by Mary Fleming
“Has anyone seen the Cézanne exhibit?” she went on.
“I have,” Stephanie piped up. “It was too crowded and disorganized. I could hardly see the paintings. They really do a better job of logistics at the Met.”
“I dow-n’t know about zat,” said BP in his heavily accented English, but one that had been influenced by English-English. “Last ti-me I was z’ere, I ’ad to wa-it twinty minutes to recuperate my coat.” Every meal, you could count on it. Stephanie would make an anti-French remark, and she would be immediately contradicted. I felt sorry for her. The French drove her crazy. Her mastery of the language was halting and her accent atrocious in a family that slipped from one tongue to another with amphibian ease.
And so the meal see-sawed on, through the cheese and salad, into the lemon meringue tart. After art, the subject tipped to films. Edward and Stephanie began to disagree heatedly about Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Stephanie loved it; Edward hated it. Mother and Edmond hadn’t heard of either film or director. Loach was too gritty and working class a director for their tastes, Edward’s obviously too. Mother changed the subject to Princess Di, who was promising to tell all on television. Stephanie had an opinion on that too. So Mother turned to the house on Long Island, where we spent our summer holidays, where she and Edmond still went every August. She wondered aloud if now weren’t the right time to sell, but since she’d been asking the same question regularly for the last ten years, Edward and I got up to help Lisette clear the table. The children had been released as the Camembert was making its rounds. My mother judged their presence a success. No one else cared to comment.
Right on schedule, just before three, Lisette arrived with a large jug of freshly squeezed orange juice. It was the sign that The Family Lunch was drawing to a close. Mother had adopted this French trick and had been using it on her dinner guests for as long as I could remember. Once we’d grown up, she simply carried the ritual over to us, dispensing with her family just as casually as she did friends and acquaintances. Which today was particularly fine by me. She had recently imported the American phobia for smoking and banned it in her house. Possibly it was just a way to avoid the pain I incited by rolling my own. In any case, I was dying for a cigarette.
As Edward helped little Henri with his coat, he tugged too hard, and the child started to cry. It added to an existing tension in the air that I could not quite identify. Earlier I had attributed it to the children’s presence at the table, but that should have dissipated. It was Edward. He had seemed edgy and preoccupied all through lunch. It was unlike him to be impatient with his children. Then Stephanie, who was always slightly peevish at the rue de Verneuil, sent us looking for Matthieu’s sweatshirt, and I forgot about it.
In the courtyard we ran into Antoine de Coursault, his wife Chantal, and their children. He and Edward had been classmates and friends since early childhood. Antoine and Chantal also lived in the building, having moved from the smaller apartment under the eaves into his grandparents’ much larger flat when they’d had their third child. Number four, it appeared, was well en route, but that was to be expected. Anything less in this neighborhood was substandard, as I had keenly felt while growing up, when it had been just my brother and me, five years apart, like two gaping teeth. Childbearing was still viewed as a competitive sport down here in the 7ème arrondissement, and this was one game Edward and Stephanie would have trouble winning.
As I was thus musing, the procreators planned a walk to the Tuileries gardens. On the street, Antoine turned to me: “Do you want to join us? I haven’t seen you in an age.” He had an ingenuous smile and blue eyes that reminded me of Camilla Barchester’s in their candor. Even if I could never think of anything to say to him, it was impossible to dislike him.
“Trevor can’t stay down here for more than three hours or he turns into a pumpkin,” said Edward.
“Says the pumpkin’s brother,” I answered. “Maybe another time.” I looked at Stephanie, and she looked uncomfortable with Chantal, who was the daughter—of course one always knew these things—of a count and countess. She had a maiden name that flung back several centuries and strung across a whole line of text. For all her husband’s natural friendliness, she was a small-hearted snob who would have disapproved of Stephanie even more than Mother did. I wondered, since I only got invited to their expat dinners, how she fared in Edward’s Paris world, with her halting French and brash American opinions.
Outside the building, they turned right to cross the bridge, and I turned left to walk off lunch another way home.
Home, I toss out lightly.
This short word has multiple implications, can be, has been, the source of countless questions and complications in my life.
Does it mean, for example, my ur-home, New York, where I was born to Gordon and Helen McFarquhar? My memories from that time are circumscribed to our Upper East Side apartment and my school, with snatches of Central Park in between. But didn’t it leave deeper marks on my psyche than those in my conscious mind? In writing these lines, I have remembered my father, bent over his desk, grading papers or, briefcase in hand, about to leave for the university, where he was an assistant professor of English literature. I remember my mother crying over the chopping board, while I remained unconvinced that the culprit was the onion. Or with a book. So often with a book and I’d have to poke her shoulder to get her attention.
What about the house in Connecticut, where we spent weekends and the long holidays of an academic? It was there that both my sister and my father were violently removed from the picture. Those two deaths, occurring when I was six and seven years old, were, are, and will always be the cornerstones of my existence, the bricks and mortar of what make up me. Doesn’t that, on some level, constitute home?
