The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  “Genevieve has told me about your wonderful work,” she says, cutting right past any pleasantries, any inquiries in regard to health, any comments on the weather, even the state of the larger world.

  “I brought my board along to show you. I was hoping you would be interested,” Laurent replies, taking up her tone.

  “Indeed, I am extremely interested. I have been looking forward to learning about this very much. Please explain everything to me, slowly. I am not very good at understanding things in space. With time, I am much better.”

  Is Mlle Weil making a joke? In case she is, they should laugh. In case not, they ought not to. Genevieve says, “I am going to make tea.” She leaves the decision to laugh or not to laugh to her brother, whose face, often distorted, is sometimes incapable of clear signals, in this case, a mercy.

  Mlle Weil sits on the couch next to Laurent’s chair. He pulls the easel closer to both of them. He reaches into the box and takes out one of the blocks.

  “The blocks are six inches square. Any one of them can be placed into one of the depressions on the board, where it will rest secure because the board is leaning back. The block can be easily grasped and removed because it protrudes slightly above the face. This is important for the people I work with; the articulation of their fingers can be very limited.”

  “Yes, yes, go on,” says Mlle Weil, lighting a cigarette.

  “Would you like to try using the board?” he asks.

  Genevieve is happy to be in the kitchen, watching the baby play on the floor. She has seen the demonstration a thousand times. She continues to be deeply moved, enormously proud of the work her brother has done. Giving hope to hopeless people. Giving language to the entirely mute. Freeing them from a terrible prison. But she doesn’t need to see the demonstration yet again. Whereas every action of her beautiful baby—rolling a ball, hitting a pot with a spoon—seems to her entirely riveting.

  Mlle Weil, though, is entirely absorbed.

  “Mlle Weil is a good pupil. She has gone through three sets. She seems to be baffled. You would do better, Mlle Weil, if you had begun at the beginning and progressed to this point.”

  “Well, then, let’s start again.”

  “Next time,” Laurent says. “Next time we’ll begin from the beginning. For now, tell us about your time in New York.”

  Genevieve pours the tea. She passes the plate of peanut butter and crackers.

  “This is a new food. It is called peanut butter. It was just recently invented, meant to encourage people to eat less real butter.”

  Mlle Weil picks up a cracker, looks at it as if it were an exotic, possibly dangerous animal, and puts it back on the plate. She lights yet another cigarette. Genevieve sees that her two middle fingers are stained brownish yellow from nicotine.

  “I fear I have made a very great mistake in coming to New York. I did it because I feared my parents would not leave France without me, and I didn’t want them to be in danger. I, of course, know it is my duty to be in danger, but I also know it is not their duty. So while I am here, all I do is try to make contacts that will allow me to leave and go back to Europe. I have worked on a plan for parachuting nurses into very dangerous battle zones. At the moment, I am taking a training course in first aid myself, because I wouldn’t dream of proposing a scheme in which I was unable to take part. I have written to many people, seen many people. I am at the French consulate almost daily. I have been in correspondence with a very fine naval officer, an Admiral Leahy. I have written to President Roosevelt. His office wrote back, expressing interest, but offering no help. I am even in touch with a French naval officer on a ship in Cuba. If I had to pretend to be a Nazi to get back to Europe, I would do it.”

  Genevieve and Laurent do not even want to meet each other’s eyes. “We will talk later,” they say silently, without gesture, in the way of brothers and sisters. The baby fusses in Genevieve’s lap.

  “I myself have just had a little niece. My brother’s child. I call her Patapon. She is in Pennsylvania.”

  “Are you fond of babies, Mlle Weil?” asks Laurent.

  “Simone, you must call me Simone. Of course I am fond of babies. Do you think of me as that unnatural?”

  The real answer to that, Genevieve thinks, would be yes. It is the answer that Mlle Weil would give. But Laurent only laughs, and Genevieve says, “I’ll put him down for a nap.” She will never be able to call her Simone. She will address her as nothing. But in Genevieve’s mind she can only and forever be Mlle Weil.

