Lessons in French (18 page)

thirt
y
-five

I found Clarence wandering around the frosty garden in a thick sweater, hat and wool gloves. He was as stony pale as he had been on the morning of Claudia’s “departure.” A stray hair sprouting from his right ear gave him the air of a grassy ruin.

With my awkward new boldness, I delivered my message in a whispered rush so as not to fall victim to discretion. “Clarence, you know I’ve seen Claudia and spoken to her. We talked this morning. She gave me a letter for you. It’s okay.”

“Jesus, not here,” he hissed, then stopped dead and stared at the rusting garden furniture. “I’m going to have to repaint the table and chairs, the wrought iron ones. Lydia bought those in Italy years ago. She loves them. And I need to call the gardener. She says the garden looks like Beirut. And the garden is one thing that it’s in our power to fix, isn’t it, Katie? Well, best get to it!” But he did not move. “You said something about a letter?” he asked, softly apologetic.

“What are you two conspiring about?”

Clarence and I both jumped at the crackle of Lydia’s voice.

“Some breathtaking discovery from the world of nineteenth-century fashion? Some
scandale
, pray tell?”

“As a matter of fact, we were talking about painting your garden furniture,” Clarence smirked.

“Were you now? What crazy-making color were you contemplating? Tangerine? Chartreuse? Fire-engine red?” Without letting him respond, she turned directly to me. “Katherine, I trust you to talk him down. I think white would be lovely. Or robin’s-egg blue. Or even a pale yellow. But what I think is obviously neither here nor there because he will do whatever he damn well pleases to drive me mad, won’t he? I’m going to lunch with Sally. Back in a couple of hours. Katherine, I’ve handwritten two letters for you to type. They’re in the green folder by my computer.”

And she was off, leaving us at the back of the garden to contemplate the dormant latticework of the climbing rosebush that was Lydia’s pride and joy. “So much easier to care for than the children. So much more straightforward.”

We stood in silence, beginning to feel the cold, until the front door of the apartment slammed and we knew she was gone.

The letter changed hands. With a brisk nod of gratitude, Clarence burst into speech.

He hit me with a flood of words about Lydia and Claudia existing on separate planes in his mind. Parallel planes. Well, maybe not parallel exactly, but planes that did not intersect. So, even if he were to see Claudia again, he wouldn’t be betraying either woman. But it took an overarching mind to see this. He implied that I had such a mind. “As I’ve said, your father would be proud of you. Your intelligence, and your sympathies, run so deep. He must have instilled that in you.”

I nodded.

“What you and I understand better than most,” he continued, “is that, contrary to popular belief, we humans have very little control over matters. However, I will try not to talk about Claudia directly with you, Katie, because it puts you in an awkward position. I recognize that. And things should not have been revealed to you this way, by surprise. But then that’s fate, isn’t it? Fate that Harry Mathews sent you for ice cream to the very spot where Claudia was . . . I would have told you myself eventually, maybe after you had stopped working in Paris. But you were destined to find out on your own.”

I startled. Life after Paris had not yet occurred to me.

“And perhaps Claudia was meant to find you. She’s been so isolated the past few weeks. I think it’s driven her a little crazy. And she doesn’t quite grasp the complexity of the situation with my family. It’s very black and white with her, which is part of what can make her so bloody wonderful. But, I hope she wasn’t too dramatic with you, and that you’re not upset.”

I couldn’t deny that I was uncomfortable, but I didn’t know how to admit it either, so I turned the conversation’s course. “What’s pretty clear is that she’s very much in love with you.”

He gave a crooked smile. “I know, I know. But let’s not discuss it, shall we? It’s too unfair to you and to Lydia.”

Realizing those should have been my words, that I ought to have been the one to call the situation unfair, I blurted out a lame, “Okay.” I looked at the dark branches roping the pale wall and I let myself think of Lydia. It was tempting to imagine her heart as a place of patterned light and shadow, the secret generator of her creative energy. It was easy to think of her as indestructible. As thorny. Until I remembered how delicate the roses would be, how short their season after a hard winter. All our lazy joy in them would be a result of their long absence—and of the labor of a small army of gardeners.

