How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  “Hi, guys,” I said.

  They didn’t invite me to have a seat or anything, but I didn’t want to stay on the threshold, so I closed the door behind me and made my way to the center of the room to stand between the two of them.

  “What do you want?” Leonard said. He’d rotated his desk chair to face in my direction.

  “Well I’m working on Simone’s biography,” I said, “and I was wondering if you had anecdotes or stories about her that you would want to share with me. Or anything. I mean, we can talk about anything you want.”

  Leonard squinted as if I’d said something complicated.

  “I heard you got laid,” Jeremie said. He was still looking at his computer, and sound waves of different colors, but he’d taken one of his earphones out.

  “I did!” I said, and regretted sounding the exclamation mark right away. I was excited that Jeremie was showing interest in something I’d done, but he must’ve thought I was just boasting.

  “It wasn’t with a pretty girl, though,” I said in an attempt to undo the exclamation mark.

  “Those who lose their virginity to good-looking girls are very rare,” Jeremie said. I thought he would expand on that, but he resumed adjusting sound waves on his screen, and for a while the clicking of his mouse was all there was to be heard.

  “What exactly do you want to know about Simone?” Leonard asked me as I was about to sneak out and apologize for having interrupted their work.

  “I don’t have specific questions,” I said, “but I think she’d like it if you had funny memories about her to share, how it was to see her grow, things like that.”

  “She believed in Santa Claus ’til she was eight years old or something,” Jeremie said. “It must be a kind of record.”

  I knew about the Santa Claus thing because the reason my mother had ended up having to tell Simone that Santa was really her and the father staying up late to put the presents beneath the tree was that I’d figured it out before Simone had and my parents didn’t think it was right to let me keep that knowledge from an older sibling. I actually remembered my mother telling Simone the truth about Santa—I’d listened to their conversation through our bedroom door. I’d heard her ask Simone if she was mad that she’d been lied to, and then Simone’s voice come out like a thread you pull from a sweater, like something was being irreparably wrecked in its wake. “My throat is closing,” she’d whispered, “my heart is beating faster. I wish you’d never told me.” I remember it because it was the first time I’d heard Simone express regrets about knowing something. When I’d let her break the news to me later that day (our mother hadn’t told her I already knew; she’d thought letting Simone tell me about it would be a good way for her to get over the lie), I’d responded the way she had, stealing the line “I wish you’d never told me” from her. Simone had shown no empathy and asserted that I was being a pussy and that knowledge was power, which I’d thought sounded good but also puzzled me, given how often she complained about always being looked down upon for being a kid by grown-ups who knew less than her about literature and geography.

  I didn’t want to discourage Jeremie from telling me more stories about Simone, so I pretended his Santa Claus bit was helpful, but when I asked if he could think of anything else, I just heard more mouse clicks. He didn’t put his second earphone back in his ear, though, so I assumed he was still considering himself involved in the conversation and just needed a little time to think about my request. I turned to Leonard’s side of the room to see what he had to say, but before my eyes landed on him, they stopped on a black and white picture that was lying on his desk. I didn’t want to be nosy, but even though I couldn’t really see what the picture represented from where I stood, it triggered some sense of familiarity and I understood that it concerned me.

  “What’s that picture?” I asked Leonard.

  He turned on his chair and handed it to me.

  “It’s for my work,” he said.

  The picture was a picture of us all, minus Leonard, asleep on different mattresses laid out on the floor, the same floor I was standing on now. I was in the upper left corner, curled up in a ball. Berenice had fallen asleep with a bundle of papers on her stomach, Jeremie with his mouth open to the ceiling, Simone and Aurore top to tail with arms sticking out of the mattress. It looked like we’d all died in awkward positions, like these illegal workers I’d seen on TV who’d been living in a sweatshop and had been poisoned in their sleep by a portable heater. My siblings and I had only all slept in the same room on one occasion: after the father had died. As I was trying to make sense of how that picture could relate to Leonard’s PhD dissertation, I saw him, from the corner of my eye, grab a notebook and write something down, something that I could tell by his eye movement was linked to my reaction to the photograph.

  “What exactly are you working on?” I said.

  Leonard took the time he needed to complete the thought he was writing down before he answered.

  “I’m studying the variety of processes and strategies through which a family unit reorganizes itself after the disappearance of one of its members—in my case, the main household provider and paternal figure.”

  “The father,” I said.

  “In other words, yes: the father,” Leonard said.

  I still wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the father or the concept of a father.

  “Our father,” I said.

  “That sounds interesting,” Jeremie said, apparently finding out about the topic of Leonard’s research just as I was.

  “Wait,” I told Jeremie, “you didn’t know his dissertation was about us?”

