Folie à Deux (19 page)

“Maybe I nicked it with my nail as I was putting it on you,” she offers.

“Maybe,” trying to not incite her to say anything worse. I feel my eyes grow heavy equally from exhaustion as escape. I’m asleep before she turns the light out and leaves the room. I don’t know what she does or where she goes but I discern nothing until after noon.

When I awake the room is empty. I walk through the rest of the apartment, finding it also empty. It scares me and I immediately blame myself for having slept. I feel abandoned, unsure of anything after this morning. I take a bath and dress just to do something that nears progress. I leave the bathroom to find Carla straightening our room.

“Oh hi,” she kisses me, “I went to the patisserie and got us some pastries. Do you feel better after having slept?” I don’t but I tell her I do.

“Did you sleep at all?” I ask.

“No, I laid out on the couch for a while but couldn’t relax so I went for a walk. I feel fine now.” She is remarkably calm compared with the last time I saw her, almost bubbly. Since she drops this incident I’m happy to forget it too. Instead, I ponder what the other students on this trip may be doing today with their families.

Two days after our unholy union we walk up all six flights of stairs continuing the same casual conversation we began on the bus home. When we arrive at the front door it’s ajar which seems bizarre but the day we arrived Agnès walked right in. Carla notices the door but doesn’t seem to think much of it. After walking down the hallway and into the bathroom she sees the door to our bedroom also left open, speaking as she moves out of hearing range.

As I’m looking through the fridge I hear something strange down the hall. It sounds like hyperventilating. Carla’s breath is quick and shallow, the more she wheezes the more nervous I become.

My own voice cracks as I ask, “What’s wrong?” but she is already on the phone, speaking in French. I hear her say Luce’s name and talk about the next day’s excursion into Paris but can’t be sure.

She puts her hand over the receiver and whispers what I think is, “Luce knows you’re not my nephew.” I think Carla is crying but can’t tell what she is really saying. As I’m about to ask for clarification, she blurts French words into the receiver again.

After another few minutes on the phone she runs into the bedroom and yells, “Come in here now.” I walk in, she points at the sheets and hisses, “Look at the stains on those sheets. They know you’re not my nephew.”

I have no idea the connection but I suppose there shouldn’t be semen stains when a boy is sleeping in the twin bed next to his aunt. What I’m really trying to wrap my mind around is my first acquaintance with what semen stains look like. Carla’s bedroom is always dark and no one has sex on my bed at home. The dumbfounded look I must be wearing only makes her angrier.

She steps close to my face and says, “Don’t you get it? Luce probably walked in, saw the stains and called someone.” She spits on my face when she says, “Probably.” I can’t tell how the phone call concludes but she hangs up in the same state as she began and is becoming increasingly hysterical.

“How do you know she saw them? How do you know she called anyone? How would she know that they are from us?” I ask, all innocently and for my own curiosity but also hoping to calm her down. She pulls the sheet off of the bed and begins to wash it in the bath tub while mumbling something like, “How could I be so stupid to leave the door open? How did I forget to make the bed so someone could see?”

Maybe because I’m a kid, but I just don’t see the connection. I walk back into the bedroom to see if I can gather any further information. The windows are wide open, I stand idiotically still, and my mind wanders to determine my next move. I feel the volatility of the situation and do not want to make anything worse. I walk into the bathroom where she is vigorously scrubbing, more like trying to cleanse something from the fabric than just dried semen.

After painful deliberation I say, “Maybe the window blew the door open. Maybe it wasn’t Luce who walked in. I don’t think she saw anything,” in an attempt to help.

She only scrubs harder and the staccato rhythm of her speech matches the beat of her hands, “No, Jim, I’m sure she was the one
who opened the window in the first place because I didn’t leave it open. She went in to open the window, saw the stains, put two and two together and God only knows who she called, I’m sure she called Jean-Michel at the agency. And maybe she heard the bed squeaking at night which only verified her suspicion.” The anger in her voice somehow implies that any of this is my fault. With the guilt stalking me again, I wish I could lie down and fall asleep but could never get away with that.

I walk back into the bedroom and sit on the other bed and although I feel like crying I don’t. I would go for a walk except I’m afraid to be out by myself. I can’t talk to Carla and I can’t even call home because it’s eleven o’clock at night in New Jersey.

When my emotions can no longer remain harnessed, I surrender and weep. I stay as quiet as possible to not make Carla angrier so I pull my shirt over my face and silently sob until I hear the front door to the apartment open followed by Luce’s, “Bon soir.”

Carla cuts in front of me as I walk down the hall and begins conversing immediately. I have no idea the content but the few words I can pick out seem to indicate that Luce has no inkling of the dirty truth. I actually watch Carla’s entire body relax as she speaks. When she pulls out her earrings I know, for certain that we’re safe to unwind. I’m lost and outnumbered all over again so I walk back down the hall to the bedroom where Carla joins me just a few minutes later.

