Lessons in French: A Novel Read online

  “Don’t you think you should be sympathetic to your daughter if she is in pain?” asked Claudia.

  “Yeah,” I echoed lamely.

  “I suppose I should try,” he answered. “But it’s hard when I know the pain will seem absurd in a matter of weeks.”

  Sighing, Claudia reached for his hand, which he whipped away with a significant glance at me. A tiny suspicion peaked, but I let it flow away.

  “Is everyone excited to see Lydia?” I asked cheerfully, realizing as I spoke that I was testing the waters to see whether or not Claudia would stick around when Lydia finally arrived day after tomorrow.

  “You’re going to be rather busy, my dear Katie,” quipped Clarence. “Lydia can be a bloody slave driver when she’s working. You ought to rest up tomorrow night.”

  I reddened. I had other plans.

  “I will clean up all of my papers and my affairs.” Claudia’s voice was a hiss of escaping steam.

  “Perhaps you should, dear. Lydia’s a bit of a stickler for tidiness.”

  As he began to hum the opening theme of the St. Matthew Passion, she rose impatiently from the table.

  Once Claudia had left for Montparnasse, I teased Clarence gently that she had a schoolgirl crush on him. “She’s even worried that Lydia doesn’t appreciate you enough because she’s too American to get you. It’s classic, right? Oedipal? She’s fascinated with you.” Possessed by my own impossible infatuation, it was a relief to talk about someone else’s.

  “You’re both very imaginative young women,” he said, smiling his dough-lipped smile and drumming his fingers on his wineglass.

  twelve

  I reached the little horseshoe bar at dusk. Olivier was there already, sipping something brown that I guessed was whiskey. As I caught his eye, I could feel my face a confusion of deep blush and the pink chill of the first really cool day of fall. The only coat I had that didn’t embarrass me was too thin for this weather. I had walked fast to stay warm. My whole body was pumping.

  There were half a dozen people sprinkled around the old wooden U-shaped bar. When Olivier pulled me in for a kiss in front of all of them, I was stunned. He introduced me to the bartender, Michel, dark and foxishly thin. He said that since it might be tricky for me to get mail from him at the house, he would write to me in care of Michel. He untied the old black and white plaid scarf that had been Daddy’s. Mom had given it to me when I headed to college on the East Coast, saying she had saved it all these years because she always knew it would come in

  handy.

  “I love this,” Olivier said, rubbing it to his cheek. “It’s so soft.”

  “Thanks. It was my dad’s.”

  “It is your dad’s.”

  Michel asked me what I would like to drink and all I could think of was a Kir.

  From the bar, Olivier walked me to the Place des Vosges, the sixteenth-century red brick square with geometric grass and black iron benches. Victor Hugo had lived here. It was Olivier’s favorite square in all of Paris. He took me to a bench under a chestnut tree where he made me promise to sit and read his letters. He wanted to picture me there.

  He felt me shiver and draped his coat over mine. Then he gave me his hand. He began to massage my palm so that his chevalière pressed and rose, rose and pressed.

  “Your ring is like a hint of lost treasure,” I laughed, “like the one thing that was saved from the shipwreck.”

  He laughed too. “It’s all very tragicomic, isn’t it? I could have had this whole other life like you could have had a completely different childhood with your dad being some kick-ass movie director. We can’t take anything for granted, can we?”

  “And Portia can?” I ventured.

  “I told you she’s spoiled. She thinks she has desires, but they’re all just about acquiring more to pile on to what she already has. There’s nothing burning.”

  “At least she has good taste.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Have you actually told her you’re breaking up with her?”

  “She’s not stupid. She knows.”

  When he kissed me, he whispered, “This is true. We understand one another. On se comprend.”

  But I didn’t understand anything except what I felt like doing there and then. Which was so obviously what he felt like do-

  ing too.

  The old family crest pressed softly into my ear and then into my back, my legs. His hands were running through my hair.

