by Hilary Reyl
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“When I’m working, I’m not looking at the movie while it’s being shot. The whole time I’m planning and I’m thinking about what it will look like to people when it’s done. But I’m not there.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “But it could make it hard to appreciate life while it’s happening.”
“Yep.”
I turned from the stars to his face. “Does my sister tell you to live in the moment?”
He laughed through his beard. “Yeah, she does.”
“I always try to listen to my sister.”
“That’s probably a good policy.” The crickets got suddenly louder, but he did not raise his voice to compete with them. I liked this. “Do you want to be by yourself?” he asked. “I’ll get going.”
“I don’t mind if you stay.” I meant it.
“Thanks,” he said.
We counted stars for a while. When I got to fifty-one, which was Proust’s age when he died, I asked, “Do you think my questions have answers?”
He laughed again softly. “Oh, yes, all kinds of answers.”
We didn’t talk again for a while, but I stopped counting stars and tried to make a list of different possible answers. Only I was too tired.
Arthur said it was good hanging out and goodnight.
I said goodnight too. I watched his back as he walked to his car. I watched his headlights go on. They reminded me of a pair of big, kind eyes.
Monday, June 13
5:45 p.m.
I imagined that since I invited the moths to the party and tried hard to include them, that we were all finally friends. I was wrong. I’m an idiot.
Every time Mr. Swann starts to believe Odette is faithful, she does something cruel. Like she tells him he can’t come with her to Madame Verdurin’s salon. Or she makes fun of him in public. Or she lies about where she’s been and who she’s been with. And whenever Marcel starts to hope that Gilberte is happy to see him in the Champs-Élysées, she lets him know there’s somewhere else she’d rather be.
At lunch today, Marianne said thanks for inviting her with the group to the party. She said she really couldn’t believe I wasn’t on Facebook or Instagram. She got all animated, like a Center kid with an obsession. Marianne is still not totally clear to me, but there are some things I’m sure of: her purple hair streaks, her pale skin, and her low voice that booms sometimes. She kept booming, “Really? It’s not possible that you don’t want to try it! Really? You’re joking?!”
I told her I really didn’t want to. It would be overwhelming. Toxic.
People say I’m wrong. Social media would be helpful to me because of the emotional distance. I don’t buy it. My mind is noisy enough.
Marianne wouldn’t listen. She shoved her phone in front of me, saying, “Let me show you how it works! I’ll set you up an account. You’ll love it.”
I said technology isn’t my issue. I know how to set up accounts if I want them. She paid zero attention. She was in the grips of an idea and couldn’t control herself. She scrolled down on her phone to show me posts from her different friends. “See, you could talk to everyone and you wouldn’t have to worry about being shy.” She was acting like she was the first person ever to think of Instagram as a plan for me.
I didn’t want to be rude, but I also did not want to deal with her feed, which was making me nauseated.
I thought I was saved when the Giotto boys and Simon came up to our table to sit down with their trays. Then Marianne pushed her phone into my face to show me a picture of Simon and me at our party that Simon had posted. You could see Gloria Seegar in the background. “Look how cool!” she exclaimed. In the picture, Simon had his arm around my shoulders. I was smiling stiffly. I looked less comfortable than I’d imagined at the time.
Suddenly, Marianne snatched the phone away, but not before I could read what Simon had written underneath the picture. Le robot et moi. The robot and me.
The truth slugged me.
I’m a robot. Even if I have volcanoes of emotion inside, I seem to these kids like some jerky robot. And Simon thinks it’s funny. Alice probably does too.
They don’t even care enough to unlock me. They don’t think there’s anything to unlock.
When I got up, Marianne followed me through the cafeteria. “I’m sorry, Martin! Don’t be upset. Don’t worry about Simon,” she boomed. “He’s being a clown. He doesn’t mean it.”
“Excuse me.” I pushed past her without looking. I rushed outside into the yard. You aren’t supposed to go outside in the middle of lunch, but they don’t make me follow the rules here. I might panic and malfunction.
