I Love You Too Much

by Alicia Drake

  And my dad said: “I don’t know; it’s complicated. There’s a hearing scheduled for December.”

  “Why is it taking so long?”

  “I told you, Maman, it’s complicated. She’s complicated.”

  “Well, I told you that from the start.”

  “I know you did.”

  There was silence and then my grandmother said: “It’s not good for Paul, the way it’s dragging on. He’s put on weight. I noticed it as soon as he walked in.”

  “I know that,” my father said.

  “Is it Cindy? Is she overfeeding him?”

  “I don’t know what is going on.”

  “Well, you need to find out, you need to take control of the situation.”

  “How can I take control, Mother? I couldn’t control her when we were together, how am I going to control her now we’re apart?”

  “You have to talk to her.”

  “We don’t talk.”

  “E-mail her, then. Get your lawyer to speak to her. Did you see the way he was eating bread at the table?”

  “What can I do?” My father’s voice was raised.

  “He needs help. He must see someone, a nutritionist, a doctor. He needs to be on a diet, he needs rules. He has no discipline, no self-control, that’s his problem.”

  My hands were clammy. My armpits were cold and wet. I could smell myself, my flesh all around me. I hated my expanding body. A door opened in the corridor just ahead of me. My grandfather walked out of his study and closed the door quietly behind him. I ducked down to do up my laces, which weren’t laces at all, they were Velcro fasteners, but I figured my grandfather wouldn’t know the difference. My stomach folded around me as I bent down, a soft underbelly; it hung down a little. I looked up from my shoes. My grandfather looked at me and blinked a couple of times, although there was no bright light.

  “Paul,” he said. “Ah, there you are. I was just reading an interesting article on Alaska, yes, the bird life there.” He stood in front of me, not moving, poised for something.

  I got the feeling he was stalling for time, trying to recover. I got the feeling I had stumbled across a jigsaw piece that I hadn’t known I’d been looking for. I remembered coming for lunch with my grandparents—I must have been about seven—and my grandmother was washing her hands, and her diamond ring caught the light and glittered in the bubbles of the soap and I asked her who gave her the ring and she said it was my grandfather and when I asked her what for, she said: “What for? That is a very good question, Paul. I would say for putting up with all his bêtises throughout our marriage, that is what for.”

  Bêtises are the kinds of naughty things that a child does. I remember thinking that it was a pretty big diamond for putting up with someone’s naughtiness. But now, as my grandfather stood looking shifty outside his study, I thought maybe his bêtises were different than what I’d imagined back then.

  There was silence from the kitchen, the silence of two people who’ve been caught by someone while they were talking about that someone, the silence of two people holding their breath behind the door. And then my grandmother said in this really fake, bouncy voice, “At last, the coffee is ready.”

  She came out into the corridor.

  “Ah, Paul, there you are,” she said, as if she’d been looking for me. “Let’s go through to the living room for coffee, shall we? Now, tell me, who do you think that is playing the piano so beautifully?”

  By the time we left my grandparents’ place it was dark, and the prostitutes’ faces were pale moons in the night. There were cars streaming by, red brake lights, legs striding down to the curb, windows opening, eyes staring into headlights.

  It was hot in the car and I felt dizzy.

  “Why did you lie, Paul?” my father said. He accelerated away from the traffic lights and my head was thrown back against the leather headrest.

  “Why did you lie?” he asked again.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Come on, Paul, don’t expect me to believe you got seventeen, you’ve never scored over ten.”

  “I did. Ask Maman.”

  “We don’t talk.”

  “Then you’ll just have to believe me.”

  He stared at the road ahead and vented his anger on the gearbox. I did get seventeen. Guillaume let me copy his test, which was hard to do because of the calculations, but he left his paper uncovered and angled it toward me so I could see it. He did it in return for me letting him play FIFA on my PSP.

  We sat in silence. When we got as far as the boulevard Saint-Germain I said:

  “Was your dad like that when you were young?”

