by Laure Baudot
“What I love about French women is that they take themselves in hand,” said Ames. “American women, they don’t know what they want.” He drank his mineral water, quickly emptying it. “What’s wrong? Don’t take it personally. I’m sure you know what you’re doing.” He put his hand on my forearm. “Let’s go smoke du shit.”
I had never heard the expression he used. “Pot?”
“Shhh.” His hand on my arm was warm. He leaned in. “It will help.”
We passed through the train all the way to a car at the opposite end. The luggage was stored in cages on raised platforms. The noise of the tracks was loud.
“No one will come here,” he said.
We sat and leaned against one of the walls. I sat with my legs stretched out, the rubber floor rubbing against the back of my knees, giving me a kind of carpet burn. Ames took a small plastic baggy from his pocket and, balancing paper and pot on his thigh, rolled a joint as if he were performing a delicate operation.
Because of my sister’s drug addiction, I hadn’t touched any-thing more mind-altering than beer through high school and beyond. I smoked my first joint in Amsterdam; I figured that if I were going to start my life as an independent woman, free of any sense of filial obligation, and unravelling and remaking my identity on my own terms, I had to take risks. As risks went, pot seemed mild.
He lit the joint and inhaled, then handed it to me and watched as I puffed. “You won’t get anything out of that. Why aren’t you breathing it in? Inhaling — that’s how you say it, right?” He took the joint back. “My mom is a nurse. At first, she was very worried. Then she did une recherche. Now she’s okay with it. ‘To each his own medicine,’ she said.”
Again he passed me the joint. He continued talking, but I was too engrossed in myself to listen. I inhaled more deeply, three times in a row, and waited to see what would happen. Memories appeared, cartoon figures zooming toward me like those numbers and letters on Sesame Street.
I remembered the day Maddie told our father — our gentle father, who had bathed us as babies, who had cared for us in the way of a man who always wanted daughters — that she’d had an abortion. Watching from my perch on our living room couch, where I had been reading, I concluded that she was telling him to get his attention. This was usual for her, despite the fact that he always lavished on her his devotion, even when she didn’t need it. In this case, she’d already made her decision about her predicament and didn’t really need him; I thought that she was trying to hurt him, only I didn’t know why, except that maybe it was to cause some drama. She succeeded. Our father began feeling unwell, and by nightfall was in the hospital with angina. I saw myself in the door frame of our father’s hospital room. My sister wanted in, but I was barring the door. Our mother, who was in the corridor, was trying to persuade me to bring my arms down. She had one hand on my biceps.
As usual when I considered things back home, I was angry all over again. I was also sad. I understood that we would never get better as a family, that I would always resent my sister, and that my parents would always try to bring us together.
I also felt longing — but for what I didn’t know.
“Oh là là. Not so fast.” Ames pulled my right hand down to prevent me from inhaling further, and with his other hand forced the joint out of my fingers. With his left hand, he pinned my wrist down to my thigh.
I waited for him to draw me to him, but after a minute or two, he started talking again, as though he hadn’t talked to anyone before, at least not about everything in his life.
He told me about his father, a travelling businessman and a womanizer who had left the family again and again. The first time his father asked him to cover up an affair, Ames was eleven. His mother had sent him to the village pub to call his father home for dinner; there, he saw his father with a woman.
“Her collarbone was bony,” he told me. “I remember because I’d always noticed my mother’s collarbone, which was wide, from being Portuguese. And freckled, from gardening. This wispy girl, this girl with him, had a laugh with no confidence, you know? She didn’t know what she was doing. He had his arm around her and her left hand came up to meet his hand, like a closed flower.”
He drew on the joint.
“When he got home, he came into my room and put some money on my night table. I didn’t have to ask why. Well, my mother didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.” As he talked, he bounced his hand on my thigh up and down like a jumping spider, without realizing. “Oh, I’m talking too much? Well, what do you want to do? You want a little more attention?”
His hand was back in his own lap. I shrugged and smiled, pretending to not care how things would play out. “Did I tell you my sister stole my boyfriend?”
“And you’re mad?”
“It was the last straw.” I said it in English, not knowing the French expression. I said it knowing the situation between Maddie and me was more complicated than I was making it sound. My sister had struggled for years with inner demons, and I felt sorry for her. I also loved her, for she was bright, talented, and kind when the impulse took her. I thought she deserved some happiness. I resented that she would receive it at my expense. It had always been that way. I tried to clarify my use of the English expression to Ames. “Lots of things for many years,” I said.
“La goutte qui fait déborder le vase.” He gave it some thought. “I understand this last straw.” He looked at me. “You’re an attractive girl.”
Ha, I thought. There you go, Maddie: guys like me, too. It’s not always about you.
Ames kissed me, and my inner creature of pleasure raised its head. I put my hands around his shoulders. His lips were wet, but his tongue stayed out of my mouth. Then he drew away. He put out the roach, which he’d been holding up in the air away from us. It had burned down to his fingers. He squashed it on the floor and sighed.
