French Lessons (13 page)

But no time for children! I’m off on a Parisian adventure! It’s all about me-me-me!

How odd that a person can lose herself in a city, in a family, in a marriage. How odd that she never felt lonely when she lived alone all those years in New York, and now, wrapped in the tidy package of nuclear family, a member of every fucking expat group that exists in Paris, every moms’ group for English-speakers, every wives’ group for expats, she feels like she’s the kid standing outside the school and everyone’s gone home and her mother has forgotten to pick her up.

Do they call it nuclear because it’s bound to explode?

She has not mentioned to her mother that her husband has gone AWOL on their marriage, that he’s rarely home, that he barely touches her, that the last time she told a funny story about the crazy woman who yelled at her for breast-feeding in the park he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t be breast-feeding anymore.” When Riley found out that her pet name for Vic, “coo-coo,” is something French people say to their infants, he told her, “Maybe you shouldn’t call me that anymore.” She has not mentioned to her mother that she wakes in the middle of the night with something like terror lodged in her chest. No wonder her mother forgot to metaphorically pick her up—she’s a fraud and her mother knows it. She used to tell her mother everything and now she has spent a year telling her mother not to visit her in Paris, and now her mother has cancer.

“Comment?”
Philippe asks.

She looks up at him. Has she said something? In what language? The language of grief?

“Rien,”
she assures him. “My mother hums when she’s thinking and apparently I do that, too.”

“En français,”
Philippe says.

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she tells him.

He laughs.
Fuck
—the international language.

He slides his hand on her lower back as he presses her in front of him. The crowd is so thick on the sidewalk that they can’t walk side by side and he keeps his hand there, guiding her forward, like a dancer, leading her through complicated moves on the dance floor. She is a terrible dancer; she doesn’t know how to follow a guy, or maybe she’s never been with a guy who knows how to lead. Before their wedding she and Vic took a couple of dance lessons and they were dismal failures, bumping into each other, turning the wrong way, smacking into each other’s shoes. One night they got stoned and danced in the empty living room of their new apartment and suddenly they could do it—they were Fred and Ginger—they spun and dipped and swooned. A week later, at their own wedding, they had to bear-hug through the first dance, too embarrassed to fumble through a merengue in front of the crowd. “I can’t feel your lead,” Riley had whispered to Vic. “What do you want, a steamroller?” Vic asked. “Steamroll me, baby,” Riley whispered in his ear when they made love that night.

Philippe’s hand slides around her waist and pulls her to a stop.

“Nous sommes arrivés,”
he announces.

She looks around. They’re in the middle of the block; all around them people walk in every direction and cars blast their horns. She looks at Philippe, who’s gazing up—at a building that might have been built in the fifties and hasn’t been washed since. It would look like just about any building except it’s in the middle of Paris and every other building is a piece of art. This is not. It’s got a flat surface that is dull and soot-covered, the windows grimy and dark. Who lives here?

Apparently her dashing French tutor lives in this dump, because he’s tapping in a code and opening the front door. Riley’s feet are frozen in place. She hears a chorus of voices—Vic, her mom, Cole, Gabi—all shouting at her. She’s being stoned by words.

“Riley,” Philippe says, and the voices vanish, her feet thaw, and she’s hurrying inside the door. She was never a pushover before—now the sound of her name in this man’s mouth turns her into a hussy.

The elevator smells of dirty diapers. It’s hard to think about sex, and Riley tries not to breathe, as if she’d be allowing Gabi to enter her mind if she thought about dirty diapers. How does she know the babysitter’s mother will change Gabi’s diaper? She once left Gabi with her mother on her last visit home, six months ago, and came back from the beach with Cole to find Gabi drenched and soiled. “I thought they made diapers stronger these days,” her mother said, unbothered by the mess. “Next time, you take care of the baby and I’ll go to the beach with the munchkin.” Riley’s mom prefers Cole to Gabi, and has never tried to hide it.

So the not breathing on the elevator didn’t work. She’s got Gabi and Cole and her mother all living in her head now.
Go away
, she wants to scream.
There’s no room for you in this bed!

