How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  I broke up with Kevin after you left. I don’t think I’m in love with you but I did like your penis more than Kevin’s. Kevin’s is very long but it is a bit too thin in comparison with yours, and it didn’t feel right when we had sex the next time after you. He never gave me an orgasm. Not that you did either, I think we really didn’t make love for long enough, but I think maybe if it had lasted longer it could’ve happened. I have never had an orgasm in my life and I am already 18 so I am starting to freek out a little. All my friends say they have orgasms ALL the time. Maybe they are lying. I feel stupid talking about your penis, but it is part of the things of life, so I should not be ashamed, and you, most importantly, shouldn’t be embaraced that I talk about it, you should be very proud of it. It is important to be proud about things you have going for yourself. I am sure it is something your father would’ve told you if he hadn’t died when you were so young.

  Maybe when you grow up we should try to hang out more. I will go to university next year. I didn’t get into med school but I will still study biology I think.

  Cordially,

  Rose

  I wanted to be aroused by Rose’s letter, but she made it very complicated. She was just mixing too many different topics in too few lines.

  “Knock knock,” I heard Jeremie say through the bedroom door, interrupting my rereading of Rose’s letter. I said come in and asked him why he said “Knock knock” instead of actually knocking.

  “I don’t know,” Jeremie said. “Why did you say ‘Come in’ instead of actually coming to the door to open it?”

  “I would’ve had to get up from my bed,” I said. “Knocking requires less energy.”

  “It still requires some,” Jeremie said, and he sat on Simone’s unmade bed and said nothing for a while.

  “Did you come to see Simone?” I tried to guess. “She doesn’t get off school before five on Thursdays.”

  “No, I came to see you,” Jeremie said. “I just wanted to tell you that I think it was unfair of Mom to forbid you access to the Internet. I do think it was stupid of you to look for a boyfriend for her without taking her criteria into account, but nevertheless, I believe it came from a good place and you shouldn’t have been punished that hard for it. None of us ever got punished for anything before, as far as I can remember—none of us ever took any kind of initiative of that sort, either—and maybe Mom was disconcerted as to how to react to your mistake and ended up being a bit heavy-handed.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “The whole Daniel fiasco was a few weeks ago, though, so why are you telling me this now?”

  “Well, I wanted to come to you first thing to offer you access to my own computer—I wouldn’t tell Mom you’d been on the Internet, of course—but I had very important work to do with it myself, so I couldn’t just invite you to use it.”

  “But you’re done with your work now?”

  “For the most part, yes.”

  “So I can come and use your computer anytime?”

  “Well, obviously not any time,” Jeremie said. “When I’m not in my bedroom, say. You should feel free to use the computer then.”

  “But you’re kind of always in your bedroom,” I said.

  Jeremie didn’t respond to that. I said I appreciated his offer.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  I thought that would be the end of our interaction, but he just stayed there on the edge of Simone’s bed, looking around our room like he’d never seen it before. Which in fact was not far from the truth.

  “Have you read any of Leonard’s dissertation?” I asked him.

  “I look at what’s on his computer screen when he goes to the bathroom sometimes,” Jeremie confessed. Aurore had lent her own computer to Leonard for him to type his dissertation on.

  “What does it say?”

  “All I saw was a breakdown of the household budget before and after the father’s death, reorganization of family expenses after the loss of the main source of income and with Mom’s widow’s pension, things like that. Nothing too interesting.”

  I’d never thought about the consequences of the father’s death for the household budget. Since he’d died, we’d pretty much lived the same, I thought, except that we knew we’d never see him again. We ate the same things, rented the same number of movies.

  “Are we poor now?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Jeremie said. “If we were poor we would all be looking for jobs instead of getting PhDs or applying for second PhDs.”

  “Are you going to go for a PhD next year?”

  Jeremie was just finishing his master’s that year. He’d skipped one grade fewer than the others.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Why not? Are you just going to write music from now on?”

  “Have you noticed that all of them, Berenice, Aurore, Leonard, went into getting a PhD thinking they’d get answers to all of their questions, but what it did to them instead is it made them need more and more time to answer simpler and simpler questions? Rather: that it made them need to break simple-seeming questions down to a multitude of subquestions in such a twisted way that they can never find their way back to the original question?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought they’d always been like that.”

  “What I mean is I’m not sure I want to fill my head with more knowledge and theories at this point. It complicates everything. I don’t think it’s good for the art. I think artists shouldn’t be too smart.”

  “But you’re super smart already,” I said.

  Jeremie seemed a bit insulted by this.

  “What makes you say that?” he said.

  “You’re getting a master’s in both physics and musicology,” I said.

  “Well that’s just fun,” he said. “Master’s are for fun. PhDs require intellectual commitment. It’s like dating versus getting married.”

  “And you don’t want to commit to anything but music,” I said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Because making music gets easier with time whereas academic research just gets more and more complicated.”

