Lessons in French (15 page)

thirt
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Under an improbably blue sky, I pulled Orlando all the way to the Rodin Museum, where I tied him to a bench from which I had a great angle on the bronze Balzac. Balzac, who, despite the manic upheaval of his own life, always brought to mind Jacques’s deep certitude that
Les Illusions perdues
was the most important novel within the most important oeuvre of all time.

I drew, almost forgetting that my hands were cold. As my hangover lifted, I felt a rebirth, my own personal spring at the end of November. Even though it was freezing, it was a beautiful day. My head was nearly mine again and I was finally at some kind of work.

I didn’t produce a portrait exactly. My sketch was technically a copy. But it bore the stamp of my fascination for the writer’s expression, which I interpreted with an ambiguity I had heretofore guarded against in my drawing. I was gripped by the pointedness of his gaze. Despite a broad fleshy face, he was eagle-sharp. Rodin had captured the contradiction, and I tried to recapture it with my very own shading of eyes and lips.

About noon, Étienne appeared in a tight studded leather jacket carrying two camembert-and-butter baguette sandwiches, and two Comice pears. “I dare you to eat them together,” he said. Jacques and Solange used to tease me that fruit in the same bite with cheese was a desecration, but I always liked the combination. “Let’s spit on their morals.” He laughed. “Let’s see your drawing.”

I showed him my Balzac.

“Not bad at all. I like how you changed his lips. He looks hungry.”

“I didn’t change them.” I was suddenly defensive. “I don’t change things. I see them. I have a talent for seeing. I was just messing around, I guess, with the mouth and eyes. I don’ t usually do that.”

“Why not?”

“It seems like playing tricks. I like to show the beauty that’s really there. It’s almost like I’m a machine or a camera when I draw. It feels very methodical, very quiet. Or it has until now. This is not usual for me at all, this fudging.”

“So you admit that you did change the lips, even though you don’t like to.
Quelle desecration
!”

He made me laugh. “I guess you could say that.”

He took a big bite of his pear and a nibble of sandwich. “Ah, cousin, we are beginning to live dangerously, no?”

After lunch, he left to meet his friend from Berlin to collect more pieces of the Wall for his jewelery. I thanked him for feeding me and sat a few minutes longer.

I hadn’t been to the sculpture garden since that September afternoon with Olivier. There were no children today, and no one else was sitting on these benches at the back of the garden. But a few couples did walk by, arm in arm, achingly happy. One in particular, sharing a Magnum ice-cream bar despite the cold, caught my fancy.

I untied the dog and headed all the way to the Île St-Louis so that I could buy a two-scoop cone from a
glacier
called Berthillon.

Harry Mathews had told me the night before that the importance of Berthillon ice cream was on a par with that of the umbrella.

I had asked him if this was classified information.

“Not you too? Is there no one who hasn’t been contaminated by this viral story about me being in the CIA? It might as well be true for all the people who believe it. But somehow I thought you would escape infection, young Katie. If you’re not immune, who is?”

•   •   •

Orlando and I were sitting on the small bridge that connects the Île St-Louis with the Île de la Cité
,
looking across at the flying buttresses around the knave of Notre-Dame. I was feeding him bits of an empty cone that the lady behind the ice-cream counter had given me, “
pour le pauvre toutou,”
while taking alternate licks of my own fraises des bois
and sorbet au cacao noir.

We were not the only ones drawn to Berthillon off-season. The rare lack of gray made the day seem full of possibility, a surprise celebration.

I watched the river, the bookstalls on its banks, the houseboats, the soaring Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the pigeons in the perfect sky, all from the perspective of my spot on the bridge with my ice cream and sheepdog. I took a philosophical lick of chocolate.

Then I saw Claudia.

It had to be her, motionless against the Seine. That could only be her hair.

Orlando saw her too. He choked on his
cornet.

