by Jo Mazelis
‘Hello?’
‘Is that you, Marilyn?’ It was, as she’d expected, Scott and Aaron’s mother. Her voice was full of warm enthusiasm, like that of a kindergarten teacher talking to a five year old, yet it always made Marilyn think of disappointment.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘How’s our boy?’
‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Marilyn said out of habit, aware as she said it that Aaron’s voice, the angry ‘No, no, no, no, no’ must be carried, along with her own voice, over the wires, up to the satellite, to be beamed down into Audrey Clement’s ears as she stood in the overheated kitchen of their scrupulously clean Ontario home.
‘Has he had his supper?’
‘No, not yet, I’m just in the middle of it.’
‘Oh, what are you having?’
‘Meatloaf, mash, veg.’
‘Oh, he loves his meatloaf! She says they’re having meatloaf, Dave.’
Dave was Marilyn’s father-in-law, a man who was tall and stooped, with a white beard and a full head of white hair that made him look like an underfed Santa Claus, especially in the red sweater Audrey had knitted him last fall.
‘Will Baby come to the phone?’ Audrey said in a needy voice. Baby was the affectionate nickname Audrey and Dave had for Aaron.
‘No, Audrey, I don’t think so, but I’ll just ask. Hold on.’ Dutifully, knowing it was a charade, she went to the doorway and said in a loud clear voice, ‘Scott, your mom’s on the phone, does Aaron want to say hello?’
And Scott, in an equally loud voice said, ‘Aaron? You wanna talk to Momma? Momma’s on the phone.’
Unsurprisingly, Aaron’s answer was no. Though whether it was a particular no pertaining to the specific question or a generalised no to everything except clinging to the newel post was hard to discern.
‘No. Scott’s just getting him washed. Did you want to talk to Scott?’
‘Oh no, not if it’s inconvenient.’
‘How are you, Audrey?’ Marilyn remembered to ask, ‘and how’s Dave?’
‘Oh, fine, fine. It’s very quiet here. We went to the mall this morning. I got Aaron some new sports shoes and a winter fleece.’
‘Lovely.’
Audrey was forever buying new clothes for Aaron. She paid a lot of attention to what she saw boys and young men wearing and sought the advice of sales assistants in fashionable downtown shops. ‘My son’s about your age,’ she’d say. ‘Now which of these jeans are in fashion, which would he like?’ So Aaron wore designer label sports shirts, Timberland boots, even his underwear and socks were JM or Sean John or Calvin Klein.
‘Well, we’ll leave you to it then, Marilyn. Love to all. See you soon.’
‘Yes, see you soon.’
Marilyn replaced the receiver and stood for a moment gazing out of the window. The house they stayed in each year was owned by relatives of the Clements, a distant part of the family that hadn’t left France for the New World. It was at the edge of the small town opposite a restaurant called La Coquille Bleue, which she and Scott hadn’t yet had a chance to visit. Aaron’s fussiness about food and his other fears and phobias severely limited what they did, hence the good old Canadian meatloaf, the familiar mash and carrots. Scott had suggested she go out alone some evenings, as he himself did, but it seemed a pointless exercise and one she was happy to forego, preferring, once Aaron had taken his medication and was asleep, to read or, if she wasn’t too tired, to write.
They let Aaron go out for a little time most evenings. Scott referred to this as ‘going out to play’ and while it only consisted of Aaron standing outside holding onto a lamppost while one or the other of them kept an eye on him from the house, it did seem to give Aaron some kind of pleasure or satisfaction and calmed him before supper and bedtime.
Scott went out for a drink or two every second or third night – once they were sure Aaron was asleep – Marilyn would have liked to go with him, but that was impossible, besides which they had all the time in the world to be alone together once they got back to Canada. Time for just the two of them. Except that soon they’d be three.
The phone call had momentarily thrown Marilyn off her train of thought. Partly it was jetlag, partly Aaron; the annoyance at making meatloaf of all things. So she stood there for a moment by the small side table looking at the narrow turquoise glass vase which held a single white artificial rose, trying to remember the words that had danced through her mind just minutes before.
