by Mary Fleming
“Well,” I said, “he is your husband.”
Now she sat back in her chair, letting her arms drop to her sides. She sighed, leaned forward again, and took a sip of wine.
“What I was really trying to figure out is this: once you lose closeness, can you ever get it back? It seems to me what was there in the first place should be retrievable.”
“In my experience, love can turn to hate, but reversing the process is virtually impossible. It’s like trying to rebuild a demolished building with the same broken bricks.”
She nodded, looked around vaguely, then: “It just seems that Edward and I have started existing in two parallel worlds.” She shrugged her shoulders. “We argue about everything. Especially the kids. He’s so conservative.”
“That’s nothing new,” I said, sticking a piece of métro ticket as a filter into a third cigarette—this conversation was really riling me. “I mean, that can’t come as much of a surprise.”
“No. But until recently, we joked about our differences.”
I nodded, trying to think of a way off the subject of my brother’s marital relations, but on she went.
“When I met Edward, I was seduced by the whole French thing. He was so different from all the other guys I knew. He dressed better. He actually spoke in complete sentences. Yet he was American, which made him seem safe. Then I met your family, and you all seemed so welcoming and kind. And since my mother had died not long before we met, I had no family of my own to speak of. I got swept away.”
“You believed in fairy tales, you mean.”
“I guess so.” Stephanie shook her head. “Though it’s not like me. I’m not a romantic person.”
“Come on. Your life can’t be so bad. Three beautiful kids. All that riding and tennis. The busy social scene.”
“Your sarcasm is not appreciated,” she said, her full mouth bunched into a knot of displeasure.
“I was being serious.”
“Well, it’s not my kind of fairy tale,” she answered grimly. “It sounds like fun, I guess, but what’s the point to all that tennis and riding, of going to movies and exhibitions and lunches with women I don’t really even like? What am I accomplishing?” She paused. “That’s what I wonder while I wait for Edward to come home from his busy, productive day. By ten o’clock I’ve already eaten and am ready for bed.” She paused again impatiently. “I thought the French didn’t work the long hours of us Puritanical Americans.”
“Edward is, as you said, American,” I said. “Sort of.”
“Exactly. Sort-of-not-really. And he works for the most French institution I can imagine.” She paused. “He says I should get a job.”
“Why don’t you? I thought a law degree was like a magic wand in the professional world.”
She moved her fingers up and down the stem of her wine glass, then started tapping the table again. “I seem to have lost the confidence necessary to throw myself into that world. For the first time,” she added, with a look of disbelief in those round green eyes, “something seems beyond me. That’s what having babies in a foreign country has done to me.” She looked at her watch, then said, suddenly all business: “Speaking of which, I’ve got to go. Let me get this. You’ve had to sit here and listen to my complaints about your brother for the last half hour.” She unzipped a large black handbag, spread it apart, and searched the bottom for her wallet.
“Never mind,” I said, pulling the francs out of my pocket. “This is my territory. You can return the favor another time.”
“Thank you, I will.” She smiled, rezipping her bag, putting on her jacket, and tying the belt tightly around her waist.
Out on the street she said: “Thanks for listening to me.” And she leaned into me for a hug, American style. Besides the fact we had never embraced in such a way before, the hug lasted just that little bit longer than it might have. And her hands went up and down my back in a way that excited the wrong part of my body.
She pulled away, saying: “You won’t forget to come, Saturday after next, and you don’t mind bringing the bicycle?”
“No. I’ll see you then.”
“Bye,” she said, turning with a wave. “And thanks again.”
I watched her red-gold head, her athletic, almost masculine walk, until she was swallowed by the darkening street. It was a particularity of Stephanie to be intimate one minute and distant the next, as if she only came in two temperatures, hot and cold, running from separate taps. It was one of the first things I had learned about her, when Edward brought her home for Christmas, not long after they were engaged. They’d met in New York, where he was working for a year after business school and she, though a couple of years older, was attending law school.
