SoHo Sins (23 page)

After six weeks or so, however, laments and reprimands began to creep into the correspondence. Paul didn’t call when he should. He sometimes left her apartment abruptly. He wasn’t always at home when she slipped into her bedroom to phone him late in the evenings. Near the end, they exchanged little else but reproaches, punctuated by bursts of self-pity, effusive endearments, and profanity.

So Mandy had it, too, I thought, the great sickness. Just as bad as Philip or Angela or myself. Maybe even as bad as Nathalie. A hex was on us all, a disease nearly every soul shares in this city. Not AIDS, not syphilis—these are only its shadows. No, the great curse is our urge, our blind fervor, to seduce and depart, adore and betray. We exhaust ourselves in pursuit of the best lay, or the next, hoping vainly for what? A brief denial of aging and death? A transient escape from dullness, safety, and the staggering hardships of genuine love?

Above all, Mandy came to despise Paul’s PM Videos work. It took him away at key lonely hours and yielded only “smut and drivel.” It made him, or revealed him to be, another creature—no longer her golden young god but merely a pale voyeur, peeping through his camera lens, and a pimp of sorts, peddling the illicit images. Just when she thought she knew the worst, she caught an episode of
Virgin Sacrifice
. After that, her tone became insistent and shrill, sometimes hysterical. She would not rest until he was free of “those foul tapes, that abominable program, those criminals.”

Then, as if composing her own death warrant, Mandy wrote—on the very night before she was killed—“I will stop this at any cost, even if I have to notify the police.”

I stood up and went for a drink. Death was in the room with me now, like a lurking thief. I could picture Paul coming to Mandy that next morning—his arms open, his lips smiling, and his mind on the gun she kept in the bedside drawer.

But at least, while I drank, Mandy remained alive in her messages. Reading her lilting jibes was vastly different from the grim experience I had once of finding an old note from Nathalie, tucked in a volume of Pascal’s
Pensées
. It bookmarked one of the philosopher’s most famous reflections: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” In the margin, next to the underlined sentence, my wife had written a single word: “Coward.” More mundanely, on the slip of medium-weight paper addressed to me, she had recorded certain common sentiments, bits of domestic business, a column of figures—the everyday chatter of marriage, gracefully penned in her elite lycée hand. Then the signature.

I stared at her name, the chain of indecipherable ink traces. A strangeness came over me. I had been inside this woman’s body, faced a thousand household chores and crises with her, been nursed by her through fevers and nausea, fought with her in the depth of the night, suffered at the mere thought of losing her brilliance and beauty. And now this same Nathalie’s name sat inertly before me like a word from some extinct language. It was then that I knew she was truly gone, beyond any recall. And that is the one thing I have known continuously, with certainty, ever since.

I got up and phoned Hogan.

His response was matter of fact. “Tomorrow I’ll look through her received messages for Paul’s answer. Now go to sleep. It’s almost three.”

At ten the next morning, he called me with the result of his search.

“Got it,” he said. “The prick’s answer reads: ‘We need to talk. I’ll come to your place tomorrow before noon.’ ”

The following night, my life changed. I wouldn’t feel that subtle, irrevocable shift for quite a while yet, but already my once free and elegant existence had begun to alter in small ways. All because I said too much to a child, all because Melissa came to know me too well.

When I got home from the gallery that evening, I sat back in my reading chair and saw a flashing red light that urged me to play my phone messages. One of them was from Angela.

“Jack, if you get this before ten, could you be a dear and come down? Philip’s been hospitalized. I need to go, and I don’t want to leave Melissa here alone.”

By the time I went down to her place, Angela was wearing a light raincoat, ready to head out into the early autumn chill. Melissa, in tights and a T-shirt, perched on a chair in the kitchen area, her long legs drawn up under her chin.

“He fell,” Angela said. “They say vertigo is part of the progression—strange word—of Philip’s disease. Claudia is there, but she can’t handle this on her own. She asked for me. With Amanda gone, I’m practically his next of kin.”

“Don’t worry, go. Missy and I will be fine here. Say hello to Philip for me.”

“He won’t understand now.”

“Just let him hear the words.”

