Lessons in French: A Novel

by Hilary Reyl

  Lydia went out and slammed the door.

  “Joshua, that was perfectly beastly of you.” Clarence motioned us to sit down. “Don’t worry though. She won’t disappear. She might have”—he shook a scolding finger at his son—“were it not for the guests. She’ll pull herself together for them. But let’s talk about something else, shall we?”

  Joshua poured himself a second scotch. “Okay, let’s. Let’s talk about Muslim fundamentalists.”

  “Oh, please,” Clarence moaned.

  “No,” Portia sniffled, “this is interesting. I want to hear what my brother has to say.”

  “All I have to say is there’s some weird shit going down and Mom’s back in the old fatigues.”

  “Your mother gave up war photography when she had you two. That was our pact.”

  “Some pact,” Joshua laughed. “She’s headed to England on Saturday for some big ‘Death to Rushdie’ demonstration.”

  “Nonsense. There’s no war in England, and your mother isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Oh yes she is. She’s leaving before our vacation is over, leaving us here in Paris with you to try to get herself a photo-op. Fuck that, right?”

  “Don’t be disrespectful of your mother’s career. And she’s not going to England on Saturday.”

  “Fuck she isn’t. And fuck her dinner.” Carrying his drink, he stormed out of the room.

  In his wake, pale Portia looked positively angelic.

  twenty-nine

  I woke up with a headache. Lydia had sent Harry Mathews, and not Sally Meeks, into the cellar to pick a Margaux worthy of the Rushdie publishers, who turned out to be as pretty and as overwhelming as their flowers. They had not spoken a word to me all night. Harry, though, kept saying he promised to look out for me in this crowd if I swore I would buy an umbrella soon, reminding me of the promise he had exacted the night of dinner with Umberto Eco. He also kept refilling my glass because this Margaux wasn’t the kind of stuff you came across often. This morning, I was suffering from his generosity.

  Hangovers were suffused with shame for me, which I attributed to the sense, lingering from college, that I was wasting Mom’s hard-earned money by killing brain cells with alcohol and lying around uselessly for hours, eating toast and not going to class. So, I was sheepish when I came into Lydia’s office at ten o’clock, and I thought she was too.

  “Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you have the day off today. I’m going to take Portia shopping with Sally and her discount. Journalists can get thirty percent off almost everything here and of course Sally milks it.

  “But poor Portia could use some cheering up. So, I don’t feel too guilty cheating the French government. She’s still wearing that awful makeup that she thinks Olivier likes, because it reminds him of his perfect mother somehow, and I heard her sobbing in her room last night. I think it would mean a lot to her if I had a day with her, shopping and lunch, a real mother-daughter day. You understand.”

  “Of course.” What was all this about Olivier and the awful makeup? Was the girl in his sketch reading his letters on the Place des Vosges wearing foundation and blush along with her pink toenail polish? I would have to take it out tonight and look more closely.

  “Has she said anything else to you about Olivier? She won’t talk to me, you know. I can’t understand why, but I have to assume it’s developmental.”

  “She’s said she’s heartbroken.”

  “Poor girl. This is terrible. Why is he doing this to her? He should love her, don’t you think? You’ll see when you’re a mother. Nothing is more upsetting than seeing your child suffer. Who on Earth is he to reject her?”

  I stiffened inside. Olivier was not simply someone who had rejected Lydia Schell’s daughter, he was my fantasy. How dare she? But, then again, how dare I?

  When I moved to escape, she called me back. I braced myself for a new errand.

  “Katherine, I saw you with a sketchbook the other day. It got me thinking that I never hear about your drawing or painting or whatever it is you do. It’s fine if you want to be quiet about it, but make sure you make some progress. Time flies, even at your age. You’d be surprised. And if you ever want to show me anything, of any kind, I don’t have such a bad eye, you know. I’d be interested. Don’t feel embarrassed.”

  “You have time?” Her curiosity was too thrilling to process. I could only blush.

  “Of course I have time,” she said. “Well, maybe not before I leave on Saturday. But after this England trip I’ll have some time.”

  “Thanks.”

  She looked at me sideways. “Katherine, if you want to do something creative, life won’t wait.”

  “I’m going to do some sketching in the city this afternoon.”

  “That’s wonderful, but before you go, take this to Clarence in his study, will you?” She handed me a folded note. “It’s something about dinner tonight. Oh and you don’t mind taking Orlando with you, do you? The poor beast could use some exercise and we’re all awfully tied up around here.”

  Bristling, I said that of course I would take Orlando. Was that the price I had to pay for the glimmer of interest she had just bestowed on my artistic development?

  I smiled a crushing smile, buried my defiance, gathered the note, the leash, and a new sketchbook, which had been a present from Claudia after my disastrous portrait attempt. It was the expensive, marbled Italian kind. She had said that she wanted me to use it to start copying the Old Masters and at the same time sketching the people I met and the things I saw. She said I should also take notes.

