Lessons in French: A Novel

by Hilary Reyl

  The final person who came to pay her respects to Portia was Sally Meeks, slimmed to waifdom by a diet of bio-lite, the Frenchwoman’s secret potion that Christie had spoken of all those months ago at Les Deux Magots. Sally was wearing heavily constructed black linen. She felt bloated after last night’s farewell dinner for Portia at La Truite, where she had broken her diet, “shattered it so to speak, and today I can barely move.” Artichokes were in season again. There was a lethal new chestnut soufflé on the menu. No one had told me about the meal.

  “I’m so glad we had our grande bouffe before you got so very upset about Joshua,” said Sally. “Otherwise it would have been ruined for you. Such a low, low blow.”

  Lydia, who had dried her eyes by now, grimaced.

  “Portia, darling,” Sally continued, “you can’t wear those teeny pumps on the plane. You won’t be able to get your feet into them by the time you land.”

  “My daughter doesn’t swell,” said Lydia, with the first hint of levity I had seen from her today.

  Sally laughed too loudly. “I’m glad you haven’t completely lost your sense of humor. This Joshua business looks bad, but I’m telling you he’ll come around. And the one who’ll be sorry is that Claudia woman. She’s obviously delusional.” She giggled.

  “Sally, Sally,” sighed Clarence. “What matters here is Joshua. It’s not as though he’s made some silly gaffe or bad fashion choice. This is bloody serious. Stop taking it so lightly.”

  “You know, Clarence, I’m not taking it lightly. I’m refusing to believe in Joshua’s idiotic pretend decision. That’s my position. Because the most intense truths change on a dime, and it’s ‘in with the new!’ ” She gestured feverishly up and down her own altered body. “You, of all people, Clarence, should know that it’s all fashion in the end.”

  • • •

  After Portia had gone to the airport and Lydia had taken a sleeping pill, Clarence came to find me in her office, where I was fiddling with carbon copies of correspondence about sales from the show in April. Every photo had gone to a buyer. The banana diptych was slated to appear in the New Yorker, but not unless they paid “us” more. There were several letters from the new editor, who had, as foreshadowed, opened the magazine to photographs. The letters needed filing. I was labeling a new manila folder.

  “Excuse me, Katie,” said Clarence. “I’ve been waiting for a moment to tell you that Lydia mentioned that your cousin has AIDS and I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “Such bad news all around,” he said. “Can you believe Claudia was desperate enough to do this to us? To poison my son in order to punish me.”

  “Clarence, you only know what Joshua told you. It couldn’t have been Claudia’s idea. He wanted to do something like this all along and it’s possible she just talked it through with him, let him figure it out on his own. Claudia may be obsessive, but we can’t blame her for everything. Joshua is responsible for his own decisions. He’s not a baby. He’s awfully smart.”

  “Come on, you know how persuasive she is!” He pulled at his chin. “It is deeply ironic that she has such a massive ego, and that everything ultimately reverts back to her and her concerns, because the ego is the creation of her despised bourgeoisie.”

  Claudia had once told me that I was very skillful at clothing my own ego but that it was going to peek through more and more. If I didn’t allow myself to become an individual, it was going to grow powerful in hiding and start to betray me, she warned. I had to be careful. She wanted me to start being myself.

  But I was coming to understand that, even more than she desired my personal fulfillment, she wanted Clarence to learn something by realizing that I was, in fact, a separate being, with my own problems unrelated to his. And so was Joshua. She was using us to teach Clarence a lesson.

  Clarence began fidgeting with a pen in his breast pocket. “Katie, I don’t know what to do. There’s no point in trying to find her, is there? In asking her to try to change his mind?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s up to you and Lydia now.”

  “You may be right.”

  “Clarence?”

  “Yes?”

