Lessons in French (23 page)

fort
y
-four

Over the past months, I had made peace with my electric toilet, but I thought it might be a problem for Portia. She had come up the
escalier de service
for my very first dinner party. She had exclaimed about how creative I had been with my little space and how charming the view was from my dormer window. “I’m so jealous you can see the Luxembourg!” She had even eaten one of my blue-cheese-and-fig canapés. Wasn’t this great? We were all going to sit around a tablecloth on the floor to have our pasta. Such a pretty tablecloth. Yes, of course she wanted a glass of wine. Things were going swimmingly until she asked if she could use the bathroom and I pulled open the vinyl accordion door to reveal the airplane toilet. She said she would be right back. She had forgotten something downstairs.

Why had I invited her? As soon as her mother chose to reveal her father’s indiscretions, and my part in them, I figured I would be a goner in her affections and that she would look back on this evening in disgust. And even though I was upset with Olivier for humoring her antics, he hadn’t gotten back together with her. Had she known that he and I spoke of her as lovers discuss a cast-off, she would have wanted to kill me. All emotional logic should have excluded her from my party.

But the fear of offending her in the moment outweighed it all. I couldn’t bear the thought of her hearing the footfall of my friends on the stairs while she was left below. Not when she still thought I was kind.

Besides Portia, my guests were Étienne, Christie, and a couple of college friends, boys, who were coming through town and could not believe I was hanging out with Christie Brown. Wasn’t she a preppy snob?

Not at all, I said. Wait and see. And within a few minutes of their arrival, Christie and Étienne were entertaining us with their ironic version of
le rock,
the
BCBG
dance
par excellence.
Even though she was taller, he spun her fluently in and out, dipped and twirled her like the proudest of Gallic alpha males. As their moves got more and more burlesque—they had a swirling, butt-bumping figure eight—I realized they must practice a lot.

We all fell down around the tablecloth laughing. The boys were disarmed. Christie was great. She was totally self-mocking about the whole French thing. And her roommate Étienne was unreal.

We heard Portia’s heels clattering in the stairwell. “It’s the return of the hothouse flower,” whispered Christie.

“Shush! She’s just a little clueless, you guys. I don’t think she has a lot of friends her own age, but she’s trying. Give her a chance.”

“Feeling a little guilty, Katie? A little compromised?” Christie’s sternness plunged the room into silence. “You shouldn’t be nice to her. You’ll regret it. You know you will.”

The Yale boys looked puzzled.

“De quoi vous parlez?”
asked Étienne. What were we talking about? Since his English wasn’t very good, Christie and I spoke French when the three of us were together, but the presence of our American friends tonight made that seem rude. So, we translated when we remembered to.

“Christie se moque de moi,”
I explained, escaping into French to diffuse the moment. Christie is teasing me.

As the dinner progressed, I was surprised at how sensitive Portia was to the fact that Étienne might feel excluded from the conversation. She kept coming out with slow, blanket statements to him in a mix of both languages. “So, Kate says you are a
bijoutier.
” “The Bastille is a very interesting
quartier
of Paris.
Très interessant.
” “My mother’s
vernissage
for her show is
demain soir.
” She looked better now than she had at Thanksgiving. She was still thin, but not as ghostly. Perhaps her heart was slowly mending?

“Give her a break,” I told Christie with my eyes. “No one is really bad here. Just weak.” But my pleading looks were lost. I could see that Christie couldn’t stand Portia.

“I’m going to go use your fabulous electric bathroom,” said Christie, loud and drunk after dessert. “I would pretend I was so rad as to be on a plane to Paris if I weren’t already here.” She pulled the accordion door shut, then immediately opened it just wide enough for her leg to shoot out in a cancan kick, and slammed it back. We could all hear her peeing. Then we heard the beginning of the suction flush, a quick inhale, followed by a loud clanging and a series of “Oh my God!’s.”

She had flushed one of her lipsticks, a creamy pink Chanel that Étienne claimed he had risked his life for in
Bon Marché.
The boys tried to fish it out. One depressed the toilet’s metal center with a wooden spoon while another scooped around with a ladle. But they had no luck. Once we had determined the lipstick was lost, we decided to try to flush the toilet again. This was a bad idea. The bowl filled with water. None of it went down. The level stopped rising right before we had a flood on our hands.

I said not to worry. Since most of the maids’ rooms on my floor didn’t have bathrooms, there was a communal one down the hall. I would be fine.

The dinner party was over.

