by Jo Mazelis
Even as the stocky little policeman had led him to his car, Scott moved with grace, and betrayed little sign of anger or apprehension. He walked tall.
It was all a terrible mistake.
She told herself that over and over.
Some day they would laugh about it.
Then, whenever the subject of France came up while they were in company, she and Scott would quickly find one another’s eyes, and say with exaggerated warning, ‘Don’t talk to us about France!’ before launching into their long and deliberately comical tale of this current nightmare.
All of that lay in the future. It was just up the road and would begin as soon as she saw his blond head and broad shoulders in the distance moving inexorably towards her.
But he did not appear.
She must have spent an hour going between the window, the hallway and the kitchen, not quite pacing, not quite like a person with an obsessive compulsive disorder, though she got a glimpse into the restless, anxious compulsiveness of the disorder’s relentless uneasy thrall.
The phone began to ring at one point. Two quick rings, then silence. Marilyn had only got halfway across the kitchen before the phone stopped again, but despite this she continued towards it. She stared at it, willing it to ring again, then picked it up and said, ‘Hello?’ Even as she said the word she knew it was hopeless, the connection was lost and her word encountered no answering human presence, only a machine. Yet still she repeated the word. Once, twice, three times. And listened, all her senses attuned to something, anything.
She replaced the receiver and stood for a time gazing at the telephone. The only source of illumination came from the kitchen with its functional but harsh fluorescent strip lighting. Upstairs she was aware (as she and Scott were always, always aware) of Aaron’s sleeping presence.
It must be this way with a child too, she thought, even after you have laid the sleeping baby in its crib, your mind cradles the image of it as you move about the house. And there was so much that could befall a baby after it was born; for instance, a cot death – that sudden inexplicable exit from life. Or the infant could be stolen, bundled off by strangers in the rare second when your back was turned, and then forever after you would pray that whoever did it were only childless people driven by desperation – people who took your child in order to love him or her.
What was it then, the crux of this desire to parent, given its attendant fears? It was certainly about love; the wish to take the empty space between a man and woman and make a third new being who was the sum of their parts. Or not the sum, but a selective borrowing from each; Scott’s blondness warmed by her own red hair to make a coppery yellow, her blue eyes and his brown making a hybrid green.
Inevitably Marilyn’s mind returned to the poem she had struggled with so long. It was no longer merely an unsatisfactory fragment of verse but the key to understanding something about, not only herself, but her mother and also parents in general.
All children, as they grow, discover that their parents have feet of clay; they coltishly shrug off the concerns and rules and controls and silly worries, unwittingly torturing them with their young recklessness. Understanding only comes when they in their turn become parents.
Just as now she was worried sick about Scott and invented a hundred terrible explanations for his long absence, so a parent extemporises on the thousand ways they might lose their child. And her mother had seen one of these unfolding before her eyes when her beloved only daughter went pitching forward into the green algae-rich soup of the pond.
It should have proved to her mother that bad luck and danger could be overcome, but instead it confirmed the constant threat.
She automatically reached for the receiver again, but then as if catching herself; she merely laid her hand upon it. She had been about to ring her mother. Her mother whom she’d quarrelled with at about the same time she’d begun seeing Scott. It was years since they’d spoken to one another. Too long.
Both of them waiting stubbornly for the right apology phrased in the right blame-taking way, at the right time. Which, were Marilyn able to pick up the phone and dial the number, she would still be unable to produce. Instead she would sob and say, ‘Mom, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, help me, Mom…’
And her mother might just hang up. Or even if she listened to Marilyn’s garbled tale, she could not really help as she was the most impractical of women, incapable of even changing a light bulb, terrified of computers, rendered into a state of childlike awe and obedience by anyone in a position of power over her – doctors, nurses, politicians, policemen, bank managers, insurance salesmen, teachers, the clergy, tax inspectors. She was, Marilyn knew, a silly woman, the typical product of her generation.
Marilyn had fought to rid herself of these same traits, to be her own woman, relishing a vision of herself armed with an electric drill, a domestic paintbrush, a plumber’s kit, dependent on no one but herself. It was this thought that now galvanised Marilyn into action.
Aaron was asleep and with the help of the pills she had given him, he would sleep for the rest of the night. She tried Scott’s cell phone again, but when it went straight to message, she guessed that it was dead. He’d had it plugged into the car charger as they were setting off that morning, but they had gone nowhere. And he’d been waving it around at the guy in the other car. Then he’d used it to ring the police.
She had no choice it seemed, but to go out to find him. She went through to the kitchen, put on her jacket, picked up her bag, then she tore a blank page from her notebook and scribbled a note for Scott.
‘Time now nine-thirty. Aaron fine. Gone to look for you. Wait here. Marilyn. X.’
She propped the paper against the kettle, then turned to look at her notebook again. She opened it to the poem about her mother. She still had the pen in her hand and suddenly in a swift flurry of inspiration she wrote four new lines, which seemed for the moment at least, to sum up and allow an escape from the troublesome poem.
