Foreign Tongue (32 page)
Authors: Vanina Marsot
I heard him singing “L.A. Woman” in the shower. Some women
could do it. Clara did. I probably could, if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. Not because I had old-fashioned, bourgeois ideas about love, though I probably did, but because I wanted more.
I shoved my arms into my bathrobe and went into the kitchen. My internal voice, like a panicky parrot, squawked, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
“I’m having breakfast, like a civilized person, with the man who spent the night,” I muttered. “I’m drinking coffee with my lover and the specter of his married girlfriend. In the clichéd, if accurate, if odious, pop-psychobabble of my generation, I’m breaking bread with someone who is not available,” I continued. Olivier came in.
“A qui tu parles?”
he asked, tilting his head to shake water from his ear.
“Personne. Je suis folle,”
I said, because talking to myself did feel a little crazy.
“Ah bon? Je ne savais pas,”
he said, coming over to kiss me. I pulled away, leaning back against the sink.
“Qu’est ce qu’il y a?”
he asked.
“This doesn’t work for me, Olivier.” I swept my hand in the direction of the kitchen table. The sight of two croissants and four little
cannelés,
caramelized vanilla cakes, on a plate, made my stomach hurt.
“Le petit déj?”
he asked, mystified.
“No, not breakfast. You being here.”
“But you invited me,” he said, amused, as if we were playing.
“I know.” I was going to have to do better than this. I cupped his cheek. “You’re with someone else,” I said. He stiffened. “That’s what doesn’t work for me.”
“You know that doesn’t matter,” he said, with a touch of anger.
I had a dizzying sense of déjà vu, déjà vu repeating, a tautology curving back on itself, and I knew he’d used that line before, not just on me, on someone else, and I’d heard it before, not just from him. It was one thing to make a decision in the dark; faced with Olivier, in the flesh
in front of me, it was harder. I was susceptible, I could be seduced by words; they could inflate and expand, become so big that I couldn’t see around them, but I had to see around them.
“It matters to me,” I said. “I wanted last night,” I said, trying to explain. “I wanted a proper good-bye. That’s what last night was about—”
“Tu as tort,”
he interrupted, telling me I was wrong and grasping my shoulders.
“Je t’aime,”
he said softly.
“Le reste, ce n’est pas important.”
I love you. The rest isn’t important.
There they were, the big guns, but it was too late. I stepped back and said,
“Si,”
thinking only the French would have a specific kind of yes you use to contradict someone. “It is to me,” I added.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest.
“Because I have to,” I said, even as the sirens wailed from the rocks. Why can’t you have this? The man just said he loves you! Isn’t that better than nothing? You’ll regret it! One day, it’ll be over with Estelle—she’s getting up there in years, the old bat. If you push him away now, it will be
over
!
“
Mais tu es complètement ridicule!
This is American extremism!” he exclaimed. “All or nothing, black or white! It’s childish! Destructive!”
Yes, I nodded. From his point of view, it was true. But not ending it now, while it might have been a vote of confidence for Olivier, was a bet against me, and I was holding out for me.
After he left, I could still see him, an afterimage on my retina. I saw him leaning against the wall, arms folded, and saw him walking toward me. I heard his voice, felt his cheek against mine, the softness of his lips. He was on my skin, the smell of sex and sweat. I sniffed my arms, my hair, inhaling deeply, trying to memorize it. But as evocative as scent was, I knew you couldn’t conjure it up in your memory. It didn’t replay, the way a song did. The only way to have it back was to have it back.
I took a long, hot shower and washed my hair. Then I stripped the bed and gathered the towels and threw them in the shiny new washing machine. I threw out the croissants and all but one
cannelé,
which I ate. I drank a cup of coffee and smoked one of his cigarettes, then I threw those out, too.
