French Exit: A Novel

by Patrick deWitt

  Frances had no immediate reaction or comment to these words, but in entering the apartment she relieved Malcolm of the bouquet, carried it to the kitchen, and jammed it into the garbage chute. Between the unkind honesty of the couriered letter and the abject stupidity of the card, she was beyond comfort.

  Sometimes the world corrected itself, she knew this, for it had so many times in her past. She understood intuitively that it would not correct itself now, though.

  3.

  She ate breakfast at lunch in the library. Franklin Price, deceased nearly twenty years, had amassed a sizable collection of leather-bound first editions—an homage to a youthful fling with late-nineteenth-century literature. He had rarely cracked the books’ pages, and Frances never had, but she enjoyed the room for its scent, and the sense of impenetrability the wall of books gave her. Malcolm entered the room. He hadn’t changed out of his suit and his bloodshot eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. The maid brought him his breakfast and he ate it. Frances pushed her plate toward him and he began eating her remnants. She studied her son with a melancholic endearment.

  “Did you drink to the brink of sound reasoning?”

  “No.”

  “Were you driven to insomnia by the violence of your muse?”

  He shook his head.

  She laid a conciliatory hand atop his. “Menstruating?”

  He winced, and she made a chaste face. She understood what was wrong with Malcolm. “How are things with Susan?” she asked.

  “We’re in our holding pattern, as if you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, to be youngish and in love–ish.” She took a drag from her cigarette. “When will you see her again?”

  “We’re having lunch today, actually.” This was untrue, but he wanted to defend himself against her needling.

  Frances masked her displeasure as best she could. In a pinched voice, she said, “I’d thought you were on the wane. Where will you eat?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  Even if the lunch plan were a reality, he would have said the same thing, since it wasn’t uncommon for Frances to interrupt his dates with Susan. “Is there room for me here?” she’d say after sitting down, the waiter already fawning at her side. Frances was a virtuosic manipulator of waiters; presently she would bring him in on some teasing game against Susan, a seemingly benign taunt relating to her ordering gazpacho out of season, or wearing her hat indoors. “It’s an indoor hat,” Susan would say—but she would remove it, face flushed, and another loss would be chalked up to the tally. Malcolm would do nothing to defend her, and the waiter wouldn’t understand he was helping to trample Susan’s spirit. Frances would insist on paying the bill.

  “Well, I couldn’t join you anyway,” she told Malcolm. “I can’t put Mr. Baker off another minute.”

  “What’s he so excited about? Another plea for thrift?”

  “Wait and see,” Frances answered, and then became remote, sitting in silence, head side-cocked. Malcolm drifted from the library and to his room. He sat on the bed and watched the phone. It rang and he answered. Susan spoke in an unnaturally deep voice:

  “Is your refrigerator running?”

  “Hi, Sudsy. Did the cat drag you in?”

  “Just now it did, yes. Will you come eat lunch with me?”

  “Okay,” he said. Then: “Wait, I’m sorry, I just ate.”

  Susan was quiet.

  “I’ll watch you eat,” Malcolm volunteered.

  “Every girl’s dream,” she said.

  They met in a midtown bistro. Malcolm was late, Susan early. She sat alone in the booth, staring out the window. She hadn’t been sleeping or eating and looked poorly, or what passed for poorly for her. She felt very dramatic in the moment, waiting for the object of her desire, the source of her pain. A rainstorm reared up and the citizens of New York dashed here and there to avoid the worst of it. Through the crowd came Malcolm, a slow-walking, solitary figure. He still hadn’t changed his clothes, he had not shaved, he held no umbrella but appeared unconcerned at the fact of his being wet to the skin. His coat was unbuttoned and his bare, ample belly pressed against the see-through dress shirt. It seemed to Susan that each time they met he’d gained five pounds. He entered the restaurant and sat opposite Susan, rainwater dripping from his nose and hair. She removed his sunglasses and folded them onto the table.

  “You look awful.”

  He held up a spoon and studied his reflection. “I’ve got a certain something.” The waiter appeared and Malcolm, still watching himself, said, “Coffee and a short Scotch.”

  “Can I bring you anything to eat, sir?”

  “I’ll eat the Scotch.”

  The waiter went away. Malcolm lowered the spoon and Susan reached over, pinching his cheek.

  “You know she’s getting you fat on purpose, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think it’s meant to turn me off specifically, or women in general?”

  “You specifically. Women in general never cared for me.” Malcolm took his stomach in his hands and sternly slapped it. “Is it working?”

  “I preferred you before. But no, not really.”

  Susan’s eyes were the color of honey; it hurt Malcolm to look at them, so he didn’t. She watched him disappearing in his seat and wished to hit him, kiss him.

  Soon the waiter brought the coffee, Scotch, and a towel for Malcolm to dry himself with. Malcolm drained the Scotch and began patting his hair with the towel.

  “I’ve decided to try a new tack with you,” Susan told him. “Would you like to hear what it is?”

