French Exit

Tom is a handsome, normal, boring man. He’s in love with Susan, who seems to be in love with Malcolm. Susan admits this might be right—after Malcolm called, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. They find a foam mattress for Susan to sleep on, and Tom takes the floor. Joan sleeps with Frances, and they giggle like girls having a sleepover.

Frances dreams that she suffocates and dies. She puts on her coat and shoes and walks to her old Paris apartment. Through the windows, she can see that it is bare, and it makes her sad. An angry man approaches, muttering to himself, but when he sees her, becomes concerned. He offers to help her look for her cat, but she declines. After he leaves, she thinks about him going home to the person he was just muttering angrily about.

When she gets home, she watches Tom and Susan, asleep on the living room floor. Susan wakes up and sees her. She asks if Frances wants company, but Frances, embarrassed, goes back to bed.

To spend her last 2,000 euros, Frances decides to throw a party. She and Joan go shopping, and after adding money for delivery, Frances has spent everything, and feels lighter leaving the store. She asks Joan if she regrets not having children, but Joan says no. She, in turn, asks Frances if she regrets having one. Frances admits that sometimes she does, but also loves him dearly. They discuss Susan, whom Joan likes, but Frances changes the subject, telling Joan about nearly having sex with the ship captain. Joan asks if Frances regrets anything in life, but Frances won’t tell her. Joan confides that she recently realized that she and her husband, Don, fulfill each other’s’ needs, and that love is different than they thought when they were young.

Frances and Joan go to Musee d’Orsay. Joan becomes upset and withdrawn, then admits it is because of the idea of Frances dying by suicide. She feels it is cliché for a beautiful, wealthy woman to die by suicide after both beauty and money have faded. Frances responds that a cliché is “a story so fine and thrilling that it’s grown old in its hopeful retelling” (189), and Joan smiles.

Everyone dresses for cocktails and dinner that night. After dinner, Frances washes the dishes, which she has barely done in her lifetime. Malcolm dries, not enjoying the task, and worries about Frances. When they are done with the dishes and return to the living room, everyone is drunk. Tom and Julius arm wrestle, and Tom tries to arm wrestle Malcolm, but Malcolm gives in without even trying. Susan kisses Malcolm’s bruised knuckles and Tom announces he is leaving. Susan refuses to go with him. After he leaves, Malcolm shows Susan that he is wearing her father’s watch. He puts it on her wrist, thanking her for coming when he asked.

Mme Reynard decides to hold a talent show. She recites Emily Dickinson poems, while Joan draws portraits. Frances tells the story of when she set her parents’ house on fire.

When Frances was 10, her mother began pretending she didn’t exist. Seeing Frances as a competitor for her husband’s attention, she wanted to send her daughter away to school, but he wouldn’t allow it, so she ignored Frances, to the point where Frances wondered if she even existed. One night, after her birthday party, which her mother didn’t attend, Frances decided to set the house on fire in order to force her mother to react.

She took a stick of wood from her bedroom fireplace and lit her curtains. She went to her mother’s bedroom and woke her up, the flaming stick still in her hand. Her mother called the fire department, and when they came, they completely ruined the house, despite the fact that the fire had been contained in just one room. It took years to repair the damage. In the meantime, her mother went to the Bahamas, and Frances and Olivia moved into the Four Seasons.

The guests are impressed with Frances’s story and decide Madeleine should tell one, too. When Madeleine says when she was eight, she saw a green glow around her grandmother, who died later that day. She didn’t tell anyone, and a year later, she saw a green man at the grocery store. She followed him out to his car, where he had a seizure and died. She told the police and her mother about the green glow, and they committed her to a psychiatric hospital for three days.

Malcolm tells the story of when he was 10 years old and the headmaster told him that he wasn’t wanted at home for summer vacation, and would be staying at school. He lived on the grounds with the headmistress and the groundsman, neither of whom was interested in taking care of him. He was alone most of the time and discovered reading, but it wasn’t enough to assuage his boredom.

The headmistress and the groundsman became increasingly hostile toward each other, until one day the groundsman told Malcolm that the headmistress was gone. That night, the man got drunk and vandalized the school, and Malcolm woke to find him standing at the foot of his bed. He decided to run away, and started out walking the next morning. As it began to grow dark, he found a family camping near a river. As soon as the mother showed him kindness, he became upset, but remembers the feeling of closeness with them, in the tent. However, he has no memory of how he got back to the school, or what happened afterward.

