‘Confess?’ She shook her head slowly, a pinched look on her face. ‘Why disappoint them? They’re old and alone. Probably you make their day. But you are an impostor. Yes?’
‘Mrs. Soloff, you always call a spade a spade.’
She shrugged, then asked to know what had happened during walkies that week and seemed amused by what he said. At least she smiled and did not annul it, as she so often did, by shaking her head and wincing. Mrs. Soloff was barely out of mourning. Because of this, Malcolm saved the high jinks for Faye.
‘Here he is, the answer to my prayers. How are you this morning, Malcolm?’
‘Elated.’
Her pencilled-in eyebrows lifted curiously above the big white squares of her glasses frames. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s Grace,’ he said. ‘She has come through for me at last.’
‘Explain,’ said Faye.
He hung up his coat. ‘You remember Mitzi?’
‘Elsa Parker’s dog?’
‘Right. Well, you know she’s legally blind.’
‘I didn’t. Do you want a coffee? I think you have time.’
‘Do I? All right.’ Faye started to rise.
‘I’ll get it. You sit right there.’ The coffee stand was in the reception area. Malcolm plugged in the kettle. ‘And you remember Hugh.’
‘The pug.’
‘Epileptic, or so Mrs. Rodeck claims. We have yet to witness a seizure. And then there’s Lady with her growth.’
‘Where is this growth you’re always talking about?’
‘On Lady.’
‘Where on Lady?’
‘Don’t make me say. Suffice it to know that its placement brings into question her very name.’
Faye stared at him.
‘It’s pendulous,’ he hinted.
‘Malcolm.’
The kettle started to shriek. ‘Water’s boiling!’ he sang and turned away.
Already Faye was laughing. The phone rang and she answered, telling whoever was calling, ‘Is tomorrow all right? No, it’s not you, dear. It’s Malcolm. He’s got me in stitches here.’ Hanging up, she hissed, ‘That was Gwen Velve!’
‘Miss Velve! Get away!’
‘Her ears must have been burning!’
‘Not hers. Lady’s!’ He brought over the coffee and Faye lifted her glasses and daubed her eyes before she took a sip. ‘Please, Malcolm,’ she begged. ‘Tell me where it is.’
He made a show of relenting. ‘All right, but don’t ever mention it to Miss V. It’s a teat gone berserk. A rear teat. It hangs almost to the ground.’
Faye grimaced. ‘Why doesn’t she have it taken off?’
‘It’s benign! I don’t believe that’s the reason. She wants to fuss.’
‘Aren’t they silly?’ said Faye. ‘What about Grace? What’s the matter with her?’
‘This is why I’m so overjoyed. Up until now I’ve had to stand there every day adding nothing to the conversation. You can imagine how difficult that is for me. “Poor Hugh,” says Mrs. Rodeck.’ He imitated Mrs. Rodeck’s Britishness. ‘“He had another fit.’’ “What about Mitzi?” Mrs. Parker counters. “She fell down the stairs.’’ You get the picture? Well, Grace, she has an annoying habit, but it never occurred to me before that I might elevate it to a condition.’
He paused, toying.
‘What?’ asked Faye.
‘She piddles,’ he said.
Faye slapped her knobbly hand down on the desk and snorted.
‘Particularly when she’s happy. She dribbles everywhere. When you call her name, she positively gushes. I’d put it down to youth or excitability, but now I see it’s much more serious. Grace is incontinent, Faye. Incontinent. She simply cannot hold it.’
‘Oh, Malcolm,’ said Faye, wiping the tears off her cheeks.
‘I plan to make an announcement this afternoon and eclipse them all.’
But he didn’t say anything to them. He would never have risked hurting their feelings. For all he knew, they might be similarly inconvenienced. And after Mrs. Rodeck and Miss Velve had left and he was helping Mrs. Parker back on her scooter, he was especially glad he hadn’t.
Balanced in her rear basket was a garbage bag stuffed full. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘Just a few old clothes I’m giving away.’
‘Ah,’ he said, offering her his hand.
‘I thought I might give them to you.’
‘To me?’
