Maxine (21 page)

Maxine closes her eyes in the taxi and breathes deeply, evenly. She's made it this far. She's gathering her strength for the next round. It would be very helpful if she could have another kir before confronting Madame of the publishing house but alas there seems to be none in the taxi.

In Madame's office, Maxine sits up as straight as if she were carrying her manuscript on her head. Words are exchanged, then stiff silence falls, then another volley.

I am not saying I won the contest. I am saying that your company informed me I had won a contest for an English-language thriller. I had no reason to doubt that.

Of course you may see the printout of the email. It's only a copy. I can make more copies—it is on my computer at home.

If you're telling me Monsieur Loizeau won the contest then of course I believe you. It's your contest. I don't care whether I won the contest or not.

(This is of course not true, and added to her fatigue and to the humiliation of having to endure this argument is the disappointment of losing an honour so recently conferred. Maxine had re-adjusted her perception of herself to encompass the prize, and must now adjust regretfully back to thinking of herself in the usual disagreeable ways.)

Madame, I am here for a week at the invitation of Mademoiselle Emmanuelle Duchamp, who extended that invitation on behalf of your company. I have no idea why she did that—perhaps you do— and it is unfortunate, but your company is responsible and I regret that you are going to have to make some arrangements.

Madame across the desk picks up the phone, dials, has a brief conversation. They both stand—a tense pursing of the lips, Maxine emerges and descends the stairs, another taxi.

Frédérique grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the way of a taxi, and they plunged into the souks. They bought sunglasses, large pieces of fabric Frédérique could wrap herself in, some clothes that made Jerome look a bit less West Coast.

“What part of me looks West Coast?” Jerome craned his neck, trying to look over his shoulder and down his back. Frédérique laughed.

“There's nothing wrong with the West Coast. You just don't always want to look as if you're about to go snowboarding on Grouse Mountain. It stands out a bit, so close to the Sahara.” After that Jerome didn't speak for a while. It was his first display of ill temper.

Emmanuelle Duchamp's kitchen is a white galley with shapely red leather bar stools. All the cupboards are open and empty.

J'vous fait un p'tit café?

Maxine is slow to answer. She is slow in every way, swaying on the bar stool like a patron in the small hours. She is by now intolerably, unspeakably tired. Maxine is an eight-hours-a-night girl and she has long since reached and exceeded the outer limits of her capacity. She is almost a basket case. She gazes at Emmanuelle, the dyed blond hair, casually slutty just-out-of-bed look, her satin dressing gown in a colour approaching cherry wood. She thinks about the coffee for some time without reaching a conclusion.

Écoutez
, Emmanuelle says,
je vous fais un café, d'accord?
It's a shame you can't stay here, she continues, but you see the boxes. The movers are coming tomorrow. Have your coffee while I make a few calls and then we'll discuss your accommodation.

Maybe I should just... Maxine has no idea what she could possibly just, so she doesn't finish. This all feels quite weird. Emmanuelle is forty years younger than she'd expected and the apartment is very modern. She stares into the living room and through the window onto a Paris street. It could be a photograph, a poster—OpenWindow, Paris—the kind that looks classy when you're seventeen and putting it up in your first apartment above the cardboard box with the Indian throw that serves as a telephone table, the kind of poster they have in the bathrooms of coffee shops at home.

Voilà
. Emmanuelle smacks a coffee down on the counter in front of her and disappears into a back room. Maxine can hear that she is talking but not the words. She rests her head on the counter for a moment. After some time Emmanuelle wanders back into the kitchen, talking into a cordless.

Mais non...
So Serge, are you doing this or not? Your parents would love to have you. It's only a week.

What about Karim, stay with Karim, he won't mind…
Oui mon amour, t'es sympa
. I'll give her the directions,
ah merde
she's asleep.
Mademoiselle? Excusez-moi, mademoiselle.
You will be taking the bus and then the métro.