On New Year’s Eve, under pressure from Mother, I had accompanied them to a party in Senlis, at the Coursaults’ château. Just before midnight, my soon-to-be sister-in-law, whose dancing I had been admiring, pulled me onto the floor. As the year changed, we kissed. Quickly, but on the lips. Later on the way home, squeezed in the back of Edward’s Renault 5, Stephanie slipped her arm under mine and took my hand. Like the kiss, I put that gesture down to soon-to-be-sisterly affection. Even if she did stroke my hand with her finger. The next morning she hardly looked at me.
As I walked back to the shop, I put this hug down to Stephanie’s hot-cold taps and turned to more disturbing elements of the visit. Being reminded of my brother’s name change and adoption still worked on me like salt to a raw wound. But learning that all was not well between Edward and Stephanie was also unsettling. I couldn’t get it out of my mind as I pulled down a new wheel from the ceiling where they dangled. In my immutable worldview, Edward’s life was seamless, a smooth fabric of solid job, beautiful children, and spacious, well-furnished apartment, home to a perfect marriage. Weren’t he and Stephanie as solid as that large diamond she usually wore on her finger?
Apparently not. Spinning the sparkling new wheel, now mounted onto the sleek frame of the racer, I thought it really was better to stick to inanimate objects, machines that could be made to work. Then I turned to my next repair, patching a punctured inner tube.
FOUR
MY BEST AND, since I’m trying to be honest here, only real friend is Cédric Mérei. We met in the school courtyard, shortly after my arrival in France. Though when he first approached me, as I leaned against the wall, hands shoved deeply into my lonely pockets, I could not understand a word he said, our communication quickly went deeper than language. Cédric’s mother, Genviève Montsard de La Roquemare, came from an ultra-Catholic military family, but his father, Matei Mérei, was a Hungarian Jewish intellectual who had been Geneviève’s professor. Though the couple had not stayed married long, Geneviève’s family never forgave her. Cédric was ostracized on his mother’s side and somewhat estranged on his father’s. He too was an outsider; we were made for each other.
By this time, he lived about an hour from Paris, near the town of Vernon, where he taught French literature at a private lycée. He was married to Viviane Ledoux, a painter. Their house, Hautebranche, was a refuge for me, a place where complications and burdens could, for a short time, blur into the background. And that’s where I was headed the Sunday after Stephanie’s visit.
Once again closing early after a quiet morning, I ran through the scurrying shoppers to the Gare Saint-Lazare. There was a fine, cold drizzle falling, one that looked set to stay forever. The station was really gloomy that day. The dingy light filtering through the nineteenth-century iron and glass made it seem imprisoned in a cloud. After I’d bought my ticket, I took out my camera, put it on a low setting, and tried to capture the milky air against the wrought-iron skeleton but had trouble finding a focal point, until a black-clad punk crossed the scene—and I thought I’d really gotten a good shot. Until a few years later when I came across the photo in my archives and saw it was not quite as successful as I’d remembered—the figure was too small—but that’s memory, isn’t it. Only reliable up to a point.
The
train was not crowded, and I stretched out across two seats, well away from anyone else. But no sooner had I pulled out my book than two American tourists found their way right across the aisle from me, their rainproof jackets swishing as they settled into the seats. They acknowledged me with timid, fellow-traveler smiles. I responded with a stony stare.
“Oh, look, Harry,” said the woman. “There’s a tray table, just like on an airplane. Isn’t that nifty? It’s perfect for our picnic.” And they proceeded to unload goods wrapped in plastic from two plastic shopping bags. The whole business made an insufferable noise. “I’ll cut the bread and slice the cheese,” she continued her banter.
Harry, who was helping himself to a handful of potato chips, answered with a nod. They were an overweight, elderly couple with matching jackets that looked as if they’d been bought especially for this trip, and I quickly fit them into one of my prefabricated boxes: middle-western Americans from Kansas, or maybe Nebraska. He once upon a time sold either used cars or insurance to farmers; she was a homemaker, an organizer of Tupperware parties and potluck suppers.