  “It’s not about us,” Leonard objected, “it’s about the redefinition of the group members’ positions within the group after a death, about structural and behavioral changes, about how the ordinariness of a situation becomes salient once it has been disrupted…it’s not about you or me as individuals.”

  “But that’s a picture of us,” I said.

  “I’m not gonna use it as an illustration in my dissertation or anything. It’s just a visual reminder. Like a field note, if you wish.” Leonard opened his top desk drawer and took out a folder in which he kept pictures of different rooms of the house.

  “I’ve never seen you take a picture in my life,” I said.

  “I just took them a couple of days after the father died, to see if over time we started changing the way we organized objects, furniture. I’m not the best at noticing that kind of stuff.”

  “Did we change anything?”

  “Not that I can see. I know Aurore reorganized her bookshelf alphabetically instead of chronologically, but I think that had nothing to do with her mourning. It was more of a post-PhD-defense ritual.”

  Jeremie put his second earphone back in. Our conversation must’ve disturbed his concentration without providing enough interest in exchange.

  “But I guess my whole research has gotten to be more language oriented. Mostly, I look at how we changed the way we spoke of certain things,” Leonard went on.

  “But we never talk about the father,” I said.

  “That is actually one of my angles. How certain topics have become embarrassing, or how Mom and Aurore started talking like they’re carrying heavy things—I call it sigh-speak—when they want to get off of a subject. You know, our avoidance strategies.”

  “Avoidance strategies,” I repeated. “Is that what we do?”

  “All the time. Defensive processes, protecting strategies, preventive avoidance…”

  “I didn’t know there were words for all that.”

  “Well I won’t be so naive as to say there is a word or group of words for everything, but the beauty of being an academic is that you get to invent some for the things you’re working on.”

  “Did you invent these?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did you invent any?”

  Leonard looked either insulted or chagrined by my question.

  “Th
at’s not the point,” he said.

  I didn’t know there had been a point to our conversation or why we couldn’t stray from it. I still didn’t understand, at the time, that I had as much a right to decide what the point of a conversation was as anyone else participating in it. I looked at the picture of us some more, trying to find a question there that would be more in line with Leonard’s view of our point.

  “Did you notice any changes with me?” I asked. “After the father died?”

  “I noticed you stopped rubbing the couch.”

  “That’s because you guys made fun of me,” I said.

  “I noticed you started reading to Mom at night. I noticed you looked for a boyfriend for her. That gave me a lot to work with, by the way. Everyone’s reaction to that guy…Daniel. That was really interesting.”

  I waited for Leonard to thank me but he didn’t.

  “Do your professors think you’ve got a worthy research topic?”

  “It’s wildly unconventional,” Leonard admitted. “Most studies in micro-sociology are still pretty ill considered, and I’m sure I’ll have a couple of assholes on my jury who will deem it scientifically irrelevant, but my adviser thinks I’m doing some groundbreaking work with this.”

  We heard Jeremie laugh in the background, but it wasn’t at what Leonard had said. Jeremie laughed at music sometimes; certain arrangements of notes could be as funny as jokes to him, and he’d just heard one of those in his earphones.

  “I can’t believe Jeremie didn’t know that’s what you were working on,” I told Leonard. “You’re practically living on top of each other.”

  “Are you kidding? No one in this house cares about what I do. And look at him!” Leonard lifted his chin in Jeremie’s direction. Jeremie’s shoulders were now moving to the rhythms he was controlling. “That’s what he does all day. Never asks a damn question.”

  “He asked me if it was true I’d gotten laid,” I noted.

  Leonard didn’t seem to think it counted.

  “Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to ask us questions anyway?” I said. “I thought sociologists did interviews with the people they wrote about.”

  “My research is purely observation based. If I had told you that I was observing our family, your behaviors would’ve changed, and my work would’ve been compromised.”

  “So if we’d asked more precise questions about your dissertation, you wouldn’t have told us anyway.”

  “Probably not.”

  “So why are you complaining that we didn’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. The research phase is over. I’m almost done writing my first chapter.”

  “Can I read it?”

  “No.”

  “Can I keep the picture?”

  Leonard went through his file of photographs and laid out seven pictures on his desk that looked exactly like the one I was holding. He stared at them and at the one I was holding and then at the other ones again.

  “I guess you can,” he said.