Throughout my childhood, I certainly insisted that the United States of America was where I belonged. I proclaimed, ad nauseum, to anyone who would listen, that the second I had my Baccalauréat in hand, I’d be on the plane, gone for good. For good, it turned out, only lasted the nine months of a freshman year at the small American college in the middle of nowhere that I’d insisted on attending. After a month with my ice hockey roommate Brett Bourne and a couple of fraternity parties, I’d already started charting my flight back.
So what about France, Paris, the rue de Verneuil, where I lived from eight to eighteen? Officially the flat belonged to BP, the man Mother inflicted on us not long after she dragged us to this foreign country, simply, from what I could tell, because she’d studied French and had spent a “fun” year in Paris. He certainly solved, and too quickly to my mind, all her single-motherly problems. She also inflicted the name on us. BP, short for Beau-Père, stepfather, and a constant source of embarrassment and irritation. The initials sounded—still sound—stupid, and I avoided using them whenever possible. Besides, he was anything but beau to me. I never tired of reinventing his name: Bird Poop, Bat Puke, Bug Piss. Later, once my French had caught up with my English, there was Boudin Puant, Bâtard Pusillanime, Babouin Pustulleux. Et cetera. Though his only real sin was not being my father, for that I could not forgive Edmond Harcourt-Laporte.
The rue de Verneuil had too many complicated associations for me to call it home.
That left me with the rue des Martyrs, which like St. Denis, I was now climbing. Intact in body if not in soul.
THREE
YOU MAY BE wondering why I was so antagonistic to those perfectly pleasant people in the last chapter, my family. Well, it all comes back to those two deaths. The first occurred when my sister, four years old, was walking down a narrow sidewalk in the town near our Connecticut house. She pulled away from the hand that held her, jumped one little step to the side, and was run over by a car, flattened like paper. A year later my father fell to his death from the roof of our house while trying, it was said, to fix the television antenna.
Actually, it wasn’t really said, and that was the problem. I did not discuss either of these events with any member of my family. Not with Edwar
d, who was too young to remember, and not with my mother, who obviously did. As a result, it was as if they—and therefore our previous life—had never existed. It’s fair to say that I never asked, but that wall of silence was too thick, too high. This meant that all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the half-remembered things stayed trapped in my brain. Like birds in an overcrowded cage, they flapped wing against wing with nowhere to go. The outward manifestation of this imprisonment was antagonism.
So why, you might then logically wonder, did I bother to see them at all? My chosen path of least resistance? An addiction to displeasure and perversity? An insatiable desire to antagonize those whom I resented?
Late one afternoon the week following the family lunch, while I was changing the crumpled back wheel on a racing bicycle, the Tibetan chimes knocked together. I had just removed the free-wheel from its axle. I stuck my head around the corner of the workshop, free-wheel in one hand, free-wheel remover in the other. There was my sister-in-law standing just inside the door. She wore an off-white jacket with a belt tied tightly around her thin waist. Her hands were in her pockets, and she looked like a model about to take off down the catwalk.
“Stephanie,” I said, putting down the equipment and wiping my hands on a rag. “What are you doing here?” We kissed.
“Don’t you remember? I wanted to see your children’s bicycles.”
“Right,” I said. “Has Edward sent you up here so he won’t have to ruin his weekend?”
She smiled her big smile, the one that made her full lips part, exposing a line of teeth, perfect but for a slight crowding of the two incisors. That smile turned her large mouth into a slice of ripe fruit. “No, no. I’m here of my own volition. Christmas isn’t far away.” She put her hand on the saddle of the bicycle she was standing next to. “So show me what you’ve got.”
I pointed toward the only two children’s models I had, on a platform at the side. “I’m afraid this is it.”
She pointed at the flashier one and said: “This one looks fine.” Then her eyes moved around the room.
“Not what you expected?” I asked.
“No, not really,” she said. “I was expecting something a little less crowded. Something, I don’t know. Sharper? It looks a bit dated, even for a bicycle shop.”
“Since I inherited this place from Nigel Jones, ‘a slobby Brit,’ as he called himself, I haven’t done anything but keep it open. So it still carries his distinctive early seventies’ mark.”
“Which explains the orange peace-and-lovey sign outside?”
I nodded. “And the Tibetan chimes over the door.”
“That’s incredible,” she said, looking indeed as if she didn’t believe me. “You’ve never repainted or even rearranged?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I feel like I’m just passing through. Like the place really still belongs to Nigel Jones.”
“But he’s dead. And you’ve been here for years, haven’t you?”
“Ten.” I nodded. “Seven since Nigel died.”
“Wouldn’t you call that a bit more than ‘passing through’?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She shook her head in disbelief. “Well, before you get completely swallowed up in this time warp, would you like to go for a drink? Since I came all the way up here?”
“Sure,” I said. “But what about the bicycle?”
“I told you. This one.”
I waited for her to ask about price or readiness or something, but she kept looking around. “Have you got your car?”
“No,” she said hesitantly.
“Then how are you going to get it home?”
“Good question,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about that.” Then she brightened: “You could come to dinner a week from Saturday. And deliver it, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“I guess so.” I shrugged.
