Knife Play, Paris 1988-1993
by Nancy Lane
In 1984, I rented office space from a sole practitioner who I affectionately named Rumpole of the Bronx, because he was a native of that borough and a ringer for Leo McKern who played Rumpole of the Bailey, in the British television series. Like the original Rumpole, this Bronx doppelganger referred to his wife, as “she who must be obeyed,” and rarely lost a case. Bronx Rumpole taught me a lot about the law, but didn’t pay me and I scrounged for clients.
I survived on referrals, and one source was an Irish policeman, who’d been shot in the knee, retired early from the force, and joined my class at law school. He sent me cases he didn’t want, “domestic” cases; that is, women who’d been abused by their husbands or boyfriends. My job was to obtain restraining orders against the guilty partners and to accompany the women to court on Centre Street in lower Manhattan. The women rarely sought to enforce the orders. I surmised that was either because they’d convinced themselves the abuse was merited, that they’d deserved it, that they were guilty of provoking the violence, or because they believed the unbelievable, that he didn’t mean it. These women attested to the theory that attention from an abuser was better than no attention at all. I thought of abused children who often thrive where neglected children do not. An abused child, like a battered wife, exists in flesh and blood, tears and screams. They get some attention, even if its negative attention. A neglected child has no existence, he or she is miasma, like the faked ectoplasm that appears in late nineteenth and early twentieth century séance photographs. That child, like an ignored wife, suffers from being invisible. It is well known that in extreme cases, infants who are not touched simply perish, dying from lack of attention.
Novels and memoirs are rife with stories and histories that recount childhoods of physical, verbal and emotional trauma. Whereas neglected children – although, neglect is also a type of abuse – do not fare as well, if at all, in either life or literature. What can one write about such a child? Like space or time, the neglected child is devoid of matter to hold the reader’s interest. He or she is flatter than a paper doll cut-out.
The opposite of abuse is not love or kindness or care, it is neglect.
Rumpole’s offices held floor to ceiling shelves lined with red-bound casebooks, an ancient photocopier and several typewriters. There was a salt-of-the-earth secretary, Elaine, Eileen (I never could get the name right), who was a whizz at dictation. She had long pointy nails, mouse-colored hair teased into a beehive and held together with bobby pins and hairspray. I recall that she lacked an incisor on the left side of her lightly lopsided mouth, but mostly what I recall is that what she lacked aesthetically, she made up for in kindness. Employing her best nasal, New York accent, she would greet my clients warmly - she called them all, “dearie,” and usher them into the conference room where they would take a seat, place their pleather handbags on the floor, twist torn tissues between fingers with chipped polish, and rub mascara-stained racoon eyes.
There, opposite me, they gazed at the worn carpet, tapped a foot or jiggled one leg as they spilled stories of abuse I’d heard before. Hiding shiners behind dark glasses, they’d cry, “He hit me.” Or “I’m pregnant, he kicked me down the stairs.” Or, waving a plaster cast from wrist to elbow, “He broke my arm.”
Once they’d unloaded their sack of woes, like Santa depositing lumps of coal for naughty children, they’d say, “I don’t want to press charges,” and rise from their chair, hand me a check and with heads bowed, as if they might receive a benediction, return home for more of the same.
Not to be minimized in their accounts of highly charged bouts of violence and cruelty was the seismic shift, the rollercoaster of emotions, the Coney Island Cyclone adrenaline rush the women earned after enduring the abuse. For an hour, or a day, or a week, the women had the upper hand and could exact the proverbial pound of flesh from their suppliant partner. For that brief period, she wielded the power in the relationship. A neon balloon of smugness, like a flashing cartoon caption suspended over her head as she received the men’s guilt gifts, and their litany of apologies.
“I’m so sorry. Forgive me. It’ll never happen again. I love you.” These toxic, manipulative words were magical, powerful incantations the women believed, because the alternative to accepting contrition was to risk abandonment.
During my childhood, each night, when dinner was over and the white bone China dessert plates with green borders and small silver dessert forks and spoons had been removed by a silent housekeeper, my mother, having imbibed a scotch or two and swallowed several Miltown tranquilizers, which rather than having their intended sedative effect, had a paradoxical effect, became violent, physically and verbally attacking my older sister in what I now characterize as a terrible tango. My mother, seething with anger would call my sister the most awful names, “bitch,” “cunt,” “bastard,” “bad seed,” and lead her around the dining room, grabbing her arms, pushing and pulling her back and forth until, finally spent, she would release her from her sharp talons, and my sister, sobbing hysterically, would collapse in a heap, like a pile of dirty clothes waiting to be taken to the laundry.
