French Exit

by Patrick deWitt

  It was not a battle that could be praised for its intelligence; neither side could point to any strategical forethought. It was a gutter fight on a grand scale, men with grandchildren punching other men with grandchildren; piles of men; men swung about by their hair; men clawing one another’s faces. It was a spectacular if grotesque sight, and Mme Reynard was pleased with herself for being the one among the trio to first take notice of it. Her friends were rapt, and all thanks to her. As such, she felt a certain ownership of the event, and she suffered an impulse to speak of it as something she was allowing them to view. “Lucky I happened to be standing in the window,” she said. “We’d never have heard it otherwise.” She closed, then opened her eyes. Neither Malcolm nor Frances was paying attention to her. “Close your eyes, Malcolm. You won’t be able to hear it.” Malcolm said, “I don’t want to close my eyes.” Mme Reynard felt it an ungenerous statement; in an effort to save face she began counting the immigrants, aloud but not loudly, busily, as though it were a needed thing for the benefit of all. “Fifty, roughly,” she said. “Twenty-five per side.” She sniffed. “It’s a fair fight, anyway.”

  Malcolm and Frances made no comment. They’d become used to Mme Reynard’s neediness and had decided the best way to curb it was to ignore her until she began behaving attractively again. Sometimes it took a while, for Mme Reynard was not unfond of self-pity, but sooner or later, thanks to time, or drink, or a restorative nap, she would return to her typical grace and good humor.

  The riot swirled below them. It was no longer a demonstration of aggression performed by individuals but a unified, tidal force. Frances said, “It’s becoming itself.” Mme Reynard experienced an envy at these words; she knew she would never have been able to come up with something so wonderful. Hers was a mixed fate, she thought: to know brilliance on sight, but never to command it.

  Riot police came pouring into the park. Abnormally large and in battlefield armor, they went about their work with authority and vigor, certain of them with an apparent pleasure. They moved through the pack knocking down the immigrants one after the other; a tap on the skull and on to the next. Soon, half the immigrants lay unconscious on the grass, while the second half had been corralled by the police and now were clustered together in a band in the center of the park. The lamplight recast the faces in masks of terrors, hatreds; blasts of hot breath shot into chill air. The immigrants had ceased fighting one another and now were waiting for what came after, a new violence. The police held shields in their left hands; they raised their clubs in their right and inched closer to the huddled men. “Look,” said Frances.

  One among the wounded had come to. He stood apart from the crowd, holding his head, recalling himself. Something in the grass caught his eye and he moved toward it: a billy club. He took it up and bounced it in his hand. He moved toward the policemen, who, being so focused on the group before them, were oblivious to his approach. The man selected his victim, raised his club, and swung it at a policeman’s leg at the knee. The policeman dropped and the man quickly repeated the action on a second, a third policeman. Some among the officers recognized they were being attacked from behind and a small group broke away to face off against the man. A pause occurred as each side considered the other.

  “Look at his face,” Frances said.

  The man was smiling. Blood cascaded down his face at an angle, resembling parted hair. He spit at the police; he taunted them. He menaced them with lunging motions and waved for them to advance. He was not afraid; he looked possessed, grand. Frances thought he was beautiful, and he was.

  Now he attacked, and two more policemen were on the ground before the second two were atop him. They clubbed him until he was unconscious, then turned and resumed their advance upon the tightening band of immigrants. There were four smudge fires burning, one in each corner of the park; together they formed a tilting room of smoke. There was a knock on the door but no one moved to answer it. “Entrez!” called Mme Reynard. Julius and Madeleine let themselves into the apartment.

  26.

  They were invited to the window to watch the end of the riot. Once it was over, Madeleine said it was a perfect ugliness, and that police were barnyard swine. Julius posed the question of whether or not the society of man demanded policing and rules. Mme Reynard took up this line in sympathy but Frances cut her off. “All police are swine,” she declared. “That’s the final fact.”

  Mme Reynard prepared and distributed drinks. She had, since moving in, and in an effort to create a demand for her presence, purchased a cocktail recipe book. On this night she fixed an antique British concoction named the Corpse Reviver II. Its recipe called for fresh lemon, gin, Lillet, Cointreau, and a mist of absinthe, floated with a star of anise. All were pleased with the drink, and time passed as they discussed its history and ingredients. It was decided they would contact Small Frank that night and Mme Reynard pointed out how timely it was for her to select such a cocktail on such a day. She admitted that she’d always wanted to take part in a séance, and that Blithe Spirit was her favorite movie, and had anyone seen it?

  “I’m not sure this qualifies as a séance, actually,” said Madeleine.

  “Why not?” asked Malcolm.

  “A séance is the summoning of the deceased,” she replied. “I don’t know if we can say that the man we’re to contact is dead.”

  “Of course he’s not dead,” said Mme Reynard reassuringly.

  Madeleine asked Frances, “What do you think?”

  “To be honest I wish he were more dead, but I don’t know if that speaks to his aliveness so much as my dislike of the man.”

  Madeleine looked at her with a curious expression.

