You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [76]
“You could come home with me, you know. Spend Christmas with my lunatic family.”
“Mia,” I said.
“You could come, Will. I don’t know, we could . . . ” she trailed off.
The next day she left for Chicago and I stayed in Paris.
* * *
A few days before she left to go skiing with her family, Marie came over and wouldn’t sit down. She paced frantically around the apartment. She pushed me onto the floor and rode me angrily. She looked down at me, her eyes narrowed. I never saw her blink.
“Hold my hair,” she said. “Pull it.”
Afterward there was blood on her knees.
We lay together until we got cold. She stood up and wrapped a blanket around her body.
“Ariel thinks you’re so hot,” she said.
“I doubt that.”
“Don’t. She told me. She says it all the time.”
“She’s pretty horrible to me in class, Marie. I doubt—”
“Probably because you’re sleeping with me and not her, Will.”
I sat up. “Marie, have you told her?”
“Jesus. No. It was a joke, a fucking joke. Putain! Calm down. She hates her dad. That’s why she’s always so pissy. It’s nothing to do with you, Will. Believe me, she’d fuck you in a second. She told me yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“On the phone.”
“How’d that come up?” I watched her biting her nail.
“She brought you up, I guess. She wants you. What’s the big deal?” She glanced up and looked at me, “Does that excite you Will? Would you like to fuck Ariel?” She stared at me.
“No, Marie.”
She was walking around the apartment, picking things up, pretending to look at books on the shelves.
She went to the window and looked out at the city. I watched her standing naked, the curtains falling around her. Then she turned. She was shivering.
“Once, her father tried to seduce me.” She crossed her arms across her chest.
I didn’t say anything, just pulled the blanket around my knees.
“I was in Ariel’s bedroom waiting for her to come home from a run. I was sitting on her bed. He came in and tried to seduce me.”
I nodded, watching her.
“But then Ariel came home and caught us. Well, caught him.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. He was just sitting on the bed with me. He said he’d help me with my homework. He had his hand on my leg when Ariel came in. That’s it, O.K.? But she was so mad. She didn’t talk to me for like two weeks.”
She sat down on the floor next to me. I pulled the blanket around us and stroked her back with my hand.
“But that was all? Nothing more? Just his hand on your leg?”
“Nothing more, Will.”
“Does Ariel know, Marie? I mean about us. Have you told anyone?”
She looked at me briefly and then turned to the window where the light was flat and weak.
“Just tell me, Marie. I need to know.” I took a slow breath. “Please, Marie tell me if—”
“No,” she whispered pulling away. “No one knows. I haven’t told anyone. O.K.?”
“O.K.,” I said. “O.K.” I pulled her against me.
“I’d never tell anyone, Will,” she said beginning to cry. “Never. I know what it would do. To you. To us. Why would I? Fuck, Will why would I?”
“It’s all right. Forget it.”
She was sobbing, her body shuddering. I held her and I knew.
Soon, Marie went home and I stayed on the floor.
* * *
Those weeks I sat in cafés reading. I went to the movies. At night I went to La Palette and drank. I slept late, often until the afternoon. I missed Marie and as the city emptied, the streets quieter and quieter the closer we came to Christmas, the more I wished she’d return.
She wrote messages to me. I love you, Will. I miss you, Will. God, I miss your body. Comme tu me manques!
I picked at a roasted chicken on Christmas day and drank a bottle of Bordeaux.
When they were alive, I’d sit with my parents around the tree and we’d open presents. On Christmas Eve, a few months before they died, we drove up to spend a week with them. The four of us had dinner while it snowed hard outside.
My parents. Me and Isabelle.
My dad built a fire after dinner and we