Dominique Fabre - The Waitress Was New

“I know, ma’am, I know that very well.”

I gave her a smile, but I still wonder what my face must have looked like just then. Of course she knew, she just wanted to hear me say it. Fortunately Amédée started yelling about something in the kitchen, and then he came out in his beautiful pearl-gray suit, with his black wool scarf and his walkman, his day was done. He gave us a nod. “See you tomorrow, Amédée.”

“Ma’am, we’ve got to get the dishwasher fixed, I’m not a plumber, for Christ’s sake! It’s leaking! Jesus, I’ve had it with this dump!”

It was two weeks since our last flood, and then — I’d figured this out while I was washing the glasses, a little while before — it was last spring that the boss started to seem so out of sorts, with their daughter abroad and Sabrina right in front of him from morning to night. He was forty-three, it’s like a sickness sometimes, those things.

“I really can’t imagine where he might be,” I told the boss’s wife.

I felt like a good stiff drink, here I am fifty-six years old and often I think I can feel the kid in me coming back to the surface, or is that just my imagination again?

“Pierre, you know very well where he is.”

This time I wasn’t going to get off that easy, and in any case it made me sad to see her so miserable. Like I say, the boss isn’t such a bad guy, but she was a real peach of a woman, most of the time.

“This is making me uncomfortable, boss. You don’t know when Sabrina’s coming back?”

We stopped talking at that point.

Outside the sky was clearing after the morning’s gray clouds and wind, or at least that’s how it looked from the bar. I’m a weather nut, I don’t really know why. Bars can help us in fair weather and foul, for me it doesn’t make that much difference, except on my way home at night or on my day off. The boss’s wife stood up before I could, it was the young man in black, this place was getting to be a habit for him. He still had the same face, still a little like a child, slightly anemic by the look of him, she asked what he wanted and I heard the coffee machine going. I wanted to get up and head back to work, but it was clear there was no ducking out of it this time. Pierrot my friend. We’d see about that. When she came back she started stacking the ashtrays to go empty them out, and I told her I was just about to do that, if she didn’t mind waiting we could talk if she liked. She looked at me like I’d made a stupid joke, then took a Kleenex from her purse, she had tears in her eyes. That hit me in the pit of my stomach, not that I was worried what people might think, the young man was taking this all in via the big mirror behind the bottles, where my raincoat was hanging. I keep my wallet and keys behind the cash register, you never know.

“Ma’am, look at me.”

I took her by the shoulders like an old lover in a movie on Channel 3, the kind they put on too late. The next day, if I didn’t watch it all the way to the end, I keep it going while I’m at work. I’ve seen stars sit down at my bar, especially back when I was working in Paris. She looked up at me, and then she did an amazing thing, I’d never seen the like in all my time at this job, and I’ve been at it since I was nineteen. I don’t even want to count how many years I’ve been in the bar business, not including those six months on disability after the end of my last love affair, I was fifty-three when I came back. She nestled between my arms. “Pierre, oh Pierre, if you only knew.” What a dope he was, I thought. All this for Sabrina, and then I wanted to tell her everything would work out in the end, she just had to give him some time, and also I’d been thinking it might be good for them to get away for a while together, except that you can’t close a bar like Le Cercle, even for a week in October, without the next week’s take falling off by a good forty percent. And then how do you pay Amédée, and the waitress on sick leave, and her replacement, and the old barman who just wants to be left alone and keep listening to his customers tell their stories without once asking him what he thinks? She even let out a few real sobs, carefully stifled, and I felt like squeezing her tight to make them stop.

“Ma’am,” I murmured, “you’ve got to get hold of yourself, people are looking.”

The youngster wasn’t missing a second of the show. He did have a book to read, after all, right beside him. She raised her head, she wanted to tell me something, but suddenly she pushed me away and ran to the door at the far end of the bar, she went up to their apartment. I haven’t been there often, after all the years I’d put in here I knew quite enough about them as it was. I’d never tried to spend much time with them. For two summers, while they were away and I wasn’t, I’d gone up to water their plants and sort through their mail, and that was it. This thing with the boss’s wife had really shaken me up, and that’s no lie.

I’m only a barman, and when I forget that, the world around me seems like a bunch of different movies running at the same time. There are romance movies and sad movies, and if you pay attention most of their stories start to get all mixed together, till there’s no way you can go on telling them to yourself. It’s like they’re all chasing after each other, and then, just when you’re ready to decide how they end, you have to serve two beers and wipe down the counter again, and empty the ashtrays and scrub out the coffee machine, and now and then leave the bar with butterflies in your stomach to go hear the results of a blood test or chest x-ray, and then it’s to hell with the film, and good riddance. It came back to me a little while later, I was alone, the evening’s first customers were drifting in. Everything was lit up around the underpass. They don’t do things by half-measures here in Asnières. The boss gripes on and on about the way our local taxes keep going up (and the government health and pension contributions, and insurance, and Social Security, and the business tax, and the residence tax), but at least we have Christmas wreaths starting in mid-October, for the big sales period. It doesn’t do all that much to cheer things up around here, but people like it. The customers were keeping me busy again. I’d got the message, she wanted me to go have a talk with the boss. I shrugged my shoulders a few times without meaning to, and when the kid in black asked how much he owed me I said it was on the house, in honor of the boss’s wife. He didn’t know how to answer, he already had the money in his hand, and now he put it back in his pocket. He must have been waiting for his chance to get going, for me it’s just a pleasure to have a little chat. I worked like a madman for another two hours. Usually I had the boss there to help with the customers, in theory at least, but now I was all alone. I didn’t answer when the regulars asked questions, I said “They’ll be back, nothing to worry about, what’ll it be?” I hardly spoke a word to Roger, who’s been my friend for thirty years now. He’d told me he’d be coming by so we could make plans for the weekend, we have a little betting system we like to try out together, this time we were thinking of Longchamp.

“You’re swamped, huh?” he asked me.

“Worse than that.”

He was wearing a nice blue shirt, and for the past few weeks he’d been going jogging by the river every few days. He’d tried to get me to come with him. Fat chance! His new girl was thirty-seven. I didn’t notice when he got up to leave, I haven’t seen him in such a hurry for five years at least.

“So we’ll call each other?”

“Yeah, be seeing you, sorry!”

It was already dark at eight, when I got a chance for a breather. I was completely done in. Usually I’m back home in Les Grésillons by this time.