Leper Tango

by David MacKinnon

  “Something to drink, Franck?”

  The first glass flew towards me, smashing the wall behind me.

  “What are you looking at?” she inquired, as if I’d walked in on her toilette, or was caught gawking at her through a one way mirror, or was masturbating in a shopping mall.

  She fell into her now methodical default routine, tearing pictures out of the wall, smashing glasses one by one, then plates, then overturning the furniture. She stopped and briefly surveyed the day’s wreckage. Stared at me. Sneered, allowed me to catch a glimpse of the venom and hatred in its essence, then shut that off.

  “I almost forgot, Franck. It’s almost time for dinner.

  Would you like dinner, Franck? Or would you like to fuck me? Or do you want your wife? What is it, Franck? What do you want?”

  It was unsustainable, but it was a st yle. At some point, it would be time to vacate, but I could see why Cedric, and Vincent, and Christophe, and Dmitri, and all the others stuck around longer than was good for them. Compared to Sheba, everything else was black and white, and each of us needed a little bit of colour on the canvas.

  As suddenly as it rose, the tempest abated. Nothing had occurred. Just a minor epileptic seizure. She was sitting on a stool in the midst of debris skewed throughout the living room. Little Miss Muffet, except, instead of eating curds and whey, she is shaving her cunt with a razor.

  “Franck, I know I can be a little psychotic sometimes. W hen I feel my impulses, I am just like an animal. What is it, Franck? What is it I’m missing? I am missing something that other people have, am I not, Franck?”

  “Everybody’s missing something, Sheba.”

  “But I find even the passing of time difficult, Franck.

  People say time flies. Not for me. Every minute is long, oppressive. And the people around me. Other human beings. Their very existence is offensive to me. If I had access to a nuclear bomb, I would pulverize everything in existence.”

  “You probably just have too much time on your hands.

  Why don’t you take up rollerblading or something?”

  “I took up painting for a while, Franck. But, I could only paint myself, Franck. For me, Franck, the world has no meaning outside myself. No one exists. Not even you.

  Some people call this narcissism or obsession. What do you call it, Franck?”

  “Being a woman, Sheba, it’s like being in a prison, isn’t it?” “Oh la-la. Why would you, of all people, make such a statement?”

  “I’ve been having these weird dreams lately. I’d never really considered it, but your whole existence, it’s to seduce. To attract.”

  She was covering that peach of hers with foam, processing my latest theory.

  “So, basically, outside of the fact that you attract, the way honey attracts bears, or shit attracts flies, I mean what else is there?”

  She slid the razor alongside the edge of her labia, starboard side. I wondered momentarily whether she might not self-mutilate. Just to gauge how I would react.

  “C’est ça, le mystère.”

  “No, no mystery at all. None. A pretty little package.

  Another illusion down the drain. Nothing more. Even this death trip of yours is all part of the game.”

  “Do you really believe that, Franck?”

  “Sure, there’s no evidence to the contrar y. Why wouldn’t I believe it?”

  “There’s a line you shouldn’t cross with me, Franck.”

  An early morning light deflecting off her angular cheekbones. She looked clean, pristine. The twentythird virgin bride for the caliph.

  “Do you think I do what I do out of amusement, Franck?”

  “In the end we’re all stuck with ourselves. That’s just the way it is.”

  “There are only two reasons men are attracted to me.

  The first is animal attraction. The second never has anything to do with me. So, what is your second reason, Franck?”

  “With you, I don’t have to think about other things.

  In the short run, that has its advantages.” “You know, Franck, there’s always one thing that eats away at a man over time. Something he hasn’t solved. If you don’t face up to it, it eventually devours you. Like a tumour. So, don’t worry, Franck, I won’t force you at gunpoint to do anything. I don’t have to.”

  “That girl at your father’s place. She’s your daughter?” “Et alors?”

  I was debating about whether or when I would cross her imaginary line. Then thought better of it. Everything in good time.

  “You know what we have in common, Sheba? We don’t think we’re anything special. So, we take whatever we can get. But it doesn’t make us very popular with the working classes.”

  Even when she was considering homicide, she could find space for a smile. It was a form of intelligence.

  “People who think they are special make the best clients.”

  “That’s another thing we have in common. We make cash out of others’ disappointments. The bigger the disappointment, the larger the retainer.”

  “You have a talent, Franck, for talking and talking without saying anything real about yourself. Tell me something about you. Something that matters.”

  “What matters?”

  “Only two things. Where you come from, and where you’re going to. Tell me about your family.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Not much to tell. In the current jargon, I’m what you call a deadbeat dad.”

  She frowned.

  “Not that family. I mean where you come from.

  Where’s your father?”

  “Dead. A tumour. Something devoured him.” “What about your mother?” “Dead too.”

  My mind was on a basic rule of trial strategy. Never introduce evidence of good character, if you have something to hide. Opens you up to cross-examination. Sheba smiled expansively. All the earlier troubles of the day had vaporised. Something on her face, something like, this oyster took a good week to shuck, but lookee here, what a pearl inside.