Even if Lydia herself didn’t tend to the bush, she anguished about it. She told me that she worried about its flowering year after year. She would look at it from the window of her study and sigh. It was a symbol of wealth and stature, yes, but it was also a symbol of domesticity, the life that would die if untended, the lattice to her art.

Her art
was
human, no matter what Claudia said. When Lydia harangued Clarence about the garden, when she embroiled us all in the redecorating of her drifting children’s rooms, it must be because she was, in some part of herself, a wife and a mother. Lydia’s reality, although vastly more embroidered than my mother’s and mine, was as true as ours. So she had a rosebush and we didn’t. So she spoke cruelly to her husband, as we would never speak to anyone. So she had a wine cellar and was selfishly brilliant. But did all this mean she was beyond hurt?

I did not know where to file this question. It had no place in my bizarre idyll with Claudia and Clarence. Yet it was equally real.

I felt the crisscrossing pulls of too many expectations. I told myself the only way to fulfill them all was to keep a level head. The importance of a level head was something Mom had always emphasized, although I doubt she could have envisioned mine in this particular pose. When she grew sentimental, it was often about our shared resistance to what others called stress. “You and I can handle certain pressures. We don’t feel the need to exaggerate or indulge in, quote unquote, stress. We’re survivors. We have perspective. Remember that.”

thirt
y
-six

The following evening, over an aperitif at Les Deux Magots, I ventured the idea to Christie that I was living inside a Picasso, where everyone talked to me about everyone else so that I saw their lives from all angles while they had no idea about mine. I foresaw that things would only get more complicated as time passed. Claudia would ask me for news of Clarence, Lydia would ask me to find out what Portia was thinking, Portia would tell me her mother was crazy, and Clarence would try to find out, without asking directly, how Claudia was doing. All of this would overlay the mutual suspicion between husband and wife, mother and daughter, mistress and lover. Meanwhile, my every conversation with Olivier would recast the entire constellation in fresh light. I was bracing myself for supreme feats of diplomacy. I would have no choice but to take the experience as it came, from all sides.

“This isn’t good,” Christie said. “Somebody’s going to find out something, and they’re going to band together and blame you. That’s always the way these things turn out.”

“But none of it’s really my fault.”

“That depends on your perspective. Be careful.
Tchin . . .
”

“. . .
tchin.
Christie, do you always know how to stand up for yourself?”

“Not always. But I try.”

“I’m being cowardly, aren’t I? Weirdly brave and sneaky, but, when it boils down to it, spineless.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re in a tough situation. But think about what you can do for your sanity.”

“That’s just it. I have no idea.”

•   •   •

The next afternoon, Clarence neglected to tell Lydia he was going to a lecture at the Sorbonne.

“Has anyone seen Clarence? He’s vanished again.”

“He went to a talk by Julia Kristeva,” I said. “It’s about the Mallarmé fashion magazine he’s so into.”

“Kristeva, you say? On fashion?” She laughed almost meanly. “Could it get any better for him?”

Even though Clarence was truly at the university, this fact felt like an alibi, and I a liar because I knew he had been seeing Claudia.

“Clarence is acting even stranger than usual lately,” Lydia said.

“Maybe he’s worried about something.”

“You think it’s his work?”

“Could be.”

•   •   •

I had visited Claudia early that morning. I had brought her a croissant and she had made me coffee with warm milk. We couldn’t meet in the Flore en l’Île because Clarence had told me that Sally Meeks lived on the Île St-Louis, and that we had to be careful because there was “no telling what Sally was capable of.” I doubted Sally would recognize me out of context, but I had to respect Clarence’s fear; it was so much weightier than my reason.

“But this Sally, she has never met me. Why do we need to hide from her?” Claudia asked me.

“Clarence thinks that if Sally sees me with someone she doesn’t know, she’s going to wonder about it, and mention it to Lydia. She’ll come over to our table and be all friendly and try to figure out exactly who you are. She’s all about owning information, he says.”

