by Hilary Reyl
“So, Katie, if you have decided not to go back to the Sixième, then perhaps you can simply call them,” said Jacques. “Or do you have work to finish?”
It wasn’t until Jacques said it that it became real. In a burst of gratitude, I grabbed his hand. I couldn’t work for the Schells anymore.
“I have to do one more thing before I can leave,” I said. “I spoke to Lydia yesterday. She wants me home tonight to help get ready for a photo shoot. She and Clarence cut their vacation a few days short because Libération is coming to take her picture tomorrow, for a feature article about her work. And she must have gotten into some kind of fight with Clarence again because she said they weren’t speaking and she didn’t want him there because she doesn’t want to look angry in the photos.”
“I thought they were all harmonious in their fury about the son,” said Étienne.
“So did I. But things change fast.”
I tried to picture the entracte between the old marriage and the future, during which each player was mostly alone in his or her study. It was hard to know if they were finished or if they were pausing for breath.
“Perhaps she has decided to punish him,” said Étienne.
“It all sounds so decadent.” Solange sighed. “You are better off without them, Katie.”
“They probably throw away food all day long!” Étienne lit up with impish glee. “They hurl it all over the furniture and call the concierge in to clean it up once they’ve had their fun.”
Jacques and Solange both shivered and dug into their beef.
• • •
That very night, I found myself in Lydia’s office, ready to tell her about Olivier, to say that I had to leave. I would see her through the photo shoot. Then I would go to New York and learn to paint. I was trembling to join the world of talkers instead of staring dumbly up at it from the underside of a puddle.
But she beat me to the punch.
“Katherine, tell me something. Do you have a conscience?”
“Of course I have a conscience.”
“Then write to Portia and apologize for what you’ve done. She knows now about the dalliance with Claudia and how it was managed by you. You cannot imagine how devastated she is. Especially since we’ve all found out what kind of fiend Claudia is—what she has done to our family. Portia thought you were her close friend.”
“But, isn’t she upset with Clarence?” Lydia ignored the anger in my voice.
“Of course she is. She won’t speak to him now that she has the details. At first, she thought his little indiscretion might be yet another reason to feel sorry for the man. But finally, the girl understands what I’ve been going through all these years while she’s been siding so blindly with him, and I’m getting a few moments of her sympathy. Maybe because she herself knows now what it is to be betrayed? By Olivier, of course. Anyway, she’s shattered. Still, she sees why her father tried to keep his sordid life a secret from her, to shelter her. But, you, you had no business lying to any of us. She needs to hear from you that you do care about her and value her friendship, otherwise her faith in friendship itself is destroyed. She needs this now with all this craziness about Joshua and her father. It’s no skin off your back to show her you care.”
“Lydia, there’s nothing I can do for Portia. What could I possibly say?”
“Don’t pretend to be so naïve. You know what to say.”
“I can’t write to Portia, Lydia. I haven’t been her friend.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. You’re starting to sound as mopey as she does.”
“Lydia, the whole time I’ve been here I’ve been seeing Olivier. It’s over, but—”
I lost my voice. Her face went out of focus. I tried to steady my gaze on it as I sunk into a chair beside her. I waited for her to grow fangs, to rise, to strike.
But she kept a marble silence.
Then she began to laugh. “You idiot, idiot girl,” she said. “You really need some tough love, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Listen, I know you could use some kind of recommendation for a job or an art school. I mean, do you know anyone? I could give you a handful of names, people I know at magazines and galleries back home, depending on what you want to do, although you have no idea, do you? But Portia will have her letter from you first.”
“Did you hear what I just said? Until a few days ago, I was seeing Olivier. I’m not writing Portia a letter. I am not her friend.” I was laying myself stark naked, and she didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m not asking you to tell Portia about Olivier,” she said with an eerie plainness. “I’m asking you to apologize to her for what you did to us, with Claudia. Olivier is neither here nor there. I’ve known about you two forever. My dear, how do you think I found out about those letters in the first place?”
“Oh my God.”
“Olivier tells me everything. He can’t help himself.”
“He called you after I told him about Clarence and Claudia in London?”
“He called me from Heathrow, before his flight took off, to tell me Clarence was sleeping with Claudia and you were ‘stuck’ in the middle. He couldn’t even wait until he got home. He hates Clarence more than he ever liked you. The boy is obsessed with his mother and hates his father. He’s a pretty transparent case, my dear,” she said.
“Did he tell you about Versailles?”
“After you left him there, he came into town and brought me some spring rolls, the naughty thing. How was your family in Orléans?”
“I think I have to go now.”
“Just be here for me for the shoot tomorrow, and then you can do whatever the hell you want. But if you care about your future, I have one simple request and you know what it is. Now get out of here. Go sleep on everything.”
sixty
I had been in Paris for a year, and it was drizzling again. I had packed up and spent the night in Étienne’s apartment and was making my way to the Schells’ to perform my final task. The city was awash in familiar names as I walked from the Bastille toward St. Paul, across the Pont Marie to the Île St-Louis, where I would pass up a Berthillon cone, over to the Île de la Cité, around Notre-Dame and across the Seine again to the Left Bank, up the boulevard St-Michel, and through the Luxembourg. All these words were so saturated with meaning for me that I barely needed to pronounce them to know where I was.