  “Like what?”

  “Xavier this, Xavier that, Xavier for president.”

  “Yes,” he said and he laughed, but not as if it was funny.

  “Don’t you hate him for it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And Xavier, were you jealous of him?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It was always that way.”

  He was silent for a bit and then he said: “When Xavier was eleven and I was eight, his godfather took him to the Arc de Triomphe to see the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. His godfather was in the army. I stayed at home with Maman; my father was away on business somewhere. I remember when they came back late that night, Xavier’s godfather walked in wearing his army uniform and Xavier was wearing a navy-blue overcoat and I was there waiting in my pajamas. Xavier had been gone only a couple of hours, but it felt like somehow he’d turned into a man and there I was, still at home with Maman, still a boy. He was all excited when he walked through the door. ‘It was me, Maman,’ he said, ‘it was me that lit the flame.’ There’s a ceremony, you see, every night at the tomb to light the flame, and somehow Xavier’s godfather had fixed it so that Xavier got to light the flame.”

  He drove for a bit without saying anything and then he said: “It was always Xavier. He was the light and I came after. That’s all.”

  I wondered if he meant That’s all as in “It’s no big deal” or That’s all as in “That is the whole problem, the story of my life and the thing I will never get over.” I felt sorry for him then. I wondered if the real disappointment in my dad’s life was not so much me as a son but him as a son never having been the light of his father’s life.

  We drew up outside our apartment building and he parked, but he kept the engine running. He said nothing, just sat there, staring into the dark, looking sad. Finally he said:

  “I should go.”

  Just as he said that, there was the sound of a text arriving. I looked down at his phone lying in the niche between our seats. I saw the words on the screen between us.

  Come back, big boy. I’m gonna treat you mean.

  I remember that is exactly what it said. I felt a strange flush stir within me. Something forbidden. My dad snatched up the phone.

  “Some weirdo keeps sending me these texts and I don’t know who it is. They keep arriving.”

  He tried to put the phone away in his jacket, except the phone must have gotten caught up in the lining or something because he had to try a couple of times to jam it down inside.

  “Have you told the police?” I asked.

  “What’s the point? They are just texts.”

  “Isn’t there a number?”

  “Unidentified.”

  “Maybe it’s Irinka,” I said and I imagined an icy blonde with a gun against my father’s head.

  “Oh God, Irinka. I was supposed to call her.” He made a sound in his throat as if he was trying to cough out a laugh. “You don’t want to upset a Russian,” he said.

  “When will I see you?”

  “In a week. We’ll do something fun, go see a film. You should go in now, Paul.” He waited in the car while I put in the code and pushed open the wooden door to our building, then I heard him drive away.

  I went upstairs to the apartment. Maman’s bedroom door was open, but no one was there. The door to Lou’s bedroom was closed. I could hear the sound of
the steam iron and Cindy talking in Filipino. I found her in the kitchen. She kissed the screen the way she always does when she says good-bye to her kids.

  “You want some hot chocolate, Paul?” She was wearing her pajamas and her Minnie Mouse slippers; she had black mouse ears sticking out from each foot. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.

  Chapter Eight

  Scarlett and I didn’t sit together in school, but I saw her in the corridor waiting to go into classes and in the courtyard during breaks. She didn’t wait for me after school; she said she couldn’t because that’s when she met up with Stéphane to go to the jardin. She messaged me, though, and once when she was ahead of me in the queue at the bakery she turned to me and said:

  “Do you remember the swings, Paul?”

  She’d drawn around her eyes with eyeliner. Her face looked dull against the painted black lines. She had bitten down her fingernails and the skin around them was pink and a little bloodied.

  The days were getting shorter and by the time I got out of school it was almost dark. Every week the Jardin du Luxembourg closed earlier and earlier and soon I could hear the guards whistling people out of there as I walked home alone. I wondered where Stéphane and Scarlett went now that they couldn’t make out in the jardin.

