French Exit

by Patrick deWitt

  “‘It’s my birthday,’ I told her.

  “‘Your birthday was yesterday.’

  “It was painful that she’d known but hadn’t reached out. I asked why she hadn’t come and she politely said, ‘I’m inside of something at the moment, Malcolm.’

  “‘When are you coming back?’

  “She thought about it. ‘Two days.’

  “So, I went home and waited. Frances noticed I was alone and asked where Ms. Mackey was. I said she was sick but that she’d be back soon. There must have been too much emotion in my response; Frances smelled a rat and started interrogating me. Pretty soon she had me admitting Ms. Mackey was my heart’s desire. I felt like I was sharing good news but when I finished, Frances called Ms. Mackey and fired her. I never saw her again. I was devastated but it took me a month to work up the courage to go back to her apartment. The super said she’d moved, he didn’t know where. Frances asked me if I wanted to go back to school and I said I didn’t and she said that that was fine, but that I’d need to spend regular time in museums and libraries.”

  “What’s ‘regular time’ mean?” said Susan.

  “Five hours a day, five days a week. The Met, the Cloisters, the Frick, the Morgan Library. Place to place to place.”

  “For how long?”

  “Four years.”

  Susan said, “You went to museums, alone, five hours a day, five days a week, for four years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weren’t you lonely?”

  “I was lonely.”

  “Frances never went with you?”

  “Almost never. I wanted her to. Once she said, ‘What if they decide I’m a sculpture, and won’t let me come home?’” He smiled at the memory, then pushed off the wall of the pool and began swimming lazy, crooked laps.

  Susan thought of the time they’d met. It was during a gully in her life; she’d finished school and was home, wondering at the nullity before her and acquainting herself with a creeping sense of lack, chiefly in the area of love. Men had always chased after Susan, and she found the attention pleasing but ultimately unfulfilling. And it was stifling, as her suitors, at the slightest reciprocation, were so quick to assume ownership of her. She did not love these people. She had known something like love during the final year of her studies but it was oversimple, both the man, named Tom, and his plan. His speedy acceptance of her as his lifelong mate was suspicious; he selected her as if off a rack. She tried to think of him as decisive as opposed to robotic, but failed, and she could never achieve a deeper admiration for him. She broke off the engagement in the moments preceding the graduation ceremony. Tom’s face as he crossed the stage to accept his diploma expressed a whole contempt, and just afterward he spoke to her in a bellow over the cacophony of screaming students surrounding them: “I know it’s boring and I should probably just suck it up but I want you to know you’re a definite shithead.” Graduation caps swooped through the air like bats; Susan watched from behind oversized sunglasses.

  She’d been home a number of weeks and was sulking in her parents’ bedroom, avoiding the cocktail party downstairs, when Malcolm emerged from her dead father’s closet winding a wristwatch. When she cleared her throat, he flinched, wearing the face of a man caught out. She approached and asked if he was, as it appeared, stealing her father’s watch. He admitted he was, then asked her on a date. She said she was thinking of screaming; he told her to hold her horses and she did hold them. Malcolm assured Susan that if she ate with him they would have a conversation of some interest, and that he would return the watch at meal’s end, and perhaps they could forge a friendship into the bargain. She knew better than to go along with it but she was, as stated, unexcited by the cocktail party; and beyond that, she knew just to look in Malcolm’s eyes that he hadn’t an evil thought in his head, and was no more dangerous than a walk in the park.

  They lunched. Halfway through the meal she realized he was the son of the deceased Franklin Price, and now his already intriguing persona was doused in scandal. After he paid the bill she requested that he return the watch. “Oh, please, Susan, can I keep it,” he said softly. She was endeared by his solemn desire, but admitted he was making her uncomfortable.

  “I’m uncomfortable almost all of the time,” he confessed.

  “Do you know that my father is dead?”

  “I didn’t. Were you close with him?”

  “Not very close.”

  “Did you hate him?”

  “No.”

  “But you didn’t love him, either, did you?”

