by Corine Gantz
“Yes, for what? Sluttish is good!” Annie said, and laughed ferociously.
“But you’ll take it slow, right?”
“What do you think I am? A slut? I have all the time in the world.”
She did not yet know just how little time there was, and how frantic the next twenty-four hours would turn out to be.
Lying on Althea’s bed, his arms behind his head, a cigarette in his mouth, Jared watched Althea as she stepped over canvases, tubes of paint, dirty glasses, a filled ashtray and picked her clothes up from the floor. It was pouring outside and rain whipped the tree branches against the bedroom window. “I’m getting breakfast,” she said, leaving the bedroom. It was eight in the morning and they had not gone to bed yet. They had gone out until five in the morning and then he had wanted to paint her. He realized this was unfair to Althea for two reasons: he knew she would not be able to say no, and she did not know he had taken speed at the beginning of the night. But now it was the morning and he hated himself for it, for invading her space, for taking advantage of her, for not letting her sleep. He had meant to paint her to capture her stomach-churning beauty, her smiles so quick to vanish. As a small boy he tried to make his little sister smile, and then his mother smile, and it worked for a while until they got too sick to smile at all. He had always been surrounded with sick women. Now he could see that Althea was more of the same and he was furious at her and at himself.
Althea re-entered the bedroom, carrying a cup of tea and three apples.
“That’s our breakfast?” he said, feeling mean.
“They were there,” Althea said as an explanation.
“Who?”
“Annie and Lola. And they were laughing. They always laugh. I mean, I went in and out of the kitchen, I don’t think they even noticed that I was there.”
Althea looked spent. What kind of selfish bastard was he to not let her sleep? Was this love? Would he love her if she were well?
“And I’m a burden to them,” Althea said. She reddened, looked away. “Sometimes I think I’m also a burden for you. Like you feel that you have to take care of me or something.”
Was he an angel of death, killing one by one all the women he loved? “What burden?”
She sat on the bed and looked at him. “Every day I know you’re going to feed me, and I don’t want to say no to you.”
He had wondered how long they could go on, not saying what needed to be said. “You need to eat.” He moved his chin in the direction of the tray. “And not only apples.”
Althea looked at him with a sort of defiance. “When you feed me I eat too much. So then I end up eating nothing else the rest of the day or...” she stopped herself.
Jared searched his memory for the word in English. “Do you throw up?” he asked.
“It just kind of happens sometimes, after I eat like a pig.”
He could see her ribs under the thin sweater, hidden behind the red mass of her hair. He felt sick. His cowardice made him sick, feeding her all this time without talking about why, letting her be insane.
“Althea, you can’t do that to yourself. You’re too skinny,” he said, knowing this was more of the same cowardice.
Althea spoke more to herself than to him. “Models are skinny, but they don’t have the veins and the bones that show like I do. I don’t feel skinny. I feel fat.” She looked at him, powerless. “I’m too fat and too skinny.”
Jared sprung up and sat next to her before he knew it. He grabbed her by the shoulders. “This has to stop, Althea,” he growled.
Althea’s eyes widened in horror. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“You know damn well you’re doing something wrong. Don’t lie to me.”
She shook her head and began crying. “I’m not lying.”
“I can’t always be here to make sure you don’t starve yourself!” he yelled.
“Then don’t!” she yelled back. “I don’t need anybody. I’m so sick of eating, and not eating, and being hungry, and throwing up. And Lola and Annie could care less; they’re eating wads of butter. Like my mom, always cooking greasy food. And selfish.” Defiant, Althea raised her head and, through her tears, said, “I know why they remind me of my mom. I could be dead for a week, and they would not notice. Maybe then they’d realize they should have paid attention.”
“Is that what you want? Starve yourself and die?” he yelled. He let go of her.
Althea collapsed on the bed and he suddenly understood. His desire to paint Althea was no different from his desire to feed her. It was, in fact, an urgency to keep her alive. Jared had been there before. Up until his mother died, he painted her desperately. He had painted her so that there would be something left of her, like an insurance policy. Jared stood up and felt wobbly. He was not with Althea because he loved her. He was with her because he was supposed to sit with her and watch as she slowly killed herself. “I can’t take care of you, Althea.” He whispered.