“Does this mean that I am bad news?” She tugged at her hair.

“Of course not. You’re wonderful news, Claudia. But I’m not sure how well timed you are.”

I had come to her before my workday began, because I felt terrible that it was impossible for her to go to the lecture today, even though Kristeva was a friend of hers, because she was not officially in Paris and Clarence was. Although Clarence had not asked me to, I had come to apologize for him.

“Are you upset about not going to the Sorbonne? I know Clarence feels very conflicted about it, like you have more of a right to be there than he does and it’s not fair. I can tell he feels bad because he’s acting all sheepish around the house.”

“I am not upset about missing this talk,” Claudia insisted. “I am upset about the way Clarence looked when he left the church last night. He seems so weak, and his eyes are feverish. He is off balance. I’m frightened.”

“So, you’re not angry about the lecture?”

“How can I think about myself at a lecture when Clarence could be ill and I cannot see him tonight?”

“He does look a little pale,” I said, “but nothing is seriously wrong with Clarence. Don’t worry.”

“It’s that house. It’s poisoning him. I sense it. I’ve loved him for a long time, you know, much longer than he’s loved me.” She opened her window onto the mossy wall. “I tell you he will die in that house with that woman.”

•   •   •

Clarence came home from the Sorbonne with a fever and threw up. Lydia said he was falling apart exactly as his book was coming due, and that this was typical.

From across the Atlantic, Portia worried about him. She called twice in one hour to say he should get checked for cancer. The very fact that he could get sick, Portia reasoned, hinted at the truth that someday he would be taken away from her, and this forced her to imagine the worst.

The next morning, Lydia asked me to take Clarence some chicken broth. “He asked if
you
would bring it up. He says
I
do nothing for his appetite.”

Clarence’s curls were more silver than ever and flattened with sweat. As I handed him the soup, he gestured to a plastic bowl on his bedside table. “I hope I can hold this down.”

“You better hope it doesn’t come up black, Clarence.”

“Ah, so you think this is a punishment for all the second-rate fashion literature I’ve been reading? I’m Emma Bovary? Is that it?” He smiled like a gargoyle.

“You got it.”

Madame Bovary had died vomiting black from the arsenic she had taken. There was a school of criticism that said she was in fact regurgitating the ink of all the ill-conceived romance novels she read as a schoolgirl, the novels that conditioned her to be disappointed by life and to read its signs all wrong. She was killed by bad literature.

“Tell me again, Katie, what you were saying the other day about how Madame Bovary was a victim of circumstance, that bit about how we don’t choose our fate. What was that?”

“Emma Bovary was a good person.” I sighed. “My cousin Jacques says her virtues were what led her to her tragic end. She cheated on poor Charles because of her virtues. Virtues, Clarence, not defects, okay? So, don’t worry. ”

I would have gone on in this placating vein, compulsively trying to resurrect this fatherly man, but he was no longer looking at me. He was staring out the window at the garden, so impossibly far away from his sickbed.

“You’ll tell her I can’t see her?”

“Of course.” I wanted to know what exactly I should say to Claudia about his illness, but I got the feeling he wanted my communication with her to be out of his hands, my responsibility. He wished to be clean of it.

He thanked me for the soup, said he was tired and sorry, closed his eyes and curled up.

thirt
y
-seven

Portia told me, over the phone, that her mother had mentioned to her that Sally Meeks was heading to Milan to interview Salvatore Ferragamo and scam shoes. So, when I went to the Île St-Louis to let Claudia know that Clarence was sick and wouldn’t be in St-Sulpice that evening, the coast was clear of Sally and we were able to meet out in the open rather than in her depressing studio.

The day was gray and mild. I had Orlando with me, and the two of us were on the bridge, me with my Berthillon, he with his free cone, when Claudia came blinking toward us.

No, she did not feel like ice cream, thanks. How was Clarence?

I told her.

“I knew it!” She began to pull her hair. “Is Clarence dying? If Clarence is dying, I will come to that house and I will take him away myself.”

