French Girl with Mother

by Norman Ollestad

  Is he following them, or had he pulled over to fix something on his bike, to make a call, any number of logical explanations?

  Then Sophie entered the kitchen, wearing her leotard.

  “Thank you for clearing out my studio,” she said, filling up her water bottle at the sink.

  “Pas grave,” I said, and I went for a swim.

  twenty-six

  My legs and arms felt lethargic when I climbed out of the river. And trying to gear up for work, I was unable to focus, exhausted, as if I’d been through an extended trek across a glacier. Had only one night and a morning with her family drained me to the point that I needed to take a nap just to get through the upcoming lunch?

  Dragging my body up the stairs, I got into bed.

  When Anaïs entered the room, I woke up. It was already early afternoon—I’d slept for two hours. She was rosy cheeked and shiny with perspiration. She kissed me and her mouth found my ear.

  “Did she try to flirt with you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Not really. I passed her in the kitchen.”

  She studied me, finally nodding with satisfaction, and then stripped off her skirt, changing into linen shorts.

  “Lunchtime,” she said, and she walked out the door.

  I lay there, unable to move for a moment.

  When I got to the table, they were all seated in front of plates of turbot, a moist, flat fish that Sophie must have prepared while I’d been sleeping. I thought the men always prepared the meals? Anaïs sat on one side of Jean Luc and made no eye contact with me. Sophie, on the other side of Jean Luc, had the severe look of a ruffled aristocrat.

  “Sorry to make you wait,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Sophie said. “It’s already done.”

  I was surprised it was such a big deal to be two minutes late, but it was part of the experience, learning this new culture, and I took a seat next to Anaïs.

  Sophie motioned toward the wine in the center of the table. “Would you be kind enough to pour?” she said.

  “Sure.” I leaned over and grabbed the bottle and filled hers first, to the brim, and then Anaïs’s and then Jean Luc’s—who I noticed was sitting back, watchful.

  Placing the wine down, I glimpsed Sophie in my periphery. Her mouth was parted, face long, looking at me with trepidation. I glanced around to see if I had spilled or knocked something over. Anaïs was suppressing a smile.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “We must look like thirsty dogs,” Sophie said. “It’s obvious from the drawings that you see us as animals.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “I’m confused.”

  “If you fill the glass to the top like this,” she said, lifting hers so that some wine splashed onto the tablecloth, “then it suggests that we are desperate, that we are worried there won’t be more. It should be your pleasure to serve us three, four times.”

  I glanced at Anaïs. She tilted her head and shrugged.

  I turned back to Sophie. “It’s the total opposite in the states,” I explained. “If you don’t pour a full glass, then it seems like you’re holding back. It’s considered ungenerous.”

  “Let’s eat,” Jean Luc announced, and on cue the women turned their attention to the food.

  Anaïs and I would normally eat fast, with our hands, but now she was cutting small pieces of fish and spearing them with her down-turned fork, then gently nibbling them off. She sat with perfect posture and dabbed the corners of her mouth with the white linen.

  Jean Luc kept glancing between his wife and me, as if examining our rapport.

  “It’s incredible,” Anaïs told her mother.

  “A bit overcooked,” she rebutted.

  “No,” Anaïs countered. “C’est parfait.”

  “What do you think, Nathan?” Sophie said.

  All eyes were on me. It was a loaded question. I was being forced to take a side. Jean Luc’s face was animated, eyes dialed with expectancy, as if this was all for his entertainment.

  “It’s awfully good,” I said.

  “C’est parfait?” Sophie insisted.

  “Nothing’s perfect, nor should it be,” I said.

  She drew her chin down in deference and lifted her glass. “Well done.”

  I lifted my glass, only to notice Anaïs glaring at me. I’d slipped up already—sharing even this trifle moment with Sophie—and I cringed inside anticipating the arduous balancing act that lay ahead.

  “So who won the tennis match?” I asked Anaïs without skipping a beat.

  “Papa of course.” She rested her hand on his shoulder. “He was the star of the Sorbonne. I have no chance.”

  “No, no,” he said. “Anaïs is very fast, with a deadly serve. It’s always a challenge. Do you play?” he asked me.

  “No. Love to watch though.”

  “It’s too civilized for you, perhaps?” he said. “I mean with the lines and the fence around you. It’s not vast like the Alps.”

  “Never thought of it like that, but you’re probably onto something.”

  “Sophie’s the same way.” He glanced at her. “That’s why she dances and is bored by tennis.”

  “Where did you two meet?” I asked.

  “I saw her dancing in The Sun Princess at Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris,” he said.

  I turned to Sophie. “You were a professional ballerina?”

  She combed back her blonde hair and nodded.

  “She is a ballerina.” Jean Luc shot her a debonair look. “Magnifique.”

  Anaïs rolled her eyes, chewed on the side of her tongue, and stared across the room, tuning them out.

  “Maybe, at some point, she’ll give us a little performance,” he continued.

  “Only for you, chéri.”

  “Do you still dance for the ballet?” I asked.

  “No, no. I stopped many years ago. I do some consulting for them and a summer training, but nothing more.”

