How to Behave in a Crowd Page 13

  I said everyone was.

  “Your sister is depressed,” Berenice said. “Tell her she did real good, Dory. You’re the only person whose opinion matters to any of us anyway.”

  That was a lie, of course, but not the mean kind, just the kind you tell small children to make them believe their existence isn’t entirely meaningless.

  “You were great,” I said to Aurore. “I’m very proud of you.”

  “I was depressed after my own defense too,” Berenice said, and she gave Aurore a real cigarette. “It was the best day of my life. It’s only natural everything should look dreary after that.”

  Aurore lit the regular cigarette while she was still smoking the pink one. She looked like a walrus who’d just broken a tusk.

  “Ohri and Martin and Sanchez can’t stomach each other,” I said, to change the subject.

  Aurore dragged on her two cigarettes at once.

  “It’ll suck for them when they figure out they really are the same person,” she said.

  “But nothing says you can’t start another PhD,” Berenice said.

  “Why in the world would I want to do that?” Aurore said.

  “ ’Cause being a student is the best?”

  “Ohri goes around telling people you used to date,” I told Berenice.

  “Which one is Ohri again?”

  “The Japanese one.”

  “Oh. Of course. That’s pretty funny,” Berenice said, but she didn’t seem too interested, or actually amused. She turned back to Aurore and resumed her talk about multiple PhD getting. I interrupted her right away.

  “But you don’t mind him lying to everybody?”

  “Who, Ohri? Why?”

  “I don’t know, your reputation?”

  “If telling everyone he used to date me helps him bear himself, what do I care? It’s not like I’ll ever have to talk to anyone who listens to his crap anyway.”

  “Well I just listened to his crap,” I said. “I live here. And I don’t like people lying about you like that.”

  Berenice looked at my face, but not directly into my eyes, and pushed smoke through her nostrils very slowly.

  “Did he tell you why we broke up? In his story?”

  She was only pretending to care, but that wasn’t as different from actually caring as people liked to claim, so I didn’t pick up on it.

  “He only said his fiancée was very jealous of his exes, and you were an example.”

  “What a prick,” Berenice said. “I hope she leaves him for one of the other two.”

  “Who’s his fiancée?” Aurore asked.

  “You think I should go talk to him?” Berenice said.

  “Talking to him would only add verisimilitude to his bullshit,” Aurore said.

  “Maybe Dory should just steal his girlfriend.”

  “Maybe you should steal his girlfriend,” Aurore told Berenice, and they both laughed and said eww.

  “It probably wouldn’t be that hard. Beneath every jealous woman is a lesbian who has yet to realize she’s a lesbian,” Aurore said.

  “Is that so?” I asked. I’d heard someone say Sara Catalano was very jealous.

  “No, Dory, don’t listen to me,” Aurore said. “I don’t know shit about anything that doesn’t directly relate to what I talked about today.”

  She gulped the last of her plastic cup and started crying. I went inside to get her more wine.

  I never read Aurore’s dissertation to my mother. The night of the defense, she decided it was time I stopped sneaking into her bedroom to read her to sleep. She said I was getting too old for this, but I thought she was just tired of trying to understand what her children were working on. Or maybe it was my braces and the gooey stuff I had to put on them. Maybe my reading voice was too wet or something. Maybe she didn’t want to tell me that’s what it was because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

  Berenice went back to Paris a couple of days after Aurore’s defense, pretending she had a good job to get back to. Aurore stayed in bed for a month but insisted she wasn’t depressed. She just needed time to think. When I’d go in her room to see how her thinking was going (we all visited her in turns), she’d be lying completely dressed atop her blankets and staring at the ceiling, or through the window, her hands perfectly still on her stomach, feet crossed at the ankles. I knew that when she went to Aurore’s bed, Simone told stories of her own making, and that Leonard brought her the latest news from the world of Thucydides studies. I didn’t know what Jeremie talked to her about. No sound ever came from Aurore’s bedroom during Jeremie’s shift. I didn’t tell her much either. I mostly just stared in whatever direction she was already staring and if something appeared in our field of vision (a spider, rain), I would make a comment on it. One day, I passed by Aurore’s door while my mother was in and I heard my mother say, “You worry too much, honey. Everything is going to be fine. You’ve always worried and it’s always been fine.”

  “Exactly,” Aurore replied. “That’s exactly why I need to keep worrying.”

  I didn’t understand how they could agree that everything had always been fine.

  Sometime around the end of her second week of thinking in bed, Aurore asked me for a strawberry-pistachio sponge cake from Moiroud’s and I thought she was cured. It was her favorite thing in the world, this cake, but even though Moiroud’s was just a couple blocks away, she only allowed herself to have it on special occasions. When I came back with it, she didn’t even sit up, just put the box with the cake on her chest, cut through the cake with a fork, and brought the piece to her mouth without lifting her head.

  “It’s no good to eat lying down,” I said.

