Fat Man and Little Boy (7 page)

HOTEL GURS

WHAT FRANCINE KNOWS

Francine lies awake in bed, pretending to know where her husband is now. She pretends to know he is with another woman. She pretends to know they're sitting together outside an abandoned café, her husband and the other woman—a blonde—and that he brought them cheeses and melon chunks to share in the dark, seated on chairs he took off a tabletop and set down for them. He makes two flirtatious jokes before forgetting to charm the other woman, before resuming the comfort of his usual half-sullen silence, the silence that makes him pout so pretty. The one that makes his eyes seem to float in his skull like paper lanterns on the water. He pours wine for himself and neglects to offer her any. She has to pour it if she wants it. He's smoking between chews. It would be rude if it were anybody else.

She pretends her husband will not be home tonight. If she weren't sure of this, she would have to watch the door, or, more discreetly, the wall opposite the door, for changes of light. She would wait for a wedge of yellow to open, and his shadow. Now she doesn't have to wait, because she is certain. Instead she clenches closed her eyes.

Her hard heart wavers. She is no longer certain. So she changes the story. Now he is sharing a hotel room with this other woman, who is a brunette, who is also married, whose husband is away on business—scrabbling for a piece of the new action, the foreign investors, large Americans. They are making raucous love to each other. He presses her face and breasts to the cool thick window, through the curtains, but he tells her to imagine he's drawn the curtains. And it's light out. And everyone can see her. They can see the way she moans, the way her nipples press flat against the glass, like veal medallions.

When she comes he comes too. He doesn't pull out, doesn't spray the brunette's back, doesn't watch it trickle down her thighs, but pushes deeper in her; damn the consequences; damn him, he's coming. He grits his teeth the way he does. They squeak, he's sucked them dry. Francine's sure of it, lying in bed.

She's sure of it. She reaches down between her legs, then stops, thinks better.

“It shouldn't bother me if he doesn't want to do it inside me,” she says to herself, fortified by her confidence that even now her husband's clever sperm are striving for this other married woman's eggs.

Francine is thirsty. She climbs out of bed and puts her feet in their blue slippers. She goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. There's a faint chill on the air like an unwelcome secret. She tips back the glass, finishes the water in one gulp, and licks the dewy moisture from her lips. Her husband never believed in marriage, as he acknowledged on the night of his proposal. He asked her anyway, during all the excitement, when people did these things. But clearly children are out of the question.

She pours herself another glass of water and walks back to bed. Should he come home early, Francine doesn't want to seem to have been waiting up. She isn't waiting for anybody. She only woke up thirsty.

Francine reflects that her husband would not leave her alone all night simply for sex. “He's more discreet than that,” she whispers to her glass. She revises her confidence again. Her husband is still in a hotel, but now it's more expensive, and yet no one's having fun. He sits up in the bed, back to the headboard, married brunette head in his lap. He's just paid for her abortion, so he strokes her hair and twists the ends between his fingers. The brunette rubs her stomach very slowly and wonders how it would be to feel a kicking thing inside her. He whispers drowsily how everything will be all right, like drooling honey in her ear. He's drooling honey, that's his fault, but the brunette doesn't turn her head to block the flow. They'll spend the night together. He'll leave early in the morning while she pretends to sleep, buy them a sweet breakfast and chocolates, and carry the food back to the hotel in a small brown basket. This might be the end of their affair, or not.

Francine won't know about that until circumstances call again for certitude, for deciding for herself what she can't know and won't ask.

Francine has finished her water. She rolls a cigarette. She puts it between her lips and chews the paper without chewing hard enough to break it. That feels like breaking skin. When she can't wait anymore she strikes a match and lights it. She breathes deeply and blows smoke through her nose. She's never been like the leisure-soaked, cold-blooded women who can drag out a cigarette for nearly an hour, lace an evening, threading wisps of smoke through conversation. She huffs and puffs, Francine. She pauses only to cough. The taste still tickles her throat.

It must be a stranger knocking at her door. It must be a small stranger: the door makes a small sound. Francine finishes her cigarette and drops the stub in the trash before going to the door. On second thought, she brings a large knife with her. The small hand knocks again.
Put-pat.
She peeps through the peephole. There's the top of a dirty blond head in the hole and a thin white hand drawn back, waiting, shaking. It looks like a girl's hand, if the girl chewed her nails and her knuckles were knobby and pale. The hand moves as if to knock again and then falls out of sight, defeated. The dirty blond head turns away.