“Perfect.” She smiled. “Now let’s get you out of here. I have to say it’s a little creepy.”
“Let me just wash my hands.”
As I stood at the sink at the back, scrubbing the resistant grease, I wondered what this was all about. Christmas was still six weeks away. Why hadn’t she come by car, instead of expecting me to schlep it over there on the métro in ten days’ time?
It was almost dark as we walked up the hill. The Sacré Coeur had not yet been lit, and it loomed like a large cloud on the horizon. I decided not to take her to the Rendez-Vous, where Jean-Jacques would subsequently pepper me with questions.
“Sorry about the ambiance,” I said as we walked in. “My neighborhood’s not long on beauty and charm.”
“That’s okay,” she answered, pulling her long arms out of the off-white jacket, exposing a pale-blue cashmere sweater. “Though it’s true that when I came up from the métro, it almost seemed like another city.” She sat back in her chair and ran her large hands over the top of her head, smoothing loose strands.
“Paris is lots of different cities,” I answered. “Like any metropolis, I guess.”
“I confess I haven’t done much exploring. Too busy having babies.” She shook her head and sighed. “When I do get out, it’s never beyond the center. You know, to the cinema or an exhibition. Except when I take the car to go riding or play tennis, but that’s outside of town completely. I should be more adventurous, not fritter my life away on culture and sports.”
The waiter came to take our order. He was as brusque and unpleasant as the café itself. I ordered a beer, Stephanie a kir.
She was tapping her strong fingers, one after another, lightly on the table. Usually she wore a great rock of a diamond. Today there was only the gold wedding band, so slight it looked as if it would break if she pulled too hard on the reins. “Where do you ride?” I asked.
“Maison-Lafitte. The stable is pretty good, and I can ride in the woods too. I try to get out there twice a week.” Then, abruptly crossing her arms on the table and leaning forward toward me with those intense green eyes set back on either side of her finely freckled nose, she said: “Were you and Edward ever close?”
The sudden change of course made my tongue, which was licking a cigarette paper, freeze in midair. “We’ve always been five years apart,” I answered.
“I mean have you always been actively hostile?”
The crusty waiter slapped our drinks on the table, spilling my beer.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“One more cigarette in here won’t make much difference.” Stephanie’s eyes moved around the hazy air, then back at me.
I struck the match. We sipped our drinks.
“I think hostility is too strong a word,” I said, exhaling smoke. “Sarcasm and in more inspired moments irony seems a better way to characterize our relations.”
“Call it what you will, there doesn’t seem to be an overabundance of brotherly love between you.”
“True,” I said, shaving the end of my ash on the edge of the ashtray.
“Edward says it was the name thing,” she said. “That wasn’t really it, was it?”
“Let’s say it was the last straw.”
“But it’s just a name.”
“A rose is a rose is a rose, right?”
“I changed my name when I got married. It doesn’t have to mean something profound.”
“Well, sometimes it does.” I took another sip of my beer. A large drop from the sloppily served glass trickled down the side of the glass and fell on my lap. “A name is who you are.”
“You have to admit that McFarquhar is hard enough to pronounce in English, much less French,” she said. The line of her long chin extended even farther when she was trying to win a point.
“Lots of things in life are difficult,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette. “And when you have a complicated past, as Edward and I do, a name carries even more weight.”
“I’m sorry.” She leaned farther forward, hand on my arm. “I’m not trying to be contentious. I was just
interested. In what happened. Edward’s never very good with details.”
“It was the whole thing. When getting French nationality, he decided to change his name to Harcourt-Laporte and be adopted legally by Edmond. A name, as you say, that was so much easier to pronounce.” I started to roll another cigarette. “Never mind the complications involved in the adoption process. I’ve always believed that even then, when he was still a teenager, it was done with an eye on taking over the family firm.” I still couldn’t talk about it without outrage. “The legal relationship would obviously prove helpful.”
“Did anyone put pressure on you, when you got your French nationality, to change names, be adopted?”
“No way,” I said. “I took French nationality as the path of least resistance to my mother’s nagging. At that time, I believed that as soon as I had my Bac in hand I’d be on a plane for the US, never to set foot in France again.”
“Things often don’t turn out as you expect, do they,” said Stephanie vaguely, looking into her wine glass, fiddling with the stem.
“No, not for some. For others they do. Edward, for example. He walked right into his stepfather’s shoes, and Mother could claim at least half a victory on the second family front.”
“Well, she acts as if the victory were complete.”
“Mother is exceptionally gifted at seeing the sun when it’s nowhere in sight.” Stephanie looked at me but didn’t reply, so on I hammered. “Just because Edward says he has no memory of our father, of his very early years in the US, does not mean those facts don’t exist.”
“He feels like Edmond did the job of a father, and he wanted to recognize that.”
“He was denying his real father, denying our family history.” A woman from the next table looked up, startled by my rising voice. I mumbled: “You can’t just rub out your past.”
“His experience is different from yours. If that’s the way he feels . . .” she trailed off, tapping her fingers again on the table. Finally she said, very quietly: “I don’t know why I’m defending him.”