by Hilary Reyl
“Neither can I. But Portia’s not some insane person. She’s self-dramatizing and upset and you’re not helping by letting her drag it out. You’re making it worse for her because you won’t tell her to get over herself.”
“No, her parents are driving her insane. Do you realize how manipulative Lydia can be?”
I laughed. “Believe me, I’m catching on.”
“She’s told Portia basically that she will cut her off if the girl doesn’t show up in Paris for this gallery opening and spend her spring break there. It’s hell.”
“It’s not hell, Olivier. It’s the Sixième.” Then it hit me. “You mean she is coming?”
“You have to understand,” he sighed, “that Portia doesn’t reason like us. You grasp the fact that real life is hard and that nothing actually kills you until it does. You and I have the same perspective on all this. It’s like we’re realists and romantics.”
Technically, I hadn’t been betrayed, but I was angry and hurt. I couldn’t picture what was happening in New York beyond the broadest of outlines. The shading was infuriatingly suspect.
“Olivier, I have to go now. This call is going to cost my friends a fortune.”
• • •
Late that night, feeling sad at Les Bains Douches, I drank countless glasses of vodka from Bastien’s private bottle. Gallant as always, he ordered me more tonic and extra ice to suck on when I got too hot dancing.
You could tell people’s level of sophistication by how well they pretended not to be looking at Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington.
I asked him if there was any news on his parents and their separation.
He shook his head. He was becoming more fataliste. “My father says now that he wants to come back to my mother, and I find myself wondering, in reality, if it’s a good idea. I never thought I would feel this. But, seeing my mother without him, I understand that she is happier, more épanouie. She is laughing more and she is making plans and traveling with her friends. A little like an American woman, I suppose, adventurous, not so worried about what people will think.
“And my father, he and I meet for dinner once a week en tête-à-tête and we have true discussions. I’ve been learning so many things about him. Admitting he has been some kind of failure makes him more open, and now he knows he loves my mother. I see the dynamic. I have a privileged relationship with each one of my parents. There are things you could never imagine, because they are too horrible, until they happen, and then they are fine.” He sneaked a glance at the supermodels.
“They have to be fine,” I said. “And you do look happier. I’m glad. But I hope you won’t stop playing the Sonate Claire de lune.”
“I will always play anything you desire.”
Christian and Jean-Pierre came from dancing to sit with us. “Private Dancer” was booming through the club, and everyone agreed, loudly, that Tina Turner had extraordinary legs for her age. Bastien poured drinks all around from his bottle.
The boys were looking disapprovingly at Christie, who was across the small dance floor in a vaguely ethnic spangled tank top, jumping up and down with a more alternative crowd, even though she had come in with us and was drinking Bastien’s alcohol. She looked carefree, and I felt a wave of gratitude at having finally been able to help somebody by putting her together with Étienne. That, and a titillating glimmer of social mastery.
Christian and Jean-Pierre finished their vodka tonics and went back to dance. Christie saw them, widened her circle and pulled them in. They moved uncomfortably in this foreign group, where the boys wore ripped t-shirts and had asymmetrical hair.
With silver tongs, Bastien slid ice into fresh drinks and slipped a piece into my mouth with his fingers. “Don’t you think Christie has changed since she moved to the Bastille? I’m worried about her. And living with this wild pédéraste, with all these stories of contaminated blood. Le sang contaminé. It’s frightening, this world now. And she shares a bathroom with him. I understand about Americans and the tradition of rebellion, how you are supposed to have a period of pretending to be poor. But this is extreme. It’s a little disgusting too, no? Look at how she acts and how she dances with the drogués. It’s not good.”
“Bastien, the sang contaminé had nothing to do with gay people. That was a blood bank for hemophiliacs that got contaminated and gave all these poor people AIDS. It also has nothing to do with Étienne, who happens to be my perfectly healthy cousin.”
He looked at me with something akin to pity. “You are so very naïve, and protected from aspects of life.”
“Me, protected?” That’s right, Sébastien. I’m sheltered and you know all about life and about suffering because your father left your cotton-candy-haired mother for a few weeks and you had to spend Christmas like an orphan in one of several résidences secondaires. You are familiar with hard knocks while I am oblivious. You know all about life, all about biology in particular, all about getting AIDS from the toothbrushes of people who don’t even have it.
“You are completely wrong,” I said.
“Not about Christie. Elle change.”
Never had I found Bastien more repellent. But, unlike Olivier, he had not let me down.
I kissed him. I can remember thinking, quite dramatically, that I was as reckless as those plague victims you read about, partying through their last evenings on earth with nothing to lose.
We stayed enmeshed for at least an hour. Bastien’s ardor redoubled whenever Naomi Campbell came into view. (“When they are beautiful, the black women, they are stunning.”)
Christian and Pierre-Louis looked on with sanctioning smiles.
My body told me I would never sleep with him, but I liked his weightless lips.
From time to time, Christie came over to fill her glass and arch her groomed eyebrows at us. This was what she had been envisioning for me all along.
