Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  The French have an expression for a surly face: “aimable comme une porte de prison,” as friendly as a prison door. Apparently, it was the face I usually wore, but for some reason, I didn’t have it on today, and people noticed.

  I crossed the river at the Pont Neuf. There was a furniture store on the other side that always made me happy, partly because each of its picture windows exhibited a single chair, angled just so and lit like a Hurrell model, and partly because of its name, Etat de Siège, which means state of siege, but “siège” in French also means seat, armchair. It wasn’t a translatable pun, though I’d toyed with “seat of power.”

  There were lots of people milling about when I got to the market. I stood for a moment, watching the passersby. I’ve always loved French market streets. You can eavesdrop on conversations about recipes, see what fruits and vegetables are in season, and learn about the things people eat. At the poissonnerie, I’d learned that the orange sac attached to a scallop, le corail, is considered a delicacy. The secret to a velvety spinach velouté is to purée one whole ripe pear into it, a bourgeoise in a Burberry and an Hermès scarf told her friend at the vegetable stand.

  I stopped in front of the traiteur, gazing at eggs in clear jelly like resin paperweights, various salads, quiches with golden brown pâte brisée crusts, and glazed tarts paved with mosaics of sliced fruit. A woman behind the counter moved a tourte provençale aside to give the place d’honneur to a whole poached salmon, covered in translucent cucumber scales. A black olive eye glistened at the head.

  Across the street, a tourist shop sold polyester print scarves of the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower key chains, and reproduction street signs. There were also baskets filled with seashells, iridescent with mother-of-pearl or shiny with a genital pink. I picked up a spiky conch and held it to my ear. A brown stream of cold liquid raced down my forearm to the elbow. I gave a yelp and thrust the shell back. I mopped my arm with a tissue, but it had a shockingly foul and persistent odor, the smell of rotting seaweed, or rotting sea creature. In my bag, I found an old Air France towelette and scrubbed my arm, but I could still smell the stink beneath the artificial lemon scent.

  I dumped the towelette in the trash and walked into a patisserie. An idea of dinner took the shape of a couple of chocolate éclairs, but then I saw the almond croissants, fourré à la frangipane et au chocolat. They were limp with filling, as if exhausted by their own excess, and decorated with piped chocolate and a dusting of powdered sugar. I stared, rapt, until the person behind me coughed.

  “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur,” I said, stepping aside to let a beige trench coat go by.

  “Ah, Monsieur Laveau! J’ai votre tarte aux pommes ici,” said the woman behind the counter. I looked up: it was the same Monsieur Laveau. I ducked my head, debating whether to say hello or bolt. He walked past me, dangling a medium-size cake box by its ribbon, and I blurted out his name.

  “Monsieur Laveau?” I asked.

  “Oui?” He looked at me blankly. I felt a flush of anger. Was I invisible? Was there no way to make an impression on this man?

  “Je ne sais pas si vous vous souvenez de moi, mais je vous ai fait une traduction il y quelque temps?” As I reminded him of who I was, I started out okay, but then I made my statement a question, a nervous, adolescent tic. He studied me for a moment, then exclaimed:

  “Ah, mais c’est vous! Mademoiselle, on vous cherchait! Vous n’avez pas laissé vos coordonnées, ni votre nom sur le dossier! Nous étions convaincus qu’on ne vous trouvera jamais!” It’s you! We were looking for you, but you didn’t leave your name or phone number. We thought we’d never find you.

  I didn’t know who the “we” was, and his answer threw me. I knew I’d included my name and number on the manuscript, and I rushed to say so. “Mais, monsieur, je suis certaine que j’ai—”

  “Venez, j’ai un autre chapitre pour vous, j’aurais besoin de la traduction la semaine prochaine, assez rapidement si possible,” he interrupted. “Trois cents euros par chapitre, ça vous va?” he asked, taking my elbow and wheeling me around, presumably to the bookstore. Now I was even more convinced he’d mixed me up with someone else—I distinctly remembered him originally quoting two hundred euros per chapter, but I wasn’t going to argue with more money.

  “Vous avez bien deux minutes?” he asked, looking at his watch.

  “Oui, mais, peut-être vous faites confusion avec quelqu’un d’autre?” Maybe you’re confusing me with someone else?

