The girl stumbled forward.
“Fucking faggots, afraid of some stupid fucking bitch. Come on, cunt, let’s get it on.”
She, too, had a knife, and like her friend she was holding it all wrong. The baton didn’t seem sporting fighting a girl, so I waited until she was close and starting to lunge, and then I planted my right fist in her belly as hard as I’d ever hit anyone, male or female.
Something about it felt wrong, though, and when she hit the ground I saw that she was pregnant. I took the knife, which had fallen from her hand, and threw it into the river, and then I climbed the steps to the bridge and crossed it. I walked some distance trying to find a pay phone (there’s the curse of the cell phone; never a pay phone around when you want to make a call that can’t be traced to you later) and finally found one by going the wrong direction, just off the Place St. Michel.
I called the SAMU and informed them that a young woman was lying unconscious beneath the Pont du Carousel and that she seemed to be pregnant, and then I hung up.
On the way home I heard the ambulance’s Klaxon honking and wished the girl well despite it all. Mostly I hoped I’d terminated that pregnancy, though inadvertently, if only for the sake of the kid himself. I grew up with a mother like that and buddy, that’s not any way you want to grow up.
JEUDI, DOUZE MAI
M Y MOM WAS MARRIED FOR THE FIRST TIME at fourteen (illegally) and divorced at seventeen. She had got her GED and started college, an experiment that produced nothing but a second marriage, to the instructor of her freshman math course, which itself was the result of a pregnancy that began in the classic American manner, in the backseat of a Thunderbird. My father, with whom I maintained sporadic contact until his death, was overjoyed at the prospect of a child, but my mother didn’t take to it. She found that what she liked was drinking and other fellows and, after the unpleasant surprise of my arrival, birth control. I do have one sister, fifteen years my junior, from my mother’s third marriage and brief flirtation with sobriety and Christianity; my stepfather, a good and honest if somewhat stern Kentuckian, suffered through five years of her antics before divorcing her. I’m in somewhat spotty contact with him and my sister, though whether my mother is still among the living is a matter of some indifference to me.
Anyway, my discovery after my discharge that acting was something I was good at and that women liked was probably what saved me from a life of brawling and petty criminality. All that anger gets wrapped up in the preparation and chucked out in the performance. An art therapist once told me that all art is art therapy.
• • •
I was in bed telling all this to Esmée the next night. I’d spent the day wondering about the girl under the bridge and was rewarded in the late afternoon with an account on the Libération website about a group of young people who claimed they’d been beaten up by Dr. Crandall Taylor from the television. Two of them had been hospitalized; there was no mention of a third, which either meant that the first boy hadn’t been hurt very badly or that the one I’d tossed into the Seine had floated away. There was no mention of the girl’s being pregnant, which presumably meant she hadn’t miscarried. My feelings were mixed there, but I’m not the Pope and it wasn’t my business to go around deciding who could or couldn’t reproduce.
Esmée had shown up around seven, and we spent some time looking at the artwork before surrendering to the bedroom’s pull. When we were done I asked where the money had come from to buy all that artwork.
“Some of it’s mine, from modeling.”
“You earned enough modeling to buy a Picasso?”
“Please, it’s a little drawing.”
“They’re not giving those little drawings away. What does Claude do for a living, anyway?”
This was the moment of truth. I didn’t
“Fucking faggots, afraid of some stupid fucking bitch. Come on, cunt, let’s get it on.”
She, too, had a knife, and like her friend she was holding it all wrong. The baton didn’t seem sporting fighting a girl, so I waited until she was close and starting to lunge, and then I planted my right fist in her belly as hard as I’d ever hit anyone, male or female.
Something about it felt wrong, though, and when she hit the ground I saw that she was pregnant. I took the knife, which had fallen from her hand, and threw it into the river, and then I climbed the steps to the bridge and crossed it. I walked some distance trying to find a pay phone (there’s the curse of the cell phone; never a pay phone around when you want to make a call that can’t be traced to you later) and finally found one by going the wrong direction, just off the Place St. Michel.
I called the SAMU and informed them that a young woman was lying unconscious beneath the Pont du Carousel and that she seemed to be pregnant, and then I hung up.
On the way home I heard the ambulance’s Klaxon honking and wished the girl well despite it all. Mostly I hoped I’d terminated that pregnancy, though inadvertently, if only for the sake of the kid himself. I grew up with a mother like that and buddy, that’s not any way you want to grow up.
JEUDI, DOUZE MAI
M Y MOM WAS MARRIED FOR THE FIRST TIME at fourteen (illegally) and divorced at seventeen. She had got her GED and started college, an experiment that produced nothing but a second marriage, to the instructor of her freshman math course, which itself was the result of a pregnancy that began in the classic American manner, in the backseat of a Thunderbird. My father, with whom I maintained sporadic contact until his death, was overjoyed at the prospect of a child, but my mother didn’t take to it. She found that what she liked was drinking and other fellows and, after the unpleasant surprise of my arrival, birth control. I do have one sister, fifteen years my junior, from my mother’s third marriage and brief flirtation with sobriety and Christianity; my stepfather, a good and honest if somewhat stern Kentuckian, suffered through five years of her antics before divorcing her. I’m in somewhat spotty contact with him and my sister, though whether my mother is still among the living is a matter of some indifference to me.
Anyway, my discovery after my discharge that acting was something I was good at and that women liked was probably what saved me from a life of brawling and petty criminality. All that anger gets wrapped up in the preparation and chucked out in the performance. An art therapist once told me that all art is art therapy.
• • •
I was in bed telling all this to Esmée the next night. I’d spent the day wondering about the girl under the bridge and was rewarded in the late afternoon with an account on the Libération website about a group of young people who claimed they’d been beaten up by Dr. Crandall Taylor from the television. Two of them had been hospitalized; there was no mention of a third, which either meant that the first boy hadn’t been hurt very badly or that the one I’d tossed into the Seine had floated away. There was no mention of the girl’s being pregnant, which presumably meant she hadn’t miscarried. My feelings were mixed there, but I’m not the Pope and it wasn’t my business to go around deciding who could or couldn’t reproduce.
Esmée had shown up around seven, and we spent some time looking at the artwork before surrendering to the bedroom’s pull. When we were done I asked where the money had come from to buy all that artwork.
“Some of it’s mine, from modeling.”
“You earned enough modeling to buy a Picasso?”
“Please, it’s a little drawing.”
“They’re not giving those little drawings away. What does Claude do for a living, anyway?”
This was the moment of truth. I didn’t
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