Francine opens the door. There is the blond boy sucking his thumbnail. He shivers pointedly. A fat man steps into view, a real behemoth. He shivers too. When he opens his fat mouth and hazards a greeting in clumsy, fat French, she knows he's American. He holds out his hands open-palmed, showing her they're empty, except for a charred blackness and a floppy blue hat that hangs from his fingers.

“Don't worry,” she says, “I know some English. Come in, come in.” She waves them in with her hands and steps back from the doorway, like guiding toddlers. She leaves the knife on the kitchen counter. They follow her inside. The little one rubs his hands on his pink cheeks. He sucks his thumbnail and bites at what spare rind is left.

She tells them to sit at the dinner table and they do. She asks them what they'd like to drink. They both say water. The fat one asks her does she have something they could eat—a crust of bread, or some old fruit perhaps. He says it's been a day since they've eaten. She says yes, there is bread. The man and the boy are looking at each other across the table as if it's been more than a day since they've done that as well, as if they're surprised to see what they see.

Both wear haggard formerly-blue suits, stained with mud and rain, threadbare at elbows and ankles. Their shirts are untucked and their tails hang with loose white threads. The shirts are yellow with sweat and filth. They set their tired hats on the table and the hats seem to sag beneath the weight of the air. The hats have been slept on many times, used for pillows, turned inside out by angry fists.

The fat man threatens to pour out of his chair at any second—his whole body slumps precipitously in every direction, folds overhanging folds, like a pudding trying to be still. He rests his elbows on the table, holding his face in his hands, sagging glum. The little boy is nervous. He runs a hand through his hair again and again, seeming to feel for fleas. He bounces his legs.

They are both very tired.

Francine butters two slices of bread for each and sets them on the bare table. “Thank you,” says the little boy.

The fat man says, “Merci.”

They eat the buttered bread. When they're finished the fat man brushes crumbs from the little boy's face. The gesture is both tender and brusque—he means well, but it looks like it hurts. They sip at their cups. When they're finished Francine pours more water. She waits for some explanation of who they are, how they came to be here, and what else they expect her to do for them. She feels—she doesn't know why—it would be rude to ask them. Yet what else can they discuss?

The fat one wipes moisture from his upper lip, where he is growing a regrettable mustache, probably not by choice. He says, “We've run out of money.” The little boy nods: they have. “We're here from America.” The little boy nods again: it's true. “His parents are dead.” Here the fat man points at the boy, who confirms it. “His father was a GI. His mother killed herself when the news came.”

“Terrible,” says Francine.

“We came here to see where his father died, which we've done, and then to start over. I'm his uncle. I am a failure. I'm looking for work.”

“Francine,” she says, extending her hand to the boy first.

“Matthew.” He takes her hand in both of his, shakes it three times, and doesn't let go. His skin is still cold.

“John,” says the fat man, and he takes her other hand. The three of them are joined together. A portentous feeling passes through them. Francine notices the fat man is looking at her stomach with an expression of deep concern.

She slips out of their hands, which fall to the table among the crumbs of buttered bread. “Is something wrong?”

“Not at all,” says John. “I was thinking how beautiful you are. I hope that's all right.”

“Flattery,” says Francine, lowering her eyes. “So you need somewhere to stay the night.”

Matthew nods. “The floor will be fine,” he says. “It's cold out.”

“You can stay in the living room. Use the sofa if you like. If anyone comes into the house, don't worry. He's supposed to be here. I'll tell him the same about you.”

She puts their cups in the sink, turning her back on her visitors. She runs the faucet a little. “Not that I think there will be anyone coming. You can tell me everything tomorrow. I'll try to help you find work.”

“I don't want to sound ungrateful, but my curiosity overwhelms my better judgment. Why are you helping us?” says John. “I noticed you answered the door holding a knife.”

She turns off the faucet. The three share her home's quiet. They commune with the still air and its faint chill.

“I'm lonely tonight,” says Francine.

 

There's a white bust on the mantel in the living room. An old, bald white-skinned and white-haired man who looks like milk poured into a mold and frozen forever. His gaze is crisp, patient, brave, fogged, stern, shallow—lifeless. He wears a white mustache. It is smooth and featureless, not hair but a guard for his lip, a beetle shell on his face. Beside him on the mantel sits a dandy military cap.

