With my best wishes, Françoise Lussac
“Well!” I say it out loud, because there is nobody to say it to, only the four pale-gray walls of my apartment. An old friend of my father’s. Very fond of my father. An old girlfriend, then, an old flame. The woman, in fact. But how had this Françoise heard that I was in Paris? I walked up and down and thought, and decided that, of course, I would call her.
I thumbed in her number and heard the ring. Then a message. I said in French, “It’s Gaby Greenwood here, answering your letter.” And left my number. Almost immediately, my phone rang again—she must be screening her calls—and a voice said, “Gaby?”
“Oui?”
“It’s Françoise Lussac. Thank you for calling me. Does this mean that you would like to meet?”
“Well, yes. Since you were a friend of my father’s.”
“What about Thursday, for lunch? I live at 5, rue Hermel. It’s just behind Sacré-Coeur, a steep street that goes down to the métro Jean-Jaurès. Do you know it?”
“No, but I can find it. Thursday, noon?”
“Fine. I’d offer to take you out, but I broke my leg recently, and I’ve had a lot of trouble with it, especially since we don’t have a lift in our building yet, so it’s easier to meet at home. I’m not much of a cook, but we’ll eat something simple.”
“Can I bring anything? Bread, a bottle of wine?” I didn’t know this woman from Eve, and here we were discussing groceries.
“No, no, I have somebody who does my shopping for me. Just you will be fine. I do so much look forward to meeting you. I have heard so much about you, over the years.”
I wrote her name on my calendar, Françoise L. Lunch with my father’s mistress. I could hardly believe, let alone imagine it.
Yves said, trimming his nails with my scissors, “What if he faked his death in order to live with her?”
“Well, then, why is he not with her?”
“You don’t know that he isn’t. What did she sound like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Friendly, welcoming. She broke her leg recently, can’t go out.”
“Broke her leg? How?”
“I don’t know! You sound like a detective on a case, Yves. I’ll tell you all about it, don’t worry.”
With him, I was at that unusual place of backtracking from passion into some semblance of ordinary life. When you have been to bed with someone immediately after you have met him, how do you go back to mealtimes, movies, shopping, talk about work, the everyday? It’s like turning back the clock; but it’s not really possible, because you already know what there is to know.
That evening he’d said to me, “There is a film I would like to see, tu veux?” I felt a certain relief; it was possible to do something ordinary, then. Endless sex, however enthralling, does make you feel somewhat cut off from the world. We went to the old Escurial cinema on Port-Royal, which has photos of dead French movie stars along its walls and a flourish of red curtains. We saw a Palestinian film about a lemon tree that had me in tears again, and came home to make love afterward. At least we had done it, we’d sat beside each other in silence, without touching more than hands, I sniffing, he handing me Kleenex, for the two hours a film takes to run. I bought food, and we ate together. He offered to fix the plug in the bathroom. He cut his nails. We were moving into some sort of ordinariness, from the extraordinary high place at which, like acrobats flying through a darkened space above a circus ring, we had met and embraced. It was both relaxing and slightly disappointing; I wanted to be up on the high wire, soaring, forgetting the complexities of daily life on the ground, and I wanted to know him as a person, not just a seductive body. Sex can be very absorbing—but yes, there had to be life in between: nail cutting, plug fixing, cooking and eating, sleep, and the questions: Who are you? Who are we together? Is this reality, or a pleasant and distracting dream?
The night before I went to meet Françoise Lussac, he lay sprawled on my couch beside me, and we ate sushi out of little containers and drank beer from bottles.
“You don’t have a TV?”
“No, I don’t want one much. I don’t really like TV.”
“In France, it’s not like in America. There are some interesting things.”
“Well, do you have one?” I decided to let the predictable dig at America go.
“I did, when I lived with my wife. It’s good for the news, discussions, things like that.”
So, did he want to talk about TV or his wife? I decided it was the latter.
“Who was your wife? How long have you been apart?”
“A year now. She was from a very bourgeois family, she was—is—very beautiful, very intelligent, but in the end, not very nice.”
Ah, so being nice—gentille—did count for something. Beauty and intelligence, all very well, but niceness was what he wanted; wasn’t that true of us all? But I have never liked listening to men running down the women they have loved, so I said, “I have only been separated a few weeks, if that. In fact, I don’t really know if it’s a separation, or just a pause.”
“What about you? It’s hard, isn’t it? Do you miss him?”
“Well, you get so used to someone. Not always in a good way.”
“So, Gaby, what are you doing with me? It’s very soon after your leaving him.”
“Exploring, I suppose. I didn’t expect to get involved with anyone, I didn’t ask to meet you, but look—here you are. What was I supposed to do?”
“Yes, here I am. Me voici! I didn’t expect this either.”
He rolled closer and kissed me with sushi-tasting lips, the hot breath of wasabi in my mouth. “Are you glad?”
“Very glad.”
“Even if it complicates life?”
“It always complicates life, doesn’t it? But who wants life to be too simple?” I said it lightly enough but felt a pang of regret for the apparent simplicity of my life with Matt, in the old days. Where, in our innocence and selfishness, had we gone wrong?