  “Alternate these things and you will see all kinds of hazarded connections. You don’t have to show me. Although I would be very interested. And I admit that I would be curious to see how you draw Clarence’s family, if you ever decide to draw them. I will want to ask about them, but I should not. I hate the term ‘self-control,’ and I despise the term ‘exercise.’ ” She laughed. “But, I will exercise self-control and ask you no questions. And seriously, it is time for you to begin your own work, not just doing studies to calm yourself. You must start admitting that you make your own art. Otherwise, you will drown in that house.”

  Leaving Lydia now, I recalled the sketchbook in Claudia’s small hands, those colorful gloves. I couldn’t quite believe she was gone for good. It would have been right for her and Lydia to have known one another. I had a powerless urge to bring them together.

  • • •

  On my way to Clarence’s office with the note, I bumped into Joshua with a bag of croissants, chewing loudly down the hallway. The sweet odor of yeast mingled with patchouli.

  “Hey, thanks for picking out my Indian bedspread. Dad told me it was your idea. It’s cool.”

  “Sure.”

  “So, how was dinner? Unbearable?”

  “Oh, it was fine. Really, everyone had a good time. Your mom’s an incredible cook when she puts her mind to it. How was your pumpkin?”

  After the blowup last evening, Lydia had asked me to knock on his bedroom door with a plate because she hadn’t slaved over his special stuffing for nothing and he was always hungry what with growing so fast and all the dope he smoked, and he wouldn’t dare slam the door in your face, Katherine.

  “The pumpkin was all right.”

  “Cool.”

  • • •

  I knocked on Clarence’s study door. I said I had a note from Lydia.

  He was right in the middle of something. Could I slip it under?

  I did. I turned to go. He called me back, opened the door a crack and returned the paper. Could I take this back to Lydia? Across her question, “Cherche-Midi for dinner tonight?’’ he had scrawled, “Absolutely not. No point in eating Italian in Paris.”

  I called Étienne, woke him up, asked him to meet me in a couple of hours in the sculpture garden of the Rodin Museum.

 
• • •

  Almost free, snug in my down jacket, I ran into Portia in the courtyard. She was walking very slowly, her face strained by the weight of her giant eyes. I wondered if she had taken one of her Valium pills in order to be able to face a day of “bonding” with her mother. She looked long and hard at Orlando and me, as if we were scrambled and she were waiting for our features to fall into place. Then, with strange dips in her voice, she said she would love to take me out for a drink later and did I want to sneak off maybe around five?

  thirty

  Under an improbably blue sky, I pulled Orlando all the way to the Rodin Museum, where I tied him to a bench from which I had a great angle on the bronze Balzac. Balzac, who, despite the manic upheaval of his own life, always brought to mind Jacques’s deep certitude that Les Illusions perdues was the most important novel within the most important oeuvre of all time.

  I drew, almost forgetting that my hands were cold. As my hangover lifted, I felt a rebirth, my own personal spring at the end of November. Even though it was freezing, it was a beautiful day. My head was nearly mine again and I was finally at some kind of work.

  I didn’t produce a portrait exactly. My sketch was technically a copy. But it bore the stamp of my fascination for the writer’s expression, which I interpreted with an ambiguity I had heretofore guarded against in my drawing. I was gripped by the pointedness of his gaze. Despite a broad fleshy face, he was eagle-sharp. Rodin had captured the contradiction, and I tried to recapture it with my very own shading of eyes and lips.

  About noon, Étienne appeared in a tight studded leather jacket carrying two camembert-and-butter baguette sandwiches, and two Comice pears. “I dare you to eat them together,” he said. Jacques and Solange used to tease me that fruit in the same bite with cheese was a desecration, but I always liked the combination. “Let’s spit on their morals.” He laughed. “Let’s see your drawing.”

  I showed him my Balzac.

  “Not bad at all. I like how you changed his lips. He looks hungry.”

  “I didn’t change them.” I was suddenly defensive. “I don’t change things. I see them. I have a talent for seeing. I was just messing around, I guess, with the mouth and eyes. I don’ t usually do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It seems like playing tricks. I like to show the beauty that’s really there. It’s almost like I’m a machine or a camera when I draw. It feels very methodical, very quiet. Or it has until now. This is not usual for me at all, this fudging.”

  “So you admit that you did change the lips, even though you don’t like to. Quelle desecration!”

  He made me laugh. “I guess you could say that.”

  He took a big bite of his pear and a nibble of sandwich. “Ah, cousin, we are beginning to live dangerously, no?”

  After lunch, he left to meet his friend from Berlin to collect more pieces of the Wall for his jewelery. I thanked him for feeding me and sat a few minutes longer.

  I hadn’t been to the sculpture garden since that September afternoon with Olivier. There were no children today, and no one else was sitting on these benches at the back of the garden. But a few couples did walk by, arm in arm, achingly happy. One in particular, sharing a Magnum ice-cream bar despite the cold, caught my fancy.

  I untied the dog and headed all the way to the Île St-Louis so that I could buy a two-scoop cone from a glacier called Berthillon.

  Harry Mathews had told me the night before that the importance of Berthillon ice cream was on a par with that of the umbrella.

  I had asked him if this was classified information.

  “Not you too? Is there no one who hasn’t been contaminated by this viral story about me being in the CIA? It might as well be true for all the people who believe it. But somehow I thought you would escape infection, young Katie. If you’re not immune, who is?”