My father hiding in the living room, his face shrouded by the evening paper, cigarette smoke circling overhead knew what I would only learn later, that my mother was unstoppable. As if commanded by a force outside her control (Moira Shearer’s performance in the drama of The Red Shoes comes to mind), she battered my sister, her arms swinging back and forth like the pendulum on a mechanical metronome. Her descent into a fugue of madness was all encompassing and once in it, the spell was only broken, when her kinetic energy, like a spring mechanism on a windup toy, wound down.
Then, as if in a post-coital, oxytocin trance, my mother, her eyes glazed over, would screech, “Willy, get her away from me,” and leave the scene, her high heels clicking on the hardwood floors. She’d light a cigarette on the way to her bedroom, lock the door and not be seen again till the next evening when the minuet would recommence.
Hearing her clarion call, my father would lift the newspaper from his face, remove the dead cigarette clamped between his teeth, its recessed filter dented and damp, light another cigarette, exit his lair, and carry my inconsolable sister to her room where she didn’t stay for long, preferring to kneel and beg for forgiveness like a sinner before a powerful deity, crouched in front of my mother’s closed door.
The child version of a Stockholm Syndrome victim, my sister stuck close to my mother. Despite the nightly violence, she lived to be near her, on her lap, holding her hand. And my mother, like those Jekyll and Hyde men my clients returned to over and over, showered my sister with gifts, took her out to lunch and shopping, and spent Sundays, her sole day-off, with her.
Despite being mother and daughter, their exclusive relationship - neither my father, nor I were ever invited to tag along - had all the hallmarks of a sadomasochistic, symbiotic, parasitic romance. They were lovers, obsessed with one another, as attached to each other as my clients were to their abusers.
Excluded from their affair, I stood and watched from the threshold of the dining room where they acted out their drama. I was an unarmed sentry and a witness to their battles, always frightened that if I stepped away, my mother would destroy my sister, the target of direct hits, like artillery fire from a guided missile.
I was considered unharmed as if being the bystander didn’t count. Yet, like a casualty of secondhand smoke, or a stray bullet, I was and remain damaged, my amygdala and hypothalamus over reactive, my emotions always on high alert, my cortisol levels through the roof. I cannot walk in the street without glancing behind me. I cannot hear a door shut without catching my breath. I imagine I am always one minute from being run over, hit from behind, pushed down. I don’t tell anyone about these obsessive thoughts that make me shiver and shudder, make my pulse quicken and my breathe go shallow. I can’t explain why I pull my hand away from my boyfriend’s when we cross the street. How can I admit that I’m afraid he will push me in front of a moving vehicle.
These were the sequelae from the terrible tango I watched every night, as my mother and my sister danced and screamed, tethered to each other, oblivious of my presence.
My father read me Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline books. I imagined “twelve little girls in two straight lines and an old house in Paris covered with vines.” A few years later, when he took me to see Gigi, and I watched Leslie Caron cavort with Louis Jordan, in the Bois de Boulogne, I was convinced that nothing bad ever happened in Paris. There, I was certain, I would be safe, and my life would be wonderful, just as it was for Madeline and Gigi.
While working for Rumpole of the Bronx, I married R, an American born in Paris who I met at the counter of a luncheonette on Third Avenue and 57th Street eating felafel, the exotic scent of garlic and chickpeas aphrodisiacal. R, excessively handsome, had a full head of black lustrous hair, with one lock that fell over his brow. He had focused, intelligent eyes, a slim nose, and perfect teeth. He was also an excellent storyteller with a good sense of humor. When he fixed his dark-eyed gaze on me, I was the only person in the room, perhaps in the universe. At the time, I was unaware that R, who I later learned was a serial seducer, fixed his dark-eyed gaze on many others.
In the summer of 1988, R’s employer moved us to Paris with our young son. Our marriage had been uneasy. R was often traveling, away, or just absent. I never knew when he’d walk through the door or what mood he’d be in. I’d make dinner for 7 o’clock and he’d arrive at 11. Most often he’d say he’d been playing basketball, and that the game went over, before heading for the shower.
I was hopeful that in Paris, R would no longer fail to come home in the evening, that I would no longer have to search high and low for him like the Man with the Yellow Hat had to search for Curious George when he brought him to Africa. I thought that Paris could cure my marriage, the way the infirm think that Lourdes will cure their infrimaty.
