The knife was certainly old enough, and of a type our father might have used. But I couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t remember our father handing me a knife—why ever would he have?—and I couldn’t remember hiding it from Agnès, as I must have. And why leave it for Eric rather than spiriting it away when Agnès made me pack my small bag for Le Havre? I didn’t think he was lying, but I couldn’t remember.
I told him this, and I could see that I was breaking his heart. I’d grown used to his glasses, and without them his blue eyes appeared watery and unhealthy, the whites yellowed. “I was so little. I’m sorry. I remember the licorice, in your school box. You found it before Agnès meant you to and shared it with me.”
We went on this way—Agnès’s custard, Conrad’s toenails—with Eric draping flesh on the bones of what I remembered until I convinced myself that maybe I did, just a little, remember the knife. He said more that I didn’t recognize, or even understand, about some mermaid who lived in the Honfleur estuary, a siren that feigned kindness and then lured boys into drowning.
Eric held the knife out to me on his open palm. It hovered at the edge of memory as I closed my fingers around it. I pulled the tarnished blade out of its slot and touched my finger carefully to the edge.
“All this time?” I trailed off. “Thank you. Thank you for wanting to give it back to me.”
“I’m sorry it took this long.”
I reached out and embraced him, and he put his arms, tentatively, around me.
“I’m sorry it’s useless,” he added. “I’m sorry I’m useless.”
“You’re not useless.”
He asked where Joseph was now, and I told him at Conrad’s. “Should we go there?” he said. “He’s the useful one. The Brothers Useless and Useful. You can say it. I know it’s true.”
“It’s not,” I said reflexively, then turned away, because I suspected that my face might contradict my words.
It took him longer than I thought it would for a man with only one outfit to dress. I repinned my slept-on hair as best I could. He listened at the door for a moment before we went out, trying to leave while no one else was in the stairwell. Our anonymity lasted only to the front door. On a Saturday morning the children were in school, many of the adults at work, but there were still too many people out in the streets to avoid them all. At every café we passed men called out to greet him, then couldn’t conceal their surprise as they noticed that we were walking together, a man and a woman on a Saturday morning. We did not look enough alike to be obviously related, and Eric squirmed. Whenever we moved into single file to fit through a clot of people, he walked a little faster, in no hurry to move back into step with me.
I walked quickly enough to come alongside him and reached out to take his hand. He jerked in surprise but did not remove it. I’d done it out of pique, but it was pleasant walking hand in hand. His was large and warm, and maybe we were both pretending that it could offer a kind of protection. We were still holding hands as we rang the bell for the concierge to let us into Conrad’s building, and we knew it was time to break apart, but couldn’t quite figure out how. Neither of us wanted to hurt the other.
“The knife,” he finally said. He’d been carrying it in his jacket pocket for me and said he didn’t want to forget to give it back to me.
During the walk I’d rehearsed in my head what I would say to Joseph and how I’d take him in my arms, this morning and as many times on the train as he’d let me, trying to memorize his shape and warmth. But Conrad was alone in the apartment.
“I waited as long as I could,” he said, his voice infuriatingly calm. “You said tonight was the deadline.”
I didn’t understand what he’d done until he explained, and then I couldn’t make myself believe it until he’d said it twice more. Joseph was already gone, placed on a train to Cherbourg half an hour earlier.
“Mathilde’s with him,” Conrad said. “To see that he arrives safely.”
“Without saying goodbye? How could you?”
“I was trying to keep you from facing legal consequences.”
“They would have been mine to face. This was mine to do.” My disbelief gave way to more rage than I’d ever felt toward anybody, over anything. Even so, I didn’t understand that the way I was scrabbling at the knife was something more than frantic fidgeting. I pried at the blade, the knife such a grubby, unexpected little object that I don’t think Conrad realized what it was.
“I didn’t know what you planned to do,” he said. “I had no idea when you were coming back. If you were coming back.”
