Lessons in French (10 page)

twent
y

Leaving Étienne, I went to the library to find out what I could about the crowd I was to meet that evening at the Truite Dorée.

Hello, my Olivier, from the library at the Pompidou Center. I’ve ridden the glass tube escalators you told me you hate. Sorry to offend your aesthetic sensibilities, but you probably know this is the only open-stack library in Paris and I’m frantically doing research on dinner companions for tonight. Umberto Eco is coming! I wish I could talk to you and find out what he’s like because you’ve probably met him. All I know is that he thinks Portia is exquisitely beautiful (Clarence) and that he loves Lydia’s work (ahem). I’ve found a book of his essays and am about to start, but chatting to you is much more compelling than the theories of some old Italian genius. (And you’re cuter, a lot cuter, than his jacket photo.) But back to dinner—there’s going to be a writer named Harry Mathews. Clarence says he’s in the CIA. Lydia says that’s ridiculous. I wish I knew what you thought, although I imagine you agree with Lydia on this one. It’s funny, but I carry such a vivid version of you in my head that I often feel like I know what you would say in a given situation, which is strange considering how little physical time we’ve had. Not to be morbid or anything, but I feel like I’ve known you my whole life and you’ve suddenly died and I’m the repository of your memory . . .

Sorry to sound nuts, but I have to admit that I’m a teeny bit hungover still. Remember I wrote to you about that Yale girl I bumped into in the park? She and I went out together last night and it was wonderful. I simply assumed because of her look (smooth blond hair in perfect ponytail, lovely square shoulders, beatific expression) that she was some rich preppy girl. And in college we never said two words to each other because we were in such different orbits. But it turns out she’s having to make her way here too, although from a different angle. She lives in Pigalle and works in a law firm. She’s headed to law school in the fall. Anyway, she’s cool and we had a good time, but we overdid the wine.

I saw my cousin Étienne today. I was nervous because I thought it might make me sad or embarrassed, but it was great. Felt a real connection to my past but also like I may not be stuck in it. Turns out he’s gay, which was probably obvious all along. I think we are going to be good friends.

The weather is changing. Yesterday was warm but today is freezing. I got my mom to send me the down jacket that I tried not to bring because I thought it wouldn’t look right in Paris. So much for pride! But even in the cold, the city is beautiful, and I feel a bit guilty getting to wander around in all this loveliness while you are stuck in an office. If I were you, I would complain about the takeout food and working for people who only use sports analogies and about never seeing the light of day, but, then, that’s my stereotype. You obviously have a much healthier attitude toward doing what needs to be done.

Lydia has asked me to help her to archive some old photos she has in a couple of file drawers that she knows are full of treasure but hasn’t been able to deal with, stuff that she has kept over the years for various reasons and now she wants to make sense of it. But I’m not sure she can go through with it. She says she’s too busy to tackle any kind of organization but that in my spare time she’d love it if I would bring some kind of order to this cabinet.

What she does, I’ve discovered, when she gets antsy, is open her drawers and pull something out at random and kind of brood over it and then shove it back in. It’s a form of procrastination, like she wants to remember the time from the picture she’s looking at, but not fully remember it because it might make her sad about the time she’s in now. I don’t know. She’s so complicated.

Yesterday morning I came into her office to see what she wanted me to do for the day, and she was crying over a print, rubbing a white border between her thumb and forefinger. She didn’t seem to mind that I saw her crying. It was this black and white picture of a Vietnamese family crossing a river to escape the Americans. They were up to their necks in muddy water. I wondered if something terrible had happened to them right after she took the picture, like when Gandhi got assassinated a few hours after Cartier-Bresson did his portrait.

I asked her if the family made it across. There were four children, and the parents looked like they wouldn’t be able to hold them up much longer. There were these bamboo leaves in the foreground that you wanted to push aside to see better.