  “Take off your sunglasses, Franck.” “What for?”

  “I want to see your eyes.”

  I removed my shades, lit a cigarette.

  “How did she die, Franck?”

  “Let’s just say it’s my jardin secret.”

  “You feel responsible. But, you aren’t.”

  “Sometimes, I wonder. Let’s just say I unwittingly may have provided the modus operandi.”

  “I’m listening, Franck.”

  “Let me put it this way. Society might not call my mother a whore, but she was a whore. W hich never really bothered me. But I had a brother, Richard, who was strict on standards. He had a code. In his books, she had broken the code. Betrayed him.”

  We were outside in the yard at this point. It seemed like the day had been going on forever. She was wearing an apron over a blue flowered peasant dress, a scarf, wooden clogs, and was hanging the wash on one of those ancient clotheslines in the shape of a sawhorse. It was one of her strengths — providing appropriate settings and props.

  “Have you ever thought of your mother in other terms?”

  “What do you mean, other terms?” “As a woman. With her own needs and desires.”

  “It was pretty hard to think of her as anything but a woman. So, any ways, R ichard, for his own reasons, fucked mother. And, while fucking her, he stabbed her.

  So, why do you think he would do something like that, Sheba?”

  “Because words failed him, Franck.”

  “What about your daughter?”

  “What about her?”

  “I’ve never quite figured out what the story is there.”

  “There’s no story, Franck.”

  “Don’t you want to take her back?”

  “Franck, you really are naïve.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “If I could, of course I would.”

  “What’s preventing you?”

  “She serves as currency. A sort of monnaie d
’ échange.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s being purchased?”

  “Silence. La paix. Why the sudden curiosity, Franck?”

  “Well, daughters usually live with their mothers.”

  “Children usually live with their fathers.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Vraiment.”

  She was wearing a spaghetti-strapped top and a white miniskirt, so short that her lower buttocks were partially exposed. I’m thinking, whatever way this plays itself out, there’s no going back to the day-to-day after this calibre of poontang. Like asking a drug dealer or a hold up artist to work as a gas station attendant. Not an option.

  “Sure. When push comes to shove, women will hold their children hostage. Use them as bargaining chips.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Me? Hell, no. Much more basic.” “How so, basic?”

  “Well, put it this way. If you marry someone for her tits, and those go, end of story.”

  Sheba looked at me. I thought I detected some disbelief.

  “You Americans are marrant.”

  “Seriously, Sheba. Don’t you want your daughter back?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Mère indigne. Unworthy mother.”

  “So what. Deadbeat dad. Not the point.”

  I poured out a coffee. Then, thought, why not, might not like the answer, but what the hell.

  “Tell me, Sheba. How old are you?”

  “Would you believe twenty-one?”

  I looked at her. Enough lights went on in my head to light Times Square.

  “I see. How old’s that girl of yours?”

  “Six.”

  “Which makes you about ...”

  “I was fourteen.”

  “Should I be asking who the father is?”

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  “I’m going out for a smoke. I want to think about this.”

  “Be my guest. You’re a free man, Franck.”

  I stepped outside, closed the door behind me, descended the stairwell into the street. I walked several steps down rue Général du Clerc towards the gate leading out of the old city. Hearing her voice and looking up. She was perched on the window-sill, holding a bouquet of handpicked azaleas. Casting for another part which would never reach the big screen.

  “Adieu, Franck.”

  “Adieu.” A slow walk along the ramparts of the old port in the direction of the train station. I arrived at a beach, where we had spent some time just staring at the water while she spun out tales, some true, some manufactured to titillate parts of my brain which had never been activated.

  I stared up at the twin towers overlooking the old port. Tour de l ’Ecosse and Tour de something or other. Tour de France, maybe. I was alone again, something which had been hovering on the virtual plane for some time, and now was hyper-real, reopening long dormant mental ducts and passageways, kicking parallel lines of thought into gear. Autobahn A of the cerebral turnpike is seeing for the first time that history has a meaning, i.e. if a city looks with fond nostalgia at its sieges and famines, and medieval plots and vendettas, that history is likely to repeat itself, and that an old brick castle or a walled city might look cozy on a postcard, and a three hundred year old accent might provoke an erection that wobbles the frontal lobe, but that to surrender to the forces of history was the wrong move for someone hailing from a continent suffering from collective amnesia. Autobahn B is didactically looking at the case of Franck Robinson, and thinking, Franck, you got way off the beaten track here, the beaten track being the endless labyrinth of asphalt going by the name Paris, which had nothing to do with the surrounding chrysalidic fringe going by the name of la France profonde. I stared at Fort Bayard, which she loved to call the Alcatraz of the Southwest. Then Ile de Ré and Ile d ’Oléron. Our islands. It’s the water that draws us together, Franck.

  VII

  During the six-hour drive from the South to the country hamlet of Lusignan, I ran a few mental re-runs of trials I’d participated in or witnessed back in the old days when I worked for a living, particularly the Claire Lortie incident. Claire was a fellow defence lawyer. We called her the “ice queen,” and oddly enough, one day her neighbours saw her burying her fridge in the backyard. Claire’s boyfriend, or what was left of him, was inside the fridge. Claire relied on the O.J. Simpson defence, i.e. that a mysterious invader had killed him, and that she was so traumatised when she discovered the crime, she sawed him into pieces and buried him in the backyard.