As Althea sobbed in silence, Jared grabbed his clothes. He didn’t have the words, or the courage to explain. He left the room, ran down the stairs, left the house, and he felt that he was followed by the cloud of stench, of darkness, of illness he carried everywhere with him. He left taking with him his destruction.
Chapter 24
At four-fifty the next morning, Annie opened her eyes. Closed them again, tight. What in the world? The irreversibility of the last few hours, her wanton and libidinous self, in the dreadful lucidity of the early hour all came to her in a rush. Horrific! She dared open her eyes again. Judging from the last of the moonlight reflected on the ceiling above her bed, the rain had wiped the sky clean and today would be a beautiful day. She ever so slowly glanced to her right and barely repressed a giggle. There he was! Lying right beside her on his stomach was Lucas, his head buried in the pillow—Johnny’s pillow—sleeping like a gentle brute.
Without moving a muscle, Annie contemplated Lucas’s bare back, which was on this side of hairy. She found it hysterically funny that it hadn’t bothered her in the least a few hours earlier.
She slipped a leg out of the sheet, her cutely painted toes, her freshly waxed calf, and had to admit to herself that what had happened wasn’t entirely free of premeditation. The cellulite on her thigh gleamed in the early morning light and she thanked her good stars for a chance to gather herself before Lucas saw her au naturel. She felt as giddy as a teenager at the thought, and sight, of a nude man in her marital bed. She had done it! Boy, had she been at the end of her rope after those years of forced abstinence. But with Lucas? She was glad it was with Lucas. Of course, it had to be with him. Her cluelessness baffled her and she almost laughed out loud. She pulled the sheet under her chin continuing to feel in turns embarrassed and elated.
What would happen when Lucas woke up, both literally and figuratively? Would he wish he hadn’t followed her after dinner, after they had cleaned the kitchen, after a few drinks too many. Would he wish he hadn’t dragged her into that dark corner of the stairwell?
Lucas had invited himself to dinner after a day of nerve-racking silence. He just appeared as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened between them. What had first felt like a relief quickly turned to wrath. How could he say nothing? She had felt the deep burn of humiliation. Lucas continued to be tactlessly normal during dinner, that asshole, so cruelly without conspicuous eye contact.
She had lost at her own game of planned aloofness in a matter of thirty minutes. It was one thing to act as though the kiss in the park had been insignificant to her, but that it be insignificant to Lucas flustered her so much that she had behaved erratically. She had drunk too much wine with dinner, spoken too loudly, been heavily opinionated, so much more so than usual, that she had read it in Maxence’s air of sulking disapproval.
After dinner, she had put the boys to bed only to come back downstairs to find Lucas and Lola sitting together on the loveseat. The loveseat! They were so wrapped up in one of their trademark flirtatious conversations that they
didn’t even acknowledge her being back in the room. She could have murdered them both. That’s maybe what triggered the whole thing. She would not, could not, let either of them perceive her as a fool.
All three of them drank vodka, too much of it. She maybe, possibly, got a little flirtatious at that point. Nothing too obvious, though it is hard to tell how obvious she got. Things got blurry. She did remember going into the kitchen around midnight and opening the two top buttons of her top. When she got back in the room, Lola sent her eye signals that her brand new black lace bra was showing.
They drank some more, joked around, flirted heavily, and suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, Lola stood up, teetered a little, said she was going to bed, and just disappeared. Annie had enough brain left to sense the danger. She got to her feet and called it a night, but Lucas didn’t leave. Instead, he followed her into the hallway, and before they reached the kitchen, he had put his hand around her waist and dragged her into the corner of the staircase where she had turned to mush.
Should she pretend to be asleep, see how Lucas would handle the morning, take her cues from him, or pounce on him like the starving she-wolf she was? She sat up and gathered the sheet over the negligee purchased the day before when she still believed herself above suspicion. Lucas had nice skin. And he was a deliciously attentive lover. Better than Johnny. And to think she had accused Lucas of being a legend in his own mind. She took a look at the clock and watched it turn to five a.m.
