The wind and rain came in gusts so violent that the ­restaurant window vibrated with a muffled sound. From time to time Mathieu would press his palm against the glass to feel it shudder. The rain was battering down just a few millimetres from his hand, tracing watery lenses around his outspread fingers. He felt then as if he were holding back the storm with one hand: if he took it away, the window would shatter and everything inside the ­restaurant would be submerged, starting with him, with his nagging conscience and the first signs of a head cold.

A gigantic force was shaking Provincetown to its foundations; the sea was hurling itself against the beach, sudden gusts would lop the heads off waves and the spouts of water thus set free lashed against the first houses on the coast, smacking into them at full force. A premature hurricane whose effects would be felt much farther north than usual, according to the local radio announcer, in between the neo-macho slogans of Bruce Springsteen and the neo-bimbo growling of Madonna. “It’s not normal for the season—but in Provincetown, what is?”

Mathieu butted his cigarette—how many had he smoked since he’d been standing there, holding back the hurricane? Fifteen? A whole package?—in the overflowing ashtray that no one came to empty now that the tourist season was over. The handsome young men who had signed on for the ­summer and had screwed off on a whim had gone South, to the Carolinas or Florida, to continue emptying ashtrays amid the heat and the vacationing gay men in search of a variety of strong, brief and clandestine emotions. By night they would serve as means of release for the men whose ashtrays they’d cleared away during the day, whom they wouldn’t recognize the day after and who probably wouldn’t recognize them either. In a year or two though, they’d end up at this same table, where they’d be served by a new arrival whom they’d debauch in turn, with the satisfied manner of initiates who know the routine, and so on and on . . .

It was not so much his foul mood and the storm that were making Mathieu furious as his sense of helplessness, which was basically pretty hilarious, he knew that, but he certainly didn’t feel like laughing at the unrelieved boredom and the ­uselessness, above all the futility of this week’s ­holiday away from Jean-Marc. The hurricane was a sustained note, the coda to what had been a series of almost intolerable empty moments between barely containable outbursts of rage.