I Love You Too Much

by Alicia Drake

  She said she wanted to get a glass of water. I checked my phone. I had heard nothing from my father since lunchtime. Scarlett was gone for a long time. I went out in the corridor to see where she was. The door to Maman’s bedroom was open when I went by. Something moved and caught my eye. Scarlett was just coming out of Maman’s dressing room. She turned and closed the door behind her, quietly, so no one would hear. She looked up and saw me watching her.

  “Your mom’s got some amazing clothes.” Swiftly, lightly, she spoke, as if she wanted to talk before I could, as if she wanted to make the fact that she was walking out of my mother’s dressing room seem like nothing.

  “What are you doing?” I said. I was cold inside.

  “Just checking out her stuff. She’s got such beautiful stuff, God, I love her shoes. She’s got so many. I wish my mom dressed like her.”

  “I thought you were getting a glass of water,” I said.

  “I am.”

  She walked past where I was standing in the doorway and down the corridor and into the kitchen, where Cindy was feeding Lou.

  “Hello, Lou, my beautiful baby. How’s she doing, Cindy? Still no solids?” She spoke loudly, too loudly. She asked about Lou’s reflux, about when Cindy would start her on purees. She talked quickly, asking questions, scarcely waiting for a reply. She wouldn’t draw breath. I stood in the doorway. When at last she ran out of questions, she turned to me and said: “What are you looking at, Paul?”

  “You,” I said.

  She held my gaze. Her phone beeped with a message. She looked down.

  “I gotta go,” she said, but then she took forever leaving, getting her bag, putting her boots back on, saying good-bye to Lou; it was like she was treading water, waiting for something to happen or for me to say something. But I didn’t.

  After she’d gone, I sat back at my computer. I stayed there until the smell of frying brought me out of my room.

  Cindy was cooking spring rolls in the kitchen. She’d been to Chinatown to buy the ingredients. She takes the number 83 bus there with her wheelie cart. I went with her once. She meets up with friends in the supermarket; they go up and down the aisles filling their carts with bags of frozen shredded pork, bunches of spring onions that smell on the bus on the way home, and strange flat fish with ugly dead eyes that Cindy says are Philippine fish. When I went with her, she took me to a little shop that sold only Philippine stuff and she ran her fingers along the shelves until she found her favorite cookies. She had tears in her eyes when she took them off the shelf. She said they were her children’s favorite. We ate them on the bus on the way home; they tasted of peanuts and dishwashing liquid, but I didn’t tell her that.

  When she gets back from the market, she goes upstairs to her room and spends hours cutting up carrots into tiny batons and slicing the spring onions. She lays them with the snow peas in piles on the chopping board. Then she takes squares of pastry and arranges the filling at one end of each and rolls the pastry over and over, her fingers pushing and tucking until she has made a sausage shape that she seals at the end like an envelope. The fat ones are vegetarian; the small skinny ones are pork. She makes tons, a hundred or more, and she wraps them in foil so they are silver pads of ridges and furrows.

  The first time I tasted Cindy’s spring rolls was during that massive heat wave when all those old people died in Paris, baked alive in their apartments. I sat on Cindy’s bed under the burning roof; the air smelled of the shared toilet out in the corridor and shopping bags full of rubbish that people hang outside their doors. The heat pulsed off the ceiling onto her forehead so her face was sweating, but she smiled as she fried the spring rolls in boiling oil. Her room is so small she has her shower next to her stove. I waited as the black smoke filled my mouth and the room and made my eyes water.

  I could smell them now from down the corridor. Little spurts of saliva gathered in my mouth. Maman was away for the day in Milan. Cindy cooks spring rolls in the apartment only when Maman is away, because Maman can’t stand the smell of deep-fat frying. I love that smell.

  I went into the kitchen and stood next to Cindy and I watched as the spring rolls turned dark and crispy. I waited as she laid them out one by one on a bed of paper towels. I ate them in the kitchen, just Cindy and me; she’d put Lou to bed by then. I dipped each one in sticky chili sauce until they were glossy and red. There was no one to stop me. I ate one after the other, the strands of gray pork falling on my chin as I sucked at my fingers, licked the oil from around my mouth.

