Lessons in French (20 page)

“Do you know what an orgy is?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He took a bite of his taco, chewed, swallowed, dabbed his lips with a paper napkin. “An orgy is wanting everything on the menu. You, Katie, you want everyone and their father and their brother to love you. Your particular orgy is a kind of
bulimie,
a
bulimie d’affection.”

“You’re right, Étienne. Absolutely right. But, practically, what do I do now? Do I not see Olivier? Do I tell everyone everything? Or has it gone too far?”

“You’re not listening to me, are you, Katie? What to ‘do?’ Do, do, do. It’s too American. You must not try always to ‘do.’ You must learn to appreciate. To appreciate each thing, each person. You have to be in the moment. You can’t appreciate anything if you cannot focus. Certainly not sex.
Pauvre Katie.”

“What did you call me? That’s what your dad used to call me. It was his epithet. Like I was some tragic character in
La Comédie humaine.
”

“We always felt sad for you. Ever since you first came to stay with us when your father was sick and dying. I was angry about you because I hated how sad it all was.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He clinked his empty margarita glass against my wine. “So, you want this Olivier boy?”

I nodded, twisting my ring. I hadn’t touched my plate. My beans were congealing. “I do want Olivier. Yes.”

“Then act dignified. Assume your choice. That’s the only way. After that, it will either work or it won’t. Go to Deauville. Go to London. You will have a sexy time. But not as sexy as me walking my big dog all over town.”

thirt
y
-nine

On Christmas Eve, at the casino in Deauville, Bastien kissed me. Using the money he had given Christie and me to play with, I had won a hand of blackjack. As soon as I had collected my chips, he took me in a full embrace, all cologne vapors and soft hands down my neck with Christie beaming on.

The kiss had been building all that day and evening, through sand dunes and long low tides, oysters and fish soup, Christie doing my makeup for the casino, the outsize jewels in the light of old-world chandeliers, the spinning tables, the flush of black and red fans. I had sensed it approaching but had not guessed at its ardor. As a mental affair, Bastien’s kiss had been graceful and subdued as the white winter sky. The truth was much less remote.

Gently, I slid away from him to count my winnings. Nearly a hundred francs of free money! I said that our next round of champagne was on me, and for once Bastien allowed himself to be treated.

When he invited me into his bed that night, I refused kindly but unambiguously. I was so suffused with anticipation of seeing Olivier in London in a week’s time that my body barely existed in this place. Bastien’s seaside mansion in Deauville was already a memory, pale and pleasant.

I spent the night with Christie, who said to be careful not to lead Bastien on, to consider what was going on with his parents, how fragile he felt.

I said that I thought of him as an affectionate friend, and that any romance between us was a fantasy on his part, that he persisted in molding me to some image he had of an exotic American girlfriend, but that I had never encouraged him. I had only been nice. Friendly. Was it my fault if he refused to read my signals?

She insisted that I was fascinated by his manners and his trappings.

Of course, but that didn’t mean I had to sleep with him.

Point taken.

Christmas morning, Bastien gave me a Hermès scarf covered in red and orange butterflies. It was the most luxurious thing I had ever owned, but I had no idea how to tie it. Christie did it for me in the perfect neck knot I had been admiring for months. Then she gave me a tortoiseshell headband.

I gave them each a sketch done from the splashing photo of the Bande at les Bains Douches that I had in my room. I had attempted not to break my rule against portraiture and to draw each of us like an unknown model, with no symbolic pollution. But I had to admit that the cragginess of Bastien’s face was infused with the melancholy of his freshly broken home, and that Christie glowed in the light of my affection for her. I couldn’t make them anonymous.

•   •   •

I didn’t fully inhabit a moment until I landed at Heathrow Airport an hour before Olivier’s plane was scheduled to come in from New York. It was the thirtieth of December. I wore a Blondie concert t-shirt under my thrift-store coat. I considered this outfit the sign of a decision not to try to pull off something I couldn’t. I wanted to be as little like Portia as possible. I wasn’t a rich girl whose mother took her shopping for therapy. Still, I could not obliterate her. I was just wise enough to know that you can’t make a person disappear by pretending to forget them.

Portia might be back in the States, but she would be back in my life in a couple of months, at spring break.

For days leading up to my journey to London, I had been too nervous to eat much. Generally, living in Paris made me feel somewhat massive, smugly healthy and inadequate by turn. This starving girl at Heathrow was my ghost. Nervously, she scanned the crowd.

