SoHo Sins (24 page)

For an American, I was surprisingly good at the game. Adultery and wit, choice Bordeaux wines and fat profits; those were the drugs of choice in my later youth. Now I had a supply of mordant aphorisms ready for the old Marais crowd, if I ever ran into them back in Paris. “Nathalie died of sophistication the way some people die of cirrhosis.” Worldly and wry—that’s their mode, even in the sickroom.

Who cares if the cause of my wife’s lingering death was a blood disease she caught from some bisexual set designer in Saint Germain? He was nothing. The source didn’t matter, the treatment didn’t matter, the betrayal didn’t matter—not once Nathalie was wasted and bald and delirious.

“Do you miss her?” Melissa asked.

“It’s not something I talk about.”

“Why not?”

“Because people expect you to grieve, and what would be the point of that?”

Missy looked at the glass in her hand, away from my eyes. “You must wish you could talk to her sometimes. The way I wish I could talk to Daddy.”

“Talking did help,” I said. “Even when I knew it was mostly lies.”

“You see.”

I did indeed. Like Melissa, Nathalie understood the great value of hypocrisy. She knew that the gentle con she worked on me was a backhanded tribute to the romantic ideal—the pristine and impossible union that we failed to achieve. Her scheme was a way of honoring our marriage and protecting my psyche. Her words never actually deceived me, and were never meant to. No, the lies simply assured me that, whatever else inevitably happened, Nathalie cared first and foremost for me, for our peculiar, imperfect bond.

I looked down now at the blond, glowing Melissa.

“The finality hits you pretty hard the first time you forget,” I told her. “You telephone, and suddenly you realize she’s not there. The dead never answer. You stand like an idiot with the receiver in your hand. Then you know: she will never speak to you again, here or anywhere.”

I drank slowly, several times.

“At least your dad is still with us,” I said. “You can hear his voice, even if what he says is a jumble.”

“Do you think that’s enough?”

“No, it’s not enough. But it’s something.”

My mind worked on in the silence. When I went to visit Nathalie the last time, the head nurse said, “Will you be all right?” and I said, “Of course.” Touching my sleeve, the good woman tried to talk to me for a minute first, but I waved her off and went in.

The bed was surrounded by monitors, tanks, and clear plastic bags on high stands. Tubes and wires led from the equipment into the layered sheets. Under the covers was a rickety form, a thing. I thought it must be a joke. Wisps of hair were stuck to the skull. The head was rounded and moist, and the jaw protruded. From time to time, a monitor beeped. The cheeks had collapsed, and the imitation skin was pulled back from the horse’s teeth.

“Madame may be able to hear you,” the nurse told me.

So what? It wasn’t as though I had come to the intensive care ward with some final, transformative message to impart. No, nothing came to me there. I touched the bed rail, the chrome bars that kept Nathalie from rolling into a bony heap on the floor.

“Well, my love,” I said finally, “so we’ve come to this.”

There was no sign of response, and I spoke louder and clearer, and louder again—“So we’ve goddamn fucking come to this.” I repeated, “we’ve come to this, we’ve come to this” until the head nurse charged in, followed by the doctor, and then an orderly grasped my shoulders, pulling me back from the bedside, saying insistently, “
Du calme, monsieur. Du calme.
”

“Relax, stay calm,” I told Melissa softly. “That’s the ticket. One should always remain cool and composed in these situations. I have it on the best French authority.”

The girl shook her head. “You’re really a mess, Uncle Jack. But you don’t have to be.”

“You know a way to fix me?”

“Maybe you just need someone young and nice to take care of you.”

“I was thinking more of someone old and rich.”

“Oh, stop it. Behave.” Missy crinkled her nose. “
Tu me taquines toujours
,” she said. “You’re always teasing me.” She stood up quickly and finished her drink. “Why, Uncle Jack? That’s so nasty.”

Melissa came to the couch and sat down on my lap. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Something funny.”

The girl leaned against me with her head on my chest, her voice issuing from the vicinity of my suddenly pounding heart. No doubt she was comforting herself by comforting me. I was, however, more disoriented than soothed.

As she talked softly in her lilting Parisian French, I began, ridiculously, to cry without any sound. Or maybe I cried first and then she spoke to me in French—that night is still a little muddled in my mind.

