Guys Like Me Read Free Page A

rid of a few people like him might be worth it, they must have told themselves something like that. He’d been naive, and he’d been stupid, now he looked back on it, he really hadn’t seen it coming.
    He kept looking around us, around me, in the café. The booths had all filled up little by little, and there were more and more people out in the street, on their way to catch a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare. His case was full of papers, letters of confirmation, bailiff ’s notices, résumés to be sent or ones already returned, current business. He had an envelope with those words on it. He put it down on the table. He didn’t open it, as if he was still hesitating. I had the premonition, that evening, thinking about it, that something else would happen in his life, that it wouldn’t end there. Was it because of the computer case, emptied of its contents, where he kept his papers? Or was it the owner of the café, that young woman with the clear complexion who didn’t give any impression of youth or life? Guys like me often feel really sad when they look at other people. Since I turned forty, and especially since my divorce, four years after that, my only consolation has been my work, which allows me to keep such things at a distance. Since my separation, I haven’t had a real love affair. I don’t have the strength for it anymore, I kept telling myself. But why would I need strength? How the time passes … Quite often, my thinking stops there, and I try to sleep immediately afterwards, because I really don’t know what’s waiting for me if I keep thinking.
    We saw each other a few times after that. What surprised me from the beginning was that thanks to him, because he also wanted to know about me, to know things about my life, to do part of the work and not be outdone, I started to understand my own life better, or rather to see the truth in the way I tell it to myself, on those bad nights when I know I won’t be able to sleep and my apartment seems tiny and I feel as if I’m going to end up suffocating in it. He’d been unemployed for more than two years, I didn’t ask him for details. When we left the bar on Rue d’Amsterdam, he handed me the résumés I asked him for. I glanced at them, there was his place of birth, near La Garenne-Colombes, that was our suburb before, his and mine, and lots of other guys too. His résumé, as far as I could tell, seemed plausible enough, except that he’d probably never be able to find anything again, because of his age. He never changed his mind about that. I even ended up asking him over the phone: what was the point of carrying on trying if, deep down, he was convinced that he’d never get out of this mess, that it was too late for him?
    â€œI’ll pass them around, and we’ll see what happens.”
    â€œThank you.”
    He was looking at me and nodding, like a child waiting for it to pass, as if that thank you wasn’t addressed to me. How many guys like me had he approached, old acquaintances, guys he hadn’t seen in years? Then he closed his case and folded his hands over it, and I didn’t know if that meant he wanted to go, or on the contrary to stay, his hands placed on the top of his case, forever incapable of choosing between the outside and here, where he could stay. You never knew with him.
    â€œBy the way, how are things in La Garenne-Colombes?”
    A wicked smile gradually lit up his face. “Oh, La Garenne-Colombes. There aren’t many guys left who are still interested in La Garenne-Colombes.”
    â€œWhy do you say that?”
    He smiled a bit more, I liked seeing him like that, he reminded me of that little boy in La Garenne-Colombes, near Place de Belgique, he never found his way back to school, but that was beside the point now.
    â€œI went back there last year, well, maybe five or six months ago. I hardly recognized a thing, you