  “But you must tell him why you stopped,” Anaïs cut in.

  “Well, I became pregnant.”

  “Nineteen years ago.”

  “Anaïs feels guilty,” Sophie said. “But she really shouldn’t.”

  “It’s still difficult for her to give up the light,” Anaïs sniped.

  “It seems that you’re threatened because I’ve kept myself up, and men still look at me.”

  “He’s not looking at you,” Anaïs said, gesturing at me.

  “I’m not talking about him.”

  “You mean Henri?”

  “No. I mean men in general.”

  “Well, Henri followed you around like a dog and you loved it.”

  Sophie glanced at Jean Luc, a certain tautness in her cheeks that I wished I could’ve recorded—raw disdain or perhaps regret, I wasn’t sure. But Jean Luc would not meet her eye. She took in air through her nose, her mouth pressed closed, and her eyes flinched with near hatred, and then it all evaporated and she turned back to Anaïs.

  “We were guests in his home. Should I have ignored him?”

  “You were eating it up.”

  “I did nothing. Besides, if you want the man not to be like a dog, then you should become a lesbian. That’s my advice.”

  “You went out on the boat with him, Maman. You were gone for an hour. He was completely spaced out when you got back. Lost somewhere.”

  Jean Luc slammed his fist down on the table. Everyone snapped to attention. “Arrêt!” he barked. “We are here to relax. I’ve been working nonstop for six months. I need some peace. Tu comprends?”

  “Oui, Papa.”

  “Oui, chéri.”

  His command, swiftly taking control of the situation, recalled the scene in the hallway when Anaïs demanded that I ground her, claim her, and I suddenly inferred how any man she was with would be inherently tied up in her oedipal drama.

  But you’re older and wiser than Henri, I argued. And it’s just part of the package she comes in. Besides
, Anaïs and I are both artists at heart, a much better fit.

  twenty-seven

  After lunch, Anaïs and I took a long walk through the forest. She knew where the woods opened up and led me through its shaded corridors and exposed meadows. We held hands. No words exchanged. Some of the leaves were half yellow now, mingling with a few rusty ones, and the sun was already lower in the sky, casting shadows on the grass cushioning our feet, the shrubbery scraping our shins.

  She ran her fingers through my hair, gathering it up. “I love walking with you like this,” she said. “You don’t put any weight on things. Your lightness is good for me.”

  My face scrunched up.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Well, I can always feel your weight.”

  “Well then . . .” She swung around behind me and jumped on my back. “If I’m going to be the burden anyway, I might as well get something out of it.”

  She made me carry her all the way to the river. We plunked in the tall grass and I was surprised she didn’t want to make love—a simple “not now.”

  Closing my eyes, that burning image of Anaïs and her mother in the upstairs room resurfaced. Still amorphous, all friction and light, two bodies at war, and I would need to see them together again in order to discover what it meant.

  Good luck orchestrating that, I thought, and a quake of frustration went through me, as if I were already lamenting the loss of something important.

  “Tell me about your sister,” Anaïs said, breaking the silence.

  My relationship with Alice was still a sore spot and I’d mentioned her only in passing. My body retreated deeper into the grass. My hesitation drew Anaïs out of her sunken patch and she propped on an elbow, watching me.

  “Alice and I look a lot alike,” I began. “But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. She went to Stanford. Has a law degree. Works in D.C. for the State Department, doing who knows what. She sort of sided with my father when I decided not to pursue a career in law. I left the University of Washington, moved to Venice Beach, and started at CalArts. It wasn’t an explicit falling-out. Just a slow fade. She’s married now and has a young baby so she’s busy.”

  “Do you really see your relationship with Alice like a fact sheet?” Anaïs asked with exasperation.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How did you become so close? Not all siblings are.”

  I glanced at Anaïs, wondering how she knew that Alice and I were once very close. The shape of her eyes reminded me again of the agave leaf, a fluid, enveloping line—one of the ways I would evoke her ineffable potency when I finally did another portrait.

  “Alice was my first muse,” I said.

  A sound of excitement rose up Anaïs’s throat.

  “We were in high school,” I continued. “Even though she was beautiful and sixteen, she was still a bit of a tomboy and hung out with my group of friends. I’d been drawing for years, copying other artists’ styles, and at some point I started doing these rough portraits of her at the fort we hung out at. It was my first truly original work. All my buddies, who only seemed interested in sports and video games, were suddenly into the portraits, and Alice was very encouraging, so it was an exciting breakthrough for me.

  “Anyway, I entered the portraits in an art contest and I won. But some art critic for the local paper wrote that he was disturbed by the prurient gaze between the artist and model, brother and sister. It started some nasty rumors about her, about us. Kids would stare at her in school and make comments.

  “My mother and father never said a word until one day my father decided that Alice wasn’t allowed to hang out with me anymore, giving no explanation other than She needs to make her own friends. Alice suffered a lot that year. Got totally ostracized. And I was no comfort because I was the cause of it all. She sort of went into a shell and didn’t seem to come out until college.

