How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  After he left, thanking us for a lovely evening, Simone noted it had been a while since we’d had a condescension fest. I felt I’d been at the center of that particular one.

  “Dory really is to thank for tonight’s entertainment,” my mother said.

  “How did you meet that guy?” Aurore asked.

  “My guess is through the magic of the Internet.” My mother was staring at me. “Am I right, Dory?”

  “He looked smarter in his profile picture,” I said in my defense.

  “I believe you were fooled by the white hair,” Simone said.

  “By the way,” my mother asked me, “how old do you think I am exactly?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “That guy was like seventy years old.”

  “He looked like Alfred Stieglitz,” Aurore noted.

  “You should’ve told him that.”

  “And spelled the name out for him.”

  I apologized again.

  “It’s all right, honey. At least your brothers and sisters had fun.”

  That night, my Internet privileges were revoked indefinitely.

  On Sundays, I got bored. Not the way Simone used to get bored as a child (because there was no school on Sundays) but because Sundays made it even more obvious that everyone in our house was capable of finding ways to entertain themselves but me. Years earlier, our mother had tried to get us interested in gardening. She’d failed instantly with my siblings, whereas I’d planted tomatoes to make her happy. “Tomatoes are easy,” she’d said, but nothing had ever come out of the ground. I’d never attempted planting anything again, but I’d maintained the habit of checking the yard on Sunday mornings. I picked up dead leaves, mowed the lawn. I didn’t mow the lawn much, actually. It was hard work, and no one noticed or cared whether I did it or not, but I looked at how much the lawn had grown over the course of a week. Because our yard was the barest one in the neighborhood, save for the cherry tree, which could sustain itself without human help, my weekly inspection was not much more exciting than the indoors boredom I was fleeing. It was equally boring, in fact, but the silence of the yard was less heavy than the one in our house. There was hope it could be broken.

  Our yard looked out on a paved alley and then across it onto another yard, in which all sorts of vegetables and flowers grew. The reason I only hung out in our yard on Sunday mornings and not in the afternoons was that I knew the owner of that perfect yard tended to it on Sunday afternoons, and I didn’t want him to see me and be sad for me for having a yard that sucked. I didn’t care that it sucked, and there’s nothing worse than people pitying you for things you don’t even yourself consider upsetting.

  There wasn’t a lot of traffic in the alley but to some people it was a shortcut to somewhere, or a way to pay your boy- or girlfriend a backyard visit without the whole town’s knowing about it. The ones who used the alley as a shortcut said hello, and the other ones pretended I wasn’t standing in my backyard and kept on running to their secret destinations, convincing themselves I hadn’t seen them. That Sunday, Porfi approached our fence, waving. Porfi wanted to be called by his last name, Porfi, but his first name was Charles. “Can I come in?” he said.

  I walked to the gate, unsure I even knew how to open it. It was locked and there was no key in the keyhole.

  “What do you want?” I asked through the bars of the gate. I’d known Porfi all my life, but our only interaction so far had occurred in grammar school, when I’d asked him if he was myopic and he’d gone running in tears to our teacher. “He called me myopic! He called me myopic!” he’d cried. “Well, are you myopic, Charles?” our teacher had asked him, and Porfi’d admitted he didn’t know. “You do wear glasses,” the teacher had observed. “You might very well be. And myopic is not an insult. Not last time I checked it wasn’t.” Porfi had replied that what made an insult an insult was the way it made you feel when you heard it, and the teacher had said, “I really don’t think you’re right about that,” and that had caused Porfi to resent her as much as he resented me. I’d always assumed Porfi hated me because I’d called him myopic that day. He’d always picked a seat as far away from me as possible, within the limited number of seats he and I were allowed to choose from, given we were both myopic and asked by our teachers to sit in the front row with the rest of the vision-impaired.

  “Are you and Denise Galet a couple?” Porfi asked me that Sunday without further introduction. There was a combination of fear and immediate relief in his voice as the words freed themselves. He’d done his part expressing his interest in Denise. The next step was for me to handle. That he was in love with Denise came as quite a shock to me. I’d always assumed no one even liked Denise—she openly despised most of those who’d tried to come into contact with her over the years—or even noticed our existences anymore, but I tried not to look too surprised. I didn’t want to risk insulting Porfi’s feelings.

