Lessons in French (29 page)

Of course it was all the same water. It’s the same water everywhere. And of course this part of Versailles with its windy gravel paths and shadowy plantings is no wilder or less contrived than any other. It is simply portrayed in a different style.

The ghosts out here aren’t any more potent or true to life than the ghosts back in the palace staring at themselves in endless mirrors.

Getting back to nature indeed. What a joke. You never got back to anything.

“I’m going to leave here tomorrow. I have some family to see. It’s important.”

“I’m sorry. I thought I could truly care for you.”

Well, think again.

I poured the water from my glass bottle slowly back into the stream under Marie-Antoinette’s phony bridge.

fift
y
-ei
g
ht

Étienne came to meet me at the train station in Orléans. His leather pants sagging, he was waiting on the
quai
.

He saw the worry in my eyes and preempted me.

“I like being skinny! I’ve been
au régime
here. It’s driving Maman crazy. She makes me eat her choucroute and I puke like a supermodel. My Mick Jagger ass is growing more and more pubescent with each passing day. Don’t try to pretend you aren’t jealous.”

As soon as we sat down in the car, I started to cry.

My tears did no good, he said. He said that if I wanted to make him feel better, I should talk about my life.
Ta vie absurde chez la famille papaye.
He needed
distraction.

But I was sorry for all the times—

Not yet!
Distraction!

So I told him all about breaking up with Olivier.

“Finally you leave that silly boy!
Mon dieu
, Katie, you can be so slow.”

“I’m a slow learner. My mom always said I was a late bloomer, a long-term slow-growth investment.”

“What’s going on with
la salope
and the mad family?”

I did not answer.

We drove in silence, stopped at a light, then he looked at me through those sharp lashes. “Why do you look so culpable?”

“I keep flipping back and forth between feeling like I haven’t done anything wrong and this horrible guilt that I’ve been bad to this family and wasted my time and my money and my future. Remember when Lydia found out about the letters I was carrying for Clarence and Claudia?”

He nodded, shifted into gear.

“Lydia basically kept saying I wouldn’t amount to anything, but then she asked me over and over if I’d made my decision about whether or not to stay. It was so manipulative. And it made
me
feel manipulative too because I kept apologizing. And I’m still doing it, every day. Only halfway through the apologies I want to scream because I don’t understand why
I’m saying sorry
to
them
.”

“
Arrête!
Confession is only masochism. Can’t you see with these letters and her husband’s silly affair she knew exactly what was in store for her? All victims of deceit, they know on some level. Portia, she knows too. Believe me!”

“No, she can’t know!”

“It won’t kill her, or she’d already be dead. Every time I’ve been cheated on, I realize afterward that I knew. And Portia, I can tell from the smells in her room, from the wardrobe, from every little sign I read that she is like her mother, and her mother, she’s such a liar, a professional liar. It’s all completely controlled, always. And of course they want you to stay with them, these people. They are begging to be infiltrated. They want you in their devil’s pact. And you are not critical enough. All you have to do is look at the bitch’s photographs to know what she is.”

“You didn’t tell me you hated her show that much.”

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings at the time, but I did despise that stupid West German biker with the bananas who let her take his picture because he thought he looked generous, and she did it, cynically, to make him look like a fool with no grasp of the situation. That one in particular was arrogant. But they all were, I thought. She was the only one who knew the story. The people in the pictures, they were all clueless and vain-looking.”

“That’s not true! She found those images. She may be a lot of things, but she’s a great photographer. She is such a good artist that the rest of her hardly matters. Her crazy children and her stupid possessions and her papaya diet, all is forgiven because of what she makes. I believe that. She frames her images, with a time stamp, but they are not chosen. Can’t you see? You can’t not see just because you can’t stand her.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “So, she is something of an artist.”

“Thank you. But I know that doesn’t mean that I should take everything she dishes out. If I were to stay, I would do things differently.”

He accelerated around a curve into a suburban housing development. The houses were white with red mansard roofs and metal shutters. I wondered which one would prove to be ours.

