The Liar's Wife (11 page)

Genevieve thinks of the sign over the door of Mlle Weil's classroom in the
lycée.
ONLY MATHEMATICS MAY ENTER HERE
. And yet she taught not mathematics but philosophy.

It has been a very long time since Genevieve has entertained a dream of mathematical or philosophical proficiency. She can only even
recall it vaguely: a dream figure walking on a shoreline, almost entirely consumed by fog.

The light changes. Green to red. The cars stop; it is now legal for Mlle Weil to be crossing the street.

Before Mlle Weil reaches the sidewalk, the baby cries.
My baby. My baby cries.
The cry an entirely meaningful utterance. Or: an utterance with a few possible, radically limited meanings, but each entirely meaningful.
I am hungry. I am cold. I am dirty. I need to be held.

Meaningful utterance.

The meaning of meaning.

Those kinds of words indicate a habit of mind Genevieve has long since given up. Brought back by the sight of the ridiculous woman.

Mlle Weil.

“Genevieve.”

The harsh voice, a crow's, as her flapping cape makes her a crow. Worn out, worn down. Abraded. These are the words for the skin on her face. Too many cigarettes, too much shouting at workers' meetings, shouting over the heads of those who probably don't understand her.

And there had, of course, been illnesses. Mlle Weil suffered from headaches. Her mother had told Genevieve's mother that she suffered greatly.

But how had Mlle Weil even recognized her from so far away? It has been nine years. Nine years of the difficulties of war, of terrible displacements. Genevieve knows that she has aged. Sometimes, looking in the mirror, she doesn't even recognize herself. And yet Mlle Weil had known her.

“Genevieve.”

Now they are on the same side of the street.

Mlle Weil's fierce eyes, unblinking behind thick glasses.

Seeing everything.

Except what she doesn't wish to see.

“I knew, Genevieve, that you were living here. Close to where I am living. I knew, even, your address. But I didn't want to contact you. I was afraid you wouldn't want to see me.”

So she has said it: the most uncomfortable thing. The thing that ought not to be said, that no one would say. The truth. Plain. Causing the greatest possible discomfort. Did she consider discomfort a form of suffering? She had understood the contemplation of suffering to be her life's work. Of course, she wouldn't consider discomfort. She would consider the consideration of discomfort a form of self-indulgence. Bourgeois falsity.

Mlle Weil had almost been fired from the
lycée
for referring to marriage as “legalized prostitution.”

What would she know of it? Of any of it? Marriage. Prostitution. Even, perhaps, the law.

Most likely she believed in some universal law that had never been seen or practiced on this earth.

Genevieve would honor her old teacher by not telling a polite lie. She would honor her by silence. And by making a simple statement of fact.

“And so, we meet here.”

The present tense. Suggesting a continuum.

Eternity.

Genevieve remembers that among those who mocked Mlle Weil, and there were many, were those who called her the Red Virgin. Because of her left-leaning politics, because of her refusal of traditional feminine allure, feminine attachment. They thought it doubly amusing to call her the Red Virgin, because in Le Puy, the town where Mlle Weil was teaching in the
lycée
, the town that was the home of Genevieve and her mother and her brother, there was a statue of the Red Virgin, the Madonna. A mother but still a virgin. This was called a mystery, but you had to believe it or be guilty of sin. It was for things like this that Genevieve's family counted themselves among the non-, or unbelievers.

The statue had been cast from iron that came from guns taken at Sebastopol. An abomination, Genevieve's mother had called it: abominable to form a statue of a mother, the source of life, from the machines of death. Genevieve's mother did not believe, but, a mother herself,
though not a particularly tender one, she liked the tenderness suggested by the idea of the Madonna.

As a young child, Genevieve had done what many children, she later learned, had done. Made a list of words representing her place in the universe: the universe being the highest possible term in her imagination.

It was beautiful, Le Puy, the town where she had been born, the town that it was very possible she would never see again. A region of stone: the stone faces of the houses, the climbs up and down the stony streets. She had loved the high outcroppings, the cascades.

