How to Behave in a Crowd Page 27

  “What’s new at home?”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “Leonard handed in his dissertation yesterday. Maybe we can all resume our normal lives now. It’s been kind of tense here since you left.”

  “I’m certainly curious to see what he had to say about me,” Simone said. I didn’t tell her what I knew he’d written. “Do you know when the defense will be?”

  “Sometime at the end of next month,” I said. “But Leonard doesn’t want us to come.”

  “Oh, I’ll be there,” Simone said.

  “Won’t you have classes and stuff?”

  “If I can be honest with you, Dory—sorry: Izzie—I’m not sure I’ll hang out here much longer.”

  “I thought this was your dream school.”

  “I don’t know. I thought it would be. I thought it would be the perfect place for me because all they ask from us is to read a hell of a lot, and think, and write, but see, it seems to me I’m the only one who actually enjoys it. No one likes to read here. It’s just something they’re really good at.”

  “What do you care if they like it or not?”

  “There’s always a risk of contamination,” Simone said.

  “You went to school your whole life with people who didn’t like studying as much as you did. I’d say it did the opposite of contaminating you. If there’s a word for that.”

  “I guess most people would say decontamination is the antonym of contamination, but I see what you mean. It’s not satisfying in our context.”

  “Whatever. That wasn’t my point.”

  “The reason why it didn’t contaminate me at the time was that I had you guys to come home to,” Simone said. “I could see that Aurore took pleasure in her work, even if it drove her crazy sometimes. She read everything twice, and slowly. Here it’s all about rushing and diagonal reading. I actually heard a guy boast that he’d mastered a technique that made him able to make out the contents of a paragraph just by looking at it a certain way.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Don’t know and don’t care.”

  “What would you do if you quit school?”

  “Well I’d come home, obviously.”

  “You can’t stay home forever,” I said.

  Or maybe she could? Aurore and the boys weren’t showing any signs of ever planning to leave.

  “Not forever, of course,” Simone said, “but for a little while. Until I write a book or something.”

  “Oh yeah? What will you write about?”

  “I don’t know…one doesn’t write a novel about things, I don’t think.”

  “I thought you wanted to write a novel about us,” I said. “I thought you were mad at Leonard, for telling all our stories.”

  “Who would care for a novel about us?”

  As I struggled to find an answer to Simone’s question, I heard the boys’ bedroom door open and close. Someone came down the stairs—Jeremie, I guessed, from the slowness of the steps.

  “I’m afraid I did something wrong,” I said to Simone. I was thinking of Porfi lying on his side, his fallen cigarette inches from his face, about to be extinguished by the blood spilling out from the corner of his mouth. That sound he’d made just before I’d walked away. Had he said my name? Had he coughed? Apologized?

  Simone said, “You never do anything wrong, Dory. Izzie.”

  Jeremie started playing piano in the living room, the Chopin prelude the father used to sometimes request on Sunday nights. Leonard hated it, and Jeremie always complained it was too easy a piece, but he still complied. I couldn’t recall his ever playing it since the father had died.

  “You think Jeremie is playing that just to taunt Leonard?” Simone said.

  “I don’t know that taunting anyone would ever cross Jeremie’s mind,” I said.

  She said, “You really think too highly of us sometimes.”

  I started saying something but Simone shushed me.

  “Bring the phone closer,” she said, “so I can hear him better.”

  “He’ll stop playing if he sees me.”

  “Of course he will. Go sit on the stairs.”

  Our staircase was a complicated one, a squared spiral that turned twice. If I sat at the top, Jeremie wouldn’t see me, but four more steps down and we would be eye-to-eye between the propped lid and the bare, silvery wires of his baby grand piano. I brought the phone to the top step and aimed the receiver down at the music. Leonard came from his room and sat a step below me. We stayed like that for a minute or so before I saw our dead bolt turning, and then Aurore and my mother tiptoeing into the hallway. They saw us sitting at the top of the stairs and both barred their mouths with their index fingers. We nodded our assent. At least I did. I don’t know what Leonard did. I couldn’t look at him straight, not so soon after reading his conclusions, what they said about me.

  While the rest of the study’s subjects have opted, after the initial trauma of their father’s death, to retreat more deeply into tried-and-true behavioral patterns, presumably hoping that the wound that their father’s loss has opened will, on its own, eventually reclose itself around the family unit, the youngest, Isidore, has labored to exploit the breach of said wound via investigating the possibility of relationships outside the family. Over the course of two years, while his siblings continued to pursue the same achievements they had already (i.e., prior to the father’s death) been pursuing, Isidore, his sights now passionately set on a future career as a German-language pedagogue, sought and found a mentor for himself (Herr C.); lost his virginity (years ahead of the national average), possibly falling in love in the process; looked for a replacement of the paternal figure (via dating websites); and made a good friend at school (his very first).

  By these means, and without (as far as I can tell) his being aware of it, his very role in the family system has changed: he has become the one the other subjects turn to for comfort and hope.

  The prelude was just about to end. I could tell because it closed almost exactly the way it opened—the same motif repeated—except it didn’t sound as light and heartening at the end as at the beginning because there was that big dramatic part in the middle that darkened and loaded and tainted everything.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel wouldn’t exist without my husband, Adam Levin. His unwavering encouragement and constant support allowed me to see the book behind the book. I want to thank him for tricking me into believing I could finish it, for doing so for as long as it took me to finish it, and for helping me make English my second first language.

  I’d also like to thank Christian TeBordo and Jeff Parker; your readings made the book better.

  Thank you to my agent, Jackie Ko, for being the first person unrelated to me to think this book should be shown to other people unrelated to me.

  Thank you, Tim Duggan, for being the second person to think that. Thank you as well to William Wolfslau and Aja Pollock.

  Thanks to my brother and sisters: Jean-Sébastien, Florence, and Mélanie Bordas. And thanks to my mother, Marie, and her own trio of larger-than-fiction/stranger-than-life siblings: Pedro, José, and Juan.

  About the Author

  Camille Bordas is the author of two previous novels in French, Les treize desserts and Partie commune. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. She grew up in Paris and Mexico City and now lives in Chicago.

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