Melissa’s long legs were curled against my stomach, the slight declivity between her thighs curving as she shifted to hug me. “
Il était une fois un tout petit garçon….”
It was the tale of a little boy who was
méchant
all the time to his little sister. I didn’t get to hear it all, because there was a rattling of keys at the door and Missy’s mother came breathlessly in.

“Well, aren’t you two cozy?” Angela said as she hung her coat in the entryway closet. She seemed at once distracted and relieved.

“Hi, Mom,” Melissa answered. “How’s Daddy?”

The girl rose smoothly and carried the two empty glasses to the sink and rinsed them quickly in hot water.

“Oh, fine really. The poor dear just wanted some company. He’s resting now. He’ll be better soon.”

I had never heard Angela lie quite so ineptly. The strain and fatigue must have gotten to her at last. The words sounded hollow, and I could see them fail: the truth hit Melissa, entering visibly into her. It was probably the first time she grasped, felt in her stomach and nerve endings, that her father was going to die.

“Why doesn’t that awful Claudia do something for him?” she asked.

“She’s just a girl, Melissa. With a whole busy, beautiful life ahead of her. Like you. She didn’t sign on for this.”

“But why couldn’t Daddy stay with us, with the people who really care about him, instead of running away to that big snob Amanda? And now this stupid bimbo, this Claudia?”

Angela shook her head. “You explain it to her, Jack. About men.”

It was as though I’d been asked to explicate a theorem in quantum physics.

“I don’t understand it myself,” I said. “I just live it. Pretty badly most of the time.”

“That’s so bogus,” Melissa said. “So male.”

“Exactly,” Angela replied, moving toward her, trying to embrace the girl, who stood stiffly with her arms at her sides. “Now you’re beginning to see.”

Melissa shook herself.

“You guys are all just too dopey,” she said at high volume. “I have to go to bed.”

As Angela smiled after her, Melissa turned suddenly and half-trotted back through the loft to her bedroom.

“Good night, sweetie,” her mother called. “I’ll give your love to Uncle Jack.”

Then in a low voice, softly, Angela said to me, “She’s such a little drama queen. But I do think she’s truly upset. Did I give too much away tonight?”

“Angie, we have to talk.”

“I know. The poor child has to be told, of course. I’m so afraid that losing her father will completely derail her. The pity is, she’s just now doing so well at Bradford, and starting to think about boys.”

“That’s great,” I said, a bit thrown by my own lack of resolve. “But you shouldn’t try to fool her. How is Philip, really?”

Angela parted her lips to reply, but they seemed to freeze rigid and soundless. She looked like a woman zapped in mid-sentence by a stroke. As her head wavered from side to side, I moved closer to her.

At last she said, “He’s destroyed.”

I didn’t want it to be true. There ought to be years yet.

“Something’s consuming him,” Angela said. “Eating his brain at a ghastly rate.”

“Does he know you?”

“Not anymore. He doesn’t know himself. ‘Sorry to trouble you,’ he says. ‘Can you believe I’ve momentarily forgotten my name?’ ”

“Still,” I said, “it sounds like his old self in a way.” Philip, the last time I saw him, still had his sly humor.

Angela’s face was stricken. “No,” she said. “It’s not Philip anymore. I mean, it’s Philip but…not Philip.” As she spoke, she began to strike me rhythmically. “Philip, not Philip. Philip, not Philip.”

I didn’t try to stop her. Before long her blows rained steadily against my body, racing ahead of her words, thudding on my chest and shoulders in an erratic drumbeat.

“Damn it, Jack,” Angela said. She stopped pounding and fell against me, limp, without tears. “Sometimes I want to die myself. It would all be better and cleaner, don’t you think?”

“Not for Melissa.”

“No.” Angela paused to gather herself, closing her eyes and saying the words evenly, one by one. “No, not for Melissa. Thank you, Jack.”

We stood apart once more. I walked Angela to the couch and sat her down, asking if she wanted some wine.

“There’s a white open,” I said. “I had a glass earlier.”

Angela seemed not to hear. “This is the worst,” she said in a flat tone. “When I’m at home and Philip is not, and there’s no one else.”

“I’m here.”

