The next day, I go get my car, which gives me a chance to visit the cemetery for the first time. There’s no obligation, it could wait, but the place is relatively deserted so I can beat it out of there if I choose to.
The stone hasn’t been set, but that little mound of earth is perhaps even more shocking. Someone left a few flowers, which haven’t wilted yet, and this period between Christmas and New Year’s is always very strange, which is proved by this uncommon silence that accompanies me, producing a feeling of unreal calm, one that suits my mood to a T. I lean over to fix something or other and I ask her to forgive me for that poor showing I made the other day at the funeral. This is a beautiful day to go visit your mother’s grave. The sky is clear and white as a lily and the air is just the right amount of nippy.
I straighten up and realize there are lots of trees around, and lots of sky. “This is a good spot for you,” I say. “You’re in the city, but it’s like being in the country. You’ll have birds and bees in summer.”
I put one hand on the black and ice-cold earth. Then I turn to go.
The sun is setting when I pull into the minimart for cigarettes and cat food.
I’m glad I got through that cemetery ordeal, glad I held up. That’s one less thing on my mind. I have made an honorable showing in the face of that shock, I’m getting through it better than I expected. I know now that I’m going to be able to come back here once in a while, without histrionics. I still need her. I come out of it reassured.
I meet Patrick on my way into the store. His arms are full of groceries, but he freezes when he sees me, goes white, then suddenly starts to run—probably afraid that I’m once again armed with something or other—and as he bounds away, one of the bags gives out and its contents splatter on the ground.
I go on my way without turning around, walking toward the spirits. I’m still furious at him. I’m furious with myself as well for letting myself be fooled, for not seeing what was right there in front of me. I retain an option of bashing him to bits with a bat or whatever, just to render him harmless, to render him lifeless. That’s still a possible scenario. He better not come near me.
But I still want him. It’s atrocious. I would let loose a scream of anguish and despair right now if I weren’t afraid I’d wind up handcuffed to a radiator by the security guards with shaved heads. I hate this horrible trick I’m playing on myself. What is wrong with me? Is it age? Perplexed, I collect some club soda, gin, olives, fat-free fromage blanc. For a second, I wonder if it might be better to get back together with Robert, concentrate on that relationship and ignore the rest. It would simplify things, snuffing out the embers that still glow inside him, but I can’t quite persuade myself and I give up on the idea.
“I didn’t send your friend an invitation,” he tells me as he welcomes me to the New Year’s Eve party, hair impeccably combed, a scarf around his neck, spiteful smile, white teeth.
The first man who gave me pleasure looked like him, except I was sixteen. He was the psychologist who saw to me after my father’s killing spree. He was a well-known psychologist, a scumbag.
“Robert, listen carefully. I am very happy that you didn’t invite him. Very happy.”
“Well, well.”
“I’m telling you.”
I hand him my coat. I’m not crazy about spending New Year’s in his company, but I couldn’t get out of it, the others are here. I’m not in any shape to spend New Year’s Eve all alone.
I buried my mother only three days ago. I don’t expect to be overflowing with energy, or dancing on the tables, but I feel that a little company is necessary. And maybe a drink, too. Irène loved this kind of party. She would start preparing for it a month in advance. Richard just mentioned that, and he is after all the person most affected by Irène’s passing, next to me. She was not a very easy woman to love, but Richard was used to her and time wound up working in his favor. After only a few years, they had become good friends. He, himself, couldn’t care less about the life of depravity she led.
She often suggested I could be more like him. When it came to respecting other people’s lives. Or advocated submitting to his mediation. Or following his advice. He offers to help me sort through her things and I say yes.
“Patrick not here?” he asks.
“No, I don’t know. Why do you ask me that?”
“Why?”
“He’s married. He has a wife. Why do you ask me where he is?”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry. I just thought…”
I shrug and walk away from him. There are a few writers at this party, a few filmmakers who have done clips for us. There is so much ego in this place that if ever there was a blackout they would all just start to glow. They all seem well, they have billions of projects but they’re mostly here to relax and enjoy the party, to forget about the business for at least a few hours out of the year, and all you have to do is stick out your hand and a glass of champagne miraculously appears.
