French Exit

by Patrick deWitt

  Dedication

  For Rachel

  Epigraph

  Ah, the unconquerable past!

  —OSCAR LEVANT

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  New York

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Paris

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick deWitt

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  New York

  1.

  “All good things must end,” said Frances Price.

  She was a moneyed, striking woman of sixty-five years, easing her hands into black calfskin gloves on the steps of a brownstone in New York City’s Upper East Side. Her son, Malcolm, thirty-two, stood nearby looking his usual broody and unkempt self. It was late autumn, dusk; the windows of the brownstone were lit, a piano sounded on the air—a tasteful party was occurring. Frances was explaining her early departure to a similarly wealthy though less lovely individual, this the hostess. Her name doesn’t matter. She was aggrieved.

  “You’re certain you have to go? Is it really so bad as that?”

  “According to the veterinarian it’s only a matter of time,” Frances said. “What a shame. We were having such a lovely evening.”

  “Were you really?” the hostess asked hopefully.

  “Such a lovely evening. And I do hate to leave. But it sounds an actual emergency, and what can be done in the face of that?”

  The hostess considered her answer. “Nothing,” she said finally. A silence arrived; to Frances’s horror, the hostess lunged and clung to her. “I’ve always admired you so,” she whispered.

  “Malcolm,” said Frances.

  “Actually I’m sort of afraid of you. Is that very silly of me?”

  “Malcolm, Malcolm.”

  Malcolm found the hostess pliable; he peeled her away from his mother, then took the woman’s hand in his and shook it. She watched her hand going up and down with an expression of puzzlement. She’d had two too many drinks and there was nothing in her stomach but a viscous pâté. She returned to her home and Malcolm led Frances away, down the steps to the sidewalk. They passed the waiting town car and sat on a bench twenty yards back from the brownstone, for there was no emergency, no veterinarian, and the cat, that antique oddity called Small Frank, was not unwell, so far as they knew.

  Frances lit a cigarette with her gold lighter. She liked this lighter best due to its satisfying weight, and the distinguished click! it made at the moment of ignition. She aimed the glowing cherry at the hostess, now visible in an upstairs window, speaking with one of her guests. Frances shook her head. “Born to bore.”

  Malcolm was inspecting a framed photograph he’d stolen from the hostess’s bedroom. “She’s just drunk. Hopefully she won’t remember in the morning.”

  “She’ll send flowers if she does.” Frances took up the photograph, a recent studio portrait of the hostess. Her head was tilted back, her mouth ajar, a frantic happiness in her eyes. Frances ran her finger along the edge of the ornate frame. “Is this jade?”

  “I think it is,” said Malcolm.

  “It’s very beautiful,” she said, and handed it back to Malcolm. He opened the frame and removed the photo, folding it in crisp quarters and dropping it into a trash can beside their bench. He returned the frame to his coat pocket and resumed his study of the party, pointing out a late-middle-aged man with a cummerbund encasing a markedly round stomach. “That man’s some type of ambassador.”

  “Yes, and if those epaulets could talk.”

  “Did you speak to his wife?”

  Frances nodded. “Men’s teeth in a child’s mouth. I had to look away.” She flicked her cigarette into the street.

  “Now what,” Malcolm said.

  A vagrant approached and stood before them. His eyes were bright with alcohol and he asked in a chirpy voice, “Got anything to spare tonight, folks?” Malcolm was leaning in to shoo the man when Frances caught his arm. “It’s possible that we do,” she said. “But may we ask what you need the money for?”

  “Oh, you know.” The man raised and dropped his arms. “Just getting by.”

  “Could you please be more specific?”

  “I guess I’d like a little wine, if you want to know.”

  He swayed in place, and Frances asked him, in a confiding voice, “Is it possible you’ve already had something to drink tonight?”

  “I got my edges smoothed,” the man admitted.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Means I had a drink before, but now I’m thinking about another.”

  Frances appreciated the answer. “What’s your name?”

  “Dan.”

  “May I call you Daniel?”

  “If that’s what you want to do.”

  “What’s your preferred brand of wine, Daniel?”

  “I’ll drink anything wet, ma’am. But I do like that Three Roses.”

  “And how much for a bottle of Three Roses?”

  “A bottle’s five bucks. A gallon’s eight.” He shrugged as if to say the gallon was the shrewd consumer’s choice.

  “And what would you buy if I gave you twenty dollars?”

  “Twenty dollars,” said Dan, and he whistled a puff of dry air. “For twenty dollars I could get two gallons of Three Roses and a weenie.” He patted the pocket of his army coat. “I already got my cigarettes.”

  “The twenty would set you up nicely, then?”

  “Oh, quite nicely.”

  “And where would you bring it all? Back to your room?”

  Dan squinted. He was realizing the scenario in his mind. “The weenie I’d eat on the spot. The wine and the cigarettes, I’d take those into the park with me. That’s where I sleep most nights, in the park.”

  “Where in the park?”