“Don’t sweat it,” the eyebrows said. “What you need now, at this phase of life, is someone who will treat you well. Not some complicated head case who is going to drag you down. A guy who will be good to you au quotidien. That’s all. You’ve finally understood.”
forty-four
Over the past months, I had made peace with my electric toilet, but I thought it might be a problem for Portia. She had come up the escalier de service for my very first dinner party. She had exclaimed about how creative I had been with my little space and how charming the view was from my dormer window. “I’m so jealous you can see the Luxembourg!” She had even eaten one of my blue-cheese-and-fig canapés. Wasn’t this great? We were all going to sit around a tablecloth on the floor to have our pasta. Such a pretty tablecloth. Yes, of course she wanted a glass of wine. Things were going swimmingly until she asked if she could use the bathroom and I pulled open the vinyl accordion door to reveal the airplane toilet. She said she would be right back. She had forgotten something downstairs.
Why had I invited her? As soon as her mother chose to reveal her father’s indiscretions, and my part in them, I figured I would be a goner in her affections and that she would look back on this evening in disgust. And even though I was upset with Olivier for humoring her antics, he hadn’t gotten back together with her. Had she known that he and I spoke of her as lovers discuss a cast-off, she would have wanted to kill me. All emotional logic should have excluded her from my party.
But the fear of offending her in the moment outweighed it all. I couldn’t bear the thought of her hearing the footfall of my friends on the stairs while she was left below. Not when she still thought I was kind.
Besides Portia, my guests were Étienne, Christie, and a couple of college friends, boys, who were coming through town and could not believe I was hanging out with Christie Brown. Wasn’t she a preppy snob?
Not at all, I said. Wait and see. And within a few minutes of their arrival, Christie and Étienne were entertaining us with their ironic versio
n of le rock, the BCBG dance par excellence. Even though she was taller, he spun her fluently in and out, dipped and twirled her like the proudest of Gallic alpha males. As their moves got more and more burlesque—they had a swirling, butt-bumping figure eight—I realized they must practice a lot.
We all fell down around the tablecloth laughing. The boys were disarmed. Christie was great. She was totally self-mocking about the whole French thing. And her roommate Étienne was unreal.
We heard Portia’s heels clattering in the stairwell. “It’s the return of the hothouse flower,” whispered Christie.
“Shush! She’s just a little clueless, you guys. I don’t think she has a lot of friends her own age, but she’s trying. Give her a chance.”
“Feeling a little guilty, Katie? A little compromised?” Christie’s sternness plunged the room into silence. “You shouldn’t be nice to her. You’ll regret it. You know you will.”
The Yale boys looked puzzled.
“De quoi vous parlez?” asked Étienne. What were we talking about? Since his English wasn’t very good, Christie and I spoke French when the three of us were together, but the presence of our American friends tonight made that seem rude. So, we translated when we remembered to.
“Christie se moque de moi,” I explained, escaping into French to diffuse the moment. Christie is teasing me.
As the dinner progressed, I was surprised at how sensitive Portia was to the fact that Étienne might feel excluded from the conversation. She kept coming out with slow, blanket statements to him in a mix of both languages. “So, Kate says you are a bijoutier.” “The Bastille is a very interesting quartier of Paris. Très interessant.” “My mother’s vernissage for her show is demain soir.” She looked better now than she had at Thanksgiving. She was still thin, but not as ghostly. Perhaps her heart was slowly mending?
“Give her a break,” I told Christie with my eyes. “No one is really bad here. Just weak.” But my pleading looks were lost. I could see that Christie couldn’t stand Portia.
“I’m going to go use your fabulous electric bathroom,” said Christie, loud and drunk after dessert. “I would pretend I was so rad as to be on a plane to Paris if I weren’t already here.” She pulled the accordion door shut, then immediately opened it just wide enough for her leg to shoot out in a cancan kick, and slammed it back. We could all hear her peeing. Then we heard the beginning of the suction flush, a quick inhale, followed by a loud clanging and a series of “Oh my God!’s.”
She had flushed one of her lipsticks, a creamy pink Chanel that Étienne claimed he had risked his life for in Bon Marché. The boys tried to fish it out. One depressed the toilet’s metal center with a wooden spoon while another scooped around with a ladle. But they had no luck. Once we had determined the lipstick was lost, we decided to try to flush the toilet again. This was a bad idea. The bowl filled with water. None of it went down. The level stopped rising right before we had a flood on our hands.
I said not to worry. Since most of the maids’ rooms on my floor didn’t have bathrooms, there was a communal one down the hall. I would be fine.
The dinner party was over.
• • •
Portia did not say a word about the lipstick. She sat through the whole affair flipping through her father’s book on the English Romantics. And she made no reference to my near inundation as she said goodbye. Instead, she told me she was impressed with my meal. All prepared on a single electric burner! I was an inspiration. My chocolate mousse was better than at La Truite Dorée, honestly. No wonder I had cured her daddy with it. Where had I learned to cook?
I didn’t technically know how to cook, I said. But when the French cousins I lived with when I was younger realized how much I liked chocolate, they taught me this recipe. It was very simple, all about beating egg whites. You needed dark chocolate and a little coffee, a shot of alcohol. I could show her if she wanted.
