Lessons in French: A Novel

by Hilary Reyl

  I picked up the snapshot of my parents and heard my mom from years ago. “I can’t handle both of you. It’s for the best. You will be better off in the long run with your cousins. And won’t it be wonderful for you to learn French? Daddy never really learned, you know, and he’s always wished he had.”

  “Yes, French.” My dad’s voice was not strong. “A big regret. Why the hell your grandfather never spoke it to me will always be a mystery. It’s a good thing Jacques was a patient kid, best cousin a guy could dream up. Spent two of the greatest summers of my life horsing around with him, each one trying to speak the other’s language. You’ll see, he’s a lovely man. And he will teach you to talk like a novel. I’m so proud of my little girl . . . French. It’s the one that got away.”

  I had gotten the language quickly, and I had had more time to practice than anyone anticipated because my father outlived the doctors’ predictions.

  I remember Étienne saying to me, over his shoulder as he passed me on a bicycle, that I was hanging around longer than I was supposed to. I’d been with his family almost a year. “They told us you’d only be here for a few months. Tu traines.” Literally, you’re dragging. You little beggar.

  We were riding rented bicycles in the gardens of Versailles. His parents had thought it would be a nice cultural outing.

  There were daffodils everywhere, but it was still cool, and the long formal lines of poplars rippled in a May wind. The enormous château, reflected in water everywhere, looked like a gilt prison we had somehow escaped to race along these sandy paths past ornate statues, secret flower patches and temples of delight in marble and sandstone. Étienne’s parents had said they would meet us at one o’clock for a picnic in front of the Petit Hameau, Marie-Antoinette’s “rustic retreat” where she once played at raising sheep. There they promised to explain to me why this place demonstrated the absolute historical necessity of the French Revolution.

  Perhaps Étienne was annoyed at having to spend an afternoon en touriste with his earnest American cousin instead of prowling the streets with his friends, and that is why he would not wait for me when I stopped to tie my shoe. “You’re dragging again.”

  All I wanted was to belong with somebody, to feel a presence at my side in that spring chill. Instead, I got lost in a green maze trying to get to Marie Antoinette’s farm. When I finally did find “my family” behind a mound of lavender—Solange, kneeling on a small picnic blanket, buttering baguettes for sandwiches, Jacques buried in a paperback of La Cousine Bette—I was crying.

  Solange began unpacking sliced ham and cheese. “Katie, there you are! Te voilá! We thought you had decided to try a different restaurant.”

  Marie Antoinette’s village and model farm were kept weirdly clean and charming. The sheep looked overfluffed. It was creepy, I thought, to be picnicking in the shadow of the toy farm of a beheaded queen. No matter how charmant it was.

  Étienne was sprawled in the grass beside his bike, looking not proud. I dared to suspect he felt sorry for me.

  I felt utterly rejected. I hated my parents for sending me to France. I hated Versailles, full of ghosts. I hated this cold air. I hated these ham sandwiches. Too much bread and yellow butter and not enough meat because Solange and Jacques were saving for their retirement house. Always saving. I wanted to go home.

  But, when I called that night, Mom reminded me that she and Dad had talked it over many times and it was for the best that I stay in France.

  When she passed the receiver to Dad, he said, “I’m delighted to think of you making your way in Europe. Very proud. They tell me your accent is perfect. What I wouldn’t give . . .” For as long as he could still speak, he repeated those exact words in every phone call. “They tell me your accent is perfect.”

  seventeen

  With farcical timing, Christie, the Luxembourg jogger, and I both arrived at Les Deux Magots at precisely 6:30.

  Agreeing that it was warm enough this evening to drink outside, we sat beneath the evergreen awning, each with one eye across the place to the Gothic entrance of St-Germain-des-Prés and the other on our fellow consumers.

  “Je vous écoute,” said the waiter.

  Christie ordered a coupe de champagne and so did I, wincing at the price on the menu, promising myself to have oatmeal for dinner that night. Frenchwomen, Christie remarked, don’t sip wine before meals, especially among themselves, but you often see them drinking champagne.

