French Exit: A Novel

by Patrick deWitt

  “Once I was married, then I began to come with Malcolm’s father. It was different in a way I couldn’t define for a while, then I realized he’d ruined it for me.”

  “Ruined it how?”

  “The simple fact of his being.”

  “He didn’t like it here?”

  “He did, somewhat, but that’s not what I mean. With Franklin here I was no longer anonymous, and he was the reasonable voice I’d been free of. He inhibited the way I walked, dressed, the way I spoke, everything.”

  “All right.”

  “So, I stopped coming here, blaming the city: it had changed, it was spoiled. I put Paris out of my mind. But then Franklin died, and now it was me and Malcolm. He heard me speak French to a waiter in New York one day, which made him curious, so much that we came here together, and I could see him having the same reaction I’d had when I was young.”

  “He liked it?”

  “Very much. I taught him how to order a croissant in French, and he went to the patisserie every morning on his own, and was so proud of his efficiency. His first knowledge of worldliness. Then when we came home he asked for French lessons, and it wasn’t very long before he had it down. We started visiting Paris together. We bought an apartment. I’d become enamored of the place again, through him.” Frances drew from her cigarette. This was the end of the story, apparently.

  “How do you feel about Paris now?” Susan asked.

  “I still love it here, but I feel that I’ve been forced to return, which I resent.” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. The kettle whined and Susan turned the stove off. She was very tired; also she was still drunk. The combined effect was a sense of calm confidence, and she found herself asking, “Why are you always so vicious to me, Frances?”

  “Because you want to take him away.”

  Susan opened her mouth to argue against this but then she thought, That’s true. “All right,” she said, “but what if you’re getting in the way of his happiness?”

  “He’s happy with me.”

  This too was true.

  “I don’t like myself when I’m around you,” Frances added. “I don’t like the way I behave, which of course is my own fault, but in the end it’s just another reason to disapprove of you.” This was said in such a way as to represent an olive branch. Susan felt a smile growing across her face.

  “I can’t win, then,” she said.

  “No,” said Frances. “You can’t. But perhaps that doesn’t matter so much.”

  Susan told Frances it did matter and that she knew it did.

  Frances said, “Perhaps it will matter less soon.”

  The next day, Susan told this story to Malcolm: “All of a sudden she said, ‘Here, let me help you,’ and she took over making my tea. As she handed me the cup, she asked if you were asleep and I said you were. She said that if I drank the tea—she’d picked valerian root—I’d fall right to sleep, too. I told her I hoped she was right and she said, ‘Go to sleep, Susan.’ She sent me away but stayed in the kitchen, standing in that same stiff way as before, arms crossed, smoking in the dark in her cocktail dress with the price tag still hanging off the hem.”

  40.

  “Madeleine, wake up,” Frances whispered.

  “What?”

  “Wake up.”

  Madeleine opened her eyes. It was after four o’clock in the morning and Frances was richly, vividly green. She explained that she wanted to speak with Franklin again. Madeleine was feeling ill from the gin and asked if they could contact him in the morning, but Frances was insistent, and she pulled Madeleine up and led her to the bathroom. She had a candle prepared, the lights already dimmed. Madeleine splashed water on her face. Sitting cross-legged on the tile countertop, she communicated with the candle flame, which presently began its flickering.

  “Hello, what?” said Franklin.

  “Hello, Frank,” said Frances. “I’m sorry to bother you again. Were you sleeping?”

  “No.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Just sitting here, under this bench.”

  “I see. Well, I was just thinking of you, you know. So I thought I’d give you a ring.”

  Franklin said nothing.

  “Don’t you want to know what I was thinking about?” asked Frances.

  “All right,” Franklin said.

  “It’s three things, actually. Number one is: do you remember our first date?”

  “I don’t, no.”

  “Yes, you do. You took me to Tavern on the Green.”

  “I don’t remember, Frances.”

  “You do, Frank. You ate your cupcake with a fork and knife. No?”

  “No.”

  “You surely did do it.” Frances was amused at the memory. “Why did you do that?” she asked. “With the fork and knife, I mean. What were you trying to pass yourself off as?”

  “I don’t know, Frances,” he said peevishly. “Who knows?”

  Frances took a deep breath. “The second thing I want to talk to you about is that I feel badly about our last conversation, and I wanted you to know I don’t hate you anymore.” When Franklin failed to respond, Frances asked him, “Perhaps you have a reaction to that news, that you’d care to share?”

  Franklin said, “It’s late to be telling me this.”

  “Late in the night, or late in life?”

  “Both, but mainly late in life.”

  “I can’t understand that as an attitude,” Frances admitted. “Your wife of long years, who only days earlier wanted to murder you, has experienced a sudden and mysterious shift in feeling for the good. Is that not noteworthy?”

  “I guess so, but Frances?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m a cat.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m a cat living under a bench, and it’s raining, and I’ve got fleas, and, you know, I’m not much concerned about anything else besides the unhappy facts of my horrible—my truly horrible, miserable fucking existence.”

