Dominique Fabre - Guys Like Me

“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.