Eric must have understood my fury better than I did: when the blade came free and I slashed forward with it, he was there at my side. He tried to grab my wrist but misjudged and caught the blade across the back of his hand. Conrad belatedly jumped backward—it had taken Eric’s blood to make him realize the possibility of violence. None of us had thought of me as someone capable of performing it. But mother beasts do worse: disembowel, decapitate, dismember. My child was gone, my own brother the one who had separated us. For a moment, there was nothing I would not do. But in the moment just after, I was watching Eric’s blood drip down his wrist and bloom in the white of his shirt cuff.
All three of us thought, His hand.
There was a flurry of bumbling. We were each of us as bad at triage as we were at violence. I ran for a kitchen towel and water, and Conrad yelled at me not to use the towel—risk of infection. He disappeared in search of gauze and bandages that he hoped Mathilde kept in supply. Eric stood there in the middle of the living room, his hand held in the air as blood slid down it and Conrad rummaged in the bathroom. Finally Eric took his own handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to the cut. Conrad emerged with handkerchiefs of his own and a beautiful long scarf of Mathilde’s.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ve surely got clean towels somewhere.”
We sorted ourselves out, slowly, and sat Eric in the kitchen with his hand above his heart. The handkerchief he’d been pressing against it was saturated, but we were all afraid to look. At last Eric lifted the cloth and I rinsed the skin, daubed it with a clean towel. More blood welled from the cut, but I could keep it clear enough to see.
Eric peered down. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Almost nothing.”
He tightened his fist and released it, made quick trilling movements with his first two fingers, flicked his fourth finger over his thumb and folded his thumb under his fingers, reassuring himself that he could still do everything he needed to. He was pumping more blood out of the cut, and Conrad told him to stop, but we were all relieved. The wound was shallow. The knife hadn’t severed anything important. Conrad took over from me as both doctor and nurse, and as he fussed at Eric I asked about the nearest place to buy bandages. Conrad rattled off directions, mentioned money on the bedroom dresser.
Once I was outside in the sunshine I started feeling wobbly and exhausted, and I recognized the sensation as what remained after panic had washed over the body. Was this how I would feel for the rest of my life? Joseph was still gone. My mind returned from the flare of the fight to the larger explosion. Suitcase, train ticket, if I hurried I could be in Cherbourg maybe—what?—two hours behind Joseph? What will that accomplish? I asked myself. Nothing, I answered. But how could I not go?
I did, later that day, for all the useless hell of it, but I bought the bandages first, and brought them back, and rang the bell for Conrad, and when I entered the apartment I was laughing, laughing, because how had this day, this day of all days, turned into a day about Eric?
Suzanne
— 15 —
Do not leave your shadow
“REMIND ME TO TURN THE CLOCKS BACK LATER,” ANDRÉ SAID at the breakfast table. There was no urgency to the statement, as he and Suzanne, both painters, had nowhere in particular they needed to be that day. Larger deadlines loomed, however. The Salon des Indépendants was in May, two months hence, and they were both working on paintings that they watched take shape i
n their shared home studio with a degree of wary competition.
“That’s today?” Suzanne asked, and André pushed the newspaper across the table, tapping the relevant article. As of March 9, 1911, all of France and Algeria were adopting Greenwich mean time, though no one willingly called it by the English name. The switch was to PARIS MEAN TIME MINUS 9 MINUTES AND 21 SECONDS, the newspaper explained, which just happened to be exactly GMT. Local time differentials, including the five-minute grace period of train-station time, would be abolished.
Reading about station time, Suzanne thought of Erik, something she hadn’t done since renting this apartment on the Rue Cortot a year earlier. The apartment was across the street from the building where Erik had lived back in the nineties, the place where she’d once knocked at a door he couldn’t make himself open to her. She hadn’t been sure how she felt about living next to him again, if he was still there.
When she asked her prospective landlord about Erik, the man knew exactly whom she meant. Yes, he was still about.
“Across the street?”
“Oh no. Ran out of money, moved to the suburbs. But he still plays piano at the cabarets.”
