The Thursday Night Men (7 page)

Slumped on his chair, his fists in his jacket pockets, Denis Benitez was sorry he had come. Ever since he woke up that morning, an unexplained weariness had made him question his every gesture, even the very thought of work. But a guilty nagging feeling made him put on his white shirt and black apron and set untold numbers of plates down in front of diners who were hungry, or not, and for the hundredth time he would explain how the cod had been prepared, and put up with the shouting in the kitchen, and the criticism in the restaurant, and the invectives of the boss. During his three o’clock break he looked up thalassotherapy sites on the internet, convinced his fatigue was a result of burnout, and that a little bit of hot water would do him a world of good. At six thirty he took the métro to Nation and wondered why. After all, he’d already spoken his mind in front of a bunch of strangers—what was the point going back there? To subject himself to the moaning of some guy who dared to complain about his wife’s affection?

“The fear I might lose Émilie calmed me right down. No more embraces? No more luxuriating in her scent? No more devouring her like a lamb? No more letting her play the wolf from time to time? Never to know the children we would have? And all because I measure attachment with a double decimeter? For five or six months following her ultimatum, I acted the perfect partner, a model of understanding and tact. At least on the surface, because nothing had changed; other than that; I kept my anxiety to myself from then on, since it was getting more and more severe and unfair.
Why isn’t she here with me now, right away? What better things does she have to do? Why doesn’t she say she loves me when I ask her? Why is she so cautious when we talk about our plans for the future?
I knew our relationship would not survive a second crisis over such absurd complaints. I had to learn to leave her alone, whatever the price, to let her live and love me the way she saw fit. So I came up with a solution, a terrible solution . . . ”

Denis thought this testimony was a disgrace. That guy could leave the room whenever he liked to go and find his Émilie and keep her company and have children with her or fight over the remote, and yet he went on sitting there splitting hairs and quibbling about mindless details in a relationship when there were so many little moments of harmony that had no need to be analyzed or put into perspective.

“ . . . A terrible solution, but ever so effective: I am cheating on my wife. I am sleeping with another woman once a week. An act that doesn’t mean much in and of itself, only afterwards, when I get back home. I feel pitiful, I am ashamed to have to find a pretext to take a shower the minute I get home, to destroy any trace and to lie about the way I spend my time. That’s when I realize I’m living with this wonderful woman who has no idea how base I am. When I take her in my arms, knowing that another woman has just left them, I can evaluate just how unfounded my reproaches truly are, and I stop looking for problems where there aren’t any. What I used to take for indifference now seems like trust and respect. I have stopped trying to find out every detail of her time without me, I now know that she needs to find fulfillment on her own, and not live through me, or because of me or for me, and that’s the Émilie that I love.”

Who the hell is this twisted idiot!
thought Yves Lehaleur, exasperated. Since he had begun coming to the Thursday club he had heard some hard cases, but never this hard. Cheat on your wife to keep from harassing her . . . How far does a relationship have to degenerate for you to have to resort to this kind of stratagem? Having seen his own love destroyed by adultery, Yves could not tolerate the idea that it could be a solution for anything whatsoever. In his opinion, complicated psychological intriguing as a response to a rocky love life merely hid other causes of unrest. He had not resorted to any vicious subterfuge in order to cherish Pauline. She had been there, in plain sight, and that had been enough for him.

The witness left the professor’s seat and another one replaced him, eager to spit it out and get it over with right from the start: he was impotent. A disgrace he had known
all his adult life
, he said, emphasizing the word adult. At the age when
those who have done it
lorded it over
those who are about to do it
, he waited for his turn, and it seemed it would never come. In spite of his exceptional shyness, which left him absolutely tongue-tied in the presence of a girl, he had sworn he would be cured of his adolescence before he hit twenty. But one summer had followed another, as icy as winter, and his rare efforts—fear in his guts, a flaccid member, evasive glances, confused logorrhea then the silence of the dead—had led to nothing more than early mornings filled with shame, which condemned him to silence—how could he speak of his infirmity when it had become the supreme insult for anyone who wanted to hurt the male of the species? Alcoholics and reformed criminals could assume their botched lives in public, but he could not. What was more, he felt excluded from a universal culture where love in general and sex in particular had the starring roles; he would frequently put down a book when the author started to describe how a man and a woman became acquainted, the cycles of charm, feverishness, and entanglement, just as he would look away whenever, on screen, a passionate lover pushed his partner down onto the table.