Yes, she would like that because she’d spent her whole life thinking that La Truite had the world’s best mousse, and here I was proving her wrong. “Really, it was extraordinaire, n’est-ce pas, Étienne?”
“Always keep an open mind, Portia,” said Christie.
forty-five
The next day, I went down to work as usual, telling Lydia my toilet was broken, but that fixing it wasn’t urgent. She did not seem to hear me and proceeded to rattle off a list of errands for tonight’s big opening in St-Germain.
I took Orlando on my rounds, stopping only for a sandwich. I was back at the apartment a little after two.
I knocked on Lydia’s door.
Rather than calling me in, she opened it herself and stood blocking my way.
“Where the hell have you been? How long can it take a person to perform three simple tasks in the outside world? Jesus! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I even climbed all your stairs. I have to talk to you very seriously, right now. I must say, I’m shocked, positively shocked, at how dishonest you’ve been. I really believed you could change after everything I’ve put up with from you. But this is unconscionable.”
Here it was. The bomb was dropping. She must have found out about Olivier. As with the Claudia fiasco, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already dead. I hadn’t been able to envision this moment, and now that I was in it, I still couldn’t. I had no idea what shape things were taking. My heart was pounding and I was very, very hot. Maybe I was dying. I was certainly melting. I couldn’t talk. Like an idiot, I stared at her.
“The plumber told me. I had to hear it from the plumber, for Christ’s sake!”
I opened my mouth. It seemed I still had a voice. “Hear what from the plumber?” What plumber could know about Olivier?
“When you told me this morning that your toilet was broken, you never mentioned anything about a lipstick. Did you think it was going to disappear? We could have had a major flood, thousands and thousands worth of damage. This is not the sort of thing you hide. This is not a white lie. I’m furious, and I don’t think it’s at all fair or reasonable for me to have to pay a plumber for something you damaged and then tried to cover up. The bill is for three hundred francs. Add it to your rent next time. And then there will be no need for us to discuss this anymore. Let’s put it behind us.”
Remember, says Mom, it’s the little things that get you. Planes are generally safe. You die in the taxi on the way to or from the airport.
“Wait a second, Lydia, you must have figured out by now that I can’t afford—”
“This is not a question of money. It’s a question of ethics.”
“It was an accident.”
“Why did you lie about it?”
“I’m sorry. I thought it would disappear. Most toilets could handle a lipstick.”
“Don’t start playing the princess now. You’ve got the only maid’s room with a bathroom on your whole floor. We put that in at our own expense.”
“Thank you.”
“Listen, you’re not getting out of this. It’s a good lesson for you.”
At least Portia hadn’t ratted me out. I was grateful to her for this until she took me aside to say she knew her mother was angry and it was too bad I had to pay for the toilet, but it was a very symbolic three hundred francs to her mother. It had nothing to do with the actual money and everything to do with fairness. I had to understand that, no matter what Portia thought, she herself could not get involved. Her mother and I had a working relationship. It would be inappropriate to interfere.
• • •
Later, I sat in the garden in lingering evening light, doing letters on an electric typewriter. I had devised a system of extension cords up the back steps into the kitchen. It was one of those evenings where members of the family were keeping to themselves, secretly waiting for someone else to wonder aloud what was happening for dinner.
I was obsessed with one thought. Should I ask Christie for the money?
A few months ago, I certainly would have because, even though it was an accident, it was her accident and I was broke. But I was developing a sense, strong if not fully articulated, that when you invited someone as a guest you did not hold them responsible for such things. Call it a code. I knew Mom would say I was being pretentious and unstraightforward, but I could not agree with her here. No, I would not mention the plumber’s bill to Christie.
Still, three hundred francs, symbolic as they might be to someone like Lydia, were going to hurt.
What had gotten into Christie? What a clumsy thing to do. But that, as Lydia would say, was neither here nor there. The point was that the gracious action here was to not tell Christie about it, even though she made twice as much money as I did and Étienne had probably already stolen her another lipstick.
Did this mean that rightness and fairness were not exactly the same thing?
I was losing my daylight and had to type faster. Focus, Katie.
Hesitantly, Clarence started down the garden steps toward me. He tripped on my extension cord, almost fell.
“Blast! Katie, you have to do something about your wire here. Get a bright orange one or some such thing. Something we ancients can actually see. You’re going to break one of our necks.”
No, you are going to break your neck on my cord. I will not be the neck-breaker per se. There’s a difference, I thought, a subtle shift in responsibility. “Sorry,” I said.
He was holding an envelope, something for me to mail perhaps. He glanced around. No one.
“Here, take this,” he whispered. “Put it right in your bag. It’s the money for the plumber. Lydia’s not thinking clearly. It’s shameful. You shouldn’t have to pay. She entirely misses the significance of making you pay. She’s lost sight of what it means. But we all know she has other virtues.”
“Are you sure, Clarence? I mean, my friend’s lipstick did break the toilet.”