by Hilary Reyl
He sighed. “There’s something—I can’t explain it—there’s something missing.”
Let him think he was breaking up with me. I didn’t care. In fact, I preferred it.
“Do you ever feel,” I ventured, “like moments of growing up are sometimes weirdly about remembering who you used to be?”
He ignored me. “I’ve always had this ideal of perfection,” he said. “It’s from my mother and from the idea of the life she lost. I don’t know what the perfection is, but I know that when I find it, I won’t have any doubts. That’s what Portia couldn’t understand, poor thing.”
Could you blame her?
“But you’re different, Kate. You’re stronger. I’m sorry. You’re amazing. It’s me who has a problem. I’m sympathetic to all of you, but sympathy isn’t love even if it looks like it sometimes.” He frowned dramatically. “Let’s go. I’m not hungry.”
His beauty was suddenly lost on me.
“I’d like to finish my duck if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Do you still want to ride bikes tomorrow if it’s not raining?” he asked, as though gracing me with some kind of favor.
“Sure.”
That night, sex in our plush if tiny canopied bed was decadent. Olivier kept sighing. Why couldn’t he love me when I felt this good? It was ridiculous. Obscene. Sleep was pointless. We were now officially running out of time.
Nonetheless, he managed to doze late into the morning while I scoured the streets of the town of Versailles for picnic foods.
• • •
By the time we rode to the path where I remembered Étienne speeding so cruelly away from me, eyelashes cutting by, shoelaces whipping, my redemption fantasies were all but snuffed. I wasn’t going to find any kind of love here. But maybe I was going to escape from the geometry of Versailles into the leafier, more mysterious back roads of memory.
Olivier was demonstratively melancholy. He kept crying and apologizing. I felt weirdly secure in our decision to part.
Sleep deprivation infused the woods beyond the formal gardens with magic.
“That’s it! That’s the spot! I remember this place so clearly.”
We were riding out into a clearing in front of Marie-Antoinette’s hameau, the play farming village with the exposed beams everywhere, where handmaidens used to wash the chicken shit from the eggs before nestling them in clean hay for the queen and her friends to collect.
I made us a picnic in the spot where Étienne had once splayed himself on the grass, ignoring me so very gloriously. I had forgotten that there was a stone bridge here arching over the lazy stream.
We laid our bicycles down. Once we were not moving, we were immediately cold, hit by an early waft of autumn. Huddling in Olivier’s denim jacket, we ate quickly, baguettes with cheese and pears, madeleines.
When we had finished, I said I wanted to do something.
I took an empty Perrier bottle down to the stream and held it with the opening against the faint current so that it filled with water. The water flowed past my bottle, but the very same water was also trapped inside. Time and events went on regardless of the glass. And yet the glass was stopping time. Constantly.
I thought I was appropriating Proust’s crystalline image of young Marcel holding a glass jar in a stream.
In dipping myself briefly into a stream of Parisian lives, had I changed anything? Had I mattered in this monumental world I had hoped to enter into? Perhaps, but Paris would still be standing just fine without me, thank you very much, and its cast of characters would be in a virtually identical mess. I was barely more than an eavesdropper, an observer who would fade as I had appeared. What did I myself contain that year and what flowed inevitably by?
As these questions formed, I grew sure that my time here was ending.
“Kate, what are you doing? Isn’t that water kind of dirty?”
It was indeed muddy, not exactly the sparkling stream amid young Marcel’s nettles. But I defended it.
“It’s no dirtier than the water in your fancy Grand Canal. In fact, it’s all the same water. It’s all part of the very same irrigation system, I’m sure.”
Of course it was all the same water. It’s the same water everywhere. And of course this part of Versailles with its windy gravel paths and shadowy plantings is no wilder or less contrived than any other. It is simply portrayed in a different style.
The ghosts out here aren’t any more potent or true to life than the ghosts back in the palace staring at themselves in endless mirrors.
Getting back to nature indeed. What a joke. You never got back to anything.
“I’m going to leave here tomorrow. I have some family to see. It’s important.”
“I’m sorry. I thought I could truly care for you.”
Well, think again.
I poured the water from my glass bottle slowly back into the stream under Marie-Antoinette’s phony bridge.
fifty-eight
Étienne came to meet me at the train station in Orléans. His leather pants sagging, he was waiting on the quai.
He saw the worry in my eyes and preempted me.
“I like being skinny! I’ve been au régime here. It’s driving Maman crazy. She makes me eat her choucroute and I puke like a supermodel. My Mick Jagger ass is growing more and more pubescent with each passing day. Don’t try to pretend you aren’t jealous.”
As soon as we sat down in the car, I started to cry.
My tears did no good, he said. He said that if I wanted to make him feel better, I should talk about my life. Ta vie absurde chez la famille papaye. He needed distraction.
But I was sorry for all the times—
Not yet! Distraction!
So I told him all about breaking up with Olivier.
“Finally you leave that silly boy! Mon dieu, Katie, you can be so slow.”
