by Richard Vine
“Why do you say that?”
“She didn’t take her hot-date bag, the one with her folding toothbrush and her diaphragm.”
“You shouldn’t snoop in her room, you know.”
“Why not? She always snoops in mine.”
“She does that to protect you.”
“Me too. I snoop to keep my mom safe. I find all kinds of things in there. Things no one is supposed to know about.”
“Such as?”
“None of your business. I’ll never tell anyone, ever.”
“Why, Missy? Are people asking you too many questions?”
“You, my friends, Mom’s friends, Paul. Even that dorky Hogan and the policeman McGuinn.”
“What do those two want to know?”
“The stuff Mom and I did on the day that Aunt Mandy was killed. Everything we did, all day long. I tell them and tell them.”
“What?”
“Mom and I practiced yoga together and baked cookies. Gingerbread. Two dozen. I’ve never seen grown men so, like, totally obsessed with how long it takes to make cookies.”
“They have to get everything in place. On a time line.”
“Why?”
“So they can figure out who shot Amanda. You want that, too, don’t you? For your dad’s sake.”
“I guess.” Her expression turned dark. “I don’t care much who shot Aunt Mandy. She’s the reason my mom is such a disaster these days. Always boinking some piggy guy.”
“Don’t. You just want to take care of your mother, right?”
“She’s everything now, with Daddy gone. Just me and Mom against the world. Unless I count you.”
“I’m not very reliable.”
“Did Nathalie tell you that?”
“Repeatedly.”
It took me a while to talk Melissa into watching Funny Girl. What else was I supposed to do—pretend that her father was going to be normal again? We both knew the truth was terribly different.
“The movie doesn’t have to be good right now,” I said, “just simple and bright. You’ll see.”
She threw herself on the floor, and I leaned back in some sort of ergonomic armchair.
“Sit with me,” Melissa said.
“I’m more comfortable here.”
“Selfish.”
“Am I?”
For the next couple hours, she scowled at me from time to time, especially during the musical numbers. I evidently knew zilch about youthful taste.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Melissa said when the film finally ended and the VCR started to rewind. “Old-time movies are way too sappy.” She moved to a chair near mine.
“So tell me about school,” I said.
She shrugged. “It’s not totally sucky, I guess.”
“What are you studying now?”
“A bunch of junk. You know, algebra and stuff like that.”
“I see the Bradford School is a little more advanced than my alma mater.”
“It’s OK. The students are all rich, except for some of the black kids and some Asians. And they’re super brainy. With scholarships.”
“What’s your favorite subject there?”
“French, I guess.”
“Are you good?”
“Of course. Number one in the class. Want to hear?”
“Impress me.”
“Etre, imperfect subjunctive: je fusse, tu fusses, il fût…” She ran through the whole exercise perfectly, at dazzling speed.
“Great,” I said. “I feel like I’m back on the Seine.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“Nothing.”
“Does it remind you of Nathalie?”
“Not exactly. It reminds me that we could have had a daughter your age.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“We never quite got around to it.”
“That was dumb.” Missy pulled her shirt down over her knees. “If you wanted one, I mean.”
“Nathalie did.”
“And you?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“So you just did nothing?”
“Sometimes things happen that way—or don’t happen. You get distracted. Other things come up.”
“Like what?”
My voice dropped. “First we were poor, then we were busy, then she was dead.”
Melissa stayed quiet. She made a sour face, averting her eyes. I looked away as well, and noticed a box by the door. Small arms and legs protruded from the half-closed top.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“My stupid dolls. I was going to throw them out, but Mom pulled them back from the trash. She says they ‘inspire’ her or some dumb thing.”
I went and stood over the box, looking down into the tangled mass of plastic torsos and limbs.
“You’re kind of rough on your toys,” I said.
“They wouldn’t behave. I got tired of them, anyhow. I’m too big for dolls now.”
The heads and arms had been torn from many of the miniature girl bodies.
“Were you angry about something?”
“No, I was just having fun. Making a change. How many times can you sit and dress up those little snits?”
I had no idea, only a certain degree of marvel at her quick, bitter shift of demeanor.
Melissa got off the chair and took my hand, the way she did whenever we crossed a busy avenue.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s take a walk.”
I let the girl lead me halfway back through the loft to a coffee table surrounded by a cluster of soft chairs and a sofa. She steered me onto the cushions.
“Sit.”
I settled in and watched as she went to the liquor cabinet and fixed a vodka tonic and poured a tall glass of sauvignon blanc. She came back and handed me the vodka and sat down on the floor, leaning back against the couch near my feet.
“Cheers,” she said. “À ta santé.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m having some wine. A reward for learning all my lessons so well. How about you?”
“I can’t let you drink.”
“You can’t really stop me. I only do it a little bit, when Mom’s away.”
“You’re too young.”
Melissa turned to face me.
“Give me a break, Uncle Jack. Kids my age drink wine all the time in Europe. You told me so yourself. Would you rather have me take Ecstasy with my friends in the lunchroom at Bradford?”
“I’d rather have you be a little girl.”
“It’s too late for that.”
