Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  “I was. I lost my job,” I said.

  “Well, that is fortuitous,” Marais said, smoothing his mustache. “Because I have one for you.”

  So began my life as a honey trap, a “mouche,” a fly to catch the spiders. Every night I reported to the Tuileries at nine o’clock, meeting up with my fellow informer, Georges, a desperate young runaway from the country with broad shoulders and stubby legs. Clearly, Marais was looking for two physical types. I was meant to attract the men who were looking for a slip of a thing. Georges could have killed his potential customers with his bare hands. Marais had given me money to buy a set of gentlemanly clothes to work in. I found a yellow silk jacket and britches at Les Halles. The job also came with a place to live: I roomed with Georges in a furniture-free rented room near the Tuileries. We shared a straw mattress on the floor.

  Eventually Solange appeared one night, her back rigid, slender hands firmly jammed in a muff, despite the warm weather. She had been trying to find me for days, she said. My money was gone—and so was Le Jumeau. He had found my stash and fled with the well-padded cook. So that was that. Solange gave me a few sous, her mouth turned down with dismay. “Ah, Johann,” she said. “What has become of you?” She took me for a prostitute. I didn’t bother to set her straight. My current occupation was not much better than whoring.

  For several months I worked for Inspector Marais. I was good at the flirting. I got reprobates of all types arrested, from chimney sweeps to men of the Church. For me it was a game, an act. Georges took it much too seriously. He felt ashamed of posing as a pederast, and often cried himself to sleep on our lumpy straw mattress. It was impossible, he explained to me, for him to return home. His father, a violent drunk, would almost certainly kill him.

  One night, Marais and his policemen were nowhere to be seen and I had trapped a man ready to give me a fat sack of coins for my services. He offered to take me to his home—a rarity. I went. It did me no harm.

  37

  Leslie lay beside Deirdre as she slept, his chest tight with longing. His body was corrupted by need for the girl. There was no pure bit left in him, clean of her. He imagined an automobile turned over. She was in it, unconscious, blood on her face. No: screaming, awake, pleading with him. He held the Jaws of Life in his hand, a great pair of scissors to open the car like a can. And she, inside, soft and vulnerable as her carapace was removed, reached her trembling arms out to him. The charge of the scene was overwhelming to him. He stood, ruffling his hair and passing his hand over his face. He looked down at Deirdre sleeping. She seemed inanimate, alien. He had no way to reach her. He walked to the window. The moon was full, fading against the tender blue dawn sky. Down on the lawn the orange cat, the interloper, was stretching himself. The two Senzatimore cats stalked around him in a peculiar servile fashion, tails up. Two more felines emerged from the shadows. Several were skulking down the street. Leslie’s lawn was filling up with cats. He stood and watched, incredulous. It was eerie. They all seemed to be swirling around the orange cat. Some were yowling. A fight broke out somewhere. He worried for his own cats. He should go out there and break this up.

  He hurried downstairs in his slippers, pulling on his robe over his T-shirt and pajama bottoms. He walked into the teeming yard, looking for his pets. “Trix! Patty!” It was impossible to tell them apart from the other animals in this half-light. The cats moved with savage delicacy from one point to another with no apparent cause. Why were they here? Leslie tried to shoo them away, kicking out with his feet, clapping his hands. The cats would skitter away a few feet, then close in again. Leslie walked to the center of his lawn and looked around him. Cats were sniffing, mewling, stretching, yawning. Unsettled, he waded through the furry tangle of them and onto the sidewalk. He felt repelled from the house. Turning, he walked off in his pajamas and robe, meandering down a few streets in his slippers, until he found himself in front of Dennis Doyle’s house. Dennis’s squad car was parked in the garage. The kitchen light was on behind the shades. A paunchy silhouette crossed the plate-glass window. Dennis. Leslie walked up and knocked on the door. The birds were singing now. He could hear footsteps, shuffling. Dennis was arming himself, no doubt.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Leslie.”

  Dennis opened the door. He was fully dressed in his tight uniform, gun in holster. “What’s up?” he asked, ready for an emergency.

  “I have about sixty cats in my yard,” said Leslie.

  “Come again?”

  “I couldn’t sleep and I got up and looked out the window and there were all these cats,” said Leslie. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Nothing, I just thought you might want to see it.”

