I Love You Too Much Read online

  “Don’t blame me,” she said as she parked in a disabled spot right outside the station doors. “I can’t say no to Diane.”

  Her eyes were shiny with excitement beneath her red-and-blue-checked sun visor. She pulled a twenty-euro note from her wallet and frowned at me.

  “I’ve tried calling your mother, but she won’t pick up.” She looked guilty as she handed over the money. “Don’t spend it all on sweets.”

  She couldn’t wait to get away. I watched her reverse out in my grandfather’s powder-blue Mercedes; the car has a parking-assist feature because she’s so bad at parking. I didn’t care that she wanted to get rid of me.

  The train from Dinard was packed with grandparents taking their grandchildren back to Paris. It was the Saturday before schools started. I hadn’t heard from my parents all week except for two texts from Maman saying, Are you okay? I texted her on the train but she didn’t reply. I texted Cindy telling her I was coming home.

  Cindy was there on the platform at Montparnasse waiting for me. The station was hot and it was hard to breathe. A loud bell was ringing as we walked down the platform, so we didn’t try to talk. Outside, the tarmac was sticky underfoot. The taxi smelled of fake peaches; it had dirty nylon seats and windows that you had to wind down with a broken handle. The driver was sullen and white. They’re always angry in August because you’ve been away and they haven’t. After the blue of Dinard, everything was gray. The shops and apartment buildings were lined up and waiting for me on the boulevard Montparnasse. The pavements and people, the traffic; nothing had changed. It was all just the way it had always been and that made me sad.

  We stopped on our road and Cindy got out a fifty-euro note to pay for the short journey home.

  “I’m not a bank,” the taxi driver said.

  “Have you got any change, Cindy?” I asked.

  She shook her head and giggled, which made it worse.

  He swore and slapped the steering wheel. “Tell her this isn’t China.”

  “She’s not from China,” I said. “She’s from the Philippines.”

  He turned around so that he was facing us and took the money. He was snarling like a dog.

  “I don’t care if she’s from fucking Mars, she should go back to where she came from.”

  I grabbed my bag and got out. The seat sagged where I had been sitting. He flung the change at Cindy as she was getting out of the car, then he roared off down the road. I turned to go in.

  The street was silent again, empty. Nothing moved in the heat. There was a moving van parked right outside our apartment building. The back was open and there was a pile of gray blankets in the van; each blanket had a red stripe and they had been folded so that the red stripe went all the way up the pile.

  Upstairs I found the door to our apartment wide open. In the living room, there were four black guys wearing red polo shirts and sweating. They were carrying my dad’s desk across the parquet. On the polo shirts it said CORPORATE AND EXECUTIVE REMOVALS.

  At first I thought Maman must have persuaded my dad to get rid of the furniture she didn’t like, but then I saw that there were cardboard boxes as well, a stack of them over by the window, waiting. I went over to them. There was a sticker on each box that said MONSIEUR PHILIPPE DESLANDES. Underneath my father’s name someone had printed an address that was not our address. I touched a sticker. The words LIVING ROOM were underlined three times in black marker, like they had some special meaning.

  I called my dad on the phone and he said, “Where are you?” and I said, “At the apartment.” He said, “What are you doing there?” and I said, “Grandmother put me on an early train.”

  “Merde,” he said. And then: “I’ll come.”

  I waited for him out on the balcony. I looked down at the street; I looked down at the roofs of the parked cars. I stood and swayed. The air was stale, heavy with the month of August. I felt sick. I waited until I saw his dark hair below. He didn’t come up. He called me from his phone down on the pavement. I watched him do it. I took the stairs; I ran my hand along the cool brass banister, around and around, tracing a spiral, looking down into the empty space and the black-and-white marble below, until I reached the ground floor. I opened the heavy wooden door and stepped out onto the pavement; it was hard to move through the still, thick heat.

  We walked along the road for a bit and then he told me as we turned onto the rue d’Assas. He told me he had found an apartment near Le Bon Marché, that he would buy me an Xbox so I could play on it when I came to stay. He told me he was leaving.