  “He was my father,” she answered.

  He relaxed in his chair and shut his eyes, as though sunning. “It’s good, when fathers die,” he said, pressing the watch to his ear.

  Susan was smiling but wasn’t sure why. “I might let you borrow it,” she said.

  “Ah-ha,” said Malcolm.

  Their relationship was initially platonic. They went to the movies. Malcolm loved the movies, all movies, even badly written, directed, and acted ones. Actually he seemed to have no opinion of any one film he saw; he would only say afterward, “I love going to the movies.” He would not speak nor field a word the moment the lights dimmed. When the film was over, they walked, hours-long strolls in all manner of weather with no destination, and Malcolm spoke easily, though not of anything particularly revealing.

  He described himself as an avid swimmer but Susan found he did not swim so much as float; he did not wish to exercise, but to experience submersion and wetness.

  He drank, at times to excess, but there was nothing dark about it; he was looking not to kill a thought but to reset the clock, to force an occurrence. He called her one morning after a late night, and though obviously in great physical pain he spoke with earnest regard of the unassailable justice of the hangover. She’d not met anyone like him before and she admired him for his uncommon, complicated, almost entirely untenable belief systems. He never said a dull word, she learned, and he summoned in her a curiosity that her usual friends never had.

  But did she introduce him into her circle? The thought was impossible. Malcolm was unafraid of social discomfort, which is not to say that he courted it; but it was common enough that he assumed it requisite, and endured it without grievance. As his position in her life became more prominent, Susan imagined the disastrous collision of worlds: Her girlfriends happening upon her and Malcolm in a restaurant, and insisting they all eat together. Malcolm would not remove his sunglasses. He would order his eggs “really loosely scrambled,” then drown them in tomato juice. He would not speak unless spoken to and then only briefly, and a frost would take the group, an agonizing silence. The worst part of this scenario was the thought of the discussion that would transpire once Susan and Malcolm had gone. There would be shrieking, Susan knew. She endeavored to avoid the scenario at all costs.

  Malcolm was unaware of Susan’s concerns. He had no room in his mind for thoughts of her life beyond the time they shared together, and so he could never be offended by her refusal to bring him around to meet her peers.

  Susan thought of Malcolm as an exotic pet, a stopgap antidote to postcollege doldrums, but then something terrible happened, which was that she fell in love with him. It was like an illness coming on; it loitered at the edges of her consciousness, then pounced, gripping her mind and heart. She thought it must be temporary, and waited some days before addressing it, when all at once she couldn’t bear to keep quiet.

  They were sitting on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Malcolm was pointing to a hummingbird hovering above them. The bird performed an oblong circle, and again, then paused, shot away. Malcolm had followed these actions with the tip of his finger. He was pointing at an empty sky when Susan told him, “Well, Malcolm, I’m sorry to break up the party but it looks like I’m in love with you.” He removed a cheese sandwich he’d been secretly carrying in his jacket pocket and ate this in silence. After, they moved through the park. She reached for him, clamping her fingers awkwardly around his wris
t. He stopped walking and laced their fingers together.

  “This is how we’re going to hold hands,” he told her.

  Malcolm did not not mention Frances, but there was a resistance to Frances-as-topic. Susan repressed alarm when she realized Malcolm and his mother still lived together; and though he spoke of her as one in need of assistance, the volume of their activities contradicted this. When she called him to meet, as often as not he said he was busy. Busy doing what? “I’d like to meet your friends, someday,” she told him. “Oh, I don’t have any friends,” he replied. There was no remorse in this. It was stated the way someone else might have said, “I don’t have a car.” Further investigation brought the situation with Frances into sharper focus. Susan was made uneasy by the timbre of Malcolm’s voice when the subject of his mother arose. He was so plainly and relentlessly smitten with the woman, it was impossible for Susan not to view Frances as antagonistic to her happiness. “I want to meet your mother,” she finally told Malcolm, who winced and hissed and drank his drink. Frances was difficult, he said; she could be meddlesome. But these warnings, along with Frances’s infamously bizarre behavior following the death of Malcolm’s father, served only to entice Susan. One and a half years into their relationship, and in the wake of dogged badgering, Malcolm resignedly organized a dinner for the three of them at his and Frances’s home.