I
had nightmares every night. Which was odd, because during the day, I was fine. I was sad about Olivier, but it was ordinary, dull sadness, the kind you recover from, not bottomless despair, and already it seemed distant. But at night, I saw the same thing, over and over: a crash, followed by billowing clouds of black smoke. Someone crying or screaming. I’d wake up in a sweat around four, then sleep again until seven.
After three nights of this, I woke up determined to do something different, shake up my routine. I decided to get out of my neighborhood and go to a museum. I picked a group show at the Musée d’Art Moderne.
I had most of the show, sculptures and videos of ten artists from around the world, to myself. In one room, I crawled into a hollowed-out, upside-down Volkswagen Bug, suspended by steel cables from the ceiling. Inside, there was a blanket and pillows, and a sped-up video of
the Eiffel Tower in front of the Palais de Chaillot played on the TV installed in the rear window. The sky went from day to sunset to night in a matter of seconds, then started over again.
It was like being in a postapocalyptic baby carriage. I fell asleep, waking up only when the museum guard nudged my shoulder. It was the best sleep I’d had in days.
I went home and continued work on the last chapter.
I went back to my hotel that evening savoring the possibility that lay before me. I’d longed for her even after I’d taught myself to forget longing. I stepped onto the balcony and looked out over Hyde Park at night, thinking back, remembering the detective I’d hired to find her, as if the knowledge would bring her back to me. Life, the years, in their own time, had done the work. I was filled with the wildly incongruous sense of being alive again.
As it turned out, she found me. Her voice on the phone was so familiar, yet richer, burnished. We still knew each other. Some people change their essence over time. Friends you once loved you can no longer find common ground with, the only thing between you an increasing sense of misplaced nostalgia. Others change over time, becoming more who they are, more how you knew them, distilled, as it were, into purer forms of themselves. So it was with her.
We arranged to meet in Venice, in two weeks’ time.
Time passed like honey: thick, slow, but infinitely sweet. I wasn’t sure the day would actually come. I crossed streets certain I would be run over by a bus; I drove, convinced that my car would crash; I even boarded a plane convinced it would drop out of the sky. Pitched between a nervous, joyful anticipation and the vicissitudes of ordinary life, I hovered between two versions of my own existence. I would have lived to see my life come full circle. To see the one woman I’d loved and lost come back to me.
I put the pages down. Yeah, it was one of the oldest stories in the book—finding your old sweetheart later in life—but I had to admit, it worked for me.
There is no romantic like an old romantic.
There we were, the two of us, in the same city, together. In a hotel, which was not the same hotel but which might as well have been the same hotel, we sat on faded damask furniture and talked, as if nothing had changed, though everything had changed: the thing and its opposite, existing together, a hallucination of time explained by physics, a chiaroscuro of shadowy contradictions, illuminated by memory and desire.
(Love, yes, in its hibernal form.)
As if things hadn’t changed, as if we hadn’t changed, as if only the stories had changed and we had merely to catch each other up, fill in the blanks, make the most minute of corrections. After all, we’d always told each other stories.
How to resolve the problem of
histoire,
which means both story and history?
There was a sense of continuity between us, history stopped and started again. As if our story was a book, carelessly set down on a summer’s day, only to be picked up and read, years later, in late autumn. The memory of that earlier season, with its sharp, green impetuosity, lingered briefly, then dissipated.
Her voice had deepened with age and the cigarettes she’d given up. The lines around her eyes and mouth were a testament to all the years she’d smiled without me. They only made her more beautiful. She would laugh at me for that, but I wouldn’t mind. How precious it is, the sound of her laughter.
I stared out the window, absentmindedly tracing the shape of my own lips with my finger, imagining them on the bed in Venice, wondering what it would be like to find someone again all those years later. For a moment, I let myself sit on that bed in Venice with Olivier. I pictured us older, imagined myself wiser and yet unpretentious, as if I wore the mantle of a well-lived life as casually as the fetching dress I saw myself in.
