French Exit

by Patrick deWitt

  “I have quite a lot of first-aid products,” Malcolm said, then left the room to gather these. By the time he returned, however, the volume of blood was such that the situation seemed beyond him, and he proposed they call a doctor. Mme Reynard became enthusiastic at this. She adored her physician, she said; also she was a believer in the wisdom of the phrase the more the merrier. Whoever could deny it as an unimpeachable truth? Frances thought she could but she elected not to, if only to save herself the trouble and time.

  22.

  Soon came Dr. Touche, a sleepy-eyed and swarthy man with the hands of a female adolescent. Mme Reynard had asked him to bring along a bottle of champagne but he’d refused, citing an aversion to it, and brought instead a bottle of Côte-de-Brouilly, which they could none of them drink, for it was corked. Dr. Touche was greatly put out by this, and he rang his wine merchant while all in the room sat watching as he described the embarrassment occasioned by the spoiled bottle. “What must these people think of me?” he asked, at which point Mme Reynard began calling out compliments. Dr. Touche waved her down, resuming his conversation: “Well?” he said. “How will you go about making this right?” He listened for a time, holding one finger aloft; now he nodded. “Yes. I think that’s the only way. Do you have a pencil?” He gave the wine merchant Frances and Malcolm’s address and hung up the phone. “He’ll be with us shortly,” he told the group.

  While waiting for the merchant’s arrival, Dr. Touche attended to Mme Reynard. Hers was a deep, brief puncture wound, requiring three stitches. She endured the procedure in sullen silence; once it was over, she expressed her mortification at the event. Dr. Touche had moved to the kitchen to wash up; he called out over the sound of running water: “There is nothing shameful in physical injury! The Fates have done you this damage, yet your body is already in motion to heal itself! What a wonder! What a curiosity we are!” He returned, sat beside Frances, and laid his miniature hand upon her knee. In English he asked, “What’s up?” Frances removed his hand and explained in French what they had been occupied with before Mme Reynard’s injury. The doctor had no visible reaction to the news of Small Frank–as–vessel but when Frances had finished, he shook his head.

  “From where I stand you are in the midst of an impossibility.”

  “You don’t believe in the supernatural?” asked Mme Reynard.

  “What is there to believe in? Fear and guilt and sorrow; such motivations as these will bring us to the very strangest and most obscure places in our minds. I have no faith in this story.”

  “Your faith isn’t required,” Frances pointed out.

  “Still and all. This is my opinion.”

  “We’re going to hire a private detective to find the medium,” Malcolm said.

  “What an American notion.”

  “Thank you,” said Mme Reynard. “I authored it.”

  A knock at the door, and now the wine merchant arrived, a gangly man with a ponytail and underarm sweat stains called Jean-Charles. He was carrying a case filled with various bottles of wine; he set this in the kitchen and began uncorking the bottles and handing out glassfuls to the guests. Regarding the offensive Côte-de-Brouilly, he explained his own buyer had recently become irresponsible in the wake of what was apparently a total mental collapse. “There is of course no excuse,” he added, “but this is my truth, and you may do with it what you wish.”

  “What prompted the collapse?” asked Mme Reynard anxiously, as though she were concerned about the selfsame thing.

  “It’s a long story,” said Jean-Charles, “and very little of it—indeed, none of it—makes what we like to call sense.” Now he made inquiries regarding the nature of the gathering and Dr. Touche conveyed the story of Small Frank. He relished the retelling, adding minor narrative flourishes to the story that pleased him. “Sometimes, it’s as if the cat were just about to open its mouth and speak.” Jean-Charles seemed bored, but became alert at the mention of a private investigator; it so happened the man in the apartment opposite his was in the practice. His name was Julius, and Jean-Charles telephoned and invited him to join their group, and he accepted. The wine sampling continued as they awaited his arrival; by the time Julius appeared, none of those in attendance was sober. A glass of wine was placed in his hand by Mme Reynard; Julius thanked her but, not wanting a drink, he put the glass down. When she returned to place it back in his hand, he resignedly took a healthful sip and put the glass down a second time. Mme Reynard watched the glass. Julius couldn’t deduce what she was feeling by her expression, but she did not return it to him a third time and so he supposed she was satisfied. He sat opposite the group and took out his notepad and pen.