I took the métro the next day, Thursday, carrying a small rolled bouquet of gerbera daisies bought on impulse from the flower shop near the station at Censier-Daubenton. Taking flowers to older women you had not yet met, as well as to lovers and friends, seemed to be the thing to do. At least she would have to do all the snipping and separating and finding a vase that would give me time to observe her. I had watched the florist tie raffia around the stalks of the daisies and tighten the knot, after she’d asked me if it was “pour offrir.” That would take a minute or two to undo. The cellophane was stiff in my hand, my métro ticket clasped next to it. I was sweating, not just from the air down there. I came out in the square, breathed deeply, found rue Hermel on the map and began walking uphill. The clock in the square had said ten to twelve. I walked more slowly, Sacré-Coeur’s white bulges ahead of me at the top of the street. The houses had art nouveau doors and windows, and the pavements were dirtier than in my quartier, with green-and-yellow garbage bins overflowing. I thought of my father. How often had he walked up this street to this door, flowers in hand, even, and rung the bell or greeted the concierge or, in this age of security, punched a code? I checked the number she had given me, thumbed it in, and the beautiful door with its brass curlicues swung open. The stairs went up to the right, and I began my climb. Every time you visited someone in Paris, you arrived slightly out of breath, at a loss, because they always lived up flights of stairs. I slowed down again, and breathed, and tried to still my heart, which was beating overtime—and not just with the effort of arrival. I was scared, and even possibly angry, but I couldn’t let this show. She was on the second floor up, so it wasn’t far. The door was ajar; she had heard me coming.
“Come in!” a voice called to me from inside, and a second later, there she was, drying her hands.
“Just washing the salad. Come in. Oh, lovely, these are for me? How kind.”
I had expected someone large and blonde, from the voice I had heard on the telephone: a former smoker, a late-night woman, a cro
ss between Catherine Deneuve and Simone Signoret, two of my mother’s heroines. But she was slim and dark, an apron tied at her waist over jeans and a shirt, one foot still in plaster with a sock over it, one in a sheepskin UGG boot.
“Sit down, Gaby. Or, if you like, come and help me with these—I love these daisies, they are my favorites—I’m so clumsy these days, it takes me ages to do anything. Oh, and let’s have a glass of wine.” Her English was good, with hardly an accent.
There was an open bottle of Bordeaux on the kitchen table, and she poured us two glasses and hobbled over to find scissors and a vase. She handed me the scissors—so much for having given her something to do. I felt I had met my match, in some way; there wouldn’t be any pretense with Françoise Lussac. She gave me a direct glance, her eyes a strangely violet shade of blue between dark lashes thickened with mascara. Her hair was dark, streaked with gray, and put up in a messy chignon. She could have been sixty, or older, I couldn’t tell. Her forehead had lines that met in the middle as if she frowned often, but with concentration rather than annoyance. She was my height, around five nine. Both of us tall women. Both of us dark. But my eyes are greenish-brown, like my father’s. I took the daisies that I had chosen and began pushing their thick, furry stalks into a vase she handed me. She sat down at the kitchen table and watched me.
“I see flower arrangement isn’t exactly your thing, any more than it’s mine. But thanks for them, they are lovely. Now, I haven’t got a lot for us to eat, just some pâté and salad and cheese, I hope that is all right, and of course cherries. They have begun to come in from the country, Elise brought me some today. Salut, here’s to us.”
I sat catty-corner from her at the table and sipped my wine. A good Bordeaux, 2005, a good year, as she said.
“Were you surprised to hear from me? I imagine you were.”
“Well, yes, since I didn’t know of your existence.” I thought I wouldn’t mention André Schaffer’s revelations.
“Ah, but I knew of yours. I have known of yours for many years.” This did not sound threatening, as it might have, said in a different tone, but surprisingly reassuring. “It can’t be easy, losing both your parents so young. And in such quick succession.”
“It isn’t. I can’t get used to it. You know, I didn’t see them often, but they were there. I needed them to be there, without realizing it. When they both died, I felt, I don’t know, crippled in a way, as if I couldn’t function.” I had plunged in here, as I think she meant me to. “But how did you hear about me? How did you know?”
“My dear, I don’t want to give you a shock. But your father and I were lovers for very many years.”
I had expected it, I already knew, but still the shock I felt as I heard her say it was profound. Her words went in as sudden diagnoses of unexpected diseases do, I imagine, as all announcements must that change your idea of how life really is, of how it has been and will be. I had to hold my breath for a minute, and look away.
“Forgive me, I should have waited.”
“No, really, the quicker the better. I want to know everything. I do want the truth. But sometimes it is just rather a shock.”
“I know. I do know, believe me. It was like that when I heard he had died. I had to know, of course, but the shock—well, it was hard.”
“So, who let you know?”
“I read it in the paper. A colleague here showed it to me. The London Times, I believe it was. He thought I should know, and that was how I discovered. None of your family knew me, of course. But I have known you, all of you, from afar.”
She refilled my glass, and pushed a basket of bread toward me. “Eat something with your wine. I’ll get the pâté and the salad, it’s all nearly ready; perhaps you could make a dressing? We have a lot to talk about, and it shouldn’t happen on an empty stomach.”