•   •   •

Portia did not say a word about the lipstick. She sat through the whole affair flipping through her father’s book on the English Romantics. And she made no reference to my near inundation as she said goodbye. Instead, she told me she was impressed with my meal. All prepared on a single electric burner! I was an inspiration. My chocolate mousse was better than at La Truite Dorée, honestly. No wonder I had cured her daddy with it. Where had I learned to cook?

I didn’t technically know how to cook, I said. But when the French cousins I lived with when I was younger realized how much I liked chocolate, they taught me this recipe. It was very simple, all about beating egg whites. You needed dark chocolate and a little coffee, a shot of alcohol. I could show her if she wanted.

Yes, she would like that because she’d spent her whole life thinking that La Truite
had the world’s best mousse, and here I was proving her wrong. “Really, it was
extraordinaire, n’est-ce pas, Étienne?”

“Always keep an open mind, Portia,” said Christie.

fort
y
-five

The next day, I went down to work as usual, telling Lydia my toilet was broken, but that fixing it wasn’t urgent. She did not seem to hear me and proceeded to rattle off a list of errands for tonight’s big opening in St-Germain.

I took Orlando on my rounds, stopping only for a sandwich. I was back at the apartment a little after two.

I knocked on Lydia’s door.

Rather than calling me in, she opened it herself and stood blocking my way.

“Where the hell have you been? How long can it take a person to perform three simple tasks in the outside world? Jesus! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I even climbed all your stairs. I have to talk to you very seriously, right now. I must say, I’m shocked, positively shocked, at how dishonest you’ve been. I really believed you could change after everything I’ve put up with from you. But this is unconscionable.”

Here it was. The bomb was dropping. She must have found out about Olivier. As with the Claudia fiasco, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already dead. I hadn’t been able to envision this moment, and now that I was in it, I still couldn’t. I had no idea what shape things were taking. My heart was pounding and I was very, very hot. Maybe I
was
dying. I was certainly melting. I couldn’t talk. Like an idiot, I stared at her.

“The plumber told me. I had to hear it from the plumber, for Christ’s sake!”

I opened my mouth. It seemed I still had a voice. “Hear what from the plumber?” What plumber could know about Olivier?

“When you told me this morning that your toilet was broken, you never mentioned anything about a lipstick. Did you think it was going to disappear? We could have had a major flood, thousands and thousands worth of damage. This is not the sort of thing you hide. This is not a white lie. I’m furious, and I don’t think it’s at all fair or reasonable for me to have to pay a plumber for something you damaged and then tried to cover up. The bill is for three hundred francs. Add it to your rent next time. And then there will be no need for us to discuss this anymore. Let’s put it behind us.”

Remember, says Mom, it’s the little things that get you. Planes are generally safe. You die in the taxi on the way to or from the airport.

“Wait a second, Lydia, you must have figured out by now that I can’t afford—”

“This is not a question of money. It’s a question of ethics.”

“It was an accident.”

“Why did you lie about it?”

“I’m sorry. I thought it would disappear. Most toilets could handle a lipstick.”

“Don’t start playing the princess now. You’ve got the only maid’s room with a bathroom on your whole floor. We put that in at our own expense.”

“Thank you.”

“Listen, you’re not getting out of this. It’s a good lesson for you.”

At least Portia hadn’t ratted me out. I was grateful to her for this until she took me aside to say she knew her mother was angry and it was too bad I had to pay for the toilet, but it was a very symbolic three hundred francs to her mother. It had nothing to do with the actual money and everything to do with fairness. I had to understand that, no matter what Portia thought, she herself could not get involved. Her mother and I had a working relationship. It would be inappropriate to interfere.

•   •   •

Later, I sat in the garden in lingering evening light, doing letters on an electric typewriter. I had devised a system of extension cords up the back steps into the kitchen. It was one of those evenings where members of the family were keeping to themselves, secretly waiting for someone else to wonder aloud what was happening for dinner.

I was obsessed with one thought. Should I ask Christie for the money? A few months ago, I certainly would have because, even though it was an accident, it was her accident and I was broke. But I was developing a sense, strong if not fully articulated, that when you invited someone as a guest you did not hold them responsible for such things. Call it a code. I knew Mom would say I was being pretentious and unstraightforward, but I could not agree with her here. No, I would not mention the plumber’s bill to Christie.

Still, three hundred francs, symbolic as they might be to someone like Lydia, were going to hurt.

What had gotten into Christie? What a clumsy thing to do. But that, as Lydia would say, was neither here nor there. The point was that the gracious action here was to not tell Christie about it, even though she made twice as much money as I did and Étienne had probably already stolen her another lipstick.

Did this mean that rightness and fairness were not exactly the same thing?

