Guys Like Me Read online

  “How old was she?”

  “What? Oh, forty-seven, I think.”

  He seemed surprised by my question, as if it was of no interest. Then, just in his eyes, at that moment, I saw a boyish smile. Maybe he still loved her, or had never stopped? But no, not really. He’d gone to the employment court, not expecting anything from it. The guys who’d fired him were from the same generation as him, they were your age, he said. They knew perfectly well they were screwing him over, but getting rid of a few people like him might be worth it, they must have told themselves something like that. He’d been naive, and he’d been stupid, now he looked back on it, he really hadn’t seen it coming.

  He kept looking around us, around me, in the café. The booths had all filled up little by little, and there were more and more people out in the street, on their way to catch a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare. His case was full of papers, letters of confirmation, bailiff ’s notices, résumés to be sent or ones already returned, current business. He had an envelope with those words on it. He put it down on the table. He didn’t open it, as if he was still hesitating. I had the premonition, that evening, thinking about it, that something else would happen in his life, that it wouldn’t end there. Was it because of the computer case, emptied of its contents, where he kept his papers? Or was it the owner of the café, that young woman with the clear complexion who didn’t give any impression of youth or life? Guys like me often feel really sad when they look at other people. Since I turned forty, and especially since my divorce, four years after that, my only consolation has been my work, which allows me to keep such things at a distance. Since my separation, I haven’t had a real love affair. I don’t have the strength for it anymore, I kept telling myself. But why would I need strength? How the time passes … Quite often, my thinking stops there, and I try to sleep immediately afterwards, because I really don’t know what’s waiting for me if I keep thinking.

  We saw each other a few times after that. What surprised me from the beginning was that thanks to him, because he also wanted to know about me, to know things about my life, to do part of the work and not be outdone, I started to understand my own life better, or rather to see the truth in the way I tell it to myself, on those bad nights when I know I won’t be able to sleep and my apartment seems tiny and I feel as if I’m going to end up suffocating in it. He’d been unemployed for more than two years, I didn’t ask him for details. When we left the bar on Rue d’Amsterdam, he handed me the résumés I asked him for. I glanced at them, there was his place of birth, near La Garenne-Colombes, that was our suburb before, his and mine, and lots of other guys too. His résumé, as far as I could tell, seemed plausible enough, except that he’d probably never be able to find anything again, because of his age. He never changed his mind about that. I even ended up asking him over the phone: what was the point of carrying on trying if, deep down, he was convinced that he’d never get out of this mess, that it was too late for him?

  “I’ll pass them around, and we’ll see what happens.”

  “Thank you.”

  He was looking at me and nodding, like a child waiting for it to pass, as if that thank you wasn’t addressed to me. How many guys like me had he approached, old acquaintances, guys he hadn’t seen in years? Then he closed his case and folded his hands over it, and I didn’t know if that meant he wanted to go, or on the contrary to stay, his hands placed on the top of his case, forever incapable of choosing between the outside and here, where he could stay. You never knew with him.

  “By the way, how are things in La Garenne-Colombes?”

  A wicked smile gradually lit up his face. “Oh, La Garenne-Colombes. There aren’t many guys left who are still interested in La Garenne-Colombes.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He smiled a bit more, I liked seeing him like that, he reminded me of that little boy in La Garenne-Colombes, near Place de Belgique, he never found his way back to school, but that was beside the point now.

  “I went back there last year, well, maybe five or six months ago. I hardly recognized a thing, you know.”

  “Why don’t you go see for yourself? You aren’t far, are you?”

  I didn’t reply.

  He watched me put his résumé away in my briefcase, the briefcase of a man who was still whole. We both knew, maybe at the same time, how pointless it was, given his age. But then, when I read it again that evening, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Will one be enough?”

  We were both still standing there.

  “I’ll make copies.”

  He nodded. He showed me a flash drive he’d taken out of his pocket. It was red. That surprised me, coming from him, but after all why not? We were the generation of floppy disks in offices, and also of Atomkraft? Nein, danke! I suddenly remembered those little metal badges we carried on our school satchels and wore on the lapels of our jackets, bought from the flea market in Clignan-court or in fake American surplus stores. We all had them in high school. We’d walk along the streets of Asnières in our combat jackets covered with badges. He collected them, sometimes resold them, sometimes swapped them.

  “Well,” he said, “it was great to see you again, even if the circumstances could be better.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Shall we have a bite to eat one of these days?”

  He said yes, shall I call you or will you call me?

  I didn’t need to think too much, I said no, I’ll call you, no problem, we can meet next week.

  We shook hands before we left the bar. The young woman at the cash register said goodbye, her voice sounded dull and worn. Her hard features under her blonde hair, in a bar on Rue d’Amsterdam. He wasn’t sad or depressed, that time, any more than the following times. Most of the time, he kept in good spirits. He was born like that, in good spirits. What was he doing that evening? He shrugged, one hand holding the empty case and the other in the pocket of his raincoat, as if he could have stayed like that for years.

