French Lessons (12 page)

The door opens and Philippe breezes in.

He’s tall and gangly and has wasted-rock-star good looks. Too many drugs, too many hard nights. It becomes him. His hair always falls in his eyes and Riley spends much of the French lessons imagining something so simple: She reaches out and tucks that lovely hair behind his ear. Today it’s a little greasy, though. Maybe she’ll pay better attention to the lesson.

“Je suis désolé,”
he says breathlessly. She smells cigarettes and coffee and something else—sex? His clothes are rumpled. Did he rush here from his girlfriend’s bed?

She smiles at him. She could say something like “No big deal,” or “What is that delicious smell wafting from you?” but she doesn’t have the words.

When he had answered his cell phone earlier she had started to speak in English.
“En français,”
he admonished her. And so she gave him the name and address of the café and a time. That’s all. She felt a little bit like a spy giving out only the crucial information. No chitchat for her. She’s got international intrigue on her mind!

“Bon,”
he says, settling into the seat across from her, pulling out his books from his very distressed leather messenger bag, ordering something from the waiter who says something in response, and then he turns to her and smiles.

She smiles back.

He asks a question.

She smiles back.

He shakes his head, unleashing that lock of hair. She looks away.

“Bon,”
he says again. Though nothing is good. Even the coffee tastes like burnt tongue.

“Okay, listen,” she says in English. “Maybe we try something different. Maybe we get to know each other a little bit, figure out something we’d both like to talk about—I mean, I don’t know a thing about you—and then we could, I don’t know, talk about that. In English. And then eventually I’d be speaking in French because it would be just so interesting that the French words would squeeze their way into my little brain and pour right out of my mouth. Whaddaya think?”

“En français,”
he says. He’s smiling though. Either he’s a nice guy or he understood every word she said.

That’s the other thing. She doesn’t know how to read people here. Back in the States, she had a sharp ear—she could figure out who was worth knowing by how they spoke, how witty they were, how observant and caustic and wry. She chose her best friend because the woman used remarkable metaphors, inventing them on the spot. She chose her first boyfriend because he skewered the sociology professor for his foppish mannerisms. She chose her husband because he was the first guy to beat her at Scrabble. She imagines a Scrabble game with Philippe. How often could she use the word
bon
?

And forget about words—she’s lost the cultural clues! Is Philippe’s shirt cool or dorky? It’s kind of shiny—that wouldn’t pass muster in New York. And he’s got one earring that looks like a cross, but maybe it’s an X. Does that mean something? Is he charming or creepy? Doesn’t matter. She likes to look at him. He’s handsome and that seems to translate well enough in any language.

He opens his book to a page that has a picture of a house. Pictures she likes. Pictures she can read. She feels like Cole, watching intently while Papa reads the text. If Philippe keeps this up for long, she’ll need her blankie and a nap.

Philippe stops talking and points to a picture of a bedroom. He’s pointed right at the bed! Yes, she wants to say: Let’s go!

But she says, “lit.” Amazing. When it matters, the words come to her. The important words.

“Le lit,”
Philippe says.

Who the hell cares? Feminine, masculine. When will the gender revolution come to France? Maybe it’s a cross-dressing bed. Riley looks up. Philippe’s watching her. Why does she have this goofy grin on her face because she’s looking at a bed? Well, no fucking chance she can explain this one.

“Où est le lit?”
she asks.

“Dans la chambre,”
Philippe says.

“Où est la chambre?”
she asks.

He looks at her. Is he so pleased because they’re having an infantile conversation or because they’re talking about sex?

No one’s talking about sex, Riley reminds herself. It’s just in the air, wafting toward her.

“Dans la maison,”
Philippe says.

“Where is your
maison
?” Riley asks.

“En français,”
Philippe says.

“I know it’s in France. Where in France?”

He shakes his head. But he’s still smiling. He’s left a couple of buttons open on his shiny shirt. Riley can see that he has a boy’s chest, hairless and lean.

She has never cheated on Vic. She once desired a man who worked in the art department at her PR firm and she told Vic, and Vic told her he desired a woman who worked in the finance department of his company and that was the end of that. Tit for tat. Well, she hoped there wasn’t any tit involved. There certainly wasn’t any tat for her.

