Son ! Of Lord Patchogue ! — Chapter 5

Though he must have been in and out of the boulangerie hundreds of times in the years since moving into their apartment, until the incident with the homework, Jérôme had never paid much attention to whomever there would serve him. The day after having made his self-destructive contribution, however—this being before there had been any consequences for his actions, its full revelation yet to be made, and having little idea what was waiting for him once he got home—, Jérôme couldn’t help but take greater care to notice who was behind the counter.

As usual that day there was the older, blonde-haired woman, bottle job, with her runty, stunted frame and sharp features, which belied a softer voice and more kindly demeanour than any customer passing through the shop only once could have imagined, and whom, he assumed, was the boss or at least manager. She was generally stationed at the far end of the shop, behind the till, and it was to her Jérôme would direct a greeting when he entered, whether she was busy, receptive or would respond. Jérôme knew it couldn’t have been her though, despite not knowing her name, as he remembered his son’s insistence, and indeed his mother-in-law’s, that the woman from the boulangerie was “young”, and as such offered a different perspective.

The other two employees roamed up and down the counter, collecting the customers’ orders before calling out to the manager what was to be bought so she could do the totting up as they sliced, wrapped, boxed or bagged the items. Neither were wearing badges, and the running of the establishment seemed not to require the use of names, no problems over who was issuing a given order, even when clarification was necessary, interrupting a process so adeptly refined.

Of the two, both dark-haired and, in their uniforms, similar enough looking that it wouldn’t be impossible, Jérôme thought, that they were sisters, one was nonetheless the prettier, a little younger, perhaps, thinner, certainly, at the waist, and with a sharper look to her, which, when placing his order and catching her eye, involuntarily caused Jérôme to smile, to which she responded in kind. He could not help but hope that it was her: Océane, the giver of advice.

This hope, turned hunch in the bolstering inner chatter of self-conscious and reassuring babble—with no help of mine—bore fruit when, the following week, Jérôme was back in the boulangerie with Théo tagging along.

Hey Théo, Océane said breezily as the boys approached, Jérôme ever so slightly having delayed their entrance, dallying on his phone on the pavement to ensure it was she who served them.

Testifying, Jérôme noted, amused, to the girl’s attractiveness was Théo immediately turning shy, blushing ever so slightly as he returned the hello, and jerking away when his father reached out for his shoulder. Océane smiled up at Jérôme.

What’ll you have Théofilou? he asked his son, who responded, eyes dismayed, by blushing further.

Océane watched on indulgently.

Not a fan of the nickname anymore, Jérôme informed her, adopting the suave, self-possessed tones into which, throughout his life, he has so easily been able to slip when called upon to be charming, a mode now, however, usually reserved for work events and other professional introductions. Had he been fighting the urge, automatic, to extend his hand for a firm, confident, dare I say lingering, shake, eyes locked on hers, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

He used to love it, if you can believe it, he sighed, a look of bittersweet resignation flashing across his face, settling tenderly in the corners of his mouth. Océane’s smile deepened.

Yes, when he wants to be, my father really is quite winning.

When did all that change? It is not difficult to identify the moment, though perhaps the contours of Jérôme’s withdrawal, his retreat, are more fuzzy than the brute facts of the incident first suggest. Louise herself, who perhaps, aside from me, knows him best, will only see it clearly in hindsight, and only once our story has reached its climax.

Am I to blame though? I have sometimes felt I was, felt culpable, conscious of the circumstances of my arrival, and curious whether thrust here through his shattering contact with the mirror in the entrance of his building, I had ghosted some part of Jérôme away, a certain ease, his loquaciousness, the light and animating spirit he used to possess.

The problem is, for all I am able to see, project and extrapolate, to dictate and to direct, and, observing, live out the experience, I am not without my blind spots. There are moments into which I cannot see, like, for example, the hours before Jérôme, that thundery June afternoon, beat his head repeatedly, intentionally against the mirrored wall.

