“You misunderstood,” April said. “I realize I can be a little cagey about her situation, but obviously I wouldn’t have said she died when she was alive. That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I do not understand,” Luc said again, stepping even farther away from her. Soon he would be in the kitchen and April would have to shout. She wanted him to reach for her, to tell her it would all be okay.
“Forget it,” April said. “I’m so sorry, Luc. I never should’ve come. I’m a wreck and with Delphine”—she pointed halfheartedly toward the front door, the imprint of the “banker extraordinaire” still somehow visible—“Just forget it.”
April mentally berated herself. She wanted too much from Luc, too much from them, as if there were a them to begin with, when their only true connection was a contract signed by Agnès Vannier and Sotheby’s, the names Vogt and Thébault not even part of the document.
“Avril,” Luc said. “You must explain yourself. Your mother. Gone. Missing. When all this time she was here. You’ve lied to me.”
“I haven’t lied!” April snapped. “And she wasn’t ‘here.’ She was absolutely gone before I left for college. Physically, no. There was a body and it was hers. But to all intents and purposes the woman I knew disappeared.”
Luc frowned. He was trying to seem stern, angered by her withholding of information. But even from the couch and at that great distance April understood that the true face he was showing was one of concern, of worry.
“My mom has—had—early-onset Alzheimer’s,” April told him at last. “Do you know what that is? Is there a different expression in French?”
“I know what it is,” Luc said, his face still grim but starting to soften.
“The symptoms began when she was young,” April went on. “Extremely young. I was about fourteen when things started to go awry. Or, at least, I was fourteen when I started to notice. Mom was forty-two.”
“What happened?” Luc asked. “When things started to ‘go awry’?”
“Oh, ordinary stuff. Losing keys, forgetting to pick us up at school, confusion in grocery stores, not recognizing her own car. All the little things you can write off for a while.”
“Until you can’t,” Luc said, his voice like gravel.
“Right. Until there’s that one thing.” April slammed a fist into her palm. “Where you have to open it all up and look inside.”
“So what happened?” Luc asked again as he took a few steps closer. His feet were now partway onto the rug. “What was the one thing?”
“Do you really want to hear it?” April asked. “Because it’s a pretty fucking depressing story.”
“Yes. I want to hear it. You have to say it.”
April nodded, and for only the third time in her life, she told the story of the zoo.
Chapitre LVII
It was her brother’s tenth birthday. Due to their mom’s recent bout of forgetfulness, which was attributed to stress and lack of sleep, Dad decided there would be no formal party for Brian. It was too taxing. Instead Mom and her two children would enjoy a day at the zoo.
April was fourteen at the time, thus rather irritated by the endeavor from the onset. It was summertime and school was out. Her friends were at the beach, rubbing baby oil all over their bodies and lying across giant strips of tinfoil. April wanted to be there too, but instead was forced to meander around the hot, hilly zoo, surrounded by the smell of sweaty monkey fur and elephant feces plus one little brother who was hardly any fun at all.
The morning went as expected, namely with an excessive amount of time spent standing in the snake enclosure watching reptiles swallow small white bunnies whole. On the one hand, it was disgusting. On the other, at least the snake pit gave April relief from the heat.
When Brian finally tired of watching the demise of defenseless furry creatures, the three made their way to a hot-dog window. The lines were long, and what started out as treacherous boredom turned into something else entirely. About halfway through the line, their mother started to panic.
“Where are your parents?” she asked April, then Brian. “Are you two here by yourselves?”
“We’re with you,” Brian answered, confused.
“Mom, what are you talking about?” April looked around to make sure she didn’t see anyone she knew.
“There are bad people in the world!” their mother rasped, voice low, as if the “bad people” were listening and waiting to pounce. “Come, come with me!”
“What the hell?” April said as their mom flagged down a groundskeeper and asked for directions to security.
“I’m hungry,” Brian whined.
