Guys Like Me Page 8

  His tone just a little shrill, falsely mild, no, I don’t know anything. He was the same age as us and he talked like a teenager, and not just any teenager. I handed him a beer, and he took the top off it as if he was scared that if he did it badly he might blow up the building.

  “Do you want a glass?”

  “No, thanks.” He stood up. “I’d like to talk to you. Tell me if you have something to do, you’re not obligated to listen to me.”

  All the same, he’d chosen me, he explained why me as he went along. We talked what, two or three hours, something like that? I confess I’d forgotten a lot of things from the old days, and even from the last few years of my life, but I remembered them completely thanks to him. Sometimes his voice was hoarse, sometimes it was only a thin thread. It began at school according to him, when he’d been moved to technical high school. Do you remember? Yes, I remembered. He’d spent a year in that school at Quatre-Routes, he’d been separated from us, Marco and me and the others, that was where he’d first been affected. He was speaking slowly too. That surprised me, because to be honest I’d have expected more vehemence on his part. He’d had a bad patch that lasted several months, he’d stayed in bed in his room, his mother was the concierge of an apartment building. Yes, I remembered.

  I think I can even see him in those days. I remember the big covered entrance next to the little record store on the square by the station where we used to buy 45s. I remember a woman with very white skin, and the black hair that she wore pulled back. He was fifteen, and he couldn’t get out of bed. He’d lost the will to live. But that didn’t mean he wanted to die, and although he couldn’t explain it, all his life it had affected him from time to time. He’d finished his beer. I offered him another. I told myself that we were going to spend all night like this, if only I could find a way to cut things short, then, afterwards, I stopped thinking about it. He’d recovered without knowing why, that first time. He’d been to see several doctors in Paris, his mother had made inquiries. She was intelligent and very poor. He still loved her as much as ever. The doctors talked to them about adolescence, severe depression, attacks of melancholia. He told me that, attacks of melancholia, with a slightly self-satisfied smile. Melancholia. Not without hope, it seems to me, he repeated the word several times, as if it might make him more interesting. After a while, I realized he was talking almost in the dark, and I suggested we go into the kitchen, maybe he’d like to stay and have a bite to eat? I locked myself in the bathroom for five minutes and phoned Marie to tell her I had an un-expected visitor. I’d call her back later, how late would be OK? He’d taken up his favorite position, on a stool. He kept his arms crossed. When I asked him to take a stick of butter from the refrigerator, he noticed the drawings by Benjamin that I’d kept, some of them were almost fifteen years old. There’d been a time when my son always made a drawing for me when he left on Sunday night. It seems to me these drawings protect us, him and me, even though, in a way, it’d be better if I removed them. Under magnets, I also keep urgent notes, reminders of things to do, and tickets from the dry cleaner. He smiled as he looked at them, as if he didn’t quite believe them. That’s your son, Benjamin, isn’t it? How old is he now?

  He continued his life story in broad strokes, but, as always, he kept coming back to his childhood, his life with his mother, it was just the two of them. Then he told me about his first love, a girl he’d met at the skating rink in Asnières. Do you know it? Yes, I knew it. A vague smile came and died on his lips, once again, when I confirmed that yes, I knew it, I knew where it was, or I vaguely remembered some figure from Asnières or Colombes, La Garenne, all those places of ours from the old days. We’d been there together, in the old days. He hadn’t heard from this woman in three or four years. In all that time he’d had more or less nothing but welfare to live on. His mother also helped him a little, as best she could, since he had told her his situation. He’d hung around. He’d stripped wallpaper, kicked his heels outside DIY centers hoping to be hired for the day. He’d learned the geography of night shelters, municipal baths, and food banks. It wasn’t really new to him, his mother and he had always lived hand to mouth. I thought again about the ground-floor apartment he’d invited us to. The open window onto the inner courtyard. Those windows would have to be repainted almost every year. The family opposite, a couple and their two children, I remembered the little girl sitting on her tricycle, the clumsily paved-over cobblestones. He’d loved that girl. As only guys like me can, he said, and I filed his expression away in a corner of my mind to try to understand it. And what about me? I realized that he chose these high-flown phrases because he found it hard to explain things more deeply. I didn’t dare interrupt him, he didn’t stop talking while we ate.

