Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  I curled up in the dark, insulated by my own misery. I felt still and small. Even my breathing seemed diminished, as if I needed less air. As if I’d folded myself into a small space, the way I sometimes folded paper into halves, then quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, until the paper was a tough, tiny Chiclet.

  All I wanted was to sleep. No, scratch that: all I wanted was to be unconscious.

  I dreamed I was alone on the rocky beach of a river. People paddled by in kayaks and yelled out to me. I plugged my ears and sang “la la la la” at them. The pebbles beneath my feet began speaking, and as I ran away, they shrieked at me.

  I woke early, to walls that were a pale blue, as thin as eggshell, and wiped the sweat off my face with the bedsheet. It was an odd dream, but strange things happen in dreams. In the past, I’d dreamed that I was a bar of soap, that Edward G. Robinson was both a French bulldog and my long-lost uncle, and that flying was a matter of breathing properly and bobbing, like being perfectly weighted when diving.

  I shivered and changed into a dry T-shirt and sweats. My skin still felt clammy. Maybe I was having a flu relapse. Clara had given me the name of her internist, and I searched for it now, sifting through the small mountain of miscellaneous notes, receipts, postcards, and business cards I kept on the marble mantel. I pulled a dark red card out of the pile. It was an addition to my collection of African witch-doctor cards. This one was for Professeur Moro. I skimmed the text, reading, “Protection contre tous les mauvais esprits.” Maybe a bad spirit was giving me the bad dreams.

  It was getting lighter and noisier outside, but I put on an airplane eye mask I kept on the bedside table and stuffed orange foam earplugs in my ears.

  This time, I dreamed of the childhood summer weekends I’d spent at the beach in Ventura with my best friend and her family. We used to play on the man-made jetty, an accident of concrete cylinders shaped like giant plumbing pipes, and collect hermit crabs from the tide pools.

  It was cruel what we did, collecting the hermit crabs in a plastic bucket with an inch or two of seawater. I couldn’t remember if we dumped them back into the ocean or if we forgot about them, our new pets, and left them to rot and die in the bucket.

  Not remembering doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, came the thought, distant, faint. I rolled over and pulled the duvet over my head. When a jackhammer began tearing up the sidewalk, I gave up. I took a shower, made coffee, and turned on the computer to start work on the third ending.

  34

  Et les mouettes se délectent de nos anecdotes.*

  —ALAIN BASHUNG,

  “J’écume”

  Midday, I took a break and went to the organic market to buy Clara her favorite pears and a box of chocolate truffles and then hopped on the bus to her apartment. She greeted me at the door, still hobbling but in good spirits.

  I followed her into her spotless white kitchen. I chopped herbs while she beat eggs for an omelet.

  “How do you like yours? Baveuse?” she asked, adding the herbs. She poured the mixture into the pan and shook it back and forth over the flame.

  I made a face. “That’s such a gross word,” I said.

  “What, baveuse? It’s just runny.”

  “It means runny, but it’s the actual word for ‘drooly,’” I said. “Bave is drool.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re spending too much time translating.”

  “Maybe. But it’s kind of keeping me sane,” I said. “Clara, can I ask you something? How do you stand it? With your friend, I mean?” She served the omelet onto two plates. I breathed in herbs and butter.

  “What do you want me to say?” She tossed aside a dish towel and sat next to me. “Yes, of course, there are times when I am inconsolable, when I can’t stand it anymore, and I think of ending it. But other times…if he left his wife, I’m not sure I’d want him.”

  “Really?” This was a surprise.

  “The qualities that I like in him are a lover’s qualities. He is attentive, always happy to see me. I get the best of him. I’m not so sure I would like him so much if I had to look at his dirty laundry or argue about housework.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. I hadn’t gotten to the laundry or housework stage with Olivier. I took a bite of the omelet. “This is delicious,” I said.

  “And what would I do in Antwerp?” She made a face. “His company is there. Antwerp! It’s nice for a weekend, but to live? Ah, non! Je suis Parisienne, moi!”

  When I came home, Daphne was packing her bags.

  “What are you doing?” I asked stupidly.

