Telephone

by Percival Everett

  We walked to the Jardin du Luxembourg and through the park. I wanted to sit by the boat pond, but Sarah and Meg convinced me it was too cold.

  “I wish I had a boat,” I said.

  “Would that make you happy, Daddy?”

  “A red boat.”

  “I’m hungry,” Meg said. “For food, not pastries.”

  “I know where we should eat,” Sarah said. “The Café de la Mairie. It’s really old fashioned. Look it up on your phone.”

  Meg did. “It’s not far. Saint-Sulpice.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “Allons-y.”

  We chatted over an authentic and truly plain meal, complete with a waiter whose rudeness was amplified to entertain tourists. He was amusing and harmless enough. The people watching was fun, but I was out on my feet. I believed I could make the walk back to the hotel, but I wouldn’t last much longer than that. I followed along as we made our way back. At dusk the holiday lights were soft, white, beautiful. My daughter was happy.

  After all that exhaustion and wanting to sleep, when I got the chance, I couldn’t do it. I lay in bed and watched strange talk shows, stranger variety shows, dubbed American cop shows from the nineties, but no sleep. Finally, I switched off the set and was reminded how difficult it is to not think.

  Sarah had always loved paintings, and though she had not been raised with religion, she gravitated toward works with spiritual, usually Christian import. She would laugh and comment, with an irony that seemed beyond her years, “They’re just like comic books. Too much to believe.”

  I would nod. I knew she didn’t believe in a god, but what if she did? I wouldn’t stand in her way. In fact, I couldn’t have stood in her way. It seemed unlikely that she would ever fall for it, and I had to admit a certain relief. Still, it would have been nice to have some deity step in and do whatever it is deities do, maybe fix my daughter.

  We moved through the Louvre at my daughter’s pace. That day, none too fast.

  Stories of Saint Jerome and the Lion, c.1425, Master of the Osservanza. The grateful lion looks nothing like a lion, perhaps why Jerry was persuaded to get so close.

  The Retable of Saint Denis, c.1416, Henri Bellechose. Sarah liked the painter’s name. Henry Beautiful Thing. She liked the bishop behind bars. Bishops belonged behind bars.

  Watching Sarah, I was confronted with the truth of life’s ephemerality, the sad impermanence of everything. These moments in Paris would not be memories she would even have a chance to look back on. She would have these joys and very soon forget them. She did not know enough of what would happen to her to appreciate how fleeting these brief experiences were. Yet somehow, maybe on a cellular level, she must have understood, as she made her way so slowly from painting to painting. When moments are weighted, the most insignificant details become meaningful. So it was then, each painting marking a place in her story.

  Meg and I were still, quite visibly, feeling the effects of jet lag. Why Sarah wasn’t, we had no idea. It was a kid thing.

  “I’ve got a bad case of museum legs,” Meg said. “These marble floors are sucking the life out of me.”

  “Me too.”

  “She’s taking forever. Can you hurry her up somehow?”

  “I wouldn’t if I could. She’s loving it.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Meg sat on a bench and looked up at me. “Have you noticed anything today?”

  I shook my head. I felt bad for being possibly unobservant, a sin in this moment in our lives that was unforgivable, for being so tense. How could I enjoy my daughter when so tightly wound?

  “Think we can pull her away for a quick snack?”

  I studied the back of Sarah’s head; the mop of uncontrollable brown hair made her head look like a balloon set atop a stick. “Hey, slug,” I said. “Want to go downstairs and grab a bite of something? Mom and I are a little hungry.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “That was easy,” Meg said.

  “Ask and ye shall receive.”

  The Rolin Madonna, c.1435, Jan van Eyck. There is Mary all dressed in red instead of being mantled in the blue of heaven. The sullen baby Jesus is in her lap. He is unwilling to play patty-cake with the grim donor.