  “I’m going for a walk, I may catch a movie, now that I have the card.”

  He still had his boyish smile, he meant his unemployment card, stamped so that he could get discounts.

  “So long, I’ll call you.”

  Then I walked down the street without turning around. Anyone seeing us together might have thought that two old friends had just had a drink, and that these moments stolen from everyday life (work, a wife, the children already flown the nest) had been a sliver of pleasure in their lives. I mean guys who’ve known each other for more than thirty years, yes, that’s it, much more than thirty years in fact. All things considered, I’d enjoyed seeing him again. Apart from that, I wasn’t sure what else to think.

  That evening, thanks to him, I went back home with an idea in my head, something important to do, I had to try to help him get work. If it was only up to me … That’s the kind of crap I’ve often told myself, since I’ve been alone and no woman has spent the night with me. I went through his résumé, trying to cross-check. If I could believe what I was reading, things had started to go wrong for him in 1997, which was already quite a while ago. What was going on in my life that year? I can remember people, events, sometimes I can remember very clearly conversations Benjamin and I had twenty years ago, I can even quote what he said word for word. But I get con-fused about dates. 1997, I really can’t remember what that year had been like for me. Jean had even worked abroad for a short time, in Germany, he knew the language, I remembered that. I thought about two or three people I could call, though I didn’t hold out much hope. For a few years now, all the guys like me have been putting together résumés and distributing them conscientiously, knowing there isn’t really any point. He runs into you suddenly, one way or another, the one who gives and the one who asks, and you never really know why you’re on one side or the other. Why had he run into me near Cour du Havre on the occasion of an interview I’d twice postponed, rather than someone else who might not have recognized him? I thought of Marc-André, he might be interested, t
hinking about Germany. Then I put away his papers, I tried only not to think about him, in other words about me too, and also a few others, guys from my teenage years. The Hauts-de-Seine had changed a hell of a lot, but we were still alive, some of us still kept in touch, they didn’t want to let it all go. In a very short time, you end up forgetting. Sometimes I remembered passionate conversations we’d had, he was there too, we’d been to the movies, they still sometimes had debates after the movie in those days. Was it Marc-André who’d worked for a sound engineer while he was studying? All of us knew already, even at the age of twenty, that the world we came from was in the process of disappearing, but we didn’t think about it most of the time. I put his résumé away in my desk, where I spend a lot of time. Sometimes I bring back work, but most of the time I sit there and do nothing at all, it’s next to the window.

  At the start, Benjamin’s mother and I lived in a two-room apartment, my office was in the bedroom, then, when he was ten, we moved, and I had a room specially for my office, but I didn’t really use it. I’ve forgotten why, anyway. Nowadays, almost every day, I sit down at my desk for a while. When I get home from work, I sit down at my desk for five minutes, trying to relax, or else, in the morning, I often sit there briefly, for no reason. Something’s waiting for me there, but what? As a result, my desk always seems like somebody else is inhabiting it, somebody else who’s exactly like me. Saturday morning is when I read the newspaper. Sometimes, when I feel like it, I write letters. I have a photo of my son and me, he’s thirteen, we’re both in Collioure, I’m in the midst of separating from his mother, I’m trying not to let anything show. The weather is fantastic. I’ve put my laptop in the living room, I don’t use it much. All I did was join a dating site, which I look at when I feel like it. A lot of people do that where I work, not all of them are married. The photograph on my profile is already a bit old, I can’t make up my mind to change it. But in spite of that deception, all I’ve had are some pretty dull dates, women obsessed with their age, in a hurry to rebuild their lives. That’s why I soon stopped putting on a show for most of my dates. I also have photos in the dresser, mainly of Benjamin. For a long time I tried not to look at them during the week, between the weekends, when I was allowed to see him, because they sometimes made me feel really bad. Anaïs asked me to show them to her. All three of us were moved. It was like looking at a life. I keep two of him in my wallet, one when he’s about ten, we were both with his mother, and another taken at the Buttes-Chaumont park last year, he’s with Anaïs and some other guys from the same biology lab, they’re all lying on the grass. I filched it from him one evening when he and Anaïs invited me for dinner. Filched it like a little boy. I stayed there five minutes. Things were going poorly for him too. The country really wasn’t working, you heard people say that more and more often, and I ended up believing it. Sometimes also, when I’m sitting at my desk, memories come to me, there are often good moments waiting for me. Or at other times, I expect the opposite, and I don’t open the door to that room all weekend, in order not to spoil anything.

