Lessons in French: A Novel Page 5

  I reddened. I fingered the brown suede of Portia’s Maud Frizon boots, which had been delivered several days ago but which I hadn’t managed to send. They lay in their open box on Lydia’s desk.

  Jacques, Solange and Étienne knew I was here. Before I had arrived, they had written to say how thrilled they would be to see me again. They would be confused by my silence. How could I explain it?

  “I haven’t had a whole lot of time.”

  “Well, I’ve called them for you. Solange told me they are worried about Étienne in Paris. They’d love it if you reconnected. Maybe you could let them know how he’s doing. It sounds like he’s losing touch.”

  “Mom, Étienne thought I was the biggest loser he’d ever met. I’m sure he has no desire to talk to me.”

  “That was over ten years ago. Give him another chance.”

  “He always walked way ahead of me in the street on the way to school and pretended not to know me.”

  “You said he was nice to you in private. He asked you if you weren’t sad about your father.”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Well, Solange tells me they are worried about him and would you please call? We owe them a lot, you know.”

  “Of course I know.”

  “I have Étienne’s number for you. They feel very cut off from him in Orléans and they would appreciate some news.”

  “Mom, you don’t pronounce the s in Orléans.”

  “I’m too old to start pretending I can speak French, dear. I have other skills. Do you have a pen for the number?”

  eight

  In the three weeks between Clarence’s arrival and Lydia’s appearance, life was Clarence and me and Orlando, the brown dog with the giant yellow eyes that looked like Métro headlights, with constant visits from Claudia, the passionate graduate student who had been at the door that first day when Clarence pretended not to know who was there, and the friendly Moroccan housepainters cracking the windows so that the late September breezes mingled with the music of a tape of Lemchaheb, playing over and over.

  Claudia, who was half-Moroccan and half-French, was writing her dissertation for a professor at Berkeley about comparative dream analysis. She was petite, although her dramatic clothes and elaborate shoes could make you forget it. The first impression she made was one of strange and striking beauty, but once you looked at her for a few minutes and all the signs fell into place, you realized that the one beautiful thing about her, the thing that instantly stood for everything else, was her long straight black hair.

  She had rented a cheap studio apartment in Montparnasse, which she could not stand to work in, but it was all she could afford. Ever since meeting Clarence at an anthropology and literature conference at Harvard, she had had trouble staying away. Most mornings, she showed up to work before breakfast time and stayed into the evening. Clarence would read over her work, discuss it with her endlessly, feed us both.

  Her thesis covered a year she spent in a Moroccan village, keeping a dream journal. She was interpreting her dreams both from a Freudian point of view and a traditional Moroccan one. Clarence was not working with her in any official capacity, but he was a brilliant student of culture, she said, and it helped her to write in his house, to be able to talk things over with him as they occurred to her, because she couldn’t stand her adviser back in the States.

  “He is the worst kind of imperialist,” she said one evening, the day’s paint fumes fading, Orlando napping at my feet, Clarence opening a cheap bottle of wine that Lydia would never notice missing from the cellar. “The man stumbles along in benevolent self-interest.” Not so Clarence. She gulped her wine. “Clarence is a theorist, not a critic, you understand. He can see that the position of my dreams in this thesis is like a horizon between east and west. He gets that it is both a dividing line and also a joining place. Clarence, he knows so much, he is so wise and yet he has such a youthful mind. Nothing is set in stone for him. Nothing is fixated. Not language. Nothing. He is truly agnostic, this man, which takes so much more strength than dogma, you know. It is so easy to be dogmatic. But you grasp that, Katie.”

  Clarence excused himself to see about dinner and Claudia continued. “We can both tell, Clarence and I, that you are a very open-minded young woman.”

  I blushed. “I feel like I’m made out of hot wax and I’m taking impressions of you guys.”

  “Oh, no, there is more to you than that. Much more. I can see it and Clarence can see it. You have a complex moral structure.”

