by Hilary Reyl
“Good morning,” he said.
We mumbled greetings.
“Cheer up, you two,” he yawned. “This seems like a sudden bloody nuisance for Claudia, but in truth it’s the best thing that could have happened to her, her committee threatening to pull the plug, as they say. She’s basically finished, you know, and her committee knows it. We all do. It’s now a question of doing the conclusion and formalizing some odds and ends. Then, she will have her degree and get on with her life.”
“Yes, I will get on with my life, won’t I, Clarence?” She shoved the last folder into her carry-on. “I have also told Katie about Francesco being sick.”
“Yes, but that’s not the reason you’re going.” His composure slipped. He sounded irritable. “No, the important thing is that you have been given an ultimatum, which is crucial to your career, my dear Claudia.”
“Yes, I suppose that is the true version of events.”
“It’s not a bloody version! It is the thing that is happening. Paris is nothing but procrastination for you. We’ve been over this.”
I had never heard Clarence bicker with Claudia before. Their arguments had always been playful and theoretical. Perhaps he realized this too because he apologized.
“I’m very sorry, you two,” he said. “I’ve had an awful bout with insomnia and I’m afraid I’m going to have to go back to bed. This happens to me from time to time. So, I’m not ‘in my plate today,’ as the frogs say. You’ll have to excuse me. And I can’t find my glasses. Claudia, you haven’t seen my glasses?”
“Why would I have seen them?” Claudia hissed. “Why don’t you look in your own bedroom?”
“Right, I’ll just go lie down now.”
Claudia went to the bathroom.
Instead of going back to bed, Clarence motioned me into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and told me that I should know that Claudia was quite unstable, if brilliant, and that in order for her to have a career, which she richly deserved, she would have to have her energies channeled by forces far stronger than ours. He was not up to the task, and he was not her official adviser. It was crucial that she build the kind of academic alliances she was going to need in the States. We couldn’t care for her forever. No, the time was right. Besides, he was on sabbatical to finish his own book. He had deadlines. He couldn’t afford to be distracted like this anymore.
“Well, I’ll miss her,” I said.
“She’ll miss you too. In fact, I hope you will help her to the Métro station. I would, but I feel awful, and Lydia’s on her way home so I have to pull myself together somehow.”
“Lydia’s coming today?”
“Yes, she called. She’s decided to descend on us early. She needs to start processing all her German photos. The nightmare resumes this evening.” He laughed.
“Oh.” It would be bad form to laugh with him, but I managed half a smile before I changed the subject. “It’s so horrible about Claudia’s friend with AIDS.”
“Oh, that. She’s conflating things, as usual. She has mentioned the sick friend once or twice, but, in all honesty, he may be made-up. Her grasp on reality is hardly firm, you realize. The AIDS story is simply heightening the drama of it all. Claudia is a bit crazy, you know, a bit touched.”
I wanted to shake him. Until this morning, I had assumed Claudia was one of us. But today she was a crazy distraction and we wanted to get rid of her and good riddance. Had she been a burden this whole time? Had Clarence been desperate all the while for her to leave so that he could concentrate? In my fantasy that she was in love with him and perhaps he a little bit with her, had I completely missed the point?
Claudia was out of the bathroom. She was ready to go. She strapped her duffel bag to a set of traveling wheels and slung her carry-on over her shoulder. She and Clarence had a stiff hug by the door.
As she and I set off across the courtyard, Madame Fidelio, clutching an armful of newspapers, watched us from her doorway.
At the top of the stairs of the St-Michel Métro station, Claudia took off her multicolored gloves to open her wallet for a ticket. I kept my hands in my pockets. It was freezing.
“Listen,” she said, quick and conspiratorial. “We finally have a few moments to speak. I am very sorry to leave you so suddenly. And there is something I must tell you. Clarence said to me last night that you are like the beautiful sky, serene over a battle.”
I shook my head. More proof of my role as a sanctioning observer.
