inspo/characterisation

Jess used to say that he wasn’t himself until he had people around, until he had other moods and personalities to react to, and he resented when she said that, as if he were incapable of self-reflection, but now he sort of knew what she meant. It wasn’t that he disliked being alone, it was more like he felt muted, not completely awake. He held a bag of ground coffee, considered whether he could rig up a percolator on the stove if he found matches to light the pilot. And then, after standing there another minute, he heard the crunch of snow under tires, as if from his dreams.

My father’s beliefs were so rigid that once, when my parents came to visit me at Barnard, I suggested we walk down Fifth Avenue to look at the shopwindows and he refused. He was almost viscerally offended by the idea of frivolously spending money, and of accumulating wealth. To this day, almost everything he’s earned goes back to impoverished relatives and charities in India. Also, waste was a crime. My father had witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, when the English starved Kolkata. Growing up, I’d be anxious about inviting my American friends to the house for my birthday parties, because my parents would always comment on all the unconsumed food they’d throw away. When I was a child, almost every purchase my parents made was deliberated over. We arrived in Kingston with a few suitcases, a couple of pots and pans. I don’t want to exaggerate, but there was a frugal, bare-bones quality to my upbringing, and a feeling that we were just passing through.

[...] But on a number of other points too, Ivan thinks, his brother has long been a person of good sense. On the subject of how to deal with their mother’s boyfriend Frank, for instance. Or how to tell a waiter politely that they’ve brought the wrong food. Ivan has even observed Peter doing this. Looking down at the plate, he will say in a friendly offhanded kind of voice: Ah, I think it was the tortellini for me. He doesn’t hesitate before saying it, he just says it right out, completely normal. This is not a skill Ivan urgently needs to cultivate, considering how seldom he frequents restaurants, considering that he has almost literally no money, but he would still like to have this skill in his pocket for the rare occasions on which a waiter brings him the wrong dish, to be able to say nonchalantly: Ah, I think it was the tortellini.

My mother. After my parents split up, when I was eleven, it was just the two of us. On Sunday nights we watched Murder, She Wrote, eating bowls of ice cream side by side on the couch. She always solved the mystery by the second commercial break; she knew from the lost umbrella in the corner of the shot, or else from the fishy alibi that didn’t check out because the murderer used “he” to describe a female dentist. “Just got lucky,” she’d say. It wasn’t luck. It was her close attention to the details of the world, the same keen eye that kept track of every doctor’s appointment, every passing comment I’d made about a school project, a tiff with a friend; she always followed up, wondered how it went.

Her skin carried the sweet, clean scent of her soap—that blue tub of chilly white pudding that she rubbed across her high cheekbones. She baked loaves of fresh brown bread and gave me heels straight from the oven, still warm.

She helped me write down recipes in a little spiral-bound notebook of index cards so I could make us dinner once a week: sloppy joes with soy crumbles, or a casserole of pop-up biscuits and cream of mushroom soup. My economist father was on the other side of the country, or in his apartment across town, or in the sky. It was hard to keep track. He and I had dinner once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d never had my biscuit casserole.

Today Clémentine is wearing blue eyeliner today she’s wearing pink lipstick today her nails are painted today they’re not today she’s wearing lace tomorrow leather and then a massive hooded sweatshirt. I can’t pin her down, she is simply, and thoroughly, herself. I see her pretty much every day now. She knows what time I get tired of being alone, and turns up. Sometimes she’s on her way out to meet a friend, and just wants to check in. Clémentine goes places. The theatre, the cinema. Out for drinks. Once: bowling. I just run in my circles around the Buttes-Chaumont. She’s taken the place of all the friends I don’t see any more. The ones with kids (can’t bear it). The ones who are pregnant (fuck them). The ones who are trying to get pregnant (don’t want to hear about it). I figure she’s too young to know what she wants kid-wise so it’s perfect. One night we take a selfie with her Polaroid, she kisses my cheek, my smile makes my eyes squish shut.

Her mother was a fishwife at the market in Nantes. She’d rise in the blue night and drive to the city and come home midmorning with her hands chapped and glittering with scales, cold to the bone from contact with ice. Her face was delicate, but she had no education. Her husband had wooed her with his leather jacket, his pompadour, his motorcycle. Small things to trade for a life, but at the time they had seemed powerful. Aurélie’s father was a stonemason, and his family had lived in the same house in Notre-Dame-des-Landes for twelve generations. Aurélie was conceived during the revolution of May 1968; though her parents were far from radical, there was so much excitement in the air that they didn’t know how to express themselves except animally. When it was impossible for the girl’s mother to hide her pregnancy, they were married with orange blossoms in her hair, a slice of coconut cake in the freezer.

Marcel bequeathed his aunt Leonie’s couch to a bordello, and whenever he visited the place, to tease Rachel of my Lord (but never buy her services), it unnerved him to see tarts flopped on its pink crushed velvet cushions, even if there was maybe nothing more perfect and appropriate than pink velvet plush flattening under a whore’s ass. De la Mazière was different. It didn’t matter to him whether he reclined on plush furniture in the lobby of the Ritz or in a squalid St. Denis cathouse. Ate his steak at Maxim’s or at a colonial outpost in Djibouti, a backwater of salt factories and scorching temperatures on the bacterial mouth of the Red Sea. Properly seared steak is everywhere the same. A traitor satisfies his tastes, gets his high- and his low-grade pleasures wherever he can. In Havana, de la Mazière found occupied Paris all over again. Amidst its nude and adorned girls, morphine slushees and luxury hotel suites, he sensed a vague but unshakeable dread darkening the reverie and lawlessness. Despite the city’s obvious, surreal wealth, he sniffed wretched poverty. Tall and neon-pulsing casinos staking the heart of a metropolis ringed in desperation: miles and miles of neighborhoods with no electricity, no running water, and smokily typhoid trash fires. It was occupied Paris, with Americans in Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes. A sultrier climate and starrier nights, purple-mouthed girls, a cinema palace with a retractable roof. They even had Obelisk and Olympia books on Calle Belga, and obsolete French pornography—not sequestered in L’Enfer, on the top floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but displayed at the bookstalls, their pages riffling in the damp ocean breeze.

Kentucky: that is certainly part of it. My mother lived as a girl in so many North Carolina towns they are confused in my memory. Raleigh and Charlotte. She hardly knew her own parents; they died quickly as people did then, of whatever was in the air—pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis. I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was. She had brothers and sisters and was raised by them, passing their names down to us.

Her face, my mother’s, is not clear to me. A boneless, soft prettiness, with small brown eyes and the scarcest of eyebrows, darkened with a lead pencil.