  Then one Wednesday afternoon about four weeks after La Baule, I found Scarlett waiting for me when I came out of school. We got out early on Wednesdays. She told me she wanted to get a new cover for her phone on the rue de Sèvres. She asked did I want to come. We didn’t take the bus; we walked. I asked her where Stéphane was and she told me they had broken up. He’d started going out with Inès, Scarlett’s best friend, and Scarlett had found out on Facebook. Inès has a big red mouth and a mole above her lip. The boys talked about her body and what they wanted to do to it, not as much as they talked about Scarlett’s, but Inès’s popularity was gaining as her breasts grew.

  “It was after Dubai,” Scarlett said. “I knew something was going on. I phoned a medium and she told me there was danger all around me. I should have listened to her. I thought he’d met some girl in Dubai, and all the time it was Inès. She borrowed my top and she wore it to go out with him. And she was always telling me he’s a user. ‘He’s using you, Scarlett, you’ll see.’” Scarlett sobbed a little. “It’s not possible. They’re all over Facebook together and she’s wearing my top from Zara.”

  We walked on in silence while she texted and then after a while she said:

  “How’s that little sister of yours?” She sounded like an adult when she said that, like a teacher or someone old.

  “She’s okay,” I said.

  “Have you got a photo?”

  “No.”

  “I want to come and see her one day.”

  I looked at her to see if she was joking, if she really meant it.

  “I love babies,” she said.

  We had to queue for ages at the phone shop so that Scarlett could buy a cover with Hello Kitty on it. It was three o’clock by the time we came out. We crossed into the little park right below my dad’s apartment. I could see the darkened windows of his living room and bedroom. I didn’t tell Scarlett my dad lived up there. We sat on the bench near the carousel. I used to spend so long on that carousel when I was small, going around and around in the orange jeep with the flashing light on its roof. Sometimes I chose the motorbike. Maria was my nanny then; she used to stand next to me, stamping her heels on the gravel, checking her watch, her phone. “They won’t be long,” she would say. My parents were off eating lunch or brunch somewhere, or shopping on the rue du Bac. I never really knew where they were.

  “What do you want to do now?” Scarlett asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can take you somewhere, but you can’t tell anyone.” She was looking at me in a strange way.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s secret. Special.” We were right opposite Le Bon Marché and they already had their Christmas window displays up and I thought she must mean Santa’s grotto or something like that.

  “It’s somewhere, you know, holy,” she said.

  “I thought you hated Catholicism and all that stuff.”

  “This isn’t Catholic. Well, it is, but it’s different. It’s soft Catholic.”

  “Like soft porn,” I said. It was a joke, but she didn’t laugh.

  “Do you want to come or not?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer; she turned away and walked on ahead and I followed her.

  There was fake snow falling in the department-store windows and automated penguins and polar bears waving at us. We passed the sales assistants on their breaks, standing around in the cold wearing thin black suits, their mouths held tight, sucking on cigarettes. Scarlett turned left on the rue du Bac; I was a few steps behind. We walked a little way and then she stopped by a bunch of gypsy women who were begging in an open doorway. One of them was wearing a long black skirt covered in green and orange parakeets. She was young, about sixteen, with a baby strapped to her chest and her hands pressed together as if she was in prayer.

  She took a step toward me, but Scarlett grabbed my wrist and pulled me through the gypsies and their outstretched hands and into a long, cobblestoned courtyard open to the sky. There were people everywhere. They were staring at the courtyard walls, which were covered in plaques, neat, white rectangular plaques that said THANK YOU, MARY. HAIL MARY FOR THE GIFT OF LIFE. THANK YOU TO THE VIRGIN WHO ANSWERED MY PRAYERS.

