Frenchie Says

Frenchie says I look best in the khaki pants because they hide the heft of my ass. I keep asking him what he means, thinking he’s insulting me. It sounds like you think I can’t fill them in, I try to say as jokingly as possibly. His only answer is to grab my left cheek, squeeze until I think he’s gonna make me bleed, and tell me I know what he means.

I think I do.

I went to the store at the end of the block and the kid working the counter asked me about the weather, but I knew from his intonation that he wanted to see me undressed, and on my knees in front of him, begging for him—whether its for him to stop or for him to keep going I’ll never know.

Frenchie says the kid who works the counter at the store at the end of the block is a pervert. He wants to see the kid put away for a long time. I don’t want to start an argument, but I feel like I need to defend the kid in some way.

He’s always been nice to me, I say.

You would say that, Frenchie says.

Norris—the woman I see on Wednesdays while her husband is out of town on business, though she believes, to the point of knowing, that he is sleeping with another woman while he is out of town—offers me microwave-warmed coffee and stale butter cookies leftover from the holidays when I go to her apartment. From my seat I can see into their bedroom, the one she and her husband share, how the shag carpet is flattened in the places where their feet land as they make their ways to bed.

It might be several women, she says.

What a weight you have to carry, I say.

There’s nothing she can do to prove it, Frenchie says when I relay to him every detail of our conversation on Thursday morning, minus the shag carpet.

Frenchie is a large man. Not fat, but not muscular. There is a power to him that exudes through every seam of his clothing, filling every nook and corner of whatever room he exists in. He once wanted to see how hard he would have to squeeze to kill a dog, just from holding its throat. It did not take long, he says, whenever he feels like telling the story, often when he is drunk or he has friends over that he wants to impress. I want to ask him what kind of dog it was, but I can never get over the way he laughs—clicking sound that his tongue makes in the back of his throat as he really winds himself up with the story—and so I imagine it is some type of dog I’ve never seen before. One that I can’t place. One that would make me question whether it was really a dog, or not some large rodent.

Life is easier when there are gaps that cannot be filled.

The boy who works the counter at the store at the end of the block asks me about the band on my shirt. He has listened to them. He first heard them from an older boy in high school, one of the ones who appear so cool to those who are young until enough time passes that the coolness has worn off like the shine of a brass door handle, and something murkier lurks underneath.

He was ashamed for how he loved the boy. He wanted to be ashamed for how much he loved the band that was on my shirt.

But they’re just so fucking good, he says to me.

I want to cup my hands around his face, and tell him things will get better. That the band on my shirt is only a stand-in for whatever it is he feels is missing in his life. That they cannot make it better for him. But I can’t do it. The formica between us is too thick, the grime too heavy, and the music from the store’s radio too droning to properly convey what I want. I pay for my things, and ask him to take care of himself.

Promise me, I plead.

Sounds like you’re leaving, he says.

The rain has gathered force thanks to hurricanes ravaging my parent’s homes in the south. Frenchie and I live here because of them, in this city that feels too small for us. The wind throws the rain against the glass of the store and I can’t make out the faces of the passersby walking, running, hurrying to their next stage of life. The boy scratches his chin—it sounds rough and dry, and I want to tell him to lotion, but I know how ridiculous it would sound to lotion your chin, how he would look at me, possibly devastated.

Just please take care, I tell him before venturing out into the rain.

Frenchie says I look wet. I give him a coy smile and tell him I am. He laughs and his throat clicks, and I feel the room consume me and everything else in it. When Frenchie laughs, he swells and expands until there is only Frenchie left. It is why I fall into him so frequently. It is easy to let the sound drown the noise beyond the walls. When he asks where I’ve been, I tell him that the boy at the store on the corner does not work there anymore, that there is nothing to worry about, that it was only the old man who owns the place. Frenchie kisses the top of my head and goes back to the kitchen.

Norris asks me how Frenchie is when I see her on Wednesday. I don’t know what to tell her—that he is fine, that nothing has changed for him, that he makes an incredible risotto that, were someone else to make it for me, I would not hesitate to say there is too much salt, and that perhaps the rice could be cooked a bit longer and on a lower temperature—so I tell here that he is great and that we have been talking about a vacation.

She tells me when she and her husband used to go on vacations—before his new job that has taken him from her every Wednesday and placed him into the arms and bed of another woman, or women—that she used to bring around a journal with her. She asks me if I like to journal, and I tell her that I do. I want her to believe that we have so much in common.

The shag carpet, I notice while she rummages in another room, somewhere in the back of the apartment, for a notebook, is gone. It has been replaced with hardwood that matches the floor of the hallway.

Was that always under there, I ask her pointing to the floor.

Good bones, she tells me.

We finished the butter cookies the week before and so there is nothing for me to consume with my coffee, and I keep drinking the coffee. It weakens me, I think, just like Frenchie says it does, because I feel the nausea creeping. I cling to my memory of the carpet, and the way Norris and her husband’s lives had grooved into it.

I want to ask her more questions about the carpet and why she got rid of it, or whether she wanted to keep it but her husband made the choice, but the time has passed and we have started to talk about the boy from the store on the corner.

He has not been at the store the last several times I have gone, and I begin to wonder if I had spoken his disappearance into existence. Had he met some terrible fate that I, having told Frenchie he no longer worked at the store, put into creation by speaking it aloud? Had he done something that left the old man who owns the store with no other choice but to fire him? Or had I simply continued to not run into him, the timing of our lives falling out of sync?

That shag carpet in Norris’s room and its matted paths forking around the bed. That image wouldn’t leave my mind. I kept looking at the sidewalk, thinking where and when the boy had passed over these blocks of concrete and pavement, and hoping that if I looked down hard enough I could find his trail and maybe, one day, look up and see him.

