by Hilary Reyl
“Oui.”
She asked if I liked rillettes, and I answered “Oui” again.
How had this happened that I spoke French, the woman wanted to know.
“My father taught me,” I said.
“No,” Mom interrupted, “you speak French because you yourself learned.”
She never wants to give Papa credit for anything.
Elisabeth sits down next to me. Because there are so many blurry new faces in the group, I focus on her clear profile. She has a small nose that turns up at the tip. Her eyebrow looks very arched and reddish gold in the candlelight. Her eye is bright. Her hair is in a loose bun. There are two small moles on her chin that I can see from my angle. And there is one more that I can’t see now.
On the other side of Elisabeth sits a man with a brown beard. She is talking to the man very fast, in a squeakier voice than usual. Everything about her face while she talks is precise, while the man next to her is a mass of fur on top of a black T-shirt with some kind of design on it, maybe even some words.
The mass of fur stands up and says he will be right back.
Elisabeth now turns to face me so that I see both shiny eyes and both eyebrows and the point of her widow’s peak marking the middle of her pretty face. I also see her collarbones and part of her chest because she is wearing her white cotton shirt with the top four buttons undone.
“What do you think of Arthur?”
“Is Arthur the man who is hairy, with some light brown and some dark brown?”
“You don’t like his beard?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before. I have an impression of furriness.”
She laughs.
“Well, he’s great. He’s the art director for the movie. He’s smart and he speaks French, like you. You should talk to him.”
This is not an appealing idea at all. I tell her she can talk to him instead and tell me about it later.
She says okay.
Soon the hairy art director named Arthur comes back and Elisabeth goes into profile and starts to squeak again. Then some asparagus vinaigrette comes and I am served five spears. I focus all my attention on them. They are delicious. The taste helps to block out the noise of conversations.
“More asparagus, please?” I say, lifting my voice to make it sound like a question instead of an order.
I can clearly see Mom’s lips across the table, starting to form the full question for me to repeat and learn. This is the question she wants to model for me: “May I have some more asparagus, please?” She wants to help me because there are a lot of strangers with us at the table, and I’m trying to avoid saying “I” in case I say “you” by mistake, as in “You want more asparagus, please?”
Mom holds back because she doesn’t want to make a big deal in front of everyone. After she mouths the first two words, “May I . . .” she clamps her mouth shut into her tight-cheekbone smile. She badly wants me to fit in because she believes it’s important to me to fit in. This is called “projection.”
Layla says that neurotypical people project on us a lot. They think we can be happy only if we become like them. They don’t understand that the way we are is the only way we can be, like having blue eyes, or being male or female, or being human even. It’s not something we can change, Layla says, and they should stop making us try. I’m not sure what my own opinion about this is, but I think about it more than once every day.
Someone hands me the plate of asparagus. I take it, ducking the hander’s gaze.
“Thank you,” I say to the plate, taking only five more spears because I have learned from Françoise, the family cook in Search, how much trouble they are to prepare.
“Do you want some of this frothy sauce?” asks a large man whose voice is not totally foreign. He must have worked on some of Mom’s other movies. He’s sitting to the right of her, across the table.
I half raise my eyes, and I see that he has a wisp of a beard, less dense than the art director’s. I can’t make out his other features. Compared to Mom, he is broad-shouldered and massive. His shirt is solid gray.
On the left side of Mom is another large man, but this one is rounder and his skin is smooth and very white. His hair is a splash of yellow. His shirt is a splash of light blue mixed with green.
Mom is a focused image in between two blurred ones. The brown-and-gray curves of her hair are like sculpture. Her eyes are round, and her lower lashes are almost as thick as her top lashes, so that they look like the sunflower petals from the fields in the countryside around here. She is wearing her pale gray dress with the black beading. She is also wearing two silver pendants on thick chains. The pendants are cameos of my face and of Elisabeth’s face from when we were babies. When I stare at my baby profile around Mom’s neck, I realize that when Papa had it made for her she still had no idea that there was anything wrong with me. This makes it a relic.
