The 6:41 to Paris

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There are some habits you never lose. I think that if you’d mentioned Cécile Duffaut to me before this morning, the first thing that would have sprung to mind was the way she had to empty out her handbag every time she had to find something: a pack of chewing gum, cigarettes, a phone number, a checkbook. Or a train ticket. It’s reassuring. This loyalty to who you really are, in spite of everything. In spite of the elegant clothes which must have cost a fortune. In spite of her looks, far more attractive than in the old days.

I wonder what defines me, now. What characteristics I had already ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago, and that I didn’t try to do anything about.

Like separating the soft part of the bread from the crust and rolling it into tiny balls, while continuing to talk with someone, who would be transfixed, even concerned: he’s not going to go and eat those things, is he? Oh yes he is.

Like making sure the alarm on the clock radio is set at the right time, checking four times in a row, otherwise I have to start all over. In another life, I must have had many obsessive-compulsive behaviors; in this life, that’s the only one I have.

Staring at the ceiling whenever I start feeling emo-tional; keeping my eyes glued to the paint, the color, the cracks.

Scattering coins all over the place whenever I get undressed — they go springing from my pockets and rolling across parquet floors, waking everyone in the house. It’s easier now that I’m alone at night. I could never stand the idea of a wallet, that lump in your pocket. It used to drive Christine crazy. I suppose that Jérôme knows how to behave. Or only carries bills. That are ironed. He knows how to get undressed with grace and dignity. Those are two words I’m not too familiar with, grace and dignity. For a while I enjoyed the illusion of self-confidence that comes with the energy of youth, but then it was gone.

I’m on edge.

From sensing her sitting there next to me. In fact, I ought to change seats. Pretend to get off at the next station. Except that the train is nonstop from Troyes to Paris. But why do I need to give any explanation? I don’t owe Cécile Duffaut anything. I am nothing to her, she is nothing to me, and that’s all there is to it. So why do I stay? Guilt? A little, I suppose. In hopes that she might speak to me? Pathetic. Laziness?

I wonder what she remembers. Well, that is, what she would remember if she had recognized me.

Going for drives in the Peugeot 204. I paid next to nothing for that car. It was white. The same one my parents had when I was a kid. I liked having the gear stick at the wheel. The seats still smelled of leather after all those years. Cécile didn’t have her license yet. We weren’t going anywhere in particular. We were wasting gas. We smoked, with the windows cracked open.

The Peugeot 204 was my revenge for Mathieu’s motorcycle. As I thought, I saw less of Mathieu after he came back from Germany. And when we got together he would always say how lucky I was to have a car. He had become a regular on the train, the RER, and the Métro; he kept going up to Paris to try his luck. He was having a hard time. Sleeping on friends’ sofas, on mattresses on the floor, sometimes right on the floor. Sleeping out on the street, too, on those occasions when he didn’t manage to sponge off someone. He was losing his cheerful nature. I’m not really sure when things began to change for him. At one point, he almost disappeared from sight, but then when he reappeared he had landed himself a supporting role in a TV movie. But he refused to talk about it. Then another long spell of silence. He had plunged into another world. I missed him. Even though I was struggling with my own demons, and the desire to make my own way in life, I missed him. I could have asked his parents for news. I was too proud. When I got my first real contract, at the superstore where I still work, he was the one I wanted to call before anyone else. But to tell him what? To brag about how now I was qualified to sell TVs and VCRs? I didn’t want to hear myself telling him that. Even though I knew that this job was a lifesaver, since I’d given up studying English, and gone back to the town where I was born, and spent months looking for work; even after all the broken promises. No. I figured I’d call him when I found something else.

After that, I worked on other friendships. There were colleagues. Christine. Christine’s friends. That was it. Sometimes just as I was falling asleep I would think about Mathieu. I wondered what he was doing. I’d had news of him indirectly. I watched the TV movies he played in. And the feature films, where his tall, slender physique was becoming more and more visible. That was what surprised me more than anything: I had always thought of Mathieu as plump. The guy whose screen career I was vaguely following didn’t look anything like him. Even his voice seemed to have changed. It was deeper.

Whenever I came out of the movie theater, I felt like calling him — and I never got up the resolve.

