I’m Pauline’s husband.
The only thing Bruno heard in the short sentence was the word husband, and when you thought about it, what else would a guy wrapped up in his parka in a trendy Mecca of Parisian nightlife look like, other than a husband? Whose husband . . . ? Yves refreshed his memory: The slightly plump little blonde you screwed last Saturday.
“He thought I’d come to smash his face in. What a pleasure to see a big guy like him who spends hours at the gym be frightened of a guy like me. I’m anything but a fighter, I hate any form of violence. And yet in the state I was in I could have smashed his nose on the edge of the bar and removed any hope he might have of ever finding his cute little trendy face again. And he sensed it.”
What can I say? It was three in the morning . . . She was a consenting adult . . . I didn’t think I’d be hurting anyone . . . and I don’t think she did, either . . . Bruno recoiled when he saw Yves slip his hand into his inside pocket. And pull out a checkbook.
“Even though I really felt like tearing the place apart, I wasn’t there to take revenge but just to make sure. And, above all, to get the details. Without paying I would never have gotten them.”
With all these details—which would only make him miserable—he’d be able to add new scenes to the film screening nonstop in his head. These details would hurt, of that he could be sure, but they wouldn’t lie—all he needed was one, no matter how cruel, to bring an end to all speculation, misinterpretation, lying, equivocation, false hopes. Bruno was prepared for anything—except to be paid for the story of that night—and no doubt he would have asked the cuckold to leave him alone if he hadn’t had the check in his pocket. Yves was offering him the possibility to earn in fifteen minutes what normally took him an entire evening of playing the birthday present from a group of girlfriends to the one who expected it the least.
Bruno came clean, trying to remain as objective as possible. When he skipped something, Yves asked him to go back. Was she the one, or was it you, who suggested going to your place? What time was it? Did she agree right away? Bruno’s report, cautious and methodical, amounted to a slow enumeration of every grueling detail. He began by noting the little desert island tattoo at the small of her back. Pauline and Yves had chosen the motif together. A spot of paradise where he had always been the only Robinson.
Did they do it in the bed? On the floor? On the sofa? Did she do “that?” And “that?” In that position? And did you ask her to do “that” or did she do it spontaneously? Caresses Yves had always taken as gifts from his wife to the man she loved. An intimacy they had spent years forging. A stranger had gotten it all, in one fell swoop, without even needing to give her a clue. When Yves asked him if she had come, Bruno replied, I don’t know, but without leaving the slightest doubt. When he awoke, Pauline was gone, hadn’t left a note or a phone number, and for Bruno it was better that way.
Yves asked him one last question: Why my wife? You can have women who are much more beautiful, much richer, more stylish, why did you want to sleep with a little woman who must seem so ordinary to you? Without hesitating he said, Because it’s something you want to try at least once, the housewife who’s giving herself a treat. Then Bruno was called backstage, and he cast a last glance at Yves, neither ironic nor unkind. I know this won’t help, but the women I meet here look at me like some sort of living sex toy. As a rule, they go away again disappointed.
And indeed, it didn’t help, because ever since that night Yves was no longer the man who had filled his wife with dreams, her Prince Charming, her object of desire. He had once again become the little man who does double glazing, who looks just like anyone, no more ambitious than the average Joe, just a good guy who’d make a good little husband and a loving father, someone to grow old with who wouldn’t leave her with too many regrets. Passion and fire, that was already someone else’s department, a stranger who need only walk on stage to make women scream.
“Unfaithful men who get cheated on in turn just had it coming to them. But what did I do? In five years, I never met a more attractive woman than my own wife, and who knows, it might have lasted a long time after that.”
All the years he was married, Yves had never thought about fidelity, about long-term couples, about the erosion of desire. Setting sail in a nutshell that had room for only two passengers, he’d set his course for the open ocean and imagined he could go all the way around the world, come hell or high water. Now he’d stepped ashore from a dream, and he wouldn’t head back out to sea for a long time.
“I never saw Pauline again. I don’t feel even a pinch of nostalgia for our life together. Even in my worst nightmares, she hardly shows up anymore. I’m forgetting her.”
As for Pauline, she’d tried everything to beg him to forgive her, ready to swear to anything, mortified that she had strayed for even one night. To avoid having to speak to her, Yves had entrusted a lawyer with all the material issues and the divorce procedure. But before this bad film finally left him in peace, Yves had to go back over every single sequence to try and identify the one that had caused his marriage to fall apart. An illusory but systematic analysis of every hypothesis, every possible detour in a long series of episodes leading to an ineluctable ending. And what if that evening . . . ? And what if that evening they had gone to another bar? What if she’d been drinking whisky instead of vodka? What if that stupid dancer had gone outside to smoke a cigarette during his break? What if Alain had been more persuasive? Could Fanny have acted as an alibi if she didn’t live right nearby? And what if even one minute detail had been enough to counter this twist of fate, would Yves have spent the rest of his life with Pauline, surrounded by grandchildren, the two of them with peace in their hearts?