She took a small sip of the wine and sucked her lips in.
I felt powerless, outmaneuvered. So I raised my own glass and drank, the ice cubes tinkling. The mixture was sickly sweet with tonic.
Missy smiled at me, a shade too pretty, too knowing, as she sat cross-legged on the floor.
Well, my first drinks were stolen underage pleasures, too, and I turned out just fine, didn’t I? OK, so Melissa was a few years younger than I was when I started, but kids grow up faster these days. You had to change with the times. Maybe you could over-adjust, however. Who knew? It was evident that parenting wouldn’t have been my forte.
With just one interior lamp adding to the faint street glare from the windows, I was enveloped in shadows.
“What was it like being with Nathalie?” Melissa asked.
“It’s hard to remember.”
“Big liar, you think about it all the time. Tell me. I want to know.”
“It was like being whole.”
Melissa tasted the wine again. “Then why didn’t you live together more? Or at least on the same continent?”
“We didn’t want to spoil it.”
That sounded odd, but it was pretty close to the truth—as near as I was ever likely to get.
Melissa nodded. “You did anyhow, though?” she asked. “Spoil it?”
“Together, yes. Or maybe apart.”
“Did you c
heat on her?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Did she think so?”
“It’s what she said, so I went along with it. Fooling ourselves is what we did best. Nathalie was determined, absolutely, not to be jealous. She said, ‘Let’s not be stupid about sex in the naive American way.’ So we weren’t. We were stupid about it in the clever French way.”
It had all been very civilized. My wife and I conversed like characters out of Racine—and behaved like monkeys. There were times when I thought it would kill me. Once I was even hushed into silence when another man called our Paris apartment. For the sake of discretion, Nathalie, one finger to her lips, waved and mimed me into wordless soft movements. While she murmured on the phone with one of her local lovers, I became a ghost in my own flesh, my own home.
Afterwards, Nathalie and I argued ourselves into exhaustion.
“All I can do,” I said to my wife finally, “is love you as much as I can for as long as I can.”
Sitting on the couch, she merely stared at me, wordless for once.
“And when I can’t stand it anymore,” I said, “I won’t. I’ll go, without a fight.”
But, of course, I never got quite that brave. I simply found my own putes and girlfriends—and so we went on.
In truth, I’d been finding other women all along, so it wasn’t such a drastic adjustment. Nathalie had her graduate studies at the Sorbonne, then her job at Libération; I was tied up in New York with the gallery business and the SoHo buildings. We led one life together, and two lives apart.
For an American, I was surprisingly good at the game. Adultery and wit, choice Bordeaux wines and fat profits; those were the drugs of choice in my later youth. Now I had a supply of mordant aphorisms ready for the old Marais crowd, if I ever ran into them back in Paris. “Nathalie died of sophistication the way some people die of cirrhosis.” Worldly and wry—that’s their mode, even in the sickroom.
Who cares if the cause of my wife’s lingering death was a blood disease she caught from some bisexual set designer in Saint Germain? He was nothing. The source didn’t matter, the treatment didn’t matter, the betrayal didn’t matter—not once Nathalie was wasted and bald and delirious.
“Do you miss her?” Melissa asked.
“It’s not something I talk about.”
“Why not?”
“Because people expect you to grieve, and what would be the point of that?”
Missy looked at the glass in her hand, away from my eyes. “You must wish you could talk to her sometimes. The way I wish I could talk to Daddy.”
“Talking did help,” I said. “Even when I knew it was mostly lies.”
“You see.”
I did indeed. Like Melissa, Nathalie understood the great value of hypocrisy. She knew that the gentle con she worked on me was a backhanded tribute to the romantic ideal—the pristine and impossible union that we failed to achieve. Her scheme was a way of honoring our marriage and protecting my psyche. Her words never actually deceived me, and were never meant to. No, the lies simply assured me that, whatever else inevitably happened, Nathalie cared first and foremost for me, for our peculiar, imperfect bond.
I looked down now at the blond, glowing Melissa.
“The finality hits you pretty hard the first time you forget,” I told her. “You telephone, and suddenly you realize she’s not there. The dead never answer. You stand like an idiot with the receiver in your hand. Then you know: she will never speak to you again, here or anywhere.”
I drank slowly, several times.
“At least your dad is still with us,” I said. “You can hear his voice, even if what he says is a jumble.”
“Do you think that’s enough?”
“No, it’s not enough. But it’s something.”
My mind worked on in the silence. When I went to visit Nathalie the last time, the head nurse said, “Will you be all right?” and I said, “Of course.” Touching my sleeve, the good woman tried to talk to me for a minute first, but I waved her off and went in.
The bed was surrounded by monitors, tanks, and clear plastic bags on high stands. Tubes and wires led from the equipment into the layered sheets. Under the covers was a rickety form, a thing. I thought it must be a joke. Wisps of hair were stuck to the skull. The head was rounded and moist, and the jaw protruded. From time to time, a monitor beeped. The cheeks had collapsed, and the imitation skin was pulled back from the horse’s teeth.
“Madame may be able to hear you,” the nurse told me.
