Lessons in French (9 page)

“I know what you mean,” Olivier had whispered through my tears. “Our lives have not been easy.” And then, with a few strokes of his body, he had transformed all my anxiety into a predawn orgasm.

Why did Olivier have to work so hard and so far away while these
garçons
enjoyed life in Paris in their parents’ plush apartments? Why had he lost everything that they so blithely had? Olivier was a disinherited prince, working his way to what others came by effortlessly. Although we were from very different worlds, he too had to create his own luck.

Suddenly, I heard the first few notes of a Chopin nocturne coming from the baby grand. It was Count Bastien himself at the keyboard. The Chupa Chups
lollipops from the
dame pipi,
who sold them in the club’s bathroom along with lip gloss and tissue packs and perfume spritzes, bounced in his blazer pocket as he played. And he played beautifully. Any hardness to him that I had been nurturing dripped away on the notes. His eyes were bright with concentration.

I wondered if I understood anything at all.

ei
g
hteen

“This is unacceptable!” Lydia was pointing to a puddle of dog pee dangerously close to her Rococo clock, which was still on the floor because she had fired Clarence’s painters and the apartment walls were in limbo. “I can’t live like this!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was supposed to walk Orlando on weekends. I thought Clarence usually did it.”

“Well, Clarence overslept today and obviously you did too and the ultimate responsibility has to be yours. Or the two of you have to come to an agreement because I have too much work to do for things to fall apart around me.”

It was Saturday at noon. I had gone to bed at nine that morning, after the night at the Bains Douches, not drunk but not unpoisoned. While Lydia was yelling, I heard an alternation of techno music and Chopin, but could not keep both in my head at once, the way you can’t see a duck and a rabbit simultaneously in that famous Wittgenstein drawing we studied in freshman philosophy.

“Listen, I’ve got England, I’ve got Germany, I’ve got people coming over tonight. On top of everything I’ve got to entertain, and I cannot have this!” She gestured to the wet floor, her eyes rounder and more reflective than ever so that they shone with all the colors of the compromised living room, the rich cushions, the bronze of the clock, the gleam of urine, the glare of windows. I thought I was seeing a Cubist painting when suddenly her eyes were on me, and there I was in bright shards.

“No, I cannot have this!” She ripped her gaze away from me and left the room.

I went to the kitchen to find a rag and some soap, and there I saw the empty honey jar, which was what I had come down for in the first place—a spoonful of honey to put into the tea I had planned to carry back up to my
chambre de bonne
for a leisurely and reflective weekend morning.

Fine, I’ll buy my own honey, I thought while I was cleaning up Orlando’s pee, careful not to touch the goddamned clock. The poor bronze fairy looked put-upon caressing the snake above the clock face. It was quarter past twelve. Hell, from now on, I can buy all my own food. She’s not my mother.

I scrubbed the floor thoroughly, with creeping bitterness, checking and rechecking my work.

When I came out of the living room, and into the hallway, rag in a soapy bucket, Lydia was walking toward me as if by coincidence.

She had softened. “Listen,” she said, “I’m very tense right now. I can’t tell you too much, but I’m worried about Salman and I need to go see him. And I’ve got to go back to Germany soon too. I have a lot on my mind. So, why don’t you talk to Clarence about the dog and figure it out between the two of you? After all, he’s on sabbatical and his book has nothing timely about it. Although I guess you could argue that fashion theory is going to go out of fashion pretty soon.” She laughed and I found myself joining her in nervous relief. “So, he can take some responsibility for the household and I’m sure he’d be delighted to coordinate with you. He adores you, you know. I mean, if you ever want to go away for a weekend, simply clear it with him and make sure he knows he’s on duty for Orlando. I’m afraid I absolutely can’t be counted on right now for this sort of thing.”

She avoided looking at the bucket in my hands. The actual fact of the dog pee was being retouched so convincingly that I began to feel better and like it wouldn’t be so terrible to keep drinking her tea.