  I’d enjoyed seeing him again. I hadn’t asked him any questions, and in the end he hadn’t told me much about himself. Maybe there was nothing to say. Things were the way they were. We’d only decided to have a drink together the following week. I hadn’t suggested lunch, because I didn’t have my appointments book with me. It was in my desk, I also have two personal organizers, and lots of others from past years. My mother used to keep them too. Sometimes, she’d cross out every page and write the important appointments in shorthand so that nobody would know what they were. Who could have known them? I knew all the initials in her life, and I could imagine who without wanting to. Much later, I started collecting movie tickets, I used to go quite often at one point, just after my divorce. I’d go directly from my office to the movie theater, when I wasn’t invited over to friends’, and immediately afterwards, when I got back, I’d take a shower and go straight to bed, with sleeping pills. That way I didn’t have too much time to think about anything else. Of course, sometimes it didn’t work, but anyway. I also collected business cards of all the guys I met, and one summer, I’d only been away for ten days with Benjamin, I placed them all in a row and glued them like that, it took me two days. I bought some glass mounts in Paris, and then spent two days on it. Why was I in that state? For a long time I looked at those cards without daring to hang them on the wall, and then, one day, a woman came to my apartment and looked at them in a strange way, and that was when I understood. Or rather, I didn’t really understand, but since I wanted her to stick around, I realized that I probably had to do something else as far as decoration went. Sylvie. 1997. That was the year his résumé seemed to have the most gaps, not very well concealed. Eight years of hard times? 1997: Sylvie and I lived together for almost two years. We both made an effort, but in different directions, and in the end we drifted apart. And then she met a man who was a few years younger than her and fell “madly in love.” I like that expression, I wrote it on a card I sent her from Martinique, with a question mark. That was dumb of me, obviously. She never replied to my question. Had I ever loved as much as she had? Had I ever been loved?

  I can spend a whole weekend thinking like that. The first time I saw Jean was during a period when nothing was happening in my life. On Sunday evenings, Benjamin calls me. As soon as he calls, I offer to call him back. These days he says no, it’s all right. We chat for a while. Sometimes I can feel his attention wandering, he doesn’t really want to talk, often it’s because he’s had an argument with Anaïs and he’s sulking, like I used to do with his mother, or else he’s working on a project, and it’s a real headache, as he puts it. When he was a kid, he loved poetry and drawing and I worried, without making a fuss about it, that he’d never really understand the kind of world he’d have to live his life in. I was wrong. Sometimes I feel sorry because of him, but most of the time, I’m proud. Too proud. I like his expressions, they come from his childhood, everything was always too something or other with him. Too good, too boring. He also tells me how his mother is, whether I like it or not. For a long time he clung to the idea that he’d see us together again, he’s my only child. I guess I was once madly in love too.

  On Saturday, I contacted my friend Marc-André, I called about eleven. He answered, he cleared his throat, the way he always does when he’s going to speak.

  “Hi, Marco, how’s it going, hope I’m not disturbing you?”

  This time, we didn’t bother with small talk, just the minimum, he doesn’t like the phone too much. I immediately told him the news, how I’d met Jean by chance on Rue d’Amsterdam, drifting, with his almost empty case. He was silent for a bit.

  “Jean? Doesn’t he have a job anymore?”

  Then we talked about other things. He has four children, two of them with his second wife, Aïcha. They live in Levallois, like me, they bought a big apartment near the shopping mall, the living room is decorated in oriental style, that’s where they receive their friends. It’s like going on a journey but not very far, several thousand miles on a Friday evening, to Porte d’Asnières. His eldest daughter is studying medicine in Montpellier, but his son, his second child with his first wife, dropped out of college. Marco tells me about him from time to time. How he feels responsible, and yet he doesn’t want to continue giving him checks to pay for his drugs. Once, because I’ve known him since he was born, I tried talking to Antoine. But I wasn’t able to really tackle the subject. He reminds me of his father at the same age, he has the same somber, feverish look, that kind of energy and anger he gives off. He stopped without saying anything, as if he was used to it. I wasn’t the first friend of his father he’d seen, and it hadn’t helped at all. Where does he go when he seems to absent himself like that? Marc-André doesn’t know. He’s never known. He feels guilty because he thinks it happened when he met Aïcha.

  He asked his son, his son replied no, don’t worry about it. It was there before, it had always been there, and he di
dn’t know why.

  “I’m surprised,” Marco said. “What a time we live in. He was in marketing, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he even worked in Germany.”

  “Does he speak the language?”

  “Yes, he speaks German.”

  I heard him thinking on the other end.

  “I don’t know. I may be able to do something. Will you send me his résumé? Does he have an email address?”

  I realized I’d forgotten to ask him. He was busy the next week, he was looking to see when he was free, I heard his wife behind him, the children were there too. Above that background noise, I could also sense that dark look of his, I’d say it’s very human, though I’m not very sure why. Like when he talks about his first son or when he’s been to visit him on his own, because Aïcha doesn’t want to get involved, in the rehab clinic.