by Lily Tuck
“Do you know his work?” Alison asked.
Leslie had not been listening. “What?”
“The sculptor, Henry Moore. The tourists were Japanese,” Alison went on, “and at the end of the tour, I asked the tour leader if anyone had any questions about what they had seen, and after he had translated what I had said, a lady in the group raised her hand”—Alison looked over at Leslie—“and you know what she asked?”
“No, what?” Again, Leslie was only half-listening.
“She asked if now that they were finished with the tour, could they go to a shopping mall. Can you believe that?” Alison was shaking her head and laughing.
In bed, Alison put down her book and said, “I’m worried about her. After school, I tried to take her shopping but she wouldn’t let me buy her clothes. She should lose weight, but of course I didn’t say anything.”
“Who are you talking about?” Mark asked. “Leslie?”
“Yes. It’s too bad, the twins kind of ignore her. The dog, too, is making me a little crazy.”
Mark laughed. “Shoot it, “ he said.
“But I’m serious about Leslie. I want her to be happy here.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’ll adjust. It takes time sometimes.” Mark said. “Turn out the light, will you? I have to get up really early tomorrow and meet a client.”
“Who?”
“La Vache Qui Rit.”
“Who?”
“A French cheese company. It means ‘the cow that laughs.’”
“I know.” Alison said. “I know that much French.” In her head, she could not help picturing a slender Frenchwoman. The Frenchwoman was smiling at Mark.
Every day, Leslie wore the same thing: stretch pants and an oversized man’s shirt. The only clothes she could fit into and feel comfortable in. Luckily the school did not have a dress code. All the kids wore jeans. So far, Leslie had not met anyone except in a casual way—a few girls she could ask about an assignment, or whether a teacher was strict or the location of a classroom but not much more. Many of the kids in her class, and the teachers, too, spoke with a thick southern accent and she had trouble understanding them. And a lot of the girls in her class who were her age, fourteen, she noticed, wore eye makeup and were going out with boys—they wore their rings, their sweatshirts, they clung to each other in the halls and kissed. Outside the school they smoked cigarettes, some of them smoked pot. Leslie heard the girls talk about the boys—how they made out together, some of them boasted about going all the way. If the parents were not there, they had all-night parties. They drank.
Leslie, too, began to drink in spite of what she already knew firsthand about the effects of alcohol and, no doubt, due to what a costly shrink would later point out were her “self-destructive” tendencies, while she was staying at Mark and Alison’s house. Nights, when she was sure everyone was in bed, she would sneak into the dining room and open the liquor cabinet. Barefoot, in her pajamas, she stood in the dark and drank straight out of the bottle: whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, liqueurs—she did not care what it was. The alcohol burned her throat and helped her go to sleep. One night, she did not hear Mark come quietly down the stairs. Before she could move, he turned on the light. He was pointing a .22 rifle at her.
“Christ, Leslie!” he yelled. “I thought you were a burglar. What the hell are you doing in here?”
Alison looked forward to the two days, Tuesday and Thursday, she volunteered at the Hirshhorn. Not only did they get her out of the house, but they brought her close to art. Before she married Mark, she had wanted to be an artist, and she still hoped that one day, after the twins were grown, she could go back to painting. Her teachers had encouraged her and told her she had talent. For a while, when she and Mark were first married, she had hung some of the paintings she had made as a student in the house—abstract paintings of blue and green stripes that were heavily influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, her favorite painter—but after a while Alison had taken them down. She thought the paintings were bad and they made her sad.
In Paris, Alison shares a studio with a woman called Bernadette. Bernadette sits at a table in a corner of the room and does mostly decorative découpages, cutting pictures out of old books and magazines that she artfully glues together, frames and sells. Bernadette also has a house in the south of France, and often she is away from Paris for months at a time. The studio is in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, in a nondescript old building. To get to it, Alison has to cross a courtyard full of cast-off appliances and car parts and then, even in the rain, she has to climb a rickety wooden outdoor staircase. Once inside, she forgets the world, her life, Bernadette, and she paints. One whole wall of the studio is made of glass.
Leslie’s room was a mess. Her clothes were strewn on the floor, along with her school books and papers. A wet towel was draped over an upholstered chair. The bed was unmade—the blanket and the bedspread were bunched up on top of the mattress. The dog was lying on Leslie’s jacket, which lay on the floor; also spread on the floor were sheets of newspapers. Inside the bathroom, Mark could hear the drip of a faucet.
“Don’t tell Aunt Alison.” Leslie had started to cry.
Sitting down on the unmade bed, Mark patted the spot next to him. “Tell me what is going on? Do you want to go home?”
Shaking her head, Leslie said, “No. I just feel—I don’t know, Uncle Mark, I can’t explain.”
“Try,” Mark said.
“Thank god, I did not see him get knocked out,” Alison would later tell Mark. “Apparently, he just lay there on his back on the ice in a pool of blood.”
“Head wounds bleed a lot,” Mark said.
Instead, the doctor had called her from the hospital, which was probably no less worrisome, although he, Dr. Delmonico, had tried to reassure her. Peter, he was 99 percent sure, he said, would be fine. Nonetheless that 1 percent caused Alison to drive a hundred miles an hour from her house to the hospital.