  “I’m okay,” said Dennis, eyeing Leslie’s pajamas. “You want to come in and have a cup of coffee? I don’t have to leave for a few minutes.”

  “Sure,” said Leslie. Dennis’s kitchen was done up in aqua, one of Marcie’s recent whims. Leslie sat at the gleaming table, his long legs splayed out.

  “Why do you think that would happen—a convocation of cats like that?”

  “No idea,” said Dennis. “Animals are weird. They get signals …” There was a pause. “I’ll take a look on my way out in the car,” he said.

  “It’s a strange sight,” said Leslie.

  “Everything okay?” asked Dennis. Leslie took a sip of coffee and grimaced.

  “What?” asked Dennis.

  “It’s like water.”

  “That’s how I like it.”

  Leslie put the cup down. “You come over to my house, I’ll make you a real cup of coffee.”

  “Invite me, I’ll come over,” Dennis said.

  “I am inviting you.”

  “What—now? I have to go to work.”

  “When do you start?” Leslie asked.

  “Five-thirty.”

  “I should leave you to it, then.”

  “How’s Deirdre?” Dennis asked, a little too quickly. Dennis admired Deirdre. Always had.

  “She’s all right. It’s hard with Stevie sometimes, but she’s fine. Life continues.” There was a silence between them. Leslie heard a car whoosh by. “How is it, with no kids?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Dennis asked.

  “I just wonder what it’s like. As a couple.”

  “To be honest, for the marriage, I think it’s good. Kids seem to get in the way of that. But … I think Marcie’s sad about it sometimes. I hear you’re working over at Ross Coe’s.”

  “Yup. He has a Chris-Craft I’m refurbishing. Wants me to do it all there.”

  “I was called to his house a couple of times over the years, when I was stationed out in the Hamptons,” said Dennis. “False alarms.”

  “It’s a big paycheck,” said Leslie.

  “I can imagine.”

  Leslie stood up reluctantly. He didn’t want to leave. Why did he feel the need to be near Dennis, of all people, when he found him so irritating?

  Dennis was the last of the kids who had been playing in the cul-de-sac, the day Leslie’s father died. Chuck Tolan was dead; the others had moved away. Dennis was the final witness. He and his parents had come by the house when they heard the news; Leslie could still see chubby, freckled little Dennis’s embarrassed expression as he hovered near the doorway. To have your old man die was a tragedy; to have him hang himself was humiliating. Leslie resented Dennis for having been there. Yet it made him feel close to him, too, this shared horrible thing. Neither of them had ever mentioned it.

  Back at the house, the cats were gone. Leslie called his own animals, but they were nowhere to be seen. It was as if the whole thing had never happened. When he returned to the bedroom, Stevie was sleeping in the center of the bed beside Deirdre, his skinny arms flung wide. Leslie gingerly climbed under the covers and gathered the boy to him, cuddling him, kissing his warm, soft cheek. Stevie snuggled in, resting one small hand on Leslie’s shoulder. W
ithout warning, Leslie’s chest quickened, tears sprang to his eyes. He buried his face in Stevie’s birdlike chest and sobbed. The boy stirred, but he didn’t wake.

  Deirdre heard her husband crying. She put her hand on his shoulder, but he huddled in toward Stevie. Sliding her hand down his arm, she lay still, her eyes on the ceiling. Something bad was happening to him. She didn’t think it was just the girl.

  An hour later, Stevie woke. Deirdre took him downstairs, then to school. When she came back home, Leslie was still in bed. His eyes were open. I was replaying the fire rescue of Masha over and over in his mind. And words too, injected into his brain with the needle precision of a mosquito: Get up. Go to her house. Tape open the door. Needs to happen soon. In and out in fifteen minutes. Rescue her.

  “You want some coffee?” Deirdre asked him. He shook his head, but his eyes stared out the window, vacant. She sat down on the bed.

  “What I said about you last night. It’s not what I think. You know that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. When she left the room, Leslie rose. He walked over to Deirdre’s purse and peered inside. A packet of Marlboro Golds were nestled amongst the debris of everyday life. He opened the pack and drew out one clean white cylinder.

  Late that morning, Leslie drove to Masha’s Victorian wearing his navy fire department casual jacket and matching trousers. He knew her schedule: she was at the Coes’ at the moment, ironing out her accent with Doris van Hoff. Striding up to the front door, a clipboard cradled in his massive arm, he knocked on the door. A worker, a short young fellow with a scraggly blond beard, opened the door and let him into the basement without question. The respect in the man’s eyes shamed Leslie, but he stayed his course. He felt he had been supplanted by something else, a story spooling out of him. It was almost a relief to give in to it.

