The Fool of New York City

by Michael O'Brien

  Françoise drove me to the airport. In the departure lounge I said, “I will see you in a week or two.”

  “If you must stay longer, I will understand. However, if it is longer than a month, I will fly over secretly and kill you. Do we have an agreement?”

  “We have an agreement. And thanks for the warning.”

  At the gate, she said:

  “I love you very much. I will always love you. I will love you forever.”

  Beyond this, there were missing pieces. I strained to resurrect them. Specters crossed the screen of my imagination. Disconnected evocations of a life in progress, a chronology of narrative amputations.

  There was a weekend in Maryland with my grandparents. My temporary lodgings in New York became my permanent abode. I painted with intense focus, time ceased altogether, the surrounding noises and motion faded away to the periphery of consciousness.

  I wrote letters to Françoise daily and sent them off by airmail. Hers arrived weekly—in perfumed envelopes, containing her finely penned script, purple spidery ink on mauve vellum paper. I kissed the letters, inhaled her fragrance, smiled over her loving insults:

  “My beloved troglodyte, mon doux beau anomaly, when will you abandon your antipathy to electronic communications? There is not a single person on this planet who has no e-mail, no cell-phone. Do you love me? If you love me, you will buy yourself a laptop and cease torturing me with these endless delays.”

  I replied: “I love you so much that I cannot bear to metamorphose the words of our union into cold font on a screen. How much better it is to hold your handwritten letters close to my heart, imagining it’s you I embrace. When they arrive by sailing ship or as a scroll in a bottle, crossing the great sea of l’être, they are a thousand times more treasured than insta-bites. L’attente est la langueprincipale de l’amour, l’attente en presence fidele a l’autre. (Forgive my fractured French.) I wish to say, ma douce belle, that waiting is the primary language of love—waiting in faithful presence to the other.”

  In her next letter, she retorted:

  “Sweet idiot, you are a pathetic Romantic!”

  I begged her to join me here in America, my homeland. She could analyze the myths firsthand, I suggested. But she delayed and delayed: writing her thesis, defending her thesis, tending her mother, who was in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

  “Why do you not return to France?” she asked in every letter.

  Why? Because the impossible future had become possible. Because I was on the verge of becoming an established artist—a real artist. Because I had to work and there was no time to lose.

  I had a successful show, the gallery thronged with visitors because of a review in the New York Times and an article in the New Yorker magazine.

  Françoise had been adamant that she would fly over for the opening, but in the end she begged off, pleading unnamed duties to her family. My grandparents came, beaming with pride, Helen watery eyed throughout, Robbie nodding his approval over the paintings, and watching the glittering, beautiful, and bizarre people in attendance with an expression I recognized as his subtlest—amused and ironic. He also eavesdropped on the exquisitely nuanced commentary all around him, and at one point he burst out laughing, offending someone in a metal-link dress. The dress was not worn by a woman. Another lady, an actual lady, in her sixties or seventies, walked about in a leopard-skin leotard, leading her pet piglet on a diamond-studded leash. Robbie was fascinated by it all; Helen grew increasingly uncomfortable. They embraced me warmly, and left early.

  The Village Voice and other papers wanted interviews, but I said no, which made the gallery owner furious with me. He pleaded and tried to bully, but I wouldn’t budge and I wouldn’t explain. I told him only that, on principle, I felt people had no right to access the personal memories of others.

  “We’re a generation of entitlement,” I said, “and I’m not going to play by its rules.”

  Though I believed this, I also knew that their questions could split open a healed abscess, hemorrhaging old pain. Thus, without my aid, the journals published their psychoanalytical nonsense, social commentary, adulation, and antipathy. I was by turns a “prophetic articulator of the national trauma” and an “opportunist capitalizing on the sufferings of thousands”. Paintings sold well. Another exhibit was scheduled for the following year.

  Somewhere in all of this, I gave in and purchased a cell phone so that I could talk with Françoise every day. With instruments pressed to our ears, we communicated amply yet strained with desperation for the sense of communion we had had in Paris, and nearly taken for granted. We talked and cried, and I revolved the ring on my finger whenever we were connected. As I listened to her voice I stared through walls and crossed an ocean, yearning for her. I begged her to consider moving to my city.

  In August she phoned me on my birthday. During our conversation she asked me if I had visited the site of my family’s deaths. Stricken by the question, I said no, I had not, I couldn’t bear to go there. I told her I was afraid of what I would feel, what would happen to me.

  “You do not have to go alone, Max. I would go with you.”

  “Please come, Françoise. Come as soon as you can. But it’s impossible for me to go to that place.”

  “How can you complete your grieving if you do not?”

  “I have completed it. They died twelve years ago.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  On September 9 she phoned to say she would be flying to New York the following day. I was ecstatic.

  When I asked for her flight number and arrival time, she refused to tell me.

  “Do not meet me at the airport,” she said. “I will take a taxi. I do not want us to meet in a romantic place, my Max. I want us to meet in the very place where you suffer—this place you call Ground Zero. Let me be with you there.”

  “Françoise, you have to stop treating me like an invalid. You make me feel like an emotional and mental cripple.”

