How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  “Does Leonard know about your abortion?” I asked Aurore.

  I couldn’t see my own reflection in the mirror from where I stood, but because I could see hers, I knew she could see me. With her foot, she closed the door.

  The reason Leonard had come clean about studying our family was that he was about to hand in the final draft of his dissertation and he suspected his professors would be interested in knowing what our reaction to his project had been. I suppose Aurore’s anger was being disclosed and interpreted in the conclusion Leonard was crafting that very moment.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Aurore through the bathroom door. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Aurore didn’t accept my apology, didn’t say anything, in fact, and I hoped that it was because she was crying and didn’t want me to hear it in her voice. Yet I didn’t want to be the one who’d made her cry. I just didn’t want to be the only one to be sad over there not being a baby.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  I’d always thought of our house in the afternoon as a possible definition of silence, but now that Simone had gone away, I realized silence wasn’t an absolute but could always go deeper. Simone, had she been home, might’ve done nothing more at this hour than breathe over some book in her bed, and it might not have sounded like much, but I could feel her breath missing in the acoustics of the house.

  The doorbell rang and I thought for a second that I’d imagined it.

  “Go get the fucking door,” Aurore said. It didn’t sound like she’d been crying.

  I had to stand on tiptoe to see through the peephole. Herr Coffin’s face was in there, his mouth wide open, in a yawn I assumed, but then it started closing and opening very quickly like Coffin was exercising his maxilla. He looked surprised to see me when I opened the door.

  “Are you home alone?” he said.

  “Everyone’s here but my mother,” I said. “Did you want to talk to her?”

  “No, I came to see you, actually.”

  Herr Coffin didn’t elaborate on his statement and I thought this meant I was supposed to let him in, so I did.

  “I would offer you some coffee,” I said, “but I don’t know how to make it.”

  “That is fine. I do not drink coffee after two p.m. anyway.”

  We sat on the new couch, which was fake leather and squeaked whenever you moved on it even just a little. Leonard and Jeremie had complained about it, but I pretended I couldn’t hear anything. Except I could, of course, and I knew Coffin could, and I was embarrassed.

  “I have cognac, though,” I said. “Would you care for some?”

  “It’s a little early for me,” Coffin said.

  I was trying to be as still as possible on the couch, and I imagined Coffin was trying to do the same.

  “Are there specific hours to drink any drink?” I asked, only to cover potential squeaking, and Coffin must have figured I wasn’t really interested in an answer because he just smiled and turned his whole body on the couch so he could almost face me. Major squeaking.

  “So how have you been?” he said. “I didn’t see you at your friend’s funeral.”

  “I didn’t know you’d gone,” I said. “Denise was never your student.”

  “One doesn’t have to be a Germanist for me to feel for them.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “I guess it would be pretty lonely otherwise. There aren’t that many Germanists around here.”

  “It’s still quite lonely,” Coffin said, and I didn’t know what to make of that. I didn’t want every sad person on Earth to see a confidant in me, so I didn’t encourage him down that line. I wasn’t too happy myself.

  “Are you sure you’re not alone here?” Coffin said after a long silence.

  “I’m not. It’s just very quiet around our house.”

  My mother came home from work and made for the kitchen without seeing us. We heard her open the fridge and throw some groceries in. By the sound of it, she’d bought way too much food. It always took her a while to adjust her grocery list to the number of children she had to feed whenever one of us went away. Since Simone had moved out, we’d had leftovers after every meal. She startled when she came out of the kitchen and saw us on the couch.

  “Don’t tell me you unearthed another bachelor online, Dory,” she said.

  “Mom, it’s Herr Coffin,” I said. “You met before.”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Coffin, of course. I am so sorry.”

  She almost ran to shake his hand.

  “Completely understandable,” Coffin said. “Out of context, one old man looks like nothing but another old man.”

  My mother didn’t laugh or even smile at this. She must’ve thought Coffin had merely stated a true fact, and true facts were no laughing matter.

  “Is Isidore in trouble?” she asked, and I tried to spot signs of excitement on her face, but it didn’t look like she wanted me to be in trouble this time.

  “Not at all,” Coffin said. “Quite the opposite, actually. I came here to see if your boy would be interested in helping me with some work I’ve been assigned to do. I would pay him, of course.”

  “What kind of work?” my mother asked.

  “Well, as you both know, Mrs. Daphné Marlotte’s birthday is coming up at the end of the week, and I’ve been asked, since she only can express herself in German nowadays, to be her interpreter for her meeting with the president.” Coffin paused there, to give us time to congratulate him, I imagine, but my mother and I just wanted to hear the rest of what he had to say and he went on. “Now, I remembered your son was interested in doing such interpreting work, so I thought he could assist me in this task. Daphné is scheduled to meet the president for fifteen minutes on Saturday at five forty-five, before the party.”

  Jeremie appeared on our staircase before my mother or I could say anything.