  The basement was neater than he had imagined, swept clean and bare but for the washer and dryer set against the back wall, and two wicker laundry baskets tucked under a long table. Leslie walked over to the dryer, shimmied it away from the wall a few inches, and checked the gas feed pipe. He leaned down, took a small wrench from his jacket pocket, and loosened the lead to the dryer. Then he tightened it back up. He pushed the dryer back in place, walked over to the door leading to the outside. He took a roll of silver duct tape from his pocket, ripped a piece off with his teeth, and taped the door strike open. Then he walked back up the stairs into the front hall of the house. He could hear the workers in the living room.

  “Thanks,” he called out to them.

  That night, Leslie was on duty. He slept in the den, like always, in case his pager went off. Nothing strange about that. He stretched out on the couch and stared through the window. He told himself if he slept through the night, he would forget the whole thing.

  38

  It was July. A balmy evening, I remember, still quite light in the Tuileries. I had just turned nineteen. A small, sleek monkey on a long chain loped toward me and grabbed my hand. I was frightened at first, but the little fellow looked up at me kindly and chirped. He was wearing a blue jacket with gold buttons. His chain led to a colorful painted sign that I could not make out. A large man stood beside the sign. He had a big, ferocious head framed by a mane of hair.

  “Turco!” he bellowed to the monkey. And then, seeing me, he beckoned. “Come! Free of charge!”

  A crowd was gathering around players from various centuries: Henri IV, Eleanor of Aquitaine, some sort of Viking character, and others I did not recognize, ignorant as I was of most European history. Two fiddle players appeared in the circle and began to play a jaunty tune. I worked my way to the front of the crowd. The act began. I can only remember slivers of the action. The spoken part of the play consisted of bawdy rhyming couplets of varying quality, which, I suspected, the actors were largely making up on the spot. The crowd was roaring with laughter. Some people were weeping in hysterics. I didn’t laugh, but I was intrigued. When the play ended, the man with the great leonine head, monkey on his shoulder, called out in a booming voice, “Our main show begins at eight o’clock in the Spectacle des Grands Danseurs, our brand-new theater, at the ramparts by the boulevard du Temple. You can’t miss it. Come and bring your friends. Bring your wives. Your mistresses. This is a show that leaves the Comédie-Française looking like a bunch of anemics. We will show you real theater!”

  When the crowd dispersed I approached the impresario.

  “Monsieur,” I said.

  “What is it?” he asked brusquely.

  “I would like to join your company. Do you have a job for me?” Jean-Baptiste Nicolet took me by the shoulders and looked down into my face, turning me this way and that.

  “What can you do?”

  “Anything.”

  “What are you called?” he asked.

  “Le Naïf,” I answered without thinking.

  Nicolet frowned. “Come to the theater, we’ll try you out. We need a fop.”

  I scuttled in the shadow of the mountainous Nicolet as the troupe straggled through the teeming streets, my hopes already pinned on his protection. Henri IV eyed me suspiciously from beneath his velvet toque, thumbs tucked into his vest. Eleanor of Aquitaine, a sallow lady of giant proportions, farted dolefully as she trudged past me, weighed down by her gilt robes. A rat-faced girl in a Hellenic costume rushed to my side, then turned and walked backward, scrutinizing me openly, her athletic arms swinging.

  “But Nicolet!” she cried to the impresario. “He’d be perfect as the dying prince!” Then she confided to me, “Ours has been arrested.”

  Nicolet led us into the theater through a side door. The smell of melting wax, deeply familiar from my days of love with Antonia, gave me a false sense of homecoming. Impatiently, I pushed away the heavy ropes that sagged like vines from the ceiling, rushing to keep up with the maestro. Onstage, jugglers tossed painted balls back and forth; a man walked by on his hands. The monkey, Turco, hopped from Nicolet’s shoulder and swung into the arms of a rather pretty girl, who kissed him on the lips, then pirouetted away. The members of the troupe scattered and disappeared into various crevices. I swiveled to face the house, and was disappointed by the barren long hall, with its tiers of utilitarian box seats surrounding a scuffed wooden floor. Nicolet roared out, “Taconet!” A small hunchbacked man with a shock of black hair appeared from behind a canvas backdrop of an ivy-covered ruin.