The flight from New York had arrived. Face after unfamiliar face filtered out of customs. Maybe I had forgotten what he looked like, he had slipped by me a second ago, and I had missed one of those turning points that can determine a whole life.

With each arriving passenger, my mind darkened. What if Olivier and Portia had reunited and were together right now, laughing at me and my stupid clothes? What if Olivier and Lydia had planned this as a final life lesson for me before she fired me with no severance, no recommendations, nothing? On a practical level, what if I were high and dry in London? I knew no one here. My flight back to Paris was three days away. I had very little money on me.

I saw him. He was smaller than I remembered, with a very short haircut for work which made him look younger and more vulnerable.

My throat clenched. A flush spread outward from the base of my tongue. I couldn’t speak. It had been so long that I needed to feel him in order to believe in him.

Touch me so that I can calm down. Prove that you are alive.

The impression of his smallness dissolved as his face came close, blocking out the airport crowd. He kissed me, then pulled back, but not far, still filling my frame of vision, holding my shoulders and examining me. I had on no makeup besides the lip gloss, Silver City Pink, that I had been wearing the day we met.

“You’re here,” he said. “It’s you.”

“Of course I am.”

•   •   •

Barely speaking, Olivier and I rode the tube into London, where he had booked a small hotel called the Basil Street. He said it wasn’t far from Harrod’s.

The signage in the station was oddly familiar. I hadn’t seen bold-face English in months. But the specifics of Cadbury’s and “chemists” and “flats to let” were strange to me, almost abstractions. On the train, the English faces were a blur around us. I could feel details escaping me.

Olivier’s hands on me trembled. This underground journey was our first foray into our own world. I trembled back.

We came blinking up into unfamiliar streets and sounds, red everywhere on phone booths, buses, cars on the left, roundabouts. There were bulbous black taxis, a billboard for
Cats.

“This is Knightsbridge,” he said, squeezing me with mounting conviction, as though I were growing more real. The name Knightsbridge meant nothing more to me than the pressure of his arm.

The hotel lobby reminded me of Fawlty Towers, crimson carpet, white desk, crisp accents everywhere. The “lift” was operated by a man with a lever. He nodded at our greetings.

Our room was small and patterned. The walls were striped in fading brown velvet. Our bedspread was a bevy of ferns, arranged in concentric pea-green rings. The lamp shades were fringed. I found it all thrillingly old-fashioned.

Immediately we had sex. Then he slept and slept. He had been putting in long hours at the bank, proving himself. He had worked through Christmas. This was his first break since September.

While he slept, I fingered the
chevalière.
I traced the lines of a lost château. I pressed my own Berlin Wall ring into it. A few traces of my pink plaster rubbed off into its golden grooves.

It was past ten at night when he woke up, took me in his arms and said, “London has fantastic Chinese food. I bet you feel like Chinese food. I know a great place that’s open late.”

“How did you know that Chinese was exactly what I wanted?” It was only as I said it that I realized it couldn’t have been truer.

I put on more lip gloss and one of the several Monoprix
miniskirts I had packed.

•   •   •

We sat, thighs touching, on a banquette, rolling slender pancakes of Peking duck and feeding them to one another. He didn’t put enough plum sauce on mine, but I let it go. There were only two other couples eating in the sprawling restaurant, and the waiters were probably all dying to go home, but we had a sense of ourselves as charming and welcome here. Who could not be enthralled in our delirium?

They cleared our duck plates. The silence, so tender between us back in the hotel room, began now to ring. Olivier spoke to cover it.

“This wine is abominable, but have some more.”

“Thank you.”

More silence. Hand squeeze.

I saw some spring rolls on their way to one of the other tables and my throat narrowed. To clear it, I blurted, “Those spring rolls remind me of Lydia!”

Immediately, I wished I could recall the words. I didn’t want us sucked into Lydia’s sphere. But it was too late.

“She’ll never give those things up, will she?” He laughed. “After all this time, she’s still hooked. There’s something charmingly pathetic about it, right?”

“What do you mean,
still
?” I pulled my hand away. “You’re
still
talking to her about spring rolls?”

“I haven’t talked to her for weeks, actually. I think she may finally have given up on me.” He sighed. Then he looked hard at me, saw my fear and tried to calm it. “Let’s not talk about Lydia, okay?”

I nodded gratefully.

But we did talk about Lydia, and Clarence and Portia and Joshua. Despite our fledgling solo voyage, their gravity was central to us. It was our history.