  “What,” said Frances.

  “Would you mind telling me the story?” Madeleine asked.

  “Which story is that?” said Frances politely.

  “How the cat came to house your husband?”

  “Oh.” Frances took a drink of her cocktail. “Well, he died in our bedroom one morning, you know.”

  “All right.”

  “A heart attack, and he did die, but it was unexpected, and I found I couldn’t face it, somehow. He’d put me through such hellish trials, I can’t tell you. And I was not, speaking generally, at my emotional best during this period of my life. Anyway, I was set to go away for the weekend, the car was idling in the street, the driver was loading up my luggage. And I remember thinking it was silly to tell Frank I was going, because he wouldn’t care, and what was the point? But I decided I would tell him, and up the stairs I went, and he was dead in our bed, naked and uncovered, and there was a cat sitting on his chest.”

  “A cat or a kitten?” asked Madeleine.

  “A young cat.”

  “Had you seen it before?”

  “No. So, consider, please, the double shock of this. The corpse, but also that the corpse was being interfered with. They were mouth to mouth. The cat was licking his face and making a noise.”

  “What noise?”

  “A wanting, almost a whining—needful. It was simply the ugliest thing, unbearable, actually, and I chased the cat away, down the stairs and out the front door. Then I went back upstairs to sit with Frank awhile. I couldn’t seem to feel anything besides a sense of hopelessness, that there was nothing to be done. Then came the feeling of wishing to leave; then the feeling of needing to. The driver was honking his horn.” Frances shrugged. “I left.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I went skiing.”

  “You went skiing.”

  “I skied.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone about it?”

  Frances shook her head. “I don’t think I said ten words the entire weekend. The story is that I was gaily vacationing, but that’s not true at all. I thought of Frank all through the days, and every night I dreamed of him. He was shouting at me, but no sound came out—he was mute. Oh, he was very angry with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he wanted someone to come and co
ver him up. To come and take care of him.” Frances looked at Malcolm, who looked away. She looked back at Madeleine. “I assumed somebody else would deal with him while I was gone, but our live-in had the long weekend free, and no one else came around. I got home on Monday afternoon. The house was so quiet. When I entered our bedroom, Franklin was where I’d left him, only he was blown up like a balloon and as colorful as one, too. I called the ambulance, and the paramedics came. They were bothered by the sight of him and I suppose I must have been acting strangely, and they started in on me, asking me questions—when had I discovered him, things like that. I felt so odd, as though I wasn’t completely in my own body; and I didn’t think to lie to anyone. I wish I had lied, actually. It was stupid not to. The paramedics called the police and in a little while the house was full of them.”

  “Were you arrested?”

  “Mildly. Nothing much came of it from a legal standpoint. It was the social aspects that were problematic. When I got back from the precinct the paparazzi were on the stoop, and so was the cat. It followed me in as though it were a natural thing. I knew just to look at him.”

  Madeleine was nodding. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get started and see where this wants to go.” She pointed at the dining table. “Does this work for you?”

  “Fine,” Frances said.

  “May I stay?” Mme Reynard asked Madeleine.

  “Sure.”

  “May I?” asked Julius.

  “Why not?” Madeleine turned to Malcolm. “Anyone else you want to invite over? Any neighbors or garbagemen?”

  There was an esprit de corps among the group. Frances called for help organizing the room, and now they all began dutifully moving the furniture around.

  27.

  What had become of Franklin Price? After running away from Malcolm, he had wandered through the Marais in a state of high agitation. He had been uneasy since leaving New York City, and Frances’s description of what was coming his way summed up his fears neatly. He was unsure what he should do; he only knew he could never return to her.

  He walked in a northwesterly arc, eventually arriving at the Hôtel de Ville. It had begun to drizzle, and the pavement was cold on the pads of his feet. The totality of his plight revealed itself to him: to remain on the streets was to perish. As he sat under an awning watching people stream in and out of the BHV, he decided one of them would serve to save him.

  He knew her when he saw her. She was a pleasant-looking, well-dressed woman in her midforties, weighed down with shopping bags. As she paused to adjust her grip, he hurried across the street to greet her. “Well, hello,” she told him, then turned to go. He had to trot to keep up; she noticed he was trailing behind, and laughed. He followed her across her courtyard and up the long flight of stairs to her apartment. She opened the door and stood looking down at Franklin. “Go on,” she said, and he entered. It was as simple as that.

  They spent a lazy afternoon together. She was cooking a roast and listening to talk radio. Franklin was given a bowl of milk and he drank it, then sought out a bank of light in the living room. As Franklin succumbed to sleep he felt he had found his new home, and that he would like it very much.

  Unluckily for him, the woman who had welcomed him into her home was married to a man with no great regard for animals, or for anything, really, other than himself. He came home that evening in a poor mood and was looking forward to an argument with his wife. The presence of a stray cat provided a capital starting point for some first-rate viciousnesses. The sound of the husband’s final bellowing assertion woke Franklin; he raised his head in time to see the man hurrying toward him. Yanking Franklin up by his neck, the husband walked him to the front door and threw him overhand down the stairwell.

