I couldn't stay with him the entire day, but Laurent let me stay with him in bed while my parents slept. That first day, when I came into his room, he took his ruby necklace off of his neck and fastened it over mine. He napped with me, my back pressed to his belly, my ear on his pillow, and I asked him, "What should I call you?"
"Ma perle," he said. My pearl.
We did not speak French at home except incidentally. "OK, ma perle," I repeated to him.
"No, say 'Bien, ma perle," he whispered into my ear.
I did.
"Comme il faut," he said. Properly. It thrilled me. It was like having a secret, which I had never been allowed to have at all. "They should let you grow your hair. From now on you are ours, and you will not go to school, and you will not be like other boys. How do you like this?"
"I like it," I said.
"Bien, ma perle," he said.
I was too breathless with happiness to speak, to be relieved of the pressure to be like other boys.
"Do you like swords?" he asked, picking at my cotton pajamas, as if cleaning me.
"No."
"Yes you do," he said. "Do you love me, little one?"
I burned with it.
"Then do as I say, and I will make you immortal and I will make you strong. How do you like this?" his voice was a velvet purring.
"Bien, ma perle," I said.
"Smart," he whispered.
During that day he stole my father's keys and drove me into town to see "The Three Musketeers" with Lana Turner and Vincent Price, and he taught me to say "Vive le roi vive le roi!" and hiss at anti-royalists. He gave me twenty dollars and pushed me into a candy store so that he could stand outside and smoke as I encountered more sugar than I'd ever seen. I didn't buy anything and emerged with the twenty still intact, to which he patted my head and said he would get me a sword and turn me into a good little knight.
I noticed the way that people looked at him. It was the same way people looked at me. I thought, if he can look so unusual and get the very same look, why should I not be unusual? When I voiced this to him he waved his hand and said, "Don't bother me with this, don't bother me with this."
I asked him if he knew Dasius in Boston, because I liked Dasius and I missed him.
"Do you? You're a good boy," he said, fiddling with his cigarette case while I drank a milkshake in the diner on the square. When he saw me looking at the case, its reflective silver, he shut it with a snap and slid it across the table to me, and it was mine.
"Can I be like Dasius?" I asked him, thinking of his cool intelligence, how when he spoke to people they listened to him, no matter who they were.
Laurent said nothing to that, paid the check, and took me by the hand back to the car.
That evening, after Laurent had gone with Leis, my father found me sitting on the velvet cushion in the sitting room's bay window, looking after the car. He said, "What did you get up to today, my love?" and took me into his lap so that we could sit together. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face against his shirt. He smelled of cedar and musk. The smell of him made me sleepy in an instant.
Quinn's voice is a thin one, and hesitant. He wavers at any sort of volume, and is often therefore quiet even if he is passionate. I loved his quietness, and it soothed me to be close to him after the whirlwind of Laurent's presence and how it had made my heart beat. I held onto the lapel of his cotton vest, just above the first button and sucked on my pinky finger. He stroked the back of my neck and asked me again.
Guileless, I told him everything, about "Vive le roi", and taking the car, a lunch far too rich for my constitution, the cigarette case, how Laurent had called me "his" and making me like him. I was not used to keeping secrets. I told him about all the questions Laurent had asked me, about Father and about Leis and about the way we lived. Father always seemed to know what I knew even before I confessed, and so I never kept anything from him. He let me out of his arms gently and knelt to unbuckle my shoes. "May I see the cigarette case?" he asked.
I produced it from inside my shirt and gave it to him, unaware of tension.
He took it from me, and I reached out to touch his soft, brown hair, but before I could touch him he twitched, and he threw the silver case at the fireplace so hard that it broke at the hinge.
"Daddy?" I said, immediately sick, cringing. I drew up my legs and he pulled me forward by the shoulders.
"What is that on your neck?" he demanded, and before I could say anything, he snatched Laurent's ruby necklace off of me and threw it on the floor. "Don't you go around with him," he snapped at me, pointing at me very near my face, quiet but very furious. "He is a whore. Do you know what a whore is? He can't have you. Do you understand me?" He pulled me out of the window seat and his hands were everywhere, investigating me for more baubles, roughly handling me. "Do not let him buy you. Do you understand? Jackie, that is how he operates, how a whore operates. Do not let him buy you away from me," he hissed. "Do you understand?"
But I pushed him away, because I had to be sick, far too upset to listen. Leis had sometimes spoken to me of my immortal soul, and of the whore of Babylon, and Mary Magdalene. At that age I still believed completely in God. I believed completely in anything told to me.
Quinn came up the stairs, who as I grow older it is harder and harder for me to call Father because it no longer makes sense, and he cleaned up my face, and helped me change into my pajamas. I pleaded with him to at least not make me go to school anymore.
"I will work extra hard," I told him, unused to challenging him. Father was discipline, rules, and the only love I had ever known.
He sighed, without a yes or a no. "My darling, if it were my choice, you would never have gone to school at all. Calm down now; I'm sorry for shouting at you. I am only afraid. Give me a kiss. Oh, you are too pale. My poor little Jackie."
I kissed his cheek and he took me to my bed in his arms. He asked me if I wanted a book to put me to sleep, and I said no. I liked it best when Leis read to me in his funny accents, and his "I don't love you now go to bed," which made me laugh. Father pressed the back of his hand to my forehead, and I caught his hand gently, like a rare insect had landed upon me. He leaned in to kiss me, and I caught his face, too, holding onto his head so that I could look at him.
Compared with others he has a sleepy look, from hooded eyes, and a little, smiling mouth. When he laughs he shows his snaggletooth, which is why always smiles with his mouth closed. He is not so pale as the others, and when I asked him as a child, he told me it was because he was younger. He looked back at me. "Should I stay with you?" he asked the room.
My love for him was uncomplicated. "Yes."
He climbed in with me, fully dressed, and held me close.
The car did not come back. Laurent had taken Leis away, but I did not know what that meant at all. I said to Father the next morning over breakfast, "Is Leis a whore then?" which startled him and made him laugh so hard that he began to cry.
Quinn took sleep wherever it found him, like a cat, most often during the day but whenever it pleased him. I played by myself in the sitting room while he slept that day, head on hand in a wingback chair. I had many die-cast cars sent from Boston and New York, and I roamed the carpet with them, being very quiet so as not to wake him. For lunch I rambled into the kitchen to the icebox and made more cereal, and it was then that I heard the back door open and close, and looked up to see Leis, who regarded me with wide, surprised eyes. It made me laugh because I so rarely saw his narrow eyes wide.
"Sh," he hissed, finger to his lips.
"Sh," I hissed back, eating my cereal at the tall kitchen table.
"Is Daddy asleep?" he asked me, very very quiet and fussing with his hair. He took off his sunglasses and slid them into the unfastened buttonhole of his shirt. There was blood on his collar, which stilled me.
"Whore," I said, very very quietly.
He turned his face, too curious to be angry. "What?"
But then Father was there, in the kitchen doorway, and I ducked my head. They fought so often. I expected shouting, but instead it was only, in Father's tired, wavering voice, "You must thank the child."
Leis tried to speak but could not get out the words.
"Thank him," Father said, and took in a slow breath, calm. "If he were not here, I would kill you now. If he were not here and you did this to me, in my own house, I would kill you. You would be dead. I would have been waiting for you here where you could not see me, and I would have cut off your head with my good kitchen knife. See that corner? That's where I would have been, waiting for you to come through that door all night. I would have cut off your head and put that knife in your body until your whore could not find a single place to kiss. Do you hear me?"
"Quinny."
"Thank the child."
I never crossed Father on purpose again, and did not see Laurent in any way for almost five years.