  What about Kirs, I asked?

  Déclassé! She laughed a “get whatever you want but not really” laugh. Her ponytail was smoothed back and low. She wore a cropped and fitted blazer over a camisole, tapered pants, and suede loafers. She even had lipstick on. She could be a Parisienne if she weren’t

  so tall and broad-shouldered. People probably thought she was a Scandinavian model.

  It was too much for me to aspire to, so I fell into a state of admiration, stunned that she took such an interest in me. I lived in the greatest neighborhood. My legs looked so hot in my miniskirt. She loved my cowboy boots. And it was cool to have another attractive girl to hang out with in Paris. She’d have to introduce me to the bande of boys she had met through work.

  The boys were BCBG, “You know, bon chic bon genre.”

  I nodded. Because BCBG implied breezy entitlement, the closest English classification was “preppy,” but “preppy” suggested a ruggedness that was nowhere to be found in cinched and pressed jeans, impeccable shoes, heavy cologne and perfect knowledge of a codified set of twirling dance steps called le rock.

  These boys were a lot of fun, said Christie, and you never had to pay for anything with them. It was a cardinal rule. Not even the candy that the dame pipi sold in the bathrooms at Les Bains Douches, a club in an old bathhouse. I was going to love it. “So how did you get such a fabulous job? I’m jealous. You must be totally connected.”

  “No, no, it was random. Just had a roommate who knew Lydia’s daughter, and happened to write a letter at the right time. I know no one, I swear. And the job’s not as fantastic as it sounds. I run a lot of errands. It’s hard to figure out what the substance of it really is, if it’s about German reunification or walking the dog. I get really anxious about my priorities. And I had to pretend I had money to get it because it pays nothing. When I don’t eat with the Schells, I live on cereal.”

  “Don’t tell me about exploitation and errands. Or sexual harassment, which isn’t even a term here. They call it appreciation, and, to be honest, I don’t mind being appreciated up to a point. You have to be comfortable in your skin to function in France as a woman. You can be uptight about your femininity, but only about preserving it. And I can’t get bent out of shape because I can’t afford not to work.”

  “Really?”

  “Believe me. I only look like this because I played all the preppy sports at Yale and I have a good eye. I’ve stopped trying to tell the BCBG boys that I’m not rich, because they don’t believe anything that doesn’t make sense to them, which is part of their charm obviously. They think I live near Pigalle because I want to make some kind of statement and rebel against my parents. Most of them still live at home. You’ll see. You’ll meet them. I already have one picked out for you. His name is Sébastien, but we all call him Bastien. He’s a count.”

  I wondered what Bastien looked like, felt a pang of disloyalty to my beautiful and faintly tragic Olivier.

  Our champagne came and we tchin-tchinned. I had to look her in the eye, she said, twinkling, otherwise the Parisians would think I was a porc.

  “Thanks for saving me from myself!” I glanced around the cobblestone square, framed by the church, the boulevard St-Germain, and a host of tiny streets. The champagne flooded me with a sense that no avenues were closed to me yet. I was young. Any of the people whose eyes I was catching in the café, any of the petites rues or grands boulevards could take me someplace.

  My gaze rested
on a nearby table, where two pert young women were working their neat way through triangles of raspberry tart. Their hands had swirling energy as they talked and chewed. The raspberries took leap after balletic leap into their small mouths. “C’est pas possible!” one was saying as the other lifted a beautiful, even forkful of pâte sablée and crème pâtissière and framboises.

  “You’re wondering how they do it, right?”

  I hadn’t been wondering anything, just taking it all in, but I nodded. “How do they?” How do they what, exactly?

  “Mainly this stuff called bio-lite. They’ll spend two or three days a week drinking nothing but this disgusting dissolved powder that totally cleans you out. I tried it once. I thought I was going to die. And they do things like chew up nuts at cocktail parties and spit them into napkins. They’re not opposed to bulimia, but controlled bulimia, not the binging kind.”

