by Annabel Lyon
“You love me, don’t you love me?” he was yelling.
Mattie put her hands over her ears. She felt some spit from his mouth land on her cheek and she started to cry.
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIX
August 2017
High above the cathedral doors, Sara sees or thinks she sees (she is drunk), a gargoyle: hands working between withered frog-legs, wings spread, head thrown back. She imagines some red velvet hell, some masturbatorium where he suffers with his kind. She is in Paris, finally, again, and Mattie has been dead for a year. Sweet Mattie is with the worms, and Sara would like a drink please. Europeans drink; it’s elegant. It’s not a problem.
* * *
—
The joke being that she has been to Paris only once before, with her mother and sister; drunk Stella Artois in the Galeries Lafayette, the drinks counter overlooking the perfume floor, while her mother bought Mattie clothes, and everyone so nice. She had been drinking even then, she realizes, ten years ago. Agnès b., her mother’s taste: wool, cashmere. Navy, charcoal, black. Everyone so kind. And why not? What did it cost anyone to be kind? Mattie was hardly a unicorn. Retarded girls wore clothes in Paris too. She had got her mother drunk on that trip, and Mattie tipsy. She was going to hell. This was on their last night, at a restaurant around the corner from their rental flat. You are not driving, their waiter kept saying. No, we’re not driving. The fish was exquisite, the beef bloody, heavenly. Her tongue came. Mattie giggled. Maybe her tongue came too.
An alcoholic, Sara. Everyone knew, no one knew. A red-wine drunk, Sara, and the occasional cognac. That was all. The French, she would say to Mattie, trying to explain, and Mattie would smile expectantly. Certainly, the French. Sara was a drunk.
* * *
—
In her mind she lives alone, somewhere old and elegantly seedy: Lisbon, Venice, or some old Caribbean port where the sun dawns pinkly and the trade winds cool the veranda in the evening. White threadbare curtains fluttering. Or grey stone in winter, cold damp rooms with wallpapers rococo with mold, and in a single room a fire in a fireplace, a blanket on a sofa, a glass of red wine. In her mind she remains an alcoholic, but refined and functional and private. She isn’t sloppy. She wears beautiful clothes and jewels and scent, diamonds and furs, and somehow is not ridiculous. In the Caribbean version she drinks at dusk and writes on a vintage pink typewriter before that, beautiful stern short stories that sell in important places none of the locals read. She has wealth, privacy, solitude, and such lovely, lovely clothes.
* * *
—
The waiter at Le Hibou brought Sara her wine and two black ramekins, one of salted peanuts and the other of green clingstone olives. Lunch! She ordered a carafe of water, too, like the sophistiquée she was. No book this time, but sunglasses, leaning back in the cane chair, tapping a short, blood-red fingernail on the zinc pizza of a table, watching the passersby. She’d had her nails done by an Algerian girl in a cupboard in the Marais on a Sunday, that was yesterday or the day before, not far from the Place des Vosges. Only the Marais was open on Sunday. Blood red was too dark for August. She’d have them redone in another day or so, when they started to chip. Pearl grey, maybe. Blood and brains, yes. She was aware. It was too hot for red wine, also, but August in Paris—who was there to judge? Who was there to judge her drinking and shopping and beautifying on the first anniversary of her sister’s death?
* * *
—
David Park, for one. He had not wanted her to go.
“That’s all you’re taking?” He had offered to drive her to the airport, and had come early to watch her pack.
“I’ll shop there.”
He shook his head so she didn’t tell him of her plan, which pleased and excited her inordinately: to take only the clothes on her back, and buy a new outfit each day to wear the next. Toiletries too. She was going with nothing. An empty suitcase to bring it all back in.
He guessed anyway. “But you already have so many clothes.”
“You already have so many CDs.” Their old argument.
Anyway, she did not have so many clothes. She curated and edited her collection relentlessly. Terms she found on websites devoted to fashion; literary terms, oddly appropriated. Oddly appropriate, she corrected herself. She spent a lot of money on very little: a jacket here, a bracelet there. Four or five pieces a year. Like an elderly librarian in a tall stone tower, adding incremental preciousness to her collection of rarities. This splurge would be an anomaly.
“Hey, come here.” David Park was sitting on her bed while she stood in her underwear, deciding what to wear on the plane. And after a while, “Don’t go.”
“I’m not going to spend my vacation sitting around Vancouver waiting for you to sneak away from Alice.” Their other, more recent argument.
“No. You’re going to commemorate Mattie’s death with shopping.”
“Shopping and drinking,” before he could say it. They had a lot of arguments, actually. “You know, I can take a cab to the airport.”
“That would probably be better.” David Park looked at his watch.
* * *
—
The night man at the hotel desk greets her every evening in French. He knows she is Canadian and an anglophone, but she’s been trying since the day she arrived, and he honours her effort. He is respectful. On her first night she had to bring her bottle down because there was no corkscrew in the room. He opened it expertly, running the tip up the foil to score it, popping the cork with that lovely, holy, popping sound, then handing her back both bottle and corkscrew. Keep it! But no, Madame, there should have been one in the room, of course there should. It was the hotel’s mistake entirely. No, he would not take a glass for thanks, but it was genial of her to offer. Good night, Madame.
