Adam Haberberg Read Online Free PDF Page B

need to make them feel the need. If I want to persuade them to create a
sales outlet
for my merchandise I need to go in with a presentation that's about more than the outlet. They need to get the feeling I'm not there to set up an outlet at all, even if they know very well that setting up an outlet there is the bottom line. The buyer wants more from this relationship than his little sales outlet, the purely commercial presentation is a thing of the past.”
    Low apartment blocks, gray buildings, pink apartment blocks, in brick, in tiles, and Darty and Cora and Mondiale Moquette, a nondescript road through the fog, which has left only a few trails of mist behind, little suburban villas in the dusk, and Speedy and Laho Supplies and billboards all the time and the sign for Montrouge and the sign for Bagneux through the rain on the window. And Marie-Thérèse Lyoc bursting with energy inside the warm Jeep. Marie-Thérèse heading homeward, who knows it all by heart and doesn't give a damn, who's not the type to think that life's decor should be fairyland. Marie-Thérèserepeating words he doesn't understand that run into one another and dance like the gleaming raindrops.
    “Do you remember Serge Gautheron?” she says.
    “No.”
    “Dark hair, not very tall. His father had a sports equipment store at Rueil, Serge Gautheron, can't you picture him?”
    “More or less.”
    “We got married.”
    “You're married?”
    “I'm divorced now but we were married for eight years.”
    I can't cope, thinks Adam, I can't cope with this grotesque piece of information, I'll focus on the road, a road entirely dedicated to the car, a road of garages, gas stations, inspection and repair garages, I'll focus on new and used car sales showrooms, I'll focus on body shops, places where they sell tires and spare parts, I don't want to hear about Serge Gautheron's and Marie-Thérèse Lyoc's lives, I don't want to know anything about these ghosts from the past. He recalls wandering around in a scrapyard at Carrières-sur-Seine looking for a white fender for a Passat. He recalls the waste ground, the guy in his cabin that smelled of tobacco and the dog that surged up fromnowhere, barking, at the end of a very long, endless chain.
    “I even have a picture of the two of you,” says Marie-Thérèse, “a school photo taken in the eleventh grade, I think.”
    Of course she's kept all the class photos, he tells himself. The same set of class photos his mother always kept, the way she kept his teeth, blackened with age, in a metal box. Those class photos in which he invariably appears sad and ugly, sadder and uglier he used to think, with every passing year. While each time the others looked better in those photos, there was always something dubious about me, he told himself, the phony smile, the badly parted hair, something phony about my posture. Not one of those class photos was any good, he thinks, and my mother kept them all, every year approving of my freakish appearance, uncritically approving of her boy's progress from grade to grade, keeping everything, teeth, exercise books, Mother's Day gifts, only to end up, now I'm an adult, with a total lack of interest. Adam doesn't want to see the class photo with Serge Gautheron in it. When you say Serge Gautheron, he knows, you're saying Alice Canella, you're saying Tristan Mateo. Alice Canella is dead. I don't want to see myself standing alongside Tristan Mateo and Alice Canella again.
    I don't want to contemplate such an epitaph on my youth in the company of Marie-Thérèse Lyoc. I want the Bourg-la-Reine road sign, I want Peugeot, Champion, and Volvic, I want to take my car in for an inspection, I want to buy wall-to-wall carpet and wallpaper. Alice used to go on vacation with Marie-Thérèse, Adam recalls. When they came back Marie-Thérèse gave herself airs because she knew things no one else knew. That she might have had a love life of her own never crossed anyone's mind.
    “So were you together