by Hilary Reyl
“Clarence, let it go. And stop eating all of Portia’s birthday dessert. What kind of father are you?”
Madame Fidelio asked if Madame Lydia was happy with the strawberries. Madame Lydia said beautiful, but maybe a little smaller.
I asked if “debeard” was a word.
Clarence was sure it took a hyphen.
Lydia disagreed. She asked him to find a lemon. Now.
Then Portia burst through the kitchen door, Olivier’s book and one of her twenty-one white bouquets pressed to her chest. She was crying.
“I have to get some air. I have to take a walk. I am suffocating.”
“Why don’t you take Katherine with you? Madame Fidelio and I can manage the rest of the mussels. And you’ve prepped everything else, haven’t you, Katherine? The chicken and the vegetables? Portia, you’re in for quite a feast.”
“Mother, a feast is my vision of hell right now.” She looked so uncomprehendingly at all our preparations that I felt there was something obscene about them.
“Well, you won’t see things that way after a nice walk,” said Lydia. “Go, go. Why don’t you girls take Orlando to the Luxembourg?”
“No, Mother. Kate, I know you’ll understand that I need to be alone. It’s this book. It’s heartbreaking. He’s waiting and waiting for the kiss that will never come.” She threw her flowers down on the floor and was gone.
“Portia’s missing the point,” Clarence huffed. “Young Marcel is waiting for his mother to kiss him, not his ex-boyfriend.”
“Clarence,” Lydia pushed him aside to open the refrigerator, “you are alarmingly literal-minded.” She put her crème anglaise on the top shelf and closed the door. “There. I’ve done my bit.”
I picked up Portia’s flowers. I said I thought it might be pretty to float the bouquets in big bowls around the house.
Everyone agreed. We all dropped what we were doing and started hunting for bowls because the roses were starting to suffer.
Lydia could not find the silver punch bowl, the Edwardian one. Those Moroccan painters last fall must have stolen it.
“What a ridiculous accusation,” said Clarence. “Talk about racist!”
• • •
Everything smelled like saffron. Dinnertime was only an hour away. Still no Portia.
The phone rang and I picked it up.
“Allo?”
“Yes, hello, is Portia there please?” It was Olivier. What the hell was he doing calling this house? At the sound of mine, his voice shook.
“No, I’m sorry,” I said, cold to mask my hurt. “She’s out.” Then I decided to punish him. “Wait, is this Joshua? Joshua, are you messing with us?”
Clarence looked up from his New Yorker. “Joshua’s gone out on his sister’s birthday? Will wonders never cease?”
“No,” bleated Olivier. “It’s not Joshua. It’s Portia’s friend Olivier. I called to wish her a happy birthday.”
Clarence was gesturing for the phone.
“It’s not Joshua,” I whispered, “it’s Olivier.”
He frowned and flopped his head back into the magazine.
“Well, I can give her the message.” It was all I could do to keep my voice from cracking. “We expect her back any minute.”
Lydia stuck her head through the living room door. “Is that Olivier?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Tell him to hold on a moment. I’ll take it in my study. Tell him not to hang up.”
“Can you wait a moment, please? Lydia would like to speak to you. ” I hoped the effort to steady myself wasn’t apparent.
“Christ almighty,” said Clarence. “What next?” He grunted off the sofa and said he was going to shower and dress.
As soon as he left, I took his spot, staring up from the cushions at the clock mired in its elaborate bronze tree, its snake, its servile nymph. It was a few minutes past five.
At quarter past, I was still gazing stupidly at the time when the phone rang again. I jumped to answer, but Lydia beat me to it.
“Katherine,” she called out a moment later. “It’s a French boy for you. Take it in the kitchen.”
I sighed. It served me right that I should have to talk to Bastien right now, to put on a show within a show.
The portraits over the kitchen table were steamy. The air was fragrant with the fabulous meal to come, but I felt no anticipation, only an overwhelming sense of having to keep up appearances while reeling from broken trust. Tricked by Olivier’s shading, by the shortcuts and the symbols he used instead of giving a full picture, I had been left in the dark. In my mind’s eye, I crumpled the sketch he had done of “me” in the Place des Vosges. My hand balled into a fist.
I took the phone from Lydia.
“Ça va, Chopin?” I tried to make light.
“C’est qui, Chopin?”
It wasn’t Bastien’s voice, but neither was it totally unfamiliar. Perhaps another member of the bande, but none that I could place.
I apologized and asked who was calling.
“This is Michel, from the Fer à Cheval bar. I have a message from your boyfriend. He says he can’t go another hour without hearing your voice. He’s begging you to call. He’s in the office.”
fifty-one
I thought I would have to wait until after the couscous and berries with crème anglaise to excuse myself and race to my St-Sulpice phone booth to hear what Olivier had to say for himself. The irony of the fact that I was now as shaky as Portia was not lost on me, but awareness is not always a steadying force. I didn’t know if I could keep myself from crying through the meal. Luckily, Lydia liberated me much sooner than expected.