I was losing my daylight and had to type faster. Focus, Katie.

Hesitantly, Clarence started down the garden steps toward me. He tripped on my extension cord, almost fell.

“Blast! Katie, you have to do something about your wire here. Get a bright orange one or some such thing. Something we ancients can actually see. You’re going to break one of our necks.”

No,
you
are going to break your neck on my cord. I will not be the neck-breaker per se. There’s a difference, I thought, a subtle shift in responsibility. “Sorry,” I said.

He was holding an envelope, something for me to mail perhaps. He glanced around. No one.

“Here, take this,” he whispered. “Put it right in your bag. It’s the money for the plumber. Lydia’s not thinking clearly. It’s shameful. You shouldn’t have to pay. She entirely misses the significance of making you pay. She’s lost sight of what it means. But we all know she has other virtues.”

“Are you sure, Clarence? I mean, my friend’s lipstick did break the toilet.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Thanks for this.” I slipped the envelope into my bag. It seemed to me that he partook of my new code, that just as it would have been tacky of me to ask Christie to pay, it would have been negligent of him not to make sure I didn’t either. It all made sense. My newfound ethics were confirmed. “Really, thank you. It helps a lot.”

“Please, never mention it.”

I thought he would leave me to my typing, but he stood there looking at me, eyes beginning to water.

“Can I—do you need something, Clarence?”

“It’s not for me,” he spoke under his breath. “She’s—I’m worried about her.”

“About Lydia?”

He shook his head.

“About Portia?”

“God, no.”

“Oh, then, it’s—”

“Yes.”

“You want me to go and see her?”

“Your friendship means the world to her,” he mumbled. “Day after tomorrow, at ten
A.M.
She’s still in the same place. She’ll be waiting.”

fort
y
-six

Lydia’s opening went off with barely a hitch, the only off-note being Joshua’s drinking too much of the Taittinger, vomiting on the sidewalk outside the doorway, and categorically refusing to attend the celebratory dinner of
intimes
at the Truite Dorée.

Lydia was delighted. Sally and I had both been assigned to eavesdrop on the various invited journalists for her, and we were able to report nothing but praise. Even Clarence said that, despite the “unfortunate” Rushdie element, the show was a triumph.

•   •   •

The following morning, I left Lydia, Portia and Clarence at the breakfast table, half-joking about the hangover Joshua was sleeping off and his insistence that he wasn’t going back to high school because it was bullshit and he had passed the equivalency test and no one could make him.

I set out with Orlando for the Île St-Louis, promising myself I would carry no missives, play no further active role. I wanted to see how Claudia was doing. And I had to tell her that Clarence had sent me, that he was staying with his wife because that was what one did, but that he was not a heartless bastard. Mostly, though, I was going because I missed her.

In the streets, I had the impression that someone was shadowing me, a guilty phantom wafting through the budding trees and silk scarves that brightened the city. It was a windy day, alive, rustling.

To make matters stranger, Orlando kept sniffing the air and craning his neck backward as if he were catching something disturbingly familiar, the rush of odor released by the thaws of late March. Newborn rats and turning soil and the pee of a million nervous poodles. Spring fever.

The only way to get him to move forward was to bribe him with bits of the croissants I had bought for Claudia. By the time I reached her building, there were none left.

I had to knock several times before she opened, peering drowsy and confused through a crack in the door. “Ah, it is you!” She draped me in an exhausted embrace. “Are you all right? Can you survive in that house?”

“Sure, I’m okay. What about you?”

She didn’t answer.

When she let go of me, I saw that she was wearing a lime green nightshirt that barely covered her underpants. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were stony and sunken.

“Wait,” she said. “I will fold the bed so we can sit.”

Without bothering to straighten her tangled sheets, she forced them into the mattress, then pushed the mattress into the sofa frame and closed it hard.

As she leaned over to shove, the backs of her thighs thick and curved, I saw pubic hair.

We sat, bits of bedding overflowing between our legs, as on a messy sandwich.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what is going on. How are the children? How is the lost boy?”

“Pretty lost.” I chuckled, immediately cringing at my own meanness. After all, Joshua was the only member of the Schell family who had ever spontaneously thanked me for anything. Granted, it was a plate of Thanksgiving dinner, but he had been sweet about it, and here I was sounding cynical for the sake of hollow amusement. I tried to backpedal. “I mean, it’s not easy for a boy like him in that family. I’m sure he has all kinds of stuff going on that we know nothing about.”

“Of course he does. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t have secrets,” she said, shaking out her hair and blinking her eyes into something like alertness.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anyone’s secrets,” I said, hastening to add, “because I don’t know them.”

