Lessons in French (17 page)

Halfway through my cigarette, I stubbed it out. I had sworn to Mom that I wouldn’t take up smoking in France. I had to be true to someone.

And I had to talk to Olivier immediately. To find out what the hell was going on.

thirt
y
-two

Somewhere between midnight and 1
A.M.
, I crept down my five flights and braved the courtyard. All the shutters in the building were closed around me.

The Schell apartment was sealed behind its heavy “French gray” lids, but who was to say if the sound of my footsteps would rouse its curiosity?

Spooked, I turned back at the threshold and started up the stairs again. I told myself I should wait until tomorrow to call Olivier. One more night wouldn’t kill me. Portia and Joshua were leaving tomorrow. The coast would be clearer. And I would have had time to think things through. If I rushed into a confrontation now, I might say something too strong. I might have regrets.

But a faint sound held me back on the second step. The sound, I thought, of Orlando’s breathing. Had he smelled me through the heavy front door? Did he hope I was coming to take him for a walk?

No, Orlando, I thought, I’ll be back tomorrow to take you out for air. The family will watch me attach your leash and wish us a nice stroll as if we were lucky to go outside together with our joint sense of fun and our limited egos.

The Schells, even Clarence, assumed that my sense of self was no more than a function of them. I was like a courtesan in Balzac’s
The Splendors and Miseries of
Courtesans,
or at least that’s how I translated the title in my head, wondering if the splendors of my job were worth its servility. It was a forceful question, and it pushed me to action. I did not crawl back into my garret after all.

I pivoted on my step and made my way back down into the moonlight, which began to grow feeble in a rising mist, imbuing me with a sudden sense of time running out. If I didn’t rush through this night, right now, and say what I had to say to Olivier, then I never would.

Rubber boot soles squeaking across the cobblestones, I made it to the courtyard’s outer door. I pulled it open. It creaked in the damp. As I burst into the street, I felt Madame Fidelio’s porch light snap on behind me and did not look back.

•   •   •

“Do you still talk to Lydia?” I plunged right in. I knew myself well enough by now to know that if I didn’t say what I intended immediately, I wouldn’t say it at all. “Are you in touch with her?”

My body was no more versed in confrontation than my mind. It had no idea what to do with itself. My heart was pounding and my phone booth was vertiginous. I held my breath, watched a shady man pass.

“Oh, my Kate,” he said, melting with sympathy, “I can’t tell you I’m not in touch with Lydia. But there’s no harm in it.”

“What
can
you tell me?” I tried to stay strong, but felt my anger waning at the sound of his voice.

“She calls me. She wants me to go to things in her place in New York while she’s not here. Openings and cocktail parties. Stuff she gets invited to that she imagines I would enjoy. She’s a deeply lonely woman, Kate, and I have a mother thing. I can’t resist a mother’s plea. I’m not saying I’m proud of it.”

“So, you have actual conversations with her still?” My breath was fogging the glass. Yellow streetlamps watched me lazily through an incipient drizzle. The occasional coated figure wafted by.
St-Sulpice rose in front of me, a high black dream.

Olivier sighed. “It’s complicated with Lydia. She’s so miserable with Clarence.”

My throat clenched with loyalty to Clarence. I took a deep breath. “You probably shouldn’t talk to Lydia anymore. It’s not fair to Portia.”

“You’re right,” Olivier said solemnly. “But—”

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird,” I persisted, “for Portia, I mean, weird for you to be her mother’s outlet? Doesn’t that make it harder for her to let go and get on with her life? And for me, Olivier. It’s weird for me!”

“I understand. I couldn’t empathize more, Kate, but I can’t just cut Lydia off after she hosted me for so long in Paris. She was wonderful to me. She took me in. It’s delicate.”

“Well, you could say, ‘Please stop calling me because it hurts your daughter’s feelings.’ ”

“I wish it were that simple. I’m extricating myself gently. I will get away, but it might take some time. Can you believe me?”

