I Love You Too Much

by Alicia Drake

  “Don’t you know that? All those plastics that leach BPA and give you cancer, they’re everywhere. You shouldn’t keep your Evian bottle in the car because it heats up in the sun and then, man, you are cooked.”

  “I never knew that,” I said.

  “Hey, Scarlett,” Gabriel called from the sofa. “Did you see that shot? I’ve got him on the run now. Watch out, Federer, I am onto you.”

  Scarlett had her back to Gabriel and she didn’t turn around. She kept talking like she hadn’t heard.

  “She looks like you,” she said to me.

  “She does not.”

  “Yes, she does. Look at her eyes. She’s got your eyes.”

  “How can she have my eyes?”

  “She’s got my eyes,” Gabriel shouted from the living room. “Everyone says she’s got her daddy’s eyes.”

  Scarlett ignored him.

  “She’s going to be beautiful when she’s older,” she said.

  I tried to imagine what Lou would look like when she was older. I tried to imagine Maman then. I thought of those other mothers who wait at the school gates on Fridays. They watch as their daughters saunter out of school, teenage hair pouring down one shoulder, teenage bodies ripe for the picking. They look sad, those mothers. They sit high up in their Range Rovers. They look like they have lost something they won’t find again.

  Gabriel let out a roar from the living room.

  “Man, I lobbed him. Did you see that?” He took a swig of beer. “I lobbed Federer, can you believe that? I am pumping!”

  I could see the TV screen from my bedroom door and I watched as Federer walked back to the baseline with his head down. Then he turned and looked back over his shoulder, like he too couldn’t believe he’d been lobbed by Gabriel. I felt sorry for Federer.

  “I gotta go,” Scarlett said, checking her phone.

  “You can’t leave me now,” Gabriel called out, holding his arms open wide to her. “Not now that I’m in with a chance. Don’t leave me, Scarlett. I need you.”

  She didn’t say anything. She stayed where she was in my bedroom with Lou in her arms, but I saw her face crack open. I saw her smile.

  She went away that weekend. She had to go and see her grandparents. She complained all Thursday and Friday about going, saying how boring it was there, how she would miss me. I was supposed to stay with my dad that weekend, but he had a race on somewhere, so I was at home. I got up late on Saturday. The apartment was dark and silent. Maman was out getting her hair done. Gabriel was out. Cindy was out somewhere with Lou, I don’t know where. I sat in my room for a bit. I watched TV. I got up and wandered through the apartment.

  Everything was perfect, the way Maman likes it. The silk cushions were plumped up on the sofa; the books were lined up straight on the coffee table. I’ve never seen her read those books, but the first thing she does when she gets home from work at night is go into the living room and move them a centimeter to the right or the left, as if she can’t rest until that’s done. Then sometimes she calls the florist to ask why he hasn’t been by to change the roses. Or she’ll run her finger along the lacquer surface of the coffee table and call to Cindy to come in and remove a finger mark that she can see; she kind of worships that coffee table.

  Cindy is always polishing, tidying, cleaning. It’s a full-time job, keeping the apartment perfect. I’m not allowed to touch the walls, because that way they stay white. Maman has them painted once a year. Cindy is constantly tidying stuff away. The out-of-season clothes get packed in boxes. Maman has a whole room for storing the clothes that she is not wearing. It’s the chambre de bonne next to Cindy’s, up on the sixth floor; it’s the same size as Cindy’s room. Maman wants everything pristine, everything in order; it makes me think of a rubber band stretched tight.

  I got a message then from Scarlett telling me she was on the A11, heading west. I thought maybe I could go to the Chapelle de la Médaille Miraculeuse again, that it would make the day go quicker. I walked all the way along the rue d’Assas. I saw the doors to Scarlett’s apartment building were open, so I looked in, just in case, but there was no one there, just an empty courtyard. I got as far as the corner of rue du Bac and rue de Babylone. I stood for a bit watching people going in and out of Le Bon Marché. I let the department-store air blow over me as the doors swung open and shut. It was warm and perfumed. The yellow shop lights stained people’s faces as they stepped back out into the daylight. They were Christmas shopping, coming out loaded up with orange carrier bags.