“I’m taking you to the police!” their mother screamed, clutching their wrists and dragging them through the park.
Brian looked over at his big sister and laughed, hoping she might laugh too. This was a joke, he thought, Mom acting silly. April smiled back even though she knew their life had just changed, that nothing would ever look the same again. You could shrug off lost keys and dishwashing detergent accidentally put in the freezer. Forgetting the faces of your children? Not an anecdote for bridge group.
“Hello, ma’am, can I help you?” a guard asked as they stormed the stuffy security trailer.
“Someone left these minors alone at the zoo!” April’s mother shouted, flinging the kids forward, their wrists now red and lumpy from her grip. “You have to find their parents! They won’t tell me anything!”
“All right.” The man finished off his Slurpee and pulled out a notepad. He looked directly at April. “You’re hardly a kid. Where are your parents?”
“This is a little hard to explain,” April said nervously. Brian stood beside her, alternating between giggles and feeble little cries. “She is our mother.”
“Uh, beg pardon?” The man swiped a hand over his mustache, then ran a blue tongue over his lips. April would never get over that particular shade of artificial blue.
“This is our mom,” she said. “This happens sometimes. She gets confused. Her name is Sandra Grace Potter. She was born on December 2, 1951. We are Brian and April Potter. Our father is Richard. He works at the naval base on Coronado. We live in Coronado, too.”
“Oh my god!” their mother shouted, startling everyone in the room. Even the rotating desk fan jumped.
Finally, April thought. She realizes what’s going on.
“My purse! Someone stole my purse.” She turned to April. “Did you little hooligans take it?”
“Mom—”
“I can’t find my purse.” She started patting her sides, her stomach, her breasts.
“Don’t worry, ma’am,” the security officer said. He reached for a walkie-talkie. “I’ll put a call out. See if someone found it. What does it look like?”
“Hmmm.” Their mom placed a finger to her chin. “You know what’s funny? I don’t even remember!”
“It’s maroon,” April said. “Leather. With a drawstring top. There should be keys to an Oldsmobile station wagon inside. And probably a million little bunched-up pieces of scented pink Kleenex. Also black-cherry-flavored ChapStick.”
Recounting these things made fourteen-year-old April’s eyes water. She couldn’t figure out why.
“So you did steal my purse!” their mom screamed.
“Mom, I didn’t. Okay, this is so weird.”
“April?” Brian whimpered, a corner of his shirt twisted and shoved between his teeth. He was ten but at that moment looked closer to three.
Eyes locked on the maybe-family members, the guard mumbled into his walkie-talkie. He needed help of a kind he could not articulate.
That a good Samaritan found Sandy’s purse in the aviary was the lucky break April (and the security guard) needed. They were able to ID the woman as well as her children based on the school pictures in her wallet. By the time their father showed up, Mom had mostly regained her bearings, unaware they’d been at the zoo all day but with a vague recollection of trying to help someone else’s kids.
&
nbsp; “And so,” April said, looking up and catching Luc’s gaze for the first time since she started the story. “That was the beginning of the end.”
“Wow,” he said and rubbed his chin. “That is quite the story.”
“Yes. It was awful. What sucks even more is that it happened at the ‘World Famous San Diego Zoo,’ that whore of a tourist attraction that insists on forty-seven billboards on every highway and nonstop advertising loops on radio and television.”
“That is, as you say, brutal.”
“‘Brutal’ is right. When I moved to New York for college, people always thought I was crazy to leave San Diego. The truth was it would’ve driven me crazy to stay.”
“And then to Paris,” he said with a half-smile. “It was even further than that.”
“I never really looked at it that way.” She shook her head. “Anyway, things sort of went south from there. Or, even more south than they already were. Dad thought he could take care of her, but by my fifteenth birthday she was in a home. There was no sweet-sixteen party and certainly no car. I had to coerce our neighbor into taking me to get my license. My dad was more or less absent from then on. As much as Mom was. More. At least he had a choice. On my fifteenth birthday I felt like I lost both of my parents, even though up until two days ago both were still alive.”
