B008J4PNHE EBOK (56 page)

Could that really have been Brooks? It had been. He knew it. Sam hoped someone had brought the man to a hospital. Sam hadn’t meant to hurt him.

What made Sam uneasy, what made him run the jagged nail of his right thumb up and down between his teeth, was the possibility that, conversely, Brooks had very much intended to hurt Sam. Rick Savini’s Sting was rusty, but it could kill. How many weeks had Brooks been
following him, lurking around, gathering his courage, waiting for the right voice in his head to tell him the moment to finish Sam off?

“I wanted to see
Quel Beau Parleur
again,” said Booth from behind him.

“Funny meeting you here.” Sam had observed his father’s reflection in the window, approaching from the opposite side of the theater lobby, cape flicking around his heels. He turned. “Where’s Mina?”

“She claimed she had homework. Though I do not like to accuse your sister of gainsaying, my suspicion is that her true intention was to talk on the phone with the young gay man she’s in love with.” Booth inquired as to the whereabouts of his son’s friends. Sam said he didn’t know. They’d taken some drugs and the rental car and abandoned him.

“I’m sorry that we laughed. I know you saw us.” His father placed a light hand on his shoulder. “I’m suddenly always sorry, aren’t I?”

“Ah, forget it. It was funny. The movie’s funny. It just is. Why should everyone else laugh and not you?” Sam dug up a handful of popcorn.

“Because I am your father.”

“You have my permission.”

If Tess was right and he didn’t have to feel shitty about everything, it followed that neither did anyone else, not even Booth. Also, it was exhausting, being pissed off all the time. He’d felt that way before Tess said anything; he just hadn’t wanted to admit it. He offered the popcorn bucket.

Booth sat down and helped himself. They chewed. Booth used the tail of his cape to dab around his mouth.

“What if I don’t want permission to laugh about that?” asked Booth.

Sam rolled his head around. “Shit, Booth. I don’t know. I guess that’s your problem.”

His father grunted.

A few kids were horsing around in the parking lot, kicking trash, surfing the hoods of cars. Out of sight, an engine hacked, wheezed, wheezed some more, finally turned over. The two men continued to lower the level on the popcorn in the bucket.

“You know that movie
The Pit
?”

“Yes. I saw it. Las Vegas falls into a big damn hole. I enjoyed it very much.”

“Do you think I’d be able to survive? If I were there? If I lived through the initial fall, I mean.”

“With all the militia and end-times cultists and gas fires and unstable structures and so on? You’re no fighter, Samuel. You’d need protection. You’d need a skill to barter. Do you have any abilities that would help start a new civilization?”

“Mina taught me to a knit a little bit once.”

Booth shook his head in grave apology. No one would need knitwear after the apocalypse, not in Las Vegas.

“My head would end up mounted on the hood of some warlord’s all-terrain vehicle, wouldn’t it?”

“If it’s any consolation, I’m certain I’d suffer some variation of the same fate. Men like us aren’t built for post-apocalyptic adventures. If there was anyone who would have performed well under such conditions, it was your mother. Your mother was not merely intelligent, she was cunning. She was also tough. I think she would have fared well in a post-apocalypse. If we could stick with her, we might manage to survive.”

The thought of Allie in the apocalypse, directing them through their paces, ordering them to boil water and board the doors, amused Sam. He had an idea it would have amused her, too. “I like that, Booth.”

A mall cop car pulled up, and the juvenile delinquents scattered. There was only a little popcorn left in the bucket.

“Your girl’s lovely. Is Tess her name? She seems to have a fine head on her shoulders, too.”

“Tess. Yeah. I’m not sure what she sees in me.”

“A thought to keep in mind: just as it is a mistake to count on the generosity of a woman, it is also a mistake to underestimate her capacity for pity.”

“Okay,” said Sam.

They finished the popcorn. The parking lot was broad and dark.

Booth cleared his throat. “Should we go in and get our seats?” He hated to miss the previews.

 ■ ■ ■ 

A bony, dark-eyed middle-aged man trots up the walk of his apartment building, carelessly swinging a bouquet of roses. A few petals drift onto the ground unnoticed as he goes. The camera lingers long enough to show passersby, how their shoes flatten and tear the petals.