  “Mais non, mais non, mais non,” he muttered, pulling me across the boulevard Saint-Germain. His nose twitched, and he let go of my elbow. I wondered if my arm still smelled of decaying sea creature. We walked up the street and into his store, and yet again, I stood alone among the piles of books as Monsieur Laveau leaped to answer the phone in his office, slamming the door behind him. I picked up a collection of short stories and sat down on a rickety chair in the corner. The cowbell pealed, and a tall man came in and said, “Bonjour.”

  “Bonjour,” I answered politely, not looking up from the book.

  “Vous attendez Bernard?” he asked, gesturing at the closed door.

  “Oui,” I said, glancing at him. He looked familiar, with a rugged, handsome face: olive skin under a mop of brown hair, beaky nose, square jaw, and hooded, brown eyes. Around forty, he wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a velvet jacket, an old leather portfolio tucked under his arm.

  “Il nous fait toujours attendre, ce sacré Bernard,” he said with a rueful, dimpled smile. He always makes us wait. I gave a quick smile and looked away, feeling shy. “Qu’est ce que vous lisez?” he asked, tucking sunglasses into his pocket. I held up the book and read the spine.

  “Stendhal, Chroniques italiennes,” I said.

  “‘C’est la cristallisation, comme dit Stendhal,’” he said, sounding like he was quoting someone. I squinted at him, puzzled.

  “Une chanson de Gainsbourg cite la fameuse théorie de Stendhal sur la cristallisation de l’amour,” he said, explaining that a Gainsbourg song referenced some theory Stendhal had. I shook my head: I didn’t know it, either the theory or the song. He studied me for a moment.

  “Ah, vous n’êtes pas française,” he observed. “Italienne?” I shook my head. “Espagnole?” I shook my head again. “Je sais,” he said, tapping the side of his nose. “Grecque.” I shook my head again. “Dites-moi, alors,” he asked, giving up.

  “Américaine.”

  “Really? You don’t sound American. You don’t look American, either,” he said, switching into accented but fluent English. “How do you know Bernard?”

  “I’m doing some work for him. Translation.”

  “Ah.” His speculative look said, So, it’s you. I wondered if he was Monsieur Laveau’s famous secretive writer.

  “What’s cristallisation?” I asked.

  “It’s a theory Stendhal came up with to describe the process of falling in love. There’s a delightful drawing he made, comparing it to a journey from Bologna to Rome.”

  His phone beeped, and as he studied the screen, I realized where I’d seen his face: he was an actor. I’d seen him in a TV movie about police corruption, where he’d played an Algerian cop with a heroin problem. He caught me staring and held the look. A warm liquid pooled in my stomach.

  “Olivier! Navré de vous avoir fait attendre,” Monsieur Laveau apologized, emerging from his den.

  “Mais pas du tout, mon ami. Je parlais avec cette charmante demoiselle—” Olivier said, still looking at me and leaving a silence open for my name. Monsieur Laveau’s head swiveled around in alarm. He placed his hands on his hips, the picture of arms-akimbo vexation.

  “Vous êtes toujours là?” You’re still here? My jaw dropped open. It was pathological, the way he always forgot about me. Olivier folded his arms and grinned, finding this hugely entertaining. Monsieur Laveau muttered something unintelligible, took an envelope from his office, and thrust it at me.

  “Tenez, mademoiselle. A bientôt,” he said. He took my arm and h
ustled me outside. On the sidewalk, he apologized for being brusque and explained that he had a meeting with an important client. Then he reminded me that the translation was confidential. I nodded, bewildered.

  “Bien. Vous n’avez rien dit?” You didn’t say anything? he asked, cocking his head toward the store.

  “Non,” I said, wondering if telling Olivier I was translating counted.

  “Bien. Bien, bien.” He rubbed his hands together. “A mercredi prochain,” he added, reminding me to come back next Wednesday, and went back in. I walked away, turning over pieces of information like Scrabble tiles, wondering if I could arrange them to make sense. Was Olivier the writer? He couldn’t be: Monsieur Laveau had described a famous intellectual, not an actor. Though the French did consider some actors intellectuals. Maybe Olivier knew the writer. Or maybe Olivier was his important client? Nothing fit together in any illuminating way.