I looked out the window. The urban knot was already unfurling into the countryside, or what was left of it. The church spires of the old villages were being asphyxiated by concrete. Row after row of Monopoly houses and vast shopping centers surrounded them, eating away into the fields like a fast-spreading disease. The only part of the scene that didn’t change much was the Seine, which still wound its way through the landscape, steadily making its way to the sea. The train crossed and recrossed it, ran along beside it, then moved away, in a flirtatious dance. I could have watched it forever.
When we were boys, Lisette would take Edward and me across the Seine to the Tuileries to play. As we crossed the old footbridge at the end of the rue de Solférino, from which I first saw the Sacré Coeur looming outlandishly on the horizon, she would slow down and lower her voice, telling us the people in her Breton village called Paris Satan’s city. They said the spirits of the corrupted souls who had died lived at the bottom of the river. “That’s why the water turns and twists so,” Lisette would say, her bulgy eyes going even bulgier. “That’s why it’s often so muddy and brown. It’s all those tortured spirits writhing down there, suffering for their sins.” The spirits arose, she would tell us, from their subaqueous hell at night, and floated through the city in search of new recruits among the living. At which point, even in the middle of winter, she would fish out the gold cross she wore on a chain around her neck and kiss it.
Although she always ended by telling us these stories were just village lore meant to keep the many Bretons who immigrated to Paris in line, she still kissed that cross, and the stories haunted me, frequently giving me cold-sweat nightmares. In my dreams I would see people I knew—classmates and their mothers or the short-tempered baker—all green-skinned and dripping in slimy algae. They always came at me with a mad, hungry look in their red eyes, and they would chase me and chase me until I could feel their cold, slimy fingers, the ends of their long nails scraping my back as I tried to make a slow and ineffectual escape. The result of these nocturnal terrors was that I wouldn’t cross the Seine alone until I was almost twelve. The idea of those gruesome souls roiling the waters of the river always stopped me dead in my tracks.
Over time my associations with the river changed. Childish terror turned to adolescent fascination as I read Siddhartha and walked the banks with Cédric. Then the frenetic swirls and eddies, the inexorable movement toward the sea, seemed to contain all the questions of existence, and, if you looked long and hard enough, all the answers. Both hope and fear, earthly knowledge and divine mystery lay within its banks. Fortunately, I’d grown out of that phase too, though the next—sitting for hours at the water’s edge thinking about absolutely nothing while recovering from an accident—wasn’t much better.
“Excuse me,” I heard from across the aisle. “Do you speak English?” she mouthed the words loudly and slowly. “Because Harry and I were wondering . . . are we really on the right train for Gui-ver-nee?”
“Betty’s a worrier,” Harry said apologetically after swallowing a mouthful of his sandwich and wiping his mouth on a small napkin.
“Yes,” I said. “Vernon station to Giverny. By bus or taxi.” I looked back out the window.
“I told you we were saying it wrong,” Harry said. “It’s got a soft G. How come you speak English so well? You American?”
I nodded.
“Are you going to Giverny too?” Betty added hopefully, careful to get her G right this time. She was wiping crumbs into her hand from the tray table that had so impressed her.
“No.”
“Where you heading?” Harry again. He unfortunately seemed to have lost all interest in his sandwich.
“To visit friends.”
“Where d’ya live?”
“Paris.”
“So you live here,” Harry continued piecing his puzzle together. “But you’re American.”
I nodded.
“So you must be bilingual.”
I shrugged affirmatively.
“Isn’t that wonderful. You’re so lucky,” Betty said, tearing off one more chunk of baguette before putting it back into her green, plastified Harrod’s shopping bag. “This bread is so good I can’t stop myself,” she added with a coquettish lift of her thick shoulders and pinch of her flaccid face.