That’s when the shrill ring of the telephone pierced through the sleepy house.
Althea was awake and curled up at the base of her bed when the phone rang somewhere in the sleeping house. She looked up at the clock. It was precisely five in the morning. Jared had left her room at nine the morning before, twenty hours ago. After he had yelled at her and abandoned her she had put her clothes on, bundled herself up in her coat and sat at the base of her bed amongst freshly painted canvases and dirty socks. There she had drifted in and out of sleep and counted the hours until Jared came back. But this time, for the first time, he had not come back.
Her make-up was smeared from crying and her nose and mouth were swollen with tears. Within arm’s reach were the tea and the three apples she had brought up twenty hours ago but she was too desperate to reach for them. She did not deserve food or water. There was nothing in her stomach but a nauseating loneliness. During the night, a hundred times she almost rose to her feet, a hundred times she stayed down. Her stomach was empty, and her chest was full with a dry rage she couldn’t contain or understand. Soon day would come and the house would wake up. Happy noises of life, like a slap in the face. The children would complain and fight for the bathroom. She would smell the coffee and toasted bread that made her stomach scream. Lola and Annie would bark endless commands to the children who would ignore them.
The way the phone rang, or was it the time that it rang, Althea knew immediately that something was wrong. After the phone stopped ringing, there was an interminable silence, then doors began to open and close throughout the house. There were hurried footsteps down the hall. Althea stood up and put her ear against her bedroom door. Her whole body began shaking uncontrollably. Footsteps rushed up the staircase. A violent knock at her door. Nausea. She opened her door and faced Annie, who was barefoot and clad in a short lacy nightgown. Annie eyed the incredible chaos that was her room with incredulity and frowned with surprise at the sight of Althea dressed and wearing a coat. “Do you know?” she asked.
Althea felt faint. “No! What’s wrong?”
“It’s Jared.” She put her hand on Althea’s arm. “He’s at the hospital. They think it might be a drug overdose!”
Althea put her hand to her mouth. Her legs stopped carrying her and she held onto the doorknob. Annie looked at her face with suspicion. “Did you guys have a fight?”
Althea answered the truth: “I don’t know.”
“Look, you’re already dressed. You should go ahead of us. He’s is at Hôpital Bichat in the eighteenth arrondissement in the emergency department.”
“Is he all right?”
“Honey, they say he’s in critical condition.”
Althea received the news like a punch. Annie continued. “Lola will stay here with the kids. Lucas and I...he’s here. He spent the night but we’re getting dressed. Grab a cab now. We’ll meet you there. Run, honey, all right?”
Overdose? But Jared didn’t take drugs. Althea needed to tell the doctors. Maybe they didn’t diagnose him correctly. Althea ran with legs that couldn’t run, thought with a brain that couldn’t think. Her body moved out of the house and onto the street. She nearly threw herself at a passing cab. “Hôpital Bichat. Urgences s’il vous plait. Vite!” The cab, a BMW, accelerated to sixty kilometers per hour within seconds. “Stop! Stop,” she yelled. The cab’s tires screeched, and the car stopped just in time for Althea to open the door and vomit bile.
In the hospital room, Althea stood in her coat, her hands tight on her purse, her eyes scanning the room for a blanket, for Jared who laid there, unconscious, and whose body was covered by only a thin, white sheet. He was like a wax rendition of himself. He was very pale. The wiry muscle on his forearms almost flaccid. Clear plastic containers filled with liquid dangled above him, dispensing their fluids through catheters. The only sound in the room, the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor, failed to reassure her.
Voices came from outside the room. Through the small window in the door, she saw the doctor speak to Annie and Lucas. The same doctor, repeating the same words he had given her: There was no evidence that Jared could hear at the moment, but they could speak to him anyway.
