French Lessons

by Ellen Sussman

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Josie said.

  “You’ve been very distracted. Is something going on?”

  Josie mumbled her goodbye and hung up.

  She walked back into her bedroom. She was thankful for the darkness again. The room smelled rank. For a moment she remembered Simon’s smell and she felt an ache in her chest. She covered her face with her hand and breathed in her own sour smell instead.

  She walked to her dresser and picked up an envelope. She saw the drawing of the Eiffel Tower. At the top of the tower she saw two tiny figures. One had long hair; the other was very tall, with two green dots for eyes. She touched his mouth with her finger.

  She opened the envelope. In two and a half weeks she would go to Paris. She didn’t know what would happen after that. But for now, she had Paris to get her through her days.

  Josie and Nico finally find a spot from which to watch the film shoot. Nico has led her to the top deck of a floating restaurant on the edge of the quai. It’s a long boat, with beautiful teak floors and deck chairs and white umbrellas. There’s a bar at the far end of the boat, crowded with people, all with drinks in hand. Josie and Nico squeeze past the crowd and lean against the railing with an unobstructed view of the bridge.

  Next to them, a waiter has opened a bottle of champagne as if this were a premiere or a national event of great importance. He pours champagne, and the group-young office workers, perhaps, all escaping work to watch the filming-clink glasses.

  “I’m not convinced that this is art that will last for a hundred years,” Nico says.

  A bed sits in the middle of the Pont des Arts. It’s just a bed-a frame and mattress, thrown onto the wooden deck of the pedestrian bridge. A naked woman sprawls across the bed, on a rose-colored sheet. She’s young and beautiful, and the enormous crowd on both sides of the river seems caught in a kind of reverential silence.

  “Stop being a grump,” Josie whispers. They are pressed together against the rail of the boat. “Isn’t that Pascale Duclaux?” She points to a woman with a wild mess of red hair, perched in a chair at the edge of the set. “She’s a very serious director. This may very well be great art.”

  “A bed on a bridge? A naked nymph?”

  “And a man,” Josie says. “Check out the old man.”

  A gray-haired man, also naked, circles the bed, his eye on the lovely girl. Dana Hurley, the American actress, stands at the edge of the bridge, her back against the rail, watching them. Unlike the other two, she’s fully dressed. The man doesn’t seem to notice her.

  Then the man stops for a moment, his penis wagging between his legs, and he looks up, as if searching for something. He seems to catch Josie’s eye and he holds it, a half smile on his face.

  He’s no older than Simon, Josie thinks. So why does it bother me so much that he’s stalking this girl?

  She looks away, breaking his stare. When she looks back, he resumes his awful walk, around the bed, as if roping the girl in.

  The skies rumble and, in an instant, rain pours down. This part of the boat isn’t covered-everyone turns and pushes back, under the white umbrellas or down below, under the deck. Josie stands there, watching the bridge, the bed, the girl, the man.

  “Come on,” Nico says. “This is crazy.”

  “Go ahead,” she tells him. “I want to watch.”

  “There’s nothing to watch. They’re going to wait for the rain to stop.”

  But the director signals for the cameras to keep rolling.

  Josie keeps her eye on Dana Hurley. Dana doesn’t run. She’s already soaked, her hair matted to her head. She walks toward the bed as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. She won’t lose her man to a young girl. She won’t lose anyone to cancer or plane crashes. If something terrible happens the director will call “Cut!” and Dana will saunter back to her tent, where a fawning assistant will bring her a towel and a glass of champagne.

  Josie realizes that Nico is right: This is not great art-this has nothing in it that will last longer than a day. The only thing that lasts is love, even when it’s gone.

  “Please,” Nico says. “Come inside.”

  She turns to him. He is the nicest man she has ever met. For a moment she feels unburdened by grief. Even the sound of his voice offers something like hope. Yet she can’t go to Provence with him. They are writing an ending to their own movie, a fairy-tale ending, and she no longer believes in fairy tales.

  “I need to go back to my hotel,” she tells him.