  For some reason, and when I say some I of course mean unknown, as we walked south along rue de Rennes, I regarded Meg and could not help but be critical. I was finding fault, and I didn’t want to. I thought back to when Sarah was two and was having what some called behavioral trouble, a lot of screaming and recalcitrance, what I called spunk, and remembered Meg yelling at the child. She was at her wits’ end, I knew that, but her impatience, her noise led to more noise. She would scream and the child would scream louder. One night I said something that was true enough, but it bothered me for a couple of years. Without much consideration I said, “If you can’t control yourself, why should she?” Meg fell silent, her feelings hurt much as mine would have been. At the moment of my utterance, I had been clear and certain about what I had wanted to communicate, but once I said it, I felt nothing but stinging regret. The ironic and finally sad benefit to me was that Sarah drifted closer to me. In those moments when she needed quieting down from her night terrors, I was the one who sat with her, holding her, making soothing sounds. She now was plenty close to her mother and affectionate enough with her, but even Meg noted how much softer the child was with me. It was something that hurt her feelings. Right then, during that walk, all I could focus on was Meg’s yelling.

  “Daddy, can we go back to the Louvre tomorrow?”

  “If that’s what you want. I thought we might try the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Louvre,” she said.

  “You got it.”

  “Which painting did you like best today?” Meg asked.

  Sarah thought about it.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “It was the one with the baby Jesus in it.”

  “They all have the baby Jesus,” she laughed.

  “That’s one mean-looking baby, that’s all I have to say.”

  “Not in all of them,” she said.

  “I guess not. But in plenty of them. Dour baby.”

  “Mary doesn’t look much happier,” Meg said.

  “That’s because she’s got that mean baby,” I said. “Why do you like those paintings anyway?”

  “I told you. Because they’re so weird.”

  “I’ll bet nobody ever told that baby what to do. How do you tell a god to eat his peas? Stop playing with your food, Lord.”

  “Don’t pee in the tub, God,” Sarah said.

  “You two are going to hell,” Meg said.

  “When?” asked Sarah.

  We walked on awhile in silence.

  “We should swing past Le Bon Marché and look at the Christmas decorations in the windows,” Meg said.

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  Lady with Pansies, c.1475. Ophelia would say some hundred years later, “Pansies are for thoughts.” Pensées. Pansies. Perhaps the first French pun I understood. She wears a ring on her thumb.

  “Daddy, can we go back to the Louvre tomorrow?”

  I looked at Meg. I could see her moving toward tears.

  “Of course, honey. That’s a good idea. The Louvre again tomorrow.”

  The Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, c.1455, Enguerrand Quarton. The ashen Mary watches and Mary Magdalene weeps, listens to the plucking of thorns from Jesus’s head by John. Sarah thought that John was removing his halo.

  When your child is dying, it is damn near impossible to think about anything else, to enter into distracted conversation, to enjoy a meal or a piece of music or a book. I tried to find glimpses of joy or peace or whatever word fits as I watched my daughter navigate her last chapter in ignorance of her condition. Why tell her? I thought this and felt weak for doing so. Why, since she would, even if she did apprehend it all, fade into dementia and not remember anyway? Why scare her now? Why take these moments of joy or peace or whatever word fits away from her?

  The sky had
taken on a greenish twilight that looked more appropriate for a coastal town, and so I imagined that it might rain. Instead, it began to snow, a light flurry.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Mommy?” Sarah said.

  “Yes, it is,” Meg said.

  For some reason Sarah’s calling Meg “Mommy” instead of “Mom” struck me. It was not unusual for her to say that, but it drove home the fact of her youth. I was grief and sadness walking, but I could not let myself sink into a pit. I had to be strong for my child. I had to be strong for Meg. Still, while thinking such a noble thought, I wondered how I might continue without my daughter. If I could have died for her, as if sitting for an exam in her stead, I would have done so in a heartbeat. And I knew Meg would have as well. I tried to take some solace in the fact that Sarah was well loved and that she felt that, was feeling that in life.

