Guys Like Me by Dominique Fabre

Author:Dominique Fabre
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939931191
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2015-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

4

THERE HE WAS, IN FRONT OF ME, SITTING ON THE STAIRS. He was looking at his shoes, and I didn’t know if he was really looking at them or if he was doing it to hide his embarrassment, a bit like a big child. He was the last thing I needed in my life right now, he was only a side issue. But I smiled at him all the same, and we shook hands. He didn’t need to move, because of the height of the steps, when he looked up I knew what it was that struck me so much about his appearance: he had all his hair, and it was very brown, with hardly a single white hair. I remembered his mother, suddenly.

“I’m not disturbing you, am I?” he asked in a flat voice. “I was in the neighborhood.”

“Oh, really?” I replied good-humoredly. In his situation, I think I’d have thought up a better excuse. But I can’t really be sure of anything. He stood up, I asked him to excuse me while I looked in my mailbox. In the past few years, looking in my mailbox has stopped making me anxious, I’m not paying alimony to Benjamin’s mother anymore. For a long time, I only had to be a few days late to find the bailiff ’s papers in the mailbox. Now I’m more scared of news you don’t expect, news about people from the old days; we knew them and loved them, or we didn’t know them well and didn’t like them much, but they catch up with us and tell us they’re dead, or sick, or alive and well and looking for traces of their past. Anyway, there was nothing in the mailbox that day.

“How are you fixed for time? Come up and have a drink.”

“I don’t want to disturb you,” he repeated, and at that point, the desire to make fun of him came over me again, we waited for the elevator.

He looked through the window, then, from the buildings in the distance, he shifted his gaze to the end of my street, which was even livelier in April. I’d put down my briefcase and taken off my jacket, he turned toward me. For a brief moment, we looked at each other without saying anything. I think my mind was elsewhere. On the way home I’d had the idea of suggesting to Benjamin that he come for dinner one of these evenings. He was very busy with his preparations for leaving, and the closer it got, the less they felt like living in Zurich. Who wanted to be twenty-seven in a place like that, in the research lab of a big chemical company? That’s why I think Jean’s visit must have felt like an intrusion. Why had he chosen me, me rather than Marc-André, who’d actually found him a job? Was it because I live alone, and he doesn’t?

“Don’t just stand there, sit down. What’s going on?”

He resumed the same vague air, as if worried by the drafty air, just like earlier on the stairs.

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