  Ben called me around nine, he wanted to know if I could help with the move. He was going to put some things in a storage facility, you know, the one at the industrial dock in Gennevilliers?

  “Yes, listen, I have a friend here. I’ll call you on Tuesday, OK?”

  Jean was watching me, waiting for me to finish so that he could continue. So, what happened to that girl? He smiled, rather like the way an adult would smile at someone who doesn’t understand because he lacks experience.

  “Her name is Adeline Vlasquez, do you know her?”

  I made an effort to remember, not so much at the time, but occasionally in the days that followed, even sometimes at work when I thought about his story or let myself go and escaped into the past. Did she also go to Le Cercle, the bistro in Asnières? He nodded, yes. They were in love, at least he’d known that in his life, he was already twenty-four when they met. At that time he was working at the FNAC, the megastore, he was one of their first employees, in the days when it still meant something to work at FNAC. He made me laugh without meaning to. They’d set up house together, they were lucky and even found a little house on the hill at Puteaux at the beginning of the ’80s, before the property boom. They’d made plans for the future, and then, without warning, that fatigue of his had struck again. He’d had to quit his job. She thought he was doing drugs, or that he was cheating on her, she thought a whole bunch of things, and in spite of his efforts she ended up becoming tired of him, she’d left him two years after the election of François Mitterrand. By the time he was done, we’d finished dinner. He’d been talking for nearly two hours.

  “You must be fed up, I’m boring you with my stories.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He’d been telling me the life story of a guy like me, when it came down to it, but one where every episode took place between attacks of what he called his fatigue. For several years now, since Germany, where he’d earned a good living in a factory making machine tools, he’d been scraping up money from wherever he could, he loved welfare. Without it, he’d probably be dead. He’d lived a totally useless life (big smile). Later, talking with Marco, I realized that he was inexhaustible on the subject, how to live on nothing, how to make do with only the basics for as long as possible.

  I suggested we move to the living room. I made coffee and he waited, his eyes turned toward the lights in the odd-numbered houses, as if he was at the movies, a spectator of his own life. We all are, obviously. No, he’d never seriously tried to live with a woman again, he’d never forgotten Adeline Vlasquez. All the same, he’d waited several years before he tried to track her down. His eyes shone as they looked at the suburb outside, for no reason, just uttering her name. He had done it, one day. It was just before meeting us again, Marco and me. I was starting to wonder what he wanted from me, apart from talking. It hadn’t been easy to find her. She’d kept the same name. She didn’t want to believe him, after all these years that hadn’t changed her one bit. She’d lived in England, after their separation she’d let herself be led on by guys for a while. Then, and he gave me his weary smile, too big and also too slow, she’d come back. She’d always had work, apparently. He told me that in a pensive tone. She was one of those women who search desperately for a man to have
children with, but sometimes that takes their whole lives. Are you still angry? I asked him. He said yes, she asked me to stop harassing her. Harassing, he repeated slowly. Can you imagine? It was after midnight.

  Now I wanted to get rid of him, I’d had enough of people like that around me in my life, I’d also had enough of my own memories. And yet, I don’t really know what it was, something stopped me from dismissing him with the excuse that I had work tomorrow, or that I’d already spent all that time listening to him talking, about his failed life, about everything and nothing. Adeline Vlasquez. It’s lasted my whole life, he murmured. He was smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with blue Samson tobacco, like when we were all together, during our years in high school.

  “Will you roll me one, please?”

  I held his hand as he lit my cigarette. His eyes were sad, seen from close-up. I decided I’d do what I could for him, if I could.