  I pulled away so that he could look at me. “Olivier, what are we doing? What about Portia? Are we doing something terrible to her?”

  “People are meant to follow their hearts. There’s nothing else.” He gave me another whiskey-sugared kiss.

  I succumbed to the magic of selfishness and went with him back to his quirky room on the third floor of his hôtel de charme, steps away from the Picasso Museum.

  • • •

  At six the following morning, after a last kiss and a whispered “See you again tonight? Promise?” I padded down the hotel’s narrow red-carpeted stairs, past the darkened reception desk and out into the cold rose-tinged city. I decided to walk home.

  I wound through the Marais back to the Place des Vosges, ran my fingers briefly over our dewy bench, and resolved, as I buried my hands in my coat pocket, to treat myself to a pair of gloves the next time I was paid. I went through the brick archway leading out onto the rue de Rivoli and headed for the small bridge to the Île St-Louis.

  While crossing the river, I formed a perverse desire to come clean with Lydia. What better time than today, when she was finally to arrive in Paris? After all, she was a mother and mothers forgave and she obviously didn’t think Olivier was right for Portia and maybe she would be grateful to me for taking him away, or at least understand. I had already lied about having the money to afford this job, and about knowing her work my whole life. Yet there was still time to explain. I did not want to lie any more. You could only do so much to please people. When I saw her, I would tell the truth.

  But the shuttered shops and cafés of the tiny island, with the hidden worlds and lives they suggested, filled me with a very different idea: to keep my own life private, to carve out a space for myself in this new Paris I was inhabiting. I was going to see Olivier one more time, tonight. And it would be our time.

  Mom’s voice floated to mind. “Separate the personal from the professional, Katie. It’s one of the fundamentals of a healthy life. Never mix. Keeps you straight.”

  As I reached the tip of the Île St-Louis, the Île de la Cité came into view. The flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, so imposing in their silence, offered a fresh perspective, the beauty of Olivier’s sleeping face, the perfect stonework of his chest. On principal, I had never drawn from memory, but I thought for the first time I might be able to.

  At the cathedral, I faced off with a gargoyle and was struck by the potential ugliness of my actions. But then I heard Olivier: “Please, Kate, I know you would never want to hurt anyone. Believe me that it’s over between Portia and me. I’ve been trying to tell her for months, but she won’t hear it. She’s never not gotten her way, and it’s a shock to her. She’s a casualty of privilege. They’re all casualties, Lydia, Clarence, Josh. It’ll be a shock to all of them for Portia to be left. It might take a little time to sink in. Portia’s unstable. But she’s not your responsibility.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I can do this,” he had said across an inch of pillow. “I can get out of this situation. This family is a vortex. But we can’t let them rule our lives. Not after I just spent weeks in Italy thinking about you.” Another kiss. “This is our twist of fate.”

  I smiled at the gargoyle and continued on my way toward the Left Bank.

  At the base of the boulevard St-Michel, I looked at the sleeping giant, Gibert Jeune, the enormous yellow-awninged bookstore I was comi
ng to love. Like the novels it housed, it filled me with a sense of hope all tangled up with impending tragedy. My chest tightened at the memory of Olivier’s finger scrolling across my breasts.

  What if all that playful scribbling on my body vanished, along with our magic spot? What if there were no letters? Or the letters were not warm? Or he went home and found he was in love with Portia after all? What if he tasted the Hédiard goose liver while contemplating one of his perfectly pressed shirts and slipped back into the life he deserved?

  A drunk resting against a thick tree told me it couldn’t be that bad. “Allez, mademoiselle!” he grunted. “Give us a smile.”

  As soon as his voice had broken the morning silence, I began to hear other noises, small cars coughing into the fog, the rustle of falling leaves, various footsteps. All the way home, the day grew in my ears so that I had to struggle to keep a pocket of silence hidden inside me, a place to return to later on my own.