  “I might be ready to leave, really soon. I think I’m going to try New York. Most of my friends are there. And there’s a hard-core classical art academy that I’d like to enroll in once I can get my portfolio together. I need to waitress or something to make money, a job I can walk away from and do my own work. It’s time for me to learn to paint.” I looked at him for approval, then said, half to myself, “I hope they’ll accept me.”

  “Not yet, Katie. Please not with everything that’s going on. She’d never forgive you if you went now. She’d leave you high and dry. You don’t want this all to have been a waste of time, do you? Stay a few more months and I’ll help you get in anywhere in the States you want to go. I promise.”

  A couple of days later, he and Lydia left for a vacation with friends in a villa near Siena.

  fifty-six

  “Étienne, it’s me, Katie. Are you okay?”

  “What do you mean? It’s paradise here. It’s the inside of a Balzac novel. It’s a forest of symbols and rich sauces and knickknacks. When are you coming?”

  “I’m so sorry, Étienne.”

  “We can talk when you come. I hate the telephone.”

  I told him I had a week off soon and a plan to see Olivier, that I would tell Olivier I was meeting him later or leaving him early. Anything. What did Étienne want me to do?

  Étienne decided I should see Olivier first. “Finish that story and then come to me.”

  “What do you mean, finish that story?”

  “It’s only a figure of speech.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  • • •

  Next, I called Mom and asked her to sell my only valuable possession. On the wall of my room at home was a present from my godfather. He had sent it when I was born. It was a cel from Bambi, a simple image of the young deer, probably close to the beginning of the movie, before his mother gets shot by the hunters. He looks carefree and the flowers in the woods around him are kindly and cheerful.

  My godfather was a movie producer who used to work for Disney, still did perhaps. I had not seen or heard from him in years. He was one of the many people who faded from our life once Dad got diagnosed. Dad said you couldn’t necessarily blame them. They were all too young at the time to face their own mortality by looking at him. There was no point in being angry. Perhaps, I thought, but there was no point either in nostalgia for the baby presents of a lapsed godfather.

  Still, the cartoon image was part of the fabric of my childhood. From across the world, I could see its details, the three puddles of grass, the twinkle in Bambi’s right eye, the white spots on his fur, the childish spread of his skinny legs.

  Mom and I had always told each other this cel must be worth five hundred dollars.

  “Mom, I hope there will never be a time in my life when five hundred dollars will mean this much to me again. I’m going on vacation with Olivier, from New York, the guy I wrote you about, and I don’t want to be completely dependent on him.” I hadn’t realized this was true until I said it.

  “Of course you don’t. But you’re sure about this boy? Is he worth Bambi?” She was at her desk. I could hear her typewriter clanging as she talked to me.

  I didn’t answer.

  She didn’t press. “Well, then, I suppose I have to trust you on this one. We certainly don’t want you beholden to any boy.”

  • • •

  When, two days later, Mom wired me exactly five hundred dollars, I knew that she hadn’t sold Bambi for the precise amount we had imagined, that she had supplemented from her own savings for the sake of my independence.

  fifty-seven

  “Olivier, can we please rent bicycles to ride through the gardens?
I’ve always wanted to do it over.”

  What about taking a rowboat out on the Grand Canal? That was what his mother dreamed of at Versailles. She loved the idea that the canal was in the shape of the cross.

  “Maman is very spiritual. But she’s never had anyone with her at Versailles who could row the boat. Just me as a little boy. The two of us used to take carriage rides around the canal instead, lame plodding carriage rides. You didn’t even get to decide where the carriage went. You just sat there, passive.”

  Olivier stood behind me, arms wrapped around my chest, chin nestled in my shoulder. We gazed through the central allée of the formal gardens behind the château of Versailles, down a stretch of sand, bordered by cypress trees manicured to perfect points, then out a long rectangle of bright grass and on to the canal. The alignment was flawless. From up here, the canal appeared short, even though I knew it was over a kilometer in length. And it was packed with Sunday boaters on a classic summer weekend. Crowded, with no room to move.