  “And how’s it going now with your job?”

  He smiled again in his clownish way, his face still as weary. “You must be joking, I haven’t been out in a week.”

  I really think he wanted to laugh.

  “You’re the first person I’ve seen in all that time.”

  He stopped speaking. He often had these pauses, long ones, as if he’d gone somewhere and gotten lost on the way back, and nobody knew the name of the place. I realized it was Adeline Vlasquez country. It was a long way away, somewhere in the past, but he’d never been able to tell the difference between then and now. I think I remembered that we were good friends in the old days, but he’d never forgotten.

  In the days that followed I often thought about that, and even when I told Marco about it, I wasn’t able to put a face to the name, even though I flatter myself that I never forget a face. Maybe it isn’t true, then? He’d untied his shoelaces, he was sitting there stiffly, leaning back in the armchair. I bought two of them on a whim when I first moved into this apartment, I must have been forty-six, something like that. I bought them six months later, they looked exactly like the ones my mother had bought when I was fourteen. I never sat down facing her, in one of the two armchairs. In my place she would put linen that needed darning, shirts I’d lost buttons from, and more often still, papers to be sorted. My mother had a genius for sorting, and it really drove her crazy during my childhood years. It was as if she spent my childhood sorting it into files. It struck me it would be too late to call Marie. Sometimes, our lives accelerated, and then it took us years to stem the overflow. She would understand anyway. Would she sleep tonight, or else, like the last night we’d spent together, the previous week, would she wait for me to sleep and then get up and stand by the window in her kitchen for a long time, all by herself, without switching the light on? After a while, he seemed to realize that I was there, and he looked at his watch, conspicuously, like someone who wants you to know he’s looking at his watch.

  “Wow, I have to get going. Is it really two o’clock?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t feel like driving him home.

  “You can sleep here if you like, I don’t mind.”

  He looked at me, his smile was ironic. It irritated me a little but it really was late, and I had a lot of things to do the next day.

  “I get up early, all you have to do is pull the door shut behind you.”

  By the time I left the bathroom, he’d rolled himself up in the blanket I’d given him, and the clearest image I still have of him from that evening, when he’d told me his whole life story, is the one of his big hand on the blanket when he said good night. And the name of that woman he’d loved badly all his life, Adeline Vlasquez. Goodnight. Yes, you too. I’ll call you. OK. I thought about F. Scott Fitzgerald. All life is a process of breaking down, where had he said that? I set my alarm for seven. At night I don’t have much time to look at my face and the damage it wears, or even the first brown age spots already appearing on my hands. Was he just skipping work, or had he called in sick? I hadn’t asked him. I’d find out soon enough anyway. He didn’t really seem to care. In any case, I wasn’t short of work. You just had to be there, not let anything show, six more years of this pace and I’d be out of it.

  I had some strange dreams that night. We were teenagers, Marco and I and our girlfriends, and we were doing séances, I’d always enjoyed that. I saw myself doing it. I fell asleep at Le Cercle, I think it was. I didn’t see Adeline Vlasquez there. Then there were dreams that didn’t make any sense at all, with big fish and funerals and things. I thought I saw him walking in his underpants along the hallway where my bedroom is, I never close my bedroom door. Later, I also saw a woman, probably Marie, creeping about in a park, was it the park of the organization near Beaujon? She must have been about a hundred and was carrying a big bloodstained knife in her hand and singing a love song, India Song. That woke me before seven. I’d seen that movie a very long time ago. Benjamin and I loved the song from it. I got up without making a noise, and when I switched on the light in the kitchen, I saw the blanket neatly folded on the sofa bed, he’d already left. I don’t know what made me go to the window and look out. There he was, on the sidewalk opposite, sitting on the bench by the bus stop for routes 115, 341, and 207 A and B. I didn’t need to imagine him in a dream, he really was a guy like me. It was weird, the way he’d come back into my life, as quickly as he was going to leave it now, but for how much longer?