  I could smell roasted chestnuts; there was a guy selling them from a barrel at the entrance to the park below my dad’s place. I bought myself a packet of caramel-coated peanuts and I went and sat in the park on my own. I didn’t want to go to the chapel without Scarlett. She kept messaging me, sending me a running commentary of her journey—what she’d had for lunch, the row with her mother. Paris was empty without Scarlett.

  I sat on the bench and watched the carousel and I sucked the caramel off my peanuts. I watched the parents lifting their kids onto the motorbikes and jeeps. I looked up at my dad’s apartment. There was a light on in the living room and another light in his bedroom. It was probably Essie cleaning. She must get so bored; there was hardly anything to clean in there.

  Essie had lent me some keys a couple of weeks before; she’d said, “You never know when you might need them.” I don’t know why she said that. I never went to my dad’s if he or Essie wasn’t there. It was strange, thinking I was a guest in my dad’s apartment. They don’t tell you that when they break up, they don’t say, From now on you can come and see me only when I decide you can or when your mother lets you, but basically that is the reality.

  The keys were in my pocket. I didn’t usually carry them because I was worried I’d lose them, but I had them with me that afternoon. I put my hand in my jeans pocket and I turned the keys over: a flat silver key for the inner glass door downstairs and a star-shaped gold key for his apartment door. I swapped benches and went and sat farther along, which meant I could see the door to his building. A man went in. A white guy with a big shaved head opened the door and stepped through.

  Why couldn’t I go up to his apartment? Why couldn’t I just go up and be there, hang out in his living room, not do anything, just sit and watch TV? Wait for him. It was getting cold; I had only my thin parka on. I could tell my dad that I’d wanted to go up and get out of the cold. He wouldn’t mind.

  I got up and walked out of the park. I was only going to his apartment. I waited for a break in the traffic and I ran across the road. I walked along a bit until I got to his building. I pressed the digits of the door code. I put my hand on the door to push, but it swung out in front of me. A Filipino babysitter was coming out with a little boy in a gray balaclava. I helped her carry the stroller over the step and then I went in. The concierge’s rooms were dark behind lace curtains.

  I unlocked the glass door with the smooth silver key. There was a Christmas tree in the hall that was decorated with white lights and gold tinsel. There were presents loaded up under the tree. They weren’t real presents; they were just empty boxes wrapped up to look nice. Teresa does that too in our apartment building. She used to put up strings of flashing colored lights, but people in our building complained it wasn’t chic.

  I put my foot on the first step. I could hear my own breathing, coming fast and uneven. There was no noise on the staircase, not until I got to the second floor, and then I heard a child crying. Third floor there was silence; fourth floor, silence. Fifth floor was my dad’s floor. I thought I heard voices. I stopped to listen. Nothing.

  I stood outside his door looking at the dark green paint. It was so green, it was almost black. I looked up at the metal spy hole and I imagined my dad standing on the other side of the door and looking out at me through the peephole, seeing my face distorted with my eyes large and my cheeks gross and outsize. I heard voices again. From inside.

  I put my key in the lock, the star-shaped gold key; my hand was shak
ing. I pressed the key in slightly and turned it just one notch to the left. The lock released, which meant someone must be home because the door had only been pushed shut. I nudged gently at the front door and it opened. I was careful not to make any sound. I heard noises from inside, not laughter, not talking.

  The door to my father’s bedroom was wide open. It was empty in there. The bed was made, the pillows plump, and the duvet cover smooth, not a crease. The living-room doors were open. Something had happened in there, some violence had taken place, I did not know what. The magazines and books that usually lay on the coffee table had been thrown all over the floor; Men’s Fitness was lying with its pages of big bodies splayed. There was a black vase broken on the cream rug. The water had stained the rug a dull gray and there were shards of jagged black glass sticking up and white flowers lying smashed on the floor.

