Foreign Tongue (20 page)

I stared at the sentence, reading it over and over until it stopped making sense, though I couldn’t tell if it didn’t make sense because it didn’t make sense or because, if you stare at anything long enough, it stops making sense.

I pressed Delete and watched the letters disappear.

Then I pressed Undo Delete. Ctrl Z. Ctrl Y. Control zee. Control why.

What would Bernard think? What would the author think? I wondered if they’d even catch it. I wanted to leave it in to see if they noticed.

Phooey! Just when he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel, another crisis thwacks him upside the head. It was so predictable. It couldn’t get worse.

I was wrong. I slogged through the next few pages. On the train to see his mother, Daphne kept throwing up and confessed she was pregnant. He proposed, his mother approved and promptly croaked, the young couple moved to Neuilly, and he became the editor of an aerospace industry trade magazine.

The chapter ended. That was it. I even looked in the envelope, to see if I’d missed a page, but that was it. A small sound caught in my throat, almost like panic, as I wondered if this was the end of the novel. If it was, I didn’t like it. Maybe that’s how real life unfolds, maybe events are swift, decisive, coincidental, pat, even slightly grotesque, but this reeked of the best worst ending, something hatched like a scheme, not an egg, and I didn’t buy it.

Sure, sometimes you don’t get closure. Sometimes people leave and don’t say good-bye, and that’s what Eve did. Sometimes there are no explanations. There was nothing inherently wrong with the narrator marrying Daphne, except he didn’t love her. Then again, she’d put up with him and taken care of him when he was down—if she wanted him, she deserved him. But it happened too quickly, and he seemed numb at the end, even as he burned the report. Or maybe that was the point?

But none of this was my problem. My job was translating, not editing. I went back over my work, double-checking word choices, spellchecking, and making sure it read well. I hit Save and went for a stroll around the neighborhood.

On my way back up the street, I passed a new bookstore, with smart navy blue awnings. One window displayed a photo of Rémi Le Jaa and a reprint from a
Le Monde
article from 1989 titled “Le Phénomène Le Jaa.” In the photo, he had straight black hair and wore little round glasses.
He looked almost Asian, except for the large, unmistakably Gallic nose. When I went inside, the harried bookseller told me that he’d sold his last remaining copy of
La Vie de bateau,
and that they’d also sold out his other books in anticipation of his impending new release.

I glanced at the fall books table, thumbing through new novels and wondering if my author was among them. No, I remembered now, Laveau had said he wrote on politics and sociology. I went over to a table marked
Nouveautés en actualité internationale,
but my cell phone rang. I went outside to answer it, but it was someone trying to sell me double-glazed windows. I walked home and changed into black pants and a smart red jacket for my afternoon tea.

At a neighborhood
fleuriste,
I bought a dozen
anémones
and carried the bouquet aloft as I followed Antoine’s directions to their street behind the
butte
. As in my quartier, the buildings were all late-nineteenth-century
pierre de taille,
biscuit-colored Parisian limestone, but with more elaborate wrought iron and variations in the stone vermiculation. Some even had leaded glass windows and gold mosaics.

Antoine opened the door wearing a tweed jacket and a pink, open-necked shirt. He ushered me into a red and beige
salon
so jam-packed it seemed to sag inward under the weight of its contents. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and every surface was loaded with more books, plus magazines,
DV
Ds, scraps of paper, pens, objets d’art, even a banana peel, neatly folded, like a pair of spotted gloves, on the coffee table. A careless arrangement of red Chinese lantern flowers spilled over a vase on the marble mantel, obscuring the ornate mirror behind it.

“Merci,”
he said when I handed him the bouquet. He plunked it down on stack of dry cleaning on the piano. “Victorine forgot you were coming and went to the patisserie for something sweet,” he added.

“She didn’t have to go to the trouble,” I said.

“Yes, she did. I have a terrible sweet tooth.
Asseyez-vous
.” He removed a stack of magazines and an umbrella from a chair and pointed
to it. “Such a difficult week. We deserve a reward, no?” he asked. “For you, also?”

I nodded. “A friend of mine was forced into retirement, another friend sprained her ankle, and—” I stopped myself before I said anything about Olivier.

“And?” Antoine prodded.

“I couldn’t sleep. Unidentified anxiety, probably. And you?” I asked.

“
On vieillit.
Every day I am reminded how fragile we are.” He shrugged. The front door opened and slammed shut.
“Ah, voilà ma femme,”
he said and left the room.

When he didn’t come back right away, I walked around a carved trunk to admire an old still life: an artful arrangement of a dead pheasant, cloudy-skinned grapes, translucent berries, walnut shells, a half-eaten loaf of bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine. Peering closer, I noticed three insects crawling over the food. The iridescent carapace of a scorpion was rendered in a metallic blue-violet; the sharp pincers on an earwig were done with a tiny brush. A malevolent, furry, red spider raised one delicate leg over a crumbling wedge of blue cheese.

“Do you like it?” Antoine asked, pushing a tea trolley into the
salon
.

“It’s amazing. And repulsive. I’m not sure I could eat anything after looking at it,” I said, brushing imaginary bugs from my arms. He chuckled.

“Victorine refused to have it in the dining room for that very reason. It’s Italian,
ottocento,
” he said, waving at it. “Unsigned. I bought it at an auction house in Turin, years ago, even though it was an extravagance. So rare to find something that so closely echoes one’s worldview, no?”

At a loss for words—his worldview was about decay? insects and rotting food?—I merely nodded. Victorine bustled in, her cheeks splotched red above a black turtleneck. She shook my hand and gave me a thin-lipped smile.