  “Here’s your new prince,” said Nicolet, holding me by the back of the neck. Taconet took me in with hopeless, bored eyes. My yellow silk suit was stained, my wig frayed. “Do you think we can use him?” asked the impresario. Taconet shrugged.

  “We’ll try him once,” rumbled Nicolet, pushing me away.

  That very night, I was lolling in a bath chair, white paint on my face, dark circles smudged around my eyes. I was the tubercular Sardinian prince, married to the lusty princess of Naples, played by the rat-faced girl of that afternoon. Nicolet had rushed me into my costume while giving me a quick description of the plot. Around us, other players hurriedly did up buttons and crammed on wigs in the communal dressing room.

  “But what are my lines?” I asked, as Nicolet smeared my cheeks with lead.

  “You don’t need to speak, you’re dying. But, when she admits to her infidelity, make an indignant speech of a few lines …” He then stuffed me into my bath chair, turned, and walked off, preoccupied. Eleanor of Aquitaine, the giantess, now dressed as a nurse, burst into the dressing area, took up the handles of my invalid’s chair, and wheeled me onto the stage, where a family of acrobats was somersaulting into the wings. In a panic, I let my head fall back and shut my eyes, deciding to affect semiconciousness, thereby explaining my mutism.

  Squinting, I could make out the audience below us, some rapt, others milling about, eating, and breaking into fights. As the melodrama unfolded, I listened keenly for my cue, my mouth dry, breath short. At last the dreaded moment arrived: I heard the princess of Naples boasting to her handmaiden that she had been unfaithful—with m
y own brother! My cheeks burning with embarrassment, I roused myself, sat up in my chair, and gave my faithless wife a lashing I imagined my master might have given Antonia after my escape: “Is this how you repay my generosity? My trust? Lie down, sow, and traffic in the mud where you belong!” I cried, reaching a trembling hand out and pointing at the ground. The rat-faced girl seemed amazed by my liveliness. The crowd cheered and clapped. I felt a surge of joy rise up in me.

  After the performance, Nicolet called me into his office. The monkey was hunched on the maestro’s desk, picking at a roll in near darkness. A scattering of crumbs had fallen over the wood like snow. One side of Nicolet’s tortured head was thrown into relief by the warm light of a lone candle. The other side fell into pitch-darkness.

  “Where have you come from?” he asked me, peeling an orange with his big fingers. The fruit glowed in its meager spill of light.

  “I … I was in service. A valet,” I answered.

  “What led you here?”

  “I was dismissed, some weeks ago. I have nothing else.”

  “Can I expect the police to come calling?”

  “No—”

  “Because I have had enough of that for one season.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Why were you dismissed from service?” The scowling half face floated in the dark like a planet.

  “I became the greluchon of my master’s mistress.” For the first time, I saw Nicolet smile. He shook his head, severing a section of orange with a spray of juice and popping it into his mouth. The tantalizing smell of the fruit reached my nostrils. Chewing, he slid a few coins across the desk.

  “Your first week’s pay,” he said, tossing the rest of the orange to the monkey.

  And so began my career as the actor “Le Naïf.” I became a member of the Spectacle des Grands Danseurs, receiving meager pay for my work in the canevas, brief plays in which the players made up almost all the lines. Really we were filler, storylets sandwiched between the strong men, jugglers, and acrobats who were the true stars of the Spectacle des Grands Danseurs. Our working process was simple: our resident bard, the hunchbacked Taconet, designed a canvas backdrop with a melodramatic flavor—a ruined temple in Athens, for example, or a canal in Amsterdam. Then he devised a plot, and a few lines for each character to spout at crucial moments. Apart from these flimsy anchors, the actors cooked up the whole play every night. It was terrifying and exhilarating, walking the tightrope without a net day after day. With my petite stature and guileless face, I was always cast as the innocent prince or the simpleton valet. Eventually I pasted on a beard and branched out to foreign emissaries, mistrels, and … Jews. I suggested casually one day that there might be a Jewish peddler in one of our canevas that took place in Amsterdam. Unsuspecting, Nicolet told me to invent a character. Chayim Levi was a comic triumph. I did him for years, dancing across the stage in a yarmulke and protective fringes.