Chapter 11: Departures

Eating in restaurants had long since been out of the question. Even the fixed-price menus of the cheaper places were beyond their allotment of pre-apartment funds. After much bickering, counting and recounting of the fat hundred franc notes confined to Maggie's wallet, a program was finally settled on: they would eat out for breakfast, skip lunch, and smuggle dinner into their room.

Every evening they strolled to the same deli on the Rue St. Charles to fill Maggie's huge handbag with roast chicken and salad, both wrapped in abundant feuilles of foil to suppress telltale aromas. While she waited in the foyer, Olney obtained the key, chatting foolishly to divert the attention of the would-be inspector and his wife. In the mornings, on their way to the Bar de l'Automobile (where they ate croissants with auto mechanics who worked across the street), they smuggled out the garbage.

One fine day, Maggie called Olney over to show him the vinyl walls of her wallet and how they were squeaking with dismay at being reunited so soon. At precisely the same moment, the propriétaire and his wife were making plans to lay in wait that night, hoping with a glowering glee to catch their dissolute tenants red-handed. The focus of this potentially hazardous inconjunct turned out to be the apartment-at-last. Subji summoned them by telephone to a going away bottle of wine that evening: departure from the Rue de Foutre was scheduled for ten the following morning.

Our notorious smugglers scraped together the bills and coins in their pockets for a treat at the local bistro, Chez Vrolet. Before leaving the hotel, they announced their departure in the morning to a foiled Madame and Monsieur. Not since their days as informers to the Vichy Government had the owners felt such disappointment at losing their prey.

After dinner a merry Olney and Maggie took the lift to the apartment that would be theirs the next day. Gaston popped the little plastic top of one of the Monoprix's finest two-litre table wines as soon as they walked in the door. The apartment was a shambles.

"You will have had several ideas of how difficult has been our readiness to depart," launched Madame Dutronc without so much as a bonjour, "but none of them can approach the flinching awful truth of it."

"Now Subji--" began her weary husband.

"Ne me 'now Subji' pas," she exclaimed, turning her moon-sized eyes on him with sudden fury. "You have hardly been present. And where have you been? In the provinces, shuttering the hidden parts of strange women."

"Pas de bêtises, s'il te plait!" returned Gaston with unaccustomed heat. "I have been earning money to visit your family." An argument ensued in three languages. Accusations of fainèance flew from both sides, while the children fought with each other for Olney's lap. Maggie, with a side-eyed glance bordering on jealousy and breakdown, retired to the toilet.

"I am not going!" announced Subji. Kali, meanwhile, squirmed on Olney's thigh, pinning his erect petit frère to his belly. Baibai, defeated, had wandered off.

"Fine!" boomed Gaston. "I'll take the children and you can stay with Olney and Maghee."

No, no! Olney thought feverishly, you and Subji take Maggie and Baibai. Kali can stay with me.

Kali suddenly jumped up. "Il faut qu'j'fait pi-pi-i-i-yuh," she exclaimed, and ran to the bathroom. Both parents stopped squabbling at once. Olney hid his thundering cock under a copy of the Herald Tribune, certain he had noticed a comprehending look pass between them. Maggie, routed from her roost by the desperately micturant girl, returned to a strangely silent room.

Olney cleared his throat. "Look, you're both exhausted. Maggie and I should go now and you have a good night's rest."

"Yes, we need sleep," said Subji distractedly. "Come tomorrow at nine and see us off. We will give you the keys then, and tonight I will make a list of people to contact in cases of emergency. À demain, then." They were ushered pensively out the door.

Back at the hotel Olney uncorked a bottle of Chinon he'd bought that afternoon at the Nicolas shop on Rue St. Charles. "The thinking man's wine," he said, shakily filling two glasses, their first purchase in Paris. "To us, chérie. To this room which has sheltered us for lo these ten blissful days, and to an even more blissful future in our new apartment." He held his glass high.

"What were you doing with that little girl on your lap?" Maggie clinked glasses without taking her prosecutor's prying eyes from his own scanners, now shifting and whimpering in their sockets.

"Mah-ghee-yuh," he blustered. "Toi aussi, tu fais de bêtises?"

"What were you doing?"

"I ... uh ... she was just sitting on my lap is all. And why do you insist on calling her 'that little girl.' Her name is Kali." Normally a slow drinker, Olney poured another glass.

"How come she jumped up like that? I heard her clear from the toilet. What were you doing to her?" Maggie's voice had now risen to her limit in public--she regarded hotel rooms with the same sense of privacy as a downtown bus stop.

"I was just sitting there." Olney's voice was in danger of knuckling under. He wanted to get into bed and fuck his forbidden lust away, but Maggie wanted blood. "I ... it was she who did all the doing." Olney the tattletale and buck passer. He suddenly felt smaller than his glass of wine. He tried shinnying up the stem, but it was too slippery.

"She!" exploded Maggie. "Kali is barely eleven years old!"

"She's almost twelve! And anyway, what does that prove? That she hasn't yet learned to curb her instincts." Oops. He made another lunge up the stem.

"Did you have sexual contact with her?" Maggie spoke with quiet menace.

Cornered, Olney answered with a frothing attack. "What are you, some kind of spokes-Nazi for all that is 'just and good?' For all that is repressed, suppressed, illegal and otherwise shudderingly blissful?"

"I happen to know they hang people for having sexual contact with children."

"Yeah, well start building the scaffold, Patootio, because there's nothing I'd like better than to initiate that little beauty in the fine art of--"

"Olney! You're a child molester!"

"Now wait, darling," suddenly unctuous after his attempted blasphemy. "Of course I didn't mean that I would do anything, you know, illegal, or anything...."

"You did!"

"I didn't! It's just that you refuse to see the issue. Look, I realise she is too young, that the sense of guilt would turn her into a gnarled and twisted brute-of-a-hag by the time she's fourteen and that children should never be introduced to sex and that when they rub their little thingumajiggy's all over your leg it is your God-driven duty to turn them off so they can grow up to be bigoted, neurotic and sensible folk like you and me and all the other people on this slave's asshole of a planet of woe."

"Never mind all the gobbledygook. Did you ... touch her?"

"No, a thousand times no. She climbed on my leg and squirmed around. I'll admit I got a hardon--must I die for this? And I think ... I'm sure she actually came. Her little body positively rippled just before she jumped up. I think she confused having to pee with coming."

"Oh, my God!" said Maggie, her face caving in. Again she burst into the tears that flowed like wine during her days in Paris.

For his part, Olney scratched his head. In so doing, he felt like a cartoon character. Was he then, a cartoon character in a Tijuana bible? No, he felt more like Dagwood Bumstead. Yet, he had to admit that the Dagwood of family funnies fame had never discussed this subject. Bother and drat it, what's all the fuss? he wondered comico-psychopathically. "It's people like you who drive these children to grow up all tied into knots. I didn't molest her. I didn't coerce her. I didn't threaten her."

"You used her!"

"She used me!"

"She's only eleven!"

"What, does that make her brainless? Retarded? Does that mean she can't tie her shoelaces? Does that mean she can't think and run circles around Gaston and Subji? All being eleven means is that she doesn't have much experience yet. And I did nothing to ruin the experience she had tonight. No one by the name of Olney Garkle layed any guilt on her. If she wants to be guilty it's not my fault. It's the fault of repression-mongers like you."

"Give me some more wine." Maggie wanted out of the discussion. "Thank God they're going to India tomorrow."

"You can say that again," he said, putting his arms around her, at last pressing his fuel-ready pocket rocket against the only part of her that really counted.

§§§

Chapter 12: O. le Flâneur

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