He drove past a senior recreation center, turned onto a street called the rue Racine. All the while, he spoke about Lydia. “Why are we fighting about some voyeuristic egomaniac?”

“Because life is about people, not hard facts, right? And I’ve learned a lot from her.”

“For example?”

“How to use chance as a tool.”

“
Quoi?
If you learned that, it was from living, not from watching her. Stop defending her. Admit that you’re angry because it’s frustrating and ugly if you don’t.”

I felt my weight sink into my shoes, my shoes push through the shallow carpet of his tiny car to feel the steel below.

“You’re right. The whole reason I got into such a mess is that all I ever want is for people to like me, to give them back beautiful reflections. I sensed it was going to be crazy, from the very beginning, and I wanted too badly to be someone and to be seduced and to have the kind of adventure my dad would be proud of. I wanted experience. I thought experience would teach me who I was and that I would like me once I finally knew me. I had no foresight.”

“Foresight?” He laughed. “If there were such a thing as foresight, would I be like this today?”

We pulled into a carport.

Through panes of frosted glass, I recognized the fast-approaching forms of Solange and Jacques. I broke into a run. But before I could reach the front door, they burst out and took me in their arms. They had grown old, but they felt the same.

“
La petite Parisienne
,
la Rastignac américaine
,” they called me without a hint of irony. I had grown. I looked smart now, too sophisticated to be wearing a ripped t-shirt. Solange said she would sew it for me. Help hide my bony shoulders. Why was everyone trying to be so thin these days? I must be starving.

“Stunning but true, Solange has cooked you lunch,” said Jacques.

“We are all stuffed!” Étienne laughed. “
Maman
is stuffing me.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek. She flushed. “Everything is ‘
comme chez Hédiard’
these days, right, my dear parents. You can feed me until they find a cure.
C’est quelque chose.
”

Jacques took Solange’s hand and, for a second after we emerged from our embrace, they stood very still in their doorway, staring at me. The young woman they saw knew in this moment that she loved them unconditionally. And they loved her. They were her family. She did not have to perform. The simplicity was stunning.

I looked around. So this was the house they had been building since their youth, salting away the money year after year from their teachers’ salaries, first for the land, then the foundation, the construction, the kitchen, the bookshelves for
The Human Comedy,
the marble staircase, the conversion of the attic into a sewing room for Solange. They might be socialists, but their faith in the concrete on their little plot of land in the city of their birth was the most bourgeois, sentimental, beautiful thing I had ever seen.

At lunch, which was delicious, they asked me all about Mom. Her job? Her home? Her prospects for retirement? Simple basic questions that Lydia had never bothered with.

When Solange brought out her chocolate mousse, I told her I had made it for my new boss to great success.

“You see, Maman,” said Étienne, “your fame rings deep in the heart of the Sixième.”

After lunch, Étienne carried my suitcase up to a small guest room. Solange had made up my bed with the same ruffled pillow I had slept on as a girl. And she had framed a photo of Étienne and me at Versailles, looking much happier than I remembered. Jacques had left me a copy of
Le Père Goriot,
which he had had me read aloud with him when I was a kid, discussing its finer grammatical and descriptive points in order to teach me “real” French.

“Étienne,” I said as he sat down beside me on my bed, “it’s good to be here. You and Jacques and Solange are my home. I should have come sooner.”

“I know.” He sighed. “After all my rebellion, they are the ones who will take care of me and ask no questions. It would be cruel, if it weren’t so lovely.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to you after that movie about Jesus dying. I’m sorry I didn’t think things through. I hope I haven’t been hurting your feelings, but you didn’t tell me. Why? I must have seemed very callous. I was calling you a drama queen and you were really sick. I feel like an idiot.”

“No, I wanted to believe that you knew and were pretending you didn’t to cheer me up. I’m perverse. You know that. It’s part of my charm. Stop crying.”

He sat down beside me on the flouncy twin bed. I thought he might put his arm on my shoulder, but he simply stayed within touching distance.

“I said, stop crying.”

“Étienne, I forgive you for every time you were ever mean to me.”

“For the lice?” he asked.

