by Hilary Reyl
Affectionately,
Katie
• • •
Tearfully, I slipped it under the door of his locked office. I tried to squelch the fear that I was killing something between us, to remember what Étienne had taught me about my Death of the Virgin. You have to fully take a picture in, pain and all. Blind reflection isn’t seeing.
• • •
That evening, I was in Lydia’s office slipping Étienne’s jewelry back into its velvet pouches, when Lydia came in, high from a couple of Kirs.
“So your cousin wouldn’t give me a press discount?” She laughed.
“He shouldn’t devalue his art.”
She laughed harder. “Well then, I’m glad you’re getting that stuff out of here. We have to declare war on clutter in this office. I can’t take it anymore.”
My heart began to pound. I had to tell her about the letter, now or never.
I looked straight into her large round watery eyes and took my first real step toward what I hoped was a grown-up moral compass. The moment felt epic.
“Lydia, I have to tell you something.”
“My goodness, has someone died?” She was in a disconcertingly unserious mood.
“No, it’s not that bad. But I’ve really been thinking about what you said when you decided I could stay after, you know, the whole thing when I messed up with the amulet—”
“Yes, yes, what is it?” Her tone stayed decidedly light.
“I, my priorities, I’m trying to be honest, and I don’t know, I mean this is going to come out wrong, but there’s another, I mean, Claudia, Clarence’s old Claudia, she’s in Paris again and she’s been in touch and he needs to tell her that it’s over, and he needs me to take another letter and I just can’t do it without . . . I want to come clean . . . You, my loyalty has to be to—”
Her expression remained unaltered. “Oh, that, of course. You really are still rather naïve, Katherine. I basically wrote that letter for the poor man. He relapsed once or twice. Guilt. Par for the course. But he came to his senses such as they are. We drafted the letter together. I suppose he didn’t mention that. I knew he’d give it to you. He likes to think he can still keep a secret or two. Makes him feel manly. So utterly like him. Of course you should deliver the letter. Do us all a favor.”
“But—”
“Good of you to ask, dear. But really you should be onto us by now. Kir?”
forty-eight
The following morning, Portia left to return to school. As she thanked me again for my dinner party, she told me she hoped I would help cook for her twenty-first-birthday dinner in June, when she would be back. If Olivier kept refusing to even speak to her, she would be in a horrible state, and it would be good to see me, she said, averting her eyes from her parents, who stood with us beside her taxi, shaking their heads.
Her final words to them were, “If Joshua becomes a full-blown monster here in Paris, you’ll have only yourselves to blame. There is such thing as parental authority, you know.”
“At least we can keep something of an eye on him here,” mumbled Clarence as we crossed the courtyard back to the apartment.
“We can, can we?” Lydia snapped. “Do you have any idea where he is now?”
“Sleeping off last night’s pot?” Clarence attempted a playful sigh.
“His room is empty,” said Lydia.
“Well, it is noon,” said Clarence. “Perhaps he’s gone to a museum.”
• • •
Crestfallen from my conversation with Lydia, I put Orlando on his leash and carried Clarence and Lydia’s joint letter to the Île St-Louis. Again, I had the sense that I was being watched.
Get over yourself, Katie. Nobody cares enough to follow you anywhere.
I was loath to see Claudia in her final disappointment. So, I knelt to slip the note under her door. Then I caught hold of myself, stood up and prepared to knock. Wasn’t I here to comfort her? Before I could touch the door, though, she swung it open. In her solitude, she must be attuned to every passing shadow. She grabbed the envelope from me, and, motionless, read its contents before she even asked me in so that I stood blocked in the doorway by her rigid little body. I waited, noticing and renoticing the few details the room had to offer, the unmade sofa bed, the sludgy coffee cup on the tiny table, the silky mass of her clothes through the open door of an armoire of compressed wood chips, the moldy view from her window. My eyes made the rounds of these sad little facts while she read and reread the words on the the pearly page. Typed words with a signature at the bottom. All the while, Orlando sat patiently at my feet.
When she finally looked up, I don’t think she saw us. Her eyes were roasting in their own private fury. Nothing else mattered.
“This is not what he truly wants. He did not write this alone.”
“Even if he didn’t write it alone, Claudia, he put his name to it. He signed it, so I think we have to believe him.”
She backed into her room with an exaggerated slowness, her anger swelling into an eerie calm.
“I will rise from the ashes of this.”
“That’s great, Claudia. That’s all he wants for you.”
“Fuck him. I will leave Paris when I am ready. I will live my own life. He will never hear from me again. Not directly. Perhaps he will hear of me.” She flashed a devilish grin. “But I will leave Paris when it is time for me to leave Paris. You can tell him that if he is interested. And tell him his bourgeois marriage has nothing left to fear from me. His fucking fortress. Let him rot in it. He is dead to me.”
She didn’t ask me whether or not I would come and see her again. But neither did she say goodbye as though I wouldn’t. When she offered me a coffee and I said I had to be getting back, she did not insist.