  Franklin was not fully conscious; it felt sickeningly alien to be soaring through the air like that. He glanced off the wall at the bottom of the stairwell and fell into a tumble, rolling clear across the vestibule. Afterward he stood at the base of the stair, livid from insult. He thought of his grander moments with a biting bitterness: his closetful of tailored suits; the scent of a limousine’s heavy leathers; his belief that he was not merely a citizen of New York City but that the town was his in some fashion—the sounds were his sounds, the drawn skyline was not merely familiar, but accurate, a reflection of his ambition and achievements.

  He sulked for a while, eventually curling up in the corner of the vestibule to sleep beneath a row of mailboxes. He awoke at dawn in the hands of the superintendent. The man wished Franklin no harm, but it would never do to allow strays to congregate in his building. Depositing him onto the cold concrete, he said in parting, “Bonne chance, mon ami.” On the contrary, Franklin’s luck would only worsen.

  There was a phase before the fall. He continued following women home from the BHV, but none were so friendly as the first had been. Most shooed him away at the point of recognizing his interest. One woman allowed him to spend the night, but when she caught him clawing the leg of the kitchen table in the morning she kicked him out. Another woman fed him lunch, but as soon as he’d finished she pushed him onto the landing. His mewling agitated her and she came at him with a whisk broom.

  There were a number of days where he achieved not a moment of physical or mental comfort, and it became apparent that his sorry state was less a period of poor luck than something more indelible. After a sustained exposure to the elements, the indignation that accompanies placelessness must, in time, lessen. It’s in this way that a down-and-outer accepts his position, but the farther down one goes, the less likely one’s chance for return. Franklin was losing weight rapidly and a patch of fur was missing from his back after an evil cook had doused him with scalding oil in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant in Belleville. An ancient baseness took hold of him and he became known among the barbarous fraternity of Parisian strays as an animal deranged in his violence.

  As a young man in college, Franklin had half-heartedly tried to kill himself with a bottle of Nembutal. He awoke a day and a half later and shakily went about his business, telling no one what he had done, ashamed by both the attempt and his muddling of it. In his thirties he tried a second time, with Valium, and was nearly successful, but his secretary discovered him sprawled on the floor of his office after hours. Paramedics revived him and he claimed it an accidental overdose. The secretary thought this was untrue; Franklin gave her a large bonus, which she took rightly as her cue to maintain silence on the matter.

  Now, in his feline incarnation, Franklin once more knew the need for death. There was no other solution, he was certain; one morning he set out to achieve his exit.

  He spent several hours walking the streets of Paris. His method of departure was yet unknown; he considered his options. Might he dash under the tires of a city bus? Throw himself into the Seine? In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, he cleaned himself. Looking up at that behemoth structure, he realized he’d arrived at the location of his own demise.

  In the past, whenever he’d heard of someone jumping to his death, Franklin had been sickened by the thought of it: the plummet, the rendezvous with concrete. Who could desire such a sheer end as that? But now he understood it. The pavement was an immovable solution to the larger problem, and the pavement could not be mishandled or botched. Furthermore, his desire for death was so vigorous as to summon in him a wish for his vessel to be annihilated. Franklin Price wanted to explode.

  He began his ascent, climbing the three hundred sixty stairs to the first level of the tower, nearly two hundred feet from the ground; this was the only place from which one might jump with a clear line to the ground. He lapped the platform several times. From the western side he looked down at the Champ-de-Mars, its expansive, placid field of trimmed green grass. From the east, he studied the Seine, clogged with the tiered Bateaux-Mouches, open-air boats transporting tourists up and down the river. He stepped past the safety barriers and to the edge of the platform. Peering down, the wind in his ears, he had no God to curse or plead with, and the
re was no one he wished to seek out or consider.

  He stepped into the air and dropped, headfirst. Craning his neck, he witnessed the ground’s approach. He closed his eyes in anticipation of impact but at the moment just preceding this he involuntarily righted himself, landing squarely on his paws. A moment passed before Franklin understood he hadn’t died. He was shaking, and his paws smarted from the force of impact, but he wasn’t dead—no, not even injured.

  Incredulous, he climbed the steps a second time. Rushing to the platform’s edge, he leapt out as far as he was able, and all through the descent his only thought was of self-control, of the connection of skull to pavement. But as before, and at the final moment, he spun about to land upright. Franklin Price learned that an animal cannot commit suicide, this due to its survival instinct, which overrides emotion and will. He limped away from the tower, taking bitter solace in the thought that he would likely die from malnutrition in the near future.

  He wandered through the afternoon and into the night. He was curled up beneath a darkened merry-go-round across from the Voltaire metro station, waiting for sleep to come, when a queer force gripped and fixed his consciousness. A voice was coming at him, then voices; they were not heard but known from somewhere within him. They wished to speak with him, and he found he couldn’t help but acquiesce. He dipped toward a trance; his mind was warm.

  28.

  “Hello?” said Madeleine. “We’re here with you, Franklin. Won’t you please speak with us?”