On my third glass of wine, I took another of my unpracticed leaps into full disclosure and told him about Clarence’s affair with Claudia.

He couldn’t contain his astonishment. “The bastard!”

I told him everything, right down to the chocolate mousse and the amulet. I spoke, though, through a mounting tide of regret. Although he said little while he was listening, I feared that the story of my behavior was taking an ugly shape in his mind. I understood that I was more than a fresh young thing in the winds of other people’s passions. I was smarter than that. And I was worse than that. Olivier was my witness.

But, even though we were inches apart, I did not feel his focus on me. His mind’s eye was completely on the Schell family. For a while he glared in angry shock, yet by the time I finished, his gaze had smoldered into something like compassion.

“People need such very different things, don’t they?” He sighed.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, I feel this need to be successful, and my mother is desperate to get back something of her lost life. So, I guess Clarence needs someone who looks up to him and doesn’t make him feel like an idiot. Tenderness. And Lydia has to feel like she can be nurturing. She doesn’t want to be a monster. And Portia—” He saw that I didn’t want to talk about Portia and caught himself. “They’re all needy, but we can’t really blame them.”

“Do you think Lydia’s a monster?”

“Sometimes. No. I don’t know . . . But what do you need, Kate? What do you want?”

I took a few beats to contemplate a drunken answer about moving from drawing into painting, about oils being mixed to evoke flesh and portraiture and the decisive moment in the human expression and staying true to classical technique all the while. But before I could attempt to express it, he responded for me.

“You’re a bit like me. You feel a compulsion to succeed in order to get back what’s been taken from you.”

I was confused. “But there’s no way to get my dad back.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the life you should have had.” He shook his head and I noticed again how short his hair was. Then he changed the subject. “I’m still getting my mind around the fact that Clarence is having an affair. The kids are going to lose it.”

“But nobody’s going to find out,” I insisted.

“You’re sure? Lydia has a way of knowing things for a while before she chooses to discover them.”

I was at a loss. So, I smiled.

He smiled in return, his attention streaming back to me as from out behind a cloud. “Oh, who the hell cares about Lydia when you’re so beautiful.” He popped a fortune cookie in my mouth.

•   •   •

The next day was New Year’s Eve. We took a walk through Hyde Park, talked about how winding and mysterious it was compared to our geometrical Parisian gardens, how much closer an imitation of the wild. The French, we decided, had no interest in pretending to be natural.

We spoke of Paris, but whenever the conversation drifted toward the Schell family, he sensed my discomfort and guided it away.

At midnight, we drank champagne on our bed in the Basil Street Hotel. We used glasses from the bathroom sink. The velvet wallpaper quivered with the sounds of fireworks and drunken street singing.

His resolution was to work hard and fast to take better care of the people who truly mattered to him.

I didn’t have a resolution, not yet anyway. He could tell I was awkward with my lack of direction in the face of his. He didn’t press me. He seemed to know that what I wanted right now was not to be called on anything.

“It’s 1990, my Kate. A new decade. For you and me.”

fort
y

On my return to my garret, a delightful pile of envelopes was waiting to greet me, one from my cousins, two from my mom, and three from college friends doing their first jobs or internships in various cities. Wrapped in my mirrored blanket, in the orange glow of my space heater, I savored the different handwritings, one after the other and then each over again.

Jacques and Solange thanked me for my extravagant gift and for reassuring them that Étienne was
en pleine forme
. They hoped I would visit soon.

The larger of Mom’s two envelopes was a Christmas card wishing me luck in shaping the new decade we were embarking on. There was a note of challenge in it. The second envelope contained a more prosaic letter about how she was spending the holidays with Aunt Sarah, how they would roast a chicken for Christmas because what did two middle-aged ladies want with a turkey? She hoped there was a good reason for my not having seen Jacques and Solange for Christmas and New Year’s. If it was a boy, she hoped he wasn’t fly-by-night. Jacques and Solange had been wonderful to us when we needed them most. She hoped I remembered. And what, by the way, was
really
going on with Étienne? She ended by saying she loved me very much, which gave me the warm and familiar sense that she was worried.

Dear Mom,

I should start out by telling you that you’ve guessed right, there is a boy involved in my not seeing our cousins over the holidays. His name is Olivier and he is French-American and he has a promising job in banking in New York. We met earlier this fall while he was in Paris, and he came all the way to Europe to see me just now. Hardly fly-by-night, although I suppose he did fly by night to get here. Hopefully you will meet him someday and approve.

