Maman and I live together in the same dreary flat in a characterless street in the fifteenth arrondissement. This is the apartment in which I grew up, the only home I have ever known; the apartment in which my father died, four years ago, back when I was a mental case, living in a hospital among other mental cases. Every once in a while, Maman tries to make me feel responsible, as if my psychiatric condition caused Papa’s heart attack. But she dare not harass me too much about that. Because we both know the truth. Maman always said this place was too small for three people. She lived alone with Papa during my first two years in the hospital. She lived completely alone, after my father’s death, for two years. She has now lived alone with me for two years and she definitely prefers me to utter solitude, as well as to Papa. She always preferred me to Papa. Would always rather touch me than touch Papa.
But we don’t talk about that.
I need to get my own place, some place where S. and I could be alone. Maman is wrong. I plan to tell S. everything about my past. And I am certain she will understand. She wouldn’t coddle me, wouldn’t excuse the errors of my youth. She would be firm yet compassionate. Who knows? It might even make me more interesting to her. Hey, I’m not just a twenty-four-year-old computer geek. I’m a twenty-four-year-old computer geek who spent four years in a mental hospital! I’m sure S. would begin to see my time in there the way I do. Some young people spend four years at university. Some spend four years in the military. I spent those formative years of eighteen to twenty-two in a nuthouse. This was my sentimental education.
The guys at work needle me for what they call my ‘crush’ on S. Not that I talk to them about it. Not really. But I have occasionally spoken about her to my colleagues, four computer geeks who – except for the fact that none of them ever spent four years in a mental hospital – are pretty much just like me. They don’t know I was hospitalised. They just think I spent four years jerking off, watching TV, reading sci-fi novels, surfing the Internet and playing video games while collecting unemployment hand-outs and sponging off my parents. That’s what a couple of them did for four years after high school. For me to think I might have a chance with S. (yes, it must be obvious, even without my explicitly stating it) I’m conveying to my colleagues that I consider myself somehow superior to them. So they must relentlessly take the piss out of me, try to cut me down to their size. Of course, I do consider myself superior to them. I don’t tell them that. Just as I don’t tell them that it is my destiny to be with S. Not a ‘crush’. Destiny.
My colleagues suffer from a common form of self-disgust. After all, we’re just five losers working in a computer repair service centre. We make very little money. We know we’re smart but it’s not like any of us got into one of the grandes écoles. We’re neither handsome nor charming. How dare I consider myself superior to any of them? Especially in terms of attractiveness to any woman, let alone a woman like S. My four colleagues and I, it must be said, are able to occupy a level field of sexual conquest. This is another source of their feelings of intra-office egalitarianism. We have all partaken of the Nerd Girl.
Ombline, the Nerd Girl, works in Accounting at the computer repair service centre. She is the female version of the five of us ‘technical consultants’. Smart but unsuccessful, not especially appealing to the eyes. She’s a bit overweight, a bit pimply. A little older than us computer geeks, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Still wears her slightly oily, slightly dandruffed mousy brown hair in juvenile pigtails. But Ombline, the Nerd Girl as my colleagues call her, is the seductress of the computer repair service centre. Even though she still lives with her parents, in a drab concrete slab of an apartment building in the downscale nineteenth arrondissement.
I learned Ombline’s modus operandi just as my four colleagues had before me. Ombline invites you out to dinner. She gets quite drunk and demonstrably horny. She invites you to her apartment. You quickly greet her aged parents, who are always sitting in front of the TV, looking just barely alive. You repair to Ombline’s bedroom. She puts on some loud music – usually the Rolling Stones, circa 1971. You have hurried, almost furtive sex, only half or three-quarters undressed. It’s like you’re both sixteen and worried that her parents might burst in at any second. Ombline comes quickly, easily, even faster than you. After some awkward post-coital fondling she tells you you have to leave. You say goodbye to the parents who are still sitting in the living room, clinging feebly to life, in front of the TV.
Over the past two years, Ombline the Nerd Girl has regularly fucked the technical staff in a sort of five-man rotation, one man at a time, three to four weeks between each man. So there is no jealousy. No sense of competition even, since none of us believes that Ombline is worth fighting for. And she seems perfectly happy with the situation.
Naturally, I haven’t told Maman about Ombline. I don’t know what Maman thinks about my sex life. She asks no questions. But then I got careless. I mentioned, rather subtly, I thought, my feelings for S. I could understand why Maman would get upset. It was, after all, my – how to describe it?… too intense - attraction to a young girl that got me sent to a mental hospital for four years.
But we don’t talk about that young girl.
What, I begin to wonder, is Maman’s game? On the one hand, she seems worried that I might confront S. with my feelings. On the other hand, Maman taunts me, seems to be trying to goad me into doing just that – confronting S.
And what would happen if I did? Would S. understand the intensity of my conviction? My utter certainty that we are destined to be joined together forever? I would have to explain to S. that these are rather recent feelings. Though I had admired her for many years, thinking of her, talking about her from time to time with my fellow inmates during the four years I spent in the hospital, it is only in the past few months that this idea of mine, this idea of our shared destiny, has blossomed into an article of absolute faith.
I know that if I did express all this to S., she would be taken aback. Probably be slow to embrace my point of view. It would take time for the idea to grow on her. She is, after all, a wise and mature woman, some years my elder. And she already has a man in her life. As far as I can see, she is trapped in an unhappy marriage. Though, of course, you can’t even call what they have a marriage, can you?
‘Send her an email,’ Maman says. ‘Tell her everything you feel. I know you. You’ll be more honest typing this all into a computer than you would ever be speaking to her face to face.’
‘I don’t even know her email address,’ I protest.
‘I’m sure it’s very easy to find,’ Maman retorts.
It’s my turn with the Nerd Girl. Lying on Ombline’s bed, in her adolescent’s bedroom – still decorated with Noir Desir posters from 1994 – each of us three-quarters undressed, sticky and sated, we say nothing for a long time. We’re listening to Mick Jagger warble ‘Wild Horses’ at high volume.
‘What would you think about starting a serious relationship with me?’ Ombline asks as the song fades out and silence fills the room. Well, not total silence. I can hear the sound of the TV coming from the living room. Ombline’s aged parents are watching an old episode of Navarro.