The bed turns out to be a futon, and an unmade one at that. Philippe throws open the door to his apartment and Riley sees immediately that she has made a terrible mistake. There is nothing romantic about a loser. And Philippe must be a loser—who else could live like this? There’s the pea-green futon, the beer cans (why would anyone drink beer in the land of Burgundy and Bordeaux?) strewn all over the floor, the poster of Angelina Jolie, the guitar in the middle of the floor. At least that’s a sign of culture. The guy must strum on his guitar, then drop it like a sack of potatoes.

Philippe tosses his jacket on the floor and walks into the kitchen. Riley stands there, waiting to flee. It’s easy, she thinks. Turn around, walk out the door. Send a check to the language school. Never see this man again.

But he returns, carrying two glasses of champagne.

She takes a glass and sips. It’s flat and warm but it tastes wonderful. She sips some more.

When she looks up at Philippe he leans over and kisses her, a long kiss that seems to include the exchange of champagne from his mouth into hers. It’s creepy and she almost chokes, but then his hand reaches under her shirt and touches her skin. She hasn’t been touched in a long time. Her mind goes silent, and her body goes liquid.

He picks her up and carries her to the bed. They tumble down—did he trip on a beer can or did she suddenly get too heavy for him?—and they fall in a tangle of limbs on the thin futon. Riley bangs her elbow hard, but Philippe’s kissing her neck and the pain gets lost in the heat coursing through her body. She tears at his clothes, pulling them off. He gets stuck on one of her buttons and she pushes him back, then yanks the shirt off her. He makes a deep animal sound at the sight of her breasts and dives in.

Philippe slides his hand into her panties and she whimpers.

Riley bites his neck and he groans.

Philippe’s finger slips inside her—she’s already wet despite months of thinking she’d gone frigid sometime after Gabi’s birth—and Riley gasps.

Riley’s hand grabs his cock—when did his pants come off? What’s on the end of his cock?—and he moans.

Philippe’s finger presses deep inside her, his mouth pulls at her breast, his cock grows in her hand. Riley’s panting but that’s the sound of his heavy breath in her ear and the noise makes her wrap her legs around him, pull him inside her, then pull him out. “Condom,” she says.

“Quoi?”

“Whatever,” she says. “Just put one on.”

Philippe reaches for the side of the futon and of course he has a bowlful of condoms or whatever they’re called here, and in a flash his lovely penis—yes, it’s uncircumcised and it’s a thing of beauty—is swathed in latex and it towers above her, pointing every which way in its wonderful excitement, until it finds its way home.

Both of them sigh—deep, long, luxurious sighs.

And then they begin to move together and the song in Riley’s head, the song she’s been humming since childhood, spills out of her, a nursery rhyme, a Russian folk song, something her grandmother taught her mother, something her mother hummed to her while bathing her and dressing her and walking her to school, and while Philippe batters her with his cock, bites her breasts, pulls at her hair, Riley cries. It’s a flood up there, tears spilling down the side of her face, and Philippe washes her face with his tongue, a tongue as wondrous as his penis.

He doesn’t stop. He’s grunting, making some kind of
whoo-whoo-whoo
sound. His body is hard, his muscles taut, his movements powerful. Riley watches him, amazed—it’s a feat of athleticism, this kind of sex, it’s a descent into darkness, it’s a wild-animal mating ritual.

When he comes, he hoots—a cowboy shout, a rodeo ride, this bucking bronco—and then he collapses on top of her, their bodies slick with each other’s sweat.

So. This is sex.

Every other sex she has experienced in her life had something to do with love, or the search for love, or the end of love. This is just sex.

Her mind floods with words again.

Amazing. For however many minutes that took, Riley had turned off her brain. And now it’s someplace new. She’s thinking about love.

Not love for Philippe—no! How soon till she can shower, dress, and flee! Not love for The Victor—no! Love is lost, she’s sure of that now. Love cannot be found, no matter how hard one looks in all the nooks and crannies of their foolish, over-furnished apartment. Not love for all the old boyfriends who didn’t know how to have sex like this—Franklin and his too-small penis, Luca and his wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am performance, Terry and his doughboy body, Johnny and his stick-it-in-during-the-middle-of-the-night obsession, Jesse and his terror of the female netherlands.

