When You Are Engulfed in Flames

  “Who do you suppose those belong to?” I asked the woman across the road, and she pulled an unusually sour face, and said, “Who do you think?”

  I’d imagined that, like his wife and stepdaughter, Jackie would move away and start over, but it seemed he had no place to go and no money to go there with. After hanging out his socks, he picked up his rake and hoe and started getting his lawn in shape. It was strange. Were an American sex offender to return home, there’d be a big to-do. Here, though, it was all very quiet. No meeting was held that I was aware of, but somehow or other it was agreed that no one would look at or speak to this man. He would be treated as if he were invisible, and, with luck, the isolation would drive him away.

  He’d been back in his hut for a week or so when I walked by and saw him inside his front gate, worrying something with the tip of his cane. Jackie had always been kind to me, so when he looked up and said hello I employed one of the formalities I’d learned years earlier in French class. “I am content to see you again,” I said. Then I shook his hand.

  “What did you do that for?” Hugh asked later, and I said, “Well, what could I do? Someone says hello and sticks his hand out, and you’re just supposed to walk away?”

  “If he’s a child molester, yes,” he said. But I’d like to see what he would have done in the same situation.

  A few years later, after Jackie died of cancer, and the garden he so carefully tended had turned to weeds, I gave the baccalaureate address at a certain American university. When the speech was finished, I joined a procession of deans and distinguished fellows back to the president’s house, and it was there that a well-known politician approached and extended his hand, saying, “I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” Now, this politician — it’s not that I simply disagree with him. I despise him. I loathe him. My friends and I, the way we throw his name around, you’d think we were talking about the Devil himself. Spittle forms in the corners of our mouth as we denounce him, his party, and the people we refer to as his henchmen and cronies.

  I hadn’t known that this politician was going to be in the procession that day; rather, I turned around and there he was, the two of us dressed in flowing robes, like wizards.

  “I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” So did I place a pox upon him? Did I spit in his face, or even turn my back?

  Of course not. With everyone watching, I looked up, and said, “Oh. Thank you.” And because he had held out his hand I took it, just as I had taken Jackie’s after his release from prison.

  I said to Hugh after the graduation, “But I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Sure, I said, ‘Oh’ and ‘Thank you,’ but anyone who knows me would know that I was faking it, that I didn’t really mean the ‘thank you’ part.”

  “Well,” Hugh said, “I guess you showed him.”

  Had the politician been my neighbor, I might have moved. That’s how disgusted I would have felt, but Jackie, because of the metal plate in his head, because you could put a magnet to his temple and it would stay there, aroused pity rather than anger, or at least he did in me. I didn’t go out of my way to pass his hut, but neither did I go out of my way to avoid passing it. If he was in the yard, he’d say hello and I would say hello back, or “Yes, it certainly is warm,” or whatever answer seemed called for. And in this way — a word here, a wave there — little by little the summer advanced, and Jackie came to see the two of us as friends. One afternoon he invited me inside his front gate to show me the tomatoes he’d planted.

  “Well,” and I looked to see if any of our neighbors were watching. No one was, so I opened the latch, saying, “OK, sure.”

  During the years that he had been away, Jackie’s hair had gone from brown to gray. His eyes were flat and more heavily shadowed, and what had once been a pronounced limp had grown more subtle. It seemed that while in prison he had had a hip replaced, and the way he walked now was miles better than it had been before the operation. “Hey,” he said, and he gestured behind him in the direction of his open front door. “Do you . . . want to come in and look at my X-rays?”

  As I later said to Hugh, “Do you tell a person, ‘No. I don’t want to see pictures of your insides’? Of course not. How can you?”

  The hut was a lot cozier than I’d imagined it. In the kitchen were the same sorts of things you’d find in the homes of any of our neighbors: a postal calendar picturing a kitten, a hanging copper saucepan turned into a clock, souvenir salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of castles and peasants and wooden shoes. The room was tight and clean and smelled of watermelon-scented dish detergent. From the kitchen, I could see the bedroom, and rows of medications neatly arranged on the dresser. Little radio. Little TV. Little easy chair. It was like a troll’s house.

  Jackie’s X-rays were as large as bath mats, and he washed and dried his hands before removing them from their separate envelopes and presenting them to me. When handed a photograph of someone’s wife or children, I know how to form the appropriate compliment. “How pretty!” I can say. Or “How like you.” “What nice eyes.” “What a pleasant smile.” Hip replacement presented more of a challenge, and I alternated between “I like the pin” and, simply, “Ouch.” On or about the fifth X-ray, I looked through a clear patch of plastic, past the front yard, and into the hills on the opposite side of the road, where another of our neighbors grazes his sheep. The flock had been shorn earlier that day, and those in view seemed oddly aware of how dumpy and vulnerable they looked.

  “I have to go,” I said, and in the way of good neighbors the world over, Jackie said, “Stay, why don’t you? I was just going to make some coffee.”

  A few weeks after that, he invited me in to look at his government-issued ID card.

  “Oh, I don’t want to put you out.”