She sighed, then looked at the restaurant opposite. As Marilyn watched a young woman crossed the road towards it. The woman seemed to illustrate the very freedom Marilyn was yearning for at that moment – it was almost as if she had sprung from Marilyn’s mind purely for this purpose and was thus dressed for the part. She was wearing a sleeveless summer dress with a full skirt that stopped just above the knee.
A green hatchback travelling at speed appeared out of nowhere as the young woman neared the pavement. For a moment Marilyn was convinced that she was about to witness a terrible accident, such as that she had seen one summer in England when she was fifteen. Then the victims had been a man and a child whom she assumed was his son. They had been in the middle of one of those zebra crossings that lacked traffic lights and relied on the drivers travelling in both directions to notice pedestrians. It had just started raining heavily and the man was pulling the boy along at a jog. Marilyn had been walking towards the oncoming traffic. She was less than twelve paces from the crossing when she saw a yellow cement mixer pull up for the man and boy. The driver was jolly and red-faced with an almost comical bushy black moustache. He gesticulated to the pedestrians by sweeping one hand elegantly through the air, inviting their safe passage. Perhaps because of this, because of the truck driver’s smile and the reassuring size of the vehicle, because of the resolute hiss of the air brakes and the torrential rain, the father, his head craned upward as he nodded thanks at the driver, stepped onto the part of the crossing that spanned the opposite lane without really looking to see if it was safe. One minute the man was there, the next he was gone – replaced by the wildly sashaying rear end of the car that had hit him. By some miracle (Marilyn had always been convinced it wasn’t by design) the man had loosened his grip on the boy’s hand and the child was left standing in the shadow of the truck’s huge black wheels, his hand still raised to meet his father’s.
This memory had embedded itself deeply in Marilyn’s mind – morbidly, Scott said – and now in those seconds as she watched the young woman crossing the road and saw the car approaching at speed she held her breath and felt her stomach grow hollow as she steeled herself for the worst. But the young woman, seeing the vehicle, lengthened her stride and skipped gracefully onto the pavement.
Marilyn breathed out through pursed lips and felt her body deflate. Now she studied the young woman even more closely than before – with her platinum blonde bobbed hair and slender limbs she looked like a character from a 1950s or 60s French film – Jules et Jim or one of those Eric Rohmer movies or even (if the girl was to come to a bad end) a Claude Chabrol. She carried a small stylish bag that looked like a basket and she’d draped a white scarf or cardigan over it. She had an air of self-consciousness about her – which was manifested as a kind of awkwardness in the seeming naturalness of her movements that somehow made one want to stare at her.
Obviously she was French, but from one of the larger cities, Paris probably. And she was perhaps a film or fashion student, or so Marilyn imagined, and she was on her way to meet her lover, who was a much older man. No one would think anything of that in France – not if the man was good-looking, rich and powerful, and if the girl was beautiful and over the age of consent.
Marilyn watched the young woman pause at the entrance to the restaurant and stare directly at their house. Marilyn automatically ducked behind the curtain, afraid of being caught staring. When she looked again the girl had gone.
Marilyn sighed. She heard Scott say crossly, ‘Hey, no meatloaf for people who can’t behave,’ an
d remembered immediately what it was she had been doing before the phone call.
Aaron and Scott were near the door to the downstairs bathroom now. Aaron’s hair looked wet and it stuck up at odd angles, Scott had a big wet patch on the front of his olive green shirt and smaller dark patches on his sleeves. He was angry.
Sometimes this happened. Invariably it wore them all out, Aaron most of all, so that on this night he was in his bed and sound asleep by eight thirty-five.
Scott said he had to get out of the house. He was sorry. Did she mind? He’d go mad if he stayed in. He was sorry, sorry, sorry. She gave him her blessing, kissed him.
She scraped Aaron’s barely touched plate of food into the bin, then did the same with hers and Scott’s. None of them had eaten much of the meal. Prison food, Scott called it, but she knew it wasn’t that bad. It was more to do with Scott’s complex emotions about himself and his family, how he felt caged in by the fact that his younger brother was so damaged, that all his life he’d had to make sacrifices for the sake of his helpless sibling.
