The Thursday Night Men Read Online Free

for help.
    “I went and saw a therapist. Someone had to help me get things in perspective, and maybe they could give me a key.”
    Yves Lehaleur shrugged at the word “therapist.” Anything that began with the prefix
psy
inspired instinctive mistrust. In his opinion, why should one person be more gifted than the next guy at reading into another man’s soul? All those
psy
people were just charlatans who’d figured out that offering an attentive ear to another person’s woes was a rare commodity you could charge a lot for here on earth. When he had told his entourage that he needed a divorce, and quick, some of them had urged him to
speak to a specialist
before making such a drastic decision. Yves had told them to mind their own business: if someone needed a therapist it was his bitch of a wife, not him.
    Philippe Saint-Jean, on the other hand, thought that Denis was rather courageous. Having gone through it himself many years earlier, he knew how difficult it could be to ring at a therapist’s door and entrust a stranger with one’s dysfunctional self. In his milieu, it was almost a rite of passage for anyone who presumed to penetrate the mysteries of the human mind and its hidden meanings. To avoid psychoanalysis would have been tantamount to professional misconduct. Nowadays, his friends who were in treatment far outnumbered those who weren’t.
    “He listened patiently, then offered to help me
get the wheels of seduction rolling again.
Three sessions later I was surprised to find myself telling him a childhood memory, the exact moment when I realized just how fallible my parents were, after they . . . forgot me at a friend’s house one boozy evening. I dug deep in my memory and was able to describe the event as if it were straight out of a horror film: the distraught mother, the guilt-stricken father promising me a miniature car if I stopped crying right that minute. I could hear myself telling the shrink,
I even remember the model! A Dinky Toys Facel Vega, gray with a hard top, they brought it out in 1960,
and I wondered if this were the right way to get my
wheels of seduction
going again.”
    Denis struggled to find his words, and for a moment everyone thought he had finished. In fact, this part of his testimony seemed less pertinent to him than the conclusion; as if this were an official announcement, there was something he had told neither friend nor brother nor psychoanalyst and which he was about to share with a hundred strangers.
    “After five years of drifting and humiliation, where I was incapable of understanding why the entire female gender had deserted me, I had to accept the explanation I would have preferred to avoid: a conspiracy theory. As unlikely as it may seem,
they
have decided to assuage their age-old desire for revenge on
me
.”
    A ripple of astonishment went through the audience; those who had been attending the Thursday meetings for a long time had heard all sorts of fantasies, but they always bore in mind that new ones could surface at any time. Yves Lehaleur, with his neophyte’s gaze, looked around him and met the eyes of his nearest neighbor, Philippe Saint-Jean, as much a neophyte as he was.
    “Every time one of you, gentlemen, commits a crime of sexism, discrimination, loutishness, harassment, misogyny, domestic tyranny, or brutality, I’m the one who has to take the consequences.”
    It was not enough for
those women
to ignore him,
they
had to have their revenge as well. Denis was being made to pay for all
they
had suffered at the hands of men since the dawn of time. To make sure he understood that he needed
them
more than
they
needed him,
they
had spread the word, and he could take his fine virility and stick it wherever he liked.
    “I feel certain I have been chosen to inform you, this very evening, and to warn you: you will be next.”
    Philippe Saint-Jean had already diagnosed a subtle form of paranoia, but he hadn’t been expecting this theory of a martyr sacrificed on the