  Don’t think it went away. It was there as I gorged myself, there whenever I woke up, whatever time it was, there when I sat in lessons with my arm outstretched along the hot radiator, staring down at the empty courtyard below. It was there all the time; a great dark lump lodged in my heart, and it grew bigger every day, until it took up all my chest, until the burning anger of it made me feel sick even as I stuffed my face with Cindy’s spring rolls.

  Maman messaged me to say her plane was delayed and she still hadn’t left Milan. I’ve bought you a pair of black Nikes, Paul. You’re gonna love them. When I was little she used to bring me back a stuffed toy whenever she went away. At one time I had 122 stuffed toys on my bed. Then she started buying me clothes, trying to style me: skinny jeans, hoodies, T-shirts with English words on, the kind of thing Stéphane wears. I’ve got wardrobes of the stuff, but most of it doesn’t fit me. That’s why she buys me shoes now.

  Five minutes after Maman’s text, I got one from my father.

  Are you there, Paul? he said.

  I didn’t reply.

  I woke up in the night with a start. I’d dreamed Lou was in my bed; I’d dreamed I had rolled over and crushed her and she was dead, squashed beneath my shoulder, beige and lifeless, like an uncooked spring roll. I checked my phone; it was 1:48 a.m. I was sweating. Scarlett had sent a video of a monkey in a zoo in India. It was clinging to its cage, its fingers rattling the bars, trying to escape, its mouth open in a scream.

  Let me out, Scarlett wrote.

  My breath was coming too fast. I thought of Scarlett and the two hearts; I thought of her coming out of my mother’s dressing room. I thought of my father. I got out of bed to check on Lou. I opened my bedroom door. Somewhere in the apartment, Maman and Gabriel were arguing. I stood for a moment listening to their voices, remembering when Maman and my father used to argue. Just like old times.

  “You do nothing,” Maman said.

  They were in the kitchen, one on either side of the island, like when Maman had the fight with my grandmother. The big white light that hangs from the ceiling lit up their faces. Maman still had her coat on; she was leaning forward across the island, her face pale, her eyes bloodshot from the plane. Gabriel was standing where my grandmother had stood.

  “You do nothing all day and meanwhile I’m flying to Milan and back working to pay for all this.” She swept her hand through the air across the beige marble of the kitchen island.

  “I’m back now, babe. I can help.”

  “You can’t even get yourself dressed.”

  “I’ve been under a lot of pressure recently with the band, you know, and the tour. I just need some time to unwind.”

  “Oh my God, Gabriel, you are not Mick Jagger. You played five gigs as a support band. Don’t talk to me about pressure. It’s me that’s working, that’s traveling, that’s paying the bills. You’ve got no responsibilities. You just hang out with your friends, drink beers, eat my food, and sleep in my bed, and Cindy washes your clothes. I’m paying for this, you know. I pay for everything about you, your drugs, your beers, your baby, it’s me that pays.”

  She was like a woodpecker banging away at him. I saw one once in the Jardin du Luxembourg a long time ago. I heard it first and then I saw its olive-green back, a red flash at its head. I saw it hammering its beak against a trunk, splinters of bark flying off. But woodpeckers have special padding around their brains so they don’t get hurt.

  “It’s tough for me, babe. You’ve done it all
before. This is my first time. I don’t know what to do. I mean, you know about routines and stuff like that and I don’t know anything about milk and car seats. Come on, babe.” He walked around the island toward my mother. “Take it easy on me,” he said.

  “Don’t screw with me, Gabriel,” Maman said. But she didn’t sound angry anymore; she sounded scared.

  He reached out and started to undo the belt around her coat, pulling her to him as he did.

  “Babe, I’m right here,” he said.

  “Don’t mess with my head, Gabriel. I can’t take it.”

  He put his hand at the back of her neck and drew her to him. They kissed until he pulled his mouth away from my mother’s and said, “Hey, I got something good for us to share.”

  Maman turned and saw me standing in the corridor. She gave a kind of jump.