  “Now?”

  “I’ll pack my bags,” she lies. It is so much easier than saying goodbye. “I’ll meet you at the train station at six.”

  His face lights up. Thunder crashes and, in an instant, lightning blasts through the gray skies and all of Paris shines in its glow.

  Riley and Philippe

  ***

  ***

  She decides the minute she wakes up-with Cole pressed against her back, Gabi’s tiny feet in her face, and Vic gone at some ungodly hour of the morning-that she will meet her French tutor somewhere else, anywhere else other than in this apartment. She usually has her lesson at her kitchen table. Today she needs to get out. She slides Gabi’s feet-powdery-smelling baby feet-away from her and glances out the window. Rain. She hates Paris. It’s the secret shame that she carries inside her. What the hell is wrong with her? Everyone loves this fucking city.

  Riley has lived in Paris for a year, long enough-or so everyone says-to learn French, the métro system, and how to dress. She’s a dismal failure. She should also have friends, cook soufflés, and have the energy to have sex with her husband in the middle of the night. Except there are always children in her bed in the middle of the night, and she has no energy, day or night. But she’s what her mother always called “a tough cookie,” and so she tells no one that she’s miserable. Besides, who would believe her? She’s living in Paris.

  Here’s what she has accomplished in a year in Paris:

  1. She had a baby-no mean feat, since she never understood a word that the doctors and nurses at the clinic barked at her all day and night.

  2. She has gained thirty-five pounds and lost twenty-five pounds and still eats a pain au chocolat every day, even though she can no longer blame it on the cravings of pregnancy.

  3. She has learned where to buy paella at the street market near her home and serves it out of a bowl to the astonishment of Vic’s co-workers.

  4. She has lost contact with most of her old best friends from New York because she can no longer send them emails extolling the virtues of expat life.

  5. She has convinced her mother-every day-not to visit. Yet.

  6. She has watched two-and-a-half-year-old Cole learn French, make friends in the playground, lead her home when they are lost, and say the words, “It’s okay, Mama,” so many times that she worries that one day she’ll murder someone and he’ll pat her hand and say, “It’s okay, Mama.”

  7. She has lost love. She had it when they moved here, and sometime during the first few weeks, while she and Vic were unpacking the dishes and books and Cole’s toys, she misplaced it and hasn’t been able to find it since.

  Riley tries to maneuver her way out of bed without disturbing the kids, but they cling to her like vines. Take the tree trunk away and those vines sink to the forest floor. In a quick moment, Cole’s asking questions: “Where’s Daddy?” “What we do today?” “Why rain, why rain?” and Gabi’s crying, a whimpering, pitiful cry that probably means she’s got another ear infection.

  Riley scoops Gabi into her arms and plops down in the armchair, opens her pajama top, and attaches the baby to her breast. Breathe, she tells herself. Breast-feeding is the one thing she loves. She loves it so much that she does it far too much-she knows what the baby books say about getting your child on a schedule-but she just doesn’t care. She wants only this: to sit in her lemon-yellow overstuffed chair, as ugly as all the rest of the mismatched items in this furnished apartment
, and feel Gabi’s mouth on her breast, feel the comforting release of milk, and pause.

  Because in a minute she’ll be moving again.

  She’ll call Philippe and tell him to meet her at a café.

  She’ll call Fadwa or Fawad or Fadul downstairs and ask her to babysit. It’s a school day. The girl won’t be home. She’ll ask the girl’s mother, but the woman doesn’t speak English. She’ll gesture: Baby. Sit. Like charades, she’ll show the baby and then sit in a chair. That’s ridiculous. The word in Arabic probably doesn’t have anything to do with sitting.

  Breathe, she tells herself.

  “Why rain, why rain, why rain, why rain?” It’s become a chant as unnerving as a police siren, and Cole runs around the house like he’s on fire.

  Riley looks at the clock. Seven-fifteen A.M. Where the hell is Vic this early?

  They fought last night, in the only time they spent together before crawling, numb and exhausted, into bed. “You think I like this life? You think I want to work all hours of the day and night?”

