“You poor man,” she relented. “Your feelings are evident on your skin.”
No, no, no. I can see your distress? Your sentiments are plainly visible to me? I can tell you are distressed? It’s written on your face? I circled the expression I was having trouble with: “à fleur de peau,” meant visible, obvious, apparent; literally, it meant “at the flower of the skin.” It was used to describe a feeling so vivid you could see it on someone’s face, as if the emotion had blossomed there. I’d always found it poetic, almost exquisitely so.
Perhaps it wasn’t poetic in French. Maybe it was just an ordinary expression, a convention. But even some conventions had connotations. I rubbed my forehead, willing the words to speak to me. Was the expression pretty because it was pretty in French, or was it just pretty to me? Had the figure of speech become so common that its poetry had drained out of it? Or was it only pretty because, when I translated it into English, it seemed novel and pleasing?
Was I translating backward, reverse-engineering? I’d explained the expression “to nip something in the bud” to Clara once. She’d found it a lovely image, but it’s not particularly lovely in English. In fact, finding it lovely seemed particularly French—the tragi-romantic death of the young bloom, as opposed to English, where it’s merely a gardening metaphor. Not every figure of speech had a translation. Maybe I was searching for a kind of verbal refinement whose equivalent didn’t exist in English.
My head hurt. Translating was getting more difficult, though I couldn’t tell if it was because the author’s voice had become more complex or because my translating skills, along with their limitations, were becoming clearer to me. Or maybe I was trying harder because I didn’t dislike the narrator anymore.
Madame de Sousa confessed, “I don’t know where she is. There is no sign of her.”
“Since when?” I asked.
“Going on three weeks. Half of her clothes are gone. I picked up her dry cleaning, a dress and a coat, and put them in the closet, the bedroom armoire, not the one in the hall—she usually keeps coats and hats in that one,” she said. I didn’t interrupt her: I was hungry for any details concerning Eve, even the organization of her clothes.
“That’s when I noticed the closet, but I don’t know when she left,” she said. “Sometimes, it goes on for months like this,” she added. “Madame travels a lot. The accountant pays me—he sends checks.”
Though it seemed desperate, I asked, “Can you give me his name?” Madame de Sousa pursed her lips and shook her head.
“She will contact you when she returns to Paris. If she cares to. But now, you should leave. It’s not right for you to be here,” she said.
“Please,” I begged. “If I knew the name of her accountant, perhaps I could send her a letter there—it might get to her sooner,” I said, scrambling for a reason. I held on to the banister, squeezing it as if my grip could force the information out of her. Madame de Sousa pulled on her gloves and scooped the poodle back into the carrier.
“Monsieur Richebourg, Cabinet Verlet-Stein,” she said, and walked away.
“Merci, madame,” I called after her. Her heels clicked across marble.
Her accountant? He’s going to track her down through her accountant? That was so lame. I scribbled “lame” in the margin.
I went downstairs for a baguette sandwich and sat on the sofa to eat it, yet again bemoaning the lack of French words for “lame,” “rude,” and “confused,” three words I happened to use a lot. There were various phrases you could use to convey the same meaning, but no one-word correlation. Lame was sometimes “ringard,” or tacky, “nul,” worthless, bad, or “bidon,” phony. “Rude” was either “mal-élevé,” raised by wolves, more or less, “un manque de politesse,” which was only the absence of politeness, or “désagréable,” which wasn’t accurate either, but if delivered with the right tone of voice, it could be devastating.
I thought about how French had polite ways of insulting people. Only in France could you actually say “Je vous emmerde, madame.” In English, saying “I suggest you go to Hell, madam,” already far more polite than the French phrase, was the stuff of drawing room comedy. We don’t usually observe form when insulting others, whereas in French, doing so increases the injury. As for “confused,” I tended to substitute “je ne comprends pas,” I don’t understand, but while that usually conveyed what I meant, it wasn’t an accurate translation.