“I’m a slow learner. My mom always said I was a late bloomer, a long-term slow-growth investment.”
“What’s going on with la salope and the mad family?”
I did not answer.
We drove in silence, stopped at a light, then he looked at me through those sharp lashes. “Why do you look so culpable?”
“I keep flipping back and forth between feeling like I haven’t done anything wrong and this horrible guilt that I’ve been bad to this family and wasted my time and my money and my future. Remember when Lydia found out about the letters I was carrying for Clarence and Claudia?”
He nodded, shifted into gear.
“Lydia basically kept saying I wouldn’t amount to anything, but then she asked me over and over if I’d made my decision about whether or not to stay. It was so manipulative. And it made me feel manipulative too because I kept apologizing. And I’m still doing it, every day. Only halfway through the apologies I want to scream because I don’t understand why I’m saying sorry to them.”
“Arrête! Confession is only masochism. Can’t you see with these letters and her husband’s silly affair she knew exactly what was in store for her? All victims of deceit, they know on some level. Portia, she knows too. Believe me!”
“No, she can’t know!”
“It won’t kill her, or she’d already be dead. Every time I’ve been cheated on, I realize afterward that I knew. And Portia, I can tell from the smells in her room, from the wardrobe, from every little sign I read that she is like her mother, and her mother, she’s such a liar, a professional liar. It’s all completely controlled, always. And of course they want you to stay with them, these people. They are begging to be infiltrated. They want you in their devil’s pact. And you are not critical enough. All you have to do is look at the bitch’s photographs to know what she is.”
“You didn’t tell me you hated her show that much.”
“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings at the time, but I did despise that stupid West German bi
ker with the bananas who let her take his picture because he thought he looked generous, and she did it, cynically, to make him look like a fool with no grasp of the situation. That one in particular was arrogant. But they all were, I thought. She was the only one who knew the story. The people in the pictures, they were all clueless and vain-looking.”
“That’s not true! She found those images. She may be a lot of things, but she’s a great photographer. She is such a good artist that the rest of her hardly matters. Her crazy children and her stupid possessions and her papaya diet, all is forgiven because of what she makes. I believe that. She frames her images, with a time stamp, but they are not chosen. Can’t you see? You can’t not see just because you can’t stand her.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “So, she is something of an artist.”
“Thank you. But I know that doesn’t mean that I should take everything she dishes out. If I were to stay, I would do things differently.”
He accelerated around a curve into a suburban housing development. The houses were white with red mansard roofs and metal shutters. I wondered which one would prove to be ours.
He drove past a senior recreation center, turned onto a street called the rue Racine. All the while, he spoke about Lydia. “Why are we fighting about some voyeuristic egomaniac?”
“Because life is about people, not hard facts, right? And I’ve learned a lot from her.”
“For example?”
“How to use chance as a tool.”
“Quoi? If you learned that, it was from living, not from watching her. Stop defending her. Admit that you’re angry because it’s frustrating and ugly if you don’t.”
I felt my weight sink into my shoes, my shoes push through the shallow carpet of his tiny car to feel the steel below.
“You’re right. The whole reason I got into such a mess is that all I ever want is for people to like me, to give them back beautiful reflections. I sensed it was going to be crazy, from the very beginning, and I wanted too badly to be someone and to be seduced and to have the kind of adventure my dad would be proud of. I wanted experience. I thought experience would teach me who I was and that I would like me once I finally knew me. I had no foresight.”
“Foresight?” He laughed. “If there were such a thing as foresight, would I be like this today?”
We pulled into a carport.
Through panes of frosted glass, I recognized the fast-approaching forms of Solange and Jacques. I broke into a run. But before I could reach the front door, they burst out and took me in their arms. They had grown old, but they felt the same.
“La petite Parisienne, la Rastignac américaine,” they called me without a hint of irony. I had grown. I looked smart now, too sophisticated to be wearing a ripped t-shirt. Solange said she would sew it for me. Help hide my bony shoulders. Why was everyone trying to be so thin these days? I must be starving.
“Stunning but true, Solange has cooked you lunch,” said Jacques.
“We are all stuffed!” Étienne laughed. “Maman is stuffing me.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek. She flushed. “Everything is ‘comme chez Hédiard’ these days, right, my dear parents. You can feed me until they find a cure. C’est quelque chose.”
Jacques took Solange’s hand and, for a second after we emerged from our embrace, they stood very still in their doorway, staring at me. The young woman they saw knew in this moment that she loved them unconditionally. And they loved her. They were her family. She did not have to perform. The simplicity was stunning.
I looked around. So this was the house they had been building since their youth, salting away the money year after year from their teachers’ salaries, first for the land, then the foundation, the construction, the kitchen, the bookshelves for The Human Comedy,
the marble staircase, the conversion of the attic into a sewing room for Solange. They might be socialists, but their faith in the concrete on their little plot of land in the city of their birth was the most bourgeois, sentimental, beautiful thing I had ever seen.