  Aurore didn’t budge and brought another forkful to her mouth. Her swallowing seemed to trigger the vespers bells, which started ringing in the distance. We didn’t hear them every day. The wind had to be blowing sounds a certain way. It always made me weirdly happy and nostalgic to hear the vespers bells, like I was in a movie, but I tried not to let on, because Simone had caught me listening to them at our window once and started singing horrible historical facts about the Catholic Church along with the joyful melodies. The lyrics had stuck in my head for a long time.

  “You don’t think it’s weird that I’ve never had a boyfriend?” Aurore asked me.

  “Well…you’ve been pretty busy,” I said. “With the PhD and all.”

  “No, but don’t you think it’s weird that I don’t really want one now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Simone doesn’t want a boyfriend either.”

  “Simone is a child,” Aurore said.

  “She’s got her period already,” I said.

  Aurore sat up and put the box with the rest of the cake in it on her nightstand. She lit a cigarette and seemed to listen to the bells for a second. I thought maybe she was trying to tell me something important and I wanted to make it as easy as possible for her.

  “Is it because you want a girlfriend, maybe?” I asked.

  “No,” Aurore said, and it wasn’t a disgusted or dismissive no, but one that implied she’d given some thought to that, too. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not interested in sex. I think I am. I do have erotic dreams and all, and it feels nice, but then when I’m awake, I never want to try the actual thing. It barely ever crosses my mind.”

  The bells sounded like a mix of “Frère Jacques” and “Auld Lang Syne.”

  “And the erotic dreams I have, they’re always about guys I don’t want to have erotic dreams about,” Aurore said.

  “I always dream about the wrong people too,” I said. I knew exactly what she meant. “I have dreams about Denise Galet all the time when I’m really in love with Sara Catalano.”

  Aurore ashed in the box, careful to avoid what was left of the cake.

  “I don’t know about that Denise chick,” she said, “but Sara Catalano is a dumb bitch, Dory. The last one in a long line of dumb bitches.”

  “I didn’
t know you had an opinion on her,” I said.

  “I have an opinion on everyone who seems to have a good time being a teenager.”

  “Well, maybe you’d like Denise then,” I said. “She’s suicidal.”

  Aurore smiled and said I was funny, which wasn’t something I heard much. People usually told me I was sweet, but it seemed to worry them, or at least make them a little sad for me. Funny, though, was always a compliment 100 percent.

  “I’m not joking,” I said. “She really is suicidal.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Aurore said. “Funny is not just for jokes. It’s the way you said she was suicidal that was funny. The timing.”

  The bells stopped. I asked Aurore if she wanted advice on sex.

  “What would you know about it? Would I get a description of your erotic dreams with the suicidal girl? Thank you, sweetheart, but I think I’ll pass.”

  “I had sex last month,” I said.

  Aurore took the cake box back from her nightstand and put it on her knees. She was still smoking and she started alternating puffs and cake bites slowly. The box had uncovered an ugly flyer on her nightstand advertising a conference titled “Aristophanes/Plautus: Confrontations.”

  “Are you gonna go?” I asked, grabbing the flyer.

  “What are you talking about? How old are you?”

  “Thirteen,” I said.

  “How can you have had sex already?”

  “A girl offered. So that I could be done overthinking it,” I said.

  “Were you overthinking it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “But I sure was thinking about it some.”

  “Leonard and Jeremie were planning on talking to you about all that stuff soon. Sex. I guess they’re way behind on their appraisal of your puberty.”

  “They were planning to talk to me? Leonard and Jeremie never talk to me.”

  “I’m sure they will want to now,” Aurore said.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  She wouldn’t confirm.

  “When did it start snowing?” she said. “I stare out this window all day long. I look away for one second and it starts snowing. What’s wrong with me?”

  “Because you missed the beginning of a snowfall something’s wrong with you?”

  “It never snows,” she said.

  I was under the impression Aurore was okay with missing out on stuff, having barely left the house the past few years.

  “I’m sorry I made you miss it,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything for a while and I looked at the flyer about Aristophanes and Plautus. It listed the talks people would give on the matter over the course of a three-day symposium. It all sounded pretty abstract except for the last part, which was titled “How to End a Comedy.”

  “Do you want me to leave you alone?” I said.

  “Has it been an hour? You usually stay with me for an hour.”

  “It’s been an hour if you count me going out to get the cake at Moiroud’s. Otherwise, it’s only been forty minutes or so. But I can stay for as long as you want.”

  “Then stay,” Aurore said, and she lay back down in the position she was usually in during my visits, her gaze back on the window.

  “What does Jeremie talk to you about when he comes in?” I asked.

  “He mostly just hums,” Aurore said.

  “And you like it?”

  “What are you gonna do? He hums. It’s his thing.”

  “He’s been composing new things? I don’t hear him play piano or his cello much lately.”

  “He’s been trying to compose without instruments.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why, Dory. People are strange.”

  You could tell the snow wouldn’t stick. By the time the flakes reached the bottom of the window frame, they’d turned to water.

  “Did you wear a condom? When you fucked that girl?”

  “No,” I said. “You think I could’ve given her a disease?”

  I thought it was always the men who gave the diseases.