She stared at us as though it were we who were odd and magical here, we who had appeared out of nowhere. She stood so still that we might have turned her to stone with some mythic power of which we were totally unaware in our innocent
promenade.
Only her hair wisped over her frozen face.

Suddenly, she gripped the side of the bridge, tore her gaze from us and ran away, looking down, trying to cloak herself in that amazing black mane as if it weren’t the most blatant thing about her.

We rushed after her down the cobblestone street. She turned. So did we. She broke into a run and we followed.

It was a small island, and eventually she came up against a wall. There was a lot of deep dirty water between her and the Right Bank.

Orlando was deliriously happy.

“Claudia, what are you doing in Paris?” I cried. “Why are you running away from us?”

She took my free hand and looked at me hard. “You are all right? Have you been well?”

“Fine, fine. I’m surprised to see you.” It had only been a couple of weeks, but the finality of her departure had made the break seem much longer. “Are you back again for good? Does Clarence know? Did you finish your thesis already?”

“But you are okay? You look it.”

I nodded.

She, on the other hand, did not look okay. She looked tired and sad and, up close, her hair was greasy. Her black boots were salt-streaked and scruffy. An orange scarf around her neck, her only touch of color, reminded me of how much more vivid she was before.

Orlando nuzzled her leg. She held on to my hand. “Listen, do not tell Clarence you have seen me. Please.”

“Why?”

“This is very, very difficult,” she said. Then she raised her face and read something in the atmosphere. “There is nothing more to do, Katie.”

“Why can’t I tell Clarence?”

“You really want to be implicated?”

“Claudia, what’s going on with you? Please?”

“Katie,” she sighed, “come.”

Orlando and I followed her into the Flore en l’Île, the café overlooking the bridge between the islands where we had originally come with our cones. The dog under the table at our feet, we sat with the beautiful view of Notre-Dame, which she never once seemed to notice.

I ordered a large café au lait. She asked for espresso.

“I’m sorry I acted strangely just now. You were so sweet outside, so happy to see me with your ice-cream cone and your dog. It broke my heart. It makes me feel that some things are still beautiful. I have to tell you, I have been having a terrible, terrible time about lying to you.”

“Lying to me?”

“I am in love with Clarence.”

“I’ve always thought you were.”

“And he is in love with me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Listen, when you took me to the Métro that day, when I said I was going to the airport, I did not leave Paris. I moved into a small apartment here on the Île St-Louis, owned by a friend of Clarence’s, a tiny
pied-à-terre
, very small and dark. Clarence was so frightened that you would find out about us, that it would put you in an awkward position with Lydia, that he made me hide from you. I never should have done it. But he is so very scared. He loves me desperately, but he cannot make his mind up to let go of his bourgeois existence. He thinks his children might not understand. But mostly, she has him under her sway. He is terrified of Lydia. But he is about to leave her.”

“He is?”

“He comes close to leaving and then he shies away.”

“So, you mean
you
are together now, with Clarence? How?”

“He comes to my apartment when he can, but he will not be seen with me anymore. He used to think it was okay for us to look like good friends. But now he’s so spooked, you see. So we meet only in my apartment or sometimes in the church of St-Sulpice. And then when he says he must leave, I go to the Café de la Mairie that looks out at the church and I sit there all by myself and he walks away in a different direction. Only sometimes he cannot help himself and he comes to the café too and has a glass of wine at a different table. Does this make you feel strange, because of Lydia?”

“I don’t know.” I was still trying to untangle the facts. “Wait, so you never left that day when I walked you to the Métro? You went to the Île St-Louis instead of the airport? Is that what you’re really saying?”

“We stayed up all the night before, arguing about it. He got scared you were going to come down early some morning and find us together and be shocked. He was having me pretend to leave each night, then sneak back in after you were gone upstairs and go out at six o’clock every morning then pretend to arrive for the day a couple of hours later. I told him I thought you guessed, but he said, no, Katie is in so many ways a little girl. He can be very condescending, you know. And he wants you to respect him.