  To me, the water didn’t look freeing at all. I didn’t want to row up and down in a toy basin, no matter how long. I wanted to get away from this spectacular geometric part of Versailles, onto the windy gravel paths farther out, the paths I remembered. I wanted to find the little farm in the distance where Marie-Antoinette and her friends got back to nature.

  But we still had three more days ahead of us here, hiding out in this pretty Parisian suburb, and I could afford to wait. This rowboat was a crux in Olivier’s memory. If anyone should be sympathetic, I should.

  “You’re sure you’re a big enough boy to row now?”

  He bit my earlobe, whispering, “You know, I’ve told my mother about you.”

  I was supposed to feel bathed in grace by this honor, but I was annoyed. I didn’t want to hear any more about his mother. Patience, I told myself. There would be time to forget her once this boating episode was behind us.

  We started down the allée. I had given myself a hasty pink pedicure in the early morning while Olivier slept. My polish wasn’t quite dry, and a coating of fine dust settled into the toenails of my sandaled feet.

  “Maman says you sound like a lovely girl.”

  We had reached the border of the lawn by now and had to pick a path on one side or the other in order to continue toward the water. Olivier seemed unable to go forward, so I steered him gently to the left.

  Slowly, we moved through this old garden in the lingering summer, each of us feeling daylight from a different time.

  I dreamed that we were going to engage with this place, that we were going to explore it instead of only exploring our respective pasts, or each other as we had in London. I hoped that these few days at Versailles, staying in an hôtel de charme, wandering the château and its surroundings, would be the beginning of our specific history. And part of me wished that he would come to Orléans with me to meet my family, although I still hadn’t told him I was cutting our trip short to see Jacques and Solange and Étienne. I didn’t yet know how open I wanted to be.

  We strolled silently, arm in arm, toward the rowboats. We heard water spraying. Bronze horses reared from the fountains at our backs. Before us, huge urns of flowers draped the path, reds and purples and dark pinks, each with their own yellow center.

  The longer I went without saying anything to Olivier about my dying cousin, the stranger it would be to bring up. So, the fact stayed in a private chamber in my heart, a chamber I both inhabited and ignored. I was in two places at once, not remembering and not forgetting. I wanted to become whole, to mingle Olivier with Étienne, to be the consistent person I was meant to be, but my resolutions kept dissolving.

  “Where’s my Kate? What are you daydreaming about?”

  “Nothing. Come on. Let’s get boating.”

  The water was still and cramped with tourists. Olivier’s beauty grew stony as he sunk into thought, pumping the oars with a rhythm that made me wish everyone else would disappear and we could lie down together right here in this boat.

  He was gazing at the massive three-tiered blocks of the château in the distance.

  “Olivier, what are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking, ‘So this is what you can have if you’re the Sun King.’ ”

  “Only until the revolution comes, my sweet.” I pushed my naked big toe into his inner thigh. His jeans were very soft.

  “Kate,” he said with a theatrical breath, “when will we say ‘l’état c’est nous?’ When will it ever all finally revolve around us?”

  “But, it does, in a way. And it also doesn’t at all, does it? I mean, don’t you think everyone feels like they are at the heart of their own universe? That’s how our brains work. Even if we’re wrong, that’s what we think.”

  He sighed, gave me an appraising look that trailed off in disappointment. “That’s not what I meant.”

  I felt distinctly imperfect. This was not turning out to be the boat ride of his dreams. We bumped into a family of five.

  “Putain,” said the father. “Watch where you are going. Merde!”

  Olivier ignored him. “Actually, to get back to what you are saying about being self-centered, I think I’m more attuned to other people’s self-centeredness than my own.”

  The question “Who the hell is this guy?” surfaced in my consciousness like the gaping, toothy mouth of an ancient fish, only to vanish with Olivier’s touch. He dropped the oars and leaned over to take my shoulders.

  “Let’s stop trying to talk.” He sighed.

  We docked and hurried back to our room.

