Dominique Fabre - The Waitress Was New

There was a young couple camped out at a table in back. I went over and started to clean up all around them, but they kept right on making out. They were getting on my nerves, the boss’s wife still hadn’t come down. I told the holdouts that closing time had come. In England they have a bell, when it rings the people leave without making a fuss, as orderly as you please. The boss’s daughter says there are always taxis waiting just for the drunks, with a special rate. That place must be a boozer’s paradise. Oh, Pierrot, am I tired. This was a fine establishment before the boss started chasing after his life. The young couple finally left, they seemed very much in love, the way people are when it’s part-time, if you don’t mind my saying. This evening they’ll be texting each other in secret. Who was I to think that? I had the keys to Le Cercle, fortunately I’d kept them on me, because of everything that had happened these past few weeks, I suppose. I decided to leave her in peace. I turned off the lights, then the Casio, now things had quieted down out in the street. The newsstand was already closed, and the Relais H too, the people coming through the underpass were all in a hurry. Often you’ll seem them carrying a baguette at this time of night, because they’re not sure there’ll be any left in the bakery. Some of them walk quicker in the morning than in the evening, with others it’s the reverse. Apart from that, nothing much going on. I’ve never been to my bosses’ place when they were around, except once when Sophie was heading off to England, and then another time when the boss had been at it again and was having one of his crises. I sat on a stool and looked toward the station, no one there but the young guys holding up the wall by the photo shop. I thought of Sabrina. If he was at her place he’d be back soon for sure, because if I knew her she’d never let him stay with her two kids around, Jacques and Élise, although in private she called them Jasmine and Hamid, that’s the boy. Sometimes she showed me their pictures, she took a lot. I’d also seen her kids a few times when she was picking them up after a weekend at their father’s. Now and then they went to the movies at the Alcazar, next door. Last year I’d taken the little boy to one of the Levallois team’s basketball games. A colleague in the business there got me a good deal on the tickets. Lord, I realized, I was exhausted. I called the boss’s wife from the bar. She waited almost a quarter of a ring before she picked up, without speaking a word.

“It’s Pierre, I’ve closed up.”

“Pierre? Oh yes, Pierre. Thanks.”

She was sobbing like nobody’s business, and I’m not made of stone, I told myself they really were lucky to have found someone like me, by tomorrow I would have forgotten this whole thing, honestly.

“Listen, do you want me to come up?”

“If you like, Pierre. No, I’ll come down.”

So I hung up too, and then while I was waiting I went and put on a little cashmere sweater my most recent girlfriend gave me, it’s gotten all pilly now, but it’s light and it keeps you warm. I combed my hair and washed my hands, and then, in the mirror, maybe because the lighting was dim, I told myself I hadn’t done too badly, even on a day like this.

I put on my raincoat and looked out toward the sycamores. The branches were lit up by the lights over the tracks. They were swollen-looking and milky white, just like in the dream I’d been having for the past several nights. I hadn’t yet told Roger about it to see what he thought. I’m a superstitious guy, especially now that I live alone. It’s just that I have too much time to myself, really. With no one there to answer me, I come up with some very odd ideas sometimes. Or often I talk to my mother, who isn’t around anymore either. I call Roger to talk about this and that. But that’s not enough for me. Some days I’d rather not have to come out from behind my bar at all, but there’s no getting around it, life is still on the other side. I smoked a cigarette while I was waiting for her. My fourth of the day, that was something at least. When she came down I turned toward the stairway door, she’d made herself up and put on her leather jacket, and she’d taken off her glasses. I thought she looked pretty as a picture, but this was no time for compliments.

“I haven’t done the cash register,” I told her.

She looked at me like I was speaking Medieval Chinese, and then when she understood she gave me a nod.

“Would you like something to drink?”

She said “What’s that, Pierre? What on earth are you talking about?”

I answered, “Nothing, nothing,” and she sat down on a stool at one end of the bar, all dressed up to go out. The young man in black liked to park himself on that same stool. There was also that beautiful woman this morning, and in one corner of my mind I wondered if she might be coming to see me tonight behind my eyelids, with her delicious perfume. They haven’t invented Viagra for dreams yet. That might come in handy sometimes.

“I don’t know what to do, Pierre, he’s slipping away from me.”

She opened her purse, she had two full packs of cigarettes. I tried to find something to say, but like any barman I’m much better with my ears, and then the good thing about your ears is you can decide what to hear.

“Pierre, do you think he’s in love with her?”

She said that in a very low voice, very gentle, whereas as a boss she makes a habit of not mincing words, and especially of saying them very loudly, particularly when she’s talking to Amédée in his kitchen, or to the guy who comes to wash dishes, one of the old temps from the trade school. That question really rattled me, and I had to sit down on the stool next to hers so it wouldn’t show. Pierrot my friend, now’s the time to keep your trap shut. “Yes, ma’am,” I heard myself answer. And at that point I would have happily bit my tongue, but there was no taking it back now, so there we were.

“You should call Sabrina. Why don’t you call her?”

She looked at the ceiling, they’d had it redone just two years before, but what with all the cigarettes and all the life coming and going in this café, it wasn’t as clean as it used to be. La Rotonde was closing down too, now. Sometimes the new owners stay open late, on Fridays they have karaoke, and they also show soccer games on the big screen. The boss went back and forth on that for a long time, and finally he went for the renovation, we could see about soccer later. She sighed very loudly, then said “No, I’m not going to call her.” All of a sudden she turned toward me with a little smile far sweeter than any I’d seen for the past five or six years of my life.

“Incidentally, I was wondering, how long have you been working here?”

“Ever since Longardi’s time, you remember? It must be eight years now.”

“Yes, that’s right, eight years. Sophie was in seventh grade when we came here.”

We were really alone in the café, her and I.

I loved those days, back when the kid was going to school in the neighborhood, she used to do her homework at a table in the back of the dining room. Sometimes she even wanted me to help with her poetry recitations, and I’d play the fox or the crow or the turkey or the lion-king from La Fontaine’s fables. I’d never studied poetry much before I came to work here. She giggled like crazy. She got good grades and extra points for good behavior, when she got ten of those they gave her a set of little pictures as a reward. The boss’s wife went on smiling at those memories a little while longer, and then she looked at the people coming out of the tunnel. Whenever he wasn’t among them she must have been telling herself he’d be on the next train, in seven minutes if he was coming from Saint-Lazare, eleven if it was the other way. I had nothing to add, because of my advanced age, and as for what family I have, I haven’t seen them for some time now, I’ve never been comfortable with all that.