  “Really? They don’t look that messed up to me.”

  “It’s not considered messed up here. That’s the difference. What we would call a pathology in the U.S., they consider part of their hygiene, part of making sure you stay attractive, part of your duty to yourself. In the U.S., we turn everything into a medical condition. Like pregnancy. You’re pregnant in the U.S., they treat you like a sick person. Here, you’re a woman who’s had sex. It’s a whole different take. We think extreme dieting is gross. I even do. I can’t help it. It’s cultural. They just don’t see it that way.”

  I was so impressed with this absolute explanation that it didn’t occur to me that eating disorders and pregnancy might not be equivalent. “I see what you mean,” I said. “That’s so interesting.”

  The young women had finished their pretty tarts and looked blissfully undisturbed by the three days of bio-lite fasting ahead of them. They were lighting cigarettes.

  “It kind of turns our notions of empowerment on their heads.” Christie finished her champagne. “What are you doing later tonight? Do you want to go out? You look fine in those clothes, and I can do your makeup chez moi. But you have to promise to let me pluck your eyebrows. Brooke Shields is no longer the French ideal. We’re meeting for drinks at Bastien’s in the Seventeenth around eight-thirty or nine, then we’ll be whisked to dinner somewhere. Come on.”

  • • •

  At Pigalle, Paris starts to go uphill toward Montmartre. Christie lived right off the busy red-light square on a tiny steeply angled street. To get there, we passed an old strip club called La Nouvelle Eve. The crêpe-vending booth outside had smudged glass, industrial-sized vats of Nutella and cheap jam, and a ready-made stack of crêpes. “Tourist crêpes,” she whispered as we passed. “No self-respecting travelo would touch one.”

  In my childhood memory, Pigalle was sparkling with transvestites, gaily begging the question, “but who am I really?” Now they all looked exhausted to me, much older and calcified in their roles, like listless extras playing footmen in a period film. They had no energy for questions.

  The sex shops looked fake. The men mumbling “salopes” as we walked by sounded bored. Colors were faded everywhere and the trash looked ancient. Tourists were asking each other if they knew how to find the Moulin Rouge up the hill. A few thin and shedding trees were surrounded at the base by circular iron grids, metal doilies full of decaying leaves and yellow Métro tickets and cigarette butts.

  “They’re going to tear all this down soon,” Christie said knowingly. “Developers.”

  But as soon as we turned past the clouded crêpe booth and faced up the narrow street, things came alive, petits commerces, a horse butcher, a crèmerie. Clay chimneys piped up and down. The cobblestones were shit-smudged, and there was a peeling poster for a “live sex” show on the wall by Christie’s door.

  Christie did not have an electric keypad on which to type a code that would let her into a cour intérieure. She had a lot of heavy keys.

  Her apartment was dark and small, but she lit it dramatically with colored bulbs. The accents here were exotic. “I’m shedding the preppy thing.” A flood of pink light over the dressing table illuminated all sorts of cosmetics nestled in silk-lined baskets or hung on ribbons by the mirror. There was an overflowing hat tree and a spangled Indian bedspread, a bursting gold-lit closet. It took a few moments to understand that behind the silver curtain in the corner was a shower.

  This place was so different from anything I would have pictured when I encountered the jogger in the Luxembourg that I wished I could draw it, not, as I usually did, to faithfully record some line of beauty, but to remind myself that things weren’t always what they seemed.

  From a silk pouch, Christie produced a pair of tweezers. “Eyebrows. We’re going to make them even more beautiful. Sit down on the stool.”

  • • •

  The bande was certainly nice enough, assured and well mannered. The count, Bastien, had a handsome fleshy face and a smile that crinkled his eyes into deep-set stars. His hair was short and dark, his jeans tightly belted in snakeskin, or maybe alligator, with a buckle in the shape of an H that I would later identify as Hermès. I assumed Christie had told him about me because there seemed to be no question but that he was my escort for the evening. And he fit so effortlessly and solicitously into the role, making me feel that whatever I said and did was worthy of his leathery smile, that I felt I had stepped into a ballet to which I miraculously knew all the steps.