  “Yes,” Riley said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Vic snapped. “I have to pull together a team from four different countries and most of them hate each other. I can barely understand half of them myself. You think I wouldn’t rather build sand castles in the park in Place des Vosges?”

  He was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, his bare belly gone soft and pale. He stabbed the air with his toothbrush like a fierce bathroom warrior. Riley looked at him and thought: Everything you say is the opposite. You love being the big shot who makes an international team work. You hate the sand.

  “Get a grip, Riley,” he said, spitting toothpaste into the sink.

  And when did he start wearing pajama bottoms? Riley had a momentary wish to walk up to Vic and slide his pants down, wrap her body around her naked husband and whisper, “Come back to me.” But he pushed past her and headed into the kitchen for another brownie, left over from a care package her mother sent a few days before.

  Riley smells the top of Gabrielle’s head. It’s perfect baby smell and she remembers to breathe.

  The phone rings and she jumps and Gabi’s mouth pulls from her breast, taking her nipple with her. She screams and the baby cries. But the phone has stopped ringing. Then Cole walks in, carrying it. He’s smiling. “Nana,” he says.

  He’s never answered the phone before. She’s amazed. Soon he’ll put on a tie and leave for work at seven in the morning like all the other competent people in this household.

  “Mom?” she says into the phone. She does a quick calculation-it’s one in the morning in Florida.

  Her mother is crying-or she’s making a gulping sound of trying not to cry.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She’s not sentimental enough to be crying because her grandson answered the phone for the first time.

  “Mom?”

  “I don’t want to bother you with this-”

  “With what?”

  “I didn’t even want to tell you that I was having tests-”

  And Riley knows everything she needs to know. Her father died of cancer years before, and somehow she waits for everyone she knows to get it and die. On TV, people survive; in her life, they die. She is crying, silently, a steady stream of wet stuff pouring down her face.

  “Mama?” Cole asks.

  “Mom?” Riley asks.

  “Mama?”

  “Shh, honey. I’m okay,” Riley whispers. Or maybe that was her mother whispering to her. She’s squeezing the baby too tightly.

  “What tests?” she finally asks.

  “Ovarian cancer.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “You’re not coming home.”

  “Mom.”

  “Mama?” Cole is tapping her shoulder. She looks down. Gabi is hanging from one foot off her lap, ready to fall. How is it that Riley got a hold of this foot? And why is the baby laughing like this is some kind of game?

  “Sorry, sweetie,” Riley says, pulling Gabi back to safety. But there is no safety. Gabi throws up in Riley’s lap.

  “Mom, I’ll call you back.” And she hangs up.

  She’s holding Gabi in the air. Vomit puddles in her pajama bottoms. And Cole pats her shoulder. “It’s okay, Mama.”

  Soon she will clean the mess and call her mother back.

  Soon Cole will find a French cartoon on TV and watch happily as if he understands every single word of this damn language.

  Soon she’ll call Vic and ask him why he had to call a breakfast meeting when he had a dinner meeting last night and will have another dinner meeting tonight.

  Soon she’ll call every pediatrician listed in the guide her realtor gave her and ask every snooty receptionist, “Parlez-vous anglais?” until she finds someone who does, and she’ll make an appointment to check Gabi’s ears.

  Soon it will stop raining.

  Soon she’ll see Philippe.

  Riley slides into a chair inside the café-the rain has stopped for a moment, but she knows Paris well enough to know that the wet stuff will rain on her parade.

  She’s amazed she has managed so much already today. She called her mother back but Mom said she was going to sleep-it was 1:30 in the morning in Florida and she needed her beauty rest. Riley convinced the woman downstairs to watch the kids. She found clean clothes. They almost fit her-another ten pounds and she’ll be back to her fighting weight. But she’s not giving up the pain au chocolat and there is the problem of her enormous milk-laden breasts. Tant pis. She’s learned that expression-too fucking bad. So the shirt pulls tight across her chest and the jeans hug her hips. Tant pis, Victor.

