by Hilary Reyl
Although I was worried about Elisabeth being left by Jason, I was relieved that no one was angry at me after all. I wondered if this meant Elisabeth could date Arthur the art director. I said this to Mom, and she said that Arthur the art director is not a good choice for Elisabeth because he is twice her age.
“So he’s thirty-six years, six months, and eight days?” I asked.
“Oh God, Martin! It’s not that bad. He’s at least twenty-five, though.”
“Did Jason call Elisabeth to break up with her or did he text her?”
“I’m not sure,” she answered. “Your sister told me he did it over the phone. That’s all I know.”
“Layla says that telephones can be instruments of torture.”
“But we do need them, I’m afraid,” Mom said.
“We are both right,” I said. “Telephones can be instruments of torture, and we need them.”
If there is one thing that Search has taught me, it’s that there is usually more than one truth.
Thursday, May 26
10:10 a.m.
Elisabeth came into my room with a glass of orange juice to apologize for blowing up at me. I didn’t feel like talking to her, though, because I was listening to the flies buzzing through my window. They were performing a little concert for me: “the chamber music of summer.”
The sound of flies brings back summer in my memory, like it did for Marcel. Flies are the “certification of summer’s return.”
I did not want their buzzing interrupted. So I said, “Thank you for the orange juice,” very quietly, hoping Elisabeth would read my cue the way she has taught me to read other people’s cues.
Elisabeth didn’t understand my message or hear the music of my flies. “Please don’t shut yourself up from us,” she said, sadly.
I wished I could answer her, but I couldn’t pull my concentration away from the fly music, even for my sister.
Eventually, she shrugged her shoulders and went out of the room, closing the door softly behind her. I was grateful. A slam would have ruined everything.
After twenty-two more minutes, the concert ended. Maybe the sun got too strong for the flies.
No matter where the flies go when they stop singing, they will come back again and again, and make their music over and over. This knowledge makes me free.
I am free. This is what Layla and her activists are trying to tell me. This “locked” personality of mine is the creation of all the people who watch me from the outside. Inside, I’m not locked at all.
Saturday, May 28
7:55 p.m.
Today was hot. Simon texted me at 10:00 a.m. that he was going to the town pool. He would be there around noon. He asked if I wanted to come. He said we could eat there. I said yes.
Mom said it was great that Simon reached out. She smiled her open smile. “I’m happy for you, Martin,” she said as she hugged me. Even though she has good self-control, Mom’s someone who doesn’t mask her emotions. She says that in her line of work, you have to be very vocal. After she hugged me, she started to cry. She said it was because she was so happy. Then a car came to get her to take her to the set. She won’t be back until very late because the big stars come today. The last thing she said before she drove off was that she will need her yoga breaths today to deal with the stars. This was a joke. Then she winked at me through the car window.
Elisabeth took me in the Smart car to the pool, which is outdoors, surrounded by grass. She was very quiet while she drove. She might have been thinking about Jason breaking up with her.
The pool is twenty-five meters long, with six lane lines. It is divided so that half is for lap swimming and half is for splashing and messing around. Elisabeth came to the poolside with me to make sure I was going to be okay. I saw many towels of too many different colors spread around on the concrete and the grass. Some towels had bodies on them, some were blank. I couldn’t see a pattern. The towels scared me. I couldn’t look for more than a few seconds. I stared at my feet. My feet are skinny. I was wearing blue Havaianas flip-flops.
I was sure there were people around who would recognize me from school and expect something in return. This idea pressured me. The screaming and splashing were way too loud. I needed silence. I put on my cap and goggles. I started to swim. Elisabeth understood. She waved to me in the water. Then she left to go study in a café she likes in town.
I love to swim laps. What the repetition does is open me up. It flows with no breaks. It’s like I am going somewhere fast. It’s a thing that Marcel calls “the illusion of fertility.”
I did mostly freestyle, with a cooldown of breaststroke. When I got out of the pool, Simon was waiting for me. I looked at his striped white-and-blue trunks and at his chest, which was very thin, and then at his face.