The only consolation in all those years was my family. Christine. The girls. I waited anxiously for the day when Mathieu’s photo would appear in some celebrity magazine with a gorgeous Spanish actress or Ukrainian supermodel on his arm, and the cryptic caption underneath: “Could that little bulge at the waist be the sign of an future joyful event?”

It never happened.

First of all because his love affairs never lasted very long. But above all because he never became famous. For a long time he was a familiar face, but in the background. His career would have been completely lackluster had it not been for Today’s Lucky Winners. Today’s Lucky Winners was really a stroke of luck for him. He was well acquainted with the producer of the program, who was looking for an experienced host not too well-known to the general public. They did some screen tests. Bingo. There he was in one of the most popular programs on French television: a pathetic game show, perfect for filling the lonely hours of the unemployed or housewives under fifty, while they wait for the one o’clock news. His sense of humor, his handsome face, his easy way with people: in a few weeks, he walked off with the jackpot. Money was no longer a problem. It was 2004; he was forty years old. His future was all sewn up.

It was around then that Christine and I got divorced. It was also around then that I stopped buying the TV Guide. I couldn’t stand seeing pictures of Mathieu anymore. I was only too aware of how our paths in life were heading in different directions. We had met at a time when he was merely a rough draft of the person he would later become, while I was at my zenith. He would keep on rising, whereas I had begun to sink gradually. Every time I caught his face in a magazine, those were my thoughts. About failure. About destiny slipping out of your grasp.

I’m better now.

And I’m on my way to visit Mathieu today.

Gulp.

I’m not proud of myself.

And I know why.

He’s the one who got back in touch. I would never have dared. Not because I would have been afraid of disturbing him. But because I was afraid of being humiliated: What if he could hardly remember my name?

I ran into his mother, just after my divorce. She was shopping at the store. She wanted to buy a new television. She had just lost her husband — I hadn’t heard about it. We spoke for a long time. She invited me over for the following Sunday, a Sunday when I didn’t have the kids. She’d bake a cake. When I left the store that evening, I felt like crying — as much over her solitude as over the way my life was going. I was going to be filling in for my erstwhile best friend. He had dreamed of being in my place; now I was taking his. I was stepping into the shoes of the man he might have been, the lonely man who visits his mother for Sunday tea.

One day, Mathieu found out. I thought it would make him angry. It was worse than that. He felt pity. And it’s true, basically, that pity was all I deserved — a fortysomething guy taking refuge at the home of his childhood friend’s mother, talking about life, how lame can you get. But I liked going to Maud’s place. Peeling vegetables with her. Doing the sort of daily activities I had never done with my parents. What I liked was that Maud wasn’t judgmental. Even less so nowadays that she’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I look back on those days and really miss them, almost more than any other time in my life. My dinners at Maud’s. My Sundays spent preparing tasty dishes while exchanging thoughts about life, neighbors, children. I miss her.

Mathieu and I started calling each other because of her. I had just found her in the parking lot of the store, distraught and completely disoriented. I called the doctor. Then her son. I remember Mathieu’s voice on the telephone. And the voice he had as an adolescent. Nothing remotely like the grave, confident timbre he’d created for his TV movies. Nor like the exaggeratedly cheerful self he’d adopted for Today’s Lucky Winners. Truth be told, he wasn’t very lucky that day. He had to rely on me. To ask me a favor. Maybe the first of many. He was beholden to me.

That’s how we became friends once again.

Friends.

That’s saying a lot.

Let’s just say that it was saying a lot until recently. We would call each other. He would stop by from time to time. We only talked about his mother and his career. One day he did ask me, however, if it hadn’t been too rough on me, the divorce. In fact, I’d been through it already long before, so I was able to smile and shrug and say, “That’s life.” I don’t know why, but it must have touched him, so he invited me to his place. In Paris. To his apartment. To a party with his Parisian friends.

It was an honor.

There I was in that milieu where I didn’t belong, among people who drank too much and laughed very loudly, among tired-but-bubbly wives, and catering staff who walked around with finger food and refills. Mathieu simply introduced me as, “Philippe, a childhood friend.” They all stared at me with a big smile for ten seconds or so and then the conversation would continue, without me. I melted into the décor. It wasn’t hard. I felt like I was in a bad TV movie. I recognized a few faces I’d spotted on the TV screen, but I couldn’t put a name on any of them. The big shots had promised they’d come but at the last minute they called to cancel. Or didn’t call. And Mathieu really didn’t mind at all. What was radiant about Mathieu’s place was Mathieu himself.

