Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  But then part of my brain detached and watched the crying. Or noticed I was hungry. Or watched the cat bat at a fly on the window and heard the rippling sound of plate glass as it vibrated against the sash.

  In that moment, I’d distrusted my tears. How could I be in so much pain if I could think about donuts? Could I truly be suffering if I remembered Saturday Night Live was on TV that night? Wasn’t the honesty of emotions determined by their single-minded, all-encompassing focus?

  Clearly, I was false. I was false, my grief was false, and I was a faker. The jeering voices of the playground, which shouted “Faker!” to anyone who overacted injury during dodgeball, applied to me.

  It was years before I understood it was possible to remember to pick up the dry cleaning when it felt like your heart was breaking; to research and write on deadline even though your roommate wasn’t talking to you; or to schedule a teeth-cleaning while nursing a righteous anger at the entire editorial department.

  So, I cried on the train, but then I stopped and thought about crying. I cried tears of pure, hot rage as I pictured Estelle and Olivier together, and I cried sad tears, feeling stupid, ashamed, and sorry for myself. The sadness was centering, thick and familiar, and I wrapped myself in it like a shroud.

  I’d used the last of my tissues when I noticed a little girl watching me. I could see her reflection in the window. About ten, she had long, wavy hair and big eyes behind thick glasses. She wore a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt with a plaid skirt, and sneakers with kneesocks. When I turned to look at her, she ran away.

  I stared back at the window, bleary-eyed. The orange sodium-vapor lights of a highway flew past: tick, tick, tick.

  “Madame,” a little voice said. She was back. With a solemn look, she held out a Carambar, fruit-flavored caramel.

  “Merci,” I said, my voice catching. She watched as I unwrapped it and breathed in a pungent, artificial strawberry smell. It was hard and sugary, and chewing it sucked all the saliva out of my mouth. She fled with a squeak of her sneaker.

  “Madame!” She came back and held out another Carambar. Chewing stale caramel didn’t go with my tragic mood, but I didn’t have the heart to refuse her.

  “Comment tu t’appeles?” I asked.

  “Félice,” she answered and scampered away. She came back with a lemon Carambar and her brother. He was a smaller version of her, with brown pants and a green sweater, the same big eyes behind glasses. I felt like the human in a petting zoo; the nice children were feeding candy to the sad lady.

  “Merci, Félice,” I said, “Mais—”

  “FELICE! VICTOR!” A loud, stressed paternal voice yelled. A man about my age, with a newborn in a BabyBjörn clamped like a limpet to his chest, shuffled into the compartment. He looked exhausted.

  “Non, écoutez les enfants, vous laissez la dame tranquille et vous retournez tout de suite,” he scolded gently, casting me a look that was half-apologetic, half-wary. “Je suis désolé, madame.”

  “Il n’y a pas de quoi, monsieur,” I replied. “Vos enfants sont très gentils.” He smiled at the compliment and took their hands.

  “La dame pleurait, papa,” Félice said, explaining that I’d been crying. Her father threw me a worried look. She turned around, and I waved good-bye. I bit down on the lemon candy, hoping I wouldn’t lose any fillings. I thought about a time when a Carambar might well have made everything better, and it was a long time ago.

  Maybe there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Perhaps in addition to being stupid and blind, I was destined to have men be unfaithful, like I was under a Sicilian curse. Better to never get involved with anyone again. I would become like my grandmother’s eccentric friend, who went to live with the monks in Tibet after three failed marriages. I had a pleasant moment contemplating the purity of my future existence: the spirituality, the lack of material things, the bright, one shouldered orange robe and shaved head. I imagined telling my sad story to an infinitely kind monk, who would reassure me that the reasons I came to Lhasa were unimportant.

  I sat up in my seat. I was being a jerk.

  Still, it made me wonder: perhaps it was time to go back to L.A. Or maybe place had nothing to do with it, and I was merely lugging psychic baggage from one city to another. When I’d left, Lindsay had accused me of running away. Maybe she was right.

  All the times he was at the theater, was he really at the theater?