We did our volley of “Ça va?” “Oui, ça va. Ça va?” “Ça va.” They had no special meaning.
“You’ve been swimming for over an hour,” he said. “You must be really hungry.”
“You must be really hungry, yes,” I said.
“No, you must be really hungry. I’m talking about you, not me. I’ve been lying on my towel smoking for the past hour. I’m hungry, but I can’t be as hungry as you.”
I could have made it clear that, yes, I was hungry, but I figured he had already done it for me, and I was thankful.
We went to stand in the line at the snack bar. When I read the menu, I saw that there were crêpes here. Simon hadn’t mentioned crêpes in his text. I don’t usually like surprises, but this was not an upsetting one. I ordered two crêpes, one with ham and cheese, one with Nutella. Then I offered to buy Simon his lunch. I often buy people lunch. Layla says this gives me an aura of glamour, but I do it because Mom gives me plenty of money, and I usually have more than other people.
Simon said thank you, that he would get me lunch next time. The French for taking someone out is Je t’invite, which means “I invite you.” Simon said, “Je t’invite la prochaine fois,” which means “I’ll take you out next time.”
No one had ever said this to me before. I looked into his Mahomet II face and said, “Okay.”
Layla would say that Simon was being nice to me because he is a moth who has found out that the stars are arriving in town today. I don’t care. I like him.
Suddenly, I knew Gilberte was here. It was her eyes on my back again. I turned around to see her pulling herself up from the water onto the side of the pool. She was wearing a white swim cap. Her blue goggles were up on her head. She had red rings pressed in the skin around her eyes, which were now black. To have such deep rings, she must have been swimming for a while. This meant that we had been in the water at the same time.
Her bathing suit was a white two-piece. Her breasts were smaller than I had been thinking, but I didn’t mind. Her skin was brown. As her body rose up into the sunlight, beads of water made rainbows all over her.
I smiled, and she smiled back. Then she walked away into the towels.
I asked Simon, who was picking up our crêpes from the counter, if he had seen Gilberte. I knew Gilberte was not her name, but I could not let go of it.
“Who?” he asked. “I hope for her sake that’s not her name. It’s the twenty-first century, Martin.”
I couldn’t talk about her anymore.
After lunch, Simon had to go. He has a little brother he has to take care of so his mom can go to work. She’s a checker in a supermarket. I said thank you for getting me to come to the pool. He said I was a good swimmer. I no longer feel any anger from him.
I texted Elisabeth to come get me.
With Simon gone and the bright towels moving in closer, I was nervous. So I took Search from my bag to read the passage where Marcel realizes that people are “opaque” because we try to see them with our “senses” and not our “sensibility.” Only people we look at with “sensibility” can become “intimates.” I smiled inside because Gilberte, no matter what her actual name is, is already an intimate for me. Safe inside my bubble becaus
e she has always been here.
While I was watching through the fence for the Smart car to pull into the parking lot, I tried to find the courage to step into the towels to look for Gilberte. Every time I glanced at the crowd, it started to writhe. I wanted badly to escape it, but I also wanted badly to dive in and find her.
Papa has explained this tension. He calls it “conflict,” and he says it is the motor of literature. In that moment, I just wanted the conflict to go away. And it did. Because Gilberte tapped me on the shoulder.
“Salut. Ça va?” she asked. Her voice is both hoarse and musical. Her Ça va? did not sound generic. It sounded like she might be playing Papa’s and my Ça va game. Like she was really saying, “Are you happy now that we’ve met?”
“Oui, Gilberte, ça va.” My Ça va meant “Yes, I’m very happy.”
She laughed, asking how I came up with that funny name, Gilberte. Even if I don’t care about getting teased, I still recognize teasing, and she was definitely teasing me, but not viciously. She looked over into the crowd of kids, probably at her friends, who were watching us. I had to finally admit that she is visible to everyone and is not my personal ghost.
