Dominique Fabre - The Waitress Was New

I realized I hadn’t turned on the TV set I was staring at, and I wanted to see the late news on Channel 3. Eventually you get tired of the news around Asnières, which isn’t really news at all, actually. You don’t pay it much mind, apart from the people who’ve died, and then, because of my work, the changing signs on the storefronts, that Pimkie used to be an Étam, that sort of thing. Even a guy like me needs something more than that. I pushed the button on the remote and immediately turned down the sound so I wouldn’t have to hear words I hadn’t asked for, I get more than enough of that at work. I saw a fresh-breathed couple kissing behind a waterfall, Rexona deodorant. I’d missed the news. I decided to take a shower, and then I wanted to do my laundry, too. There was one question I couldn’t get out of my mind: what would happen if he didn’t come back? I couldn’t even imagine that, of course. He’d celebrated his forty-third birthday just before they left on vacation, all the regulars were there, they’d chipped in for a present. It’s strange, too, I would never have seen the boss’s wife as a nurse.

When I was out sick at Beaujon Hospital two years ago I ended up in the more-or-less attentive hands of a beautiful fat Caribbean girl, a little Franco-Moroccan homo, and a Spanish woman who danced the salsa every Friday night in an Argentinian restaurant near the Gare de l’Est. She used to practice her moves while she was getting my morning pills together. Salsa was really the only thing she cared about. She wasn’t afraid of sick people, and I never got the feeling I put her off. It was watching her dance the salsa at Beaujon that brought me back to life. Before I was discharged she even found me a place to take lessons in Paris, I went two or three times. I didn’t have much talent, but I would have been happy to keep at it if I had a regular partner. I thanked her with one of my favorite postcards, which shows a kid running down the middle of the street with a baguette. I never dared to go back to the cardiology ward and pay her a visit. What would she have thought? I liked that girl. It was half past midnight. I took a quick little shower, fairly cold, waiting for things to calm down in my head, but this time it didn’t work. It really was no ordinary day. I put on my bathrobe and looked up the boss’s cellphone number in the address book I keep by the phone. He must have thought it was her, I got the answering machine. I said I would have liked to talk to him, we all needed to know what the hell was going on, and then soon there’d be the orders to send in to the wholesaler in Gennevilliers and the Rungis market. That was his responsibility. I was about to say goodnight when all of a sudden he picked up, like he’d been there all along, waiting to pounce, if you’ll pardon the expression.

“Ah, Pierre, it’s you, hi, how’d it go today?”

“It went fine, yes, just fine. Monsieur Dilman paid up, by the way.”

I could picture the look on his face, preoccupied and not very interested, and then, because it was getting late, I added:

“You really should tell us when you’re planning to come back. You’ve got to call your wife.”

He didn’t answer. I heard him swallow, with my one ear I tried to make out where he might be, but there wasn’t a sound. Maybe he was alone, in the end.

“Hey, boss, did you hear me?”

“Yes, yes.”

He mulled that over a while, then finally told me he just didn’t know for the moment, maybe soon, he’d see, but in any case, if he was away longer than expected, he was counting on me to keep him posted. That was what really jumped out at me: keep him posted. Pierrot my friend, I don’t know why those words came into my head, we still weren’t out of the woods. Keep you posted on what, my fine fellow, I wondered? On what she thinks of you?

“You can count on me, but you’ve really got to call your wife, she’s worried, you know.”

At this point I sensed I was annoying him something fierce, I heard a dog barking, drowning out his anger. It was the bulldog over at number 33c, it really knew how to pick its moment. That dog was a nuisance, there’d already been complaints, a guy at number 31, dumb as a plank, and a family at number 27 who had real twin girls and a Siamese cat.

“Pierre, that’s none of your business.”

“Well. whatever you say, boss, and good evening to you.”

It made me mad that he’d taken it so badly. And then, since I always like to follow through on an idea, when I have one, I went to the window and looked down into the street. I opened it and gave him a wave with one hand. I’m sure he saw me. His blinkers were on. He was leaning on the hood, double parked just downstairs from my place. Today I tell myself I could have run after him and convinced him to come up, he would have talked to me just like a customer in the bar, sort of cleaning house in his head, but what would that have changed? He was just totally lost, if you ask me. I knew next to nothing about his life, only his disappearances and his little crises, and the big dents the horses put in the cash register, and then the way he fiddled with his income statements, like any other owner of a café or restaurant. He was just my boss, and that was all.

He turned down the street toward the expressway, and then at the corner he very slowly ran a red light, like the basket case he was at that point. I lit one last cigarette, then poured some detergent into my little basin and set my things to soak. These days I’d rather do my own washing than go to a laundromat. I always think people are wondering what a guy like me’s doing in a laundromat, and that bugs me, it’s stupid, I know. I’m more than old enough to own my own washing machine. Before he found himself a girlfriend, Roger and I used to go together, like old bachelors. I brought the fabric softener, and the time went by faster with the two of us watching the clock together, telling each other our stories. Now he gives his laundry to Muriel. But still. I also took my two antibiotic pills. The pain was back when I woke up from last night’s dream, and I couldn’t afford two bad nights in a row, not after a day like today. Deep down I’m a relaxed kind of guy, like most of my colleagues in the business, from what I’ve seen. But I’m also a worn-out kind of guy, as it happens. After that I smeared Nivea on my face like I do every night, on the off chance it might do something for me, you never know.

Sometimes when I go to bed I read a page or two of a book and don’t even have time to realize I haven’t understood a word. Other nights I can read a good ten pages or so, which is no small feat for a little guy like me. That night I was reading If This Is a Man , because back in September that’s what the youngster who comes to Le Cercle with his black clothes and his cellphone was reading, and his eyes were shining the whole time. And then, you’ve got to keep up on things. In that respect my profession’s not particularly challenging. There are the horse races, of course, and car wrecks and crimes, and drunk talk, and sex talk, and customers who get caught by the radar on the riverside roads or coming off the Asnières bridge, and then the occasional troubles at closing time, but apart from that we don’t have too much to ponder. If This Is a Man is the story of a Jewish Italian resistance fighter who lived through the concentration camps, he wanted to bear witness. He worked as a chemist to keep body and soul together. I’d asked the young man the author’s name, and he seemed very excited to give it to me, he even wrote it down on the cardboard coaster I’d handed him, I’ve still got it in my apartment. He was some guy, that Monsieur Primo Levi. There’s somebody I would have loved to have as a customer. It stirred me up to see the kid in such a state. I read twenty-one pages. I would even have kept going if I hadn’t had to go back to Le Cercle early to keep an eye on developments. Le Cercle was closed, and no one had thought to unlock the door for me. My friend Pierrot, lost in a bad dream. Inside I could see more and more dead leaves all over the big gray and white floor tiles. I knocked on the glass door and fumbled with the key, but all around it seemed like people were avoiding me. I thought I saw Sabrina and her two kids, but when I came closer to ask what was happening she got scared and started to run, her two children were pulling at her to make her hurry up. There was no sound in my dream, even though I ended up yelling like crazy. And that was that. I woke up at six in the morning covered in sweat, I went to drink a glass of water and pee. I picked up Primo Levi’s book again, I was hoping to sleep a little longer, but nothing doing. Pierrot, you’ve got to get up. I was sick of that stupid dream, and especially of waking up afterwards. Would I never know how it ended, assuming it did?