“Lucky, I didn’t get a ticket,” she also told Mark.
“Or have an accident,” he said. “You might have ended up next to Pete.”
To make certain, Dr. Delmonico wanted to keep Peter in the hospital overnight, and Alison had stayed with him, in his room. Meantime, she arranged for Sam to be picked up from school by a friend, who also volunteered to keep Sam for the night. She had also telephoned Mark, assuring him that Peter would be fine and that his presence was not necessary at the hospital. Relieved, as he still had a lot of work to do, he promised to be home early and to bring home a pizza for Leslie and himself.
Why did he sleep with her? If ever Mark asked himself that question, he was unable to answer it. He wasn’t attracted to her. She was not his type, she was overweight. Also, she was much too young. And a virgin. What the hell had he been thinking? And not just once but at least a dozen times. On the weekend when he was home, each time Alison left the house to pick up the twins or go do an errand, he would sneak down to Leslie’s room. He would fuck her on her unmade bed, the damn dog whining somewhere underneath the bed. Partly he felt sorry for her, partly she was willing, or something like that. She wasn’t even good in bed; she was too compliant, too passive. Probably she was frightened. He, too, may have been attracted by the danger of it. Part of him would like to think that it had been a good experience for her, it had given her confidence. It had made her feel womanly and desired or some bullshit like that. Mostly, however, he does not like to think about it.
As soon as he had shut the door to her room and left, Leslie whispered to herself, “Uncle Mark, Uncle Mark.” But when they were in bed together, she did not call him Uncle Mark. Nor did she call him Mark. She did not call him anything. He was always in a hurry, not saying much to her except to tell her not to worry, that he was the one who took precautions, and that he would not hurt her, although sometimes he did. He never got completely undressed either, he ke
pt his shirt on while they had sex, and most of the time Leslie kept her eyes shut. The worst was afterward, when she saw him in the house, with Alison and the twins, at dinnertime or during the breakfast rush, behaving as if nothing had happened, as if he had not touched her breasts or put his penis in her mouth, asking her to pass the salt or asking how she had done on an algebra test. All the time she hardly dared look at him, and her heart was pounding so hard and fast she was afraid she would faint or drop dead. Of course, too, she always felt horribly guilty toward Alison, betraying her like that in her own house and taking advantage of her kindness. In addition, she worried that Alison would find out. But, perhaps as, later on, Leslie began to suspect, Alison knew. In the years to come, Leslie always told herself, and told her costly shrink whom she saw twice a week—and this may have been only an excuse—that she was in love with Mark. Uncle Mark. He was so good-looking, so energetic, so kind and understanding. She could not help it, she said. And he, too, must have loved her.
If, from time to time—times that are now marked by longer and longer intervals, especially since she lives in Paris and her life is so removed from what it once was—Alison thinks about Mark, she does not think about him with bitterness or with any ire, especially now that he has died. Instead she tends to think about him quite fondly. Like an old family friend or perhaps like a beloved old dog. She has concluded that Mark was a romantic, that he was an egotist, and that he never thought to do harm. He simply did not think. Also, she has forgotten what it was like to be married to him, and the twelve years are reduced to what amounts to probably only a few minutes of memories, so that sometimes she feels almost cheated. She could never, like the French prisoner Papillon, confined to years of solitary confinement, recall the events of her life minute by minute. No never. Instead she remembers random unimportant things like Mark singing. He had a nice voice and he took such pleasure belting out the verses of his favorite hymn: “Bring me my bow of burning gold! / Bring me my arrows of desire!” Ah, desire, Alison thinks, smiling. She is painting in her studio in the Nineteenth Arrondissement. Recently, her canvases have become more and more abstract. The one she is presently working on depicts a large round brown mass with a bright electric-yellow background.
Coming over to look at it, Bernadette puts her hand on Alison’s shoulder and remarks that it is très violent. What will Alison call the painting? Bernadette also wants to know.
Without thinking about it, Alison replies, “Accident.”
Alison also remembers the time Mark proposed to her. It was an August night and they were lying on the beach together looking up at the stars. Alison was determined to see a shooting star so that she could make a wish—perhaps a wish that Mark would ask her to marry him. Then they made love on the stony beach. Now, of course, she cannot recall if she had actually seen a shooting star that night and made her wish. Nor, worse still, can Alison recall Mark’s lovemaking.
The accident occurred when Leslie was thirty-one. Leslie was on her way home after she had been drinking several whiskey sours at a bar in town called the Buena Vista, and the road was icy because, earlier that evening, it had snowed. Leslie was driving too fast, and her car skidded out of control around a corner and hit a tree. She was killed instantly. Alison only learned about Leslie’s death several months later while she was buying a newspaper at a kiosk in the Gare de Lyon.
“Alison! Hello!” A man called out to her. “It’s Anders. Remember? Janine’s husband. Ex-husband.” He laughed. Anders’s hair had gone gray and he had grown a beard, which was also gray. Alison would never have recognized him.
