Dominique Fabre: The Waitress Was New

Madeleine came in with her hands in her raincoat pockets. She’d taken great pains with her makeup, her lips were redder, and she was wearing less base, I thought. She looked around, there was a little lull at my bar, the boss’s wife still hadn’t shown. We gave each other a peck on the cheek, she was already one of the staff. When I die I’ll be replaced just like that.

“How’s everything? It didn’t take you too long?”

I often tell myself that, it doesn’t bother me, really.

“I’m doing fine, Pierrounet. The bosses aren’t here?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She took off her raincoat and hung it on the door in back, she lit a cigarette, and without having to ask I made her her first espresso. She smiled at me.

“Pierrot, you don’t even seem to care!”

“You want some milk?”

She nodded.

“I guess they’re having a spat, huh? Well, the bloom went off that rose a long time ago.”

The rain was starting up again, and now people were hurrying along between the underpass and the pedestrian street.

“Yes, a long time ago,” she said again, “you can tell right away. Ah, men!”

She smiled sadly toward the rain. This must all have seemed a long way from Colonel-Fabien. Then no, she stopped smiling. I made a face like I had no idea, and in a sense it was true.

“We’ll never manage all by ourselves, thirty-two set-ups, there’s just no way!”

I gave the bar a good wipe with the mop rag to erase what she’d said, then I told her, “Yes, we will, Madeleine, it won’t be any worse than yesterday, don’t you worry.”

“What a grind, Pierrounet!”

She put out her cigarette and went to have a good yell with the cook, she showed him her burned hand, but just before that they’d said hello with a kiss on the cheek. Good old Amédée. It was going to be another hard day in the salt mines.

Just before noon the boss’s wife came downstairs at last. She’d carefully made herself up to cover the damage of the night before. “Pierre, how are you doing?” “Fine, and you?” She must have done a lot of crying, but she manned the cash register as if things were perfectly normal. I was having to be everywhere at once, this far from a breakdown. At one point I saw Amédée coming out of his kitchen to go see the boss’s wife. He silently held out a little stack of papers, she gestured that she understood, he’d written up the orders. Le Cercle was packed, it was almost like they were doing it on purpose, no way we could keep this up for long, especially with Madeleine from Colonel-Fabien, who might decide at any moment it wasn’t worth sticking around, you never know. Pierrot my friend, I said to myself, and then I didn’t finish the sentence in my head because we really were swamped. At two-thirty I had a quick bite, I hadn’t even once glanced out toward the street, where you can always see life going by, along with a wicked draft now and then. Madeleine tended the bar in the meantime, two or three customers asked if I’d heard anything from him, and I said “He’s sick, but he’ll be back on his feet in no time.”

“It’s that time of year.”

The boss’s wife gave me a look every time, that day Amédée didn’t even rib the waitress, we really had too much to do, I never heard one curse from the pass-through. Things were looking bad. I finished my lamb chop with green beans and went over to see her, she was standing there lost in a fog with her eyes glued to the Casio.

“Ma’am, we’ve got to do something, we can’t last another day without him.”

She looked at me like she didn’t understand.

“He didn’t call you?”

“No, Pierre, he didn’t even call me. It’s not right, it’s not right.”

She mumbled a few other things I couldn’t hear. So I turned all that over in my head, and I asked her:

“Could you give me the keys to the Audi?”

She really seemed very alone just then. She let her gaze wander all around the room, and then she went back to staring at the cash register like it was The Young and the Restless or some other soap opera.

“The keys to the Audi? Why? Wait, Pierre, I’ll go get them, they must be upstairs.”

“OK, thanks.”

She didn’t want to come with me. I was a little perturbed to see her head back to the cash register, staring off into space, Madeleine had agreed to look after the bar. On my way out I saw the young man in black coming in, and I smiled at him without meaning to, how much longer was he going to keep hanging around Le Cercle, anyway? There were dead leaves on the car again, she was parked on the Avenue de la Marne. I picked them off and drove away, I really should save up and buy myself a car someday, when I get too worn out. I’d left my old one behind when I left my last girlfriend, Jacqueline, and the apartment we lived in. We’d bought that car together, we’d taken out a little loan for the purpose. We also took little vacations together, never more than a week. We toured the châteaux of the Loire, where I was thoroughly bored, and then once in August we rented a place in the country near Dieppe. I wanted to see the beach again, and its pebbles, the first one I’d been to with my new foster family. I never explained all that to Jacqueline. We’d even made some more distant plans, we’d bought the Michelin guide to Italy, but just then I got scared of the new life spreading out in front of us, and I left her before we could go. Sometimes on Sundays we went for aimless little drives here and there, through the forests around Paris, or along the valley of the Chevreuse, or to Fontainebleau. It must be wonderful around there right now, with the fallen leaves. Why was I thinking of that? I drove through the little streets of Asnières, and when I reached Gennevilliers I took the four-lane toward Eugène-Varlin and the big housing projects, that’s where Sabrina lived. I had no trouble finding a parking place under the gray skies, there’s construction going on everywhere, walled-off work sites in an unholy mess, with nobody working, it can go on like that here for years at a time. Young guys hang around in the streets, talking loudly about the same things people talk about everywhere else. It’s only their voices that change, to tell the truth. Women with baby carriages and plastic bags from the big Carrefour supermarket in Gennevilliers.

I looked at the mailboxes and found Sabrina’s name, I couldn’t remember what floor she lived on. It felt pretty grim in there, so close to my tidy little suburb, kind of like another world. I rang at her door. There was noise coming from every floor, music, dogs waiting for walk-time, and then the TV in Sabrina’s apartment.

“Why, Pierre! Come in!” She was wearing a bathrobe. “What are you doing here?” Her hair was undone, and her eyes were a little too red, she really did have the flu. “Don’t get too close, or I’ll give you this bug I’ve got!”

She stood aside to let me in. There were bottles of medicine on her table, she’d set up the ironing board in front of the TV.

“You should have let me know you were coming, I would have straightened up.”

I told Sabrina I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by, the boss had been gone for two days and we hadn’t heard a thing from him. Her eyes got wide.

“Oh really? What’s up with him?”

She gave a big cough, tears came to her eyes.

“Oh, this flu. I was just about to make some tea, like a cup?”

“Yes, thanks.”

She’d taped up her kids’ drawings on the wall by the TV, all marked with the dates, and sometimes a few words too, in red, blue, or green. Sabrina was in all sorts of bright colors, a huge sun was shining. It was quiet here, and I would gladly have stuck around a while myself, I could well understand how the boss might fall in love with that girl. And as a matter of fact, Pierrot, I said to myself, but those are just stupid little ideas that come into my head now and then, because I’m alone, and because most of the time I have nothing in front of me but the same old barman’s day, and how much longer is that going to last? And then in the evening, at night, that stupid dream that keeps waking me up. She came back with a tray, she had some little cakes on a plate next to the tea. That was very sweet of her, I thought.