“But you are not a placid sky. You cannot let him think that. It is very important that you start expressing your own opinions, giving them a voice. Like when you draw, you make choices, no?”
“Not really. I draw as purely as I can.”
“That’s not true. You make choice after choice, my dear.”
I wanted to tell her she was mistaken, but suddenly I wasn’t sure.
“I know you are very strong,” she went on, “not too high above the world at all. No, Clarence is wrong. He does not understand the way the real world is working.”
She embraced me less warmly than I would have liked and hurried into the station. The wintry air rippled around her disappearance, settling again within seconds.
I looked up at the leafless branches above St-Michel. I had been in Paris nearly three months. It was time to call Jacques and Solange.
twenty-five
Jacques answered the phone. There was no accusation to modulate the delight in his voice at the sound of mine.
“How is my little Rastignac? You are seducing all of Paris, no? Your mother tells us you are a rising star in the world of the arts.”
His words unleashed an olfactory memory of the tiny kitchen in the Nineteenth, a blend of bouillons and coffee grinds, slow-cooking garlic and browning crêpes. It was a historic smell, old and textured despite the soulless concrete walls of the apartment bloc that encased it. Since the kitchen was the warmest room in the house, I did my homework there, on a laminated table cloth with an orchard theme. Jacques would slip dark chocolate into my pencil case, for inspiration.
“Rastignac?” I laughed. “You’re still impossible!” Instantly we were back in our age-old joke where I was Balzac’s Provençal hero, decoding the capital, and, after a few disastrous mistakes, taking it by storm. “How are you? How is Solange?”
“Solange is cooking bolets in case you decide to come to Orléans for dinner. You should see the beautiful kitchen we have here. She is like a fish in water.”
Bolets were my favorite mushrooms. We used to drive out to the country to gather them in the fall, then take them to our local pharmacy to be checked because it was the job of every pharmacien to recognize poison mushrooms that might have masqueraded as edible. Afterward there was a flurry of omelettes aux bolets, chickens in their earthy fricassée, even the occasional veal dish to celebrate our harvest in style. At the end of each meal, Étienne would pretend to be poisoned and stage a gasping death over dessert, until one day he stopped. His parents must have told him that making light of death was insensitive to my situation.
When Jacques put Solange on, she asked if I was eating enough in Paris, if the lady I worked for knew how to cook or had domestiques to do everything for her, if my work was interesting, if I would like to come and spend Christmas with them.
I said I would love to come. Would she please make rabbit with prunes? I thought I could picture their Orléans interior, comfortable and cluttered, with the collection of Limoges china pillboxes displayed in a glass cabinet in the salon.
“Lapin aux pruneaux, mais bien sûr, ma cocotte!”
Then her tone changed to pleading. Had I seen Étienne?
Yes, I had seen him several times. I loved seeing him.
How was he doing? He was living such an irregular life that they were worried about his health.
I could hear Jacques breathing in Solange’s ear, “Do
not worry Katie so about Étienne. Do not perturb la petite,” as though I were still a little girl in need of shelter from bad news.
I assured them that he was full of energy, that his rent-stabilized apartment near the Bastille was big and decent. He had managed to take over a lease from a friend who had moved away. This was only a little illegal. Besides, artists had their own moral code, no, apart from the rest?
“He’s invited me to move in with him instead of paying rent to my boss. But I can’t. It’s part of my contract that I live on site. I’d love to stay with Étienne though. You should see how clean his place his. He’s a maniac about cleaning.” I laughed. “But you must know that.” I didn’t mention his passion for shoplifting household products—bleaches, brooms, even an iron once.
“And does he cook for himself?”
“He’s an elegant cook. Everything he makes is pretty. And interesting. He makes very colorful salads.”
“Yes, but are they nourishing?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said as lightly as I could. “Il surveille sa ligne.”
“Sa ligne?” She sounded terrified.
“He looks wonderful, Solange. And happy.”
