Fidelity

by Michael Redhill

  “YOU CANNOT go back,” Janine said. She’d put on a thin silk nightdress to come to the door and sat at the table beside me. She pressed a cold washcloth against my temple. “There is another room here.”

  “You’re very sweet,” I said, pulling my head away a little. Of course I wanted to stay. I wanted to forget about Louis. She’d made us tea and put a few more cookies on a plate, and I liked the idea of taking the teacup out of her hand and slipping her nightdress from her shoulders. I thought she’d probably let me, but it had been a long time since I’d taken any chances like that.

  She lowered her arms to the table, and looked at the lights coming from the church. “It’s vespers tonight. It makes the quartier smell like candles, and I think, when I am falling asleep, that it is someone’s birthday!” She laid her head down on her arms and smiled sleepily. The dim light shadowed her sloping collarbone. “When I am a little girl, my mother made me a cake with coins in it of chocolate.”

  “That sounds nice,” I said. “Once I had a pirate-ship cake.”

  She nodded. “Your friend is very sad.”

  “He might be crazy, too.”

  “Your poor head.” There were tears in her eyes.

  I got up to close a window because the tears made me feel odd, and I’d seen goosebumps on her chest. I couldn’t remember the last instance in my life of that boyhood awe of thinking that a woman was actually naked under her clothes. It made me nostalgic for all that time when I still knew nothing. There were children in the street below, even though it was already dark. It seemed to me that they were safe, that their childhoods were going to be full of nothing but hot pain chocolat and fall vegetable soups and their fathers singing the classics at bedtime in cigaretty voices. I believed for a moment that when I turned around, I’d see what I was thinking of, Janine standing there with the lights from the church reflected in her eyes, her nightdress draped over the back of the chair. But instead she was collecting the plates from our tea, and she looked sad. I turned away from the look and saw the Elmore Leonard novel that Louis had taken out of her bookshelf, and I picked it up and slid it back into place.

  “Will you go anywhere in the summer?” I asked.

  “Where is there to go?” she said. “And with what person?”

  “There’s no one?”

  She turned and vanished into the kitchen, hiding her face. “Oh, fuck,” she said. She started running water. I stayed where I was; my hands were hot. I wondered where I’d spend the night, in what hotel, whether I’d call Carol or not. My ticket wasn’t for another eight days, but even I knew it’d be wrong to keep traveling after all this.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  She came out of the kitchen, her eyes brimming red. “I’m from Minneapolis,” she said in a flat American voice. “I’m here on a French course. I’m lonely, what can I say?” She was standing there with her hands spread apart, suds dripping off them.

  “You’re from Minneapolis.”

  “I live in a two-and-a-half with my dog and my mother lives across the park with her lousy boyfriend and I got a B.A. from the U. of M. and my whole fucking life is in a three-mile radius,” she said, hyperventilating. “So I came to France!”

  She was wracked with sobs now, and suddenly it seemed to me that the perm really didn’t suit her. I stood where I was and she slid down in the doorway. After a minute or two, she calmed down and brought her streaky red face out from behind her hands.

  “Pretty exotic, huh? Meeting some French chick in Strasbourg.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You haven’t had a very nice day, huh?”

  “My day’s been great,” I said. I felt as though someone had stuck a pin in my spine and left me unable to move. “Burned fish sticks, physical assault, and a girl from Minneapolis.”

  She nodded, willing to accept my disdain. “I’m sorry.” She pushed herself up and rubbed the corners of her eyes, took a deep breath. “Okay, so look,” she said. “You liked me when I was French, and I’m the same person you were thinking of then, except for that one little thing. So, you know, stay, all right? We don’t even have to talk.”

  My face was burning. “No thanks,” I said, moving toward the door. What Frenchwoman reads Elmore Leonard? I thought. How stupid am I?

  “Paul?” she said. “I really do like you. I wasn’t faking that. Just stay awhile, please.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have a headache.”

  AT SCHOOL, Louis had been a proponent of the world of concrete things. He thought every problem had an earthly solution. His hero was the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. “Give me the coordinates and I can plot reality on a graph,” was one of the things I remember him saying. I hated his certainty and I railed against it. We fought about physics—his god—because so much of it seemed boneheaded to me. Once we fought about heat and cold. “Heat is not the absence of cold,” he said. He was sitting on his bed, collapsed there in the middle of dressing for a dinner thing, in a fit of exasperation. “Cold is the absence of heat. Heat is the result of a chemical or physical reaction. It adds something to the preexistent condition. Which is cold.”

  “Is there cold when there’s heat? No. So heat is the absence of cold.”

  “But when heat dissipates, Paul, you have cold. If cold dissipates, you only have more cold.”

  “Aha!” I said. “That means before it dissipated, there was some heat present. So the cold is absent.”

  He stared blankly at me, a dead-cow face. “You only think you’re making an argument. It sounds to you like you’re saying something. But you’re not.” He looked at me in the way you’d look at someone it’s hardly worth disillusioning. “You know?”

  “Science thinks that because it invents the terms, it gets to define them into perpetuity.”

  “Are the terms we’re referring to ‘hot’ and ‘cold’? Those scientific terms?”