  • • •

  Orlando and I were sitting on the small bridge that connects the Île St-Louis with the Île de la Cité, looking across at the flying buttresses around the knave of Notre-Dame. I was feeding him bits of an empty cone that the lady behind the ice-cream counter had given me, “pour le pauvre toutou,” while taking alternate licks of my own fraises des bois and sorbet au cacao noir.

  We were not the only ones drawn to Berthillon off-season. The rare lack of gray made the day seem full of possibility, a surprise celebration.

  I watched the river, the bookstalls on its banks, the houseboats, the soaring Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the pigeons in the perfect sky, all from the perspective of my spot on the bridge with my ice cream and sheepdog. I took a philosophical lick of chocolate.

  Then I saw Claudia.

  It had to be her, motionless against the Seine. That could only be her hair.

  Orlando saw her too. He choked on his cornet.

  She stared at us as though it were we who were odd and magical here, we who had appeared out of nowhere. She stood so still that we might have turned her to stone with some mythic power of which we were totally unaware in our innocent promenade. Only her hair wisped over her frozen face.

  Suddenly, she gripped the side of the bridge, tore her gaze from us and ran away, looking down, trying to cloak herself in that amazing black mane as if it weren’t the most blatant thing about her.

  We rushed after her down the cobblestone street. She turned. So did we. She broke into a run and we followed.

  It was a small island, and eventually she came up against a wall. There was a lot of deep dirty water between her and the Right Bank.

  Orlando was deliriously happy.

  “Claudia, what are you doing in Paris?” I cried. “Why are you running away from us?”

  She took my free hand and looked at me hard. “You are all right? Have you been well?”

  “Fine, fine. I’m surprised to see you.” It had only been a couple of weeks, but the finality of her departure had made the break seem much longer. “Are you back again for good? Does Clarence know? Did you finish your thesis already?”

  “But you are okay? You look it.”

  I nodded.

  She, on the other hand, did not look okay. She looked tired and sad and, up close, her hair was greasy. Her black boots were salt-streaked and scruffy. An orange scarf around her neck, her only touch of color, reminded me of how much more vivid she was before.

  Orlando nuzzled her leg. She held on to my hand. “Listen, do not tell Clarence you have seen me. Please.”

  “Why?”

  “This is very, very difficult,” she said. Then she raised her face and read something in the atmosphere. “There is nothing more to do, Katie.”

  “Why can’t I tell Clarence?”

  “You really want to be implicated?”

  “Claudia, what’s going on with you? Please?”

  “Katie,” she sighed, “come.”

  Orlando and I followed her into the Flore en l’Île, the café overlooking the bridge between the islands where we had originally come with our cones. The dog under the table at our feet, we sat with the beautiful view of Notre-Dame, which she never once seemed to notice.

  I ordered a large café au lait. She asked for espresso.

  “I’m sorry I acted strangely just now. You were so sweet outside, so happy to see me with your ice-cream cone and your dog. It broke my heart. It makes me feel that some things are still beautiful. I have to tell you, I have been having a terrible, terrible time about lying to you.”

  “Lying to me?”

  “I am in love with Clarence.”

  “I’ve always thought you were.”

  “And he is in love with me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Listen, when you took me to the Métro that day, when I said I was going to the airport, I did not leave Paris. I moved into a small apartment here on the Île St-Louis, owned by a friend of Clarence’s, a tiny
pied-à-terre, very small and dark. Clarence was so frightened that you would find out about us, that it would put you in an awkward position with Lydia, that he made me hide from you. I never should have done it. But he is so very scared. He loves me desperately, but he cannot make his mind up to let go of his bourgeois existence. He thinks his children might not understand. But mostly, she has him under her sway. He is terrified of Lydia. But he is about to leave her.”

  “He is?”

  “He comes close to leaving and then he shies away.”

  “So, you mean you are together now, with Clarence? How?”

  “He comes to my apartment when he can, but he will not be seen with me anymore. He used to think it was okay for us to look like good friends. But now he’s so spooked, you see. So we meet only in my apartment or sometimes in the church of St-Sulpice. And then when he says he must leave, I go to the Café de la Mairie that looks out at the church and I sit there all by myself and he walks away in a different direction. Only sometimes he cannot help himself and he comes to the café too and has a glass of wine at a different table. Does this make you feel strange, because of Lydia?”

  “I don’t know.” I was still trying to untangle the facts. “Wait, so you never left that day when I walked you to the Métro? You went to the Île St-Louis instead of the airport? Is that what you’re really saying?”

  “We stayed up all the night before, arguing about it. He got scared you were going to come down early some morning and find us together and be shocked. He was having me pretend to leave each night, then sneak back in after you were gone upstairs and go out at six o’clock every morning then pretend to arrive for the day a couple of hours later. I told him I thought you guessed, but he said, no, Katie is in so many ways a little girl. He can be very condescending, you know. And he wants you to respect him.

  “He also probably wanted you to think you were telling the truth if Lydia asked you where I was. He wanted you to be able to say I was gone back to America without feeling torn. He did not want to make you lie. He thinks this makes him a better person.”