It was a quarter past twelve, and it wasn’t going to be a long night, assuming I took two or three urgent measures to ward off insomnia. Was it because I’d had dinner out that I found myself in such an inexplicably fine mood? Because I hadn’t been alone tonight, like I was every other night? Or maybe because the boss’s wife had taken me aside? He really should have come home earlier, or else he should have left long ago, if that’s what he wanted to do. Or so it seems to me, at my age, though I’m not really all that sure. When I was thirty I went out for a pack of cigarettes, as they say, except in this case it was true. I smoked Craven A’s, as I recall. All the tobacconists are closed Sundays here in the suburbs, of course. It took me a while to get my hands on a pack, and then I made my decision just as I was opening it, I remember it well. I smoked a bunch of cigarettes one after another, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t go home either. Was I really unhappy with her, or had I just stopped believing in us, in all that? I can’t even remember. I only remember the pack of Craven A’s. That’s what my mother smoked too, I think. I signed the divorce papers on the corner of a bar, where I also poured myself a good number of drinks, for me, at the time. It was probably for the best. At that age the thought of children never entered my mind, the fatherhood routine didn’t interest me at all. And then afterwards it was too late. It took me a few years to really regret that, and since then I’ve never stopped asking myself questions. Was I right? Would I have left her if I hadn’t run out of smokes? I always keep my apartment neat and tidy. It must be living alone that’s made me so fussy, but it suits me like that, with everything in its place. Sometimes when I come home after work I feel completely alone, but not tonight, with my head full of my employers’ troubles, and then all those other people too, I never see them for very long in the course of a day, but when all’s said and done, even if we’re not exactly acquainted, we’re never really apart. They keep me company when they’re not around. Meantime, the boss’s wife was one hell of a woman. I sat down on my couch, it’s true that she’d cracked a little tonight before we went to the Kabyle’s place, but all day long she’d managed Le Cercle like nothing had happened. If he wasn’t at Sabrina’s, where was he? If he weren’t my boss I would have gone and told him there was no room for a guy like him in her life, with her two children to raise. The fact is, his time was already past. He probably couldn’t take getting old either.
I realized I hadn’t turned on the TV set I was staring at, and I wanted to see the late news on Channel 3. Eventually you get tired of the news around Asnières, which isn’t really news at all, actually. You don’t pay it much mind, apart from the people who’ve died, and then, because of my work, the changing signs on the storefronts, that Pimkie used to be an Étam, that sort of thing. Even a guy like me needs something more than that. I pushed the button on the remote and immediately turned down the sound so I wouldn’t have to hear words I hadn’t asked for, I get more than enough of that at work. I saw a fresh-breathed couple kissing behind a waterfall, Rexona deodorant. I’d missed the news. I decided to take a shower, and then I wanted to do my laundry, too. There was one question I couldn’t get out of my mind: what would happen if he didn’t come back? I couldn’t even imagine that, of course. He’d celebrated his forty-third birthday just before they left on vacation, all the regulars were there, they’d chipped in for a present. It’s strange, too, I would never have seen the boss’s wife as a nurse.
When I was out sick at Beaujon Hospital two years ago I ended up in the more-or-less attentive hands of a beautiful fat Caribbean girl, a little Franco-Moroccan homo, and a Spanish woman who danced the salsa every Friday night in an Argentinian restaurant near the Gare de l’Est. She used to practice her moves while she was getting my morning pills together. Salsa was really the only thing she cared about. She wasn’t afraid of sick people, and I never got the feeling I put her off. It was watching her dance the salsa at Beaujon that brought me back to life. Before I was discharged she even found me a place to take lessons in Paris, I went two or three times. I didn’t have much talent, but I would have been happy to keep at it if I had a regular partner. I thanked her with one of my favorite postcards, which shows a kid running down the middle of the street with a baguette. I never dared to go back to the cardiology ward and pay her a visit. What would she have thought? I liked that girl. It was half past midnight. I took a quick little shower, fairly cold, waiting for things to calm down in my head, but this time it didn’t work. It really was no ordinary day. I put on my bathrobe and looked up the boss’s cellphone number in the address book I keep by the phone. He must have thought it was her, I got the answering machine. I said I would have liked to talk to him, we all needed to know what the hell was going on, and then soon there’d be the orders to send in to the wholesaler in Gennevilliers and the Rungis market. That was his responsibility. I was about to say goodnight when all of a sudden he picked up, like he’d been there all along, waiting to pounce, if you’ll pardon the expression.
“Ah, Pierre, it’s you, hi, how’d it go today?”
“It went fine, yes, just fine. Monsieur Dilman paid up, by the way.”
I could picture the look on his face, preoccupied and not very interested, and then, because it was getting late, I added:
“You really should tell us when you’re planning to come back. You’ve got to call your wife.”
He didn’t answer. I heard him swallow, with my one ear I tried to make out where he might be, but there wasn’t a sound. Maybe he was alone, in the end.
“Hey, boss, did you hear me?”
“Yes, yes.”
He mulled that over a while, then finally told me he just didn’t know for the moment, maybe soon, he’d see, but in any case, if he was away longer than expected, he was counting on me to keep him posted. That was what really jumped out at me: keep him posted. Pierrot my friend, I don’t know why those words came into my head, we still weren’t out of the woods. Keep you posted on what, my fine fellow, I wondered? On what she thinks of you?
“You can count on me, but you’ve really got to call your wife, she’s worried, you know.”
At this point I sensed I was annoying him something fierce, I heard a dog barking, drowning out his anger. It was the bulldog over at number 33c, it really knew how to pick its moment. That dog was a nuisance, there’d already been complaints, a guy at number 31, dumb as a plank, and a family at number 27 who had real twin girls and a Siamese cat.
“Pierre, that’s none of your business.”
“Well. whatever you say, boss, and good evening to you.”
It made me mad that he’d taken it so badly. And then, since I always like to follow through on an idea, when I have one, I went to the window and looked down into the street. I opened it and gave him a wave with one hand. I’m sure he saw me. His blinkers were on. He was leaning on the hood, double parked just downstairs from my place. Today I tell myself I could have run after him and convinced him to come up, he would have talked to me just like a customer in the bar, sort of cleaning house in his head, but what would that have changed? He was just totally lost, if you ask me. I knew next to nothing about his life, only his disappearances and his little crises, and the big dents the horses put in the cash register, and then the way he fiddled with his income statements, like any other owner of a café or restaurant. He was just my boss, and that was all.
He turned down the street toward the expressway, and then at the corner he very slowly ran a red light, like the basket case he was at that point. I lit one last cigarette, then poured some detergent into my little basin and set my things to soak. These days I’d rather do my own washing than go to a laundromat. I always think people are wondering what a guy like me’s doing in a laundromat, and that bugs me, it’s stupid, I know. I’m more than old enough to own my own washing machine. Before he found himself a girlfriend, Roger and I used to go together, like old bachelors. I brought the fabric softener, and the time went by faster with the two of us watching the clock together, telling each other our stories. Now he gives his laundry to Muriel. But still. I also took my two antibiotic pills. The pain was back when I woke up from last night’s dream, and I couldn’t afford two bad nights in a row, not after a day like today. Deep down I’m a relaxed kind of guy, like most of my colleagues in the business, from what I’ve seen. But I’m also a worn-out kind of guy, as it happens. After that I smeared Nivea on my face like I do every night, on the off chance it might do something for me, you never know.