Angela kissed my cheek. “You are a dear,” she said. “As soon as this awfulness is over, I want you to have a drawing. Anything you choose.” She turned to Melissa. “Be good with Uncle Jack. I’ll give Daddy your love.”

“I want to tell him myself.”

“You will, sweetheart. When the time is right.”

The girl walked over and stood helplessly by the door as her mother went out. When she finally came back toward me, her face was blank.

“What shall we do, Missy?” I asked. “Watch a tape?”

“I’ve seen them all. They’re lame.”

Without another word, she strode to the rear of the loft, going into Angela’s room instead of her own. A few seconds later, she came back out.

“I guess she really is going to the hospital.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She didn’t take her hot-date bag, the one with her folding toothbrush and her diaphragm.”

“You shouldn’t snoop in her room, you know.”

“Why not? She always snoops in mine.”

“She does that to protect you.”

“Me too. I snoop to keep my mom safe. I find all kinds of things in there. Things no one is supposed to know about.”

“Such as?”

“None of your business. I’ll never tell anyone, ever.”

“Why, Missy? Are people asking you too many questions?”

“You, my friends, Mom’s friends, Paul. Even that dorky Hogan and the policeman McGuinn.”

“What do those two want to know?”

“The stuff Mom and I did on the day that Aunt Mandy was killed. Everything we did, all day long. I tell them and tell them.”

“What?”

“Mom and I practiced yoga together and baked cookies. Gingerbread. Two dozen. I’ve never seen grown men so, like, totally obsessed with how long it takes to make cookies.”

“They have to get everything in place. On a time line.”

“Why?”

“So they can figure out who shot Amanda. You want that, too, don’t you? For your dad’s sake.”

“I guess.” Her expression turned dark. “I don’t care much who shot Aunt Mandy. She’s the reason my mom is such a disaster these days. Always boinking some piggy guy.”

“Don’t. You just want to take care of your mother, right?”

“She’s everything now, with Daddy gone. Just me and Mom against the world. Unless I count you.”

“I’m not very reliable.”

“Did Nathalie tell you that?”

“Repeatedly.”

It took me a while to talk Melissa into watching
Funny Girl
. What else was I supposed to do—pretend that her father was going to be normal again? We both knew the truth was terribly different.

“The movie doesn’t have to be good right now,” I said, “just simple and bright. You’ll see.”

She threw herself on the floor, and I leaned back in some sort of ergonomic armchair.

“Sit with me,” Melissa said.

“I’m more comfortable here.”

“Selfish.”

“Am I?”

For the next couple hours, she scowled at me from time to time, especially during the musical numbers. I evidently knew zilch about youthful taste.

“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Melissa said when the film finally ended and the VCR started to rewind. “Old-time movies are way too sappy.” She moved to a chair near mine.

“So tell me about school,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s not totally sucky, I guess.”

“What are you studying now?”

“A bunch of junk. You know, algebra and stuff like that.”

“I see the Bradford School is a little more advanced than my alma mater.”

“It’s OK. The students are all rich, except for some of the black kids and some Asians. And they’re super brainy. With scholarships.”

“What’s your favorite subject there?”

“French, I guess.”

“Are you good?”

“Of course. Number one in the class. Want to hear?”

“Impress me.”

“
Etre
, imperfect subjunctive:
je fusse, tu fusses, il fût…
” She ran through the whole exercise perfectly, at dazzling speed.

“Great,” I said. “I feel like I’m back on the Seine.”

“What’s wrong then?”

“Nothing.”

“Does it remind you of Nathalie?”

“Not exactly. It reminds me that we could have had a daughter your age.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“We never quite got around to it.”

“That was dumb.” Missy pulled her shirt down over her knees. “If you wanted one, I mean.”

“Nathalie did.”

“And you?”

“I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“So you just did nothing?”

“Sometimes things happen that way—or don’t happen. You get distracted. Other things come up.”

“Like what?”

My voice dropped. “First we were poor, then we were busy, then she was dead.”