Also radiant that evening was a woman twenty years younger than him, lively and witty. Who worked as an usher at a theater to pay for law school. Totally on top of things. Her name was Astrid. Even at the very heart of the party she was true to herself. She would drift toward Mathieu and then away again, perfectly natural and nonchalant. I envied her. I envied Mathieu, too, of course. They’d been seeing each other for a few months, but she had no illusions. Sooner or later their affair would end, she would get tired of playing the gerontophile or he would find a woman who was more docile.

At one point the volume went up a notch, and she and I ended up in the huge kitchen. The caterer and his assistants had left, they’d be back in the morning to clean up. It was very late. She found a bunch of black grapes, and began to eat them one by one.

“You know, Mathieu often speaks of you.”

“Oh. In flattering terms, I hope.”

“I wouldn’t know. At the same time, it’s fairly recent. Out of the blue.”

“Blue moon. As in, once in — that’s how often we’ve seen each other.”

I tried to change the subject. I got the feeling it was headed in a direction that might prove unpleasant.

“It’s because I was looking after his mother.”

“Or his mother was looking after you. Well, that’s how he put it.”

“Sometimes human relations go both ways.”

“For a while, people were making fun of you around here. All these people you see here, they’d slap their hands on their thighs whenever they heard one of Mathieu’s stories about Philippe making apple pie with his friend’s mom.”

“I’m not sure I really want to hear this.”

“Wait. It’s not as bad as it sounds. And in life, truth is the greatest asset, don’t you think?”

I imagined getting to my feet with dignity — it wouldn’t be hard, I had drunk only two glasses of champagne. Something had prevented me from drinking more — the fear of making a slip, of feeling nauseous, of making a fool of myself. I imagined walking across the kitchen and through the crowd in the living room, picking up my coat, going down the stairs and, whistling, making my way to the Gare de l’Est, where the first trains would soon be departing. I imagined disappearing.

Yes, I saw myself doing all that, but I am an actor only in my dreams. In reality, I nodded and poured myself a glass of water.

“Gradually it changed. You became a … what should I call it, yes, a kind of character witness. He refers to you as if you were a character witness.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He’s come in for quite a lot of criticism lately. Let’s just say that he behaved badly with certain individuals. And people began saying that he was forgetting where he was from, that he was getting bigheaded. He had to get things back on an even keel. He was antagonizing everyone. So he did a lot of soul-searching. And you are part of that. You allow him to show that no, he hasn’t changed. That he’s had the same friends for years. That he’s stayed close to his roots. That the things he was being accused of were unjustified.”

I poured myself some strong booze. Over ice. I swirled the ice cubes in the glass. None of this came as a surprise. What did astonish me, however, was that I didn’t feel more offended. I was past all that. I shrugged.

“I’m sorry if this comes as a blow,” she said.

“I’m past feeling any blows. I’m already on the ground.”

“I like you a lot, you know.”

“Do you need a character witness as well?”

I looked up at her from under my brows. For a moment she didn’t know what to say, then she burst out laughing.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“With what?”

“With what I’ve just told you.”

“Nothing at all. He’s taking advantage of the situation. So am I. It’s not exactly as if I’m swamped with invitations. And then when I get home and go into work I can always casually mention the fact that I spent an evening with Mathieu Coché. Everyone finds their misplaced vanity where they can.”

“I don’t know why I spoke to you about truth just now. You don’t need any lessons from me.”

“On the other hand, I would like a refill.”

On we went like that, in the kitchen, just the two of us. Words whizzing by. Minutes, too. This hadn’t happened to me in a long time. I think we confided in each other the way people rarely confide in each other. We knew perfectly well that we would never meet again. That one of us was bound to be exiting Mathieu’s life before long. I was prepared to go away again, the way I had come. But in the end she was the one who slammed the door — which meant that I got to stay on and put up with Mathieu ranting and raving against women. Particularly younger women. Before we left the kitchen, early that morning, after the party, we exchanged phone numbers. To be used only in case of an urgent need to confide — which meant never. I still have her number on me, in my wallet. It has become a sort of talisman. I could call her now and tell her about Cécile. About Mathieu. About the nagging reluctance I feel going to see Mathieu.

Dear God, what am I doing on this train?

Next to Cécile.

Who suddenly stands up.

And brushes past my knees.