While I am staring at the pendant on the skin of Mom’s neck, which is sunburned, the voice of the man to the right repeats its question: “Hey, do you want some of this frothy sauce?”
“Sauce mousseline!” I yell, trying to look at him, but seeing a gleaming pot on the wall behind him instead.
The man laughs and asks me if I read a lot of cookbooks.
I say, “Yes, I read them from cover to cover.”
Here is a list of my six favorite recipes: quatre-quarts cake, ratatouille, cassoulet, chocolate mousse, leg of lamb with mustard, couscous.
Tuesday, May 24
10:20 a.m.
Elisabeth came into my room. She was wearing her long, soft white T-shirt with the word COFFEE spelled in block letters across the front. This is her favorite thing to sleep in.
She sat on the edge of my bed. She told me she drank too much wine last night and had a headache. I said I was sorry. Then she asked me if I thought Arthur seemed too old for her.
I asked her what she meant.
She answered, “Mom says I’m too young to date him, but I think it’s more that she’s weirded out that I would be with somebody who is from her world.”
“What about Jason?” I asked. “Maybe Mom is worried about Jason.”
Jason is Elisabeth’s boyfriend who is a sophomore at UCLA film school. Even though he has been in the picture for two years, I do not like to look at him. He has a hiss in his voice that scares me. And his arms snake around Elisabeth in a way that makes me picture boa constrictors. The arms and the hiss stop me from wanting to know Jason. He can tell. He doesn’t talk to me much.
“Jason is bugging me,” she said, looking at her feet. Her toenails are painted sky blue. She sounded sad though, not like someone was bugging her. But I didn’t want to contradict her. So instead I explained a fact from Search. “Sometimes,” I said, “you meet someone new, like Arthur, and they erase everything that has gone before.”
“You’re a trip.” She laughed. Then she stretched and said she wanted to go dive in the pool to clear her head. She asked me why I’m ditching school. “Did Mom give you a hard time?”
I said I did not want to talk about it, and that Mom was cool. Then she asked what I was doing today.
I said I was going to hang out on set for a while. “I’m going to watch Fuchsia in a high-ruffled collar strolling through the palace gardens while Mom tells everyone around her what to do.”
When I told Elisabeth my plan, she squinted at me. She squints like Mom, only the wrinkles around her eyes smooth out right away when she is done, unlike Mom’s, which stay for a while. When Elisabeth squints, it is a sign that she is joking around. “I’m on to you,” Elisabeth said.
She told me that between Fuchsia’s collar and the top of her dress there will be transparent lace so her cleavage will be very visible. “But you should know they aren’t real,” she said. Then she left.
I’m wondering how Fuchsia’s breasts can not be real when they are so real in my mind. I’m also wondering how it is that I can picture Gilberte’s breasts so clearly even though I don’t rememb
er seeing them. Can wanting something make you know what it is?
Wednesday, May 25
5:50 p.m.
Before Simon and I had our fight, I gave him my cell phone number. Today, he texted me that he was sorry and asked me to come back to school. So I went. He was waiting for me in the yard. He said he wasn’t kidding about his dad being in jail, but he didn’t want to go into it. Then he said that he knows it’s not my fault I say the wrong thing sometimes. I obviously try hard and I’m brave.
I wanted to explain that I hadn’t said the wrong thing at all. But I didn’t want him to get mad again.
It took me two hours and ten minutes to be able to look at him without shaking. When I finally did, on the way out of geometry, he smiled.
There was quatre-quarts cake again for lunch, but no Gilberte. I haven’t seen her since the first day. I am frustrated by her hiding.
In the cafeteria, I sat with Simon and his friend Marianne, who has very long straight shiny black hair, with purple streaks. Her hair moves like a single piece of cloth. It must be nice to hide behind.
