The afternoon sun has managed to burn a small aperture through the thick clouds, briefly filling the world with a dazzling, orange light like molten steel pouring from a foundry, forcing de Vere to shield his eyes when he wakes from his troubled dream. Momentarily blinded, he rolls over and almost knocks heads with the woman sleeping next to him. Her mouth hangs open like a Venus Flytrap, better to capture the brown spiders that drop from the spinning blades of the ceiling fan. Her lips are dry and crusted over with an unidentifiable white glop, her face pale, swollen, a tapestry of despair stretched across the iciest trenches of hell. De Vere thinks of all the wicked things he can do to her right now. How many men, he wonders, have considered tying her to the bed, gagging her, slitting her throat, putting a quick end to the years of misery?
With expert precision, he slides from the sullied sheets, cringing as the cold floorboards groan like the waterlogged planks of a sinking ship. Bleary-eyed, whiskey-dicked, de Vere stumbles naked around the room, searching for his shirt and pants, but when he pinches his chin and smells the woman on his fingertips, he suddenly has a funny idea. He crouches in the middle of the room, tongue flitting in and out of his mouth like a snake trying to taste the early November air, and with a pleasure more exquisite than the wild hour of drunken lovemaking, he squeezes hard, grunting with the effort of it, and feels his bowels rumble and then suddenly, blissfully empty. Even his mind empties. A long, soft, stinking coil of crap oozes out of him, forming a terraced pyramid, and for one spectacular moment he is no longer a human being but a gigantic evacuating rectum, nothing more.
As he squats beside the bed, he takes inventory of the room—the empty bottle of bourbon on the dresser, the scented candles that line the windowsill, and on the nightstand a stack of paperback romances with lurid covers featuring bare-chested men ravaging women in various poses of rapture, their lips parted in anticipation of long-awaited and much deserved love. De Vere flips to a random page and cringes at the absurdity of the narrative, the wretched sentimentality of it, the overwrought descriptions of breasts and buttocks, the syrupy prose that sounds more ludicrous than lascivious.
With mild embarrassment, he wonders what the Parisians, lounging on the park benches that line the perpendicular walkways of the Jardin du Luxembourg, might say if asked their opinion of these masturbatory epics. "Why rely on such a poor simulacrum," they would invariably answer, "when you can have the real thing? Love is everywhere. It falls from the skies."
In some ways, the French are very naïve and have a difficult time grasping the fact that Americans absolutely depend on sordid novels, pornographic films and battery-operated toys. In the United States, any show of affection is considered taboo, hand-holding shunned, kissing on street corners and in public parks denounced as a kind of pathological disorder. Instead of spontaneity, Americans prefer long-term contracts and decadent wedding pageants, women in ridiculous, white gowns—white, of all colors!—a march down the aisle toward messy divorce, dysfunctional children, medicine cabinets crammed with mood-altering pharmaceuticals.
De Vere forces himself to read a few paragraphs more. Though he considers using the pages to wipe himself, he knows tearing them one by one from the book would make too much noise, so he uses the down comforter instead. He pulls on his pants and shirt, laces his shoes, but before exiting the bedroom he spots the woman's purple dress hanging from the closet doorknob. He searches through each of its hidden compartments until he recovers the wad of fives and tens that he gave her. He intends to use the money to buy a croissant and a travel magazine at the quaint coffee shop down the street.
Skirting the lumpy memento in the middle of the room, he hurries over to the door, and, in his haste, nearly collides with a little girl in a yellow dress standing in the hallway. She is perhaps four-years old but looks younger. Her limbs are so bony, her hair so long and knotted, and her skin so tawny and smeared with dirt that she looks like one of those undernourished North African street urchins who lurk in the gloomy carpet shops along the Boulevard Barbes, waiting to accost tourists who have foolishly wandered away from Sacre Couer in search of the Metro. De Vere used to visit a nearby brasserie there run by a family of Berbers. The proprietor served a drink called buzo, the best in Paris, and sold bags of hash and, if he trusted you, an hour with one of "the new girls" smuggled into the country from Algeria. "You will find her most cooperative, monsieur," he promised, and he was never wrong. Intoxicants and copulation are the trades by which the world's underclass survive.
The little girl sucks her thumb and stares with indifference at the pile of shit next to the woman's bed.
"Come over here," De Vere whispers.
The little girl skitters away from him, her eyes large and dark as nighttime in the Sahara.
"We don't want to wake your mommy, do we? Are you hungry?"
She blinks again but doesn't respond. With coos and simple hand gestures, de Vere coaxes her toward the kitchen. "Watch you step," he says, kicking aside the pink guitar on the floor. He clears a space at the kitchen table and tells her to sit. After searching the drawers and cupboards, he finds a loaf of slightly moldy bread and puts two pieces into a toaster oven. Using a dirty steak knife from the sink, he lathers the toast with jelly scraped from the bottom of a jar.
"Guess I should have washed my hands first..." he murmurs, setting the plate in front of her. "What's your name?"
She stuffs the toast into her mouth.
"I have a child, too," he tells her. "A son. But he ran away from home. He was a bad boy. Very naughty. He stole lots of money from me. And stealing is the worst thing you can do to someone. I wonder how he's getting on. He's not used to the real world. Eventually he'll come back home. Sooner or later kids always do..."
As he speaks, the girl opens her mouth and lets the brown paste fall onto the table near his hands. He jumps away. She seems to find his reaction funny and pokes at the goop with her fingers, sniffs it, then rubs it across her face.
"Jesus," de Vere whispers, "what should we do with you? Let me think about this. Oh, I know just the thing. You'd better come with me. Yes, that's right, this way. Good girl. We'll have you all fixed up in no time at all..."
The bathroom is small and windowless with a single bulb screwed into a wall sconce for light. The black and white tiles are covered with long tentacles of coarse hair, the corners crawling with mildew so green it looks radioactive. Bras and panties hang from the towel rack. Bloody tissue paper fills the small trashcan beside the toilet. De Vere opens the medicine cabinet, hoping to find oxycontin, vicodin, praying even for a single aspirin with codeine, but there are only vials labeled setraline, amitriptiline, duloxetine.
He instructs the girl to stand against the wall, pulls the shower curtain open and plugs the drain in the tub. Though it takes a little effort, he manages to twist the faucets. Water trickles from the tap, cold and gray like the waters of the nearby river after a heavy rainstorm. Debris floats around the tub—nail clippings, pieces of plaster that have flaked from the ceiling, a thin sliver of blue soap.
"Raise your arms," he says. "Hold still."
De Vere lifts her dress. When he turns to check the water level he sees, framed in the cracked and spotted mirror, the woman's face. From the look in her eyes and the knife in her hand, he knows what she is thinking. Clearly she is still drunk, high, confused.
To the girl the woman says, "You clever little bitch, how'd you get out?"
"Excuse me, but you shouldn't talk that way..."
"Fuck you!" The woman jabs the knife at him, the blade bright red and dripping with jelly.
Obstinate in her silence, the naked girl clings tightly to de Vere's leg.
He gives her a gentle push. "Go on. Go see your mommy."
"Keep your stinking hands off my child!"
De Vere stumbles backward. "Listen, lady, I'm a million kinds of monster, but I'm not that kind of monster."
The woman lifts the girl off her feet and practically catapults her into the hallway. Then she turns the knife on de Vere again.
"Stay right there, motherfucker. Stay right where you are."
"Whatever you say."
Without taking her eyes from him, the woman slowly backs out of the bathroom, slams the door shut, and turns the lock.