“Listen, one of my old editors from
Look
back in the sixties before you were even a twinkle in your mother’s eye, one of my oldest friends, the guy who published my first Vietnam shots, is coming for drinks and dinner tonight. His name is Hugo DeLeon. He’s Franco-American, like you. Now he’s at
Paris Match
. I think they are going to do something big on Germany at
Match
. So, it’s an important evening for me. I can’t stand his wife but that’s another story. And maybe the editor of the
New Yorker.
I know he’s passing through town and I have my sights on the
New Yorker
. I think it’s a new frontier.”

“But they don’t publish photographs, do they?” I was disproportionately proud of knowing this fact.

“Ah, but the times they may be a-changin’.” I think she winked at me. “And do you know Harry Mathews?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“The novelist?
Cigarettes
? Oh, you’d know if you did. You’ve got to know Harry. It’s impossible to get along in Paris without him. And we may get Umberto Eco. He’s in town too. You know, I was one of the sources for that piece he did in 1986, ‘A Photograph’ in
Travels in Hyperreality.
”

I nodded.

“And let’s invite Henri, if we can get him in such a big group. And this horrible fashion writer I have to be nice to, Sally Meeks. Every time I tell her I’m depressed about my weight she buys me chocolate to cheer me up because she knows I can’t throw it away. But that’s neither here nor there. So, we’re going to have drinks here and then go to La Truite Dorée. I was wondering if you could call and make a reservation with your beautiful accent. Maybe for nine o’clock? What do you think?”

Was I invited or was I the secretary? The flutter between joy and hurt was faster than my heart.

I stuttered, “Nine o’clock is a good time.”

“
Parfait
! So, we will be how many?”

While Lydia was counting on her fingers and moving her lips, I recalled Clarence opining about the Truite Dorée
around the corner, and about two exquisite items in particular. One was an artichoke heart, a fresh one, not from a can (“Imagine cooking the whole artichoke simply for the heart and tossing away the leaves! The wastefulness is positively aristocratic!”) topped with crème fraîche and the slenderest haricots verts. (Claudia shook her head and laughed at this description. “I despise that wasteful, buttery, bourgeois cuisine of yours. Please, Clarence, please stop talking!”) The other item was a clementine sorbet inside pistachio meringue (“The ultimate in palette cleansers”), which I had spun into something fantastic in my mind, one of Albertine’s elaborate ice-cream constructions in
La Prisonnière
that I had been coveting ever since reading Proust the summer between sophomore and junior year, on Jacques’s suggestion. We wrote back and forth about it for months.

“Go through this with me, will you?” said Lydia. “We have Hugo and his sorceress, Bob, Harry, Henri, Sally, Clarence, you and me. That’s nine. Did I forget anyone?”

“You forgot Umberto Eco!”

“What would I do without you?”

“Is the number for La Truite Dorée
in your Rolodex?”

“Should be. Listen, go make the call and then get out of here and enjoy the day. It’s Saturday after all, and you’re young and in Paris. Go paint something. And make sure you’re here by seven for drinks.”

I turned to take my bucket of dog pee back to the kitchen, but she called me back softly. “One more thing.”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever seen this Claudia person who hangs around Clarence when I’m not here? Clarence says she’s stark raving mad. Is that true? I trust your character judgment, you know.”

“Are you talking about Claudia, the grad student? You’ve not met her?”

I knew perfectly well that Lydia and Claudia had never seen one another, but I did not think this should be true. It left too much room for suspicion and misconception where I persisted in wanting familial understanding.

“No, why? Does she talk about me?”

“I figured you had to know her or have crossed paths or something. But Clarence talks about you so much to Claudia that it probably seems like the two of you are in the same room.”

“So is she crazy?”

“She’s expansive is what she is.”

“And strange-looking. Clarence said she was a strange-looking sort of dwarf.”

“Claudia?”

“Is she a crazy dwarf?”