I turned on the midday news. Romain Chesnier, the Minister for National Education and Research, was filmed leaving Lariboisière Hospital days after a minor cardiac incident following a vacation in the country. He was accompanied by his wife, the actress Estelle Bailleux. Wearing dark glasses, she put up one gloved hand, either to hide her face or to wave, I couldn’t tell, as the cameras filmed them pulling away in the back of a chauffeur-driven car.
So that was who Bernard had gone to visit. It was the phrase his sister had used, “a cardiac incident.” I took another bite of my jambon-beurre, the crisp baguette shredding my soft palate. A pigeon waddled along the window ledge.
And there it was. The thought was unbidden, unwelcome, snakelike and scaly, but coiled in my head nonetheless: perhaps those weren’t airport sounds I’d heard on the phone; maybe Olivier had gone to the hospital as well.
Later, when he called and suggested a late dinner after his rehearsal at the theater, I wondered if he’d mention it.
I met him at La Cafétéria, a restaurant with fancy wallpaper and mood lighting. He sat at a table, smoking a cigarette and scribbling on a graph paper carnet.
“What are you writing?” I asked, leaning over to kiss him.
“Notes for the actors—things I must remember.” He poured me a glass of wine. I draped my coat over the back of the chair. There were dark circles under his eyes.
“You look tired,” I said, resting my chin on my hand.
“Quelques jours compliqués,” he said.
“Do you want to tell me about it—the thing you needed to take care of?” I asked. He shrugged. “Is it the play? Or something else?” I asked. He gave me an odd look. “I mean, what with your actress’s husband in the hospital,” I said, watching him.
“That, yes,” he said. He tapped his cigarette in the ashtray, not looking at me. I turned to study the chalkboard menu, but I didn’t see the items written in French elementary school cursive; instead, I saw Olivier in a hospital corridor, his arm around the lovely Estelle as she cried on his shoulder and wiped—no, dabbed—her eyes with an embroidered lace handkerchief. I saw him there; I knew he’d been there, with her. There was nothing wrong with it, except that he hadn’t told me and I knew. I took a long, slow sip of wine.
“I don’t actually know anything about it,” I remarked. He gave me a sharp look. “The play,” I said. “I mean the play.”
“It’s in three acts, with three characters, but the same thing happens in each act. Because each act is told from a different character’s point of view, they are totally different.”
“Like Rashomon?”
“Un peu, oui.”
“And what happens?”
“A husband and wife spend a weekend in the country with an old friend of hers, a man. During the weekend, the husband finds out that his wife and her old friend had an affair, before she was married. Even though it’s been over for a long time, there is still a mysterious connection between the wife and her former lover, and it means something different to all three of them.”
“And what does it mean?” I asked, wondering how close to home the play was.
“I can’t tell you. It will ruin the surprise!” he exclaimed.
“Ah, so there’s a surprise ending,” I said.
He smiled and reached out to stroke my fingers. I looked down at his brown hand against my paler one.
“I will be curious to know what you think. You’ll come to the opening?” he said.
I didn’t answer right away; I was picturing his hand next to Estelle’s.
“Yes.�
�� I smiled, not quite meeting his eyes. A plate of sautéed mushrooms appeared in front of me, shrunken ears in a fragrant butter and herb sauce.
After dinner, we went back to my place. I loaded a tray with two pale pink cups and saucers decorated with grayish white cranes. I’d read that cranes mated for life. If you ever saw a solitary adult crane, you could be sure it had lost its mate. I poured hot water over loose mint tisane and carried the tray into the living room. We sat on the sofa, and for the first time, I couldn’t think of anything to say, probably because all normal conversation was being drowned out in my head by the clamor of all the things I couldn’t bring myself to say. I put my feet up on the coffee table. He lit a cigarette.
“Would you like to go away this weekend?” he asked. “It’s a holiday weekend, we won’t rehearse. There’s a place I love that I want to show you,” he added.
“Sure,” I said, looking up. “Where?”
“Normandy. A friend of mine has a house near Trouville. We could drive out on Friday afternoon.”
“I’d like that,” I answered. Olivier described the town, the beach nearby where he’d spent summers as a kid. We went to bed a short while later. Despite some awkward, fervent kissing, we didn’t make love.
