The Cry of the Sloth (15 page)

For the first few days, beguiled by her manner (the pleasant exterior I mentioned) and by the thought that of course I knew Jolie, I didn’t suspect a thing. Arriving home in the late afternoon, chirpy as a wren, she would kick off her shoes—“absolutely bushed” from “traipsing” all over Paris—and sit on my bed, if I was in bed, or on the floor in the hall, her back against the WC door, if that’s where I was, and talk to me about the places she had visited. How could I have guessed that she was pilfering the descriptions from the guidebook? True, when she kissed me good-bye on setting out each morning, it was on the forehead instead of on the lips as before; I noticed, but thought she was just avoiding my microbes. It was the smell that finally gave her away. My olfactory powers are normally quite muted—I have to stuff a rose up a nostril in order to smell it. Maybe the purging blandness of boiled potatoes and Vichy water had sharpened them, but the fact is it was a smell that betrayed her. Cheap Paris hotels in those days didn’t have bathtubs or even showers—I mean the sort of hotel a pair of economizing lovers might resort to for an afternoon—and Jolie, innocent that she was, had no idea what to do with a bidet. I was crawling under the sheet one morning looking for my socks when the truth was borne in upon me.

To make a long story short—in fact it was not very long; it only felt as if it were lasting forever—we ended up in a
ménage à trois
with young Gustav Lepp, a teacher at a secondary school near our apartment. (This is not the funny part.) Jolie had met him in the breakfast bistro on our second day in Paris. He was one of those people you can spend an evening with and be utterly charmed, swept off your feet by their wit, their erudition, the fact that they seem
extremely interested
in you
, only to wake up next morning with the feeling that you’ve been had. Their affair lasted for seven weeks. Even now I can recall in excruciating detail, as if it were yesterday, listening as if transfixed to the gasps and cries from the bedroom, five feet from where I sat at the kitchen table staring at my face in my coffee. It was part of the ideology of the time that this sort of behavior was normal, even desirable, and to keep myself from wailing in agony I would stuff my mouth full of bread. When they would leave off at last and emerge glistening with sweat to join me in the kitchen, I would turn away to the sink as if to draw a glass of water, and there I would let the bread dribble quietly from my mouth, forcing it down the drain with a spoon, while they sat down at the table and spread jam on theirs. That’s the reason I don’t eat white bread now, on account of the memories that rush in the instant I taste it and make it impossible to swallow, only whole wheat or rye. Somehow we got through the summer, though it was thoroughly spoiled for me. And this, I suspect, was Jolie’s aim all along, a way of pointing out that we ought to have gone to Rome, where none of this would have happened. When I wasn’t tagging after the two of them, as a tiresome third, I would tail them at a distance in order to obsessively observe every kiss and caress. As a consequence I saw next to nothing of Paris—not the Louvre, not even Notre Dame. I must have passed near both places many times, but I could not
see
anything, blinded as I was by the visions that filled my mind. Our money mercifully ran out in August. After we had returned to the States they tried to keep up a correspondence, but this too petered out after a few months.

Years went by, and I was confident that I had left the worst of it behind me. Jolie and I were able to prepare beignets de courgettes together, enjoy French movies again, and even discuss them afterwards without shouting. Then one Sunday morning about five years ago Gustav Lepp turned up unannounced on our doorstep. I heard the thrill in Jolie’s voice when she answered the bell, and without lifting my head from the morning paper I knew who it was. He had not changed, except to grow more so. More witty, more charming, more tanned, more vain, and, if this is possible, more tall. I, meanwhile, was looking increasingly like a ticket-taker in the Metro, right down to the little paunch, the bad teeth, and the ill-fitting pants. He had written a book,
On the Phenomenology of Lust
, and apparently was famous now in some psychotic niche of the university world. He was just stopping by on the way to a lectureship in California. So of course we invited him to stay for lunch. And it was not an unpleasant meal—we were after all practically middle-aged people by then. We discussed lust, of course, or rather he discussed it, while I kept an eye on their feet under the table.