  Often, I dreamed the father wasn’t dead—he’d faked his own death to protect us from the international villains he’d been secretly fighting his whole life, or they’d made a mistake at the hospital and we’d buried someone who looked like the father while the father had coincidentally been made a secret prisoner somewhere far away, or he’d been resurrected, no specific explanation for it. The scenarios varied but the conclusion was always the same: the father was back, and even though I was aware while dreaming it that a dream was all it was, I still enjoyed the chance I was given to see him again, and I woke up sad that dreams had to be so short, hopeful that in the next one (soon, if I was lucky), I would be better at controlling the setting and what the father and I would talk about. I’d read on the Internet that some people knew how to control their dreams. I don’t really want to say it, but there was a part of me that thought that if I could control the dream, I’d maybe be able to bring the father back from there to real life.

  Not long before I found out about Leonard’s research, though, I’d started growing ambivalent about those dreams where the father wasn’t dead. I’d started dreading them. See, the more time passed in real life, the more it did in dream life as well, and even in dreams, I’d gotten used to the idea that the father was dead, and the thought of his being resurrected had become discouraging, because if he wasn’t dead, I thought, it meant he had yet to die, and I to go through all the steps of grieving him, and I didn’t know if I could do it again. I felt guilty inside those dreams, selfish, and worse than that, obvious, like the father knew I didn’t really want him to come back with me to real life anymore, the way sick people know, when you visit them in the hospital, that they don’t look as good as you say they do and that you can’t wait to leave. I was still sad waking up from these dreams, but the relief was new. I didn’t tell Leonard about that. Maybe if he’d asked us questions, I would’ve. But I guess it wasn’t part of the observable world he was interested in anyway.

  The next time I saw her in the neighborhood, Daphné Marlotte confirmed she spoke German. I didn’t ask her right away under what conditions she’d learned the language, if she’d been a Nazi or not. I wanted to save it for a lull in the conversation.

  She understood what I meant when I talked about looking for a conversation partner and invited me for tea and cookies, or as she put it, “für Tee und Kekse,” which immediately made me realize how much I would learn from her, given how Herr Coffin had never thought it useful to teach us how to say cookies in German.

  I’d walked by Daphné’s building almost every day of my life but I’d never been inside her apartment. I’d caught glimpses of her living room now and then, particularly in the summer, when she opened all the windows looking out on the street—she lived on the first floor—but it had always been through her white lace curtains. Seeing those curtains, you’d think they wouldn’t do a great job at concealing, with the hundreds of openings and the thinness of the fabric, but really they made it hard to discern much behind them, unless you stood by Daphné’s window and picked a hole in the lace through which to look at her apartment and stuck your eye to it. Which was something I’d actually thought about doing, except I couldn’t really find a valid reason to proceed.

  Her place wasn’t as crumbly and old as I’d expected. The kitchen had been recently remodeled, Daphné explained, by kind people from an organization that made sure older folks didn’t give up on comfort and miss out on the newest home improvement technologies.

  “It’s very nice,” I said, knocking on the imitation-marble counters as Daphné made us tea.

  “I think it’s too tacky, honestly,” she said. “I don’t like it one bit. But it was free, you know? Charity. I shouldn’t complain.”

  She repeated the exact same thing in German.

  It was weird being alone with Daphné. She seemed to have grown shyer inside her own home. She spoke more softly, like we might wake someone resting in the other room. I said I wasn’t used to speaking everyday German, that my teacher was more into the nineteenth-century poets. She said it was all right, that I could speak to her in French and she would respond in German and that little by little, I’d grow confident enough to try out some words and, eventually, whole sentences.

  We took our teas to the living room and sat there quietly for a minute, pretending that having to blow on our smoking cups prevented us from talking. It felt rude mentioning the fact that there were no cookies when she’d promised me some. I looked around the room for pictures to start a conversation about but there weren’t any.

  “You don’t have pictures,” I said.

  Daphné smiled and said something in German that I didn’t understand. I didn’t know if you were supposed to have your conversation partner repeat what she’d said if you hadn’t understood it, or just go with the flow.

  “We don’t have pictures either,” I said.

  She said something else, in which I recognized the words for memories and sad and wall, but I don’t kno
w if she said it was sad that she hadn’t taken enough pictures to save and display good memories on her walls or if such a display would amount to building a wall of sadness.

  “Maybe we should try the way we did it in the kitchen,” I said, “when you first said the sentence in French and then repeated it in German?”

  Daphné agreed to my suggestion but didn’t offer a new topic of conversation.

  “So,” I said. “I’ve always wondered: do you still get excited for your birthdays?”

  I had wanted to avoid the subject of her age, given it was what people always talked to her about, but apparently, I was no better than anyone else. Daphné had made good progress on the scale of old people over the past year: she was now the third-oldest person in the whole world. Two women had to die in India and she would be number one. People in town hoped that this would happen before her next birthday, to make it a national event, have the president come and celebrate with us, and I wondered if Daphné felt more pressure than usual to stay alive.