It turned out Lydia wasn’t crying for the people in the picture but for a photographer friend of hers, her best friend at the time, she said, the first woman photojournalist to be killed in Vietnam—
“
to die in action” was how she put it. Apparently this woman was young and naïve and came into Vietnam as a kind of official photographer who was supposed to toe the U.S. party line, but once she was there and saw how horrible it was, she started taking pictures that showed the truth and they tried to censor her and she learned how to stand up for herself. She took some of the best photos, the ones that turned the tide of the war. Then she died in a helicopter crash, “in ’72,” Lydia said, sounding all scratchy and distorted like her voice was coming through some vast distance in time. She seemed a little crazy. She started talking about riding the transition from black and white to color and how all these changes can make you very, very tired and about when
Life
magazine folded, that was some defining tragedy in her life. I think she said, “Our mission used to be so clear.” Then she asked me to go make her some tea, and by the time I got back, it was like the whole thing about missing her friend was sealed and forgotten and we had this incredibly busy day ahead of us and chop-chop!

Well, you can’t exactly picture me right now on your lovely bench in the Place des Vosges, but I am looking pretty languid sprawled out across a table in the fluorescent library light, surrounded by high-school kids scoping each other out. I can see through the glass and steel walls to the square below with the jugglers and the fire-swallowing guy entertaining small crowds. It’s kind of medieval down there. Talk about time warps.

Anyway, I miss you.

Love,

Kate

twent
y
-one

The artichoke hearts were as Clarence had described them, only more perfect. There were two of them in the center of my large gold-rimmed plate. Each heart was mounded with cream
,
latticed with green beans and sparkled over with a bright dice of tomatoes.

I was sitting at a big round table between Clarence and the photo editor from
Paris Match
, Hugo DeLeon. Next to Hugo was Harry Mathews, a great-looking older man who had taken my elbow on the walk over and said, as though delivering inside information, “The thing you’ll learn about Paris: carry an umbrella with you at all times.” Maybe he
was
in the CIA. Next to Mathews was Hugo’s wife, who was quiet and not especially sorceress-like despite Lydia’s earlier description. Then there was Umberto Eco, oracular in the mist of his cigarette smoke. Then Lydia. Then the
New Yorker
editor, who had known Lydia for years and had asked me with kind concern if I was “okay” over drinks back in the living room. Beside him, Sally Meeks, the fashion writer with whom Lydia seemed to be in some kind of sibling rivalry (“See, the skirt’s too tight. She’s always taking advantage of these free sample clothes that don’t fit her”). And it was back to Clarence, and
then me.

Hugo was telling me how lucky I was to work with Lydia because she was a great artist
and
a popular storyteller. Her images were epoch-making. They transcended the facts.

“You know, you should be careful,” Clarence interrupted him. “Photography out of context is dangerous, very dangerous.”

I wanted to give him my attention, and tilted my chin in his direction although I was dying to taste my food and my eyes kept drifting to Umberto Eco.

“Without context,” Clarence went on, “it’s all about the desire to be entertained, not the desire to know.”

“What’s the sin in entertainment?” asked Hugo.

“Who mentioned sin?” Clarence quipped. He and Hugo began a friendly argument, trying to resist the pull of Umberto Eco’s fame, but they could barely concentrate on their own thoughts and the discussion went nowhere.

None of the conversations around me were sustained because everyone was half-listening to the famous writer. Although we were only beginning our appetizers, the table had fallen silent several times already as he spoke, a situation he accepted quite naturally by opening his gaze to include not only Lydia, with whom he was ostensibly talking, but all of us. His thick beard swirling in smoke suggested unknowable depths. His glasses magnified the candlelight into flames that engulfed us all.

I could not tell if it was with pleasure or with resignation that he said, “Yes, they do say that, with the Vatican’s condemnation, I am the Italian Salman Rushdie, but I think it’s a grotesque exaggeration. Besides,” here he laughed, “Rushdie hated
Foucault’s Pendulum
. He thought it was boring and overstuffed and that most of the people who bought it were never going to read it. They wanted it for their coffee tables so that they could appear learned.”

“Do you think that’s true?” Lydia asked him, her voice rising to fill our expectant ears.

“Listen, if people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.”

As he put out his cigarette and lifted his fork, I tasted my first bite of coeur d’artichaut.
It was the most delicious thing ever. I thought with an inward smile of a trip to the supermarket with Mom when I was about fourteen. I had seen so many artichokes in still lifes that I was curious and slipped a couple into our cart. Mom caught my wrist. “Artichokes,” she had said, “are a special-occasion food. Now put those back.”