  “Jean-Marc, you don’t love me anymore,” she said, folding a yellow sweater. She placed it in a suitcase on the bed, her face hidden behind her blond hair.

  “That’s not true,” I said, moving toward her.

  “Yes, it is. Otherwise, you wouldn’t treat me this way.” She shut the suitcase. Floral-printed silk dangled out the side. I recognized the pattern of one of her dresses.

  “Don’t be silly,” I cajoled. I swept her hair off her shoulder and bent to kiss her.

  “I can’t believe you!” She whirled around, her face an ugly shade of red, a bruised fruit. “Don’t touch me!” she shouted. I backed out of the room.

  A foreign sensation—perhaps it was panic—edged into my thoughts. Daphne pulled the hard plastic suitcase behind her on a leash. It rolled awkwardly, sinking in the carpet pile. I didn’t help her. She gave the room one last look.

  I touched her arm, slid my hand down to her wrist. I didn’t know what to say, so I said the obvious. “Don’t go.”

  “That’s my problem, you know,” she said sadly. “I always believe you, even when you say things you don’t believe yourself. ‘Don’t go,’” she mocked. “You don’t mean it—you don’t want to eat dinner alone, that’s all.”

  “That’s not true.” But I said it because I had to say it, even though she was right. She gave me a pitying look. “What can I do to change your mind?” I asked, studying her face, the skin sprinkled with summer freckles. We would have had pretty children.

  She wheeled the suitcase into the elevator. Her face was impassive; she was already a stranger to me. I watched, helpless, as she disappeared from my life.

  This was the second variation to dispatch Daphne, I noticed.

  I immersed myself in work. I hated coming home. Daphne’s words rang in my ears. It was true: I didn’t like eating alone. It made me feel shabby.

  I scribbled a note: is “shabby” right? Maybe “lame” or “stupid” or “like an idiot” would be better. The sentence was “Je me sentais con.”

  When Verbier’s report arrived in the mail, I tore it open.

  “My research has determined that Madame Eve Dessès, née Hoda ‘Francine’ Abdi, is presently in London, in a suite at Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair—

  This was the third version of Eve, with yet another name.

  “—reserved in the name of Eric Beaufort, of Beaufort Communications, Ltd.”

  So, she had gone to him. I hadn’t been wrong.

  “Beaufort is separated from his second wife, Elizabeth Burrows, owner of the public relations firm EZ Burrows & Associates. When in London, Beaufort stays at Claridge’s, where his longtime mistress, Madame Dessès, usually accompanies him. Beaufort dines with his wife once a week at Cipriani…”

  I poured myself a shot of whiskey, and drank it…

  I paused, hands hovering above the keyboard, confounded. To drink something down in one gulp in French was to swallow it “cul sec,” literally “dry ass,” another variation on words derived from “cul.” “Chuga-lug” didn’t quite capture it. It was the Franglais syndrome again: I couldn’t remember the expression in English. I wrote “I downed a shot of whiskey.”

  “Eve Dessès, née Hoda ‘Francine’ Abdi, was born and raised in Cairo, the only daughter of an Egyptian silversmith and his Syrian wife. After her father died of a brain aneurysm when Francine was thirteen, her mother remarried and sent Francine
to a French Catholic boarding school, Notre-Dame de la Sainte-Espérance. She ran away from the school numerous times.

  “At seventeen, she ran away again. She was found months later in Alexandria, where she was working as a dancer in a French cancan revue. There, she’d become involved with a notorious gambler, Ali Marwan. When the news reached Cairo, her mother collapsed and had to be hospitalized. Her brothers went to Alexandria and brought her home. She lived under virtual house arrest for the next two years.

  “Her brothers attempted to marry her off to a middle-aged Syrian, owner of a textile factory in Damascus, but two weeks before the wedding, Francine stole her passport and flew to Athens, where she changed her name to Eve Abdi. At first, she worked as a belly dancer in a Lebanese restaurant, then she became the star of a cabaret show at the luxury Twelve Nymphs Resort. She was rumored to be the girlfriend of a shipping magnate and fled the country after receiving death threats from his wife.

