I Love You Too Much

by Alicia Drake

  All the way up in the elevator to our apartment she talked nonstop, telling a story about what some guy had said in math, speaking loudly, giggling as if it were hysterically funny, twisting a strand of hair around her fingers. She was still talking when she walked into my apartment, showing off as if there were an audience. I wondered if she’d been drinking. She broke off from her story and looked into the living room.

  “Is anyone home?” she said.

  I wondered who she meant by anyone.

  We found Cindy in the kitchen feeding Lou. They both looked up when we walked in. Lou made funny noises like a dolphin and banged hard on the tray of her high chair. She had saliva running down both sides of her mouth. Her cheeks were red and her eyes were watering. She kept shaking her head and crying out.

  “Poor baby has her first tooth,” Cindy said. “She’s been crying all day.”

  Scarlett went over to Lou in her high chair. There was a little white chip of tooth pushing through Lou’s top gum.

  “Come to Scarlett,” she said. She hoisted Lou up into her arms, then onto her hip. She held Lou close to her. “I wish you were mine,” she said, resting her face in Lou’s hair. “I wish I could start all over again.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but Lou smiled as if she understood. She thrust herself against Scarlett’s waist with her legs wrapped around her; she grabbed at the necklace at Scarlett’s throat and tried to slide her fingers beneath her T-shirt.

  “Well, hello, stranger,” a voice said behind me.

  It was Gabriel. He was standing barefoot in the doorway. He had his guitar slung around his neck and he was wearing his rock-star shirt, a red checked shirt with the sleeves ripped off to show us his biceps.

  “Is that what you wear to school every day?” he said to Scarlett. “My God, Paul, how do you get any work done?”

  Scarlett blushed and pulled at her skirt. I said nothing.

  “So, are you ready?” he said.

  “Sure,” Scarlett said.

  “Ready for what?” I said.

  I looked across at Cindy. I saw the dark silence of her eyes. Scarlett went to give Lou back to Cindy, but Lou didn’t want to go back; she grabbed a handful of Scarlett’s hair from the pile on top of her head and pulled. Scarlett squealed.

  “Stop that, Lou,” she said, giggling, but Lou wouldn’t let go; she kept tugging hard until Scarlett cried out in pain. “Let me go, Lou,” she said. “I have to go now.”

  Cindy tried to pry Lou’s fingers open and when she finally did, Lou screamed and beat her tiny fists against Cindy’s shoulder. Cindy carried her away, down the corridor to her bedroom.

  Gabriel looked at me and grinned.

  “We’re gonna make music,” he said.

  Scarlett said nothing; she didn’t look at me. She followed Gabriel out of the kitchen like she was pulled along on a string, walking down the hallway, leaving me on my own.

  I could hear Lou’s screams from her bedroom, the same note, over and over, a dismal cry that vibrated in the back of her throat so that she sounded like an animal.

  I stood for a few seconds with my hands rolled up in fists hanging down by my sides until the pain became too much. I pulled open the cupboard door; the rack slid out without a sound. There were racks of expensive nothing—chickpeas, brown rice, pasta, quinoa—stuff that could do nothing for me. At the back of the top rack I found a box of mini–chocolate cookies meant for five-year-olds. Maman lets Cindy buy them because she reckons the smaller the cookie, the less weight I’ll put on. I ripped open the cardboard. I tore open each pack with my teeth and I held them above me and let each happy chocolate face fall into my mouth. I ate them five at a time. I ate them fast to get the factory-sweet creaminess, cookies turning to mush against the roof of my mouth; I held it there, closing my eyes, the vacuum-packed vanilla in my nose, on my tongue, then I let the mush slide down the back of my throat and reloaded.

  I found a packet of madeleines in the cupboard above the oven. I hate madeleines. I was crying as I licked the powdery crumbs from my hands and stuffed each dry sponge shell into my parched mouth. I was trying to reach oblivion; isn’t that what my father said?

