Dominique Fabre - Guys Like 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.

ON THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, THERE WAS A LOT OF RAIN. The Seine was very high. I could spend hours watching it when it’s like that. I often went to Brochant, Marie was fairly well, I thought. We both knew what she was waiting for. It was always there between us. But we almost never talked about it. Sometimes, she’d drift off for an hour or two, sitting on her couch without moving, and it was good to be there next to her at moments like that. I took some extra days off that I was owed from the previous year, I really needed them. I was glad I could do that. I could live without my job for a week and concentrate on myself. The girl looked at the computer screen and even said: at last! I went to a whole lot of places, I did a lot of things, the kind of things you’re always putting off until later and end up never doing. Most of the time it’s as if these things are only there to make us think about them without ever going anywhere near them. I went to see Benjamin when he left his lab in Jussieu, we walked for a while along the Seine, it was brown or gray, and quite swollen. We were near the Gare d’Austerlitz, it seemed odd to me to be in a part of Paris where I almost never set foot when I’m not working. We walked for a long time without saying anything, after we’d talked about work, his move, his new job in Zurich, Anaïs, what did she think about it? She wasn’t exactly delighted, but it’d be OK. They’d see, anyway. He’d reached a dead end here. There was only Switzerland or the United States left. That made me smile, I think. I’d have been incapable of studying the things he did. Was his mother gifted for that kind of thing? I couldn’t remember. We had a drink at the counter of an Auvergnese café in the Gare d’Austerlitz. We played the lottery cards. Ben won one euro fifty. We had another beer, and then lost three times. We then crossed the Seine and walked to the Gare de Lyon, to take Line 14 on the metro.

That was where we had to say goodbye, I’d continue on to visit Marie, and he would go home by train. And then I changed my mind. I told him about her on the platform at the Gare Saint-Lazare. It was the right moment, I thought. For a long time, whenever I waited for him on Friday, at the end of the platform, I used to see lots of guys on their own also waiting to see their kids for the weekend. We didn’t speak to each other, but we recognized each other in the end. The people on the opposite platform were just getting off the train when I told my son I was seeing somebody, her name was Marie. I don’t know if I said it loudly enough or not, he said who? Marie? He read my lips and he just smiled, oh really, has it been long? No, we chatted for quite a long time, but we’ve really only been seeing each other for a month … I felt a bit stupid, saying all that. Will you get married again? My son had often asked me that when he was in his late teens. His mother didn’t have any more children. She lived for a few years with a guy from Asnières, a dentist, also divorced. I don’t know why it didn’t work out. I’d have had other children, I think, if I’d forgotten more easily. Forgiven too. In these past few years, I’d had nothing but brief encounters. A woman on a street corner, with her indifferent smile and eyes. It happened like that, and it’s nothing. An evening, a year. With Sylvie, almost two years. You don’t have many real encounters in a lifetime. Night bars, flashing your debit card, and aspirin the next morning. Another guy’s wife, the lies that are true when you tell them, and then you forget you told them. People are well-behaved on the train. Those who aren’t using their cell phones all the time look out the windows, not many people talk apart from that. Ben sat down on a fold-up seat, his legs slightly parted. He hadn’t said anything at all about Marie. Maybe because it had taken me all that time to consider living with another woman? Otherwise, I don’t know. Maybe I was imagining things, because he’d be going soon and I’d be on my own, even though I didn’t see him very much anyway. He gave a little sign with his hand, then he took his MP3 from the pocket of his bag and for a guy like me, a father every other weekend and for half of every vacation, that has to last two weeks, for years on end.

My heart was pounding. I became aware of it on the steps at Cour de Rome, after the escalator. I went and killed time at the FNAC in Saint-Lazare, waiting for seven o’clock, Marie wouldn’t be back before eight, there was no point in hurrying. I looked at the books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I’d already read two of them. I didn’t know which of the others to choose, and I didn’t want to ask the assistants. At the snack bar on the second floor, people take what they’ve just bought out of their bags, or else they’re waiting for something. I used to come here often a few years ago, to the FNAC in Saint-Lazare. It isn’t an especially pleasant place, it’s just there with the idea that, between purchases, people should take the trouble to talk to each other, because after all they live together, for better or worse. I don’t remember why I went there so often, on the weekends when I didn’t have Benjamin. I’ve spent a lot of time in that area since my teenage years. I used to wait for my son at the Gare Saint-Lazare, on Saturdays. Once, I’d spotted him and his mother on Rue de Caumartin, it was a sunny day, he must have been telling her one of those endless stories that came into his head sometimes, and he looked perfectly happy, without me. I remember I smiled like an idiot in their direction, and then, when I realized, I went and took refuge in the snack bar on the second floor of FNAC. There, women wait for their girlfriends so that they can go to the movies, notch up another one on their schedule, or, where guys like me are concerned, they drink coffee and wait for it to pass, and end up deciding not to approach their children when they see them on the street, on the sidewalk of Caumartin. It felt strange to me to be on vacation at this time of the year. I’m one of those guys for whom work has become a kind of blessing, it stops you from having to think, basically. Several times in the past few years, I’ve tried to calculate the number of hours I’ve spent in offices, receiving people, making phone calls, or reading files without the slightest interest, I’ve never been very good at counting. I didn’t always think about Marie, far from it, but the nearer the time came for her to go into the hospital, the more I thought about things I’d like to do with her if she wanted. Sometimes, at night, I had obvious nightmares about her illness, and I was afraid she’d read them on my face when she woke up. In the end, I didn’t buy anything, I got up and left.