“These days, I tell people what I think. Directly. Like last night. ‘Do me a favour,’ my father says. I said to him, ‘It’s the last time I’m getting you out of a mess.’”
He nodded as if he were convincing himself. Then he pulled the plastic baggy out of his pocket and opened it up.
Suddenly, the train’s wheels screeched and my head slammed into the back of one of the cages.
“Putain.” Ames was lying half on his side, against the sliding doors.
The suitcases had held, except for a stroller that had jumped one of the elastic straps and was now lying on the floor between us. Ames eyed it, then asked me, “You okay?”
I rubbed my arm. “I think so.”
He helped me up. Then he tried to open the outer door, but couldn’t. There must have been an automatic mechanism that locked it in the event of an accident. It was too dark to see anything out the window. Outside, male voices were yelling. Ames stepped over the stroller and opened the sliding door to the next car.
Up and down the sleeper cars, people in dressing gowns peered out of their rooms. We got to one of the first-class cars and found the woman from the dining room lying across the corridor floor. Her head, bent at a strange angle, rested on the baseboard. Her briefcase was at her feet.
Ames hurried to her and bent down. Blood trickled down the woman’s cheek from a cut on the right side of her head. “Help,” he said to me.
I hated being someone’s prop. I went to his side and took the woman’s arm. Her perfume smelled of overripe cherries.
“Where is your room?” Ames asked. “Madame?”
Her eyes focused on a point down the hall. “Numéro huit. La clé est dans ma poche.”
Ames held her propped up against the wall while I reached into her business jacket, which was lined with something satiny.
Her room was the same size as mine, only with a single bed instead of two bunk beds. The bed was made with a thin white coverlet. On top was a pink peignoir, unfolded but not crumpled, as if it had been placed the
re lovingly, but in a rush. Gauze curtains hung over two windows. On the other side of the room a hinged table was folded open, and on it was a closed metal box with a handle, which I assumed contained makeup.
I let go of the woman, but Ames walked her to the bed, where her small frame dropped heavily and made the bed-springs squeak. She seemed softer than she had been in the dining car, blurred at the edges. Her lipstick was gone, and her eyeliner was smudged, but she was more beautiful than ever. “Could you pass a tissue?” she asked.
As if he had taken care of people all his life, Ames reached for a box next to the bed. She put the tissue to her temple and closed her eyes. “Should we call a doctor?” Ames asked. When she shook her head slowly, Ames instead brought her water from the tiny sink.
The train’s intercom came on. A male voice told us there had been an accident and that, due to minor damage, we would switch trains at the next station. Anyone injured was asked to proceed to the first aid station in the last car.
“I’m okay,” said the woman.
“Are you sure?” Ames frowned at her.
The woman sighed. “My husband told me he would pick me up in Paris, but I insisted on the train. I get so much work done.” She smiled at me. “Enfin, the landscape is nice, n’est-ce-pas?”
“Bon.” He gave her his room number. “Knock on the door if you need me.”
In my first month of travel, I received letters from my family. My father hoped I was enjoying the sights. My mother seemed distracted, concerned with Maddie’s daily appointments and making sure she was on track. A few months before, our parents had asked me to take Maddie to my drama club and beg my director to give her an understudy position. Maddie and I had in common an affection for theatre, and I had adored putting on skits with her when we were children. I felt then that we were cut from the same cloth, that she was one of the few who really understood me. So it was natural that, after another one of Maddie’s periods of drug abuse, my parents would ask me for this particular favour. But I refused, arguing that, for once, I wanted to do something that didn’t involve her. I wanted them to see my point of view, to support me in a way that they never had. They always took Maddie’s side. Now, in her letter, my mother reminded me of the fact that I had not done what they asked, and that Maddie’s health was worse because of it, implying that I had failed them all.
There was even a postcard from Maddie:
Dear Jeanne, I’m at home now, which sucks as you can imagine. Mom and Dad don’t let me out of their sight. And everything is flat. You don’t get it, I know. I’m just saying. I miss how mad you get, at least it makes some waves around here. Are you still too pissed to let me join you there, à la Owl and The Pussycat?
It was a reference to a play we had put on in our living room years before, modelled on Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat. I was the Owl, she, the Pussycat. We married using my dad’s wedding ring. At the end, we hugged, and I smelled the honey-scented shampoo we both used.
I tucked Maddie’s postcard in my mother’s envelope and put all the correspondence in the back of my knapsack. When I looked for it again weeks later, I couldn’t find it; it must have slipped out through a tear that had developed in the bag’s lining.
An hour after the announcement, I queued in the corridor and waited for the slowly moving train to arrive at the station. Ames was back in first-class, waiting to exit from that car.
I could see the lightening sky through the windows. On the pale grey platform, about thirty metres away, two men with red crosses on their arms brought a stretcher down from the train. The person on the stretcher was almost completely covered by a sheet, except for a head of auburn hair.