Frances feels guilty about Malcolm’s story, but he tells her she’s made up for it. She decides to go to bed, and Malcolm walks her to her door. He asks why she had him; she admits that she hadn’t thought she could get pregnant, and when she did, thought it might help her marriage. Malcolm’s birth, however, had finished whatever remained of her and Franklin’s relationship.

Frances tells Malcolm not to waste his energy hating Franklin, nor making him out to be more than he was—an idiot, but not evil. She admits that when he was born, it hurt her so much that she had him taken away. However, she says if she’d known who he was, she never would’ve been separated from him, and tells him she loves him. He tells her he loves her, and watches her get into bed. Something about her manner reminds him of a young girl. Susan waits for him in his room, and everyone else goes to sleep in the living room.

Susan can’t sleep. She goes to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and finds Frances there, wearing a red dress and smoking cigarettes. She lights one with a click of her lighter, and is rude at first, but then softens. She talks about the first time she came to Paris, when she was young. When she’d returned with Franklin, she no longer felt that same freedom, and Paris was ruined for her, so she stopped visiting. Malcolm, however, expressed interest when he was young, and when she returned with him, Paris changed for her again.

Frances admits she hates Susan because she wants to take Malcolm from her. However, she also admits that she doesn’t like the way she acts around Susan, which makes her dislike Susan even more. She gives this honesty as a peace offering, which Susan understands. She also knows that she will never be able to compete against Frances. Frances tells her this may not matter soon, then makes tea for Susan and sends her back to bed. She continues to stand in the kitchen, smoking in her red dress.

It is still night. Frances wakes Madeleine up, wanting to speak to Franklin. Frances’s aura is bright green, so Madeleine agrees. Frances tells Franklin she doesn’t hate him anymore, and when he doesn’t seem to care, she is annoyed. He reminds her that he is trapped in a cat’s body and is completely miserable. Frances confesses that she has recently realized she felt a certain way upon first coming to France because she somehow recognized it as the eventual setting for her death. Franklin asks if she will die soon, and she says yes, then breaks the connection.

Frances goes to run a bath. Madeleine knows that she can’t change what is going to happen, but knocks on the door, wanting to wake Malcolm up. Frances suggests she leave the apartment instead, so that she doesn’t feel she has to act. When Madeleine hears the bath turn off, she leaves the apartment.

Outside, Madeleine sees Small Frank at the edge of the park, but he won’t let her come near, retreating into the darkness. After she leaves, Small Frank returns to his spot, looking up at the apartment.

Frances cuts her arms and relaxes into the water. It is painful at first, then numb, then calm. Then she feels a kind of ecstasy, and knows that it must be a trick of the body to ease her into death, but she goes along with it.

Mme Reynard finds Frances’s body the next morning. She is calm and waits for the police to arrive before waking Malcolm and Susan. While the rest of the group is giving their statements, the detective, Alphonse, asks Malcolm to go to the station with him. He reveals that he recognized Frances’s name that morning, from Franklin’s death so many years ago, but doesn’t pursue the matter.

Malcolm admits that he isn’t surprised that Frances has died by suicide, even if he was unprepared. She was behaving differently, taking people into their apartment, and her life. When Alphonse asks if he knows why she did it, Malcolm states that she was too good for the world. After he leaves the station, he relishes the anonymity of Paris, which he’s always enjoyed.

He sits on a bench and thinks about the day Frances came to pick him up from boarding school. She took him out with only his clothes, promising to buy whatever he needed. He was surprised there was no driver in their car, but Frances explained that she would drive. She threw his school tie out the window and told him that Franklin was dead. He told her he already knew because another student showed him the newspaper, and she asked what it had said about her. He was embarrassed, but she told him that her actions weren’t wrong, and that he would have to trust her.

Malcolm comes out of the memory when he smells flowers reminiscent of Frances’s perfume. He sees a florist and buys an armful of flowers. He enjoys the feeling of being a man with an armful of pink flowers in Paris, and decides to give them to Susan.