I can conjure up the space, explore the aftermath, and can conceive with sufficient verisimilitude to sense that what I am depicting I am doing so accurately, how the scene must have unfolded, how squared opposing the mirror he must have placed his palms against it, and seen himself there, within it, and sensed, perhaps, this beyond; and how he had to have recoiled just slightly before the first butt, jaw clenched, neck tense, ready. I can imagine too the sound the contact would have made, dull and resounding, not unmusical, and understand that to have broken the mirror, shattered it as he did, one impact would not have been enough, and so he must have repeated it, hammering his forehead against the glass, his brow colouring, then scarlet; the glass fracturing, cracking, then coming apart, and how the terrifying sound of it still hadn’t deterred him; and how again, though slower, pausing, he must have pressed his forehead crunching to the fissure and decided: one more, one final time. And stepping back, he must have thrown all his weight behind that last blow of his head, as though, with all his might, he would finally break through. And that must have been when the mirror smashed, when the skin of his forehead split and the glass imbedded; when he began to bleed and sank unconscious to the floor, Tantôt to find him some unknown moment hence.

All that I can see, or presume to, knowing it occurred, intimate with the feel of mirrored walls, their weight and how sturdy they are, the chill of placing one’s forehead against them; how hard the surface is, how impenetrable, and how one’s fist might rise in welts if one were to strike there; how futile it must feel to imagine one would be able to break it.

So knowing how badly he bled, and where the cut is, and bearing the same scar myself, yes, I am able to describe it all. But what I have found I do not have access to—blame the concussion which he suffered, and maintains, wiped from his memory the whole preceding afternoon—is what Jérôme had been thinking in the lead-up, what other than a little brazen self-harm, a little plea for attention, he might have thought he was trying to achieve, whether he intended to get here, to escape here—how naïve!—, or to reach me. But then, if that were the case, why has he never tried to get back to me again?

I cannot find that place in him. I cannot hear or see him there through the fug of his lost consciousness, and so I am lacking—just as one cannot remember one’s earliest years. I have had all the time in the world to consider theories, which, as I have said, I do not lack, some of which I intend to expand on anon, but this moment, this eluding one, is the moment with which we will have to reckon—me, us, Louise—if we are ever to come to terms with what Jérôme is, whether having become or having always been.

How did it go with your homework, Théo? Océane turned to the boy. Did you get your mark?

Not yet, he mumbled.

I’m sure it’ll be great, top of the class, she winks. He was in here with his granny and I helped him with some stuff for school.

Oh, I know all about that, Jérôme said.

It is remarkable the way he managed to smile so broadly in his response, considering everything that had happened since.

Have you got any advice for me?

Océane was unabashed, holding his eye. She laughed:

Be good. And don’t hold up the queue—

She glanced over his shoulder to the slowly filling shop.

Later that night, while Louise was out, Jérôme lay on top of their still made up bed and masturbated. Though playing pornography on his phone, as his pleasure mounted and orgasm approached, his mind began to wander, concocting circumstances in which he and Océane were alone. The scenes were no more realistic than the one unfolding on the device in his hand, as in between glances at the screen and the jerky, irregular rhythms of his other arm, he pictured arriving at the boulangerie just as Océane was closing up, and her letting him in, and locking the door behind him, turning off the lights and leading him through to a back room; or meeting her in the darkened stairwell of his building, her having made some delivery to a neighbour, and asking if she wanted to come up, and her saying yes without hesitation, leaving the empty plastic palette in which she had been transporting pastries in the hallway and following him to his bedroom. He imagined hooking the waist of the tight, black trousers she wears under her tabard, marked up with flour and buttery smears, and pushing them down with his thumbs, and shifting her string panties to the side, and entering her, standing, from behind; he imagined dropping to his knees as she sat on his bed, and brusquely yanking her trousers off, leaving them inside-out on the floor, before burying his face in her waiting crotch.

His eyes flitted back to the action on-screen.

He thought about her taking his cock in her mouth in the darkness, her lips around it, feeling her tongue at work across his scrotum, her hand caressing as she licked and sucked him. He was no longer imagining them anywhere, not in the back room, not on his bed; his eyes were closed. He thought about her lips, her tongue again; he thought about the black hollow of her throat, and the round black of her moaning mouth, and how she is dragging a pleasure up, up from a pit at the root of his cock—and he is going to come, she is going to make him.

