Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

“I go home and you sleep,” she said. “You can have a good sleep now.”

“You’re very clever,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

She was already up from the bed, where we had been sitting side by side against the wall. “ Fais des beaux rêves ,” she said. “ Pas de cauchemars .” She was wishing me to sleep. And she found her too-good coat and got herself out the door.

I wasn’t proud of myself the next day. Liliane had no phone at her place — you had to leave a message with a friend down the street, not an English-speaking friend — so I’d have to go in person later to apologize. I knew perfectly well that I was drinking too much. If I started later in the day, I could cut back significantly. And use my days better. Since I wasn’t going home anytime soon and my money (though it was holding out nicely thus far) couldn’t last forever, it might be time to learn more French: Take a class? Find a tutor? And eventually I could get a job in management in one of Paris’s many, many hotels. One of the big regal places or a small adorable one. I’d be around different people then — Liliane’s friends were really quite limited — and I would settle into the city more deeply, more thoroughly.

It was cold when I finally ventured out, a blustery November afternoon with the light fading quickly. Liliane’s building, a four-story slice of soot-dusted stone, was at the end of a narrow street, near Boulevard Voltaire. From the hallway I heard voices, and when Liliane opened the door—“Allo, it’s you!”—I saw she had Jean-Pierre and Yvette with her, a couple I’d met maybe once before.

They were laughing about something that had happened to another friend. His wife had left him, which did not sound that hilarious to me. Oh, if I knew, they said, it was very funny. But they were speaking in French, and I was lost. Liliane had me sit in her one dining chair — the room was crowded with all of us in it — and then sat on my lap. I was glad and relieved to see her so friendly, so sunny.

And she was very lively all that night. We went to a restaurant that had oysters — much joking about their aphrodisiac effect (“I will cripple this man if I eat another dozen”) and much bragging about how she used to gather oysters as a girl and carry baskets home. Jean-Pierre said, “Always a strong girl,” and Liliane wanted to lift the table to show us, but we stopped her. Yvette was choking with laughter and had to be given water.

We were out very late, and when I was back in my hotel room with Liliane, I passed out in my clothes. I was dimly aware of her taking off my shoes and pants and I was touched that she was tending me. When I woke up the next day, she was gone — it was already noon and sunlight was pouring in from the courtyard. The room was underheated and I had no reason to get out from under the covers. I stayed in, eating crackers and chocolate and reading a detective novel (Mickey Spillane) and snoozing off and on until the next day.

I was up at daybreak, and the windy walk to the café on the corner for coffee convinced me that I, the famous coat-buyer, needed a new one. The Florida version of a topcoat wasn’t going to cut it here, and this gave me something to do that day. I unlocked the valise with my money in it — I was thinking camel’s-hair would be nice — and when I lifted the lid, the suitcase was empty. The piles of bills, bound with rubber bands, were not where they had been. I thought for a minute I had the wrong suitcase, but I didn’t. Had I gone and moved the money, in some drunken theory about a more secret hiding place? I forgot a lot of things I did. It was possible I’d put it under the mattress. Or I could’ve wrapped the greenbacks in plastic and hidden them in the high toilet tank. The labor of lifting the mattress — not there — and climbing above the toilet — not there either — made me sweat in the cold room. I was yelling, “Shit, shit, shit!” over and over. The cash wasn’t in the drawer of the writing desk or on any of the shelves of the big chiffonier. It wasn’t under the bathroom rug (well, I wouldn’t put it there). I was shouting all the time, and I groaned as if I were ill. I was ill, buzzing with the heat of mounting anguish.

There were two maids, a handsome old one named Mireille and a plain young one who would never tell me her name. It wasn’t the maids. Probably not, I really didn’t think so. If I asked Liliane, would she say it was the maids? I drank what was left of a bottle of marc and I went downstairs and bought a token at the desk to call Liliane from the pay phone off the lobby. Liliane’s friend said, “ Pas ici! No more!” That was as much as she had ever actually spoken to me and I couldn’t get her to say anything else. “ Pas ici !” Not here.

Okay. I had to go find Liliane in person. I could threaten her, I could push her against the wall. Listen to me. I could call the American Embassy! They would laugh, wouldn’t they, at another poor horny bastard duped by one of the local girls. Oh, Liliane , I thought. Had she hated me all along? Was it hate-sex we’d had? If so, I hadn’t known. She had been an eager and athletic lover but not coarse or strange. And I saw how naïve it was to think she had robbed me out of hate. No, the money had tempted her, the money had been too beautiful to resist. The golden abundance, the hanging fruit.

Had she ever seen me go into that valise? Had I left it open in front of her? I didn’t know, how could I remember such a thing? I was lucky I remembered where my shoes were in the morning. Or she might have snooped while I slept, which was not very pleasant to imagine. That lock could be pried with a bobby pin. It was too much money for someone like Liliane to ignore. Once she knew it was there, the fact of it must have burned in her mind all the time. All the time.

I got on the Métro to go to Liliane’s apartment. The subway was filled with women in angora mufflers and shining boots, men with combed hair slicked back with tonic. I was the unshaven, sullen one.

At Liliane’s building, I rang the bell over and over, and I banged on the door and yelled her name up to her window. Nobody on the street was happy about this. An old man in a woolen cap scolded me in hisses. I wrote a note on the back of an old restaurant receipt and wedged it into her mailbox. Call me now — urgent — Anthony.

Back at the hotel I sat up in bed, drinking and smoking and counting how much money I had in my wallet. Enough for five days, maybe longer, depending on what I ate and drank. My room was paid up for another two weeks. There were things I could sell. I had several books that could go to the English bookstore. The rubber plant had been bought at a street market and might be set out on the sidewalk again. I could make a sign that said for sale. EN VENTE. I knew that much French.

I hadn’t eaten for some time, and I went to the nearest grocery store to stock up on what could be downed cheaply in my room. Hard cheese, dry salami, a tin of sardines. Red wine of a kind I had not stooped to try before. When I was back in the room, chewing my foodstuffs at the writing desk, I felt less crazy and weak. I began to think more about Liliane. She used to kiss my toes, laughing! We were not done yet. If I could get her attention, I could shame her into giving the money back. She might, after all, hide it again in the room and pretend it had only been lost. Once she saw me again, once she remembered what there was to remember.

I went back to her building later that night and rang the doorbell for ten minutes. I showed up the next morning, and my message was still stuck in her mailbox. I showed up that evening too, as if it were my work in life, but this time I walked all the way, which took an hour, including my getting lost. I wore a heavy sweater under my light wool topcoat and buttoned the collar as high as it went and kept my bare, frozen hands in my pockets. I rang and yelled her name, I rang and yelled. Liliane. Liliane. Liliane.