This dream I’ve started having of passing in a non-special school, it’s just that: a dream. Because even at the party, when I felt like I was doing great, I was still a total freak. Nothing has changed except that I have started to care.
I left school and walked all the way to the hawthorn bushes. I did not text Elisabeth because I did not want to have to explain anything.
I’ve put my sonata on loud. My book is open. I’m appreciating the flowers the way Mr. Swann appreciates a beautiful painting, after he’s looked away for a while at something way less beautiful. I’ve been distracted by the French moths and the whole scene here, but now I’m back home. Home is Search and my headphones.
I focus on the flowers. I shape my fingers into a frame, so that I can’t see anything else. I try to count blossoms. I keep losing count and having to start over.
I want to climb back inside the person I was before this all began.
I get a text from Alice, who is definitely not Gilberte anymore. She never was. She said: Marianne told me about the misunderstanding. Can you talk?
The misunderstanding? There is nothing to misunderstand. It’s all perfectly clear. These kids have decided I don’t feel anything. End of story. And if they knew me at all, they would stop trying to fool me with their sloppy language.
I don’t answer her.
Tuesday, June 14
12:20 p.m.
I refuse to go to school. School is a failed experiment.
I’ve been moping around, staring into bowls of milky tea, memorizing the cracks in the ancient beams on our cottage ceiling, taking on cooking projects that involve a lot of repetitive prep. I’ve been chopping onions, peeling toasted hazelnuts, and plucking oregano leaves. I made trout with almonds last night from Julia Child. I was the only one who ate it. And I’ve made four quatre-quarts cakes from Papa’s and my recipe that are a thousand times better than in the cafeteria at school. Why did I ever like that stupid industrial cake?
No one eats what I cook. Mom is behind schedule at Chenonceau and is working until late at night. She is too busy to focus on me staying home. She says that as long as my Center work is getting handed in, she can’t force me to do anything. I emailed the last of my assignments for the school year yesterday, a take-home test in pre-calculus and a short paper on The Catcher in the Rye that I titled “Phonies Rule.”
Asparagus Man hasn’t been here the past three nights. Elisabeth has pretty much stopped eating.
This morning, Mom told Elisabeth that starving herself was an “unimaginative response” to being in a fight with Arthur. Mom was drinking her coffee fast because she was late to shoot a crowd scene. She kept puckering her lips because the coffee, which she takes black, was burning her mouth. She was running her hands quickly through her hair. Papa used to say he loved her hair and that she should never color it. So far she hasn’t, which gives me hope.
Elisabeth got mad at Mom. “So, you think I can control my response? Like I can just pick up my psych textbook and choose a more worthwhile way to feel? Not all of us are as perfect as you are, Mom. I’m not like you, okay. I’m sorry if I don’t live up to your standards.”
I could see Elisabeth’s point that the ways we react to sad events are not always logical. But I also hear her calling Jason’s new actress girlfriend a skinny bitch. This helps me unde
rstand why Mom would worry about her not eating my cooking.
Mom did not reply to Elisabeth. Instead she asked me if I was sure I didn’t want to go with her today to see my friend Simon in the big funeral scene she’d cast him in. Even though her voice was gentle, her forehead was very creased, which meant she was anxious.
I didn’t say that Simon was not my friend. I said that I did not feel like going, which was true.
The idea of seeing “Gilberte’s” parents working in the gardens of the château made me sick. In my head, I listed the flowers I used to picture them planting: petunias, tobacco, Lilliput dahlias, impatiens, verveine, begonias. I listed the trees in the Green Garden: three planes, three blue cedars, two magnolias, one Spanish fir, one catalpa, one chestnut, two Douglas firs, two sequoias, one two-hundred-year-old holm oak tree, one white acacia, one black walnut.
These lists felt old and stale.
There is no mythical place called Chenonceau, inhabited by the mythical parents of a mythical girl. I don’t need to go deal with a crowd of extras in stupid costumes to understand how wrong I’ve been. It’s already clear.