Olivier slept on his back, with one arm wrapped around me. I rested my head on his chest, listening to my breath with one ear, his heartbeat with the other. When I was little, I’d listen to my breath, the inhale and exhale, and watch my chest rise and fall. Thinking about it too much made it impossible to do naturally, and I’d panic, fearing I’d have to remember to breathe for the rest of my life, and what if I forgot? Unconscious, reflexive behavior, when observed, became fraught with difficulty.
I tried to breathe normally. It was impossible.
I thought about how hard it is to unlearn something you’ve been doing wrong all your life. Trying to stand up straight when you’ve always been a sloucher, for one. My third-grade teacher used to chastise me for not holding my pencil properly. “Look at that ugly callus on your middle finger,” she’d said. Up until then, I’d liked my callus. I’d liked touching it, feeling its contours, the self-made bump of it, the indurate surface like orange peel. But after Miss Brendan pointed it out in class, I tried to bite it off, nibbling off bits of toughened skin. It didn’t work. I still hold my pencil the same way.
I drummed my fingers on Olivier’s chest. He didn’t move. I wondered if he was pretending. Sometimes, I pretended to be asleep, mostly so I could find out what people would do around me. It usually just led to tiptoeing. In the rare cases when someone tried to wake me up, I’d have to pretend to wake up. It’s always intriguing to watch actors do this on film. The ones who wake up too easily make me suspicious. Of course, the ones who do it well get no love either, because it seems like they’re merely waking up. A siren wailed in the distance.
I eased out of bed and tiptoed into the living room. Olivier’s pack of Camels sat on the coffee table. I hadn’t smoked in years, but I lit one of his cigarettes. It was strong, and it burned my throat in a way I liked. The paper crackled as I inhaled, and the smoke hung in the room like a blue ghost. Smoking and sitting naked on the sofa made me feel like someone else.
Something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but I couldn’t shake it. Something about the translation, or something Olivier had said. Or something he hadn’t said. He seemed a little bit far away, out of reach. The image of him at the hospital with Estelle flashed through my head again, but maybe I was being paranoid. I watched part of TF1’s evening newscast on the computer, freezing the frame on the minister and Estelle leaving the hospital. She ducked her head and held up her hand. Hiding, not waving. There was no sign of Olivier, but then, there wouldn’t be.
It was four a.m. and I was thinking too much. I took a sleeping pill and slid back into bed. Olivier mumbled something in his sleep. I tucked a pillow under my head and lay on my back, waiting for the narcotic, floaty feeling to kick in.
I pictured the drive home in Los Angeles. As I wound down the sinuous, moonlit road, a host of white moths shook themselves free from the trees and flew at the headlights. It was like being in a snow flurry.
I wound down the road again and dreamed about them. They were the thousand moths of memory, and each moth had the face of a Victorian angel, a pink-cheeked holiday caroler with Cupid’s bow lips curved in an “O” of song. As they approached the windshield, their wings fluttered and released random memories. I saw images and heard bits of conversation and songs, as if a radio on scan were playing snippets of my childhood. It grew louder and louder, until the noise became a white, crashing static, and I fell asleep.
24
The Etruscans: For instance, the verb ‘is.’ Marilyn: I didn’t know ‘is’ was a verb. The Etruscans: What did you think it was? Marilyn: A light for the other verbs.
—ANNE CARSON, “Detail from the Tomb of the Diver (Paestum 500–453 BC)”
In the morning, Olivier whispered something in my ear and left. I lolled in bed, fuzzy from the sleeping pill and slightly headachy. Clara called to cancel our lunch: she’d sprained her ankle but told me not to worry, her mother was on her way in from Versailles and would take care of her. That left me practically all day to work on the translation before tea at Antoine and Victorine’s.
Every time I thought about Olivier, a vague, worried sensation fluttered its wings and settled in my stomach, so I got to work on the translation in order to distract myself. I looked again at the chapter, wondering if I’d absorbed anything—like osmosis—from my amateurish foray into translation theory.