Some people might have called this evening a disaster, but Marilyn knew better. Disasters happened to people who didn’t expect them, who were shocked by the disruption to the simple routine of an evening at home. With Aaron to look after she found it was the evenings that went to plan which were the surprise. She understood Scott’s need for escape, understood too, that it was nothing to do with her, and that Aaron, his issues and problems and tantrums, somehow weighed less heavily on her. She was not a blood relative – she could, if she wished, just walk away.
L’écriture Feminine
Michael and Hilda Eszterhas were celebrating ten years of marriage. They had known one another for nearly fifty years, but for most of those years they had each been in relationships with other people.
‘Do you know, I always sensed that there was something between us,’ Hilda said to Michael as they relaxed in the small boulevard café under the shadow of a plane tree. ‘Then when Bill died, I thought… Well, you remember…’
Michael nodded gravely. He was a pragmatist and resisted Hilda’s attempts to dwell on romantic notions of fate and lost opportunities. They were together now. That was all that mattered.
Hilda’s family life had been fixed and stultifying, middle class and middle England, C of E, tweed and lace, malice over the dinner table, spite in the rose garden, loathing in the bedroom (or so Hilda assumed about this last). Michael was part Spanish, part Jewish, part Irish. They’d first met in a dingy little pub in Cambridge after attending a talk given by E.P. Thompson.
Hilda’s hair, though now almost completely white, was still waist length. She rarely wore it loose and tonight she’d woven it into a long plait. Michael was also grey, but these days his hair, or what was left of it, was cropped to a quarter of an inch, and in good weather was usually covered by a jaunty straw hat. In winter he favoured a black bargeman’s cap.
They paid little attention to the young blonde woman sitting at the table next to theirs. Though Hilda had happened to glance over just as the blonde (rather ridiculously) tipped a perfectly good cup of espresso into the wooden planter by her side. Hilda had meant to mention it to Michael, but he was busy reminiscing about Paris in May 1968.
They were both still passionate about politics, but had long ago ceased to speak of revolution. The word ‘revolution’ seemed to have become an obscure pop lyric. Both Hilda and Michael had police records. Not that anyone looking at them would guess that. And, as much as a criminal record might paint a picture of amoral lying, scheming, selfish ne’er-do-wells, both Hilda and Michael Eszterhas believed they were ethical, moral, selfless, honest people. That their criminal activities were righteous and legitimate, and the law itself was unjust.
‘I sometimes wonder how things would have been if we’d got together sooner,’ Hilda had said, after the waitress had taken their order for a bottle of the local cider.
‘The way I see it…’ Michael began, and he paused, as he often did when he was about to say something important. In the silence that followed, a fragment of someone else’s conversation invaded their ears. Ugly words spoken in English.
Both Hilda and Michael heard it very clearly. Hilda had been gazing at Michael, listening to him, waiting for him to continue. As she heard the other voice, she saw Michael frown at the crudeness of the stranger’s words. Hilda’s eyes widened and her mouth gaped. Then she shook her head slowly from side to side.
She and Michael understood one another, would not let other people’s vileness – their ignorance, lust and cruelty – spoil their evening. Hilda had glanced over at the girl the words had been directed towards. She wore an expression that suggested she was embarrassed, but didn’t want to show it. Michael described the same look as a smirk, a smile with indications of cruelty and coldness.
Each of them was absolutely certain of the words the man had spoken. Michael said he had heard the man say, ‘I follow strange women and I fuck them.’
Hilda disagreed; she was infuriated with Michael because she knew he was wrong. What Hilda heard was, ‘I let strange women follow me, then I fuck them.’
‘I remembered you see, because it struck me how unusual it was. I’ve been reading the French theorists – Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva – so I was immediately struck by the seeming passivity of the man’s words. Or rather by the contradictory nature of the sentence: “I let strange women follow me” is a passive statement and therefore feminine. “Then I fuck them” is active and thus masculine. The young woman did indeed smile, but it was a conflicted smile, defensive, and when the man got up and left the table she looked very confused, and deflated.’