I poured the oil and vinegar into the bowl she gave me, and mixed in mustard, salt, and pepper. She placed a thick square of country pâté on a plate, and cut more bread. It was a picnic, by French lunch standards, and I wished she had offered me meat, potatoes, even soup. I was weak with something, perhaps hunger. I drank more wine and began to feel warmer, less shaky. The lettuce leaves went in, and she lifted them gently, turning them over. “People are so often far too rough with salad. It needs gentle turning, only. There.”
I thought, People are too rough with other people too. I felt as if I had been rushed along on a moving walkway at an airport, with all my luggage left far behind.
“Tell me,” I said to her. “I need to know.”
“Well. There are things I need to know from you too. But I’ll start. We met—let me see—in the late seventies.”
I would have been ten or eleven.
“We met here, in Paris. He was buying paintings and taking them back to London, under the noses of French dealers. I was working as a journalist at Le Monde, on the arts pages. It’s what I do. We met, I think, at an opening of some sort.”
I said, “Were you his lover for all those years, then?” My heart sped and I felt a little sick. My history, the family narrative—the loving parents, the family holidays, my parents hugging in the kitchen, their bedroom, his goodbyes, her welcomes—everything was shifting in my mind and turning into something else. There had been something going on during my entire childhood that I had been completely unaware of. “Did my mother know?” I was about to explode into angry tears; my throat hurt, and my hands trembled.
She said gently, “I’m sorry, Gaby.”
“No, no, I have to know.” Just as I have to hear the dentist’s announcement, This needs a root canal, or the doctor someday who would tell me, It’s cancer, it’s inoperable, I’m sorry.
“He didn’t tell her. Or, I don’t think he did. I’ll never really know.”
“Did you want him to leave her?” Leave her, leave us, leave home? Leave me? Damn her, with her calmness, her so-French assumptions.
“I knew he wouldn’t. It was all right. I had part of him, for part of the time, and that part was very good. I didn’t have the right to ask for more.”
“But you must have wanted more?” Of course you did. You’re only human, admit it, go on.
“Eat something, Gaby. We don’t have to rush this. We do have time.” She paused. “To answer your question, he didn’t want more.”
I would not tell her that I had seen him in the streets of Paris. I would never let her know. It would be my secret. Let her eat her heart out; I had seen him, and she had not.
“I know, I knew you would inevitably feel angry with me; that’s why I told you straightaway. I suppose, there wasn’t a gentle way of doing it, really, you know. I could have said we were old friends, colleagues, but I think you would have known anyway.”
“Yes, actually, I did know, as soon as you wrote me that stuff about having been fond of him. It could only have meant one thing.”
“It isn’t a crime to love somebody,” Françoise said. The tone of her voice made me look at her, and again there was that clear glance, cool mauve-blue, not giving an inch. She pushed back a black lock of her hair. My match, in more ways than one. A woman who existed simply as herself, who gave herself the right. I thought of that trip to Paris when he bought me the painting of the Chinese horse. Was that what he was doing—seeing her? Everything began shifting and sliding again. There was no memory that could be left intact—not those trips away from us, not those homecomings with presents and bottles of wine, not those seaside holidays on cold Norfolk beaches, not those wedding anniversaries, those parties, those lifted glasses of champagne.
“Did you see him after my mother died?”
“Yes. He was inconsolable. It was such a horrible shock for him.”
“But you consoled him, all the same.”
“Don’t, Gaby, don’t hurt us both that way.”
“I’m sorry, but she was my mother!” I pushed my chair back from the table like an angry child refusing to eat what has been put in front of her. “She was my mother, and she was k
illed, in a car crash. Somebody killed her, drove into the back of her, and then he came here to you, and you tried to cheer him up? It’s horrible.”
I did begin to cry then, the way I had cried in the flat during those first days—noisy, messy, with snot and hiccups. She handed me a paper towel. I took a swig of my wine. Any pretense there had been of us having a politely civilized lunch together had ended.
“I know that she was your mother. And that he was your father. And I was an outsider. But, Gaby, forgive me, you are not a child. Reality is better than pretense, really, believe me. Here, have a real handkerchief. You are simply blowing holes in that paper. You are so like him.”
I looked at her. I knew then that she really had known him, his rages, his sulks, all the parts of him that my mother tried to smooth away and ignore. She had seen him trumpet into paper tissues and sob.
She pushed the salad toward me, and I helped myself, and took more bread. Something settled between us. I looked at her, and she looked at me sideways, and then we both began to laugh, I sniffling and blowing and wet-cheeked still.
Perhaps the picnic lunch was to show me she was not the maternal type, was in fact the opposite of my mother, who had made huge soups and stews and fed everyone in sight, whose Bible in the sixties had been a stained cookbook by Elizabeth David, who believed sincerely in the redemptive virtues of French country cooking. Perhaps Françoise was telling me, there was no competition, never had been. She was not a cook but a career woman, she had had no wish for marriage, children, all that—was that the message? We spat cherry stones into our palms and looked at each other.
Paris Still Life: A Novel Page 7