After lunch I went to wash up as usual, since Jolie had cooked, while they took their coffee out back on the terrace. I had advised against that, since it seemed to me the air had turned chilly—it was October, after all—but they brushed me off with a laugh, Gustav Lepp shouting back something about
la
chaleur d’amitié
. I thought I had put it all behind me, but to my surprise, to my
shock
really, I experienced at that instant such a rush of inexplicable rage that I was compelled to turn away to the sink, again! I plunged both hands deep in the soapy water and gripped tightly the rim of a large serving platter at the bottom. Though the water was painfully hot, I remained like that, head bowed, until the feeling had subsided and I could go about the business of tidying up. I had almost finished by the time Jolie came in, I hoped for good, though it was only to fetch the Sunday
Times
and blankets so they could stay on the terrace a while longer. She pressed me to join them, but I declined on the pretext that the fish tank needed cleaning.

The tank stood next to a window that gave on to the terrace, and as I knelt beside it and began scraping algae from the glass, I was amused to observe that I could make out their wavering shapes through the water. Side by side in deckchairs on the terrace, they appeared to be drowning among the angel fish and mollies. A heap of newspaper lay between them, from which each had taken a favorite section: Jolie the Arts and Leisure, and Gustav Lepp the Week in Review. I watched them turn the pages, bringing their arms to their chests and then flinging them out, and I thought of butterflies slowly beating their wings as they drowned. I watched, fascinated, as a large black snail crawled in the direction of Gustav Lepp’s (I now noticed) slightly balding head.

Soon afterwards I heard the animated murmur of renewed conversation. Leaving the fish—I had nearly finished, and it was anyway supposed to be Jolie’s chore—I slipped out the front door, and going around by the driveway, still wet from an afternoon shower, tiptoed up on the terrace. I held in my hand a straight pin I had picked up from the floor the day before and placed on the mantel, where I happened to catch sight of it on my way out. As I drew near the terrace, I realized I could just as well have kept my shoes on; they were absorbed in conversation—Jolie’s plans for her life now that she had decided to become a painter—and oblivious of my approach. I had been right about the cold and,
en plus
, my socks were now soaking wet. Dropping to all fours (I almost wrote “like a panther”), I crawled across the flagstones until I was crouching directly behind Gustav Lepp’s chair. He was telling Jolie, “It’s important, I think, that one have a public visage, a way of defining oneself apart from one’s husband and what really after all is
his
work. That is just common sense.” At the conclusion of the word “sense” I reached up with my pin and gently pricked the back of his neck. I had meant it to be nothing more than a mosquito bite, so you can imagine my mirth when he reached back and slapped the spot. My second prick was rather more assertive. Jolie was talking—“Yes, I know, I’ve always felt a need for expression. During my first year at college …”—when she was interrupted by a Gallic cry of pain: “Aie!” She stopped in midsentence. “Gustav Lepp, what?” At this point I was not able to stifle my laughter, which burst through my closed lips, I regret rather laden with spittle. Gustav Lepp turned and peered over the back of his chair down at me where I crouched grinning and wiping my chin with my hand. He said, rather humorlessly, “I believe this is what you call playing the card.” I later turned this phrase into something of a joke between Jolie and me. (This is the funny part.) She would come out with something she considered amusing, and I would say in my best French accent, “I believe zees is what you call playing zee card.” In context this was often extremely droll, though it seemed to vex Jolie. Of course I never used it if what she had said was actually amusing, and my little intervention often saved the day, provoking smiles all around, where otherwise there would have been only embarrassment and blank looks.

Well, Harold, I have spent a long time telling you all this—my little Olivetti is fairly smoking—and now I wonder why I bothered. True, I had been thinking about pain, and in an earlier letter I talked about the way French speakers express it. The mind, I have found, is just one thing after another, especially lately, but that hardly justifies the intimacy of what I have just told you. Does it strike you as unseemly? I think I find it easy to talk to you because I don’t remember you very well. It’s like talking to the furniture, but with the added attraction that in your case the furniture understands, or at least pretends it does. Ever since you wrote I have tried to picture you. In the beginning, the chubby rubicund fellow I used to best every Saturday at ping-pong would come to mind, but of course I knew this could not be you still, so I have tried to update the image with the bits of information you have given me in your letters, and I have ended up, vaguely I’m afraid, with someone in overalls.

