Leper Tango (23 page)

She held her finger out, as if drawing a picture, and traced a rectangle in the air, then smiled.

“Could she have meant the Dutch police? I have never understood how the Dutch have survived. They are not like us.”

The next letter was from Vincent's grandmother. She asked for clemency as Vincent had been a good boy, and needed the money for his next campaign to become a school board trustee. His one chance to make good.

“Clemency!
Nul
. Then she had the nerve to ask for the money in guilders. How could I possibly calculate that? You know how much I detest
les maths
. I told her I might arrange for payment in Euros.”

That might have ended the exercise, had it not provoked a recollection.

“Tell me about your past, Franck.” “Nothing to tell.”

“There were other women ... you are brutal with me. Brutality comes from experience. Were you married?”

“Sure. I was married.”

“Tell me about
your
ex, Franck.”

“Which one?”

“The one you loved.”

“What about her?” “Why did you leave
her
?” “Problems.”

“Were the problems
vertical ou horizontal
?”

She held her index stiffly upwards, then laid her hand flat, as if lowering a corpse into a tomb.

“There was no problem
horizontal
, there was no nothing
horizontal
.”

“How big were her breasts?”

“What difference?”

“I saw a picture of her in your wallet, Franck. It was disgusting,
dégueulasse
. I don't understand. Were you looking for a cow to milk, Frank? Haven't you heard of the risks of mad cow's disease? How old was she? Oh, god, Franck, sometimes you really lean towards the lowgrade. Promise me, Franck, that you will never leave me for another woman unless she is younger and more beautiful.
Promis, juré
, Franck?”

I lit a cigarette. We watched each other in silence for a moment. We were seeing each other in a new way.

Sizing each other up, maybe for the first time. Like a couple of sparring partners about to go at it for the nth time, then suddenly realizing that only one would survive. Although, that wasn't quite so clear at the time.

She had wound a transparent Indian sari around her torso like a funereal shroud. She appeared ephemeral in it, as if she could fade away and become part of the firmament at any given second. A faint smile appeared on her face. She had a way of making the smile appear, as if emerging from the depths of a translucent forest mist.

“Call your wife, Franck. I want you to kill her. I must have this proof of your undying love for me. Kill this cud-chewing ruminant. A mercy killing.”

Her stare was limpid, her skin transparent. Her mind nuclear. “You, I might consider killing.” I mused aloud. “Why were you drawn to me, Franck? What was it?

No man has ever answered this question properly. Do you remember Père Lachaise, Franck?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“When you took me, in the mausoleum, what did I look like?”

“Like a silhouette. A corpse.”

“That's it, Franck. It is our wish to destroy ourselves that brings us together.”

“Self-destruction is a solo flight, Sheba. It's not a dance.”

She wasn't listening. Or she was desperate. I tried to recall what was novel about her.

“The difference between us and the others, Franck, is we know we won't get another chance.”

“Actually, that's not it at all, Sheba.”

“What is it, then?”

“ We're just not concerned with what is going on around us.”

“I see it another way, Franck. I think we are precursors of something yet to come. I have these visions.

Everything fire and ashes. Everything destroyed. Not just you and me.”

She was marking me. I was marking her. She had used the lines a hundred times before. I didn't buy into the lines; the content was superfluous. It was the delivery and the sonority that made considerations like truth secondary. The delivery and that ass of hers. And something else, but at the time I didn't admit it to myself.

“We are anti-celebrities, Franck. No one will ever know who we are. But at least we are voluntarily choosing our fate. Franck, let's kill someone. Why don't we make a sacrifice to the gods, Franck? Let's sacrifice your ex-wife.” Sheba was now leaning back against the tiled wall of the square shower-bath stall, had removed her lingerie, but not her pumps, and was spraying her cunt with the coiled metal shower head she held in her left hand as if it were a flowerbox of pansies. She had smeared her body in coconut oil, which enveloped her in a larval cocoon. She ran her finger up and down her thigh, prying open her cunt, spraying her clitoris with the nozzle end, scrutinizing me, then retreated into her silence, but the silences were losing their mystery. Like the intimidating glare of a boxer with a losing record. Statistics stronger than anything the soul can muster.

“We were supposed to be like
this
, Franck.”

This was illustrated by her holding up her index and forefinger, side by side like two sentries standing face to face during the changing of the guard on the Pall Mall.

“Who could possibly be more like
this
?” I inquired, holding up two of my own fingers, and jamming a Marboro between the two of them. Then lighting it.

“No, no we are not like this. We can never be like this, as long as you insist on not being transparent, Franck. You can't keep hanging on to your
jardin secret
, Franck. Why are you looking at me like that, Franck?

What's the matter, Franck? You don't love me anymore?”

I walked across to the kitchenette bar counter.

Reached for some whisky. Poured several ounces into a glass. Drank it down. Looked through the two portals and, at the end of the tunnel of vision, her, washing that cunt. As if it could never be too clean. She looked calm, which was a bad sign. I was getting used to it. You can get used to anything. I reached for a steak knife, slid the saw-toothed blade between my thumb and forefinger.

Laid it down again. Premature. “Franck, I was just thinking that today might be a good day for you to call that
salope
, and tell her exactly what you really think of her. And prove, once and for all, that you love me, Franck. Or at least, that you have
cojones
. But that is a question you've never really answered, isn't it, Franck?”

Her tone was still even, controlled, but the cadence had slowed to an inquisitorial crawl. Her right eye darkening into ebony translucence. Maybe it was her lenses. “Sometimes, I wonder whether it isn't you that caused everything
.”

Her hand dangling the shower head against her cunt, the eyes retreating, the rising crest of a wave ready to lash onto shore.