I was mistaken. R was even busier and less available in Paris than he had been in New York and the same pattern of late arrivals, and no-shows set in. R was like the pilot of an aircraft that circles the airport, round and round looking for the landing strip and when, at last, he locates it, pulls into the wrong gate. Unknown to me, not long after we deplaned our Air France flight at Roissy Airport, Terminal 2, perhaps, only a day or two after arriving in Paris, R started an affair with a woman I’ll call, C.
R grew up in Paris. As youngsters, R and C went to the same private primary school and C was the best friend of R’s best friend’s sister. When, in casual conversation R mentioned C to me along with his other childhood friends, I envisioned them holding each other’s pudgy hands, sharing buttery croissants and skipping home together, on cobble stone streets. He wears short grey pants, she, a short grey skirt. Both wear white shirts with peter pan collars and navy jackets. A gold insignia is sewn on to their blazer breast pockets. There are jaunty navy berets on their small heads, and each carries a crusty baguette and a sac a dos containing lined composition books, rulers, and colored pens, grammar tests, history and math lessons, dictations to correct, and words to memorize. Clueless, I failed to envision them in bed together, naked, hairy, sweaty and screwing, her mouth on his cock and his on her clit.
With complete ignorance of their affair, R and I moved into a dream – come – true, fifth floor, light-filled, spacious apartment on the rue Lagrange, the extension of the more famous rue Monge, with its own metro stop. We were close to Parisian landmarks: up the hill, was the Sorbonne and the Pantheon, down the hill was the river Seine, and the Pont des Arts bridge, and across it the entrance to the Musée du Louvre.
Leaning over the wrought iron railing of my balcony, on market days I saw fruits and vegetables, cheeses, and breads, meats and fish and heard the cries of vendors in from Rungis, the second largest food market in the world, and of farmers in from the countryside outside Paris as they set up stands and hawked their goods.
French housewives trailed caddies filled with fresh produce, and meat, beef, or pork, often rabbit, and occasionally horsemeat. The boucherie chevaline, horse meat butcher shop, on the next street over from the market, exhibited a painted plaster, life-size horse’s head, like a safari trophy, over its entrance. I knew a Frenchman who ate horse meat tartare and whinnied between forkfuls. This was his idea of humor. The French have always taken themselves very seriously and are notoriously unfunny. There is no such thing as a Gallic sense of humor.
In addition to the butchers at the outdoor market in the square, the Boucherie Lagrange, an upscale, white tiled butcher shop occupied the ground floor of our building. The shop was owned by a couple in their thirties. Thierry, the husband, was blond, with blue eyes and wore a long white, blood-stained apron. Maryline, his wife was short and round with a sweet face, clear eyes and brown hair cut in a no-nonsense, wash and wear bob. She wore skirts and shirts under flowered aprons that tied in a bow at the back and sensible shoes. From morning to evening, Maryline sat on a high stool in front of the cash drawer, took in francs, made change and handed out mimeographed sheets with detailed recipes written in perfect cursive script. Thierry, meanwhile, decapitated fat, plumed poulet de bresse, and arranged skinned, pale-fleshed rabbits, their beady-eyed heads without ears, their rumps without cottontails, on trays next to an assortment of other meats, before hoisting great sides of aged Charolais beef from the walk-in to carve into steaks and chops or roll into roasts neatly tied with string.
The couple in the apartment below us, on the fourth floor, were also customers of the Boucherie Lagrange. Thierry informed me that the man was American, the woman English or maybe Scottish. He suggested, as we all had the same mother tongue, we might get to know one another.
On rare occasions I rode the elevator with the man, never with the woman who, to my knowledge, didn’t appear in daylight. Together, he and I shoehorned ourselves inside the vertical casket without touching or speaking. It had a metal grate over double doors. If the gate wasn’t pulled all the way shut, the doors would not close and the elevator, like a stubborn two-year old, refused to budge.
If R and I were out to dinner, we’d cross the fourth-floor couple on our way back in as they were on their way out. Like vampires, they appeared after dark, always in evening clothes. He, with a shock of salt and pepper hair, dressed in a tight shirt, dark jacket with velvet lapels, pressed blue jeans, and leather slip-ons, while she, pale complected with long red hair, loosely cascading over her shoulders, wore low-cut gowns with sequins and stiletto heels.
