Exposure

By Christopher Watkins

Sybille Chevrier, sure that her dream of becoming a film star is going to come true after her fathers hectic career transfers them from Paris to America, slowly but surely begins to realize her strange new world is not what it seems.

It is 1962 Manhattan.

America defuses The Cuban Missile Crisis.

Things begin looking up.

Until Sybille descends into a world of paranoia when coming to believe that her father is conspiring the JFK assassination with an organization of Communists and a sordid man known as Oswald.

Exposure.

The only resolve. The only absolution. The only hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479716005

Book preview

Exposure

Christopher Watkins

Copyright © 2012 by Christopher Watkins.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4797-1599-2

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4797-1600-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Part I  The Façade

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Part II  . . . a servant to paranoia… 

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Part III  The Core

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

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Part I

The Façade

One

Surely, if English actress Vivian Leigh could play southern belle Blanche DuBois, French novice Sybille Chevrier could too. She had always wanted to play Blanche DuBois and in a way she had already begun.

From Laurel, Blanche rode a streetcar named Desire, transferring to one called Cemeteries before arriving at Elysian Fields in New Orleans. The Chevriers’ trip was far more distant and direct: the 3:30 p.m. Pan Am from Paris to Manhattan.

Very much like Sybille Chevrier, that streetcar had brought Blanche DuBois, due to circumstances beyond her control or foresight, to a descent into madness and horror. Very much like Blanche DuBois’ move from Laurel to New Orleans, the move from Paris was a matter in which Sybille had no say.

Once her father, Jean-Claude Chevrier, a thirty-six-year-old financier for SimCaul Oil Corporation was green lighted for a transfer to the Manhattan office, the decision was set in stone. But he had always planned on sending Sybille to an American university upon her completion of high school anyway.

Upon first hearing the news, she was supremely ecstatic. America! It was now her time to be discovered; until then, this kind of happiness only came to her in dreams.

By Friday, August 10th, 1962, their fieldstone house in rural Paris was nearly closed. Whatever they were taking was sealed in moving boxes and loaded into the van; whatever was being left behind was draped under dust tarps.

Suddenly, the sight made her sick.

Suddenly, to her, the set of the play in which she had starred for fifteen straight years was being torn down.

Sybille escaped.

Sybille left her dreams of The States in a psychological limbo.

Sybille smoked a Marlboro she had stolen from Jean-Claude.

An uprooted flower, Sybille walked barefoot and aimlessly through crisp, fruitful, evergreen fields behind the house.

Had Jean-Claude found a home for the dog yet?

Would Sybille ever return to this place  –  the only place she knew?

She dragged deeply.

She stared at the skinny tree near the storage shed behind the house. Sybille recalled vividly, six years ago, the day her papa was cutting down that tree with a gasoline-powered chainsaw, and she was give or take twenty yards away down the lawn trying to figure out how to work the boomerang he had brought home for her as a present for finally accepting the fact that her mother wasn’t coming back.

The boomerang, however, was supposed to come back when she threw it; but all it did was twirl and descend to the ground.

Busy Jean-Claude, grinding and slicing the chainsaw through bark and branches, didn’t have time to show her how it worked.

Discontent Sybille, exerting more force than she intended to, hurled the crooked-shaped object far through the air, hitting Jean-Claude in the shoulder with it.

It jarred him so bad he brought the saw down without looking and amputated his left hand.

When she heard those vicious metal teeth sever something that wasn’t lumber, she froze; when she saw the blood and slices of flesh splatter onto the tree trunk, her knees gave out. Head-pulsing, body-sweating, throat-swelling, Sybille was screaming. It was all she could think of doing.

She shrieked and screamed and experienced a moment so surreal it couldn’t have been anything but a nightmare from which she should have awoken any minute. It was a moment too horrendous to be issued for her.

Jean-Claude didn’t scream. He didn’t even cry out. He looked at it the same as he would look at a rose thorn prick. He took off his shirt, used it to swaddle his blood-coated arm, and staggered into the house to call an ambulance.