  “She turned up in Paris, renting a studio apartment near Château Rouge and working as a dancer at the Crazy Horse. Her boyfriends at the time included a professional soccer player, a Nigerian restaurant owner, and her landlord.

  “A knee injury put an end to her dancing career. She worked at various jobs, including translation of Arabic newspapers and literature, and a stint as a salesgirl at the Samaritaine department store. A small role in a soft-porn film by the Italian filmmaker Alessandro Diavoli made her a minor cult celebrity and introduced her to the film’s backer, Gilbert Dessès. A Moroccan immigrant who’d amassed a fortune in import-export, Dessès had become a film producer (though he is credited as a writer on the film Una Notte a Parigi, 1974). He was seventeen years her senior and married to a French writer, Véronique Boutros.

  “Obtaining a divorce, Dessès married Eve Abdi, but the marriage was not a success. Neighbors complained of screaming and suspected physical abuse, and the police were called to the apartment twice. Eve began divorce proceedings, but before the divorce became final, Dessès died in a private plane crash in the Dolomites.”

  People keep dying in this woman’s life. Often in snow.

  “Eve Dessès inherited the Dessès estate. She became an ardent advocate for women’s rights in the Arab world, chairing fund-raisers and giving interviews. Over the next few years, she became involved with an American investment banker, P. Stanley Carruthers; a French publisher, Bertrand L’Huissier; and a French journalist, Alexi Barthès-Levinsky. Her comfortable life in Paris came to a halt with the publication of Véronique Boutros’s roman à clef, The Many Lives of a Femme Fatale. The scandalous bestseller depicted the amorous adventures of a ruthless woman who seduced and discarded men at will. While Eve Dessès was never actually named as the character in the book, it was widely assumed the two were one and the same.

  “The Many Lives of a Femme Fatale is no longer in print.

  “Eve left Paris for London, where she made the acquaintance of Constantine Ziyad, a Greco-Iraqi horse trainer for a Saudi Arabian prince. Through him, she met Eric Beaufort…”

  Stunned, I read Verbier’s report, unable to imagine this was the woman I knew.

  “She has maintained a relationship with Beaufort for the last four years. They meet in London, as well as in Paris. The relationship is not exclusive. Beaufort’s other girlfriends include a Russian model and a Milanese makeup artist. While in London, Eve Dessès has also been seen in the company of Trent Blackburn, an American sculptor.”

  I threw the report on the table.

  I’d thought I was in love with her. Now I didn’t know who I’d been in love with. I could make no sense of anything.

  Interesting that he felt so shocked. Just because there were other people in her life? Because her life was more exotic or scandalous than he’d expected?

  One single thought haunted me: this information wasn’t enough. I had to see Eve again, find out the truth about us. I bought an airplane ticket to London. Whether it was to win her back or perform an exorcism, I would let fate decide.

  I drummed my fingers on the table. This version seemed just as flimsy, albeit in a different way, as the other two. It was as if they were all sketches, cartoonish, opera buffa rather than sweeping sagas. So far, I couldn’t tell whether this was intentional or an error in tone. Perhaps it was my error—this was where translating got iffy.

  Or maybe they were supposed to be flimsy, like transparencies or thin coats of lacquer, meant to be layered on top of one another.

  I thought back over the previous versions and made a chart: in the first version, he marries Daphne in some kind of vaguely Oedipal fantasy in which Daphne mothers him just as his own mother dies. He eventually forgets about Eve and burns the report.

  In the second version, the Fear of Intimacy version, he and Daphne break up, Eve runs away, he stalks her, she turns out not to be Beaufort’s mistress, and they get back together after she confesses her feelings for him had overwhelmed her.

  The third version was shaping up to be the Femme Fatale story, what with her history as a dancer, her many lovers, and the scabrous novel. It had elements of Camille, and I was already anticipating someone dying and the obligatory deathbed scene: tears, confessions, swooning violins, a trip to a cemetery under gloomy skies…or it could veer into film noir, something with gangsters, guns, and nightclubs.