She closes the door behind her, sits down next to me and puts her arm around me like she were my big sister, “I’m sorry I bit your head off. I thought that we were going to get caught.”

A voice I’ve never heard before from somewhere inside screams, “WE?” but what comes out are a series of questions I decide need to be asked.

I list, “What did you say to Luce? What did you say on the phone? How are you going to explain why the bed sheet is soaking in the bathtub?” Much like every other time that she needs to rise to the occasion everything adds up after her spin is crafted. We always arrive at some gross misunderstanding that can be laughed off and forgotten, most often at my expense.

By the time we’re preparing to return home I don’t speak. My mind is simply full. I can take no more on my shoulders and still function. I speak neither to Carla, nor my classmates, nor the friends they made in France. Even my last phone call to my parents is unusually short. I barely say goodbye to Luce and when I walk away I’m certain Carla is making some excuse for my hostility. Our return flight is much like our first, adjacent seats, sequestered conversation.

This debacle of a trip, which will live vividly in my memory forever isn’t punctuated until we arrive back at my high school. The bus parks in front of the school and since it’s a Saturday afternoon nobody else is there but our parents. I lock eyes immediately with my mother who hugs me with an uncharacteristic sense of urgency followed by my father. They ask rapid fire questions about the flight, meals, on-board movies and the ride to school. They want to know where my luggage is and who I sat next to on the plane and I tell them all of it, with as few words as possible. After I retrieve my luggage from the bus and begin to walk to my parent’s car I hear Carla greet them, gushing about what a great time we all had. As I listen to her and my parents begin their conversation panic brings me to edge of hyperventilating. I have no idea what she is going to say and I cannot imagine how this will unfold.

My vision blurs from the tears that fill my eyes as I hear Carla detail the wonderful aspects of our trip. It’s a masterful display as she weaves in and out of stories that are quasi-true, omitting it was just us two, fabricating things that she knows I did with my host family. Her intimate knowledge of what happened when not in her presence clearly puts my parents at ease.

With no chance to regain my already slack composure, I cry. She just recreated my study abroad experience in the most wholesome and natural way imaginable, and now I envy even lies. I want my parent’s newly programmed memory to be mine too. I want to feel like I got the most out of their money like they do. The other students had what she just described and the gaping hole left by it’s absence is agonizing. I still want to be an exchange student, willing to exchange my life with anybody.

My mother whispers some things that resemble, “We didn’t know if Jimi would be too homesick.” The irony of my mother confiding in Carla is heartbreaking, I sit on the curb and wait for the end.

Carla approaches for the grand finale, “Ok, Au Revoir, Jacques, tu me manques.” I know she will tell all of the other students that she will miss them too but it seems a ridiculous thing to say. Her pure and bland tone is the final erasure of the hell that was my life for the last eleven days.

I sob audibly.

Carla’s bewildered look shocks all of us. My mother speaks of me as though I’m a child, and it makes me happy, “Oh he’s just tired, he gets like this when he’s cranky.”

I’m thrilled to hear her say such a thing, reclaiming ownership over my youth. The youth that Carla feels entitled to twist into whatever she wants. I enjoy a small sense of relief that her last image of me is recorded with tears streaming down my face.
I don’t fool myself that she will care but I allow it to mean something to the kid I was before this trip.

I feel minute. My life is in tatters and whether I’m half a world away or living in my house, nobody knows. Carla’s reach is international and omnipotent. Once back in my house, I finish speaking with my parents and walk upstairs to my room. After I strip to my boxers, unplug my phone and lie down I remain in bed until school Monday morning.

My life coasts right back into the same routine as before we left for France. The Foreign Language Forensics competition, still a month away, gives Carla the perfect alibi four days a week. School becomes a blur. I go through the motions because none of it matters anymore. I rarely see the need to brush my teeth. I shower only when my parents force me, just to masturbate anyway, I no longer wash my hair or body. Homework and classwork are done on autopilot from years of obligation indoctrinated by nuns. Each day I find a slightly renewed hatred for my life and each time I have an orgasm in the back of her room I hate her exponentially more.

This is me for an entire year. She invents creative ways to fuck me with the ignorant blessing of my parents. Phantom exchange students come to New Jersey that need accompanying, traveling troupes of actors perform at my school, her parents have her best students for dinner, celebratory parties exist for Forensics competitions. All false, all to conceal me and all for the simple purpose of securing me into her bed.

I feel apathy like none I have ever known, my emotions so blunted that I am simply unable to care any less. My parents scold me for typical adolescent offenses, dirty clothes on the floor, leaving my cereal bowl in the sink, overgrown grass. And with each admonition I shrug, I chuckle to myself. Am I really supposed to
care about those oversights with the images that perpetually clog my mind? Pictures of a grown woman obsessed with my penis.