The Thursday Night Men (25 page)

So what, said Philippe’s expression.

“He said that ejaculating inside a girl was
reductive
. That was the term he used.”

“Reductive?”

“He wasn’t the only one. Corrado, the one before Ronnie, used to do it, too. But you’re fairly old school in that respect.”

“Did you all learn how to fuck in front of the Saturday night porn flick?”

Philippe could quite easily conceive what might be
reductive
about the philosophical message of a Schopenhauer or a Heidegger, but what on earth could an English pop music bass player mean by the same word when referring to his orgasm? Philippe had been in for other surprises too as the months went by, which caused him to question many of his certainties regarding his sexual practices, and left him feeling moralistic at times and completely square at others. The day Mia declared she had no objection to sodomy he had almost been disappointed. What for him might be a gift of supreme intimacy was for Mia nothing more than a jolly variation on everyday coitus.

Instead of bringing them closer, this return to the alcove merely widened the gap between them. They would not get any more sleep than on the previous nights.

“I thought I was open-minded enough to respect your values, but I just can’t. You are young, you are beautiful, you are living a dream life, but you represent a certain concept of decadence that I’ve been trying to describe in my work. I cannot contradict myself to such a degree. I thought I’d be able to disregard your lifestyle, your friends, I thought I could be patient and help you to avoid a few pitfalls, but I haven’t got the strength anymore. I remember that afternoon when we were walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg and you were trembling from the cold, you were hardly wearing a thing. It began to rain so I put my coat over your shoulders—sure, it was a romantic sort of gesture, but the moment seemed to call for it. You pouted and made a face, then you pushed me away and exclaimed,
You don’t actually believe I’m going to wear your old overcoat?
I hadn’t realized how much your life revolves around what other people think. You live off their regard, and because of it and for it, and you would die without it.”

It was no longer a time for confrontation but for cold realization, so Mia let him finish without protesting, without even feeling hurt. Now that she was relieved of the tension that had been building for several days, she waited for her turn to voice her conclusions.

“You don’t live among your contemporaries any more than I do, and you have no idea who your
man in the street
is, the one you refer to so often. You bend reality so that it fits your ideas and not the other way around, and that’s your brand of secondary rationalization. You’re in love with your own reasoning, and what you call real has no reality whatsoever. You’re part psychologist, part philosopher, part sociologist, and the role you like best of all is that of prophet, because you dream of predicting a global catastrophe and then watching it come. You’d die along with everyone else but at least you’d take with you the satisfaction of having foreseen what was invisible to the rest of us.”

They sat in silence for a long time, relieved it had taken only a few words to sum up everything that had been brewing over the last few days.

“Only people who truly love one another can ordain when they want the outside world to cease to exist,” he added. “We can’t.”

“You’re right, we can’t.”

Two planets located light years from each other had met, and according to astral logic, the instant of their meeting should end in an eclipse. In the very near future, one of them would cause the other’s light to vanish.

A new silence, no doubt their last, left them motionless, their expressions lost in the darkness.

But beneath that silence was the rumbling of an incipient tumult, heavy with telluric forces, rousing fauna and flora, a rumbling that human beings could not yet detect. Mia and Philippe thought they were hearing the final murmurs of their lost idyll. They were both mistaken. The threat was very real indeed.

Yves had insisted Sylvie postpone an appointment with another client to spend the afternoon with him. He dreaded some sort of unpleasant disruption but nothing came to disturb their delightful encounter, a ritual they had perfected over the months, and which obtained the desired results. After they made love, Sylvie wrapped her hips in a beige silk shawl, like a loincloth, which emphasized her swaying curves as she walked by. She wandered around the apartment looking to see what had changed, then came back and lay down in a pose worthy of one of Maillol’s models and held her hand out toward a plate of plump pears, which she then savored, allowing the juice to pearl at the corner of her lips. Typically, she interrupted their long silences to say something out of the blue:
What a pity you can’t find any of those winter pears after April.
Or:
I really wish I liked reading.
But that Saturday, once she had assumed her odalisque pose, Sylvie asked, “Would you still fancy me if I were thin?”