  My jaw was tightening. Just a few moments earlier, it had felt like I knew what I was trying to say. “You know what this is like,” I said. “It’s like the way white Americans look at blacks. They see everything in context to themselves. It’s pure solipsism.”

  “Can we just get back to heat and cold for a second? Let me put it this way.” He got up slowly and reached for one of his all-white shirts. The resumption of dressing was a signal that the conversation was about to end. “When you leave a room—let’s say it’s a room with white and black folk in it—people say you’re absent, although in your case they probably say ‘Thank God!’”

  “Ha ha.”

  “But when you come back in, they don’t say your presence is the absence of your absence. Because that would be stupid. Either you’re there or you’re not. When you’re there, you’re heat. When you’re not, it’s cold.”

  THE MUNSTER was just around the corner from Janine’s apartment, and people were streaming out of vespers, trailed by a mist of incense. The square was packed with students and supplicants. There were a few mimes, standing stock-still under the klieg lights, in suits and ties. I counted at least three of them, looking ridiculous and utterly alone, depending on the generosity of strangers to get them through.

  I felt cold despite the mildness of the night and thought I’d better walk off my evening before going back to the hotel and calling the gendarmes, or whoever was going to get my suitcase for me.

  I walked into the middle of the crowd leaving the church and fought the flow back to the doors. Inside, the stairwells were still open, and I slipped into one of them and climbed the long flights to the top, and stood at the stone wall there that lined the edge of the roof, under the carillons. It was about six o’clock at home; Carol was probably finishing her dinner—maybe one of her guilty-pleasure meals I won’t eat, sardines on buttered toast, or boiled franks in macaroni—and getting ready to watch her programs.

  Across the square on all sides, jumbles of terra-cotta roofs caught the moon at different angles and threw back a warm orange light. I had m
y hand on the wall, and on top of it and all across it there were names scraped into the stone. Underneath my hand there was Giuseppi, 1535. All over, people had taken the time to leave signs of their pilgrimages—Thomas Ames, Nov’r 1670; Maria, 1488. I found a stone under one of the bells and scraped Paul R., 1999, but my name came out in a white powder. From the parapet, I could see small crowds surrounding the buskers, leaving them at the centers of little circles. A man’s voice behind me said “Nous sommes fermés,” and I turned to look at him, but I didn’t move. “Monsieur,” he said, coming toward me. I don’t know why, but I backed away from him, and he stopped and extended his hands cautiously. “Monsieur? Écoute-moi, hein? Mon ami? I talk to you!” I remained where I was, staring at the man who thought he was going to have to save my life. If I’d spoken his language, I might have been able to explain how I’d come to this moment in my life, but what people say about themselves is not nearly half of what you need to know about them. After another moment, I stepped back from the parapet and the man lowered his hands and smiled at me warmly. A misunderstanding is all it was.

  The Victim, Who Cannot Be Named

  AT FIRST, ON WALKING INTO HIS HOUSE, PETER BOWMAN thought his wife was laughing at a nature show. He saw the back of her head, and the screen in front of her flashed pink and black, and there were sounds of a pursuit. He came closer to where she was sitting, and heard that she was weeping.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “That’s Vanessa,” said Margot quietly. “It’s Vanessa.”

  He saw that the image on the television was his daughter, a junior in high school. He grabbed the remote control and clicked the image away, and Margot collapsed into her lap. There was a bubble-wrap envelope beside her. It was addressed, in big Magic Marker letters, to Nessa Bowman. He picked it up; there was nothing in it.

  He and Margot had been discussing Vanessa recently, an ongoing conversation about a child who was gradually becoming strange to them. There had been the changes in hair color and the debatable fashions, but he and Margot were as enlightened about these things as they could be, and they didn’t turn their concerns into issues. They placed their faith in providing a good house, with books and other wholesome diversions. There was nutritious food and opportunities for personal development—piano, swimming lessons. They knew rebellion would come, would rage through the house at some point, and they had faith that it would pass through without breaking anything that couldn’t be fixed.

  Peter had gone through an adolescent phase he remembered well, when he grew his hair long and made political pronouncements about things he didn’t really understand. Feeling passionate about something seemed a defining rite. His parents hadn’t taken it away from him, and he did not want to take it away from his own children. Whatever Vanessa was going through, he and Margot understood it was necessary, ordained by nature.

  But this. Peter checked the envelope for a return address, knowing he’d find none, and then performed a moral calculation that would have resulted in Margot opening it. Opening the envelope was a transgression in itself, the sort of thing neither he nor his wife would normally do. He started with the name on the envelope, a version of “Vanessa” they knew no one to use for their daughter, then backtracked to the conversation the previous night about whether one of them should sit down with the girl and make sure everything was all right in her world.

  He remained behind the couch. He knew he was supposed to sit on it with Margot and comfort her, or lead her out of the room and assert control in the way she might be expecting him to. But he did not do any of this. Rather, as if powerless, he tilted up the remote control feebly and clicked the TV back on. A ball of white light expanded and became Vanessa. There were two boys in the video with her. Peter and Margot watched silently, Margot with her hand over her mouth. The video showed their daughter involved in a variety of sexual acts, some of which Peter and Margot had both, at one time or another, enjoyed with each other. It was a display of knowledge as well as of sexuality, and it was hard for them to know what they were reacting to. Often, both of the boys were inside their daughter at the same time. When the tape ended, they both watched the white fuzz on the screen in silence.

