Gabrielle (2 page)

“Good.”

She smiled as I walked over to kiss her on the cheek and I was about to move away to put my bag down when she put one hand on my forearm. Stilling, I noticed how carefully she was looking at me.

What did she see, I wondered? Five minutes at the piano felt like they'd changed me on the inside. Did I look different on the outside, too?

“Every day I expect a little girl to walk through that door, and always, I'm surprised by a beautiful woman. Seventeen going on eighteen.” Her expression was strangely serious. “When I was your age ... no, it's too soon,” she said, almost as if she'd forgotten I was in the room.

My grandmother and I didn't often talk about her past. I only knew the barest details about her life as a courtesan in France—that it had begun on her eighteenth birthday and ended when she became pregnant with my mother. But with my eighteenth birthday coming in less than a year, I'd found myself thinking more and more about the fact that when she was barely older than me, she'd been forced into prostitution.

She had never called it that, had always used the word
courtesan,
but I wasn't a kid anymore and I could read between the lines.

Men had paid her for sex. She had been a mistress many times over, never a wife.

What had she been forced to give up, apart from the obvious control of her own body?

Had there been someone she would have dated or married if she could have?

“
Grandmaman
,” I suddenly said, thinking of the way I'd felt in the practice room playing piano with a gorgeous stranger, “did you ever want to marry someone?”

Her only outward reaction to my question was a slight halt in her wrist as she sliced through a courgette.

I knew that circumstances had dictated my grandmother's choices and her mother's before her. But although she'd never hidden the truth from me, I'd never asked many questions.

Mostly because I didn't want to think too hard about what being a courtesan meant. And I didn't want any reason to judge her for what she'd done or who she'd been.

“Gabrielle,” she said in her precise yet heavily accented English, as beautiful to my ears as a perfectly composed sonata, “you know I will never lie to you.”

Just then, the kitchen lights overhead seemed to flicker, the marble countertop beneath my fingertips suddenly turning cold. I shivered. Was she telling me not to ask questions if I couldn't handle the answers?

“I know that,
Grandmaman
,” I said softly. But I didn't retract my question. Instead, I came at it from a slightly different direction. “Was there ever a man you could have married?

Instead of simply—”

I was unable to finish the sentence.

“Ah,
ma petite
, I have wondered when we would have this discussion.”

I swallowed. I'd meant it only as a simple question. Not as the lead-in to a
discussion
.

Fortunately, her tinkling laughter seemed to set the lights back to normal. She leaned over and kissed my forehead. “So many worries. Always so hard to be a young girl. Don't worry, I promise not to say anything that will shock you tonight.”

“When have I ever been shocked,
Grandmaman
?” I challenged her.

From the first time I'd learned that she'd been a courtesan—I couldn't have been more than thirteen—I hadn't been shocked. Well, perhaps a little, but I thought I'd hidden it well.

She put down her knife, the lines that criss-crossed the tops of her hands the only true betrayal of her age. “You know I was near to your age when I took up the life.”

The life
, I knew, meant becoming a courtesan. A prostitute.

“Were you scared?” I asked, but I already felt I knew the answer. How could she not have been frightened? How could anyone—especially my incredible grandmother—trade her beauty, her wit and talent, her sexuality for money without fear?

She shrugged and waved her hand in the air as if to dismiss my question. “Much was different then.”

“The nineteen-thirties weren't
that
long ago,” I argued.

“For someone who has lived less than two decades, you claim to know a remarkable amount about what the six before you were born were like,” she chided.

“So, were you?” I pressed. “Scared, I mean?”

This time she licked her lips, seemed to consider the question more carefully. “If I was afraid, I could not admit my fear. And my mother prepared me well.”

It sounded so calculated, I thought silently, one woman preparing another for that life.

How could her mother have done that to her? Basically sold off her daughter to the highest bidder?

I slid the pile of chopped celery into my palm and dropped it into the pot on the stove.

“Because you had to do it.”

She laughed again and I turned to her in surprise as she said, “You make it all sound so horrible,” before looking off into the distance as if she were fading back into her memories.

“Becoming a courtesan was my best option, yes, but I embraced the life.” She opened her eyes again, pinned me with them. “I soon came to see that there was more good than bad in it. And I reveled in my freedom.”

I couldn't help the slight twist of my lips. “Freedom? I don't understand. You were a man's possession. How could there be more good than bad in being paid for—”

Again, I couldn't just come out and say,
How could you let anyone pay you for sex,
Grandmaman?

“Oh no,
ma petite
, being a courtesan is not about being anyone's property. Nor is it simply about sex.”

She almost seemed to delight in saying the word, in trying to shock me, and were it not for my disbelief I would have laughed.

“Of course it is,” I said, but, amazingly, the seed of doubt had been planted and my words came out far less sure than they should have.

“Being a courtesan is about the art of love. And, indeed, part of that art is when you are in someone's arms.”

I couldn't help it, I immediately thought about the way the stranger's thigh had shifted against mine on the piano bench, the light brush of his knuckles against mine as he played beside me. I bent my head to let my hair cover my cheeks, where a blush was waiting to be noticed—and surely remarked upon—by my grandmother.

“For some, that is where love can begin. But more often, real love begins in the sharing of culture, music, and confidences. Later, when you come together, it is that much more beautiful.

That much more rich. One day, I hope you will learn this for yourself.”

“You don't have to defend what you did to me,
Grandmaman
,” I said quickly. “I'm not judging you.” How could I when she'd had to do it? “I would never do that.”

She patted my hand. “No,” she said, “you would not. And no, I did not ever want to marry.”

I gave up the pretense of chopping and after putting down my knife, turned around to lean against the counter. “So you were never in love with—” I wanted desperately to act mature.

