Lessons in French: A Novel

by Hilary Reyl

  “But you haven’t seen them yet? Not since you’ve been here this time?”

  “How did you know?”

  He smiled indulgently, tossed back a curl. “I know something about moving on. You’ll look back eventually.”

  “There’s something kind of martyr-like about them that makes me sad. Maybe because they are so pure. Solange has these firm, busy arms, always in motion like the kids she taught. And Jacques is quieter, with a dark mustache and a slow smile and an absolute certainty that Balzac was the greatest writer in the history of the world. He knows it’s funny—he’s onto himself—but it does nothing to shake his conviction. They took me in when my dad was sick and made me so much part of the family that I felt kind of guilty for how attached I got to them, disloyal to my own parents.”

  “But your own parents sent you away.”

  “They had to,” I almost snapped. I stared into the olive oil shining up from my plate. Why had my parents left me in Paris for so long? In a trough between two waves? Learning French? Life had traded me fluency for my father’s last touch. Not the bargain I would have chosen. But, as Mom would say, there you have it. Instead of asking so many questions, go make something of your gifts.

  “Sorry,” Olivier said. “You shouldn’t call them until you feel ready.”

  No, I wanted to protest. Ready or not, I was going to call them later today.

  “Although you may not get around to much of anything,” he continued, “after Lydia gets here. It’s hard to get out of her orbit once you get caught. She and the family can be pretty overwhelming. They can erase everything else.”

  He told me that I would surely be conscripted to deliver letters between the offices of husband and wife, as they preferred to speak through third parties.

  I replied that while Lydia remained mysterious to me, so different from anyone I had ever dealt with, Clarence was quite knowable despite being so erudite. He never appeared shocked by my ignorance. He often liked what I had to say. And he was available to me.

  Olivier warned that Clarence could be devious and that I should be careful.

  “You’re wrong there,” I said, refusing to get upset. “But then again he’s wrong about you too.”

  “Oh, so he talks about me, does he?” Olivier grinned, suspending a fork full of penne.

  “I’m sure it’s complicated,” I tried to sound light and knowing. “I mean, you’re dating his daughter. Fathers and daughters can be close.”

  “I’m going to break up with Portia,” he declared, putting down his uneaten bite.

  I dropped my fork. The wall between us crumbled to lace. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Why do you think, Kate?”

  I thought of Portia’s voice, so taut and wiry, its oblique mentions of Olivier, never by name, making sure his luggage was in order, managing his shirts, having me go to Hédiard for a gift bag of foie gras and several jars of the jam of a green plum impossible to find Stateside. “Reines Claudes, they’re called. It can’t be any other kind of jam. And get goose foie gras, not duck. One bloc with truffles and one without. Make sure they put a bow on the bag. A red bow. The color is important. You can leave it on the dressing table in my room.”

  The dressing table.

  “Does Portia know you’re breaking up with her?” I asked.

  “On some level. She can’t not. But you must have noticed that the truth is not exactly an obstacle in this family. Portia has inherited this sort of sad romantic version of her parents spoiledness. She’s really not a bad kid, and I care about her. But I can’t do it anymore. I can’t take the sense of entitlement, the cluelessness, the assumption that her jet-set intellectual parents make her someone. She’s always saying someone in italics to indicate all the people she hangs out with by proxy and all the parents at the New York prep school she went to. And I think she thinks I will be someone too by virtue of some inherent prestige. It’s all very flattering and pathetic and I want out. Besides,” he smiled, “I’ve met another girl.”

  In spite of myself, the idea that I might be that girl washed through me, stunningly warm. I took a sip of water, choked, looked away from him.

  “Wait. You’re not responsible for anything,” he said. “Don’t get that guilty wrinkle in your forehead.”

  Was he already familiar with my facial expressions? Of course I was guilty. This conversation was wrong. But I was also elated. These were two feelings that should not exist in the same picture, a travesty. I was out of my depth.

  He pressed on. “All I meant was, you opened my eyes that day we walked around together. You’re making your own way as your own someone and I’m impressed by that. You’re also very, very pretty. You have eyelashes like tarantula legs. And I’d love to spend a little more time with you before I disappear into the mines.”

  The only release I could find was laughter, which he took as encouragement because he made me promise to meet him in the Marais the following evening at seven. There was a tiny horseshoe-shaped bar he liked, called Le Petit Fer à Cheval.

  I said I would be there. I refrained from asking why we couldn’t meet tonight. Now that I was on this insane path, I wanted heedlessly to find out where it led. I was scared, and preferred to know the worst rather than be in the dark.

  After lunch, he kissed me briefly on the lips.

  We walked our separate ways down the rue du Cherche-Midi. I had to get back to my time lines for Lydia. He did not say where he was headed. I turned to look at him a couple of times, his back maneuvering through autumn’s trench-coated crowd, shouldering the duffel into which he had packed the clean shirts and the gifts from Portia, which now seemed pathetic rather than intimidating, her desperate stab at buying his waning affections.