Lehaleur also looked away, as he would have gladly turned off the sound if he could have; this testimony was making him feel ill at ease. Imagine yourself deaf? Mute? Both at the same time? A trifle. One-armed, paralyzed? Anything, but not
that
. Like so many men, he could not imagine resigning himself to a handicap that was so much more degrading than any other. That was what he thought already when he was still living with Pauline, and even more so nowadays, at the threshold of a great career of debauchery. But the witness went on, implacably: after revealing what must be the height of misfortune, worse was yet to come. Once he was past thirty he no longer committed the error of judgment of yielding to an attraction to a beautiful young stranger—he imagined she would immediately grasp the meaning of his avoidance behavior, and make herself scarce; nor did he find a bunch of friends to hang out with: sooner or later, they were bound to wonder why he never said anything about his love life, why he did not seem to enjoy talking dirty. In the absence of any effective treatment, and by virtue of never putting the mechanics of desire in gear, his libido had vanished.

A sudden anxiety roused Denis Benitez from his lethargy: every sentence he heard sounded like a foreshadowing of his own future. His life as a shameless rake seemed far in the past, and he too felt a loss of desire which seemed irreversible. To be sure, he could imagine that between a man who has always been impotent and one who is about to become impotent, there must be the same difference as between someone born blind and someone who has lost their sight. But Denis would have been incapable of saying whether nostalgia for a past life gnawed away at one as much as the lack of something one has never known.

“When I turned forty I made a resolution.”

He would turn his pathology into destiny: he would no longer be
an impotent man
but a
virgin.
A profession of faith which, traditionally, was better suited to women, but which would allow him to legitimize an entire life of abstinence. Thus, in his virginity he had sought a mystical significance which would transform the agnostic into a believer. But the revelation was a long time coming; no doubt he was not made of that particular cloth.

“So many years spent feeling less than human weren’t about to help me find God or the path to a monastery . . . ”

When he turned fifty, he gave a different twist to his exceptional status: to be sure, he had never known the pleasures of the flesh or the transcendence of love, but this life of his spent isolated from human passion, exempt of any commerce with his peers, had enabled him to reach a degree of absolute, almost perfect egoism. This never-ending cohabitation with his own self, to the exception of all others, had made an urban hermit of him—civilized, incapable of empathy for others, peaceably inured to the misfortunes of his own kind. He had spent those years as if he were the last individual on earth, full of a silent scorn for all normally functioning men, and all those women whom he had not penetrated.

“I was only sorry that my shell of misanthropy had formed around me so late in life.”

And yet, when he reached the year of his fifty-fourth birthday, humanity reminded him of its existence in the person of Emma, a coworker the same age who had been living alone since she had become a widow and her children had left home. She wasn’t the talkative sort, she hugged the walls so to speak, and they must have passed each other a thousand times on the métro platform and in the company corridors and as they pushed their trays along in the cafeteria before they ever spoke. They met again at the theatre, and occasionally on Sundays at outdoor concerts, and over the months their conversations had become more refined, with nothing at stake, joyful for the most part, always serene, yet no doubt it was already too much: what if they became close? The following pages of the script would be as tragic as they were predictable, and in order to forestall the inevitable complications, he launched into a long confession.