“Well, she’s pretty small and she’s definitely not ordinary. I get the feeling she looks up to Clarence intellectually and in a very daughterly way, but I couldn’t say if she’s clinically crazy.”

“Well, Clarence already has a daughter. He doesn’t need to drag in raving diminutive grad students. Not into this house.”

“No, I suppose he doesn’t.”

I sloshed the rag in the bucket a couple of times. She crinkled her nose.

“Anyway.” She smiled. “Neither here nor there, is it? Let’s have fun tonight.”

“Drinks at seven?”

“Drinks at seven.”

“Is there anything I can do to help get ready?”

“Aren’t you a dear? You know there is one thing. You wouldn’t mind picking up some petits fours at Hédiard, some of those lethally delicious pâte feuilletée
things? You know the ones I mean? Get two dozen. And maybe a few hundred grams of their fabulous pistachios. If you could have it all here by, say, six-thirty. I’ve got Madame Fidelio coming to help me set up. Don’t forget to keep the receipt.”

nineteen

That afternoon, I went to see Étienne for the first time in ten years. When I had finally called him to say I was sorry to have missed his dinner party, that it wasn’t my fault because Lydia had made me work all night, which was technically true, he had asked me to meet him at the Edvard Munch show at the Pompidou Center.

I spotted him first. He was the city of Paris in human form, quite transformed over the past decade, but unmistakable. Still slight and long-lashed, although his hair was much curlier and his jaw had thickened, he was standing in front of a painting called
The Dance of Life
looking behind the scene of ethereal couples, waltzing on dark grass at the seashore, through to what appeared to be an orange pillar with an orange ball floating on top, somewhere out on the ocean.

He wore a metallic t-shirt with shoulder pads and tapered black jeans tucked into combat boots. I could tell from the fixity of his gaze that he had seen me but didn’t want to waver until I recognized him. After all these years, he was still pretending to ignore me. And, although I was no longer hurt, the knowledge of how hurt I once would have been was acute, and I had to hold myself back from crying out.

When he had asked me to the Pompidou Center, he’d said he would be wandering through between two and three and that I should see if I could spot him. He had changed
un peu
, he told me. His ass was even better now.

There was a familiar current of love and embarrassment, while I feigned hesitation and he total absorption in the painting. But what swirled between us was only the dust of our past, catching light here and there to make us remember that we had changed. He no longer wielded the power of rejection. I couldn’t believe I had been so wary of seeing him again.

I touched his arm. “He was depressed, Munch, wasn’t he?”

“
Un malade mental.”
He embraced me warmly. “
T’es belle
,” he said. “I’m so happy to see you. I was annoyed, you know, that you waited for so long to call me after missing my dinner. Not very well brought up, are you? But now that I see you, I’m not angry anymore. I’m cool. Are you cool?”

“I think so. You look the same, except for your hair.”

“And my ass, my Mick Jagger ass? It’s something, no?”

“I’d have to see you in leather.”

He linked arms with me and we walked around the show, agreeing that we were much happier now that we weren’t such inhibited children. It turned out the shapes he had been staring at, the pillar and the ball, were a moonbeam and a moon. They were everywhere in Munch’s paintings. The bases of the columns pooled as their light dissolved into the ocean. Couldn’t I see? Étienne wanted to incorporate these “tragic” moonbeams into his jewelry line. He was going to chain round moons to cylinders and make pendants out of them. And could I guess what
matière
he was going to use?

I shook my head. We were in front of a painting called
Self-Portrait in Hell
, in which the naked painter’s own shadow appeared huge and murderous behind him.

“I’m going to use chunks of the Berlin Wall. They are starting to chip away at it already, but soon there will be mountains to take. The colors are going to be fantastic. Can you imagine all that graffiti? I have a contact in Berlin. He’s going to bring me the best pieces. I wish I could go. It’s going to be an incredible party. But at least I will have the souvenirs. I can’t wait. I can’t focus on anything else. Do you think your photographer will be interested?”

“Interested how?”

