Lessons in French (6 page)

eleven

That evening, Clarence sent Claudia and me to a Pasolini movie about Christ’s life, scored with Bach’s
St. Matthew Passion.
He said it was heartbreakingly beautiful. He wanted to know how we would react.

As the movie played, black and white, lyrical, unstudied, cast with ordinary Italians playing peasants who were at once beatific and disillusioned, I recounted it to Olivier in my head. I saw his eyes react, his chin cocked in its listening pose. I had never been so focused—or so distracted.

Several times, the heat of Claudia’s gaze lit my face, and I swiveled to see her expression like that of the people on the screen watching Jesus suffer. Their eyes deepened to the swell of the gorgeous choruses, so that they looked both infinitely wise and clueless. Claudia’s pupils burned me with the same idiot understanding, blessed somehow, but also brutally judgmental.

I squirmed. Yet I was touched by her attention. I knew she could sense an obsession under my skin. I wanted to describe it to her, to tell her about Olivier, to begin to forge a real bond. And even though I couldn’t talk to her, her growing friendship was a comfort.

“What did you think of the film?” Claudia asked at a traffic light on the way home.

“Clarence was right. It was beautiful. The music and the faces were so full.”

She kept staring at me, waiting for me to break through my own babble.

“It seemed so innocent that I feel like it was kind of deceptive,” I blurted.

“Is it bad to be deceptive?” She was pushing me to confess whatever my secret was. I wanted to believe it was out of a growing intimacy, but I couldn’t be sure.

“It’s hard not to be a little deceptive,” I owned. “I’m not talking about lying really. Just that you can’t always bare your feelings like the people in that movie. You can’t be moved all the time. For me, it would be like I was always drawing, having this intense scruple about getting it exactly right. With no blurs. I’d go crazy. Life isn’t like that.”

“Ah, but you also go crazy in life with too much hiding. I think you will learn to be more relaxed as you get older, Katie.”

“I’m trying.” By this point, I had little idea what we were talking about, only the conviction that she was boring into my soul, and that, no matter how well-meaning she was, and how much I enjoyed her companionship, I wanted my soul to myself for the time being.

“I know you are trying,” she said gently.

Deciding perhaps that she had gone far enough for one evening, she let me be the rest of the way home.

Grateful for the simple sounds of traffic and footfall along the boulevard Raspail, I returned to my inner arguments about Olivier.

It wasn’t as if by going to the Fer à Cheval tomorrow, I might betray a friend. Portia was not my friend. She was a thin and imperious telephone voice with high boots, a blond face in an expensive frame in a house in New York City that had nothing to do with me. And Olivier did not love her. He’d made that very clear.

I told myself that seeing Olivier wasn’t wrong. It was my own business. If I were to give in to the temptation to confide in Claudia right now, she would tell Clarence, and I had a strong feeling that no matter how much he liked me he would not be sympathetic to my falling into the arms of his daughter’s ex-boyfriend.

Clarence and Claudia seemed the types to condone a romantic secret. Only not my particular one.

When Claudia and I arrived at the apartment, she made a lamb couscous, with raisins and chickpeas, while I clipped and read articles on Germany. I was familiar now with the names of the players, with Kohl and Honecker.

What had we thought of the Pasolini? asked Clarence as we ate. Did we like
cinéma vérité?
Did it make us feel truthful?

I said that there was something infuriating about the gorgeous actors: they were totally innocent and yet they had an almost creepy all-knowing quality, kind of like children in a horror movie.

Again, Claudia’s gaze seared me with suspicious concern.

Clarence laughed. “Horror, you say? Not bad. And Claudia,” he turned to her as to the next pupil, “what did you think?” His tone with her was no different from with me. We were his little girls.

“I think what’s interesting is the way the power of chance plays such a strong role in Christ’s destiny. He doesn’t have our modern egotistical notion of self-determination. He follows a path.”

Happenstance and fate, I was learning, were among Clarence’s favorite themes. He expressed annoyance at the common assumption that we do everything for a reason, however conscious, that we are actually capable of guiding ourselves through life and therefore have most of the responsibility for our situations.

He thought that way too much power was attributed these days to psychology. As he experienced more and more of life—he was in his fifties now—he felt a growing respect for the random as well as for Greek tragedy. So much, indeed most, of what happens is beyond our control, he argued. And it is both self-aggrandizing and self-flagellating to maintain otherwise.

I agreed with him and gave an example straight from the mouth of my cousin Jacques: “Madame Bovary was
such
a victim of circumstance. She only committed adultery because of the limits of her situation. How can you blame her?”

“Precisely!” There was a happy camaraderie in his voice, the professor letting the student in.