She would cross them out again tomorrow, of that she had no doubt, but at that moment it had been important to write them down, to say in words that she recognised the source of her mother’s exaggeration, even while she chided her for it. Chided herself too, for buying into it.
She recapped the pen and put it, as was her habit, diagonally across the open page.
In the hallway she retrieved the house key from its hiding place and before unlocking the door she stood at the bottom of the stairs straining to hear any sound from upstairs that might suggest that Aaron was not asleep.
Silence.
She opened the door, then put it on the latch.
The air outside was wonderfully fresh and still carried some of the day’s heat. The street lamps sent pools of warm yellow light onto the darkened streets. Across the road she could make out the evening’s diners and drinkers inside La Coquille Bleue. All of them seemed to be settled into little groups, all were with friends or family, only she was alone. She remembered the poster she used to have of Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ where an American diner is populated by four individuals, three men and a lone woman, each trapped within a private reverie. In that painting there was loneliness. Here was companionship. An easy companionship which excluded her.
Marilyn focused her eyes on the figures inside, searching (though she knew it was unlikely) for Scott. She comforted herself with the relief and joy she would feel at finding him. First she would throw herself into his arms, kiss him and say his name, then she would probably punch him on the shoulder. Not that she had hit anyone since grade school and even then it was no doubt pretty feeble and half-hearted.
Once she had passed La Coquille Bleue she quickened her pace. She was confident that she knew the route into the centre of town, even though Scott usually drove. There was a tree-lined avenue, then a right turn and a beautiful maison bourgeoise with its ornate white stonework and tall shuttered windows appeared on the left. Then there was the Ecole and the ugly apartment block, th
en another right turn down a road with houses on one side and a high stone wall on the other. After another turn, they reached the main square where the old men played boule under the shade of the cedar trees. At the far end overlooking the patch of green was the Hotel de Ville and next to it, the police station.
She could picture the route in her mind, but at night and on foot everything looked different. She had considered taking the car, but couldn’t find the keys.
She set off down the long avenue exactly as they did when in the car, and took a right fork then continued down the nondescript street as before, but there was no sign of the beautiful house she had expected to see rising up suddenly beyond its long manicured lawns.
Confused and a little frightened, she comforted herself with the knowledge that distance contracted as one sped along comfortably in a vehicle. Roads and hills shrank.
Marilyn continued on along the road in the expectation of finding familiar landmarks. She tried by some mathematical process – whereby she figured speeds of somewhere between thirty and forty miles per hour against her own much slower walking speed – to measure the length of time it would take her to reach the place where the white mansion stood. But she did not wear a watch; was always dependent on other timepieces – her computer’s clock, Scott, the read-out on her electronic radio alarm, or any of those external devices on town halls, in railway stations, in shops and cafés. Time, or rather reports of its progress were usually everywhere you looked, but not now.
In her worried state, she had only the false internal measure of distorted guesswork. This was a compass that she knew was easily set out of kilter. Good time – with its first kisses and birthdays and great sex and seamless, perfect performances of poetry and enthusiastic acceptance letters – always seemed to end all too quickly, while bad time – with its root canal work, its car breakdowns and queues and exams and banishment to bed without supper – stretched out into an infinity of aching, lazily moving seconds.
She therefore followed this one long road for twenty minutes before concluding that it wasn’t the one they usually took.
She turned around and walked back the way she had come and after ten minutes came to a fork in the road. Here then, is where I went wrong, she thought. She gazed down the length of this new street and noted how similar it was to the one she had just walked down. Her mistake had been understandable and she swore there was something distinctive about the line of pollarded trees which she recognised.
She walked more briskly now as this road was more or less straight, but even in the darkness she saw that there was no sign of the tall ornate gates that guarded the big house and interrupted the regularity of the smaller houses’ neat front gardens and modest fences.
She stopped walking abruptly and gazed around her. Why, she thought, why must Europeans build their streets in such a maze? What was wrong with the good old grid system with its blocks and easy north and south, east and west, and numerical avenues and streets? She knew the answer, knew that these villages and towns developed organically and gradually, following the contours of the land with its rivers and valleys and existing pathways and buildings.
This is just so stupid, she thought, so, so stupid, like something dreamed up by the surrealists, by Magritte or de Chirico. Everything that had happened from the moment they stepped out of the house that morning might have been the enactment of a convoluted Hitchcock plot whereby mistaken identity and concealed knowledge baffled protagonist and audience alike.
Everything unravels. It is all done to drive me mad, as in the film Gaslight, as in Les Diaboliques.
Marilyn allowed herself these excesses. The old habits of imagination, well-stirred and qualified by a liberal arts education. The gift of a mind that can find fire-breathing dragons and effervescent cherubs in cloud formations, but can also put the hairy sharp-toothed bogeyman under the bed and knows the precise measure of his grasping hands’ strength and clamminess, and what it symbolises in Freudian terms.