‘Yes. You’re about his height. I can’t throw them out. I’d like to think someone nice got some use out of them.’
He untied the bag, reached in and pulled out a tail of yellowed silk. It was an aviator’s scarf. As he wound it around his neck, Mrs. Parker smiled.
‘It’s monogrammed. Here, see? A.E.P.’
‘Albert?’ said Malcolm.
‘That’s right. How sweet of you to remember.’
He found Denis and Yvette as he’d left them when he’d picked up the dog a half-hour before—Yvette reclining on the couch, her doughy feet in Denis’ lap, Denis rubbing worms of dead skin and dirt out from between her toes. She wore a badge now, with her name and a surely ironic happy face.
Denis looked up, saw Grace and immediately let Yvette’s feet fall. ‘What have we here?’ his delighted cry, Grace responding in a volley of yaps and dampening the doormat.
‘Elle est mignonne! Who does she belong to?’
‘You.’
‘Moi?’ cried Denis. He swept her, still trickling, off her clawed feet. ‘Mais tu n’aimes pas les chiens. What in the world possessed you?’
‘I did it for you.’
‘Tu n’aimes pas les chiens.’
He let her lick his face all over with her pink tongue and Malcolm, watching, felt a tinge of jealousy.
‘Who does she belong to?’ Denis asked.
‘You. What are you going to name her?’
He clutched her shaggy muzzle and turned it left and right. Grace whimpered. ‘She looks like a Mireille.’
‘Very nice,’ said Malcolm. ‘Grace suits her.’
‘Oui. Grace Kelly.’
Denis took her into the living room to show Yvette. ‘Regarde. Voici Annabelle. Elle est mignonne, n’est-ce pas?’
Which reminded Malcolm that Denis’ condition did have its element of bliss. Every time Denis saw Grace, he saw her for the first time. With each encounter, he was freshly smitten. And the mileage Malcolm had got out of the Phil Epstein joke! He told it to Denis in translation almost every night. At the punchline, ‘So Mr. Epstein? You’re single?’ Denis nearly died laughing.
Malcolm took the bag of clothes to the bedroom where he found the bed, as usual, unmade—no hope that Yvette might have, on a whim, straightened it. Out of the bag he pulled a camel-hair overcoat and laid it across the rumpled covers, then a cashmere sweater ruined by moths. Ties and shirts, camphorous, but otherwise in good condition, a maroon dressing gown with broad quilted lapels, then something really fine. Peering into the bottom of the bag, he saw the tangled black sleeves and legs and tails of what turned out to be a tuxedo.
‘Malcolm?’ Denis was calling.
‘In the bedroom.’
He heard Denis in the hallway opening the door to the linen cupboard, looking for the bedroom.
‘Ici!’ Malcolm called and when Denis appeared in the doorway, he was just slipping the dressing gown on over his clothes.
‘My!’ said Denis. ‘Where did you get that? Mon Dieu, que tu es beau!’
Malcom lifted the towel off the dresser mirror and saw for himself how distinguishing a garment it was. All he needed was a pipe and a leather-bound copy of Proust.
‘Did Yvette leave?’
‘Oui. Are you angry?’
‘Not yet. Try something on, why don’t you?’
Because of the clumsiness that had infected Denis’ fingers, Malcolm undid his buttons for him, lifted the shirt off his shoulders and helped slide his arms out of the sleeves. He could still get out of his trousers on his own, but didn’t know when to stop, kept on going, stepping awkwardly out of his briefs. Trying to shake the snare of them off one ankle, he teetered and Malcolm reached out to steady him.
‘My God. What happened to your ass?’
‘Quoi ?’ asked Denis.
‘It’s disappeared!’ He had noticed the same thing about himself a few months ago getting out of the shower. ‘First we lose our looks, then we lose what’s left behind.’
Denis looked over his shoulder at his flattened, diminished buttocks reflected in the uncovered mirror—so it was only his face he objected to. He grabbed a cheek in each hand and pumped them like bellows, laughing.
The shirt that Malcolm lifted off the bed was much too large for Denis. He had to roll the sleeves and, with Denis balancing against his shoulder, help him step into the trousers.