I edited the image: maybe a silk shirt with flowing sleeves. Narrow black skirt, sheer stockings, and a different perfume, one that came out of an old-fashioned, cut-glass bottle…Suddenly, Olivier wasn’t in it anymore. I’d let my mind wander, and I was with someone else in Venice, a man I loved, like a presence I could imagine but not quite see.
On the street, a garbage truck shrieked to a halt. Hydraulic arms shrieked as they lifted and emptied the green recycling bin. The unmistakable sound of shattering wine bottles put an end to my reverie. Still, even after it faded from my mind, I felt a pang of nostalgia for my pretty little scene.
I flopped back on the couch with the chapter, staring up at the ceiling molding as the garbage truck groaned down the street. He wasn’t a bad guy, my author. “My” author, I thought wryly; I liked him now—or, he’d become someone I liked. Someone who could look at the woman he’d loved years before, and love her more.
She told me about her lovers, her travels, her marriage and divorce. I told her about mine. We talked about our careers, the ambitions we’d fulfilled, the ones we’d regretted, the ones we’d left behind.
There we were, in the most romantic city in the world, and we chose to barricade ourselves in our hotel room, ordering room service and drinking Barolo. She still had an endearing penchant for sweets and disposed of the Toblerone chocolates in the minibar.
I untied my shoelaces. She’d long since kicked off her shoes, tuck
ing her feet underneath her. Now we both lay down on the enormous bed, yet another island in the liquid city.
“Do you remember that place we met?” she asked. “What was the name of it?”
I could see it, the restaurant with the yellow walls, the long table, but the name wouldn’t come to me. “I don’t remember,” I confessed.
“Ah, memory,” she said ruefully. She turned, sliding a pillow underneath her head. Her hair fell to one side. “We could have stayed in London or Paris for this,” she remarked with an impish smile.
“Yes,” I agreed. As if to refute us, a water taxi sped by on the canal below, throwing sparkling lights on the ceiling. “But I’m happy we’re here,” I said. A moment passed. She toyed with my cuff link.
“They have a phrase for it in the Venetian dialect, the lights playing on the ceiling,” she mused.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’ve forgotten,” she said, working the cuff link free. She bent down, pressing her cheek to my wrist. We fell asleep in our clothes, holding hands like children.
I don’t require much sleep anymore. I wake at dawn. Sometimes I read, sometimes I write. I stood at the window. There was mist on the horizon, obscuring everything but the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. I thought about waking Eve so she could see it, but she lay asleep, a faint frown on her forehead, as if she were impatient in a dream, and all I wanted to do was memorize her face. She smiled, her eyes still closed.
“And if I returned to Paris?” she asked.
“Nothing would make me happier,” I murmured.
“It won’t be easy…I have certain obligations, certain attachments,” she said.
“I make no demands,” I said. An idea of us thickened from a mist of imagination and took form.
In the late afternoon, I went for a walk through the Marais down to the Seine to catch the sunset. On the way back, I stopped in a
boulangerie
to buy my favorite licorice candy, shiny, slightly oily black tubes stuffed with sugar paste. They were stale, just the way I liked them: tough and chewy.
On the rue des Archives, a hard chunk of licorice caught in my teeth, and I stopped to pry it free from a molar with my fingernail. In front of a store I must have passed a hundred times but never noticed, I looked at the windows, displaying various old magazines: a sixties
Vogue
with Twiggy in striped kneesocks, a
Paris Match
with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, and a yellowing
Paris Soir
newspaper about the war in Algeria. The shop was full of old periodicals, a reference treasure trove for pop culture historians as well as fashion and design people.
I pocketed my bag of licorice and went inside. Mountainous piles of magazines, some so old the edges of the paper were tobacco brown, made up a haphazard maze. The air was thick with a fug of cigarette smoke, and I heard two male voices argue heatedly about the recent insider trading scandal.
