Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

The tears I cried felt bitter and brown, like oversteeped tea, and I wiped them away with a grimy, balled-up tissue I found in my pocket. I stewed in a caustic bath of embarrassment, shame, and disappointment. I felt terrible about Monsieur Laveau, and I railed against my own carelessness. What was worse, I knew Olivier hadn’t told Estelle out of malice. He’d told her out of a casual disregard for me.

  I could feel myself spiraling down into a familiar vortex of self-loathing. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, because it felt destructive and hurtful, staring at the passing buses in the damp air as the heat lamp burned my scalp. And I fell inward, like a brick off a building, further and further out of reach.

  It was still raining when I left. I bought a flimsy umbrella and walked back to the Eleventh. My cell phone rang a couple of times, but I didn’t answer.

  At home, I took a quiche out of the freezer. I bent to put it in the oven and nearly fell over from the head rush. If a walk across Paris had that effect, I was seriously out of shape.

  The phone rang, and my mother spoke into the answering machine like it was some kind of annoying flunky blocking access to her daughter. I picked up. She and my father were leaving for Hawaii, and she wanted to say hi before they left. I hadn’t told them about Olivier and couldn’t bring myself to do so now.

  “Darling, are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes, just tired,” I said, leaning against the refrigerator.

  “Well, get some rest. I’ll call when we get back. I e-mailed you the number in Maui, just in case.” We said good-bye and hung up.

  I sat on the kitchen floor, near the warm oven, and wrapped my arms around my knees, shivering. I slid my fingernails between the floorboards, digging up lint and crumbs. My eyes blurred; probably all that cigarette smoke. Maybe I was delirious. My head hurt; it felt hot against my hand.

  I found a fancy digital thermometer in the bathroom. It beeped when it was ready, the display flashing Celsius and Fahrenheit. I had a fever of 102.

  I changed into a T-shirt and pajama pants and padded into the kitchen when the oven timer rang. I stuck my hand in, trying to drag the quiche out with a dessert fork, then leaped back when I felt a searing pain, accompanied by a small sizzle. I’d burned the back of my hand on the electric coil. My skin turned red, and a transparent layer puffed up into a white crust. I fished ice cubes out of the freezer and held them to my hand while I ate a slice of quiche.

  There was something in the medicine cabinet for “brûlures,” so I applied a thin gel to my hand, bound it in cotton gauze, and fell into bed.

  I woke up fifteen hours later, my hand throbbing.

  30

  On croit que, lorsqu’une chose finit, une autre recommence tout de suite. Non. Entre les deux, c’est la pagaille.*

  —MARGUERITE DURAS

  Something bad happened in the night. Someone spoke to me: a stranger, a tearful, accented woman’s voice, telling me bad, horrible, irreversible things. I stared at the wall, racing through recent memory, trying to remember, but it was like trying to see around a corner.

  My hand smarted. I peered under the bandage. The burned skin was goopy and red. It was hard to tell what was human goop and what was oily burn ointment, but it looked bad. I stood up, my damp T-shirt clinging to my back, and my legs shot out from underneath me. I fell back on the bed as the room spun. Little black shapes, like commas, darted soundlessly through my peripheral vision like warning punctuation. Not good, I thought, holding the walls for balance as I shuffled to the bathroom; not good, not good, not good. The thing I couldn’t remember gnawed at me. What the hell was it? I stepped on something sharp and yelped. It was a baguette crumb. In fact, there were bread crumbs all over the hallway. This was totally unacceptable. I tore open the hall closet and grabbed the broom. Too tall for the space, it was shoved in at an angle, stuck, the bristles bent over. I wrestled with it, gave one powerful yank, and knocked myself in the face with the wooden handle, missing my eye by half an inch.

  “Putain de merde!” I yelled, clutching the tender bone of my eye socket. What next? Choking to death on leftover quiche? I sat on the floor, letting loose a torrent of frustrated tears.

  The pigeons on the windowsill fluttered their wings and crooned avian love songs. They were probably billing and cooing and grooming each other. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. My face hurt. My hand throbbed. I was jealous of pigeons.