  Much to Clarence’s irritation, I had virtually emptied the “petty cash” drawer to pay for these presents. “Portia asked you to do what?! Poor thing . . .”

  ten

  Moments after I slipped back into the apartment, the phone rang. Clarence handed me the receiver in the kitchen. “A young man for you,” he said.

  I was confused. The only young man I knew who had this number was Olivier, and Clarence would surely have recognized Olivier’s voice. I supposed my mother would have given the number to my ex, Peter, if he’d asked, but I couldn’t think what reason he would find to call me long-distance. He had never shown any urgency toward me. Why now? The mere thought of his indifference made me sure that no boy would ever telephone. There must be some mistake.

  It was my cousin Étienne. He seemed to feel none of my trepidation about our cruel past. There was a familiarity in his voice that suggested memories on his part that had nothing to do with mine. He sounded as though we had always bantered playfully and were simply taking up where we had left off. He was, it turned out, a very good actor.

  “Alors, c’est chic ta nouvelle adresse.”

  “Assez chic, oui.” My new address was chic enough.

  Who was this lady I was working for in such a posh part of town? Was she rich? Did she buy lots of jewelry? Because Étienne was about to start a jewelry line, part precious, part objets trouvés.

  Very postmodern, I said.

  Did he actually want to engage with me? Why was I so afraid? I was no longer the little girl he could tease in a Paris that belonged to him.

  He sang the word “postmodern” back to me several times before he declared that he would call his jewelry line “PoMo” and thanked me for the inspiration although he wasn’t exactly sure what the term meant (I did not believe him) because he hadn’t gone to college (probably true). He hadn’t even gotten his high school baccalaureate. Had I heard? His parents were devastated. They had always seen him as a fonctionnaire, somewhere deep in the postal system or maybe a prof de gym. They hoped he would follow them back to his roots in Orléans, build his own little house down the street from theirs. Here he made hims
elf laugh very loud, and I could see his eleven-year-old neck arched way back, his tongue halfway out and shining.

  At ten in the morning, he sounded like he was on speed. I understood why Solange and Jacques were worried.

  “I’m just home from a big night,” he said. “Hey, we should go clubbing together sometime.”

  “With pleasure.”

  So, he was going to court me now. How odd.

  “Yes,” he said, “you’ve always been eager to please.”

  Was it that simple? I winced.

  This was the slender and harsh boy with the pitch-dark lashes who had made it clear that he did not want to know me in the schoolyard, me, the milk-fed American cousin who did not know the élastique routines of the other girls and had visible knots in her hair and who studied so hard that his parents never stopped asking why he couldn’t be more like me. They pointed to the big books I read and my promising drawings. He was forced to be polite to me because I was a pauvre fille, a poor girl who was losing her father. Didn’t he know how lucky he was, they whispered, not to be abandoned? Mais elle me barbe, he said. She bores me.

  Did he remember that I had gotten lice and he had called me dégueulasse? Did he recall that I would do anything for a chocolate éclair, even slip him the answers to a math test or hold hands for ten seconds with the dirty old man on the bench outside the hardware store while his friends watched? Did he know now that it wasn’t for the éclair but for love of him that I had been willing to prove so brave? I had simply been more mortified by my love than by the base act of accepting a pastry for my favors. Shame is good cover.

  Now, though, over this phone eleven years later, he wanted to know me.

  What was I doing this weekend?

  He was having un petit dîner chez lui on Friday night. Would I come?

  Two nights from now. I took a deep breath and asked what I could bring.

  He said he loved champagne and that it would be great to see me after all this time. He hoped I was still cute. He gave me an address. The closest Métro was Bastille. And by the way, did the woman I worked for shoot publicités?

  Absolutely not, I said. She’s not that kind of photographer. Then I told him I loved champagne too, although I’d only had the real kind once or twice. Maybe we would discover some affinities after all.

  Once I had seen him, I would call his parents and make a plan to visit them in Orléans.

  eleven

  That evening, Clarence sent Claudia and me to a Pasolini movie about Christ’s life, scored with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He said it was heartbreakingly beautiful. He wanted to know how we would react.

  As the movie played, black and white, lyrical, unstudied, cast with ordinary Italians playing peasants who were at once beatific and disillusioned, I recounted it to Olivier in my head. I saw his eyes react, his chin cocked in its listening pose. I had never been so focused—or so distracted.

  Several times, the heat of Claudia’s gaze lit my face, and I swiveled to see her expression like that of the people on the screen watching Jesus suffer. Their eyes deepened to the swell of the gorgeous choruses, so that they looked both infinitely wise and clueless. Claudia’s pupils burned me with the same idiot understanding, blessed somehow, but also brutally judgmental.

  I squirmed. Yet I was touched by her attention. I knew she could sense an obsession under my skin. I wanted to describe it to her, to tell her about Olivier, to begin to forge a real bond. And even though I couldn’t talk to her, her growing friendship was a comfort.

  “What did you think of the film?” Claudia asked at a traffic light on the way home.

  “Clarence was right. It was beautiful. The music and the faces were so full.”

  She kept staring at me, waiting for me to break through my own babble.

  “It seemed so innocent that I feel like it was kind of deceptive,” I blurted.