Moments after I had hung up the phone, as I was staring at Yoko Ono through the cooking condensation, Lydia came rushing to me. She had a crucial errand. How could she have almost forgotten? Where was her mind? It was Portia’s being so upset, throwing everything off balance. She couldn’t take it anymore. But that was neither here nor there. Could I please go to this address immediately? It was in the Sixteenth, on the Square Alboni. No. 8. I should take the Métro to Passy. The package would be all ready for me, with the concierge. It was urgent she have it for tonight. If I hurried, I could probably get home for the beginning of dinner.
This was the same doctor’s office where Olivier and I had stopped on our way to the Marmottan to see his mother’s Monets back in September. Lydia was sending me out at seven o’clock on a Friday evening for diet pills.
This meant I was free to return Olivier’s call, but I wasn’t ready to modulate my anger or express my confusion. I was going to have to take a blind leap.
From the vestibule, I heard Madame Fidelio announce that she had found the silver punch bowl. We could put mademoiselle’s roses in water now, before they faded.
Was she sure, Lydia wanted to know, that it was really the Edwardian one?
• • •
I closed the apartment door behind me and ran through the courtyard, then down the street and into my phone booth.
As if to soothe me, the glass of the cabine walls took me in like a home. I felt the city refracting from all sides, the shimmering trees, the metal café tables with their dirty glass ashtrays and half-empty carafes, the dust on passing shoes, the dripping ice-cream cones, the parked cars, the shop windows drowsy with oncoming summer. Paris was flowing unfiltered through my body.
What might I have looked like to my father, poured into this cabine, unable to sort out the meaning of this day even as it swirled inside me? Would he still be proud of his brave accentless little girl?
If only I knew what he would have wanted, I thought I could unravel into a real person. Yet so far all I had to go on were memories, ideas, family myths, visions of the life we might have had together with him directing movies and Mom not having to be so serious and the three of us taking fami
ly vacations to Paris to visit Jacques and Solange and Étienne. I couldn’t hear his real voice, only the strains that ran through my head, as much my creation as his. He was the Old Master I was trying to copy. But copying, I thought, looking through the glass to the doors of the church, is not the reflex I have always assumed. It is a choice.
It was time for me to take a stand, to shape my own life. But how? I was not giving up on this city. That much I knew. I had had enough disappointment. No, I was going to start setting my boundaries with Lydia and Clarence. And with Olivier. Slowly, slowly, I would become forthright and clear of head. And begin untangling my experience.
I dialed the operator.
“Morgan!”
Olivier accepted my collect call.
Breathlessly, before I could ask any questions he began to apologize. He knew it looked bad, but he couldn’t be rude to a family that had housed him. Portia hadn’t been remotely led on by his present, had she?
Grateful to have something concrete to respond to, I answered that Portia had been upset by his book. I wasn’t going to go into the details, but it contributed in large part to the ruin of her birthday. “I thought you had cut off all communication. What were you doing talking to Lydia?”
“I’m almost free of them, but it’s common decency to acknowledge someone’s birthday when you’ve lived with their family. At least while it’s so fresh. I agree with you that by next year she will have forgotten all about me.”
“What about Lydia? Is Lydia forgetting you?”
“Don’t tell me you’re jealous of a middle-aged lady who’s addicted to papaya pills and spring rolls?”
“Olivier, this isn’t funny. I don’t think—I don’t know if I should see you again.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Of course I do, but—”
“Do you think you can ask Lydia for the third week in August off?”
“Why?”
“Well, I’ve done something a little presumptuous.”
Feeling my resolve shake, I tried to be forceful. “Look, Olivier. This isn’t working. You promised you wouldn’t talk to her and you’re calling the whole family and sending birthday gifts.”
“Don’t you want to know what I’ve planned?”
“Planned?”
“I knew I’d get you curious. I know you like I made you.” He told me I should get that week of vacation time because he had booked us a hotel in Versailles where he thought I would like to return because of the memory I had so vividly described to him of my day there with my cousins so long ago. He could tell Versailles was an important place to me. Was he right? Would I like to redeem it? He laughed gently. Would I give him one more chance?
Through the glass, I nodded a slow yes at the passing city.
fifty-two
Christie’s internship at the law firm was over at the end of July. Throughout our time together, this moment had seemed so distant that we had hardly mentioned it to ourselves, and now it was only two weeks until Christie was bound for law school. We were suddenly inhabiting the horizon.
There were two soirées d’adieu in the works, one with Étienne and some of his clubbing friends from Queen, one with Bastien and la bande.
“If this were America,” said Christie, “we would mix them all up and figure the various people could get along, but it would be easier for the different French social classes to mingle with someone from mainland China than to mingle with each other. And the funny thing is that the disdain is mutual. It’s beyond politics of left and right. It’s virulent on both sides. Ah, the French! How are you going to figure them out, Katie, without me around to explain them to you?”
I did not know.
• • •
Bastien and I met on the leafy terrace of a bar he liked on the Avenue Foch, outside the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne, to talk about Christie’s party. Afterward, he wanted to take me to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the children’s amusement park in the bois, where he used to go all the time as a child.