  “Under a bush.”

  “A particular bush?”

  “A bush is a bush, in my experiment. Experience.”

  Frances smiled sweetly at Dan. “All right,” she said. “So, you’d lie under a bush in the park, and you’d smoke your cigarettes and drink your red wine.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’d look up at the stars.”

  “Why not.”

  Frances said, “Would you really drink both gallons in a night?”

  “Yeah, yes, I surely would.”

  “Wouldn’t you feel awful in the morning?”

  “That’s what mornings are for, ma’am.”

  He’d spoken without comedic intent, and Frances thought that Dan’s mornings were probably wretched beyond her comprehensio
n. Sufficiently touched, she opened her clutch and fished out twenty dollars. Dan received the bill, shuddered from skull to toe, then walked off at an apparently painfully brisk pace. A beat cop approached, looking after Dan with malice.

  “That guy wasn’t bothering you two I hope?”

  “Who, Daniel?” said Frances. “Not at all. He’s a friend of ours.”

  “Seemed like he was putting the bite on you.”

  Frances stared icily. “Actually, I was paying him back. I should have paid him back a long time ago, but Dan’s been very patient with me. I thank God for the fact of a man like him. Not that it’s any of your business.” She held up the lighter and lit it: click! The flame, stubby and blue-bottomed, was positioned between them, as though defining a border. A sense of isolation came over the cop and he wandered away, asking sorry, small questions to himself. Frances turned to Malcolm and clapped her hands together, communicating a job is done sentiment. They disliked policemen; indeed, they disliked all figures of authority.

  “Have you had enough?” asked Malcolm.

  “I’ve,” answered Frances.

  Walking toward the town car, she took up Malcolm’s arm in her special-loving-creature manner. “Home,” she told the driver.

  The grand, multilevel apartment was dim, and resembled a museum after hours. The cook had left them a roast in the oven; Malcolm plated two portions and they ate in silence, which was not the norm, but they were both distracted by personal unhappinesses. Malcolm was worrying about Susan, his fiancée. He hadn’t seen her in several days and the last time they’d spoken she had called him a rude and vulgar name. Frances’s concern was existential; she lately had found herself mired in an eerie feeling, as one standing with her back to the ocean. Small Frank, elderly to the point of decrepitude, clambered onto the table and sat before Frances. She and the cat stared at each other. Frances lit a cigarette and exhaled a column of smoke into his face. He winced and left the room.

  Malcolm said, “What’s tomorrow?”

  “Mr. Baker insists on a meeting,” Frances answered. Mr. Baker was their financial adviser, and had been the executor of the estate after the death of Frances’s husband, Malcolm’s father, Franklin Price.

  “What’s he want?” asked Malcolm.

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  This was not, technically, a lie—Mr. Baker hadn’t stated explicitly what the meeting was about. But Frances knew all too well what he wished to discuss with her. The thought of it made her morose, and she excused herself, ascending the marble staircase to curry solace in a bath choked with miniature pearlescent bubbles. Afterward she sat on the settee in the bathroom, in her plush robe, and her hair was down, Small Frank sleeping at her feet. She was speaking with Joan on the phone.

  2.

  They had met five decades earlier, at an all-girls’ summer camp in Connecticut. Joan was new money and everyone was aghast at her lack of refinement, her apparent disinterest in self-improvement. Frances was the most popular girl there, handily; vast energies were expended daily that her friendship might be won. She was bored by this, and became fixated on Joan, admiring her gracelessness, her scuffed kneecaps, her scowl. In the cafeteria one afternoon all looked on as Frances moved to sit with Joan, a piece of chocolate cake in each hand. Joan eyed the dessert with suspicion.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “One for you, one for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Just being decent, I guess. Why don’t you unscrew your face and have a bite?” Frances took a bite herself; Joan followed after. Over the course of the consumption of the cake, Joan became emotional, and the moment she finished she hurried from the cafeteria, fearful she might cry from the fact of Frances’s kindness, and she did cry, in the forest by the lake where a loon came in for a wake-making landing on the polished silver water. That night, at the campfire sing-a-song, Joan sat next to Frances, and Frances smiled at her and touched her knee to welcome her into her life.

  Their friendship began with a pistol shot, it seemed; they loved each other from the start and it had been this way all the time since. Now, so many years later, Joan was the only one Frances could be herself with, though this isn’t accurately stated since it wasn’t as if Frances suddenly unleashed her hidden being once Joan arrived. Let it be said instead that she did, in Joan’s company, become a person she was only with Joan—a person she liked becoming. Joan had many friends, but beyond Malcolm, Frances had only Joan.

  She, Frances, was looking out the high window above her vanity and into the black cube of sky. A leaf wandered drunkenly past. “It used to be that seasons filled me with expectation,” she said. “Now they seem more a hostile encroachment.”

  Joan was perusing a catalog in bed. “I thought we’d agreed not to talk about death at night.” She flipped a page. “Christmas is coming. I say it each year, but you’re hell to shop for.”