“Who's that?” asks John. He has claimed the sofa. Matthew curls up in a worn chair. Francine takes down the bust, cradling the old man's head and shoulders against her breast. He stares blankly askance at the fat man.

“This is the marshal,” she says. There is no spark of recognition in the fat man's eyes. “
Pétain
.”

“How did you find yourself in possession of so fine a depiction?” says John. Francine wonders if he talks more the more tired he is—all the shiver has gone out of his pudding and now he seems so close to perfectly still, eternally slouched.

“Most people around here have one. They made quite a few. They were everywhere for a while. These days, most paint them, usually as a joke. Sometimes as another kind of statement. If you see someone who painted his
Pétain
realistically, it probably means he's a supporter, or at least a mourner.” She puts the head back on the mantel. “Unless there's an emphasis on liver spots, wrinkles, or other deformities. Then it's hard to say.”

“He's white,” says Matthew. “You left him blank.”

“I guess I don't know how to paint him,” says Francine. She puts the dandy cap on his head. It casts a snug shadow over his face. “We like to put the hat on him for formal occasions. I guess that would be you.”

The fat man adjusts his yellowed collar. “A formal occasion,” he says, closing his eyes. “Me. Like a small dinner party, or a banquet. I like that.”

The little boy laughs. “You'd be some banquet.”

Francine lies in bed, knowing her husband will not be home until morning. She considers staying up, waiting—it's already nearly sunrise. She wants to suffer. She wants him to come home and see that she's suffered. She wants him to feel guilt, for once, or fear—fear of what she might do in her exhaustion, in her exhausted rage.

There are strange, hungry people downstairs. The marshal overlooks them, smart as a puffin in his cap and smooth mustache. His skin is colder than the air, colder than the windows.

She feels an urgent warmth against her belly. There is nothing there. There is a hot nothing, a wanting nothing, pleading nothing, thirsty nothing, loving, lonely, grasping nothing, nothing, urgent warmth against her belly. Like the visitors downstairs, it wants in.

WHAT GROWS
AROUND THEM

The brother bombs wake to the sounds of stairs straining beneath a man too tired for stealth. The staircase is behind them and they are afraid to sit up. Fat Man looks to the bust on the mantel as if its reaction could tell him what's coming.
Pétain is calm, his eyes are blank as ever. The tired man makes the floorboards cry for help.

A pistol lowers itself from over the back of the couch. It dangles over Fat Man's cheek like a hanging tongue, though dry and cold. He feels around him in the blanket for help. It's wet. He understands he's had a wet dream. Under other circumstances he would like to take a moment to remember it—what he dreamed, or rather who—and savor the memory. Now, staring sideways up the barrel of a gun, he remembers the imagined feeling of a woman's hips melting in his iron grip. He chokes it down. He tells the first lie he learned to say in French. “We are not vagrants.”

The gunman prods the fat man's cheek with his lethal probe. He uses it to pull Fat Man's eye open wider. The gunman peers inside.

“Are you Francine's husband?” asks the fat man. The gunman nods. He is a handsome man with thick black hair, sharp wide eyes, and a nose like some ripe lovely root, with a pink, glowing tip. There are bags under his eyes and his hair is mussed—it stands on end in the front. The fat man smiles up at him, spreading his jowls like curtains. “I'm John,” he says. “It's good to meet you.”

The gun points down his open mouth.

“Albert,” Francine shouts, running down the stairs. She vomits language—what must be French. People say it's a beautiful tongue. Sometimes, reflects Fat Man. Not always. Albert answers in low, measured sentence fragments, nodding or shaking his head, gun still trained on the fat man.

“I'm sorry my husband's an asshole,” she says to the brothers. Then back to the fight. She pulls his gun arm up and away from the fat man. She wrenches the weapon from his hand. He doesn't fight back. She tries to empty the chambers, but they're already empty. She wrings the air as if it were his neck. He shrugs.

“It's safer that way,” says Albert.

Fat Man is proud to understand him.

Albert says, “What if he knocked it out of my hand and turned it on me? Do you want me to die?”

“What's happening?” says groggy Little Boy, whose French is not coming along.