“For the lice.”

“For the chocolate éclair?” he asked.

“That too.”

“For the time I ignored you at Versailles?”

We had the same memories. How rare.

“Almost. I almost forgive you for Versailles.”

“You know it was because I thought your papa had died that day and that they were going to tell you and I wouldn’t have any idea how to act?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“I was very uncomfortable with you because you were such a tragic little girl and they were all so worried about you. It’s a hard place for a young boy. So, forgiveness?”

“I said, almost.”

“Then I suppose my Mick Jagger ass can rest in peace.”

“You know, Clarence met Mick Jagger at a party the other night with Lydia. He said Mick was surprisingly smart and well read and ‘not at all what you’d think.’ Mick talked to Clarence for a long time about fashion.”

“Oh, I am so relieved that my idol is
cultivé!
I was deeply worried about his mind for a while there. Please tell Clarence when you next see him that I want to lick him all over.”

“You really don’t.”

Étienne hummed a few bars of “Sympathy for the Devil.”

“You haven’t heard from Christie either, have you?” he asked.

“No, but I’m sure we’ll hear from her as soon as she’s settled. You know Christie. She’ll have to get the whole lay of the land in her new world. Then I’m sure she’ll be in touch. She won’t forget us.”

“Oh, she won’t forget us, but she won’t be in touch for about five years. That’s what I predict. She needs time away. In five years, she’ll glide back into our lives in a fabulous lawyer outfit as though nothing has been and no time has passed and she doesn’t owe us any explanation.”

fift
y
-nine

“What’s the matter, Katie?” asked Solange. “You’re not eating like you usually do. Don’t you like my beef?”

“It’s August,” said Jacques, gently mocking. “Beef bourgignon is perhaps a bit rough in August.”

“No, it’s not that,” I said. “It’s delicious. Any time of year. I’m just sad to be leaving here. I’m not ready to go back to Paris yet. I feel like I’ve only just come home.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Étienne. “Sadness is never reason enough to waste food. Not when there is china to collect.”

I smiled and looked up at the glassed-in shelf where Solange displayed her collection of porcelain pillboxes. There was a pea pod, a violin case, a hat box, a bread basket, a bright blue egg with gold trim, a perfume flask, none measuring more than a couple of inches.

“Katie, you are nervous about something, no?” A pearl onion suspended at her lips, she searched me. “Is it very upsetting, this situation?”

“I don’t think I can go back to Lydia.”

“What will your mother say?”

“I don’t know, but something about being here makes me realize I need to change. It’s been fascinating working for her, but I can’t be in her house without feeling like a liar all the time.”

“They make you lie!” Étienne put down his fork.

“Étienne,” said Jacques softly, “this is beautiful meat your mother has bought and prepared. Please try.”

Étienne looked into his plate as at an unfordable river.

I forced down a stringy bite.

“I’ll finish Étienne’s,” I tried to laugh. “Just give me some time.”

Solange began to tear. “It is difficult for us to understand the rejection you young people feel. When you are upset, you reject things. We spent our life with not enough. The war when we were children. It’s unimaginable to leave a plate of beef. But what do we know about today?”

“We’re trying,” said Jacques.

“You’re amazing,” I said. “We’re sorry—right, Étienne?”

“No, you’re flawed actually. If only you’d made veal, I’d be devouring it. It’s August, Maman.”

She pretended to slap him.

“So, Katie, if you have decided not to go back to the Sixième, then perhaps you can simply call them,” said Jacques. “Or do you have work to finish?”

It wasn’t until Jacques said it that it became real. In a burst of gratitude, I grabbed his hand. I couldn’t work for the Schells anymore.

“I have to do one more thing before I can leave,” I said. “I spoke to Lydia yesterday. She wants me home tonight to help get ready for a photo shoot. She and Clarence cut their vacation a few days short because
Libération
is coming to take her picture tomorrow, for a feature article about her work. And she must have gotten into some kind of fight with Clarence again because she said they weren’t speaking and she didn’t want him there because she doesn’t want to look angry in the photos.”