“Yes, you are, Jack. In your way.” She spoke without looking at me. “And there are the men, of course. They help, when they’re around. But no one stays.”

She looked toward the far, dark end of the loft, where Melissa lay sleeping now.

“At times like these,” Angela said, “all the reasons that couples find to split up seem to me perfectly inane. Especially the cheating nonsense. What else could we expect from each other really? Just put up with it, for God’s sake. Nothing matters very much except not being alone.”

“You’re talking like a wife again.”

“Yes, Jack, I want a real marriage, a real mate. No matter how wretched it makes me. I need it.”

“And you want it to be Philip still? Philip again?”

“It’s terribly sophomoric of me, I know. But it’s what I’ve been thinking lately, a lot, looking at him in his hospital bed. I don’t seem to be able to stop.”

I told her there were worse things to think.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I’ve pretty well thought them all.”

When I went back upstairs, I had to face the task of viewing Paul’s compilation tape. The package he had sent over sat on my dining table like an exquisitely wrapped letter bomb. Disguised, discreet and perverse—exactly the way I was supposed to like things.

I sliced my way through the brown paper and cellophane. Exposed, the black plastic box bore an O-Tech logo and the title
Microcircuit Sequence Systems: The Basics
. Only a small red X in the upper right corner, and its tiny subscript reading “PM Videos,” signaled a variation from the usual corporate training fare.

When I took out the video cassette, however, identification got a bit more explicit. The label read
Virgin Sacrifice, Live, Vol. 3
. I could imagine the cardboard slipcase that would be added by enthusiastic graphic designers in the fly-by-night dubbing mills of Shanghai. With the Asian—particularly Japanese—market in mind, they would lift stills of the very youngest girls, adding a block of provocative text in demotic Chinese and bizarrely translated English.

Once the tape started, I saw immediately that Paul had gone for an outlaw effect. Everything was done by available light, and the moving figures had a ghostliness I associate with early video art. The decor was familiar—a U-shaped group of couches set around a low table bearing liquor bottles and dope. Nearby was an open space for dancing, and beyond that a doorway.

A mobile shot eventually took the viewer through the entrance and down a short hallway to a smaller room. In the center was an inflatable children’s swimming pool filled with a glutinous muck that looked like a mix of tapioca and mud. It was here, when things got serious, that the girls—mostly naïve party-lovers or early-teen runaways—would sometimes tumble and roll with each other, or be shoved down and mounted from behind by the Donkey.

El Burro, as his stitched monogram read, was a short Hispanic guy, about forty, who usually performed the climactic “sacrifice.” At first, when I saw him standing around in a kind of boxing robe, I didn’t really get the nickname. Then, with the first girl drugged and caressed, lightly kissed, ready, almost entranced as she was petted by three or four men, El Burro opened the robe like a theater curtain, and I understood.

The excerpts already sped up the seduction process, edited into a series of predictable acts: initial flirtation with soft words and light touches, followed by drinking and doping, group dancing, petting, some erotic roughhousing, more intoxicants. Then, in the back room, to cheers—full-on sex. Sometimes one wrangler took a girl through the entire process, alternating outrageous sweetness with an iron insistence and subliminal threats; at other times, the young mark passed from one guy to the next until she was delivered up to El Burro.

The repeated arcs of the little drama threatened to grow monotonous, but the variety of the girls—their physical types, their innocence or fake cynicism, their responses to booze or hash or the sight of a bare male organ, their reluctance or alacrity in the carnal act—created an insistent forward-surging-and-retreating structure, recalling episodes in some harsh, long-practiced initiation rite.

A remote control, like the one in my hand, made it possible for connoisseurs to pause, freeze frame, go back and repeat a favored passage in slow motion. Volume could be easily adjusted for those who preferred purely visual stimulation or those who got off on the confused, pathetic, occasionally overly eager vocalizations of the virgins. Only a few of them actually cried.

When the show was done, I lay back for a long while on the bed, looking at the blank blue of the screen and listening to the whir and click of the VCR as it rewound the tape. With the machine chattering relentlessly, I viewed the images again in my mind—backwards this time, in quick succession—as though each forlorn girl were being instantaneously restored, at a comic pace, to her original inviolate state, ready to fall again.