At the door of our car stood a uniformed railway employee. He studied the scene on the platform. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell how hurt a person is,” he said. “You seem fine and, then, you know.”
A man approached the group on the platform. He brought his hand up to his mouth upon seeing the stretcher, and hurried toward it. When he arrived, he bent down and said something to the prone figure. She turned her head in my direction, and I recognized her as the woman we had helped. Her eyes closed, she moved slightly so that her cheek touched the man’s. From their intimacy, I presumed the man was the woman’s husband. An ambulance man said something to him, and he unbent himself and nodded. The two ambulance men started to walk away, carrying the stretcher. As they moved, the husband kept a hand on his wife’s body as if it belonged there, like a mast on a sailboat.
After the train departed, I found Ames waiting for me at the platform’s snack bar. He sat at a bistro table, smoking. I sat down and said nothing about the woman on the stretcher. We had so little time left. He would have wanted to talk about her, how we should have helped her, how we should not have left her alone, etcetera, when what I wanted to talk about was how the man on the platform kept his hand on her. I suspected Ames would say something dismissive, make me feel immature about the situation. He wouldn’t understand what I wanted to say; I myself wasn’t sure I could articulate what I felt. All I knew was that when I thought of that hand, I felt a return of the longing I’d been experiencing the last few weeks.
“I’ll tell you why I’m going home,” said Ames. “Our maid drowned. She was cleaning the pool, and she fell in.” His eyes were bright.
I stopped breathing for a moment, and when I started again I was doubly aware of the smell of his cigarette smoke. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes.” For the first time, his tone had lost all irony. He brought his cigarette toward a plastic ashtray. “My father’s mistress. Trust him to hire someone who can’t swim.”
“That’s really awful.” I pictured a woman face down in a pool, her arms outstretched as if she were flying. I reached for Ames’s hand, the one methodically tapping his cigarette. He let my hand linger on his wrist for a second or two before pulling it away.
I sat there. “I thought you weren’t going to rescue your dad anymore.”
He shrugged. “Otherwise it’s la maman who has to deal. I’m doing it for her.”
Ames smoked until he was done and then looked down the track. The next train was due at any minute.
“Hey, how long do you think it’ll take for you to sort things out?” I asked him.
“I need to talk to the coroner. Contact the maid’s family.”
“I was thinking. Do you want to come with me?”
“You decided you need some companionship on your solo tour?” He smiled.
“After Antibes, I was thinking Spain. Or maybe Portugal. Isn’t your mother from there?”
He smoked some more, then shook his head. “I can’t. I have my army service to do.”
My eyes prickled.
He touched my arm. “You’ll be fine.”
In Antibes, the sky was blue and the houses were pink and yellow. The afternoons were long and sunny. On every surface was white light upon on which you could make shadows, experiment with versions of yourself. I walked the streets, empty because of the heat, and went to the beach. The aging ladies who sunned themselves didn’t talk to me, only threw me covert glances as if to accentuate the fact that I was a stranger.
I sat in a hollowed-out place in the sand and thought about my family. I decided to call home.
My mother answered, sounding genuinely glad. She had no idea where Antibes was, she said, but she envied me the beach.
“How’s Dad?”
“Fine. The doctor’s cleared him for another year, at least.”
I had promised myself I wouldn’t ask about my sister, and yet. “How is Maddie?”
“Doing pretty well, considering.” My mother sounded guarded, ready for a fight.
I felt a sudden urge for reconciliation. “You know what? How about a visit? This hostel isn’t great, but I could look for a real hotel.”
“That sounds so nice. It’s been years since
we’ve taken a beach vacation.”
“So come!” But what, outside my sister, could we talk about?
“It’s complicated.”
I didn’t say anything. She would have to bring it up.
“Maddie needs to be here. With some structure.”
“I meant just you and Dad.”
“I know.”
“Can you put Dad on the phone?” I could hear whining in my voice.
“Please don’t ask him to come, Jeanne.”
After we hung up, I thought of Ames, wondered what he had been asked to do to deal with the drowning. Surely he hadn’t had to pull the body from the water himself. Surely, he had simply made some administrative calls and then comforted his mother.
Before parting from him, I had asked him for his number, and he had given it to me. When I dialed it, the phone rang over and over, and nobody answered.
Three weeks later, I went home. I had slept with two more men and then stopped. Sex had started to make me feel disgusted with myself. Neither was it helping my loneliness.
When I first got home, Maddie tried to talk to me on several occasions, but stopped each time when I didn’t respond. I was so damned tired of her. After six months, it was her turn to leave home. For a few weeks we heard nothing from her. Then she came back. I think it was because she had some crisis with a boyfriend. Maybe she ran out of money.
I stayed home for one year, then I left for university.
Over the next decade Maddie had her comings and goings, and a stint or two in a rehab centre. There was some talk about cocaine. I stopped paying attention. Whenever my mother called me to give the latest news, I tuned her out, cradling the phone with my shoulder as I made notes for whatever project I was working on.