Yves joined her on the bed to knead her body and reassure her of her beauty. Then he stretched out next to her and closed his eyes, nestling peacefully against her curves. She roused him from his reverie by grabbing hold of his cock, wanking him with great delicacy, and starting up a conversation to see how long he would be able to stay with her.

“What will you do when you run out of money to pay for girls?”

“ . . . I don’t know. That day is drawing near . . . ”

“It won’t take you long to find yourself a wife.”

“I’ve become . . . become . . . hard . . . to please.”

“You’d be the perfect little hubby!”

Sylvie did not know that her client had come very near to fulfilling that destiny. Yves almost muttered a few words about his former life, but it was too late by then to mutter anything.

“You’d treat her well, you’d surprise her all the time, and I’m sure you’d never cheat on her.”

“I . . . I . . . uh . . . ”

As the desired effect of her hand movement was imminent, she stopped; he tore the wrapper off a condom with his teeth, then penetrated her urgently, which caused her to burst out laughing.

At the end of the afternoon, fresh and dressed again from head to toe, she left the apartment, saying, “If one day you find your sweetheart, try to stay in touch all the same. We’ll go to tearooms
together.”

He went back to bed and buried himself in the sheets to prolong the languor for a moment. That evening he would go have dinner at Denis’s brasserie, the guy had invited him so often. Between Agnieszka’s tears and Céline’s ramblings, Yves had not attended the previous Thursday session, and the ludicrous idea that he might have missed out on a testimony of major significance did cross his mind. He owed it to himself to respect his commitment to the Thursday meeting for as long as his journey through the land of streetwalkers lasted. On that day in the future that Sylvie had just mentioned, he would once again be a man like any other, but he’d be reconciled with himself, enriched by everything these women had brought to him.

He slung his leather jacket over his shoulders, and with his helmet in his hand he left his apartment, then went through the glass door into the hall, failing to notice a figure seated on the three steps leading down into the garage.

Suddenly he felt someone grab him by the collar, pull him backwards and fling him to the ground.

The aggressor knelt with all his weight on Yves’s torso, taking his breath away. With a violent burst of threats and insults he hammered his face until the blood was spurting from his mouth.

Then he stood up, spat on Yves, kicked him one last time in the ribs and, before leaving the premises, forbade him ever to see his wife again.

They were sleeping in the same bed, sharing their sustenance, communing in good faith. And yet nothing enabled Denis to penetrate the eternal mystery of an intruder who was determined to remain an intruder, nor that of her imminent departure. Tired of resisting, he had to resume his exhausting labors of speculation, now tinged with fear: Marie-Jeanne was no angel from heaven, but most certainly the exact opposite: a succubus assigned to the forces of evil.

Denis had been tempted to believe there was a magnanimous God who would reward his creatures after he’d subjected them to a trial. If someone like Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had been sent to him, then no doubt it was so that she would be taken from him again, sooner or later.

And only the devil in person was known to give human beings the very thing they were most in need of, only to confiscate it so that they could buy their souls for next to nothing.

Yves spent the evening in the emergency room, knocked out by powerful analgesics. As soon as she got his message Sylvie came to see him, her face swollen with shame and sadness.

“Some little fucker went berserk and told me not to see you anymore.”

“It was a mistake.”

“You mean I got my face smashed in by mistake?”

“He thought you were Grégoire.”

“ . . . Who thought I was who?”

“The one who hit you was my guy. He may be a filthy bastard, a miserable wretch, a tool, and the cause of all my woe, but he’s mine.”

Yves just looked at her.

“He went through my diary and saw,
2:00
p.m.
Grégoire, his place.
But in the meantime you called and I postponed my appointment. The bastard followed me to your place thinking it was Grégoire’s.”

Yves was then treated to the detailed account of a modern tragedy which, although it had its charge of intensity, was far less tangible than the pain in his ribs that made it impossible to breathe.

“Grégoire is my dietician client who’s ashamed he fell madly in love with the only woman who isn’t begging him to show her how to lose weight. My Greg goes crazy at the thought I’m seeing other clients. He wants me all to himself, but up until now he’s always been afraid everyone will laugh at him.”

Yves hesitated to let her go on; he refused to get caught, even fortuitously, between a small-time pimp and a guy who was building a global business on the back of a medical practice. Yves’s only crime in the story had been to buy an assortment of frosted cream puffs to keep Sylvie happy.