  “I’m simple: I want nothing.” Frances had come to think of gift-giving as a polite form of witchcraft. Another leaf bobbed past her window and a chill took her. She was wrestling with the thought of whether or not to discuss her problem with Joan. She had decided she would when there occurred an unexplainable event, which was that a sleek black lizard, ten inches from nose to tail, shot from behind the toilet and breezed over the tops of her bare feet before continuing on into the bedroom. Frances hung up the phone, crossed the room, and closed the door to shut herself in. She returned to the phone, picked it up, and called Malcolm, who was in bed down the hall, staring at the telephone and wondering why Susan wasn’t calling him, but also why he wasn’t calling Susan. He jumped when it rang.

  “Malcolm,” Frances whispered.

  “Oh, hello, there. Did you miss me, or what?”

  “Listen to me. There’s a lizard dashing around my bedroom and I need you to come down here and do something about it.”

  “A lizard? How’d that happen?”

  “I don’t understand the question. It walked in of its own accord. Will you come, yes or no?”

  “You want me to?”

  “I want you to. Also I want you to want to.”

  “Well, I guess I’d better come, then,” said Malcolm.

  Soon he entered Frances’s bedroom. She spoke from behind the bathroom door: “Do you see it?”

  “No.”

  “Stomp around a bit.”

  Malcolm stomped about the room but there was no sign of the lizard. Knowing his mother would accept nothing less than unassailable proof of the reptile’s demise or departure, he constructed a plan to set her mind at ease. He opened a window and waited awhile. “You can come out, now,” he said. “It’s gone.”

  Frances’s face appeared in the doorway. “Gone where?”

  “Wherever lizards go—it’s not for us to know.”

  She crept across the carpet and to his elbow. Malcolm explained about the window and she asked, “You saw him run out?”

  “He took it at a sprint.”

  “You’re very good,” she told him, squeezing his arm.

  “It wasn’t much.”

  “You’re very good and clever.”

  But now the lizard emerged from beneath Frances’s bed, approaching them in halting zigzags. It stood at their feet performing important push-ups and Frances returned to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. “Please will you pack me a bag,” she said, “and one for yourself, and I’ll meet you downstairs in fifteen minutes.”

  He did as he was told and soon found her in the lobby, explaining to the doorman about the lizard. Her hair was up, her cheeks faintly rouged; she wore a long black-and-red-checked wool coat to cover her pajamas, and ballet slippers on her feet. She took up her suitcase and exited the building, Malcolm following behind her. They registered at the Four Seasons and retired to their respective suites.

  Frances ordered two martinis from room service. When they arrived she set them on the bedside table, admiring their twin-ness for a time, then she drank them. Failing to take any water before
sleep she had parched visions all through the night: a juicy plum eluded her, passed from hand to hand in some person-thick open-air-market dream environment. Upon waking she once again called room service, requesting that which she could not have in slumber. The plum was delivered on a heavy, filigreed tray. She sat in the center of her overlarge, sunlit bed and ate it, hopeful for a valid experience, but it erred on the dry side, possessed no magic, and did nothing to lessen much less solve her deeper difficulties. This was unfortunate but unsurprising and she didn’t let the fruit’s failure influence her mood. Bracing herself, she called Mr. Baker, who wasn’t available to answer, mercifully. She left a false but believable message explaining that she was indisposed and so unable to meet that day. Returning home in the early afternoon, the doorman presented Malcolm and Frances with a couriered letter as well as an outsize floral bouquet. Frances sniffed the flowers and asked, “Who has died, and what was their purpose, and did they fulfill their potential?” The doorman didn’t hazard a response. Frances made him uneasy; he believed there was something quite wrong with her.

  “Any lizard news?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mrs. Price. That’s the end of that.”

  “You killed it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You personally?”

  “Personally I killed it.”

  “What was the killing style?”

  “Foot killing. I’ve got it in a box if you want to take a look.”

  “I’ll pass, with thanks and sad regrets. Please will you carry the flowers, Malcolm?”

  The letter was from Mr. Baker. Frances read it to herself while she and Malcolm waited for the elevator. Frances, enough of this. It’s past time and you know it’s past time. I’ll be at the Grotto at 3 P.M. tomorrow. There’s nothing to be done about the larger problem but we can take measures to simplify the transition. Frances gasped inwardly; the last word was a tactless violence against her.

  The bouquet eclipsed Malcolm’s head and shoulders. His voice came from behind the flowers: “What does it say?”

  “Nothing,” Frances said.

  “Who’s it from?”

  “Nobody, nothing.”

  The elevator arrived and Frances pressed the penthouse button. Once in motion, she sought out the card in the bouquet. It was from the hostess of last night’s party; Frances read it aloud: “‘How lovely it was to peer across the room and to see you standing there, with your son, and your cigarette. I’m rich in friends but not so that I can’t identify the gem of the bunch. Yours admiringly and ever fondly.’”