  I followed Scarlett and the plaques and the trail of excitement leading somewhere. Scarlett pulled open a door and I smelled incense, not fresh and burning, but stale incense that was always there. There was a knot of people stuck in the doorway, all trying to get into the chapel at the same time, black people, white people, Filipinas, old nuns in white, young nuns in navy blue, South Americans, a tour guide with an umbrella, a woman wearing a sari with jade-green rosary beads in her hand. Inside there were so many people that the chapel hummed. We sat down on a wooden pew and I listened to the hum.

  It felt safe in there. It felt like Cindy’s room. It wasn’t like the church we used to go to with my elementary school, which was huge and dark and had a sculpture of Jesus carrying a big black cross on His back, looking up at the sky as if He was searching for God but would never find Him.

  Here, everything was light. There were shimmery golden mosaics and the ceiling was painted sky blue with white clouds and gold and white stars. There was a big white statue of the Virgin Mary standing on a puffy white ball of cloud that stuck right out of the wall. She was wearing a high gold crown that had two flaming gold hearts at the front and there was a halo of electric-light stars that went all the way around her head. I really loved that. She had these rays coming out of her hands. They were gold metal with bits of diamanté or something that glittered and they shot out of her hands and went straight down into the cloud ball below.

  There were women everywhere: in the pews beside me, and on the walls, sculptures and paintings of women and angels, soft-mouthed women with love in their smiles, their arms held out to me. And the Virgin Marys were not the sad, black-eyed Virgins you get in other churches; they were floaty white Virgins, electric-light Virgins. Golden-hearted Virgins.

  A side door opened and a priest walked in and came and stood at the front.

  “The Lord is here,” he said and he raised his arms into the air. His green cassock lifted up and I could see his jeans beneath, not cool jeans, but ironed jeans, the kind you buy in Monoprix.

  “Search for His pardon, beg for His pardon,” the priest said. “Pray for His pardon, for He alone can accept our sins.”

  He kept going on about preparing ourselves now for the life after, repenting now, repenting of all our sins. Then something started happening at the front; the priest was handing out the bread. At my grandparents’ church in Neuilly, when they hand out the Communion, it takes forever and everyone queues and looks depressed. Here people went rushing to the front, rushing like it was hot bre
ad and it would run out. Nobody waited their turn; they all stood up and ran.

  There was an old guy in front of us who looked like he was a waiter from the Flore—he was dressed in black and white—and he knelt in the aisle for the whole service. He had wooden rosary beads around his neck and he was so thin that when he bent forward to pray, I could see the tendons in his neck, holding his head on to his body. He went up to take the bread and so did Scarlett. I stayed in the pew. I only wanted to look at the Virgin and her soft mouth. “A woman of most excellent obedience”; that is what the priest called her.

  When the waiter guy came back from Communion, he lay down in the aisle and kissed the floor; his lips met the cold white marble and his legs stretched out behind him. I wondered why he did that. He was wearing leather sandals and no socks and it was December.

  “He’s a pilgrim,” Scarlett whispered, as if that explained his bare ankles and his body lying flat on the floor.

  Most people left the chapel straight after the bread. But Scarlett didn’t move; she sat there staring straight ahead, so I did the same. She sat there while the priest walked out and left by the same side door he had entered from. Navy-blue nuns started blowing out candles and moving furniture about. But Scarlett kept staring, like she was in a trance or something. And then finally she said:

  “Do you want to see Saint Catherine?”

  She led me up to a glass box at the front of the chapel.

  “That’s her,” she said, pointing to the box. “That’s Saint Catherine.” The woman inside was old and dead and lying flat on her back with a funny white triangular hat on her head that fanned out from her forehead. Her hands were held together in prayer. I put my face up to the glass. She was wearing black shoes. I was glad I hadn’t been the one to put the shoes on her feet.

  “When she died they buried her and then ages after, they dug her up again and her body was intact, it was just like the day they buried her. Her arms and legs were dangly, not rigid, and she hadn’t decomposed. Then they knew she was a saint. Because she was intact.” Scarlett’s eyes were funny when she said that, glittery and wide, like she really believed that stuff.