Jean-Philippe Blondel - The 6:41 to Paris

He looks pretty shattered to me.

He was very popular at the lycée, Philippe Leduc. We weren’t in the same class, but I’d noticed him. Some of the girls in my clique would talk about him. Their comments were by no means all positive. Particularly on the part of a redhead who’d gone out with him: a total fiasco, she said. She shouted out for all to hear that he was despicable. We nodded, but deep down we thought she spoke that way out of bitterness. We were sure that with us it would be different.

I was only in the outer circle of that group. I never viewed Philippe Leduc as potential prey. I had no potential prey. I was realistic. I wasn’t all that attractive, I had brown hair that got greasy overnight and defied all my efforts to control it. An ordinary face. I didn’t make any effort, either. I had no desire to look pretty. I’d gone out with two boys you could refer to as lumps: losers of my own caliber. I parted with my virginity without too much pain but also without any pleasure.

I don’t have any good memories of the lycée. It was only afterward that I made real friendships. Along the way, two years after I’d finished, there was Philippe Leduc.

The last image I have of him. That angelic little mug of his: I felt like blowing it to smithereens. My entire body full of tension in the effort to seem calm. And snapshots from the previous days: the rope bracelet he wore on his left wrist. The fine muscles on his arms. His thighs. His butt. I can still see it all quite sharply. I’m biting my lips not to laugh. If he only knew, Philippe Leduc, how I am eyeing his butt from twenty-seven years ago, it’d blow his mind. I’m starting to talk like Valentine.

I don’t want to imagine what his butt is like nowadays.

I’ll bet it’s succumbed to the same fate as all the rest — sagging. Lassitude. I wish I could see myself in the mirror. To see whether I’m a similar disaster area.

That’s what I did the day after the party we went to together. I can just picture myself. Naked in the bathroom. Inspecting every feature, mercilessly. I couldn’t understand what he saw in me. Because I was perfectly realistic. When I was at the lycée, the girls there had really helped me. They thought I was plain. Not ugly, no, just plain. Nothing striking. A bug. I knew he’d had a lot to drink by the time we started talking out in the garden. That when we sought refuge in the attic, away from the others, he had alcohol in his blood. We thought it would be full of cobwebs and old toys and wardrobes stuffed with cast-off clothes, but what we found was a regular two-room apartment, with a bed and armchairs and a coffee table. We stood there for a moment, astonished. He was holding my hand. We wondered whether we dared violate this space that didn’t belong to us or even to the boy who had invited us, but to his parents. It was as if we had walked straight into adulthood.

And violate we did.

That next day as I stood at the mirror in the bathroom, I kept my emotions in check. I told myself I’d been very lucky. But I shouldn’t get my hopes up. He wouldn’t call. It would be better if I forgot about him. And that was still my strategy when he came up to me the following Friday as I was on my way out of the technical institute. He wanted to talk to me. To apologize. For what had happened last week. I lifted my chin. I said, “Don’t worry about it. I wanted to. And anyway, I’ve forgotten all about it.” He was stunned. No one spoke to Philippe Leduc like that. He went on the attack. I’d nailed him. I hadn’t planned it. It would never have worked if I had. He took me by the arm. I turned to look at him. I was very solemn. I studied his face. I dissected him the way we dissected the company reports we worked on in our business classes.

He was the one who melted first.

We became an item — sort of.

I say sort of. Because apart from during vacations, we met only on weekends. I went to two or three parties in Paris that his friends from university threw. I stayed in the background. He was ingratiating. A lot of people wondered what we were doing together, but at the same time they didn’t really ask questions, and in any case, when you’re twenty, couples come and go. Before long we would be ancient history, too.

He was the one who wanted to go to London.

I remember how it came about. We were at the café, Les Trois Amis, not far from my parents’ place. I went past the place just this weekend, when I took my mother to the boulangerie that isn’t a boulangerie. It hasn’t changed. The same wrought iron tables outside, the same little gravel courtyard. The veranda has been painted green. You can just get a glimpse of the room at the back, a bit too dark. My mother followed my gaze. She delighted in telling me that the owners had recently put the café on the market, because they were about to retire. I waited for her to go on, to start annoying me and say how she hoped that this den of iniquity, of debauched youth, would be wiped from the surface of the planet, because there had always been problems, with noise and concerts and drunken customers, but she merely gave a little sigh and said she hoped the new owners would keep it as a bar. “It’s a good thing, it livens up the neighborhood, it’s fun to see all these young people.” I couldn’t believe my ears. My mother used to hate it when I hung out at Les Trois Amis.

I thought about old age. About change. About the boredom of repetition.

Maybe I’ll tell her that I was on the train with Philippe Leduc.

No.

She wouldn’t remember him. She saw him only two or three times.

And yet he made a huge impression on her. She thought, Well I never, for once Cécile has brought home an attractive young man. Who’s got presence. And manners on top of it. It’s true that Philippe was the perfect son-in-law. Smiling, relaxed, considerate toward older people, opening the car door for the ladies, well-mannered. He was studying English, the language of the future, but he didn’t brag about his abilities. He made friends wherever he went. He was the young man at family reunions who tickles the kids and makes the grandmothers laugh.

I thought he took it too far.

I knew what made me want to be with him: vanity. To parade around on the arm of a handsome man. To show other people that even when you’re insignificant you can still manage to do such a thing. I was perfectly aware that the relationship wasn’t headed anywhere and that it would end soon enough. But not the way it did. No, not like that.

I’m sure my mother also wondered what miracle had propelled us into each other’s arms — even if it was only for a few months.

Sex. That’s what I should have told her, just to see her face. And because it was part of the explanation. To him, I was reassuring.

In bed, Philippe Leduc was no longer quite so high and mighty. He was clumsy. More than once it was a near fiasco. And he was uptight, as well. He simply could not walk around naked. I never found out why he was like that. There was a time when I would have thought it could be interesting to get to the bottom of it, but we weren’t close enough for that. And then later on it no longer mattered anyway.

But I liked to reassure him. I would cling to his back without saying anything. I knew that talking would be the worst thing. So I would put my hand between his thighs and my lips on his shoulder blades and stay there without moving. I closed my eyes. I tried to imagine everything that was going through his mind — bits of conversations, locker room bragging, clips from porn films, and other dream-like sequences of drownings or fires or railroad disasters. And then very gradually the calm would return. Memories of a deep blue lake in the mountains. Walking along the ocean. Slowly, beneath my fingers, he would regain his vigor. I know that he liked this about me. My discretion. My patience. Then I would take over, still ever so gently. That’s what he needed, gentleness. That’s why our affair lasted for months and not days. That’s also why I was so angry with him afterward.