He put the bag on the green baize and took all the items out, laying them down at random. There was a tiny pocket in the lining where he found two unused Métro tickets and a dry-cleaning chit. Thursday’s date was ticked, and the word ‘dress’ encircled. He checked the diary. It was obviously the ticket for the strappy dress, but it was just a generic ticket with no logo or address.
What was she like, this Laure who enjoyed having lunch in the garden, was frightened of red ants, dreamt she was making love to her pet which had been transformed into a man, and had a signed Patrick Modiano?
She was an enigma. It was like looking at someone through a fogged-up window. Her face was like one encountered in a dream, whose features dissolve as soon as you try to recall them.
‘She’s probably some old slag.’
The sentence had dropped like a fly into a bowl of milk, and Laurent rolled his eyes. He was lunching at the Jean-Bart with his friend Pascal Masselou, considered his ‘best friend’ since adolescence. The years had rolled by. Did Pascal still merit the appellation? He certainly didn’t have any competition for the title. But in fact the two men had little in common now. Their family situation was the same though; they were both divorced. But apart from that, everything that had bound them together had been left behind in the past. Messing about together in class, fantasising about supposedly inaccessible girls, giggling and shared secrets, beers in the bar, then university degrees all seemed light years away from the adults they had become. They had kept their relationship going like two poker players who continue late into the night, shuffling their cards and emptying their glasses long after the others have left the table and gone to bed. Laurent had told him about the bag, wanting to believe for a moment that Pascal would share his fascination.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you don’t know who she is and you never will,’ replied Pascal, chewing his entrecôte. ‘All you have is the bag and her first name, no address and, most importantly, no photos. When I go after a woman, I know who she is, everything about her: what she looks like, how old she is, what we have in common, what she does, the colour of her eyes and hair, height, weight …’
Since his divorce Pascal had discovered dating sites on the web. Usually he signed up to them under various pseudonyms. He was spreading himself about in the cyber jungle of the lonely hearts ads and had several times tried to convince Laurent to join him. He used ‘SeniorExec’ on Meetic and Attractive World – and the more evocative, not to say grotesque, ‘Shivers’, ‘Jimmy’, ‘Magnum’ and ‘TheBest’ on respectively: Adultery.com, Infidelity.fr, AshleyMadison.com, Adopt-a-bloke.com. Available for no-strings intimacy evenings and weekends, he was also in the market for ‘serious’ relationships, thereby easing his conscience.
‘I’m making the most of it,’ he liked to say, with a satisfied smile.
It seemed to Laurent that Pascal had been seduced by the very worst that the Western world offered, managing his love life, or, not to put too fine a point on it, his sex life, like the product manager of a small business. At a previous lunch, he had shown Laurent the relevant files on his laptop. In one click, Pascal had made three folders appear, filled with photos of women. ‘Stock’ for the women he had already slept with, ‘In progress’ for those he’d had a date with, ‘Prospective’ for the women he was aiming to date soon.
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