I go to open it. Antoine shoves his way past me into the room in a cloud of booze and stale sweat. I take a step back.
He pushed his way in here like this only two weeks ago: “Dominique’s cheating on me. I know she is. The little slut. She comes back smelling of a different scent. I called her yesterday in the stairwell and I heard her ringtone coming from somewhere in this building. Second time I rang she’d switched it off. She’d told me she was having a pedicure in Saint-Germain. It’s him, I know it. It’s that English connard you invited to live here . . .”
And me thinking: could it be true? Ben and Dominique? Yes, there had been flirtation at that drinks, on the roof terrace. I hadn’t read anything into it. Ben flirted with everyone. But could this be an explanation for why he had been avoiding my eye, avoiding my calls? Why he had been so busy?
Now Antoine snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Wakey wakey, petit frère!” He doesn’t say it affectionately. His eyes are bloodshot, breath rank with wine. I couldn’t believe the change when I came back after those years away. When I left, my brother was a happy newlywed. Now he’s an alcoholic mess whose wife has left him. That’s what working for our father does to you. “What are we going to do about her?” he demands. “The girl?”
“Just calm down—”
“Calm down?” He stabs the air in front of me with a finger. I take another step back. He may be a mess but I’ll always be the younger brother, ready to duck a punch. And he’s so like Papa when he’s angry. “You know this is all your fault, don’t you? All your mess? If you hadn’t invited that cunt to live here. Coming here and thinking he could just . . . just help himself. You know he used you, right? But you couldn’t see that, could you? You couldn’t see any of it.” He frowns, mock-thoughtful. “In fact, now I think about it, the way you looked at him—”
“Ferme ta gueule.” Shut your mouth. I take a step toward him. The anger is sudden, blinding. And when I’m next aware of what I’m doing I realize my hand is around his throat and his eyes are bulging. I loosen my fingers—but with an effort, as though some part of me resists the instruction.
Antoine puts up a hand, rubs at his neck. “Hit a nerve there, didn’t I, little bro?” His voice is hoarse, his eyes a little frightened, his tone not as flippant as he’d probably like it. “Papa wouldn’t like that, would he? No, he wouldn’t like that at all.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. Ashamed. My hand aches. “Shit, I’m sorry. This isn’t helping anything, us fighting like this.”
“Oh look at you. So grown-up. Embarrassed about your little hissy fit because you like pretending that you’re sorted, don’t you? But you’re just as fucked-up as I am.” When he says the word “fucked”—a harsh foutu in French—a huge gob of spit lands on my cheek. I put my hand up, wipe it off. I want to go and wash my face, scrub at it with hot water and soap. I feel infected by him.
When Jess spoke about Antoine last night I saw him through a stranger’s eyes. I was ashamed of him. She’s right. He is a mess. But I hated her saying it. Because he’s also my brother. We can do our family members down as much as we like. But the second an outsider insults them our blood seethes. At the end of the day I don’t like him—but I love him. And I see my own failures in him. For Antoine it’s the booze, for me it’s the pills, the self-punishing exercise. I might be a little more in control of my addictions. I might be less of a mess—in public anyway. But is that really something to boast about?
Antoine’s grinning at me. “Bet you wish you’d never come back here, huh?” He takes another step closer. “Tell me, if it was all so great rubbing shoulders with the high-flyers in Silicon Valley, why did you come back? Ah, oui . . . because you’re no better than the rest of us. You try and pretend you are, that you don’t need him, his money. But then you came crawling back here, like we all do, wanting to suck a little more from the paternal teat—”
“Just shut the fuck up!” I shout, hands forming fists.
I take a long breath: in for four, out for eight, like my mindfulness app tells me. I’m not proud of myself losing my temper like this. I’m better than this. I am not this guy. But no one can get under my skin like Antoine. No one else knows exactly what to say and how to say it for maximum impact. Except my father, of course.
But the worst part is that my brother’s right. I came back. Back to the paterfamilias like some seasonal bird returning to the same poisoned lake.
“You’ve come home, son,” Papa told me, as we sat together up on the roof terrace on my first night back. “I always knew you would. We’ll have to make a trip to the ?le de Ré, take the boat out one weekend.”
Maybe he’d changed. Mellowed. He didn’t taunt me over the money I’d lost on the investment—not yet. He even offered me a cigar, which I smoked, though I loathe the taste. Maybe he’d missed me.
It was only later that I realized it wasn’t that at all. It was just more proof of his power. I had failed at finding a life apart from him.
“If you want any more of my money,” he told me, “you can come back under my roof so I can keep an eye on you. There’ll be no more gallivanting around the world. I want a return on my investment. I want to know you’re not pissing it all up the wall. Tu comprends? Do you understand?”
Antoine is pacing up and down in front of me. “So what are we going to do about her?” he asks, with drunken belligerence.
“Keep your voice down,” I say. “She might understand something.” The walls have ears in this place.
“Well what the fuck is she still doing here?” He kicks at the doorframe. “What if she goes to the police?”
“I’ve handled that.”
“What do you mean?”
“It helps to have friends in high places.”
He understands. “But she needs to go.” He’s muttering to himself now: “We could lock her out. It would be so easy. All we’d need to do is change the combination on the front gate—she wouldn’t be able to get in then.”
“No,” I say, “that wouldn’t—”
“Or we could make her leave. Little girl like that? Wouldn’t be hard.”
“No. If anything we’d just force her into going to the police again on her own . . .”
Antoine lets out something between a roar and a groan. He’s a total liability. Family, huh? Because blood is always thicker than water, in the end. Or, as we say in French: la voix du sang est la plus forte. The voice of blood is the strongest. Summoning me back here to this place.
“It’s better that she stays here,” I say, sharply. “You must see that. It’s better that we can keep an eye on her. For the time being we simply have to hold our nerve. Papa will know what to do.”
“Have you heard from him?” Antoine says. “Papa?” His tone has changed. Something needy in it. When he said “Papa” for a second he sounded like the little boy he once was, the little boy who sat outside his mother’s bedroom as Paris’ best physicians came and went, unable to make sense of the illness eating away at her.