  “We’ve decided to take a break,” he said as we walked along side by side. “Your mother and I.”

  “What from?”

  “From each other.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I don’t know, Paul. Maybe we are not happy people to begin with.”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “Are you taking a break from me?”

  He stopped then and said: “Of course not, Paul, of course not.” But he didn’t smile and put his arms around me.

  He said: “You’ll carry on living with your mother during the week and then some weekends you’ll come and stay with me. We haven’t worked out how often you’ll come yet.”

  We turned down by the Lycée Montaigne. School hadn’t started. There were no children hanging around outside; instead, there were big black tour buses from Eastern Europe. The drivers were standing on the pavement eating baguettes and speaking a language I didn’t understand. They had cruel bodies like wrestlers and they wore big gold buckles on their belts. I wondered why my parents were splitting up now, at the end of summer. I wondered what it was that broke them.

  We crossed into the jardin so that we were walking under the alley of trees, in and out of light and shadow. The leaves were brown and dried up. They were dying where they hung. The flowers in their beds looked like they were tired of the summer; they were waiting to be pulled up, to be taken away. It was strange to think that people were still at the beach, still on vacation, and here in the jardin, autumn had begun. My phone rang.

  “Chéri,” Maman said, “where are you?”

  “At the jardin.”

  She was calling from her car. I could hear her voice up against the windscreen and a siren driving past.

  “What are you doing there? You weren’t supposed to get in until this afternoon.”

  “I got an early train.”

  “An early train?”

  “Grandmother made me. She was playing in a golf competition.” My voice was flat. “Diane asked her to play. She said she couldn’t say no to Diane.”

  “What the hell was she doing putting you on an earlier train without telling me?”

  “She said she called you but you didn’t pick up. I called you too, but you didn’t answer. I left you loads of messages.” I wanted Maman to know she should have been there.

  “Putain, that woman; she changed the plan. She did it on purpose. She changed the plan. I’m going to call your father.”

  “He’s here,” I said. “He’s here with me.”

  She lost it then. I remember thinking she must have looked strange in the traffic, shouting in her car; the people next to her must have been staring at her. Maman doesn’t usually mind being stared at.

  “Put him on the phone!” she shouted. “Put your father on the phone.”

  My dad was sitting on a bench behind me, typing into his phone. I handed him mine.

  “She wants to speak to you,” I said.

  He listened to her shouting for a bit and then he said, “He already knows.”

  He said it in a dull voice, as if what I already knew was something everyday, as if what I already knew was Cindy was cooking cordon bleu for supper that night. He listened some more and then he said: “I told you, Séverine, he already knows. He came back and found the moving men. He knows.”

  He stood up and turned away from me; he walked toward the stone balustrade, over by th
e statues of the queens. I looked around. There was no one about. Soon we would be back at school and the jardin would fill up; there would be babysitters sitting in the shade by the sandpit, there would be kids playing soccer on the tarmac dalle, there would be new shoes, new backpacks, a fresh start. The sun beat down on my forehead. There was a cool green breeze about my feet. The dust hovering above the ground was bleached white; I could taste it in my mouth. I was so parched. Was it me? Was I why they broke up?

  “It wasn’t the way I would have chosen to tell him,” he said patiently, talking to her as if she were a child. Then I don’t know what she said, but he lost it as well and he started shouting back.

  “You could have picked up the phone, Séverine, you could have read your texts. Where were you? At the hairdresser? At the Flore? Where the fuck were you?”

  I kept my eyes closed until there was no more shouting. When I opened them, my dad was walking toward me, panting like he’d just got back from a run.

  “Voilà,” he said, thrusting the phone into my hand. “You see now why we’re splitting up?”

  He said it as if I’d tried to stop them, as if I had told him he couldn’t do it. I knew then it was my only chance to stop it from happening; that moment in the jardin while he was still burning with anger, before it was set in stone, I could have saved their marriage if only I had the words. But I couldn’t think of what to say that would make it better.

