The Intruder
David’s mother took him with her to Paris the day after his eighth birthday, which was July the Fourth.
Paris was all lights. It was the best time he ever had in his life. Even if the business with the doorbell hadn’t happened when they got back from Paris, he still would think of Paris as the best time he ever had. They were staying at a very nice hotel called the Raphael on Avenue Kleber. Hardly anyone spoke English at the Raphael because it was a very French hotel, and English was grating on the ears. David learned a lot there. He learned, for example, that when someone asked “Quel temps fait-il?” you did not always answer, “Il fait beau,” the way they did in Miss Canaday’s class even if it was snowing. He told this to Miss Canaday when they got back from Paris, and she said, “David, I like to think of the weather as being toujours beau, toujours beau.” He used to speak to the concierge on the phone every morning. He would say, “Bon-jour, monsieur, quel temps fait-il, s’il vous plait?” And the concierge would usually answer in a very solemn voice, “Il pleut, mon petit monsieur.”
It rained a lot while they were in Paris.
He and his mother had a suite at the Raphael, two bedrooms and a sort of living room with windows that opened onto a nice stone balcony. David used to go out on the balcony and stand with the pigeons when it wasn’t raining. The reason they had a suite was that his mother was a buyer for a department store on Fifth Avenue, and they sent her over each year, sometimes twice a year, to study all the new fashions. What it amounted to was that the store was paying for the suite. David’s father was account executive and vice-president of an advertising agency that had thirty-nine vice-presidents. The reason he did not go to Paris that summer was that he had to stay home in New York to make sure one of his accounts did not cancel. So David went instead, to keep her company. He wrote to his father every day they were in Paris.
Escargots were little snails, but they didn’t really look like snails except for the shell, and they didn’t taste like them at all. They tasted like garlic. David and his mother ate a lot of escargots in Paris. In fact, they ate a lot of everything in Paris. They used to spend most of their time eating. What they would do, his mother would leave a call with the desk for eight o’clock in the morning. The phone would ring, and David would jump out of bed and run into his mother’s bedroom and ask her if he could talk to the concierge for a moment. “Bonjour, monsieur,” he would say. “Quel temps fait-il, s’il vous plait?” and the concierge would tell him what kind of day it was and then he would hand the phone back to his mother and lie in her arms while she ordered breakfast. Every morning, they had either melon or orange juice, and then croissants and coffee for his mother, and croissants and hot chocolate for David. The chocolate was very good; the room waiter told them it came from Switzerland. They would eat at a little table just inside the big windows that opened onto the stone balcony. His mother used to wear a very puffy white nylon robe over her nightgown. One morning a man in the building opposite waved at her and winked.
The salon showings used to start at ten on some mornings, it all depended, sometimes they were later. Some days there were no showings at all, and some days they would go to the showing at ten and then have lunch and go to another one at two, and then another one in the afternoon around cocktail time. His mother was a pretty important buyer, so she knew all the designers and the models and they used to go back and everybody would make a fuss over David. He didn’t mind being kissed by the models, who all smelled very nice. Once, when he went back before a showing, two of the models were still in their brassieres. One of them said something in French (she said it very fast, not at all like Miss Canaday or the concierge) and the other models started laughing, and his mother laughed too and ran her hand over his head. He didn’t know what was so funny; he’d seen a hundred brassieres in his lifetime.
For lunch they used to like the cheese place best; it was called Androuet, and it had about eight hundred cheeses you could choose from. Every now and then, they would go to a ritzy place on the Left Bank, but that was only when his mother was trying very hard to impress a designer, and then he was supposed to just keep his mouth shut and not say anything, just eat. They had the most fun when they were alone together. One night, on top of the Eiffel Tower, his mother ordered red wine for him. She held up her glass in a toast, and he clinked his glass against hers and saw that she was crying.
“What is it?” he said.
“Nothing,” she answered. “Taste your wine, David. It’s really lovely.”
“No, what is it?” he insisted.
“I miss Daddy,” she said.
The next day, he sent his father a card from Notre Dame. On the back he wrote, as a little joke, “Can you find Quasimodo?” He had read that in the spring in Classics Illustrated. His father wrote back and in his letter he sent a thing that he’d had one of his art directors work up. What it was, it was a composite from the monster magazines, with very good type across the top saying, “Yes, this is Quasimodo! But where oh where is DAVID?”
The fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, fell on a Sunday and that was lucky to begin with because it meant there were no showings to attend. David woke up at eight o’clock, and then slept for another two hours in his mother’s bed and then they had breakfast and she said, “David, how would you like to take a car and go out into the country for a picnic?” So that’s what they did. They hired a car, and they drove out down by the Loire where all the French castles were, and they stopped by the river and had sausage and bread and cheese and red wine (His mother said it was okay for him to drink all the wine he wanted while they were in France) and they drove back to Paris at about seven in the evening, getting caught in the traffic around the Étoile. Later they stood on their little stone balcony and he held his mother’s hand and they watched the fireworks exploding over the rooftops. He didn’t think he would forget those fireworks as long as he lived.
The next week, they were back in New York.
The week after that, the doorbell started.
The building they lived in was on Park Avenue, and there were two apartments on their floor — their own and Mrs. Shavinsky’s, who was an old lady in her seventies and very mean. Mrs. Shavinsky was the type who always said to David as he came off the elevator, “Wipe the mud off your shoes, young man,” as though it were possible to get mud on your shoes in the city of New York. Mrs. Shavinsky wore hats and gloves all of the time, because she was originally from San Francisco. She was constantly telling the elevator operator, as if he cared, that in San Francisco the ladies all wore hats and gloves. Even though there were only those two apartments on the floor, there were four doors in the hallway because each apartment had two doors, one for people and the other for service. Their own main entrance door was on one side of the hall, and Mrs. Shavinsky’s was on the other side. The two service doors were in a sort of alcove opposite the elevator. They hardly ever saw Mrs. Shavinsky (Except she always managed to be there when David got off the elevator, to tell him about his muddy shoes) until the business with the doorbell started, and then they practically lived in each others’ apartments.