Now he was slimy wet and cold. He bit his lip to keep from crying. From that moment a strange twinning of sex and safety lodged itself in his unconscious.
He maneuvered around and rested Chloe as comfortably as possible in the tub’s bottom while he stepped out and ran to what he hoped was the linen closet, water squishing in his shoes, and pulled out an armload of towels. He paused before he covered Chloe, feeling a tenderness (he had never seen a naked middle-aged woman’s body before, certainly not his puritanical mother’s). Her breasts were small and high, slightly concave on top, the nipples darker and more pronounced compared with the small, pink, puppy roundness in magazines his friends passed around. Even at his young age, he recognized that the images in the porn mags were not the real deal, but fetishistic, consumerist fantasies that encouraged the substitution of anatomically supersized body parts for attraction, a paid voyeurism of man-made boobs, airbrushed crotches, inflated inner tube lips. Chloe’s body was real. Slim and toned, it contained a history. Her stomach, although flat, was soft, the lower belly pouched. Her rear end was gloriously full — one could see its contours even under clothes — with tiny ribbons of stretch marks around the hips. He worshipped this woman and, given the chance, would have married her a thousand times over the silly girls his own age.
When Richard had used all the towels from the linen closet — under her head as a pillow, wedged underneath her body for warmth, on top for modesty — he at last felt safe enough to leave her. He ran into the bedroom, grabbed the phone, and called his mother.
* * *
Sarah Dolan, née Donnelly, was the third daughter, fifth child, of a large alcoholic Irish family, and the appearance of one overdosed woman in a bathtub did not greatly perturb her. She did want to know what part her Richard had in this, but first things first. She took the pulse of the stylish Frenchwoman, a woman who had snubbed her and instead befriended her young son. She slapped her awake, then asked her a barrage of inane questions like name, date, and current president, determining that if Chloe had taken enough pills to kill herself, the job would already have been done. When she mentioned calling an ambulance, Chloe became so agitated it was clear that she didn’t need one, or the attending scandal that would follow. Sarah hunted around the medicine cabinet until she found the ipecac, then forced a dose down Chloe’s throat. She got her out of the tub and into underwear, a robe, and tube socks.
“Where is Claude?” Sarah yelled into the bedroom.
“Not here,” Richard mumbled.
A cloud darkened Sarah’s prim blue eyes. This, too, would have to wait. “Go make a pot of coffee and bring us a cup,” she said, to get her son out of the room and preserve whatever innocence he had left.
Sarah sat on the edge of the tub while Chloe hugged the toilet, retching out the last toxic remnants of her stomach. Periodically Sarah got up, once to fish around the drawers for hairpins, which she used to pin Chloe’s bangs back, and another time to find a washcloth, which she repeatedly wet, wrung out, and handed over. After the toilet had been flushed a last time, Chloe put the lid down, laid her head down on top of it, and began to sob. The lavishness of her grief impressed even a stern Irish girl. Now that the danger was over, Sarah was getting impatient to leave. She had left the dinner preparations in midstream — uncooked hamburger in the pan, frozen corn in its boiling bag.
“Dear, would you like me to call the professor?”
A loud wail came up out of Chloe’s chest as she stood up, her robe gaping open and revealing her body once more just as Richard came through the door with the cup of coffee.
“That piece of shee-ittt. Merde. He’s left me for his little pute secretary. He’s such a cliché, he can’t even be original in his choice.”
“Richard, go find alcohol — vodka or gin — and pour a glass for Mrs. Arnoux.”
“Claude’s father sleeps with the mother of Claude’s first girlfriend. The girl my little boy lost his virginity with. It will make him sick in the head.”
“Richard!” His mother yelled down the stairs. “Bring the bottle and two glasses.”
After her own family’s boisterous drunken example, Richard’s mother was a teetotaler who sipped only enough wine to make toasts on special occasions, so this was a big deal.
Richard went to the cabinet that he knew from long habit held the liquor. During sleepovers, Claude and he used to sneak into it, watering down the alcohol until the remainder was the color of pale tea. All he could think of was that Claude had done it with a girl and not told him, a major breach of best friend etiquette. He was not anxious about Chloe despite the horrific events of the afternoon. Truth was his mother was the person you most wanted in charge during times like these.
When Richard was six years old, it had seemed an excellent idea to steal grass clippings out of the garbage can, add flowers from the garden, and pour bottled salad dressing on top, just like his mom’s salad. Then eat it. Out came the ipecac.
Calmly his mother kneeled and held his tiny shoulders as he vomited in the wastepaper basket, dabbing his lips with Kleenex, washing his forehead with a damp cloth nonchalantly as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world to happen — your son eating grass.
“Mama’s little cow,” she crooned.
He slept through the afternoon, night, and next morning, finally waking at noon. No mention of school missed. She brought him his favorite, grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off, not once scolding him, figuring rightly he had already suffered enough. She was mystified by her son’s precocious love of cooking but defended it, especially against her husband, who called him a sissy. A good Catholic girl, she believed it was a mysterious gift that demanded to be used by its recipient.
Now, as Richard sat on the stairs at Chloe’s house, Sarah made a call to the family doctor, explaining the situation in as vague terms as possible, not using names, although it would be common knowledge soon enough. He said the only responsible thing to do was take the woman in question to the hospital, where she could be monitored. That, or have her personally supervised.
The hospital wasn’t an option — Chloe had made that much clear — but she was surprisingly willing to live with the Dolans. She moved into the guest room while Claude shared Richard’s room in a kind of extended sleepover.
“How come you never told me you did it?” Richard whispered.
“If you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll say you were banging my mom,” Claude hissed back.
For the next week, Richard’s parents lived in terror.
Chloe stayed up all night, playing cassettes of Edith Piaf and Nina Simone over and over. She drank profusely, although the doctor had strictly forbidden it, and smoked her black cigarillos like a chimney. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the house, but his mother said nothing, instead choosing to focus on keeping the house from being burned to the ground. Brown-rimmed holes scorched into the fabric of the sofa revealed the white eyes of stuffing. Years later, the faint reek of tobacco still hung in the curtains.