Poor bastard, Suzanne had thought. Did he play his own songs, or someone else’s? It wouldn’t have made much difference to the man she’d known then—Erik would have been bitterly disappointed either way to still be in the cabarets.
There was a knock on the door now, hard and sharp, and the dogs started barking.
Suzanne, having grown accustomed to that kind of knock, prepared herself for bad news, and asked André if he’d heard Maurice come home the previous night. André shook his head. Coco had already run barking to the front door, but Pierrot, coward that he was, nosed into Suzanne’s side. She laid her hand on the wolfhound’s soft head, steeling herself.
André offered to answer the door, all the more an act of kindness because Suzanne constantly assured him that Maurice wasn’t his responsibility. Twenty-seven years old now, Maurice should have been responsible for himself, but that was a pipe dream.
Her previous husband, Paul, had arranged job after job for Maurice, calling in favors only to have Maurice no-show or arrive drunk. “You have no understanding of reputation,” Paul had told Suzanne when they fought, mostly about Maurice, about the damage the boy—no longer a boy—had done to his stepfather’s professional credibility. To which she’d laughed, infuriating him further. But of course she understood reputation. What she didn’t understand was why so many people aimed for the exact same reputation, dull and uniform. That was the trap. On the marriage-license application, Paul had insisted they list separate addresses, as if they hadn’t already been living together. Perhaps she should have known then that it wouldn’t last.
At the door, over André’s shoulder, Suzanne saw the unmistakable blue caps of two police officers. They mentioned her son’s name, asked if André was family. André delayed a moment but nodded. Suzanne invited the policemen inside. One was grizzled and rotund, the other young and tall and skeletally lean. They looked more like a comedy duo than colleagues.
“You don’t look anything like your brother,” the giraffe-like one told André. “He’s sleeping it off now, but he didn’t make himself any friends at the station last night.”
“You must be the one got all your mother’s good lucks,” the grizzled one said, and winked at Suzanne, who at forty-five still possessed more than enough good looks to be winked at. André was twenty-one years younger than she, three years younger than Maurice, and with his golden hair looked like he’d leaped out of an advertisement for one of the new aviation clubs. Maurice, even Suzanne would admit, still looked like a walking sheet of dark, smudged newsprint.
“Oh, I think she kept some for herself,” André said.
“Decidedly,” the grizzled one said. “I suppose your brother’s the black sheep. One in every family.”
“What’s happened?” Suzanne asked impatiently.
As expected, Maurice had been arrested the previous night. Again. Public drunkenness. Again. It took a lavish kind of public drunkenness to be arrested for it in Paris, and Suzanne didn’t care to hear the details. She asked which station he was being held at and inwardly cursed when they told her: the tenth arrondissement rather than Montmartre, where people knew the family and made allowances.
“No place for a lady,” the grizzled one said to André. “Be a good boy and save your mother the trip.”
“He’s not my brother, and she isn’t my mother,” André said, putting an arm around Suzanne and pulling her against his side. The lovers watched the policemen stutter and squirm and let themselves out.
As the sound of their footsteps receded, André offered to fetch Maurice from the jail, or at least accompany her, but Suzanne said she’d go alone. There was no reason for them both to lose a day of painting.
André was not an especially good painter. He was thoroughly outclassed by both Suzanne and Maurice, though the three of them never talked about this. His real strength was as a dealer, a charismatic salesman, which was the only reason his own paintings sold for anything at all. If he got out of the studio and concentrated on the business end of things, he could work marvels for her and for Maurice, Suzanne thought. But she wouldn’t ask him to, or even suggest it, because she loved him and didn’t want him to resent her, and because after the way she’d come up, she wasn’t going to tell anyone else no.
André had been Maurice’s friend before he was his stepfather. Under normal circumstances all three of them did an excellent job pretending there was nothing unusual about this, but during or after a bad binge Maurice, like an ill or sulky little boy, tended to want only his mother. After a night in jail he would not have been overjoyed to see André showing up to collect him.
