The Thursday Night Men (8 page)

Christelle Marchand, past thirty, had been in the business long enough to know the necessary precautions she must take with a new client. She never had clients at her place, didn’t solicit in the street, didn’t agree to appointments in suburbs that were too remote, or if she was not sure she could get a taxi home after nine p.m. She recruited on the internet through carefully selected websites, and she’d built up a network of clients who steadily found new ones for her; an average of six a day enabled her to live without fear of failing to making ends meet, or unemployment, or the fallout from economic crises and stock market crashes.

She arrived on time, agreed to a small shot of whisky in a lot of Perrier water, slipped the folded fifty-euro notes from the tabletop into her handbag, and asked Yves if he wanted anything in particular. Surprised, he answered,
No, just the usual thing.
Relaxed, with her glass in her hand, Kris made small talk with her client about the approach of spring. She was wearing a thick black jacket that zipped diagonally, decorated with topstitching at the shoulders, a skirt that came mid-thigh, and thigh-high boots in black suede. He could see a certain innocence in her features, and a blonde brilliance that hinted at the child she had once been. She headed over to the bed, perfectly relaxed as she removed her clothes and tossed them here and there on the floor. Yves saw she was wearing panties that laced up at the back and a bra made of the same lace; her skin was light and smooth. He undressed like an awkward adolescent, sat down on the edge of the bed, then slid beneath the sheets and embraced the body he had been waiting for for too long, warm with their exhaled breath, a mingling of sweet and sour. He would have liked to take the time for contemplation, for emotion, to enjoy this return to basics, to find in a long embrace everything he had been deprived of, but his urgency to penetrate her betrayed him, and in spite of himself he was already forcing his way between her thighs. She got the condom business over with in a few seconds, and encouraged his too-feverish body to come inside her. Prisoner of her legs, incapable of resisting such an embrace, as if he were being sucked inside her, Yves was lured into a furious in and out, abetted by her hand clinging to his hips. She enhanced the movement even further with violent spasms of her vagina which forced him to come. While he lay on his side, restraining a moan, Kris had already put a knot in the condom which she dropped into a small bowl. Drained, mute, Yves watched her head for the shower, come back out a minute later, and get dressed, validated by her sense of duty fulfilled, ready for her next appointment. He had the unpleasant impression that he’d been robbed of the best part of that sensual pleasure he had so looked forward to.
No need to see me out
, she said, satisfied that she had gotten the job over with in such a short time.
You have my number.

He was dismayed that his little business had been taken care of so nimbly. He lay in bed, vanquished, his cock drooping, and he already dreaded the terrible solitude to come.
I got laid
, he said out loud, laughing at himself. For a few minutes his body had been hostage to another, and that body, for all its contrived gentleness, had known how to dictate its requirements. Just the thought of it would curtail most of the loneliness that kept him from sleeping.

As he was drifting off he had to admit that he too, at times, had used a woman’s body in that way.

That same night, at two ten in the morning, Philippe Saint-Jean lay in bed mechanically turning the pages of a book. He had tried ten times over to get into the little book he had bought that afternoon, and ten times over he had lost the thread, absorbed in the memory of his first meeting with Mia, that dinner at a friend’s house, as snobbish as it was boring. For her aperitif she had asked for a mineral water that was totally unknown but
very popular in Switzerland.
All evening long she had involuntarily slipped Anglicisms into her conversation, saying “personalité” when she meant “character” or “insécure” when she meant “hesitant.” Convinced she must be an Anglophone, Philippe had asked her where her lovely olive skin came from, and she replied,
Fifty percent Provençal, fifty percent Réunionnaise, and one hundred percent French.
Later he had served her some arugula salad with shavings of parmesan, lovingly describing the countryside of Reggio Emilia where this little masterpiece of six years of age had come from; not even stooping to taste it, Mia had pushed the shavings of cheese to one side of her plate. To finish with a flourish she complained bitterly and at length about the treatment inflicted on a certain species of lemur that lived in the north of Madagascar.

Today she had seemed far less superficial, almost authentic in spite of the circumstances that were anything but. A young woman who, once you removed the makeup and projectors, must be troubled by the same fears and aspirations as anyone. No doubt she was driven by her ego—but then, who wasn’t?