“I always felt sorry for her,” Alison told Anders.
Anders shook his head. “She seemed to be having a pretty good time screwing Mark in your—” Anders stopped himself. “Hey. I thought you knew. I thought that was why you and Mark got divorced.”
In her seat in the first-class section of the train, on her way to visit Bernadette, whose house is located in a small hilltop village called Pierrefeu, near Toulon, Alison was surprised, after all these years, at how shocked and duped she felt.
Outside, it was drizzling. “Bastard,” she repeated. The train picked up speed, and suddenly before she had a chance to realize it, they were already in the country. They passed a thick forest of trees, then an open field dotted with red poppies, then more fields filled with sunflowers.
She and Leslie had gone shopping together again, and that last time Leslie had let Alison buy her clothes. A black polka-dot party dress with a full skirt and a bit of a plunging neckline. By then it was late spring and the end of the school year and Leslie had lost weight; her complexion had cleared up. At home, when she showed off the new dress, Mark had twirled her around the living room, making the polka-dot skirt flare out. He promised her that all the boys were going to fall in love her.
The sun was trying to come out, and the sunflowers appeared a bright, almost unnatural neon yellow, their heads all nodding in the same direction. In the distance, Alison saw a village, a church, a large turreted house surrounded by a stone wall, then more fields filled with sunflowers, then fields with cattle and horses. Everything looked green and fresh and well cared for. Not slowing down, the train went hurtling by a row of white houses. Behind the lowered barrier, Alison could see the stopped cars, a man on a tractor, some children waving at the train. From where she sat, Alison waved back, but she was too late.
Bloomsday in Bangkok
In June, after Frank had left, Claire saw monkeys, monkeys instead of people. She saw them sitting behind the wheels of cars, she saw them swinging golf clubs, she saw them doing the twist—Lock to the light, lock to the reft, she mimicked how the Thais sang, how they transported the ls for the rs and vice versa.
She, James and Frank had once spent an afternoon mimicking how, on a visit to Bangkok’s floating market, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, with both hands touching his forehead and joined as if in prayer, ignoring protocol and uninvited, was said to have jumped into a vendor’s tippy little boat. First, it was Claire’s turn, and with the serious look she might put on for a funeral, she made an exaggeratedly awkward leap next to where James was sitting in the living room. The result of this leap was to send James, as the vendor, into a violent paroxysm of rocking, while Frank, as the bystander, contorted his face to show horror. Then they switched roles. Frank was Claire and James’s best friend. Frank was a captain in the U.S. Army; he went away for long periods of time up-country not telling them where—to Laos, probably.
Claire and James made a point of living differently from the other Americans and living the way the Thais—they referred to them as Siamese—did. They took off their shoes before going inside their house, they eschewed air-conditioning in favor of ceiling fans, they went without hot water—to wash her hair which then was long, Claire went to the Royal Bangkok Sports Club. Once a week, James drove to a Chinese barber on New Road who cut his hair, shaved him and cleaned his ears—the barber inserted a thin blade deep into James’s ear, then twirled the blade. Afterward James claimed that he could hear a lot better.
They took small, single-engine planes with names like Otter and Beaver, rode on packed local buses, hitchhiked in rickety wooden trucks to places like Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Pimai. They slept on bamboo mats on the floor of raised thatched houses, they ate the eyes of fish, the testicles of roosters, thousand-year-old duck eggs soaked in horses’ urine—delicacies reserved for guests—they drank Mekhong, the raw local liquor made from distilled rice (the deposit on the bottle cost more than the liquor itself), they went to the bathroom in thickets, in paddies. They got heatstroke and sunburnt, they got soaked to the skin in sudden downpours, stung by mosquitoes and sucked on by leeches, sick the one time they smoked opium and, of course, they always had diarrhea.
Also, everywhere they went, people stared at them. In the more remote villages, the children—except for one little girl of about eight or nine who ran up and ya
nked two-handed at Claire’s hair as if the long blonde braid were a rope for her to swing on—were frightened and hid from them.
And Pinai? Pinai?—Where are you going? the villagers always called out after them.
In her letters home, Claire wrote about the orchids, the jasmine for sale in the market, the purple bougainvillea and the sweet-smelling frangipani growing in their yard. She described the mangoes, mangosteens, papayas, lychee nuts, the twenty-some variety of bananas—she vowed, she wrote, to try each one. Meantime, her friends, Claire imagined, were pushing carts in the supermarket, making piecrusts, changing diapers, while their husbands left their cramped houses, half awake in the mornings, to go to banks, to practice law, to sort mail—one of Claire’s friends was married to a postal clerk.
Claire played golf, she swam laps in Frank’s pool, she played mah-jongg. The Siamese women she played with, she told Frank and James—clack, clack, Claire imitated the sound of the ivory tiles—were so polite that they let her win, and Frank said, “Politeness can kill you,” going on to describe how when once he had taken the wrong road to Ubon and had stopped at a village to ask for directions, he was told that chai, chai—yes, yes—he was on the right road so that he would not lose face by turning around and going back. “Forty miles out of my way and none of it paved. Can you imagine?” Frank said.
