I Love You Too Much

by Alicia Drake

  I kept walking. I was still breathing. I knew that because I could hear the sound of my breath echoing back at me from my phone.

  “Are you there?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  I needed to tell her. I needed someone to know. But how could I trust her?

  “It’s Max,” I said.

  “Who’s Max?”

  “Estelle’s son. Estelle, my mom’s best friend.”

  “The one with the plastic tits?”

  “Yeah, her.”

  “What about her?”

  “Not her, it’s him. Max. He walked in on his father. He walked in on his father and a man having sex,” I said.

  “Oh my God!” She shouted it, the way she shouts with her friends in the jardin when they are slamming gossip about. “How bad is that?” She laughed out loud.

  I didn’t reply.

  “Are you still there, Paul?” she said.

  I could hear excitement in her voice; she was enjoying the revelation, replaying it in her imagination, waiting for details.

  “Yeah, I’m still here.”

  “Where were they?”

  “At his dad’s apartment. He went around and found them in the laundry room.”

  “In the laundry room? Why would you do it in the laundry room with all your dirty washing?”

  “He was wearing a hood.”

  “Who was wearing a hood?”

  “The guy. The guy was. The guy doing it, he was wearing a black hood.”

  She swore then, a whole trail of expletives that went on and on. I kept walking, staring straight ahead.

  She said: “Didn’t they see Max standing there? Didn’t they, like, stop and say, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing here?’”

  “No,” I said. “They did not.” I curled my fingers around the blue inhaler inside my jeans.

  “Is he gay?” she said.

  “Is who gay?”

  “Max’s dad, who do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen him with women. He has loads of women. He’s always got some new girl. He says it’s easy for him to attract women—”

  “Yeah,” she said to someone. “I’m coming.” Then to me she said: “They drive me crazy. They won’t leave me alone.” She shouted at someone, “I told you. I’m on the phone.” She sighed with frustration. “I hate my mom. All she does is nag. I have to go. I’ll text you later.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do that.” And then I said: “Wait. Scarlett?”

  I wanted to tell her not to tell anyone about Max.

  But she’d already gone.

  My grandmother’s handbag was stiff and black, with the letters D, I, O, and R hanging off it in gold. It was sitting on top of the table in the hallway when I walked in. I heard her voice somewhere in the apartment. The water in the flower vase was cloudy. The white petals had turned oily and transparent and there was red pollen smudged across the table. Maman wouldn’t be happy about that.

  I found them in the kitchen, Maman and her mother, one on either side of the marble island.

  “Where have you been?” Maman said when she saw me. “Oh my God, what happened to your leg? Your jeans are ripped. You’re soaking, take that coat off, you look terrible. Didn’t you get my texts?”

  She felt my forehead like I was a child.

  “I went for a walk,” I said.

  “He’ll get ill like that,” my grandmother said.

  Maman helped me take my coat off and my sweatshirt, then she threw the clothes on the counter behind her.

  “Where’s Cindy?” I said.

  “She’s gone to the supermarket,” Maman said.

  “He needs a bath,” my grandmother said, “put him in a hot bath.”

  “Come, Paul.” Maman led me into my bathroom and turned on the taps.

  I was so cold.

  “Where were you?”

  “I got lost.”

  “How did you get lost?” She was testing the water, trailing her hand in the bath. “Where did you go?”

  “I wanted to see the Seine.”

  “The Seine? What did you want to see the Seine for? It’s pouring down out there. What’s wrong with you, Paul?” She touched my forearm.

  “Nothing.” I shrugged. “I’m hungry, that’s all.”

  She left me then and I locked the door and took off the rest of my wet clothes and I stood there, naked and shivering. There was dried blood on my leg. I looked at my body in the mirror. I was fatter than before. The hairs on my legs were black and insistent. I had hairs in my armpits too, growing thicker and blacker, sprouting out of me. A bitter smell of my own sweat followed me around all the time now, like it was my new shadow. I waited until the bath was deep enough to drown in and then I lay in it and cried.