  “My prince has been wounded in mortal combat. The dragon has—”

  “There is no dragon! It was politics and jihad. It was a declaration of war. And it’s in the past.”

  “It dominates your present. . . and our future. Let me be with you there,” she said again.

  “If you love me, you will not ask this of me,” I said, shocked and hurt by her insistence.

  “If you love me, you will overcome this thing that is killing you,” she said.

  “Is this a test?”

  “It is not a test. Let our love conquer it forever.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Françoise.”

  “It works exactly that way, Paul Maximilian.”

  Angry now, I raised my voice: “You are so stubborn!”

  “Do not worry. When we are married, I will not be like this.”

  “I doubt it very much.”

  The following morning she called me again. I had prepared a new strategy: I did not know if she had relented of her mad schemes to heal me, but I thought that if she still insisted on me not meeting her at the airport, she might be argued into taking a taxi straight to my apartment. I would promise to consider her proposal, and once she was here with me I would reject it.

  But she had already read my mind.

  “The flight is boarding now. Tomorrow, Max. Tomorrow at the ground zero of your pain. I will be there at nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “I won’t be there, Françoise.”

  “But I will be there.”

  “Stop! What’s your flight number?”

  “Adieu, mon cœur.”

  On the anniversary of the catastrophe, I awoke from a fitful sleep, afflicted with a feeling of dread. It dissipated only gradually as I showered and shaved and made my breakfast.

  I knew that I would have to go. I could not risk letting her be alone, a stranger in a strange land, in that worst of places. If I did not meet her there, she might or might not admit defeat, and pace around the great gaping hole in
the city that even now was being reconstructed into something more elaborate and magnificent. Would she become angry? Would she lose heart? When she finally accepted that I could not join her there, would she hire a taxi to bring her to my apartment? Once we were reunited, our long-restrained love for each other might sweep everything aside and restore us to the enchantment of our beginnings. Or she might chastise me. Or, seeing the extent of my fears, she might be overcome by pity, expressing her understanding and compassion. Or, being a person of strong will and varying moods, she might do something else.

  I admonished myself severely: This was not about me! What about her feelings? If I succumbed to mine, would it not be a supreme form of selfishness on my part? Surely I could fulfill such a simple request.

  On the other hand, I wondered if this was an ultimate test, despite her protestation to the contrary. Was she testing my courage, my capacity for sacrifice? And, more onerous, was it a test of how compliant I would be throughout the rest of our lives? In other words, was she manipulating me? Was this ultimatum really about who was in control of our future? And if that was the case, what kind of marriage would we have? After the intoxications of passion subsided, would we be left with power struggles and habitual bitterness?

  Even if that was the case—and it was by no means certain—I knew that if I did not join her there, I was being unfair to her. I had to prove to her my love. Mine was a love stronger than death, I told myself. I was not a coward. I was a man who kept his word, a knight faithful and true—and, perhaps, the prince she desired me to be.

  Shortly after eight in the morning, I left the apartment and headed west on East Twelfth Street, beginning the three-mile walk that would take me to the financial district at the southern tip of Manhattan. My route zigged and zagged out of the East Village and into Little Italy, then onto Broadway, where I turned south. I jogged some of the way, trying to burn up the adrenaline flooding through my system. My heart banged in my chest, and my throat ached.

  Once or twice I looked up at the office towers around me, and cringed as I saw jet planes crashing into them, fireballs blowing through their walls, bodies dropping from the heights. I heard screams that began as police and ambulance sirens and ended in wails of despair. I had just passed Canal Street, I think, when I began to see bodies heaped along the sidewalk, and only with an effort of the will was I able to turn them back into garbage bags. My mind told me these were trauma hallucinations, but the knowledge did not stop the bodies from multiplying, block after block. By now I was choking with terror, growing dizzy with insufficient oxygen. I slowed my pace and ground to a halt.

  Horns beeped angrily, drivers yelled at me out of their windows, for I had stopped in the middle of an intersection. I hobbled forward toward the Twin Towers, seeing a cloud of ash descend in front of my eyes, bodies hitting the pavement, the pulverized flesh of my mother, my father, my little brother.

  I leaned against a brick wall, bent over double, trying to catch my breath. Sobbing, I could go no farther. My hair standing on end, I ran all the way back to the apartment.

  When my panic had subsided I called her on her cell phone. It went immediately to her voice mail, so I left a message explaining what had happened. Throughout the morning the phone did not ring. There was no knock on the door. I left numerous voice messages begging her to call me. She would understand; I knew she would understand. But why was she not answering? Had she accidentally left her cell phone in Paris; was it ringing and recording in her residence near the Sorbonne?

  Why did she not call me?

  I waited and waited. I telephoned the international terminal and gave her name to airport information, requesting that a public announcement be made, calling her to their desk. Nothing came of it. I asked if any flights from Paris had been canceled yesterday or today. None had. Could they tell me if a certain passenger had arrived or not? But they were bound by regulations not to divulge such information.