“Oh, Vincent, my darling, thank you. How are you? Josie isn’t here yet?”
His face scrunches up. He pours himself a glass of champagne. “She isn’t coming. She won’t set foot at Anna’s.”
“Really? How did that happen?”
“It just did.”
“Wow, everything’s so complicated. Anyway. So are you happy with that flat-screen?”
“Yes. I mean, yes and no. It’s on all day long. I wonder if she ever takes a leak.”
“She’ll ruin her eyesight, that’s for sure.”
Anna motions me over, tells me that it’s better this way, for Josie and for her, and that she’s counting on my support with Vincent. “You know, the girl is a real menace and that imbecile just can’t see through her.”
“I warned him like a hundred times,” I say. “A hundred times I cautioned him. A hundred.”
“She wants to get the father of her child out of jail. That’s all she cares about. She’d go to any lengths. And if Vincent can’t find the money, I don’t think she’ll be in love with him much longer. You know, I think we should be thinking about the issue of custody, avoid any nasty surprises.”
“Yes, but not tonight,” I answer with a smile. I turn toward the party.
I’m not a man, but looking at Hélène I can almost imagine what they feel in the presence of such a well-turned-out young woman. “I’m thinking the same thing you are,” says Anna, a hand on my shoulder.
I light a cigarette. They have pushed the furniture back and set up a big buffet table. I mingle left and right, avoiding Robert.
But later, at about three in the morning when everyone is fairly exhausted, he manages to corner me near the bay window where I stopped to gaze out at the falling snow, silly me.
“I’m going to make an announcement,” he whispers in my ear. “It’s time to stop lying.” I immediately grab him by his lapel. I know he isn’t bluffing. I know that look in his eye. “Fine,” I say through clenched teeth. “Fine. You’re pathetic, Robert.”
“No. Wait, take back that ‘You’re pathetic.’ Take it back right now or I’m going to.”
“I take back the ‘You’re pathetic.’ ”
“I just want to remind you that fucking me was not always the chore you make it out to be lately.”
“Talking about the past won’t help. Don’t ask me to explain what’s inexplicable.”
“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not a moron.”
We set aside a late afternoon in the coming week. The snow has almost stopped, the lights are glistening.
“Aren’t you disgusted with yourself?” I ask him. “Having it end like this?”
“I would’ve been happy if we kept it right where it was. Never changing a thing. With you still the same person.”
“And so blackmail is all you could figure out? Fucking asshole.”
“Take that back.”
“I take back ‘fucking asshole.’ But this is beneath you, Robert, you can’t change that. So I’m sorry if my heart isn’t in it
the next time we meet. Don’t be mad at me, respect is something you can’t control.”
Be that as it may, I accept the drink he offers me but I refuse to drink it with him. “Fucking me is one thing…” I say.
He laughs and turns around after doffing an imaginary cap to me. I’m aware that my conversation is a little ridiculous, but I’m just about seriously drunk. Great. That’s exactly what I wanted. Exactly what I needed.
At about four in the morning, I disappear without a word. The streets are deserted. I stay off the main thoroughfares and after a while I’m out of town. I get to within a few miles of my house, into a patch of fog that’s starting to play tricks on me. I have to brake a little sharply, twice, because I can’t see a blessed thing. I’m supposed to have fog lights, but when I turn them on the results are less than conclusive. What inevitably had to happen then happens: I miss a curve and wind up in a ditch.
The impact is fairly hard, enough to deploy my air bag, which nearly knocks me out. When I recover, the engine has stalled and the first thing I notice is the silence. I reach out and turn off the ignition and now I’m in total darkness.
I know where I am. I’m in the woods. I’m almost home. It’s not far, but it’s a narrow road where there isn’t much traffic, even during a business day. Suffice it to say, the new year is starting off great. I throw my head back and stay there a moment, unmoving. Then, as I’m about to get out of the car, I let loose a scream, loud enough to shoot chills through the sleepy surroundings in the milky darkness. Excruciating pain in my left ankle. My mouth hangs open in agony, in pure astonishment.