  Susan arrived at the appointed time, fist poised to knock when Frances opened the door. In her youth she had been renowned for her beauty and style, and these attributes were still in evidence, but she had a searching, malevolent flicker in her eye that marred her person and kept Susan at a remove. Frances told her, “Stand up straight and let’s see what you are.” Susan already was standing up straight, however. Actually it seemed most everything Frances said to Susan that night was, upon consideration, an insult. “Was it a gift?” she asked about an admittedly daring bracelet Susan wore. And when Susan didn’t lick her plate clean, Frances commented, “I’m too old to even think of dieting.”

  Martinis were served in the library after dinner. Frances sat across from Susan, drunk to the point of stillness. Occasionally she would look over at Susan and softly laugh, murmuring some bitter remark to herself. Then she began to stare. It was just the same way a leopard might peer out at spectators in a zoo, the eyes explaining, If it weren’t for this pane of glass I would eat you up. Malcolm was a hologram that night, granting Susan nothing but the occasional partly sympathetic nod: You asked for it, he seemed to be saying, which was true, of course, and obnoxious.

  The evening was a catastrophe, in short. When the pain of silence became acute, Susan stood and announced her departure. Malcolm was sleeping or pretending to sleep; Frances walked Susan out, caressing her hand, and demanding she return when she was feeling “more like herself.” After Frances shut the door, Susan stood on the sidewalk staring up at the apartment. She was ill at ease to a degree that seemed outsize to what had occurred that night. An unknown voice spoke to Susan, and it said to her, Be careful. Frances appeared in the window; Susan walked away.

  The mother of the man she had accidentally fallen in love with did not approve of their union: this was so. But it was a common problem, wasn’t it? It was a trope. She quieted her instinct. It could never have occurred to her that Frances would actively try to dismantle their relationship, and furthermore, that she would succeed.

  In the swimming pool at the Four Seasons, Susan learned Frances had done just this. Malcolm explained he was leaving for Paris. His departure was imminent and for all he knew permanent. Susan’s numerous panicked questions were met with Malcolm at his vaguest and most maddening. The inquisition trailed off; there was nothing more to say; the time had come for Susan to give up once and for all. She felt struck. In a powdery voice she asked Malcolm, “Why don’t you love me correctly?” Possibly he heard; he didn’t answer her. “The Sinking Sword,” he said. Plunging underwater, he hung upside down. Raising his right leg ceiling-ward, toes rigid as a dancer en pointe, he exhaled. The hairless leg began its slow submersion, soon disappearing altogether, and there was nothing on the water’s surface but a low, rolling boil.

  8.

  Malcolm and Frances breakfasted in her suite. They spoke of small things, and it was not evident to look at them that they were about to quit their lives. Frances asked Malcolm to check them out of the hotel and he attempted it but returned bearing news that each of his credit cards had been declined. Frances called down to speak with the concierge; when her request for a line of credit was denied, she grew irate: “Don’t ‘Mrs. Price’ me, what’s-your-name. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars of mine do you have?”

  “I personally have none,” said the concierge. “The hotel thanks you for your long patronage. We are looking forward to further mutually beneficial exchanges between us. Please let me know how we may assist you in reaching your current goal.”

  Frances hung up. Malcolm offered his remaining cash to settle the bill but she explained they were going to need it to buy their tickets out of the country. Frances arranged for their copious baggage to be discreetly collected by a town car driver, then she and Malcolm left the hotel without paying their bill, returning on foot to their building. In the lobby, the doorman informed them that a bank representative had put a lockbox on the front door of their apartment. Frances and Malcolm drifted back outside, where they discovered Small Frank sitting glumly on the sidewalk. “Hello, asshole,” said Frances. The cat looked at her, then away. She told Malcolm she had an errand to run, and for him to meet her at the passenger ship terminal on Twelfth Avenue at noon. He walked away without a word, Small Frank following behind; a moment later the town car pulled up. Frances tapped her watch. “I admire your timing,” she told the driver.

