Lessons in French (11 page)

twent
y
-two

Of my dad’s stories, the one I pictured most vividly, even though very little happened, was about the Berlin Wall. A few years before I was born, he was in West Berlin, at the film festival, with the first movie he had directed in his own right. He decided to go to the opera in East Berlin and drove back and forth through Checkpoint Charlie, on what I envisioned as a cold and moonless night, by himself in a rental car. The opera was
Don Giovanni.
Nothing in particular took place, but he spoke with such awe of the night crossing, the barbed wire and the mysterious guards shining flashlights on his passport, that I got the sense he narrowly avoided being swallowed into the void of East Berlin for love of music. The Wall he described was a geographical fixture, like the Grand Canyon.

On November 9, 1989, it came down in a riotous celebration. At first, all I could think about was how astonished Daddy would be.

Lydia was in Berlin. After reading and clipping the newspapers for her, I made a drawing in my sketchbook of a tiny section of Lydia’s desk, my coffee cup, a pair of scissors, a pencil and a pen. It took me almost three hours. Then I did something I had never done before. I titled my work:
The Berlin Wall Falls.
Up until now, all my pictures had been exactly what they were,
Potted Ficus, New Haven, April 10, 1988;
Peter’s Foot, New Haven, January 1989.
There was nothing suggestive about them. Even though this was still the classical drawing that my teachers had assured me I would grow out of, it began to be personal.

Tingling with satisfaction, I got up to walk Orlando. On my way out the door, I was joined by Claudia, back on the scene with Lydia away. I had guessed correctly.

As we approached the Luxembourg, I asked her why she refused to come to the house when Lydia was home. I knew that she was infatuated with Clarence, but I didn’t have a handle on the true parameters of her feelings, or how realistic they might be. I thought maybe I could fold her into the family.

“I do not want to bathe in the same atmosphere with that woman,” Claudia said.

“But you might actually like each other. She asks about you. Maybe you should come for Thanksgiving?”

I realized as I extended this invitation that it was not mine to make free with, that I was not quite a daughter of the house. And I was relieved to feel sure that Claudia would not accept.

Indeed, she declared that the ambience at “that dinner” was sure to be sulfurous.

“Is that woman genuinely interested in other people?” She knelt to pet Orlando, whose eyes had a faraway golden look in the autumn fog. She was wearing hand-knit gloves with a different color for every finger.

“When she focuses, she’s interested,” I said. “When she doesn’t, you become invisible.”

“Do you mean to say she has that kind of light that shines and then vanishes?”

“I guess so. And right now she’s shining it like crazy on Berlin.”

A gust of wind broke off a couple of straggling leaves from their branches. The barren trees allowed us to see through to the park’s patterns, to notice how perfectly symmetrical the quadrangles were, how precise the flowerbeds.

When we had completed our loop and Orlando was tugging on his leash toward our usual gate of exit, Claudia reminded me that we had to get back as Henri was coming to lunch.

•   •   •

Henri Cartier-Bresson cut into our bread with his pearl-handled pocket knife, squirted hot sauce from a tube he carried everywhere onto our dry sausage
and tabouleh and hard-boiled eggs, quietly deploring
nouvelle cuisine
as the latest travesty of the bourgeois social order while Claudia looked victoriously at Clarence and I wondered if those artichoke hearts and chestnut profiteroles had actually been all they were cracked up to be.

Here was an artist who
wanted
our company, Clarence joked, not like Lydia’s preposterous “housepainters” (as in “Hitler was one”), the crew she had hired to replace our beloved Moroccans, and who treated the three of us like Madame’s unruly children. Henri actually liked being with Clarence, Claudia and me, got a kick out of what he called our
géométrie.

Henri’s movements were weightless despite broad shoulders, height and the aura of his many years. His eyes were blue and unfaded. While his face was agile, he chose to keep it mostly at rest. There was almost always some expression, though, softly crouching inside him, waiting for its moment to beam. If there were such a thing as a natural athlete, he would embody it.

“Ah, saucisson sec, why does one need anything else?” He cut himself a generous slice, flashed a smile, then carefully laid down his knife.