  I put some ice in a towel and held it to my cheekbone. It was two in the afternoon, and I could barely wrap my brain around anything other than the fact that I was a wreck. And I’d forgotten something. Someone’s birthday? Did I forget to pay a bill? I looked through my date book, but the page was blank. The nagging feeling didn’t go away.

  I looked up “pleurer comme une Madeleine” in the dictionary. It didn’t refer to Proust’s lemon cakes at all: the expression derived from Mary Magdalene, who’d cried at Christ’s feet, and was spelled with a capital “M.” This was what I got for being ignorant about religion. The danger of homonyms.

  I put the dictionary down and grasped the desk as another wave of dizziness made the room spin. The answering machine light was blinking. I pressed the button.

  “Message effacé,” the automatic voice announced.

  “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I yelled. Thanks to the miracle of digital answering machines, the message was gone, irretrievable. I punched the button again, but the awful digital voice repeated “Vous n’avez pas de messages.” I wanted to rip it out of the wall: now I was sure whatever I needed to know had been on the answering machine. I raked a hand through my knotty hair, deliberately snapping individual strands. My eyes welled up with the pain.

  I drank a glass of water that tasted like metal. Or my mouth tasted like metal and so did everything else. I swallowed three aspirin and went back to bed.

  I knew how to take care of myself when I fell ill. I cosseted myself with comfort food and bad television. But the real battle was against the feeling that I’d never be well again. My thoughts drifted. The last time I saw Olivier, at the train station. Was that only days ago? Stop thinking about Olivier. Must exile Olivier from my mind. The last time I kissed Olivier. No, stop, I admonished myself. The last time I heard his voice. The last time Olivier and I made love—

  I drifted off and dreamed I found Olivier on the beach, drawing in the sand with a piece of driftwood. His hair was messy, longer, and he looked almost gaunt. I held him, and savored the feeling of being held. In my dream, I gave myself permission to luxuriate in the memory; even so, it felt like something forbidden, something beautiful and careless, a bolt of red silk tossed down a flight of stairs.

  I woke up, famished, at four in the afternoon. I seemed to be reverting to L.A. time. I reheated the rest of the quiche and ate it in the kitchen, listening to the ticking of the oven clock and making a list of things to do.

  Change the burn bandage. Sweep up the bread crumbs. Take a bath, wash my hair. But then what? Beyond frying my eyes on TV until I fell asleep again?

  Even when I was miserable about Timothy in Los Angeles, I still had to eat, sleep, work, pay bills, and guilt myself into going to yoga class. I followed a routine, and it kept me sane. Going through the motions, however mechanically, gave me a semblance of progress, at least movement through time.

  Up to now, I’d had a similar—if pseudo—schedule, organized around regular work hours translating for Monsieur Laveau, long walks hanging out with friends, and seeing Olivier. Funny how quickly I’d gotten used to it. But now? No more Olivier. Probably no more job. I lived in a borrowed apartment. I didn’t have to be anywhere, anytime. My friends here had led regular lives before I came, and they’d continue to do so whether I stayed or left. I didn’t intersect in any real-life way, and with no job, I’d have to go home pretty soon.

  The piteous lowing of dying calves wafted up through the floorboards. The downstairs neighbor was practicing his clarinet. The upstairs neighbor closed his shutters, alternating shrieking hinges with slamming metal. All arou
nd me people went through motions and actions with purpose, with rhythm. I’d come to a standstill. I was stuck in place, treading water, while the rest of the world swam by.

  The fever persisted, giving me body aches and a dull headache that wouldn’t ease up. And I got no respite, because whenever I did sleep, I had nightmares, about fires and accidents, sirens and ambulances wailing through the night. A woman sobbing, repeating the same unintelligible phrase. Aspirin and sleeping pills didn’t help. My eye developed a yellow-plum halo.

  The washing machine deliveryman and his teenage assistant removed the old model and replaced it with a stainless-steel number while I sat on the sofa in Tante Isabelle’s robe de chambre, catatonic in front of the world’s most boring detective, Inspecteur Derrick, a German series dubbed into French, and the news, which kept showing the same aerial shots of a tunnel on the A8 between Ventimiglia and Nice, the scene of a massive car pileup over the weekend.