At lunch, which was delicious, they asked me all about Mom. Her job? Her home? Her prospects for retirement? Simple basic questions that Lydia had never bothered with.
When Solange brought out her chocolate mousse, I told her I had made it for my new boss to great success.
“You see, Maman,” said Étienne, “your fame rings deep in the heart of the Sixième.”
After lunch, Étienne carried my suitcase up to a small guest room. Solange had made up my bed with the same ruffled pillow I had slept on as a girl. And she had framed a photo of Étienne and me at Versailles, looking much happier than I remembered. Jacques had left me a copy of Le Père Goriot, which he had had me read aloud with him when I was a kid, discussing its finer grammatical and descriptive points in order to teach me “real” French.
“Étienne,” I said as he sat down beside me on my bed, “it’s good to be here. You and Jacques and Solange are my home. I should have come sooner.”
“I know.” He sighed. “After all my rebellion, they are the ones who will take care of me and ask no questions. It would be cruel, if it weren’t so lovely.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to you after that movie about Jesus dying. I’m sorry I didn’t think things through. I hope I haven’t been hurting your feelings, but you didn’t tell me. Why? I must have seemed very callous. I was calling you a drama queen and you were really sick. I feel like an idiot.”
“No, I wanted to believe that you knew and were pretending you didn’t to cheer me up. I’m perverse. You know that. It’s part of my charm. Stop crying.”
He sat down beside me on the flouncy twin bed. I thought he might put his arm on my shoulder, but he simply stayed within touching distance.
“I said, stop crying.”
“Étienne, I forgive you for every time you were ever mean to me.”
“For the lice?” he asked.
“For the lice.”
“For the chocolate éclair?” he asked.
“That too.”
“For the time I ignored you at Versailles?”
We had the same memories. How rare.
“Almost. I almost forgive you for Versailles.”
“You know it was because I thought your papa had died that day and that they were going to tell you and I wouldn’t have any idea how to act?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“I was very uncomfortable with you because you were such a tragic little girl and they were all so worried about you. It’s a hard place for a young boy. So, forgiveness?”
“I said, almost.”
“Then I suppose my Mick Jagger ass can rest in peace.”
“You know, Clarence met Mick Jagger at a party the other night with Lydia. He said Mick was surprisingly smart and well read and ‘not at all what you’d think.’ Mick talked to Clarence for a long time about fashion.”
“Oh, I am so relieved that my idol is cultivé! I was deeply worried about his mind for a while there. Please tell Clarence when you next see him that I want to lick him all over.”
“You really don’t.”
Étienne hummed a few bars of “Sympathy for the Devil.”
“You haven’t heard from Christie either, have you?” he asked.
“No, but I’m sure we’ll hear from her as soon as she’s settled. You know Christie. She’ll have to get the whole lay of the land in her new world. Then I’m sure she’ll be in touch. She won’t forget us.”
“Oh, she won’t forget us, but she won’t be in touch for about five years. That’s what I predict. She needs time away. In five years, she’ll glide back into our lives in a fabulous lawyer outfit as though nothing has been and no time has passed and she doesn’t owe us any explanation.”
fifty-nine
“What’s the matter, Katie?” asked Solange. “You’re not eating like
you usually do. Don’t you like my beef?”
“It’s August,” said Jacques, gently mocking. “Beef bourgignon is perhaps a bit rough in August.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said. “It’s delicious. Any time of year. I’m just sad to be leaving here. I’m not ready to go back to Paris yet. I feel like I’ve only just come home.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Étienne. “Sadness is never reason enough to waste food. Not when there is china to collect.”
I smiled and looked up at the glassed-in shelf where Solange displayed her collection of porcelain pillboxes. There was a pea pod, a violin case, a hat box, a bread basket, a bright blue egg with gold trim, a perfume flask, none measuring more than a couple of inches.
“Katie, you are nervous about something, no?” A pearl onion suspended at her lips, she searched me. “Is it very upsetting, this situation?”
“I don’t think I can go back to Lydia.”
“What will your mother say?”
“I don’t know, but something about being here makes me realize I need to change. It’s been fascinating working for her, but I can’t be in her house without feeling like a liar all the time.”
“They make you lie!” Étienne put down his fork.
“Étienne,” said Jacques softly, “this is beautiful meat your mother has bought and prepared. Please try.”
Étienne looked into his plate as at an unfordable river.
I forced down a stringy bite.
“I’ll finish Étienne’s,” I tried to laugh. “Just give me some time.”
Solange began to tear. “It is difficult for us to understand the rejection you young people feel. When you are upset, you reject things. We spent our life with not enough. The war when we were children. It’s unimaginable to leave a plate of beef. But what do we know about today?”
“We’re trying,” said Jacques.
“You’re amazing,” I said. “We’re sorry—right, Étienne?”
“No, you’re flawed actually. If only you’d made veal, I’d be devouring it. It’s August, Maman.”
She pretended to slap him.