“I thought they were all harmonious in their fury about the son,” said Étienne.

“So did I. But things change fast.”

I tried to picture the
entracte
between the old marriage and the future, during which each player was mostly alone in his or her study. It was hard to know if they were finished or if they were pausing for breath.

“Perhaps she has decided to punish him,” said Étienne.

“It all sounds so decadent.” Solange sighed. “You are better off without them, Katie.”

“They probably throw away food all day long!” Étienne lit up with impish glee. “They hurl it all over the furniture and call the concierge in to clean it up once they’ve had their fun.”

Jacques and Solange both shivered and dug into their beef.

•   •   •

That very night, I found myself in Lydia’s office, ready to tell her about Olivier, to say that I had to leave. I would see her through the photo shoot. Then I would go to New York and learn to paint. I was trembling to join the world of talkers instead of staring dumbly up at it from the underside of a puddle.

But she beat me to the punch.

“Katherine, tell me something. Do you have a conscience?”

“Of course I have a conscience.”

“Then write to Portia and apologize for what you’ve done. She knows now about the dalliance with Claudia and how it was managed by you. You cannot imagine how devastated she is. Especially since we’ve all found out what kind of fiend Claudia is—what she has done to our family. Portia thought you were her close friend.”

“But, isn’t she upset with Clarence?” Lydia ignored the anger in my voice.

“Of course she is. She won’t speak to him now that she has the details. At first, she thought his little indiscretion might be yet another reason to feel sorry for the man. But finally, the girl understands what I’ve been going through all these years while she’s been siding so blindly with him, and I’m getting a few moments of her sympathy. Maybe because she herself knows now what it is to be betrayed? By Olivier, of course. Anyway, she’s shattered. Still, she sees why her father tried to keep his sordid life a secret from her, to shelter her. But, you, you had no business lying to any of us. She needs to hear from you that you do care about her and value her friendship, otherwise her faith in friendship itself is destroyed. She needs this now with all this craziness about Joshua and her father. It’s no skin off your back to show her you care.”

“Lydia, there’s nothing I can do for Portia. What could I possibly say?”

“Don’t pretend to be so naïve. You know what to say.”

“I can’t write to Portia, Lydia. I haven’t been her friend.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. You’re starting to sound as mopey as she does.”

“Lydia, the whole time I’ve been here I’ve been seeing Olivier. It’s over, but—”

I lost my voice. Her face went out of focus. I tried to steady my gaze on it as I sunk into a chair beside her. I waited for her to grow fangs, to rise, to strike.

But she kept a marble silence.

Then she began to laugh. “You idiot, idiot girl,” she said. “You really need some tough love, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Listen, I know you could use some kind of recommendation for a job or an art school. I mean, do you know
anyone
? I could give you a handful of names, people I know at magazines and galleries back home, depending on what you want to do, although you have no idea, do you? But Portia will have her letter from you first.”

“Did you hear what I just said? Until a few days ago, I was seeing Olivier. I’m not writing Portia a letter. I am not her friend.” I was laying myself stark naked, and she didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m not asking you to tell Portia about Olivier,” she said with an eerie plainness. “I’m asking you to apologize to her for what you did to us, with Claudia. Olivier is neither here nor there. I’ve known about you two forever. My dear, how do you think I found out about those letters in the first place?”

“Oh my God.”

“Olivier tells me everything. He can’t help himself.”

“He called you after I told him about Clarence and Claudia in London?”

“He called me from Heathrow, before his flight took off, to tell me Clarence was sleeping with Claudia and you were ‘stuck’ in the middle. He couldn’t even wait until he got home. He hates Clarence more than he ever liked you. The boy is obsessed with his mother and hates his father. He’s a pretty transparent case, my dear,” she said.

“Did he tell you about Versailles?”

“After you left him there, he came into town and brought me some spring rolls, the naughty thing. How was your family in Orléans?”

“I think I have to go now.”

“Just be here for me for the shoot tomorrow, and then you can do whatever the hell you want. But if you care about your future, I have one simple request and you know what it is. Now get out of here. Go sleep on everything.”