Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (11 page)

“C’est dommage,”
I say, my mouth full of Divorce. I mention the men looking around, the libidinous, headlit bath the Frenchwomen are swimming in.

“The worst thing, though,” says Marguerite, “is when a man walks by you in the street, sizes you up, and says,
‘Pas mal.’ Pas mal!
You feel outraged in a hundred different directions.” She pauses. “For one, you expect a little grade inflation on the streets.”

I laugh in a giddy way. I’ve eaten too much sugar. Marguerite orders water—“Château Chirac”—(a Parisian joke everyone knows, apparently, because it is scarcely acknowledged as a joke). The waiter barely cracks a smile and then goes off
to the kitchen. Château Chirac is no longer funny; it is water; it is what water is called; it is what water is. And it makes me wonder how many things have begun this way, as jokes. Love, adolescence, marriage, life, death; perhaps God is looking down saying, “Geeze, y’all, lighten up. This is
funny
. You’re missing the into
nation
!”

“I can’t give my heart away to anyone but you,” Daniel said to me in the hospital. “Not that I haven’t tried, of course. It’s just that when I do, the other organs start a letter-writing campaign.”

“Don’t be clever,” I said. “Don’t be like that now.”

“What is your favorite painting in all of Paris?” I ask Marguerite. The liter of water has come and we gulp it down. She looks refreshed.

“Let me think,” she says. She names Géricault, van Gogh, Picasso.

“All the
O
s,” I say.

“All the
O
s! Actually, at the d’Orsay, there’s a pastel of Madame Monet, with the ribbons of her hat all untied. That’s probably my favorite. She’s sitting on a bright blue sofa—the most beautiful blue you’ve ever seen—and she is looking straight out of the drawing, as if to say, ‘I married a painter, and I still got this sofa.’ I like that one. Very French.”

“Do you think the Venus de Milo looks like Nicolas Cage?”

“A little,” she says, smiling. “But you’ve got to remember: even with all her handicaps and shyness, she’s lived in Paris; she’s been gazed upon by Parisians for years, so she believes—a belief as good as gold—that she’s absolutely beautiful.”

“Absolutely beautiful?”

“Cute. OK. She thinks she’s
cute
. She thinks she’s so
goddamn
cute.”

“Don’t you hate that? Even in a statue, I just hate that.”

We wander off to other galleries, where Marguerite shows me what she likes: big, broad, energetic paintings. “Sexy ones,” she says.

At a show of collages—tiny, fussy, intricate little cuttings and pastings, ink squiggles, swatches of color—I go from one to the other, slow and fascinated, but Marguerite is bored. She comes up behind me. “See, I don’t really like these,” she says. “They’re not
sexual
.”

I turn and look at her. “See, to
me
, these are totally sexual,” and then we both burst out laughing, our laughs booming in the gallery where others are whispering as if it were church.

“They’re sexual maybe—like a foot fetish is sexual,” says Marguerite.

“Exactly,” I say.
“Exactement.”

Afterward we hike up to Père-Lachaise to look at Jim Morrison’s grave, where there is a constant beer party, and where so many bottle caps have been mashed and pounded into the dirt they have made what looks like a carpet of coins. Over the sound of one badly tuned guitar, strummed by a barefoot German, Marguerite tells me that what she’d really like to do is make films. She knows the film she’d like to make—stories of Algerians in 1962: how they were herded outside Paris in camps; how many of them were killed, disappeared. How even now, on the outskirts of Paris, Africans in bright ski pants work the toxic jobs, the factories and power plants, how Paris is built and running on the backs of these people, on the back of abominable history. The Nazis, well: Everyone knows about the Nazis.

There is no place to put such facts, not properly. There is only one’s own mournful horror, one’s worthless moral vanity—which can do nothing. The bad news of the world, like most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the
bulletin board part of your heart. You say
look
, you say
see
. That is all.

“… So if this production company comes through, that is what I’d like to do, work with some of these documentary people,” says Marguerite, “and make that film.”

“Marguerite,” I say. “That’s great.”
That’s great
. “You must.”

From Horsehearts to Paris, I think, staring at the ceiling. Has anyone even put those two places in the same thought before?