  “You can’t scare me with a good time,” Malcolm answered, wrapping the towel around his neck.

  “Well, normally I ask a series of roundabout questions, approaching the subject, namely you, from seemingly unrelated angles. The answers, taken together, form a portrait of what’s going on in that mausoleum you call a life.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not going to do that anymore.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to interrogate you directly.”

  “I’m ready,” he said, pouring cream into his coffee.

  Susan folded her hands. “Has anything changed in regard to your relationship with your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe it will change within the span of the year?”

  “No.”

  “Have you told her about our engagement?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  “I’d be surprised if I did.”

  “Have you thought any more about moving out?”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “But will you do it?”

  “I doubt it.”

  She took a moment. “The thing I can’t figure out is whether or not you expect me, or if you even want me, to wait for you.”

  “Of course I want you to.” Malcolm slurped his coffee. “But it wouldn’t be very chivalrous to ask, would it?”

  “And chivalry—is that an interest of yours?”

  He laid the towel fully over his head. “I have many interests.”

  “Would you describe yourself as a coward?”

  “No.”

  “How would you describe yourself?”

  “I don’t know that I’d bother in the first place.”

  She pulled the towel away from Malcolm’s head and studied his olive-colored, unlined face. How had she come to care for this lugubrious toddler of a man? Love seemed evil at times, and human nature, this need to attain the unattainable, was so banal. Susan folded the towel on the table and said, “I want you to know that I am trying to fall out of love with you.”

  Malcolm’s mouth creaked open, and he put his sunglasses back on. His silence conveyed pain, and Susan was pleased her words had had an effect. Still, she knew she had achieved nothing, and that victory was as far off as ever. She’d often wondered what Frances would do if she were in her posi
tion; now she asked Malcolm and he stirred, speaking as though he’d worked the question through long ago: “She’d never have found herself in your position in the first place.”

  It was always this way. No matter what she said to wound him, the simple facts hurt her more. Frances would never let go of Malcolm, Susan knew this. She asked Malcolm to leave her alone and he stood to go. “I’m going to kiss your forehead,” he said warningly, then he did, and exited the restaurant, forgetting to pay for his Scotch and coffee.

  Susan resumed her window gazing. The rain had stopped, replaced by radiant sunshine. Minutes had passed when she noticed Malcolm was standing across the street, watching her. His sunglasses were crooked; steam was rising from his damp shoulders. He was a pile of American garbage and she feared she would love him forever.

  4.

  Mr. Baker was a mouselike man, which isn’t to say he behaved as one, but that he truly did look very much like a mouse. Sometimes he looked like an angry mouse, sometimes wise; on this day, as he sat waiting for Frances to arrive, he resembled a mouse who wished he were another mouse. He had been enamored of Franklin Price; coming up the ranks he’d had the honor of witnessing the great litigator in court any number of times. The first case was still clear in his memory—a minor affair, a hostile takeover of some Midwestern communications company, but Mr. Baker had never seen Price’s equal for controlled brutality and pure showmanship. It was on this day that Mr. Baker grasped the elusive point: the court was a performance environment, a stage play whereby the actors conceived their lines on the spot, and it was the finest entertainer who won the prize. From the instant Price rose from his chair to speak, all in the courtroom were rapt. Restrained applause followed his closing arguments. Mr. Baker afterward followed Price’s career with an almost fanatical fervor.

  Price personified all that Mr. Baker held to be of any importance. Certainly he looked the part: he was a dashing man, poised, stylishly attired; but this was offset by the needed amount of menace, a tactile pulse of psychic violence. It was difficult to speak with Price because if you bored him, he told you you did; and if you bothered him, there was in his carriage and language a hostility that one could not help but equate with actual bloodshed. Price was never recognized for physical mayhem, but his dismissals were just the same as a wallop in the face.

  For all the inhabitants of this particular landscape, there was the pursuit of money as a primary, as the primary goal. This was key to Price, of course, and in the years making up the first half of his career he accrued a legitimate if modest fortune. But there were others who made more, which must have displeased him, for he set out to address this during the second half of his career, the phase that came to define him.

  Price became known as the most vicious, the most tenacious litigator, defending only the indefensible: the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, the apparatus of the war machine, gun lobbyists. Mr. Baker was not above the occasional unsavory pursuit, particularly if the pay was sound, but Price took one repugnant case after another, with never a break in between, so that his own persona became indivisible from that of those he worked for. The collective assumption was that he enjoyed his role in the wrongdoing. Whether or not this was the truth, who could say; what was indisputable was Price’s prosperity. He was among the highest-paid lawyers in the United States, and his every extracurricular investment was seemingly predetermined to turn a profit. Sensible, professional men and women spoke with sober seriousness of Franklin Price as one imbued with and directed by dark energies. Up-and-comers shared a joke, which was to discreetly genuflect when they crossed Price’s path.