“Portia thinks that Lydia essentially told you to break up with her,” I said. I had never been quite this straightforward before. It was an out-of-body experience. I was far from sure that I wasn’t going to dissolve. But I couldn’t stop. “This is going to sound totally messed up, but Portia suspects that you and Lydia are having an affair.”

“Okay, that’s so crazy I can’t even think about it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

As my breath steadied, I rested my head on the phone book wired to the wall.

“I guess the Schell paranoia is a little infectious,” I ventured at last, surprised that I still had a voice.

“Just a little.” He laughed. “Hey, Kate, about London. I’m so sad, but this GE deal is never going to be wrapped up in time for December. Can I buy us tickets for January? Over New Year’s? Don’t you think New Year’s will be festive?”

A whole new month to wait! I had to recalibrate all my hopes.

I tried to sound buoyant. “If I can find someone to walk the dog!”

“What about your friend Christie?”

“I’ll have to make sure she’s around.”

“I could help you hire someone.”

I laughed. “Poor Orlando. He’s such an unwitting obstacle.”

“Speaking of obstacles, I hear there are Frenchmen buzzing all around you like bees in a flower patch.”

“What?”

I had the unpleasant notion that he was talking about my peonies from Bastien, that Lydia or Portia had mentioned them.

“Well, can you blame them?” He asked. “I miss you so much,” he went on. “I’m the one who’s getting paranoid, imagining things. Can you tell me something? Why the hell do we have to feel so guilty all the time? What if we just stopped?”

“I love that idea.” I sighed.

•   •   •

The streets leading home felt cavernous. Rain fell in earnest. The moon was gone. I ran in a state of rapture.

Of course I had been sucked into Portia and Lydia’s paranoid orbit. Of course there was nothing “going on” between Lydia and Olivier, nothing that time and a little patience wouldn’t unravel. It had all become clear, but only because I had found the courage to demand an explanation. Maybe life was simpler than I thought; you actually got what you asked for.

thirt
y
-three

The next morning, Lydia announced that she was delaying her trip to England. She was mysterious about her reasons.

Portia invited me into her bedroom while she packed for her return to the States. She needed an extra suitcase for all of her Paris purchases, but this fact did nothing to cheer her.

“I only bought these clothes for him,” she sighed.

I told her that she was smart and beautiful and that she shouldn’t base her self-esteem on the actions of one guy. After all, in the fullness of time, all old boyfriends became fond and faraway figments, right? Think about how dire things used to seem in high school. Now high school was funny. Even college. My college boyfriend Peter was hardly a memory and I used to cry myself to sleep at his callousness. Life was perspective.

“I have no perspective,” she said. “I love him.” And she began to tremble in one of her new outfits, the Jean Paul Gauthier, a tight black skirt and asymmetrical jacket, heels, full makeup.

I looked at her. I decided that our intimacy was one-sided on both counts, as though each of us were gazing at a painting. We had no common view of one another. I thought I could X-ray her unawares; she thought I was her friend.

I could not be disinterested, and yet there was a disinterested voice in me that wanted her to move on for her own sake. There were things to love about her and she was wasting them on the wrong man, who happened to be the very same one I wanted.

When the cab came to pick Portia and Joshua up for the airport, “because,” as Joshua put it, “our mother is saving humanity and our father is performing brain surgery in his study, so neither can be interrupted to drive us,” I stood between Clarence and Lydia waving goodbye.

Through tinted glass, Portia waved back, sad and formal, as from the slow height of a parade float. Joshua ignored us. The Citroën tires splashed through a puddle as it carried the precious children off, muddying my tights, which I ran to sponge off before meeting Bastien at La Coupole.

I had only had oysters three times in my life, once with my dad as a special treat for dinner right before leaving for France, once with Jacques and Solange on New Year’s Eve and once at a house party I was invited to in Newport, Rhode Island, by a college friend. I couldn’t so much remember what they tasted like as what they meant.