  On the other hand, three hundred euros a week under the table wasn’t a bad income for someone who wasn’t paying rent. I stopped in front of a boutique window and stared at my shadowy outline in the glass as I twisted my neck to unkink it.

  “Puis-je vous aider?” asked the store clerk, a young woman in a miniskirt and high heels standing in the doorway. Startled, I realized I’d been standing in front of a window display of silk and lace lingerie, all the time wondering what the hollow at the base of Olivier’s neck tasted like.

  10

  Je t’aimais inconstant, qu’aurais-je fait, fidèle?*

  —JEAN RACINE, Andromaque

  A few pages into chapitre deux, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t needed to buy a dictionary of slang for this project. I needed a medical textbook. For every word I knew (“frenulum,” “vagin”), there were others I hadn’t heard before, accompanied by descriptions of such scientific rigor that I began to wonder if the author wasn’t either a doctor or a humorless obsessive-compulsive.

  “Why settle for one?” Bunny asked when I told him on the phone. “Let’s assume he’s a humorless, obsessive-compulsive oncologist, specializing in colorectal cancer. And let’s call him Heinz. I once had a terrible doctor in Munich named Heinz. Never get a colonoscopy. I’m sure dying is better.”

  “But he’s French,” I protested. “What are you up to?”

  “Waiting for pizza from Speed Rabbit. They deliver it on farty little mopeds,” he said. “You gonna read me something, or do I have to watch the porn channel to get a thrill tonight?”

  I gave a long-suffering sigh.

  “And don’t take that long-suffering tone with me, young lady. Canal Hot is showing Paula and the Randy Martians in half an hour,” he added.

  “Okay, okay.” I skimmed the next page. “Oh,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It turns into a childhood memory. Apparently his father was a gynecologist, and he used to sneak into his office and pore over his medical textbooks, copy out the racy words. It’s kind of sweet,” I admitted. Bunny’s intercom honked.

  “That’s the door,” he said. “Call me later.”

  I found a website with a medical dictionary, looked up the words, and typed.

  I copied the terms into a notebook, as if having them in my own hand was some kind of erotic communion. Ah, the pleasure of words! They were magic, conjurations and conjugations from the mysterious world of adults. Of course, the pictures helped. There was one book in particular, from the nineteenth century, with detailed engravings and faded colors. Multichambered, more intricate than a nautilus, a woman’s anatomy was so complex. It was hard to imagine how everything fit inside…

  A couple of pages on the vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries (like flowers on stalks of fallopian tubes—ugh) followed. I skipped ahead.

  My first great love was Madame Ronet. She looked like the angel in my catechism book. My schoolmate Raymond’s mother, she wore her thin platinum blond hair in a small chignon and painted her lips a bright red. Her curvaceous body and tiny waist, wrapped in tight-fitting suits, made me think of a fist squeezing a tube of toothpaste. When she ruffled my hair, I suffered alarming aches. The fact that she was one of my father’s patients gave us a special bond, I felt. Once I stayed home from school feigning illness because I knew she had an appointment. After she left, I crept into the downstairs examination room and pressed the used cotton sheet to my face before Martine, my father’s nurse, could clean up. It smelled of tuberose and sweat.

  “You must watch out for my little Raymond,” Madame Ronet told me. “He’s not as clever as you.”

  It was true: Raymond was a boring little runt, whose principal interests were burning bugs with his magnifying glass and knowing facts about dinosaurs. But I did keep an eye out for him, even befriending him, because she’d asked me to. For my trouble, I was invited to the Ronets’ country house for a weekend.

  It was a damp, miserable cottage in Normandy, set on a grim stretch of local highway. Monsieur Ronet, a tense, burly fellow with a handlebar mustache, took us out for a long walk—“an airing,” he said—then put us to work repairing a stone wall. At dinner, Madame Ronet served pumpkin soup and a gristly beef stew. We listened to a giant radio, shaped like a church window, while Madame mended socks with a darning egg. Later, she tucked us in bed.