  If there’s one thing you learn in life, it is just how little is random or magical. Lightning strikes, and mysterious invaders kill your spouse, or the hand of God inter venes only when you want to ignore some overwhelming evidence pointing in one direction. So, if a girl is waving her cunt in the direction of middle-aged Americans while she raves on about death, and an old man is housing her daughter, and the mother is in a cemetery, and nobody’s talking about anything, there’s a reason for it. You don’t have to know what the reason is. You just have to know what you want.

  I had brought along a bottle of Pastis just to get through the door. But, after knock ing three or four times, I had to walk around and go through the gate to his backyard. He was sitting in the same chair as the last time, in front of the same truncated oak tree, stirring a drink. A bag of Gauloise blonde tobacco in front of him. The little girl sat at a child ’s fold-up table a few paces away, colouring inside a Tintin comic book. She was dressed up in her Sunday best, blue and white summer dress, hair tied back in a single bow.

  He didn’t stand up to greet me. He didn’t look surprised either. I sat down beside him, pushed the Pastis in front of him.

  “I am not marrying your daughter.” “Ça ne me surprend pas du tout.”

  He poured the remainder of his glass onto the lawn, then rolled a cigarette with his left hand.

  “What did she do this time?”

  “She didn’t do anything. She’s just too young.”

  “That’s not why you’re here.”

  “No it isn’t. I’ve come for the girl.”

  His face darkened, but remained expressionless.

  “She doesn’t deserve her. She is a mère indigne.”

  “That’s not your call. Nobody is worthy of children.

  The girl needs her mother.”

  He remained silent for several moments. Took a deep drag off his rolled cigarette and looked into the ravine behind his property.

  “Over my dead body.” I glanced at the girl, intently colouring, registering everything.

  “Who dresses her in the morning?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who takes her clothes off at night?”

  He slammed down his glass onto the table. His hand was shaking. I briefly debated whether to send the child inside the house, then thought better of it.

  “How’s the colouring going, petite?”

  “Tu veux voir? ”

  Within a few years, she’ d be an adolescent. Developing her own bag of tricks in life. Maybe she already was.

  “You can show me later. In the car.”

  The old man stared straight ahead. He’d lost everything he’d ever fought for. He was used to it. Defeats were his navigational tools in life.

  “Didn’t she tell you I’m a lawyer?”

  I didn’t really care what he’d done or not done. It was a question of energy, of vitality. Nothing more. I still had mine. And this old man was gone, well on his way out. My turn would come.

  “There’s truths in the combat zone, my friend. And there’s truth in the courtroom. Your daughter doesn’t strike me as the type who would hold back on the witness stand.”

  I could see he’d probably killed men. Maybe even quite a few. It’s hard to sustain that type of thing in the long run. It was more organic than anything else. The overall energy remaining the same. He slumped over, his head between his legs, buried inside his one remaining hand. I’d seen it in the court
room. Some of these people, you need winches to get their faces vertical and exposed to the public again. “C’mon, petite. We’re going for a car ride.” The girl looked up, clapped her hands. “Ouais! A car ride!”

  “Kiss your grandpa goodbye. And promise him you’ll be back soon to visit.”

  It didn’t take long to pack her bags and get into the car, but she didn’t look too disturbed, one way or the other. More interested in the car.

  “Dis-donc, we’re going fast.” “Ever been in a car before?”

  “None of your business. Mêle-toi de tes oignons.” “None of my business? Who the hell taught you that?

  What’s your name, kiddo?” “Je m’appelle Charlotte.”

  Six years old, and already a seasoned pro. “Okay, Charlotte, know where we’re going?” “Sure, we’re going to the moon.”

  “We’re going to see your maman.”

  “In the moon. Maman, she lives on the moon!”

  “Sure, she lives on the moon. All mamans live on the moon.”

  “Can I have ice cream?”

  “Later.”

  “I want ice cream now! Or else!”

  “Keep your mouth shut.”

  I stopped at a Total gas pump at roadside. A middleaged bald man wearing orange coveralls approached the car. Charlotte pointed at me.

  “C’est lui, mon nouveau papa! Et je ne connais même pas!

  I don’t even know him!”

  “Kids.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. The attendant glanced at Charlotte. He filled the tank.

  “That’ll be 223 Francs.” We rolled out slowly. I checked the rear view mirror, and spotted him noting down something.

  “You keep your mouth shut from now on. Hear?” “I want ice cream.”

  I stopped at a roadside grocery, purchased a Drumstick for her, returned to the car.

  “There, eat that. You and your mother are going to make a great team.”

  “Merci, papa.”

  “Cut the papa business. W hat do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Rich.”

  “What do you want to be, though?”

  “A doctor. An astronaut.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Or a geisha. Or a rabbit. Or a bank robber. Have you met my fairy?”