Lessons in French (21 page)

fort
y
-one

No further mention was ever made of my raise.

After I told Lydia I would stay, she was dry and business-like for about a week before drifting into a postapocalyptic détente with me. She did not speak directly of Claudia or my treachery again except to tell me in no uncertain terms that I was not to say anything to Portia. Portia had enough to worry about. Of course, the children had to know eventually, but Lydia herself would tell them, when the time was right. Probably when they were here for spring break, although that was none of my business. My business was to help her to get ready for her upcoming gallery show in March. She had decided to make it openly political. She would include recent work from Germany and England.

I stayed in part because I did not want to miss the flow of history, of Berlin, of Salman Rushdie, of the strange and frightening new rumblings from the far right in the South of France. I still didn’t know what any of it meant. To leave now would be like giving up before the end of a novel. And I stayed because Clarence had made me feel I was part of the family, the child who was neither spoiled and ethereal nor spoiled and defiant. Even though I knew with every conscious fiber that I was a servant, I suspended my disbelief in the face of his affection. Our relationship was not dead yet. Neither was his with Lydia. Or Lydia’s with me. Or his with Claudia. No matter how unhealthy the view, I was compelled to look on. The story was not over yet.

The fact that I had decided to remain meant that I could also decide to leave. And while it was hard to believe I would ever follow through with such a drastic measure, I had shown myself that I could take greater risks than I had ever imagined. No stance was impossible. My drawing was beginning to show evidence of style. Somehow, this gave me courage, made me less timid with Lydia.

By mid-February, buried in preparations for the big show, the surface of life in the Schell household was close to normal, if punctuated with dizzying reminders of recent trauma. Lydia had repainted everything to the point where the original colors were virtually erased. Claudia did not exist. I was Lydia’s faithful servant. Clarence was harmless if profoundly annoying.

But there were moments when the old paint would suddenly appear, blood from a fundamental crime seeping through the walls. Even if it vanished as fast as it had come, we all saw. I was reminded in a thousand ways that I still existed in Paris only on the whims of Lydia’s grace.

It was strange, this hairlined normalcy, but it was tenable. Lydia was, if anything, more jocular than before. A strident and lordly jocularity. She had won, after all. On all fronts.

Several times, I had tried to call Claudia from my phone booth, but there was no answer. And I didn’t have the time these days to stake out her shadowy building on the Île St-Louis. Once when Lydia was out to lunch with Harry Mathews, I dared to ask Clarence if he knew where Claudia was. I hoped she was all right. Perhaps she really had gone to Berkeley this time? Or to Morocco?

He had given me the blankest look I had ever seen.

I had written to Olivier in great detail about the unraveling of events, but his letters in return made no mention of it. I figured the ugliness of the situation was one he would rather not touch.

•   •   •

The invitation to Lydia’s opening on the rue du Four in St-Germain was double-sided, with a diptych on either face, one pair of German photos, one pair of British ones. On her desk were the two mock-ups alongside a half-eaten container of the evil spring rolls
.
She had given me an exemption from my ban on buying them today because we had a lot of stressful material to cover. We had to sign off on the invitation and make the guest list.

“Katherine, your job today is to keep me focused,” she said.

“Thanks for finally telling me what my job is.”

“Don’t be facetious, young lady.” Her tone might be light, but her protuberant eyes rolled to see me in a new way. For a moment, they lingered, half-impressed, half-suspicious. I had never been fresh with her before. Then she turned back to the task at hand.

She examined the German side of the invitation. There were photos taken a few days after the one of November 9 for
Paris Match
. They showed the same bunch of bananas, on either side of a wide gap in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. In the left-hand photo, a young man in a biker jacket, with sunglasses and a briefcase, was holding out bananas, smiling. His gesture was luxuriant, full and stretched. In the opposite photo, a man closer to middle age, having accepted the bananas, held them to his chest. His eyes were downcast and apologetic.

The impetus for this exchange, according to Lydia, was an article in
Die Welt
reporting that East Germans had never had access to imported fruit. So, the West Germans thought it was a beautiful gesture to hand out bananas to their suddenly visible neighbors. They drove over the border with carloads.

