by Hilary Reyl
“Sure, I’ll go back to school. If I’m around.”
While this answer seemed to satisfy his busy parents, it gave me the creeps. Joshua and I hadn’t spent much time alone together since our walk back from the Île St-Louis, but he would occasionally accompany Orlando and me to the park, always offering to take the leash, for which I was inordinately thankful. The day before he took off, I asked him if he would come along to the Luxembourg.
“How lovely to be invited somewhere,” he said in a stage whisper so that his father, having tea and toast at the kitchen table, could hear.
“Don’t be facetious, young man,” laughed Clarence, with a grateful wink at me.
Once we were outside, I asked him what it was he was planning to do back in the States and why it was so sudden and urgent.
“Hey, it’s nice that you’re worried and all, but I know what I’m about.”
“I realize that, Josh. No offense, but you’re at a weird time in your life. I am too. That’s how I can tell. In my art, the only thing I’ve ever been comfortable with is pitch-perfect imitation, and now I’m trying to find a style, and I keep screwing up.”
“What are you trying to say?” He jerked Orlando’s head out of a flower bed. The dog looked surprised and hurt.
“Okay, I don’t want to invade your space, but can I ask you to write me or call me if you think you might do something self-destructive? I know your parents think your nihilism is just a pose, but sometimes posing can get real. Don’t look at me like that! I’m not calling you a poser. Okay, I’m putting my foot in my mouth. I’m just hoping you’ll get in touch if you start to think about harming yourself because it’s not worth it. Not to prove a point.”
“So why do you put up with all this shit in our house? Is that worth it?”
“I’m betting it is. I’m like some endurance athlete, a long-distance runner. I’m suffering for a cause. I’m learning.”
We both smiled sadly.
“I’m not asking you to take me as a role model,” I continued. “I know I suck as a role model.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“How about this? If I’m thinking of doing anything I think might be dangerous, I’ll get in touch with you, and vice versa?”
“Deal.”
• • •
Only days after Josh had gone, it was time to say goodbye to Christie.
But, on the date of Étienne’s going-away for her at Queen, Lydia had a crisis. She realized she left behind several rolls of film in a hotel room in Marseille, where she had gone to shoot a rally for the far-right party of Le Pen, and she said I had to be the one to go get them. These pictures were crucial at the moment because Le Pen was deceiving the French into thinking that immigrants were a plague, and deception and racism were shaping into the themes of the nineties. Hence the vandalism in the Jewish cemeteries. Lydia sensed that it was all interconnected.
“You can take the overnight train, Katherine. Make sure you sleep on your backpack—those night trains are crawling with thieves.”
“Mother,” said Portia, who was on a rare visit to the office, “the least you could do is buy the girl a first-class ticket so she won’t have to be with all those gross people.”
“When Katherine is my age, she can ride first-class, but Katherine’s not soft, are you, dear? A first-class ticket would be an offense to your youth and vigor.”
Portia looked confused. “But, Mother, I’m young and I always travel—”
“Enough! The train leaves at nine tonight.”
“But, Lydia,” I stammered in protest, “my close friend is leaving Paris in a couple of days and tonight my cousin is throwing her going-away party. Couldn’t I go tomorrow morning?”
“Katherine, this is the wrong time to assert whatever you are trying to assert lately. My film has to be at the printer’s day after tomorrow. This is a critical moment in the history of French ideas. This is at the heart of your responsibilities. It’s not as though I’m asking you to go to the grocery store or take Orlando for a
stroll.”
I had been about to say that taking the train to Marseille for forgotten film felt more like an errand than an important mission, but I held my tongue. Lydia had finally given me an admission that there was a scale of importance in the tasks she assigned. This was information to store and use. And it was true, the cemetery vandalism was scary and potentially telling in its threat. I should assume my roll as guardian of her Le Pen photos. Besides, there would be another going away party for Christie in a couple of days, the one Bastien and the bande were planning.
So, I took the overnight train and I slept on my backpack. I rode a taxi to the hotel, where the film was in an envelope at the front desk, and then took the same cab right back to the train station. In Paris, I delivered the film straight to the printer’s.
Then I went home and got up the nerve to show Lydia a sketchbook of fledgling portraits of my friends, bits of Paris and copies from the Louvre. After looking for a long time, turning pages back and forth, she said that she was impressed with my effort, but that my framing was weak. I hadn’t given it enough thought. And, without framing, you had no sense of time. You weren’t authorial enough. For instance, look at this one of the child touching the Rodin (she recognized the Balzac sculpture from the garden instantly). The kid and the statue were right in the center of the picture, with a pretty border all around. Everything looked good, but there was no sense of anything coming in or out of frame, no evidence of the passing moment. No time stamp. Nothing.
“But, Lydia,” I said, “what if I want the image to be sort of timeless? I’m not going to be a journalist. I’m going to be an artist.”