  “I see,” said Frances. “Well, whether or not you care to know it, I felt compelled to tell you, and now I’ve done that. Are you ready for the third thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve just been talking about Paris with your son’s steady, and something occurred to me, which I wanted to share with you.”

  “All right.”

  “When I came to Paris for the first time, do you remember what I told you about it? About how it felt to be here?”

  “I remember you telling me.”

  “Oh, you remember something? How nice that is for you. And me. It’s nice for both of us. Hail, hail.”

  Franklin cleared his throat but didn’t speak.

  “Well,” Frances said. “I’ve figured out what I was startled by.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I recognized Paris as the eventual location of my death.”

  Franklin paused. “And what does that mean?”

  “Just what I said. Something in the sight of this city sent up an alert. Now I understand what startled me was a presentiment of what was to come, do you see? Of what’s coming now.”

  “You’re planning on dying soon, is that what you’re telling me?”

  Frances said, “We’re both going to be dead quite soon, Frank, yes.”

  The sentence hung there. “Frances,” Franklin said. She reached over and blinked the light shut between her forefinger and thumb.

  She thanked Madeleine for her assistance and instructed her to go back to sleep. Madeleine returned to her foam pad but Frances remained in the bathroom. She began running a bath, while Madeleine lay on the pad, staring at the ceiling and wondering what she should do. She knew by the fact of her greenness that Frances could not be helped, and yet, she felt an obligation to act in some way. Her head was pounding, and an ill-defined nausea lingered at the edge of her every breath. She stood and returned to the bathroom, knocking softly. The door opened a crack.

  “I’m going to wake up Mal
colm,” she said.

  “Then I’ll lock the door. I only need a moment, you know.”

  Madeleine said, “You can’t expect me to sit by like this.”

  Frances thought about it, and it seemed she agreed with what Madeleine was saying. “Why don’t you leave?” she said. “I’ll wait until after you go, all right?”

  Frances shut the door and Madeleine went back to her pad. She was thinking of something that had happened years before in a park in downtown Los Angeles.

  She’d been sitting on a bench eating her lunch when a young man walked past and sat on the bench beside hers. He looked troubled, and she spied on him, looking sideways at his stern profile. There came into his face the green coloring; it would rise and retreat, vanish, then reappear. He sat suddenly upright and the greenness flared, bright and constant, now. He stood and walked from the park and Madeleine watched as he crossed Wilshire, disappearing into the mouth of a beige stucco apartment building. A long moment passed before Madeleine heard the muffled clap of a gunshot from deep within the building. A woman shrieked; Madeleine went away.

  Frances turned off the bath. Madeleine packed her bag and left the apartment.

  41.

  Stepping onto the sidewalk she saw the mangy figure of Small Frank sitting at the edge of the park across the street and looking up at the apartment. Madeleine crossed over to meet him, but upon noticing her approach he trotted away, out of reach. She paused, then came nearer a second time; again Small Frank retreated, disappearing fully into the darkness of the park, now. Madeleine was considering following after him when she understood all at once how absurd the scenario had become. She decided she’d had more than enough of this group, and she turned and walked away in the direction of a taxi stand up the road. After she’d gone, Small Frank returned to his initial position in the park and resumed his study of the apartment.

  42.

  Frances eased into the bath without removing her dress. A box cutter lay on the lip of the bathtub and she watched it awhile. She took it up and drew a line with the blade from the left wrist to the crook of her arm. She drew the same line on her right wrist, then submerged both arms in the warm water. There was pain at the start, a very awful, stinging pain, but then there came a numbness, and after that a knowledge of calm, which in turn grew to something like rapture. It was in the room with her; it was behind her; it was at her shoulder. Her heart was sprinting and blood issued from her wrists in pulsations, an image that put Frances in mind of beta fish streaming from her body. An exclamatory brightness saturated the field of her mind and in the moment preceding death she felt heroic. She suspected this a trick of the heart, one final deception before the void announced itself, but she went along with it, wanting to be game. Was there anything worse in the world than a poor sport?

  But are not

  all Facts Dreams

  as soon as

  we put

  them behind

  us—

  —Emily Dickinson

  Coda

  Mme Reynard was making coffee for the policemen. She had been the one to find Frances early that morning. Her reaction was surprising: she was perfectly composed and single-minded about it. She telephoned the authorities and waited silently with Frances. She looked at the corpse from time to time but said nothing to it and understood it was no longer her friend. When the police arrived, she brought them to the body, then moved alone to Malcolm’s bedroom, waking him and Susan. “Your mother has killed herself in the night,” she said. “The police are here to take care of her. You are going to be all right, Malcolm. You just are.”

  “Where,” asked Malcolm, standing.

  “She’s in the bath but I wish you wouldn’t go and I’m asking you please not to.”