“My question,” said Lydia, “is do I need a title here?”

“What would the title be?” I asked.

“That’s the
real
question. I don’t have it yet. I need something that captures the symbolism of Berlin. The West Germans are condescending and the East Germans are self-conscious. They feel incompetent and they are on the verge of feeling very bitter about it. So, after that initial moment of unity between the countries, there is this total lack of recognition, right? And in Berlin it’s much more potent than anywhere else because there the two peoples are literally face-to-face. These two banana moments are like the last moments of an illusion . . . Can you come up with anything, Katherine, anything about the power of illusion? The death of illusion? You should know something about trickery by now. Do you want a spring roll?”

“No, thank you.”

“Mind if I interrupt?” It was Clarence standing in the doorway. “May I come in for a minute, Lydia? Can we have a moment of mutual recognition in empathy with the Germans, please? Just this once?” He did not wait for an answer, but strode up to her desk. “I couldn’t help but overhear you two talking titles, and I have a thought. How about, ‘Habits of Deceit’?”

Lydia honored the suggestion with a moment of silence.

“It’s rather perfect.” Clarence gathered steam. He was hellbent on pretending he hadn’t done anything wrong. “If you think about how both sides have lived so long in deception about the war, but each with a deeply different deception.”

“Deceit, yes, deceit,” Lydia muttered. “Coming from you, that’s not bad. In fact, it’s downright rich, Clarence.”

Either he wasn’t going to bite, or he simply wasn’t listening, because he went on with undampened enthusiasm. “It gets better! The East Germans think they are about to have the jeans and the televisions and the motorcycles and everything they’ve ever heard or dreamed about. They are deluded. I think it’s unimaginable for us. We three in this room have no idea what it feels like to be an East German. And neither does this guy in West Berlin with his damn bananas. I mean, we’re all exactly like him if we’re honest with ourselves. We’re all clueless and condescending. And we’re going to lose patience with our poor relations in about five minutes.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “You don’t see the irony in this, do you, you poor man?”

Clarence blushed, but pushed hoarsely on. “So, ‘Habits of Deceit’ it is. Don’t you like it, Katie?”

I looked at Lydia. She was very still, eyes rounded out in concentration. Then I looked away and figured out what I myself thought of Clarence’s suggestion.

“I like it,” I said.

“Come on, Lydia, don’t get mired,” said Clarence. “Admit it’s a good idea.”

“It’s not bad. I’m thinking about it.”

“That’s marvelous, dear. Thank you.”

When the two of them began to get along like this, bright threads of hope surfaced in the family fabric. Perhaps the reason Clarence and Lydia could afford to be so mean to each other was that these threads were in fact strong. If they could see that they did love each other, then she would stop calling Olivier when she was drunk and lonely, and Clarence would never cheat on her again. Maybe everything was about to get a whole lot healthier around here.

I hatched a plan to have Clarence write the catalog notes for Lydia’s show. It could be their Paris collaboration. Their true
rapprochement.
I could help with the work. The family I might once have helped to ruin could be whole again.

“Can I see that invitation?” asked Clarence.

She handed him the German mock-up.

“These are excellent photos, my dear. What idiocy was going through Georges’s mind when he rejected these?”

Georges was one of the heads of Agence France-Presse.
He had originally turned down several of the images that were going to appear in the show.

“Georges is trying to turn the whole agency against me. It’s disgusting. After all we’ve done for him. I introduced him to everyone he knows in the States. Everyone. Talk about having no memory. The traitor.”

“Bloody traitor. We’re not inviting him to the opening, are we?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve crossed him off the list. First round of cuts.”

It struck me that Clarence and Lydia were a united front. They
were
going to stay together. I knew it.

To make the moment tactile, I touched Étienne’s ring.

Although I had been wearing the ring for weeks, Lydia chose this moment to notice it in grand style. Her eyes widened over the bright pink chip. “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”

“A piece of the wall, yeah. My cousin makes them,” I answered proudly. “He’s into
objets trouvés
. He’s doing rings and chokers and bracelets and pendants. He has a friend who went to Berlin and brought him back some rubble to work with.”