“I’ve been thinking about our genes,” says Daniel, when I ask him how the day’s conference events went. We are in bed, and it’s hard to sleep. There are car alarms, motorcycle alarms, disco noises. A woman in the street below is singing, “Eef I ken mek eat there, all mek eat onywhere, eats op too you, New York, New York.”

“Yes,” I say.

“I mean, maybe it’s all for the best. Besides the Tay-Sachs. Look at the genes. On your side there’s diabetes and bad hearts.”

“And bad blood.”

“That’s right. Bad blood. And on my side there’s, well—”

“There’s arrogance and not listening,” I say.

“Arrogance and not listening.” He laughs in a sighing way. “Did you have a good day with Marguerite? What are you thinking about?” he asks. “Was it fun? Don’t worry. I can have this whole conversation by myself. You can just watch.”

“I really like Marguerite,” I say.

“I know you do.”

I sigh, clutch the covers up under my chin.

“That’s it? That’s all that’s on your mind?”

“Also
Manon Lescaut
,” I say. Last week we saw a production of it at the Bastille.

“
Manon Lescaut
?”

“I’d like to die like that,” I say. “All my jewelry on, and singing about madness.”

“You would?”

“With all my jewelry on? Sure.” Probably, in real life, I would die in a bathrobe, the telephone cradled in my neck.

“Do I know you?” asks Daniel. “You don’t even wear jewelry.”

“Yes, I do.”

“A watch. You wear a watch. Lots of lipstick and a watch.”

“It’s a nice watch.”

“It’s gorgeous,” Daniel says now sleepily. The air in our room is damp from the rains; it has turned my hair strumpety and full, but has made Daniel’s skin moist and pale, color in his cheeks coming only in the day, outside, in the hurried pace to and from drier destinations. He seems delicate and young beside me.

I keep talking. “You know,
that’s
one thing Manon wasn’t wearing: a watch. You don’t see a lot of watch wearing in the soprano world. Have you ever noticed that? Tosca? No watch. Madame Butterfly? Again, no watch.”

He is no longer paying attention, but it doesn’t stop me. We have traded places. “If in
La Bohème
you gave everyone wristwatches, you’d have a happy ending.”

“You would?”

“Sure,” I say. “You wouldn’t have that guy singing about his coat. He’d look at his watch and go ‘Yikes!’ ”

“Now that’s what I’d like to hear. A nice aria with the word ‘yikes’ in it.”

Daniel has never really liked opera. “What I like is philosophy,” he said to me once. “Philosophy’s great. Except I don’t like the whole Existence thing.
Do we exist?
That really pisses me off. But I like Good and Evil. I like What is Art. But just a little of What is Art. If you get too much it circles back around again to
Do we exist?
, which pisses me off.”

“I’m not really looking forward to going home,” I say now.

“Really?”

“I feel disconnected these days, in the house, in town. The neighbors say, ‘Hello, how are you?,’ and sometimes I say, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little empty today. How about you?’ ”

“You should get a puppy,” he says sleepily.

“A puppy?”

“Yeah. It’s not like the cat. A puppy you can take for walks around the neighborhood, and people will stop and smile and say, ‘Ooooh, look—What’s
wrong
with your puppy?’ ”

“What
is
wrong with my puppy?”

“Worms, I think. I don’t know. You should have taken him to the vet’s weeks ago.”

“You’re so mean.”

“I’m sorry I’m not what you bargained for,” Daniel murmurs.

I stop and think about this. “Well, I’m not what you bargained for, either, so we’re even.”

“No,” he says faintly, “you are. You’re what I bargained for.”

But then he has fallen over the cliff of sleep and is snoring, his adenoids a kind of engine in his face, a motorized unit, a security system like a white flag going up.

THE FIRST
few days of July Isabelle began to show up at odd times and just stand at my cash register, watching. She would do this for five minutes, then leave, go back to her office.

It was making me nervous. The park was crowded. The lines were long. I had stopped doing any money, except, well, once in a while, when Sils and I would decide to go out to dinner someplace fancy—the Lafayette Café, the General Montcalm Inn—where we would order surf ’n’ turf and stingers and baked potatoes with sour cream.

Then, the second weekend of the month, something happened in the park, and Isabelle seemed briefly to have disappeared with her new concerns: the Lost Mine crashed.

