Rake (11 page)

On the floor was linoleum of a type I’d never seen before, intricately patterned and, near the walls where the wear on it was less severe, still brightly colored.

“What’s in there?” I asked her, indicating a large door at the end of the hall with a steel locking mechanism.

“Just what it looks like,” she said. “A walk-in meat locker.”

I tried the handle, and with a loud, rusty squeal the door came unsealed. From inside came a musty smell of dust, grime, and stale air. Hanging from the ceiling was a single, ancient light bulb with a chain dangling from its socket. I pulled it and heard a click, but it failed to illuminate.

“Seems a shame no one’s doing anything with the space,” I said.

“Who said no one’s doing anything with it?” she said, and went down on one knee, unzipping my fly with a neat stroke as I leaned back against one of the counters in expectation of ecstasy.

Just as she hit her rhythm, though, there was a metallic crash outside the closed door, and her reaction was so startled I counted myself lucky she hadn’t bitten my dick off.

She stood and zipped me up, and we slowly opened the door and found that an old brass service tray had fallen from its spot on the wall.

“There’s your old lady cook,” I said.

“What do you say I sneak you into my room instead?” she said.

•
     
•
     
•

I don’t think I’d awakened in a dorm room since I was about twenty. The one into whose windows the setting sun’s rays shone
was small but comfortable, with a ledge beneath said windows from which Annick sat watching me sleep.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It’s late. You fell asleep right after and I didn’t have the heart to wake you.”

“I did? That’s a new one.” And it was; usually I jump out of bed and into the shower and get out of there as quick as I can.

“Guess I sapped your precious bodily fluids.”

“There may be something to that.” I got up and headed for the sink and, as I didn’t care to brave the communal shower Annick had shown me on the way up, washed my dick in it.

Actually, she may have been right about those bodily fluids. To say I’ve never been the monogamous type would be to understate the matter. In fact, someone once told me I was a textbook case of satyriasis. But even for me it was unusual to be carrying on intensive affairs with four different, sexually demanding women. Maybe, to paraphrase Mick Jagger, I just didn’t have that much jam. Tonight, I vowed, oysters.

I decided to take Annick with me, as it seemed ungentlemanly to fuck and run in her case. Marie-Laure or Esmée would have understood, and Ginny would have expected it, but young as she was there were many experiences Annick still lacked, and it would be fun to take her out to the sort of restaurant I had in mind.

We went to a restaurant I used to love when I was a student, over by Les Halles. In those days it was a special treat to eat a half dozen oysters there, washed down with a glass of Alsatian wine, and so now I ordered a mixed dozen oysters apiece along with a bottle of Riesling, and Annick explained to me how she’d ended up with Bruno in the first place.

“We were both writing about John O’Hara. You know him?”

“I know he once beat up a midget in a bar fight.”

“That’s right. He also once said, ‘I have never in my life hit a woman, except in anger.’ Anyway, he couldn’t get through the reading.”

“Bruno couldn’t?”

“He has a lot of trouble reading, particularly in English.”

“That would seem to be a handicap in a student of American literature.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, I ended up reading about half of his course load and describing the plots to him, and then I helped him write the paper.”

“That’s touching. He needed you.”

“It sounds sort of pathetic now, but there was something sweet about him. He did need me, it’s true, and I didn’t mind.”

“Something I don’t understand. I thought you told me you lived with Bruno?”

“He has an apartment; I live there about half the time. When I’m working at the foyer, though, I have to sleep there. It’s also nice to have a place to retreat to when he’s being an asshole. Which is a lot.”

We were seated in a banquette by the window, and it was difficult for the other diners to get a glimpse of us. I kind of missed the attention, but at the same time it allowed me to massage her thigh unmolested.

“So what do you know about Claude?” I asked.

“Bruno’s dad? He’s not around much, for one thing.”

“What exactly is his line of work? I don’t imagine investing in oddball nightclubs is what made his fortune.”

She looked a little uncomfortable. I always forget about that French reluctance to speak about money, even to discuss what one does for a living. In America it’s sex we don’t discuss. (Most of us don’t, anyway; I’d be short of things to say if I followed that particular cultural taboo.) But I pressed her; it was important, since he was theoretically going to be in business with me, and since I was banging his lovely wife.

“I was wondering if it was some sort of import-export business, since he travels so much.”

She looked down at the three oysters that remained. One of them was so big it looked like the giant gray tongue of a calf.

“Come on,” I said. “I thought you were planning to go to the States someday. You’ll have to get used to this kind of vulgar talk.”

“It’s not that,” she said, looking very uncomfortable. I realized for the first time that her eyes were not quite identical. One of them was blue, the other a sort of bluish green. “It’s just that it’s something Bruno told me in secret.”

“You can tell me,” I said, massaging that thigh, moving up the leg a bit toward her midsection.

She leaned forward and said in a loud stage whisper, “He sells weapons.”

That put a new spin on things. I tried to sound unimpressed. “Is that so? Guns and such?”

“Guns, missiles, artillery. Bruno thinks he might be dealing nukes with North Korea.”

No shit. I was fucking the wife of an arms dealer, the kind of guy for whom killing really meant nothing at all. Cool.

•
     
•
     
•

I dropped her off in a taxi on the Boulevard de Sébastopol and started walking toward the Left Bank. The occasional passerby stopped and called out to me, to which I returned a snappy salute, and at Châtelet one old lady stopped me to lecture me about my character’s love life.

“That pretty nurse, why do you treat her that way? She should be making you babies! There’s more to life than making love to strange women, doctor.”