‘À gauche, n’est-ce pas?’
He tucked the long shirt tails in, then, surprised, he drew back his hand from inside the band.
‘Denis.’
This had not happened in such a long time, not during waking hours, only early in the morning as Denis slept against Malcolm’s back. If Malcolm happened to wake to that gentle, involuntary nudge, he would grapple with himself, then smear his own semen on his face. If he had had fewer scruples, he could have involved Denis in the tussle, but how to exact consent from a person who, in a moment, might forget what he’d consented to? He tried not to hope now, tried to put it out of his mind, yet the thought of being tenderly buggered by a man in a tuxedo, while wearing a dressing gown of maroon silk, simply engorged him with hope.
He went on dressing Denis, got down on his hands and knees to roll the trouser cuffs, his hands trembling as he touched Denis’ feet. His feet were the only part of him that really showed his age. Crusted around the heels with flaky rinds, toe knuckles like knobs, they were the feet of an ancient. Clutching each slender ankle, Malcolm began pressing his lips to Denis’ insteps.
The first time he saw Denis was in a Paris train station in 1959. He was coming over from London, where he’d trained, on a recommendation from a friend who knew a certain Denis opening a new salon. If, back then, Malcolm ever found himself in a crowd, he would scan it and in his imagination pick someone out to love. He saw among the throng there a man of boyish build with a woman’s wrists and fair hair cow-licked up and falling over one eye. He did not know he was the very man he’d come to see. Then, like in all Malcolm’s romantic dreams, the one he had picked chose him too, came right up and said, ‘Ello.’ The dropped “H” was an indulgence Malcolm would never have allowed himself in his already too dubious dreams.
Gallantly, Denis lifted up his suitcase. He jangled when he walked. It was the music of loose change in his pockets. Leaving the station, he fished out the coins and gave them to a beggar. Malcolm would remember that they left in a procession, Denis radiantly in the lead sowing his beneficence, Malcolm, already besotted, trailing him. Denis was beautiful. Denis was good. He was touchingly hairless. He taught Malcolm how to love.
And there was Malcolm still—on his hands and knees grovelling. He didn’t dare look up. Dizzily, he rose, took the tuxedo jacket with its wide silk lapels and the black pleated cummerbund from the bed. Once Denis was in it and the dangling sleeves tucked up, the black bow tie knotted, he was transformed. He looked Continental again, instead of like a man who had no idea what continent he lived on.
Straightening the tie, Malcolm met Denis’ gaze. ‘My, you look dapper,’ he said. Denis smiled and it seemed that he was all there.
‘A glass of port?’ Malcolm suggested.
‘Certainement.’
In the living room, Malcolm stepped out of his trousers, left them in a heap before the sideboard as he walked off with the decanter. Already he’d sprung out of the dressing gown, could possibly have carried the tray on his tumid cock. He couldn’t recall ever being that magnificent.
They simply had to smoke; in those costumes, it was obligatory. They used to, Denis straddling Malcolm’s thighs, holding his exhausted cock up by the head, making as if to torture it with the lit end of his Gitane. Each time he brought the burning end up close, Malcolm stiffened with an exquisite terror. In minutes, they were back at it again.
He picked through Yvette’s butts in the saucers, searching for something not smoked to the filter. Down the hallway with the tray. On the way he slipped into the bathroom for a jar of something once purchased on a whim in Boulevard de Clichy.
In the bedroom, Denis was standing exactly where he had been, looking marvellous, but clearly he’d forgotten what they were up to. He was gazing around blankly, but as soon as he saw Malcolm in the robe, he brightened. ‘Where did you get that? Mon Dieu, que tu es beau!’
‘Asseyez-vous.’ Malcolm gestured to the unmade bed and Denis sat down. ‘Cigarette?’
‘Oui.’
Malcolm puffed at it first to fill the atmosphere with atmosphere, then handed it to Denis and bowed close with the other unlit between his own lips. The spark transferred, the port poured, he joined Denis on the bed where, ringingly, they touched their glasses together.