  “Of course not, dummy, you were a virgin. Maybe she gave you something though. You should really wear rubbers next time.”

  “I don’t know that there’ll be a next time.”

  “You don’t have to say that just because you feel sorry for me,” Aurore said.

  “I was just saying, now that I have braces, I doubt anyone will want to be my girlfriend.”

  “Braces are the worst. I have nightmares I still have them on at least once a week,” Aurore said, and then she sighed and pronounced her next sentence within the sigh. “Maybe I should just embrace it and come out as France’s oldest virgin or something. Get together with Daphné Marlotte and form the saddest duet. We’ll do a double act, throw a joint party each year, about her still being alive and me still having not yet fucked anyone.”

  “You’re not the oldest virgin in France,” I said.

  “I’m twenty-four. That’s pretty old.”

  “Do you need sex advice?” I offered again.

  “No offense, Dory, but I suspect you didn’t perform too well that one time.”

  Aurore had the sweetest face in the family, and even when she tried to be harsh, it didn’t work as well as with the others. The efforts she had to make to have her features twist in a vaguely mean expression, it looked painful—you ended up feeling sorrier for her than for yourself.

  “At this stage, I should probably seek advice from a professional anyway,” Aurore said.

  “Like, a prostitute?”

  “No, more like a sex counselor. But I guess you actually need to have had sex before you go see a sex counselor. Aren’t they just for couples?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “In the movies they are. Maybe you can just go in with a friend and pretend you’re a couple.”

  “What friend?” Aurore said.

  “Good point,” I said.

  Aurore closed her eyes.

  “I only went into this because I wanted to know everything,” she said, “to be able to answer every question on the spot, you know? Like these old people on Questions pour un Champion? But now…not only do I know about a very limited field, but even there, there doesn’t seem to be a simple answer to anything anymore. I believe I got smarter, but also slower, somehow. Any question now, I need days and days to think about it. I don’t understand what happened.” This seemed to be the most confusing thing Aurore had ever been faced with. “There should be a postdoctoral program to teach you how to resume a normal life,” she went on. “Or a whole PhD program. ‘Life Experience Studies,’ or something. The student would have to gather a bibliography on the kind of life he’d like to pursue, and his professors would orient him toward potential life partners—both friends and lovers—according to his research interests. Maybe the first forty wouldn’t work out, but then the student would get to talk with his adviser about what went wrong, and the adviser would help him back on the right track, so as not to spend too much time trying to fix something that won’t work. I mean, people say that to acquire life experience you have to actually live and have experiences, but there must be another way, right? It can’t be that any experience is valuable.”

  “There are dating websites,” I said.

  “But I need guidance. The Internet assumes you know exactly what you’re looking for. I don’t know what I’m looking for, even less where to look for it. I need to be educated in recognizing what my life should be like now. Why do we stop having professors after a PhD?”

  “I think it’s because at some point you have to become your own professor,” I said.

  I knew Aurore would hate me for saying something like that, but she spent her life hiding from self-help statements and support systems and feel-good movies: someone had to give her the cheese-ball motivational lines by surprise.

  “The only way to get educated is to talk to people who are smarter than you. Period. One can’t be one’s own professor of something one has no idea how to think about,”
she said. “There’s a contradiction in terms here.”

  “Not more than in a doctoral program that would teach you how to live outside of academia,” I said.

  “I guess you’ve got a point,” Aurore conceded, and she didn’t make it sound like it was a big deal, but it was the first point she’d ever granted me.

  The Funnel

  On the first day after winter break, at recess, Denise met me in the staircase. We still didn’t know what was behind the door at the top of the stairs, but by that point I’d given up on even checking the lock. I didn’t even go all the way up anymore and had taken to sitting at the bottom of the stairs, to be closer to where Denise would be.

  I asked her how her Christmas went, what gifts she’d gotten, but she said she didn’t want to talk about it, as if something horrible had happened, except I was pretty sure nothing horrible had happened to Denise over Christmas break other than being at home with her parents—whom she thought were stupid, who maybe were (she complained they often wore matching T-shirts stating their star signs)—and being forced to eat more than she wanted.

  “Isn’t there one thing you like about Christmas?” I asked her. “One food?”

  “As far as meals go, I only tolerate breakfast,” Denise said, which would’ve been understandable if she’d been talking about a real breakfast with lots of bread and butter, but I knew she meant fruit and eggs. I knew that was all Denise ate, and that she would only eat it in the mornings, sometimes for lunch if she really had to, but she didn’t understand dinner. Dinner was for her the most useless thing because she said we didn’t need energy before bed. I didn’t know how anyone could elect not to have dinner. I sometimes thought dinner had in fact only been invented to give people a reason to go through the day.

  “I don’t know what I would do with myself at night if dinner didn’t exist,” I said.

  “That’s because you’ve been raised with dinner as a convention. And you’re a conformist. All children are.”

  I took this as an insult but then I realized taking the word conformist as an insult was the most conformist reaction and so I let it slide.

  “Did you watch the New Year’s TV movie this year? On Channel One?” Denise asked.