Sybille remained collapsed in the yard and continued screaming until they arrived.

The chainsaw lied on the grass and kept rumbling and sputtering until it ran out of gasoline.

The doctors may have been able to reattach Jean-Claude’s hand, but the dog ate part of it; the only thing he got back was his wedding ring.

Six years later, the tree remained. Sybille, standing and staring at it, was stung on her foot by a bumble bee hovering below the surface of the grass, and then she hurried back and entered the house through the French doors from the cobblestone porch off of the kitchen where Jean-Claude was verifying the validity of the passports and papers on the counter next to the keys he was leaving for the caretaker.

She told him of the sting.

There won’t be any bees in Manhattan, will there? she irritably inquired, limping over to the breakfast nook chair and plunging into it as Jean-Claude retrieved a damp rag and the baking soda.

Mainly in Central Park. And you can’t walk barefoot there either.

He clamped her foot between the rubber-padded hooks where his left hand used to be. Adapting to his prosthesis was infuriating. Once, while trying to pass a cup of coffee from his real hand to his artificial one he spilled it in his lap, sprung from his chair and then savagely through his mug through the glass in an armoire door, unaware that Sybille had seen. (She already knew it was all her fault.)

She always cringed when touched by the hooks, but quickly learned how to hide it.

Jean-Claude was able to pluck out the stinger with his other hand, then applied the remedies; he once had the callused hands of a skilled carpenter at heart who helped his brother and father build the house when he was fifteen.

The dog was lying under the table, glowing in the parallelogram-shaped ray beaming from the full-length casement. Her name was Margot. A genuinely beautiful creature; a Pyrenees Mastiff with such personality dwelling luminously in her eyes.

Sybille had had her since she was eight, and having to ask if her papa had found another home for her was equivalent to a knife in her heart.

But no one wanted her. Jean-Claude’s parents, retired, living happily in Quebec, didn’t want her, and all his friends had such young children.

It was Sybille who wanted to take her to Manhattan, but Jean-Claude insisted that it would be too much trouble to keep a dog in the city. That there would be no time to walk her daily. That Margot would go mad with boredom being cooped up in the apartment.

Again she resented him. This time for talking about the dog she loved so much like an imposition. He was exasperated and took a minute to think.

Sybille unraveled and began crying. No longer did she want to move; just to visit America was one thing, but to move there was something else, now that it was actually happening.

Jean-Claude held her tight. Said he knew how she felt,

You’re homesick and we haven’t even left yet. I hate leaving home too. Trust me. Once we’re there, we’re both going to love it.

Later that afternoon, after the van left, Sybille hugged Margot goodbye and then Jean-Claude loaded her in the back seat of the car. Sybille watched through the living room window until they disappeared below the dip on the horizon.

On the first night Sybille had Margot, she ran away to the old farm where she was bred, born, and sold, solely by her sense of smell. What if later she likewise ran away back to the Chevriers’ empty house and thought she did something to make Jean-Claude and Sybille leave her behind?

Sybille was sadder than ever; she thought surely her chest would soon crack open from the pain.

Jean-Claude returned with only her collar. The local veterinarian had references of a family in search of a dog.

The next morning he put the car in storage in Paris, and then they took a taxi to the airport and boarded a Pan Am to America. It was Sybille’s first time flying. The farms and estates below looked like giant green patterned squares.

A stewardess brought Jean-Claude the Capitan and Seven that he had ordered before he was even seated. Ever since a friend of his from college died in a plane crash, Jean-Claude was unable to tolerate a flight completely sober.

It was nightfall when they landed so Sybille’s first impression of New York was a dark one with the East River reflecting the millions of lights piercing the night sky. New York life appeared to be constant and restless.

The two took a taxi to their new apartment on 94th St. in a place known to New Yorkers as The Upper West Side. The two stayed long enough at their new apartment to set down their carry-ons, look around, admire, and then go back out to eat. Jean-Claude’s ears popped at the restaurant; Sybille’s did the same when returning to the apartment.