“You can only achieve that if you’re willing to commit to a certain moment in time. Otherwise it’s bullshit.” She peered again into my Rodin drawing, then flipped to a profile of Étienne. “I need to qualify what I’m saying for you. You don’t need to choose your frames or define your moments, you need to admit that you are doing so. What you have here is a hell of a talent contorted into a surreptitious naiveté. Be bolder.”
“Thank you,” I said.
• • •
I was there for Christie’s very last night in Paris, her blowout with la bande.
Since her flight was at ten the following morning, there was no point in her sleeping, was there? And we should all accompany her through the night. These boys were nothing if not loyal in their festivities.
When Portia asked what I was doing, I didn’t think to lie. She was so depressed that it never occurred to me she would invite herself along. But she said a mindless night out with people she didn’t really know might be just the thing to distract her.
“I’ll check with Christie,” I said, dreading the call. “I have to see what the plans are.”
Sensing the discomfort in my phone voice, Christie sighed and said fine, bring her along. Nothing was going to ruin her good time.
But when Portia and I showed up at Bastien’s apartment for drinks to kick off the evening, Christie pawned her off on Christian, pulled me into the leather couch and grilled me.
“Is it because you feel guilty or because you want to get close to her? I don’t know which is sicker.” She folded her knees into her chest.
“You know I still have to be nice to Portia.”
“There’s a difference between being nice and pretending to be her friend. You’re still acting like the boundary is not there.”
“There are no boundaries in that house, no real ones anyway, none that get any respect. I’ve been trying to set them here and there. No luck yet.”
“Oh yes there are. And you’re on your way to the wrong side of one. I’m telling you, the Schells could still all turn on you.”
“But they seem to have completely forgiven me for the whole Claudia debacle.”
“The Claudia debac
le might not be over yet.”
“But she’s gone for real now. And I wish she weren’t sometimes. She was totally in the throes of her Clarence obsession, and it could make her a bad friend. But mostly, she saw straight to my heart. I think she cared about me. And Clarence and Lydia still care about me. You know, people do the best they can. So they can’t always control their passions.”
“Katie, I love you. Étienne loves you. Lydia and Clarence and Portia and Joshua do not love you. You are their domestique. They have a lot of affection for you, and that’s it. Face it. And you don’t really love them either.”
Although I began to sense that Christie was right about the quality of the Schells’ attachment to me, I wasn’t quite ready to admit that that was all there was. “Okay, I don’t really love Portia. But I do feel for her. I mean, she’s sad. It’s tough being Lydia’s daughter. Perks aside, jokes aside, it’s tough. But look at her over there flirting with Christian. For once, she’s having a good time. Why shouldn’t she have a good time? Why shouldn’t she realize that she’s perfectly capable of fun? After all, she’s been nice
to me.”
“What are you talking about? She makes you nervous and she talks your ear off and she drives you nuts with her clothes. And you hate it when she calls herself a ‘daddy’s girl’—remember you said it was like a slap in the face? And she won’t ride the Métro. Remember all those taxis she’s made you split? And, for Christ’s sake, she’s obsessed with your boyfriend, or you’re obsessed with her boyfriend. It’s still unclear.”
“No, it’s very clear to me that Olivier is with me now.” I looked across the room at Portia, holding an untouched glass of champagne, still porcelain pale in August, in a brand-new short black dress. In another week, she would leave Paris again. For a late-summer internship in New York. Would I miss her at all as the relief sunk in? Or would she fade gracefully back into the role of the fragile daughter? Would she finally disappear?
“Anyway,” I said, “she’s leaving.”
Once Portia was gone, I would go to Versailles. Clarence was on the verge of finishing his book. Lydia was plunging headlong into a new era of reportage. Time was speeding up.
Christie looked bleak for a moment. Then she took herself in hand, deciding to enjoy her last night in Paris, and went to find a boy to fill her glass.
I looked around the living room. I had developed a perverse affection for the beige and the leather, the wall-to-wall carpeting and for the bad blue orchid painting. The first time I had been here, I had floated above it all in indignant sympathy with Olivier, who had to work so hard and could not afford to be in Paris taking this lifestyle for granted, who had nothing but his chevalière to symbolize his loss. His image had been so strong in me that there had seemed no point in bothering to create other memories with other boys. And yet I had.
I could not completely recognize the person I had been when Christie first dragged me into this living room. Shades of her were missing now. Or maybe I had had too much champagne, vintage champagne no less, customary in this particular corner of my life. I felt the growing pressure of experience, but no ability to stop time and think.
• • •
I headed for the bathroom. Just as I was about to step out into the corridor, I heard Portia’s voice, soft and conspiratorial. “I’m sure Kate had never tasted champagne millésimé in her life before meeting your group.” I peered through the doorway just long enough to see she was still talking to Christian. “She’s a fast learner, but she’s definitely not one of us.”
Loudly, I cleared my throat and headed straight past them.
• • •
At dinner under an awning in Neuilly, Bastien, Christian, Jean-Pierre and a couple of the others stood up and asked for silence.
