French Exit

by Patrick deWitt

“Who has died, and what was their purpose, and did they fulfill their potential?”

Certainly he looked the part: he was a dashing man, poised, stylishly attired; but this was offset by the needed amount of menace, a tactile pulse of psychic violence.

“We called that one Dead Man’s Float,” he said. “Who’s ‘we’?” “My school friends and I.” “You never had a friend.” “I had four friends.” “What were they like?” “Rich brats, like me. One was sex obsessed, one was sporty, one was gay, I guess. One was weirdly content.”

The realization that she was poor was very shocking to me. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, and I was actually frightened by it.

he did not wish to exercise, but to experience submersion and wetness.

The cat hung limply in the waiter’s hands and seemed bored by the fact of his removal.

She had a half-hidden limp, her homeliness summoned double takes, and her private life was, so far as I could tell, joyless.

“You made love to her?” “Well, yes.” “Did you do a good job?” “Not a very good one, no.” “Do you normally do a good job?” “Sometimes I do. I think the problem is that I don’t care enough.”

the heft of the bag tantamount to manual labor, and she soon succumbed to self-pity. To combat this, and finding herself envious of the cat’s state, she also took five Valium.

She found him sitting on the far side of the church, looking at nothing and thinking of it.

She had in her youth thought of her beauty as something to be weaponized, something capable of inflicting pain,

interesting at the start but ultimately dreary in its familiarity.

“I didn’t want a cat in the first place. I don’t even like cats. It was only that Small Frank impressed himself upon us and there was nothing to do but endure him.”

a sleepy-eyed and swarthy man with the hands of a female adolescent.

Recently she’d tipped him a hundred euros on a glass of house wine, and when he had protested she had said it couldn’t matter.

It was so thoroughly tactless as to be fascinating to them.

One evening, Malcolm was sitting on the sofa eating a carrot and wearing for unnamed reasons a suit.

“I absolutely did. That’s something nonangry people never give angry people credit for. It’s fun, being mad. I loved my work. I loved the game of it. I loved money. I loved getting away with everything.”

Caesar sees her: “Seizure, seize her.”

In the portrait she was as in life, sitting on the sofa with a drink in her hand, forward leaning, an affable yet mildly psychotic look in her eye.