As much as I can, I avoid the late-night conversations that Janine tries to start when the restaurant is empty, the customers gone, and we have another few hours of work. She gets on my nerves with her ready-made judgments and her way of interfering with everybody’s life, of wanting to solve all their problems by herself. If she folds the paper napkins while she smokes those strong cigarettes of hers, I’ll fill the salt shakers and sugar bowls; if she starts bustling about with a bottle of vinegar in one hand and a rag in the other to scrub off the tables and booths stains that are sometimes suspicious, left by certain customers who are bigger bastards than the rest, I stay at the employees’ table next to the kitchen door with one last cup of tea. If I’m unlucky enough to be taken hostage by her endless prattling, too shy to tell her to shut up or to walk away in mid-sentence, I pretend to be listening, nodding now and then or making a sound that could pass for something resembling agreement. Actually she doesn’t talk to me, she listens to herself talking. And it can go on for hours. In fact, I’ve been known to fall asleep in the middle of one of those lengthy orations, without her seeming to notice … Lucien, Nick’s Haitian assistant, calls her the chattering magpie and likes to enrage her when she goes on for too long by imitating obnoxious bird cries to cover her voice. She calls him a bad-mannered immigrant, he calls her a repulsive racist. She complains to Nick, he complains to me.

That night, though, I wasn’t going to avoid the conversation; I knew that by listening to her, I would find out everything that had been said about me and Gilbert and of course I wanted to know what malicious gossip was being spread via bush telegraph. To my amazement, though, instead of her usual monologue, she asked me a number of serious questions. For once, Janine didn’t want to judge, decree or decide (she’d do that afterwards, when I’d told her everything she wanted to know!) But each of her questions bounced off a wall of silence, or else the answer she got was monosyllabic like the ones that I generally give her but that, this time, she was obliged to listen to and maybe saw as unacceptable insults in view of the interest she’d deigned to show in my situation which until then had been seen as hopeless.

Then she decided to change tactics by using a tone of voice close to that of a friendly confession or a personal confidence. For a while, she’d been asking impertinent questions about Gilbert, questions about size, performance and staying power when, finally realizing that she’d get nowhere with this method, she stretched out her hand to touch mine, something she’d never dared to do before, even though she was lavish with hugs and kisses and cuddles of every variety with others. I’d always suspected, though, that I disgusted her and I was amused to see how hard she was struggling against her disgust. I could see her coming from a mile away, I laughed at her by showing an imperturbable face, but instead of bursting her balloon right away I let her carry on: for once I listened to the usual string of stale clichés that constituted her armchair psychology and it took a lot of control not to laugh in her face.

“Sometimes, Céline, there’re things that are hard to let out but that have to get out anyway … Things it’s hard to admit. Things that hurt. If that’s the case, if what happened to you last night is … I don’t know … humiliating or shocking or sad, you have to let it out … It’s no good keeping it in, hiding them, it will only hurt you more … You just need the right person to listen to you and you’ve found her … Trust me, you’ll feel better …”

Besides not being very subtle, the way she tried to worm information out of me showed incredible naïveté, and I felt a little sorry for her. She didn’t let my stubborn silence get her down though: she probably thought that she’d find a sensitive point and set off the avalanche of confidences she hoped for. And then, of course use it, not against me, she isn’t mean, but to spice up her conversations with clients and the other employees and to perfect her reputation – already significant, especially with the drag queens – as a tremendous giver of advice and outstanding settler of conflicts of every kind. She was thinking not about me but herself. I was the last bastion of resistance to her wonderful generosity – along with Lucien, who also knew what she was up to – and she thought she’d found the way to crush it for good by making me her debtor.

“Let yourself go for once, stop holding back … It’ll do you good. The guy’s already got a reputation so if he did something bad to you, everybody should know … He has to be dealt with once and for all … There’s too many like him who get away with murder and it has to stop. When I saw you leave with him last night, I knew how it would end and I should’ve stopped you …”

And when I finally understood – it was about time – that what she really wanted was for things to have gone badly between Gilbert and me so she could blab about it all over town, because she couldn’t imagine that I might have spent a wonderful night because a midget couldn’t have good and satisfying sex, the thought was inconceivable, I was so angry that I could see the moment coming when I’d have to hit her.

To make her drool then, I told her everything. Ev-ery-thing. She wanted details, she got them! But not the ones she was expecting. She thought she’d be hearing the heartrending outpourings of a whining, frustrated, frigid freak. Instead, she got a description of revels like she herself couldn’t even imagine, so I hoped anyway: the smells, the sensations, the cries, the waves of pleasure, the silly giggles, the tears when it was just too good, the exhaustion after so many orgasms, the rest periods between sessions of sublime love-making and even the frustration at having to get out of bed and have breakfast in the morning, with promises to do it again – it was all there. I was lyrical, I was to the point, I found the bon mot and the right expression very easily, I practically mimed what I told her and I know for sure that the picture I painted was clear and possibly disturbing. For once, I parked my modesty at the door and had a fabulous time watching her blush to the roots of hair that was too blonde to be believed. She sat there, unmoving, spellbound, she didn’t even think to close her mouth which hung open over her cup of coffee that had been cold for a while. She didn’t try even once to interrupt me, something unheard-of, and as my story came to an end, she just murmured, as she swallowed her spit, “Well, how about that …”

If I had described some endless horror, some unbounded pain, she’d have had millions of things to tell me, advice to lavish, words of consolation both hollow and empty to dish out, she’d have played guide, mentor, guru, she’d have tried to take control of my life the way she did, gladly and unscrupulously, with anyone so misguided as to confide in her, but before this brazen display, this triumphant explosion of delights shared in a vast explosion of excess people dream of but can’t even hope to experience because they imagine that it can’t exist, she was paralyzed, suspended, I think, between the most naïve amazement (Why her and not me?) and the utmost incredulity (It’s impossible, she’s saying whatever comes into her head to impress me!).

But she simply stacked the paper napkins she’d folded earlier and got up from the fake leather booth without adding a word. I honestly think I was the very first person who’d ever left her speechless: faced with someone else’s misery she was very forthcoming, even chatty, but confronted with happiness, she realized that she was disarmed and useless. The vulture hadn’t found the rotting food she’d been looking for and now, vanquished, was going back to her nest.

All of the evening’s tension, my uncertainty, my doubts, had been cleared away by my gymnastics and the relief I felt made me sleepy. I could have stretched out my arms on the Arborite table, rested my head on them, and slept till morning, I was so exhausted.

But I’d forgotten the note that my three roommates had left before they went out …