Delaying her departure for the station, Suzanne knocked softly at her mother’s bedroom door, down the hall from hers and André’s. Silence, and Suzanne cracked the door to peer in. Her mother was sleeping, which she did more and more of, rising late and retiring early and napping in between. She was eighty, and had been living with her daughter and grandson since Suzanne had asked her to return to help with Maurice. That she hadn’t really been able to help was not her fault. She’d already been growing frailer as Maurice grew stronger and more capable of refusing whatever checks anyone tried to place on his behavior.
At Montmagny, her mother had been horrified when Suzanne and Paul allowed Maurice to drink wine openly with dinner. It was watered, but still. “Right in front of you? What message is that supposed to send?”
“We can’t stop him. If we can at least keep him close to home—”
“You’ve given up, that’s what it says.”
Suzanne had not given up.
There was more paperwork at the station than she expected. Receipts for the release money, acknowledgment of charges, an upcoming court date.
“He has to appear in court? He didn’t before.”
“How often do you two do this?” the desk officer asked, and Suzanne clenched her jaw.
“Severity of the charge, madame.”
“Public drunkenness?” Was there some stiffer penalty for habitual offenders?
“No, the indecent exposure.”
“The what?”
The officer pointed her toward the relevant portion of the report. Please let him only have taken a piss somewhere stupid, she thought before reading, but no—he’d stood under a streetlight and systematically stripped his clothes off down to the socks.
“Why?” she asked Maurice, once he’d been released to her care, his clothes rumpled but resumed.
She didn’t really expect an answer, and he didn’t have one. He shrugged, wincing in the sunshine outside the police station. He never had a reason. For a while after the divorce, when she and André and Maurice and her mother and the dogs had all moved in together, she’d hired nurses simply to sit in a room with Maurice while he painted and keep him from walking out the door. He started jumping out the window instead.
Then Suzanne ran out of money to pay the nurses.
Paul’s money had always made her feel hopeful for Maurice, even though nothing the money bought ever seemed to do any good. She’d burned it all down anyway by taking up with André. But he was so beautiful. My God, he was beautiful. And the way he looked at her? She’d tried not to do much hand-wringing about the passage of time, but how many more chances did she have for a man that young and that beautiful to look at her the way he did? Was she really going to let them all pass by, still married to Paul?
“That is generally what it means to be married,” Paul had said, after he’d found out about André and she’d tried to open a negotiation.
“That isn’t what it has to mean,” she’d said.
“It is what I assumed you meant when you agreed to marry me,” Paul said. “I am not interested in changing the terms.”
Had he ever sounded more like the banker he was? The terms of their marriage, like the terms of a loan he regretted extending. Certainly she couldn’t repay it, the money he’d spent on her and Maurice and her mother, even on the dogs. They turned up their noses at the food she offered them now, wanting the diced steaks the cook had prepared for them at the country house in Montmagny.
“Keep waiting if you like, but you’ll be waiting forever,” she said, and kicked their bowls across the floor when frustration got the best of her. On better days, she hoped this wasn’t true. She could have it all again—the steaks, the good wine, the domestic help. No reason to think she couldn’t. Well, plenty of reasons. But there was at least one reason to hope for better, and she wanted so badly for that reason to be her, but she knew it was Maurice.
One of the doctors at the first hospital had suggested painting, offhandedly—just a hobby to keep Maurice occupied, a harmless mother-son activity. The doctor was thinking of painting at most as a site for sentimental overspill, telling her to stretch a canvas the same way she’d grown accustomed to putting a bucket by Maurice’s bed for him to vomit into. But immediately it was clear that Maurice possessed a fearsome, bewildering talent. They’d started their lessons at the Montmagny house, their easels set up in front of the glass doors that looked out onto the back garden with its neat stamped paths and hedges. She’d meant to deliver a lesson in perspective, the way the geometry of the garden changed as it receded to a stone wall and pastureland beyond. But Maurice had grabbed a palette and started slopping paint.
The Vexations Page 33