I told her my name was Martin. Holding out her hand, she said, “I guess I’m Gilberte. Nice to meet you, Martin.” The moment she said my name, I became somebody. So this was our game.
“Are you coming to school on Monday?” she asked. Her freckles were dazzling but not strange. This was definitely not a first impression. I might not know her body so well, but I know her face. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to look straight at her like this.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll see you Monday.” As though there was never any doubt. Like I was always up for a school full of strangers.
The girl who has been nothing but a name with a picture attached is now a person I will find again on Monday.
I swelled up with confidence. I pictured going into the boulangerie and asking the woman behind the counter for two madeleines, smiling right at her instead of staring into the pastry case at the chocolate swirls decorating the tops of the mille-feuilles, which are called “Napoleons” in English.
Layla says that fantasy is the first step to action.
Elisabeth pulled into the parking lot. “That’s my sister picking me up. See you Monday,” I said to Gilberte.
“See you Monday.”
Sunday, May 29
1:00 p.m.
Elisabeth has a poster of an aerial photograph of the Chenonceau castle in her room at home. I’ve been looking at it for years. It has six arches over the river, and it makes a perfect reflection in the water. It has three stories, four chimneys, and two turrets. Elisabeth used to say she wanted to live there so that she could sleep in a canopy bed in a room full of Flemish tapestries with unicorns on them. Now that she’s older, she doesn’t mention these things anymore.
This morning, she drove me to the château to watch a scene being shot in the king’s bedroom. I asked her if she remembers wanting to be a princess.
“Sort of,” she said. She didn’t sound annoyed, but she sighed.
I had this idea that I would try to make Elisabeth feel better about things with Jason, because she is the one who tries to make me feel better most of the time. They call this “reciprocity.”
I can tell Elisabeth is unhappy because she’s frowning a lot, and not the kind of frown where she is concentrating on memorizing chemistry, but the kind of frown where the corners of her eyes get wet.
I said: “Try not to worry about the breakup with Jason because Jason is a twit.”
She laughed for a second, then the laugh stopped and she started in on a teaching moment. “Martin, can you come up with another word for Jason? Twit is Mom’s word for him. Mom said at breakfast that he was acting like a twit. What is your word?”
To find my word for Jason, I started going through Search in my mind.
Since I can’t really look at Jason, I didn’t have much to go on. But Elisabeth has told me that there is another girl involved. She is an actress and perhaps more glamorous than Elisabeth, who is beautiful but sews her own clothes and wants to be a doctor for kids with mental problems. It hit me. Jason is a snob.
There are tons of snobs in Search.
My first idea was to tell Elisabeth that Jason was a snob too. Then I remembered I should be trying to make my own cakes instead of only lining up my ingredients. So I squeezed together the ingredients in my brain. This is what I came up with: “Jason is nothing but a twit-snob.”
“What?”
“Well, Mom is right that he is acting like a twit. But I need to be original, so I shouldn’t copy her. And Jason makes me think of one of the snobs in Search called Legrandin. Legrandin thinks he’s better than Marcel and his family. He prefers duchesses the way Jason prefers actresses. And he’s very stupid. So Jason is both a twit and a snob, and I’ve made my own version of the two things. Twit-snob.”
I had a moment of panic that Elisabeth would decide her teaching moment had failed because I wasn’t saying anything that hadn’t been said before. But she didn’t get her angry flush or her disappointed frown. She reached over to the passenger seat, squeezed my knee, and said something she had not said before. “Never change.”
This was confusing. They are always trying to change me.
11:40 p.m.
I was going to make cassoulet today from a new cookbook that Mom bought in town. Cassoulet is a French stew of white beans with sausages and duck legs. The cookbook is a French classic called Je sais cuisiner by Ginette Mathiot. It is bright yellow with a photograph of Ginette Mathiot in an apron, surrounded by traditional dishes—a roast, a ratatouille, and a clafoutis—along with some raw vegetables for decoration. Mom bought the book so that I would branch out from the cassoulet recipe I always use, which is from Julia Child, who looks bigger and stronger than Ginette Mathiot. Julia Child also doesn’t put her picture on the cover of her books. Her books have a simple, soothing pattern on the outside, with Julia’s picture tucked inside, on the jacket flap.