* * *
—
Long night, Madame. Her room overlooks the Carrefour de l’Odéon, a busy little triangular intersection of cafés, bars, restaurants, shops, hotels. There is Le Hibou, just there. Her hotel features a famous restaurant on the ground floor. Her window is veiled by pink flowers that grow in the window boxes outside, such that she can sit on the floor and look out and drink only a few feet above the heads of passersby without being seen, when she has passed the stage of sitting presentably at Le Hibou and needs to go on alone.
* * *
—
She walks each day until her feet speak to her. Why? her feet ask. Oh, please, why? Then she sits in a café. She always has a book so no one will talk to her, though it seems there is little danger of that in any case. She goes to galleries, museums. She stares at the Art. She thinks about what Mattie would have liked, what Mattie would have understood. That painting with the horse: she would have liked the horse, but because it was a horse, not because it was a painting. She would have been bored by the rooms of broken pots. Sara decides she, too, is bored by the rooms of broken pots. But is her boredom more genuine than Mattie’s? That is a question.
* * *
—
In her sober moments—early in the morning, reading in a café with sunglasses and ibuprofen, unsweet milky coffee, the washed streets, the horizontal dawning light, the recycling trucks, the storefront grates rolling up, the sharp early-morning ring of footsteps and everything, the pink and blue of everything—she reads Au château d’Argol by Julien Gracq. Young people drunk on Hegel, sleeping on furs, arguing philosophy, in a bizarre castle perched above a great and sinister forest. It tests her French punishingly, and in these early mornings is a source of profound pleasure. She sleeps poorly. The coffee is a help. The waiters let her be. “It is a pretty colour,” she says one morning, aloud, to Mattie; her sister commenting on the blood-red cover of her book because she can share no other part of it. The waiters look at her. After that she cannot go back to the Café de Flore.
* * *
&n
bsp; —
In the Jardin de Luxembourg she sits for a long time at the mouth of the cool green tunnel that is the Medici fountain, thinking about David Park. Thinking, luxuriously, after sex with David Park, as he lay sleeping and she lay awake: I have made a mistake. She remembers blowing him to sleep and then drinking and watching TV. Plunging into the colours of red wine: cherries and smoke, chocolate, pepper. She tried to tell him about the spider in Dr. No, velvety and big as a rodent. The spider in Through a Glass Darkly. Was he sleeping? Oops. Was he sleeping?
* * *
—
Grey and cognac. Those are Sara’s colours. She goes shopping at the grands magasins on the Boulevard Haussmann. In the Galeries Lafayette she attempts a form-fitting grey dress from a house with a name so famous it might as well have been the House of Atreus. The assistant’s glance passes coolly over Sara’s tummy. “Mais non,” Sara says impatiently, dismissing the dress, as though the fault is the assistant’s, the designer’s, and the assistant hastens to agree. A bit of theatre, all good fun. This shirt dress, now, though, somewhere between charcoal and chocolate, the very colour of sleep. “Alors, Madame,” the assistant says. (This is much better for you, at your age.) The shoulders fit precisely, the collar features her collarbones, the sleeves end early to show off a pretty bracelet, the skirt flares from a trim leather belt. She could wear it for her shopping tomorrow, and at home it would do into the fall with a cardigan. She could undo the buttons for David Park, and do them back up when he was done. Their sex has been increasingly violent lately as they try and fail to let each other go.
* * *
—
At the hotel, the night man greets her with a smile that fades when he looks more closely at her face.
“I will tell you,” Sara says in French. “It is the anniversary of my sister’s death. I came here to get away. I have had too much to drink.” A card she can only play once, but no matter. “I started to cry in Le Hibou. It was very embarrassing.”
The night man looks stricken. He offers his condolences in French and then again in English, to make sure she understands.
“It’s been a year. You would think—”
The night man shakes his head. “A year is nothing.”
“It was my fault.” Sara steps away from the desk as an elderly couple come in from the street and request their heavy brass room key with its maroon tassel. They glance at Sara, glance away, and go to the elevator. “I was supposed to take care of her.”
“Absolutely not.” The night man comes around the desk and offers his arm. “I will take you up to your room. With your permission, I will bring you a piece of bread and a cup of warm milk and cinnamon, and then you will sleep. Tomorrow will be better.”
* * *
—
At Le Hibou, the waiter from yesterday greets her with a smile and asks if she would like the same. Thank you, yes. She has of course only imagined the scene with the night man: her tears, her penitence, his offer of a piece of bread and a cup of warm milk and cinnamon. It was what her mother would make for her when she was little and sad. She puts the bag with the dress on the chair next to her and throws her scarf over it to obscure the logo of the House of Atreus so it won’t look like she’s showing off.
When she was little and sad. So often; so often. Her mother seemed proud of Sara’s precocious sadness, and told her repeatedly about Churchill’s black dogs. Sara’s father had left many biographies of Churchill on the shelf in his office. Sadness was a sign of great creativity and intelligence, that was the gist. Mattie, for instance, was rarely sad.