“In shooting my jewelry? It’s so American of me to make something exploitative and market it. Don’t you think she’ll be interested? It’s so capitalist, the art from the rubble. It’s fantastic!”

“She doesn’t do still lifes.”

“Then we’ll have a party for her to shoot us wearing my jewelry. She’ll love it, as an American, because it’s disposable.”

“Why would you want to make something disposable? What’s the point?”

“
C’est la sagesse, ma belle.
Wisdom. Life is disposable.”

“Aren’t we the Zen master?”

There was a glimmer of pain in his eyes.

“Well, it’s going to be unbelievable, my jewelry,” he said quietly.

“I’m sure it will.”

It was wonderful to see him, like coming home, but he also unnerved me. A layer had fallen away from him, like the chippings around a sculpture as it takes final form. His new shape was at once familiar and perplexing. I was going to have to look long and hard in order to make it out.

I wondered what he made of me.

“Tell me something about your photographer,” he said.

“I don’t feel like talking about Lydia right now. She’s been horrible lately.
Une salope.
” I started backward at my own words as though they had been fired from a hidden gun. Stunned, I looked at my cousin. But he had not said anything. They were my words, all mine. I simply hadn’t admitted I harbored them until now.

“Tell me.” Étienne’s eyes were anything but hollow. Because his face was too thin, they were even more startling than before, like roasting chestnuts right before they burn. “
C’est une vraie salope, alors?”

I nodded. Yes, a bitch. Already the term was a bit less shocking in my mouth. I told him about the dog pee freak-out and about how afterward Lydia had sent me out to buy us papayas for lunch, because we had been eating like pigs and we had a
grande bouffe
tonight
.
I reminded her that I loved papayas. We didn’t have to think of it as punishment.

We had eaten the papayas in morbid silence because they had cost twenty francs each and I should have better judgment than to spend something so obscene on lunch. How could I sabotage her like this? Things were going to have to change. People around here were going to have to take responsibility.

I had no idea where I stood with her, and all because I had overpaid for the papayas I thought I was supposed to buy so that I could keep her company on her doomed diet.
“C’est insupportable,”
I said. There was a whole new region of hostility in me. “But until talking to you, Étienne, I had no idea that I could get this angry.”

Étienne appeared to be listening so deeply that I thought he was going to solve the mystery of Lydia’s personality for me. But instead he asked, “
Alors c’est vraiment une grosse bonne femme?”

“
Merde
, Étienne, no! She’s not obese. She’s completely normal-looking. She’s even kind of great-looking, not teeny like a Frenchwoman, but stylish. These potions and papayas and pills are ridiculous. Especially since if you saw her work . . .”

“Well, but maybe she wants to be delicate like a real
Parisienne.
C’est logique.
”

•   •   •

Then we went to a café for an espresso, looking out on a fountain of bright kinetic sculptures.

Étienne said it was ironic that we were so cold to one another as kids.

But I wasn’t cold, I said, I was shy and scared. You were cold.

Was not. Was confused. Was figuring out I was gay.

I almost yelled that I was an idiot. Of course. That’s why he’d rejected me. I’d made him uncomfortable with my hopeless crush. So much was becoming clear. But I tried to act like I had always known he was gay so as not to appear naïve. I put on a game face while he ordered a fondant au chocolat
and ate it fast and furtively.

“C’est bon?”
I asked.

“Almost as
bon
as
chez Hédiard.”
Did I remember his mother’s old joke?

Of course I did. I walked by Hédiard all the time now.

“
Maman
and
papa,
they are ensconced like mollusks in the plastic house they’ve built. All those years of not living so they could plan to be old, cooking the same righteous boeuf bourguignon
and rereading
La Comédie humaine,
always
La Comédie humaine
! Papa says he never needs to see Paris again because he can go there with his volumes, in his armchair, in his slippers.”

“But your parents are healthy?”