I took another bite, a small one because these were not big hearts, and I tried to distinguish the different textures in the dish, the cream, the firm tomatoes and beans, the soft flesh. Maybe Christie was misguided about the women here being thin only because they were drastic. Maybe it was actually because things were so thoughtful and structured that they did not need to be large for you to experience them. With apologies to Claudia, I loved bourgeois food.

I had walked by this neighborhood restaurant several times a day for weeks so that I had a deep passing knowledge of it the way you know the spine of a book that has been sitting on your shelf. Inside now, I had been introduced to the
patronne
(“
une vieille amie du quartier,”
Lydia called her). I had discovered the rustic décor and the
cheminée
and the red and yellow Provençal upholstery on the chairs. There was a wrought iron chandelier over our table that held real honey-colored candles. I knew I was supposed to order the artichokes and the bar au sel, which was not necessarily salty, Clarence explained, but baked in a salt crust to keep the fish especially moist.

Clarence was shaking his head with pleasure as he chewed.

“It’s ironic,” Umberto Eco was saying, “all the honorary degrees that have come to me
since
the popular novels. The universities are all in the sway of fashion. But I understand them. This fame of mine, it acts like a filter. People trust it. People put inordinate trust in me and my opinions. I find it very perplexing. They expect me to save them from all that is irrelevant, to decimate the white noise, if you will.”

Again, the table quieted around him. I knew that, long ago, his father had wanted him to be a lawyer too.

“Not your theory of decimation again!” Lydia was flirting. “I’ll never forget that from our first interview.” And she raised her voice in my direction to explain. “Katherine, I told you Umberto and I worked together on a piece about photography years ago.”

“No,” Clarence interjected. “No, if you will only choose to remember correctly,
we
discussed the need for cultural filters in an age of information overload, my dear. Umberto and
I
discussed how the illusion of democracy at the bookstore is like the illusion of democracy in the appreciation of images. The same concept goes for prêt-à-porter, by the way. Precisely b
ecause
there is so much access, only the informed have a clue as to what to read or see
or wear.”

“Darling, we’re not talking about your manuscript. We’re talking about—”

“Listen, I understand decimation. I have given decimation a lot of critical thought and you think it’s a joke, Lydia.” He speared the last of his artichoke as his plate was cleared and began a more general address. “She has no idea what the theory of decimation could possibly mean. She’s just an artist.
I
am the critic in the house.” His smile froze in triumph. He turned decisively to me and Hugo and whispered, “Did you notice that Mathews drank nothing but Perrier back at the house?”

“And that proves to you that he’s CIA?” Hugo chuckled.

“It’s not insignificant.”

“You know it’s a practical joke Mathews is playing on you conspiracy theorists. You know that, Clarence?”

“Ah, Hugo, you say he’s pretending. But, remember, how quickly we become what we pretend to be.”

On a silver platter came the fish, steaming from the crack in its massive salt crust. Once we had glimpsed it, it was whisked off, filleted and returned to us on beds of julienned vegetables. So, this was civilization.

La patronne
knew that Lydia liked the glow of a fire from the small stone
cheminée
, especially on a chilly night. I overheard her saying that she would have the
maître d’hôtel
light it for her since there was a
courant d’air
tonight, wasn’t there?

“
Merveilleux, madame. Merci!”
Lydia raised her voice slightly, in delicate advertisement of their intimacy
.

La patronne
stayed on a beat, her eyes tracking the waiter kneeling by the fireplace, watching him strike a very long match and put it to the kindling. “Madame, how is Monsieur Olivier? Has he gone back to America?”

“He has left us for the world of finance. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

Terror. I felt terror. They must have come here often over the summer, Lydia and Olivier, when there was no one else around.
La patronne
was familiar with Olivier. She liked him. Had she seen us strolling together through the neighborhood? Would she mention it in order to prolong this illusion of friendship she was sharing with Lydia? Was some throwaway line about Olivier about to ruin my life?