“Maybe he will come for Christmas too?”
twenty-six
Gingerly, I held a photograph of one of the very first breaks in the Berlin Wall. It was taken in the morning, from the west. I saw a line of movement, framed on either side by gray concrete scrawled with black graffiti. The gray was the standing Wall, probably rubble by now but here still imposing. The section of light in the middle, the break, was only bright by comparison. It was not a dazzling morning at all, and still the daylight was a relief.
From behind, there was a row of raised arms, waving bunches of flowers, reaching through the fresh gap toward a row of police officers on the other side. From the thrust of their bouquets, I guessed that the West Germans were singing or chanting. The East German soldiers, in olive hats, were looking through the hole in the concrete, out over the flowering hands, toward the other Berlin.
Paris Match was preparing its special issue dedicated to the history of the Wall. It would include this shot of Lydia’s in my hands. The space in the concrete, a slice of light and of movement, was a strip of hope, Lydia said, right before everything was leveled.
The doorbell rang and I excused myself to go answer.
It was Madame Fidelio with a package for la jolie petite, who was coming tomorrow with the brother. Madame Lydia must be very happy, non? And all the painting in the apartment was finished? She stepped through the foyer doors into the hallway, peered into the living room where two workmen were finally hanging the brass clock up over the mantel where it belonged. The living room walls were now a few shades lighter than a papaya. You might call them apricot.
Madame Fidelio turned to me and clucked.
“Katherine!” Lydia called me back into her office. “I need you now.”
I felt a surge of anxiety about an amorphous task she had set me a few days back, Research on the Muslim religion that I hadn’t started for lack of a clear idea how. Was she going to call me on it already?
The mock-up of the upcoming Match was on her desk. The cover was going to be a wide shot of a huge mixed crowd, hanging out under what I now easily recognized as the Brandenburg Gate.
Just above the Brandenburg Gate photo was a half-eaten container of the spring rolls from the great Vietnamese takeout place on the rue du Bac. She had made me promise not to let her have those anymore. Who could have picked them up?
“Lydia,” I said, hoping to preempt disaster with an earnest question, “I don’t understand what exactly I’m supposed to do about the Koran scholars in England. I’m not sure where to begin.” She had told me to summarize the thoughts of a few modern Muslim scholars, but hadn’t told me why or which ones. “I mean, do you want me to go back in history or just stay in the present? What is this for?”
“You’re smart. You’re well educated and resourceful. And verbal. It’s all a question of words. I know you’ll figure it out.”
So much trust was staggering. I wanted direction. I wanted to do a good job. To be taken on faith, with no guidelines, made me deeply nervous. I began to formulate another question, but she interrupted me.
“All right,” she sighed. “We have two days to pull Thanksgiving together. In theory, Portia is smuggling in the cranberries from the States. We’ll see if she remembers. We have the turkey ordered and the sausage for the farce from that wonderful charcutier right off of Montparnasse. I like to do a hazelnut and prune stuffing. We can get the fruit and nuts at Hédiard. And for the rest, the vegetables and what have you, we’ll go to Bon Marché and have a big livraison. Is it terrible if I don’t bake pies? Maybe you can stop by Mulot and order one of those chestnut Mont Blanc fluffy cake things. Portia loves a Mont Blanc and you can’t get them in New York. But for the apple tart, go to Poilâne.”
“Where’s Poilâne?”
“On the rue du Cherche-Midi, right around the corner from that awful Futurist sculpture of the soldier on the horse.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Of course you will. You find everything, don’t you? Do you think we need a soup to start? Does your mother do a soup? How does your mother do Thanksgiving?”
The way Mom “did” Thanksgiving was so foreign to all this that I felt a sad sense of righteousness and was relieved when Lydia did not wait for an answer and segued straight into her wine anxiety.
