And then we’d dance.
4.
“Don’t tell me you’re leaving for work again! You’re going to work yourself into an early grave, my dear man. What day can it be?” she groaned, abandoning her pillow to cling to me.
“It’s Saturday, Desirée. Today is Saturday, and my garages are open on Saturdays, so I’m working today, as I do almost every day,” I answered, as I did every morning, happy to let myself be clung to by her warm and cuddly body.
“Oh, it’s true, you still work on Saturdays, don’t you, but please tell me this laborious nonsense isn’t going to go on much longer.”
“I’m afraid it might go on for quite a while. You may not be aware of it, but that is how most of the world lives,” I replied, trying to coax her grouchy face back into a smile.
“Well then, tell me why our young downstairs neighbor never has to go to work on Saturdays?” she asked defiantly, rolling on top of me to plunge her inquiring eyes deep into mine.
“Because he’s a schoolboy, my dear lady, and children don’t have school on Saturdays.”
“What a bother! I should have married a child rather than my own grandfather. My life wouldn’t have been so bleak, at least not on Saturdays,” she said mournfully, ignoring my proffered cheek.
“I suppose so, but it’s a very bad thing to do. And it’s neither legal nor moral.”
“Perhaps not, but at least children can enjoy themselves on Saturdays, while I get bored waiting for you. I never know what to do! I feel left on a shelf here all day by myself. So why doesn’t the man on the first floor ever work either? I see him taking out his garbage every day at four when I’m on my way to the grocery store. His eyes are puffy and his hair’s all choppy, and his clothes are always very sloppy. Don’t try to tell me that he’s still in school or I’ll know you’re taking me for a fool!”
“No, for the man on the first floor, it’s a different story. He’s lost his job, and I bet he’d be thrilled to have to work on Saturdays, the poor slob.”
“Wouldn’t you know it? I gave my hand to the only fellow around who works on Saturdays,” she mumbled, looking peeved and aggrieved, one hand over her eyes, as if to spare herself the sight of an unbearable reality.
“If you’re looking for something to keep you busy, I’ve got an idea . . .”
“Oh, you and your sordid ideas. You want me to get a job, but no way! I’ve already told you, I tried it once, on a Thursday.”
“I remember it very well, my belle. You worked for a florist for a few hours, but they fired you, because you refused to take money for the flowers.”
“Well, I should certainly hope not! What is the world coming to? You can’t sell flowers, flowers are free! You just bend over and pick them. Flowers are life, and as far as I am aware, you can’t sell life! And besides, they didn’t fire me, I left of my own accord. I didn’t want to have anything to do with their scam, which I abhorred. While the others were on their lunch break, I decided to take the biggest bouquet I could make. I had so much fun, it was a scream, and then I left with the most beautiful bouquet anyone has ever seen.”
“I compliment you on managing to be a stickler for principles while having sticky fingers. Everybody knows Mr. Robin Hood, but I married Miss Robbin’ Flowers! But that’s not actually what I was thinking of, my love. You refuse to seek gainful employment, as you’d much rather, let’s say, focus on your own enjoyment. That much I gather, but since you’ve got nothing else to do, surely you wouldn’t refuse to help our neighbor, would you? Our address book is overflowing with VIPs, someone’s bound to be able to help him with ease. And that way, perhaps I won’t be the only fellow here who has to work on Saturday.”
“What a wonderful notion! I’m going to swing right into motion, and help our neighbor get a promotion! We’ll organize a great job-hunt lunch, with a big bunch of your VIP pals and their gals. I’m sure we’ll arrange a transaction to everybody’s satisfaction. But first, I’m going to take him shopping for decent clothes and shoes, because everyone knows, if you want a fresh start, you’ve got to look the part!” Cheering with exuberance, she turned the bed into a trampoline for an airborne dance. Well, that was the best-case scenario, anyway.
Ever since that firecracker day we met, she had pretended to be charmingly ignorant of the way the world worked. Or at least, I pretended to believe she was pretending, because it came to her so naturally. After the incident at the pool, we fled the hotel, leaving behind our prank, the outraged entrepreneurs, and that poor, nasty woman who nearly sank. With the top down, we rode out of town and off into the sunset, singing splish-splash and glug-glug-glug, and laughing like crazy as we drove through the night.