By the time Maxine stumbles up to a door and presses the buzzer, it's nearly six in the evening. She has dozed for about two and a half of the last thirty-six hours. She has secured somewhere to stay but the effort required to meet another human being is more than she can quite bear and as she hears the buzzer and pushes the door open she is furious and ashamed to feel tears. She drops her backpack and runs a hand hard over her face, and then does her forehead as well, in the hope that anyone noticing might think she was sweating. She tries to conjure Frédérique but can only visualize her flung across a bed. She thinks she hears a faint snore. For some reason it does not help that Emmanuelle's boyfriend, Serge, when he appears before her, looks remarkably like the young man in the film
Amélie
, with a face that seems both fairly ordinarily agreeable and at the same time heart-rendingly evocative of sweet vulnerability and breath-snatching young-French-maleness. Maxine takes in that face and bawls.

15

i
t's one of those huge wooden doors in an archway, with a smaller door set inside it. Maxine has passed through the outer door and into the courtyard and somehow her French has remained out on the street. She sobs wordlessly to Serge, who has picked up her suitcase, put an arm around her shoulders and begun to lead her up a staircase.

Ne vous en faites pas, mademoiselle
, he says. Emmanuelle has been ill, she did not have the intention of deranging you. Maxine sniffs.
Vous êtes sans doute fatiguée
, Serge says as he guides her slowly up umpteen flights and along a corridor. He opens the door on a tiny, tidy studio apartment. Ten minutes later he emerges with a gym bag, closing the door quietly behind him, and disappears down the stairwell. Maxine flings herself across the futon. She sets her puffer on top of a huge book on the table beside the bed. It seems to be a manual for trainee pilots. She pictures Serge in a neat Air France uniform and sunglasses, and sleeps for a long time.

Frédérique and Jerome lay flung across a bed, covered by a single ivory sheet, where they had dropped, exhausted, the night before. Their room was light and warm with the sun, despite heavy white curtains that hung in thick folds over the window. Neither had moved for a long time, in spite of the car horns and shouts from the street. But now Jerome stretched and Frédérique rolled over to face him.

An hour later they sat at a small round table in the courtyard, shaded by tall potted plants. They were surrounded on every side by the walls of the house, windows whose shutters stood open, a narrow balcony on the next floor, with an ornate railing. A boy brought them strong coffee. Their knees were touching. They needed to feel close. Frédérique stirred sugar into her coffee with a tiny silver spoon. She shifted her chair so that she sat close beside him.

“Darling,” she said softly. “You have been wonderful.”

“So have you.”

“No, I mean...you've been brave. You hardly knew me, and yet you risked your life to help me.” Jerome made a self-deprecating noise and started to speak but Frédérique placed two fingers over his lips. “Here's what we're going to do. As long as you stay with me, you are in danger. I have arranged for you to go away for a time. A pleasant place for you to stay. You may work there if you wish. After things have died down, in a few months, it should be safe for you to return home. Matters will have taken shape by then, and they will have no further use for you, or for me, at that point. I hope that this will make you safe. I will do everything in my power to—”

“Forget it.”

“Pardon?” Frédérique had been so intent on explaining carefully that it seemed to take her some time to recognize the existence of a dissenting viewpoint.

“You heard. I'm not going off on some goddamn working holiday. I might not be fluent in Arabic but I've noticed yours isn't up to much. That guy you were whispering away with in the market spoke French, didn't he?Well as it happens I speak French too. But that doesn't mean I'm going to let him escort me to some place where I can lie on the beach and do a few chores until after Christmas. I'm sticking with you. Don't tell me you don't need someone to watch your back. And you can stop calling me ‘darling' like that all the time. I'm not some boy toy and I'm not going away.” A yellow petal floated in the basin at the centre of the courtyard, a square, blue-tiled pool a few inches deep, from which rose a planter, or perhaps a birdbath. Frédérique watched the petal for several seconds and then she tossed her hair and laughed. “Well,” she said. “Well, well Mr. Kerville, aren't we full of surprises.”

Serge has hair the colour of the pyramids, short and sticky-uppy on top, his face not equine exactly but a little on the long side, ditto the nose. Loose-limbed but not gangly. Actually Maxine doesn't know quite what loose-limbed means but she imagines it's what happens when your arms seem to hang easily quite a long way down from your shoulders.