  “I thought I’d heard voices,” he said, and he came all the way down the stairs to salute Herr Coffin. “Wie geht’s?” he asked him, and they started chitchatting in German and Coffin told Jeremie what he’d just told my mother and me, and Jeremie said it sounded like a great opportunity for me. Jeremie’s German was infinitely better than mine.

  Coffin stayed for tea but refused to impose on our family dinner. I thought my mother had only offered dinner out of obligation—he was going to introduce me to the president, after all—but when Coffin declined, she looked disappointed. She even insisted he share our roast, since she had bought too much anyway, she explained, and I tried to perceive romantic interest in her voice, but I understood she was only seeing in Coffin a distraction from the tension Leonard had raised in the house a few days earlier. Coffin left and we ate in total silence. Aurore wore one of her many shapeless gray sweaters. She hadn’t lied earlier. She had nowhere special to go that night.

  I didn’t think much of the president. All he asked Daphné was how she felt that day and exactly how many presidents had governed France over her lifetime, which was something he could’ve calculated for himself beforehand, I thought, instead of having the old lady—whose memory had not only been Germanized but also more broadly impaired by the stroke—make the effort. It took Daphné three whole minutes to go over the list, and she wasn’t even sure she hadn’t forgotten one or two names in the end. “All pretty useless anyway,” Daphné said about the presidents she remembered, which is not something Herr Coffin translated back into French. I was only there to learn and take notes if I wanted, Coffin had said, so I didn’t jump in to translate what Daphné had said about presidents’ being useless, I just wrote down in my notebook that the things an interpreter thought could offend one of the parties present could be left out of the translation at his discretion. It is actually the only thing I took note of in the notebook my mother had bought for me specially for the occasion and that I would never use afterward. I had time to look at the president closely enough to notice he looked at people’s mouths when they spoke. He was an expert at avoiding eye contact and I found that odd. I would have
thought politicians to be masters of eye contact, that it was how they got people to believe they had a special connection with them and that their voice mattered, but I guessed that now that the president was in office and wouldn’t run for reelection, it was more important for him to not get caught in annoying conversations than to get approval, and you could always pretend you hadn’t heard someone when you didn’t look them in the eyes.

  Simone, over the phone, had given me a list of questions for the president if I had a chance (she was mostly concerned about the latest draft of the government’s secondary education reforms) as well as a selection of words she believed he would be inspired to look up in the dictionary when he had a minute (Simone had said if he actually only had one minute, he should just read the definition of the word elitism) because it was obvious to her he didn’t precisely know what they meant. I had Simone’s questions memorized, but I knew I wouldn’t get to talk to the president at all. I knew he would just look at my mouth and pretend I either hadn’t spoken or had said something different entirely, so I didn’t even try. Also, I didn’t like people looking at my mouth, with the braces and all.

  An hour before the meeting, I’d been inspected by the secret service to make sure I wasn’t planning on killing the president. That was something they did with anyone who was scheduled to be in a room with him. Coffin had explained this to me in a tone that suggested he was accustomed to such inspections, even though when I’d asked him if he’d met any other president before, he’d admitted he hadn’t. When the secret service guys had asked me to confirm that my name was indeed Isidore Mazal, I’d thought they were only double-checking because they’d recognized the father’s name and were amazed at the coincidence, for the father had been a dear colleague, a legend even, maybe, but when I’d confirmed my name, there had been no spark of recognition in their eyes. But then if the father had really been a spy and these people had known him, I thought, they would’ve known better than to just reminisce with me about his many qualities and top secret achievements.

  The meeting didn’t go a second over the allotted fifteen minutes. On his way out, the president looked down at my notebook and asked me if I wanted an autograph. I said I was fine. His entourage laughed a little and a lady said, “Kids!” in a way that was meant to restore the president’s confidence that he was still someone whose autograph any sane person would want and that also made it clear she had never spent too much time around kids.

  “Who was that?” Daphné asked me once the president was gone.

  I’d been nervous about seeing Daphné again, nervous that she would hold me responsible for her stroke, but she didn’t seem to remember a thing about our last encounter, or to even understand she’d had a stroke. If anything, she thought I was her best friend.

  “That was the president,” I said.

  “The president? What is he doing in town?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Coffin was supposed to stay with Daphné ’til the end of her birthday party, in case people wanted to ask her questions and he had to interpret, but he asked me if I could take care of her for half an hour or so—he wanted to see if he could run after the president and try to raise his attention regarding a couple of flaws in his secondary education reform. I said I could manage Daphné, of course, but before he left, I needed to know something.

  “Did the secret service people ask you to confirm your name?” I asked him.

  “They did,” Coffin said. I realized I didn’t know his first name.

  “It’s Albert,” he said, and he went chasing after the president.

  Daphné and I were left alone in this small room behind the reception area of city hall. Through the door, I could hear people starting to gather and the sound of champagne corks popping. I wondered if Daphné had any idea this was all in her honor.

  “Do you want me to bring you a glass of champagne?” I said, in German of course.

  “Will you be sad when I die?” was her answer.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Will you really? Will you think about me? Or will you just find comfort in thinking that at least I will have had a full life?”