Marianne took a picture of my moth sneakers under the table. She asked if she could post it. I said sure. I didn’t ask her specifically where she was going to post it.
There are some things I am very precise about. Posting is not one of them. It’s a thing you can obsess on but can’t control. Posting happens to you. Like weather.
“Can I tag you?” she asked.
I nodded.
She started to work her phone. “What’s your Instagram?” she asked.
“I don’t have one.”
“Facebook?”
“Sorry.”
“Snapchat?”
I shook my head.
“Wait, are you even on anything?” she asked.
“Leave him alone,” said Simon.
“What, I just asked a question!” She was still looking at her phone.
“I said, leave him alone!” Simon yelled.
I recognized his anger as inappropriate. Marianne was not being hostile to me. She was asking me a simple question.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Marianne is not bothering me. She’s curious. That’s all.”
“Fine!” Simon slammed his water glass down on the table and some drops splattered onto my cake. “You’re welcome, Martin!”
I watched the moisture soak into the cake. I stared at the damp spots. I did not understand why Simon was first angry at Marianne and now angry at me all over again. I thought maybe I was supposed to thank him for something, which was the reason he was saying “You’re welcome” in a sarcastic tone. I wasn’t sure though. I wished Maeva was here to help with cues. I tried to think what hints she might give me. I came up empty.
Simon stood up and took a step away from the table.
Marianne turned and grabbed his wrist. Her black hair swished. She had striped nails. She said, “Calm down.”
Simon broke away from her and walked off.
“I don’t understand,” I said. Nothing made sense. I had no more appetite.
“Of course you don’t understand. It’s fucking absurd. It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
Whoa, amazing. She had just echoed what I thought: the way Simon gets angry doesn’t make sense. Marianne doesn’t get it either. I’m not the only one. When you are not by yourself, being confused is a whole different thing. It’s not lonely anymore. Once there’s more than one outsider, there aren’t really any outsiders.
Marianne put her phone down on the table and we both stared at her picture of my shoes.
A minute after he stormed off, Simon came back. “You okay?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said.
He laughed. “As long as you’re okay. Just don’t, you know, ever let people walk on you.”
“I wasn’t walking on him,” Marianne said.
“Can this be over now?” I asked.
They both laughed. My appetite came back.
10:10 p.m.
This evening, I tried to tell Elisabeth and Mom about my day. We were on the terrace. They were drinking wine. I was eating wrinkled black olives. I didn’t tell them about Gilberte and the way she has vanished. I wanted to make them happy by explaining that I had a decent time at school, and that lunch wasn’t bad in the end.
“Something was hidden in that golden cake, but I couldn’t figure out what,” I said. “I sat there in the lunchroom, immobile, watching and breathing, trying to lift my thoughts beyond the image and the odor.”
“Use your own fucking words!” Elisabeth yelled. Something was wrong with her. Her gentleness was gone. “Stop quoting all the time!”
Mom told her to go easy. Mom was frowning at me while she talked.
I tried to keep logical. “I wasn’t quoting Marcel exactly. When he talked about objects hiding certain meanings, he wasn’t talking about pound cake. He was talking about three other things: a rooftop, the reflection of sunlight on a stone, and the scent of trees and flowers along a path. There’s a difference.”
“Just stop!” Elisabeth snapped. Then she took such a big gulp of her rosé that she choked and teared up. She’s not usually like this.
I was acting especially annoying, but I couldn’t stop. “Hey, I stayed through lunch again today,” I said. “That’s progress.”
Mom took a big loud breath. Then she picked up an olive and checked it out. She has bony fingers like tree bark. Her fingers were trembling, but only a little. Without tasting it, she put the olive down on her small napkin. “Tell us about the boy who is showing you around,” she said.
That gave me an idea. I ran upstairs to my collection of postcards, which are all of the paintings in Search. I found the Bellini. I ran downstairs, went outside, and showed it to them. “This is him,” I said. “Simon. Mahomet II. Only Bloch is younger. I mean, Simon is younger. Once he grows a goatee, they will be the same person.”