  “We’re not a couple,” I said as quickly as possible, in case hesitation on my part could change his mind about loving Denise. I’d gotten to like Denise somewhat, but the idea that someone else wanted to share recess with her, try to make her happier, was a load off my shoulders. Denise could be quite a downer sometimes.

  Porfi carried with him a spiral notebook in which he’d glued pictures he assured me were pictures of Denise, but he’d taken them from such a distance, and with such shitty cameras (those disposable ones you could buy for a few bucks at the supermarket, he admitted), that you really had to believe it to see it.

  “I took that picture of her just outside school last week,” he said, pointing at a dark shadow the size of my pinky nail that he assured me was Denise leaning on one of the bike racks outside the school’s main gate. “She’s always very early,” he explained. “Even when her first class is at eight a.m., she gets there before the gate is even opened. The janitors never open the gate before seven fifty.”

  “Is that so?” I said.

  Porfi nodded, a serious nod. He’d learned that fact the hard way. On the next page of his notebook, he’d taped a copy of Denise’s weekly schedule.

  Pages of the notebook had titles like “Books Denise Has Read,” with pictures of dust jackets Porfi had likely cut out from catalogs. The “Known Relationships” page only bore Denise’s parents’ names and mine.

  “How long have you been in love with Denise?” I asked.

  “Almost since I started junior high,” Porfi said. “I spotted her feeding the birds, you know, with you, and I thought it was a very cute thing to do. But I could never talk to her. She’s always running right out of class when the bell rings, to meet you in that staircase, and then she gets back at the last minute. I thought about maybe passing a note to her in class, starting a conversation that way, but I don’t know. It seems corny. And other people could intercept it, and I don’t think Denise would like that one bit.”

  “What do you like about her?” I said. “Aside from her feeding the birds and stuff.”

  “Well I don’t know. She’s smart, I guess. She reads so many books.”

  “I didn’t know you liked reading,” I said.

  “Well I don’t. But I like that she likes it. And I’m not as smart as her, but I have other skills.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like mechanics, electricity. I’m good at repairing things. Do you know if there’s something Denise needs to have repaired? Like a lamp or something? I’m good with lamps. That could be a good way that you could put us in contact,” Porfi said. I admired him for being so open about his feelings.

  “She never said anything about a lamp,” I said. “But I’ll ask.”

  “Don’t be too obvious about it, though. I don’t want to become a joke between you guys.”

  “Why would you?”

  “I don’t know. People are cruel. I’m sure you can be too.”

  I wondered if he was referring to the day I’d called him myopic. I thought about saying, like I’d said at the time, that I had meant no harm
asking about his eyesight but had merely been seeking information since I’d been told myself that I would soon need glasses, but then this guy Victor came out of nowhere on his bicycle and nearly ran Porfi down. The notebook where Porfi had compiled all of his Denise knowledge slipped from his hands and fell to the ground, open.

  “What are you guys doing, talking between bars?” Victor yelled at us, although he’d turned around and stopped his bike a mere yard from where we stood. Porfi had managed to pick up his precious notebook without Victor’s seeing what it contained, and he seemed grateful to all gods that the notebook had made it back safe to his arms, as though it could’ve broken in the fall.

  “Are you like a couple now?” Victor went on. “Are the bars a metaphor for the prison of gayness you always felt creeping up around you, depriving you of a chance to ever fit in?”

  “Get lost, Victor,” Porfi said, and his confidence impressed me, considering the fact he was holding something against his chest, first of all, in a very girly manner, something that, second, could’ve caused Victor to make fun of him for eternity if he ever discovered what exactly it was. Victor was in my German class, because his parents thought he was smart and German was the choice of smart kids, but Victor wasn’t smart.

  “Chill out, ladies,” Victor said, “go get yourselves a sense of humor,” and he went on his way.