  “I do?” No, I wanted to say, but being in the room with you two makes me look good. It’s like hitting with skilled tennis players. I’m not even sure I know what a moral structure is.

  “Of course, he sees your complexity and your lovely intuitiveness. You have such instincts. You draw with perfect pitch and he makes the analogy to your character. You are gorgeous and this reflects an inner beauty.”

  I tried to protest, but she waved me silent.

  “Yes, he is very understanding in his way.” Here I thought she looked at me woman-to-woman. “Now, some things he does not comprehend and it frustrates me, right? Sometimes he has a colonialist bent that he doesn’t recognize. For example, take the women in Morocco. He does not grasp their nuances. He can’t see how privileged they are to be left alone among themselves. He has the Western prejudice that they are miserable and somehow can’t see it, as though they were thick in the head. But he is coming to see the bias. I keep explaining to him, and he listens. You’ve heard us discussing it? He is so very open-minded for a man with his stature. It makes him sexy, no? That kind of intelligence?”

  Clarence came back into the room to say the lamb was almost done. He was attempting Lydia’s gigot recipe, with a mustard coating.

  “You see,” Claudia smiled. “He is interested in everything. No meal is too low, no theory too high.”

  “Not everyone would agree with you, Claudia,” Clarence laughed.

  Clarence had recently published an abstract of the book he was working on about fashion as the nexus of high and low culture in the late nineteenth century, “fashion as horizon if you will.” Some imbecile had written that the abstract was “jargon-heavy” and he hoped the book would lighten up, considering its subject matter.

  “Such a fool, that critic!” Claudia’s gaze flickered between us. Whenever she defended his work, she jumped up in a flame of bright clothes and dancing hair. “What is jargon? It means nothing. The word ‘ego’ is jargon. ‘Original sin’ is jargon. ‘Soufflé’ is jargon!” She turned her fire decisively on me. “You just wait until the book comes out! Clarence writes so elegantly that he will bring the so-called jargon into the street and the street will never be the same.”

  “I know, I know,” I flushed. “It’s going to be a great book. I’ve been hearing bits of it.” Clarence had a hand-held tape recorder that he slipped to me every morning so that I could transcribe his thoughts for the book when I had time, and only after I was done with my work for Lydia, of course, and with the various tasks that Portia called with on her behalf.

  The toilet was fixed now. The windows were clean. The boots were sent. The Thanksgiving turkey was preordered from the butcher. The new linens to match the toile were on Portia’s bed. The tulip bulbs had been planted in a row of stone pots in the garden. Since the gardener was not “entirely trustworthy,” I had personally counted eighty bulbs, which was exactly the number Portia told me had been ordered from Holland.

  Was I sure? Yes, I was. Had I remembered to reserve La Coupole for her mother and father on October 12, their wedding anniversary? Yes, I had.

  Clarence’s chuckle brought me back to the living room. “I wouldn’t quite say I’ll be bringing anything to the street per se, not with my book anyway, Claudia, but I will say there’s nothing wrong with a little pleasure in your seriousness. Always remember that, my girls.” Here he refilled our wineglasses.r />
  When he had to leave the room to take a call from Lydia, Claudia confided in me that she worried Lydia might not be the kind of woman who could value Clarence. “She is very conventional in her fame, you know, very utilitarian, very puritanical.”

  “Her photos don’t look puritanical to me.”

  “No, no, you miss my meaning. She thinks that anything that doesn’t work or sell or have immediate impact is a little sinful. She’s materialistic in that way, that insidious American way. They call it pragmatism. She’s too American for him. He deserves a European sensibility.”

  Clarence came back into the room flush with the excitement of his long-distance conversation. There was a whirl of names and terms—Perestroika and Walesa and Stasi and Ostpolitik—all meant to show how the German uprising had been building for years, all twirling, bright and somewhat abstract in my head, like the first leaves of fall. I knew what they were, but indistinctly.

  “You realize,” said Clarence, “now is the most exciting time to be in Germany, right before the East Germans go west. Because it is going to happen anytime now. The Wall is coming down. I mean, East Germany has essentially collapsed. They’ve got fifty thousand people ‘on vacation’ in Hungary, going through to Austria. It’s all on the verge.”