  The distinct crawl of insect feet across my forehead woke me up at night. Without thinking, I smacked my hand down, killing it with an audible crunch. I panicked when I felt a sticky pulp on my hand, and I ran down the hallway, colliding with Madame. She was dressed for bed, in a clingy nightgown under her open dressing gown, her hair in curlers under a threadbare red scarf.

  “How horrible!” she exclaimed, blanching at the squashed insect carapace stuck to my forehead. She led me into the bathroom and cleaned my face. Afterward, while she heated a saucepan of milk and vanilla, I sat at the kitchen table, dangling my feet, mute with joy at being alone with her at last.

  “There,” she said, placing a cup in front of me. I blew on the surface, a fine pucker of milk skin already beginning to form. “My poor little man,” she said, stroking my face, “poor little Jean-Marc.” I gave a theatrical sob, biting my lip to keep from laughing. It had the desired effect. She pulled me onto her lap and held me close to her chest. My nose was squashed flat against her nightgown, pressed right into the hollow between her breasts. “There, there. You’ll be able to sleep now.”

  Not likely. I couldn’t breathe.

  It was the happiest memory of my childhood.

  I was eleven.

  The next few pages covered the author’s adolescence, including a high school sweetheart and a brief affair with one of his father’s nurses. The language was straightforward, factual. Then the narrative returned to its main subject.

  Is there anything more compelling than the pursuit of a woman? All I could think of was Eve. The facts and routine of daily life were just a stopgap, a bookmark, a pause between notes, background noise. I lived through my senses. Information did not get processed through my brain; instead, I felt it on my skin, tasted it with my tongue, and caressed it with my fingertips. After an escalating campaign of phone calls, flowers, and lunches, Eve and I began an affair.

  We met at noon, in the late afternoon, sometimes on weekends, but always at the same sparsely furnished apartment near the place de Clichy. We made love, ate, made love again. We didn’t discuss jobs or friends or obligations, how we filled up the day until we saw each other. We kept ourselves free from the mundane details that dull most affairs. Instead, we talked about our childhoods, favorite books, memories. The time I spent with her was enchanted, and she’d agreed to a weekend in Venice with me later that month.

  The first weekend in October hosted the most important horse race in France, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Daphne and I went with my cousin Yves, a sports journalist. He’d finagled us an invitation to a cocktail party at the loge of a wealthy Brit. Neither Daphne nor I knew anything about racing, so we drank champagne and soaked up information from the horse world cognoscenti.


  Extravagant hats were traditional, so Daphne wore a wide-brimmed straw confection covered in plumage. It resembled nothing so much as an unidentified flying object after an infelicitous encounter with a chicken coop. She was more interested in examining other hats through her mother-of-pearl opera glasses than the horses.

  Between races, we visited the paddock. The horses were magnificent, glossy, high-strung creatures. They knew they were about to run, and they twitched and pranced with anticipation. I angled my face beneath her hat and nuzzled Daphne’s neck. Her skin was cloying and sweet with tea roses. A chestnut stallion picked his way around the ring, placing each hoof as if he were tracing a dance step. A tremor of excitement rippled through the spectators. I placed a hand on Daphne’s hip and scanned the crowd, idly wondering if a familiar face would emerge.

  It was Daphne who spotted her. “That woman is very elegant,” she said, nudging me. I followed her gaze.

  Eve wore dark glasses and an ivory suit, a black fox wrap draped over her shoulder. A small, veiled hat sat on her head at an angle. She stood next to a gray-haired man, her arm linked through his. My cousin mistook the object of my scrutiny.

  “Not as old as he looks in the papers,” Yves commented, tilting his head toward Eve’s companion. It was Eric Beaufort de Blois, an industrialist who’d made a fortune in petrochemicals. “He got into horses about five years ago. Partnered with a Saudi prince and an Indian pharmaceuticals magnate. That’s their horse in the next race.”

  “Who’s the woman?” I muttered, trying to catch Eve’s eye.

  “Girlfriend, mistress, whore.” He shrugged. “He’s always photographed with different women.”

  So this was why she never mentioned a job, why she never went elsewhere, why there were never any questions about Daphne.

  “Why are you staring at her?” Daphne hissed. At that moment, Eve saw me, and widened her eyes at the sight of Daphne’s hat. She slid her sunglasses back on her face, a small smile playing on her lips. Beaufort caressed her cheek.