  “Why do you do that, Paul? Why do you creep up on us like that?”

  “You woke me up,” I said.

  “I hate it when you do that.”

  It was happening right in front of me. Something was draining from her—her looks, her power? I’ve seen her stare and stare in the mirror, like she can’t get enough, like she’s drinking from her own beauty. That’s why she always smiles in photos, because she’s smiling at herself. Did she think it would last forever?

  “Go back to bed, Paul.” Her voice was sad. I wondered if she was ill, if it was an illness that was doing this to her.

  Then Lou let out a sudden cry that burst from the baby monitor on the island, bleak and insistent.

  “She does it every time!” Maman shouted, slamming her fist down on the counter. “I’ve told her not to leave it on full volume. Paul, I said go to bed. I can’t cope with you as well.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Maman said she wanted to go to Megève for Christmas. She said Estelle was planning on going with Max, that they were renting a chalet at Mont d’Arbois and we should go with them.

  “Wouldn’t that be cozy, Paul? Wrapped up and drinking hot chocolate on Christmas Day? Fun, no?”

  I would have liked to see the crystal mountains in the sun, to watch the slabs of snow fall from the roofs and smash to the ground, powder at my feet. But I wasn’t sure Megève was a real plan. I wondered if it was just another of her whims, one that she discusses with everyone—me, Gabriel, Estelle, not her mother because they still weren’t talking, but her hairdresser, her clients, her assistant at work—obsessing about how to get there, which restaurants to book, who else was going, what to wear, which bar to try, only for it all to burst like a bubble and leave no trace.

  I couldn’t figure out what she would do next, what was real and what was not. One moment she was sobbing because a client canceled a shoot that left her right down on her end-of-year targets, then in her next breath, she’d be on the phone ordering a sofa from Milan that cost ten thousand euros. She came home from work the day the sofa arrived and saw Gabriel with his feet up on it and she let out a scream. But the next night I found them lying together on the sofa, Gabriel with his feet up and Maman smoking a cigarette, quiet as a lamb.

  Catalogs showing pictures of couples sitting in front of open fires and snow falling outside kept arriving for Maman. Guys at school were talking about what they were going to get for Christmas. Cindy went shopping on the Champs-Élysées and bought a big blue-and-silver Cinderella dress for her daughter and a Paris Saint-Germain soccer jersey for her son.

  My dad messaged asking when he could see me at Christmas. I hadn’t seen him since the Jardin du Luxembourg. I blew him off the weekend I was supposed to go to his place. Maman didn’t ask me why I didn’t want to go; she said it was up to me what I did.

  I sat in my bedroom after school checking out Scarlett’s Facebook page. I scrolled through everything of hers, the music videos, the rap, the anti-animal-cruelty stuff, a video of a sheep getting manhandled on its way to becoming an Ugg boot. I went through pictures of all her friends. I looked at the photos of her and Stéphane when they were together, kissing for the camera, tongues touching, Stéphane with one eye fixed on me like he knew I was watching. I wanted to tell him that Scarlett was mine now.

  Are you there? I wrote.

  My phone rang straightaway. I thought it was Scarlett, but it was my grandmother. She never calls me. She wanted to know if I would be at their Christmas Eve dinner; she said my father had said he still didn’t know and so she’d decided to find out for herself. Christmas Eve in Neuilly. I could smell it. My grandmother says the scent is her Christmas tree from Normandy, but Maman told me once it’s really just a scented candle my grandmother hides behind the clock on the mantelpiece.

  It used to be fun when Maman was there; she always gave over-the-top, expensive gifts, like the latest remote-control helicopter or an iPod for my cousins or a Gucci handbag for my grandmother. The cousins tore into her presents first while my aunt and grandmother sat rolling their eyes in disapproval, making faces across the ripped wrapping paper. I remember one year Maman gave Catherine a red satin Dior nightgown. It made Catherine blush when she opened it and her hands shook so that it slid from the silk tissue paper onto the floor. Christmas presents were Maman’s way of reminding them she wouldn’t play by their rules.

