I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (17 page)

He locked the door from the inside. It hadn't occurred to her that there could be a situation where she wouldn't be able to fight someone off. That was a surprise. She had thought of herself as strong. But when it became clear what was physically inevitable, she played dead. It interested him much less that way. It was over quickly.

My god,
she thought,
how pathetic.
It wasn't as bad as she'd feared. It was just her body. It was easy enough to leave her body.

How stupid of her it had been, she thought later, to go to his house. Lesson learned. From now on, she wouldn't go to someone's house unless she was sure she wanted to have sex. But she wasn't going to let one unpleasant experience change her. He didn't deserve such power. It was years before she spoke of the incident to anyone.

She told me this calmly. She seemed more worried about my reactions than her own. But I wasn't reacting. I felt numb all over. My thoughts were replaced by a buzz like the low hum of a generator.

“
Mais,
Maman,
” I said, “he had no right to do that to you.” Even with the rest of me shut down, the words jerked out of my mouth automatically.

“It was my responsibility to know better,” she replied.

“It wasn't your fault,” I said. Though I wondered what good it could possibly do her to acknowledge all the anger and hurt I felt she should feel.

“Fault and responsibility aren't the same thing,” she said. “It was my responsibility. It was much more traumatic when someone broke into my loft and stole my radio. That was my
space.
I didn't particularly want to have sex with Meister either but—”

“You slept with Meister?” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “I admired him, intellectually, as a mentor, so it was . . . okay. It was fine. I waited for it to be over so that we could go back to talking. The Greek guy, though, he repulsed me, physically. But mostly it was just a revelation—there were people who needed to force others to have sex with them. I felt bad for him.”

I could feel how stiff my body had gone and knew that I was
glaring at her. I was furious. With the Greek guy. With myself. With her.

“Come here,” she said and pulled me into her arms. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm so sorry. My poor girl.”

“Why?” I said miserably. “Why should
you
be sorry?”

“Because,” she said, “I'm your mother. I'm supposed to protect you from all this.”

—

I
N
P
ARIS
, Françoise sank into a deep depression. She spent days without leaving her small maid's room. It was dark and cramped. The ceiling was slanted. There was a twin bed, a small high window that let in a glimmer of light, and a wooden wall that created a separate area for the sink. The toilet was down the hall. She sat on the floor, staring at the wall by the sink that unnecessarily divided her small apartment. She needed open space. She needed to breathe. She could think of nothing but tearing down that wall. She sketched an architectural plan. She would turn the sink into a bathtub, install a hot plate, create a kitchen.

But she didn't own the room, she kept reminding herself. She couldn't tear down the wall.

One day, there was no longer a choice. With a hammer and an X-Acto knife, she forced a window into the wall. It looked awful. The edges were jagged and the floor was covered in splinters. The landlord would be furious. Françoise sat down in the corner, shaking. She was still holding the X-Acto knife, and she pressed it now to her wrist. Her body resisted her. She breathed deeply and steadied her arm. She pushed harder, as hard as she could, using her right hand to cut across her left wrist. A bead of blood appeared,
and then another, until blood trickled across her arm. She thought about leaving a note, but what would it say?
I'm killing myself because I made a hole in the wall?
She pressed down harder and more blood came. But she was still in her head, watching herself. “Harder,” she coached herself, mumbling the words. “Harder than that.” But she couldn't make the knife slice through to her veins.

I can't even kill myself,
she thought. She threw her head back against the wall and shut her eyes, drifting off to sleep in the splinters of her room.

My mother told me about trying to cut her wrists late one night in her children's book office, on the ground floor of our four-story building. I was still in college then and still eager to prove myself. Her voice was unwavering, and her tone resigned yet matter-of-fact. I tried to match her. I was tough, I wasn't shocked, I looked her in the eyes. I asked her if she knew then that you have to cut your wrists in a vertical line, straight up your forearm, not horizontally across. She looked at me, surprised, and said she hadn't. It was information I'd inhaled like New York City smog. How to cut your wrists, how to create dreadlocks, how to slip keys between your fingers to make brass knuckles—these were just things you absorbed in high school. I shrugged and she continued, almost conspiratorially, describing the details, the blade pushing its way through her skin. I barely flinched. But later, writing about it, my hands cramped up and I sucked in sharp air through my teeth. I paused every few words to rub away the ache in my wrists.

—

F
RANÇOISE LEFT
P
ARIS
four months after she'd arrived. In her dreary maid's room she'd stared at the ruined wall and dreamed of her loft as it had been when she first moved in: the spacious
rush of freedom, the honking of the cars outside on Canal Street, the wooden floors she'd laid herself stretching half a city block. But when she returned to New York, her loft was still the shattered illusion she had left behind: the loft as her mother had seen it. The light was gray and meager now, whole swaths of the center of the space left dark. She'd given up her job selling cigarettes, her job at the architecture firm, in the avant-garde plays. She could have tried to get them back, but she couldn't find the courage. She had a few odd jobs but she went less and less often. Instead she huddled by the industrial gas blower in her sleeping bag, trying to stay warm.

At first, her phone rang sometimes. It had a jarring, insistent jangle. She stared at it until it stopped ringing, until eventually her friends stopped calling.

She slept eighteen hours a day. She hardly ever left the house. When she was awake, she read from a dense philosophy textbook. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. The letters swam and rearranged themselves. She read certain pages over and over, until ideas pierced her with astounding clarity, then left her devastated. She couldn't tell if the text had begun to make more sense or if she was beginning to make less. She ran out of food. She ate raw oats by the handful. She began to write letters, her hand moving with furious speed, letters addressed to no one, letters that she knew she'd never send.

