For thirty seconds or so I saw through to my future — and then the door slammed shut. It took me more than fifteen years to open it again. They weren’t lost years. It took me that long to come to terms with everything I was feeling that night.
A desire for revenge; pride, determination, and even a sort of feverish joy. A joy that vanished the minute the sun came up. A joy which, on the train home, gave way to that electrifying hatred. Which spread all through my body. A hatred which left a lasting trace. A hatred which, much later, only Luc managed to extinguish — even though, in the beginning, all I wanted was to seduce him, the better to drop him not long afterward. To leave him reeling. Gasping. Needy. Like all the others, after Leduc and before Luc, whom I had unceremoniously dumped.
I never went back to London. I’ve visited half the planet, and I’ve always taken great care to avoid the United Kingdom.
Would I be ready to go back there now?
Would I be ready to forgive?
~ ~ ~
It still gets to me.
I may claim that it doesn’t. That it’s just some unpleasant memory I can brush aside. That would be true, too. I don’t dwell on it. But there are times when that night comes back to me. I’ll be shaving, looking in the mirror, telling myself I’ve gone downhill, that I look like an obese, wrinkled caricature of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral—and my mind wanders as I pull at my skin, and the razor tries to restore a semblance of youth to my cheeks and my neck. Then all of a sudden, my lips pucker with a bitter taste. I can see myself outside the stadium in Aube, I’m twelve years old, and I’ve just made Karima cry, telling her that I don’t talk to foreigners. Or I’m sixteen and I’ve just told off a classmate because he’s worried about his mother, the chemo is really rough going, and I shouted at him that he was a pain, couldn’t he stop making such a big deal out of it? I don’t know what came over me. Then I’m twenty, there are two girls in a hotel room, it’s dead quiet, and one of them walks past the other and says, “I’m not his sister, you know.”
What do other people do to forget?
One day I started looking to see if there wasn’t some sort of group therapy, an Alcoholics Anonymous type meeting, where everyone would sit and hold hands and say their name — hello, I’m Philippe — and where you could off-load your most shameful memories. I couldn’t find anything. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. That’s my problem, after all. I don’t look hard enough. I wait for the fruit to fall fully ripened from the tree. Stewed. For a while, it worked. But now I lack confidence in myself. No, that’s not exactly it, either. I don’t trust myself. That’s why I’m going to see Mathieu at the hospital.
Because Mathieu is at death’s door, and he trusts me. And it feels good.
It’s repugnant.
I could tell her, Cécile, about Mathieu. But she probably doesn’t remember him. They crossed paths only because of me. When I was going out with her, I saw a lot less of him. She must have met him two or three times at most, at parties, where they hardly spoke. He thought she wasn’t much to look at. He couldn’t understand why I was wasting my time with her. When I came back from London, I simply told him that it was over, he nodded, and we never spoke of it again.
I can’t believe it.
We can’t go our separate ways like this, with me getting to my feet, and her sitting there, and me saying, “Have a nice time in Paris!” and getting off the train. It’s idiotic, I have to do something, it’s my only chance. If only I had a business card. I’ve always been impressed by business cards. These people you hardly know, and after only a few minutes talking to them they hand you a card with their name and address, you don’t really know why, what do they expect, for you to call them? For you to go and have a drink together, and become friends or even more if you get along? And yet the fact remains I wish I had one now.
These days our kids have it easier. Manon and Loïc just tell someone that they’re on Facebook or Twitter, and the other person nods, and that very evening they’re virtual friends, and they know all about each other’s lives, their likes and interests, their professional situation. I’m not on Facebook. At one point I wanted to sign up — my kids couldn’t believe their ears. I toyed with the idea for a while and then on reflection I wondered who I would contact on a social network. Mathieu’s friends? Forgotten classmates? Colleagues I see every day anyway? It seemed pointless. I abandoned the idea. But now Paris is getting closer, and on our right you can just see the outline of Sacré-Coeur between two tall buildings, and I’m beginning to feel real panic.
I can’t go on letting things slip away from me. I can see the years ahead — like railroad tracks stretching into the distance, as far as the station. I meet people, and then they’re gone. And all that’s left is the debris they leave behind — remnants of shared lunches, hastily drunk coffees, snatches of conversation, murmurs.
It hurts.
There, in my chest.
Between my ribs.
I’m not scared. I’m used to it. It’s been waking me up at night for the last few months. I mentioned it to the doctor, he shrugged, he asked me if there was anything bothering me. It’s nerves, he added. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I’m nervous.
And nothing out of the ordinary.
That night was probably even more unexceptional than the others. Pathetic. Kathleen didn’t ask a single question after Cécile left. She just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. You could hear the birds in the little park across from the hotel. She got undressed very quickly and lay down on her back. She didn’t seem to care one way or the other about what was about to happen. It was depressing. As for me, I tried to revive a bit, but it didn’t go very far. By tacit agreement we didn’t take the experiment any further. She fell asleep almost at once. I didn’t. I lay staring at the ceiling — it had recently been repainted, it looked like a rush job. The day that had just gone by flickered past my eyes, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. I just wondered how I had come to this.
Apparently there are people who, at a certain time in their life, get the impression they’re touching bottom and then mentally, they kick the floor with their heel to go back up. I’ve never believed in that sort of nonsense. Because it’s never happened to me. I didn’t get the feeling I was headed back toward the light, either the next morning, or in the days that followed. I woke up at noon, and Kathleen had left, the room was paid for two more nights, so I hung around London. I wrote two or three letters, to Cécile, to Mathieu, but I didn’t send them, I forgot them at the hotel. I must have done that deliberately.
I went back to France.
Life went on.
The defiance only came gradually. I knew I was capable of shabby betrayals, of low-down tricks. Whenever I started going out with a girl who was willing and eager, I tried to make her understand that I wasn’t worth it. And when we broke up, I would point out that I had warned her. But that never prevented the crying, the tears, the insults — on the contrary, the more they knew I was right, the more they hauled me over the coals.
And then at one point I just gave up.
I was twenty-seven, I was a TV and VCR salesman at a superstore, I was living in a cheap and reasonably comfortable two-room apartment; one evening, I sat by the window in the kitchen and I said to myself, Okay, I think I’ve had enough. I didn’t feel like meeting anyone — all the hoops you had to jump through, pretending to admire or understand — I would rather just fade into the background and let the world go about its business — it would be easier that way. I was tired. That’s it. Yes. Exhausted, even. I met my wife six months later. That’s what she liked about me, right from the start, my fatigue. My disillusionment. And consequently, my candor. She took up the challenge. My wife is something of a Pygmalion. She wanted to restore my fighting spirit.