“Speed up, don’t be lazy, or your lies are going to catch up with us, and that woman’s going to make a fuss!” she shouted, standing up. “But we won’t mind her,” she added, her shawl fluttering behind her.
“I can’t go any faster, the speedometer is as high as it can go, and the gas gauge as low. Besides, at the rate we’re going, our truancy is going to crash into your lunacy any minute now anyhow!”
In a village called Paradou, in the hills of Provence, the automobile started trembling miserably, as if begging for mercy, then it stalled for good in front of a chapel with doors of worn red wood, topped with a rusty iron pineapple.
“Let’s get married right away, lest we forget we’ve met!” said my soon-to-be-blushing bride, leaping over the door with clumsy pride. We got married then and there, with no priest and no witnesses, but thousands of prayers, and vows of our own invention. In front of the altar, we sang and clapped like the faithful at a gospel church. I knew I’d never leave her in the lurch. Stepping outside again, we heard a tune wafting from the car radio, a lovely song by Nina Simone, a song that still reverberates through our lives at all hours of the day and night.
The extravagant behavior of my new wife soon took over my life, nestling in every corner, occupying every minute, devouring every instant. I had welcomed her folly with open arms, then closed them to hug it close and soak it in, but I was afraid that such sweet madness couldn’t go on happily ever after. For her, real life didn’t exist. I had married a female Don Quixote who seemed permanently high on peyote. Every morning, her eyes still swollen with sleep, onto her exhausted nag she’d leap, spurring it on with frantic antics as she galloped up the hill to tilt at the next windmill.
My Sweet Charity had brought great clarity to my life by turning it into constant chaos. Her path was clear, she was headed every which way at once, and I had no objections to her moving in a thousand directions. My role was to dance attendance on all that resplendence, to enable her to revel with the devil in her insanity rather than get bogged down at the level of mundane reality.
When we saw a wounded crane by the side of a path in Africa one day, she wanted to keep it and tend it until its leg was mended. So we extended our stay by nearly two weeks, and when the bird was better, despite its shrieks, she insisted that the crane should fly back to Paris in the plane with us. But my darling Starling couldn’t understand that we needed to cover mountains of certificates with stamps in order to bring an exotic bird back to France.
“This fowl nonsense makes no sense! Don’t tell me that every time my crane flies over a border she has to deal with all this paperwork and red-taper work!” she railed and wailed as she flailed around, pounding on the vet’s desk, making a mess.
Another time, we had invited a scientist to dinner. The poor man, who meant no harm, was explaining that the expression “a castle in the air” or “a castle in Spain” meant something that wasn’t really there. Her green eyes began to sparkle with defiance. “So much for science! Say what you may, but a year from today, we’ll be drinking champagne in our castle in Spain! The castle will be in the air, I swear, but the drinks will be on you, so you’d better beware!”
To win that bet, we had to fly to the Mediterranean Costas every weekend for months before we managed to find a huge house topped with
a crenellated turret that seemed to float above the clouds in a mist-shrouded valley. The people in the village below, meaning well, had nicknamed it “El Castel.”
Living like that required complete devotion, so when I finally offered her the child she had been demanding of me every morning, I was struck by the notion that one day, without warning, I would have to give up my garages, liquidate everything and devote myself to my charges. I knew her madness could go off the rails someday. I couldn’t be sure, but with a child, it was my duty to be ready anyway. With a niño in the mix, there could be so much more to fix. For all I knew, the countdown might already have started. And it was on the strength of that “might” that we danced and threw parties day and night.
5.
It was shortly after one of her birthdays that Mom’s metamorphosis began. “It was barely visible to the naked eye, but there was a change in the mood, in her personal weather. We didn’t really see anything, we just felt it. Little nothings, a change of tempo in the way she moved and grooved, batted her eyelashes, clapped her hands. At first, to tell you the whole truth, we didn’t see it, we only sensed it. We assumed that her originality had kept rising, that she had reached the next level. Then she began to get upset more frequently, for longer periods, but nothing alarming. She was still charming, still danced like before, or perhaps even more, with even greater abandon and enthusiasm, but nothing worrisome. She was drinking a bit more, cocktails and such, sometimes before she got out of bed in the morning, but the time of day and the amount didn’t really change much, didn’t affect the way we lived. We kept on as we had always done, with our parties, our castle and our life of fun.” That’s what my father wrote about what happened.