  “What if we just walked forever?” I said.

  Sarah turned to look at me.

  “What if we never went back to our hotel or back home?” I stepped forward to hold her hand. “What if we simply walked and walked forever?”

  “To the horizon,” Sarah said. “That would be perfect.”

  The snow fell a little harder.

  The display windows of the fancy department store, Le Bon Marché, were well worth the modest detour. They were elaborate and understated at once, each a work unto itself. A few required patience as they unfolded gradually, while others were mere explosions of color and motion. At another time, in another universe, the spectacle might have been almost enough to make me like Christmas. Meg wanted to make one. Sarah wanted to live in one. I wanted my bed.

  The Ship of Fools, c.1500, Hieronymous Bosch. Oh, our proclivity for neglecting the immortal soul. Bad nun. Bad monk.

  Meg and Sarah wanted to walk through the store, and so we did. I had to admit that somehow the merchandise here appeared superior to any of that I recalled from the stores at home. It did not take long to realize, however, that it was all in the presentation, the arrangement of colors, the way things were given space. How exactly it was pulled off I had no idea, but I came to see that all the clothes were exactly what I would find at home, the same styles, the same materials, the same brands. Somehow a plain Woolrich field jacket looked rugged and exotic folded and stacked on the table of Le Bon Marché. Magic. In short order, however, I had had enough. As our hotel was only a couple of blocks down the street, I told them that I would meet them back there.

  The snow now seemed significant, as if it might amount to something. It was falling in huge flakes now that bothered my face, lingered for seconds on my coat before melting away. The temperature had fallen enough that I actually felt cold, not such an unwelcome feeling; I liked the novelty of it, being from Los Angeles. I also appreciated that the sensation distracted me ever so marginally from other concerns.

  I collected my key at the desk and walked up the four flights to my room. I peered out the window at the eddy of people in the snow. The cars, seemingly all black, were backed up single file along the rue. I watched out for Meg and Sarah. I didn’t want to lie down because I knew I’d fall immediately to sleep. Though not hungry, I wanted to dine with my family. At that moment, I wanted to see my daughter walking up the street toward me, just to observe her familiar gait, merely to see her approaching my position in space in present, living, promising motion.

  My room was dark behind me.

  I was leaning out into the cold air when I spotted the two of them. I waved as they crossed the intersection, but they didn’t see me. From the other end of the block I heard a Christmas song played on trumpets. The sounds of the horns bounced off the buildings, and in spite of the music itself, I enjoyed the playing. I looked to see the two men with horns. They paused beneath windows, and people tossed coins down into a hat one of them held. They stopped beneath me and looked up. I dropped a coin to them, and that’s when Sarah saw me. She was thrilled by the sight of me hanging out the window, the music, the snow. She moved like she was about to become a teenager but looked like a child. I could see this on her face so easily. What I could also see easily was the look of stress on Meg’s face.

  The Knight, the Young Girl, and Death, no date, Hans Baldung Grien. The skull bites the dress, a foot in a boot placed against a rock for leverage. Its bone lies separate, severed, isolated near the hooves.

  After dinner in a bistro at the end of the block, we returned to the hotel for the night. Meg did not report to me what had happened in the department store. She did knock on my door and place a damp pair of panties in my hand.

  “Thank you?” I said.

  “Those are your daughter’s.”

  “That’s creepy. They’re damp.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Where’s Sarah?”

  “She’s in the shower.” She took back the underwear. “She leaked.”

  It was all happening so fast, or at least things seemed to be; that it was happening at all made it too fast. To leak a little urine was such a small loss of motor control. To repeat oneself was something I did every day, often several times. But each small thing was magnified, amplified for us—mere whispers were shouts; tiny flickers were blinding flashes. It was quite likely that we were also missing some symptoms altogether.