“Oh God, they’re going to sing,” Christie whispered in my ear.
Sure enough, they had changed the lyrics to a French pop song to memorialize their friend Christie’s time in Paris. The gist of their version was that Christie had almost become one of them, but she still danced le rock like a cowgirl. The new refrain was, “Et Christie danse le rock! Quel choc!” as they spun each other in and out, then drew imaginary pistols from their impeccable leather belts.
“This is what they all do at weddings. They call it a ‘sketch.’ It always involves changing the words of a song that they all know, and it’s usually terrible.”
I looked over at Portia, who was picking at her appetizer, faintly appalled. Why the hell had I brought her?
“You realize,” Christie said during the applause, “that there were two counts and at least one duke in that group. Not bad for a Yankee upstart like me.”
• • •
Portia was trying to go home before we headed to Castel. Knowing she had shown her true colors back in Bastien’s hallway, she could not look me in the eye, and I could tell she wanted nothing more than to get away from me. The boys were trying to talk her into staying.
“What’s going on here?” asked Bastien.
“Portia says she’s too tired to dance,” Christian said.
“Christian”—Bastien was drunk—“take this girl and put her on the back of your motorcycle!”
As Christian led Portia away by the hand, Bastien informed me that my copine Portia wasn’t very marrante, but that she was assez classe.
By morning, we were rid of her.
“What does she know about champagne anyway? I’m glad you finally have concrete proof that she’s a bitch. Must be a relief,” Christie said. “You should call Étienne. He was so disappointed when you didn’t show up at his goodbye party for me.”
I ripped my chocolate croissant and gave her half. She almost smiled. We were finally alone, outside the Bastille apartment, sitting on her suitcases, waiting for her taxi to the airport. Étienne had gone to spend a few days with his parents in Orléans. He had said he didn’t want to be here at the moment Christie left. It would be too hard to watch her disappear.
“Are you excited about Stanford?” I asked. “You seem like part of you is already there, or already gone from here anyway.”
“You’re such a nut. I’m going to miss you.” She looked up. Last night while we were dancing, thunderstorms had washed the sky. She shook her head and kept looking into the pale blue, but she did not find what she was after because she finally turned back to me and said, “Katie, I’m at a loss.”
“No you’re not. It’s only the transition. You feel like you’re making this break, but you’re still going to be you and we’ll all be friends and Étienne will steal you all kinds of great things and I’ll mail them to you. Life will go on.”
I could tell she was going to tell me something terrible, and all I wanted was to stave it off.
“Do you remember when Étienne destroyed the letter you wrote him?”
“Destroyed? I thought he threw it away. What do you mean, destroyed?”
“He burned it. He burned a lot of things.”
“See, he has a cruel streak. I keep trying to tell you. Ever since we were kids. He used to torture me those years I spent here. He and his friends used to tease me in the playground, on the street, everywhere. I mean I know he’s grown up into a fine upstanding person, but that nasty little boy still peeks out sometimes. I’m not surprised he’s torching people’s letters.”
“Katie, Étienne has AIDS.”
“What?”
“He’s HIV-positive. And he’s starting to get sick. That’s why he’s so tired all the time.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’m sorry.”
Frantically, I scanned the street for some sign that this wasn’t the real world, that I was going to wake up and life would fall back into place. But the street held no answers.
I grabbed Christie’s shoulders.
“Breathe,” she said. “You’re not breathing.”
&
nbsp; “It’s not fair. It can’t be true.”
She touched my ring.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I moaned. “Why didn’t I guess?”
“I thought he would tell you himself when he was ready. It felt like it wasn’t my information. But I think now that he’s waiting for me to tell you. I hope he is. I hope I’m not wrong.”
We cried in each other’s arms until the taxi took Christie away.
fifty-four
It was eight-thirty in the morning. Raw with sleeplessness, I stood outside Clarence’s study with two notes that I had forgotten to deliver the day before, one from him to Lydia, one from her to him.
Étienne was going to die, and here I was nudging a missive under a doorway with my big toe.
Next I went to Lydia’s office, still locked at this early hour, with the letter from Clarence, the first he had dictated in a while. I hoped she would not realize it had been delivered late. I had been in such a rush to get to Christie’s going-away night that I had let things slide.
There was a big space between Lydia’s door and the floor. Clarence’s message sailed through.
Lydia’s was in a fat blue envelope from one of the beautiful handmade paper stores in the Fifth Arrondissement that she patronized. It was a list of things that needed to be fixed in the apartment and garden.
Clarence’s was in a thin white business envelope. It was a stream of discussion points that I had taken down on a legal pad. “These are in no particular order,” he had assured me, “1: Replace Joshua’s therapist; 2: Throw book party for Harry Mathews in New York or Paris this fall; 3: Insurance for the wine in the cave here; 4: . . .” These talking points persuaded me that he was not envisioning leaving Lydia anytime soon, that the story with Claudia was truly over. Folding the paper and slipping it into the thin envelope, I had had the impression of finally sealing her doom.