Lydia and Clarence arrive back from the States today and the whirlwind is about to start up again. The break I’ve had from them over the holidays has given me time to reflect and to understand something: that not all experience is equal, sort of like dishes at a feast. You have to figure out how to sort through it all and eat mostly what you like instead of filling your plate with the same amount of everything. What I mean is that the interesting parts of this job, the chestnuts so to speak, are probably worth some suffering and even some humiliation. How many hours of dog-walking in the rain, how many tantrums over the price of papayas are worth the promise of meeting Salman Rushdie? And my deepening friendship with the Schell family, a friendship that could last and change my whole life, is worth putting up with some craziness, right? But how much? How do you dose it and parse it? If I learn how to do that, my time here will be well spent. But, boy, is it easier said than done, Mom!

It’s freezing here. My windows are frosted and the treetops I can see in the Luxembourg are bare and claw-like, blanched against a white sky. I wish you could—”

•   •   •

My chatty comfort was interrupted by a knock at my door. It was Madame Fidelio, breathless from her six-story climb and looking quite concerned. Madame Lydia was home and had to see me for something of great importance right away.

I got dressed quickly in full anticipation of a postholiday papaya mission. I would make sure this time to ask her to set her maximum price before I ventured forth.

•   •   •

“I have to talk to you, very seriously, about you and Clarence and Claudia.” Lydia brandished a fistful of handwritten letters.

We were in the living room with Clarence. She was standing in front of the clock, he was sunk into the sofa, I was perched on the edge of the ottoman where she had motioned me to sit with the abrupt passion of an orchestra conductor.

“Did she give you an amulet to protect my husband against me? It says here”—Lydia looked deep into a line of Claudia’s writing—‘The amulet will cure you.’ It also says that you, Katherine, reassured Claudia that you yourself would place the magic charm in my husband’s hand. It says she knows she can trust you. And obviously
she
can.”

“I’m sorry,” I said softly, stunned that I was still breathing. Shouldn’t the world be in flames by now? Shouldn’t I have vanished?

“That’s it? You’re sorry?”

“Lydia,” Clarence bleated from his slump on the couch, “give her time to process what you’re saying to her. Please.”

“Obviously, Clarence should never have dragged you into this. It was the most unfair thing he could possibly have done and he feels terrible about it. But you have to realize two things, Katherine.
Actually, you have to realize a lot of things, but two major ones.

“First of all, you have, at least ostensibly, been working for me. Your allegiance should be to me and only to me. And I will never be able to recommend you professionally to anyone in any business because you have no notion of loyalty, and that is the one fault that is unforgivable.”

I lifted my eyes to face the next blow, but my gaze was off-kilter. Lydia stood at a strange angle to me, as though I were falling backward while straining to keep her in my line of sight.

Orlando was dozing on the floor. His coat rolled like a muddy sea. I wanted to fall into it and never surface again.

“Do you want to know what the second lesson is?”

I think I nodded.

“What you’ve done to me is something that women do not do to other women. You’ve betrayed me not only as a boss but as a member of your sex. You’ve threatened my family.”

I stood up. “I, but I didn’t actually do—”

“What you did is unconscionable. Sit down.”

I found myself next to Clarence. In a stolen glance, he searched me through the flecked thickness of his glasses. Did he think I might be angry with him? Was I?

Lydia continued. “I can’t believe you’ve had access to my files, my correspondence. I’ve opened everything to you. I’ve been completely disarmed by you. I feel so violated.”

“Lydia, I’m sorry, but I’m not the one who had an affair.”

“Let me finish, Katherine. What you’ve done is treacherous, but I understand that you may have been getting very confusing messages about where your loyalties should be, and that maybe you were a lot less mature than you seemed, stupider than we thought. I have to believe that this wasn’t all malice. I’ll try to give you the benefit of the doubt. So, this doesn’t have to be catastrophic for you. Not if you’re willing to take yourself in hand and think about what you’ve done. You’re not necessarily finished yet. Clarence and I have been talking the situation over, haven’t we, Clarence?”

Briefly, he squinted up at her. I could not imagine him doing much talking since Lydia’s big discovery. In fact, I could not imagine him ever talking again. What could he possibly say?

“Clarence and I have decided to give you another chance. We’ve been saying for months that we’d like to keep you on, pay you more and out of our own pocket, let you develop here a little longer. Maybe this is absurd of me, but, without ever truly forgiving you, I could find a way to live with what’s happened. It’s been a very confusing time for all of us. We could work through this, like a family. As I say, maybe this is absolutely the wrong decision, but I’m making it on instinct.”

