Lessons in French: A Novel Read online

  The three of us smiled indulgently at one another. Again, I felt a certain pride in sensing I had made a favorable first impression on regal Madame Fidelio. I had passed through my first gate.

  “How do you like your tea?” Olivier asked once she had gone.

  “I like milk, if there is any.”

  He took a carton from the small refrigerator.

  My cousins’ refrigerator had been an even tinier affair, drawerless, without a working light. But I had bright memories of the food packages inside, and they were revived in a flurry by the box in Olivier’s slender hand. It was longue conservation milk, the kind everyone here drank. It could sit in that box for months until you snipped one of the corners and began to pour. It had a chemical smell that used to make me nauseated. I hated it. I had never told Mom because she had had more important things on her mind at the time, but the milk here was terrible.

  “I got some honey at the farmers’ market on Boulevard Raspail. Would you like some in your tea?”

  I had forgotten I liked honey but was suddenly longing for it.

  “Sure. Honey would be great. I’ve never been to the market on Raspail. Is it wonderful? I haven’t been to Paris in over ten years.”

  “Where did you get that accent? You sounded totally native talking to Madame Fidelio just now.”

  I fell back on well-rehearsed lines. “I think the timing of when I learned was perfect. I was here between the ages of nine and eleven, young enough to get the accent and old enough to intellectualize the language.”

  “No, you must be gifted. I’ve spent years here on and off and my mother’s French and I sound awful.”

  “I doubt that.”

  He laughed gently. “Spend some time with me then.”

  I felt brave enough to glance into his eyes.

  “So you’re fresh off the plane,” he said. He made my freshness sound like the quality of a flower or an apple. “Lydia says you’re a painter. Is there anything you want to see today, any art, anything in particular in Paris?”

  “She told me you’d only have a few hours before you caught your plane and you’d barely have time to show me the alarm and the washing machine and such.”

  She told me you were charming.

  “But I don’t leave until tomorrow, remember? I love Lydia, but she has a lot on her mind. We can’t expect her to remember other people’s schedules. I have a whole day. I thought maybe I’d just walk around. I have to pick something up in the Sixteenth. Figured I’d go to the Marmottan. You know, where all the Monet waterlilies are? I haven’t been there this trip. I know it’s not very cool or contemporary, but I’m a nostalgic person.” He sighed. “I’m about to start a job in New York. Investment banking. I doubt I’ll have time to flâner in the foreseeable future. So I’m open. What do you want to do?”

  “Can we get a croissant?”

  three

  At the pâtisserie on the corner, Olivier asked what I would like.

  A plain croissant, please.

  He bought it for me, and ordered a pain au chocolat and a pain aux raisins for himself.

  We wandered over into the Seventh Arrondissement. On the rue du Bac, we passed the luxurious grocery store Hédiard, and I smiled inside because Hédiard had been a joke in my cousins’ house. When Étienne and Jacques would refuse second helpings of Solange’s food, she would say, “If this isn’t good enough for you, changez de restaurant! Allez chez Hédiard!”

  I wondered now if Solange knew that Hédiard wasn’t a restaurant, but a famous store with Art Nouveau windows framing pyramids of fruit and pastries against a luscious depth of cheeses and exotic teas in red-lacquered drawers. But what caught my eye, as we floated by, was a silver tray of croissants à la crème de marron. I loved chestnuts, and imagined chestnut cream to be something otherworldly. These chestnut croissants, with their dusting of powdered sugar, struck me as the most delicious things I could possibly eat, but I wasn’t sad that I didn’t have one at this moment. I still had half of the plain croissant that Olivier had bought for me, and I knew I could wander to

  Hédiard on my own anytime from now on. I lived nearby.

  My lack of covetousness toward today’s uneaten treasure was so marked that I wondered if I hadn’t become a new person. So often I was defined by what I could not have.

  Olivier veered away from me into Hédiard. I moved to follow him, but he told me to give him a second. When he reappeared, it was with two of the chestnut croissants. “Second breakfast.” He winked.

  • • •

  When we reached the Seine, I gazed across to the Grande Roue, the giant Ferris wheel that comes to the Tuilleries a couple of times a year.

  He saw me staring. “You’d like to ride in it too, wouldn’t you? It’s a great way to get the lay of the land if you haven’t been to Paris for a while. Let’s go.”

  We had a compartment to ourselves. Our knees grazed in the metal seat. Whenever the wheel stopped, we rocked into each other, pretending not to notice, talking too much.

  After the ride, we were altered and unsteady. We walked quietly along the Right Bank all the way to the Sixteenth, where we picked up a small paper bag that he said was for Lydia.

  “I get along with her pretty well,” he ventured. “But she’s complicated. And the family is complicated. You’re in for some interesting times. I hope you’ve been taking your vitamins.”

  I wanted more information about Lydia and her mysterious family, but I also didn’t want to be reminded that this boy across this café table from me sipping Belgian beer, drawing glances from all around, belonged to them.

  I reminded him that he had mentioned the Marmottan museum with the Monets.

  “Are you sure you want to go?” he asked.

  “I would love to.”

  “That didn’t sound entirely convincing.” He looked at me with an attention I had rarely felt. “Are you being polite?”