“I made up some story about a serious accident that had ‘altered my erectile functionality.’ I wanted it to sound like a euphemism . . . Since I knew the score by heart, I had no trouble gaining her sympathy. Contrary to all expectation, Emma seemed relieved. Her own libido had vanished along with her husband.”

But she was reassured by the idea of spending her old age with a last companion. Retirement was around the corner, and their gentle friendship had evolved into a peaceful life together. Liberated from any pressure, for the first time he was discovering what shared intimacy meant, sleeping with a woman nestled up against his shoulder. Before long the sacrifice of so many years of sensual pleasure seemed far less cruel than having been deprived of these treasures of tenderness.

“Alas, such happiness could not last. And God knows I had waited a long time.”

The audience before him had been expecting a happy end to his sad story, but now he looked graver than ever: after a few first nights in their shared bed, he awoke in a frenzy, his cock standing upright against Emma’s thigh.

“It was an order from my body, the first it had ever given me with such authority.”

Every night his desire for Emma grew, and every night he hid his youthful hard-on, sidestepping the issue ever more resourcefully. To be sure, she would have taken his excitement as a late-blooming compliment, but how could she forgive such a pernicious, diabolically detailed lie—he had described his accident with such precision, recited word for word the doctors’ diagnosis, which left no hope that he would ever get hard again; he had even, with the help of a drawing, depicted the absence of blood flow to the cavernous hollows of his cock. This was the man who had said farewell to his virility, and had climbed into Emma’s bed claiming to be harmless, and now here he was, destroyed by the brutal self-confidence his member was bestowing on him at last. About to turn sixty, he had to admit as much to his brethren: he had a sexual problem.

Saint-Jean watched him leave the podium to go back to his seat. Without such an astonishing reversal, that man would have taken his secret with him to his grave. Philippe was sorry the man had decided to come and tell his story just at that particular moment in his relationship with Emma, and not just after making love to her: it would have made an ineluctable epilogue, with its promise of unexpected descriptions.

One last participant got up to read at length from the logbook of his relationship, as if he were the captain of an expedition and his wife was first mate. Denis Benitez had respected the protocol by resisting the urge to leave the room before the end of the session. His presence among the brotherhood no longer made sense. It wasn’t here that he’d find an answer to the great mystery of female evasiveness. At this point, his struggle against so much indifference had worn him out for good, psychologically but also physically; he needed some rest. He should go away somewhere, into exile, all alone and far away, but above all alone, alone, for Christ’s sake, a true solitude, one that he’d chosen and not a constraint, quality solitude, exceptional solitude, well up there among all the great solitudes of History, an absolute return to the self. Then they’d see,
those women
, all of them, that it was possible to exist without them.

At nine o’clock sharp the men left the place for the very last time. Until the next meeting in the little museum god knows where near the Place des Ternes, Yves, Denis, and Philippe said a hasty goodbye on the street corner—no one suggested going for a drink. Denis disappeared into the métro, Philippe headed for the nearest taxi rank, and Yves hurried off on his scooter for the Place d’Italie. Of the three of them he was surely in the greatest hurry: he had an appointment at his house at ten o’clock, with a stranger.

At nine forty, after he’d tidied the living room and made his bed, Yves put an ice bucket and some bottles on the coffee table. On the phone, Kris had asked him before anything else how he had gotten her number, then she told him her rates. She spoke to him the way he himself spoke to clients, careful to ensure there would be no unpleasant surprises. Their actual meeting, on the other hand, threatened to be more awkward: what do you say to a girl you know nothing about, except that she is blonde with dark eyes, and that
she will do almost everything,
according to a friend. It was something he’d never experienced, but he dreaded the scene of the call girl and her trick, all the clichés you found in the cinema, in literature, in the collective unconscious, and in guy talk in cafés. No matter how he tried to justify the oldest profession in the world, or pay homage to it, a woman was about to show up at his house to open her legs and go away again with 250 euros. Even if he did reject any notion of romance, it made the operation seem all the cruder.