  “Is it bad to be deceptive?” She was pushing me to confess whatever my secret was. I wanted to believe it was out of a growing intimacy, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “It’s hard not to be a little deceptive,” I owned. “I’m not talking about lying really. Just that you can’t always bare your feelings like the people in that movie. You can’t be moved all the time. For me, it would be like I was always drawing, having this intense scruple about getting it exactly right. With no blurs. I’d go crazy. Life isn’t like that.”

  “Ah, but you also go crazy in life with too much hiding. I think you will learn to be more relaxed as you get older, Katie.”

  “I’m trying.” By this point, I had little idea what we were talking about, only the conviction that she was boring into my soul, and that, no matter how well-meaning she was, and how much I enjoyed her companionship, I wanted my soul to myself for the time being.

  “I know you are trying,” she said gently.

  Deciding perhaps that she had gone far enough for one evening, she let me be the rest of the way home.

  Grateful for the simple sounds of traffic and footfall along the boulevard Raspail, I returned to my inner arguments about Olivier.

  It wasn’t as if by going to the Fer à Cheval tomorrow, I might betray a friend. Portia was not my friend. She was a thin and imperious telephone voice with high boots, a blond face in an expensive frame in a house in New York City that had nothing to do with me. And Olivier did not love her. He’d made that very clear.

  I told myself that seeing Olivier wasn’t wrong. It was my own business. If I were to give in to the temptation to confide in Claudia right now, she would tell Clarence, and I had a strong feeling that no matter how much he liked me he would not be sympathetic to my falling into the arms of his daughter’s ex-boyfriend.

  Clarence and Claudia seemed the types to condone a romantic secret. Only not my particular one.

  When Claudia and I arrived at the apartment, she made a lamb couscous, with raisins and chickpeas, while I clipped and read articles on Germany. I was familiar now with the names of the players, with Kohl and Honecker.

  What had we thought of the Pasolini? asked Clarence as we ate. Did we like cinéma vérité? Did it make us feel truthful?

  I said that there was something infuriating about the gorgeous actors: they were totally innocent and yet they had an almost creepy all-knowing quality, kind of like children in a horror movie.

  Again, Claudia’s gaze seared me with suspicious concern.

  Clarence laughed. “Horror, you say? Not bad. And Claudia,” he turned to her as to the next pupil, “what did you think?” His tone with her was no different from with me. We were his little girls.

  “I think what’s interesting is the way the power of chance plays such a strong role in Christ’s destiny. He doesn’t have our modern egotistical notion of self-determination. He follows a path.”

  Happenstance and fate, I was learning, were among Clarence’s favorite themes. He expressed annoyance at the common assumption that we do everything for a reason, however conscious, that we are actually capable of guiding ourselves through life and therefore have most of the responsibility for our situations.

  He thought that way too much power was attributed these days to psychology. As he experienced more and more of life—he was in his fifties now—he felt a growing respect for the random as well as for Greek tragedy. So much, indeed most, of what happens is beyond our control, he argued. And it is both self-aggrandizing and self-flagellating to maintain otherwise.

  I agreed with him and gave an example straight from the mouth of my cousin Jacques: “Madame Bovary was such a victim of circumstance. She only committed adultery because of the limits of her situation. How can you blame her?”

  “Precisely!” There was a happy camaraderie in his voice, the professor letting the student in.

  “Of course,” he continued, “I’m not advocating passivity, per se. That would be preposterous. No, not passivity, b
ut there is a wisdom to acknowledging fate, and the modern world is losing sight of it, don’t you agree? Claudia, you’re awfully quiet.”

  “You know what I think,” she sighed with mock mystery. “Or at least you should.”

  I told them I had never had a couscous before, that it hadn’t been in Solange’s repertoire and that it was delicious.

  “I’ll teach you how to make it,” said Claudia.

  The phone rang. Clarence picked up, grinned, then frowned. “No, my dear, I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing Olivier off for good, but his things are gone and he’s left the keys, thank God. I believe he’s in a hotel for a couple of days before he flies to New York, but I’m not privy to his schedule, nor do I wish to be.” His frown deepened as he listened. I could hear the higher tones of Portia’s voice. “No, Portia. I have no idea what he said. Would you like to speak to Katie? She handled it, I believe. Or else Madame Fidelio dealt with him. As I say, I wasn’t here.” He rolled his eyes in Claudia’s and my direction. The notes trickling from the receiver grew shriller. “Listen, Portia, I love and admire you and I have to tell you that boy is an idiot and you are better off without him.”

  Had Olivier done it already? Had he told Portia goodbye over the phone?

  Clarence grimaced. “I tell you I don’t know. Here, I’ll pass you to Katie.”

  I braced myself but was saved by Portia’s shriek of “Don’t you dare!” sailing out into the kitchen.

  I understood her. Why would she want to share her heartbreak and humiliation with a total stranger?

  When Clarence hung up, he clucked, shook his head, sat down to his couscous. “Portia says,” he chuckled sadly, “that she senses Olivier pulling away.” He popped a chickpea into his mouth. “Rubbish, I say. Rubbish, Portia.”