April grabbed her purse and pulled out her wallet.
“Here. I’ll show you. A picture says a thousand words, right?”
She plunged her fingers into the space behind her credit cards. Tucked amid a checkbook, three business cards, and stamps from some lower price point, was a photograph. April extracted it and passed it Luc’s way. Much to her surprise, he was now beside her on the couch. She looked down to see their thighs nearly touching.
“These are your parents,” Luc said, studying the photograph, eyes following the curve of the man’s sparsely covered head as it leaned over a hospital bed. Beneath him a blank-faced woman reclined against two pillows. His eyes were closed; hers were vacant and staring. They held hands. Or, rather, the man clutched the woman’s hands as her fingers sat limply inside his hold.
“It’s them,” April said with a nod. “Don’t even ask when it was taken because I have no idea. He’s been in that position for the last nineteen years. Or he was, at least until the other night. Poor guy. What the hell is he going to do with himself now?”
“C’est incroyable,” Luc said. “That is true love.”
“I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” April muttered.
“But it is beautiful, non? We all want to feel this way.” Luc went to slide his hand around April’s waist or touch her back—or something—but then uncharacteristically pulled back. “Most people never get the chance. Too many things—people, life—it all gets in the way.”
“I’d never figured you for a romantic,” April said, lying in some way. “And while I agree he loved her tremendously, at the risk of sounding like the teenage April, what about us? He still had a family to raise but completely forgot about us.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Troy, my husband, ex, my—”
“Le grand m’sieu,” Luc said and tried for a smirk. “Yes, I am familiar.”
“Le grand m’sieu thinks I hold him to these standards, that my so-called ‘trust issues’ stem from the fact I don’t think Troy could ever display that level of devotion. But I don’t want that. He should love Chelsea and Chloe more than he loves me. I’d be upset if he didn’t! That’s where my dad got it wrong. Troy’s girls should be number one, the wife a distant second.”
“Avril,” Luc frowned. “That makes me sad. You should be number one. You should also not refer to yourself as ‘the wife.’”
“Ha! You’ve got that second part right.”
“That’s not what I meant—”
“They’re his kids, Luc! They’re his forever. I could get sick or just plain leave.”
“You could leave,” he said. A question? Was it a question or a statement? Or was it simply an echo of April’s words?
“My dad knew my mom wasn’t going to get better. It wasn’t like she could come to her senses, or they could work things out, or she would even know who the fuck he was the next day. Yet all he cared about was spending every waking moment with her, even as she deteriorated. He quit his job. He sold everything, every heirloom and stick of furniture and car to pay for her care, to put food on the table since he bailed on actual employment. He did a few odd handyman jobs around the island, favors offered up by our neighbors, I’m sure, but our life was basically stripped to the bone. Looted.”
“The heirlooms,” Luc said. “The things in Marthe’s apartment. Your job. It all makes sense now.”
“It’s not that simple,” April said. “I didn’t want those things, the stuff. Lord knows I lack a spacious apartment in the Ninth to keep it all in.” April tried a smile, Luc smiled wistfully in return. “I only wanted something to keep, something that was hers, something substantial that would outlast even me.”
Luc smiled again, brighter this time. “You have in mind one thing, non?”
“Oui.” April nodded. How was it that Luc almost always knew the correct answer? “Mom had this long cherrywood dresser passed down from her grandmother. It was gorgeous. It had that shiny, glistening marquetry. Queen Anne–style but not actual Queen Anne. You know the kind, with the brass pull handles?”
“Not really—”
“Anyway. It was so her. I can close my eyes and picture what was in every drawer, even her horrible skin-colored bra and panty collection.” April let her lids fall shut. “I can see the doilies on top, the pink and orange perfume bottles sitting on them. I see Mom brushing her hair in the dull mirror, my Girl Scout picture tucked in the corner.”