As I turned up our particular rue, so embroidered now in my mind that the purring cars and the clatter of high heels seemed to originate in my ears, I saw Clarence disappear around the far corner. Banished from Lydia’s photo shoot, he was probably going to take refuge with Henri. I figured it was only a matter of time before Lydia told him about my romance with Olivier and he became disgusted with me.
Rain was falling in earnest now. I reached No. 60 and punched in the door code. Madame Fidelio was standing inside. She had been on vacation for the past few weeks, and I had almost forgotten her existence. Her solid frame was reassuring. Over the year, we had grown fond of one another. Her face was a surprising relief, like the first sighting of my mom down an airport corridor after a long semester at school.
“Madame Lydia says you are leaving us. It is a shame. But I understand. Je comprends.”
“You do? You understand?”
“Ce n’est pas facile.” She motioned across the rain-dark courtyard to the marble stairway she had so cautiously led me up last September. “No, it is not easy in that family. You were admirable.”
No I wasn’t admirable. I was an idiot for still not having bought my own umbrella despite repeated advice from an ex-pat who knew. I was soaked. “Thank you, Madame Fidelio. You’re right, it is not easy, but it is sometimes very interesting and that’s what I think I came for. It was an experience.”
She laughed. “Intéressant! En effet, ils font les intéressants! Ah, c’est trop bon, ça!”
“I have to get inside. The photographers from Libération will be here any minute.”
“Photographers? Here? Mon dieu.” She rolled her eyes to the wet sky.
sixty-one
Lydia told me to wait in the living room while she finished getting dressed and to answer the door for the photographer and his assistant if they came. “Just stay in here.” The subtext being keep out of my study and out of my kitchen, you little rodent.
I knew she did not need me here to translate. If anyone could orchestrate a photo shoot, it was Lydia Schell. Did she want to impress upon me one last time the sort of glamour and importance I would be losing out on as soon as I boarded that plane to New York, where, she was right, I knew virtually no one who mattered? Did she want to hit me with one final image of all that I was losing out on?
After a few minutes, she returned.
“How do I look?” she asked me.
“Fabulous.”
She had styled herself in a fitted black silk button-down shirt, the same one she had bought Portia in their back-to-school trip to agnès b. Her makeup was more perceptible than usual, particularly on the cheeks. And there was a chalkiness under her eyes where the shadows usually were. Her lipstick was plum.
A touch creepy to the naked eye, this look would surely translate into freshness on camera.
Below her breastbone, she wore a large pendant, jet-black with ornate golden borders that could be Middle Eastern. Or maybe Victorian. She was a compact and alluring force.
The doorbell rang.
“Go,” she mouthed.
When I came back with the photographer and his assistant, Lydia explained that, since the rain appeared to have let up, the pictures would be taken in the garden and that, while we were setting up, I could be the stand-in for her husband, Clarence, who would be here any minute. I was almost his height. She had sent him out to buy a new shirt. “He’s written a major book about fashion writing. It’s fascinating, and I’ll make sure it gets into the article because you French will love it. Vous allez adorer mon mari,” she said proudly, “but he doesn’t own a shirt that works with his skin tone. So, I’ve sent him to Alain Figaret for the right shade of pink. He will be back momentarily.”
Clarence in pink? Clarence in the photograph for her big profile in Libération? “But, Lydia, excuse me, I thought Clarence wasn’t coming today. I thought you said—”
“Well, my dear, I’m afraid you’re already out of the loop. And why would you think I wouldn’t want my husband by my side in a major piece about my life in Paris?”
“Isn’t it about your work?”
“My work is my life. And if my children were here, I’d have them in front of the camera too. Does that answer your question?”
We led the photographer down the hallway, through the kitchen and out onto the back steps down to the garden. The bright orange extension cord that I had bought so that Clarence would be able to see it and not trip when I was working in the garden was coiled now on the landing.
The sun had come out. Leaves were beginning to turn. I pictured Clarence, his new pink shirt folded in a fancy bag under his arm, rushing through the streets so that he wouldn’t be late.
Lydia checked her watch as she sat down on one of the chairs she had placed in front of the beloved rose bush.
The photographer suggested he get a few shots of her alone while they waited. She got up and looked at his light meter, then returned to her place.
I had thought it might be strange for her to be the object of an image, to find herself on the other side of the camera. But she was teaching me, yet again, that art was about framing, not about where you stood.
While the camera clicked, Lydia sat still, her eyes fixed on a branch chosen for reasons known only to her.
The photographer told me to hold a black umbrella high over her head. He asked, could I move a little to the left, please? I was peeking into the shot. No, that wasn’t right at all. The umbrella was drooping.
He sighed and looked sympathetically at Lydia as if to say that his own assistant was an idiot too. With a smile, she returned his sigh. Useless, all of us.