He would never know the answer. But in their way, all these conjectures merely confirmed that tragedy alone knows how to summon destiny in person. Happy endings, never.
“Nowadays I have come to think that this blow from fate might have been lucky after all. The events are still too recent, but I know that someday I will thank Pauline for having set me free.”
Yves left the podium, drained, astonished he’d been able to open up to strangers as much as he had. He hadn’t tried to compromise with the truth, they had listened to him openly and generously, and now it was as if his story no longer belonged to him. Philippe Saint-Jean, who generally made it a point of honor not to let anything faze him, was forced to admit that this funny little guy, who said he felt ill at ease in public, had captivated a hundred people for two whole hours; even at the Collège de France, he had never attended a lecture as intense as this one had been. While his story may have been as banal as they come, his experience of it and, above all, the way he had ended it, were not at all common. How could he have been so radical, so merciless with a woman he had loved tenderly until then? So much intransigence seemed unfair, out of all proportion. How could his dark feelings have been so strong that they could destroy such obvious happiness? Philippe could just see her, this Pauline, queen for a night, losing control of her emotions. Was it not obvious that her crime that night was no chance occurrence, but was committed at the very moment when she was about to start a family in her brand new home—an adventure that would pass so quickly that before she knew it middle age would be there to relieve her of her mission. Was it not obvious that the symbolic value of her escapade was far greater than the frisson? And that one night’s foolish behavior was clearly the last, daring gesture on the part of a young woman on the verge of sacrificing everything, and willingly so, to the daily life of her loved ones? If you loved a woman, how could you not forgive her, when you were prepared to give other far less deserving people the benefit of the doubt? When you granted attenuating circumstances to crimes of passion?
Philippe Saint-Jean and Denis Benitez left the room together and walked along the corridor, reminiscing about primary school. At the main entrance to the building they saw Yves Lehaleur, silhouetted against a streetlamp
, opening the lock on his scooter. The three men shook hands, exchanged names and a few pleasantries that had nothing to do with the brotherhood; they no longer knew what to think about it. One of them, on seeing the glow of light from a sidewalk café, suggested they go for a drink.
They became acquainted over their beers as if they’d actually met in more usual circumstances. Philippe was intrigued by Denis, the man that women avoided like the plague, and even more so by Yves, the man who could not forgive.
If Philippe had had a similar misadventure back in the days when he was living with Juliette, his most recent girlfriend, he would have tried to unravel the truth from the lies, to find a balance between listening and reproaches, to draw both on everyday common sense and psychoanalysis. He would have tried to be more attentive, then virulent, then defenseless, and finally magnanimous, but always there for her and for their life together, in order to make a fresh start. Philippe would have entered into a dialogue with himself, even if it meant getting lost in a spiral of meaning, or he would have confided in a friend who was the author of an essay on jealousy, or he could have gotten in touch with a former therapist for the occasion. Anything except this implacable, irreversible decision, like a blade dropping without leaving the other person even the slightest chance. Philippe still lived in the land of Voltaire and Sartre, the land of words.
As for Yves, he had turned a page that night. As a free man, he did not know what tomorrow would bring, but it hardly mattered; he had paid too dear a price for his future projects with Pauline to come up with any new ones. From now on he was going to leave things up to chance, and if chance decided to bide its time, Yves had already found his time. It was, in a way, the first gift of his brand new freedom: time, time for himself, time for everything, time to lose, blessed time.
While Philippe was ordering their drinks, Denis observed the waitress from head to toe, pink cheeks and high cheekbones, capable of giving everything she does not have if you know how to ask tactfully. The knowledge that he was utterly available to every woman on earth suddenly brought his terrible solitude home to him, and in order to stave it off for a few more hours he decided to go back by way of his brasserie for a final drink with his coworkers. Philippe was in no hurry to leave, he’d already decided he’d nod off in front of the rerun of a documentary. And as on every night, once he was back in his big empty bed, Yves would wonder what to do about the only aspect of his single life that bothered him now: the lack of sex.
After Pauline, finding a new partner was not a priority. It took him months to get over the shock and overcome a sort of disgust with any form of human warmth. But since that time, his libido had reminded him of its presence, and was becoming more and more preoccupying by the day. A strange feverishness at nightfall; lingering gazes when a skirt went by; untimely erections. He was going to have to set off in search of new bodies, and in his daydreams he imagined a whole variety of women, as if after five years devoted to a bitch who hadn’t deserved his loyalty, the time had come at last to catch up on his interrupted career as a charmer. The loss of the woman he loved had irreversibly modified the chemistry of his sentiments. Never again would Yves—and he insisted on the never again—fall into the intimacy trap. While he might not always manage to put words to his emotions, some of those words now filled him with a nauseous reflex, words such as love and its parade of synonyms, or tenderness and its derivatives, with a special award for couple, which was particularly indecent but had no other real equivalent. Other words fared better: affection did not conceal anything too sordid, and attraction remained sufficiently vague not to take any risks. Oddly enough he had banned the word seduction from his vocabulary. Seduce? Big deal. The term implied a whole compulsory ritual, each step more fastidious than the next one. Meet a woman, go up to her, act as brilliant as possible with what you have available, get the telephone number off her, wait the right amount of time before calling, wring a date out of her, remain patient and keep your sense of humor, all this just to end up in bed together—but, don’t act too bold, guess her limits without transgressing them. And if peradventure you managed to make your way safely over all those hurdles, the girl who had succumbed must under no circumstances go thinking that she had met someone. From now on Yves Lehaleur, his heart drained of courage, would dispense with any romantic scruples.