“Henri, why do you keep trying to pass for a simple man with that knapsack and those shoes? Everybody knows you are the scion of a
grande famille.”

“That’s anecdotal,” Henri said.

“Henri believes,” explained Clarence, “that the anecdote is the enemy of art, especially photography.”

Henri squirted a red line of hot sauce along the center of a celery stalk.

Claudia swung all her hair to pour over her left shoulder. “Would you say then that what you feel for the downtrodden is interest, visual interest, and not sympathy? Might you be a colonizer, Henri?” She was practically purring so that only the meaning of her words was hostile.

“You’re missing his point,” said Clarence, as Henri bit neatly into his celery, looking from one to the other of us and at our four plates. “Henri doesn’t set out to tell stories. He discovers visual order and the drama takes care of itself. It’s the old surrealist mantra, right, about the hidden power of coincidence? How does it go? ‘Put oneself in a state of grace with chance?’ ”

Henri finished his celery and cleaned his plate of tabouleh with fresh mint and cucumbers, dabbing up the last of his hot sauce with a crust of peasant bread, which he fed to Orlando under the table.

“Well,” I ventured, “even if it is all about chance, you can’t help but feel some warmth and concern for the people you photograph, can you?”

Although he did not answer, he smiled and I felt his focus. Regardless of my status, I was an important part of the composition here at this lunch table. Like the bars on a grate or the shadow on a face or the light on a wall, I might prove to be the nonnarrative secret to this picture’s success. You never knew.

Claudia asked Henri if he wished he were in Berlin today. Surely the breaking down of the Berlin Wall was a decisive moment.

I thought the question could be construed as a cruel reference to his age or a hint that he might no longer be pertinent. But he did not appear to take it so. “The decisive moment is when time is stopped by the camera. Or by the drawing pencil. It is framed later by the flow of history. So, I am working in Paris today,” he said cheerfully, rising to carry his plate to the sink. “Just like Kate.”

Clarence stood too. “I love this about you, Henri, that you are quintessentially French in the best way.”

Claudia, Henri and I all looked confused.

Clarence was delighted to enlighten us. “He’s French in that he allows that everyone can assimilate, immigrants and artists. They can all become the citizens of their current country or the actors in their current dream. Don’t you see? This implies that anyone who wants to badly enough can become an artist. You, Katie. You, Claudia. Even yours truly. It’s wonderful. And generous.”

Claudia looked at both men adoringly.

“What are you doing these days, Kate?” Henri asked. “I’m curious to know if you have started on portraits.”

“I don’t really draw people I know, except to make a study maybe of a body part. I do models, but I don’t think you could call them portraits.”

“Why?” Claudia turned to me.

“I guess I don’t want interference,” I said. “I don’t want symbols or, or”—I smiled at Henry, “anecdotes to get in the way of drawing.”

“You are still trying to avoid a style,” Claudia said. “It’s quite impossible to do, you know, to avoid a style.”

•   •   •

Claudia was sipping red wine. I tried to make the shape of her glass abstract, simply a shape, but I couldn’t help seeing beyond the form to the fact that the drum of her fingers on the stem was sensual and that the liquid inside was making her shoulders sway to invisible songs. This was too much information for me to work with. My hands were unsteady, my work clouded. When I got to her amazing hair, I wanted to be done with it and began to rush. I practically scribbled a crawling, hazy mess.

“I look like I have lice!” She said when I let her see over my shoulder. “I had a horrible case of lice once as a little girl and they made so much fun of me in school. They said I had bugs in my pubic hair, which of course I believed.” She stared hard into my terrible picture.

“I had lice once too,” I said by way of distraction. “When I lived here, in Paris, a long time ago. And I was in love with my French cousin Étienne, who teased me along with all the other kids in the schoolyard.”

“Did they say you were dirty?”

“Of course. And now look at us both with our long thick, shiny hair. We’ve shown them, haven’t we, Claudia?”

“How is your cousin now?”

“He’s gotten nicer. And he’s gay. I mean, he probably always was, but now that it’s out in the open it’s easier for us to get along.”

“Is it nice for you to have a common history?”

I nodded vaguely.