  “Who may I do what for?” he asked. He was blushing, somewhat.

  Frances said, “I and my son need to find a girl, a young woman. She’s a clairvoyant from the United States living somewhere in Paris. Or is she not living here but visiting, Malcolm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anyway, she’s around.”

  Julius asked, “What is your relationship to this person, madame?”

  “None whatsoever.” Frances pointed to Malcolm. “My son knows her carnally.”

  Mme Reynard began choking, and she stood and moved to the bathroom. There came the sound of gargling. In a moment she began humming to herself.

  Julius told Frances, “It can be helpful for me to know the nature of your desire to find this person.”

  “We’ve lost our cat,” Frances explained.

  “All right.”

  “And this woman, we believe, might be of assistance in locating him.”

  “She knows its whereabouts?”

  “Not at the moment, no. But I believe she can speak to the cat in her mind, if we ask her to.”

  Julius’s pen hovered above his notepad. He opened and closed his mouth. Finally he said, “What is this woman’s name?”

  “Madeleine,” said Frances. “We don’t know her surname.”

  Julius asked for a physical description and Malcolm said, “She’s pretty curvy, actually.”

  “What color is her hair?”

  “Blond hair, blue eyes.”

  Julius wrote this down. “Do you believe Madeleine wants to be found?” he asked. “That is, do you have any reason to believe she wants not to be?”

  “No reason,” said Frances.

  The wine merchant, Jean-Charles, cleared his throat and stood and said, “I would like to share a few words.” He looked away, and back. “The world changes, my friends, as the weather changes. Our motivations, our dreams and agitations, our fears change, too. But wine? Wine is immovable. Upon hearing good news, what do we do? We reach for wine. And when we hear bad news? Wine again.”

  “Gin,” said Mme Reynard, reentering the room and taking up her former seat on the sofa.

  Jean-Charles pretended not to hear. “I’ve been thirty years in the business. I give my life to wine. And wine in turn gives me life, and a livelihood. It is an honor, it is a duty, it is, yes, a calling. But where in the world would I be without my good, paying customers?” He gestured in the direction of Dr. Touche. “I would be nowhere. I would be”—he made a small space in between his thumb and forefinger—“this big. This big and no bigger. Without my good, paying customers? Well, you can just as soon forget about me. Tear me up like paper, scatter me on the breeze: termination. And that’s about all I care to say about that.”

  Jean-Charles sat, neck aflush with emotion, moved as he was by his own words. Dr. Touche patted his friend’s back and stood himself—he too wished to give a speech. He said, “We are pinned to a frozen marble boulder skating through black space at an obscene rate of speed. They say we’ll soon collide with the sun, or moon, or some other passing asteroid. But when? Perhaps today? Quite likely tomorrow. Be sure that the end is coming, and you can take that to bed with you.” He started pacing back and forth. “My father,” he continued, “when he came home from work and it was time to take stock, would often say, ‘And how about
a ribbon of wine?’ Then he would uncork a bottle and perform a little gulp, a slip of cabernet down the throat, a ribbon of it down the hatch, and then came relief: ‘Ah,’ he would say. He was a simple soul, and had no need for art. And yet I wonder all these years later: is this wine fancy not evidence of his love of beauty? An appreciation for fineness? Perhaps there was a brilliance in the man, only his life didn’t allow him the latitude to locate and cultivate it. We’ll never know, alas. Dead and gone. Dead and burned and buried, pfft!” Dr. Touche filled his glass and held it out before Jean-Charles. “A ribbon of wine,” he said.

  Jean-Charles held up his glass. “A ribbon of wine.”

  The men clinked their glasses and drank. “Ah,” they said together. Dr. Touche sat down on the couch, looking suddenly sorrowful, as though his own speech had made him depressed. Julius stated his rates and Frances paid him twice what he asked for, in cash. Folding the bills away, he said, “There isn’t very much to go on, but I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch with news. Or if I have no news, then I’ll also be in touch. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” said Frances.