He opened his eyes again, and dropped his phone, the woman on it, spreadeagled on a sofa, bore no relation to the one of whom he had been thinking; she was older, blonde, American. Her fake breasts were bouncing comically, her body a spasm of over-lit overacting. He switches to a different scene. In the darkness, there was the warmth of Océane’s mouth again, her tongue again. He replayed both of the scenarios he had concocted from the start, overlapping in the rut performed, arm wearying, frustration threatening. He takes her, turns her over, takes her, spreads her thighs, tastes her, sees her drop to her knees offering her tongue.

Once finished, Jérôme took the t-shirt her had been wearing, left balled up on the bed beside him, and wiped the semen off his stomach. He pulled up his boxers and got off the bed to put his soiled clothing into the wash basket. When he returned, the scene on his phone was still unfolding. He watched the ending of the act with absolute disinterest, the performer, much like he had been imagining, dropping to her knees and offering her open mouth to a man whose face Jérôme had not seen. The faceless man ejaculated across the woman’s chest, catching her cheek with a second spurt. She scooped the come up with a finger and sucked it, though balked at accepting the man’s cock, moving away as he tried to put it, dripping, back into her mouth. She smeared the come across her breasts, as though in mitigation, rubbing her sticky fingers across her clamped lips and chin. The scene ended, freezing on that image, her face distorted by proximity to the lens, as another clip automatically started loading up. Jérôme swept closed all the tabs he had open.

When Louise got in, she tried to rouse him; Jérôme pretended to be sleeping.

*

Over the following days, as the crisis deepened and the decision was made to return to Tantôt’s, Océane was forgotten. The extent of the reaction to what he did catches Jérôme by surprise, having managed to convince himself, despite the hungover discomfit of the morning after, that he couldn’t have possibly written what he thought he remembered writing, that it must have been an exaggeration, heightened by fear and guilt, as when, for example, he would send a regrettably flirtatious email to an intern at work or found himself dropping benign but not entirely innocent private messages to female acquaintances on Instagram. In such cases, when he finally picked up the courage to look back at what he had said or spoke to the recipient directly, it was generally little more than a case of brushing the missives off with a jokey apology, and the wry acknowledgement that he should be more careful when he drinks, with lip-service paid to the embarrassment he felt, not that it was ever potent enough to prevent him doing it again.

It wasn’t that he didn’t feel ashamed, though, he did. But the shame was less to do with the risks involved, whether of rejection or, more significant, being called out for his behaviour—either via the HR Department or by Louise finding out—, but instead a shame that he might be revealed as having felt lonely enough, unsatisfied enough in his marriage, to send the messages in the first place. That would be mortifying. No, boys will be boys, he would think to himself, and didn’t that give you a certain license to flirt a little or hit on a woman from time to time, even if you never wanted anything to actually come of it? It should do nothing more than demonstrate what he was, surely: a healthy, red-blooded male. It is what you are supposed to do, after all? No? The idea that it might betray a weakness, his failure, scared him to such an extent what shame he felt redoubled with the fear.

Jokingly admitting to getting a bit tipsy and over-enthused—read horny—was generally enough to paper over any cracks; more often than not, his messages and subsequent apologies were received with eye-rolling indulgence. But he had always been careful not to overstep, phrasing his sallies with light-hearted spontaneity, as though in seeming unpremeditated he could maintain deniability, while hinting that his indirectly expressed interest was an impulse just beyond the remit of restraint. He was also always careful never to focus too much attention on any one individual or send messages too frequently. My father is neither a vulgar, explicit nor aggressive man, but more from caution than out of any moral sense. He does not tend to like things getting out of his control.