  It was true that we women didn’t pay for anything. “Tu plaisantes,” laughed Bastien when I tried to buy him a drink. “You’re joking?” We were at an overpriced and mediocre Italian restaurant where the members of the bande were well known and where the waiters looked from the women to the men and winked. I learned over dinner that socialists were idiots, “débiles mentaux,” and that Americans were puritanical but that I was obviously an exception because my French was so good that I could pass, they said. “C’est rare!” “C’est exceptionnel!”

  After dinner, we careened in a black Mercedes and a silver Citroën of the armored crustacean variety to the Bains Douches nightclub. There was a dense crowd outside, but we pushed through and the velvet rope broke for us like water.

  Although it was past midnight, I did not feel tired, only ghostly. Inside, several of the boys had bottles of vodka and whiskey with their names on them in a glass case. These cost a fortune and explained the miracle of our seamless entry.

  Bastien kept my glass full, but not too insistently because I did not look like the kind of American who could swig her alcohol, which was not a bad thing, he whispered with a gently ironic glance at Christie doing shots with his best friend Christian, a tall, thin doe-eyed creature whose lashes kissed when he blinked in the strobing dance lights.

  There was a Stéphane and a Georges and a Charles and a Pierre-Louis, appearing to me as a gyrating mass of signet rings and starched jeans and sweaty temples. At one point, Pierre-Louis invited me to dance to a Psychedelic Furs song and began to twirl me in and out in the preordained fashion that had always baffled me. I burst out laughing. So did he. “She does not know how to dance le rock!” the boys chorused to one another, not so much mocking as astonished to discover my exoticism when I had given off so many signs that I could be one of them. They proceeded to take turns trying to teach me their moves. Christie doubled over.

  We stayed until sunrise, ending up in a shallow tiled pool by one of the dance floors, plunging, then standing to sway in knee-deep water. It was hard for me to believe that I was inside this scene, arm in arm with strangers in wild celebration while my heart wished to be with someone else. But I was having a good time.

  After the club, somebody knew where there was a twenty-four-hour bakery and we drove very fast to pick up croissants to take back to Bastien’s. His parents were away in Deauville.

  I sunk with a cup of coffee into a caramel-colored leather sofa, looking at a terrible Georgia O’Keeffe rip-off of an electric blue orchid. There was a stack of Madame Figaro
magazines on a side table, a scattering of Venetian ashtrays, a white baby grand piano and wall-to-wall carpeting.

  I started to compare this tasteless comfort to the eclecticism at Lydia’s and these soft and careless philistine boys to my complicated Olivier. Despite their astronomical bottles of alcohol and their vulgar furniture, I had responded to the ways of Christie’s bande without thinking, the way you respond to a pop song, and I was now vaguely ashamed.

  Olivier’s image began to haunt me. I felt the shadow of the Marais hotel sheets over our two faces. I basked in the sympathy of his gaze at my description of waiting in the Nineteenth Arrondissement for my father to die. I had explained that as the time dragged out into one year and then another, Paris came alive with signs that he might be going to survive after all, that Mom was nursing him to health. They simply didn’t want me to come home until they were sure everything was perfectly fine. They were responsible

  that way.

  I read proof of my father’s miraculous recovery in everything, the ink marks on used Métro tickets, the arrangements of the crocuses and tulips at the park, the number of deux-chevaux cars that I passed on the walk to school, the looks my cousins gave me, the pattern of my salad leaves.

  “I know what you mean,” Olivier had whispered through my tears. “Our lives have not been easy.” And then, with a few strokes of his body, he had transformed all my anxiety into a predawn orgasm.

  Why did Olivier have to work so hard and so far away while these garçons enjoyed life in Paris in their parents’ plush apartments? Why had he lost everything that they so blithely had? Olivier was a disinherited prince, working his way to what others came by effortlessly. Although we were from very different worlds, he too had to create his own luck.