  “Not at all,” he said, and two minutes later I found myself back at his kitchen table. The ID was in a bright plastic folder, the sort of thing that a young girl might carry. On the cover was a cartoon pony having his mane braided by a troop of friendly ladybugs.

  I think I said, “All right, then.” Jackie opened the folder and withdrew his identity card, a small color photograph attached by grommets to a stiff piece of paper. As when looking at the X-rays, I didn’t know quite what to say. His birth date, his height, the color of his eyes. He was obviously proud of something, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “See,” he said. “Right here. Look.” He pointed to the corner, and I saw that the government had classified him as a “grand mutilated” person. The “grand” business was new to me, but the other part was familiar from riding the Paris buses. “These seats are reserved for the elderly and for those who have been mutilated in the war,” the signs used to read. It’s a much stronger word than “wounded” or “handicapped,” and I imagine that, if we used it in the United States, enlistment in the volunteer army would fall by at least half.

  As a grand mutilated person, Jackie was entitled to a discount on all train travel. “With the metal plate, I got fifty percent off, but now, with the hip replacement, it’s gone up to seventy-five,” he told me. “Both for me and the person I’m traveling with. Seventy-five percent off!”

  I handed him back his ID card. “Those are some real savings.”

  “You know,” he said, “we should maybe take a trip together. Over to Brittany, down to Marseilles — wherever we wanted.”

  It took a moment for his “we” to register, and another moment to come up with a fitting response. “That would be . . . something,” I finally said, thinking later that at least I didn’t lie. “Where’s David?” the neighbors might ask. And Hugh could say, “Oh, he and Jackie are off on vacation. You know how those two are, give them seventy-five percent off on their tickets, and the sky’s the limit.”

  It was only after I left the house that I started feeling insulted. What made Jackie think that I’d want to travel with him? Could he possibly have believed I’d be swayed by the discount, or did he think, the way certain people might, that
the two of us belonged together, the homosexual and the child molester being cousins of sorts, like ostriches and emus. I’m usually not paranoid about this kind of thing, but in a small village, you sometimes have to wonder. Why had the neighbors to our immediate left, a truck driver and his family, never said anything more than hello to us — this after years of living next door. Then there was the man two houses down, who stopped me one afternoon and asked where I slept. “I’ve been in that place of yours, and there’s only one bedroom,” he said. This is the same man who chained a goat to a tree in his backyard and let it starve to death, so in his case it was probably the craziness talking. Just as with Jackie it was the loneliness. I usually passed his hut every other day, but after the incident with his ID card I cut it back to twice a week, and then to once a week. Late that August, I traveled to Scotland, and on my return an irritated Hugh collected me at the train station. “What’s eating you?” I asked, and he gunned the engine, saying, “Ask your little friend.”

  What happened was that Jackie had come looking for me. He’d knocked on our door while I was out of town and asked in his loud country voice if David could come out and play. Those weren’t his exact words, but according to Hugh they might as well have been. Not everyone saw the child molester calling my name on our front steps, but the ones who did were pretty well connected, and it took no time at all for the story to spread.

  From that day on, I always wore headphones when walking past Jackie’s hut. He may have called out to me, but I neither heard him nor raised my head to look in his direction. And it went on this way for three years, until I sort of forgot about him. We didn’t speak again until after he’d gotten his diagnosis. The cancer, I’d heard, was in his esophagus, and its progress was swift and merciless. In a matter of months, he was carved down to nothing, face all gaunt, pants held up with a short length of rope. I saw him on his front stoop a week before he died, and when I waved he beckoned me inside the gate, and we shook hands one last time. I found myself wondering if the cancer had upped his train discount, bumped it from seventy-five percent to something even higher, but it’s a hard question to ask when you’re not fluent. And I wouldn’t have wanted him to take it the wrong way.

  Of Mice and Men

  I’ve always admired people who can enter a conversation without overtaking it. My friend Evelyn, for instance. “Hello, so nice to meet you,” and then she just accepts things as they come. If her new acquaintance wants to talk about plants, she might mention a few of her own, never boastfully, but with a pleasant tone of surprise, as if her parlor palm and the other person’s had coincidentally attended the same high school. The secret to her social success is that she’s genuinely interested — not in all subjects, maybe, but definitely in all people. I like to think that I share this quality, but when it comes to meeting strangers, I tend to get nervous and rely on a stash of pre-prepared stories. Sometimes they’re based on observation or hearsay, but just as often they’re taken from the newspaper: An article about a depressed Delaware woman who hung herself from a tree on October 29 and was mistaken for a Halloween decoration. The fact that it’s illegal to offer a monkey a cigarette in the state of New Jersey. Each is tragic in its own particular way, and leaves the listener with a bold mental picture: Here is a dead woman dangling against a backdrop of scarlet leaves. Here is a zookeeper with an open pack of Marlboros. “Go ahead,” he whispers. “Take one.”

