Guys Like Me Read Online Free Page A

drink together the following week. I hadn’t suggested lunch, because I didn’t have my appointments book with me. It was in my desk, I also have two personal organizers, and lots of others from past years. My mother used to keep them too. Sometimes, she’d cross out every page and write the important appointments in shorthand so that nobody would know what they were. Who could have known them? I knew all the initials in her life, and I could imagine who without wanting to. Much later, I started collecting movie tickets, I used to go quite often at one point, just after my divorce. I’d go directly from my office to the movie theater, when I wasn’t invited over to friends’, and immediately afterwards, when I got back, I’d take a shower and go straight to bed, with sleeping pills. That way I didn’t have too much time to think about anything else. Of course, sometimes it didn’t work, but anyway. I also collected business cards of all the guys I met, and one summer, I’d only been away for ten days with Benjamin, I placed them all in a row and glued them like that, it took me two days. I bought some glass mounts in Paris, and then spent two days on it. Why was I in that state? For a long time I looked at those cards without daring to hang them on the wall, and then, one day, a woman came to my apartment and looked at them in a strange way, and that was when I understood. Or rather, I didn’t really understand, but since I wanted her to stick around, I realized that I probably had to do something else as far as decoration went. Sylvie. 1997. That was the year his résumé seemed to have the most gaps, not very well concealed. Eight years of hard times? 1997: Sylvie and I lived together for almost two years. We both made an effort, but in different directions, and in the end we drifted apart. And then she met a man who was a few years younger than her and fell “madly in love.” I like that expression, I wrote it on a card I sent her from Martinique, with a question mark. That was dumb of me, obviously. She never replied to my question. Had I ever loved as much as she had? Had I ever been loved?
    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.
    â€œHi, 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.
    â€œJean? Doesn’t he have a job anymore?”
    Then we talked about other things. He has four