  I didn’t hear from Monsieur Laveau, and I didn’t hear from Olivier, and it was hard to tell which felt worse. I missed Olivier and hated myself for it, because that was easier than hating him. I fantasized about him breaking up with Estelle and begging me to take him back. Like that was going to happen. I knew that if I wanted Olivier back, I would have to accept the Estelle situation, which I considered at least five or six times a day before hating myself for that, too.

  As for Monsieur Laveau, the thought that I’d disappointed him made me miserable. I’d enjoyed our antagonistic relationship as well as the translating work. I’d grown attached to him, the way you grow fond of an eccentric relative or neighbor, particularly once he or she dies or moves away. I felt a pang every time I thought of his bushy eyebrows and forbidding stare over our shared espressos. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the second ending, the one I’d gotten last Friday, which seemed like a century ago. I wondered if I should mail it back to him.

  And I dreaded sleep. My nightmares morphed into claustrophobic horrorscapes of being trapped in a large metal box, hammered in on all sides, or less specific but equally violent scenes of explosions and natural disasters. After three days of this, I felt brittle and frail, as if the only thing holding me up was a scaffolding of twigs.

  31

  Hashish. One imitates certain things one knows from paintings: prison, the Bridge of Sighs, stairs like the train of a dress.

  —WALTER BENJAMIN, The Arcades Project

  Pascal and Florian stopped by to check in on me on their way to an art opening. Pascal handed me a goody bag filled with beauty products, and Florian brought two cartons of Picard Surgelés sorbets and herbal tea. Pascal took one look at me and stepped back.

  “T’as pas bonne mine,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Ben, évidemment,” I replied, exasperated. “I’ve just spent four days in bed, I bruised my face, and I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep. You’d look like shit, too.” He gave me a puzzled look and sat down to page through a Vanity Fair Tante Isabelle had left behind. I forget the French think that they’re being helpful when they criticize you. Saying nothing, or telling me I looked fine when I didn’t would be the equivalent of blowing smoke up my skirt, which is tantamount to hypocrisy. Of course, hypocrisy has its place in France, as it does anywhere else, but between friends it’s a crime.

  “Ginger tea, with lemon and honey,” Florian said, prescribing treatment. “Every hour on the hour. At night, you can put something medicinal in it, like this.” He picked up a bottle of rum from the liquor trolley. I nodded, resting my head on the sofa arm.

  “I brought you de l’herbe,” he added. “So you can sleep.”

  I blinked at him. “You brought me pot?” I asked.

  “Oui,” he said, inhaling the word in that peculiar French manner that can mean resignation, vexation, fatigue, or nothing at all. Pronounced that way, it doesn’t resemble a word so much as a sound effect, the short flight of a swift paper airplane: fweeh. “Be careful,” he said, removing a cigarette case from his jacket pocket, “this is very strong stuff.” He took out two neatly rolled joints and placed them on the coffee table.

  After they left, I ate a bowl of soupe au pistou and watched TV. I smoked half a joint. It was past ten, though it seemed later. My limbs felt sluggish, my arms too heavy for my shoulders. The dull throbbing in my head increased, a jungle tom-tom, and I went to the window to press my forehead to the cool glass.

  Down below, the orange streetlights cast dramatic tree shadows that seemed to bend and climb like spiders over asphalt and sidewalk. I studied the wrought-iron balconies of the buildings across the street, fascinated by their seemingly infinite, lacy designs. Was there a book on wrought-iron balcony designs? Was there a union for wrought-iron forgers? Were there people who invented patterns all day? Did the patterns have names, like Elisir and Arpeggio? I was more than a little stoned.

  Down the street, a tall, stooped man in a trench coat walked underneath the trees.

  “Bunny!” I whispered, craning my head. He went around a corner and disappeared. I stumbled, steadying myself with a fold of curtain. I turned off the lights in the kitchen and living room, calculating the fastest route to bed. I could almost taste the exquisite pleasure of my head sinking into the pillow.

  I pulled on a fresh T-shirt and pajama bottoms and stretched, grasping the top of the doorframe. A couple of bones in my spine cracked, and my fingertips came back coated in gray dust. I wanted to press myself into a hard, flat surface, roll myself out like clay. I sat on the floor and uncurled my back, yoga-style. I fell on the floor with a thud.