It was the doorbell that revealed my mother’s new nature. Or rather the person who rang it. With his sunken cheeks, that peculiar complexion that only an office job can supply, and a sense of duty that leaked onto his gabardine, the tax assessor explained to my parents that they had forgotten to pay their income taxes for a very long time—so long, in fact, that he had a big file under his arm, because his memory alone wouldn’t suffice. My father, trying to be cheerful, didn’t give him an earful. With a smile stuck on his face, despite being a tad hungover, he filled his pipe and went to get his checkbook off the table in the hall, the one the painting of the Prussian hung over. But my father’s face and pipe both fell when the tax man stated the amount of taxes due, plus the little something for the late fees, too. Those alone were humongous, so the amount of taxes themselves could have bowled you over. Actually, they wound up bowling the tax man over instead: Mom started shoving him away so frantically that he fell. Dad tried to calm her down and to help him up, boastfully offering his humblest apologies. The tax man didn’t let Dad help him up, although he did get carried away, stuttering, “You have to pay now! It’s good for everyone to, to, to p-p-pay your t-t-taxes! You’re happy enough to have paved streets to walk on! You are un-un-un-scru-pu-pu-lous!”
“You villainous varlet! How dare you insult us on top of everything!” Mom replied, screaming with unprecedented ferocity. “We don’t walk the streets! I’m not that kind of harlot! Hotel rooms, perhaps, but streetwalking? Never! And if paying taxes is so great, then go ahead, enjoy yourself, pay ours!” As Dad tried to relight his pipe, keeping a perplexed eye on Mom, she grabbed the umbrella by the door, opened it, and used it to chase the tax assessor out of our apartment.
Backing out onto the landing, the tax man shouted hoarsely, “That’s going to cost you a pretty penny, too. You’re going to have to cough up every last cent. I’m going to turn your lives into a descent into tax hell!”
My mother, using the umbrella like a shield, tried to send the swordsman of the taxocalypse hurtling down the stairs, while he clung to the banister, grunting valiantly. He would fall, haul himself up again, slip and catch himself. Mom really put his sense of duty to the test, giving him no respite or rest. For an instant, I even caught his long career flashing before his stubborn red eyes. By the time Dad managed to stop her by hugging her tight, she had gotten the taxes down several brackets, or rather flights. After two threatening calls on the interphone, the tax man went to get money to pave the streets from other people. The three of us had a good laugh about the whole thing, until Dad asked, “Really, Hortense, what came over you? Or what got into you? We’re going to be in serious trouble now.”
“We’re in serious trouble already, my poor George! That’s right, you’re poor now, George. We’re all poor! And that’s so commonplace, so trivial, so sad. We’re going to have to sell the apartment, and you’re asking what got into me? It’s not what got into me but what they’ll be getting out of us: everything, George, everything! We won’t have even one pretty penny . . . ,” she replied. Then she suddenly spun around, looking panic-stricken, as if she wanted to make sure the apartment was still there.
“But, Hortense, we haven’t lost everything, we’ll find a solution. Perhaps the Senator can provide absolution. And in the future, we’ll open the mail, though I fear it might be to no avail,” my father sighed, glancing at the mountain of paper with more than a touch of administrative regret.
“Not Hortense! Not today! They’ve even taken my real name away; I don’t even have a name anymore,” she said, sobbing like a fountain, collapsing mournfully onto the mail mountain.
“Selling the apartment will fetch plenty more than our debt, so you needn’t fret. We still have our castle in the air, which is not exactly a hovel, you know. And I could always get another job.”