  “Well,” I told Porfi after Victor had disappeared at the end of the alley. “That was brave of you. Not quite sure it convinced him we weren’t flirting, though.”

  “It’s fine. I prefer Victor believing I’m gay to knowing I’m in love with Denise. People don’t like Denise very much.”

  I wanted to say I would’ve preferred Victor to know the truth than believe I liked boys, but then why hadn’t I said anything in my own defense?

  “I guess she’s too…unconventional for people,” Porfi went on.

  “She’s unconventional all right,” I said.

  “Hold that thought!” Porfi said, licking his index finger to flip through his notebook ’til he landed on a blank page. He took a pencil out of the chest pocket of his overalls; pressed the lead to the top left corner of the page, ready for dictation; and raised his black eyes back to me. There was a minute of silence.

  “What do you want me to say?” I ended up asking. “It seems like you know more about Denise than I do.”

  “Don’t be so modest. I don’t even know what you guys talk about all the time. Like, what are the topics of conversation that she likes? You have to help me out here.”

  I thought about all my conversations with Denise, tried to see a pattern. Porfi mistook the time I spent coming up with one for reluctance to share my knowledge.

  “What do you want in exchange?” he said.

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Tips. To make Denise like me.”

  “I don’t want anything in exchange,” I said, and it was the truth. I just didn’t know what to tell Porfi that could help his courtship. There were a certain number of things I knew about Denise—the medication and dosages she took for her depression and anxiety, that she’d had a crush on a girl named Juliette in a video a few years before, that her favorite movie was Au Revoir les Enfants—but it seemed like they would all be turnoffs to Porfi. I was looking for a way to be fair to Denise, and it kept eluding me.

  “Come on,” Porfi said. “We all want something. I have a skateboard I don’t use that I could give you. Dirty magazines.”

  I pretended to be interested in those because you had to, if you were a boy, but when Porfi listed the titles I lied and said I had them all already.

  It wasn’t only that I didn’t want anything in exchange for my tips, I realized. I just wasn’t sure I wanted anything at all, and the thought made me dizzy, the way I felt before a test I hadn’t studied enough for. I looked behind me at the yard as if it could help me figure out what I wanted from life. It didn’t.

  “Do you speak German?” I ended up asking Porfi. I was sorry for myself for being unable to think of anything more exciting, so I tried to be mysterious about it. The way I said it, you could have believed I was assembling a team of spies for a secret mission in Germany.

  “Of course I don’t speak German,” Porfi said. “I have a little Spanish though. My grandfather was from Argentina.”

  “That won’t work,” I said, still looking at the bare rectangle of dirt where I’d once tried to grow tomatoes.

  “Does Denise want a German-speaking boyfriend?”

  “No,” I said. “I was asking for myself.”

  “What do you need a Kraut for?”

  I turned my face back to Porfi.

  “Would you be interested in skipping school with Denise and me to go to Paris around Easter?” I asked.

  Porfi said that anything that could get him closer to Denise, he was ready to try.

  “I’ll tell her you want to come with us then,” I said. “I will leave the whole thing about how you love her out of the conversation at first, see how she reacts.”

  “Test the waters,” Porfi said.

  “Right. I’ll tell you what she thinks.”

  “Thanks, man,” Porfi said, and then he extended his hand through the bars of the gate for me to shake.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And you know what?” he said as he was getting ready to leave. “That old lady there, Daphné Marlotte. She speaks German, I think. Her husband was a Nazi or something, back in the day. Or she was. If that helps you any.”

  “Well obviously, he was kidding,” Denise said after I told her all about Porfi’s visit.

  “He looked pretty smitten to me,” I said.

  “Don’t use that word. It’s disgusting.”

  “Fine. He looked honest. And he had all these pictures of you.”

  “That’s so creepy. Tell him I don’t want him to take any more without my permission.”

  “So you would agree to having one taken with your permission? I’m sure he would love that.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Denise said.

  I might’ve only wanted to see things that weren’t there, but it seemed to me Denise was trying to hide being flattered that a boy was interested in her behind her feigned disbelief and her real disappointment that the boy in question was only Porfi.