  “Our relationship got a little better at that point. I’d visit her, she’d visit me, but there was always this undercurrent of animosity she had for my art. She never wanted to see it and would sort of minimize my pursuit of it. Then when I bailed out of university it all came to a head.”

  Feeling a warm pressure at the backs of my eyes, I stopped talking. I could feel Anaïs studying me and then she rested down beside me, shoulder to shoulder.

  “So,” Anaïs said, “it is to Alice that you want to prove yourself.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” I said, staring into the overhead limbs. “I wished Grandfather was still alive during that time, someone to talk to. I even tried to conjure up that soothing feeling of being out to sea with him by going fishing. But it turns out it wasn’t the sea that did it, it was him.”

  A few tears rolled down my cheeks. Anaïs turned her head. I let her watch me, allowing her to see the unfiltered emotions that I’d never shared with anyone but her and Grandfather, and perhaps, for a short time, with Alice. The side of her face was cradled by the grass, and her skin radiated the soft golden light falling down through the limbs, no judgment in her face, her father’s man-killer unrecognizable. She rested her palm on my chest, her fingers faintly kneading.

  “You’ve seen all my ugliness,” she said, motioning toward the château. “It’s okay to show some of yours.”

  twenty-eight

  Dinner was pleasant, without drama. I wondered if each of them had gotten the hostility out of their system. After a lively backgammon round robin, won by Jean Luc, we went to our rooms.

  Anaïs and I were very slow and deliberate, all the hunger contained, seeping out our skin, mouths, fingers. We never separated, unwilling to peel apart, and I fell asleep inside her.

  In the morning, I watched her, black hair curling like flames across her face, lips peeled outward in soft sonorous exhales. I wondered how she ever got into engineering, so meticulous and inanimate, compared to her impassioned personality. Later, when she awoke, it was as though she’d heard my thoughts, and she brought me outside to show me something.

  The driveway split where the horse stables ended. One arm of the driveway curved to the front of the château, right up to the big entrance door, and the other arm went around the back of the house, turning into a dirt track. Anaïs led me around the back and onto the track, stopping beside two circular woodpiles that looked like giant beehives.

  “It’s called a Holz Hausen,” she told me. “It’s a special way to stack wood. I’d read about it in one of Papa’s magazines when I was twelve and it piqued my curiosity.”

  She pointed to the older, less-stable circle of wood, held up with crooked limbs leaning against its sides.

  “That was my first attempt. But the instructions were in German and I didn’t catch some of the technical terms. See how, as the sides get higher, the wood begins to tilt a little more outward?”

  “Especially near the top,” I said.

  “Yes, well, they should tilt slightly inward; that way if pieces fall they fall into the open center. This one”—she pointed at her first, rickety attempt—“would collapse right onto the road without the wood posts holding it up.”

  She moved to the newer, sturdier-looking Holz Hausen and patted it as if it were a prized stallion.

  “This was my second attempt and the one we still use. See how I put in some small perpendicular pieces of wood every meter or so, so that the pile tilts inward?”

  I nodded.

  She walked around to the backside of the older pile—her first attempt—and I followed her. There was an opening where some wood had collapsed, and she stepped over the pieces and into the hollow center of the pile.

  “I would come here when I was upset. It was my secret hideaway where nobody ever thought to look.”

  Her face turned into that twelve-year-old girl—rounder, plumper, eyes full of wonderment—and she sat down in the center. Tilting her head back, she looked up at the sky. “It still kind of works,” she said in a woebegone voice I’d never heard her use.

  twenty-nine

>   Finishing their croissants and coffee, Anaïs went upstairs to put on her tennis clothes, and Sophie went to her room, I assumed, to put on her leotard for her workout. Jean Luc watched his wife climb the steps, studying her as he sipped his coffee.

  “I’d like you to do a portrait of her,” he said.

  He must be joking.

  But he raised his eyebrows, expecting an answer. Was this a test of my devotion to Anaïs?

  “Well,” I said. “Anaïs wouldn’t like that.”

  He folded his lips, dipped his head to one side, eyes searching the kitchen.

  “You do it on the side,” he said. “I’ll pay you well.”

  How well? I was almost out of money and running thin on materials.

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

  His eyes narrowed and he glared at me, the intruder who’d settled in his house.

  “So you refuse?”

  Eyebrows forked down, he dared me to disobey him, and I felt the immense power he held over me. It was his house, his food, his daughter; everything I’d come to rely on for my art was under his control.

  “It’s such a complicated situation . . .” I said, getting up and moving to the sink for a glass of water.

  “Pas grave,” he belittled, like a man that expected to get what he wanted, and I turned to tell him that I needed to think it over.

  Footsteps startled me. Anaïs was trotting down the stairs, racket in hand. She kissed me, told me she already missed me, and then as they started down the entrance stairs, Jean Luc peeked back and gave me a thumbs-up.

  thirty

  I heard the gate bang shut and stood in the center of the kitchen. What exactly was behind the threat of his forked-eyebrow glare? I’ll poison your relationship with Anaïs. Interfere with the work. Kick you out of the house.