With regards to Louise, he generally does not feel too guilty for the half-hearted importuning in which he sometimes partakes. He assumes his wife understands, no less than he believes it is the case, that men will sometimes act that way, committed to his furtive, desperate hope that nothing will be inferred from his messages other than common lechery. He is even able to convince himself that Louise would be disappointed if he weren’t a bit flirty, that she might be glad to know he is confident enough in himself and his good looks, and has retained sufficient of his youthful élan, to throw some none-committal feelers out or take pleasure in sustaining the attention she is anyway aware he gets. Provided there are lines he doesn’t cross.

He is also certain, befitting the woman she is, that she bats away no small amount of interest herself, in person and in private messages, whether from strangers or those she, even he, might know. He tells himself he prefers it like that, as, maturely, he is supposed to; that he likes that she is wanted, even appreciating an occasional jealous pang when she is out several evenings in a week or goes a while without responding to the messages he sends.

I’ve never stopped her doing anything she wants or suggested that she might be playing around. It’s not like I check up on where she goes or who she’s with! he exclaims in the midst of some argument with himself to which I’m party, when feeling the accusations she has levelled against—in his head—are unjust, and so weighs up their relative behaviours.

He trusts her, or he used to trust her. Now it rarely seems necessary to think in such terms: trust, betrayal, infidelity, cheating. Nor does he really feel all that jealous, if he were to be honest with himself, it being another of those sentiments he experiences more based on the notion that one should than due to the feeling itself manifesting. It isn’t impossible that Louise has a lover, he concludes, finding that to do so doesn’t cause the slightest twinge of anger, inducing instead a resigned melancholy, the understanding that it would no longer matter. He couldn’t blame her for finding with someone else what he can no longer offer.

It is at this point I should say I find it something of a relief that Jérôme can still get the horn for a girl like Océane. Were he not to, I would be even more convinced that I bare responsibility, disincarnate, of sapping, with my banishment here, every drop of his vital force!

Whatever degree of detachment, however, under which Jérôme now lives, nothing could have made the look on Louise’s face when she saw what he wrote on Théo’s homework feel worse.

For the first time, it is not merely guilt and embarrassment, emotions he is well practiced in the dismissal of, especially when alcohol is involved, but something deeper, more scouring, more so even than the fear that he might have revealed his emptiness within. Having been called into school in the first place put the lie to being able to shrug off the whole thing as a drunken indiscretion. But her reaction was something else. He has seen in her throughout the years every shade of anger and resentment, from outraged to seething; he has seen her disappointed, scared, confused, bereft, exhausted and in pain. But he had never seen the shadow fall across her face that his words cast. He could only, in the panic that hid behind his petulance, hope that its harm was not irreparable.

And yet, despite her reaction, and for all he was taken aback himself on seeing the line of wobbly text in his almost unrecognisable scrawl, M. Lenoir turning the page around on the desk, Jérôme was less surprised confronted by the sentiment it contained than he was by how considered it appeared—if I do draw attention to its potency myself—, by how unyielding despite the impairment of the writing. It was a cold, hard thing to have written, but still now, when he thinks about it, insightful seeming.

When, since, he has been asked what he was thinking, and replying: I don’t know! there has been nothing dishonest about his response. Jérôme cannot recall what was going through his mind, what could have made him imagine it was a good idea, what effect he thought it would have or what, pig-headedly, he believed he was writing against.

It doesn’t even feel like something I would say, he contends, the phrasing, the words not sounding like his.

There hasn’t been anything going on, he thinks, in his life or that of family, that could have pushed him to such a lacerating or hopeless point of anguish. He has not been experiencing what is professionally known as “suicidal ideation.”

But there has to be something, doesn’t there? An expression like that doesn’t come out of nowhere.

*

As for Océane, despite her soft spot for him, she barely thinks of Jérôme again. And why would she? At twenty-two years old and studying to be a speech therapist, on top of the part-time job and three younger siblings back in Courbevoie to look after, she has more than enough on her plate. There are also plenty of men, of every imaginable age, who flirt with her over the croissants and cakes, and with whom, generally speaking, she is happy to flirt back, so long as it goes no further than smiles, prolonged eye-contact and perhaps a wink. What she doesn’t like is when men ask her what time she gets off work or if she would like to go for a drink or what she looks like out of her uniform. For the most part, however, the customers are polite, and she can allow for a little back-and-forth, feeling secure behind the counter, and with Cristine, the manager, and her co-workers ready to step in, all of whom are also more than happy to kill time sharing a laugh at the attempts of men old enough to be her grandfather to say something seductive, comparing notes on whom among the clientèle they actually find attractive, and excoriating the disgusting ones.