  Claudia and I hung on his words.

  “People,” he continued, “can watch their revolution on TV as it happens, and it excites them no end. The image of progress engenders progress. It’s all about the image. Last time Lydia was there, she took a whole series of a family in Leipzig one evening watching the day’s protests on an illegal satellite channel. It’s one of the best things she’s ever shot.”

  Claudia’s eyes were sweeping the living room. “Such an ugly clock,” she said.

  But Clarence was not done with Germany. “No, no, no, don’t you see that Germany is her moment to flourish again? She’s got a chance to save herself here because it’s not as if the demolition of Germany as we know it is going to be some kind of disaster and she’s going to be called a sadist for looking on at the beauty of the destruction. It’s not as if she’ll be filming children dying of starvation. It’s not exploitative or colonial at all. She’s going to be able to show how Germany is our shared destiny, even if we aren’t there with her. She’s got to seize this opportunity to reconnect and to redeem her career.”

  “What do you mean ‘redeem’?” I asked. “Redeem from what?”

  “Oh, that last book about the Parisians. People are saying she’s become a celebrity-watcher and that she’s lost all sense of responsibility for her point of view. I mean, to lead with Derrida? To put Naomi Campbell facing a striking English coal miner? I think she was trying to make some comment on the death of photojournalism, but the point is she doesn’t truly believe photojournalism is dead, nor should she. So the whole thing came off as disingenuous, and the criticism from people she cares about was brutal. Magnum almost didn’t publish it.”

  “But it sold, right?” I tried to sound as if I weren’t sure.

  Claudia flashed her eyes at me as if to ask, why was I so afraid of allowing what I knew?

  I promised inside to do better.

  “It didn’t sell as well as Lydia would have you think. But I’m more worried about her career as an artist, and the work she’s doing now in Germany is so good, so bloody good. I want her to keep at it and not get sidetracked by this Rushdie rot. That man is simply another celebrity tangent and I don’t want her to fall for him. That Olivier character, little star-fucker, got her all excited about Rushdie. He has some crackpot theory about Rushdie’s significance. He’s stopping by tomorrow by the way, Katie. From what I gather, he’s finally leaving Europe.” Clarence’s face melted into a sneer. “He wants to come around noon to pick up his things from Portia’s closet. I won’t be here. I’m meeting Henri for an early lunch. Can you make sure he leaves behind his keys to the apartment? I don’t like the idea of him having keys to my home. He has some nerve, that twit.”

  Olivier rose in me, freshly bright. He hadn’t even bothered to let me know he was in Paris. Yet the news that he was here set my inner sky aflame.

  I had lost my focus on Clarence. He was saying something about Salman Rushdie again, about Rushdie being beside the point of the Muslim question. Then he was onto Germany and the moment of tension right before the collapse. How poetic such a moment was.

  I found it in me to nod.

  Claudia nodded too. Her hair undulated.

  After she left that night, as Clarence and I were finishing the last of the dishes, he said, “You know, Katie, your father would be very proud of you.”

  “You mean for going to a good college?”

  “No, no, that goes without saying, my dear. The point is that you are adventurous, intellectually adventurous. You’re not after a way to turn your education into quick money. You’ve taken on something rather difficult and unwieldy, and you are doing a beautiful job.”

  “But I don’t really understand what the job is.” For the first time, I felt safe admitting this.

  “Of course you don’t. If you thought you did, you’d be an idiot.”

  I laughed with relief, said goodnight, climbed the stairs to my attic, turned my skeleton key, saw at once the red envelope slipped under my door, my name written big across the front.

  nine

  “Dear Kate, So looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. À bientôt, Olivier.”

  Even though I had no way of getting one to him, I composed several versions of a short answer. Letters were my main means of communication, the phone being so expensive, and it was impossible not to respond to one, even in my imagination.