  That time we met, at that cocktail party, did she know about me? Did her husband, the minister, know about Olivier? I reminded her of her?

  What did Victorine know?

  Bitch.

  At Lisieux, I boarded the train with a teenager whose MP3 player was cranked up so loud I could hear lyrics and a craggy-faced woman who ate an apple with precise, vicious bites. No sooner had I found a seat in another empty compartment than my stomach spasmed. As the train pulled out, lurching from side to side, I listed over to the bathroom and threw up in the metal toilet bowl, which stank of urine and lemon-scented, industrial-strength cleaner.

  I rinsed my mouth out with the tap water, marked “non potable,” and considered the various illnesses one could contract from impure water. Spitting to get rid of the taste of bile until I had no spit left, I wondered whether bile tastes the same to everyone, the way garbage smells the same way the world over.

  I walked back through the near-empty train. Few people were headed back to Paris on a Friday night. Like so many other things that evening, it felt wrong, like the turn you make that gets you lost. Wrong the way everything the day of a car accident feels like an omen you couldn’t see: the stubbed toe, the burned toast, the misplaced keys.

  I thought about the night Olivier and I had driven home from Althea’s birthday party. We’d parked on my street and made out in the car. We’d kissed on the sidewalk, in front of the coiffeur, in the elevator, laughing, delirious. He’d held my face and caressed my cheeks with his thumbs. “Comme tu es belle,” he’d said.

  I pictured Estelle. The purring, husky voice, the wide eyes rimmed with sooty lashes. Smiling as she waited to use the phone. Admiring my shoes.

  My head throbbed, a persistent hammer in my left temple. The train pulled into the Gare Saint-Lazare. I took the stairs up to the main hall, passing the empty Salle des Pas Perdus, the waiting room known as the Hall of Lost Footsteps. Lost because they led nowhere, those footsteps of people pacing, retracing the same pointless steps. I was taking me and my lost footsteps home, to a home that wasn’t even mine.

  I walked out with a small throng of cooler-than-thou French teenagers, couples on dates, and commuters with wheeled weekend bags. Everyone looked like they had a purpose, which is one way other people look when you’re unhappy. I stood in line, waiting for a taxi.

  Whenever a character walks around a city in a movie, there’s always music playing. That’s why I like portable music players, because you can choose your soundtrack. If you match the music to your mood, especially when traveling, you graft the song onto the city: David Bowie onto downtown Berlin, Sonic Youth or Cesaria Evora or Brahms onto the sidewalks of Aix-en-Provence. I had some tunes so affixed to certain streets in Paris that they floated into my head whenever I walked down them.

  But I didn’t have any music on me, so tonight my soundtrack was the screeching and honking of passing cars and, when I finally got a cab, Eastern European folk songs and a driver who sucked his teeth.

  At home, there were two messages. I tried to suppress the hope that Olivier had called to say the impossible thing that would make everything fine, but it persisted, despite the fact that nothing could make it fine and I knew it wasn’t Olivier.

  The first one was from Tante Isabelle. “It’s so last minute, sweetie, I’m sorry to do this, but I’m stopping by on my way to a conference in Geneva. Can you make yourself scarce? Don’t worry about cleaning up. I’ll be there with my friend on Saturday afternoon, and we’ll be out by Monday.”

  The second was from Bernard Laveau. “Ecoutez, j’aurais besoin de vou
s voir aussitôt que possible. C’est urgent. Veuillez me téléphoner ou venir me voir à la librairie.”

  Great. I was homeless for three days, just when I needed to curl up in bed and die. On top of which, Bernard Laveau needed to talk to me ASAP. As if.

  All I wanted was to be unconscious. I took a sleeping pill and crawled under the duvet. My body flattened into the sheets, and I relaxed as the muscles in my face loosened and slipped back toward my ears.

  In the morning, I hauled myself out of bed and got to work. I needed the support and spare couches of my closest friends.