The back of my neck burned. The shame of getting caught was unimaginable. Why was I living so dangerously? Was it a form of jealousy? Did I want to be Portia? Perhaps on some level I did. But it wasn’t only that. There was a deeper reason I was risking everything for a guy who wrote bad letters: I could write back and know that he had been here too, at this very table, and could share with me more closely than anyone the life that was Lydia and Clarence’s.

With no more mention of Olivier, the
patronne
went to get the
carte des desserts
and Lydia turned back to Umberto Eco.

“Now,” she said. “I want to talk to
you
about the Berlin Wall.”

He winked at her.

I took a sip of Burgundy. My fear of unmasking began to flame out like one of the twigs in that beautiful old
cheminée
over there. Olivier’s name was forgotten for the evening. Quietly, I breathed.

I wondered aloud what to have for dessert. The clementine sorbet in the pistachio meringue or the chocolate soufflé?

Clarence argued for me to taste the former.

Hugo pushed the latter. “It’s the best soufflé in town. Better than Lucas Carton. Better than La Tour d’Argent. You cannot forgo it! Don’t listen to Clarence about the sorbet. Sorbet is pathetic.”

Not wanting to take sides, I chose profiteroles with chestnut ice cream.

•   •   •

Lydia and I had our stockinged feet tucked under us on the living room couch.

“Wasn’t that funny at coffee?” She chuckled. “Umberto was pretending to be facetious and Harry was pretending to be grave, when they are both such lighthearted beings.”

“It was nice,” I ventured, “the way Umberto kept including Harry in his statements about the life of a famous writer, as though Harry were as famous as he was. It was gracious.”

“How could neither of you have picked up on the strain in their amiability?” The tremble in Clarence’s lips was exaggerated by drinking. “Umberto and Harry were circling each other like territorial dogs.”

“Stop suspecting everyone’s motives all the time. It’s unbecoming. Katherine is right, Umberto was being nice.” Lydia sipped Armagnac from crystal she had smuggled from Prague.

“Your statements make scoops as do your silences,” I said in a low oracular voice, stroking an imaginary beard and pretending to blow smoke. “He was looking straight at Harry when he said that. It
was
nice, Clarence.” I had had way too much wine, but Lydia and Clarence wouldn’t let me go to bed without Armagnac and a postmortem.

“Men,” laughed Lydia, raising her little stolen glass to me.

Clarence glared at her. “Who would Eco be if Sean Connery hadn’t starred in
The Name of the Rose
? The most famous man in the literature department in Bologna?”

“Clarence, we all know you’re jealous.”

“Jealous? The man’s a bleeding egomaniac.”

“Enough!” said Lydia. “I’m sick of talking about all these men. I want to talk about who had the worst outfit, Sally in her pilfered Sonia Rykiel or the sorceress, Madame DeLeon? What is Hugo doing with her besides cheating? What was that blouse? Was it actually crocheted? Care to weigh in, Katherine?”

Clarence came to my rescue. “That’s not the real question, my dear. The real question is how damned good were those artichoke hearts?”

“You know Lydia,” I raised my glass, “I have to agree with him. The artichokes were the heart of the matter.”

Silently she assented and we clinked our Armagnacs together with a round of
tchins-tchins.

Clarence tried to give Lydia a hard time about her sudden departure for England tomorrow, announced during the dinner conversation about Rushdie, but she would have none of it. She could manage her own career, thank you very much. There was something she needed to shoot. Something imminent. It wasn’t her fault that the world was changing so fast on so many fronts. But it
was
her job to keep up. She would spend a day in England, then head straight back to Germany and stay until “it” happened.

I thought, with a guilty spread of happiness, that her leaving meant Claudia would probably return to the house. I looked at Clarence as he shrugged at his inability to have “any say whatsoever in anything.” His shy smile told me he might be thinking what I was.

As I finally started up to bed, Lydia took my hand and asked for one more confirmation that Hugo DeLeon had said “good things” about her. Had he mentioned the
Match
retrospective on Germany? The photo she hoped he would include?

“All I can tell you, Lydia, is that he thinks you’re fantastic and that my working for you is the job of a lifetime. At dinner, he kept telling me how lucky I was. He said you were epoch-making.”

“He did, did he?”

“He did.”