Anthony’s drunken ride to Stéphanie’s house and final rejection

Anthony Casati’s drunken ride to Stéphanie Chaussoy’s house begins as a demand for a turn on Hacine Bouali’s Suzuki DR 125 and ends with Stéphanie’s final rejection. The bike gives Anthony speed, exhilaration, and a temporary sense of command; it cannot restore a relationship or keep Stéphanie in Heillange. The shift from daring physical control to helplessness at her door makes the ride a last, failed effort to outrun separation.

The Loan and the Empty Lot

Anthony and Hacine take the motorcycle to the new des Montets enterprise zone, still a construction site and one of the city’s economic renewal projects. Warehouses, a department store, an outlet, and recently built offices stand amid vast parking lots. The offices look like stacked containers, hurriedly assembled and fragile; the empty lots, divided by concrete barriers and dotted with streetlights, suggest an ocean at night. This landscape of promised future activity is conspicuously vacant while the two men negotiate who will control the machine.

Hacine stops at the lot’s west entrance, where five hundred yards of open asphalt stretch in front of them. He switches off the bike and puts it on its stand, hesitating; there is no need to hurry. Anthony, however, is already impatient. He believes that he rides better than Hacine and that Hacine owes him a turn. Their shared past—growing up in the same town, attending the same schools, leaving them too soon, and being bored at the same jobs—does not make the request easy. Their fathers had both worked at Metalor, and the men had crossed paths repeatedly, yet those common circumstances have not produced ease or intimacy. Anthony feels a thickness between them as the desire to ride grows harder to contain.

After smoking a cigarette Anthony gives him, Hacine sits on a flower bed, calm while Anthony stands over him and asks again. The exchange changes from reluctance to threat. Anthony comes closer and holds out his hand; Hacine searches his pockets and tosses him the key, but limits the permission: Anthony is to ride to the end and come back. The loan is conditional, and the boundary is plain. Anthony accepts it, then immediately turns the short, controlled errand into a test of how far he can push both the machine and Hacine’s authority.

Speed Becomes Defiance

Anthony starts the motorcycle in the quiet summer night. The engine’s chatter and the distinctive vibration of the 125 rise through his body; the prose makes the pleasure physical before it becomes an image of power. He accelerates down the straight lot, slows at the far end, turns, and sees Hacine on his feet, waving him back. Rather than simply return, Anthony sets off again faster, lifting the front wheel in a wheelie. He rides toward Hacine at nearly sixty miles an hour, circles him closely enough to come within an inch, and roars away.

Hacine runs after him, sweating and waving his arms, calling for him to come back. Anthony keeps evading him. He is becoming thoroughly familiar with the motorcycle and, in the narration’s terms, is in no danger as he dodges Hacine. But the scene is not just a demonstration of riding skill: the original agreement has become an opportunity to defy the person who lent him the key. Hacine’s instruction had been to go to the end and return; Anthony repeats the approach-and-retreat on his own terms, making Hacine run after a machine he can no longer control.

The riding carries an expansive, almost martial charge. Anthony’s heavy acceleration is associated with broad-chested riders who move forward without caring about anything else. The image turns a local act of youthful recklessness into a fantasy of force and escape. Yet its energy has a direction. Anthony finally rides away, and, without stopping to consider the choice, takes the road to Stéphanie’s house. His heart is pounding even harder than the motorcycle. The momentum that seemed to promise limitless freedom instead delivers him to the person he has come to seek.

At Stéphanie’s Door

Anthony stops outside the Chaussoy house, a large building with an upper story, gables, a balcony, hewn stone at the corners, and a heavy front door. Its grounds are carefully composed: circular flower beds, two willows, a silver birch, bougainvillea, and a gravel drive where a BMW Series 7 and an old Golf convertible are parked. Anthony has never dared come this close before. The house’s solidity and visible prosperity contrast with the empty, temporary-looking buildings of the enterprise zone and with Anthony’s exposed arrival on the motorcycle.

Fifty-watt spotlights under the roof catch him in a harsh white glare. When the motion-sensitive lights go out, he tests them with a wave of his hand and watches them come on again. He recognizes that they are the kind of lights meant to startle cats and burglars, and briefly finds the mechanism amusing. The small discovery gives him something to do while he stands outside, but it does not make him less conspicuous: when he turns back toward the bike, the lights make it seem like broad daylight. Then someone calls from the steps and asks what he is doing there. The arrival he has reached by instinct is no longer private.

Anthony and Stéphanie stand close together in the dark, but closeness does not become reconciliation. Stéphanie grows impatient and asks whether that is all; Anthony offers a motorcycle ride. Her question and his invitation expose how little they have to say to one another now, and how poorly his chosen gesture can answer what he wants. The motorcycle had enabled him to approach her house; it cannot supply a shared purpose once they are face to face.

Refusal and Departure

Stéphanie tells Anthony that it is over. He touches his left eyelid, an old reflex, and realizes that he will not have another chance to say what he has come to say. He puts his hands in his back pockets and takes a deep breath. The situation feels as if it is slipping away from him; he would like to take her hand, but instead tells her that he thinks about her all the time. The confession makes his longing explicit only at the moment when it can no longer alter her decision.

Stéphanie stiffens and answers that he is dreaming. She says she has to go inside and get up early. Her refusal is not merely a pause in their connection: the narration sets it against her imminent departure. In a few days, she is due to fly to Canada, where her boyfriend is waiting in Ottawa. He has completed a journalism degree and found an internship with a local paper. Stéphanie is meant to stay for three weeks, but privately plans to enroll at the university and work as a waitress, expecting tips to make it possible to live there. Her imagined future is already extending beyond a short visit. A vast new country draws her away from Heillange, which no longer makes sense to her.

She climbs the stairs two at a time, and Anthony never sees her face. He says goodbye; she raises a hand in farewell, framed for a final moment by the doorway before it closes. The scene joins a small gesture to an irreversible change: her raised hand acknowledges him, but does not invite him back. Anthony’s recollection returns to the image of her ponytail on a July day and to the knowledge that he will never touch her breasts again. Desire remains vivid, but the possibility of renewed intimacy has ended.

The Ride’s Aftermath

Before starting the motorcycle, Anthony carefully rolls it away from the house. The care contrasts with the dangerous, defiant riding in the lot: here he avoids making the same kind of spectacle as he leaves. He presses the starter, and the engine responds. The narration then follows the motorcycle’s operation—a spark ignites the gas-air mixture, combustion drives the piston, and intake and exhaust repeat in a cycle that produces movement and speed. The mechanism is reliable and tireless, a precise sequence that can be restarted as long as it runs and gasoline flows.

That mechanical cycle offers Anthony energy and forgetfulness, not a way to reverse what has happened. The contrast sharpens the ending: the motorcycle can answer a touch, start again, and carry him away, while Stéphanie has gone inside and is preparing to leave the country. His ride began with the conviction that he was owed a turn and reached its limit at a closed door. The journey is therefore more than an impulsive visit. It converts the force of his unresolved attachment into a final encounter in which speed gives way to rejection, and departure becomes the only remaining direction.