Lucas and Annie would enter the room in an instant and she would no longer be alone with Jared. She ventured a small step toward the bed and had the hardest time getting her body to obey her. She glanced behind her shoulder, through the window. Annie and Lucas who had just arrived were still speaking with the doctor. She bent down and brought her face close to Jared’s. He did not smell like himself. She came close enough to feel his breath on her face. She had tricked herself into thinking that he loved her, but the brutal truth was that she knew nothing about him. He had never trusted her enough to let her in. They didn’t have a relationship. She couldn’t have despised herself more. She whispered in his ear the truest words she knew “I love you. And I hope that you love me, too,” and stood up as Annie and Lucas entered the room. Their faces displayed the same fear the doctor’s words had inflicted on her. Jared was in a coma. There was no evidence he could hear, no indication he ever would again. Althea refused Annie’s hug, walked past her and Lucas, and ran out of the hospital room.
Lucas couldn’t imagine himself staring at Jared’s still, waxy face another instant. “Why did Althea run out like that?” he asked Annie. “Isn’t she supposed to be his girlfriend? How come we’re staying here and she is gone?”
Annie was sitting in a gray chair next to the bed, her hands clasped, her eyes glued to Jared’s heart monitor. “You can go,” she said.
“Go? Go where? Why would I want to go? That’s not going to help Jared if I go.” Lucas paced in the small room full of awful medical smells. Everything in the room was gray, the walls, the chair, Jared’s face. “I need to go,” he finally said.
Annie looked at him. “So? Go.”
“I need to find an answer,” he explained.
“I’ll stay.”
Answers. Yes, he needed answers. What kind of answers he wasn’t sure. The hospital staff described precisely what drug Jared had used and how much, and no amount of additional information would improve his condition. Lucas left the hospital and walked down boulevard Boissière like a somnambulist. There had been no time for shaving or a shower and he was still wearing the clothes from the evening before—his charcoal Dior sports coat, a tailor-made baby blue dress shirt, and a gray raincoat by Karl Lagerfeld. Who knew Jared? Did Althea? He certainly didn’t know any more than what Jared deemed to show or tell him and that wasn’t much. Besides, Jared
had a distaste for answering or asking questions.
Across the boulevard was the entrance of the métro Porte de Saint-Ouen. Lucas took taxis through Paris when he was not driving his own Mercedes, but he suddenly felt the commanding need to take the métro, something he had not done in perhaps fifteen years. Jared was always in the métro; this would be just like getting into Jared’s mind. He walked down the foul smelling steps, odors of trash and urine, and waited in line to purchase a ticket, feeling self-conscious. He was shocked to discover how much a ticket cost these days.
He stood on the platform, waiting for the next subway amid African workmen, maids and elderly men. His clothes suddenly felt deeply inappropriate. This attire had been meant to dazzle Annie, certainly not to wear in the métro in an undesirable neighborhood early in the morning. He discretely removed the folded silk pocket square from his suit jacket and buried it deep inside the pocket of his raincoat. He imagined he’d get himself mugged in this attire but all he got was indifference. He stepped into the subway car and held onto the bar rather than sit down. He studied the faces around him with great interest but no one looked at him. Men and women on their way to work, closed to the world. This was how people lived.
He changed trains at Place de Clichy and headed toward Place Blanche and Pigalle, reasoning that if this was the Paris he never set a foot in, it therefore had to be Jared’s territory. Only by attempting to retrace Jared’s footsteps, no matter how futile an endeavor, would Lucas have a chance to understand what might have happened.
He emerged from the métro station Pigalle and was surprised by the heat of the morning. Yesterday had been a day of storm and thundering rain and today would be a scorcher. A record heat had been predicted for the day. He removed his raincoat and folded it over his arm. Everything was upside down: the weather, Jared, and he and Annie.
At Pigalle, he stood in the middle of the boulevard and surveyed his surroundings. He had somehow expected stench and prostitutes in broad daylight, but instead found only a few tourists looking for a place to have breakfast, he assumed, looking as out of place as he did. A group of Senegalese men armed with brooms were laughing contagiously as they cleaned the front of closed stores still protected by metal screens.