“I really, really don’t want to go, Mom. Sorry.”
Mom sighed. “Are you sure, Martin?” she asked. “You don’t want to go to the shoot to see your friend?”
“Leave him alone,” Elisabeth said.
I saw Mom’s face crumple for a second, then reform itself. I suppose other faces do this. But I don’t focus on many other faces. Hers is the only one I’ve ever seen leave and come back so instantly. She was worried about me. She would be relieved if I went with her to the set today and greeted Simon in his period costume. She would see things coming together. Like my normal friendship, and my normal friend being in her movie, and me acting normal in a big scene full of people. It would be the kind of “united” moment that Layla describes from Downton Abbey. For example, a wedding, or a Christmas party, or a village fair, where you get the Grantham family and the servants all interacting together. If I’d gone today, Mom would have been so incredibly happy. But I couldn’t do it. Not even for her.
I’m having what Proust calls an “involuntary memory.” It’s a memory of a conversation. The conversation happened when I was fifteen, two months before Papa left. Three things reminded me of it.
1. Elisabeth turning a page in her biology textbook sounded like Papa turning a page of his book about the history of World War II in our living room.
2. Bernadette’s teakettle whistled like Mom’s teakettle back in our kitchen.
3. A napkin on my cheek reminded me of the sheets where I buried my face while Mom and Papa were arguing.
I heard Papa turn a page, then slam his book onto the coffee table. “Sam, did you know that before Hitler started euthanizing Jews he started out by euthanizing disabled children?” Papa’s voice caught. “Tens of thousands of disabled children.”
“Martin is not disabled. He’s not a cripple, okay? Stop worrying retrospectively. Or hypothetically. Or whatever.” Her voice was angry.
Papa kept talking like he hadn’t heard her. “Before Martin was born, I never would have imagined wanting a disabled child. Now I love him so much that I love autism. That’s why this killing them is so, so horrible. How can life be about anything besides wanting your child to thrive? Martin has reshaped me, Sam.”
“Shut up, okay?” Mom screamed. Her teakettle whistled. It stopped.
“What’s so wrong?” His tone got even sadder.
“Paul,” she hissed, “it’s pretty galling to hear you talk about ethics. To drag our son into your story like some kind of cover for what you did. It’s not like we needed the money for his therapy bills. You happen to be married to one of the most successful women in Hollywood. But that’s the story you’re telling yourself. That it was all justified because you were trying to save Martin from whatever you imagine he needs saving from. It’s sick. Doesn’t the disconnect strike you?”
I was lying in bed repeating everything they said under my breath. By the age of fifteen, I had enough self-control not to be loud enough for them to overhear. And I was smart enough to understand that Papa’s crime was my fault. He was trying to save me. Trying to save me made him lose sight of reality.
In the pause after Mom’s words, I had time to repeat her question—“Doesn’t the disconnect strike you?”—three times, in a whisper, before Papa spoke back.
When he finally spoke, he said, “You can’t compare me to the Nazis, Sam. I haven’t murdered anyone.”
“How do you know?” She was screaming again. “People do kill themselves over this kind of thing. And lives are ruined. You don’t even realize what you’ve done. You don’t see all the repercussions. How could you?”
This is where I stopped listening. I hid my face in my sheets and repeated the question, “How could you? How could you? How could you?” until the words lost meaning.
Wednesday, June 15
2:10 p.m.
Alice texted me again this morning. She texted an emoji of a madeleine next to the number sixteen followed by a question mark. She’s asking me to meet her at sixteen hours, or 4:00 p.m., for madeleines.
She’s an imposter and I should ignore her. She’s not a friend. The thing is, though, that I’m dying to go meet her. I want to send her back a heart emoji with an arrow through it. My body aches for her. My knee wants her hand on it again. I want to kiss her.