Marilyn interpreted the world through its likeness to a Coen brothers’ film, to a poem by W.H. Auden or Sharon Olds, to Greek myths and film noir classics; danger and pleasure and pain were all subjects. But now she wished only to remove herself from these tangled night streets and find Scott.
A door opened two houses away and a woman in a white nylon tab apron emerged carrying a watering can. Marilyn watched as the woman began to move around the small front garden tending the many flower-filled pots and tubs arranged there.
‘Excusez moi! Excusez moi, Madame!’ Marilyn called and hurried towards her.
The woman looked up in surprise, blinking in Marilyn’s direction.
‘Ou est le Hotel de Ville si vous plait?’
As she drew closer Marilyn saw that the woman was older than she had at first thought, though her body was as trim and straight as a much younger woman’s. Marilyn repeated her question looking earnestly at the old woman’s face, half of which was alive and mobile, while the other drooped down as if it had melted, and its eye had a deadness about it.
The woman said something in a drowned distorted French which Marilyn could not understand.
Marilyn mimed a body language of being lost, looking up the street, then down the street, shaking her head and raising her palms towards heaven.
The woman watched her uncomprehending, as if she were tired by the endless japery of Marcel Marceau and Jacques Tati. They did not amuse her, she was too old for humour and she had thirsty plants to water.
‘Si vous plait, si vous plait,’ Marilyn tried again, sensing she was losing the woman’s attention. Then she pointed down the road in the direction she had been going. ‘Hotel de Ville?’
Slowly the woman’s one good eye seemed to widen as if at last she understood, then aping Marilyn she pointed down the road and nodded.
‘Merci Madame! Merci beaucoup! Bon nuit!’ This last called out cheerfully as Marilyn broke into a trot heading confidently on down the road.
The Lamb
At 8.45 they’d led Scott down a narrow corridor to the phone. He had begun by dialing Marilyn back at the house, but by the time it had rung twice, he’d changed his mind. One phone call only, so it had to count. There was the Canadian embassy in Paris, or alternatively, a lawyer friend in Toronto who might be able to advise him, even at long distance, but who might easily take everything Scott said as an elaborate joke, because that is what they’d done for a long time now, since High School in fact – mount elaborate hoaxes on one another. Scott could ring his father of course, but his parents would panic and flap and get the wrong end of the stick and would thus cause more confusion. If he rang Marilyn she could contact the embassy, get a good lawyer’s number and, if need be, ring his parents.
He dialled the house again. It was engaged.
The young policeman looked at him sternly.
‘Engaged,’ Scott said. He understood what had happened back at the house, that his hesitant first call had brought Marilyn to the phone and that while it had stopped ringing she had probably still picked up.
‘Try later,’ the policeman said, taking Scott’s elbow and guiding him back down the hallway to a holding cell.
‘When?’
‘Ten minutes.’
Scott nodded. Sat on the edge of the thin mattress that covered a metal shelf as the cell door was swung shut and locked.
Ten minutes. But they’d taken his watch from him. Also his keys, wallet, loose change, cell phone and belt.
In his wallet there was a photo-booth snapshot of Marilyn. He would have liked to look at it at that moment – to remember her grace and comfort and honesty. Her milky skin, her clear eyes, the red Pre-Raphaelite hair which in public slightly embarrassed him for its wild hippy connotations, but which in private, he adored.
He was such a damn hypocrite, he thought. So excessively hypocritical about so many things you would almost think he had two personalities locked together in one body – a Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde each unaware of the other’s existence. O
r aware only vaguely of strange half-remembered dreams, as when he recalled the murderous night in Aaron’s nursery. As in the memories of his words and actions of a couple of days ago – his meeting with the English girl, his mood which had been unreasonable, gruff and sarcastic. Because?
Because? Now he hardly knew why he had acted that way. He hadn’t been drunk, merely uninhibited enough to say things he would never have said were he completely sober and, he realised, were he not in a foreign country, a stranger talking to another stranger. And, damn it, she had been coming on to him, was throwing herself at him. She had followed him for God’s sake! But the come-on was hardly a well-polished performance, beneath the make-up and blonde hair and bold words he had sensed vulnerability and sweetness, a fragility which he had been attracted to. That was why he had been so aggressive, it was to drive her off, swat her away, make her decide he was a nasty piece of work, an arrogant jerk who would screw her over.
He thought about her carefully, focusing his attention on the character of the young woman. She was beautiful. She was dressed in such a way that one could not fail to notice her, not because it was provocative or overly sexy but because it was girlish, almost virginal, the summery look of a girl from the nineteen-fifties.
If she had acted so oddly towards him (following him all the way from the house for example) she was capable of acting in a similarly provocative way towards other men. British and American women (and therefore also Canadians who got carried along in their wake) had reputations in Europe for being easy, for being sexually available. Or so he understood, though perhaps his data was outdated and inaccurate. He saw how the murdered woman might easily have gone like a lamb to the slaughter. Driven not by desire or lust, but sheer aching loneliness.
That was it. He saw it suddenly – she had, despite the bold front, been painfully lonely. Lonely and lost.