“
Everything
Franck, is
everything
that has created this storm in my head that is lashing against the wave breakers and dykes of my very mind, Franck, and
everything
that has given me bad dreams and causes me to do these things I do to other people.

“I am starting to wonder whether I wasn't mistaken in letting you fuck me, and sodomize me and stick that cock of yours into my mouth. Why am I wondering this, right now, Franck? Why?”

During one of those
whys
, her left hand had inched its way downwards and shut off the cold water. She swung the nozzle towards me, spraying the scalding hot water into my face, then lunged at me. I side-stepped her, and she slipped, falling to the floor. I wrenched her wrist hard, pushed my shoe into her neck, pressing her face harder into the tile floor. I held it there until I was pretty sure she had calmed down a bit.

“You going to behave?”

“
Bien sûr
.” I removed my foot, allowed her to rise. She walked out of the bathroom at an easy pace, into the living room, up to the wall telephone.

She wrenched the jacks out of the wall.

“Late t wentieth centur y telephone.
Ringard
,” she decreed. She crossed towards the coffee table, picked up a multi-coloured lamp, rotated it in front of her for me to see.

“Rococo. Very kitsch. Personally, I am a minimalist.”

She allowed the lamp to slide through her fingers.

The porcelain shattered into pieces across the tiles of the bar area.

“Franck, you know, one of the arts never mastered by Americans is letter-writing. Here, if something is even typed, it is considered to be an insult. So, you can only imagine what I think of you ruining the harmony of my life with
this
.”

I think
this
was a Ricoh, or at least was a Ricoh until the machine smashed onto the ground. She held t wo crystal champagne flutes in her hand.

“Something to drink, Franck?”

The first glass flew towards me, smashing the wall behind me.

“What are you looking at?” she inquired, as if I'd walked in on her toilette, or was caught gawking at her through a one way mirror, or was masturbating in a shopping mall.

She fell into her now methodical default routine, tearing pictures out of the wall, smashing glasses one by one, then plates, then overturning the furniture. She stopped and briefly surveyed the day's wreckage. Stared at me. Sneered, allowed me to catch a glimpse of the venom and hatred in its essence, then shut that off.

“I almost forgot, Franck. It's almost time for dinner.

Would you like dinner, Franck? Or would you like to fuck me? Or do you want your wife? What is it, Franck? What do you want?”

It was unsustainable, but it was a st yle. At some point, it would be time to vacate, but I could see why Cedric, and Vincent, and Christophe, and Dmitri, and all the others stuck around longer than was good for them. Compared to Sheba, everything else was black and white, and each of us needed a little bit of colour on the canvas.

As suddenly as it rose, the tempest abated. Nothing had occurred. Just a minor epileptic seizure. She was sitting on a stool in the midst of debris skewed throughout the living room. Little Miss Muffet, except, instead of eating curds and whey, she is shaving her cunt with a razor.

“Franck, I know I can be a little psychotic sometimes. W hen I feel my impulses, I am just like an animal. What is it, Franck? What is it I'm missing? I am missing something that other people have, am I not, Franck?”

“Everybody's missing something, Sheba.”

“But I find even the passing of time difficult, Franck.

People say time flies. Not for me. Every minute is long, oppressive. And the people around me. Other human beings. Their very existence is offensive to me. If I had access to a nuclear bomb, I would pulverize everything in existence.”

“You probably just have too much time on your hands.

Why don't you take up rollerblading or something?”

“I took up painting for a while, Franck. But, I could only paint myself, Franck. For me, Franck, the world has no meaning outside myself. No one exists. Not even you.

Some people call this narcissism or obsession. What do you call it, Franck?”

“Being a woman, Sheba, it's like being in a prison, isn't it?” “Oh la-la. Why would you, of all people, make such a statement?”

“I've been having these weird dreams lately. I'd never really considered it, but your whole existence, it's to seduce. To attract.”

She was covering that peach of hers with foam, processing my latest theory.

“So, basically, outside of the fact that you
attract
, the way honey attracts bears, or shit attracts flies, I mean what else is there?”

She slid the razor alongside the edge of her labia, starboard side. I wondered momentarily whether she might not self-mutilate. Just to gauge how I would react.

“
C'est ça, le mystère.
”

“No, no mystery at all. None. A pretty little package.

Another illusion down the drain. Nothing more. Even this death trip of yours is all part of the game.”

“Do you really believe that, Franck?”

“Sure, there's no evidence to the contrar y. Why wouldn't I believe it?”

“There's a line you shouldn't cross with me, Franck.”

An early morning light deflecting off her angular cheekbones. She looked clean, pristine. The twentythird virgin bride for the caliph.

“Do you think I do what I do out of amusement, Franck?”

“In the end we're all stuck with ourselves. That's just the way it is.”

“There are only two reasons men are attracted to me.

The first is animal attraction. The second never has anything to do with me. So, what is your second reason, Franck?”

“With you, I don't have to think about other things.

In the short run, that has its advantages.” “You know, Franck, there's always one thing that eats away at a man over time. Something he hasn't solved. If you don't face up to it, it eventually devours you. Like a tumour. So, don't worry, Franck, I won't force you at gunpoint to do anything. I don't have to.”

“That girl at your father's place. She's your daughter?” “
Et alors
?”

I was debating about whether or when I would cross her imaginary line. Then thought better of it. Everything in good time.

“You know what we have in common, Sheba? We don't think we're anything special. So, we take whatever we can get. But it doesn't make us very popular with the working classes.”

Even when she was considering homicide, she could find space for a smile. It was a form of intelligence.

“People who think they are special make the best clients.”

“That's another thing we have in common. We make cash out of others' disappointments. The bigger the disappointment, the larger the retainer.”

“You have a talent, Franck, for talking and talking without saying anything real about yourself. Tell me something about you. Something that matters.”