  I couldn’t ask Clara—not when she had a sprained ankle and her mother staying with her. I called Althea, who pronounced Olivier “a perfect shit” and promised a rollicking, drunken weekend with her, Ivan, and a good bottle of vodka. Pascal offered me the spare room and suggested selling the item about Olivier and Estelle to the gossip rag Voici. Then he invited me as his date to a dinner party at a fashion designer’s apartment that evening.

  “Allez, it will be fun,” he coaxed. “Florian refuses to go and I need a date. There will be no straight men, only gay men, faggy haggies, and a famous lesbian, very glam. You can switch teams.”

  I made coffee and considered my options. Luckily, the flat wasn’t too much of a sty. I remade the bed with fresh sheets. The phone rang. It was Lucy, Althea’s sister.

  “Right. I’ve just spoken to Thea, and I’m calling to tell you to get yourself on the Eurostar immediately,” she commanded, not bothering with preliminaries. “I had brilliant plans for the weekend: Angus, this dreamy Scot I’ve been dating, was coming to London, but now his mum has broken her leg in a fit of passive-aggressiveness, and he’s staying in Scotland to take care of her. I know she hates me; she calls me the ‘Yank lassie.’” She let out a frustrated yelp.

  “It’s very nice of you, Lucy, but—”

  “Not nice, selfish. I felt pathetic at the theater all alone last night. I won’t have fabulous restaurant reservations go to waste! You must come,” she urged. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Um…” I stalled. What I really wanted was to mope at home and wallow in misery, but I couldn’t do that with Tante Isabelle arriving in the next few hours.

  “I’m looking at the computer—there are four trains that’ll get you here in time for dinner. You can cry on my shoulder until you become a raving bore, then I’ll tell you to shut up and make you listen to me whine. Deal?”

  Just then, it felt right to get out of town, at least for a few days. I called Althea, Clara, and Pascal, and told them what I was up to. I called Laveau, but I got the machine, so I left a message telling him I was out of the country until Monday. I deliberately left my cell phone behind, picked up my still-packed weekend bag, bought a box of truffles from the chocolatier, and caught the bus for the Gare du Nord.

  On the sidewalk outside the nineteenth-century train station, I found another witch doctor card. This one was blue and stamped with dirty sneaker tread marks. Maître Samadhi specialized in “les problèmes de cœur”; he could guarantee the return of my lover’s affections by telepathy. The card was edged with crude drawings of a heart, a nose, an ear, and an eye. Magical realism cereal, I thought. Lucky Charms, breakfast spells for the heartbroken. I tucked it in my pocket.

  I bought an expensive last-minute Eurostar ticket and, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, boarded a train.

  At St. Pancras, the bus driver, a ginger-haired man with muttonchop sideburns, called me “love.” Parisian bus drivers don’t use terms of endearment, let alone describe the highlights of the route. He pointed out Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and the London Eye. A billboard for a snazzy red convertible read MEAN AND ROOFLESS.

  Lucy lived in the Fulham Studios, a series of little houses originally built for artists located behind a wall on the Fulham Road. I followed a mossy walkway, decorated with lichen-stained urns and rusted garden furniture, to her door.

  “You’re here!” she exclaimed. She enfolded me in a tight bear hug and pulled me inside. “You’re in the study. I’ve blown up an air mattress and moved all my work crap to the side,” she said. She gave me a brief tour, pointing out the living room and kitchen, then her bedroom and bathroom on the second floor. The company where she worked as a senior financial investment manager paid the fortune in rent.

  “Now,” she said, giving me a beady stare, “you have two hours to tell me everything, then we’re going to a mad trendy restaurant and we’ll see what kind of trouble we can get into.”

  The late-afternoon sun streamed in through paned windows, and we sprawled on the sofa with tea and biscuits. Lucy listened and supplied tissues while I gave her a nutshell version of the Timothy story, then a more detailed account of the Olivier story.

  “One right after the other,” she said. “Gosh, that’s rough!”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I sensed an opinion lurked beneath the sympathetic words. “Now tell me what you really think,” I said, steeling myself. “I mean it.”

  “Let me ask you something,” she began. “Did you ever talk about seeing each other exclusively?”