‘But,’ Michael said, ‘when the young woman came to the café she was alone. The man joined her sometime after. So he must have followed her, mustn’t he?’
‘That may be,’ said Hilda, ‘but I am certain of what I heard.’
‘And so am I,’ Michael said, and neither of them would stand down, or be shaken from their respective positions. Each of them was used to being disbelieved by others due to their long involvement with politics – they had warned of the threat of pollution, of the dangers of pesticides and other scientific adjustments to nature, they had spoken of a future with government cameras on every street corner, and bugs (that was how they had described it in the seventies) which monitored every member of the population, seeing what it read or bought, what it watched on TV. They had made grim statements about the blind hedonism of the western world and the effects of its endless consumerism and bullying in the Third World. They had lectured and written pamphlets, and marched and joined organisations. And they had been laughed at. There was not much consolation in finally being proved right.
This overheard fragment of conversation on a French café terrace was one of the few things they disagreed on.
The police inspector, a man by the name of Vivier, believed (just as Hilda might have predicted) Michael. The plain-clothes female officer (Hilda wasn’t sure of her rank) whose name was Sabine, seemed to believe Hilda.
On the whole however, the police didn’t see that there was any great difference; a man had been overheard saying the words ‘follow’, ‘strange women’ and ‘fuck them’. And the woman he had said them to was dead. The finer points of syntax, the groundbreaking work of French literary theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray, ideas based around l’écriture feminine and Hilda’s absolute certainty were as chaff in a hurricane; irrelevances, superficialities and distractions that should not be attended to lest they sway the investigation and the course of justice.
Miroir Noir
With her empty wine glass on the table in front of her, Lucy considered her options. Scott was still inside the café chatting amiably with the staff and customers. She felt envious of him because he seemed to have formed bonds here in this small town. It was something she would have liked for herself.
She lit a cigarette – the last from her pack – and smoked it reflectively. That was what s
he liked about smoking, it provided an interval of time in which one could stop and consider the next move. She was also consciously using the cigarette to make decisions. If he doesn’t come out before I’ve finished this cigarette, she thought, I’ll stub this out, pick up my lighter, my bag, my cardigan and be on my way. No backward glances, no attempts to catch his eye or wave. I will just become what I was a few days ago, a woman alone, quietly going about my own business.
She looked about her. Only three other tables were occupied. A bodybuilder in a Real Madrid football shirt was hunched over the table by the exit with his back to her. His neck, she noticed, was almost as thick as his head. The shirt was very tight on him, giving the impression that he had been inflated inside it. She supposed some women would find such a build attractive, but it did nothing for her. At the table nearest the entrance to the café were four young people, three girls and a boy who seemed to be playing some sort of game, each of them taking turns to speak while the others paid careful attention. Perhaps it was one of those memory word games where you had to remember and add to alphabetically arranged but otherwise unconnected items bought at a supermarket. She was too far away to hear the words, and when they occasionally raised their voices she didn’t recognise the language.
Nearest to her, two tables away, was a middle-aged couple. The woman had a striking plait of long silver hair that reached halfway down her back. You seldom saw older women with hair that long, or certainly not hair which was long and had been left to go grey naturally. She was plump but shapely, with large breasts, large hips and by comparison, a smallish waist. She wore a navy linen dress with a deep V at the neck. The skin on her chest looked red and almost bruised with sunburn, though her face wasn’t affected. The man she was with had closely cropped salt and pepper hair. He wore a brightly patterned shirt in splashes of orange and turquoise that jarred and jumped, a mushroom-coloured seersucker suit and a straw hat. He looked like a character from a John Grisham novel, a New Orleans lawyer with some kind of secret weakness that would be his downfall. Lucy’s eye happened to drop towards his feet. Socks and sandals. Mottled grey and green socks, a little thin at the heel, and brown leather sandals. Not a Grisham character at all then – he had to be British – the proverbial Englishman abroad.