Mature enough, at least, to finish at least one sentence. “With any of your protectors?”

“Companions,” she corrected me softly, and then, “I loved with my whole heart.”

“But the guy you loved was married, so you could only remain his courtesan?” I assumed aloud.

She smiled. “No.”

Her smile had always been full of wisdom, but for the first time I wondered just how hard-won that wisdom was.

“So then he could have married you?”

“Yes. He wanted to marry me.”

“I don't get it. Why didn't you marry him, then?”

She could have finally been respectable, was what I was thinking. A normal wife rather than a paid companion.

“There were many reasons for continuing our arrangement,
ma petite
.”

“Like?”

“I had lived my whole life as an independent woman. I had freedoms that other women my age could only dream of. I danced and dined with exceptional artists, debated with the greatest thinkers, played chess with men and women in history books.”

She made
the life
sound so glamorous, but I knew it couldn't have been. Not at its core.

“But you were dependent on your companions, weren't you?”

This time she raised her eyebrow. “Everything I ever accepted from a man was my choice to accept. Whereas the girls I had known from school, from the village, were trapped.”

“Trapped?”

“In marriages. With men who gave them no choices. No art. No stimulation in any area whatsoever. With men who did not appreciate their brains. With men who loved their mistresses rather than their wives.”

And my grandmother had been one of the mistresses the married men loved.

When I had asked her about marriage, I hadn't thought this is where our conversation would end up. I hadn't thought to stand in the kitchen and question the things she'd done. I hadn't thought to wonder if she'd felt guilty to be a party to betrayal in a marriage—the mistress who led the husband astray.

I knew the question would have to be asked at some point. But not today. Still, I couldn't help but say, “Not all marriages are bad,
Grandmaman
.”

Even as I said it, I wondered where this judgmental girl had been all my life. Had she been hiding inside me all along? Buried deep enough that I didn't have to face her pronouncements?

I was ashamed of myself for the shame I felt over my grandmother's former profession.

“No,” she agreed, “I suppose there may be some wonderful marriages where the partners are equals in love and all else.”

The way she said it seemed so philosophical. As if she'd never actually witnessed a good marriage, one where a woman could love a man and be free at the same time.

Again, I couldn't let it go. Not because I wanted to hurt her, but because my whole world order was beginning to tip and shift in a dangerous direction—and I wanted desperately to right it. I'd always thought she hadn't married, that she hadn't lived a
normal
life, because she'd had no other choice.

But now she was telling me that there had been a choice after all.

“Couldn't your marriage have been to one of those good ones? And then you wouldn't have had to be a courtesan any longer.”

She put down her knife, slid the rest of the vegetables into the pot with her slender yet strong sculptor's hands, and then picked up the mortar and pestle to grind the freshly picked herbs.

“I dared not risk the love we shared,” she finally said, as utterly honest as she had always been regardless of the subject.

I felt the words jumble in my brain before jumping onto my tongue. “You weren't afraid to sleep with a man for money, but you were afraid that marrying him would make you lose his love?”

A sudden silence fell hard in the room, punctuated only by the bubbling stock in the large pot on the stove.

“Perhaps you are right,
ma petite
, and I should have taken the ultimate risk by marrying him, but he was shipped away to war before I ever had the chance to rethink my decision.” And he hadn't come back. “Still, I never regretted my years as a courtesan. Never.”

She picked up my hands, turned them over, and traced the lines on my palms with the tips of her fingers as if she were trying to read my future. When she looked up into my eyes, a shiver ran through me.

“I can see that you do not understand. Perhaps the time has come to tell you more of the story.”

“I'd like to know more,” I said, and I did. I sensed just how much knowledge my grandmother had to share with me...and just how much I might need it. But not now. Not yet. Not when I needed to try and process everything that had been said already. “But tonight I have some math to finish up.”

I was glad—and incredibly relieved—when she simply kissed me on the forehead and said, “Go. Study. I will call you out when
le
dîner
is ready.”

Later, much later, I realized that all through our conversation she had spoken in present tenses. That she had said what being a courtesan
is
, not
was
. That she had regaled me with the virtues of it and worked to steer me away from any darkness that might be hidden beneath her words.

But, even so, at that point it honestly never occurred to me that becoming a courtesan was anywhere in my future.

In the morning, instead of just taking a shower and letting my hair air dry, I pulled out my blow dryer and mascara. Standing in my closet in my underwear, I scanned my clothes carefully, but it was just the usual mix of jeans and T-shirts and sweaters. Nothing amazing had hung itself up while I was sleeping and I finally grabbed my favorite dark-wash skinny jeans and a long-sleeved red T-shirt.

I'd walked up the stairs to my school a zillion times, but today it felt different. Because for the first time there was someone inside that I really wanted to see.

A guy whose name I didn't even know.

Missy was sketching something in her blank book when I walked into first period, English Composition. We'd met the first day of City School's kindergarten. Even then she was larger than life, while I was the quiet one. There was no reason we should have become best friends, except that we'd both lost parents. I guess even at five, each of us sensed the hole inside the other person.

For the past twelve years we'd continued to be best friends even though as we got older our paths diverged even more. She lost her virginity at thirteen. I didn't kiss anyone until I was sixteen (and it wasn't nearly good enough to make me want to go out with him again, let alone get into bed with him). But the thing that always fascinated me about Missy was how far she went out of her way to seem normal. Having sex with a bunch of losers, to my mind, was simply part of that. A part of her act. Because Missy was exceptional. She picked up languages as if she had been born in France, in Spain, in Russia. When she came over to my house and let her guard down, she would frequently switch into French with my grandmother, who loved it. Just as I knew Missy secretly did. Plus, she could draw and paint like a master.