Suicide Practice

The first time you see Paris, the sky over the city is a sheet of dove grey that looks as unbreakable as the marble floor in the apartment of the father you just met. This father is thin and his features are delicate, almost feminine, with dark eyes that have even darker shadows underneath. He chain-smokes without opening the windows first, holding out the pack to you as if you’re twice your seven years of age. You’re so taken aback that all you can manage is a slight shake of your head.

The two of you sit across from one another in stiff leather seats. Neither of you say a thing. There is something evaluative in his gaze, like he’s an executioner who’s been given the choice between sparing you and bringing the knife down. After several long minutes he asks if you’re excited to go to Switzerland. “It’s out of my province,” you say, repeating what you heard from your mother’s lawyer over the phone. This earns you an amused huff. You only mean that you’ve never been to boarding school before, let alone one in a different country, and that the choice to go hadn’t been yours in the first place. After this exchange, you see no point in continuing to speak.

He offers to take you on a walk and you accept, eager to leave the smoke-filled apartment. You’re used to someone checking that all the buttons on your coat are fastened properly and holding your hand so that you don’t get separated. Your father does neither. He moves so quickly that soon he’s just a dark coat in a sea of dark coats. You refuse to scurry or run to catch up. Instead, you slow down even more to look up at the balconies encircling the buildings around you, the dark roofs that disappear into the sky. They’re so different from the grand homes you’re used to back in the States, but there’s something satisfying about their elegant uniformity. You didn’t choose to come here but it’s nice all the same.

You find your father in a stone courtyard filled with black-and-white striped columns. He’s leaning against a wall off to the side, watching small children and adult tourists try to climb up the pillars. He startles when you sidle up next to him, like he’d forgotten you existed at all. Your father is a novelist, a well-known one from what you can piece together. Later, you’ll find out that he’s one of the country’s more polarizing figures, a one-time public servant who’d gone on to stun the world with morally ambiguous works filled with unambiguously vulgar individuals. A year after this meeting, the French government will officially charge him for inciting hatred. But on this wintry afternoon he’s just a small man in a peacoat two sizes too big, asking you if you’d like to join the other children. You wrinkle your nose. He matches your expression with one of his own.

“We all hated this thing when they built it,” he tells you, nodding at the columns. “But it’s elegant, don’t you think? Especially those tall ones in the back. Perfect for suicide practice. Get to the top, contemplate whether you really have it in you to jump. Then imagine doing it from ten times that height. Most people don’t have it in them, but you won’t know for sure until you’re up there.”

News of your father’s passing will coincide with the day of your high school graduation: a fall off the roof of his Normandy home, dead on impact. He’d been on drugs, his friends said later. He’d been trying to get a better look at the stars. He leaves that home and his Paris apartment to you, along with his literary estate and all proceeds from his novels. The press can’t get enough. Isn’t it funny that the country’s most famous misogynist would leave his entire legacy to his American daughter and not his French sons? It’s his final twist from beyond the grave, the tabloids proclaim. In the pictures, you look all of five years old. You let the magazines pile up at the door.

When your father’s lawyer delivers the keys to that Paris apartment, you drag one of the leather seats to the balcony and enjoy a cigarette in the cool summer morning. You’d started reading his books a year ago, stunned at how he’s managed to recreate your inner monologue right there on the page. You’d been meaning to tell him this and now you can’t anymore. Tant pis. You think back to that first meeting, when your mother had died and your grandparents reacted by shipping you off to Europe. How numb and lost you’d felt then, even if you hadn’t known it. You’d asked him to lift you onto a column. His hands had shaken with the effort, his cold fingers digging into your ribcage as you did your best to find stable footing. You can climb it on your own now. Nowadays, when the heavy feeling overpowers your ability to think, you find your way to the tall ones in the back and look down, contemplating. So far you haven’t felt a need to go any further.