In my postcard collection is a painting called Lost Illusions, by a nineteenth-century painter named Charles Gleyre. It’s a Romantic painting of a party of people who look Roman to me. They’re getting onto a Viking boat under a crescent moon. Marcel wrote that the moon in Gleyre’s landscapes was cut out against the sky like a silver sickle. Papa chose this postcard for me. He wrote a note on the back, covering both the message area and the part where the address should go. He put it for me on the kitchen counter the day he left for five years in prison. I’m holding it right now in my left hand. My feet are in our pool.
Here is what Papa wrote:
Dear Martin,
I am very sorry for what I have done, and especially sorry that I have to leave you. I feel nothing but admiration for you. The ability to communicate that most of us acquire instinctively, stupidly almost, like animals, is something that you have acquired through discipline, reading, and deep thought. With one book, you’ve taught yourself to see how another person perceives. You’ve found empathy. I have every confidence in you and in the fruits of YOUR Search. Remember, it’s not what’s inside the madeleine. It’s what’s inside you. I love you.
Papa
While I was reading Papa’s card, Elisabeth came to the pool with a glass of lemonade for me. She sat down next to me, handed me the lemonade, and began to dangle her toes next to mine in the cold water.
Today, Elisabeth is wearing the dress with the hawthorn flowers. She is barefoot. Her hair is swept into a bun. She has shadows under her eyes, but she is smiling.
“Why are you looking at me like you’re trying to remember something?” she asked. She used her gently teasing voice. I wondered if her fight with Arthur was over.
“I’m trying to figure out if you look like someone from one of my postcards right now.”
“How about the Botticelli? She’s hot. I’ll take her. And no way am I that Giotto Charity one. She’s gnarly.”
I recognized this as a joke, and I laughed.
My mind was still on Alice’s text. I was having all kinds of bright images of meeting her for madeleines, but I couldn’t decide if I should.
My confusion must have shown on my face, because the next thing my sister said was, “Why the frown? Are you worried about something?”
I asked her if she remembered Alice from the big dinner. She said of course she did. Then I told her that Alice, Simon, and the other kids from school are all moths drawn to the flame of glamour like the ones Layla draws on my Converses whenever I get a new pair. I told her about how at first Alice was Gilberte from Search. When the diff
erences appeared, and I realized she was Alice, I still liked her. I told her about Alice’s letter admitting that she and the others had only been friendly to get close to Mom’s movie and the actors. I described my reaction in the bathroom, which proved to me that original speech is basically an illusion. Then I told her about my translating at the party, about the amazing feeling of unlocking a world for other people. Then I told her about Marianne’s Instagram feed and being called a robot. Robots have no emotions. They’re not general-ed, but they are not neurodiverse either.
“Robots,” I said, “are neuronothing.”
Elisabeth was staring hard into the place where the sun hit the pool. She stares this way when she imagines being a therapist. “You didn’t mind so much if your friends were betraying you as long as they made it clear that they were betraying a human being. That’s why Alice’s letter wasn’t a deal breaker, right?”
I nodded.
Elisabeth said she thought the robot comment seemed especially cruel because it suggested that Simon didn’t consider me human. She asked if she was right.
I told her she was right about Simon, but that I can handle cruelty. I have fantastic literary models for cruelty and suffering. I can take abuse. What I can’t take is not existing.
“Martin,” she said, “you are missing out on some subtleties here.”
Missing out on subtleties is one of my specialties.
“I wonder if this robot thing is as big a deal as you perceive.” She hesitated. “Can I take a stab at some perspective?”
She took my hand.
“Kids coin nicknames sometimes that work as a kind of shorthand. The names themselves don’t necessarily carry that much weight. Your friends might even have meant le robot affectionately, half as a joke, because sometimes, Martin, you can come off as quite formal with your precise vocabulary. It’s about your mannerisms, not about you. It’s meant to be funny, not true. And let’s take the worst-case scenario, that it’s an insult, okay? So it’s Simon’s insult, not Alice’s. Alice is the one who wrote you the letter, remember? She’s cool.”