Your old friend,

Andy

¶

Dahlberg,

You will find no one home. I am going to Italy for the winter. I have something in my chest. If after beating your fists blue on the door you decide to go around and peer through the windows on the side, please take care while crossing the flowerbeds, which I am in the process of reseeding. Also, I have asked the police to keep an eye on the property, so you should try and not look suspicious.

Arrivederci,

Andrew

¶

Adam’s knuckles were white, for he was gripping the steering wheel of the big pickup with a fury born of the knowledge that his car might even now be hanging from the hook of a battered tow truck. Or perhaps it had already been released, hitting the ground with a thud that had injured the front shock absorbers or the delicate torsion bars. Anything, he knew, was possible. They could have left it in gear during the towing and damaged the automatic transmission, damage that might not show up for years. He thought of all the precision-milled gears, the tiny valves, the fragile gaskets, intricate clutches and torque converters that must work together in a smoothly shifting automatic transmission of European manufacture, and he shuddered. Flo, sitting close beside him, laid off tugging at the shreds of her blouse and looked up. She saw the clenched jaw and the white knuckles and the reckless skill with which he handled the big truck on the narrow blacktop, and she wondered at the source of the violence which seemed to animate his every gesture. After all, she had given herself to him willingly, as she had to most men who gave her half a chance—in cars, on the gravel in the back of filling stations, in tents, barns, toilet stalls, phone booths, even once in a Ford Torino with two police officers—and yet he had insisted on ripping her clothes off, including her underpants, which were so damaged she had had to leave them in the grass in front of the shack, and the embroidered blouse with puff sleeves, which she now held closed with one hand, while with the other she caressed Adam’s right thigh even as he held his foot firmly on the accelerator. Violence, but also a quiet bitterness. She dimly sensed that whatever dark forces were driving him had their roots in a past which was still closed to her. She was wondering if perhaps he had suffered abuse at the hands of a close relative while still a child, when they came to an intersection. “Turn left here,” she shouted. Braking for the turn, he reached for the floor shift. “Excuse me,” he muttered, as he fumbled between her thighs in search of the shift lever. Finding it, he shifted smoothly into second, and then, as the big truck regained speed, he dragged the stick back down into third, before resuming his knuckled grip on the wheel, while Flo closed her thighs once again on the vibrating knob of the shifter. She looked over at the strong thick-veined hands and the rows of white knuckles on the steering wheel, and she thought of the miniature eggs the chickens had laid after they got sick, when they laid any eggs at all, which most of them couldn’t. Of course, even when they could, they laid them higgledy-piggledy wherever they happened to be when the urge hit them and never in neat rows of four like Adam’s knuckles.

Now she was beset by a new apprehension. She twisted in her seat to look back at the John Deere riding mower on the trailer, for it was on a trailer in fact and not in the bed of the truck as before, skittering and fish-tailing behind them, and the sight of it made her shudder also. She knew that with the exception of his thirty-seven volume Almanac collection and her mother’s hairbrush, in which a few last gray hairs were still tangled in wistful reminder, the big John Deere riding mower was her father’s dearest possession. During the first terrible year after the accident visitors to the farm would usually find the once hale old farmer slumped dejectedly in an old rocker on the rotting front porch, perhaps lifting a wizened head to halloo intermittently for his daughter, who was invariably out of earshot milking in the cow shed or else in the hay with one of the many delivery men who were wont to stop by with increasing frequency as did salesmen of various useless articles and a deputy sheriff as well. Or else, getting no answer from her, he might be struggling in vain to drive his wheelchair through the deep sand in the yard, or, if it had rained the night before, he might already be sunk up to the axle there, pounding his fists on the chair arms and shouting for his daughter to fetch the pickup and snatch him out. As a consequence of being in this manner impaired and restricted, the proud old man, who had never had to ask a helping hand of anyone before, felt sorely diminished. Sometimes he would say as much to his daughter as she knelt beside him tying a rope to his chair. “I feel sorely diminished, daughter” he would say, “and if I could find the fucker that hit me I’d blow his dick off and make him eat it, and after that I’d kill him.”