Perhaps, they were going clubbing at Les Bain Douches in the Marais or dancing at Les Noctambules in Pigalle. These were places, hot spots for the glitterati, that I’d read about in Paris Match, but never visited. The couple returned to their apartment at about 4 a.m. the hour that boites de nuit, nightclubs, were no longer permitted to serve alcohol. They slammed doors, blasted music and yelled at each other. And although they argued loudly at other times, their fights in the early hours of the morning were particularly vicious. Since they’d moved in, I’d lost those last two precious hours of sleep before I needed to get up and ready myself for work and my son for school. I’d awaken to a dialogue, snippets of which went something like this.
“You impotent cocksucker, son-of-a-bitch, bastard. I hope you die.”
“You’re an ugly barren hag, a dumb cunt, and a slut. You don’t care who you fuck.”
“Drop dead, you pathetic prick.”
After a brief lull, he’d slur, “Fuck you, you bitch.”
She’d hiss, “Your cum smells like roquefort cheese.”
I wondered whether their constant arguing, and the stress of being at a new job in a foreign country was adding to my anxiety over R’s increasingly frequent absences. Despite the gorgeous apartment and having more money than we’d ever had, R had become the Harry Houdini of the rue Lagrange.
In an attempt to salvage our marriage, though in retrospect, within two years after landing in Paris, its demise was a foregone conclusion, I found an American couples’ therapist. I made an appointment for us to see her, but R who’d promised he would meet me there, never showed.
Some years later, I read that we always marry our mother; that is, someone whose treatment of us is reminiscent of the mothering we had. R did a good job of replicating my mother’s chronic non-involvement in my life. Still, under the influence of the gods of denial, it took a while for me to see his behavior as resembling my mother’s, but once I saw it, I could never unsee it.
I recall once being asked why I divorced R. “I was invisible,” I said.
One Saturday afternoon, with their kitchen window wide open, the fourth-floor boyfriend attempted to strangle his girlfriend, the redhead. Our kitchen was directly above theirs, which kept me from being an eyewitness to this drama. But I saw the neighbors across the courtyard gesticulate, wildly flail their arms like drain-cleaning tools and heard them call the police who carted him off as I stood on my balcony and watched. An ambulance arrived at the same time to take her to the hospital. Three days later they were back downstairs and at it again. She’d refused to press charges. They carried on as before, screaming obscenities and fighting.
Shortly after the strangling episode, although unrelated to it, except temporally, R left for good. It turned out R wasn’t running away from me, he was running to C, who was pregnant. In the end, R didn’t marry C. She had an abortion, and they broke up when soon after he moved on to his next mark.
Two weeks after R’s departure, I was alone in the apartment with our young son. I woke not from the raucous couple’s usual late-night howling and door slamming, but by the sound of metal scratching the wall outside my apartment. The luminous face on my alarm clock read 3 a.m. I crawled out of bed, slipped on my robe, and stood at the front door. I heard something heavy bump down the stairs. I imagined it was a burlap bag full of potatoes, the kind delivered by truck to supermarkets and restaurants at dawn. Then I heard the gurgling sound pipes make when the bathtub plug is pulled and water empties down the drain. Then silence. I peered out the peephole, known in France as a judas, named after Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus in exchange for 30 pieces of silver. I saw nothing. The hall was black.
French buildings are lit by automatic timers, minuteries. You press a button when you enter and lights go on just long enough to allow you to get from the entrance hall to the elevator and on each floor, to get from the elevator to your own front door. When time is up, the hall goes dark. Someone I couldn’t see had pressed the button. The building was illuminated; five minutes later it was dark. Then lit again. The dalmatian that belonged to the chef, from the Dodin Bouffant restaurant around the corner, appeared on the right of the peephole, within my field of vision. Its black and white coat shone for a moment as he noiselessly reached the top step and without investigating further disappeared back down to his master on the second floor. Rooted to the spot, one eye glued to the judas, I was unable to return to my bed.
As a very little girl, in flannel pajamas with giraffes gamboling across the tops and bottoms, after I’d washed my face, brushed my teeth, had my story and said my prayers, once I was under the covers and the lights were out, I was alone in the dark. Lying in bed, I’d stare out the window opposite terrified that men were going to climb up the side of the building, we were only on the second floor, enter my room through that window, take me away, and I would never see my mother again. I would disappear into the night, and no one would come to look for me. Maybe, I wouldn’t even be missed.
When I told my mother how frightened I was, she told me I was being silly and forbade me to get out of bed. I obeyed her orders. I’d watched her destroy my sister, leave her crumpled on the floor, her psyche shattered, her soul murdered[1]. The violence and cruelty I saw every night exacted its emotional ounce of flesh. I cried myself to sleep. But I never disturbed my mother who practiced her own brand of parenting.