As she spoke, my waves of shame and anger succeeded one another. Orlando’s chest rose and fell with eerie peace.

Had I done something terrible? Or was I nothing but a distraction from the true blame?

I tried to grasp the offer that Lydia was making. And then it hit me: this wasn’t an offer. It was a trap. It was sham forgiveness, fake generosity, and I did not need it. No, Lydia, I wasn’t that poor.

“I think I should go,” I said.

She took a violent step toward me. “Then you’re fired!”

“Lydia, please,” begged Clarence.

“Clarence, you have absolutely no moral authority here. None whatsoever. Shut up.”

•   •   •

To give immediate direction and weight to my decision, I ran up into my room and began to pack. I would leave now. I would go to Christie’s. Or to Étienne’s.

As I pulled my clothes from their wire hangers, different reactions pierced my consciousness, each as sharp as the next, the points of a blaring star. I was guilty of the inability to distinguish right from wrong. I had sided with emotion over duty. I had been exploited. I had been narcissistic, believing myself so large in the hearts and minds of these people, when in reality I could have been anyone, and there would be a string of Katies after me and I should get over myself. I had acted to defend the romance and true love that Clarence would prove too cowardly to live out.

These people were crass. These people were tragic. These people were ultimately ordinary. Lydia would sacrifice everything for art. She would channel Clarence’s affair into her work and never be the worse for it. Lydia was a human being first and foremost. She was traumatized.

I was traumatized. I was humiliated. I was the wiser. Mom would be proud, ashamed, understanding, furious. She would say, make sure you get recommendations for some kind of job because you need a future, get letters of introduction, get something no matter what it takes because otherwise it will all have been for nothing. She would say, learn and move on and take care of yourself.

I was scared. I was strong. Maybe I should stay. What, was I crazy?

My room emptied quickly, most of it fitting into a couple of suitcases, until it was little more than a frame for its own rooftop view with its patch of Luxembourg in the lower right corner.

I took the elephant bedspread from the futon and rolled it into a backpack. I winked at my dad before wrapping his picture in the same tissue paper it had crossed the Atlantic in. I peed in the electric toilet one last time.

I still hadn’t figured out exactly where I was going. I supposed I should walk to the pay phone and make sure someone was home to take me in before I embarked with my luggage. I probably needed a cab. But the urge to get my things out of this place was so violent that I pushed the larger of my bags through the door and began to jostle it down the stairs.

After one flight, I heard footsteps rising heavily toward me.

I abandoned the suitcase on a landing and bolted back to my naked room.

I had barely closed the door when there was a knock.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Katie, it’s Clarence. Let me in, please.”

Clarence had never once set foot in my room. I assumed that, like Lydia, he didn’t quite want to acknowledge how I lived.

His eyes looked inward, taking me in just enough to place me in the cosmology of his own dilemma.

“Katie, you’ve got to stay. I can’t imagine her forgiving anyone the way she’s willing to forgive you. She needs you. If you go, the whole thing is too disruptive, too real.”

“But it
is
real, Clarence. We can’t pretend it isn’t real.”

“Of course it is. You and I know that. But you and I aren’t Lydia. She can recraft this situation if we let her. She’s a bloody genius. And we are bloody responsible for her. Please. We really can pay you more if that’s an issue,” he said, with a quick glance around the maid’s room. “You know, you don’t only owe it to her to stay on, but to yourself. Your opportunity here is only beginning. You have so much to learn. It’s going to all be wonderful again soon.”

Clarence smiled, and for a second filled the outline of the father in my heart. I could feel myself bending. But I did not want to.

“What about Claudia?” I asked.

“We will have to cut ourselves off from Claudia, you and I both. And she will cry suicide perhaps but we have to realize it’s rubbish. She has to understand.”

“Understand what exactly?”

“That there is such a thing as real life.”

“I don’t know if I can do it, Clarence. I don’t know if I can ever be comfortable here again. I feel so terrible now.”

“Don’t,” he squeaked, then looked longingly out into whatever vista he perceived across the expanse of my electric burner. “Please, Katie. Please. I’m sorry. And if you feel sorry too, then the thing to do is stay.”

I wanted to hug him, to tell him we would all survive, but instead I fidgeted with the handle of my suitcase and said I needed time to think.