French Lessons (9 page)

“I’ll teach you French. We’ll talk dirty in French in bed with each other.”

“I’m terrible at languages.”

“I’ll be your French tutor.”

“You don’t talk dirty in English.”

“That’s just because I can’t catch my breath.”

“Say ‘Undress me’ in French.”

“Déshabille-moi.”

“Say ‘Fuck me.’ ”

“Baise-moi.”

“Say ‘Devour me.’ ”

“Dévore-moi.”

“Say ‘Don’t ever stop.’ ”

“N’arrête jamais.”

“Say you’ll come with me to Paris.”

“Je t’aime.”

Nico and Josie reach the top of the tower. Josie takes a deep breath and finally allows herself to look out. She was glad for the elevator ride, but she kept her eyes closed as she was whisked to the top.

Now she looks out, way out. The observation tower is crowded with people who all seem to be speaking at once—a jumble of languages and sounds. She walks slowly, unsteadily, to one window. She feels as if she’s not yet landed, that her legs need to keep climbing. She’s got sea legs, miles above the sea.

When she reaches the window she takes in a lungful of air and then holds it. It’s as if she doesn’t want to let go of what she sees. All of Paris is spread before her, from the heights of Sacré-Coeur, down along the banks of the Seine, out to the farthest reaches of each arrondissement. The clouds swirl around her, at eye level, and every once in a while the city disappears and she’s heaven-bound. Then a gust of wind pushes away the cloud and, like magic, Paris sits at her feet.

She looks straight out into the sky and sees what Simon must have seen in his small plane. Clouds, sky, space. It’s enormous and infinite and thrilling.

“Take me,” she had said when he told her how he loved to fly.

Now she knows. Now she has a piece of him that was missing. He loved this: the wild space of it, the changing possibility of clouds and sky, the power of height.

“Thank you,” she says to Nico when he comes to her side.

He stands next to her for a long while, both of them silent, both gazing out into the sky.

Josie remembers the weight of Simon’s body after they would make love. They would fall into each other, wrapping themselves as closely into each other’s bodies as possible. “Come closer,” he would say. “Yes,” she would say. After losing themselves during sex, they would land, and they needed to take away all the space between them.

Did he die in the sky? Did something happen in the plane while it flew through the sky? Is this what he saw before he died? Or did he come to earth and die when the plane crashed into the hard, unyielding ground? Did he and Brady know they were going to die? Did they hold each other and wait for it to happen?

“Take me,” she had said to Simon.

He left without taking her.

She makes a sound and Nico puts his arm around her.

The clouds move in and surround them. They can no longer see the city below. They’re wrapped in silvery black clouds, cocooned in space.

“I love it,” Nico says finally. “My tower. My Paris.”

• • •

Simon had said he’d come over to Josie’s cottage after dinner. He told his wife another client was in town, that once again he needed to stop by the guy’s hotel to buy him a drink and talk up tomorrow’s meeting. When the doorbell rang Josie thought Simon was early. She ran to the door, threw it open, and saw her father standing on the porch, flowers in his hand.

“Dad!”

“I’m disturbing you?”

“No, of course not. I’m just surprised.”

“Your old man was in the neighborhood.”

She ran dates through her mind—it wasn’t her mother’s birthday, their anniversary, the anniversary of her death.

“You don’t need an excuse,” she said. “Come have dinner with me.”

“Dinner? I don’t need dinner. I just need a little time with my girl.”

“I’m eating, Dad. You want time with me, you have to eat, too.”

She stepped aside and let him pass. He clung to his flowers as if he had no intention of giving them to her.

“Smells good in here,” he said, heading straight to the kitchen.

“I gotta make a call, Dad. Pour yourself a glass of wine. I’ll throw in the pasta in a second.”

“Pasta. Wine. I should come more often.”

She smiled and kissed him. He seemed smaller. No, she was used to standing on tiptoe to kiss Simon.

She walked into her bedroom and closed the door. She had to reach Simon, to tell him not to come. He’d be home, having dinner with his wife and Brady. She’d call on his cell phone but still, it was risky. She had to do it—she didn’t want him showing up with her dad here.