  I leaned back, making the chair creak, trying to picture Eve, what she looked like, what she wore. On childhood visits to Paris, I used to beg my grandmother to buy me French fashion magazines, claiming they would improve my vocabulary. My favorite was Vogue, with its thick, glossy paper and risqué photos. One photo stayed with me, a black-and white Guy Bourdin, which I saw again many years later, at an exhibit at the Jeu de Paume. It was of a woman in a flowing, printed chiffon dress, which fell off one shoulder and revealed her entire right breast. She was photographed from above, and her eyes were closed, her lips dark and shiny. I was twelve, and the photograph represented everything that was glamorous and mysterious to me about being a woman. That was Eve, I decided: sexy, a little undone, lost in another world.

  The clock said 12:34. I wondered if Bunny was up for a late lunch. Though his answering machine beeped, there was still no message. “Hey, it’s me. Are you around? Call me,” I said. I went to the kitchen and rifled through the cupboards. Definitely bare.

  I left another message. “I’m thinking Café Beaubourg. Maybe an exhibit afterward,” I said. “Please come if you’re free.”

  I walked through the Marais to the café by the Pompidou. There was no sign of Bunny, but a banner on the museum advertised a new exhibit on Surrealism. I ordered a quiche and a green salad, wolfing them down while reading the paper. Afterward, I spotted Bunny’s head outside, towering over a crowd gathered around a fire juggler.

  “You got my message,” I said, walking up to him. He grimaced.

  “I could barely hear you. That machine is a stupid piece of shit. Probably assembled by some exploited ten-year-old in Guangzhou after he ate a rancid fried turnip cake, poor kid, which explains why it is a piece of merde and I had to throw it out the window,” he fumed. He turned back to the juggler, his eyes following the flames.

  “That’s a lot of anger you’re carrying around there, big fella,” I remarked.

  “Insomnia,” he explained. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “I had a strange dream,” I said, falling into step next to him.

  “What was it about?” he asked. We stopped on the corner of the rue du Temple to watch a parade of clowns in rainbow suits zoom by on scooters. One clown with a pink Afro and extralong shoes grinned and tooted his horn at us. Bunny laughed and waved back, the worn, tired look erased from his face.

  “Bunny, promise you won’t go to Italy again,” I said instead, my tone urgent. He exhaled. It sounded like a gust of wind over the ocean.

  “I’m not going anywhere for a while, kid.”

  I checked into a small hotel in Chelsea and followed Eve around London. My own impulses puzzled me. Here I
was, hunting her like a predator.

  She frequented an exercise spa near Sloane Square. She ate in an Italian restaurant on Beauchamp Place. Her dentist was on Bond Street. I followed her to a bookstore in Hampstead.

  It seemed like the right moment to approach her, but through the window, I saw her greet a man in dirty jeans and cowboy boots the way I’d hoped she’d greet me, by flinging her arms around his neck. He whirled her around as other shoppers shot them disapproving looks. They walked out, arm in arm, oblivious to the world. I turned away to face a pyramid display of Kingsley Amis books.

  I got drunk in a nearby pub and crawled back to the hotel. Still drunk, I called the Claridge and demanded Eve. At first, they claimed not to know who she was. “Please tell Beaufort’s mistress that her former lover is here from Paris and demands to speak to her,” I said and gave them the name of my hotel.

  A banging on the door woke me up at two in the morning.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Eve asked when I opened the door. She brushed past me into the room.

  “I could ask you the same question,” I said. I could smell her perfume. Her pink coat was open over a silky black evening dress. A pulse beat in her neck. She didn’t seem like the same person who’d come with me to Venice. This person stared at me—

  I looked up “dévisagé” in the dictionary. I knew it meant to stare at someone, but it was a particular kind of stare, something hard, insolent, calculating, even intimidating. The word seemed to imply a stare that had an almost physical impact on its object, but the dictionary merely said “to stare.” None of the synonyms in the thesaurus—“to pierce,” “to pore over,” “to scrutinize,” “to peer at,” “to study”—felt right. Maybe I was reading too much into the French word. And yet, certain stares are shocking, and we don’t have a word for that in English. I made a note to ask Clara.