Orlando and I were barely outside Claudia’s door when he bounded up the street, so quick and delighted that his leash slithered and flew from my hand. He was headed for the sunlight at the corner of the dark street where a familiar figure stood against a wall, licking an ice-cream cone. That figure was Joshua.
“Hey.”
“Joshua! What are you doing here?”
“I came to get some ice cream, dude.” He ran his tongue over a scoop of what looked like rum raisin.
At a total loss, I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“You know ice cream isn’t vegan.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right.” He turned his cone upside down and dropped it into the street, where Orlando inhaled it.
“I’m sorry, Joshua, that was a bitchy thing to say. You’ve always been so sweet to me. I guess I’m having a bad morning. But I’m still sorry.”
“So, tell me, what’s she like?”
“What’s who like?”
“My dad’s lover. His mistress. Whatever you people call her. What’s she like? Is she hot?”
“That’s all over, Joshua.”
“Okay, let’s say I believe you. You can still tell me if she’s hot.”
“I, I, it’s really not my business. Please. Can you ask your dad if there’s something you want to know? I’m just the messenger, okay?”
“Don’t kill the messenger?”
“Something like that.”
I was scared he was going to ask me which apartment Claudia lived in, but instead he asked, perfectly friendly, if Orlando and I were heading home, and when I said we were, if he could walk with us.
He offered to take the leash, and together we loped through the streets of Paris, discussing the fact that he wasn’t exactly a Republican but that he was sick of his parents hypocritical knee-jerk liberal bullshit and there had to be something else out there worth fighting for.
• • •
Once we had exhausted the subject of his personal politics, he asked me how I had learned to speak French.
I told him about
my cousins and about my dad’s prolonged death forcing me to stay with them here in Paris longer than anyone thought I would. I talked about Étienne and our school and how proud his parents seemed to be of me when I took to the language and the culture, how it gave me a feeling of belonging that I’ve pretty much hung on to ever since. “French has kept me connected to my dad even though it was the thing that once kept us apart.”
So what were my cousins doing now, he asked, as we started up rue St-André des Arts, the narrow crêperie-lined street that would take us from St-Michel to St-Germain?
Well, Étienne was in Paris, making jewelry. I showed him my ring.
Cool. And Étienne’s parents?
They were retired in a town called Orléans.
What was Orléans like?
I had no idea. But I would go to see them soon.
“Whoa! Weren’t they like your adoptive parents? Why would you want to blow them off like that? Haven’t you been here for like months and months already?”
“Eight months.” I shriveled. “I’m not blowing them off. It’s just that working for your mom and this whole situation, it’s pretty consuming.”
“You mean it’s glitzy.”
“I am going to see my cousins.”
My voice must have cracked because he softened his tone. “Listen, if you’re worried my mom won’t let you get away, I’ll talk to her. I’ll tell her they’re your adoptive parents, for Christ’s sake, not her and Dad, but these real people out in wherever they are. She’ll let you go if I ask her. She’s so freaked out that I’ll do something insane, in case you haven’t noticed, that I have some leverage. If you want, I’ll do it for you. Just say the word.”
“Thanks, Joshua. You’re really kind. I’ve got to learn to stand up for myself though.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.” He gave me a pale, searching look, then broke into a grin and said these crêpes smelled too fucking good and he didn’t care if they had eggs and milk in them he was going to get one and he’d buy one for me too if I wanted.
I asked for chestnut.
“Thank you,” I said as he handed me the crêpe, folded into a triangle in a wax-paper sleeve. “You know, Joshua, this may sound like a cliché, but you’re not nearly as harsh as you seem to want to come off. Are you really angry or are you acting rebellious for the fun of it? Because you’re obviously a sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me that,” he spoke through a mouthful of Nutella.
“Sorry.” I laughed.
“I’m not angry for no reason, you know. Do you have any idea what it’s like growing up in a house full of phonies? You’d be pissed too.”
“Maybe, but I wouldn’t want everyone to think I was an asshole.”
“Well, you have a nicer personality than I do, don’t you?”
I thought for a second. “Granted, but it doesn’t mean I’m really any nicer, just a friendlier package, which some could call phony. In fact, people have.”
“Nah,” he said, “you’re okay.”
“Thanks, Josh. This crêpe is awesome by the way.”
“Don’t mention it.”
As we approached the doorway to our courtyard, I seized my last moment with him to ask how he had found out about Claudia.
“Not so hard to miss,” he said. “There’s information floating around our family like poison gas. Unless you’re a total idiot like my sister, all you have to do is sniff.”
“You won’t do anything crazy, will you Joshua? The Claudia thing is over. You won’t try to see her?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m a big boy.” He laughed. “I’m full of surprises, but I’m not stupid.”
forty-nine
That evening, from the apartment, I called Solange and Jacques. I pictured her, aproned, running to the phone with a wooden spoon in her hand, a light spray of béchamel in her wake. Or perhaps it would be Jacques, who was fingering one of the precious Pléiade editions that he kept locked with a tasseled key in a glass cabinet. I envisioned their smiles when they heard it was me. They would stand together by the phone and ask again when I was coming to visit.
No one picked up. And, as Étienne had warned me, there was no answering machine either.