When I met Bastien, who was waiting for me on a dark red banquette beneath a golden dome, wearing a crisp pink button-down, I launched into an anecdote about my dad telling me, as we watched a seafood platter approach our table at Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, that the world was my oyster. I didn’t tell Bastien that Hollywood had dropped Daddy like a hot potato once the word got out that he had cancer, that the phone had stopped ringing overnight and the life our family was supposed to have had was relegated to a place of pipe dreams. By saying the world was my oyster as he sent me to Paris, Daddy implied it was no longer his; he had had his fun and now it was time for me to have mine.

“Did you like the oysters?” asked Bastien.

“I liked them as much as he wanted me to.”

After ordering a bottle of champagne, Bastien got two dozen fines de claires for us. They were delicious. They burst like little oceans in my mouth. I could have eaten many more, but I thought it might be indelicate to say so.

He told me he thought the shells in the ice were beautiful, and that if I came to Deauville there would be many different kinds. He would be curious to know what an artist like me would make of their primitive shapes. He pulled out one of his cards. Since he had no profession yet, it showed his name and phone numbers in black script. He turned the card over to its blank side and asked me to do a sketch of an oyster shell for him, as a souvenir of
today.

“You’re so nostalgic, Bastien.”

“I like to preserve certain moments, yes.” His fleshy dimples were at once childlike and stubbornly old.

The waiter came to see if we had decided on what to have for our main courses. Without consulting me, Bastien asked for two grilled sole. “It’s the only thing to have,” he said in answer to my questioning look.

“Very good, monsieur.” The waiter was gone.

Now would I draw that shell?

I didn’t do party tricks. “I’m not a monkey.”

“I never said you were.”

I continued my train of thought. “If anything, I’m a weirdly gifted parrot.”

He smiled kindly.

I understood that there was an attachment forming in Bastien’s mind where in mine there was nothing more than a pleasantness and a fascination with golden-hued restaurants, cologne, family crests that still meant something and shells on shaved ice. He thought we were close. And because I was unworthy of his confidence, I felt compelled to mimic it. I told him I would most likely come to Deauville but that I had to think about my family.

Couldn’t I see my family anytime?

Of course I could, but perhaps only Christmas would be symbolic enough to make up for my absence thus far.

•   •   •

When I returned to my garret, loopy from the champagne, I found a plain white envelope slipped under my door.

Could it possibly be from Olivier? Perhaps he had had someone deliver it?

I glanced at Bastien’s peonies, which I had taken out of Lydia’s vase downstairs and cut to fit in a pair of jam jars on my windowsill.

There was nothing written on the envelope, but I could see through to black ink in florid lines. I tore the seal and recognized the handwriting immediately from the pages Claudia used to spread over the dining room table.

My Dearest Katie,

I must ask something of you. Something very, very important . . .

thirt
y
-four

Claudia had not told me what it was she wanted, but I had the nervous feeling, as I walked Orlando toward the address she had given me on the Île St-Louis, that she needed me to take some kind of message to Clarence.

Her studio was as small as mine, but much darker and mold-veined, with only a slit of a window above the lumpy velvet couch where she slept. On one of the oldest streets of Paris, the place felt mired in its damp medieval origins.

I felt sorry, seeing her here all alone, her luscious hair matted and pulled back into a rough ponytail, while Clarence and I were roaming around the big freshly painted apartment in the Sixième with different people coming in and out all day and Kirs at five. The injustice made me want to help her.

Pouring me a cup of Moroccan mint tea, she spoke quickly through the steam. “Please, I know it is complicated for you, but you are not a simple person. I see the complexity in you, and so does Clarence. Only now that he knows that you and I have met one another, because I told him right away, he is too frightened to see me. He is in a panic. Katie, I wish you to carry a letter to him. I know he is expecting it, even though he says he is not. He loves me. He needs me. The situation is desperate. He will die soon in that house. Can you do this for us?”

“Take a letter to Clarence?” I swallowed hard. The request went down like a fish bone.