“Oh, no, over my dead body! As long as I’m alive, you’ll never work again! Do you hear me? Never!” she screamed hysterically, tossing the letters in the air, like a baby splashing the bathwater in despair. “Your place is with the two of us! I can’t spend my days waiting for you. I can’t live without you! Not even for one single second, but certainly not for a whole day! In fact, I wonder how other people manage it,” she whispered, her voice breaking into sobs, gliding from rage to hopelessness in just a few words.
That night, in my room, contemplating the beds I would have to leave behind, I wondered why the Senator hadn’t warned me about tax assessors. What if ours had been a vegetarian cyclist, too? I couldn’t even bear to think about it. We may have been lucky after all, I realized with a shiver of fright, before transpiercing Claude François with precision, but without delight.
Between the appeals board and the Creep pulling strings, our lives weren’t completely upended in a day. The procedures took time, so we didn’t have to move out right away. After her bout of toxic-shock syndrome, my mother’s behavior went back to how it had been. Or, almost, anyway. Sometimes, during dinner parties, she would get this odd grin, then start laughing so hard she couldn’t stop, going on and on until she had slid under the table, and was banging her hands on the parquet floor.
Depending on the dinner guests, and the subjects being addressed, either everyone’s laughter would mingle with hers, or else the table would go silent, the guests not speaking or smiling or comprehending her laughter unending. When that happened, Dad would help her up, whispering sweet, soothing nothings in her ear and wiping the wild streams of makeup from her cheeks. He would lead her to their bedroom and stay as long as necessary. Sometimes it took so long that the guests left, tiptoeing out to avoid disturbing them. For laughing fits, they were strangely sad.
The problem with Mom’s new state of mind, as Dad put it, was that you never knew where you were standing, let alone dancing. And when it came to dancing, you could take his word for it, because he was an expert. Sometimes she wouldn’t have a single fit—of either laughter, anger or despair—for weeks on end, long enough for us to forget about her spells of confusion and bad manners. During those periods, she seemed more adorable than ever, and even more lovable than before, which wasn’t easily feasible, though she pulled it off breezily.
The problem with Mom’s new state of mind was that it had no schedule, no set time; it didn’t make appointments. It just showed u
p without warning, the cad. It would patiently wait for us to forget all about it and go back to our old lives, and then it would pop up unannounced, morning, noon or night: during dinner, after a shower, when we were out for a stroll. And when that happened, we never knew what to do or how to do it, even though, after a while, we should have gotten used to it.
There are first-aid manuals that tell you how to act in case of an accident, how to save people’s lives, but there were none for this sort of thing. You never get used to it. So with each and every new alarm, Dad and I would stare at each other, completely disarmed. For the first few seconds, anyway. Afterward, we’d remember. Then we’d look around to see where the relapse could be coming from. But it wasn’t coming from anywhere, it was just there, and that was exactly the problem.
We had our lot of sad laughter, too. One evening, when a dinner guest kept saying “I’ll bet my bloomers” every time he declared anything, we watched Mom stand, lift her skirt up, pull down her panties trimmed with lace, then silently take them off and throw them in the gambler’s face. Those panties sailed over the table, landing smack on his nose. So it goes. After a shocked silence, a lady blurted out, “She’s lost her mind!”
To which my mother replied, having downed her glass in one gulp, “No, ma’am, at worst, I’ve lost my panties.”
The Creep, that wonderful fellow, saved the day. He bellowed and guffawed, and the chilly atmosphere soon thawed, turning the nascent drama into a saucy story of flying lingerie. If the Creep hadn’t laughed, no one else would have either though. Like the other guests, Dad had laughed until he cried, but with his face in his hands.
One morning at my breakfast time, when my parents hadn’t gone to bed yet and a few dancers were still going at it in the living room, making strange noises, when the Creep was sleeping on the kitchen table, with his nose on his cigar and his cigar crushed into an ashtray, and Mademoiselle Superfluous was doing her dormitory rounds, waking the soiree’s stragglers, I saw my mother step out of the bathroom perched on stiletto heels, stark naked except for the smoke from her cigarette that fleetingly garbed her face. Looking for her keys on the table in the front hall, she informed my father in a perfectly natural tone of voice that she was off to get oysters and cold muscadet for their guests.
Waiting for Bojangles Page 4