A mother sits down at the next table with a teenage girl and a toddler boy. Sara obligingly removes her shopping from the chair so the little boy can have it. The teen notices the logo and her eyes flicker over Sara. The little boy bursts into tears. He does not want to sit with the strange woman. He wants to sit on his mother’s lap.
“Mais non.” The mother’s pretty, dark-haired and dark-eyed, in a silk summer dress and heels. The teen wears heels also, jeans, and a blazer. “Assieds-toi, Olivier,” the teen says. The little boy holds his arms up to her instead, so she pulls him onto her lap. “Petit menace.” She kisses his dark hair. The mother pulls a magazine from her bag and lays it on the table so they can all see it. She turns the pages and occasionally points at an image, or the teen does. The little boy’s Orangina arrives with a tiny red straw. The teen and the mother get espressos. The teen slides the boy onto the chair she was sitting in and raises her eyebrows at Sara. Sara gestures towards the empty chair, please. The girl pulls it a little closer to their own table, takes out a phone, and begins to text. The little boy slides his eyes over to Sara and inches closer to his mother when he sees her looking.
Mattie had wanted a phone so badly. Sara liked the idea of an iPhone because the built-in GPS would always show where Mattie was. But Mattie lost that phone, and the next one. Either the missing phones were destroyed or whoever found them disabled the GPS because Sara was never able to locate them. After that Sara bought her cheap flip-phones, and Mattie lost those too. A dozen phones, maybe, in the five years they lived together. Sara would get bitterly angry about these losses, though the cost was negligible.
The little boy, Olivier, has grown bored with his mother’s magazine and tugs on his sister’s sleeve until she yields the phone and sets up a game for him with the sound turned off. Brightly-coloured cartoon figures drift across the screen while the boy, moving his entire upper body, attempts to arrest them somehow, tagging or shooting. The teen returns to looking at the magazine with the mother, their heads almost touching, murmuring.
Sara and her mother were never close like that. Of course there were reasons, reasons Sara had been able to appreciate since she was younger than this teen is now. Sara’s father died when Sara and Mattie were still children, and that was hard. Seeing to Mattie had been a full-time job for their mother. She had taught Mattie to read when the school had given up. She had nursed Mattie through the bronchial infections that plagued her every winter, and guarded her virtue relentlessly as soon as it became apparent how pleasing she would grow to be. How eager to please. Twelve, thirteen? Mattie was the pretty one but Sara was the smart one, which meant her virtue was her own business. If she did not make trouble for her mother, her mother would not make trouble for her, that was the understanding. Her mother had required of Sara straight A’s and a career plan. She didn’t have space in her head or her heart for more.
The little family left without Sara noticing. Now their table is taken by two businessmen talking politics and smoking into their beer.
So you resent your mother? she imagines being asked, while she lies on a worn red velvet couch with the back of one hand pressed to her forehead. What about the piece of bread and the cup of warm milk and cinnamon?
Sara responds in her thoughts. Of course my mother cared for me. Of course she loved me. Of course we had some moments. I’m just saying we weren’t close. Especially as I got older.
What about Mattie? the voice asks.
What about her?
Were you close?
You can’t be close with someone like that.
No?
Well, what does it mean to be close? Sharing things that matter? I couldn’t share anything with Mattie that mattered to me. Books, art, fashion, and my work, later.
Those are the things that mattered to you?
What else?
Dreams, maybe? Feelings? Hopes?
Now the businessmen are gone and it’s two younger men, a couple. Scarved, sandalled, dapper in their cool linen shirts and rolled-cuff pants. They, too, smoke, over a bottle of blanquette de Limoux. The waiter stands the ice bucket next to their table.
Love? Sara thinks, mocking, vicious. My feelings for David Park?
Why not?
Because Mattie loved him too?
No, the voice sa
ys. The first thing the voice says that’s not a question. She wanted to marry someone else. She did marry someone else.
That wasn’t marriage.
Wasn’t it?
* * *
—
Sometimes the voice belongs to David Park, sometimes to her sharp, dry, clever friend Donna August. Really of course the voice is her own—her conscience, those neurochemicals. She’s chained in the masturbatorium of her own guilt, clawing at her own pinkest places.
* * *
—
“It’s my fault,” Sara tells Donna August. “I killed her,” she tells David Park. She’s lying on the hotel bed with the TV on low, a soccer game. There’s no more wine, the room spins, she’ll sleep soon. The sun sets slowly. It might be seven or eight. She’ll wake deep in the night with a throbbing head and a dry mouth and lie awake, going back there again and again.
* * *
—
“The police just called. They found Robert. They’re…going to talk to him for a bit. I can go to work today, and you can go to your drop-in like you always do. Isn’t that good?”
She imagines Robert in his Hastings Street room no bigger than a cupboard. He can touch the door from his bed. He leaves the room unlocked at all times because he owns nothing but the clothes on his back. He eats at the soup kitchen, vomits it up in the alley, and staggers back to his room, to bed. He’s sick, he’s feverish. He’s got a throbbing head and a dry mouth. He’s not well.