“Sit, sit, please. What’s this?” she asked, pointing to my bouquet.
“Ah, c’est joli!”
she said, sounding as if she meant the opposite. She whisked the vase off the mantel and disappeared, leaving a trail of red blooms on the Persian carpet. She came back and plunked the anemones in the vase. “Do you take your Earl Grey with milk or
citron
?” Not listening for an answer, she turned to Antoine. “
Bon
. They didn’t have a chocolate cake for you,
mon vieux,
so I got your
étouffe-chrétien,
” she said. I gave an involuntary laugh at the phrase, which literally meant a food that suffocated Christians but was often used for rich or dense cakes.

“Je suis épuisée!”
She grimaced, falling into an armchair with theatrical exhaustion. “Why haven’t you told me how you take your tea?” she demanded.

“Citron, s’il vous plaît,”
I answered. A white cat crawled out from underneath a tasseled ottoman, glanced around, and skulked away. Neither of them seemed to notice.

“An old friend of ours gave us a scare,” she said conversationally. “At first, he thought it was a
crise de foie,
but then it turned out to be more serious. We were all at the hospital earlier this week. But surely Olivier told you?” she asked, slanting me a sideways look as she handed me a cup of milky tea.

I felt like the wedge of blue cheese. I glanced at Antoine, but he was cleaning his pipe. “Was it really a minor heart attack?” I asked, neatly sidestepping her question.

“The poor man!” she exclaimed, nodding. “Of course, Estelle has been a wreck. Thank goodness Olivier was there. She’s always been able to lean on him.” She crossed her legs and gave me a smile so insincere you could sharpen a knife on it. A crushed red lantern flower clung to her heel.

“Enfin, Victorine,”
Antoine said mildly. She tossed her head and cut into a raspberry cream cake. A dark red fruit coulis oozed out. I’d never been to such a dangerous tea: spiders and scorpions and bloody cake, oh my. Antoine banged his pipe against the mantel.

“
J’ai oublié les citrons.
Didn’t you say lemon?” She gave my cup an angry look.

“Don’t pay too much attention,” Antoine murmured when she left the room. He patted my hand awkwardly, the way a man who doesn’t like animals pats a friend’s dog.

“What do you mean?” I asked, now on my guard with both of them.

“She’s bored,” he explained, looking guilty. When she came back with a plate of sliced lemons, he steered the conversation toward more anodyne subjects, and the afternoon took on a milder tenor. Without talking directly about the translation, I got them started on my new favorite topic: the difference between French and English.

“The pun, for instance, is respected in French. It is also more complicated; in English, it’s a base form of wordplay. It is usually greeted with groans,” Antoine said. “It explains why my American friends do not appreciate my sense of humor,” he quipped.

“The French adore a kind of sculpted wordplay that Americans find baffling, as if they’re being asked to admire an intricate tool which has no practical, modern use, like a hook for closing buttons on spats. But then the French place an aesthetic value on frivolity, finding art in something charming and meaningless and ephemeral, whereas Americans tend to find it trivial,” I said, thinking about what Clara had said.

“‘Allons! Finissons-en, Charles attend!’”
Antoine said, quoting Louis XVIII’s famous
calembour,
uttered on his deathbed about his successor, in which “Charles is waiting” was a homonym for “charlatan.” He gave a crafty little smile and sucked his pipe. Victorine gave him a tired, indulgent look: she’d heard it too many times before.

“You see? We don’t have
calembours
and
contrepétries,
” I pointed out. “Even trying to explain them in English is hard: they’re like sentence-long puns and complex, constructed spoonerisms,” I said.

“Ah, oui, le révérend Spooner,”
Victorine said, waving the cake knife in my direction. Dark red drops of coulis spattered the carpet.

“French has these complicated, contorted phrases that sound overdone and arch in English. And they all seem to be about very subtle, French sorts of situations,” I said.

“What is a French situation?” Antoine asked, amused.

“My father likes the phrase
‘astuce vaseuse dans un esprit marécageux.’
That’s an elegant, if old-fashioned, way of describing a far-fetched, pseudo-clever, overly complicated allusion or observation. We just don’t do that often enough in English to have a description for it.” I thought for a moment. “We do have ‘the elegant variation,’ but we use it to describe overwrought writing, specifically unnecessary synonyms.”

“No one says
‘astuce vaseuse’
anymore,” Victorine pointed out.

“I know, but the idea seems more French to me, where turns of phrase and wit—
l’esprit
—count for something. In English, we’d just roll our eyes.”

“Name another one,” Antoine demanded.

“‘Passer pour un idiot aux yeux d’un imbécile est une volupté de fin gourmet,’”
I said. “That’s Courteline, and we don’t have this in English either. The notion that appearing—or pretending—to be an idiot in the eyes of an imbecile is some kind of refined pleasure? No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe in England, but not in America. First off, no one in America thinks passing for an idiot is
ever
a pleasure—”

“But that’s because you’re so
premier degré,
” Victorine said. “Everything means what it means. If you are precise, you’re precise, if you’re vague, you’re vague. But we can be vague in such precise ways, and precise in vague ones. We like layers of meaning, subtlety, and contradiction.”

“Sure. All the better to be malicious,” I said. “Especially if it takes the person you’re talking to a while to register any possible hidden or double meanings.”

“You make us sound so cruel,” she observed.

If the
chaussure
fits, I thought. “You have a more comfortable relationship with cruelty, perhaps. After all, in French, to be
malicieux
can
have a good connotation, like someone who has a delightfully pointed sense of humor:
malicieux et délicieux,
” I said.

“But you have this as well—the wicked sense of humor,” Antoine remarked.

“That’s true,” I admitted. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Victorine poked a finger in the teapot and took it into the kitchen. I put my plate back on the trolley. Antoine’s pipe smoke made my head ache right between the eyebrows.

“We are not so different
à la base,
” Antoine mused. “It is more a question of style, of the things we privilege more than you, and vice versa.”