Guys Like Me Read Free

they be? When the guy listened to her talking, that little blonde with extensions, he’d look up at the ceiling, with a smile on his lips, his body strained toward her. My wife took the decision to get a divorce after reading an American book called Mars Versus Venus . Or something like that. She only ever read in bed, slowly. For three months, that book was on the coffee table in the living room. Benjamin also noticed it. I don’t know why the scenes of happiness that I see, in cafés or elsewhere, always remind me of that book lying on the coffee table in the living room all that time, and I’m not able to wipe out the memory.
    â€œDid you see Mom’s book?”
    â€œYes, Benjamin, it’d have been hard not to see it.”
    I must have given him some kind of awkward answer like that, it was already thirteen years ago.
    â€œWhy don’t you talk to her? Don’t you know what to say to her? Why?”
    I remember I took it badly at the time. He was angry, he already knew what was going to happen. I asked him to shut up, and later, when the two of us were alone, my son and I, I tried to explain. But I couldn’t find the words, and as for him, he was busy tapping away on his computer, he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
    â€œYou’re right, it’s none of my business.”
    And so I didn’t tell him.

    When we finally stopped looking at each other and looking away, when he took another cigarette from the pack and, as if we were regulars there, I made a sign to the waiter to bring us another drink, yes, that’s right, the same, he started to tell me. Yes, he’d lost his job. I should have suspected it; he didn’t make a big thing about it, except that he was over fifty. I didn’t ask him any questions, the whole time he was talking to me. Yes, the whole time he was talking to me that day, I don’t think I came up with more than two sentences, because I’d immediately sensed how much he needed it. He really had given a lot of himself to the job. He’d followed all the technical changes, and he spoke German reasonably well. That wasn’t an obvious thing for a guy like him who hadn’t had much schooling. He quite simply hadn’t seen it coming. Of course, you just had to switch on the TV to know, but he didn’t think it would happen to him, not to him. The worst thing was, he hadn’t put any money aside. He’d helped his mother with the apartment in Marseilles with her cousin, and now he was renting a really small ground-floor apartment. A man had a lot of debts in life, that’s what life meant. He came out with two or three things like that, without knowing it. Without knowing it, he was painting a picture of a guy who could have been me, or so many others, but who was actually him. He didn’t get worked up as he told me. He occupied his days as best he could, he’d asked all his acquaintances to keep their eyes and ears open, because at his age they were the only people he could count on. He called it being humanly alert. I remember that awkward expression, where had he dug it up? His last partner had left him, he’d become unbearable, she kept telling him, unbearable, that was the excuse she’d given, but in fact she didn’t really care either way. She’d been with him out of a kind of self-interest, which she’d calculated pretty well, and seeing him unemployed had made up her mind for her.
    â€œHow old was she?”
    â€œWhat? Oh, forty-seven, I think.”
    He seemed surprised by my question, as if it was of no interest. Then, just in his eyes, at that moment, I saw a boyish smile. Maybe he still loved her, or had never stopped? But no, not really. He’d gone to the employment court, not expecting anything from it. The guys who’d fired him were from the same generation as him, they were your age, he said. They knew perfectly well they were screwing him over, but getting