Dominique Fabre - Guys Like Me

“It doesn’t hurt, it’s strange. It doesn’t hurt at all.”

I lit a cigarette, now that I was going to start smoking again for real, outside my office building, at home, on the scooter, and the thing I really rediscovered that morning was my good old cough, it had never quite left me. We’d have to wait for the results of the other tests anyway. Do you think so? I already knew Beaujon Hospital. I’d been there myself a few years ago, and before that too. I didn’t tell Marie, obviously. When I left, she asked me to hold her tight, there was nothing else she could do now, we’d talked for a long time. All those wasted months faded away. I went back to work. There would always be work for a guy like me. Besides, we had a whole bunch of things to do, a lot of young guys had started in the last few months, with degrees in things that didn’t exist before. I was nicknamed the old man, which didn’t really say much. Their stories, their love affairs too, their all-too-obvious ambitions, their meals in the cafeteria where I no longer set foot, their passion for computers and worthless movies, it really was a new world. Benjamin was my only link with them. Sometimes it made me smile, we’d helped each other out for years on end. Well, anyway.

I took advantage of the lunch break to call Marie, she hadn’t done much. She’d gone for a walk along the end of the boulevard, around Porte de Clichy, and then the Cité des Fleurs, do you know it? Yes, I know it well. She’d sat there for a while. She hadn’t wanted to leave.

“I’m scared you’ll dump me.”

I didn’t answer. I thought no, why would I dump you? I’ll never dump you, Marie. Then we chatted for a while, I should have called her from a phone booth, I told myself, seeing colleagues pass, it embarrassed me. We’d talk again that evening. When she hung up, I think she was pleased. She would never tell me, I already knew that about her, but if I sensed it, she wouldn’t bother to hide it from me. Marie had nothing to hide, to tell the truth. And then I waited for evening. I left the office a little while after the others. I was pleased to be going home. I’d spent so many years completely alone, they were part of me now, and even the presence of a woman might weigh on me from time to time. Was I too old already? In the years after my divorce, I’d been in a cold rage that made me talk to myself for hours on end. Guys at the office would look at me strangely sometimes. But I didn’t notice, and besides, most of the time I couldn’t help it. I often think of those wasted years of anger, where did they get me?

It was Marco who’d said: listen, you have to do something, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but you’re going a little bit crazy, you can’t carry on like this.

“You’re not going to start, too?”

We talked a lot, for whole evenings, he and I. Then some time later, we had to reverse roles, his son had been arrested several times for some drug-related thing, and Marc-André couldn’t carry on burying his head in the sand, Antoine had been sentenced to six months. He would take him to rehab when he got out of prison. Antoine had been shooting up for a long time. During that period, I’d slept with a whole bunch of women, it hadn’t lasted long, almost all of them had suggested a plan of action, that’s what they all said, a plan of action, but he was the only one I accepted those words from. How many of them there were, guys like me! The shrink I saw looked like he didn’t sleep well at night. Was it because he made me come to his office at seven in the morning? I skipped several sessions, sometimes for legitimate reasons, but he didn’t care at all. He looked grumpily at the checks, he preferred to be paid in cash; he was a strange man. Why was I thinking about that now? I was a bit scared for Marie, but also, beneath that, I was scared for no reason, just plain fear, there was always a good reason to be scared, most of the time.

THERE HE WAS, IN FRONT OF ME, SITTING ON THE STAIRS. He was looking at his shoes, and I didn’t know if he was really looking at them or if he was doing it to hide his embarrassment, a bit like a big child. He was the last thing I needed in my life right now, he was only a side issue. But I smiled at him all the same, and we shook hands. He didn’t need to move, because of the height of the steps, when he looked up I knew what it was that struck me so much about his appearance: he had all his hair, and it was very brown, with hardly a single white hair. I remembered his mother, suddenly.

“I’m not disturbing you, am I?” he asked in a flat voice. “I was in the neighborhood.”

“Oh, really?” I replied good-humoredly. In his situation, I think I’d have thought up a better excuse. But I can’t really be sure of anything. He stood up, I asked him to excuse me while I looked in my mailbox. In the past few years, looking in my mailbox has stopped making me anxious, I’m not paying alimony to Benjamin’s mother anymore. For a long time, I only had to be a few days late to find the bailiff ’s papers in the mailbox. Now I’m more scared of news you don’t expect, news about people from the old days; we knew them and loved them, or we didn’t know them well and didn’t like them much, but they catch up with us and tell us they’re dead, or sick, or alive and well and looking for traces of their past. Anyway, there was nothing in the mailbox that day.

“How are you fixed for time? Come up and have a drink.”

“I don’t want to disturb you,” he repeated, and at that point, the desire to make fun of him came over me again, we waited for the elevator.

He looked through the window, then, from the buildings in the distance, he shifted his gaze to the end of my street, which was even livelier in April. I’d put down my briefcase and taken off my jacket, he turned toward me. For a brief moment, we looked at each other without saying anything. I think my mind was elsewhere. On the way home I’d had the idea of suggesting to Benjamin that he come for dinner one of these evenings. He was very busy with his preparations for leaving, and the closer it got, the less they felt like living in Zurich. Who wanted to be twenty-seven in a place like that, in the research lab of a big chemical company? That’s why I think Jean’s visit must have felt like an intrusion. Why had he chosen me, me rather than Marc-André, who’d actually found him a job? Was it because I live alone, and he doesn’t?

“Don’t just stand there, sit down. What’s going on?”

He resumed the same vague air, as if worried by the drafty air, just like earlier on the stairs.

“I don’t know. I won’t stay long.”

I made up my mind not to let myself be irritated by his remarks. During all those years of being unemployed and on welfare, he’d always been idle, and maybe that kind of dialogue was the only kind he could bring off.

“Is it the job?”

He gave me a weary, slightly boyish smile. “Yes, they’re real oddballs, things haven’t gotten better with the years, from what I can see … Didn’t Marc-André say anything?”

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.