  “Goodbye,” said Malcolm.

  “Goodbye,” said Mme Reynard.

  “Goodbye,” said Dr. Touche.

  “Goodbye,” said Jean-Charles.

  “Goodbye,” said Julius again, and he shut the door softly behind him.

  23.

  Julius was shy. He had always been shy, from the point of cognition down the line. Any small interaction caused him discomfort, and occasionally anguish. The post office, the market, the tailor’s: the pleasure of camaraderie others derived from these moments was denied him. As a child he had been comforted when his mother explained the shyness would pass as he came of age, but it didn’t pass and still had not, and then she’d died so that he could never correct her.

  Curiously, his shyness did nothing to diminish his fondness for humanity. Julius loved people and was often saddened at the thought he would never truly know them. It was this shyness that brought Julius to his field of work, as he had always felt he was studying behaviors while maintaining invisibility. Why not receive a wage if he was already performing the duty? He worked only as needed and was not particularly successful, that is, not very skilled; but his mother had left him the apartment in her will, and his needs were modest, and so his life passed vaguely, evenly before him. He was in his middle years.

  He was surprised by the coming of this latest job, but the cash in his pocket was thrilling. It was raining and the hole in his left shoe drank puddle water; he entered a shoe store and purchased a pair of black leather Italian loafers. This was extravagance on a level he could scarcely credit, and it served to buoy his mood, but the next morning he awoke in a state of concern at the particulars of the assignment. A blond-haired, blue-eyed woman named Madeleine, he thought. With such scanty clues as this, failure seemed a certainty, and he began to regret his having taken the job at all. He lingered over his hygienic rituals and afterward sat in the park, worrying and wondering if it was too late to give the money back. He felt foolish about the shoes and attempted to return them but the salesman wouldn’t allow it as Julius had scuffed the soles. He slunk back to his apartment, drew the curtains, and slept. In the night he dreamed he had posted flyers describing Madeleine and that she herself had responded; after breakfast he re-created the flyers, offering a reward to the person responsible for Madeleine’s unearthing. He had copies printed and all that day taped the notices up in various metro stations. Forty-eight hours later his phone rang and a hoarse voice came through the receiver claiming to know Madeleine’s whereabouts. Julius was sitting up very straight; he was wearing white briefs and a pair of argyle socks. “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Right here. I’m she.” Madeleine coughed phlegmily. “What about this reward?”

  Julius made arrangements to meet her outside the Odéon metro. They sat on the terrace of a café; Julius drank coffee, Madeleine a double whiskey. She wore crooked sunglasses, and Kleenex peeked from her coat pockets. She wished to speak of her hardships, which were not insignificant. “The cruise line stopped payment on my check, first thing. Then I set up in a hostel but my money ran out in a week and the manager there was pure scum who rifled all the girls’ bags and, I think, watched us shower through a peephole. Then my wallet was stolen, and I got fleas, or lice, and this cold.” She blew her nose to illustrate. “I’m bored,” she said. “I’m bored and lonely and sick and my parents won’t loan me the money for a ticket home.” Her head tilted. “Did that guy Malcolm put you up to this?”

  “And his mother, yes.”

  “Are you going to give me the reward, or are they?”

  “There is no reward,” Julius said, and Madeleine frowned significantly. He explained about the Prices’ wish to locate a missing cat, and said that perhaps there would be a fee for this service. Madeleine nodded, understanding at once what would be expected of her. She muttered something under her breath.

  “What was that?” said Julius.

  “I said, ‘It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do.’” She drank her whiskey down. “Take me there.”

  24.

  Frances awoke to find Malcolm had gone out on his bicycle, and so she dressed and left the apartment on her own. She had begun frequenting a café nearby, but only when she was by herself. The staff called her Jackie O for her coldness, her inscrutability, her fashionable beauty. She drank red wine; she spoke to no one; she tipped lavishly, absurdly. She watched passersby on the sidewalk but never an individual, only the mass in motion. On this day she did something new, which was to fill out a postcard. Walking to the café, she’d seen two young girls sharing an elaborate farewell in the street: they shook left, then right hands; they simultaneously curtsied, cheek-kissed, twirled, and parted, smiling in affection for one another. It was a routine, a private tradition, and it put Frances in mind of Joan, hence the postcard.