On the rue Lagrange, I was still at the peephole when the first rays of morning sun pierced the stained-glass window on the landing and threw multicolored shapes on to the dark carpet in front of my door. I heard footsteps. The young man whose mother was the building’s concierge descended the stairs from his chambre de bonne, on the sixth floor. He stood in front of the elevator that faced my apartment. I cracked open the door and told him about the noises I’d heard.
Something happened during the night, I said, “Quelque chose s’est passée pendant la nuit. Please, s’il vous plait, look at the stairwell, regardez sur le palier.”
He said there was a woman’s body slumped against the faux marble wall, under the window and a lot of blood.
“Il y a beaucoup de sang. Maman will call the police,” he said. I pulled my robe tighter, stepped back and closed the door. A few minutes later, I heard pim pom, pim pom, pim pom.
The police knocked. They’d gone through the building. There was no one. They said whoever attacked the woman was gone. They said the redhead was dead, murdered, stabbed multiple times, like the sainted Italian martyr, Maria Teresa Goretti. They pointed to my blind spot on the left, the part of the landing invisible to me last night where today, one flight down, illuminated by the stained-glass window, her lifeless, bloody body was sprawled against the painted wall.
I shut the door, dressed for work and readied my son for school. I steered him toward the elevator and used my open coat to shield his eyes away from the blood-splattered wall. Six months would pass before the walls were washed and repainted, the bloodstained carpet removed, and new carpet laid. In a Paris you will not read about in any guidebook, only the mayor’s office can order a homicide clean-up crew. If the season has been particularly murderous, the wait can be long.
At 8 a.m. my office on the Champs Elysees was quiet; the other desks were empty, and I walked down the hall, picked up a large bottle of mineral water from the kitchen, sat at my desk and turned on my computer. It whizzed and blinked until the screen welcomed me. I swiveled around in my chair, stared out the window at the leaves rustling on the plane trees that lined the avenue and listened to the hum of constant traffic below. I opened the bottle and took a long swig. Exhausted from the night’s interrupted sleep, and ashamed I hadn’t called the police when I first heard the thump, thump, thump of what turned out not to have been a sack of pommes de terre bumping down the steps, but a body, and the gurgling in the pipes which turned out to have been a death rattle, I could not focus on my work, all the words ran together, my head ached. I left early.
The following day, the detective in charge of the case summoned me to the Hotel de Police, which is not a five-star hotel, or even a three-star hotel, but the local police station. I arrived and was escorted up poorly lit stairs by a uniformed policeman. A lit Gitane cigarette hung from his mouth. In 1991, everyone in France still smoked everywhere and the pungent scent of dark tobacco perfumed the air. The policeman left me in front of the detective’s office.
If only her complexion wasn’t so sallow, she be a very attractive woman. Perhaps, it’s the lighting that gives her the appearance of a person with elevated liver enzymes. In France, to reduce the cost of electricity in municipal buildings, the lights are kept low. Otherwise, she had pretty features, thick hair, brown eyes, long lashes, and a generous mouth that reminded me of Anouk Aimée’s in A Man and A Woman. She wore a wrinkled trench coat over a wrinkled blouse, and she too smoked an unfiltered cigarette. She cantilevered toward me, nodded her head in the direction of a folding chair on the other side of her desk and gesturing with the red hot ember of her lit cigarette said,
“Asseyez-vous. Parlez-vous francais?” Sit down. Do you speak French?
“Oui,” I said.
She looked at the space between my eyes where a third eye might appear if I had one, and shot off a rapid series of questions.
“Did I know the woman? Were my husband and I friendly with her and her boyfriend? Did I know she had tried to crawl up the stairs to the fifth floor?”
“No, I didn’t know the woman, we never spoke. My husband and I only spoke to her boyfriend twice when the music coming from their apartment interfered with our dinner conversation.
“No, I didn’t know the woman had tried to crawl up the stairs.”
She looked down at her notes.
“Autre chose?” she asked. Anything else?
“My husband no longer lives with us,” I volunteered. “We are separated.”
“Torn pieces of his mail were found in her apartment,” she said.
“The concierge often delivers mail to the wrong tenant.”
I could have raised my eyebrows, shrugged my shoulders and sent a puff of air out pursed lips, signaling the possibility that R’d been friendly with the redhead, but it wouldn’t have been true, and my life was already complicated enough.
A typewriter held pre-printed forms with 6 carbons jammed onto the rubber roller. The police had not yet been assigned word processors. I answered her questions, and she hit the keys hard, probably releasing latent aggression from being holed up in that dark, dusty office, and forced to work, hunched over antiquated equipment.