Her mother had admired Mlle Weil. She had been amused by Mme Weil, Simone's mother.

Mme Weil had confided in Genevieve's mother, who was a teacher in the
lycée
where Mlle Weil taught, where Genevieve was a student. She had come to Le Puy for a visit. That is what Mme Weil had said, but really she had come to check up on her daughter. She was very worried. Her daughter took shockingly little care of herself. She was eating only boiled potatoes. She liked to think of herself as living like the poorest workers, but the truth, said Mme Weil, was that her palate was quite refined. Especially sensitive. If there was the smallest spot on a piece of fruit, she couldn't even touch it. And she could tolerate only the finest cuts of meat. Would Mme Le Clos consider helping Mme Weil—of course, it was really her daughter who would be helped, though it would involve some subterfuge. Would Mme Le Clos give some extra money (provided to her by Mme Weil) to the butcher so that when Simone ordered horsemeat she would be given filet mignon?

Mme Le Clos laughed, and Mme Weil laughed with her. The two mothers were laughing.

“Of course, Mme Weil. And I will do more than that. When she comes to give lessons to my son, I will provide her with dinner. And I will make sure it's something that she will like to eat. I will tell her it's horsemeat, of course.”

“She particularly likes my way of cooking mashed potatoes,” Mme Weil said and made some notes on the back of a used envelope. Which Genevieve's mother put in one of the kitchen drawers. The one where string was kept, along with the screwdriver and pliers.

And Genevieve had been appalled. Tormented that she was somehow involved in deceiving Mlle Weil.

Whom she revered.

Whom she admired.

Whom she loved.

Was it possible that Mlle Weil was the only person at that time not related to her by blood whom she could say, in complete confidence, that she loved?

She loved her mother.

She loved her brother.

But her mother was her mother.

Her brother was her brother.

And Mlle Weil was … what?

Her teacher.

A hero.

A saint.

She could invoke that category, although she was an unbeliever. Mlle Weil was a saint of the mind.

And yet she had always seemed in need of some protection.

It had to be said that what Genevieve felt for Mlle Weil was a kind of love.

They had all loved her. All her students, all Genevieve's friends. The combination of her extreme purity of mind, her extraordinary learning, her extreme devotion to them, her students, and her clumsiness
brought out the gallantry that rests in the hearts, Genevieve had come to know, of all young girls. Behind the eyes of each French girl:
La Pucelle. Jeanne d'Arc.
The dream of knighthood. A participation in a valorous undertaking. The vulnerable foot shod in iron, ending in a metal point, knife sharp, pressing hard into the soft earth. Relinquishing her girlhood, the girl sheds, Genevieve had come to understand, her dream of armor. She takes on breasts, hips: no longer the valorous knight. So perhaps Mlle Weil brought out our early gallantry, or we gave her the last of it, before it was required to transform itself into the smaller compass of maternal ardor.

She had demanded a great deal of them. Everything. And she would give them everything. She was, for all her brilliance, surprisingly patient. Generous with her time, never humbling the slower girls, always kindly. Yet rigorous in her pursuit of truth.

Only mathematics may enter here.

Her idea was that the mind could be best trained by geometry, geometry as it was practiced by the Greeks, that the attention required to solve a problem in geometry was the best possible training for any kind of difficult intellectual work. She had talked often about the virtue of attention. She had described it as a moral good.

But sometimes she was ridiculous. One day she came to class with her sweater on backwards.

Genevieve had been the one to see it first, had been the one to rise to her feet. She gestured to her three best friends: Hélène, Colette, Chantal. Where were they now? Starving? Dead? Collaborators with the cabal of Pétain?

They made a guard in front of the blackboard so that Mlle Weil could disappear behind it and turn her sweater around.

Had Mlle Weil laughed?

Made fun of herself?

Genevieve cannot remember seeing Mlle Weil laugh.

But no, that isn't true. She
had
seen her laugh. She had laughed that day …

She had come from behind the blackboard with the sweater on the
right way and said, “Young ladies, you have spoiled my great effect. Do you not know that the most fashionable women in Paris are wearing their sweaters backwards this season?”