A group of twenty-one cast and crew members were here for dinner tonight. I said I would cook for them because Mom had a full day of shooting. While I was prepping, I imagined Gilberte tasting my food. I had soaked my white beans overnight to get them soft and ready. And I had baked two quatre-quarts cakes for dessert in order to have something comfortable in the meal, in case the new cassoulet was a disaster. I was nervous about an unfamiliar recipe, but I’d given myself this goal.
At dinner, a man’s voice described the type of places Mom picks when she’s on location. He was making a toast. The man’s voice said, “Samantha, you usually get the most homey and least expensive place by a factor of five, and it ends up the place everyone is drawn to, where all the faithful gather.” It was the same voice that had offered me more asparagus the other night. I decided to call the speaker “Asparagus Man.”
People raised their glasses and drank. Asparagus Man said, “Here’s to the reigning queen of Chenonceau. Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Médicis don’t have anything on our Samantha de Mitchell.”
Mom’s last name is Mitchell. Elisabeth changed her name to Mitchell too. I’ve kept Papa’s last name, which is Dubois. I’m Martin Dubois.
I wanted to add to the toast. I wanted to say that Mom is exactly like Marcel’s grandmother because she favors old things that somehow educate you about the past, and she’s “allergic to vulgarity.” This is why we are renting a cottage with no air-conditioning instead of a big renovated house with marble bathrooms. Mom hates marble bathrooms, unless they are the old-fashioned black-and-white kind with art deco faucets. They don’t have those here. I wished I could stand up and say these things out loud but I couldn’t.
Asparagus Man stopped toasting Mom and sat down.
Mom’s cast and crew were crowded around folding tables on our little terrace eating cassoulet, made by me, and salad, made by Elisabeth and our housekeeper, Bernadette, when they could be at a restaurant
with Michelin stars or at a catered party at one of the actors’ big houses. Baxter Wolff, for example, is staying in a renovated manor house with many bathrooms (most likely marble) and a big staff. But he has spent his evening having dinner here, on our terrace with mismatched chairs and all different-sized plates and bowls. He has even had seconds of my cassoulet.
I ended up caving and making my usual recipe, but I didn’t mention this to Mom. She can’t tell because, even though I followed Julia Child as faithfully as ever, the cassoulet tastes different from at home. The duck meat here is gamier. And the rosemary is much stronger.
I did tell Bernadette that I was following my tradition, and she said she approved because it is rarely a good idea to innovate. Bernadette looks about seventy-five to me, but Mom says she is younger and that she is weathered. She has thick, round shoulders and fingers that are as knobby as old trees.
By the end of the evening, there were eight people left at the party. They are what Search calls the intimes. Every one of Mom’s movies has its petit clan, its tight little group of people who spend most of their time together. Elisabeth calls this a “hothouse environment.” She says it leads to a lot of affairs.
What I know about affairs, I have learned from the second section of Search, which is all about Mr. Swann’s obsession with Odette de Crécy. It takes place in the novel’s past, before Gilberte is born, back when her parents are having an affair in Paris.
The first time Mr. Swann sees Odette, he doesn’t even find her pretty. The second time he sees her, she reminds him of a woman called Zephora, from the Bible, in a fresco by Botticelli that he’s seen in the Sistine Chapel. That’s when he falls in love. I have a picture of Zephora in my postcard collection.
When Mr. Swann says he “knows” a person or a place, it is because he has found a way to connect them to art. He doesn’t see people as their original selves. He sees them as Old Master faces. That’s why, even though she is not very smart or nice and she has a gray complexion, Odette casts a spell on Mr. Swann. As soon as he notices that she looks like the woman in the fresco, he gets obsessed with her. It’s all about references. Maybe Mr. Swann is autistic.