She dialed his number. It rang and rang. She hung up and texted him:
Call me
.

They were careful about text messages—too easy for his wife to pick up the phone and find the revealing words.

She waited a few minutes, pacing in her room. It was rude to leave her dad alone after he had driven all this way. Simon was probably in the middle of dinner. She’d try him again later.

She found her dad in the kitchen looking for a vase.

“Up here,” she told him, and reached above the refrigerator for the tall glass cylinder. “They’re beautiful.” Blue irises. Her mother loved irises. Again Josie tried to remember what day it might be—not Mother’s Day or her father’s birthday. Something made him get in the car and drive an hour and a half to drop in. She didn’t have a clue.

She took the flowers and placed them in the vase, filled it with water. She set the vase on the windowsill, next to her kitchen table. “Nice,” she said, pleased. “You’ve never brought me flowers.”

“Someone should spoil you,” he said.

The phone rang. She leapt at it.

“Hey, you,” Simon whispered in her ear.

“Mr. Reed. Thanks for calling me back. I need to talk to you about your son’s college choices. He and I met a few days ago and I promised I’d chat with you.”

“Well, thank you, Ms. Felton. Very responsible of you.”

“But my father just dropped in for a visit. Let’s talk about this another time?”

“You go ahead,” her father insisted. “I can wait.”

She shook her head. Now there would be no reason to take the phone into the other room. She was caught in her lie.

“Why don’t we talk about it during the parent-teacher conference tomorrow,” Josie said into the phone. “What time are you coming by? I have it written somewhere—”

“Can you go home for lunch?” Simon whispered. “I’ll stop by then. Brady and I fly out at three.”

“Noon it is, then. Thanks very much, Mr. Reed.”

She hung up the phone.

“You’re very good at what you do,” her father said. “It seems like it wasn’t very long ago that I might have been having that conversation with one of your teachers.”

No, Josie thought. You would never have had that conversation.

She walked over and kissed him again.

“Thanks for coming, Dad. I’ve missed you.”

“You could visit once in a while. It wouldn’t kill you.”

“I have so much work on the weekends.”

“You bring it with you. I can cook you a dinner once in a while. Where’s that wine? I couldn’t find it.”

Josie found a bottle of wine in her cupboard and opened it. Her father never would have had an affair. He was such a good husband, such a loyal man. But Simon had told her that he had never imagined that he would slip out the back door and take another woman to bed. “I’m a good man,” he had told her. Had he stopped being a good man when he fell in love with her?

She poured wine into their glasses. She handed her father a glass and took a sip of hers. An evening with her dad instead of her lover. She wasn’t disappointed. It was a chance to catch her breath.

“Sit down and let me get this meal together,” she told him.

He sat at the table and watched her. She put the pasta in the boiling water, then set the small table. She already had the sauce made—a simple tomato sauce with herbs from her garden. She tossed the salad with some vinaigrette.

“Look at you,” her dad said. “You would have made your mom proud.”

Josie smiled. She had often thought of that:
Mom should see me cook. Mom should see me teach
. But when she began her affair with Simon she no longer wished her mother alive to watch over her. When she thought about her mother now, she felt a hot blast of shame.

“Tell me what’s new, Dad. How’s the store?”

“Same old,” he said. “Nothing changes anymore. One of these days I’ll sell out and move to Palm Springs.”

“No you won’t,” Josie said. “You’d leave me?”

“Maybe you’ll visit more in Palm Springs.”

“Hey, guess what. I’m going to Paris!”

The timer rang and she tested the pasta, then poured it into the colander. She heated it with the sauce for a moment while she concocted her lie.

“You remember Whitney? My friend from college? We’re going together for six days.”

“You can afford something like that on your teacher’s salary?”

“Whitney got a great deal. I’m really happy about it. Paris!”

“Yeah. Good for you, Josie. You bring me back one of those berets the old men wear. I’d look good in one of those.”

Josie smiled. “You’d look great in one of those.”

She served them and sat across from her father.