  The day after that was Sunday and Maman stayed in her bedroom. Cindy left for church, and soon after that I heard the door buzzer. I pressed on the button and opened the door. My grandmother walked in, not my dad’s mother, the other one.

  “Hello, you,” she said. “It’s been an age since I saw you.”

  She pulled her monogrammed wheelie trolley past me and parked it with a flourish in the living room. Her hair was darker than usual. She looked disappointed, the way she always looked.

  “Where’s your mother?” she said.

  I wondered if my grandmother knew, if that was why she was here, to find out what was happening. She didn’t come around that much; she lived in the 15ème arrondissement, down in the southwest of Paris, with her son. She used to live with my grandfather in a suburb called Buzenval until my mother persuaded them to move to Paris. Maman hates the suburbs; she hates anything that is outside Paris, which is strange because she spent her whole childhood in Buzenval. “You’re Parisian by conquest, not birth, Séverine”—that’s what my father used to say. Maman hated when he said that.

  My grandparents lived for only a year in the 15ème, and then my grandfather’s company sent him to take a course advising people how to retire without getting depressed. He ran off with the teacher of the course. Maude was her name. My grandparents had been married for thirty-seven years when he did that.

  Now he lives with Maude in Malmaison. It’s another suburb, next to Buzenval. Malmaison was where Napoléon and Joséphine had their country house. My grandparents took me to Napoléon and Joséphine’s château when I was little, before Maude. There were yellow roses in the garden and we ate strawberry tarts that my grandfather bought at the bakery nearby. The strawberries were huge and covered in this sweet red syrup and there was a custardy cream underneath them and I let the cream and the red syrup and the pastry run up and down between my gums and the flesh of my inside cheek until it was warm and liquefied and then I got stung on the neck by a wasp and we had to go home.

  After my grandfather left her, my grandmother drove out to Malmaison one Sunday morning, not to Joséphine’s house, but to Maude’s. She parked her car in Maude’s drive and got out and punched her fist through the glass of a ground-floor window of Maude’s house.

  She shouted, “Pute de Malmaison, pute de Malmaison!” (“Whore of Malmaison, whore of Malmaison!”) She kept shouting until the police came and got her. They took her to the hospital; they had to give her an injection to stop her shouting. She needed eighteen stitches in her wrist. It’s kind of funny now.

  I don’t see my grandfather anymore.

  “So, how was Dinard?” my grandmother asked me.

  “Okay.” I shrugged. “Where are you going with the wheelie trolley?”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’ve come to stay with you.”

  “With me?”

  “Your mother needs me.”

  I knew things must be bad if Maman needed her.

  She stayed all that week, buying the stationery for my new school, cooking the meals, telling Cindy what to do while Maman lay in bed. I started school on Tuesday. I didn’t hear from my father.

  After a week in bed, Maman got up and went to see a doctor, who gave her pills—helium pills, she called them. She said they made her feel like she was a balloon up on the ceiling looking down at us all and she quite liked that. The day after she started taking the pills, she went back to work. She said she had to go to the office because she owned the business and they couldn’t cope without her. In the evening she came home and went to bed.

  That was the beginning of her not going out. Before, she and my dad went out all the time. They went to dinners, openings, the cinema, Paris Photo, parties, cocktails; sometimes they went to three places in one night. But she didn’t do that anymore; she just hung around her bedroom in her leggings and a T-shirt. Her cheeks sunk in and she looked sad.

  On Saturday she didn’t go out for brunch like she usually did, she didn’t go shopping, she didn’t go and get her hair done. Her personal trainer didn’t come around. She just stayed in her bedroom all day. I went in to see her about five in the afternoon.

  “Paul, come and watch with me,” she said and she patted the bed beside her. She’d sent her assistant out to Fnac to buy a boxed set of an American television series. We watched them one by one. She said it was good for my English. Sometimes I didn’t get the jokes even with subtitles—I was eleven then—but I laughed when Maman laughed. Her face went soft when she laughed, even though she was sad still.