  “I admire your coat,” the driver replied. He drove her to Mr. Baker’s offices in midtown. Mr. Baker’s assistant was laying out juice and pastries and Mr. Baker sat beaming in his chair, behaving as though he and Frances had concluded a pleasant piece of business together, and now he wished to discuss the opportunities to come. He asked Frances why she’d needed the money in euros and she told him, “I’m going to Paris.”

  “That’s right, you talk the talk, don’t you?”

  “Oui, petit cochon.” Mr. Baker didn’t understand. “Little prince,” she explained.

  Her cash stood in neat stacks on the table between them. Mr. Baker watched as she transferred the banded monies into her large black shoulder bag. He knew he should say something, decided he wouldn’t, but then couldn’t not.

  “A hundred and seventy thousand euros loose in your purse?”

  She slid the bag over her shoulder. “You’ve never been boring before,” she said. “Why start now?”

  He stood, extending his hand. “I’m going to miss you, Frances.”

  “Yes, won’t you all.” She shook his hand and left. Mr. Baker turned to his assistant with a look of fond amusement on his face.

  “They broke the mold with that one,” he said.

  “Cochon means ‘pig,’” the assistant told him.

  Malcolm and Small Frank were waiting outside the passenger ship terminal next to a dumpster exploded with trash. As the driver began unloading their luggage onto the sidewalk, Malcolm realized they would be taking a cruise ship to France. As one who suffered from seasickness, he asked her to reconsider air travel. Frances was apologetic but immovable: she was engaging her crisis in full dramatic tilt and wanted, needed to face the limitless ocean with a terrific, stabbing pain in her heart. She asked Malcolm for his cash and he passed it over.

  They entered the terminal and followed the folding line to the ticket station. Frances purchased two first-class suites from a sad, gray man at a podium. “Passports,” he said, and Frances handed these over. When the man noticed Small Frank cradled in Malcolm’s arms, he requested documentation for the animal. Frances explained she had none and the man heaved a sigh of spiritual exhaustion. “I can’t allow you to bring an undocumented animal on b
oard the ship,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” said Frances, and she told Malcolm, “Put him outside, please.” Malcolm moved to deposit Small Frank on the sidewalk in front of the terminal.

  The man at the podium watched this in silent disbelief. When Malcolm returned, the man at the podium said, “You’re just going to leave him on the sidewalk?”

  “That’s right,” Frances answered.

  “You’re going to leave him on the sidewalk and go to France?”

  “Paris, France.”

  The man at the podium shook his head. He was half-perusing their passports but a peevishness was growing in him. At last, he couldn’t hold back. “You bring an animal into your life, you’ve got a responsibility to do right by that animal.” Frances nudged the passports closer to the man. He was disgusted, but had no legal recourse to keep Frances and Malcolm from leaving the United States; he handed them their passports and tickets and curtly waved them on. Small Frank, meanwhile, had snuck back into the terminal and now was walking along the interior wall toward the point of embarkment.

  Frances and Malcolm checked their baggage and made their way toward the looming vessel. Frances was excited by the sight and size of it, but Malcolm felt instantly queasy, mistrustful of his legs to carry him. It was a skyscraper laid on its side, larger than any seagoing vessel should ever be, he decided, and representing human ambition at its unsightliest. The check-in process took place at the top of the gangplank and Malcolm could not, he found, take part; he stood to the right of his mother, not daring to look anywhere other than directly at his own homely brown leather shoes, telling himself to breathe, breathe, keep breathing. His stomach was squirming by the time he arrived at his suite and he began vomiting before the ship left the harbor. He took to his bed, a plastic trash can resting on his chest, Frances sitting on a chair nearby, Small Frank perched on her lap. In her hand was a drink that tasted, she said, like suntan lotion over ice.