Dominique Fabre - Guys Like Me

“Did you see Mom’s book?”

“Yes, Benjamin, it’d have been hard not to see it.”

I must have given him some kind of awkward answer like that, it was already thirteen years ago.

“Why don’t you talk to her? Don’t you know what to say to her? Why?”

I remember I took it badly at the time. He was angry, he already knew what was going to happen. I asked him to shut up, and later, when the two of us were alone, my son and I, I tried to explain. But I couldn’t find the words, and as for him, he was busy tapping away on his computer, he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“You’re right, it’s none of my business.”

And so I didn’t tell him.

When we finally stopped looking at each other and looking away, when he took another cigarette from the pack and, as if we were regulars there, I made a sign to the waiter to bring us another drink, yes, that’s right, the same, he started to tell me. Yes, he’d lost his job. I should have suspected it; he didn’t make a big thing about it, except that he was over fifty. I didn’t ask him any questions, the whole time he was talking to me. Yes, the whole time he was talking to me that day, I don’t think I came up with more than two sentences, because I’d immediately sensed how much he needed it. He really had given a lot of himself to the job. He’d followed all the technical changes, and he spoke German reasonably well. That wasn’t an obvious thing for a guy like him who hadn’t had much schooling. He quite simply hadn’t seen it coming. Of course, you just had to switch on the TV to know, but he didn’t think it would happen to him, not to him. The worst thing was, he hadn’t put any money aside. He’d helped his mother with the apartment in Marseilles with her cousin, and now he was renting a really small ground-floor apartment. A man had a lot of debts in life, that’s what life meant. He came out with two or three things like that, without knowing it. Without knowing it, he was painting a picture of a guy who could have been me, or so many others, but who was actually him. He didn’t get worked up as he told me. He occupied his days as best he could, he’d asked all his acquaintances to keep their eyes and ears open, because at his age they were the only people he could count on. He called it being humanly alert. I remember that awkward expression, where had he dug it up? His last partner had left him, he’d become unbearable, she kept telling him, unbearable, that was the excuse she’d given, but in fact she didn’t really care either way. She’d been with him out of a kind of self-interest, which she’d calculated pretty well, and seeing him unemployed had made up her mind for her.

“How old was she?”

“What? Oh, forty-seven, I think.”

He seemed surprised by my question, as if it was of no interest. Then, just in his eyes, at that moment, I saw a boyish smile. Maybe he still loved her, or had never stopped? But no, not really. He’d gone to the employment court, not expecting anything from it. The guys who’d fired him were from the same generation as him, they were your age, he said. They knew perfectly well they were screwing him over, but getting rid of a few people like him might be worth it, they must have told themselves something like that. He’d been naive, and he’d been stupid, now he looked back on it, he really hadn’t seen it coming.

He kept looking around us, around me, in the café. The booths had all filled up little by little, and there were more and more people out in the street, on their way to catch a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare. His case was full of papers, letters of confirmation, bailiff ’s notices, résumés to be sent or ones already returned, current business. He had an envelope with those words on it. He put it down on the table. He didn’t open it, as if he was still hesitating. I had the premonition, that evening, thinking about it, that something else would happen in his life, that it wouldn’t end there. Was it because of the computer case, emptied of its contents, where he kept his papers? Or was it the owner of the café, that young woman with the clear complexion who didn’t give any impression of youth or life? Guys like me often feel really sad when they look at other people. Since I turned forty, and especially since my divorce, four years after that, my only consolation has been my work, which allows me to keep such things at a distance. Since my separation, I haven’t had a real love affair. I don’t have the strength for it anymore, I kept telling myself. But why would I need strength? How the time passes … Quite often, my thinking stops there, and I try to sleep immediately afterwards, because I really don’t know what’s waiting for me if I keep thinking.

We saw each other a few times after that. What surprised me from the beginning was that thanks to him, because he also wanted to know about me, to know things about my life, to do part of the work and not be outdone, I started to understand my own life better, or rather to see the truth in the way I tell it to myself, on those bad nights when I know I won’t be able to sleep and my apartment seems tiny and I feel as if I’m going to end up suffocating in it. He’d been unemployed for more than two years, I didn’t ask him for details. When we left the bar on Rue d’Amsterdam, he handed me the résumés I asked him for. I glanced at them, there was his place of birth, near La Garenne-Colombes, that was our suburb before, his and mine, and lots of other guys too. His résumé, as far as I could tell, seemed plausible enough, except that he’d probably never be able to find anything again, because of his age. He never changed his mind about that. I even ended up asking him over the phone: what was the point of carrying on trying if, deep down, he was convinced that he’d never get out of this mess, that it was too late for him?

“I’ll pass them around, and we’ll see what happens.”

“Thank you.”

He was looking at me and nodding, like a child waiting for it to pass, as if that thank you wasn’t addressed to me. How many guys like me had he approached, old acquaintances, guys he hadn’t seen in years? Then he closed his case and folded his hands over it, and I didn’t know if that meant he wanted to go, or on the contrary to stay, his hands placed on the top of his case, forever incapable of choosing between the outside and here, where he could stay. You never knew with him.

“By the way, how are things in La Garenne-Colombes?”

A wicked smile gradually lit up his face. “Oh, La Garenne-Colombes. There aren’t many guys left who are still interested in La Garenne-Colombes.”

“Why do you say that?”

He smiled a bit more, I liked seeing him like that, he reminded me of that little boy in La Garenne-Colombes, near Place de Belgique, he never found his way back to school, but that was beside the point now.

“I went back there last year, well, maybe five or six months ago. I hardly recognized a thing, you know.”

“Why don’t you go see for yourself? You aren’t far, are you?”

I didn’t reply.

He watched me put his résumé away in my briefcase, the briefcase of a man who was still whole. We both knew, maybe at the same time, how pointless it was, given his age. But then, when I read it again that evening, I wasn’t so sure.

“Will one be enough?”

We were both still standing there.

“I’ll make copies.”

He nodded. He showed me a flash drive he’d taken out of his pocket. It was red. That surprised me, coming from him, but after all why not? We were the generation of floppy disks in offices, and also of Atomkraft? Nein, danke! I suddenly remembered those little metal badges we carried on our school satchels and wore on the lapels of our jackets, bought from the flea market in Clignan-court or in fake American surplus stores. We all had them in high school. We’d walk along the streets of Asnières in our combat jackets covered with badges. He collected them, sometimes resold them, sometimes swapped them.