He had flown over the previous June, found that building, fell in love with it, and signed the lease then. It was a contemporary upper middle class apartment on the 3rd floor of a renovated brownstone with a compact elevator. Originally, it was a boarding house during the Civil war and just before the crash of the stock market it was expanded into the next door house with a two-bedroom apartment on each floor.

The Chevriers’ living room overlooked the street, and they had a large kitchen with a balcony view of the courtyard. Jean-Claude’s bedroom was the last door on the right of the hall; Sybille’s was opposite his, beyond a small entry way of built-in, floor-to-ceiling storage cabinets, and between their rooms was a fair-sized bath, equipped with milky, ceramic fixtures with silver accessories.

The whole place was mostly plastered with various styles of traditional American wall paper.

Hardwood floors throughout; glossy white base and crown moldings and chair railings traced out every room.

The ceilings: ten feet; the windows: enormous; the rooms: invitingly large.

Their house in Paris had a separate dining room, Jean-Claude had his own study and a den, and upstairs were two bedrooms, each with their own bath.

So never would they have thought; comparing the vastness of rural France to the high, monotonous, vertical compartments of Manhattan knows as living quarters, they actually gained space in the move.

But their new furniture didn’t arrive that day. Jean-Claude was furious upon learning that because of an error in paper work, it wouldn’t arrive until the following Monday, and so they spent the weekend at a Plaza suite.

And he thought Margot would have been bored.

By Sunday evening, Sybille was at The Border of Sobs. Jean-Claude, too, had been in better moods; the entire weekend in which he had planned to set up the apartment was wasted.

Everything came Monday while Jean-Claude was at the office and Sybille welcomed a plunge into a demanding, time-consuming project. She felt immensely liberated placing the furniture, setting the candles and lamps, forgetting about Margot, hanging the pictures (those that survived), stocking the dishes and linens, and fitting their beds with sheets. She now felt like the lady of the house.

It was their very first full day in the apartment when they first heard the music from below. A hi-fi in the apartment beneath them played a succession of classical string concertos that resonated up through the furnace pipe.

No faults of any kind could be found such as shot electrical fixtures or water stains or plumbing playing bass saxophone. Though he knew he could have done a better job than the previous contractor with the paper-hanging and the paint job, Jean-Claude was satisfied with the décor and didn’t so much as vocalize the idea of redoing it in view their crippling delay in settling in.

Only one flaw. A piece of weathered broken glass that Sybille found unintentionally wedged underneath the floor molding in the kitchen. This piece of glass matched the glass presently in the French doors to the balcony.

She was throwing it away when Jean-Claude returned from a hardware store where he had duplicates of his keys made, keys which consisted of the house front door, their apartment door, their French balcony doors, the basement, the roof, and their apartment mailbox in the foyer. He had strung the duplicates on a ring; they were for Sybille.

Overall Jean-Claude was right: they loved the apartment.

Until Sybille, a matter of days later, quickly realized she was a drop of water in the ocean. The people, the citizens, the New Yorkers. She heard the people when she was in the apartment; she saw the people when she went out.

And what ownership Americans have of public space, she noticed. People excused themselves when walking around her in stores though they were not intruding.

Sybille’s girl friends from school had given her a party before she left; where were they now?

Jean-Claude, consumed by his job, promising his availability would loosen once he had settled, returning daily with new contributions to the decor, took her out occasionally.

The following Wednesday she introduced herself to a couple in the elevator of the apartment house, but they weren’t tenants. They were on their way to attend the party being given upstairs.

Sybille entered her bedroom, sat in the armchair which she loved more now than when she had first seen it in the catalogue, and jingled the tags on Margot’s collar that she kept under her nightstand table with a collection of fashion magazines and a wicker basket of cinnamon-scented pinecones, as if she would be taking her on a walk on short notice.

