Lessons in French
Authors: Hilary Reyl
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For Charles, mon grand amour
contents
one
They say I have no accent and that this is a gift. Sometimes, people can detect a lilt in my voice, which makes them wonder which rural part of France I come from, or maybe which Scandinavian country. But no one can hear that I’m American. And yet, because I am not French, I show almost no signs of belonging to any group or class. In Paris, I am virtually transparent. A gift, perhaps
. Un don,
so to speak
, voilà.
But, when you feel invisible, there is no end to the trouble you can get into.
My trouble began in 1989, on a wet September morning at Charles de Gaulle Airport, when I decided to splurge on a taxi into town. The worn smells of leather and tobacco were deeply reassuring, the precise blend of odors I craved at the edge of the unknown.
But I probably shouldn’t have taken that taxi. Mom claimed that you had a much higher chance of dying on the way to or from the airport than you did on the plane. However, you had more say about how you traveled on the ground. You could go by car, bus or subway. You could slow down, look both ways, watch your back. On the ground, you could take responsibility. In the air, worry was nothing but a production.
I had just graduated from college, and was trying to ignore most of what Mom said, but I was secretly proud of her, pretending to be as callous as she would have been to any signs of fear in myself as my plane flew to Paris.
The driver asked me where I was returning from. Where had I been on my
vacances
?
I told him I hadn’t been on vacation anywhere. I had been a waitress in New Haven all summer. That was a town on the East Coast, near New York.
Ah, New York!
But I was returning to Paris for the first time in ten years. Though I wasn’t French, my grandfather was, and I lived here once, for two years, with cousins, in the Nineteenth Arrondissement.
He laughed. Today, he wasn’t driving me to the Nineteenth but to the Sixth. A much more chic
quartier
. More central. Mademoiselle was moving up in the world!
We glided through the industrial ring around the city. We had just permeated its first layer when the taxi was rear-ended at a stoplight. There was a shock, a screech, swearing.
I felt so vindicated for Mom that I was strangely overjoyed by this accident, proof-positive of her theories of relative danger. I sidelined the fact that she would have told me to take the Métro because it was cheaper, and safer. I had wanted a driver to be my own personal shepherd into my new life.
This was my moment in the sun. So what if it was drizzling? Experience was going to transform all.
The driver punched the steering wheel—“
Merde
!”—as I flew into his headrest.
“
Ça va
?” he asked, rubbing his own forehead. “Are you hurt?”
No, no, I was not hurt, and I would wait uncomplainingly on the sidewalk of this outer arrondissement for him to exchange the necessary information with the woman who had hit us.
We were by a news kiosk. I had forgotten that the news kiosks here were green and suppository-shaped, that the newsprint was denser than ours, that there were Chupa Chups lollipops and Holly-wood gum for sale, a magazine called Figaro Madame, headlines about a pop star named Johnny Hallyday, erotic ads for coffee and chocolate, small posters for chamber music concerts in Ste-Chapelle, dog shit. It was all coming back.
Looking hard at the familiar candies and magazine covers, I saw their colors and meanings bleed into lines and shapes. I pulled a sketchbook and pencil from my bag, keeping half an ear to the words between my driver and the offending woman. He wrote down her details. She lit a cigarette.
Because I sensed the conversation wrapping up, I did not put pencil to paper. There was too much to draw in a few moments, and I hated resorting to quick symbols and tricks. I was uncannily good at reproducing what I saw, but only in the fulness of time. If I couldn’t do it right, I would rather simply stare. I slipped my sketchbook away.
The drizzle was lightening into the gray gauze I recalled well but hadn’t thought of in years.
In Germany, the Berlin Wall was about to come down. A photo on the front page of
Le Monde
showed a rock band playing a concert in front of big bright graffiti on the West Berlin side. I looked into the crowd that filled out the
Le Monde
photo. People were dancing ecstatically, sensing the coming demolition, except for the photographers, who were still, their flashes going off.