“Or what if I accidentally shot him?” asks Albert. He takes back the gun from his wife and tucks it in his belt like a bank robber.

Francine slaps her own forehead demonstratively. She says, perhaps believing John can't understand her, “Where were you all night?”

Albert answers in a whisper, perhaps out of shame, perhaps realizing the fat one understands them.

Fat Man motions to Little Boy that it's time to get up and go. The little boy wants to hide beneath his blanket. Instead he stands up, brushes grit off his clothing, and begins to dress. He pulls on his pants over his shorts, his discolored jacket over his ragged shirt the hue of an old smoker's teeth. The fat man is doing the same. He struggles with suspenders so tested they might give way any second. The jacket feels like it wants to strangle him—any thoughts of buttoning it closed are instantly forgotten.

Fat Man listens in as Francine whispers to her husband an explanation of the guests' presence. She offers something about being homeless, pathetic, without work. Something about how cute the child Matthew is, and something about how hungry they look. The husband laughs, probably thinking of the fat one's suspenders. Francine interrupts herself twice to smile at the fat man. He can see she likes to reassure people. The husband goes into the kitchen, gun still hanging from his belt, and lights a cigarette. He puts his feet on the table. Somehow it looks like they belong there.

Francine makes them breakfast while the brothers sit at the table listening to the English version of the conversation she and her husband just had. This time no one is pathetic or hungry. It's not clear how much her husband follows. He nods when she's not talking. He ashes his cigarette onto a scrap he tore from the newspaper he's reading. Little Boy draws small shapes on the table's surface with his own grease and sweat.

When she's done talking and the sizzle of eggs and sausages fills the air, John starts filling in the gaps. “We thought we brought enough money but we had to bribe several men to get through the border.”

“You're lucky it wasn't more,” says Francine, tending to the sausages in the pan.

“It's sleazy but I guess to be expected.”

Albert chimes in, “Everything is chaos.”

Little Boy Matthew turns his own collapsing hat in circles on top of his head.

Fat Man John continues, “We've found odd jobs here and there but it's hard. Of course as things return to normal, people want to give the jobs to Frenchmen. I understand that.” He looks at the hard, slow curve of Francine's shoulders and the slope of her back. She wears a light yellow dress with a flower print. He says the thing that everybody wants to hear him say—the thing they wait to hear without knowing they wait. “I guess it was a mistake to come here, especially with him.”

Little Boy pushes down his beaten hat until it covers the tops of his ears and his eyes.

“We've traveled much of the country, starting at the coast, moving south. It's so beautiful. I regret bringing little Matthew, I guess, though I'm all he's got. But I don't really regret coming.” He reaches for his brother's hand. This time Little Boy remembers not to recoil. Their hands are hot when they touch. “I'd just like to find some simple work so we can establish ourselves. He's happy to work as well, until we can get him back into school.”

Albert taps more ash onto the newspaper fragment. He turns a page. As he shifts his weight, his gun clicks against the chair where it hangs from his belt.

An empty thing can be so ominous.

Albert says something to Francine. She straightens her back and turns to look at them each. First her husband, then John. She says, “He wants to know what happened to your hands.”

“How do you mean?” Of course he knows what she means.

“Your palms,” she says.

He shows Albert the blackness of the soft parts of his hands, the heels and inner knuckles. “I burnt them,” he says. “On a burning tree.”

Francine translates. Albert smiles and gestures with his cigarette as if to say, All's well then.

Francine serves up breakfast. Fat Man takes his time. He doesn't ask for seconds. As he chews he thinks what it would be like to hit Albert, and though its chambers are empty he wonders how fast he would need to move to get the gun.

Albert goes to his office without the gun. He manages money—his own, the money of others, it's not clear, Fat Man doesn't ask. Francine brings the brothers to a restaurant that serves sandwiches, salads, and coffees spiked and sweetened with mint and fruit liquors. She knows the owner. She goes into the kitchen while Fat Man and Little Boy sit at a table inside and watch the handful of patrons—all of them half asleep, drinking from blue ceramic mugs and smiling lazily when the shift's only waiter walks past, tipping sugar into their cold coffee and stirring with brown-stained fingers. There are several women among them, all would-be Parisians compromising with practicalities of budget and scarcity in pursuit of the improvisational fashions from up north. Their skins, like the skins of most here, are damaged; plagued by boils and rashes that rose up in the hunger and deprivation under Nazis and Vichy. One is missing several teeth. Another has very thin hair. They do their best to simulate their former beauties. They are rowing upstream against time.