“Of course,” he continued, “I’m not advocating passivity, per se. That would be preposterous. No, not passivity, but there is a wisdom to acknowledging fate, and the modern world is losing sight of it, don’t you agree? Claudia, you’re awfully quiet.”

“You know what I think,” she sighed with mock mystery. “Or at least you should.”

I told them I had never had a couscous before, that it hadn’t been in Solange’s repertoire and that it was delicious.

“I’ll teach you how to make it,” said Claudia.

The phone rang. Clarence picked up, grinned, then frowned. “No, my dear, I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing Olivier off for good, but his things are gone and he’s left the keys, thank God. I believe he’s in a hotel for a couple of days before he flies to New York, but I’m not privy to his schedule, nor do I wish to be.” His frown deepened as he listened. I could hear the higher tones of Portia’s voice. “No, Portia. I have no idea what he said. Would you like to speak to Katie? She handled it, I believe. Or else Madame Fidelio dealt with him. As I say, I wasn’t here.” He rolled his eyes in Claudia’s and my direction. The notes trickling from the receiver grew shriller. “Listen, Portia, I love and admire you and I have to tell you that boy is an idiot and you are better off without him.”

Had Olivier done it already? Had he told Portia goodbye over the phone?

Clarence grimaced. “I tell you I don’t know. Here, I’ll pass you to Katie.”

I braced myself but was saved by Portia’s shriek of “Don’t you dare!” sailing out into the kitchen.

I understood her. Why would she want to share her heartbreak and humiliation with a total stranger?

When Clarence hung up, he clucked, shook his head, sat down to his couscous. “Portia says,” he chuckled sadly, “that she senses Olivier pulling away.” He popped a chickpea into his mouth. “Rubbish, I say. Rubbish, Portia.”

“Don’t you think you should be sympathetic to your daughter if she is in pain?” asked Claudia.

“Yeah,” I echoed lamely.

“I suppose I should try,” he answered. “But it’s hard when I know the pain will seem absurd in a matter of weeks.”

Sighing, Claudia reached for his hand, which he whipped away with a significant glance at me. A tiny suspicion peaked, but I let it flow away.

“Is everyone excited to see Lydia?” I asked cheerfully, realizing as I spoke that I was testing the waters to see whether or not Claudia would stick around when Lydia finally arrived day after tomorrow.

“You’re going to be rather busy, my dear Katie,” quipped Clarence. “Lydia can be a bloody slave driver when she’s working. You ought to rest up tomorrow night.”

I reddened. I had other plans.

“I will clean up all of my papers and my affairs.” Claudia’s voice was a hiss of escaping steam.

“Perhaps you should, dear. Lydia’s a bit of a stickler for tidiness.”

As he began to hum the opening theme of the
St. Matthew Passion
, she rose impatiently from the table.

Once Claudia had left for Montparnasse, I teased Clarence gently that she had a schoolgirl crush on him. “She’s even worried that Lydia doesn’t appreciate you enough because she’s too American to get you. It’s classic, right? Oedipal? She’s fascinated with you.” Possessed by my own impossible infatuation, it was a relief to talk about someone else’s.

“You’re both very imaginative young women,” he said, smiling his dough-lipped smile and drumming his fingers on his wineglass.

twelve

I reached the little horseshoe bar at dusk. Olivier was there already, sipping something brown that I guessed was whiskey. As I caught his eye, I could feel my face a confusion of deep blush and the pink chill of the first really cool day of fall. The only coat I had that didn’t embarrass me was too thin for this weather. I had walked fast to stay warm. My whole body was pumping.

There were half a dozen people sprinkled around the old wooden U-shaped bar. When Olivier pulled me in for a kiss in front of all of them, I was stunned. He introduced me to the bartender, Michel, dark and foxishly thin. He said that since it might be tricky for me to get mail from him at the house, he would write to me in care of Michel. He untied the old black and white plaid scarf that had been Daddy’s. Mom had given it to me when I headed to college on the East Coast, saying she had saved it all these years because she always knew it would come in
handy.

“I love this,” Olivier said, rubbing it to his cheek. “It’s so soft.”

“Thanks. It was my dad’s.”

“It
is
your dad’s.”

Michel asked me what I would like to drink and all I could think of was a Kir.

From the bar, Olivier walked me to the Place des Vosges, the sixteenth-century red brick square with geometric grass and black iron benches. Victor Hugo had lived here. It was Olivier’s favorite square in all of Paris. He took me to a bench under a chestnut tree where he made me promise to sit and read his letters. He wanted to picture me there.

He felt me shiver and draped his coat over mine. Then he gave me his hand. He began to massage my palm so that his
chevalière
pressed and rose, rose and pressed.

“Your ring is like a hint of lost treasure,” I laughed, “like the one thing that was saved from the shipwreck.”