I scanned the photo for my new boss, Lydia Schell, the woman I had come here to work for. She was a photographer, a famous one. Mom had not heard of her, but once I was able to prove her credentials, Mom was impressed that I would have the opportunity to be the Paris impresario to someone with such a name. “Impresario” was Mom’s term. When I had interviewed with her in her Manhattan town house a few weeks ago, Lydia had called me her assistant.
Now she was in Germany capturing the momentous happenings. There was a chance, wasn’t there, that she was in that crowd, peeking through her lens at me in welcome?
“You made it,” she would say, if only I could spot her.
“Bien-venue!”
two
My dented taxi stopped on a beautiful street that flowed toward the Luxembourg Gardens, stonework giving way to rich green. This was a new angle on Paris for me.
Le Sixième.
Even the cigarette smoke was elegant here, twirling above well-groomed bodies in a velvet calligraphy quite foreign to the noxious haze of my youthful memory. There was no confusing this cigarette smoke with car exhaust just as there was no confusing the clatter of high heels on this pavement with the street sounds outside my cousins’ subsidized building. What had those sounds been again? I couldn’t remember. They were muffled now by the luxurious revving of a Citroën’s engine, by the calm rustle of nearby leaves, by the voluptuous exhale of an impossibly petite woman in two-toned heels, which even I knew were Chanel, her shoulder pads broad enough to soften any blow.
The taxi was gone. I was outside No. 60 with my suitcase, forgetting the exorbitant fare as I looked down my new street, repeating the building code, 67FS, which I would have to punch in order to open the door to the interior courtyard, “a hidden gem,” according to Lydia, “although my husband Clarence likes to complain that it’s dark and depressing.” As I was preparing to punch the keys that would work this magical door, it opened by itself.
“
Ah, c’est mademoiselle Katherine?”
“
Madame Fidelio, je vous reconnais de votre photo!”
It was true. I recognized her overhanging brow from a photograph of Lydia’s. Her plumpness did nothing to soften her sculptural face. I knew that skull, those imposing eyebrows. She was an intimate, the Portuguese concierge who also helped with Lydia’s housework.
“C’est vous, non?”
“Oui, c’est moi. Enchantée, Mademoiselle.”
She gave a short laugh, overshadowed and outlasted by the suspicion in her eyes. Was I going to be a slut like so many of Madame’s other assistants? Was that what she was looking to know from my brown ponytail, pale pink lip gloss, jeans, leg warmers, t-shirt frayed and ripped to reveal one shoulder?
I wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about. I was a serious young woman who could not afford to be careless. I needed this job. I still wasn’t quite sure what it entailed, but whatever Lydia’s “little bit of everything” was, it would become my mission because Lydia was my first step into a real future. I had no intention of being a disaster, of dragging strange men up to my maid’s room or coming to work hungover. This wasn’t throwaway time for me like it had been for the other, more privileged girls. This time was real, Madame Fidelio.
“You have no accent.” Her tone hovered between mistrust and admiration.
“I lived in Paris when I was younger. I had cousins here, cousins of my father’s. My grandfather came from France to America but his brother stayed here, and his children were my dad’s favorite relatives. His only relatives really. I stayed with them for two years.”
“They will be happy to see you again, no?”
“They have retired and moved away. They were teachers in Paris, because they were sent here by the school system, but they always knew they would go home, to Orléans. So, I’ll have to take the train to visit them sometime.”
“That is a good thing, to be attached to your roots. My husband and I, we return to our family in Portugal every August.”
Watching Madame Fidelio’s slow understanding nod as she spoke, I was struck by the force of my cousins’ nostalgia. As a kid, I never thought much about the fact that Solange and Jacques were always scrimping and saving to build a small retirement house in a development outside their native town despite the fact of forty working years in Paris. It was simply the state of things. But it now struck me as incredible to have so concrete a vision of the future guiding your every youthful move, to know you will go home again, to live your life in a loop.
I thought Madame Fidelio might begin to tell me more about herself, perhaps her own plan to return home someday for good, but instead she said that I was prettier than the last girl and repeated that my French was
impressionnant.
