Happy Are the Happy by Yasmina Reza Read Free Book Online Page A

since I met Luc Condamine. Some noisy young people, full of energy, occupied the booth behind ours. Luc asked me if I’d seen the Toscanos recently. We’d met at the Toscanos’ apartment. Luc is Robert’s best friend. They work at the same newspaper, but Luc’s a senior correspondent. I said I’d been working late and hardly seeing anybody. Luc told me he’d found Robert depressed and so he’d introduced him to a girl. That surprised me, because I’d always thought that Robert was a different kind of man from Luc. I said, I didn’t know Robert had affairs. —He doesn’t, that’s precisely why I’m arranging things for him. I reminded Luc that I was Odile’s friend and he was giving me too much information. Luc laughed and wiped his mouth. He pinched my cheek with a semipitying look on his face. He’d already gobbled up his bowl of fried potatoes and was bearing down on the remains of his escalope. I asked, who is she? —Oh, no, Paola! You’re Odile’s friend, you don’t want to know that! —Who is she? Do I know her? —No, you’re right, it would be bad if you knew. —Yes, it would be very bad. So who is she? —Virginie. Medical secretary. —Where do you know her from? Luc made a sweeping gesture, indicating the vast world of his acquaintance. I felt cheerful all of a sudden. I’d drunk an entire glass of cognac in an unusually short time. But I was cheerful because Luc himself had brightened up at last. He ordered an apricot tart and two spoons. The tart was acidic and too creamy, but we fought over the last piece of fruit. The young people behind us were laughing, and I felt young like them. I said, will you take me home with you, Luc?Let’s go, he said. I couldn’t tell whether this was a good idea anymore. In fact, my ideas were uniformly unclear. Things remained light for a little while. We ran through the rain. In the car, the mood was still light, at first. Then I dropped one of the CDs Luc kept in the center storage console. The disc slipped out of its case and rolled under my seat. When I came back up with the CD, Luc was already holding the case. Still driving, he took the CD out of my hands and put it back in its container himself. Then he stored it in its former place, tapping it a little to get the alignment right. All this was done without sound. Without words. I felt clumsy and maybe even guilty of an indiscretion. I could have considered the obsessiveness of his actions and deduced that Luc Condamine was a maniac, but instead I felt a stupid urge to cry like a child caught doing wrong. I no longer thought it was a good idea to go to his apartment. Once we were in the lobby of his building, Luc used his keys to open a glass door. On the other side there was a staircase with a baby carriage and a folded stroller hanging from the banister. Luc had me go ahead of him, and we climbed up to the fourth floor on stairs that wound around a shaft occupied by an invisible elevator. Luc turned on the lights in the entrance hallway of his apartment. I could make out some shelves with books and some coathooks where anoraks and overcoats were hanging. I took mine off, along with my gloves and my scarf. Luc showed me into the living room. He adjusted a halogen floor lamp and left me alone for a moment. As in every living room, in his there was a sofa, a low table, and a few mismatched chairs. A rather worn leather armchair. A bookcase with some books and framed photographs, among them one of Luc in the Oval Office, hypnotized by Bill Clinton. An assembly ofhaphazard elements. I sat in the leather chair, on the edge of the seat. The curtains were printed in a pattern I’d seen somewhere before. Luc came back. He’d taken off his suit jacket. He said, do you want something to drink? Cognac, I said, as if in the course of a single evening I’d become a woman who drank cognac at every given opportunity. Luc got a bottle of cognac and two glasses. He sat on the sofa and poured our drinks. He dimmed