So what? It wasn’t as though I had come to the intensive care ward with some final, transformative message to impart. No, nothing came to me there. I touched the bed rail, the chrome bars that kept Nathalie from rolling into a bony heap on the floor.
“Well, my love,” I said finally, “so we’ve come to this.”
There was no sign of response, and I spoke louder and clearer, and louder again—“So we’ve goddamn fucking come to this.” I repeated, “we’ve come to this, we’ve come to this” until the head nurse charged in, followed by the doctor, and then an orderly grasped my shoulders, pulling me back from the bedside, saying insistently, “Du calme, monsieur. Du calme.”
“Relax, stay calm,” I told Melissa softly. “That’s the ticket. One should always remain cool and composed in these situations. I have it on the best French authority.”
The girl shook her head. “You’re really a mess, Uncle Jack. But you don’t have to be.”
“You know a way to fix me?”
“Maybe you just need someone young and nice to take care of you.”
“I was thinking more of someone old and rich.”
“Oh, stop it. Behave.” Missy crinkled her nose. “Tu me taquines toujours,” she said. “You’re always teasing me.” She stood up quickly and finished her drink. “Why, Uncle Jack? That’s so nasty.”
Melissa came to the couch and sat down on my lap. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Something funny.”
The girl leaned against me with her head on my chest, her voice issuing from the vicinity of my suddenly pounding heart. No doubt she was comforting herself by comforting me. I was, however, more disoriented than soothed.
As she talked softly in her lilting Parisian French, I began, ridiculously, to cry without any sound. Or maybe I cried first and then she spoke to me in French—that night is still a little muddled in my mind.
Melissa’s long legs were curled against my stomach, the slight declivity between her thighs curving as she shifted to hug me. “Il était une fois un tout petit garçon….” It was the tale of a little boy who was méchant all the time to his little sister. I didn’t get to hear it all, because there was a rattling of keys at the door and Missy’s mother came breathlessly in.
39
“Well, aren’t you two cozy?” Angela said as she hung her coat in the entryway closet. She seemed at once distracted and relieved.
“Hi, Mom,” Melissa answered. “How’s Daddy?”
The girl rose smoothly and carried the two empty glasses to the sink and rinsed them quickly in hot water.
“Oh, fine really. The poor dear just wanted some company. He’s resting now. He’ll be better soon.”
I had never heard Angela lie quite so ineptly. The strain and fatigue must have gotten to her at last. The words sounded hollow, and I could see them fail: the truth hit Melissa, entering visibly into her. It was probably the first time she grasped, felt in her stomach and nerve endings, that her father was going to die.
“Why doesn’t that awful Claudia do something for him?” she asked.
“She’s just a girl, Melissa. With a whole busy, beautiful life ahead of her. Like you. She didn’t sign on for this.”
“But why couldn’t Daddy stay with us, with the people who really care about him, instead of running away to that big snob Amanda? And now this stupid bimbo, this Claudia?”
Angela shook her head. “You explain it to her, Jack. About men.”
It was as th
ough I’d been asked to explicate a theorem in quantum physics.
“I don’t understand it myself,” I said. “I just live it. Pretty badly most of the time.”
“That’s so bogus,” Melissa said. “So male.”
“Exactly,” Angela replied, moving toward her, trying to embrace the girl, who stood stiffly with her arms at her sides. “Now you’re beginning to see.”
Melissa shook herself.
“You guys are all just too dopey,” she said at high volume. “I have to go to bed.”
As Angela smiled after her, Melissa turned suddenly and half-trotted back through the loft to her bedroom.
“Good night, sweetie,” her mother called. “I’ll give your love to Uncle Jack.”
Then in a low voice, softly, Angela said to me, “She’s such a little drama queen. But I do think she’s truly upset. Did I give too much away tonight?”
“Angie, we have to talk.”
“I know. The poor child has to be told, of course. I’m so afraid that losing her father will completely derail her. The pity is, she’s just now doing so well at Bradford, and starting to think about boys.”
“That’s great,” I said, a bit thrown by my own lack of resolve. “But you shouldn’t try to fool her. How is Philip, really?”
Angela parted her lips to reply, but they seemed to freeze rigid and soundless. She looked like a woman zapped in mid-sentence by a stroke. As her head wavered from side to side, I moved closer to her.
At last she said, “He’s destroyed.”
I didn’t want it to be true. There ought to be years yet.
“Something’s consuming him,” Angela said. “Eating his brain at a ghastly rate.”
“Does he know you?”
“Not anymore. He doesn’t know himself. ‘Sorry to trouble you,’ he says. ‘Can you believe I’ve momentarily forgotten my name?’ ”
“Still,” I said, “it sounds like his old self in a way.” Philip, the last time I saw him, still had his sly humor.
Angela’s face was stricken. “No,” she said. “It’s not Philip anymore. I mean, it’s Philip but…not Philip.” As she spoke, she began to strike me rhythmically. “Philip, not Philip. Philip, not Philip.”
I didn’t try to stop her. Before long her blows rained steadily against my body, racing ahead of her words, thudding on my chest and shoulders in an erratic drumbeat.