  All this pain was my pain. There was no one to share it with. Even if I told Scarlett the truth, that it was me, not Max, my dad in the laundry room, not his, it wouldn’t be her pain, it would just be a story she could tell, a kind of horror story that made her gasp and be thankful that it wasn’t her dad.

  When I went back into the kitchen, they were still standing there. Maman looked tired; her skin was purple beneath her eyes. She’d worked late the week before.

  “Better now, Paul?” my grandmother said; she didn’t wait for a reply. “I’ve just been telling your mother about my terrible day. My car got towed away on the rue du Bac, can you believe it? I only nipped in to pick up my coffee—of course the queues were terrible before Christmas—and then when I came out I couldn’t find the car.”

  Why was she even here? I wanted Cindy, not her.

  “I walked up and down the rue du Bac looking for it, I thought I was losing my mind, and then this man came out of the hairdresser’s and he said to me, ‘Are you looking for a silver Golf with a Yorkshire terrier in the back?’ and I said yes.”

  She wouldn’t stop talking.

  “He said they’d taken it ten minutes ago; they took it with the dog inside. I screamed when he told me that. He said they jacked up the car and rolled it onto some kind of trailer. He said they were racing to do it, like they were in the pit at Le Mans. He saw it all with his own eyes, Chipie sitting on the ledge and looking out the back window as they towed her away. Can you believe it? It’s criminal. She could have died from the shock or dehydration. I could sue them. I didn’t bring her with me now. I left her at home. She’s still recovering. Christophe’s looking after her.”

  I wouldn’t want Christophe looking after me. He is my mother’s brother. She hardly ever sees him. She won’t let him come to the apartment. I looked at my grandmother standing there with her black suede ankle boots and the silver zips running up the back of them and their high wedge heels that make her tip forward. She was wearing her gray fur gilet, the one she thinks makes her look young. The flesh along her jawline was loose, and her chin bulged a little underneath. She tries so hard to run after my mother, to keep her in her sights. I wished she would leave us alone. I went over to the cupboard.

  “What are you doing?” Maman asked.

  “Just getting a cookie.”

  “Not now, Paul,” she said. “Cindy will be back any minute, she’s bringing soup.”

  I didn’t want soup. I wanted Cindy’s rice. I wanted a massive plate of Cindy’s white rice with a slab of butter in the middle and ketchup too, a dirty squirt of it, and I wanted to mix it all up, around and around, the butter chasing the ketchup until the rice turned pink and the butter left skids of golden grease on the rim of the plate and I could eat the lot and I could forget.

  “I’m starving,” I said.

  “The last thing you need is a cookie,” my grandmother said.

  Lou started crying from her bedroom, that special cry she uses when she wants feeding, a kind of desperate cry that makes people stop in the street and lean over the pram and look inside and wince with pity.

  “She’s hungry,” my grandmother said.

  Maman said nothing. She hates it when you tell her
Lou is hungry. She pulled open the fridge door and scanned the shelves, acting like she was looking for something when really she was just trying to hide her anger. The baby monitor was on the island and the radio version of Lou’s screams joined the real live sound coming from along the corridor. She was televised too, twisting her body, bringing her legs up to her chest, scratching at her face with her fingers, milking the full drama from it.

  “She’s not getting enough food, Séverine,” my grandmother said. “She’s hungry. That is the real problem, not this colic you keep going on about. You did the same with Paul when he was a baby. He was always hungry. Always crying. Don’t you remember?”

  Maman slammed the fridge door. It should have been more dramatic but the fridge suction pads took the bang out of the slam. She turned to face her mother. There was silence between them. The only sound was Lou’s screaming.

  And then Maman said: “And you, Mother, what makes you think your child-rearing was so perfect?”