How had he disappeared, Norris asked me the following week. She was perplexed by what I was talking about, but confirmed that she had also not seen the boy.

Have you asked the old man about him, I asked.

I never noticed he was gone until you just said anything.

I feel it would be too awkward for me to ask the old man about it.

It would only be a passing comment, Norris says. Frenchie would never have to know.

The old man isn’t a gossip, I suppose.

I’ve never heard him speak more than a few words at a time.

I should get going.

Yes, you should, Norris says. My husband will be home any moment.

I look at the bedroom floor, its absence of movement from a life I feel I am learning less and less of.

I believe he’s losing his job, Norris tells me.

When I tell Frenchie about Norris’s husband and about his job, Frenchie says that I shouldn’t worry about them. He tells me that he knows them both so well—better than I could ever know—and that they will land on their feet. The shag carpet weighed down by lives they used to live. So much is changing, Frenchie says, this world can’t support the number of people we have here. Think about the old man at the corner store. How often do we go there, he asks me.

I tell him we both go there so often, on our own individual trips. Almost never together, I say.

Exactly, he says. And yet he can’t afford to keep any help. Think about that silly little pervert you used to like talking to.

You’re the only pervert for me, I say to him, hoping to shift the conversation away from the outside world. I want him back inside these walls, filling every inch of space in here.

That pervert left that man high and dry, Frenchie says. Just as you said the other day, that boy left the old man to work those long hours at the store all by himself. That’s the kind of world we’re living in now.

It is, I say.

It is.

When Frenchie and I first met, Norris had only just entered my life. I hadn’t yet taken to going to her apartment for the coffee and leftover stale sweet treats that we would pretend to enjoy. I hadn’t learned that she had a husband—his existence in their apartment being marked by the way he wore down their furniture and surroundings—or that Frenchie and her had dated years previously, before Norris discovered that she had a family history of one degenerative disease or another that made it hard for Frenchie to imagine a life with her into the future. I knew Frenchie only as Frenchie. It wouldn’t be until our fourth date that I took his license, after presenting it to our bartender, and scoured over the the limp piece of plastic for his real name.

Jacque Orsel. I ran my thumb along its rigid structure. The deep valley between the top of the j and the o exacerbated by the bottom of the q. The line of lovers I had imagined him having as Jacque, among them Norris. I asked him about her on that date, and whether he still had feelings for her.

The thing about these things, he started, is that nothing ever really leaves a person.

I had wanted him to say that no, he had no feelings towards her. I desired it in that moment more than I desired hearing him ask me to come back to his place, the first time he would ask me, and how thrilling the thought of him being so demure and respectful with me on our first three dates—the way he held me in his arms as he said goodnight after our first meeting, of how his lips lingered on mine after our second, of how much I wanted more after our third.

I am happy, now, that he said what he said. It makes living easier. It makes his own disappearances easier to consume, when there are only his echoes and stains in the corners of these walls, these rooms, for me to lick up and savor.

Why do you hide from me, I ask him.

What do you mean? I’m right here.

As you typically are, I say. And still, there is so little of you in this space.

I like to be alone, he says.

But I am right here.

As you always are.

Norris tells me that she has broken down. That she could not do any longer. She broached the subject with her husband. It was eating her alive, she told me, as though a million little ants crawled over every inch of her. Never quite biting, but always within a mouth’s yawn from consuming her flesh. She told me that most Wednesdays, after I would leave her, she would consume whatever coffee she had left in the pot—and if there were none she would make an entire pot, and shortly thereafter making an entire pot regardless in order to consume as much of it as her stomach could tolerate—and, with her body vibrating and pulsating in her sugar and caffeine rushes, she would lay on the shag carpet of their bedroom staring up into the ceiling, and imagining all of the cracks that ran along the popcorn ceiling of every room in this apartment opened up and consumed her. She was so tired, she says, of feeling exhausted by this space. She could never feel at home.

It was why, she said, they had decided to remove the rug.

How long have I not known that you’ve talked to him about the affair?

Only since yesterday, she says. The rug was my test.

It was the sign of their love, she said. Something they could easily point to and say that Yes, we loved each other this much and we will still love.

But carpet only has so much wear it can take, she says.

When I relay this information to Frenchie, he laughs his clickety clacking laugh and I am reminded of how pleasant and youthful he can look. I tell him I will go to the store on the corner and buy us some drinks—to celebrate Norris and her husband staying together, despite what she believed him capable of. To celebrate that while he lost his job, he did not lose his wife.

The boy is working the counter when I set down the bottles I’ve chosen. He smiles at me and I notice that he is missing a tooth. It gives him a sinister edge that turns me on, like the first time I saw Frenchie without his shirt on, running my hands over the tattoos of indecipherable scripts that he told me I couldn’t understand even if he told me.

You’re back, I tell the boy.

I’ve been right here, he says, just as I typically am.

Frenchie says I look like a ghost. My pale skin illumines in the light of the alarm clock in the darkness of our bedroom. He is running his hands over my body, the way he does when he has gotten what he wants. I stare up at the popcorn ceiling and notice a crack has begun to form in the corner.

I kiss Frenchie goodnight and think of Norris and her husband and the shag carpet that is now gone, of the boy from the corner store and his missing tooth, and of Frenchie’s laughter filling this space, opening the crack in the ceiling further, tearing the building down into nothing but its frame, and finally getting to see what all of this is made of underneath.

JOSEPH LINSCOTT is a writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. His work can be found online and in print. He can be reached on social media @prosephlinscott.

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