“What about his parents? Have you seen them much?”

“Not yet. They live in Orléans.”

She shot me a look of concerned suspicion. “Orléans is not far away. But you have spoken to them?”

“Not yet.”

“Why? Aren’t you worried they will think all this—” she gave an opulent wave around the room—“this high life in the
Sixième
has made you want to forget them?”

“They could never think such a thing,” I said unsteadily. “I’m not like that.” I took a sip of Burgundy from a gorgeous bell-shaped glass. So, what was I like?

“I was planning on calling them soon,” I said.

“But they must be like parents to you.”

“Yes, they are. Very much, but not exactly.”

“You feel guilty about how much you loved them?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know all about dreams, remember? You dream that if you had not loved them so much, perhaps you would not have let them replace your father?”

“Claudia, no offense but that’s a little far-fetched.” I snapped my sketchbook closed. “We’re not that complicated in my family.”

“Perhaps, but you will admit that you don’t want to remember what it was like when your father was dying, even though you have tenderness for your cousins?”

Despite my resistance, her approach was hypnotic.

“Maybe,” I owned, suddenly wildly sad.

“It will be fine once you call them. They will be glad, and so will you. Shall we start on the couscous?”

We went to the kitchen together. We had soaked chickpeas overnight. She showed me how to brown lamb with onions, ginger and tumeric, to simmer raisins with the chickpeas and with cinnamon, to add a touch of honey toward the end. The slow method of it all helped me recover my mood, but I was now aware that I floated over a pool of regret.

Once the lamb was finished, we put the couscous grains, which you had to moisten first—very important—in the steamer. Then we sat down to another glass of wine. “Katie?”

“Claudia?”

“Does Clarence ever talk to you about his son?”

“Not much.”

“Not even to you, then? That poor boy is the
non-dit
in this family. The unmentioned.”

“He was in the house when I met Lydia in New York, but he never came downstairs. She kept trying to engage him, but he wouldn’t bite. She even offered him my spring rolls,” I smirked.

“So, you have never seen him.”

I shook my head. “Only pictures. He’s not as good-looking as Portia, but he seems like a pretty normal kid in his Deadhead phase. I doubt there’s anything to worry about.”

“But what if all this hatred toward the boyfriend of Portia’s, this venom of Clarence’s for this Olivier person, what if it is in truth for the son?”

“Wow. I never thought of that. I’d sort of forgotten about Joshua.”

“Everyone has. Poor child must feel like a ghost in this household.”

“Maybe he prefers it that way. Wouldn’t you?”

She began to laugh and I joined her.

“What,” Clarence came jovially into the room, “are you two cheeky things giggling about now? It smells fantastic in here!”

•   •   •

Soon after dinner, instead of pouring drinks in the living room, Clarence looked at his watch. “It’s late, you know. Claudia, you should be getting home or no one will get any work done tomorrow.”

Dropping eye contact with us, Claudia began slowly to gather her things.

“Katie,” said Clarence, moving down the hall, “can you help me out with something? In here.”

I followed him down the hallway into Portia’s bedroom, where I had come to know three perfume bottles in particular, with gold labels tied around by golden threads, all by a
Parisienne,
a family friend, named Annick Goutal. Gardenia Passion, Eau de Charlotte, and Petite Chérie.
There was one wicker basket of lipsticks and glosses, another of matchbooks from restaurants all over the world. Snapshots and postcards were stuck along the sides of the gilt mirror, two featuring Olivier in what looked like New York, some water lilies from the Marmottan, a black and white view of the Place des Vosges.

Clarence was pacing with pale purple paint swatches in his right hand, looking desperately up at the molding.

“Lydia says she’s trusting me with this one and I honestly have no idea how to proceed. She thinks Portia’s depressed over this idiot boy who says he is leaving her, thank God, and she thinks somehow that having her Paris room spruced up for Thanksgiving will help, or at least make her think her mother cares . . . You’re artistic, Katie. Which one of these shades will work with the fabric?”

Squinting thoughtfully at the ceiling, I pretended to be in Portia’s skin and wanted to cry because I did not have a father to fret about the color of my room or the state of my love life.