  She’s early. She opens her notebook to last week’s lesson. The words swim in front of her eyes. She used to be a smart person. She used to be a person who had long conversations with intelligent people about politics and the arts and why her neighbor in apartment 3B sang in the middle of the night.

  Now she’s either silent or she talks to infants. Either way, there’s been a diminishing of intelligence, she’s noticed. Hard to discuss global warming when she’s got potty mouth.

  And Philippe won’t speak English. She’s sure he can-he’s got that European je ne sais quoi that usually means “Oh, I speak six languages. And a little Japanese.”

  He thinks that if she has to speak in French, then she will. Instead, she sits there as if she’s a timid soul, one of those mousy girls in high school who never raised her hand. “I’m the teacher’s pet! she wants to scream. I’ve got so much to say that you can’t shut me up!” But she has nothing to say, because she doesn’t have any of the words with which to say it.

  Her wondrous career, which she gave up three weeks before Cole was born-though she can’t remember why anymore-had her writing crisis communications for major corporations. Stock tumbling? I’ll spin that! CEO caught in the men’s room with the mail boy? Give me a second and I’ll explain how this is good for the company! But now she can’t even turn her own life into a good story-because she doesn’t have the words for it. Je suis lost.

  The waiter comes over and asks her something that she knows she can answer. “Café, s’il vous plaît.” Then he says something else and she nods. He’s probably going to bring her a plate of pigs’ feet with her coffee and she won’t be able to complain. Because she doesn’t have the words!

  Six months ago, Cole went through a tough phase. Her American mom friends told her: “It’s the terrible twos, don’t worry, it will pass.” He raged-throwing things, often including himself, onto the floor and most often in the most public places. She and Vic found a phrase that helped: “Use your words.” And miraculously, as Cole learned his first few words, the tantrums stopped. He could say “Pop Tart” or “Rug Rat” or “Pig in Wig” or “bad Mama” and they would nod and get him what he needed. (“Bad Mama” meant that Daddy should put him to bed.) When Riley is standing in the middle of Les En
fants Rouges farmers’ market and the cheese lady asks her something in rapid-fire French, Riley considers throwing herself on the ground and kicking her feet. Use your words! But there aren’t any.

  The waiter returns with coffee and no pigs’ feet. Riley burns her tongue on the coffee. Doesn’t matter, she thinks. Don’t need this tongue. Everything about her feels raw. She has stopped crying and promised her mother she won’t be a drama queen. It’s only cancer, for Christ’s sake. Everyone has cancer these days. Her mother is redefining “tough cookie” and Riley is redefining ball of mush. “On with your day!” her mother ordered. This is her day then. On with it!

  She looks around the café. The place is crowded though it’s mid-morning. Is Vic the only one who goes to work in this city? Everyone else seems to sit in cafés all day, drinking endless espresso until they start drinking wine. They’re immaculately dressed, as if eventually they’ll either go to the office or a movie premiere. One woman is wearing a leopard suit, skintight, with four-inch stilettos. Probably on her way to pick up her babies and go to the park, Riley thinks.

  The door opens and Philippe breezes in.

  He’s tall and gangly and has wasted-rock-star good looks. Too many drugs, too many hard nights. It becomes him. His hair always falls in his eyes and Riley spends much of the French lessons imagining something so simple: She reaches out and tucks that lovely hair behind his ear. Today it’s a little greasy, though. Maybe she’ll pay better attention to the lesson.

  “Je suis désolé,” he says breathlessly. She smells cigarettes and coffee and something else-sex? His clothes are rumpled. Did he rush here from his girlfriend’s bed?

  She smiles at him. She could say something like “No big deal,” or “What is that delicious smell wafting from you?” but she doesn’t have the words.

  When he had answered his cell phone earlier she had started to speak in English. “En français,” he admonished her. And so she gave him the name and address of the café and a time. That’s all. She felt a little bit like a spy giving out only the crucial information. No chitchat for her. She’s got international intrigue on her mind!