“He also probably wanted you to think you were telling the truth if Lydia asked you where I was. He wanted you to be able to say I was gone back to America without feeling torn. He did not want to make you lie. He thinks this makes him a better person.”

“Well, does he know that you might be telling me the truth now? Did you say what you would do if we bumped into each other?”

“I told him that if you saw me that it would be too ridiculous for him to force me to make up another story. He will be very upset, but I think that this will be good for him to be able to speak to you, to see that once you know he is not perfect you still love him. He needs to be able to talk to somebody besides me. He told me he was finally going to explain the situation to Henri, because he thinks Henri has probably guessed and has an accepting philosophy. That will help, but you will help more.

“I am so lonely here. He is leading the fullest life, and I am in the shadows. But I think it is more difficult for him because he is in a false position all the time. I am very clear that I love him and he loves me. In some ways, even though I’m in hiding, my part is easier.”

As the facts crystallized, I loved her for confiding in me. So much began to make sense now. Of course she and Clarence
were
in love. Love had reigned the whole time we three were together. But, now that this was definite, what did it mean for Lydia?

I let my coffee go tepid.

Every once in a while, Claudia asked reflexively if I was uncomfortable, but she went on before I could form a response. She had not had a conversation with anyone besides Clarence in ages, and their time together was fraught and compressed. It was so good to finally talk to another woman.

So, Lydia had suspected, and Clarence had worried that she might ask me about it and it would be too unfair to force me to lie and too horrible to make me tell the truth.

He was protective of me, as of a daughter, Claudia said. But a true daughter, she added, was more intuitive about her parents’ happiness than Clarence assumed. Portia would understand.

I was struck by the fact that Clarence had tried to protect me from the complicated truth much like a father. But the childish satisfaction I felt made me suspect that daughters wanted, selfishly, to be daughters, to be at the center of the world. They were perhaps not as sympathetic to their father’s extramarital needs as Claudia was making them out.

Most likely, Portia would not find his situation with Claudia wildly romantic, if problematic and potentially tragic. She would think it was sick.

“So,” Claudia continued, “when Clarence first knows that you know about us, he will be feeling scared. But once he sees that nothing terrible materializes, I think it will show him that we can be natural again. I hope this does not make you nervous.”

Of course it made me nervous, but I didn’t feel there was room in this moment for my qualms.

“Don’t worry. You shouldn’t be concerned about me. This is not about me at all.”

“Ah, but it is about you, Katie. I cannot say how it is going to happen, but your blessing on us, it will mean so much, because this is the moment for him to leave her, and her chintz and her awful clock, and he needs to sense that this is positive. You can help.”

“Why now?”

“He has been waiting to make sure she felt good after her German photos. He said he could not do anything until he knew her photos were a success. So, I have been suffering so much while he was going to all these parties and events, going around Paris with her. And now that is over. The excuse is gone.

“But what I worry about is that he will fall again under her sway because she is so very powerful. She has a strong, binding influence, not healthy for him. And I think he is not good to her either. She turns him ugly, you see. He is patronizing about her work. He thinks she might not survive if he leaves. But she will be better too when he is gone. It’s simply that they have to be able to imagine the disruption, and that is very, very difficult. It is the thing that seems impossible but is not. That is where you will help.”

“I don’t see how I can help. It’s not my—”

“Believe me, you can help by being yourself and reacting as you react.”

I took my first drink of cold coffee.

So, Clarence was going to leave Lydia. The household was going to explode.

“But Lydia’s work! Will Lydia still be able to work? I think that for Clarence her work is the most important thing.”

“Lydia,” Claudia narrowed her eyes on her second espresso, “she is very intelligent. Her photographs tell stories quite lyrically and they are very engaging, but they are also very controlled. First I am taken in, then I am controlled. And I think the problem is this, that she does not have respect for the unconscious urge that is behind photography. She wants to annihilate it with too much work. And this is barbarous.”