Fat Man estimates three days before these women start to show, and after that two weeks until they are bursting, until all their waters break and babies flow. Little Boy points out no one will know it was them, that no one possibly can. They could stay.

“I suppose you
enjoy
being subjected to the adoring stare of three dozen strange babies everywhere you go.” Fat Man rubs his tired eyes. “How about when they get pregnant for a second time so soon, and they're birthing some half-formed thing a week later, some hideous child who would be better off dead, and they die in delivery because it's just too much? I guess you won't mind that either.”

Little Boy shivers.

“No,” says Fat Man. “You're right. We'll definitely stay for that.”

“We'll leave in two weeks,” says Little Boy, looking at the floor.

“You're damn right we will. No one asked you anyway.” The waiter comes by with eyebrows raised—do they need assistance? Fat Man waves him away. Or perhaps the waiter swerves that way because he's come close enough to see the state of their clothing.

“I only wonder how long it'll last,” says Little Boy.

“Maybe forever.”

Francine comes out of the kitchen with the glow of good news on her face. Fat Man is drawn instead to the sight of her stomach. Perhaps it already bulges with some budding human fruit. It's hard to tell through the dress, which could slim an ox under the right circumstances. Francine shouts, “You've both got jobs.” She seems to believe English is meant to be screamed. She throws her hands up in the air as if to summon a shaft of merciful light from the sky, through the ceiling, and onto the brothers. “John, you'll wash dishes, and Matthew will sweep the floors.”

“Thank you,” says Fat Man. “What's the pay?”

“Dreadful,” declares Francine, her tone surrendering nothing to the word's meaning. “But it's something. You can stay with us until you've set yourselves right.”

“Thank you,” says Fat Man again. “Shall we get to work now?”

 

The large pile of dishes hidden in a humid closet of sorts behind the kitchen does not seem commensurate to the small number of customers. But then this must be why Fat Man was needed in the first place.

The owner is a thin man in a white shirt with a stiff, bent collar and both sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow. His name is Jacques. He doesn't know English and he doesn't know the fat man knows some French, so he points at the dishes and makes a scrubbing motion on an invisible plate. When the fat man doesn't respond he tries scrubbing harder. Fat Man nods, makes the OK sign, and gets to it.

Coffee stains are tough. There are sick sticky brown rings on all the plates and on saucers, and in the bottoms of the mugs. Tendrils of discolored gunk that overflowed the rims and dribbled down the sides are frozen there, seemingly forever, fixed in place by the things that cream and sugar do together. Worse though is what that coffee makes when it finds sugar. A deposit, a rich vein, like volcanic rock, like shale on a plate, brittle gunk. He scrapes it with butter knives and fork tines. He lets the water run over this, and the cake crumbs collected at its edges, and the pastry flakes, assembled bread bits, and lettuce leaves. He rubs some off with a washcloth, rinses, and then rubs some, but it won't come loose from the ceramics. Instead it becomes a kind of black-brown scab that runs with greasy water like a sore runs with human juices.

But the worst thing of all is the mold that springs up in the sink, sometimes faster than he can scrub it away and rinse it down the drain, sometimes so fast he can actually see it grow up from nothing into an inch-thick layer of white-green cotton yuck. It sprouts from everything he hasn't cleaned, all the leftover food and orange peels and cheese rinds. The mold grows to be near him. Where he touches the dishes, it rises to meet him, reaches out, or grows up, and reaching for him seems to seethe, and seething hums with energy he knows without knowing what it is.

Any meat he finds he picks up with a fork and hurls into a garbage bag before the hungry white worms come.

Fat Man asks the owner if they have to pay for meals. Jacques explains that he doesn't know English—explains it in French. Fat Man tries to ask him in French, then, but Jacques has already left the room. Several hours later he comes back with half a loaf of bread and a bit of roast beef for the fat man. “You looked hungry,” he says, though not, of course, in English. The fat man nods. He is always hungry. He eats the beef first, and though he feels a faint tickle in his mouth on swallowing the last morsel, he assures himself no worms have grown. Next he eats the bread. There are two mold handprints in the crust when he's finished. It feels alive.