Melissa stayed quiet. She made a sour face, averting her eyes. I looked away as well, and noticed a box by the door. Small arms and legs protruded from the half-closed top.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“My stupid dolls. I was going to throw them out, but Mom pulled them back from the trash. She says they ‘inspire’ her or some dumb thing.”

I went and stood over the box, looking down into the tangled mass of plastic torsos and limbs.

“You’re kind of rough on your toys,” I said.

“They wouldn’t behave. I got tired of them, anyhow. I’m too big for dolls now.”

The heads and arms had been torn from many of the miniature girl bodies.

“Were you angry about something?”

“No, I was just having fun. Making a change. How many times can you sit and dress up those little snits?”

I had no idea, only a certain degree of marvel at her quick, bitter shift of demeanor.

Melissa got off the chair and took my hand, the way she did whenever we crossed a busy avenue.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s take a walk.”

I let the girl lead me halfway back through the loft to a coffee table surrounded by a cluster of soft chairs and a sofa. She steered me onto the cushions.

“Sit.”

I settled in and watched as she went to the liquor cabinet and fixed a vodka tonic and poured a tall glass of sauvignon blanc. She came back and handed me the vodka and sat down on the floor, leaning back against the couch near my feet.

“Cheers,” she said. “
À ta santé
.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m having some wine. A reward for learning all my lessons so well. How about you?”

“I can’t let you drink.”

“You can’t really stop me. I only do it a little bit, when Mom’s away.”

“You’re too young.”

Melissa turned to face me.

“Give me a break, Uncle Jack. Kids my age drink wine all the time in Europe. You told me so yourself. Would you rather have me take Ecstasy with my friends in the lunchroom at Bradford?”

“I’d rather have you be a little girl.”

“It’s too late for that.”

She took a small sip of the wine and sucked her lips in.

I felt powerless, outmaneuvered. So I raised my own glass and drank, the ice cubes tinkling. The mixture was sickly sweet with tonic.

Missy smiled at me, a shade too pretty, too knowing, as she sat cross-legged on the floor.

Well, my first drinks were stolen underage pleasures, too, and I turned out just fine, didn’t I? OK, so Melissa was a few years younger than I was when I started, but kids grow up faster these days. You had to change with the times. Maybe you could over-adjust, however. Who knew? It was evident that parenting wouldn’t have been my forte.

With just one interior lamp adding to the faint street glare from the windows, I was enveloped in shadows.

“What was it like being with Nathalie?” Melissa asked.

“It’s hard to remember.”

“Big liar, you think about it all the time. Tell me. I want to know.”

“It was like being whole.”

Melissa tasted the wine again. “Then why didn’t you live together more? Or at least on the same continent?”

“We didn’t want to spoil it.”

That sounded odd, but it was pretty close to the truth—as near as I was ever likely to get.

Melissa nodded. “You did anyhow, though?” she asked. “Spoil it?”

“Together, yes. Or maybe apart.”

“Did you cheat on her?”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Did she think so?”

“It’s what she said, so I went along with it. Fooling ourselves is what we did best. Nathalie was determined, absolutely, not to be jealous. She said, ‘Let’s not be stupid about sex in the naive American way.’ So we weren’t. We were stupid about it in the clever French way.”

It had all been very civilized. My wife and I conversed like characters out of Racine—and behaved like monkeys. There were times when I thought it would kill me. Once I was even hushed into silence when another man called our Paris apartment. For the sake of discretion, Nathalie, one finger to her lips, waved and mimed me into wordless soft movements. While she murmured on the phone with one of her local lovers, I became a ghost in my own flesh, my own home.

Afterwards, Nathalie and I argued ourselves into exhaustion.

“All I can do,” I said to my wife finally, “is love you as much as I can for as long as I can.”

Sitting on the couch, she merely stared at me, wordless for once.

“And when I can’t stand it anymore,” I said, “I won’t. I’ll go, without a fight.”

But, of course, I never got quite that brave. I simply found my own
putes
and girlfriends—and so we went on.

In truth, I’d been finding other women all along, so it wasn’t such a drastic adjustment. Nathalie had her graduate studies at the Sorbonne, then her job at
Libération
; I was tied up in New York with the gallery business and the SoHo buildings. We led one life together, and two lives apart.