Then I catch my breath and lean over cautiously to touch it. I can’t see a thing. I’m in a panic over the idea that I’m going to discover my ankle has been mashed or my foot has been severed. But no, it’s all there, and apparently there is no blood. The only thing is, I can’t move.
I think it over. I turn on the hazard lights. The fog is so thick I can hardly see the hood of the car. I let loose a big sardonic laugh. I think. I’m a little dizzy. I admit I’ve been a bad girl. Which inspires a feeling of evil power. I call him. I ask if I’m waking him up. I explain my situation.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says.
I light a cigarette. Reason only very rarely wins out—and it only engenders frustration, boredom, and desperation when you give in to it, or so I tell myself.
He just threw an overcoat over his pajamas and his hurrying practically warms my heart, but I don’t show it. He leans over. I roll down the window. “Take me home. Thanks,” I tell him. He nods, hands in his pockets, staring at the tips of his shoes. We stay there like that, completely still, for a full minute. Then I say, “All right, Patrick, look. I’m hurt. You have to help me to get out of this car, can’t you see?”
He’s lost the power of speech but not the use of his arms and I hold on to him as he lifts me out of the car and out of the ditch. This is the first time we’ve made physical contact since I tore his mask off and I am having a very strange, very violent reaction. He is practically carrying me. I’m relatively fascinated. By him, of course, but also by myself, with respect to this gift I have for carefully picking them.
He puts me inside next to him and suggests I put my seat belt on and not once do I manage to meet his eyes. He keeps his fingers tight to the wheel, in plain sight—and he is in profile, in the feeble light of the dash, never once turning toward me.
I say nothing. I recognize the smell in his car—church incense. I was in it once when the man who drove it was a charming neighbor and not the madman who had raped me a few days earlier, and I remember having smiled at recognizing that smell from my childhood and how soothing it seemed. It doesn’t make me feel that way now. I find it ghoulish. I open my window. Icy air rushes in, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s concentrating on his driving. That bandage is soaked in blood—I figure his wound opened as he struggled to get me out of the car. That’s probably to remind me just how brutal were the events he and I lived through, only a little while ago. I must not make the mistake of forgetting that. Patrick is a violent man. He didn’t hesitate to punch me in the face, grab me around the throat, twist my arms up behind my back hard, smother me, and I will be covered in bruises this time, too.
And strangely, I’m not afraid of him. I’m on the lookout, but I’m not afraid.
I don’t know how on earth he can drive because you can’t see anything at all. The mile and a half we have to cover is like an ocean of foam into which it feels to me like I would have sunk sooner or later, considering my current state.
That last glass of gin I had for the road, right before I left, that wasn’t a good idea.
My ankle is swelling, I can feel it. I struggle to bend over—which is how I make the delightful discovery that my muscles ache all over. The ankle feels warm and shapeless when I touch it. He remains stuck to his steering wheel, tamped down inside himself, head between his shoulders—unless it’s because of the cold air rushing into the car, but I need to breathe. I forget to tug on my dress.
Then all of a sudden we’re there. I can’t see the house but it’s very possible and Patrick does seem sure of himself. He even gets out to make sure, then comes back nodding in the affirmative.
Once again, I have to explain that I’m not going to make it on my own, that I’m freezing in my seat, before he finally moves his butt over to pull me out of the car. I put one arm around his neck, aggravating his discomfort, which I can feel as it forms and grows in the mind of my one-night-only savior at the instant we touch. I’m glad I can provoke such a reaction in him, glad I possess that little sprinkle of power.
He carries me. I didn’t ask him to, but I never let go of his neck and I expected—correctly, it turns out—that he would sweep me off the ground, through the front yard and up to the door, where I give no indication that I would like to touch either foot down anytime soon.