“When did Clarence ask you to come find me?”

“Yesterday. I’ve tried to call a couple of times, but it’s been crazy at the house with Lydia’s show. I assumed you were gone.”

“I wanted to leave Paris. But I could not stay away. And, no matter what he tells you, he does not wish me to go.”

“Oh, Claudia, please don’t take it that way. He didn’t ask me to come because he hopes to be with you. He’s worried about you, but he can’t be with you anymore.”

“So that is why he fucks me?”

“What?”

“Oh, he can be with me! Believe me.”

I had been trapped. For a second I thought to ask her if she wasn’t imagining being fucked by Clarence, but I knew she wasn’t that crazy. Clarence had had me completely fooled. I wondered if Lydia knew.

“Claudia, I can’t help you anymore. I mean, I can’t be a messenger anymore. I’m not a spy.”

“I do not need
you
to spy! I can see Clarence on my own. But we are friends, no, you and I?”

“Of course we are.”

•   •   •

I managed to avoid being alone with Clarence for two days before he cornered me in the garden again.

It was a strange time, what with the letdown after the opening. Joshua insisted with mounting vehemence that he was not returning to boarding school but staying in Paris to be “a thorn in all of your sides, and because it’s pretty here.” Lydia stopped arguing with him, which Portia interpreted as passive acceptance and yet another piece of evidence that her brother was a spoiled brat and it was “totally unfair, but I’ve learned to expect that over the years.” She spent most of her time in her room, writing in a lime green leather-bound notebook which she locked with a tiny bronze key, and changing clothes.

Clarence clucked and shook his head a lot. He and Lydia had a couple of private conversations, from which he emerged trembling and mumbling, as though he had been told in no uncertain terms to deal with the situation of his son and were testing out various threats under his breath.

When he caught me, I was typing again at the the wrought iron table. My first thought was that he would make some mock-curmudgeon comment about the threat to his bones posed by my extension chord snaking down the steps. But when I looked at his face, there was no trace of professorly twinkle, only a dour and secretive purpose.

He did not beat around the bush. “Katie,” he whispered, “I have to ask you one more favor. And I promise it will be the last.”

“I don’t mind seeing her. I’ve told her I can’t ever carry messages again though.”

“This is the final one.” He laughed in mild self-deprecation. “The message to end all messages. This is the one to tell her I can never see her again, that she has to go, that the situation is untenable.”

“But didn’t you already tell her that? And then you got back in touch?”

“She got back in touch.”

“She told me you have been
with
her again.”

“I had no choice.”

My grin must have betrayed a certain irony because although my answer was a simple, “I see,” he proceeded to accuse me of a sarcasm that was unlike me. He said he was disappointed.

I said I thought Claudia would be fine if he were honest with her.

He agreed, which was why he was giving me one last letter to carry to her, telling her in no uncertain terms that he could not see her again and that if she would not leave Paris then he would. He and Lydia were talking about returning to the States in a few months anyway. He would simply precede her if he had to. But he suggested Claudia go to Berkeley or to Morocco, somewhere she could stop hiding.

“Clarence, I’m not sure I should do this. I mean, Lydia . . .” I looked for some kind of sign in the budding rose vine on the garden wall, but it was a maze.

“We’re doing this
for
Lydia. Carrying this letter is the most important thing you could possibly do for Lydia right now, don’t you see? But if you can’t do it, you can’t do it. I’ll drop it in the mail. It’s simply that coming from your hands the letter has more meaning. You lend it weight because she trusts you.
And
you soften the blow, Katie.”

His face was still thin from his illness. His skin cragged around his eyes and pulled back from his pillowy lips so that he had a sort of tubercular pout which I found both repulsive and irresistible, as though I could cure it.

“Really,” he pushed out a smile, “it’s rather important, this last letter.”

“Okay,” I said.

Sadly, I watched him walk away. I had to betray his trust. I could not deliver his letter without first telling Lydia what was going on.

Was I choosing the stronger, healthier parent over the one who really loved me? Was that horrible? No, I told myself. I was learning to sort through experience, to find where loyalty lay, to be straight. From now on, I was determined to do a good job no matter the sacrifices.

Then I was hit with a further layer of compunction. The truly straight thing to do would be to explain myself to Clarence before I told Lydia. I wasn’t sure I could manage it, but I should. And Clarence, because he was a grown-up and a father, would ultimately understand my need to blossom into an honest human being. He would allow himself to be sacrificed. It would be bittersweet for him, but he would forgive and admire me in time, because that’s what fathers do.