“Fascinating,” said Clarence. “Instant pillage.”

“So you have finally seen your cousins?” Lydia fixed her gaze on me. “I’m glad.”

“Not Jacques and Solange in Orléans, not yet, but I see their son Étienne all the time. He has this idea of making jewelry from historical waste products, things that aren’t treasures anymore become treasures again.”

“Could you get me some samples?”

“Oh, I’m sure he would be thrilled!”

“Any idea what he’s asking? I’m feeling flush.” She laughed.

Clarence had lost interest in Étienne’s ring and was focusing again on Lydia’s invitation. “This is vintage Lydia,” he sighed, staring into the banana photos.

She snatched the invitation back. “I hate it when you use wine words on me. It makes me feel old.”

“It’s simply a figure of speech, Lydia.”

“Thank you, Clarence. Thank you for clearing that up. A figure of speech, of course. Deceit is also a figure of speech. Very convenient, I’m sure. Now, Katherine and I have work to do here. Please leave us alone.”

But, Clarence would not go. As though acting on some fevered resolve to change the state of things, some sleepless promise he had been making to himself to purge bad blood, he stood his ground .

“The Germany work,” he said a bit too loudly, “is brilliant. But I will never see the analogy you’re trying to make with the Rushdie affair.” His eyes glanced over the other page of the invitation, the diptych from England, a shot of a book catching fire, with a
DEATH TO RUSHDIE
banner half-legible through a smoky haze, next to it a close-up of the writer himself, posed as for a book jacket.

He took the kind of breath you take on a high dive. “If I were you, I would stick to Germany.”

“Then it’s a good thing you aren’t me, Clarence.” Lydia did not raise her eyes from her desk. “That’s enough from the peanut gallery. Katherine, can you please go back into your time lines and look for title ideas for my show. We’ll find one, or one will find us. You know, titles are like sex.”

“Like sex?” Clarence and I asked in unison.

“Sometimes titles are instant and amazing. Other times they are a total grind.”

I blushed for Clarence. “But I thought we were using Clarence’s title. What about ‘Habits of —’ ”

“Listen, we are short on time here. Please go to your time lines and find me something I can actually use!”

Clarence shuffled from the room.

I went to the file cabinet, but before I could retrieve anything, she interrupted me. “Listen, I have to be alone to focus right now. Do me a favor. Read this. A friend of mine at
Granta
in London has published this essay by Rushdie in hiding called ‘In Good Faith.’ Go read it and see if you can find some ideas for titles for some of the England pictures. There’s good stuff about unrest. That’s the connection with Germany. Unrest.” She looked at me. “That weekend you spent in London over the New Year, what signs did you see there?”

I dug my concrete ring into my thigh. “You know, I spent the whole time I was there inside with my friends. The weather was so terrible.”

“Surely you noticed something.”

The spring roll crumbs in the takeout container on the desk glistened like the interior of a Chinese restaurant in a fever dream. What if she asked what neighborhood my “friends” lived in? I wasn’t sure I knew the name of any residential neighborhood in London. Did people live in Knightsbridge? Did I know the name of a single street? Had I actually been to London with Olivier, or just to a bed somewhere?

My fantasy of being found out ebbed as I realized that Lydia was simply stating the fact that there was plenty of unrest to notice these days in London. She was not making an inquiry of me at all. Surely, I had remarked something askew there. Anyone would. She did not wait for a response.

“So,” she handed me the
Granta
issue, “read through this and maybe you can discuss it with Clarence. See if he mentions anything beyond his usual opinions. He’s being so negative and cagey about my work on the Rushdie affair that I wonder if he’s not secretly writing about it himself and not telling me because he thinks I might be working on a photo essay with another writer. Believe it or not, he’s competitive that way. Have you noticed material in his study about the affair? He hasn’t asked you to help him with anything extracurricular?” She gave a short bitter
laugh.