  “We have to show this to the police,” Peter said finally.

  Margot shook her head.

  “It’s evidence,” he said.

  Margot took the remote from her husband’s hand and silenced the hiss. “Rape victims don’t smile, Peter.”

  VANESSA RETURNED from her ballet class at six-thirty. Her younger brother, Eric, had been home since five, and had walked around the house in complete silence, being aware (as children are) that asking his parents why they seemed so upset was only likely to result in a reaction, rather than any information. There was no dinner cooking. He eventually grabbed a bag of chips and went downstairs to play a video game that involved a dexterous fox retrieving a nuclear warhead. When Vanessa came through the door, she had time enough to offer only a singsongy hello before Eric heard, in quick succession, the sound of someone slapping Vanessa, Vanessa crying out in shock, and his mother calling his father’s name. He could then hear the three of them going up the stairs.

  He returned to his game, not paying much attention to what was happening on the glowing screen in front of him, trying to behave normally. His was a family of rare outbursts, and both his parents worked in quiet professions—his father was a radiologist, his mother a librarian at city hall. At one time or another they had both expressed their belief that raised voices and anger never accomplished anything. Listening, observing, and other forms of stealth were their touchstones. Eric had once stood in the protected booth where his father’s technician took the X-ray pictures, and he’d looked at the images afterward. Milky shadow and solid white got resolved into some benign thing or another; sometimes the pictures confirmed something bad. No matter what the outcome, his father would lightly touch the X-ray, naming the thing-made-visible, and write it down on a pad. On the few times Eric had visited, his father had found a couple of tumors and a number of broken bones. Here and here, his father had said, showing him where the breaks were, his fingertip slowly tracing a bone.

  That his sister had been hit by one of his parents was unimaginable to Eric. He cast his mind back over the things he’d done recently that he knew were wrong, but he couldn’t come up with anything worse than smoking a couple of cigarettes. It was the kind of thing his mother wouldn’t have approved of, but she would never have hit him for it. His father might even have given him one of those looks that said he was surprised to discover his twelve-year-old was smoking, but that it improved him somewhat by its daring. Although, of course, he could be compelled to stop, and he would stop.

  The only thing he could be certain of was that whatever Vanessa had done, it was worse than smoking.

  IN HER room, his sister sat alone on the bed, her hand pressed against the hot spot on her cheek. She pushed back to create more space between herself and her parents, who stood just barely inside the room.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Peter said. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?” He waited a moment, already exhausted from the effort of his anger. “Your mother and I are completely stunned. And disgusted. Who ever taught you to behave like this?”

  Vanessa watched her mother, whose thoughts she believed she could read, but her mother lowered her head. “Tomorrow,” said her father, “we’re going to Dr. Davies and he is going to run every test known to man on you. But before that, you’re going to give me the names of these animals and any other information you have about them.”

  Vanessa stared sullenly at her father.

  “Do you have anything to add to this conversation?”

  “I don’t know their names.”

  “Should we play this tape for your friends? Maybe they know.”

  “Maybe they do.”

  This sass provoked Peter, and he lunged toward her, but Margot shouted his name and he stopped himself. “Get out of
here now,” she said.

  “I want an answer!”

  “What does it matter?”

  “You can’t bring the anonymous to justice.” He turned to his daughter. “You try to remember the names of these boys who raped you.”

  When he left the room, Vanessa started to cry. Her mother did not come and sit beside her as Vanessa thought she would, but remained beside the door, watching her, waiting her out. After a few moments, seeing her tears were having no effect, Vanessa calmed down. “Were you raped?” said Margot.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Whose camera was it? Who shot it?”

  The girl drew the back of her hand over her mouth. The fear she’d been feeling from the first slap had grown into a general sense of danger. Her mother might even be more difficult than her father. “It was on automatic,” she said.

  “Whose camera?”

  “I don’t know.”

  (In the hallway, her father leaned against the wall opposite, his mind reeling with strange geometries, picturing the camera placement, the size and shape of the room, the various alignments needed to minimize shadows, then shook his head to loose the figures rampant in it.)

  Margot went over to her daughter’s television, now a sinister presence. They’d bought it for her as a gift for earning straight A’s the previous fall. Margot held the tape up. “How could you let them do this to you? How could you have done this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s the last time you’re going to say that, Vanessa. You obviously knew very well what you were doing.” She was not going to cry in front of the girl. “I feel I don’t even know you. How could a child of mine—?”

  “Mom—”

  Margot turned sharply and kicked the television set off its stand. It struck the wall and then the floor, sending up a shower of blue sparks. Immediately, Peter opened the door and looked back and forth between the stand, and his daughter and wife. Margot was shaking her hands in front of her, as if trying to dislodge something from her fingertips. “They weren’t even wearing condoms!” she said to her husband.