April opened her eyes again. She was surprised to find Luc tearing up.
“I’ve spent years looking for a replica,” she admitted. “We’ve had a few come through for auction, but nothing exact. I even went to the consignment shop my father took it to in the first place. They sold it to someone named Carol for $125! Can you believe it—$125!? I put an ad in the paper looking for any Carols who bought that dresser, said I’d pay five times what she did. I’d pay fifty times. A hundred times! Anyway, that ad ran for a year. Nothing.”
“I’m so sorry, Avril, I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s what bothered me so much about Marthe’s apartment. How could her children, whoever they were, and her granddaughter, leave it behind? Didn’t they want something to remember her by? And never mind the furniture,” April said and laughed dryly. “Never thought I’d say those words. Although the furniture grabbed me first, it’s the journals I think about when I go home at night. If I were Lisette I would’ve kept those above all else. Maybe I don’t want the damned dresser after all. Maybe I just want my mom’s life, her memories. Of course, given her diagnosis, memories were the very first thing she lost.” April shook her head.
“You are an extraordinarily strong woman,” Luc said as he moved closer. “I knew that from the onset, I just never realized the extent until now.”
Luc inched ever closer. He was still hesitant, a little reticent to make contact, whether due to her story or the night in her apartment or Delphine or some combination of the three April did not know. She smelled his cologne, the cigarettes on his breath, and although he was not yet physically touching her, April felt him as though he was.
“I’m hardly strong,” she said, shoulders loosening. “What did I do? I ran. Mom didn’t know who I was. My father didn’t care. I decided to start fresh somewhere else because I’d lost what I had in California. I still went to visit like a dutiful daughter but I tried to start over. I went to college, and then grad school. And ever-more grad schools until I could grad school no more. I thought my life would reset here in Paris. And it did. Sort of. For a second there everything was perfect.”
“Americans and their quest for perfection,” Luc said. “One day you will learn it�
�s not achievable. It’s not even something you want. So, ma chérie, here is the question I pose to you. What will you do now? You cannot worry about what you didn’t do. What will you do going forward? This is the only way to find your answers.”
“In the long run? I have no idea. But short-term I’m going back to San Diego,” she said. “I’m going home to say good-bye.”
Chapitre LVIII
Paris, 17 April 1898
Intentions! Oh, for the devil are they!
You can have them. They can be pure and good. In your mind you will execute them in a very precise manner with the purest of hearts. Then something happens and shoots it all to hell. Does that make a person any less good? I don’t think it does.
Since that fire beneath the tents, I have scarcely spent a night away from Boldini, save for his multiweek adventures to Monte Carlo to commit hara-kiri. No matter how he aggravates me I continue to love the bristly, cagey man.
Still, the temperament of our union can be trying. Indeed, he never tries to smooth things over with jewels or furnishings. For now I am able to live off the generosity of Le Comte, yet I worry about tomorrow, and the day after that. Heaven knows Boldini cannot be relied upon to contribute. So many years have passed, yet I still do not know if he is a rich man, a poor man, or something in between.
I could not for a third time survive that bone-weakening feeling of near-destitution. There might not be any bat guano kings or famed flatulists or amorous counts to save me the next time. So I’ve done what I had to. I slunk back to the Folies and asked for my former job. Precious Gérard said that as long I remain beautiful he will always make a spot for me. I cannot guarantee the beauty part, but damned if I won’t try. Henna and the latest in enamel whitening masks will continue to be my greatest allies!
The day I reclaimed my position at the Folies was the day after Boldini returned from a six-week trip to Monte Carlo. The minute my shift was up, I scrambled over to his studio, anxious to see him after all this while, anxious share in the good news: Gérard took me back. Boldini no longer had to worry about supporting me. Not that he worried about it in the first place!
A Paris Apartment Page 28