I skimmed through the pages: mostly plot-heavy, mostly about the narrator’s attempts to get information about Eve from her accountant, who wouldn’t talk. Well, duh.
Then he spent six pages rabbiting on about being sucked into a whirlpool of despair. Yeah, yeah, yeah; I was familiar with the whirlpool. Was despair always this boring, or was it the way it was written? In desperation, the narrator called the friend he’d met Eve through, a writer of detective novels. The friend sent him to a private detective near the Gare du Nord.
I expected André Verbier to look like a hardened cop, but he was as memorable as a tollbooth operator: dull gray skin and mouse-brown hair in a shapeless suit. When he spoke, he revealed a row of jagged, stained teeth, putting me in mind of a rodent.
He had no reaction to my story, other than to take notes.
“Do you handle cases like this often?” I asked. I looked at the dusty blinds and the vinyl wallpaper, a pattern of blue and green bubbles outlined in silver foil. There was a brown water stain shaped like India above the window.
“I specialize in finding women,” he said with an inward smile. “I am an expert.”
“What makes you so successful?”
“I listen. People are always revealing information, whether they know it or not,” he said. I could tell he was waiting for me to ask him what I’d revealed about myself. I refrained from doing so. He continued, “And then, I have been in the business for seventeen years, locating runaway teenagers, adulterous wives, suicidal girlfriends…”
“Why do women leave?” I asked. He looked at me with eyes the color of shit.
“Because they are unhappy,” he said.
It felt like a rebuke. Verbier made me feel small. It was odious to be here, this office, the dingy neighborhood, his knowing air. I felt an intense self-loathing, that I’d been reduced to this, hiring a detective out of a trashy novel…
“Trashy novel” wasn’t right. Too colloquial, and it didn’t do “roman de gare” justice, considering there was a possible play on words: “train station novel,” in this case, could refer to the genre as well as the location. Pulp novel? Dime-store novel?
“I will call you when I have news,” Verbier said. When I shook it, his hand felt dry and firm, the opposite of how I’d thought it would.
I walked around the dirty neighborhood, riddled with garish cafés and storefronts selling prosthetic limbs. The thought
of going back to the flat I still shared with Daphne was monstrous, and I was a monster for going home to her.
But Daphne was no fool. She’d probably sensed something. Perhaps she was as unhappy with me as I was with her, though I didn’t care. My life had shrunk, reduced to the thought of seeing Eve again, if only once more.
During the two weeks I waited to hear from Verbier, I was cruel to Daphne. Perhaps the worst cruelty was that I did it without thinking. I was impervious to her manipulations. Though they had no effect, she tried every ploy in the book: being affectionate, being cold, attempting to make me jealous, ignoring me, watching me like a hawk. I came home to candlelit tables, elaborate meals, Daphne in various stages of undress. Or it was crying fits and angry scenes. After one final, semi-rehearsed speech, she announced her return to her apartment near the Jardin des Plantes and indicated that I should not contact her unless I came on bent, and preferably bloodied, knees.
I worked longer hours. Sometimes I stopped at a café near the place de Clichy for a drink. I was haunted not by the specter of my empty flat but rather by the darkened windows of Eve’s apartment.
Verbier sent me a typed report peppered with explanatory notes.
“After many hours of research and a few well-placed payments (itemized in addendum A) I have ascertained that Eve Ribot, née Solange Ramzy, is living in Monte Carlo, at 39, avenue des Tilleuls, in an apartment owned by Ericsson Holdings, Ltd. Eric Beaufort de Blois is CEO and majority owner of Ericsson Holdings, Ltd.
“Beaufort and his third wife, Bettina Beaufort de Blois, née Astiani, maintain separate residences. Madame Beaufort resides primarily in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Beaufort and Madame Ribot are often seen together in public, even at the Red Cross Ball, which indicates their relationship is an open and accepted secret in Monte Carlo society…”
I threw the report aside. Just as I’d suspected, she was Beaufort’s mistress. I’d guessed as much when I’d seen them together at Longchamp. I should’ve known, but I didn’t want to know…
Foreign Tongue Page 19