“The French,” Christie had told me, “make no distinction between nostalgia and romance. Remember that when I’m gone.”
I told Bastien I felt like a glass of red wine, maybe a Côtes du Rhône, slightly chilled. He said that a woman drinking red wine without food in the afternoon was categorically depressing. People might think I was an alcoholic. Á la limite, white wine was much better. Champagne or a light beer or a citron pressé, a coffee (but no milk in the heat of the day), these were all fine. Now, what did I want?
Water, I wanted water. No bubbles.
Plain water was too sad.
Okay, then, white wine. Any white wine he thought I should have.
I was annoyed at his particularity until I tasted the Montrachet.
Bastien had very specific ideas about Christie’s farewell. We should have drinks chez lui then go out to Neuilly, where there was an outdoor restaurant overlooking the Seine. Then Castel. Then Les Bains. Then coffee and croissants back at his place.
I said this pretty much followed the arc of every night we had ever spent together. “Maybe Christie would like something a bit more original for her last night out? Maybe we could go find some jazz in one of the clubs near Les Halles?”
“Les Halles? With all the backpackers?”
“Christie loves live music. Have you even asked her what she wants? It’s her party, you know.”
“Katie, I do not like this attitude. You used to be so much softer. You are changing, Katie. Be careful.”
But I did not want to be careful. I needed to change.
When he asked if I was ready to go to the bois, I said the Montrachet had made me so sleepy and relaxed that I hoped he wouldn’t mind if we did it another time.
“But, Katie, we had a plan. I want to show you the Jardin d’Acclimatation. It will be charming after the wine.” He weighted the word “charming” with all the tragedy of his parents’ divorce. I melted and agreed.
I had been to this amusement park already, twice. With Cousine Solange, we had come once for Étienne’s birthday and once for mine. We had both turned ten here. We were each allowed to invite two friends, no more, because the Jardin d’Acclimatation was very expensive and only for special occasions.
Recalling Solange’s descriptions of rare and extravagant pleasures as Bastien fished for two 10-franc coins for our admission to the park, I started to view the bois as one giant, barely attainable artichoke. I must be drunker than I realized.
Inside, I asked Bastien for cotton candy, called barbe à papa. I ate it on a small wooden train that did a circuit through the trees outside the jardin, ending up at a fairy-tale station back at the center of things.
This train ride used to be epic. While Solange knitted on a bench, Étienne and I rode through the forest, pretending we might never come back.
Now the ride was dull, constrained and short.
I had eaten my cotton candy and was still hungry. Right by the train station, there was a guimauve cart, looped all around with thick strands of fancifully colored marshmallow taffy. I would like a yellow one please. Because I could. Because I no longer had to hold to a seven-franc candy budget.
“Petite gourmande!” Bastien seemed delighted at my childlike embrace of the sweets. His enthusiasm sent a wave of affection through me, even though the guimauve had grown a lot sweeter over the years and I could barely stand it.
“Thank you for my nostalgic treat,” I smiled, “but I’m not sure I can finish it.”
“Then throw it away. All the pleasure is in the first few bites anyway.”
Bastien wanted to go on the bumper cars. He remembered his mother watching him drive with such adorable angoisse maternelle in her eyes every time someone ran into him that he had a certaine tendresse for the experience. So, we got in line for ride coupons. My childhood fear of limited tickets kick
ed in. Solange had doled them out so carefully. How many would he buy?
When he bought more than we could possibly use so that we wouldn’t have to wait in line again, my gratitude was disproportionate.
He said that, when we left, we would give the leftovers to a child, make his day. “In fact, Katie, why don’t you pick the lucky child? That would make me very happy.”
I moved to throw the yellow guimauve away, hesitated by the poubelle, took one last bite and let go.
Was this rich French boy defiling my childhood?
No, I thought. As I evolved, whole parts of me were dissolving. This felt strange and it was sad. It was probably also normal. In any case, I couldn’t blame Bastien.
After the amusement park, we wandered the sandy paths through the woods. He held my hand too tightly for comfort. When he pressed me against a tree and moved up inside my t-shirt, I asked him gently to stop.
“But why?”
“I love being your friend, Bastien. I’m with someone else, though. I can’t keep kissing you.”
“But,” he did not take his hands away, “you are not the only girl I kiss. You can kiss other boys. Kissing is like eating. There is variety. And I want you, Katie.”
He pushed into me.
I ducked away, scraping my back against the bark.
“I am perplexed.” He frowned.
I almost told him I couldn’t have everything on the menu anymore, but I simply said that he was lovely and I treasured him but that I had made a choice.
He shrugged, took my hand again, and led me out of the woods.
fifty-three
In late July, right before Christie was to go, Joshua abruptly left Paris. He said he had something important to do at home, a word he invested with a quavering, weirdly patriotic fervor.
Lydia and Clarence did not seem worried. They had been dealing with his antics for years now. Besides, they had gotten him to promise, in a manner of speaking, that he would return to school in the fall to do the second semester of his senior year. After all, he was eighteen. As long as his education moved forward at some kind of pace, they were appeased.