The jingling of the faded metal tags refreshed instantly the memory of Margot’s face. The memory of her nudging a door open with her snout. The sound of her hind paw scratching her ear. To Sybille she was dead and buried, though she never expected Margot to out-live her anyway.

The next day, Jean-Claude took a long lunch to enroll Sybille in the nearest public high school.

After his first week at SimCaul’s Manhattan office, his boss, Donald Wallace, had the Chevriers over for dinner to meet his other colleagues’ families, none of whom had daughters for Sybille. The only ones with children had toddlers presently in the care of babysitters and ironically, Jean-Claude was the youngest.

Sybille nearly being a lady herself helped her papa’s colleagues’ wives clear the dishes as she assumed her mother would have taught her. Watching the men at the table through the butler’s window, she savored sweetly her admiration of Jean-Claude, for he was an important man working with important people in the most important business to America. Though he was quite repressed, he was finely equipped with multiple capabilities, skills, and possibly even hidden talents not yet revealed.

Later, watching the men’s conversation entailing John F. Kennedy, something about a bunch of pigs in Cuba, and the controversy of state laws defying federal laws, Sybille was as involved as an audience member seated on stage would be.

Her attitude rendered on the streets where daily she saw American advertisements for cigarettes and televisions spelled without diacritics or hyphens. Where daily she saw handshakes instead of hugs and kisses. Where daily she saw chic but completely impersonal architecture of the future. And where daily she was reminded by the mere presence of passing citizens that she was only a visitor. That she was quite unreachable by these members of American culture.

To Sybille Chevrier, New York was a shrinking place; she had to adjust before it swallowed her.

Two

September 3rd, 1962, fifteen-year-old Sybille Chevrier commenced her semester at an arm and a half length’s distance.

L’horreur.

Grade 10. L’horreur.

Like the innocent white marble dropped onto the roulette wheel, powerless over herself. And she landed where she landed.

To mask any indication that she had never before set foot in that place, she memorized explicitly the school map, routes to all her classes and room numbers, otherwise the intimidating hallway stares of inferiority by those born and raised would be aimed at her.

Tightly Sybille clutched to her shield, denying them all the opportunity to learn that she was an outsider.

There was one classroom of strangers after another, all instructed by one stranger after another. What she wouldn’t give to be able to start a school year in a well familiar place surrounded by well familiar faces. How will she communicate with these aliens?

That week Jean-Claude finished the last details of the apartment, including but not limited to replacing the frames ruined in the move with dirt cheap ones bought at an antique store that he restored via sanding, staining, and a posh lacquer job.

Once that was accomplished, Saturday he sat, smoked, watched television, and prepared a tidy little lunch for himself and Sybille. Yet again, she faintly heard the muffled, orchestral music from the apartment downstairs.

At the table, Jean-Claude revised his reply to a letter from his brother and sister-in-law Marc and Jeanne Chevrier, still in Paris, with two children, Susanne and Philippe, twelve and thirteen.

Jean-Claude wrote vague descriptions of his job, Manhattan, the house; he wrote a duplicate letter for his parents in Quebec and enclosed photographs of Sybille posing in front of the iron fence of the stoop outside.

Always there had been this endless competition, this classic sibling rivalry. Marc was the first to be married, but Jean-Claude was the first to have a child; Marc saved up for his own car during adolescence, but their father taught Jean-Claude more about carpentry.

Ergo, Sybille couldn’t help but think the only reason her papa took the Manhattan transfer was to get ahead.

She drove him mad about taking her to The Sinclair theatre a few blocks down; he sent her alone.

At the theatre, small and ill-fitting as if it were only installed because a Laundromat wouldn’t have filled the space and an AMP wouldn’t have fit, she saw a screening of All About Eve.

Sybille sat, envying the women with a man’s arm around their shoulder. All she had was popcorn in her hand and a distant flickering beam from the projection room above her head. Impulsively, she asked the lady behind her, lighting up,

Have you a cigarette for a desperate woman? But the lady didn’t have any left.

Sybille saw theatres as commercialized embassies through which the stars (or more to the point, their characters) could