Maxim Jakubowski - Paris Noir

My colleagues suffer from a common form of self-disgust. After all, we’re just five losers working in a computer repair service centre. We make very little money. We know we’re smart but it’s not like any of us got into one of the grandes écoles. We’re neither handsome nor charming. How dare I consider myself superior to any of them? Especially in terms of attractiveness to any woman, let alone a woman like S. My four colleagues and I, it must be said, are able to occupy a level field of sexual conquest. This is another source of their feelings of intra-office egalitarianism. We have all partaken of the Nerd Girl.

Ombline, the Nerd Girl, works in Accounting at the computer repair service centre. She is the female version of the five of us ‘technical consultants’. Smart but unsuccessful, not especially appealing to the eyes. She’s a bit overweight, a bit pimply. A little older than us computer geeks, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Still wears her slightly oily, slightly dandruffed mousy brown hair in juvenile pigtails. But Ombline, the Nerd Girl as my colleagues call her, is the seductress of the computer repair service centre. Even though she still lives with her parents, in a drab concrete slab of an apartment building in the downscale nineteenth arrondissement.

I learned Ombline’s modus operandi just as my four colleagues had before me. Ombline invites you out to dinner. She gets quite drunk and demonstrably horny. She invites you to her apartment. You quickly greet her aged parents, who are always sitting in front of the TV, looking just barely alive. You repair to Ombline’s bedroom. She puts on some loud music – usually the Rolling Stones, circa 1971. You have hurried, almost furtive sex, only half or three-quarters undressed. It’s like you’re both sixteen and worried that her parents might burst in at any second. Ombline comes quickly, easily, even faster than you. After some awkward post-coital fondling she tells you you have to leave. You say goodbye to the parents who are still sitting in the living room, clinging feebly to life, in front of the TV.

Over the past two years, Ombline the Nerd Girl has regularly fucked the technical staff in a sort of five-man rotation, one man at a time, three to four weeks between each man. So there is no jealousy. No sense of competition even, since none of us believes that Ombline is worth fighting for. And she seems perfectly happy with the situation.

Naturally, I haven’t told Maman about Ombline. I don’t know what Maman thinks about my sex life. She asks no questions. But then I got careless. I mentioned, rather subtly, I thought, my feelings for S. I could understand why Maman would get upset. It was, after all, my – how to describe it?… too intense - attraction to a young girl that got me sent to a mental hospital for four years.

But we don’t talk about that young girl.

What, I begin to wonder, is Maman’s game? On the one hand, she seems worried that I might confront S. with my feelings. On the other hand, Maman taunts me, seems to be trying to goad me into doing just that – confronting S.

And what would happen if I did? Would S. understand the intensity of my conviction? My utter certainty that we are destined to be joined together forever? I would have to explain to S. that these are rather recent feelings. Though I had admired her for many years, thinking of her, talking about her from time to time with my fellow inmates during the four years I spent in the hospital, it is only in the past few months that this idea of mine, this idea of our shared destiny, has blossomed into an article of absolute faith.

I know that if I did express all this to S., she would be taken aback. Probably be slow to embrace my point of view. It would take time for the idea to grow on her. She is, after all, a wise and mature woman, some years my elder. And she already has a man in her life. As far as I can see, she is trapped in an unhappy marriage. Though, of course, you can’t even call what they have a marriage, can you?

‘Send her an email,’ Maman says. ‘Tell her everything you feel. I know you. You’ll be more honest typing this all into a computer than you would ever be speaking to her face to face.’

‘I don’t even know her email address,’ I protest.

‘I’m sure it’s very easy to find,’ Maman retorts.

It’s my turn with the Nerd Girl. Lying on Ombline’s bed, in her adolescent’s bedroom – still decorated with Noir Desir posters from 1994 – each of us three-quarters undressed, sticky and sated, we say nothing for a long time. We’re listening to Mick Jagger warble ‘Wild Horses’ at high volume.

‘What would you think about starting a serious relationship with me?’ Ombline asks as the song fades out and silence fills the room. Well, not total silence. I can hear the sound of the TV coming from the living room. Ombline’s aged parents are watching an old episode of Navarro.

I tell Ombline I cannot commit to her. She is not upset. She tells me she likes me best of all the technical consultants and she wants me to be her one and only lover and I) since I know she has the pick of the crop, and 2) since I know I’m not going to get any easier or better sex anywhere else, and 3) since I know that, someday, I am going to want to get married and have children, I might as well face reality and decide that, yes, I want to commit to her.

That’s when I tell Ombline about my feelings for S. Perhaps, I go into too much detail, explaining my whole conviction of destiny. Ombline tells me that I’m sick. She tells me I should be put back in the hospital (until that moment, I never knew she had known I’d been hospitalised). She tells me to get out of her bedroom or she’ll call the police.

I dress hurriedly, scurry through the living room, barely say goodbye to Ombline’s decrepit parents, hunched before the flickering TV screen.

I catch the Métro back down to the fifteenth. And while Maman sleeps in the next room, I write the email to S. I put it all down. Everything I feel. In 2,222 words. I find her address easily. Just as Maman knew I would. I send the message at 02.22. Two has always been my lucky number.

I will not tell you what I wrote to S. It is too intimate. It is between S. and me. At least, that is how I wanted it to be.

I barely sleep. In the morning, over breakfast, I tell Maman about the message I have sent.

Maman takes a bite of her croissant, chews contemplatively, then says, her voice thick with scorn, ‘She’ll never answer.’

‘Salut, Jean-Hugues,’ an unfamiliar, deep male voice says.

I am sitting in a corner booth in a café near my house, reading a Norman Spinrad sci-fi novel. It is late on a Saturday morning, early November – unusually, bitingly, cold for this time of year in Paris. I look up, expecting, of course, to see someone I know. Not one of my computer geek colleagues. I know their whiny voices too well. I brace myself for the sight of one of my old acquaintances from high school, someone who has recognised me as the troubled boy from their class, despite the fact that I have grown a thick beard, as a kind of disguise, since getting out of the hospital two years ago.

But as I look up, I see before me, in the smoky air of the café, two men I have never met before. They are practically identical, maybe forty years old, the two of them sporting shaved heads. Not cleanly shaved: each large, finely shaped skull bears a thin layer of greyish stubble. Both men wear black leather jackets and black pants. You might take them for a homosexual couple. But there is nothing remotely delicate about their appearance. If they are fags, they are tough, violent fags.