“We’re doing our first European tour,” Harry said. “Just came over from London two days ago. Great pubs.” He grinned while Betty rolled her eyes. “We’re here two more days, then we take the train to Italy. Where are you from in the States?”
“New York.”
“We’re from Philadelphia. How long you lived here?”
“Since I was a boy.”
“Whatcha do over here?” No matter how curtly I answered him, Harry would not get the hint.
“I have a bicycle shop,” I answered.
“Oh, that’s interesting. We’re retired now,” he continued with his unsolicited flow of information. “But Betty and I,” he put a hand affectionately on his wife’s ample knee, “we were social workers. Now we stick to our hobbies. Can’t get Betty out of her rose garden. And I sing. For weddings, confirmations, anniversaries. That kind of thing. I’m really looking forward to seeing Italy. Italian songs are my favorite.”
So Harry and Betty had devoted their lives to helping the poor and dispossessed on the East Coast, not to selling cars or insurance or Tupperware in the Midwest, and they now spent their time singing and gardening rather than watching television and attending community picnics. Though it wasn’t surprising my scenario had proved incorrect, given that my lived experience of the US was limited to Augusts on Long Island and the short, disastrous year at the college, seeing Harry and Betty in the softer, dappled light of their real lives, rather than the harsh glare of my assumptions, made me resent their intrusion into my train ride even more. I preferred them to remain as I had invented them.
“It must be wonderful to be bilingual,” Betty went on. “We wanted our daughter to study in Italy. She inherited her father’s voice, and we thought it would be nice if she could understand all those songs. Unlike her father.” Now she squeezed Harry’s hand.
“I get the gist,” he said with a defensive look at Betty. “It’s the emotion that counts anyway.”
“Actually,” I said, looking straight at their attentive faces, “it’s no big deal having two languages. No different from riding a bicycle,” I paused, changing the comparison, “or knowing how to swim. It’s just something I can do.”
They sat in silence for a moment, stunned, perhaps, that I was actually able to assemble more than four words together at a time.
“Sounds to me,” Harry said, looking down at his lap, “like you don’t know how lucky you are. Betty’s right. It does bother me not getting all the words, and the meaning under the words, of the songs I sing.” He looked up at me. “I’ve always believed the more you know, the richer your life is.”
>
I shrugged. We were arriving in Vernon, and the conversation I never wanted to have in the first place was thankfully coming to an end.
As I was rolling a quick cigarette on the platform, Betty lumbered down the steps of the train. Not seeing me, she said to Harry: “Why would a nice-looking young man like that, at home on two continents, be so sour?”
“Beats me.” Harry shook his head. “But what a pill. Let me take that bag for you, Betty.”
I turned and walked quickly toward the underground passage that led to the station parking lot, indignant and embarrassed. A pill. What did they know?
Cédric was huddled against his car waiting for me with a gently mocking smile on his uneven face, as if everything about me amused him in a pleasant way.
“It’s about time you decided to come see us,” he said as we got in his old Volvo station wagon, which even in the cold smelled of dogs. He and Viviane had several; it was hard to keep track of the numbers.
“You know what a busy life I have.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, releasing the hand brake and moving into first gear. “Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t wait any longer. The train drivers are threatening to go on strike any day now.”
“They’re always threatening to go on strike.”
“But this time their precious régime special is being threatened.”
“I guess losing the right to retire at fifty is something to strike about.”
Cédric shook his head. “It’s impossible, really. There’s a teacher at my school who wanted to do the opposite, to put off his retirement for a couple of years. Because he loves his job and the students love him. His request was rejected.”
“Vive la France,” I said. “Speaking of jobs”—I looked out the window as we crossed the Seine, its wooded banks here crowding down to the water—“I was recently informed that I’m being evicted.”
“What?” Cédric looked over at me. His long nose wasn’t quite straight, and one side of his face was a bit higher than the other. It made him look perpetually uncertain.