“I’m going to send Sally into the cave even though I’m loathe to. But she’s a terrible wine snob and I have to trust her because we may have Rushdie’s French publishers at the table. They’ve had bomb threats, you know, poor souls, and they may leave the country. But if they’re still here on Thursday, then we can’t have anything less than a Margaux, and I don’t trust Clarence further than I can throw him with Bordeaux. He can work his way around Burgundies and Rhônes, but he’s hopeless with the Bordeaux. He has this ridiculous notion that they’re overvalued, so he refuses to pay attention to them. You’ll see, when he sees we’re drinking Margaux for Thanksgiving, he’ll sulk all night . . . Or maybe I’ll send Harry down to the cave. What do you think? Harry’s even better than Sally for this sort of thing.” She handed me a legal pad. “Let’s make a list. Then maybe you’ll take it to Clarence—he’s been locked in his study all day, working, we hope—to see if he thinks we’ve forgotten anything.”
As I took Lydia’s dictation, black felt on yellow paper, the fact of Thanksgiving, which was really the fact of Portia, became inevitable. So much of this fuss was for her. She was the occasion.
“As I say, Portia loves chestnuts. Let’s put some in the Brussels sprouts. You can get them already roasted at the épicerie in the Bon Marché. Add chestnuts to your list for our long-suffering Portia.”
As I wrote the word “chestnuts,” a dam burst inside me. A long slow buildup of guilt and fear, come to its tipping point, flooded my conscience. I looked down at my shaking hands and couldn’t believe they still held their shape.
I could argue all I wanted that my meeting Olivier had been an amazing coincidence, that I had put myself in the way of chance, that he would have left her anyway. But try telling that to Portia, who had asked me to count the pills in her Valium pack and report the number back to her before leaving them in the drawer of her dressing table. The top right drawer please.
Portia was coming tomorrow, for real. Everything was about to change. The wall between us was coming down.
twenty-seven
Portia was impossibly thin, short but willowy, otherworldly as a surrealist watercolor. The explanation for her great delicacy did not remain a secret very long.
“Heartbreak,” she said when she saw my eyes drop to her sagging suede pants the first time we were alone. “I don’t usually look like this. I can barely stand to eat.” There was accusa
tion in her voice.
I stiffened. Was she waiting to pounce on me? Was it conceivable that Olivier had told her? Or that Madame Fidelio had seen the two of us wandering in and out of the courtyard that first day, guessed, and taken Portia aside to say that this assistant was even more of a slut than the last one?
Although Portia’s blond hair and blue eyes were recognizable from her pictures, I could not match her expression to the voice on the phone. She didn’t look officious. She looked dramatically sad.
“Your mom told me you’ve been pretty upset.” My instinct was to be nice, but being nice made me queasy. This moment of meeting her was the moment I became a liar. Passing through it, seemingly unscathed, was bizarre. It was the abruptest change of season I had ever been through, like getting off a plane in the Caribbean in February, which I’d never actually done, but I bet she had.
A surge of jealously steeled me. “Your mom says you’re having a hard time getting over your ex-boyfriend.”
“Really?” The roll of her eyes was suspicious, but I could not tell whether she suspected me, suspected her mother, or was simply in the habit of mistrust. “What exactly did my mother tell you?”
In a flailing attempt to hide my fear, I clung to the rules of conversation and answered her as normally as I could.
“Well, she told me that she’s worried about you, about your breakup and how hard it’s been. I think she’s worried you don’t feel like you can talk to her. Typical mom stuff. She wants you to feel better.”
“I wish it were typical mom stuff. I wish she were truly worried about me. I wish she could be.” Her words were as airy as she was, but her eyes were solid, big globes shining at me with what might be the beginnings of gratitude. They bulged like Lydia’s, but they were deeper set and in such contrast to her fairness that they leant a shadowy quality to her beauty.
Clarence had described Portia as pure and ethereal, a Raphael. No, Claudia had disagreed, from her photographs Portia was a Caravaggio, but no man could say that about his own daughter. Because Caravaggio’s models were prostitutes.