  “She drives me crazy,” my grandmother was saying. “Making your father wait and wait until the very last moment to tell him when he can have you. It’s all part of her game.”

  “Why does he want me now?” I said. “He never wanted me before.”

  She should have listened to me then, she should have stopped and heard the tremor in my voice, but she laughed instead, her chandelier laugh.

  “What an extraordinary thing to say,” she said.

  It was her laughter that made it leap out of me.

  “I’m not coming to your Christmas Eve. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see you. I’m sick of it. Him, you, your whole existence, all of it, your puffed-up hair, your gold door code, and your assisted parking because you can’t even park a fucking car.”

  “You can’t speak—” she started to say, but I cut her off.

  “You blame her for everything, you think she’s not good enough, but she’s better than the whole lot of you. Ask him why I won’t come for Christmas. Ask your son. He knows why. Ask him why I don’t ever want to see him again.”

  I had more to say, but she wouldn’t listen. The line was dead.

  I didn’t feel regret. I felt triumph. I wanted to climb out onto the balustrade and shout so that the girl opposite would look up from her books and see me and she would laugh and punch the air. I wanted to ring Maman and tell her what I had done, tell her that I had said what she had always wanted to say, that I had defended her.

  My prince, she would say. I love you too much.

  I called her on her mobile, but she didn’t pick up. I called her again straightaway, but she didn’t answer. And then I remembered she was in London, which meant she’d be in a meeting or at some kind of appointment. I didn’t leave a message. I thought of calling Scarlett, but she hadn’t replied to my message. And then I remembered her face as she came out of Maman’s dressing room.

  The adrenaline drained out of me as quickly as it had come. It left me hollow. It left me hungry. I stood at my bedroom window looking out. It was one of those December days when the sun never comes out; all day long the sky was a band of dark cloud that pressed down low over the courtyard. Everything about that day was waiting for darkness. The cobbles below were wet and slippery. Stay away from the window, Paul. Go find Cindy.

  The next day I waited for Scarlett at the lockers where we usually meet to go and get lunch, but she didn’t turn up. I messaged her, but she didn’t reply. I wondered if she was with Stéphane. I didn’t see her all that day. The next morning was Wednesday and I hung out in the corridor before geography, standing by the windows, looking down into the courtyard to see if she was below.

  I looked up; she was coming toward me.

  “Hi, Paul,” she said, but she didn’t s
top walking.

  “Looking hot today,” a guy in my class shouted after her.

  She turned and laughed. Her mouth was painted a burning red. I’d never seen her lips that color.

  I sat through geography wondering why she didn’t stop to talk, why she didn’t text me back. I wondered if she would come and find me for lunch, but she didn’t. I looked for her on the rue Vavin, but she wasn’t at the noodle bar or at the bakery. She wasn’t in the jardin. I walked up and down the paths; I looked for her on the benches over by the bandstand. I walked to the other side of the circular basin and back.

  I didn’t see her all afternoon, but at the end of lessons she was there, waiting for me at my locker, as if everything were normal and nothing had changed. She was texting when I walked up, but she put her phone away when she saw me. She asked if she could come back to my place.

  She linked arms with me on the rue d’Assas and told me that she’d missed me. I wanted to believe her; the warmth of her body felt good next to mine as we walked together down the road. When I asked her why she hadn’t replied to any of my messages, she said she’d been too busy. I asked her if she was back with Stéphane.

  “I’ve left him behind,” she said and she laughed out loud.

  She told me she got a three in a chemistry test and a four in a math test and that the school had contacted her parents and she was in trouble. She said her parents had grounded her and that’s why she hadn’t come around after school the past two nights. I asked her why she wasn’t going straight home now and she said: “Are you checking up on me, Paul?”

  She told me her parents were making her do extra work at home, that she was exhausted from all the work. But she didn’t look exhausted; she looked as if someone had set fire to her from the inside. She didn’t stop fidgeting as we walked along and when we turned onto my road, she stopped and got her phone out again. She pretended she was checking her texts, but I saw her using the screen as a mirror, swooshing up her hair to make herself look hot, piling it high like a bird’s nest. She pressed her lips together and pouted at herself.