  “No, no, I’m strange about the Impressionists, the style. I don’t have my own style yet, so I get a bit wary, and impressed, so to speak.” I giggled lamely. “But I’d like to go. I’d like to look at the actual paintings. I’ve seen so many reproductions.”

  “You can’t not have a style.”

  “Think about mirrors. No style, right?”

  “You’re funny,” he smiled, making my funniness into an appreciable quality, a style of its own.

  He told me his mother used to take him to the Marmottan on trips to Paris when he was a boy. It was her favorite museum because it was small and perfect, a bijou. He always made at least one pilgrimage when he was in town. “She loves the place and the paintings, and it’s hard for her to travel these days. Her circumstances aren’t what they used to be. Hopefully, I can start bringing her back once I’m working and I can afford it. Anyway, her favorite thing about this museum is the series of footbridges over the lily pads. I think you’ll see why.”

  As we walked uphill to the end of the rue de Passy and through a dainty park, Olivier’s eyes gleamed with what I took to be memory.

  “What are your parents like?” he asked.

  “Well, my dad died when I was eleven. While I was living in Paris actually. The whole time he was dying of cancer, he kept writing me letters about how happy he was that I got to be here, living with his cousin Jacques whom he adored, and learning French. He never really got fluent in French. His own dad didn’t speak it to him—I guess he wanted him to fit in in America—and Dad had this idea that my learning the langauge would somehow make my life complete.”

  “You must miss him.”

  “I think about him all the time, try to guess what he would say if he could see me, especially here.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I shook my head. “It’s okay.”

  “So, did your mom bring you up? I mean, after?”

  “Basical
ly. I guess you could say my mom is wonderful. I mean, she was supposed to have another kind of life. My dad was an up-and-coming movie director when she married him. She probably thought she was going to have fun, but ended up taking care of him when he got sick and then working hard as a secretary, an executive secretary in a law firm, but still a secretary, when she could have done something truly interesting with her life. She’s slaved all these years to send me to good schools and she’s proud of me. It’s been just the two of us since I came home from France. She lets me do these things that make her seem almost liberal, like coming to Paris to work for Lydia, but it’s because she believes in some form of well-roundedness to prepare you for life. Actually, she’s obsessed with me becoming a corporate lawyer because what she wants for me more than anything is security, and she knows that you can’t rely on anyone but yourself for that. And I feel terrible about not wanting to be a lawyer. But I really don’t. I don’t think that way at all. Logically, I mean. I don’t think logically. It would be torture.”

  I was suddenly embarrassed. Had I been talking this whole time? Did I seem disloyal to Mom? Was I?

  “You know, Kate, I’ve only just met you, but you appear to me to be many things at once. So, you may not have the luxury of diving into your dreams right away. Almost no one does. I’ve thought about this a lot. Not everyone can do everything in the ideal order. That’s what children of privilege don’t have to face.”

  I imagined that he too dreamed of the freedoms of privilege and I felt intensely jealous of Portia, but only for a second because the next thing he said was, “They get so hedonistic sometimes, it makes them soft. Portia and Joshua have their good points, but they are incredibly spoiled. They just don’t get it like we do.”

  At the mention of Joshua, I was startled into recalling that Portia had a problematic younger brother. I felt the onrush of all I had yet to know.

  • • •

  We stood in a room full of different colored impressions of the footbridge in Monet’s Japanese garden at Giverny. Olivier explained that his mother had told him that it was impossible to know that this was a bridge from looking at only one of the paintings by itself. You needed the series of views superimposed in your head for the true image to take shape.

  “I see what she means,” I said. “It’s a beautiful trick. Pretend you don’t know what they are supposed to be and walk around until the bridge comes out at you.”

  These paintings were gorgeous, but they made me uncomfortable. Even though they had become classics, they took an intimidating leap of faith, painting the light instead of the contours of the thing itself, letting the subject slowly emerge on a magical surface. I was convinced I could never do such a thing. I was too literal. I loved the Monets, but I didn’t entirely trust them.

  • • •

  In a nearby tearoom, over the tiniest and most expensive of tomato tarts, which Oliver treated me to, he finally told me what was in the bag he had just gotten for Lydia. “Papaya extract pills, probably mixed with speed. She gets them from a diet guru up here.”

  “Why are you picking them up?”

  “She likes to involve people she feels close to in her fetching and carrying. It’s an emotional thing. She’d never ask Clarence because she would feel too judged, but I’m sure she’ll want you to do it. She starts by asking you to pick something up somewhere without telling you what it is. But she always ends up blurting it out sooner or later. She can’t not confess eventually, but she controls her timing.”

  “Maybe that’s what makes her such a great artist.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you have to remember when you’re tempted to make fun of her for wanting to funnel baguettes and cheese all day, then sending you out for these damn pills. She’s amazing at what she does.”

  • • •

  We made our way back across the Seine and over to the Sixth with a detour through the Rodin Sculpture Garden, where we sat on a bench and watched children feed ducks in the shadow of Balzac. How lucky to grow up here, we agreed.

  I asked him about the signet ring on his finger.