(In the foyer of the building, a pensioner greets him, and we learn
that the man’s name is Marcel. “Written any good books lately?” asks the pensioner, leaning over a battered walker and grinning a spittle-flecked grin. More information is gleaned: the man we are following is a writer.

“Keep bothering me and I’ll take your walker, old man, and give it to my wife for her art,” says Marcel.

The pensioner waves a hairy hand:
bah!
)

Marcel enters his apartment and discovers a note tucked in the frame of the hallway mirror. As he unfolds and reads the missive, as his face falls, our view inches wider, revealing the pale square on the opposite wall where a painting used to hang. His fiancée has left him.

The bouquet is deposited in the garbage and quickly buried beneath empty wine bottles . . .

Furry dust lies on the keys of a typewriter. Marcel is blocked. Day after day, he slumps in the window seat of his apartment, sucking brown cigarettes.

From the window seat, he sees a white shirt on a clothesline that traverses the air above the street, connecting his building with the building opposite. The garment grays and stretches through autumn, stiffens and freezes in the winter, thaws in the spring, and begins to fray as summer arrives.

An anemic mustache has germinated across Marcel’s upper lip, and the dark circles under his eyes are pits. No matter how often he smoothes the hair at his temples, it fans up. He is transparently, quietly frazzled.

One day men in white suits transport a body bag from the apartment building across the street. The clothesline’s owner apparently was deceased for months, but no one noticed . . .

At the local grocery, Marcel gets a job bagging groceries.

A queue develops on his first morning. Marcel arranges the contents of his grocery bags with artistic judiciousness. The baguettes are tucked into one corner of the bag and braced by the boxes of pasta; bricks of cheese are pieced together in another corner; potatoes fill in the center; parcels of sugar and flour are added; a carton of eggs tops off. Some people yell at him to pick up the pace. An outraged man actually uses a beret to strike Marcel. The blocked writer is so numbed by his own troubles that he ignores the abuse. Even when the beret briefly awakens him from his stupor and he invites the man to suck his ass, it’s obvious that his heart’s not in the insult.

A few days later, Marcel realizes that a young woman—a customer we recognize from the grocery queue—is stalking him on the streets. She wears a yellow scarf knotted in her black hair. Her expression is fierce. When their eyes meet, she snarls, bares her pretty teeth and growls; a close-up shows her pupils dilating.

Marcel, alarmed, tries to shake her. As he darts up a department store escalator, she darts up behind him. He slips into the second-to-last car of a Métro train, but she manages to dive into the last car. On the street again, Marcel dashes for a bus, grabs the back railing, and swings himself up just as the vehicle is accelerating, leaving the woman in the yellow scarf behind. She shoves a man from the seat of his Vespa—the man had been leering at her, flapping his tongue—and leaps aboard, and comes roaring after the bus.

Marcel disembarks in front of his building. He steps out into the street to face the oncoming Vespa. In a gesture of absolute surrender, he shuts his eyes and spreads his arms. The Vespa shows no signs of slowing, its narrow wheels flickering around like snapped reels, its engine hum rising to a whine, the obsessed woman tucking low over the handlebars, scarf drawn out behind into a fluttering antenna. Marcel stands mere feet away, eyes tight, unmoving, and—

—the film slam-cuts to the writer’s bedroom. He’s lying nude except for the yellow scarf, which is knotted around his neck. The young woman sits on the edge of the bed and slips on her stockings. She is very beautiful and tranquil; the unexpected range of freckles above her bare breasts make her appear unusually naked. Marcel asks, “Why me?” He’s forty-nine. He bags groceries. His most recent novel is already out of print. The view from his window is of a tattered shirt. “What about me attracted you?”

“You’re a very good talker,” she says insensibly. Until that afternoon we know that Marcel has hardly ever spoken to her except to tell her how much she owes for her groceries.
Quel beau parleur
 . . .

The woman in the yellow scarf is the first in a patternless series of lovers—young and middle-aged and quite elderly, all female customers from the grocery store. The blocked writer is initially aroused, then annoyed, and finally exhausted by the stream of lovers. When he asks them to justify their attraction, they refer to his handsome face, which isn’t handsome—or his physique, which is scrawny—or his kind hands
and gentle fingers, which are nicotine-stained and bitten to the quick. Most frequent are references to his verbal savoir faire.