  There was something there in the dark. I could imagine it in there, rustling in the dry leaves, dragging itself, perhaps. The sun was beating down on my back, burning my neck. I was always lax about using sunscreen, a disregard that came with dark skin, but I knew I was burning. Yet I could not tear myself away from the mouth of the cave. Members of my team were far off, uninterested in me or what I had found, doing something at the river’s edge. How a breeze was able to blow from within the cave I did not know, but it smelled of leaves I knew but could not identify. Ordinary things became puzzles; I felt this happening. The opening of the cavity was quite clearly what it was, and yet it made no sense to me. Confused by the breeze, I found the mouth of the cave to be something else altogether. There was a monster here, and that mouth was its mouth, that face of rock was its face, that wind was its breath.

  “Why do you stand there like a thief?” the monster asked me.

  “I am no such thing,” I said, startled by a diction that was not my own.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “What do I want from you?” I looked around. “You are the monster. I want nothing from you except that you go away.”

  “Where would I go?” the monster asked. “This is my place. This is where I have been and will be. Give me back my bones.”

  “What?”

  “Give me back my bones.”

  I didn’t get away from the cave, and so I turned to connect the ropes beside me to my sling so I could rappel down to the river’s edge. But the breath of the monster turned me back to it.

  “Take what you want,” the monster said.

  I lit a match in the bright daylight, thinking it would help me see better. When it flared to life, the day became dark, and all I could see was the flame. I heard the movement again, the rustling.

  My father called to me from below. I couldn’t see him, but I knew his voice well enough. “What a terrible thing, to watch a child die,” he called.

  “It is,” I called back.

  “Is there nothing you can do?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps.”

  I awoke only to wonder if I was still asleep. I knew that my daughter’s bed was just on the other side of the wall behind me. I put my hand to it and imagined that I could feel her heart beating.

  What is it you want? the monster had asked. What do you want? the monster asked.

  I lay awake for the balance of the night letting my dream shatter into indecipherable pieces the way dreams do. I would reconstruct it later in ways that made little if any sense, ways that would yield a vague belief in some meaning that I desired. Dreams were not important; it was the reconstruction of dreams that was always significant. The
rein one could find a window, a clue or a vein, longing, fear, and guilt. I didn’t know what my reconstruction of that dream sought to tell me or what I sought to create in remaking it, but it troubled me perhaps beyond reason.

  We were at the Louvre the next morning, and Sarah resumed just where she had left off, viewing paintings that bored me silly, the religious significance of which mattered little if at all to her, but it was clear that she enjoyed them honestly and, strangely, without irony. I was told by the concierge in the hotel that the best way to enter the museum was through the metro stop below. And so we were able to avoid the long queue, which meant I was not nearly as exhausted or irritable as I had been the day before.

  “Tell me again what you like about this room,” I said.

  Sarah looked around, sighed, and gave me the best of all possible answers. “The colors,” she said.

  I made a complete turn, looked at every wall. She was, as ever, right. If I looked at nothing but the colors, I found the room near perfect. It was nothing but reds from rose to ruby, crimson, brick, blues from phthalo to cerulean, cobalt. A sadness came over me. My daughter would continue to teach me even as I was losing her, and yet there was so little I could offer her. My job had been to prepare her for life. Now, with what was coming, it made no sense to even consider preparing her for death.

  The Head of John the Baptist, 1507, Andreas de Solario. Sarah loved the painting and I hated it. “The shaft of the platter looks so much like a skinny human neck,” she said. “Like he’s really not dead at all.”

  We exited the museum through the pyramid on the mall. Our plan was to meet Meg at the Jardin des Tuileries for lunch. It was cold and there was snow around the bases of trees and on what grass was there. It was crowded, more crowded than I had imagined it would be. I worried briefly that we would be unable to find Meg. I smelled ground coffee beans and caramel and wondered why the two were mixed. The odor served to make me hungrier. Sarah was nearly skipping. She had had that little bout of incontinence, if that was what it was, and a couple of forgetful moments, but there had been no seizures that we had noticed.