I thanked her, promised to consider it, and was on my way.

•
     
•
     
•

I decided to walk along the river and descended to the Quai du Louvre. As I crossed beneath the Pont du Carousel I heard someone snicker from the shadows, followed by more snickering from several individuals, followed by a suggestion that some cocksucker be killed for his shit. Sensing that I was the cocksucker in question, I reached into my vest pocket and removed the tactical baton.

“Uh, ’scuse me, sir, you dropped something,” came a voice from behind me.

I spun and faced a guy in his twenties carrying a blade with no idea how to use it offensively. From beneath the bridge came four of his comrades, at least one of them a girl, judging from the giggling.

“All right, faggot, let’s see the wallet. And the watch, and that way you don’t get fucked up.”

“Goodness gracious me,” I said, the joyful adrenaline flowing through my veins and counteracting the pacifying effect of the oysters and wine in my belly. “Want my phone, too?”

“Fuck yeah, I want your fucking phone, bitch, hand it the fuck over.”

I flicked the baton under and over and hit his hand, and the knife went flying into the river with a satisfying, plosive splash. Before he’d fully processed its loss I cracked him across his teeth and kicked him hard in the balls, and he went down to the paving stones howling.

His friends hesitated, and then the girl said, “Are you gonna let that faggot kick René’s ass like that, bitch?”

At that one of them charged me, a large fellow with a stupid look on his face, at least as far as I could tell in the dim light of the quai. He was open for one of the real textbook moves in judo, so I de-telescoped the baton and, just before impact, replaced it in my jacket pocket. I bent down, stepped slightly aside and altered his trajectory over my shoulder and down the
stones of the embankment and then down into the Seine to join his friend’s blade.

(I used to hear that if you fell into the Seine they automatically hospitalized you and gave you a serious, heavy-duty course of antibiotics. Is that still true, or was it ever? Or is it just one of those things they tell young American exchange students to discourage them from diving into the river?)

“
Au suivant
,” I yelled, and two of them turned and ran. The girl stumbled forward.

“Fucking faggots, afraid of some stupid fucking bitch. Come on, cunt, let’s get it on.”

She, too, had a knife, and like her friend she was holding it all wrong. The baton didn’t seem sporting fighting a girl, so I waited until she was close and starting to lunge, and then I planted my right fist in her belly as hard as I’d ever hit anyone, male or female.

Something about it felt wrong, though, and when she hit the ground I saw that she was pregnant. I took the knife, which had fallen from her hand, and threw it into the river, and then I climbed the steps to the bridge and crossed it. I walked some distance trying to find a pay phone (there’s the curse of the cell phone; never a pay phone around when you want to make a call that can’t be traced to you later) and finally found one by going the wrong direction, just off the Place St. Michel.

I called the SAMU and informed them that a young woman was lying unconscious beneath the Pont du Carousel and that she seemed to be pregnant, and then I hung up.

On the way home I heard the ambulance’s Klaxon honking and wished the girl well despite it all. Mostly I hoped I’d terminated that pregnancy, though inadvertently, if only for the sake of the kid himself. I grew up with a mother like that and buddy, that’s not any way you want to grow up.

JEUDI, DOUZE MAI

M
Y MOM WAS MARRIED FOR THE FIRST TIME at fourteen (illegally) and divorced at seventeen. She had got her GED and started college, an experiment that produced nothing but a second marriage, to the instructor of her freshman math course, which itself was the result of a pregnancy that began in the classic American manner, in the backseat of a Thunderbird. My father, with whom I maintained sporadic contact until his death, was overjoyed at the prospect of a child, but my mother didn’t take to it. She found that what she liked was drinking and other fellows and, after the unpleasant surprise of my arrival, birth control. I do have one sister, fifteen years my junior, from my mother’s third marriage and brief flirtation with sobriety and Christianity; my stepfather, a good and honest if somewhat stern Kentuckian, suffered through five years of her antics before divorcing her. I’m in somewhat spotty contact with him and my sister, though whether my mother is still among the living is a matter of some indifference to me.

Anyway, my discovery after my discharge that acting was something I was good at and that women liked was probably what saved me from a life of brawling and petty criminality. All that anger gets wrapped up in the preparation and chucked out in the performance. An art therapist once told me that all art is art therapy.

•
     
•
     
•

I was in bed telling all this to Esmée the next night. I’d spent the day wondering about the girl under the bridge and was rewarded in the late afternoon with an account on the
Libération
website about a group of young people who claimed they’d been beaten up by Dr. Crandall Taylor from the television. Two of them had been hospitalized; there was no mention of a third, which either meant that the first boy hadn’t been hurt very badly or that the one I’d tossed into the Seine had floated away. There was no mention of the girl’s being pregnant, which presumably meant she hadn’t miscarried. My feelings were mixed there, but I’m not the Pope and it wasn’t my business to go around deciding who could or couldn’t reproduce.

Esmée had shown up around seven, and we spent some time looking at the artwork before surrendering to the bedroom’s pull. When we were done I asked where the money had come from to buy all that artwork.

“Some of it’s mine, from modeling.”

“You earned enough modeling to buy a Picasso?”

“Please, it’s a little drawing.”

“They’re not giving those little drawings away. What does Claude do for a living, anyway?”

This was the moment of truth. I didn’t care if it was true or not, I just wanted to see if she’d tell me.

“He’s in the import-export trade.”

“Where is he now?” I was thinking North Korea or Iran, or maybe Pakistan or Israel.

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me where he goes. Anyway, he won’t be back for a week.”