Denis noticed a hair lying on the crumpled sheet between them. By the colour, it belonged to Malcolm. Holding it close to his face, squinting, Denis said, ‘Quel trésor.’ They both laughed, remembering, and Denis abandoned the cigarette in the ashtray and began sucking on the pubic hair.
‘Monsieur?’ Malcolm let his hand graze Denis’ lap, but to his crushing disappointment, nothing rose to meet it.
Denis shone upon him nonetheless. ‘Après vous,’ he urged.
‘Êtes-vous certain?’
‘Oui, oui. C’est mon plaisir.’ Invitingly, he lifted his arms and lay back on the bed. Malcolm undid the tuxedo waistband, with difficulty now that his hands were shaking. And the recalcitrant lid of the jar taken from his pocket—at first he couldn’t budge it, then it flew off and rolled across the floor never to be recovered. No matter, he would not need it in the future. This would be their last time, Malcolm knew it.
Enter the bitch. Yapping shrilly, she charged, Denis’ whole body tightening when he heard her, and Malcolm, gripped, came. Came to a ruined moment—to little needle teeth in his calf, to Denis calling out a name that wasn’t his.
6
Each question the doctor asked, Malcolm translated. ‘Where are we now?’ ‘Paris,’ Denis answered, and the doctor, after muttering that he wished that were the case, asked him the date.
‘I’ve never known the date without looking at the appointment book.’ He turned to Malcolm. ‘Isn’t that so?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Fifty,’ his smug reply, and Malcolm let loose a laugh.
‘Count with me,’ said the doctor. ‘Backward by sevens. One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine . . .’
‘Soixante-dix-neuf . . .’ said Malcolm.
‘Quatre-vingts,’ continued Denis, ‘quatre-vingt-un, quatre- vingt-deux, quatre-vingt-trois—’
‘Thank you.’
Denis flashed a triumphant look at Malcolm.
‘Tell me, Mr. Cassel, what does the expression, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, bring to mind?’
Malcolm translated this as, ‘Point de feu sans fumée.’
‘Well, that’s evident,’ said Denis. ‘Smoke, yes. Fire.’
They sat waiting for him to elaborate, and by the way his nearly transparent eyebrows came together and his gaze rested in middle space, he seemed to be thinking. But no, he was only looking at something on the desk. Leaning forward in his chair, he picked up the doctor’s coffee mug.
‘What is that you’ve got there?’ the doctor asked, and Denis really began
to think. A plain blue mug, luckily it was empty, because Denis began to turn it around and over in his hands, studying it from below, looking down inside it, even touching the unglazed ring on the bottom, feeling for the answer. The handle’s purpose eluded him completely. He held it to his eye and peered through it. Malcolm, watching with shocked fascination, had to bite his tongue to stop himself from blurting, ‘It’s a mug, you idiot.’ And all at once there rose in him an intense paternal urge to protect Denis—from his own foolishness, and from the doctor, the sadist who had set him up like this. When he turned to confront the doctor though, he had to admit there was nothing mocking in his manner. He was younger than both Malcolm and Denis and had an intensely sympathetic face.
Shrugging, Denis set the mug back down on the desk. ‘I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t say.’
Malcolm translated this for the doctor, who didn’t react in any way. ‘How about, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”?’
‘Trop de cuisiniers gâtent la sauce.’
Denis laughed and turned to Malcolm. ‘You know how I like to be alone in the kitchen!’
‘“Love me, love my dog”?’
It took Malcolm a moment before he could remember the equivalent expression. ‘Qui aime Bertrand, aime son chien.’
That the doctor thought was funny.
‘Who is Bertrand?’ Denis asked.
‘It’s uncanny,’ Malcolm told the doctor. ‘You’ve picked proverbs that seem to resonate for us.’
‘Really? I just take them from a book. Do you notice how he’s unable to interpret them? His thinking has become quite literal.’
Strange that he would need this pointed out to him, but he did. Malcolm stared at the doctor for a second. So his life companion was now a literal thinker. Was literal thinking any worse than, say, wandering the apartment half the night or hurling things at mirrors? Yes, it was. He knew it was. On Denis’ behalf, he felt bereft. He could not imagine a life without metaphor.
A History of Forgetting Page 5