Dominique Fabre: The Waitress Was New

The boss doesn’t like dealing with that sort of thing, especially with a guy like this. Also, he’s too quick to lose his temper. The guy looked at me, he’s one of my favorite customers here, deep-set eyes, never a pain in the ass, a cup of coffee between nine and nine-thirty, daily special at lunchtime when he’s not away on business, and then for the past few months he’s been coming in after work, too, when I’m finishing my shift. Sometimes we talk, which for a barman means I listen while he throws out sentences that don’t always know where they’re going, about his life, his career, his children. He has three, with three different wives. The oldest of the girls is thirty, and he’s just turned sixty. They look a lot alike. Sometimes they eat together at Le Cercle. She’s a psychiatrist at Marmottan Hospital. She must be his favorite, I’ve never seen the two others. Does she know her daddy makes a habit of undressing in Le Cercle to go throw himself into the Seine when he’s had one too many? I don’t think she has the slightest idea. I like seeing the two of them here, sometimes I even have regrets.

“Oh lord, I really tied one on, Pierre! Can you get me a glass of water?”

He took out a tube of Nureflex with codeine and dropped two tablets into the glass.

The new girl was already setting tables back in the dining room. There’s nobody here in the morning but the kids from the high school, usually just two or three of them, this is where they come to skip class. They don’t always have enough cash for a Coke, or even a coffee. I’m well known around here, they call me by my first name, I can’t always keep them straight but generally it’s a pleasure to see them. We also get people waiting for a phone call to set their course for the day, and housewives from the villas behind the train station, they come in together for a cup of coffee before they head off to the shops. He gave a big sigh and asked what he owed us. Without my noticing, the boss had left by the back door, next to the old dumbwaiter from before they renovated the café. Sometimes he uses the front door like everyone else, but now and then he slips out on the sly. They live above Le Cercle.

“Hang on a minute, if you don’t mind, I’ll go see,” I said.

I went to the Casio and found his sheet under the coins. He hadn’t paid for ten days or so.

“160 euros,” I told him.

I didn’t ask if he wanted to check over the bill, because with the states he got into, he’d have no way of judging. He pulled out his Société Générale checkbook, then said “No, not that one” and got out another, from Barclays. He filled out the check with a fancy Mont-Blanc pen, the slender kind, like the one the boss’s wife keeps in her purse to sign the vendors’ invoices. “Thanks,” I said, and I set down a change saucer beside him. That made him smile, not really a nasty smile, just a smile.

“Do you want a receipt?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll go write it up.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be back for lunch.”

“We have lamb chops with ratatouille.”

“Right.” (He was looking toward the train station.) “I’ll see. Could you please put this on my account?”

“No problem, have a good day.”

He put on his jacket and got out his cellphone. His workday was starting, it was after ten.

“Thanks,” I said, picking up the twenty euros he’d left as a tip. He paid those all at once too.

He was a prince of a customer, the boss would be happy.

I went on serving drinks, soon the lunch crowd would be trickling in, I had a little chat with the new girl, she lived in Paris on the Rue David-d’Angers. She asked if I knew the neighborhood. You bet I did, I’d spent a good twenty years knocking around Buttes-Chaumont. I’d done some short stints at a big café on the Rue Manin, just left of the town hall. Ah yes, she could picture the place. She knew her way around the nineteenth arrondissement. There was still room for people like her there, and in any case she lived alone. How would she fill her spare time if she didn’t live in Paris? She was born on the Place Colonel-Fabien. For the past three years she’d been living across from the swimming pool on the Rue David-d’Angers.

“How long does it take you to get here?”

She also casually asked me how business had been, and I was happy she’d come to trust me so quickly, I’m a fixture around here, people realize that. I served a few beers, brought the schoolkids their coffee, two coffees plus three glasses of water, and the girl greeted me with a peck on the cheek. “What’s new, Pierrounet?” As usual, I wasn’t thinking about anything much. I was wondering why the boss had left without a word, and even that didn’t particularly interest me, in the end. I was just feeling a little disturbed by a dream I’d had the night before, and not for the first time, either. Here I am nearing the end of my working life and I still have dreams about my job, sometimes they terrify me, I’d like to understand that. This guy had come in with another guy, they looked at their watches and changed their minds, it was too early to serve them anyway. They turned around and left without so much as a word to me, and mind you these guys had to be in their forties. I wanted to give them a piece of my mind, but I kept quiet. The new waitress went into the kitchen for a chat with Amédée, the Senegalese cook we found, he’s one of the best the bosses have ever had. They even gave him a raise to keep him around, but I don’t know if that’s going to do it. I went in to see him as soon as I got here, just like I always do, once I’ve wiped down the bar to start off my day. We talked for a while, that Amédée knows a lot of things. He rents an apartment in Saint-Denis, by the new tramway line. I used to go visit him on our days off back when I had my Renault 5. By bus it would take me an hour and a quarter at least, maybe even more with the changes, and that’s too long. We call each other “my friend” when no one’s around to hear us, and not as a joke, either. The new girl would fit in nicely, I was sure of it now.

I spared a thought for Sabrina, who’d been a real ray of sunshine around this joint these past few months, thanks to the big smiles she gave the customers and the good times she had with her two children, which she was always happy to tell us about. She loved taking the kids’ pictures. She got on well with the boss’s wife, too, or at least she did at first. Madeleine had put the napkins into the glasses with the kind of artistic fold you can’t master without some sort of experience. Apart from the fact that on the whole I didn’t give a damn, the day was off to a good start, the boss still hadn’t come back. His wife always shows up at eleven o’clock sharp. She stopped coming in earlier after the renovation, when they redid the café and we stopped selling tobacco and candy and little cards to scratch at or fill in or peer at from under your glasses while you check a tiny TV screen over the bar, and those Morpion cards with the little bugs smiling at you, or sneering, try again tomorrow. It really wasn’t worth the trouble, there are two other places to buy that sort of thing right nearby, there’s a newsstand and a big Relais H for smokes, and then another one at the other end of the underpass, a little hole in the wall where they don’t serve food. Now and then the new girl looked at her watch, she took off her apron, and meantime I’d got everything on my end ready to go for the next three hours, which are always the toughest in this business. At times like that, when you’ve got to be serving the meals, and making sandwiches for the people who only want sandwiches, and making sure not to mix up the office workers’ apéritifs, and doling out coffees and after-lunch drinks all the while, you’re a long way from the realm of psychology, which is really the most important thing in a barman’s life, after all.