Philippe, with his glass in his hand—and this was not like him—was talking more than the other two. As a rule, in a conversation he often waited in ambush, ready to reappear whenever one of the speakers went off on a dead-end tangent. That evening, no doubt because he was the only one of the three of them who had not yet spoken out at the session, he was monopolizing the conversation. Denis, amused by the way Philippe thought their barroom gossip had some sort of significance, was happy enough just to keep him going. As for Yves, he was looking for the least vulgar way to talk about sex with two strangers: and you guys, how do you manage? If Denis’s testimony were to be believed, he hadn’t made love in years, and Philippe said he’d only just separated; it was fair to assume that each of them would have something to reply.
But despite Yves’s efforts they did not broach the topic that evening. They would learn nothing about Denis Benitez’s forced abstinence, the anxiety he felt at the loss of desire, the specter of impotence. Over the years, every form of sensual enjoyment had deserted him, right down to his dreams, that last refuge of unappeased urgings. Denis placed virility at the top of his list of lost causes.
Nor would they learn anything about how Philippe tried to find Juliette in other women’s beds. None of them smelled like her, none of them knew how to curve her back the way she did so that they could spoon, none of them moaned with pleasure the way she did, discreetly yet so intensely. He had tried to console himself with the first woman who came along, then the second, and with every embrace he had to imagine Juliette’s body in order to bring on his partner’s orgasm and to get there himself, which was proof of a kind that faking it was not solely a female preserve. So while he tried to refrain from indulging in any form of nostalgia and stuck to his resolutions and feigned indifference as he reread his classics, life had lost all its charm ever since his woman had left him.
They had met at a seminar where Philippe had publicly lambasted a biography of Spinoza she had written. Not the least bit intimidated, she had stood up to him with such assurance that he had invited her out to dinner and apologized profusely. In the beginning, he had been disconcerted by this woman who was older, taller, and more experienced than he was. She was at least a head taller than anyone around, four years older than he was, and she had raised her children on her own. She’d lived several lives in one lifetime, so she was not afraid of grappling with life, unlike Philippe, who acted as if he were pure spirit, at a total loss where everyday life was concerned. The more he paid tribute to her nimble mind and her independence, the more he admired her beauty, which had remained intact ever since the days when, to pay for her studies in literature, she had posed for any number of painters and sculptors. Juliette Strehler, six foot one, one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, her full-size statue is on display at the Smithsonian museum. That was how he introduced her to his friends, who had never known Philippe Saint-Jean so proud to be seen with a woman on his arm. Today, wrapped in his pride, he was not about to admit that, deep down, missing Juliette was what had motivated him to attend the Thursday meetings. If she had left him for someone else, even a go-go dancer, the sentence would have seemed far less cruel. She had left him because of who he had become: a man who had not a trace of self-doubt, and was only too ready to accept the image of the brilliant intellectual he saw reflected in other people’s eyes. Philippe Saint-Jean took himself for Philippe Saint-Jean, and only Juliette had noticed.
A conversation on sexual frustration failed to materialize, but that wouldn’t alter the response Yves had found to get rid of his frustration, as logically as possible: he would consume, without seducing. Without saying a word. Without ev
en knowing the girl. Without even taking the time to figure out whether he really fancied her. Without running the risk of even the tiniest atom of feeling worming its way in. A married friend had told him, You know, the advantage of a whore is not so much that she’ll do anything you ask, but that she leaves right away when she’s done. That same friend, who seemed to know what he was talking about, had left him the number of a certain Kris.
Yves had never been with any prostitutes, and few of his acquaintances had made use of their services. For him it was a practice belonging to another era, and had nothing to do with his milieu or morals. It was not that for Yves there was a moral dimension, no, it was simply a matter of circumstances: he had never needed to pay. And now that he was all of forty, brutally single, eager to avoid any notion of attachment, he had made up his mind to call this Kris woman; he’d had a vague physical description of her. If a stranger like Philippe or Denis had said to him, I do, from time to time, Yves would have felt he belonged to the norm, would have been prepared to concede that sooner or later all men take this path. The girl’s number had been languishing in his pocket for over a week, and the need to call her suddenly became imperative. She would come, he would take possession of her body and, once she’d left, he would have done with that good Monsieur Lehaleur once and for all, that exemplary little husband en route for the great family adventure. No Kris, from now on, could ever ask that of him.