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Page 67.
Chapter 12
 The night of his departure from the owl-eyed street, he would have a battle all alone with moths high in his garret room. But first—it was still daylight before then, and he was filled with the purpose of picking up dropped threads.
For the first time in several weeks, he drove out to his parents’ house in Créteil, arriving just as streetlights came on in the inky-blue evening. Crickets chirped in the squirrel and frog-filled tidal swamps around the nearby lake as he knocked. The door was as always radiant with a friendly amber light. Good old milk box, good old dog house, good old trees, good old door handle, good old moths ticking blindly against the brick wall and the milky lamp cover.
He and his parents ate in the den while the TV flickered and the potatoes looked blue. His father, wearing Madras shorts and a crinkled white shirt whose buttons were laden with the weight of his belly hairs, sat enthroned in the easy chair with a seven-and-seven at hand. His mother, a small, wiry woman with her jet-black (obviously dyed) hair in curlers, sat beside Marc on the couch as they ate calmly.
“How about school in the fall?” his father asked after dinner, kneading his fingers and peering at Marc with discomfitingly direct, gleaming eyes while a handsome male talkshow host sat back laughing on the TV, and a circle of appreciative, gossipy looking young women in casually dressy clothing joked with each other.
Marc shrugged. “I’ve thought about it. I’m making a little money and I may put it off for a year. Save some money, you know, get a bigger apartment.” It was a lie, sadly; he knew Léopold Montblé would demand periods of dissolute artistry in which no money could be saved.
His mother said, “Are you going to continue in your major?” It was a reproving question requiring a negative answer. Her dream was for him to be a teacher, preferably a college professor.
He shook his head. “There is a good business program at on of the Unis.”
“What about Poitiers or one of the other cities?” his father asked.
“I’m looking for something different,” he said. “I need a total change.”
“Do you think you can handle business and accounting?” his mother asked.
“I’ll have to take the entrance exams first, of course.” Marc Fontbleu, if not Léopold Montblé, was practical minded. He had no idea if he could do well in those highly competitive exams against people who were far less loose and creative, but so structured and ambitious.
“That sounds a little more like it,” said his father, a smart fellow, lately working as a mill foreman supervising the extrusion of stinking rubber at a nearby tire factory. His father hadn’t had the chance to go to college. His good mind and sound body had been carefully harnessed over the years to the task of raising a family and providing a comfortable, if small, home in a middle-class suburb which forty years earlier had been swamp land and a country of gravel pits.
“We just wish you the best,” his mother said.
They were easy-going, understanding parents. They understood struggle, though they little realized it could exist in the form of poetry. He could attach no formula of rebellion to his departure from their enclosed world. They had married when his father was nineteen, his mother sixteen. Perhaps the one benefit of this premature liaison was that today they were still young enough to enjoy the relative calm as their children moved beyond adolescence.
It was too quiet around the house, and he rose, saying he was going out. “Try to stop by or call a little more often,” his father told him as they saw him to the door.
“And remember there’s always a room here for you if you need a place to sleep,” his mother added anxiously.
“Mom!” he admonished. After kissing her, he re-entered the night and dove back into his own life.
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