“If they wish to speak with us truly, then they will call back later, no?”
• • •
The spring progressed. Lydia took a trip to photograph the Jewish cemetery desecrations in a town called Carpentras in the South of France. While she was gone, the patio furniture was finally cleaned and painted white, and Clarence and I started to do all our work outside.
The climbing rosebush was beginning to flower after much fretting that this might be a barren year.
On a particularly bright afternoon, clipping my newspapers at the table, I looked over at the beautiful roses, at Clarence writing nearby, Joshua asleep on a blanket in the grass.
A companionable cynicism was growing between father and son, smirks and asides about the French, quips about Lydia, eye rolls, the occasional passing of a joint. I could tell that this rapprochement was making Clarence unspeakably happy. And I found a comfort in it reminiscent of last fall, the innocent time of Claudia’s couscous and the Moroccan house painters.
Joshua rolled over, stretched, went into the house, and came out again with a baguette, which he brought to the table. He and Clarence began to pick it apart like two seagulls, talking with their mouths full about how relieved they were that Olivier was sticking to his guns about cutting off all contact with Portia. She would of course be a basket case when she arrived, and her twenty-first birthday would be about as much fun as a wake, but at least that creep was out of the picture.
Pretending to be completely absorbed in my work at the other end of the table, I clipped furiously, an article in Le Monde about skinheads in Marseilles. I was supposed to keep Lydia abreast of far-right activity in the south.
“Olivier’s a cretin,” said Clarence.
“He’s an asshole,” said Josh.
“One and the same.”
“Stop eating all the bread!”
“You stop!”
“You!”
“You know what Olivier is”—Clarence laughed through his mouthful—“he’s a striver, a vulgar little striver.”
“Nice vocab, Dad.”
My scissor work was eerily straight. The tips of my fingers unfurled into perfect leafy points, alive, precise. Like me, I thought, Olivier is becoming true. He’s doing what he promised he would do. He’s making Portia let go.
But my satisfaction was clouded with bewilderment at Clarence and Joshua’s hatred. It seemed to go deeper than simple jealousy of Portia’s affections or a desire to protect her. Did they truly think Olivier was a bad guy, or were they simply put off by his hunger? Did they find his ambition threatening? Couldn’t they see, from their private garden in the Sixième, that, at some point in time, someone had to fight to get them there? Did they not recognize the dignity in that fight? We couldn’t all be aristocrats all the time.
fifty
As the days passed, the air softened.
Portia arrived. She was skinnier than ever and monosyllabic.
On her birthday, Umberto Eco sent twenty-one bouquets of white tea roses. He wished he could be here, but he was stuck in Bologna. Portia’s disappointment that the flowers had not—and would never again—come from Olivier was only heightened by everyone’s fascination with their famous giver.
To my chagrined surprise, Olivier also sent a present. Granted it was only a simple card and a book, but he was supposed to be keeping silent.
“Cheap bastard,” said Clarence. He had wandered into the kitchen where Lydia, Madame Fidelio and I were cooking for the birthday dinner.
“Clarence, please. She’ll hear you,” said Lydia. “Besides, it was thoughtful of him to send a small gift. Why on E
arth would you want him leading her on with expensive presents? That would be criminal. I think a book is appropriate, very well judged. Olivier knows what people need. He’s attuned. But I wonder if that’s something you can understand.”
I nicked my finger on a mussel shell and swore under my breath.
Olivier’s gift was a paperback edition of Swann’s Way. Portia had been saying lately that she felt Proust was a big hole in her knowledge. She was now in the living room, reading avidly.
“We already have Proust in the house, and he can’t not know that,” Clarence went on. “He’s certainly spent enough time squatting here to remember we have the complete Proust. I’ve been telling Portia she should read it for years.”
“So, be happy. Be grateful. She’s reading it as we speak. You may not hear from her until she’s done. Taste this.”
Lydia was making a crème anglaise to have with berries because Portia did not want a birthday cake. (“Cake is boring. It has always struck me as a waste of calories.”) She force-fed him a spoonful.
I had volunteered to make a couscous and was scrubbing the mussels for it, because, as Lydia said, they simply wouldn’t do it for you in Europe like they would in the States. Assumptions were different here.
So, I was at the sink, Madame Fidelio was slicing strawberries and Lydia was watching Clarence swallow her custard.
“That’s delicious,” he said. “You’re all working so hard. I hope you can get her to eat.”
“She better eat. The saffron for Katherine’s couscous is worth its weight in gold. By the way, Katherine, we’re all so impressed that you know how to make couscous, especially Portia. Where did you learn such a thing?”
Clarence cleared his throat.
“From my mom,” I said.
Lydia did not miss a beat.
“How nice for you.” Her voice was syrup. “I’d love to teach Portia to cook, but she has no interest. Still she’s touched, you know, that you’re doing this for her. Don’t you think, Clarence?”
“Of course she’s touched.” Clarence took another, nervous, bite of crème anglaise. “But do you see what I mean about him giving her Proust when we already have it? He wants to bloody own Proust. It’s insidious. It’s undermining.”