She knew she was going crazy.
Devenir folle
wasn't just an expression to her. She'd watched her roommate go crazy; she knew what it meant. But she didn't know how to turn back.

One day, she was a triangular metal ruler balanced on its point. A woman's voice sang a wordless opera, holding her in place with its crystalline pitch. She was inside the voice, she was the voice. She
knew she was hallucinating and she struggled to open her eyes. But a triangular metal ruler didn't have eyes. It lasted an eternity.

Finally, she forced her eyes open and found she was standing on a street corner a few blocks from the loft. She was between a lamppost and a trash can. She was talking to herself. People were staring. She couldn't remember having left the house.

She looked around wildly at the people passing by. Their eyes were cold and they kept their distance. The anonymity of New York reared up around her, dangerous. She dragged herself back home. She gathered her courage. She called her father. He didn't ask questions. He paid for her plane ticket home.

—

M
Y MOTHER FOUND
one of the letters she'd written that winter alone in New York. It was on delicate translucent paper. It was in that unfamiliar hand, the one that was no longer hers.

I am going to tell you New York—I know in advance that I can't write to you—not now—my head is lost in a storm of sensation—my notion of time reconstructs itself each second—for weeks now I haven't known how to think—I can't do it anymore—I don't know how to write a simple letter—I am going to tell you New York—Nothing that I can say makes sense—it changes at the moment it hits the paper—so I know that what I write is—will be absurd—But I am going to tell you New York—I shouldn't, but I want to write to you—I found your letter today—I just reread your letter—I line up my words—I place one word after the other—Normally that is a way to write—But all this—and the rest in general—is that
I think I can only know that I lost—all this—thinking of writing—could only exist if I hadn't lost time—For a few weeks now—or months—maybe deep down since New York—but certainly for a few weeks—In this moment—I have only the instant—the instant from second to second, from hour to hour, in days and in nights, up until the weeks and the months—the instant—

I held the letter carefully. I had recently looked up the etymology of the word “past.” It was from the French
pas
, for step, from the Latin
passus
, for a stretch of the leg. In its earliest uses it meant journey. The past, then, was not a fixed place one could visit. It was not static. It was a voyage, constant motion. But this letter, with its manic present tense, reduced that journey to its smallest unit: a single step, a single outstretched leg. It felt like the closest I could get. I pretended it was addressed to me, sent by the girl I'd been searching for.

—

P
AUL LIVED
in a bachelor pad now. The apartment's wide wraparound balcony overlooked the corner of the Seine where a small replica of the Statue of Liberty stood, facing west toward New York. In the living room there was a large zebra-skin rug and a hidden wet bar that turned out from the wall at the push of a button. Blue lights lit the undersides of the black cabinets. Françoise moved into Andrée's room. A parade of her father's girlfriends, all around her own age, greeted Françoise with tousled hair in the mornings as they made themselves coffee.

Paul was trying to lose weight with new diet pills and he
offered them to Françoise. She liked the blitzing rush of energy they gave her, how they cut through the fog. Neither of them knew, or maybe admitted that they knew, that they were taking speed. Françoise wrote manically, filling notebook after notebook. Paul was nearly always gone: at work, at the casino, on dates, on long holiday weekends. Alone in his place, Françoise felt her mind racing, and yet she was unable to outrun her dark thoughts. Everywhere she looked, she saw dead ends. She had lost New York. She had lost everything. She stood on the terrace, looking down at the street below. It was never empty enough. Or perhaps she was simply too cowardly. One May weekend, the answer materialized abruptly. The medicine cabinet. Her father's sleeping pills.

She poured the pills out into her hand. Too few would make her sleep, and too many would make her throw up. She based her calculations on how many she'd seen her father take. It was such a clean, such a comfortable, such an elegant way to die. What a beautiful gift she could give herself.

She stripped down to her underwear and went into her father's room. She pushed the button that rolled up the heavy metal grates that covered the windows. The afternoon sunlight streamed in. She lay on his bed.

Do you realize these are the final moments of your life?
she asked herself silently.

I'm just lucky to have such an easy way out,
she replied.

She swallowed the handful of pills and lay down on her father's bed to die. She wondered about leaving a note. But a note could be dissected, mangled, and reinterpreted. Her parents would use her words to shift blame. And she was exhausted, too tired to write.

Are you sure you have no regrets?
she asked herself sleepily.

No,
she thought.
The things I have yet to do don't exist. No regrets.

She concentrated on the feeling of the covers against her skin. The sunlight seared her eyelids shut. She drifted off.

—

O
RANGE
!

Make it stop!

She was tied down. It was violently orange. It had to stop. She had to move. She could hear herself howling.

“If you calm down, we'll untie you.” A nurse's gentle voice. Françoise could see her in her peripheral vision.

Make the orange stop!
Françoise thrashed as hard as she could against the restraints.

“Your mother is here,” said the nurse.

“No! no!” Françoise shouted. She heard the rattling of a gurney's wheels down the hallway of a different hospital, echoing through the years.

“Oh my darling girl, it's so wonderful to see you awake,” Josée said.

Françoise's hands pulled against the restraints.

“I saved you, you know,” Josée said. “I found you just in time.”

“You killed my baby,” Françoise said. “You killed my baby.”

—

S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
, the day before Mother's Day, Josée had been on the roof of her houseboat, gardening. Françoise had tentatively agreed to stop by for dinner on Friday evening but had not come. Josée thought little of her absence. In those days, Françoise often made plans she didn't keep. But as Josée bent to trim a branch, she froze, the shears locked open.

“Maman!” she heard Françoise's voice calling her.

“Did you call me?” Josée turned to ask Andrée. But Andrée was downstairs in the shower.

“Maman!” Françoise's voice called again. It was crystal clear. Josée ran inside.