Emmanuelle, Serge says, had some
difficultés
. Her life has not always been easy, and at times she has perhaps not made things easier, let us say. Some of the things she does may seem
un peu bizarre.
Lately there have been a few
chutes
. But
au fond
she is a good person and the family hopes for a full recovery.

His voice is full of concern and tenderness. He has stopped by early with Karim to make sure everything is all right, and to pick up a few bits and pieces. The buzzer system, has she tried it? And the keys for the door downstairs? He rummages in a narrow closet and pulls out a pair of soccer cleats. He tosses them in a bag and both he and Karim shake her hand politely, saying she must call if she needs anything.

Serge est bon
, Emmanuelle says fondly. He was a big support during her
crise
. Emmanuelle has arrived less than half an hour after the departure of Serge and Karim, just as Maxine was about to go out for the day.

I wanted to reassure myself that you were well installed, says Emmanuelle, opening a cupboard, since it was I who—

Not at all. You've been so helpful, I don't know how I would have—

Did he leave any food? I'm starving. Emmanuelle starts rooting through the fridge. She looks like a different person today in a brown and tan floral wraparound skirt and snug chocolate blouse. She's pinned her hair up and put on brown lipstick. She looks very young. Emmanuelle pulls out some cheese Maxine bought that morning and cuts it into strips and lays the strips over a hunk of baguette cut lengthwise. She plops on the futon, leans back, and wriggles her feet out of a pair of high-heeled sandals.

So, Emmanuelle says after a big bite, for all the world as if Maxine had asked.
Voici
what happened: I was in this stupid job at the press and things weren't going so well for me, you know? I was
malade, quoi
, I was not good in my skin. This camembert is excellent, I wonder if he gets it at the market. I started writing letters. It was a bit like drugs, you know, the first time it's kind of exciting and scary and then you keep wanting to do it again?

Why you would do it more than once if it's scary is not something Maxine can fathom, but her opinion remains unsought.

I didn't like the job and Duclos, she was very
critique
, always. I wrote one of our authors, she's very good, Mélanie Desherbiers, maybe you have heard of her, and I told her how much I liked her novel. And she wrote back and we had a little correspondence by email. And then I wrote a few little emails to people about their writing. There is a power in writing, you know? People believe you. You make them believe you. And I wrote you and one other guy about winning the contest.

He was the winner?

No, I wrote the winner too. The winner knows he won. He arrived two days ago. But I told someone else he won also. He was from Marseille, so he didn't come as far as you, and he had an aunt here so it was less
compliqué
.

So…Madame Duclos has been through this once already?

Yes, she fired me, and then Maman made me see the
psychologue
and he said I was very
stressée
, so Maman decided it would be better for me not to work this summer, I will live with her and relax and see my friends in the cafés. You know our singer Edith Piaf, her song
“Non, je ne regrette rien”
? It was not what you do every day but
moi non plus
, I regret nothing. Emmanuelle smiles in a resplendent sort of way and then appears to have remembered something.
Euh
in your case
bien sûr
there were the expenses and some inconveniences which were unfortunate. But—she swings to her feet and looks out the window—here you are in Paris, on a sunny day and it has all worked out well in the end, has it not? Don't worry, Duclos will pay for your ticket. The thought of a lawsuit puts her in
un état de panique
. And Maman will pay her back. And now if there is nothing further I can do for you then I must wish you a very
bon séjour à Paris
.

They'd bought ouzo in the ville nouvelle and walked back to the medina. Frédérique spoke for much of the way back, in fragments, giving him a piece of information here, the next bit a block away.

“OK Jerome. Here's the plan. We shouldn't stay here much longer. Tomorrow we'll go north, as far as Casablanca. Then Tangiers. We'll get a ferry to Spain and then up to Paris but not always the same way. A train one day, then a bus, the boat, a car—it's harder to track, you see? I'm going to give you a phone number, in case we get separated and you need help. You'll have to memorize it.