawn in the sand what the rest of his life would be like. He would grow old in Paris to the rhythm of the seasons, increasingly out of his depth in the speed and ferociousness of his beloved city. And that is where he would die, because that was his only natural element. Climbing the three flights of stairs to his apartment would become more and more trying, but he would not move house for fear of losing the waves, the vibrations, the fluids, the phantoms that had been accumulating there from the very first day. And as long as possible he would continue to orbit around a concept, until he had the illusion he had been all the way around it. When he went out on his walks, wherever he happened to end up, he would always linger in a bistro at the bar, sipping his espresso, jotting something down in his notebook, and eyeing a passing skirt. Sooner or later he would be awarded a chair among his peers in some academy. With his little following of exegetes, who would be quick to deep-freeze his memory before he had even died, he would indulge in a few whims, a few outbursts. And one fine morning, with a peaceful expression on his face, he would be placed in a coffin in a good old tweed jacket, ready for that final journey whose destination he had questioned so often.