“Are you that clueless?” asked Elisabeth. Her neck and cheeks got flushed. “Can you only think about yourself?”
I have no idea what to do with questions like this, which are actually challenges. To escape Elisabeth’s anger, I looked out at the sunset. I managed a sympathetic frown. But I couldn’t aim the frown at her because I couldn’t look in her direction when she was upset like this. So my “appropriate facial expression” was wasted on the open sky.
Elisabeth kept going. “All you can do is be self-referential all the time. Think about someone outside yourself! There’s a world out here. Everything isn’t about you.”
My groaning was coming on. When I groan, my guts go taut and start to vibrate. They make the sound of an out-of-tune violin. I’ve mostly learned to keep the groaning inside, but sometimes it gets too loud and I have to let it out. Mom hates it when I groan. So I tried very hard not to do it by yelling instead.
What I yelled was true. “Technically,” I yelled, “I’m not self-referential. I am referencing a book that is very important to me.”
“There’s no difference! You are wasting your beautiful life on some random obsession for an old book.” Elisabeth’s voice got softer and shakier. “Please, Martin. Get real.” Then she grabbed her wineglass and went inside. Once she was no longer looking at me, I finally got up the nerve to watch her back disappearing through the red doorway. She was wearing a pair of white shorts with a pattern of blue pineapples that she sewed herself and a soft gray T-shirt. I could tell from her hunching shoulders that she was going to cry.
I couldn’t help it: I dropped my head to my chest and groaned. The sound came bursting out of me like steam that has been pent up.
Mom looked away into the setting sun, taking breaths loud enough for me to hear through my groaning. These are her yoga breaths. They help her to steady herself when I drive her crazy or when one of her actors is being difficult.
After ten breaths, she turned her head to me in a jerky, mechanical way. She forced herself to do it against her body’s will (I should know because I force my body into uncomfortab
le situations all the time). She lifted my chin and then took my shoulders in her hands and found my eyes with hers. I could see her effort to connect.
Then, suddenly, the skin around her eyes crinkled, like leather. She jokes that this expression makes her look tough and scares people on set, but I have a very different reaction. When she crinkles her gaze, she is interested in me, and I want to hold on to her interest. She is watching me the way you watch someone important as they walk toward you. She is curious to see what I will do. This makes me want to do something.
The sleeve of her blouse, which was thin white linen, got picked up by a breeze and brushed against my face. It felt amazing. I stopped groaning.
“Martin,” she said gently, “Elisabeth loves you very much. She worries about you because she loves you. It’s normal. Can you understand why?”
Then my mind started to work. It went backward to pick up on something Elisabeth had said. She had said that everything wasn’t about me. I now realized that this was a key phrase.
Having a mind that loops can be a useful thing. Sometimes someone else’s words will return to show me what I missed the first time around. Marcel calls this “an epiphany.” Only for him, it usually happens through smell or taste. For me, epiphanies come mostly in echoes.
“Is it possible that this isn’t about me?” I asked Mom. “Elisabeth did say everything isn’t about you. I mean, she said everything isn’t about me.” I was only repeating Elisabeth’s words, but I was onto something big. “Her problem tonight is about her and not about me at all.”
Mom let go of my shoulders and moved her head back to get a new angle on me. Then she broke into a smile and started to laugh. “You’re right. Talk about self-referential, sweet Martin. You are absolutely right. Elisabeth isn’t upset because of you. It’s that stupid boy, Jason. He broke up with her this morning.”
We stayed on the terrace for twenty-five more minutes. I now believed that Mom forgave me for saying that Simon looks like Bloch from Search. She also forgave me for reminding her about the quatre-quarts cakes that used to mess up the kitchen all the time. Whenever she forgives me, I get hopeful that she will forgive Papa too.