  “I don’t know what a full life means,” I said.

  “I know that that’s what these people will think,” Daphné said, eyeing the door between us and the reception hall. “That I’ve had a full life. Except I actually had more than a full life. It went way over the brim. And when it goes over the brim, all bets are off. Things that shouldn’t happen start happening: you don’t just lose one child, you lose all of them, you don’t just have to learn about new technologies to keep up with the times, you have to learn about new technologies because the ones you were used to have simply disappeared. I knew how to send a telegram, for Christ’s sake. What good is it to me now? I used to love so many people, what good is that to me now—now that they’re gone? You know, when someone dies, it’s not just the person that dies, but all the ties that that person had with those who survive them. Severed. It all just hangs loose in the survivor’s brain and weighs, like a useless knowledge. I would just like it if I could weigh on someone’s life, after I die, you know? Will I weigh on your life?”

  I can’t be a hundred percent sure that’s what Daphné said exactly—it was all in German. The way she stared at me after she was done speaking, though, her neck outstretched in my direction like a turtle’s, it did look like she needed me to say yes to whatever she’d asked, and I thought about Berenice doing the dishes for her roommates in Chicago and how hard she felt it was to be nice to people. I didn’t understand how anyone could find it hard to be nice. It seemed to me the easiest thing, pleasing people, strangers and friends. You only had to go with the flow, nod, agree, fetch, go do what they wanted you to. It made all the decisions for you.

  “I can’t promise you anything,” I said to Daphné.

  She said she understood.

  Aurore was drinking wine in a corner with Ohri when I went into the reception room. She was laughing at something he’d said, but I knew it wasn’t funny. We’d discussed how unfunny Ohri was a million times.

  My mother wanted my impressions on meeting the president and all I did was shrug. I didn’t care about the president, or Daphné’s birthday. Maybe I didn’t even care about German. Maybe German was useless. Hell, even the president didn’t speak it. All I wanted was to find Porfi. I knew it would be giving him a disproportionate sense of his own power to put Denise’s death on him, but if there was the slightest chance it would crush him, or at least make Denise one of the five or fewer prominent memories from junior high that would weigh on him forever, then it would be worth it.

  Porfi and Victor were smoking in the parking lot. Their backs were to me and they didn’t see me approach them until I was close enough that I could read the names on the soccer cards they were showing each other.

  “Hey!” Porfi said as he turned to face me. “Don’t sneak up on people like that. You fucking scared me.”

  “Have cards to trade?” Victor asked me.

  They were both way taller than me, but I knew from watching Viet Vo Dao on TV that it didn’t matter. I kicked Porfi in the knee, and as he bent to grab it, I punched his temple. He fell on his side on the pavement, wailing. I kicked him again, in the kidney, and pivoted, ready for Victor, but Victor went low, leaned over Porfi, struck him on the face.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I said.

  Victor didn’t respond. He kept smashing Porfi.

  I sat right there, in the middle of all the soccer cards they’d dropped.

  “Fucking pussy,” Victor said, but I didn’t know who he was saying it to. “Come finish what you started.”

  Victor helped me up. Porfi made a sound. I kicked him one last time and walked off.

  I went straight home. There was nowhere else to go. I knew I’d left Aurore and my mother at the party, but the door to my brothers’ room was closed—I didn’t know if they were in there. I made myself a sandwich and
took it to the living room. I knew exactly what would be playing on TV so I didn’t bother turning it on, I just sat there on the squeaking couch, kind of looking around for something to focus on other than Porfi. Halfway through my sandwich, I noticed that the printer next to the computer was blinking and got up to turn it off. There was an “out of paper” message on the screen, and I figured I could be a good citizen and fill the tray for the next user. The second I pushed the full tray closed, the printer started laboring loudly and spitting out pages of Leonard’s dissertation, the last 16 of its 295 pages, to be precise. Leonard must not have seen the printer had run out of paper, and he’d probably taken the first 279 pages of his work upstairs assuming he had the whole thing. I knew he’d turned in his final manuscript the day before, four copies of it, bound and manically checked for page order beforehand, so this one was probably just a copy he’d printed for himself. I took the 16 pages to my room.

  Simone called an hour later, from the cell phone my mother had bought her before she’d moved to Paris. She kept complaining that having a cell phone was a horrible thing because it made you reachable at all times, and being reachable at all times was the first step toward the end of freedom, but she still used the cell phone to call me every night. She also gave no hint that any human being other than our mother had ever dialed her number.

  “So,” Simone said. “Did you talk to him?”

  “The president? No,” I said, “I didn’t get a chance. But I think Coffin had a word with him.”

  “About the education reforms?”

  “What else is there to talk about?”

  “Was he charismatic at all? He doesn’t look too charismatic on TV, but sometimes it just doesn’t translate.”

  “I think Coffin is actually more charismatic than him,” I said.

  “Ouch.”

  I’d picked up the cordless phone in my mother’s room and brought it to mine. I was talking to Simone while lying on her old bed. I slept in it sometimes. I always made it in the morning when I did.