Seeing Mia cross his path again like that might be a sign, but of what? He was such a thoroughgoing Cartesian, the resident rationalist, he could go on for hours about the difference between fate and determinism, yet he could not imagine this second meeting had been mere chance. What’s more, when he allowed himself to be tempted by a psychoanalytical reading of the minor events that occurred in his life, he gladly conceded that chance did not exist. Mia had not reappeared for no reason. Even if he never saw her again, he had to find the true meaning of what she had called a
coincidence.

At that same moment Mia climbed into a taxi that would take her back to the Ritz. After her endless day filming she had not been able to get out of a dinner with sponsors who had hired her at a premium. She was leaving first thing the next morning for New York, an initial fitting for a sportswear line that had commissioned the services of some major couturiers. She wouldn’t have time to see that intellectual who had made a much better impression on her today than the first time she’d met him. He’d been so overbearing that night, listening to himself talk, beginning all his sentences with
As I am sure you are aware,
lecturing about existentialism as if it were for dummies, zigzagging brilliantly between the theories of Kant and the cinema of Wim Wenders. But what would be the point, after all, of trying to keep a philosopher from reasoning; that was like trying to stop a greyhound from running after a decoy, or a salmon from swimming upstream. Today’s meeting had been a change from all those living nullities she met all year round, hollow people who looked good, all a bit cynical and apt to panic the moment they left their luxury hideouts. She was one of them, no doubt about it, but there were times when she tried to fight back. All she had to do was go and see her parents, near Avignon, to remember what a normal person’s life was all about.

Her father was still running his trucking company, and her mother looked after the big house, empty now, where Mia and her brothers had had such a happy childhood. Whenever their famous little daughter didn’t cancel at the last minute, a family dinner would be organized in her honor. Her mother got cooking, her older brother rushed over with his wife and kids, Mia handed out presents. Afraid of putting on even a hundred grams, she wouldn’t touch the Creole pâté, or the pork curry with ginger, or the traditional sweet potato pie; she’d just nibble at a few shrimps wiped clean of their onion salsa. Then she’d be subjected to a thorough interrogation:
I heard you’ll be doing the Dior campaign . . . You got in an argument with Naomi? Is that really you on the poster with the handbag, I hardly recognized you . . . You’re not with that English guitarist anymore?
Where did they find it all? In magazines, on television, at the hairdresser’s? None of it was true, or it had been completely distorted, but there was no way could she say,
I’m still your little Mia.
Her parents had been viewing her as their totem ever since they, too, had been treated like stars in the neighborhood, for having brought into the world a creature whose measurements bordered on mathematical mystery. In the onslaught of questions, the ones Mia dreaded most were the ones about boyfriends.
No, I’m not with So-and-So anymore.
In general, she refrained from adding,
How could I have wasted six months with such a jerk?
An old married American TV network boss, or a Spanish tennis player who was definitely either too tennisy or too Spanish, but the worst of all had been Ronnie—Irish, not English, a bass player, not a guitarist. He couldn’t stand the fact that she’d taken the initiative to break up, and he’d had his revenge by declaring to the celebrity press that because she never ate anything, Mia secreted a gastric juice that gave her the breath of a fox terrier. For weeks, people had stood three feet back from her, sometimes with their faces turned to one side. She didn’t know how to respond to such bad faith, not even around her parents, who had read the nonsense. This was not the only nonsense they’d read since they’d started seeing photographs of their daughter in every getup imaginable. Gossip, hearsay, but also some direct attacks, like the ones in that prime time program where a columnist had been so tacky as to tell this joke in Mia’s presence:
Do you know why models have one neuron more than horses do? It’s so they won’t shit while they’re on the catwalk.
And everyone on the set had laughed their heads off. She’d put a good face on it until she left the studio, and then she’d burst into tears.

She would have given anything that night to be able to seek refuge in a kind person’s arms, far away from the cliques and the posers, from fashion and snide remarks.
When are you going to introduce us to someone nice?
her mother asked repeatedly. Someone she wouldn’t be ashamed of, someone who wouldn’t be driven by his obsession with fame, someone level-headed and thoughtful and who, when he was at her side, would get all those mocking critics to shut up. But it didn’t seem likely that Mia would meet
someone nice
at any of her jet-set parties or in the idolatrous circles of the glamour industry.