Draped over a chair next to where I sat was an evening dress in a clear plastic garment bag. I guessed it had been the redhead’s, the one she’d had on when she was bludgeoned, and the detective confirmed that the gown had belonged to my neighbor.
“We suspect her boyfriend, son petit ami,” she said, and told me to stay in touch.
I waited a week and called for news; I was nervous a murderer might be roaming the neighborhood. The detective answered the phone. I heard her exhale, and envisioned a tobacco cloud, a grey nimbus, floating over her head.
It wasn’t le petit ami. He was travelling, she told me. She inhaled a short breath, “Nous avons l’assassin. Il a avoué. Il l’a tué.” The murderer is in custody. He confessed. He killed her.”
She continued, “All alone, her boyfriend away, the redhead went to a club where she met a man. She brought him home to her empty apartment. They played with knives.
“You know, le jeu de couteaux, le jeu de lames,” the knife game, the blade game, she said.
“The game turned mortel, deadly.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est ce game? ” I asked.
The detective, all business, told me it was a sex game, not uncommon in certain circles.
“Ah, oui?” I said, marveling at her sang froid. Maybe, she’d investigated other similar homicides.
I did my own research. The game is said to be erotic. One person dominates, the dom, the other person obeys, the sub. There are rules concerning consent. In the case of the redhead and the man she’d picked up, it’s clear the rules weren’t followed. Presumably, they were both too drunk or high to ask or give consent. I didn’t think she’d agreed to be stabbed to death.
Who would do that?
No, she’d poked the bear and refused to do as she was told, didn’t obey his orders, which, I learned, is the sine qua non of “sub” and “dom” games. At some point, he must have realized she was no longer playing her part, feigning protest for the sake of erotic excitement and the game was forfeited. Death will do that.
I recalled their fights. The redhead accusing her boyfriend of being impotent, not a real man. Her voice penetrated the walls. Was she egging him on, hoping to drive him to strangle her for real? Perhaps, she’d been trying to end her life all along and lacking the courage to do it on her own, sought an accomplice.
I questioned my earlier assumption. What was her real motive the night of her murder, the excitement of kinky sex or death? Why would she have wanted to end her life? I thought back to the arguments I’d overheard. Her voice claiming it was his fault she couldn’t conceive a child, his voice calling her barren.
After her boyfriend’s attempt to strangle her failed, I wondered if she hadn’t enlisted the man from the club to be her helpmate. Had she fingered him to be her killer, to do the deed she could not accomplish on her own. Before she became his victim, he was hers. I never learned what drove her to seek out men who would hurt her. Perhaps, something in her childhood?
Some months later, after the rue Lagrange walls were cleaned, the faux marble repainted, and the carpet replaced on the stairs and the landing, the yellow police tape along with the judicial seal on the fourth-floor couple’s front door came off.
At the boucherie, I asked Thierry for two biftecks. He nodded at me, crooked his finger, raised one eyebrow, cocked his head to the side and motioned me to come close. Leaning over the vitrine of fat marbleized roasts, long filets of pork tenderloin, lamb chops with frilly skirts, wild boar terrines, bowls of chopped meat, fresh blood sausages, plump chickens, pheasants and other fowl, some still with their feathers, he told me le boyfriend had returned to the fourth-floor apartment with a woman, a new girlfriend in tow. Thierry shook his head, “encore une rousse,” another redhead, he said.
In 1993, R and I divorced in Paris. At his suggestion, we walked together along the banks of the Seine, past the bouquiniste stalls and, arm in arm, crossed the river at the Pont d’ échange. to the majestic Palais de Justice,where a judge dissolved our marriage. It was our final act as a married couple. For once, R was on time.
[1] Concerning soul murder, for a sensitive and thorough understanding of childhood abuse and its consequences, I refer the curious reader to the work of the psychoanalyst, Leonard Shengold, M.D. and his books Soul Murder and Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory” (1999). In addition to many adults who had been abused as children, Dr. Shengold also treated Oliver Sacks who dedicated his best seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, to Dr. Shengold.
Her writings have been read at Saint Malachy’s The Actors Chapel in New York City and published in Women’s Voices for Change. She is a founding member of the Actors and Writers Workshop which provides opportunities to workshop audition pieces, Nancy is bi-lingual (French/English) and is known for the following films, Fort Buchanan (2014), Division Movement to Vungtau (2017) and Fort Buchanan: Hiver (2012).