But the idea of saying “No, I can’t help you” was so impossible that I blocked out the notion of repercussions. The consequences of my actions loomed vague and foggy, frightening, yes, but peripheral to the current picture. In the here and now my role was to make this wronged woman feel better.

Slowly, Claudia nodded.

“Okay, Claudia.”

She took my hands. Her tiny warm fingers swarmed mine in their gratitude. She kissed my forehead.

“Thank you. Thank you. Now, tell me, how is he doing? He seemed so worried about the children when I last saw him. But he said you were very helpful, a balm. He is very happy that you are friendly with Portia. He thinks you will also help her forget about the boyfriend and feel young again. He worries that she is too serious, too old for her years, not natural enough. Is that true?”

“She could loosen up.”

“I see,”she said hungrily. “What else?”

I didn’t want to say anymore, but felt compelled to paint poor Claudia a fuller picture.

“She looks like Clarence,” I explained, “but she’s so thin it’s hard to tell. What stands out about her are her slightly bulging eyes, like Lydia’s, that can either be beautiful or strange. The rest of her is kind of pinched.”

Once I started talking, I found I couldn’t stop. Claudia was starved for intimacy. I had to feed her.

“Or maybe it’s that I feel pinched for her,” I went on, “because her world is very brittle from her not being able to trust anyone. I think that’s why she comes off so unnatural.”

“Tell me about Joshua.”

“Joshua is becoming even more of an outcast from the family—he’s joined the Young Republicans at his prep school to piss them off.”

“So tragic.”

We sank deeper into the couch beneath her one obstructed window. Orlando slept at our feet.

“But,” she continued, “can we return for a moment to the idea of Portia not having anyone to trust? You say this is why she is brittle, no? But how can it be that she does not trust her own father? This seems strange to me for her not to trust Clarence.”

“She does sometimes, but not all the time, because her mother doesn’t trust him and Portia picks up on it. Even if Portia can’t stand Lydia, she of course does love her and wishes she were more like a mother and not a selfish artist. Then again, Portia likes having a famous mother because the only other kids she knows all have fancy parents. I guess you could say she’s conflicted. Does that make any sense?”

Claudia’s eyes were the brightest thing in the room, hot coals in soot. “Tell me. You are a bit jealous of Portia, and you have to be nice to her of course because you are working in that house, but you think she is spoiled, no, insensitive? And she has things you would like?”

“Well, I haven’t exactly come out and told her I was poor. I don’t think it has occurred to her. I guess because I went to Yale and my mom always tried to educate me so I can talk to her family as somewhat of an equal. But, to anyone who’s paying attention, I’m not.”

“So you are a bit indignant. This is not a bad thing. I’m relieved to see this, that you are capable of something like anger. But you must not feel inferior to Portia, ever. Clarence says that Portia senses that you are much more at ease than she is. He said she might be jealous of you if she didn’t like you so much. But tell me, are she and Clarence close?”

“Well—”

“Closer than she and Lydia?”

“You could say that.”

“Do you think Portia understands him?”

“You mean understands what will make him happy? I have no idea.” Suddenly, I felt sick. We were being gluttonous with other people’s lives. “Claudia, I have to get back. I have a bunch of letters to type before tomorrow. Lydia will be looking for me.” With the mention of Lydia, I felt a tinge of panic at what I had just agreed to do.

Claudia handed me the envelope. Like the one she had left for me, it had nothing written on the outside. She stared while I slid it into the pages of the book in my bag.

“Don’t worry, Claudia,” I said, as much to calm myself down as to soothe her.

I woke Orlando and pulled him back out into the wintery light.

A few paces outside Claudia’s building, just beyond the island’s interior labyrinth, toward its shore, I wondered if I had actually been in her shadowy studio? The world was teeming with dogs, cigarettes, tourists. It was all so vibrant that Claudia, inside, circling her obsession behind a single window facing a wall, kept alive by the stories I spun from a place she could not enter, seemed impossible. Until I reached into my bag to feel the corners of her envelope stiff in the pages of the Proust I was rereading. Then I knew I hadn’t dreamed it.