  And so I waited. And waited. Three days passed, and she neither came to the door nor phoned me back. I slept little, if at all. I took sleeping tablets but they didn’t help. I went out to a liquor store and bought alcohol. Drinking a bottle pushed me down into a drugged stupor, but it seemed to make my mind more confused than ever.

  Finally I called her parents’ number in Paris. Her father answered. When I told him who I was, there was silence on the other end of the line.

  “What do you want?” he asked at length.

  I stammered a garbled explanation, but he would not hear it.

  “You have hurt her terribly,” he said. “It is better for you to leave her alone.”

  “This is insane,” I cried. “I can explain.”

  “Insane,” he said in a cold voice. “Yes, insane.” And hung up.

  I phoned him again an hour later.

  “She is not here,” he said. “She has gone away.”

  “Away? Where?” I cried.

  “That is none of your business. Do not call again.”

  I could not understand it. It was so completely out of her character simply to terminate all communication. Not a word, not even a sorrowful final conversation ending our relationship. Nothing.

  Memories strained to coalesce, to piece together the chronology:

  Autumn leaves fell. Snow fell.

  I saw myself unable to paint. I saw the empty bottles of wine accumulating, waiting to be taken down to the trash. I saw myself in the mirror with a heavy growth of beard, red eyed, growing thinner. The mirror of my mirrored self, the bathroom cabinet’s triple panes receding me into infinity.

  I called her cell phone two or three times a day, until finally a French-speaking operator informed me that the number was no longer in service. My letters were returned to me unopened, stamped No longer at this address.

  After anxiety came frustration, then anger, and then depression.

  I showed up at the gallery drunk one evening, and was preemptively driven home to my apartment by an employee.

  I could not bear to face my grandparents in my present condition and begged off their invitation to spend Christmas with them. I lied shamelessly. “I’m fine,” I said, steadying my voice. “I’m just on a creative roll.” Their questions followed.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t be alone for Christmas. Friends want me to join them. I’ll miss you a lot. I’ll be thinking about you. Love you.”

  It was true that people had asked me to join them, though they were not, in fact, friends. They were denizens of the cultural circle of the gallery owner, and collectors intrigued by me or sexually attracted to me, or both. I declined the constant invitations to parties and beds.

  “A mistake, Max,” said the gallery owner. “They’re rich and they’re in love with you. You’re a fatal attraction, you see—they want a piece of history, and more important to them, you’re the tragic genius they long to cuddle and heal.”

  “To heal?” I shouted.

  “Uh, in a manner of speaking. Relax, relax. I wasn’t saying that I think you’re unbalanced. I’m just suggesting you go along for the ride.”

  “I am not a commodity! Cancel my next show!”

  “No, I am not canceling the show. You signed the contract, Max, and I have your paintings in secure storage.”

  “Then I’m not painting anything more for you—ever.”

  “That’s your choice, but the show goes on.”

  I walked out on him, and from then on I answered none of his calls.

  That was a month devoted to liquor bottles, my contribution to the recycling industry, two big boxes of empties a week, which I carried down the five staircases to the save-your-planet bins at the curb, carrying replacements in bags and boxes back up to my apartment. Harder liquor bestowed absinthine dreams, less romantic than wine, less consoling, but vastly more medicinal due to its numbing effect.

  My world became infested with the sounds of phonograph records, scratchy, nostalgic, faint through every apartment door in the warren’s hallways. Christmas bells in the
city. White Christmas. Have a holly jolly Christmas. I entertained murderous feelings toward Bing Crosby. On my CD player I played Mozart’s unfinished Requiem at full volume, constantly, in honor of my unfinished life. I should have been finished off with my family. I killed them, though I was not yet certain how I had done it. I killed them and I survived. It was the survival that provided the incontrovertible evidence.

  Whenever I left the apartment, I was forced to enter the realm of merriment—the amplified colors, the soaring tree-of-lights in Central Park, children skating to the piped music of Strauss the Waltz King, the jingling bells of charity Santas and con-artist Santas, and the plastic Santas staring with manic-depressive glee. I staggered through midtown and uptown and never again wandered beyond the guarded frontier into lowertown, the city of death.

  When I was not drinking I was sleeping or checking the in-box of my cell phone for voice and text messages. How did they find me, all these people? How did they track my code? Who told them my secrets? Why so many, when the only person I wanted to hear from would not call?

  My bank account was full of money, the last of the old inheritance replenished by the new deposits from the gallery. I was semi-rich. If you sell your soul to the highest bidder, you can become rich, which proves that you are a social parasite, which proves that you are a mistake—a mistake become a fraud, because that is where it all ends, really, that is where you end when you don’t know the truth about yourself. Ben Franklin saw the truth. Françoise saw it.

  The day after New Year’s I received in the mail a small padded envelope, with no return address. It was postmarked Lyon, France. Inside I found a greeting card, a fine art reproduction of a painting—a boy in a red suit, tethering a jackdaw on a string, beside three cats and a cage full of little brown birds: Boy in Red, Portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuhiga, 1788, by Francisco de Goya.

  Penned inside the card:

  I am not the one you need.

  I must cut the string.

  F.

  Taped beneath these words was the gold ring I had given to her in Paris.