  A series of contractions started in my face, as if all my features decided to twitch in concert. My lower lip trembled. The contractions moved to my throat, shoulders, and arms. My stomach tightened, then my inner thighs. Uncontrollable impulses shot down my legs. My kneecaps contracted and released like cap guns. I felt tight knots, like cramps, in my calves, shins, the arches of my feet.

  It stopped. I was aware of a tingling in my body, as if the muscles were humming, ready to pounce, but not on my command. I wondered what it meant to have muscles that were usually voluntary respond involuntarily.

  It started again, this time in my feet.

  The contractions were stronger, more specific. Each muscle gathered itself into a knot, then released like a blast of hot water, pins and needles and sparks. My heels drummed on the floor as my calves, tight as baseballs, contracted and released. It felt like my body was climbing up inside itself of its own volition. I broke into a sweat.

  I saw myself from the ceiling, flopping around on the floor like a fish on dry land. My quadriceps tightened, my hamstrings like bows, buttocks like fists. Goose bumps swept over my skin. I ricocheted between panic, fear, and a misplaced fascination about what was happening.

  The contractions continued up my body, clenching and unclenching. My fingers curled into my palms. Shooting convulsions wrapped around my neck, tightening like a noose. The spasms crept, like little paws, up my face. It’ll be okay, I tried to whisper. My breath caught in my throat, and I coughed, choking on my own spit.

  It stopped. I lay still, waiting. The contractions didn’t come back. I stayed on the floor, a blind rabbit listening for a fox: my mind the blind rabbit, my body the fox.

  I’d had all kinds of nightmares as a child, but the worst were when I’d wake up paralyzed with fear, unable to move or speak, and I’d have to talk myself down. It came back to me like an old habit, the gentle cajoling of an internal voice that spoke to an unyielding body until it relented. It’s all right, pick yourself up, shhh, everything is fine.

  The phone rang; the machine answered. No one spoke. I sat up, my limbs trembling, numb with the kind of cold that makes you think you’ll never be warm again. I squinted at the clock. Who calls at midnight and doesn’t leave a message? I pulled on a wool sweater, a pair of wool socks, and a thick terry bathrobe.

  My stomach hurt with a hollow, precise ache, as if I could trace its outline with a felt-tip pen. I heated m
ilk in a saucepan, stirring in vanilla and sugar with hands that looked blue. I sat at the table with a mug. My eyes smarted, and the buzzing of the overhead light seemed to crowbar into my ears.

  I put my head down and slumped over the kitchen table, pressing my forehead into my forearm. In the dark angle of my elbow, I shuddered. That was scary, I admitted to my arm. I’d been afraid and alone. I peered underneath the bandage at my injured hand. The edges of the wound seemed puckered and hard. Gangrene, probably.

  I needed sleep. Restful, uninterrupted sleep would cure me. I smeared on fresh burn ointment and pressed the bandage back into place. I climbed into bed in the sweater, socks, and bathrobe, wondering what the fuck was in the pot.

  32

  What good is insight? It only makes things worse.

  —RAYMOND CARVER

  French/English Word Game (toggle back and forth):

  “Siege” in English to “siège” in French (identical spelling), to

  “chair” in English (identical meaning), to

  “(la) chair” in French (identical spelling), to

  “flesh” in English (identical meaning), to

  “(une) fléche” in French (identical pronunciation), to

  “arrow” in English (identical meaning), to

  “héro” in French (pronunciation starts to fudge here), to

  “hero” in English (identical spelling and meaning)…and then it falls apart, because I can’t think of a homonym except for “gyro” and I can’t do anything with

  Hungover and fuzzy from the pot, I sipped lemon-ginger tea and read the scrap of paper I’d found on the kitchen floor. The list, scrawled in a handwriting that sort of looked like mine, but was more likely mine on drugs, reminded me of a Lewis Carroll word puzzle where you had to transform one word into another, for instance, “love” to “hate,” by moving one letter at a time. The trick was to do it in as few steps as possible, but each letter shift had to create a legitimate word. This list seemed to be an attempt to build some kind of French-English word chain, based on meaning and sound.