Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) Read Free Page A

holidayed at the
slightest provocation. Yvette had been abandoned in her fair share
of airports and when she wasn’t waiting in the lost and found she
was watching Papa chase Maman around their antique-laden Parisian
home with a kitchen knife.
    Her therapist forbade her
from telling me too much about her upbringing presumably because
she thought I‘d be shocked but she couldn’t know that having
experienced certain childhood eccentricities of my own these
nursery tales had a certain soothing effect on me. Anyway, by the
time I was formally introduced to Maman I was very
well-disposed towards the mass of neuroses, complexes, impulses and
moods that stood now collectively before me.
    “ Bonjour I’m
Veronique. It’s so nice to meet you”
    With her aquiline profile,
long dark hair and red leathery skin she looked more like a
Cherokee Warrior than the mother of a systems analyst from the Bank
of Paris. I had already heard about the legendary debates with
airport staff, the aborted attempts to liberate cute little pigs
from zoo enclosures and the commandeering of microphones from
singers considered unworthy of the title. She bent almost in half
to kiss me.
    Veronique was an artist. A
pretty good one actually. If I hadn’t been so consistently afraid
of being fired I might have even bought one of her paintings which
to my eye, were heavily influenced by Henri Rousseau. I didn’t dare
tell her that though. We were en route , en famille to
the Metropolitan Museum Of Art to see an exhibition of paintings by
Gauguin, because logically enough, he was one of Veronique’s
favorite painters.
    Yvette, though nervous
about this meeting was pleased it was happening. She had wanted us
to meet at Thanksgiving but this idea had proved too much for me
loaded as it was with so much significance. I knew that meeting the
parents, or even one of them, at Thanksgiving was tantamount to a
marriage proposal. Even if the celebrants were French and Irish
there was still an unspoken implication that I was agreeing to
something other than just a plate of turkey. But I was ok with
Primitivism.
    In fact Gauguin was a hero
of mine too, since he’d given up his job as a bank clerk to shag
French Polynesian girls. Confronted suddenly by an almost
life-sized sepia photo of the artist’s tight-faced wife and
children I felt like I myself had just arrived home late and what
time did I call this and who were these two women I’d brought home
with me?
    “ Can’t blame
him for leaving.” I said, and immediately regretted it. It was
exactly the wrong thing to say, touching as it, did on Yvette’s
sensitivity about being abandoned. I braced myself for the public
humiliation that would surely follow. I myself was about to become
an exhibit.
    “ Ahh she is
so afraid of being abandoned, no?” said Veronique bending even
deeper now to kiss her daughter. Yvette’s cheeks beamed
embarrassment outward into the exhibition space and I suddenly
realized Maman was Papa too. She had to be, because Papa had fucked
off. But Gauguin had fucked off and they called him a genius. He
can’t have been the most considerate of men to dump his wife and
kids and take off with Van Gogh, that other famous family man. But
the Swedish wife took the children to live with her wealthy parents
so there was no need to dwell on them too much and they did look
pretty fucking boring compared to the technicolor windows into
paradise on the walls ahead. I refused to believe that he wasn’t
fucking every little Polynesian trollop he could get his hands on.
Painting all day between orgasms and shagging all night between
paintings. Art historians count him amongst the most notable
Post-Impressionists but to me his most significant achievement was
that he lived in an aftershave commercial before aftershave
existed.
    “ You have
found she can be difficult, no?”
    We were on the roof patio
of the Met Museum and Veronique was talking about her daughter as
if she wasn’t standing next to