She’s thinking about her love for Paris!

Paris. The city of sex. The city of clandestine affairs. The city of handsome French tutors in pathetic apartments. The city where the
pain au chocolat
you eat in the morning is only the first erotic taste of the day. The city where you can stop talking long enough to hear the song your mother sang.

Just in time—just as Riley remembers her mother’s phone call this morning—Philippe turns her over, holds her hands spread open on the bed, pushes her legs apart with his knees, and enters her from behind.

We are speaking the same language, she thinks.

And this time the sex is even harder—he bites her shoulder at one point, he pushes so hard inside her that she feels herself opening, breaking up, crumbling, splitting.

When he comes, he falls beside her on the bed.

She puts her hand between her legs and makes herself come. She’s almost there, and he’s not going to do anything about it. He watches, his face full of something like wonder.

When she’s done, she’s crying again. This time the tears are for Vic, the old Vic, the old marriage, the love vanished in thin Parisian air. Riley slides away from Philippe and hobbles to the shower. Sure enough, it’s a pit, a hole, and she doesn’t mind one bit. She washes and cries and washes some more. She hums.

Philippe is sleeping when she comes out. She finds her clothes and gets dressed. A button has torn off her shirt—it gapes open, exposing her baby belly. Who cares? She’s a sexpot.

She leaves, pulling the door closed behind her. She doesn’t want to talk to him. Besides, she doesn’t speak the language.

• • •

On the way home Riley sees a couple walking down the street, their pigtailed little girl between them, all of them holding hands. To let Riley pass, the dad drops the girl’s hand, like the child’s game London Bridge Is Falling Down. Riley walks past and then looks behind her—sure enough, the little girl skips ahead, untethered, and the parents walk with a gap between them.

Riley imagines that anything that once held Vic and her together—love, passion, Cole’s hands—has fallen down. She knows that cheating on Vic didn’t kill love. Love was already gasping its last dying breath. Even if Vic has been cheating on her, it’s what he did to fill the space between them.

She race-walks down the street, her heels clattering on the pavement.

Twenty minutes later, she is home. Gabi is taking her nap—with a clean diaper—and Cole is playing checkers with the babysitter’s mom. Riley pays the woman twice what she’d normally pay and bows too many times, backing the woman out the door. Cole wraps his arms around Riley’s leg as if she’s been gone for years.

“Let’s call Nana,” Riley says.

“Nana!” Cole repeats, rapturously. He loves his grandma.

It is early morning in Florida—her mother will be reading the paper in the sunroom overlooking the golf course. It is early afternoon in Paris—Riley and Cole sit in the breakfast nook overlooking the courtyard below. A little girl, the concierge’s granddaughter, stands in the middle of the courtyard, her mouth open in a wide O.

“Open the window,” Riley says. “I think she’s singing.”

Cole climbs over the chair and slides the window open. It squeaks and the girl looks up at them, caught mid-note. She pauses and the sound of
tey-tey-tey
hangs in the air. In a quick moment, she’s singing again, in a thin, high voice. It’s a beautiful song and she watches them while she sings.

“Mom,” Riley says when her mother answers the phone.

“Don’t start calling me every two minutes, Miss Worry-wart,” her mom says.

“I just want to talk to you,” Riley says quietly.

“Is my favorite little man there?”

“Cole,” Riley says, handing him the phone. “She wants you.”

“Nana?” Cole says.

He listens, but he never once takes his eyes off the girl in the courtyard below. He has his grandmother’s voice in one ear and a child’s song in the other ear. His smile spreads across his face.

“I love you, too,” he says, probably to both of them.

He hands Riley the phone.

“I’m fine,” her mother says right away. “I’ll have the surgery, they’ll take it out.”

“Chemo,” Riley says. That’s all she can say.

“So I’ll do chemo. I won’t be the first person in the world.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He says we should all be so tough at sixty-four years old. He says what I already know. I’m a fighter.”

“How come you didn’t give any of that fight to me?”

“You got plenty of fight. Who else goes to live on the other side of the world with two babies?”

Riley looks around the kitchen—it’s all white, as if aliens or nuns live here.