  I let the curtain fall gently. Why was he still sitting there? Was he waiting for a sign from me, like a runaway child or indeed a guy who was lost? I don’t know. Neither did Marc-André when I called him from the office during the lunch break and told him about our evening. I hadn’t been able to wipe out the image I had of him, early in the morning, sitting at the bus stop. Which one had he taken? The A went right through the middle of La Garenne-Colombes, I remember. Now he was nothing more than a guy filled with regrets, incapable of holding down a job. Especially as, and Marco knew this, he had a nasty temper. Does he really? I heard him laughing at the other end, gravely. You could say that. I know what I’m talking about. He’d called him to keep him abreast of his problems with his employer. He hadn’t been too sure what to do, although he’d often had the desire to just hang up the phone, and that would have been the end of it.

  “You never did it?”

  “No, I thought things were getting better.”

  Then we talked about something else. Did he remember a girl called Adeline Vlasquez? He thought about it, but no, he couldn’t remember. It didn’t mean much to Marco and me. Our memory wavers, it has no middle, like fishing lines on the cloudy surface of the water. Marco told me he had to go, unfortunately. Aïcha wanted to know when she could meet Marie. How does she know? I asked Marco.

  “I must have mentioned her without meaning to. All right, then, bye, I really must go.”

  In a sense it’s always good, when we hang up on each other, because we could spend our whole lives making small talk about this and that, but I may be imagining things. We’re always more alone than we suppose, I think.

  I also think I was relieved, in the end, to see him leave my apartment. I’d invited him in, we’d done our best to help him get back on his feet, and now he really had to walk by himself. I don’t like thinking these things, saying these words. They made me think of the father I didn’t have. I never talked like that to Benjamin, or I would have had the impression I was someone else. I didn’t say anything to Benjamin, to tell the truth. I regret it sometimes, obviously. There was a time when I often went for a walk during my lunch break over to his elementary school, then later to his high school, when the classes were coming out, on Fridays when I could wait for him. I’d keep myself at a distance so as not to embarrass him. I didn’t intend it that way, but I was using him to give meaning to my life, after our separation. I’d forgotten exactly why we’d separated. I’d had affairs, and probably so had she, but I think more than anything that there were other things she wanted to do with her life, and she didn’t think she could do them with me. I’d disappointed her
too. I’d always hoped, I think. She suddenly came out with the idea of a divorce one Sunday evening, that afternoon we’d gone for a walk with Benjamin in the Buttes-Chaumont. We’d eaten ice cream on the square outside the town hall of the 19th arrondissement. I remember the flavors he chose, chocolate and lemon. After that, we weren’t able to speak anymore. She’d already found a lawyer, she’d been planning it all for a long time, everything was worked out in her head. It took me several months to realize. What had I done to get to that point, were they all like me? It had taken Marco less than three months to decide to live together with Aïcha. All the same, my son and I had never stopped loving each other. He never blamed me.

  “Why did you and Mom end it?”

  He asked me that once, a few years ago. He hadn’t met Anaïs yet, but had been dumped by the girl who’d been the love of his life from tenth grade to senior year, they’d just broken up. I liked the girl a lot too, the three of us had been on vacation together two years running, once to Brittany, and another time to the Baie de Somme, Marco had let us use a house he’d bought there. He was desperate, my son, and all the words I could have said, looking at his distraught face, I kept to myself.

  “I’m not sure anymore, Ben. It happened gradually with your mother and me, we loved each other a lot.”

  “Is that true?”

  That time, his eyes had lit up, and then we quickly left the café where we were because he’d started crying again. He was heartbroken. He’d never see her again. He didn’t think he could live without her. He didn’t know what to do. And then in the end, obviously, he did know. He was twenty-one when they broke up. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? It was a nice story, but it wasn’t always enough to pull it down. Sometimes, you had to go even deeper.