  I walked dazed along the corridor toward the voices. The door to the laundry room was open just a bit. A windowless room. I stood to the side of the door, not showing myself. I stood so that I could see through the narrow gap. I saw a man. Blindfolded, I thought. No, not blindfolded, a black hood over his face. Slits for eyes. Like wrestlers wear. Behind my father. My father’s chest was naked. He was wearing cycling shorts, but they were pulled down. The hooded man was punishing my father, punishing him with his sex—son sexe, that is what they say in French. There was sweat on my father’s body, not sweat from running, sweat from fucking, from being fucked. They were animals. Hammering at each other, grappling, shouting, saying things. There were red welts on his shoulders. “Beating and thrashing”—that’s what the man behind my father was saying. He needed taming. He needed to be taught a lesson. I could see them through the crack in the door, the laundry room with the washer and the dryer, their feet squeaking on the white tiles, my father’s work shirts, washed and ironed, hanging from the rack above their heads.

  I looked away. There was a blue asthma inhaler on the floor by my feet and I wondered if it was his, the man in the mask’s, if he had dropped it when he was putting on his mask. A leather jacket was lying there too, abandoned. I wondered what would happen if he had an asthma attack now. If he would start to cough and choke and wheeze inside the black rubber. “I’ll make you beg for it. I’m going to thrash you so you can’t sit down.” “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” I tasted my own sweat. I tasted my own tears.

  I reached down and picked up the inhaler. I took some steps backward. I put it in my pocket. I stepped on the jacket that was lying on the floor. Is this what I had been searching for?

  I fell slightly against the doorjamb, knocking my shoulder. I got through the door but it made a noise as I shut it and afterward I wondered if my father had heard. I ran down the steps, two at a time I ran down them, down the burgundy-and-gold-flowered carpet, down the stairs, the oblong descent of dark wood and polish, the black-red of the stained-glass windows. The brass banisters were green, glowing green in the overhead electric light; someone was going up in the elevator. I hated that elevator. It was a black elevator with a wrought-iron door that closed in a concertina that would rip your arm off if it could. That is what a door like that would do in an elevator like that. I burst out of the door. I was crying. I ran. Fast. I ran fast, but I couldn’t keep up the pace for long. I was so unfit. I couldn’t even run to the end of the road. I looked over my shoulder. He wasn’t following me. He wasn’t even running after me. I stopped and bent over, holding my knees, to catch my breath.

  Everyone was staring at me. I was crying so much. I was sobbing. Is that what you are? Is that what you want? Is that why you left Maman, why you left me, because we can’t give you that? I was on the boulevard Raspail and people were pushing past me. Those texts he got, the text on his phone that he said some weirdo was sending. I’m gonna treat you mean. All the training and his body obsession, his abs, his chest, all the pushing harder, faster, taking Didier, riding around Longchamp on his bike with his ass in the air. Begging for it. Todd. I thought of Todd, the animal man and the bulge in his shorts when he was standing in the corridor with my dad looking at my dad’s phone. Maybe it was Todd under the mask—only Todd was Australian and the guy was shouting in French. Swearing in French.

  He told me to do better in math, to be better, to work harder.

  I walked along the boulevard Raspail. I can’t remember what I saw, I thought only about what I had seen. I’d tell my grandparents. I’d tell them over lunch in Neuilly, when Manuela was serving the cheese, when my grandmother had a salad leaf poised on her silver fork, when my grandfather was boring us all with the year and the château and the grape, when Xavier and Catherine were just back from their pilgrimage. I would tap the side of my glass and clear my throat, the way my grandfather does. You have always blamed Maman, I would say, complained that she is not one of you, rolled your eyes at her clothes when we went to lunch at your tennis club in the Bois de Boulogne, called her hard-faced, demanding, said it was her fault they broke up. Well, I’m here to tell you how your son spends his weekends. Last Saturday afternoon he was not at the race he’d told me he was at; last Saturday afternoon he was getting fucked by a man. Which man? you ask. Good question. I am unable to tell you which man because he was wearing a black hood with slits for the eyes and your son, your lying son, was begging for it.