“Of course they are! Healthily ashamed that their son is
au chômage.
Their only child on the dole. They always dreamed I’d be gifted enough to have some prominent post in our great bureaucracy. They think I’ve wasted my life. I’m sure they’ve told you, they think I’m irregular. You know what that’s code for, don’t you?”

I nodded. It was already impossible to imagine him heterosexual.

“But you’re making jewelry. Isn’t that the beauty of the French system, that it supports struggling artists? It’s great that someone like you can collect unemployment while you need to, right? Aren’t your parents socialists? Don’t they believe in that kind of thing?”

“They believe in the idea of that kind of thing. The practice is different. They are socialists who have sacrificed everything for a little piece of property and who think homosexuality isn’t conducive to family dinners.” He scraped up the last of his crème anglaise, sucked dreamily on the spoon.

“Well,” I told him, “I think of your mom’s ‘
chez
Hédiard’ line almost every day. In fact, that’s where I got Lydia’s stupid papayas. It was the only place I could find them. It wasn’t my fault they cost so much.”

“Calme-toi.
Tell me why this Lydia is working in Paris? Why France and not America?”

I explained that TV was replacing photojournalism as a way of giving the news. So, photojournalism had to reinvent itself. When
Life
folded in 1972, that was a moment of death for photojournalism in the States, not total death, but a kind of defeat. And at the same time all these photo agencies were starting in Paris that were more sophisticated. They knew that the photographer couldn’t pretend to be a fly on the wall because she couldn’t compete with the fly of TV. Instead, she had to show she knew she was part of the scene. That was Lydia’s genius. Anyway, these Paris agencies made it so that photographers could freelance instead of working for one magazine. Some of the best of them set up bases here. Lydia had had her apartment in the Sixth since 1974. She worked for Magnum and Agence VU and one called Editing and another called Métis . . . “And did you know that the Magnum agency is named after a magnum of champagne because all that Robert Capa drank—he was the founder—was champagne?”

As I spoke, I felt myself synthesizing the lore of the Schell household. I had been listening to Lydia more carefully than I knew.

“Sympa.
You understand so much.”

“It sounds like I do, but it’s only little facts that I’ve picked up and I’ve made a story out of them. There’s tons I’ve left out.” I underplayed the pleasure I got from rendering Lydia’s history in such vivid detail. It was like drawing, only more complicated.

When Étienne asked me if I’d been going out at all, I told him about Christie and the
BCBG
boys and our night at the Bains Douches. My tone was deprecating because I guessed that this was not his scene and he would disapprove of a kind of snobbery that was not his own. But, when he simply nodded, I added the detail of the surprise Chopin at sunrise. “So they weren’t complete philistines.” Still no reaction beyond a lowering of lashes toward the empty cup and sugar packets.

He asked for
l’addition,
and when it came, he pulled it to his bird breast. “
Je t’invite
,” he said.

Christie had told me that, in France, friends of the same class took each other out. It was one of the more graceful aspects of the culture. “You hear it all around,
‘je t’invite’ ‘je t’invite.’
‘I invite you!’ The implication is that you’ll meet again and again and keep inviting each other in turn. It’s never a done deal.
‘Je t’invite.
’ It has such a nice ring, don’t you think?”

This was the first time the little phrase had been directed at me, and it felt like a sacrament.
“Merci, Étienne.
Next time, it’s me.
”

“I was worried about seeing you,” he said. “Because you knew me before.”

“That’s exactly why I was worried too. You know where I come from. I thought you might still make fun of me for having messy hair and being a nerd and a hanger-on.”

“No, I don’t want to make fun of you anymore. I want to relax with you.”

I began to tear at the loveliness of his words. “You have no idea how badly I need to relax.”

“I think I do.” He smiled.

I pulled on a gray tweed pea coat, bought used in college like my trench, its lining much too thin for the day. I hadn’t wanted to wear my stupid down jacket to meet Étienne.

“T’es cool, toi.
” He did my top button. “Well, I can’t get you into Les Bains Douches,” he said. “But I can get you into Queen sometime
.
”