French Exit

by Patrick deWitt

“I got my edges smoothed,” the man admitted.

“Wouldn’t you feel awful in the morning?” “That’s what mornings are for, ma’am.”

“How are things with Susan?” she asked. “We’re in our holding pattern, as if you didn’t know.” “Oh, to be youngish and in love–ish.”

the court was a performance environment, a stage play whereby the actors conceived their lines on the spot, and it was the finest entertainer who won the prize.

By the end of their first year together Malcolm was in love with her, and she knew it, and treated his love with care and caution. She was pleased to wield this power over him but she neither abused it nor cultivated it.

but it was oversimple, both the man, named Tom, and his plan. His speedy acceptance of her as his lifelong mate was suspicious; he selected her as if off a rack. She tried to think of him as decisive as opposed to robotic, but failed, and she could never achieve a deeper admiration for him.

As one who suffered from seasickness, he asked her to reconsider air travel. Frances was apologetic but immovable: she was engaging her crisis in full dramatic tilt and wanted, needed to face the limitless ocean with a terrific, stabbing pain in her heart.

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

He smelled of cigarettes and drink and aftershave, a combination of scents that she loved devotedly from this moment and through the span of her life. Franklin had emanated that same deadly troika when they’d met, before the alcohol had turned sour in him, and the smoke acrid.

In the beginning Malcolm found riding around Paris a harrowing, a genuinely frightening activity. It was not that the drivers wished to hit cyclists, as has been stated elsewhere, but it couldn’t be said they were much concerned by the thought of a collision, either. It took Malcolm several days before he was comfortable traveling on primary roads; his courage grew in phases. Eventually he found himself circling the Bastille amid dense, anarchic traffic, left arm jutting out defensively as the cars and mopeds swarmed and honked at him, and the taxi drivers cursed him with lusty gusto, but ultimately all yielded rather than run Malcolm down. It was faith that enabled him to do this, faith that every hurtling vehicle would elect to stop short of killing him.

Mme Reynard nodded, then looked inward for a time. “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?”