Detective Alphonse shut his notebook and stood. “Thank you for speaking with me,” he said. “You have my card, and I hope you’ll tell me if there’s anything I can help you with. Please let me know if you decide to leave Paris.”
“Thank you, I will. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Malcolm left the police station and walked toward Joan’s apartment. The sidewalks were overrun with people hurrying to work; Malcolm stepped off the curb and walked in the street to avoid them. He had always, since the first time he visited Paris, felt he was invisible there. It was a feeling he loved very much.
He was aware of being in an intermediate period: he hadn’t yet recognized Frances’s death but sensed the recognition’s even approach. He sat on a bench across from the square at Saint-Sulpice. He couldn’t latch on to any particular thought or emotion for a while; then he began thinking of the morning Frances came for him at the academy.
Malcolm was summoned from his classroom and arrived at the headmaster’s office to find her bantering with the man about the protocol of removing Malcolm from school. She had a sheaf of papers in front of her, which she regarded with distaste. Looking up, she greeted Malcolm and explained her wish to take him away. Her eyes were glassy and she smelled of cigarettes.
“Is there anything you want from your room?” she asked.
“Clothes,” he said.
“I’ll buy you new clothes. Is there anything else?”
“No.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
“But the forms, Mrs. Price,” said the headmaster.
“Why don’t you be a champion and fill them out for me?”
“No, it’s not for me to do.”
“Well, I don’t want to, and I’m not going to, and I’m afraid that concludes the tune. Good morning.”
Malcolm stood gawking at the headmaster. How novel it was to see this fearsome man on the defensive. Frances gave Malcolm a friendly shove and they exited the office, walking down the hall and toward the entrance. They crossed the courtyard to the waiting Rolls.
“Where’s the driver?” asked Malcolm.
“Driver quit.” Frances stopped to light a cigarette: click! “I’m the driver.”
“I thought you didn’t know how to drive.”
“It’s pretty self-explanatory. Sit up front and keep me company.”
She drove down the gravel road. Pebbles were pinging off the Rolls’s undercarriage and the leaden car fishtailed around corners. They came to a paved two-lane highway; Frances accelerated and the sedan crouched nearer the ground.
She asked Malcolm, “So, how was it?”
“How was what?”
She jerked her thumb back. “Your educational experience.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Don’t say ‘I don’t know.’ Of course you know. What was it like?”
“Not really very much fun,” said Malcolm.
“Didn’t you have any friends?”
“Some.”
“But you found the relationships unfulfilling?”
Malcolm was going to say he didn’t know but caught himself. He looked at his mother and shrugged.
“What was the food like?” she asked.
“The food was awful.”
She held her palm out flat. “Give me your tie.”
“Why?”
She continued holding out her hand. Malcolm undid his tie and gave it to her and she threw it out the window. Malcolm turned to watch it whipping in the wake of the Rolls. Soon they entered into a dense forest. There were no other cars on the darkened road. “Your father’s dead,” Frances said.
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“The other kids showed it to me in the paper.”
“What did it say about him?”
“That he died a few days ago.”
“That’s true. What else did it say?”
Malcolm folded his hands together and rested them on his lap.
“What did it say about me?” she asked.
The question made Malcolm shy.
“It’s okay, go ahead,” Frances said.
Malcolm said, “You were arrested, it said. Because you didn’t do what you were supposed to do.”
Frances muttered to herself, lighting a cigarette off another and tossing the short butt out the window. “Look,” she said. “They didn’t know your father, and they certainly don’t know me, and it’s boorish, typically boorish of them to state the terms of what should have been done in an episode they could never guess at. What was and was not done was done or not done for a very good, a very real reason, all right?”
“All right.”
“What you need to understand is that I wasn’t wrong,” she said. “If this is going to work—you and me, I mean—you’re going to have to take my word for that. Okay?”
Malcolm nodded. “Okay,” he said. In a little while he asked, “What was jail like?”
Frances was tapping the steering wheel. “Not really very much fun.”
“How was the food?”
Frances nodded approvingly. “You’re getting it.”
They exited the forest and emerged into sunshine. To the side of them lay undulating fields of grass. Frances flicked the cigarette out the window and rolled it up tight, smoke floating in the Rolls. “Are you going to have to go back to jail?” Malcolm asked.
Frances considered the question. “I don’t think so,” she said. The road banked south and they followed the line, moving toward Manhattan.
Malcolm was pulled from this reverie by the faint scent of flowers. The smell was similar to a perfume Frances had worn; he suddenly had the feeling she was there with him now—that she was visiting him. The scent of flowers became stronger, and now Malcolm sensed she was standing behind him. He was frightened by the thought; he turned slowly around to face her. But Frances was not there. Malcolm found himself looking at a florist’s storefront. For no good reason, and just to do something, he stood and entered.
The shop was dim, the air dense with moisture. The displays were soothing in a small and wanted way. When the clerk moved to stand beside Malcolm, he pointed. “I’ll take those ones.”
“How many?”
“A big armful.”
Malcolm made his purchase and exited the florist’s. He was a young man without socks on walking in the golden, late-morning Parisian sun with a bouquet of pink ranunculus in his arms. He looked down at them, admiring them, and wondering who they were for. They were for Susan, he decided. He imagined her face when he passed them over. She would be confused by the gesture, but later, in remembering the moment, wouldn’t she be pleased? Malcolm wanted to be kind to Susan.
He felt nimble as he navigated the sidewalk, moving around the bodies, men and women alone in their minds, freighted with their intimate informations. Crossing the square at Saint-Sulpice, he split through a stream of nuns, who, as insects interrupted, lost the scent of their paths and spun away in eddies.
Acknowledgments
Phil, Emma, Nina, and Leonard Aronson, David Berman, Suet Yee Chong, Caspian Dennis, Gary deWitt, Gustavo deWitt, Mike deWitt, Nick deWitt, Susan deWitt, Emma Dries, Ashley Garland, Sammy Harkham, Alexa von Hirschberg, Alexandra Pringle, Andy Hunter, Eric Isaacson, Azazel Jacobs, Megan Lynch, Sarah MacLachlan, Peter McGuigan and all at Foundry, Laura Meyer, Brian Mumford, Leslie Napoles, Rene Navarrette, Max Porter, Jon Raymond, Kelly Reichardt, Shelley Short, all at the Sou’Wester, Antoine Tanguay, Marie-Catherine Vacher, Libby Werbel, Janie Yoon. Special thanks to Emahoy Tsegue-Mariam Guebru.
About the Author
PATRICK DEWITT is the author of the critically acclaimed Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, as well as the novels Undermajordomo Minor and The Sisters Brothers, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he has also lived in California and Washington, and now resides in Portland, Oregon.
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Also by Patrick deWitt
Ablutions
The Sisters Brothers
Undermajordomo Minor
Copyright
FRENCH EXIT. Copyright © 2018 by Patrick deWitt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover illustration © Eric Hanson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: deWitt, Patrick, 1975- author.
Title: French exit / by Patrick deWitt.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053127 (print) | LCCN 2017057308 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062846945 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062846921 (hardback) | ISBN 9780062846938
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Humorous. | GSAFD: Black humor (Literature).
Classification: LCC PS3604.E923 (ebook) | LCC PS3604.E923 F74 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053127
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Digital Edition AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-284694-5
Version 06302018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-284692-1
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French Exit Page 17