  “I never said music got easier with time,” Jeremie said. “That whole thing people say about the hardest thing for an artist being his first novel, or first movie, or first opera, or whatever…well that’s just nonsense. I believe if you’re doing it right, the hardest thing to do for an artist should always precisely be the one he’s working on.”

  “I don’t see how it’s different from getting a PhD then, if art doesn’t get easier either.”

  “Who would want a thing that only got easier with time?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I said.

  “What do you know about difficulty? You’re in tenth grade.”

  “Eighth,” I said, and Jeremie must have detected a little shame in my answer—there was—because his tone softened.

  “I guess certain things do get easier,” he said, but he didn’t give any examples.

  “Do you know how to break up with a girl?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Jeremie said after thinking about it some. “I believe, when I’m with a girl, that it’s always clear from the get-go that we’re not engaging in any kind of relationship.”

  “Have you been with many girls?”

  “Not that many, no. Ten, twelve.”

  “Do I know any of them?”

  “The last one was Ohri’s fiancée, Carla. I don’t know that you ever met her.”

  “Did she and Ohri break up?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jeremie said.

  “So how come you slept with her?”

  “Berenice asked me if I could do it. I think she was trying to get back at Ohri for something without him having to know about it necessarily.”

  “How can you get back at someone if he never knows you did anything to get back at him?”

  “It’s just personal satisfaction, I guess. You get the satisfaction of having gotten back at the person without a
ctually having hurt anyone. I think it’s pretty healthy.”

  “So you had no interest in Carla but you slept with her for Berenice’s satisfaction.”

  “You make it sound incestuous, Izzie.”

  “Sorry. What I meant to ask was if it was better to sleep with a girl when you were actually in love with her.”

  Jeremie plainly ignored my query.

  “Who do you need to break up with anyway?” he asked.

  “Just this girl,” I said, tapping Rose’s folded letter against my palm.

  “The same girl you first had sex with? I didn’t get that you were a couple.”

  “We’re not, actually, but she still sends these letters and they make me uncomfortable.”

  “Letters? Aren’t you in school together?”

  “No,” I said. “She lives in a different city.”

  “How did you meet her? We never go anywhere.”

  “She was Simone’s pen pal.”

  “That girl Rose?” I was surprised Jeremie remembered her name. “God, she was thick.”

  “Well, don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “I won’t if you show me what kind of letters she sends you.”

  “I don’t know which is more embarrassing,” I said.

  Jeremie gave me some time to think about it and started drumming on his thighs with his fingers. He had these very long fingers that people always said, as he was growing up, were perfect pianist fingers. Jeremie was indeed a very good pianist, but he didn’t like to hear he had the hands for the job. He thought it minimized his achievements and all the hard work he’d put into mastering the instrument. I showed him Rose’s letter.

  “She does talk about your penis a lot,” is all Jeremie said once he’d read it. He handed me the letter back. No question about my running away or mention that today was the anniversary of the father’s death.

  “So how do I break up with her?”

  “Tell her you got into an accident and your cock shrank?”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re fine,” Jeremie said. “She lives far away. You don’t have to do anything. She’ll forget all about you eventually.”

  “But if I were to write her a response, what would I say to suggest she shouldn’t write to me anymore without hurting her feelings?”

  “She can’t even spell your name, how could you hurt her feelings?”

  “Feelings don’t depend on literacy,” I said.

  Jeremie didn’t look convinced.

  “Just tell her you fell in love with someone else then,” he said. “Girls respect that kind of honesty. Better than boys at least.”

  Jeremie got up from Simone’s bed and readjusted his pants at the waist. I wanted to ask him if he’d had or was still having problems finding comfortable underwear, like I did, but I thought he would just make a joke about the size of my penis.

  “Do you know if Leonard is close to finishing his dissertation?” I asked him instead, as he went for the door.

  “He talked about defending in the fall,” Jeremie said, and then he made this grunt, this sort of maimed-animal grunt he had whenever our mother asked him to do something he didn’t want to do but knew he had to, like renewing his insurance card at the beginning of a school year. “Sometimes I wonder if the father didn’t die when he did just to avoid all the PhD defenses,” he said.

  In April, the two Indian women died within days of each other and Daphné Marlotte became the oldest person in the world. The journalist who wrote the article about it seemed to be walking on eggshells, though, not ready to cry victory too quickly. Daphné was still in the hospital recovering from her stroke and word had started to spread in town that the death of seniors of humanity went in threes and that Daphné might only have a few more days to live. I don’t know if my mother believed that but she wanted to visit Daphné in the hospital and she wanted me to come along. I told her hospitals made me uncomfortable, even though I couldn’t remember ever being in one. My mother didn’t pick up on the discrepancy. She tried to convince me it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that we could pay a visit to the oldest person alive and then go down a couple of floors and see the newest newborns in the world, appreciate the greatness of the circle of life, and I said I didn’t care, that I was good enough only seeing people in the middle of the life spectrum. She said I was starting to sound like my siblings. This seemed to worry her.