  “Ah, then we mustn’t wake him. But I hope I will come back. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

  “Unless President Roosevelt agrees to meet with you,” says Laurent.

  “No, that will not happen, I’m afraid.”

  “He’s rather busy,” Laurent says.

  Genevieve makes a threatening face at him: Don’t tease, the face says, and he can read it, and is silent.

  “Tomorrow, then,” says Mlle Weil.

  Most people, Genevieve thinks, would wait to be invited. But Mlle Weil is not like most people. She is entirely herself. Unlike anyone else. Barely human. Barely inhabiting the world.

  OCTOBER 9, 1942

  She comes the next day, at teatime. Four o’clock. Genevieve wonders if she understands that tea is rationed and her coming for tea means there will be less for her and for Laurent. An old instinct of hospitality makes her hope that she does not realize it, and the same instinct brings to birth a clutch of shame that there is nothing good to serve with the tea. It should make things better that Genevieve knows Mlle Weil would probably not eat anything with her tea. She remembers that Mlle Weil ate almost nothing that was served to her by Genevieve’s mother, who was, she very well knows, a much better cook than she. She is used to believing that, but now she wonders: How would my mother cope with wartime New York? Would she do better with rationing than I? With almost no butter. With bread so soft you could squeeze it to nothing in your hand.

  “I see your brother is not here. I was hoping he and I could work again with his board.”

  Genevieve tells Mlle Weil that Laurent should be home shortly, but that he will probably not have his board with him, since he has to enlist a student to carry the board when he wants to bring it home.

  “That is too bad. I am disappointed,” she says.

  Genevieve is annoyed with Mlle Weil’s self-absorption, but she has to remind herself that no one who has not lived with a disabled person understands the endless calculations that must be made, how to ask for help without overstepping some kind of mark. A mark that is invisible, but once crossed, impossible to cross back over.

  “I am eager to talk to you about my plan to parachute nurses into battle zones. But we will wait for your brother.”

  This is my home, Mlle Weil, she wants to say, and you are taking it over, dictating terms. She hears Laurent’s key in the door, and her relief is enormous. She hates the thought of being alone with Mlle Weil.

  “I will just get the tea,” she says, and Mlle Weil waves her away like a distracting fly.

  When she comes in, she sees that Laurent is beginning to be bored, has nothing to say when Mlle Weil asks him if he knows a place she could train as a parachutist. She thinks of Mlle Weil’s clumsiness and she can’t imagine her being able to open a parachute. Laurent’s boredom can be a danger in a social situation. When he’s bored he becomes sarcastic. Ironic, he calls it: my knife of irony cutting through the fog of excess and confusion. He teases. And Mlle Weil is not a good person to be teasing.

  The doorbell rings. Genevieve doesn’t know who it is, but whoever it is, the air in the room will be changed, and there is very little air that is right for Mlle Weil to breathe. She answers the door, and her heart contracts.

  Joe and Lily. Of all people, the wrong ones to be in a room with Mlle Weil.

  Usually, Joe is the person she most wants to be in her home. He laughs, he makes Laurent laugh, he praises her hair, he throws the baby in the air and catches him as Laurent cannot
and as she is afraid to do.

  Joe owns a beauty parlor on the East Side. She would love to go there sometime, but he has told her it’s very “pricey” and so she would never suggest paying a visit.

  What will Mlle Weil make of Joe and Lily? Genevieve hopes she can count on him not to start talking about his great love, the miracle of his great love for the beautiful Lily, who enters on his arm, and then almost leaps across the living room to kiss Laurent. Lily, beautiful Lily, never seems to actually walk anywhere. She leaps, she floats, she dances. Lily, young as Genevieve knows herself no longer young, with her wonderful, full, red lips and her hair like a glossy chestnut and the whites of her eyes so clear, never reddened by fatigue, and her black emphatic eyebrows. Lily, Joe’s mistress, twenty-five years younger.