  Then there was the story mailed to me by a stranger in New England, who’d clipped it from his local paper. It concerned an eighty-one-year-old Vermont man whose home was overrun by mice. The actual house was not described, but in my mind it was two stories tall and isolated on a country road. I also decided that it was painted white — not that it mattered so much, I just thought it was a nice touch. So the retired guy’s house was overrun, and when he could no longer bear it, he fumigated. The mice fled into the yard and settled into a pile of dead leaves, which no doubt crackled beneath their weight. Thinking that he had them trapped, the man set the pile on fire, then watched as a single flaming mouse raced back into the basement and burned the house to the ground.

  The newspaper clipping arrived in the spring of 2006, just as I was preparing to leave for the United States. There were clothes to be ironed and papers to sort, but before doing anything, I wrote the New Englander a thank-you note and said that the article had moved me in unexpected ways. I did not mention that I planned to get a lot of mileage out of it, but that was my hope, for how could you go wrong with such a story? It was, to my mind, perfect, and I couldn’t wait to wedge it into whatever conversation presented itself. “Talk about eighty-one-year-olds . . . ,” I imagined myself saying.

  Six months earlier, my icebreaker concerned a stripper who became a quadriplegic and eventually had her vagina eaten away by bedsores, not the easiest thing to wrangle into a conversation. But if I could pull that off, I figured that a burning mouse should pose no problem.

  My first chance came in New York, when I took a cab from JFK to my hotel in the West Eighties. The driver was ten to fifteen years older than I, American born, with a shaved head. There are certainly men who can pull this off, but this fellow looked like someone had taken to him with a hammer — maybe not recently, there was no blood or bruising, just a heck of a lot of lumps. The two of us got to talking, and after telling him that I lived in Paris, and listening to his subsequent remarks about what snobs and cowards the French are, I found my entrée. “Speaking of rats, or things in that general family . . .”

  I thought I did a pretty good job, but when the story was finished, instead of being amazed, the cabdriver said, “So then what happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, did the guy get insurance money? Was he able to save some of his stuff?”

  How to explain that this wasn’t really about the homeowner. He figured, of course, but the lasting image is of the flaming mouse, this determined little torch, shooting back into the house and burning it to the ground. What happened after that is unimportant. That’s why the newspaper left it out.

  I covered these points as cheerfully as possible, and the cabdriver responded with a T-shirt slogan. “Only in New York.”

  “But it didn’t happen in New York,” I said. “Weren’t you listening? It happened in Vermont, out in the country, where people have houses and piles of leaves in their yards.”

  The man shrugged. “Well, it could have happened here.”

  “But it didn’t,” I told him.

  “Well, you never know.”

  That’s when I thought, OK, Lumpy, you just lost yourself a tip. The French business I was willing to overlook, but “Only in New York” and “It could have happened here” just cost you five dollars, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  Of course I did give him a tip, I always do. But before handing it over, I tore the bill practically in half. Passive aggression, I guess you’d call it.

  I’d come to America for a lecture tour — that’s what they’re called, but really I just read out loud. My first date was in New Jersey, and because I don’t drive the theater sent a town car, which met me in front of my hotel. Behind its wheel was a black chauffeur who wore a suit and tie and introduced himself as Mr. Davis. The man was in his early seventies, and as he lowered his visor against the setting sun, I noticed his fingernails, which were long and tapered and covered with clear polish. Above each knuckle shone a ring, and on his wrist, in addition to a watch, there hung a delicate gold chain.

  I meant to plow right into my mouse story, but before I could begin, Mr. Davis started in on what he termed “the traffic situation vis-à-vis liquidity.” His tone was finicky, and rather than speaking normally he tended to intone, like God addressing Moses through the clouds, only gay. After telling me that people were fools to drive in Manhattan, he looked into the surrounding cars and slandered his competition. The woman beside us was a boob. The man in front, a chucklehead. Dimwits, dopes, dummies, and dunces: it was like he had a th
esaurus on his lap and was delivering the entries in alphabetical order. He criticized a cabdriver for talking on a cell phone, and then he pulled out one of his own and left an angry message with his dispatcher, who should have known better than to send him out in this mess.

  For blocks on end, Mr. Davis fumed and muttered, this until we came to Canal Street, where he pointed to a gap in the downtown skyline. “See that,” he said. “That is where the World Trade Center used to be.”

  Out of politeness, I pretended that this information was new to me. “What do you know!”

  Mr. Davis stared south and brushed a bit of lint off his shoulder. “Eleven September, two thousand and one. I was present on that fateful morning and will never forget it as long as I live.”

  I leaned forward in my seat. “What was it like?”

  “Loud,” Mr. Davis said.

  One would expect a few more details, but none was offered, and so I moved on and asked what he had been doing there.

  “Had myself a meeting with an import-export company,” he told me. “That was my profession back then, but 9/11 killed all that. You can’t ship anything now, leastwise you can’t make any money at it.”

  I asked what he imported, and when he answered “You name it,” I looked into the window of the adjacent car.

  “Umm. Little stuffed animals?”

  “I moved some of those,” he said. “But the name of my game was mostly clothes, them and electronics.”

  “So did you travel a lot?”

  “Everywhere,” he told me. “Saw the world and then some.”

  “Did you ever go to China?”

  He said that he had been more times than he could count, and when I asked what he had seen, he rolled forward a few inches. “Lots of people eating rice, mainly from bowls.”