The Thursday Night Men Read Online Free Page B

she’s sorry she isn’t out exploring Paris with her girlfriends.
    And that tall girl:
innocent, thirty-odd, looks self-conscious in her matronly blouse, burdened by complexes that will cause her to waste twenty years.
    As he weaned himself off women, Denis discovered in himself an extraordinary male intuition. But this activity—obsessive, dangerous—was wearing him out, and to no good purpose; it merely fueled his bitterness. Just before seven o’clock he hurried toward the gate of the lycée that had been left open, found the same classroom as the week before, and nodded to Yves Lehaleur and Philippe Saint-Jean in the last row.
    Yves had seen enough the previous week to feel confident: tonight was the night. He waited for the audience to fall silent, raised his hand, then headed up to the blackboard like the good pupil he’d never had the time to become.
    “I’ll probably babble and repeat myself, so I’d like to apologize in advance. I will begin by telling you about my life the way it used to be. To be exact, my life before the fourth of November of last year.”
    Judging by his opening words, Philippe Saint-Jean was afraid that his story would be interminable, so he allowed his gaze to wander out into the darkening schoolyard.
    “For five whole years, I was a married man. Her name was Pauline and she worked for a real estate agency run by Alain, who was a childhood friend of mine. He had introduced her to me because she needed some double glazing—that’s my job, I install windows for a major company—so I went over to her place for an estimate.”
    A woman like Pauline, single? That was a minor miracle that surely would not last, unless he were to outrun her other admirers. Their early years living together were just Bohemian enough for them to acquire some precious memories. But their work came before everything, because they were both working very hard to fulfill their dreams. They decided to start a family—two kids, no more, but no less—so they needed to find a little house in a quiet suburb, and that was Pauline’s job. In order to obtain a loan at the bank, Yves used his 87,000 euros of life insurance as collateral—everything he had saved since obtaining his vocational training certificate, plus a little early inheritance from his parents—and Pauline would borrow the equivalent of a third of her salary over twenty years.
    Yves did not spare his audience a single detail: even the financial ones, which were insignificant at first glance, had acquired a symbolic value that was a source of relentless torment to him.
    “With Pauline in charge, everything was bound to work out fine.”
    She was a petite little woman, bursting with energy, always smiling, and she never gave the impression that her heart was not in her job, or that she was going through a rough patch. Running a household, fighting with the administration to obtain what was owed them, negotiating with banks and carefully filing away every single credit card receipt, she managed everything as if it were a breeze. Nor had it kept her, after hours, from unearthing their Xanadu—in Champigny, on the banks of the Marne river, a stone house that had been restored. It had an open plan ground floor with a gigantic fireplace, no fewer than four upstairs bedrooms, a garden that was well-protected from outside gazes, and all of it less than fifteen minutes from the Porte de Vincennes. Happiness had an address.
    “We had an appointment to sign the sales agreement and the move was set for January. After that, Pauline planned to stop taking the pill so she’d get pregnant.”
    Philippe Saint-Jean couldn’t really see why all these details were necessary. His own fear of talking too much sometimes hampered his ability to listen. He did, however, find it interesting to listen to a story that so painstakingly described the sort of aspirations that were the opposite of his own. When was the last time he’d met a man who dreamt of starting a family