  I remember the way she said the word Mother, like she was throwing a punch to break my grandmother’s jaw. They stared at each other across the kitchen island. The skin above my grandmother’s lip was ironed flat. No matter how hard she tried, she was losing ground. Maybe getting at my mother was the only way she had of staying in the race.

  “What do you mean by that?” My grandmother’s smile was jaunty as she said that, trying to downplay the aggression that she had unleashed, trying to put back the pin she had pulled from the grenade.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mother, how about we start with the fact your son still lives in a maid’s room above your apartment and he’s thirty-seven, how about we start right there?”

  “What has Christophe got to do with this?”

  “You criticized the way I bring up my children. I’m criticizing the way you brought up yours. Your son can’t even cook his own supper. He’s dependent, emasculated.”

  “He has a job.”

  “You do his washing.”

  “He doesn’t have a washing machine.”

  “Why not, Mother? Why do you think he doesn’t have a washing machine?”

  “It’s different with a boy, they still need their mothers. You’ll see one day.” She jerked her eyebrows in my direction.

  My mother laughed, a harsh, bitter laugh.

  “You call him a boy even though he’s thirty-seven and divorced. I was out earning money, living on my own in Paris at nineteen, and there he is, still tucked up living above his maman.”

  “You wanted to leave, Séverine, that was your choice,” my grandmother said.

  “You’re right.” My mother drew her lips back from her bright white teeth. “I wanted to leave.” To get away from you. She didn’t say that last bit out loud, but that is what she meant, that is what she was thinking; it was obvious from the way she was staring at my grandmother, staring so hard that it seemed any second now, two burning red laser beams would spring from Maman’s eyes and drill straight into my grandmother’s skull.

  Then out of nowhere my mother said:

  “You always made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for Philippe.”

  My grandmother made a snorting sound. “Nonsense, Séverine, that was you who thought that.”

  “Perhaps, yes, perhaps you are right, but if I thought that, it was because you made me think that. That I was lucky to marry him.”

  “Well, you were.”

  “Meaning what?” my mother said.

  It would be better if my grandmother shut up now. She was taking my mother to a place where they would both erupt in flames and I wasn’t sure what I could do when they got there.

  But she didn’t shut up; she continued, her slack jaw set, her voice hard.

  “Meaning you were lucky to marry him, Séverine. He was a good catch. And you caught him. Were you vigilant enough?” She raised an eyebrow as she said that.

  “Why did I need to be vigilant, Mother?” Maman sounded like she was making a threat.

  Stop, I wanted to say to her, stop, you don’t understand. You don’t know what he wants. No one could be vigilant enough for him, not you, not me, not your mother. But I said nothing. I was mute and inert. I watched as my grandmother pursed her lips, opened her manicured hands, and said: “There must be a lot of temptations along the way for a man like Philippe—handsome, rich, clever, from a good family.”

  “You sound like you want to fuck him yourself, Mother.”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Séverine.”

  Maman laughed out loud, but not as if it were funny. And then she shook her head and said: “You used to love me for being beautiful. You used to buy me dresses and do my hair and tell me all the girls at school wanted to be like me. And then you got angry; angry when I got dressed up, angry when I went out. That time we went to Naples, to that hotel where you broke your toe on the side of the bath. I was fifteen and I was wearing my new red dress that I had bought from Kookaï with my own money and when I came down, you told me I looked like a slut. Remember? We went out for pizza and there was a good-looking waiter who took our order and he was wearing a red shirt, not the red of my dress, but a deep black-red, and he leaned over me and called me signorina when he took the menu away. I looked up and he was staring at me and you were staring at me too, Maman, staring at me and hating me, I saw it in your eyes. Is that why you keep Christophe? So there is someone you can control?”

  Lou had stopped crying. I held my breath and watched my grandmother. It was like a wildlife documentary on TV, like watching the antelope being stalked by the lioness down to the edge of the water hole, and the antelope looks around with bulging eyes, waiting for the leap that she knows is coming, for the tearing of claws into her own flesh. But then my grandmother laughed out loud, not a real laugh, a brittle Disney laugh, and I realized that she too was a lioness.