  I opened the fridge door. A pale green oblong box was hiding behind the natural yogurt. My heart leaped. I lifted the lid and the air sucked backward and the scent of macaroons grabbed me and pulled me in. I ripped off the padded paper, and there they were: coffee, salted caramel, chocolate, strawberry, raspberry, all those I love, waiting for me. I ate them. Twenty-four of them. Even the flavors I hate—rose, licorice, violet—I ate them too. I threw them into my mouth. I pushed at them with my fingers, forcing them in to fill the emptiness.

  I walked out to the corridor. I could hear them together. I didn’t know she could sing. I didn’t know her voice was soft and sad. I thought she was mine. It hurt so much. I needed to get the hurt out, to reach inside of me and rip it out with my own fingers if I had to. I ran to make it to the bathroom. I stood with my head above the toilet and I retched until there was nothing left. I stood and panted. I flushed and washed the toilet with the brush. I’d read on the Internet what to do to keep them from finding out. I had madeleine crumbs in my underpants. I brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth with mouthwash. The lights around the mirror made my face look green. There were tiny purple dots under the skin around my eyes.

  I walked back along the corridor until I could see them. Gabriel was sitting across from her in a chair, head down, strumming on his guitar. They didn’t look up. She was curled up on the sofa. She looked different when she was singing. Her eyes were half closed so I could see the pinkish flesh of her eyelids, and her mouth was round and sweet as she sang. She had taken off her shoes and her black-stockinged legs were tucked beneath her, her feet under her ass. Her T-shirt was sliding off one shoulder.

  I wanted to strike her then. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to tell her that she’d put on weight, that her thighs were fat, that Inès was hotter than her, that all the boys at school said so. I wanted to be Stéphane; he would know what to say to bring her back to his side. But I was me. I stood in the corridor outside the living room, watching them, too scared of losing her to say anything.

  There was nowhere for me to go. The jardin was closed and it was dark outside. So I went back into my bedroom. I lay down on my bed and I waited for it to be over.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They sent us home from school early because the heating had broken down. I couldn’t see Scarlett anywhere so I went to McDo’s with Guillaume and Pierre instead. We walked back through the Jardin du Luxembourg. The crêpe lady was closed, her kiosk boarded up. They had taken away the huge piles of leaves from the metal cages. The jardin was bare without them. Someone had covered the carousel in yellow tarpaulin and it was caught up over the head of one of the wooden horses. Its eyes were missing; it stared at me from hollow black sockets. There was bird shit on the benches, and the flowers in the round beds were sodden and rotting on their stems.

  We sat down on the sloping metal chairs to stuff our faces and drink Fanta. We sat by the weird fruit trees that they keep behind cages. The gardeners strap their branches to posts, tie up their limbs, stick plastic bags over their heads. Guillaume and Pierre were swapping porn on their phones, listening to music at the same time. Guillaume looked up from his screen and flicked his head in my direction.

  “Hey, Paul,” he said. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, where’s the hot babe?” Pierre said. “Has she dumped you? Is that why you’re hanging out with us?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I said. I was already at the bottom of my fries. I should have ordered an extra portion.

  “She’s not your girlfriend?” Guillaume acted like he couldn’t believe it; he looked over to Pierre and then back at me. “What are you, gay or what?”

  “He must be if he hasn’t had Scarlett. She’s desperate. Stéphane says she sends him pictures and videos of herself every day.”

 
“She does not,” I said.

  “Wanna bet? I’ve seen them myself, videos of her touching herself and stuff, she sends them all the time, in the middle of the night. He told me.”

  “He’s a liar,” I said. I thought of the videos Scarlett sent me in the middle of the night, dolphins choking on plastic bags, guys out torching cars on the street. I thought of the videos I’d watched after I found my father in the laundry room. Guillaume reached into his box of fries.

  “They’re cold,” he said. “I fucking hate cold fries.”

  “She’s a slut and everyone knows it,” Pierre said. His mouth was full of burger.

  “Don’t call her that,” I said.

  He leaned back on his metal chair. He took another bite from his Quarter Pounder.

  “What you gonna do about it, gay boy?” Ketchup was oozing from the corner of his mouth.

  Guillaume laughed. “Hey, give him a break. It’s not his fault he’s gay.”