  “I hear you are coming at lunchtime. Perhaps we can grab a tomato tart. Can’t wait to hear about life on the Venice canals.”

  “Look forward to seeing you too. Hope you won’t feel too landlocked.”

  “Don’t let me forget to take your keys. Clarence made me swear to get them back. By the way, why does he hate you so much?”

  “Will be good to have closure tomorrow before you go home to Portia. It’s been nice knowing you.”

  “Mon cher, I have such trouble not smiling and laughing that I will surely be pleasant when you stop by, but know, even in the fantasy space of my writing, that you abscond with a little piece of my heart.”

  I couldn’t sleep. At one point, I sat up and sketched my left hand with devilish accuracy, getting every skin crease, every suggestion of bone, leaving nothing undrawn, with the fantastic idea that I would give it to him as a keepsake and a proof that, despite my ramblings, I had consistency. Then I lay down and spun more lunatic words under my breath. Somehow I made it to morning.

  Noon passed. It was almost twelve-thirty. I had looked into the courtyard several times to see the door to the street as shut as a sleeping eye. Twice, I noticed Madame Fidelio peering from her own curtains. Had she also been alerted to Olivier’s arrival? Was she too waiting for his return from Italy and his final farewell? Did she also long for closure?

  Roaming the empty apartment, I fingered my precious note.

  Again and again, I returned to Portia’s closet, where, beside a neat stack of shoe boxes, I stared at his duffel bag, unzipped, his neatly rolled socks, a swatch of soft gray sweater.

  Above the bag hung the three shirts Portia had had me pick up from the pressing on the rue de Vaugirard. “You can put them in my closet. You should see a duffel there. Hang them above it.” I had detected a wisp of melancholy in her tone, as if she might somehow intuit how left-out she made me feel, as if she might be human.

  With all these possessions here, Olivier couldn’t not show up. I took comfort in the socks, the sweater, the worn leather luggage tag whose writing matched the writing in my hands. Even if it was going to make me feel terrible, I was going to see him again.

  The doorbell rang. The hallway pulsed as I moved toward the
entryway. I opened the door. He had grown a beard, golden and slight. It tickled when he leaned in for the double kiss.

  “I’m going to have to shave it off in a couple of days.” He laughed. “And I guess I should probably cut my hair.”

  “How was Italy?” I managed.

  “Amazing. Are you going to let me in?”

  I realized I was frozen in the doorway. I let him pass, followed him into the kitchen.

  “Anyone else around?” He cast his eyes about. “Clarence here?”

  “No, just me. Would you like something to drink?”

  “No thanks, let’s get out of here. Can I take you to lunch?”

  “Sure.”

  Lunch. It must be okay to get lunch. Lunch was only a moment. Why not enjoy it?

  Olivier said he didn’t like to stay in the apartment while Clarence was here so he was in a hotel room in the Marais. Did I know that part of town, the winding old Jewish quarter that was getting so funky? He could show me around if I had time. He was going to be here until Friday.

  So not just a few more minutes. Two more days.

  He took me to a narrow Italian restaurant called the Cherche-Midi. Our table was so small that our knees almost touched underneath.

  We shared a tomato and mozzarella plate. Then I had spaghetti with baby clams and red pepper, which I tried to eat as neatly and prettily as I could.

  “It’s such a pleasure,” he sighed, “to be with a woman who actually eats. So many women just play with their food.”

  I flushed as the specter of impossibly delicate Portia rose between us, batting pasta around into little piles with a silver fork. I wanted to be her, and I wanted to be the opposite of her.

  I took a tiny bite and got a burst of garlic.

  “Sensing my discomfort, he changed the subject, “What was your French family like?”

  The question caught me off guard.

  “They were great. My cousin Solange taught preschool and she was really energetic. And Jacques always made these corny jokes about how everyone in the world was really a Balzac character from The Human Comedy. He was a teacher too, a literature teacher in a lycée. And they had this wild son, Étienne, who I had this love-hate relationship with. They were lovely. I mean, they are lovely.”