  His death came unexpectedly, while the man was at his zenith, and was thrilling in its details. The coroner who performed the autopsy said he’d never seen so powerful a heart attack in his long years at practice, and his line, often repeated by Price’s cronies and enemies, was that the overtaxed organ had exploded like a goddamned hand grenade. The fact of his wife’s discovering his body, then going skiing in Vail for the weekend without bothering to call the authorities, was somehow fitting as an ending, the just debasement of a man who in all honesty had it coming. The tabloids ran a photograph of Frances attending an après-ski party at the mountain lodge, and she had never looked more glamorous or pleased; the image presented her to the public as one reveling in the private knowledge of the stiffening corpse of her husband. The picture in question was five years old but the tabloids couldn’t see the point in stating that, and so they didn’t.

  The hushed discussions in the following years that Frances, that witty, fearful beauty, had gone quietly mad and now addressed her aged cat as Price represented a weird icing on an already weird cake. It was a good story, and so it was told, and told again, and it brought a reliable delight to the tellers and audience both.

  Mr. Baker had seen no evidence of this particular mania in Frances. All he knew was that anyone who could hold her own against the formidable Franklin Price—and by all accounts Frances did more than hold her own—was one deserving of his respect, and from the start of their working together he had afforded her this. She’d received it as a matter of course, and for the first years of their collaboration had extended him a mirrored respect along with the occasional small kindness. But as time passed, and the estate faltered, Mr. Baker had become for her a totem of disintegration, and she turned away from the man. So began their game of go-seek.

  Having made every effort to salvage her holdings, Mr. Baker suffered no professional guilt: Frances’s spending was pathological. How many times had he reached out to beg for frugality, only to learn later that the warning had kicked off a frenzy of lavish purchases? She bought homes in cities she never intended to visit; she gave staggering sums to charities whose aim she could not accurately name. Mr. Baker couldn’t rid himself of the notion that ruin was the object of the game for Frances. But was she herself aware of it? That is, was she perhaps attempting to distance herself from what could be considered dirty money? For what his opinion was worth, he thought her motivation was not linked to morality, but something smaller, something more personal, and bitterer.

  He’d experienced a queasiness in the recent months whenever her name came to mind, knowing the matter was beyond hope, and knowing he would eventually have to have the conversation he most dreaded having with his clients. He was having that conversation now. Before Frances had settled in her chair, Mr. Baker spoke:

  “It’s all gone, Frances.”

  “What’s all gone?”

  “Everything.”

  Frances took a drink of water. “Everything,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Not the money in my account.”

  “It’s not your account for long.”

  “It’s in my name.”

  “The name you get to keep. But every penny in that account, in addition to the investments and properties, is going back to the bank.”

  Frances said, “The properties.”

  “The properties are yours I would imagine until the end of the month. By that I mean you have use of them. But they can none of them be sold or rented, and you will be locked out on the first of January at the latest.”

  Frances took another sip of water, then held the cool glass to her cheek. “Certainly I’ll get to keep the money I brought to the marriage?”

  “That was shuffled into the estate a long time ago and it was not, excuse me, a very large sum.”

  “What about Malcolm’s legacy?”

  “No,” said Mr. Baker.

  “What are we meant to live off once the bank has moved against us?”

  “I can’t claim to know the answer to that.” It was grotesque to see a person such as Frances exposed in this way, and Mr. Baker was peeved to be party to it. He told her, “I spoke to you about this as a possibility for seven years, and as an eventuality for three. What did you think was going to happen? What was your plan?”

  She exhaled. “My plan was to die before the money ran out. But I kept and keep no
t dying, and here I am.” She shook her head at herself, then sat up. “All right, then. It’s all been settled, and now I want you to tell me what to do.”

  “Do,” he said.

  “Yes. Tell me, please.”

  “What else is there to do but start over?”

  “And what does that mean, I wonder? When you know I’ve never generated money, but only spent it?”

  “What can I say, Frances? Take a loan from a friend?”

  “Impossible. Name something else.”

  “There is nothing else.”

  “There is something else.”

  Mr. Baker looked away and back. He said, “Speaking off the record, there’s only one thing you can do: sell it all.”

  “Sell what all?”

  “Everything that isn’t nailed down. Sell the jewelry, the art, the books. Sell it privately, quietly, cheaply. Bring me the checks and I’ll transfer it to cash for you.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then whatever-you-wish.”

  “But where will we live?”

  “I suppose you’ll have to rent.”

  To hear the word, it was like swallowing a sharp crust of stale bread, and Frances winced. No one was going to help her, she realized, and she felt very small and cold. She stood. Staring at Mr. Baker’s forehead she said, “Thank you for everything. I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing each other again.”

  “Frances, sit,” he said. “Order some lunch.”

  “I need to breathe.”

  “It’s not a death.”

  “I need to leave.”

  That evening, Malcolm came into the kitchen to find Frances sharpening a long, gleaming knife at the marble-top island. She worked with a sense of rhythm, and intently. Malcolm had never seen her perform this or any other kitchen duty before, and he asked her, “Are you cooking?”