  “I’m gonna put that on Facebook,” Pierre said. “Paul is the only guy never to have had Scarlett.”

  I stood up. My burger and the last of my fries fell to the ground.

  “Wa-wa-wa-wa.” Pierre made a noise like a siren. He shouted over to Guillaume, “Gay-boy alert!”

  I charged at him then. I put both my hands on his shoulders and I shoved him hard and his chair fell over backward. His eyes stretched wide as the chair hit the low metal hoops at the edge of the lawn, and the back of his head hit the metal of the chair. We fell to the ground. I was on top of him. I smelled the meat and the gherkins swilling around inside his mouth. I hit him below the cheekbone, in the fleshy part of his face. It felt good. I felt strong. He was swearing at me and trying to shove me off him. I hit him again.

  Pierre let out a high-pitched scream.

  “I’m bleeding, fuck, I’m bleeding!”

  Guillaume was pulling at my jacket, shouting at me to stop. I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to smack him until he stopped moving.

  “Get off him, Paul,” Guillaume shouted; he tried to grab my arm. He pulled at my collar, dragging at it, trying to haul me off Pierre.

  “You fucking asshole,” I said to Pierre. I put my hand on his neck and shoved him again. “Don’t call me gay.”

  I rolled off him. I got to my knees and then to my feet, trying to catch my breath. Pierre lay on his back whimpering and clutching at the side of his face. His burger lay on the ground, his yellow fries scattered around the chair. My hands were shaking.

  “Get up,” Guillaume said and he pulled Pierre to his feet.

  “You fucking psycho,” Pierre said to me. “You could have killed me.”

  “I wish I had,” I said.

  My trousers were wet from rolling on the damp gravel and I had grit in my mouth. Pierre wiped the blood from his face and stared at it on his hand. He spat on the ground. A thin clot of blood was suspended in the shiny slick of spit.

  “I’m losing blood,” he said.

  “Shut up,” Guillaume said. “I’ll take you home.”

  “My mom’s going to kill you for this,” Pierre said. His cheek was red and there was a graze under his eye.

  A group of guys from the lycée were watching from the other side of the fence, jeering and shouting. Guillaume pulled at Pierre’s arm.

  “Let’s go before they start.”

  They walked away together toward the exit. Pierre turned and shouted: “Fuck you, fat boy.”

  I pulled my chair out from the food; it scraped across the gravel and inside my head. A crow landed on Pierre’s burger and started to dig at the meat. I checked my phone. Why hadn’t she messaged me?

  Where are you? I wrote.

  But she didn’t reply, even though I had risked my ass defending her. Too busy, she’d told me, but not too busy for Stéphane. I got up and hunted among the McDo bags for something to eat. I ate the rest of Guillaume’s damp fries. The white potato inside felt like tissue in my mouth.

  More and more crows kept landing on the food, four or five of them. They just sit around the jardin all day stuffing their faces on fast food, but they don’t get fat. I kicked at the burgers on the ground. I kicked at the crows, at the shreds of pale lettuce, at the paper bags and the mayonnaise and the plastic forks, I kicked until everything turned black, smashed up and dark with earth and gravel.

  I couldn’t keep it in anymore. It kept erupting out of me. I had to tell Maman. I had to tell her what I knew. I thought if she knew what I knew then she could help me. She could help me understand what I had seen. She could take her share of the sorrow, because it belonged to her, because I couldn’t bear it on my own.

  I stood up to walk home. The air was icy and the sky dark, like a bruise. Maybe it would snow. I walked alone through the jardin. I walked past the upright green benches, past the neatly trimmed lawn and the metal hoops of fencing. The gardeners were grappling with a shrub that had blown onto the path, hacking off its branches. Everything in Paris is constrained. Everyone is trying to hold you down, make ordered beauty, afraid that you’ll run wild: the guards whistling you off the grass, the gardeners cutting back the trees to bleeding stumps. If you are ugly they will rip you out the way they rip out the flowers as soon as they begin to die. I wanted to be out of this Paris, out of this darkness that was pulling me down.