“And just lately Grégoire made a decision . . . ”

To live his love for her out in the open, in spite of his fear of being seen arm-in-arm with a living counter-publicity. Even if it meant he’d become the prey of living room psychoanalysts.

“A sort of coming out, basically. Display in public his penchant for voluptuous women.
I’m sleeping with a Rubens and you can just lump it.
”

Dazed with pain, Yves tried to feel sorry for the man’s inner turmoil. While the pimp might be a real piece of shit, he nevertheless belonged to a well-known prototype and, in spite of his boundless scorn, Yves could easily imagine the guy’s pathetic thought process. Grégoire, on the other hand, who dreaded being seen with a woman not because she was a prostitute but because she was fat, seemed to be the exemplar of a decadent era where it was not morality that decreed what was taboo or forbidden, but the imperatives of profit and the universal fear of media derision.

“And my pimp found out. He’s such a coward but he wanted to play tough guy. And it landed on you.”

Yves closed his eyes for a moment, just long enough to wonder what perverse God was hounding him like this. He had a sudden urge to scream and only just stopped himself, then felt tears of fatigue welling up. At around one o’clock in the morning they let him leave, with bandages on his face and a strap around his thorax. Sylvie had waited until the last minute to beg him not to file a complaint.

“He’s terrified that he might get called in. He’s been carrying this little suspended sentence, and if they send him down they’ll give him a harder time than anyone, his nerves won’t take it. What would become of him without me? He’s too dumb. I’ll do whatever you like, I’ll come as soon as you call. I’ll obey.”

Yves went home in a cab, then with one hand on his ribs he walked painfully across the hall of his building, like the little old man he would be someday. He lay down but could not sleep, hindered by the pain that was just waiting to flare up, and by the memory of the attack, which would haunt him for several days to come. To dodge these thoughts he dreamt about that other Lehaleur, the one he might have become if, once upon a time, his betrothed had not cheated on him. For the very first time he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off had he stayed on that clearly marked path. How far along would he be by now, with his beautiful future?

In all likelihood, he’d be in that house in the suburbs, sitting outside on this summer night.

The baby, upstairs, would be sound asleep, and he and Pauline would be enjoying peace and quiet at last, after a day or errands, housework, and diapers.

They’d treat themselves to a little after dinner drink and discuss their next vacation.

Then they would go to bed, and maybe caress each other.

When they woke up it would be Sunday.

Back in his bed, after projecting himself into a future he would never know, Yves felt his physical pain taking on an entirely new meaning. It reminded him of yet another, purely psychological, pain that was just as violent and unfair, the one Pauline had inflicted upon him. And that pain had not been overcome in vain: it had made him stronger, and put him back on the right path. The pain that was shooting through him at present would take far less time to heal, and it was already delivering its message: every time a body or a soul felt pain, it marked the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one.

Night drawing to a close, the suffocating heat mingling with the fever of bad dreams. The faraway rumbling seemed to signal the end of a dark voyage in limbo; in fact it was merely the very real echo of a nightmare still to come. The congested bowels of the earth had split open to eject their surplus into the ocean. Woken by the hoarse cries of a cloud of birds, Philippe glimpsed a murky, dirty sky, deserted by the sun. He got to his knees, lifted his hands to his temples to try and banish hideous visions, then looked up: a gray wall was rolling toward him, obstructing the horizon, crashing against the hill. Below him the beach was receding in a black ebb of sheet metal and hemp, bamboo and plastic, then was quickly covered again by another enormous wave. Mia groaned, her eyelids shut tight, refusing to confront the threat her body could already perceive, but she went to stand beside Philippe who was watching, unbelieving, as the island was destroyed. Another groundswell, more monstrous still, snapped the palm trees. Yielding to panic, Mia scrambled down the path toward the shore. Momentarily stunned by her absurd reflex, Philippe rushed after her. A wave rolled over the roof of the hotel and almost dragged Mia away in its wake. Philippe grabbed her arm, hoisted her forcefully before the following wave tore away the teak steps, leaving behind a shapeless muddy slope littered with upended deck chairs. When they reached the top of the hill they stood huddled together for an instant.