He laughed too. “It’s all very tragicomic, isn’t it? I could have had this whole other life like you could have had a completely different childhood with your dad being some kick-ass movie director. We can’t take anything for granted, can we?”

“And Portia can?” I ventured.

“I told you she’s spoiled. She thinks she has desires, but they’re all just about acquiring more to pile on to what she already has. There’s nothing burning.”

“At least she has good taste.”

“There’s that.”

“Have you actually told her you’re breaking up with her?”

“She’s not stupid. She knows.”

When he kissed me, he whispered, “This is true. We understand one another.
On se comprend.”

But I didn’t understand anything except what I felt like doing there and then. Which was so obviously what he felt like do-
ing too.

The old family crest pressed softly into my ear and then into my back, my legs. His hands were running through my hair.

I pulled away so that he could look at me. “Olivier, what are we doing? What about Portia? Are we doing something terrible to her?”

“People are meant to follow their hearts. There’s nothing else.” He gave me another whiskey-sugared kiss.

I succumbed to the magic of selfishness and went with him back to his quirky room on the third floor of his
hôtel de charme,
steps away from the Picasso Museum.

•   •   •

At six the following morning, after a last kiss and a whispered “See you again tonight? Promise?” I padded down the hotel’s narrow red-carpeted stairs, past the darkened reception desk and out into the cold rose-tinged city. I decided to walk home.

I wound through the Marais back to the Place des Vosges, ran my fingers briefly over our dewy bench, and resolved, as I buried my hands in my coat pocket, to treat myself to a pair of gloves the next time I was paid. I went through the brick archway leading out onto the rue de Rivoli and headed for the small bridge to the Île St-Louis.

While crossing the river, I formed a perverse desire to come clean with Lydia. What better time than today, when she was finally to arrive in Paris? After all, she was a mother and mothers forgave and she obviously didn’t think Olivier was right for Portia and maybe she would be grateful to me for taking him away, or at least understand. I had already lied about having the money to afford this job, and about knowing her work my whole life. Yet there was still time to explain. I did not want to lie any more. You could only do so much to please people. When I saw her, I would tell the truth.

But the shuttered shops and cafés of the tiny island, with the hidden worlds and lives they suggested, filled me with a very different idea: to keep my own life private, to carve out a space for myself in this new Paris I was inhabiting. I was going to see Olivier one more time, tonight. And it would be
our
time.

Mom’s voice floated to mind. “Separate the personal from the professional, Katie. It’s one of the fundamentals of a healthy life. Never mix. Keeps you straight.”

As I reached the tip of the Île St-Louis, the Île de la Cité came into view. The flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, so imposing in their silence, offered a fresh perspective, the beauty of Olivier’s sleeping face, the perfect stonework of his chest. On principal, I had never drawn from memory, but I thought for the first time I might be able to.

At the cathedral, I faced off with a gargoyle and was struck by the potential ugliness of my actions. But then I heard Olivier: “Please, Kate, I know you would never want to hurt anyone. Believe me that it’s over between Portia and me. I’ve been trying to tell her for months, but she won’t hear it. She’s never not gotten her way, and it’s a shock to her. She’s a casualty of privilege. They’re all casualties, Lydia, Clarence, Josh. It’ll be a shock to all of them for Portia to be left. It might take a little time to sink in. Portia’s unstable. But she’s not your responsibility.”

“I suppose not.”

“I can do this,” he had said across an inch of pillow. “I can get out of this situation. This family is a vortex. But we can’t let them rule our lives. Not after I just spent weeks in Italy thinking about you.” Another kiss. “This is
our
twist of fate.”

I smiled at the gargoyle and continued on my way toward the Left Bank.

At the base of the boulevard St-Michel, I looked at the sleeping giant, Gibert Jeune, the enormous yellow-awninged bookstore I was coming to love. Like the novels it housed, it filled me with a sense of hope all tangled up with impending tragedy. My chest tightened at the memory of Olivier’s finger scrolling across my breasts.

What if all that playful scribbling on my body vanished, along with our magic spot? What if there were no letters? Or the letters were not warm? Or he went home and found he was in love with Portia after all? What if he tasted the Hédiard goose liver while contemplating one of his perfectly pressed shirts and slipped back into the life he deserved?

A drunk resting against a thick tree told me it couldn’t be that bad. “
Allez, mademoiselle
!” he grunted. “Give us a smile.”

As soon as his voice had broken the morning silence, I began to hear other noises, small cars coughing into the fog, the rustle of falling leaves, various footsteps. All the way home, the day grew in my ears so that I had to struggle to keep a pocket of silence hidden inside me, a place to return to later on my own.

As I became fully aware of the action of the sky, cloudy and dramatic, I finally came to terms with the fact that Lydia was coming home from Germany today. This was no time to brood.