  “What else should I tell him?” I said. “Would you agree to him going to Paris with us?”

  “That part’s up to you, really,” she said. “You’re the brain behind the whole Paris operation.”

  The rest of recess we talked about Denise’s impression that she had two different heads.

  “I often feel like I have a smaller head inside of this one,” she said, “that people don’t see. It is smaller but it has more things in it than the other one and so it keeps trying to repel the outer head and take its place.”

  “You’re sure it’s not just a headache?” I asked, because it sounded mostly painful.

  “You really can be quite dumb,” Denise said.

  “That’s exactly why you should start seeing other people,” I said, and then she told me I had a piece of breakfast stuck in my braces, which I’m not sure was true (Denise used that line any time I said something she didn’t want to respond to). She asked me what I thought happened to kids who died with their braces on.

  “Do you think they get buried with them? That seems wrong for some reason, but I doubt they have special orthodontists for the dead,” she said.

  I said I didn’t care because I didn’t plan on dying too soon.

  “Well I don’t plan on wearing braces,” she said.

  “You always manage to keep the mood so light,” I said.

  “I was kidding,” she said. “See? You can never tell if someone is kidding you or not.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t always tell when you’re seriously suicidal or just trying to entertain me,” I said.

  I wasn’t really apologizing, but Denise took it to heart and said it was okay, that she knew she was the one who
should be sorry. “I know I’m a nightmare,” she said. She was good at turning a thing you said into yet another example of how complicated she was, but I knew that she didn’t get pleasure in doing that either. I also knew the next thing she would say would be a peace offering, something she didn’t really mean but believed I would be happy to discuss.

  “Does Porfi really keep track of everything I read?”

  Denise didn’t meet me at recess for days in a row and I thought Porfi had to be doing something right. Either he had built up the nerve to go up to her on her way down to our staircase or Denise, now aware of being watched lovingly, had lingered a little longer than usual in the classroom to make it easier for him and he’d taken his chance. I didn’t want to feel lonely, I just wanted to be happy for them, but it’s not that easy controlling your feelings and I’d gotten used to having someone to talk to, even if only about how little there was to look forward to in life. I wondered if there was a chance I was in love with Denise, but even in the privacy of my own thoughts, the idea seemed ludicrous and I couldn’t consider it seriously for more than a few seconds.

  On the third day without Denise, I missed talking to someone so much that I went up to Simone after school to see if she wanted to have an interview. She was working at her desk and dismissed my request. “I appreciate that you’re taking the biography seriously,” she said, “but when I’m busy, you can just do some research. Go interview other people about me. See what they have to say.”

  Aurore and my mother were out and my brothers’ door was closed as usual. I stood in front of it and tried to come up with a way to disturb them without their seeing it as a disturbance. My brothers scared me a little. I felt I had to have something important to say if I was to request their attention. From a very early age, my sisters had made me understand that I wasn’t as smart as them but that it didn’t matter, that I had other qualities, whereas I feared the reason my brothers never talked to me was because they didn’t think I was interesting enough. I’m not sure my sisters and I were close, but I knew my brothers and I definitely weren’t, and I couldn’t tell whether we never talked because we had nothing in common, or if it was because we never talked that we never found out if we had something in common. Their school grades seemed to suggest they were as smart as the girls, but they never mentioned their work or shared what they were learning. We didn’t even know what Leonard’s PhD dissertation was about, for instance. He just said he was working in a micro-sociological perspective. Jeremie studied music composition and whenever my mother asked how it was going he would just avoid answering by saying that music was an abstraction and couldn’t be talked about. Most of what they said was said in reaction to something one of my sisters had said, or had been said on TV. I’m not sure they needed attention at all, or that they could understand people who did, and that’s why I had no idea how to get theirs. I decided I would never find a way to sound interesting and found myself knocking on their door without a speech prepared. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. Jeremie sighed a weary “Come in” that suggested people knocked on their door all the time, which was not a thing I could say for sure had ever happened. Leonard and Jeremie were both at their desks, their backs turned to each other.