The Main

This is not what LaPointe came here to listen to, and he doesn’t want the burden of problems he did not cause and cannot help. “Oh, well,” he says, making a gesture toward the expensive apartment, “you’ve come a long way from all that.”

She looks at him sideways through her shoulder-length, rolled-under hair. “You sound like my analyst,” she accuses.

“The one you take to bed?”

“The one I screw,” she corrects. “What is it? Why are you shaking your head?”

“It must be the fashion to use the ugliest words for making love. I met a girl just recently who found the nicer words funny, and couldn’t help laughing at them.”

“I say screw because I mean screw. It’s the mot juste. When I’m with a man, we don’t ‘go to bed,’ and we certainly don’t ‘make love.’ We screw. And what’s more, they don’t screw me. I screw them.”

“As in, Screw you, mister!”

Mlle. Montjean laughs. “Now you really sound like my analyst. How about another Armagnac?”

“No, thanks.”

She carries her glass to the divan before the fireplace, where she sits staring silently for a short time before beginning to speak, more to herself than to him. “It’s funny, but I never despised the men Yo-Yo brought home— mostly good mecs, laughing, a little drunk, clumsy. Yo-Yo used to come in to tuck me in and kiss me good night. Then she’d close the door slowly because the hinges creaked. She had a way of waving to me with her fingertips, just before the door closed. I remember the light on the wall, a big trapezoid of yellow getting narrower until the door clicked shut, and there was only a thin line of light from the crack. Her bedroom was next to mine. I could hear her laughing. And I could hear the men. The squeak of the bedsprings. And the men grunting. They always seemed to grunt when they came.” She looks over at LaPointe out of the corner of her eye and she half smiles. “You never grunted, Lieutenant. I’ll say that much for you.”

He lifts his empty glass in acceptance of the compliment, and immediately feels the stupidity of the gesture. “And you didn’t resent me?”

“Because you screwed Yo-Yo? Hey, notice the difference? Men screwed Yo-Yo; I screw men. Deep significance there. Or maybe shallow. Or maybe none at all. No, I didn’t resent you, Lieutenant! Goodness gracious, no! I could hardly have resented you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you were my father,” she says atonally. Then, “Hey, want another drink?”

LaPointe takes the shot in silence and doesn’t speak until she has crossed to the bar and is refilling her glass. “That was cute. That ‘want another drink?’ part was particularly cute.”

“Yeah, but kind of hokey.”

“Of course you know that I was not…”

“Don’t panic, Lieutenant. I know perfectly well that I don’t owe the Gift of Life to any squirt from you— grunted or ungrunted. My father was Anonymous.” She has a bit of trouble saying the word; the drink is beginning to close down on her. “You know the famous poet, Anonymous. He’s in all the collections—mostly toward the front. Hey? Aren’t you just dying to know how come you’re my father?”

She stands behind the bar, leaning over her glass, the ball of colored light tinting her hair, her face in the shadow. LaPointe is unable to see the expression in her unlit eyes. At a certain point, he turns away and watches the fire dwindle.

She uses a clowning, melodramatic style behind which she can hide, and occasionally her voice broadly italicizes words to prove she isn’t taken in by the sentimentality that hurts.

“You see, children, it all began when I was very, very young and suffering from a case of innocence. I overheard Yo-Yo talking to some hooker she had up to the apartment for drinks. The subject was one Officer LaPointe, our beat cop, blue of uniform and blue of eye. Some yahoo had given Yo-Yo trouble, and the brave LaPointe had duly bashed him. You remember the incident?”

He shakes his head. In those days, that was not so uncommon an event that he would be likely to remember it.

“Well, bash you did, sir. You Protected My Mother. And the next Sunday, when she was taking me for a walk in the park, she pointed your apartment out to me. This Was the House of the Man Who Protected My Mother. And there were other times when she had good things to say about you. I didn’t know then that she was praising you for paying for your nookie when, as a cop, you didn’t have to.

“Well, sir, it was about that time that I went off to school and discovered that other kids had daddies. Before that, I had never thought about it. Living alone with Yo-Yo was simply how one lived. I neither had a daddy nor lacked one. Then the teasing about being a redhead began. And little boys wanted me to go behind the bushes and pull down my pants to show them my red hair. I couldn’t understand. You see, I didn’t have any hair, let alone red.

“So life went along, and went along, and went along. Then when I was about ten or eleven, the Great Myth began. One day after school, I was crying with anger and frustration and there was a ring of kids around me, chanting ‘Redhead, wet to bed… Redhead, wet to bed!’ And I screamed at them to cut it out, or else! Or else what, one of them asked, logically enough. And another asked why I didn’t run home and tell my father on them. And everyone laughed—we have to save the children, Lieutenant; they’re our hope for the future—so I suddenly blurted out that I would too tell my father, if they didn’t leave me alone! And they said I didn’t have a father. And I said that I did too! Sergeant LaPointe was my father! And he would bash any son of a bitch who gave me trouble!”

There is a thud and a tinkle of glass, then silence.

“Oops. I have knocked over my glass in my efforts to decorate my fable with… whatever. How graceless of me.”

LaPointe keeps his eyes on the fire. It would be unfair to look at her just then. He hears her walking behind the bar, the crisp crunch of glass under her shoes. He hears the squeak of the cork in the Armagnac bottle. When she speaks again, she has assumed a gruff, comic tone.

“Well, sir, that was the winter when I had a father… or, to be more exact, a daddy. You screwed Yo-Yo two times that winter, and both times I was awake when you came to the flat, and you chatted nonsense with me before she put me to bed. Your uniform smelled like wool, which wasn’t so strange, considering the fact that it was made of wool. But it smelled good to me… like my blanket. Like the blanket I pressed against my nose when I sucked my thumb. At ten, I still sucked my thumb. But I’ve given that up in favor of cigarettes. Thumb-sucking causes lung cancer.

“And every day that winter, on my way home from school, I made a big loop out of my way so I could pass your apartment on Esplanade. I used to stand there, sometimes in the snow—grab the image of a little girl standing in the snow! Doesn’t it just rip you up?—and I would look up at the windows of your apartment on the third floor. By the way, your apartment is on the third floor, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he lies.

“I knew it. Infallible instinct. I knew you would live on the top floor, looking out over the world. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if all those afternoons I had been looking up at the wrong apartment? Wouldn’t that be an ironic blast?”

He nods.

After a silence, she puffs out a sigh. “Thank God that’s out of me! Pal, you have no idea what a zonker it was when you walked in here this afternoon. Talk about ghosts! I didn’t really have an appointment tonight. I was walking up on the Main—the first time in years. I dropped in at a bar or two and had Armagnac, because that was your drink. And I walked around the old streets, over past your apartment, trying to decide if I should unload all this crap on you. And finally I decided that I wouldn’t. I decided to keep it to myself. Sic transit all claims to being mistress of my fate.”

LaPointe has nothing to say.

“Well!” She brings him an Armagnac he doesn’t want and sits on the divan beside him. “Presumably you