“You really going to move to Palm Springs?”

“Who knows? I’m thinking about it. There’s a lady I know who’s got a place down there. She wants me to visit.”

“A lady?”

“You never heard of a lady before?”

“A girlfriend lady?”

“It’s not impossible.”

“Dad. That’s great. Since when?”

“Since never. I said it’s not impossible.”

“Tell me about the lady.”

“Somebody I met at bridge. A nice lady.”

“I’m glad, Dad. I’m really glad.”

“So what’s wrong with you? Your old man can meet a lady and you can’t bring home a boyfriend?”

“I’ll bring home a boyfriend, Dad. I promise.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know. It’s very complicated. There’s a man I like. I don’t know.”

“What’s not to know?”

“Like I said, it’s complicated.”

Her father put his wineglass down on the table. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

“He’s married,” he said, his voice low.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Love isn’t complicated. Married men are complicated.”

“Forget I said anything.”

“Your mother would be very upset with you.”

“Don’t bring her into this.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Dad. Sit down.”

Her father walked into the other room. Josie was furious with herself for saying something—there was no reason to talk about Simon. She got up and followed her father into the living room.

He was standing by the front door as if considering his escape. He gazed through the window; his face was dark and brooding.

“This is the day your mother was diagnosed,” he said quietly, as if he weren’t even talking to her. “Eight years ago.”

“Oh,” Josie said weakly. She stood back, scared that if she went to him, he’d throw open the door and disappear.

“I went with her to the doctor’s appointment. We thought it was nothing—some swelling in her ankles, a little discomfort, nothing important. But you know how much she hated the doctor.”

His hands hung limply at his sides. He looked helpless, lost, as if what happened eight years ago happened over and over again.

“She went in to the appointment and I stayed in the waiting room with all the ladies. Then the nurse came into the room and said, ‘The doctor will meet with you now.’ I knew everything I needed to know right then. I didn’t need him to say a word.”

“How was Mom?” Josie asked.

“Quiet. Scared. We sat in front of the doc’s desk in his fancy office and listened to him talk about surgery and chemo and new kinds of treatment. But right then I knew: I had lost her. I lost my world. I lost my life.”

There were tears running down his face. Josie swiped at her own face with the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry I was so far away,” she said.

“Oh, you did what you needed to do. What all kids do. We never blamed you for that.”

“Come have dinner with me, Dad.”

“Eight years go by. And there’s still all these feelings I have. Like I can’t gather them up and put them away in a box.”

Josie walked over to her father. He turned toward her and let her hold him.

After a moment he stepped away. “No married men,” he said.

“Who said anything about a married man?” she told him.

Nico and Josie take the elevator down from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Let’s walk along the Seine,” Nico says.

“This is the first day I have spent back in the world,” Josie tells him as they head toward the river. First they walk along the wide boulevard at the side of the road; below them, to their left, is the Seine and across it, the Grand Palais. Farther up is the Louvre. Then a stairwell takes them to a lower path, one that brushes the river and protects them from the street traffic and the mad crush of pedestrians.

“You have been hiding?”

“Hiding?” Josie says, considering the word. “No, there’s no place to hide. I try the bed, with the covers pulled high, but even then, it finds me and knocks me out.”

“Sadness?”

“I wish it were sadness. That seems kinder than what I feel now. It’s a gut punch now. It’s a wallop of grief.”

“When your mother died …?” Nico lets the question trail off. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m asking too many questions.”

“You are,” Josie says. But she slides her hand around his arm and walks at his side with their arms linked together.

They’re quiet for a while. The clouds have darkened the sky and they hear thunder far off in the distance.

“When my mother died,” Josie says, “I remember thinking I was no longer a child. It all ended at once. I had just graduated from college, I was thousands of miles from home, and then she was gone. I floated for a while—it’s so different. This grief has me crawling on the earth; that time I was cut loose and I couldn’t ground myself. I had a lot of sex. Isn’t that odd? I slept with every boy I knew—old friends, new friends, passing acquaintances. I guess I was trying to feel something. Now I feel too much.”