  As I became fully aware of the action of the sky, cloudy and dramatic, I finally came to terms with the fact that Lydia was coming home from Germany today. This was no time to brood.

  thirteen

  A few hours later, I set out for the Luxembourg with the ever-sympathetic Orlando. I was afraid. I realized that the paint colors in the house, which had been congealing all around me as in a dream, might be very wrong. Lydia was going to hate the entryway. She was going to say the living room was too pale and the dining room was depressing. She was going to ask why anyone would paint a bedroom pea green. Why hadn’t I been more vigilant? But what could I have done? Maybe I felt guilty because I liked the Moroccan painters so much, loved their music and the way that Claudia spoke Arabic to them, but I knew they probably weren’t up to Lydia’s standards. “Who are those people Clarence has found? Not professionals?”

  Would this disaster turn out to be my fault? I had never done the apartment walk-through with Clarence that Lydia had asked for, comparing his vision of the wall colors to mine, giving her a report. But she had mentioned the idea only once and I hadn’t thought it was my place to bring it up again.

  I pulled Orlando down chestnut-lined allées, dragged him brutally fast to judge by the cross looks I drew.

  Shit, were my German time lines all wrong? Had I hidden the Rushdie photos well enough? Lydia didn’t want Clarence to see them at this juncture, and Clarence, she warned, was always snooping. And what about the envelope of proof sheets, the one labeled “Book Burning in Bradford, January 14, 1989?” with the close-ups of the word “Satanic” as the flames were beginning to lick it, right before it was engulfed? Had I buried those proofs in the right drawer?

  Was Marine, the snotty black and white printer, going to tell Lydia that I was a ditz when it came to photography? Would she say that my look was blank when she mentioned Magnum? That I did not know that Picto was the only photo lab in France? That I had no lay of the land? And would Lydia defend me while secretly wishing she had hired someone more with it? Or would she fire me on the spot?

  Orlando was miserable. He didn’t like to run. “Your dog is dying of thirst!” snapped a passing businessman.

  I stopped. Orlando’s tongue was hanging low and puckered. There was white phlegm webbing the corners of his mouth. Of course he was thirsty. How could I be so blind? I lead him to the closest puddle, which the poor dog began to lap furiously, and where I immediately drew more indignation. “C’est dégoûtant!” “Pauvre bête.” I burrowed my hands into my jacket pocket and fidgeted stupidly with the red note that Olivier had left under my door.

  “Hey, you went to Yale, didn’t you?” It was a jogger.

  Before I could answer, I realized with blinding certainty that I had to destroy Olivier’s letter before anyone saw it. I started to crumple the paper. I thought I looked like I desperately had to go to the bathroom because a shadow of disgust crossed the jogger’s face. But I quickly saw that she was not watching me squirm but focusing on the passersby.

  “The people here can be so rude. That’s nothing but rainwater he’s drinking. It’s fine for a dog.”

  I wanted to hug her.

  “I totally recognize you,” I said. “You were in Branford, right? I’m Katie.”

  “Christie.”

  It turned out she was here doing the sort of paralegal job Mom wished I had. And she seemed so cheerful and blond and unconfused that I thought maybe Mom was right. Here Christie was jogging in the park before a normal day’s work, while I was subjecting a panting sheep dog to one of my anxiety attacks.

  She and I had surely passed one another thousands of times in college, with no flicker of conscious recognition. To say she was a pressed and pretty WASP from prep school, and that I was a mutt who still could not place Groton and Choate, was too reductive. There had been more blending of worlds than that at Yale. But perhaps not so much that she would have felt this friendly, immediately locking me into a drink date at Les Deux Magots two Fridays from now, were we not the only ones of our species in the Luxembourg this morning. As I took in the pert ponytail and perfectly open smile, the INXS lyrics “You’re one of my kind” unfurled inside me. I remembered a passage from Proust where the narrator goes to a seaside resort for the summer and realizes that people from classes that would never interact in the city are delighting in one another’s company in a foreign atmosphere. The Proust, the INXS, the beautiful girl who wanted to know me, the river of Parisians going by, I suddenly saw it all in a Baroque X-ray.