The Lost Mine was a roller-coaster-style ride through a
dark tunnel up in the Frontier Village part of the park: lighted mannequins dressed as old miners made snarling robotic noises as the little five-car train you were in zipped by them. I had taken the ride twice that summer: once early on, with Sils, and then another time, only just the week before, by myself, on a break, what the heck. You weren’t really supposed to do that, as an employee, but mostly no one was watching, and the guys running the rides didn’t care. I don’t really know what the thematic point of the ride was except to plunge you into darkness alongside a narrative involving people who had gotten lost in that same darkness, stuck there in time: If you entered the Lost Mine (all that was Mine is Lost!), you, too, could become a trapped ghost, the worst kind of ghost, though of course the most common. Somehow I liked it. It made me feel that I was availing myself of whatever excitement there was in the world.

At dusk on the seventh of July one of the cars derailed inside the mine. From the main gate I first heard the dull banging sound, and five minutes later one of the other cashiers came rushing back from her break to tell me. “The Lost Mine!” she gasped. I took my break right then, emptied the drawer into the box, locked the register, and lugged my money box, went up there, along the Jack and Jill path, arriving in time to see a flashing ambulance in front of the entrance to the ride, long streaks of blood being hosed out of the wrecked train by the grounds crew, and the owner—the legendary Frank Morenton himself—standing there in his white hair and white shoes, his presence startling in the deepening dusk. He was quietly writing someone a check.

The small crowd that had gathered was being asked by some of the cowboys (the ones who staged the bank robbery every noon, the romance of theft and sun, how I knew it!) to disperse, please. Everything was fine, they said firmly, bowlegged
in their chaps, their hats pushed to the very back of their heads. Everything was under control. One of the cowboys was Markie Russo, the one who’d had a crush on Sils last year.

Since I had five minutes left to my break, I went and lay on the grassy hill near the Shoot-Out Corral, where there were pony rides for the children. Cashiers were not supposed to sprawl about on the grounds like that, wander into sections where they were out of context, out of character, but once in a while you could get away with it. You could saunter aimlessly into the wrong story—a situation that, in real life, I thought, actually happened all the time. There was Randi, as Little Bo Peep, constantly going over to Jungle Safari to talk to a boy there she liked. There was Sils, who one day had to flee the palace grounds to mooch a cigarette from Alice in Wonderland. And there was me: I got to take this money box wherever I went; I got to hang out with Sils, and change in the ladies’ locker room; I briefly got to feel that all that mattered was here and now in Horsehearts, though I was a worrier, a candy eater, a getter of canker sores.

I turned my head to read the fake western gravestones that had been placed on this side of the hill at angles calculated for a look of decrepitude. I could make out only one of the inscriptions:
Leadfoot Fred. Danced too slow and now he’s dead
. Over the lake, days late, fireworks began—no doubt, as a distraction. (Pay no attention to that catastrophe in Frontier Village!) I watched as they exploded in the navy blue sky: a star, a heart, electric sea creatures, glittery bell skirts, garnet tarantulas—the delayed boom of each like something witty, and the whistling, zigzag ones so much like the surface of war that they scared me. Perhaps someone had really died. I grabbed up the money box, and headed back to my register.

The next day there was no word of the bloody Lost Mine
crash in the local Horsehearts paper, and not the next day, either, though the rumor among the ride operators was that a boy had lost his legs. “Morenton wrote the parents a check for a million dollars,” Randi whispered to me at lunch, and I began to understand—again, anew—the cleansing power of money. By the end of a week the Lost Mine was functioning again, and the accident existed only as a persistent rumor, and then by the end of the month a less persistent one, and then a story, as if from long ago.

On my day off, in the afternoon, I went to Sils’s house, the place athrob with her brothers’ band in the basement, the drums and electric guitars vibrating the windows and screens. Just back from Canada, her brother Kevin, tall with bristly, ochre hair, came up from the basement, to look at the kitchen clock and take a pill. (“He times his drugs,” Sils had said. “Maybe that’s good.”) He saw me at the screen door and sauntered over. He was wearing blue-tinted wire rims and a paisley vest with no shirt underneath. He was potbellied, and his skin was white, amphibious, strange with swirls of hair.