  Denise and Porfi and I had planned to run away to Paris after school on a Friday, and for Porfi to pick the staircase-door lock before that, as a prelude to our adventure. I’d stuffed my backpack with the usual runaway accessories, and I’d made a list of useful items for Denise, telling her to share it with Porfi, but when he met us at the top of the staircase to pick the lock, his bag didn’t look any more stuffed than usual.

  “How come your bag is so slim?” I asked him. Porfi said there was no use in loading oneself like a mule when one knew where one’s parents hid their cash and could just travel with a few wads and buy things whenever one needed them.

  “Clever,” Denise said.

  I was uncomfortable with this. I didn’t think running away with your parents’ money counted, but I didn’t say. I wanted to see how Porfi picked the lock before I’d engage in any kind of moral argument with him.

  “Look what else I got from my mother!” he said, rummaging through his pocket to present us with a black bobby pin.

  “Is that all you need to pick a lock?” I asked.

  “Just watch and learn,” he said.

  Porfi opened his mother’s bobby pin at a ninety-degree angle and placed the wavy side inside the lock.

  “The key, if I may say, is to keep that part at the bottom of the lock,” he explained, and then he started wiggling the flat part of the bobby pin left and right.

  “Do you also know how to open dial combination safes just by listening to the mechanism?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Porfi said. “I’ll show you if you want.”

  I just nodded, trying not to show my excitement too much. It seemed, from what I’d gathered in movies at least, that the spy apprentices who showed too much excitement didn’t end up being as good as the placid ones.

  “Okay,” Porfi said. “I found the soft spot.”

  He looked nervous, and I thought it was because he was scared of what we would find on the other side of the door.

  “How do you know you found it?” I said.

  “You can tell the pin has slid between the latch and the plate.”

  “Can I feel it?”

  “I’m scared if I drop it, I’ll lose it,” Porfi said.

  Denise and I were holding our breaths, each leaning over a different one of Porfi’s shoulders.

  “What are you waiting for now?” Denise asked him after a minute where nothing had happened. Porfi let go of the pin and looked up at Denise.

  “I’m worried that if I open this door for you now,” he said, “you’ll throw me out of the whole Paris thing. I want guarantees.”

  “Why would we throw you out?” Denise said.

  “Because you would have gotten what you wanted from me.”

  “Are you kidding me? I don’t even care what’s behind that goddamned door,” Denise said, and then she looked at me. “He does.”

  “What kind of guarantees do you want?” I asked Porfi, who glanced at me for a second before he went back to Denise.

  “I want to know that we’re a couple,” he told her. “And to seal it with a kiss.”

  “To seal it with a kiss?” Denise said. “Who even says things like that?”

  Porfi didn’t let this get him down.

  “I want a kiss with the tongue,” he said.

  “Are you going to add a condition every time I think something out loud?”

  For a second, it looked like Denise wouldn’t have minded Porfi’s adding as many conditions as he wanted.

  “Do you guys want some privacy?” I said.

  “You’re not going anywher
e,” Denise said, looking at me like everything that was happening was my fault, which I guess was the case.

  “I’ve never kissed anyone,” she told Porfi.

  “Me neither,” he said. “But I practiced on my hand, and I think I’m pretty good.”

  “Lucky me,” Denise said, and she took a pack of gum out of her pocket. She always had gum in her pockets. She would chew one or two sticks at lunchtime instead of eating. She put one in her mouth and offered Porfi a piece.

  “What flavor?” he said.

  “Peppermint.”

  He took it and Denise offered me one too. The three of us chewed for a few seconds without talking.

  “What now?” Denise asked.

  “You have to close your eyes,” Porfi said.

  Denise rolled her eyes and shut them. Porfi cleared his throat. I didn’t know if I was supposed to watch them or not. I looked down the stairs. I didn’t hear their mouths touch but I saw a group of six or seven kids tiptoe over and form a line at the bottom of the stairs, Victor in the middle of them all. The way they laughed and pointed in our direction, I knew Porfi and Denise were at it.

  “What are you looking at?” I yelled at Victor. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Victor and his followers started clapping their hands and woo-hooing at Porfi and Denise, but I still didn’t understand at that point that their presence down at the bottom of the stairs didn’t owe to pure chance.

  Then behind my back, I heard Porfi telling Denise he was sorry. She didn’t ask what for, she’d put two and two together. Porfi was already walking down the stairs anyway, to meet his new crew.

  There were a certain number of things one had to do to become a part of Victor’s crew, and those things, I’d heard said, varied wildly, depending on Victor’s inspiration on the day he gave his assignments, but all were aimed toward making the candidate feel lousy. Kissing Denise was supposed to be a ritual humiliation for Porfi, not her. I wasn’t sure that she saw it that way. I was pretty sure I shouldn’t help her to.