Relief sunk in. Along with gratitude to my cousins for their patient teaching. When Lydia arrived, she would learn from her faithful concierge that I had told the truth about my fluency back in New York, and our first bond of trust would be forged.
But, even more striking was the fact that I had impressed the impressive Madame Fidelio. I must, in fact, be someone.
She looked at me, smiled.
I read my substance in her eyes.
“I do not know if the young
monsieur
is awake yet,” she said. “Perhaps we should not ring the doorbell. I have a key to the apartment, of course.
Allons.
”
It took me a few seconds, as we walked across the interior courtyard toward a staircase at the back, to mentally match “young
monsieur”
to Olivier, boyfriend of Lydia’s daughter, Portia, who was a couple of years younger than I. Olivier was going to show me around the apartment before he left later today for the final leg of his European trip. Madame Fidelio’s hushed and reverential tone suggested a prince.
“Does he like to sleep in?” Although I had quite forgotten his existence until now, my curiosity was suddenly acute.
“He is often pale. He has many
soucis,
I think. But he is
charmant.”
“Ah, bon.”
What kind of
soucis?
What troubles?
I could see why Lydia had said the courtyard was precious. It was cobblestoned and planted with manicured trees in ornate pots, with dignified doors and tall windows rising all around. The building’s inner walls formed a plush lining to this jewel box, known only to its owners and their secret guests. I felt a thrill of initiation. I also saw Clarence’s point. There was almost no sunlight. It was indeed a little dark and depressing.
The apartment was on the ground floor. As Madame Fidelio turned her key, I recognized the firm, if vaguely tender, expression from the final plate in Lydia’s latest book,
Parisians.
It was a book of portraits that began with the famous literary critic Jacques Derrida, in a bathrobe, in front of a bowl of coffee at the white plastic table in his suburban garden, and ended with this Portuguese concierge. The book had been criticized. They said Lydia Schell had lost her edge.
Parisians
was a mixture of Who’s who and
noblesse oblige
. But it had sold better than anything else she had done.
We came into an entry hall half-painted a color I could only call eggplant. The painting work must have stopped suddenly because the last brush-stroke of purple dripped down the creamy primer.
Madame Fidelio clucked at the unfinished walls.
“Pauvre Madame Lydia,
” she said cryptically. Then she signaled me to follow her down a long paneled hallway with many doors, some closed, some ajar enough to give me clues as I passed, a swatch of fabric, the pattern of a rug, the flicker of a mirror.
Only one door was fully opened. I saw an unmade twin bed with a pale blue ruffle in the same fabric as the drapes. I could not tell whether there were flowers or little figures on the fabric, but something was going on, something delicate and complicated. There was a dressing table strewn with bottles and tiny baskets.
“
C’est la chambre de la jolie petite
.”
La jolie petite
must be Portia. I thought of the fine-boned blond girl in the red leather frame back in the dining room clutter of the Greenwich Village house. As I wondered how Madame Fidelio might describe me, I tried to tread lightly down the hallway, a girl accustomed to bed ruffles that matched her drapes. A girl with a dressing table perhaps.
After a time, the hallway forked. That door down to the right, said Madame Fidelio, was Monsieur Clarence’s study. We veered left into the kitchen, which, on first glance, was less substantial than Lydia’s kitchen in New York. The appliances here were white, not stainless, and they appeared half-sized.
On the wall was a framed series of Lydia’s magazine covers. There was a
Rolling Stone
cover of Jim Morrison and one of Yoko Ono crying, holding a single wildflower in Central Park. There was a
Time
cover of Nelson Mandela. There was a
Life
cover that was probably the March on Washington. Martin Luther King was moving in a sea of signs. “Voting Rights Now!” “End Segregated Rules in Public Schools!” The March on Washington took place in 1963. That would make Lydia about my age when she took this photo. I wondered if she had felt young.
“
Ah, monsieur!”
Madame Fidelio smiled appreciatively, a woman who approved of men.
Young Monsieur was sitting at the kitchen table. He was tousled, and there was a fresh warmth to him, a waft of the morning bread from the
boulangeries
I could remember from my childhood.