I saw them when I rounded a tower of milk crates. The owner, seated behind a table, tapped his ash out in a Cinzano ashtray. Beneath him, a Yorkshire terrier sat on a chewed-up fleece cushion. The other man wore a suit. I muttered a hasty
“Bonjour.”
I wandered through the chaotic piles of publications, trying to determine the logic, if any, of the organization. Every conceivable French magazine was there: political journals, fashion magazines, sports, interior decorating, music, gardening, crafts, and knitting. Remembering Clara’s birthday was coming up, I stopped in front of a table of fashion magazines. Maybe she’d enjoy an
Elle
from the year she was born.
It was amazing how the articles in women’s magazines hadn’t changed much in thirty-odd years: “How to Dress for That New Job,” “How to Tell If He’s the One,” “Interview with Sylvie Vartan.” Even-featured girls and women posed stiffly, smiling up from yellowing paper. They were touching, those models, trapped in a dated archness, a bygone vision of femininity—especially the ones from the fifties, with their headbands and vacuum cleaners and recipes for
béchamel
and
mousse au chocolat.
I found an issue of French
Vogue
from August 1975. Perfect for Clara. I tucked it under my arm.
Nails tapped on varnished wood. The Yorkie came around the corner and barked, a high-pitched yap followed by a pint-sized growl. I tried not to laugh.
“Venez, César!”
the owner called, addressing his dog in the formal second-person plural. The little dog gave me another yap and clattered away.
As I straightened up, I saw a hoard of
Figaro Madame
magazines in a box beneath the table. I picked one off the top: from 1989, with Iman on the cover, stunning in a white linen dress and dangling, gold earrings. When I’d lived in Paris as a student, my grandmother used to save me the fashion magazine from her Sunday
Le Figaro.
I flipped through the pages, looking at the fashions of the late eighties: huge shoulder pads,
Flashdance
off-the-shoulder sweaters, and Anaïs Anaïs, a perfume I used to wear. I remembered the department store bombings, the student riots, the year the Seine flooded, making the
quai
highways unusable, and later, when I studied in Paris, the seminar I took with a famous French political scientist who smoked a pipe in class—and the curly-haired philosophy student I fell in and out of love with, who had a face like an Italian cherub and worshiped the Ramones.
I flipped past a photograph of a woman with familiar, exotic features and pink frosted lipstick, and then turned back without thinking. There it was, proof the brain is faster than the eye: an article titled “Estelle Bailleux: sa vie, ses amours.”
My once rival. My nemesis, if I wasn’t being too grandiose or present-tense. I had to read it.
In 1988, she’d completed a successful run of
Private Lives
in the West End and had made a film with Alain Resnais. Recently divorced, she’d started a new relationship with a man she described as
“l’homme de ma vie.”
It’s such a romantic expression from the English-language point of view: “the man of my life,” the “of” and “my” implying a whole life, the single most important man of your life. The French equivalent of “the one,” or “my soul mate,” but lacking the pop-culture shorthand of the former and the gooey romantic aspect of the latter. The expression is simple, concise, and direct.
I turned to a two-page spread of Estelle wearing a pink gown embroidered on the back with two black squiggles of sequins shaped like the curvy openings on violins. Meters of duchesse satin flowed out behind her. The dress was Christian Lacroix; the choker of diamonds and rubies at her neck was Mauboussin. Seeing her at roughly my age, in a getup worthy of the court of Louis XIV, I found it hard not to feel outclassed.
I devoured the interview, looking for information about her personal life, but it was mostly about her new film, her passion for the theater, and her country house. She refused to name her mysterious new man, saying only that he was recently divorced and that they’d known each other for years.
I kept hoping I’d stumble across some lurid morsel of information, but the interview was full of the usual platitudes.
“Avez-vous besoin d’aide?”
a voice called out, asking if I needed help.
“Non, merci, monsieur,”
I called out, feeling like I’d been caught with pornography. On the last page, the interviewer, determined to worm another snippet of information about her personal life, asked how she knew her new love was Mr. Right.
