I let the curtain fall gently. Why was he still sitting there? Was he waiting for a sign from me, like a runaway child or indeed a guy who was lost? I don’t know. Neither did Marc-André when I called him from the office during the lunch break and told him about our evening. I hadn’t been able to wipe out the image I had of him, early in the morning, sitting at the bus stop. Which one had he taken? The A went right through the middle of La Garenne-Colombes, I remember. Now he was nothing more than a guy filled with regrets, incapable of holding down a job. Especially as, and Marco knew this, he had a nasty temper. Does he really? I heard him laughing at the other end, gravely. You could say that. I know what I’m talking about. He’d called him to keep him abreast of his problems with his employer. He hadn’t been too sure what to do, although he’d often had the desire to just hang up the phone, and that would have been the end of it.
“You never did it?”
“No, I thought things were getting better.”
Then we talked about something else. Did he remember a girl called Adeline Vlasquez? He thought about it, but no, he couldn’t remember. It didn’t mean much to Marco and me. Our memory wavers, it has no middle, like fishing lines on the cloudy surface of the water. Marco told me he had to go, unfortunately. Aïcha wanted to know when she could meet Marie. How does she know? I asked Marco.
“I must have mentioned her without meaning to. All right, then, bye, I really must go.”
In a sense it’s always good, when we hang up on each other, because we could spend our whole lives making small talk about this and that, but I may be imagining things. We’re always more alone than we suppose, I think.
I also think I was relieved, in the end, to see him leave my apartment. I’d invited him in, we’d done our best to help him get back on his feet, and now he really had to walk by himself. I don’t like thinking these things, saying these words. They made me think of the father I didn’t have. I never talked like that to Benjamin, or I would have had the impression I was someone else. I didn’t say anything to Benjamin, to tell the truth. I regret it sometimes, obviously. There was a time when I often went for a walk during my lunch break over to his elementary school, then later to his high school, when the classes were coming out, on Fridays when I could wait for him. I’d keep myself at a distance so as not to embarrass him. I didn’t intend it that way, but I was using him to give meaning to my life, after our separation. I’d forgotten exactly why we’d separated. I’d had affairs, and probably so had she, but I think more than anything that there were other things she wanted to do with her life, and she didn’t think she could do them with me. I’d disappointed her too. I’d always hoped, I think. She suddenly came out with the idea of a divorce one Sunday evening, that afternoon we’d gone for a walk with Benjamin in the Buttes-Chaumont. We’d eaten ice cream on the square outside the town hall of the 19th arrondissement. I remember the flavors he chose, chocolate and lemon. After that, we weren’t able to speak anymore. She’d already found a lawyer, she’d been planning it all for a long time, everything was worked out in her head. It took me several months to realize. What had I done to get to that point, were they all like me? It had taken Marco less than three months to decide to live together with Aïcha. All the same, my son and I had never stopped loving each other. He never blamed me.
“Why did you and Mom end it?”
He asked me that once, a few years ago. He hadn’t met Anaïs yet, but had been dumped by the girl who’d been the love of his life from tenth grade to senior year, they’d just broken up. I liked the girl a lot too, the three of us had been on vacation together two years running, once to Brittany, and another time to the Baie de Somme, Marco had let us use a house he’d bought there. He was desperate, my son, and all the words I could have said, looking at his distraught face, I kept to myself.
“I’m not sure anymore, Ben. It happened gradually with your mother and me, we loved each other a lot.”
“Is that true?”
That time, his eyes had lit up, and then we quickly left the café where we were because he’d started crying again. He was heartbroken. He’d never see her again. He didn’t think he could live without her. He didn’t know what to do. And then in the end, obviously, he did know. He was twenty-one when they broke up. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? It was a nice story, but it wasn’t always enough to pull it down. Sometimes, you had to go even deeper.
5
ON THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, THERE WAS A LOT OF RAIN. The Seine was very high. I could spend hours watching it when it’s like that. I often went to Brochant, Marie was fairly well, I thought. We both knew what she was waiting for. It was always there between us. But we almost never talked about it. Sometimes, she’d drift off for an hour or two, sitting on her couch without moving, and it was good to be there next to her at moments like that. I took some extra days off that I was owed from the previous year, I really needed them. I was glad I could do that. I could live without my job for a week and concentrate on myself. The girl looked at the computer screen and even said: at last! I went to a whole lot of places, I did a lot of things, the kind of things you’re always putting off until later and end up never doing. Most of the time it’s as if these things are only there to make us think about them without ever going anywhere near them. I went to see Benjamin when he left his lab in Jussieu, we walked for a while along the Seine, it was brown or gray, and quite swollen. We were near the Gare d’Austerlitz, it seemed odd to me to be in a part of Paris where I almost never set foot when I’m not working. We walked for a long time without saying anything, after we’d talked about work, his move, his new job in Zurich, Anaïs, what did she think about it? She wasn’t exactly delighted, but it’d be OK. They’d see, anyway. He’d reached a dead end here. There was only Switzerland or the United States left. That made me smile, I think. I’d have been incapable of studying the things he did. Was his mother gifted for that kind of thing? I couldn’t remember. We had a drink at the counter of an Auvergnese café in the Gare d’Austerlitz. We played the lottery cards. Ben won one euro fifty. We had another beer, and then lost three times. We then crossed the Seine and walked to the Gare de Lyon, to take Line 14 on the metro.
That was where we had to say goodbye, I’d continue on to visit Marie, and he would go home by train. And then I changed my mind. I told him about her on the platform at the Gare Saint-Lazare. It was the right moment, I thought. For a long time, whenever I waited for him on Friday, at the end of the platform, I used to see lots of guys on their own also waiting to see their kids for the weekend. We didn’t speak to each other, but we recognized each other in the end. The people on the opposite platform were just getting off the train when I told my son I was seeing somebody, her name was Marie. I don’t know if I said it loudly enough or not, he said who? Marie? He read my lips and he just smiled, oh really, has it been long? No, we chatted for quite a long time, but we’ve really only been seeing each other for a month … I felt a bit stupid, saying all that. Will you get married again? My son had often asked me that when he was in his late teens. His mother didn’t have any more children. She lived for a few years with a guy from Asnières, a dentist, also divorced. I don’t know why it didn’t work out. I’d have had other children, I think, if I’d forgotten more easily. Forgiven too. In these past few years, I’d had nothing but brief encounters. A woman on a street corner, with her indifferent smile and eyes. It happened like that, and it’s nothing. An evening, a year. With Sylvie, almost two years. You don’t have many real encounters in a lifetime. Night bars, flashing your debit card, and aspirin the next morning. Another guy’s wife, the lies that are true when you tell them, and then you forget you told them. People are well-behaved on the train. Those who aren’t using their cell phones all the time look out the windows, not many people talk apart from that. Ben sat down on a fold-up seat, his legs slightly parted. He hadn’t said anything at all about Marie. Maybe because it had taken me all that time to consider living with another woman? Otherwise, I don’t know. Maybe I was imagining things, because he’d be going soon and I’d be on my own, even though I didn’t see him very much anyway. He gave a little sign with his hand, then he took his MP3 from the pocket of his bag and for a guy like me, a father every other weekend and for half of every vacation, that has to last two weeks, for years on end.