  As I fumbled in my bag for a pen to write down Christie’s number, I felt for the fifty-franc note that Clarence had given me to buy lunch on the way home. It wasn’t there! I felt again, found it, recalled my shock of shame at the tremble in Clarence’s voice as he had gone over what to buy with me.

  “Get a poulet rôti, well done, and some céleri rémoulade. She likes jambon cru, but for goodness sakes don’t get any regular cooked ham. She can’t abide the stuff. Says it’s watery. You might pick up some of those puff pastry things with the béchamel and the chicken. She loves those when she’s not dieting.” No ham, nothing with mushrooms. No eggplant or peppers. No egg.

  The man was terrified, reduced. He would have no time today for my musings about the Luxembourg as art, and neither should I. We were both in grave danger of fucking up.

  I told Christie I would call her to confirm that I was free as the evening of our drink approached. I wasn’t my own master, I explained. “Well, I’m off at six every day,” she said with sweet certainty. “So great to run into you.” And she jogged away.

  I pulled the crumpled money from my pocket. I walked to a poubelle with every intention of throwing away Olivier’s note, but buried it in the pocket of my jeans instead.

  Then I led Orlando out of the park toward the food shops on our list. One by one, we hit them.

  The baker slipped him one of yesterday’s croissants. The traiteur had a sliver of pâté for him, but none for me.

  fourteen

  Apparently, I did not err buying lunch because Lydia ate with pleasure, chattering about how each taste brought Paris back to her, how good it was to be here.

  She did not mention the paint colors. She talked instead about the perfect crisp weather and how telling it was that Orlando liked me because he was such a good judge of character and would I mind spending a couple of hours with her in the office after lunch? She had some letters to dictate.

  She was framing the day to make it pleasant, getting Clarence and me to smile. We agreed with her that the poulet rôti from the rue du Cherche-Midi was indeed the best and the most evocative of our little corner of Paris. Where in the States could you find a chicken like this?

  “Have you explained the office system to her yet?” Lydia asked Clarence.

  “I wouldn’t call it a system, exactly, my dear. ‘System’ is a trifle too serious, don’t you think?”

  “Call it what you like,” she turned to me,
“but Clarence and I are very private about our workspaces. He doesn’t come into mine, and I don’t go into his. It’s respectful, if you will. But it does mean that you, Katherine, as a neutral party, will have to carry messages from time to time.”

  I almost said, “I know. Olivier prepared me for this.” And the deliverance I felt at not having slipped made me fear I could never come clean.

  • • •

  “So,” Lydia looked at me mischievously as we sat down in her office after lunch, she at her desk, I in a nearby chair, “I’m going to do something simply awful and I hope you won’t mind.”

  I couldn’t think of anything funny to say back.

  She gestured to a pile of envelopes. “I’m sinfully late answering some of these people. I’ve missed about ten invitations this past month, given no word, no sign of life. With Germany and Rushdie side by side, my social life is starting to look like Beirut. So, here’s where you come in. I’d like to blame some of this on you. Our line will be something like, ‘My new assistant is a Deconstructionist from Yale. She doesn’t do the date and time thing very well yet, but she’s a quick learner and we have high hopes for the future. So sorry your invitation had to be a casualty of literary theory,’ something like that. You can refine it. I’m sure you’re a better writer than I am. Is this terrible? Do you mind? I mean you don’t know these people. You don’t begrudge me a little scapegoating for a good cause?”

  “Are you kidding? Blame me for anything!”

  We had a hilarious afternoon going through her pile of neglected correspondence, pretending I’d misplaced letters and inverted dates. As I scribbled her responses on a legal pad to type up later, she painted me as a distracted intellect. It was flattering in a backhanded sort of way. With each completed reply, each fresh easing of her conscience, she grew more buoyant and more brazen in the lines she dictated until finally I had used some poor woman’s invitation to a chamber music concert as a bookmark in my Foucault and forgotten all about it.