That someone was not likely to be Philippe Saint-Jean. But how could she be sure if she didn’t see him at least one more time?

Late at night, unable to fall asleep despite his exhaustion, Denis Benitez decided to give his companions the slip until further notice. The time to take leave of reality had come. He swallowed three sleeping tablets from a box that had been past its sell-by date for several months now. He wouldn’t go to work the next day. With a bit of luck he’d sleep so long that the day would go by and he wouldn’t even notice.

He must be headed for some unknown place, lost in the middle of nowhere. But where he’d be alone at last. And never mind if the place turned out to be sad and deserted. Denis was already far too weary to turn back.

In the room: a simple bed, a night table, a chair for visitors and overhead, where there used to be a crucifix, a television that was never switched on. The setting wasn’t important—nothing was important, Denis slept most of the time. At worst, he drowsed between two visits from the nurse, suspended in weightlessness by medication that changed from one day to the next. On the rare occasions when someone roused him from his lethargy, a blurry image entered his field of vision, most often that of a meal tray, a white uniform, or a handful of tablets in a cup. When a hurried intern announced his presence with a booming
How are we feeling today?
Denis would wonder what was meant by “today.” When he was conscious enough to correlate two ideas one after the other, he tried to go back over the cottony sequence of events that had led him to this bare, silent room where he was no longer afraid of collapse. The rest was all forgetfulness, the real thing, the kind that snatches you up. His body felt none of the sensations, whether pleasant or not, that call you back to life, with one exception. When he woke up, Denis would turn his pillow over to feel its coolness against his cheek; the only moment of the day when his nerves flushed his skin.

At the end of that afternoon, a psychiatrist sat by his side for a long time to try and unravel the origins of Denis’s depression. His eyes half-closed, his breathing calm, Denis answered the practitioner, who was no doubt a kindly man, but way off track. How could he share with a stranger a message too shameful for confession: living without love, he had gradually lost his faith in humanity. Then, in himself.

They agreed on the word overwork, which avoided the need for any others. As soon as he was alone, Denis glanced at the fading daylight and all he had to do was close his eyes to lose himself in the darkness.

It was Mia who got in touch. Philippe would never have dared take the initiative. The gentlemanly tradition whereby it was up to the man to call upon the woman did not apply in this case. If Mia had been the sort of woman you meet in everyday life, he would have taken the first step, and then all the others. But Mia’s image inhabited the streets and dreams of millions of men, her very name sounded like a luxury label, her radiance crossed borders. How on earth could Philippe Saint-Jean, who both questioned and shunned the values of a world sacrificed to appearance, show any interest in a universal object of desire? Just one phone call to the supermodel and he would have been guilty of allegiance. Conversely, it seemed natural to him that the futile, flashy world where Mia lived would be drawn to his own, a world where curiosity in other people remained intact, and answers were far less important than questions.

She suggested they have dinner at a restaurant that was practically a secret, patronized by a handful of initiates in pursuit of anonymity. As was usual for him, Philippe arrived on time, and was instantly sorry—year in year out, his damned punctuality meant he had to wait for careless people. He was led over to a plush corner where red velvet vied with a trendy silver, and did he want still or sparkling, so he made do with sparkling in lieu of the beer he would really have preferred. To strike a pose, he hesitated between reading the menu and jotting down some not really necessary notes in his notebook. He saw some well-known faces at neighboring tables, though he wasn’t sure exactly who they were, men and women with perfect figures, as if designed for the setting. In his notebook Philippe wrote,
renew subscription to Paris-Match.
Finally he glanced at the menu, which immediately exasperated him. Philippe was not at all a foodie, and had no real interest in gastronomy, but what he despised more than anything was dietary terrorism, the ultimate hypocrisy of a handful of rich people prepared to pay top dollar for their fear of putting on one ounce. All it took was to read
lightly steamed John Dory on its bed of watercress sprouts
€45
for him to want to roast the chef on a spit with an apple in his mouth.