  Genevieve prays to a God in whom she cannot believe that he won’t talk about the wife he loathes, with whom he lives most of the time in an overlarge apartment in the Bronx, a section he calls Belmont (“ ‘Beautiful mountain,’ right, isn’t that French?”), his children grown and gone. That he won’t talk about the apartment upstairs he rents for Lily. “Imagine me, a grandfather and madly in love with this princess here.” And she hopes, desperately, that Mlle Weil won’t question whatever it is that Joe has in the paper sack, treats he always brings from “his cousin who owns a farm in New Jersey.” She and Laurent speculate that Joe has contacts in the black market, but they agree not to look into it too closely. She tells herself that Mlle Weil isn’t familiar enough with the ins and outs of American rationing to notice anything amiss.

  “And how’s the most beautiful mama in New York?” he says, kissing Genevieve on both cheeks.

  “Joe, this is our old teacher from France, Mlle Weil,” Laurent says.

  “Uh-oh, I’m in for it. My French is lousy. I got bumped from French class for throwing spitballs.”

  Mlle Weil blinks. “I do not know what spitballs are,” she says.

  “Spitballs, let me see. Well, you take a little piece of paper and you roll it up into a ball, and then to weigh it down, so that the paper holds together, you add a little spit, or maybe I should say saliva, and then you throw it across the room and try to hit someone in the back of the head.”

  Do you know who you are speaking to, Joe? Genevieve wants to say. This is Simone Weil, a very great intellectual, a very great thinker. And you are explaining spitballs to her. You are talking about spitting into paper just as we are about to eat.

  “That’s very interesting. Amusing,” Mlle Weil says. Genevieve knows that she is neither interested nor amused, but at least she isn’t offended, and that’s better than it might be. It is possible that the encounter will not be a disaster.

  Joe reaches into the sack and takes out four small wooden baskets of raspberries. Genevieve relaxes about her black market worries: fruits and vegetables aren’t rationed.

  She takes the raspberries into the kitchen and puts them in a pure white bowl, her favorite of all the pottery Howard’s mother has provided because it is plain. The others with their fussy pattern of rosebuds—of course she is grateful for them, she can see that they are well made, perhaps even called fine, but she would not have chosen them. But this, this pure white bowl, unornamented, well proportioned: she can think of it as hers. She puts her face to the beautiful dark red of the fruit, disappointed that there is no fragrance. She doesn’t have much opportunity for sensual pleasure these days. Except with her son. She breathes him in … the yeasty smell of his hair, when he is sweaty after sleep.

  “I think we can save our sugar ration; these are sweet as sugar. And speaking of sweet as sugar,” Joe says, squeezing Lily’s shoulders.

  To Genevieve’s enormous relief, Mlle Weil doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Aren’t these just beautiful?” Joe says, passing around the bowls of fruit. “Aren’t they just perfect? There’s got to be a God somewhere out there; this is the proof. But then there’s Hitler, so I guess it’s up for grabs.”

  “Are you interested in the proofs for the existence of God?” asks Mlle Weil.

  A sour taste comes to Genevieve’s mouth. She wants to beg her old teacher: Please, Mlle Weil, don’t begin with the ontological argument. Not with Joe.

  But Joe doesn’t miss a beat. “Nope, I guess I’m not. I just shut my eyes, hold my nose, and hope for the best.” He offers Mlle Weil a bowl of berries.

  “No thank you, I am not fond of fruit,” she says.

  Joe seems genuinely puzzled. “I never heard of that,” he says.

  “You see, Joe,” says Mlle Weil, “one of my shames is that many kinds of food disgust me. I have been very held back from being the kind of person I want to be because I seem to be susceptible to both fatigue and disgust.”

  Genevieve wants to rush across the room and put her hand over Mlle Weil’s mouth. Don’t talk like this, she wants to say. Nobody talks like this. Not to someone they’ve just met. You are impossible.