Is Vic cheating on her now? Is he really meeting boring French businessmen every hour of the day and night? She asked him once—mid-dinner on a date night—and he said, “My God, Riley. Can’t we even spend one night out without your ruining it?”

She had a sudden image of herself as a shrew, the kind of woman a husband complained about to his office mates. Wasn’t she the siren a few years ago, the woman Vic boasted about? “My wife loves sex,” he once told a friend of theirs. “You lucky fuck,” the friend said. Whenever they finished making love, Riley would whisper in Vic’s ear: “You lucky fuck.” And he would fall asleep with a smile on his face.

She hasn’t seen that smile in a long time.

“J’habite près du Centre Beaubourg,”
Philippe says.

She understood him! The Pompidou Center! But they call it whatever he said. She remembers standing on the top floor of the museum and looking out at the rooftops of Paris and thinking: Everyone else is having a wonderful life. Just look. Charming attic apartments, sex in a single bed, the smell of bouillabaisse and hashish floating through the air.

Now she knows: Philippe is one of those people.

I had a wonderful life, she wants to say. She remembers the bon voyage party her friends threw for them a few weeks before they moved to Paris. She and Vic wore matching berets and striped shirts (hers stretched over a pregnant belly). Mid-party they had a fencing match with baguettes as weapons. They were grown-up kids embarking on a grand adventure. “Will you be lonely over there?” one friend asked her. “Not with Vic and Cole and little Miss Wiggle Worm. Besides, it’s Paris,” she said.

Wonderful slips away, day by day. Why, even yesterday she was more wonderful than today. Yesterday her mother didn’t have cancer. Riley has lost her mind in a tangle of thoughts and Philippe has asked a question.

She smiles.

He repeats it.

She shakes her head.
“No comprendo.”

“Je ne comprends pas,”
he corrects her.

Why bother trying to explain it’s an expression in English—well, not in English exactly, but something everyone says in English even though it’s in Spanish.

“Right,” she says. “What you said.”

Vic speaks French. He speaks it so well that he’s now changed his name to Victor. He says that the French don’t use nicknames and so he’s now Victor. “The Victor.” That’s what she calls him when she’s really annoyed, as in: “Will you be home for dinner, The Victor?” To which he usually responds no. He used to say “Don’t call me that.” But now he doesn’t bother. “No” takes care of everything—it’s an all-purpose word. In fact, it’s the same word in French even if they do put an extra unnecessary letter on the end.
Non!
I won’t be home for dinner!

But Riley is Riley in any language. “What am I supposed to call myself now,” she asked The Victor. “AllRiledUp?”

“Clever,” he said.

Of course he calls Gabi Gabrielle, which is her real name, but damned if Riley’s going to start burdening her daughter with a name that’s longer than she is. Cole is Cole is Cole is Cole. Thank God.

Does anyone call Philippe Phil? In bed, maybe? A kiss here, my Philistine? Sometimes sex draws a thing out, doesn’t it?

So they’re back to the
lit
and the
lampe
and all things
de la chambre
. Riley learns a few new words while gazing at the book. Then she imagines her mother in the bed in the picture. When Riley was little she would climb in bed with her mother and they would read, side by side, their cottony arms rubbing up next to each other. Her mother often hummed, but she said she didn’t. And now Riley hums while she gives Cole a bath. It’s the same tune. How can she ask her mother what the tune is when her mother says she never hums? Riley feels a kind of urgency and peers at her mother in the bed. The image begins to fade until poof—she’s gone—and a goddamn tear splashes on the page.

Philippe says something, real alarm on his lovely face, and Riley wipes her eyes, shakes her head and says,
“Rien, rien.”
Amazing what words appear when she needs them.

But in a quick moment, Philippe is packing up. Men and tears. She half expects him to dash out and leave her behind, but at the last minute he gestures for her to follow him.

Whatever.

They stand outside the café, in the middle of the Marais, looking at each other.

Philippe says something.

Riley smiles.

“Bon,”
he says.