  She wrote: I saw a man’s penis yesterday. He was pissing in the courtyard of the apartment. Actually I’ve seen a number of penises since my arrival. Have you noticed men simply take them out and use them here? No harm in it, I suppose, but it takes some getting used to. Yesterday’s was memorably large. What a gift that must be for a man. What a lottery life is. It was nice to see it, I’ll admit. Frances described the second part of her private, two-part plan for Joan, concluding the note with words of devotion and love. I’ve always admired your heart. Your heart is the rightest of all.

  She called for the check, and in the time it took to receive it she decided she could never send the card. She folded it and left it on the table beneath her empty wineglass. The waiter found it but didn’t understand English. He showed it to the other waiters and the cook but none of them knew English either. On his way home from work he stopped by the post office and mailed it. It was out of character for him to do this but he thought Frances was a special case. Recently she’d tipped him a hundred euros on a glass of house wine, and when he had protested she had said it couldn’t matter. What did she mean by this? The waiter had mailed the card not because of the tip but because of what prompted her to leave the tip. He wasn’t certain what that was, of course, only that it was something fearsome, and so, worthy of his esteem.

  25.

  Mme Reynard had, discreetly and without asking or acknowledging it, moved into the apartment with Frances and Malcolm. Each night, after long hours in close quarters, Frances or Malcolm would stand and say, “Good night, Mme Reynard,” and Mme Reynard would stand as if to leave. “I hope to see you again, and soon,” she’d say, “though I’ve so much to do. My affairs are in knots since you two came along—not that I regret it!” Standing in the open door, she’d tell them, “But yes, you’ll likely see me sometime tomorrow. Pray you sleep as the dead, the dead.” Malcolm and Frances would retire, and Mme Reynard would sneak to the couch to prepare her bed. Early each morning she’d leave the apartment and return to her own home to shower and change her outfit, but an hour
later she’d be knocking on the door, face bright, eyes slightly demented, newspapers and croissants wrapped up in her arms. “Are you receiving?” she would ask, and they would allow her in to begin another day together. Neither Frances nor Malcolm was bothered by this behavior, somehow. It was so thoroughly tactless as to be fascinating to them. Frances sometimes was frightened when she opened the freezer, but only for an instant, and her fear was never validated.

  One evening, Malcolm was sitting on the sofa eating a carrot and wearing for unnamed reasons a suit. Frances was yet in her robe, and at that late hour, namely seven o’clock. She had not left the apartment in several consecutive days and had not taken the robe off during this time. There was a phase of each day through which she felt conspicuous to be so attired, specifically from when she sat down to eat her lunch and to the moment she took her first cocktail, just preceding her dinner. During this time she felt shabby, naked, a victim of drafts, untoward, and she combated such unpleasantnesses with blasts of perfume and makeup. She knew she was living improperly but hadn’t the strength to correct herself. She had twenty thousand euros left; she’d taken to flushing hundreds down the toilet each morning.

  Mme Reynard stood looking out the living room window. She had been standing there fifteen minutes, and her carriage was slack, her expression vague. Through a period of five or so minutes, however, something caught her attention and held it. She became increasingly alert, and finally she said, “Come look at this, you two,” and Malcolm and Frances walked over.

  There was a great violence occurring in the park.

  Lately there’d been an unease amid the park’s inhabitants as a new faction of immigrants had arrived and insinuated themselves into that small parcel of land. The existing group of immigrants naturally were opposed to this, and there had been for some time an unseen line drawn down the park’s center. In the day the mood was grim; in the night, when the wine and substances began to circulate, then the situation became more volatile. Malcolm had seen several skirmishes, but more recently a calm had occurred that he’d taken for peace but that was actually the prayerful moment before combat.