  There were no bicycles that afternoon.

  The next morning, it was pouring rain. We sat in the breakfast room of our hotel. I craned my head back to rub against the chintz padding in the wallpaper. I took the last miniature croissant from an ornate basket. They weren’t particularly good, but they were here, and Olivier, recovering again from overwork in the bank, had slept through dinner last night so I was starving.

  “More coffee?” he asked. There were flecks of golden sleep in his eyelashes that reminded me of our first meeting in Paris, flooding me with vanished warmth.

  “Yes, please. I like this hotel. It has all these quirky little touches of decadence.”

  It was called La Bergère, the Shepherdess, after poor Marie-Antoinette’s fantasy role. The faucets in the bathroom were all sheep’s heads. Her toy farm was the prevailing motif of the toile.

  Olivier said we should go inside the château today, because of the weather. I agreed and went to get my sketchbook, my bicycle dream receding.

  Sharing an umbrella with La Bergère’s gold imprint of a frilly shepherdess complete with ribboned staff, we walked across the wet cobblestones of the Cour d’Honneur toward the château’s main entrance. The slate roofs and gilded balconies shone sadly in the rain.

  At Olivier’s suggestion, we headed for the Hall of Mirrors.

  La Galerie des Glaces, connects the Salon de la Guerre with the Salon de la Paix, war with peace, and the queen’s chamber with the king’s. It drips with gold. A hideously impressive display of aristocratic waste, it is at once endlessly dazzling and profoundly silly.

  Standing on the outskirts of a guided tour, Olivier and I learned that there were 357 mirrors there and that at the time they were produced only Venetian craftsmen could make mirrors. Since everything in the palace had to be produced in France, the craftsmen were hired away from Venice to a French factory, only to be poisoned by Venetian envoys for their desertion.

  We peeked through the crowd at our reflections. He wanted to know if I thought people were looking at us.

  I drifted off to one of the gilded statues of women holding crystal candelabras that lined the windows of the hall, and I pulled out my sketchbook. The statue was standing like the figure of Prince in Étienne’s poster. I drew her quickly, much too quickly by some standards, with tricks of shading
, dark, light, dark, to evoke her contours. It felt good, and not necessarily dishonest. I had a vocabulary now and I let it flow. After I had the body, I began to drape her in flower petals.

  “Isn’t she Baroque enough already?” Olivier whispered over my shoulder. “Why are you adding that crazy cloak?”

  I had forgotten about him while drawing and found his intrusion not altogether welcome.

  “It’s for a friend who’s into kitsch.”

  “A friend?” He laughed with waning confidence. “Should I be jealous?”

  “No. He’s my cousin, and he’s encouraging me to have style. Or to admit that I can’t not have style. I think it’s going to be fun.” I closed my pad and took his hand. His family ring was heavy. “Let’s go see the queen’s room.”

  We stared dumbly at the overflowing bouquets, ribbons and peacock feathers embroidered onto the silken walls, looked up at the flounces and tassels and bunches of golden berries and grapes, at the impossibly tall candles. Like all commoners, we were set off from the royal bed by a gilt railing.

  Could I picture myself a queen, he asked?

  I shook my head.

  Could I imagine, he gestured at a suite of inlaid furniture, the heartbreak of having to walk away from all of this?

  I bit my tongue.

  • • •

  At dinner, Olivier told me he thought it was a good thing that Joshua was going into the army. Maybe he’d be less stoned and pimply and whining if he finally climbed into one of the beds he made and dealt with the consequences. “If there’s any character in that boy, this may be his only hope of finding it. He called me to ask me what he should do, and I called his bluff.”

  “You’re kidding. You would do that to Josh? Tell him it was cool to risk his life? Just to prove some point. You’ve got to be joking!”

  “No.”

  I said I was getting the feeling that I was disappointing him, and that I wasn’t what he expected, was not as graceful, not as feminine, not quite “it.” I sensed he was pulling away. Was I right?