  The cars were driving fast along the quai. I ran out between a gray car and a bus. I didn’t see the taxi and he had to swerve. “Go fuck yourself!” I shouted at him as he hooted at me. I climbed over the metal barrier on the other side of the road. The fat of my thighs squashed against the metal as I hoisted my leg up. I ripped my jeans on a spike getting over the metal. I cried out. I ran up some steps onto the bridge. I don’t know which bridge; don’t ask me which goddamn bridge. I stood there panting in the dark watching the Seine beneath me. Flowing fast under my feet. There were peaks of white surging on top of waves; there were smooth glassy plates of water. I had blood on my leg. It started to rain again, flooding the cone of light beaming down from the lamppost. All the shit he gave me for lying about my results. About how I had to try harder. Harder. Harder. I had tried so hard. You lied to me.

  I needed Scarlett, she would help me, she would know what this was about, what it meant, she would tell me about an article she’d read or a television program she had seen and then she would say, It wasn’t you, Paul, it wasn’t you that made this happen.

  I stood on the bridge for a long time. I stood letting the water rush beneath my feet, letting the cold air dig into me and all the yellow lights of Paris blur in my eyes. I stood until I looked down and a jacket came floating by, underneath the bridge to the right of where I was standing, near the bank; it was transported along on the flood of the river. It was a man’s jacket, red-and-black checks, floating and bloated, being washed away downstream. It had the shape of arms in the sleeves, the shape of a chest in the front. It was puffed up like there was a body inside.

  And I wished it were my father inside that shirt. I wished it were him, dead and floating before me, bloated, gray from being poached in the dirty rushing river, eyes wide open, looking up at me, knowing what I knew, seeing what I had seen. Thrashed to death.

  Chapter Ten

  It was too wet to stay out. My parka was soaked through and streams of water ran down inside my sweatshirt. Maman had bought me the coat in Milan when she went there for work. I thought it was pretty cool until it went all over Facebook that fur collars on parkas were made from dead dogs in China. Scarlett sent me videos of skinned dogs heaped up in piles, still writhing in pain, flapping their heads at the camera.

  I looked down at the collar; the skin was exposed beneath where the wet fur had clogged and clumped in the rain. I smelled like a dead dog.

  I wandered along by the Seine, looking down at the sheer drop into the river. The water lapped up against the wall on the other side of the bank and the tourist boats seemed to spin on the surface of the flooding tide. The Tuileries was empty, washed away, bleached of color, just bald blackened tr
ees and white statues and gray ponds of water. The wind whipped at my body. I was so cold. Maman kept texting me, asking where I was. I knew that was the Seine beneath me, the sky above, but when I looked around for help, the grand apartments on the quai Voltaire stared back at me, indifferent.

  I crossed over the road and looked into the windows of the antiquaires, lavish shops selling chandeliers and dark tapestries with unicorns and weeping ladies. There was a long black-and-white marble table that stood on heavy gold legs in the shape of bare-breasted women. On top of it there was a silver bowl of red flowers, petals the color of blood. Everything was extravagant and elegant and I cried then because I knew it would always be this way. Paris will never change, not for you, not for me. Paris doesn’t care that you are dying inside; it will always be beautiful, untouchable, aloof, unmoved by you and your pathetic fate.

  The rain lashed against me and the Christmas shoppers pushed by, clutching their bags to their chests, turning their eyes away from my tears, shoving me with their open umbrellas. I turned down the rue Bonaparte and I called Scarlett, but she didn’t pick up. She messaged straightaway. She said she couldn’t talk right then; she would call me back.

  I had a big dead lump inside my chest that was weighing me down. It got in the way of my breathing. It expanded within me; it pressed against my lungs. It struck against my vertebrae. I don’t know how I got home, because there was this dead lump making me sink, making me fall. When I got onto the rue d’Assas, Scarlett called.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  I wanted to cry out when I heard her voice. I wanted to say, No, no, I am not okay. I tried to pretend I was, even when I knew I was not, but now there is a deadweight inside my chest and a dead dog around my neck and they are bringing me down. Save me, Scarlett, I wanted to say.

  But instead I said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “You’re too lucky to be in Paris instead of stuck out in this dead man’s hole. I’ve just had to listen to my grandparents talking about their next-door neighbor’s colon cancer.”