  “Well, no. I just sort of assumed,” I said. “Between the time we spent together and his play, it didn’t occur to me—I mean, where would he find the time? Of course, that was dumb,” I said, thinking of the evenings he’d spent at the theater.

  “And you’d been seeing each other for, what, a few weeks?” she asked. I nodded. “Which is a relatively short period of time.”

  “True. But I thought we both felt the same way,” I said.

  Lucy gave me a kind look, like I’d made a very human mistake. “Well, it is abominable behavior on his part…”

  “But?” I prodded, though I knew I wouldn’t like what she’d say. Already I felt like a recalcitrant cow being dragged down a steep slope. I wanted to dig my heels in and snort, or at least moo in protest. If I wasn’t the wronged party, I didn’t know where—or even how—I was supposed to stand.

  “What is it?” She looked at me over her cup. “You look so nervous! Like I’m the angel of doom.”

  “You think I overreacted. That the situation was relatively banal,” I accused.

  “I don’t think you overreacted,” she clarified. “But perhaps things aren’t as irretrievably dire as you think. Look, you have a nice connection with him. He’s in a tricky situation that predates you, and it’s hard for him to extricate himself right now, but maybe it’s worth hanging around to see if things get straightened out.”

  “But he’s sleeping with her!” I blurted out.

  “That’s problematic.” She bit into a biscuit.

  “And he’s not breaking up with her!” I added.

  “I got that.” This, with her mouth full.

  “And—and—he lied! He hurt me! I feel bad! Humiliated, stupid, wronged! Betrayed!” These were very good reasons, damn it.

  “Got that, too,” she said, nodding her head. “If you want me to tell you he’s a shit, I will. But there may be another way of looking at it,” she said.

  I folded my arms and burrowed deeper into the sofa. Lucy poured another cup of tea. I noticed the fine lines around her eyes, the worried furrow above her arched brows. I’d known her for over ten years. We’d met after college.

  I looked down at my hands. I had a thin, maroon-brown scab on one knuckle. There was a pale, silvery scar the shape of an eyelash on the back of one hand where I’d scratched myself ten years ago, ripping the thin skin. The magazines said the back of your hand was as fragile as an eyelid: easily scarred and just as fine. I’d altered two of my fingerprints over the years: one from careless chopping with an expensive chef’s knife, the other from overambitious use of a pair of jewelry pliers. The scar tissue underneath the pad of each finger would never go away. I had scarred hands, scarred fingers, a scarred heart, but I wasn’t tossing them out the window.

  “You think I shouldn’t necessarily throw this away,” I said in a low voice.

  “It’s a risk, but—y
es,” she said, her blue eyes clear and direct.

  I looked out the window at the treetops, the pub chimney across the street, the second floor of a double-decker bus as it drove past. Down below, one of Lucy’s neighbors watered his plants. The sunlight caught the water, shooting a spray of rainbow drops, and something like hope leaped in my chest and fell.

  “No. It’s been a lie from the start,” I said. “You could be right, but I can’t do this. I can’t do this again.”

  She nodded as I spoke, and I wanted her to argue with me, to convince me I was wrong, because I wasn’t sure I believed myself. But she didn’t.

  28

  Est-ce que l’âme des violoncelles est emportée dans le cri d’une corde qui se brise?*

  —AUGUSTE VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM, “Véra”

  Lucy and I caught a taxi and rode into somewhere she described vaguely as “North Londonish.” I was lost. None of the letters and numbers that designated London’s regions and subdivisions made any sense.

  “At least with arrondissements, you not only know where someone lives but what their zip code is,” I said. “You know where to send mail, a thank-you card.”

  “The French are famous for food and logic, the British for gardens and eccentrics,” she said and asked the driver to pull over so she could dash out to an ATM.

  “Off we go then, love,” said the cabdriver when she came back.

  “It just happened again!” I hissed. She looked bewildered. “He called you ‘love’! And went willingly to a cash machine!” I shook my head in awe. “I’m moving here.”

  We pulled up to a striped awning. A doorman dressed in a Nehru coat and turban opened a carved wood door. A square brass plaque read BHANGRA.