  It was a chevalière with the coat of arms from his mother’s side of the family. He wore it for her.

  “Is that castle on there your long-lost château somewhere deep in the Dordogne?”

  “The Loire, actually.” He laughed. “But you’re right, it’s long-gone. The land is gone too. They sold it when my mother was a child. The only piece of it left is the ‘de’ in her name. It’s my middle name. I’m Olivier de Branche Craft.”

  Suddenly, I felt light among the statues in this venerable garden. Amid all these voluptuous stones straining toward life, just short of breathing, here I was so very alive without even trying. The simple stupid joy of it was overwhelming.

  I stole a glance at Olivier. I felt my throat catch. I had to say something to make sure that I could still speak.

  “Olivier de Branche,” I said, with emphasis on the particle, and I reached to touch the golden ring. “Maybe you’ll be able to rebuild the château for your mother one day.”

  “You’re sweet, but I’d settle for a pied-à-terre in the Sixth.”

  I pulled my hand into my lap.

  • • •

  Back at the apartment, we sat in the half-painted living room and drank Lydia’s white wine infused with a crème de pêche. She had gotten Olivier hooked on her peach Kirs while they were here together last month. Olivier had been traveling in Europe all summer, mostly without Portia, who I gathered was interning at a fashion magazine in New York and was now headed back to college for her junior year. I wanted both to picture her and to block her out, so that I had a filmy image of her as a drowned princess or a girl frozen in a magazine.

  Being in the Schells’ living room, among their many possessions, cast a sheen of formality back over Olivier and me, and we started conversing seriously. I tried hard to ignore the fact that each of his words was a little drumbeat between my legs.

  “Lydia and I were good roommates,” he said. “She got me on this routine of starting with her Kirs around five.”

  We looked at an ornate clock that had been taken down by the painters and was leaning against a striped silk ottoman. A fraying wire connected the clock to a hole in the wall above the mantel. It was quarter to five.

  “We’re knocking off early,” I tried to laugh.

  I had to stop myself from drinking too quickly and asking too many questions. My curiosity about this household was intense, but so was my awareness that Olivier was completely bound up in it.

  After three Kirs with no food, I began to feel dizzy. Struggling to my feet, I said I had to go to bed. I couldn’t even count the hours since I had last slept. The jet lag was catching up to me.

  Didn’t I want some dinner?

  “No thank you.” Mom had taught me what a waste of time it was to long for the unattainable.

  “Goodbye, then.” But I couldn’t quite close the door. “Maybe when you’re back between Italy and the States? Are you staying in Paris for a day or two then?” I hoped I sounded nonchalant. “Will you stay here?”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

  I blushed.

  He smiled sadly. “But I might not be able to help myself,” he said. Flecks of green melted in his brown eyes as he leaned in for what I realized in the nick of time was a double-cheek kiss. The curls that only this morning had seemed such a rare vision actually brushed my neck, and then it was over.

  I stumbled backward.

  “Not sure of my exact dates yet,” he whispered, “but I’ll see you in two or three weeks.”

  • • •

  As soon as I reached my own tiny space, I knew I was too tipsy and tired to unpack. But I did manage to rummage for a half-eaten turkey sandwich I had leftover from the plane. My first dinner in Paris, alone, staring out at a sea of blinking windows. I ha
d no idea what I was doing here. This was not the Paris of Jacques and Solange, bound by all the limitations of decency, where I first discovered how faithfully I could draw in the illustrated letters I sent home. This was a city whose shapes were still unclear. I had no idea what tomorrow would look like, except that it would be empty of the only person I thought I needed to see.

  I forced down a final chalky bite.

  I wondered what Olivier might have whipped up for me in the kitchen downstairs. A recipe of his mother’s? Of Lydia’s?

  In a couple of weeks, he would pass through my life again, on his way back to Portia, whom we had hardly touched upon all day. Slender Portia of the toile and the bed skirt. Portia who was not me.

  four

  Lydia had told me that my sixth-floor maid’s room, the garret that came attached to “every Paris apartment,” would have a view of the Luxembourg Gardens. When I woke that first morning to the alarm on my digital watch, I looked out to the promised sliver of green visible through rain-glossed rooftops.

  I had not told Lydia that my cousins had not had a maid’s room, or a cave for their wine for that matter, nor had I told her that it might be a problem for me to pay the $400-a-month rent for her maid’s room out of my salary. I had said that, of course, I understood, and I had implied that I was among the lucky few who did not have to worry about such things. The world was elitist, and this was a funny if slightly embarrassing fact. Common knowledge. The chambre de bonne with a view, c’était normal, normal at any price.

  The rooftops and the little corner of Luxembourg trees in my line of sight were glossy and trembling. The room was spartan, but I took my time in arranging it with my few things. I had an hour before Lydia was to call me with my first instructions.

  On an old trunk, I made a neat pile of books next to a framed black and white snapshot of my mother and father with me as a plump five-year-old with short hair, outsized eyes and an unsure smile for the camera. Dad was already sick in the picture. His own smile was strained, but he was still trying. Mom had unimaginably long hair and a roundness to her that I couldn’t actually remember, but the firm set of her mouth was the same as today.