He asked his assistant, a young man with a mottled neck like Joshua’s, to hold the umbrella instead. “Ça ne peut pas être pire.” It couldn’t be worse. I should simply stand back and out of the way, he said.
So, I did. I saw Lydia against the vined background of overripe roses. What did she look like?
She was a petite woman, perhaps not as thin as she hoped to be, but elegant and elongated despite the shortness of her limbs. Her rough skin was smoothed now by makeup. She had short brown hair, highlighted an expensive burgundy color. She was graceful, well dressed. Her mouth was pursed, worked into leanness by a constant movement of silent formulations. She was relaxing it now, I could tell, at great effort. Her too-prominent eyes burned with small calculations and otherworldly intelligence. She was petty and she was larger than life.
With my own blind need for sense, I stared at her. But the more I tried to read, the more abstract she became until her eyes were globes and her cheeks were fading roses and her hair was sun. And then there were only shapes and colors and webs of light. Nothing would stay literal.
“Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Wake up! Merde!” The photographer was yelling at me in disgust. I had never failed so completely to win someone over. I had lost my touch. “We are ready for you to take the part of the husband now. Please go sit in that other chair.”
But, at that moment, Lydia smiled up to the top of the garden stairs where Clarence stood in a pale pink shirt that looked great on him. We did not know how long he had been surveying us.
“Hi, Clarence!” I called out, running toward him. Would he stay my friend? Would he continue to care about me and protect me from irrational swings of fate? After all, he had an overarching mind, right? I had to say something to him, anything. “Clarence,” I babbled, “I have this new idea . . .”
He looked crossly down at the steps. His lips shook.
I saw then that it was too late, that the time for us had passed, that he knew everything. But I could not stop. “Clarence, look, I got a new extension cord, an orange one. So no one will break their necks on the stairs. Remember when you said you were going to break your neck on my extension cords? Remember that night?”
Nothing.
“Check it out. It’s my legacy. I’m on my way out, but the extension cord is here to stay.” My fluency had deserted me. I could not make sense. “Remember what Henri said about legacies at lunch that time? About being in the way of chance and his favorite knife?”
Clarence brushed by me.
“Voici mon mari, l’écrivain,” said Lydia to the photographer, getting up to embrace Clarence as he came toward her. “His new book is going to be huge.”
As he and Lydia walked toward their garden chairs, Clarence risked one last over-the-shoulder look at me. It was scathing.
• • •
When they were finished, Clarence disappeared into the house. I never saw him again.
Lydia dropped a final, punitive hint about Salman Rushdie perhaps coming to hide in Paris, not so very far from here.
“Lydia, no matter what, I’m not writing to Portia.”
“I know. Sometimes it’s best to leave a spent situation behind you without looking back. If you’re going to go to New York, then don’t try to remedy anything now. Don’t overthink it. We will obviously be fine in this household. But as far as you’re concerned, just know that some things can’t be salvaged, and you’re young enough for a fresh start. Burning bridges is not the end of the world. People will try to tell you it is, but they’re wrong. Sometimes, bridge-burning is the best policy.”
“But I don’t want to forget what has happened here, Lydia. And I also want to make something clear, if you’ll permit a domestic to speak her mind. I thi
nk I’ve done a good job. Professionally, did I ever let you down?”
“You insist on this divide between professionalism and personal loyalty that doesn’t exist! Fine, I admit you did your job well, if you don’t count your various betrayals, but I cannot recommend you to any of my friends, not professionally or at all. I’ve given you something, though, haven’t I?”
“I think so, but I still don’t know what it is.”
“I’ve armed you to be ambitious, my dear.”
I began to laugh. “My cousins call me Rastignac!”
“Then go forth and be hungry!”
• • •
My Métro ride from Paris to the airport was without incident. I had mailed my few boxes ahead and was traveling light.
By the time I boarded the plane, my latest version of Paris was already falling into the lightness and shadow of memory. Parts would be overexposed, parts would be stressed to obsession, parts would remain strange. Someday, I would retrace it through the dozens of letters I had kept.
As I flew west, a layer of myself calcified into something pearlier, milkier than before. I was no longer quite crystalline, no longer accent-free to the point of invisibility. There was something to me now. Perhaps, I thought with an inner wink to Lydia, it was a sharper appetite. Or a deep knowledge of trouble. You might call it experience. Although Mom would say that you couldn’t yet take it to the bank.
acknowledgments
This book has many friends.
I would like to thank Lizzie Gottlieb, who first told me to write Lessons in French. I will always remember the sparkle of your voice and the sparkle in your eye. And Bob Gottlieb, its first reader and most prescient critic.
Shireen Jilla, nobody read it more times or lavished more light and enthusiasm than you. You cared about every word and you are a part of the book.
Margie Stohl and Rafi Simon, my wine-writing partners in crime, there from the beginning in Otranto, you are my rock and my other brain.
John Wyatt, thanks for the unshakable writerly connection and the faith.