“Claudia, it’s probably the stomach flu. At worst it’s mono or something. My god, you’re as bad as Portia.”

“So, Portia is worried? That is a bad sign. A daughter, she knows when these things are grave. She senses.”

Not sure I could continue being nice, I took a lick of sorbet. People whose fathers die young of cancer can be impatient with the flu.

“Katie”—Claudia took me by the shoulders and locked her eyes on mine—“will you do something very important for me? Will you give Clarence another letter? And something else? An amulet I have. It will protect him.”

“Claudia, I don’t know.”

“It is very important he has a sign from me. A charm he can hold. Clarence must feel so alone. He needs to sense me now more than ever.”

“It’s weird for me, you know.”

“Of course, it is a strange, uncomfortable thing, and I would not ask you if I had any other way. It will be the last time.” She was crying.

Squirming in the glare of her drama, I’d say anything to get her to stop. “Okay, okay.”

•   •   •

Two days passed. Clarence was not getting any better. He barely woke or ate. I promised Portia over the phone that I would make him chocolate mousse. She had a notion that if he had something soft, sweet and delicious, he would come out of his stupor, as she herself sometimes did with spoonfuls of coffee ice cream in bed when she was pining for Olivier.

He was sleeping now in Joshua’s room because his “writhing” at night kept Lydia awake. (“This is a horrible thing to say, but he’s acting like a character straight out of
The Inferno
. What do you think he’s being punished for, poor harmless man? I can’t possibly imagine.”)

As Clarence grew weaker, I too began to worry. I still refused to indulge in apocalyptic fantasies, but I saw that his misery was real.

After hanging up with Portia for the second time that day, I began to separate eggs, remembering the Christmas when Solange first taught me her technique of pouring the yolk back and forth between the two halves of broken shell while the white slid off into a waiting bowl.
“Comme ça!”

The egg yolks got whisked with sugar and some kind of liqueur. Then stirred over simmering water so they wouldn’t be raw. “A
bain-marie,”
Solange whispered from her distant kitchen.

I still had not decided between Orléans and Deauville for Christmas.

Once the yolks and sugar were mixed, I went to the living room liqueur cabinet, fidgeting on my way with the coin-shaped bulge that burned in my back pocket.

I harbored the silver amulet for Clarence, an abstract image strung on a slender leather thread. It came from Morocco. It was a charm to ward off evil, and it was meant to protect him against Lydia. Claudia had told me that until I could get it to him, it could not leave my person. I wanted to be rid of it, to finally be finished as a messenger, but I had not found my moment.

I returned to the kitchen with Grand Marnier, rum and kirsch and called Portia in her dorm room to see which she would like me to use. “You choose,” I said.

“I think Daddy likes rum more than fruit flavors. He sort of hates fruit and chocolate.”

No, he doesn’t, I thought. He eats dark-chocolate-covered orange peels from Hédiard while he works. He stashes them in his bottom desk drawer. He shares them with me sometimes.

“Great,” I said aloud. “Let’s use rum then.”

“Thanks.” She sighed. “You’ll let me know how he likes it? You’ll tell him I helped? That the chocolate mousse was my idea?”

I cooked the egg yolks, sugar and rum, then stirred in melted chocolate, coffee and an obscene amount of butter. Next I beat the egg whites until they formed stiff peaks and folded them into the chocolate mixture. Then I put the mousse to chill in the refrigerator.

•   •   •

A few hours later, once the mousse had set and Clarence was awake, I went to his bedside and we called Portia.

I could hear her try to make him laugh. “Daddy, you’re wasting away. Mother’s going to get jealous.”

When he hung up, I asked him if he wanted to try some mousse.

“You made this by yourself?” he grunted affably.

I almost said, no, I made it with my cousin Solange whom I was supposed to spend Christmas with, only in the hallway just now, looking at nothing in particular, it hit me that I will go to Deauville instead. But I simply nodded and smiled, spooned a bite into his mouth, then took Claudia’s amulet from my pocket and pressed it into the damp palm of his hand.