French Exit

by Patrick deWitt

Possibly you won’t like to think of your mother as one who lived, but I’ll tell you something: it’s fun to run from one brightly burning disaster to the next.”

She had occasionally in her life found herself loving men not in spite of but for their stupidity.

That’s why I invited you over, because I’m lonely.” Frances felt burdened, even revolted by the admission.

In his adult life, Malcolm had rarely thought of what it would be like to have male friendships; and he never pined for any. But to witness this camaraderie gave him the pang of an outlying jealousy, which embarrassed him, and which he pushed away.

“Were you expecting me to mourn our loss in perpetuity?” Susan asked. “Yes,” Malcolm answered truthfully.

Malcolm was wondering what the meanest thing he could say might be. There were so many mean things, but which was the absolute, the incontrovertible?

“Do you ever feel,” she asked, “that adulthood was thrust upon you at too young an age, and that you are still essentially a child mimicking the behaviors of the adults all around you in hopes they won’t discover the meager contents of your heart?”

In recent months Malcolm had found his thoughts shifting from the benignly strange to the grotesquely sexual and apocalyptic. He supposed this meant he was growing up, but he didn’t want to grow up. Adulthood had no benefits that he could see and he was loath to join that cruel population.