  “Enjoy it while you can, Séverine,” my grandmother said. “You keep your grip with your personal trainer, your dermatologist, your teeth bleaching, your workouts, your detox diets. You’ve got Lou in her baby clothes and cashmere, oh, how you love it, the Bonpoint outfits, the Liberty blouses—don’t think I haven’t seen you styling her like she’s a model at one of your fashion shoots. But wait until the day when she wears her red dress and her breasts are full, not fake, not inserted by some surgeon; wait until she is young and desirable. Wanted.” She spoke slowly, relishing every word. “Then it will be you watching the waiter and he will see only her.” She paused to take a breath. “No one will look at you then, Séverine. Or if they do, it is only as the well-preserved mother of Lou. It will be Lou who is the object of desire, Lou who is the one everyone wants, her beauty, not yours, on the Métro, on the terrasse of the café, every day, everyone staring at her, not you, and no amount of clothing or money or dieting will change that. Wait until you feel that pain. Wait until all your power has gone.”

  My mother stared at her mother. I stared too, transfixed by her strange, triumphant smile.

  “Voilà, Séverine, when you know that moment, then perhaps you too will have need of your son.”

  There was silence.

  A key turned in the service door just behind us. It was Cindy, loaded up with shopping bags from Ed l’épicier. The smell of garbage cans followed her up the tradesman’s staircase.

  “Good evening, madame,” she said to my grandmother. “Hello, madame. Hello, Paul.” She was smiling. “There was no dishwashing liquid, madame, I looked everywhere, but there was none. I got some product for sir’s ironing.”

  Maman said nothing.

  “I must go,” my grandmother said, her voice sharp and pointy. She didn’t kiss us good-bye. She leaned forward slightly on her wedges and walked slowly and deliberately down the corridor, taking care not to pitch over onto her face. We heard the slam of the front door, and then Lou started crying again.

  “I go, madame,” Cindy said. “I give her the bottle.”

  Maman didn’t protest. Her thumbs were all over her phone screen.

  “Where
are you? You are never there when I call,” she said into her phone, and then in another voice, a pleading voice, she said: “Call me back, won’t you?”

  She went over to the window. The apartment opposite was in darkness. She stood by the window and wept. I wanted to go to her, but I didn’t know how to reach her. I didn’t know what I could say that would comfort her. So I stood and watched with the dead lump in my chest and my hands hanging down by my sides.

  Chapter Eleven

  I looked it all up. I looked up the sites. I saw the images. I watched the videos of men doing it. I let their bodies and faces flash before me; I let their cocks beat at the screen until I couldn’t watch anymore. I spent hours on my laptop. I watched it all.

  Later that night, my father texted me.

  How’ve you been? he wrote.

  I read it so that he would know I’d read it.

  I wanted him to feel uneasy. I wanted him to remember the sound of a door shutting somewhere in the apartment.

  Half an hour later, he texted me again.

  Are you okay, Paul?

  After it was over and the man had taken off his hood, did he turn to my father and say: Merde, I’ve lost my inhaler, it must be here somewhere. I really need it for my asthma. I have chronic asthma, you see?

  Did they get down on their hands and knees then? Did they scrabble across the parquet side by side, my father with his cycling shorts pulled up, the man with his stomach hanging over the belt of his jeans, no longer animal and hard, two strangers searching through a pile of cold, discarded clothes. And later, when Essie came round, did my father say to her, Did you come by this afternoon, Essie?

  Come by, sir?

  Here to the apartment? This afternoon, I thought I heard someone.

  Sir was waiting for me?

  No, Essie, no, I wasn’t waiting. I just wanted to know if you came by this afternoon.

  Oh, no, sir.

  I was hungry again. I went out into the corridor. Cindy was in the kitchen polishing the surfaces.