She does notice, however, the next time Jérôme is in, that he is not looking well, as though he isn’t sleeping or has come down with something. He no longer meets her eye when he says hello; questions about Théo go unanswered too, but for an unconvincing, tight-lipped smile. It is enough of a change in his demeanour for her to mention it to Cristine, who admits she finds Jérôme handsome but cannot, she adds, abide temperamental men.

A few days later, when Théo comes in with his grandmother on their way home from school, Océane takes the opportunity to inquire about his homework again, provoking a horrified look from Marie-Thérèse, and a dramatic: Don’t ask!

If it weren’t for those two interactions, Océane would likely have never thought about Jérôme any moment they weren’t standing across the counter from one another. She finds herself, however, thinking about him on the metro home. She had assumed Théo’s granny was Jérôme’s mother, but her reaction suggested that is not the case. She wonders if he is married, PACsed, divorced or single. She can’t remembering seeing Théo in the shop with his mum, or seeing Jérôme with a woman—or a man, she reminds herself—but there is nothing too unusual in that as it would only take a moment of inattention, and she couldn’t really recall having seen him either before the recent interactions.

She vaguely hopes he is doing OK, whoever he is, conceding that he can’t be doing all that badly to be living where he lives, and must have a decent job, going by the suits and shoes he wears, pretty good money, anyway, and— Changing trains at Châtelet is enough to put the thought of him from her head, and it isn’t until much later that night as she’s brushing her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror, that Océane will think:

You know, Cristine is right, he’s really very handsome. It’s a shame that he’s so sad.

*

From the spare room in Tantôt’s apartment, Jérôme texts Louise to ask if she is up. He knows she hasn’t gone out this evening as he hasn’t been asked to look in on Théo. She answers yes quickly enough that he can guess she’s sitting in bed scrolling on her phone. He begins to type: what have I told you about being on your phone before bed … but before he can, another text comes through: Really need to be getting to sleep. Busy day tomorrow x. Jérôme deletes his draft, and though the subtext of Louise’s message it clear, doesn’t allow it to stop him: I’m thinking about you … Louise hearts the message without further response.

Jérôme rolls onto his back. The apartment is quiet which means Tantôt, in all likelihood, has fallen asleep in his armchair. Jérôme hadn’t spoken to him when he came in that evening. As the weeks have gone on, though Tantôt has stridently refuted every suggestion that he has grown sick of his guest, turning down every offer Jérôme has made to book a hotel or find accommodation elsewhere, the two men now rarely spend time in each other’s company.

From the beginning Jérôme had made sure not to interrupt his old neighbour’s routines too egregiously, for example were he to get up and wake his neighbour, advising him he would be better off settling in for the night, but now more than ever he feels that he will be tolerated better if Tantôt is left to his own devices. As he would prefer to stay close to Théo, he goes out of his way so their paths rarely cross—an impressive feat in a Parisian apartment.

Beginning to massage his crotch over the bedsheet, Jérôme picks up his phone again to send another text: I miss being intimate with you. The message is immediately seen. He holds the phone above his face as he watches the animated dots that indicate Louise is composing her response. His left hand finds its way under the sheets, and he starts to coax himself to an erection. With his right hand he is writing Can I come over? He waits for Louise to finish typing before he presses send.

We haven’t been “intimate” as you put it for a long time. So long I’m not really sure what you think you’re missing. I don’t feel like getting fucked by you tonight though so you’re better off going to sleep. If you want to we can talk about this tomorrow. Good night.

Jérôme throws down his phone. Amid the frustration of the night that follows, he decides he will speak to Océane when next the opportunity presents.

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