He takes her arm and they start walking down rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

For the first time in a year, Riley feels French. She’s walking next to a Frenchman—a handsome Frenchman at that—and instead of doctor’s appointments and playground visits and
pain au chocolat
shopping, there is only this: mystery. She has no idea where they’re going. She’s been dropped from her life into a French novel.

Never mind that Riley looks pathetically American. Before she moved to Paris, everyone told her “Whatever you do, don’t wear sneakers.” She left them all behind. And now, in a swift change of fashion trends, every goddamn Frenchwoman is wearing little white sneakers. But it’s not the clothes, it’s the breasts. No one in France has breasts this size. She tried buying a new bra and got tired of the way the saleswomen rolled their eyes and sadly shook their heads. And then there’s the hair! She has long, curly hair, messy hair, hair that won’t be contained in rubber bands or hair clips. It explodes from her head like confetti. “Cut it,” Vic said.
“Non!”
she told him. She loves her hair.

So somehow she has arrived at a point in her life that she looks like a porn star. She has big hair and high heels and enormous breasts. In New York, everyone would know that she’s not a porn star, because she’s smart and funny and the clothes she wears are sophisticated and she has her sneakers. But here, there’s only one way to translate this: “Fuck me!”

Maybe that’s what Philippe plans, Riley thinks. She tucks thoughts of her mother away—no, Mom, you’re not coming along for this ride!—and clicks her heels as she struggles to keep up with Philippe’s long stride.

The sky darkens as suddenly as a full eclipse of the sun and then, in a flash of lightning and thunder, as if God is screaming,
Get sex out of your mind right now!
, the heavens open up. Philippe’s grip tightens on Riley’s arm and he leads her under the canopy of a corner restaurant. In a second, a crowd of people huddle under this teeny canvas, and they are squeezed together.

The crowd oohs and aahs as if God were a fucking superstar. Riley can barely see the street anymore—they’re sandwiched between so many people. Someone smells as if they had garlic oatmeal for breakfast; someone else has the hiccups and the whole crowd seems to jerk with each gasp of breath. Riley feels her heartbeat racing—she’s not sure if it’s the drama of the heavens or Philippe’s arm pressed into her breast. And for once, she doesn’t have to speak. She gets this: it’s weather and it’s wild. No need for a running commentary. Just take it in.

Riley remembers a camping trip with Vic in Vermont—pre-kids, pre-marriage—when a storm woke them in the middle of the night, pounding their tent so loudly that they knew it was hail, a freak midsummer hailstorm, and Riley began to tremble, suddenly sure that the thin fabric would give way and they’d be iced to death. Vic climbed on top of her and in a quick moment their sleeping bags were unzipped, their clothes pulled off, and their bodies pounded each other in the most violent, urgent, ragged sex they ever had. Afterward, the hailstorm too had ended and they lay there, gasping, staring at the roof of the tent in the dark, side by side, their hands clasped together. They never spoke about it afterward, as if there were something shameful about the way they tore at each other. Riley wonders now: What would it take to bring Vic back to me?

A clap of thunder and Riley transports herself on a transatlantic journey from Vermont to Paris, from Vic to the French tutor, from the smell of pine trees to the smell of wet wool. The rain stops as abruptly as it started. The sky lightens. The crowd doesn’t move as if they’re not ready for the show to end. No one says a word. Riley almost expects a call: “Encore!” But eventually the first few people break away from their tight little gathering, and then the next, and then Philippe’s arm leaves her breast. She sags a little—not her breast, which is firmly ensconced in an American 34 DD bra with underwire and wide straps—but her whole body feels a little post-orgasmic. The show is over.

Philippe looks at her. She feels closer to him now, as if they have shared something. And to her delight, he doesn’t speak. He wraps that wonderful hand around her upper arm and leads her onward.

The sidewalks are crowded with people, everyone on the move again, and the city streets glisten with light reflecting off the puddles. Riley thinks of Cole and his new green rubber boots with the frog eyes on the tips—he should be splashing his way to the Place des Vosges instead of sitting in front of the TV with Fadwa or Fatah or Fadul’s mother. Bad Mama! And tonight, when he wants Daddy to put him to bed, she’ll have to explain:
It’s you and me, babe
.