I rummage in the pockets of my coat for my keys. I ask if I’m too heavy, but I don’t hear his answer.
I open the door, turn off the alarm, motion for him to carry me upstairs. “You know the way,” I add.
I think he’s in shock. I think he doesn’t understand. I think in his present state he would agree to cleaning out my cellar or tidying up my attic before he leaves, all I have to do is ask.
He puts me down on my bed. Right away, paying no attention to him, I nervously take off my panty hose and toss them. By pure chance, they land at his feet. Then I pull my ankle up toward my eyes for a better look. It doesn’t look great. It’s already pink and swollen and shiny and it hurts like hell. I look up, grimacing, and I’m thrilled to see that the sight of my bare legs, my white thighs, my dark lace—my gymnastics have put it all out there on display, I’m not hiding anything from the eyes of this discriminating connoisseur—that this delicious display, the baring of which, as I said, provides me with a none-too-negligible inward satisfaction, leaves him petrified.
I stretch my leg out toward him, thus exposing even more of my crotch, ostensibly so he can take a look at my ankle and give me his considered opinion or God knows what. And I wait. I’m ready to blast him with incapacitant agent if I’ve made a mistake—my Guardian Angel is under the pillow. My leg is starting to cramp when he decides to back away, his eyes locked on the part of my anatomy he covets but which, once again, he decides to forsake. He lowers his head all at once. For a moment, I maintain that somewhat obscene position, fairly unambiguous, but it has no effect on him. He soon scrambles toward the door and scampers down the stairs.
Marty jumps up on the bed and rubs against me. I pet him.
Later I go downstairs, having wrapped my ankle in a skin-tone Ace bandage, clutching the banister, hopping step by step, and I lock the door behind him. I have no cold compresses, so I use a plastic package of frozen peas. The fog is gone, the sky is clear. I call a tow truck to get my car and I take two Alka-Seltzers. It’s the first of January.
I get a phone call from the prison. My father has han
ged himself overnight. I sit down, but in fact I’m not thinking anything at all, I’m hollow. Leaning over the kitchen table, forehead resting in one hand, my phone vibrates in the other. A journalist, who wants to know if I am indeed the daughter of the man who slaughtered the children at the day camp beach club in the ’80s. I don’t answer. I hang up.
I wanted to be a journalist when I was sixteen, the year my father splattered us with blood. I wonder what kind of journalist I would have made if I’d had a chance to pursue my studies. I stand up. I let my phone vibrate on the table.
I’m ashamed of my feeling of relief. I’m ashamed. I wish I could at least offer up a pang, some fleeting frown, some regret as compensation, but there’s nothing doing. Rather, I’m worried this whole thing will crop up again—a mud rising from the depths. I wonder if that is his revenge, his punishment, if he used his last breath, his last few moments of lucid thought, to rain thunder down upon me because I never once in thirty years took the time to visit him, as he complained to Irène. Because I deprived him of the comfort my company might have provided, the support of his child.
I can hardly remember a thing. I have vague memories of photographs I’ve seen of him—especially those the newspapers kept printing over and over again for months, but I can’t make him move in my mind, I can’t hear his voice or smell him. So without those elements, the fixed images are nearly meaningless and sterile. I’ve forgotten him. He’s an empty chair. Over the years and with no regard for the agony he caused us, Irène kept her little flame burning, as tiny as it might be, by way of several stories she told that featured him in a positive light—your father did this or your father went there—but it was a waste of time, she was wearing herself out for nothing. Your dad said this, your dad said that. I would nod, I would just move my head and never heard a word of what she told me.
I think Irène kept a whole box of photographs. They’re not in the attic, I didn’t want them, but I imagine she kept them, tucked away in her apartment. Photographs of him, apparently, from his childhood until prison, which Irène had managed to hide from the press, dozens and dozens of photographs of the Monster of the Aquitaine at every phase of his life. She was offered a fortune, they would have been stolen from us if she hadn’t left them in a safety-deposit box, while my mother and I went homeless for months, moving from boardinghouse to hotel, on and on.
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