  Teresa was downstairs when I walked into our apartment building. She was stooped over her mop like a vulture waiting for doom. My heart sank. She would want to know why my jacket was ripped, why my jeans were wet. She looked up from cleaning the floor.

  “You’re home early?” she said. It was a question.

  “Yeah, the heating broke down. We got sent home.”

  She dipped the mop into the dirty water, pulled it out again, and wrung it out against the bucket sieve.

  “It’s going to snow.” She pulled her black cardigan around her stout body. “It’ll be minus three tonight.” I said nothing. She was blocking my way.

  “Your friend,” she said, “the girl. She’s upstairs.”

  I went to get past her. She waited until I was by the elevator and then she said: “Your mother’s flight was canceled.”

  I turned back. Her face was sly.

  “She came home,” she said.

  I ran then. I took the stairs. I took them two at a time. I ran even though my leg was killing me from where I’d fought with Pierre. I ran to try to stop something, but I didn’t know what. Around and around, up and up. I held my key out in front of me. I pushed open the apartment door.

  Maman was there. I saw her first. She turned to me, her face mangled, her mascara smudged beneath her eyes. Her nose was red and running. Scarlett stood beyond her. She was wearing only a bra and panties. They were my mother’s bra and panties. Leopard print and satin, tassels and stuff. Maman bought them after my father left.

  Scarlett was swaying in my mother’s high heels and boudoir lingerie. She stood beneath the ceiling spotlight. She didn’t try to cover herself. She looked at us, her black eyebrows raised, her hand poised below one hip. Her breasts were too small for my mother’s bra; her stomach was soft like a peach. Beyond her, in the shadow between two lights, stood Gabriel.

  The doom that had been trapped inside me swelled up and burst out, like gas escaping; it spread and rose and filled the corridor, taking up all the space so that it was everywhere, inside me and out, and I could hardly breathe.

  “This little slut—” Maman said, but Gabriel interrupted.

  “There’s been a kind of misunderstanding, Paul,” he said.

  “Don’t give me that crap,” Maman said. She shoved at her nose with the back of her hand. “What do you think I am? She’s wearing my fucking underwear.”

  “Babe, I can explain.” Gabriel took a timid step toward her. “We were just taking some photos. This is not what it seems.”

  “Not what it seems? I find my thirty-five-year-old boyfriend and father of my child in my dressing room with a teenage girl wearing my underwear and him taking photos of her
on his phone. And you tell me that is not what it seems. Why don’t we call the police, then, Gabriel, and ask them what they think? Shall we do that? Shall we see what they say? Let’s do that. Why don’t we do that right now?”

  Saliva fell to the parquet as she spoke.

  “Babe, I can explain.”

  “How can you explain?” Her voice was madness. “How can you explain?” she shouted again. She started to pull at her own clothing; she grabbed at her top and lifted it up high so that her bra and breasts were exposed. She cried out. “What about me? Aren’t I enough for you?”

  Gabriel screwed up his face as if he were afraid to look.

  “Babe,” he begged.

  And then Scarlett spoke.

  “Nothing happened,” she said. “He just took some photos. That’s all.”

  Her voice was flat when she said that, weirdly calm. She wasn’t afraid of my mother; she wasn’t afraid of anyone. She shrugged.

  “Nothing happened,” she said again.

  And then she turned away and started walking in the direction of Maman’s bedroom. Her bony shoulder blades stuck out like wings on her back.

  “Where do you think you are going?” Maman shouted after her.

  Scarlett turned around, her expression insolent.

  “Well, I’m not going to walk home like this, am I?”

  Maman lunged forward and grabbed Scarlett’s left arm. “You,” she said. “You’re nothing but damaged goods. I knew it from the start.”

  “Hey, lady, you should blame your boyfriend, not me,” Scarlett said.

  Maman let go of her arm then and grabbed her by the throat.

  “How dare you,” she said. “How dare you come in here and fuck up my life. This is my world. I made it. It’s me that controls.”

  Her right hand was gripping Scarlett’s throat, thumb to one side of it, fingers on the other, there where there is no flesh, just veins and tendons. Maman’s face was screwed up; she had white spittle gathered at the corners of her mouth.