Much of the movie’s second act chronicles Marcel’s efforts to evade these ravenous females and, failing that, to convince them that they could make a far better match.

“I’m not even a successful bagger of groceries,” he says to the willowy red-haired wife of a diplomat as she winds around the doorway of his bedroom. “Blah-blah-blah,” she says.

After a long chase, a cheerfully corpulent middle-aged woman tracks him to his hiding place in the showroom shower stall of a department store. “Okay, okay! But be careful!” cries Marcel as the enormous woman presses in on him, her bosom swallowing up his face, her hands digging into his hair. “I never could resist a sweet talker,” she confesses.

A cut removes us to the exterior of the stall, where our perspective is largely occluded by the shower’s frosted door. What we can see is reminiscent of a lava lamp: through the pebbled glass, the woman’s paisley-print dress swells and heaves against the scarlet of Marcel’s grocery-store uniform.

An elderly widow tricks Marcel into delivering groceries to her luxurious motel suite. Upon opening the door, he finds her seated in a wingback chair, nude and smoking a pipe. Marcel, startled, drops his armful of groceries, where they explode against the floor—eggs, milk, meat, apples. “Um,” says Marcel.

The elderly widow uncrosses her legs. “Enough with the fancy chitchat! Tell it to the box, Don Juan!”

Dutifully, he approaches . . .

Marcel arrives home to find a skinny, mohawked, giggling stranger in his bathtub. He is unsurprised. “Whenever you’re ready,” he tells her.

She is riding Marcel on the window seat—the ghost of a shirt fluttering in the background—when the pensioner bangs into the apartment, thudding down the hall with his walker.

“Papa!” cries the woman.

“I’ll kill him,” shrieks the pensioner. He is fumbling with an antique pistol.

“I warned you, you old fart,” says Marcel.

We cut to the apartment landing. The pensioner has a bloody nose.
He’s on the floor, leaning against the wall, wheezing and clutching the pieces of his destroyed pistol. His granddaughter walks past him. “I’m not sorry for you,” she says . . .

“What’s this?” asks Marcel’s ex-fiancée.

Marcel has come to the art gallery she curates. He has the pensioner’s battered walker. “I thought you could use it for an installation.”

The ex-fiancée asks, “Did you take this from a cripple?”

“He was an asshole first and a cripple second,” says Marcel. “I want to understand what went wrong between us, Selene.”

“So you bring me a walker?”

“Everyone loves me except for you,” Marcel says plaintively.

Selene shakes her head—and guides him to a nearby painting.

Before the wall-size oil, Marcel’s ex-fiancée scans one way, then the other: no one is watching. She grabs the frame and hoists herself up and into the artwork. Marcel follows.

They stroll around a cubist jungle scene, alive with boxy parrots and jumbled-looking monkeys, distorted palm trees and crooked clouds. The distances are unstable, single elements broken into close-up pieces and faraway pieces, as if seen through a shattered lens. Marcel isn’t interested, though. He doesn’t want to wander around the sweaty, jagged world of the painting. What he wants is their life back. They were comfortable. They made sense. “What is your problem?” he asks.

“What is your problem?” Selene replies.

Marcel becomes furious. He kicks the sharp grass and punches the sky; several blades snap, and one of the crooked clouds fissures. She smiles sadly. It’s evident that Marcel has spoiled any chance he might have had to win her back.

Together, they do their best to repair the painting, gluing the grass, applying some powder from her handbag to the cracked cloud. Eventually, Marcel climbs out of the frame and offers a hand to help her down to the floor. The curator accepts it with a sigh. “Time,” Selene observes, “makes us imprudent with what we love.”

“It’s because I’m mortal, isn’t it?” Marcel lights a dented cigarette.

His ex shakes her head. She looks at him and manages a half-hearted smile. “No, you stupid man. You don’t see. That was my favorite thing about you.”

At the door, he tells her she doesn’t have to take the walker if she
doesn’t want it. Selene kisses him and says thank you. It was a thoughtful gift. She won’t use it for art, but maybe for magic . . .

The next day the first young woman, the one with the yellow scarf who chased him on the Vespa, comes to the head of Marcel’s queue. “Marcel . . .” she whispers. He groans and shoves a bottle crunching down on a head of lettuce in her bag. The woman slaps him and dashes out, ignoring his belated cry that she should take another lettuce.