Yes, she had laughed.

And the students had laughed.

But Genevieve had not laughed, because she hadn't thought that what Mlle Weil said was funny, or not funny enough to laugh at, and she was afraid that the others felt the same and were just pretending. And this would have been, this pretending, this deceiving of Mlle Weil, this would have been below Mlle Weil's standards for truth.

And if Mlle Weil didn't know that she was being deceived, being humored, what could that mean? About her intelligence, her wisdom, her knowledge of the world?

She didn't know that her mother and Genevieve's mother were in league to deceive her.

Genevieve understands that this is why she had not liked to remember that Mlle Weil had laughed.

Mlle Weil isn't laughing now. All the expression on her face is taken up with the effort of furious blinking. The sun is very bright; it is high noon; the vivid colors of the leaves exaggerate the brightness.

How weak her eyes look, as if seeing must be, for her, a perpetual strain.

Her eyes are tired.

Her glasses are the thickest Genevieve has ever seen.

And now something must be said. Something ridiculous.

“How are you?”

Without a pause, as if waiting to speak had nearly suffocated her, as if she were taking her first breath in much too long, “I am trying to get out of here. I must get back to Europe. To join de Gaulle and the Free French in London.”

“And will that be difficult?”

Mlle Weil makes a face—screwing up her tired eyes, tightening her thin lips—that suggests that the idea of difficulty is in itself ridiculous.

“And is this child yours?”

“Yes. My son, Aaron. He is thirteen months old.”

Mlle Weil bends over the baby, puts her face close to him. She makes cooing noises, as anyone might with a baby. This surprises Genevieve.

“A fine little man,” she says. “And so you must be well. But Laurent, I have thought of him often. How is your brother?”

Laurent. One of the afflicted, his body broken from birth.
My brother, for love of whom, in outrage on whose behalf I refuse to bend the knee to any God.
Any God who would have allowed the fate of Laurent's body could only be a monster.

Misshapen in his mother's womb.

Our mother, in whose womb I was, strictly by chance, not misshapen.

Cerebral palsy.

Sporadic control, only, of his limbs. A bent spine, so that most days he presents to the world the shape of an upside-down L, his spine a flat table, parallel almost to the ground. Usually, he tried to talk to people only when he was sitting down, but if he had to talk to people when he was standing or walking, he would have to awkwardly twist his head, look up at them from a sidewise angle. Which made people more uncomfortable still.

Genevieve can only love people who are able to look at Laurent without looking away.

“I was quite fond of your brother. I would like to see him.”

Genevieve takes the words as a command. Now there is no choice. Because of the way she had been with Laurent, Genevieve would owe Mlle Weil fealty.

I love my brother.

I love my brother without question.

I may have loved my brother from before my birth. From my time, well formed as he was not, in our mother's womb.

Of everyone whom she had observed in Laurent's presence, Mlle Weil seemed to have the least trouble looking at him. She had appeared to have no trouble at all. Of everyone who had looked at him, only
with Mlle Weil had there been no catch, no taking hold of the reins to check the horse of recoil, of revulsion, the impulse Genevieve had seen so often. The effort to control disgust. Genevieve had many times tried to understand the position of people seeing Laurent for the first time. Tried not to judge them, to forgive their look of shock. But she could not forgive. She knew that Laurent saw it, was hurt by it. So how could she forgive?

Was it possible that Mlle Weil didn't notice Laurent's distorted body? That she saw only his mind?

Yes, this was possible. For this, Genevieve would always owe her fealty. Beyond question. A knight's fealty. Unto death.

It was how Mlle Weil had first come to their house. She had, of course, been Genevieve's teacher. But there was a distance there, a formality. People were careful not to bring the scent of home into the clear air of the
lycée.
It would be like whispering about your boyfriend as you knelt in church. Not that she had ever knelt in church, coming as she did from a family of unbelievers. Nevertheless, there were things that, as a native of the land of France, she had always known.