Rake: A Novel by Scott Phillips

Author:Scott Phillips [Phillips, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781619022218
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2013-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

JEUDI, DOUZE MAI

MY MOM WAS MARRIED FOR THE FIRST TIME at fourteen (illegally) and divorced at seventeen. She had got her GED and started college, an experiment that produced nothing but a second marriage, to the instructor of her freshman math course, which itself was the result of a pregnancy that began in the classic American manner, in the backseat of a Thunderbird. My father, with whom I maintained sporadic contact until his death, was overjoyed at the prospect of a child, but my mother didn’t take to it. She found that what she liked was drinking and other fellows and, after the unpleasant surprise of my arrival, birth control. I do have one sister, fifteen years my junior, from my mother’s third marriage and brief flirtation with sobriety and Christianity; my stepfather, a good and honest if somewhat stern Kentuckian, suffered through five years of her antics before divorcing her. I’m in somewhat spotty contact with him and my sister, though whether my mother is still among the living is a matter of some indifference to me.

Anyway, my discovery after my discharge that acting was something I was good at and that women liked was probably what saved me from a life of brawling and petty criminality. All that anger gets wrapped up in the preparation and chucked out in the performance. An art therapist once told me that all art is art therapy.

•••

I was in bed telling all this to Esmée the next night. I’d spent the day wondering about the girl under the bridge and was rewarded in the late afternoon with an account on the Libération website about a group of young people who claimed they’d been beaten up by Dr. Crandall Taylor from the television. Two of them had been hospitalized; there was no mention of a third, which either meant that the first boy hadn’t been hurt very badly or that the one I’d tossed into the Seine had floated away. There was no mention of the girl’s being pregnant, which presumably meant she hadn’t miscarried. My feelings were mixed there, but I’m not the Pope and it wasn’t my business to go around deciding who could or couldn’t reproduce.

Esmée had shown up around seven, and we spent some time looking at the artwork before surrendering to the bedroom’s pull. When we were done I asked where the money had come from to buy all that artwork.

“Some of it’s mine, from modeling.”

“You earned enough modeling to buy a Picasso?”

“Please, it’s a little drawing.”

“They’re not giving those little drawings away. What does Claude do for a living, anyway?”

This was the moment of truth. I didn’t care if it was true or not, I just wanted to see if she’d tell me.

“He’s in the import-export trade.”

“Where is he now?” I was thinking North Korea or Iran, or maybe Pakistan or Israel.

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me where he goes. Anyway, he won’t be back for a week.”

“Would he kill me if he knew?”

She snorted. “Don’t be melodramatic.

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