He must have just emerged from that soft rustled bed I had glimpsed from the hallway, Portia’s bed. Without being able to look straight at him, I knew he was the most attractive person I’d ever seen. He was reedy and lithe. His hair tumbled like light over features of brushed elegance, light brown eyes, cheekbones curved and quick as the paws of a cat.
“Bonjour, Madame Fidelio.”
He had an American accent.
There was a flicker of annoyance in his face, surely at the invasion of his last private moments in the apartment, but the flicker disappeared as his gaze lit on me, and in the lifting of Monsieur’s irritation I felt myself uplifted, blessed, sun-kissed.
“You must be Kate. I’m Olivier.”
“Sorry to bother you so early.” It was just before ten o’clock. “Lydia says you’re leaving for Italy today. You probably have a lot to do.”
“Tomorrow, actually.” He smiled. “I don’t fly to Venice until tomorrow morning. And I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to pick up most of my stuff before I head out for good. So, I’m mellow.” He flung a wave of brown curls out of his eyes and looked at me again. Then he rose and put the kettle on. “Tea? Madame Fidelio? Kate?”
Madame Fidelio said she would leave us. Here was my key to the main apartment. Here was the key to the maid’s room on the sixth floor where I would live. But not the sixth floor on this staircase. The
escalier de service.
Monsieur would show Mademoiselle,
please.
“Pas de problème, Madame Fidelio
,” he said.
“Merci beaucoup, Madame!”
I added.
“Vous êtes gentille de vous occuper de moi.”
“Bonne journée, mes petits.”
The three of us smiled indulgently at one another. Again, I felt a certain pride in sensing I had made a favorable first impression on regal Madame Fidelio. I had passed through my first gate.
“How do you like your tea?” Olivier asked once she had gone.
“I like milk, if there is any.”
He took a carton from the small refrigerator.
My cousins’ refrigerator had been an even tinier affair, drawerless, without a working light. But I had bright memories of the food packages inside, and they were revived in a flurry by the box in Olivier’s slender hand. It was
longue conservation
milk, the kind everyone here drank. It could sit in that box for months until you snipped one of the corners and began to pour. It had a chemical smell that used to make me nauseated. I hated it. I had never told Mom because she had had more important things on her mind at the time, but the milk here was terrible.
“I got some honey at the farmers’ market on Boulevard Raspail. Would you like some in your tea?”
I had forgotten I liked honey but was suddenly longing for it.
“Sure. Honey would be great. I’ve never been to the market on Raspail. Is it wonderful? I haven’t been to Paris in over ten years.”
“Where did you get that accent? You sounded totally native talking to Madame Fidelio just now.”
I fell back on well-rehearsed lines. “I think the timing of when I learned was perfect. I was here between the ages of nine and eleven, young enough to get the accent and old enough to intellectualize the language.”
“No, you must be gifted. I’ve spent years here on and off and my mother’s French and I sound awful.”
“I doubt that.”
He laughed gently. “Spend some time with me then.”
I felt brave enough to glance into his eyes.
“So you’re fresh off the plane,” he said. He made my freshness sound like the quality of a flower or an apple. “Lydia says you’re a painter. Is there anything you want to see today, any art, anything in particular in Paris?”
“She told me you’d only have a few hours before you caught your plane and you’d barely have time to show me the alarm and the washing machine and such.”
She told me you were charming.
“But I don’t leave until tomorrow, remember? I love Lydia, but she has a lot on her mind. We can’t expect her to remember other people’s schedules. I have a whole day. I thought maybe I’d just walk around. I have to pick something up in the Sixteenth. Figured I’d go to the Marmottan. You know, where all the Monet waterlilies are? I haven’t been there this trip. I know it’s not very cool or contemporary, but I’m a nostalgic person.” He sighed. “I’m about to start a job in New York. Investment banking. I doubt I’ll have time to
flâner
in the foreseeable future. So I’m open. What do
you
want to do?”
“Can we get a croissant?”