  But Lily, who usually says very little, responds immediately. “I can’t stand fat on meat,” she says. “And I am often so tired that I just want to die.”

  Mlle Weil nods. “It is very difficult to work through fatigue. What is your work?”

  Lily says she’s a beautician, and this is another English word that has to be explained to Mlle Weil. She nods and asks Joe about his work. He tells her he’s Lily’s boss but that he used to be a farmer, that that was what he really loved. That the raspberries came from his family’s farm in New Jersey, but his father lost the farm in the Depression and it was taken over by his cousins. That he is really happiest there, but he had to learn a trade so he got a job in a beauty salon that another one of his cousins owned. But that he really misses the farm. Genevieve has never heard him speak this way before.

  “I’m sorry you won’t be enjoying the fruit. But what you say makes a lot of sense,” he says. “Only I never heard anyone say it before. Fatigue and disgust. You’re completely right, Simone. It’s okay if call you that?”

  “Of course. And I will call you Joe.”

  “Sure thing. You know, you really know how to go to the heart of things.”

  And then she does something else unheard of, something that ought to be unacceptable. She asks Joe to read a poem. She reaches into the large pocket of her overlarge trousers and takes out a folded piece of paper, which Genevieve can see is covered by her tiny writing.

  “This is an English poem which I love very much. And I like your voice. Its inflections. It is a voice of kindness, a good man’s voice. I have wanted to have this poem read by a native English speaker, but I was embarrassed to ask. But with you, Joe, I couldn’t be embarrassed.”

  “Okay, Simone, but I don’t know if I really speak English. My first language was Sicilian, and I came to English by way of New Jersey and the Bronx. But here goes nothing.”

  “It will not be nothing,” says Mlle Weil. “Whatever it will be, it will not be nothing. It is a very beautiful poem by a great English poet, George Herbert, who lived in the seventeenth century.”

  “So he’s even older than me,” Joe says, putting on his glasses to read the poem.

  Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back

  Guiltie of dust and sinne.

  But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

  From my first entrance in,

  Drew near to me, sweetly questioning

  If I lack’d anything.

  “A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here.”

  Love said, “You shall be he.”

  “I, the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah, my deare,

  I cannot look on Thee.”

  Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

  “Who made the eyes but I?”

  “Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame

  Go where it doth deserve.”

  “And know you not,” sayes Love, “who bore the blame?”

  “My deare, then I will serve.”

  “You must sit down,” sayes Love, “and taste
My meat.”

  So I did sit and eat.

  The easy feeling in the room has gone. Genevieve sees that Joe is uncomfortable. He hasn’t understood the poem. Mlle Weil wants to talk about it, wants to explain it to him, wants to become his teacher, but he doesn’t want it. He wants to be upstairs with Lily.

  “I’m not much of a one for poetry, but it sure was swell meeting you,” he says, and Lily, embarrassed to be in the same room with poetry, says nothing, but lowers her beautiful eyes.

  “Tiens, I am once more late. My mother will be furious,” Mlle Weil says, and rushes out the door without saying goodbye.

  Genevieve picks up the cups and saucers, then sets them down and sits down herself on the sofa.

  “She’s impossible. Impossible. I could kill her for making Joe and Lily feel uncomfortable.”

  “Well, yes, GeGe, he was perhaps uncomfortable for a moment. But he will remember this time, remember meeting her, remember what she allowed him to think, what she allowed him to say. Lily, I think, will especially remember it. Remember how the workers she taught loved Mlle Weil, how Mama told us she would carry fifty pounds of books on her back so they would be able to read Greek poetry and geometry. Perhaps if she has more time with Joe she will convert him to Metaphysical poetry. You heard what he said—she goes to the heart of things.”

  “Only some people have hearts of stone, perhaps no hearts at all. And so yes, Laurent, her students loved her, the workers loved her, but many people hated her. Hated her with an almost insane violence, and sometimes for no reason.”

  “Joe and Lily are among the kindest people in the world.”