A week after their arrival, Frances entered Malcolm’s room and set twenty thousand euros on his pillow. “For walking around,” she said.
A piece of mail had arrived, an invitation to a dinner party scheduled for that same evening. The inviter was unknown to them, one Mme Reynard; at the bottom of the card were the words, Please come!! You will find yourself among friends!!!
“What do you think of that?” Frances asked Malcolm.
“Too many exclamation points.”
“But do you think we should go?”
“Late notice. But sure, I’m up for it if you are.”
Frances spent the afternoon getting ready. She had in her youth thought of her beauty as something to be weaponized, something capable of inflicting pain, and now this feeling returned to her. A good many of her invitations in New York during the previous decades had been rooted in a certain macabre social value she possessed as the grisly widow of Franklin Price; she had the sense this was the reason for her invitation now, and she wanted to arrive looking so attractive as to smite whoever opened the door. Hatred was a fillip and she was glad in her preparations.
The party was located near the Place des Vosges and they set out on foot in the early evening with Small Frank leading the way. It occurred to Malcolm that his mother and father had been to Paris without him, and he asked her about this. “I’ve been coming since I was a young girl, of course.” She pointed at the cat. “But he’d never been until I insisted. Actually, we spent our honeymoon here.”
“I can’t picture the two of you on a honeymoon.”
Frances shrugged. “It was all the normal things. Hotels and flowers and champagne. It’s strange to think he was actually fun, but in the beginning he really was. We went to the Luxembourg Garden and I noticed him watching the children beside the pond with their sailboats and long sticks. I rented one for him and he set about following the boat with his stick, a glad, stupid look on his face. We were twenty-five years old. He lost interest in the boat and it floated away; then we started feeding the carp bits of a hot dog I was eating. They went berserk for it, and there was something about all these grotesquely fat fish piling on top of one another, and for a hot dog—it made me laugh, hard. I never laugh like that anymore, and rarely did then. I think your father was surprised by it. Well, he went away and came back with six hot dogs.” She looked at Malcolm. “He’d bought them because he wanted to make me laugh again. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Such a small gesture,” she said, “but it couldn’t have been further away from the man I knew later. A groundskeeper came over and asked us to please refrain from feeding hot dogs to the carp. Your father’s response was to toss the hot dogs and stick into the pond. The groundskeeper and sailboat rental man both were shouting after us as we left the garden, but it was like we couldn’t hear them. Our arms were linked. We were making plans for dinner, I remember.”
The story made Malcolm feel solemn. Frances squinted at her son. “What do you remember about him?”
Malcolm didn’t remember much, but two moments stood out. The first was a trip to the Central Park Zoo when he was eight. It had been going well enough at the start; they weren’t sharing anything significant but it was something, time together, a modest experience, but real. They drifted from cage to cage, saying nothing. Malcolm had wanted to know his father so badly in those days, and he wondered if this wasn’t the beginning of an understanding between them. Then came the gorillas.
When they entered the monkey house, the gorillas were lazing about peaceably, docile in their fabricated jungle. But the moment Franklin took up his position at the glass they stirred, became agitated. Soon they were howling and circling the cage, every one of them taken up with a collective outrage. Franklin had watched the shift in the gorillas’ mood with an amused bafflement, but as it became clearer he was the focus of their hostility, his expression grew more severe. Now the largest gorilla approached and stood before him, shrieking and pounding at the glass. Reaching down, he shat in his hand and smeared his waste at the level of Franklin’s face. Franklin yanked Malcolm away by his wrist, dragging him to the ticket booth to formally protest. The woman in the booth was afraid of Franklin; his anger was acute and his complaint sounded like paranoiac raving. “You’re saying the gorillas didn’t like you, sir?” She assured him it wasn’t personal, but that was just it: it was. Franklin had been singled out by distant relatives as one unfit to live among them, and he felt the sting of tribal ostracism. He got his money back, a bitter victory. Malcolm sensed his father blamed the incident on him. Years passed before he would be alone with him again.
Malcolm’s second memory told of the time his father had brought him along to a father/son function at the Metropolitan Club. The other children seemed far more competent than Malcolm was—miniature men who understood the value of wit, who knew that socializing was a game of consequence. They had their schools and professions selected, and their fathers were proud, affectionate, present, whereas his own father had gone off to some secret chamber and left him to sit and chat with a sleepy bartender named Sam. Malcolm drank four cherry colas in a row and vomited on the carpet of the foyer. His father was called for; when he saw the vomit, he pressed a hundred dollars into Sam’s hand. “Clean him up and put him in a cab. He knows the address.” Franklin left the room, cigar smoke cresting over his shoulder. Sam looked at the hundred-dollar bill, then Malcolm, who wore a bib of cooling bile that was seeping into the top of his boxer shorts. “All right, kid,” he said.
Malcolm told these stories to Frances but she wasn’t listening very closely. She was studying the party invitation. Pointing at the building before them, she said, “This is us.” Small Frank was no longer with them, having chased after a plump, hobbling gutter mouse.