  He did go, and the sight of his mother sitting upright in the still, red water folded his legs for him, and he sat down roughly on the tile floor. A policeman assisted him in standing and led him to the sofa in the living room. A cup of coffee was placed in his hand but he didn’t drink it. Susan sat beside him, saying nothing, holding his arm. Joan was crying in the bedroom; Julius and Mme Reynard were in the kitchen giving statements to the lead detective, a calm, attentive man named Alphonse. Three policemen stood in a group by the living room window, talking in low tones about something other than what had occurred, was occurring in the apartment.

  Detective Alphonse asked Malcolm to come to the station headquarters with him. Malcolm agreed and they left together, walking without speaking. Malcolm was wearing the houndstooth trench coat Frances had bought him when they’d arrived.

  Detective Alphonse’s office was not the dingy chamber of television drama but a tidy, airy space with skylights and a number of thriving plants hanging from the ceiling. He asked Malcolm if he wanted a coffee and Malcolm said he did and Detective Alphonse called for two, which were delivered by a uniformed policeman who did not address Malcolm or even look at him. After he left, the detective and Malcolm sat in further silence, taking sips of their coffee at intervals.

  Detective Alphonse began speaking about his history, his youth. As an adolescent, he said, he’d been a fan of crime. He followed criminal news as his friends did the football scores. “I came to learn this is common in my profession,” he said. “The interest is simply there in certain of us, and from an early age. A very specific social deformity.” The detective had known a glint of recognition when he came on shift that morning and heard the name Frances Price. He looked into it and realized he had followed the case of Franklin Price in his early twenties. It had been a sort of sensation in France, possessing all the noirish American elements a crime-hungry heart could hope for—the deceased millionaire, the chic widow, and at the center loomed the great mystery of: Why had she left him like that? And to go skiing, no less? Had she gone mad? Or had he deserved such an end?

  Detective Alphonse didn’t ask Malcolm any of these questions, naturally; he only referenced a familiarity with Malcolm’s family history. Malcolm seemed hardly to hear him. He sat staring at his feet; realizing his shoes were untied, he tied them. When he finished this, Detective Alphonse told him, “Mr. Price, a mystery has occurred in Paris, France. I am paid a wage that I should illuminate the mystery so much as I can. Of course, you’re under no obligation to answer any of my questions. But it would be helpful to me if you would.”

  Malcolm said, “You can ask me whatever you want.”

  Detective Alphonse took up a pen and flipped open his notebook. “What is your age?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “And your mother’s age?”

  “Sixty-five.”

  “What is your place of residence?”

  “We’ve been living at Joan’s apartment, here in Paris. Before that we were in Manhattan.”

  Detective Alphonse asked for their respective US addresses and Malcolm named the Upper East Side address. “You and your mother lived together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she unwell?”

  “No. We lived together because we wanted to.”

  “Had you lived apart in the past?”

  “They kept me at boarding school until my father died. Since then I’ve been with her.”

  Detective Alphonse asked, “Did you anticipate this from your mother?”

  “I’m unsurprised that she’s done it. But I wasn’t prepared for the sight.”

  “Had she been despondent recently?”

  “I don’t know if I’d use the word despondent. She’s been acting weird since the money ran out.”

  “Did your money run out?”

  “It did.”

  Detective Alphonse wrote out a long sentence, nodding to himself. “And she’s been emotional?”

  “Not in the way you mean. Actually she’s been abnormally friendly. She always avoided strangers and hangers-on, but in the last weeks she became sort of a joiner.”

  “Interesting,” Detective Alphonse said.

  “Is it?”

  “Is it not?” The detecti
ve took a breath. “Something delicate.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did your mother ever discuss the details of the death of your father?”

  “Here and there she did.”

  “Do you have any idea why she behaved that way?”

  “Which way?”

  “Why she didn’t, for example, call the authorities?”

  Malcolm said, “What I know is that she felt strongly apart from him, then.”

  “Strongly apart.” Detective Alphonse wrote down these words and underlined them. He said, “I’d think that would be a burdensome thing to carry about for the rest of one’s life? Her having done that, I mean.”

  “I don’t know if it was.”

  “No?”

  “Anyway I never noticed it as a burden.”

  “So you don’t believe there’s a connection between your father’s death and your mother’s suicide?”

  “No.”

  “Why did she do it, do you think?”

  Malcolm thought for a while. “Aesthetic preference,” he said finally. He frowned. “What will they do with her body? I’d like her removed from the bath as quickly as possible.”

  “I imagine they’ve already removed her, Mr. Price. They’ll take her to the morgue. It’s not far from here. You can see her whenever you wish.”

  “I don’t want to see her, I just want them to take her out of the bath.”

  “They’ll clean her and dress her injuries.”

  Malcolm shook his head. “Fine,” he said.

  Detective Alphonse studied his notes. He had no other questions, and really, there were none that had needed answering in the first place. In the case of a suicide, the collection of data surrounding the event was often interesting but not requisite, from a legal standpoint. He put the cap on his pen and looked up. Malcolm was opening his mouth to speak: “My mother was overfine for this world, Detective Alphonse. That’s what damaged her. She belonged to another time and it was her ugly luck to be born among us.”