I can spend a whole weekend thinking like that. The first time I saw Jean was during a period when nothing was happening in my life. On Sunday evenings, Benjamin calls me. As soon as he calls, I offer to call him back. These days he says no, it’s all right. We chat for a while. Sometimes I can feel his attention wandering, he doesn’t really want to talk, often it’s because he’s had an argument with Anaïs and he’s sulking, like I used to do with his mother, or else he’s working on a project, and it’s a real headache, as he puts it. When he was a kid, he loved poetry and drawing and I worried, without making a fuss about it, that he’d never really understand the kind of world he’d have to live his life in. I was wrong. Sometimes I feel sorry because of him, but most of the time, I’m proud. Too proud. I like his expressions, they come from his childhood, everything was always too something or other with him. Too good, too boring. He also tells me how his mother is, whether I like it or not. For a long time he clung to the idea that he’d see us together again, he’s my only child. I guess I was once madly in love too.
On Saturday, I contacted my friend Marc-André, I called about eleven. He answered, he cleared his throat, the way he always does when he’s going to speak.
“Hi, Marco, how’s it going, hope I’m not disturbing you?”
This time, we didn’t bother with small talk, just the minimum, he doesn’t like the phone too much. I immediately told him the news, how I’d met Jean by chance on Rue d’Amsterdam, drifting, with his almost empty case. He was silent for a bit.
“Jean? Doesn’t he have a job anymore?”
Then we talked about other things. He has four children, two of them with his second wife, Aïcha. They live in Levallois, like me, they bought a big apartment near the shopping mall, the living room is decorated in oriental style, that’s where they receive their friends. It’s like going on a journey but not very far, several thousand miles on a Friday evening, to Porte d’Asnières. His eldest daughter is studying medicine in Montpellier, but his son, his second child with his first wife, dropped out of college. Marco tells me about him from time to time. How he feels responsible, and yet he doesn’t want to continue giving him checks to pay for his drugs. Once, because I’ve known him since he was born, I tried talking to Antoine. But I wasn’t able to really tackle the subject. He reminds me of his father at the same age, he has the same somber, feverish look, that kind of energy and anger he gives off. He stopped without saying anything, as if he was used to it. I wasn’t the first friend of his father he’d seen, and it hadn’t helped at all. Where does he go when he seems to absent himself like that? Marc-André doesn’t know. He’s never known. He feels guilty because he thinks it happened when he met Aïcha.
He asked his son, his son replied no, don’t worry about it. It was there before, it had always been there, and he didn’t know why.
“I’m surprised,” Marco said. “What a time we live in. He was in marketing, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he even worked in Germany.”
“Does he speak the language?”
“Yes, he speaks German.”
I heard him thinking on the other end.
“I don’t know. I may be able to do something. Will you send me his résumé? Does he have an email address?”
I realized I’d forgotten to ask him. He was busy the next week, he was looking to see when he was free, I heard his wife behind him, the children were there too. Above that background noise, I could also sense that dark look of his, I’d say it’s very human, though I’m not very sure why. Like when he talks about his first son or when he’s been to visit him on his own, because Aïcha doesn’t want to get involved, in the rehab clinic.
“It looks like it’s going to be a crazy week,” Marco said. “Can we speak again on Wednesday? I’ll have a clearer idea then, maybe the three of us could get together?”
“Yes, if you like.”
Then, very quickly, he hung up. I stayed in my office. I’m too old to change my job. Aren’t there any new departures? There are no second acts. My son had that book, which I’d loved when I was a teenager. Yes, that was it. There are no second acts.
I sensed that today was going to be one more day of regrets. I don’t like feeling like that, but I’d become incapable of fighting. It was building up inside me without my being able to do anything about it. I spent time in the bathroom. I cleaned the kitchen the way my mother used to forty years ago, and it was pointless because I’d already cleaned everything on Thursday evening and I hadn’t invited anyone over this week. So I stopped and put away my broom and my stupid mop. I told myself I should keep trying, but what? They were the only words I knew, you must keep trying. Where had I learned that? Those dumb things? I couldn’t make up my mind to go out.
The rain was coming in over the roofs from the Seine. We’d end up having almost no winter. I wasn’t hungry. I’d had quite a lot of work that week, and I’d thrown myself into it without thinking about the weekend. I looked toward the end of my street, I have a three-room apartment. I finished paying it off one year ago. I should be happy, but I don’t like Levallois much anymore, it’s changed a hell of a lot in the last few years. I’m often one of those guys who can only say stuff like that, it seems, stuff like: it’s completely changed, it’s not the same at all, you can’t recognize a thing. Of course, these thoughts are stupid, so I keep them to myself. I still sometimes dream about someone to share them with, a woman who’d understand what they mean.
They’re an old man’s thoughts, Benjamin says. I know he’s right. I’ve never told him that they’ve been lurking inside me ever since I was a child. Who else could I have told them to? I went to see a shrink not long after my divorce. It was because I’d heard so many bad things said about me … I’m joking, obviously. In fact, I just wanted to understand why, after I’d let things go for many years, after I’d accepted that life I was so ill-suited to, based on lies and convention. There are no second acts. But I still believe there are, from time to time. I wouldn’t have the courage to go out this Saturday, the office had tired me out too much, I might do some shopping late in the afternoon. I’d pass guys like me, you also see us, younger ones, waiting at the ends of platforms, in large stations, at the beginning and end of the school vacations. What was the name of the guy I hit it off with, so to speak, the year Benjamin and his mother spent in the south, near Marseilles? She’d found a job with an open-ended contract and had decided to put as much distance as possible between her and me, and particularly between Benjamin and me, I think. That wasn’t a good time for me.
I tried to distract myself, I might have a phone call or else what? I switched on the computer, checked the world news on the home page, then went on the dating website. I really should change my photo, I told myself. Years spent on that thing, it’s not so easy to have a real date. You talk, you get excited, and the next day you’re really not sure who it was. I looked at the new members. Some people subscribed to different sites, I wondered what the point of that was. You recognized their photos, even when they had different usernames. Of course, there was an enormous loneliness there, it was like a kind of ocean, the messages people sent each other hummed with it. These last few years, I’d met two or three women who were real culture vultures, and I’d run away after the sixth exhibition or the fifth museum. There had also been a woman I liked, ten years younger than me, but she’d taken off after three dates, and I couldn’t blame her. She sent me a long recorded message two weeks later, the gist of which was that she was looking for somebody better than me, a younger guy who could be the father of her children. Three women I’d slept with, without hope or despair, just like that. I’ve often hurt myself thanks to the computer. I’ve probably hurt others too. But what else can you do? I chatted for an hour, thinking about Marc-André. He’d been braver than me, he’d been strong enough to start all over again from scratch. It hadn’t been hard for him to decide when he met Aïcha. I closed the computer after an exhausting conversation about the musical tastes of a woman who told me how to download the pieces she liked. She had a really dumb username, Myosotis, she worked in the medical field. Goodbye, Myosotis. I wasn’t likely to see her again with a handle like that. I still hadn’t made up my mind to go out. I didn’t get a phone call until six in the evening. I read for a while, and then, from my little balcony, I watched a few lights coming on down on the street three floors below. I saw people going out for a stroll because it had stopped raining and they were taking advantage, the time often passes for no reason.