  She let me stay in her bed all afternoon with my back resting against the suede headboard and my legs tucked up under the duvet. My grandmother had gone home by then, so Maman and I ordered pizza and we ate it in bed. She let me have the cheesy base and dough balls as well. They were hot and buttery in my mouth and I drank Coke cold from the can. After, we ate cookie-dough ice cream straight from the carton.

  Around ten o’clock that night she said, “I’m so tired, Paul. I’ve got to sleep.” She took her sleeping pill and then she switched off the bedside light. I sat in the bed and waited for her to say, Go to bed now, Paul, it’s late, but she didn’t.

  She fell asleep almost straightaway. I stayed watching the episode that was on, sitting in darkness with just the TV screen for light. It was past eleven when it finished. I heard a motorbike go by, then a voice shout out on the street below, and then nothing. It was warm in the room, but I didn’t want to get up and open a window. I had sweat on my back. I heard her breath go in and out; I watched her chest rise and fall. She was sad even in her sleep. I didn’t want to go pee in case I woke her and it ended. I slipped down onto one shoulder so that my head was resting on the pillow; it was my father’s pillow. I waited a bit and then I moved down some more, stretching my legs down along the mattress, taking care not to kick her. I lay on my side looking away from her so that my breathing wouldn’t wake her. My bladder felt half full, but I didn’t dare get out of bed.

  In the morning when I woke up, I was facing my mother’s back, lying on my side. Maman was still asleep. I lay and watched her. Her hair stretched over onto my father’s pillow. I reached out and stroked it with just two fingers. After a while she woke up and turned. She saw me looking at her. She was beautiful in her half sleep. Her lips were parted.

  “Coucou, toi,” she said. “Coucou, mon prince.”

  After that I slept in her bed every night. We never said anything about it, Maman and I. I didn’t ask if I could sleep there and she didn’t say I could; I just did. I really loved that time. Strange, I know,
to say I really loved it when my father left. But I did. Him not being there didn’t change that much anyway because he’d never been there before. He left early for work; he worked late at night; they went out to dinner. On the weekend he was on his phone or out training or back in the office on a deal. What changed was that Maman was there.

  She would come back from the office around eight o’clock; I could hear her as she walked through the door, talking on the phone in the corridor, chatting to Estelle or her assistant, and then she would say, “Listen, ma belle, I have to go, I’ve got my boy waiting for me.” She called me her boy, like I was her man now. Then she would see me and say, “How was your day?” and she would stroke my hair as I told her how I hated school.

  It felt right to share her bed at night; it felt as if that was where I should have been all my life, next to my mother. I don’t mean replacing my father; I wouldn’t have minded if he’d been there too, but he’d never let me stay in their bed. When I was little, if I had a nightmare or if I woke up cold because the duvet had fallen off the bed, I would go to their room and I would stand by their bed waiting for Maman to wake up. I would ask to get in, but my father always woke up then. “Allez, Paul,” he would say, “you’ve got your own bed to go to.” I don’t think he let me sleep in their bed once.

  After he left, I lay in their bed at night and watched Maman as she took off her clothes. She looked at her naked body in the mirror. “At least I’ve lost weight, Paul,” she said as she turned to see herself from behind, “there’s that to be said for all this.”

  Then she would go into the bathroom to take her bath. I’d lie in bed and wait. When she came out I watched as she dried her body with a towel and rubbed her creams into her thighs, her legs, her breasts. While the cream sank into her skin, she walked around the room, pointed the remote control at the TV to turn it on. She must have known I was watching, but she never told me to stop. I watched as she put on her slip, holding her arms up, letting the satin cover her face, her breasts, before it slid in a waterfall over her body. The satin was the color of nougat with raspberry lace at her breasts. She came and lay down in bed beside me. Her phone flashed with texts and messages, but she said to it: “You can wait.”