Lessons in French (13 page)

twent
y
-five

Jacques answered the phone. There was no accusation to modulate the delight in his voice at the sound of mine.

“How is my little Rastignac? You are seducing all of Paris, no? Your mother tells us you are a rising star in the world of the arts.”

His words unleashed an olfactory memory of the tiny kitchen in the Nineteenth, a blend of bouillons and coffee grinds, slow-cooking garlic and browning crêpes. It was a historic smell, old and textured despite the soulless concrete walls of the apartment bloc that encased it. Since the kitchen was the warmest room in the house, I did my homework there, on a laminated table cloth with an orchard theme. Jacques would slip dark chocolate into my pencil case, for inspiration.

“Rastignac?” I laughed. “You’re still impossible!” Instantly we were back in our age-old joke where I was Balzac’s Provençal hero, decoding the capital, and, after a few disastrous mistakes, taking it by storm. “How are you? How is Solange?”

“Solange is cooking bolets in case you decide to come to Orléans for dinner. You should see the beautiful kitchen we have here. She is like a fish in water.”

Bolets were my favorite mushrooms. We used to drive out to the country to gather them in the fall, then take them to our local pharmacy to be checked because it was the job of every
pharmacien
to recognize poison mushrooms that might have masqueraded as edible. Afterward there was a flurry of omelettes aux bolets,
chickens in their earthy fricassée,
even the occasional veal dish to celebrate our harvest in style. At the end of each meal, Étienne would pretend to be poisoned and stage a gasping death over dessert, until one day he stopped. His parents must have told him that making light of death was insensitive to my situation.

When Jacques put Solange on, she asked if I was eating enough in Paris, if the lady I worked for knew how to cook or had
domestiques
to do everything for her, if my work was interesting, if I would like to come and spend Christmas with them.

I said I would love to come. Would she please make rabbit with prunes? I thought I could picture their Orléans interior, comfortable and cluttered, with the collection of Limoges china pillboxes displayed in a glass cabinet in the
salon
.

“
Lapin aux pruneaux, mais bien sûr, ma cocotte!
”

Then her tone changed to pleading. Had I seen Étienne?

Yes, I had seen him several times. I loved seeing him.

How was he doing? He was living such an irregular life that they were worried about his health.

I could hear Jacques breathing in Solange’s ear, “Do not worry Katie so about Étienne. Do not perturb
la petite
,” as though I were still a little girl in need of shelter from bad news.

I assured them that he was full of energy, that his rent-stabilized apartment near the Bastille was big and decent. He had managed to take over a lease from a friend who had moved away. This was only a little illegal. Besides, artists had their own moral code, no, apart from the rest?

“He’s invited me to move in with him instead of paying rent to my boss. But I can’t. It’s part of my contract that I live on site. I’d love to stay with Étienne though. You should see how clean his place his. He’s a maniac about cleaning.” I laughed. “But you must know that.” I didn’t mention his passion for shoplifting household products—bleaches, brooms, even an iron once.

“And does he cook for himself?”

“He’s an elegant cook. Everything he makes is pretty. And interesting. He makes very colorful salads.”

“Yes, but are they nourishing?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said as lightly as I could. “
Il surveille sa ligne.
”

“
Sa ligne?
” She sounded terrified.

“He looks wonderful, Solange. And happy.”

“Maybe he will come for Christmas too?”

twent
y
-six

Gingerly, I held a photograph of one of the very first breaks in the Berlin Wall. It was taken in the morning, from the west. I saw a line of movement, framed on either side by gray concrete scrawled with black graffiti. The gray was the standing Wall, probably rubble by now but here still imposing. The section of light in the middle, the break, was only bright by comparison. It was not a dazzling morning at all, and still the daylight was a relief.

From behind, there was a row of raised arms, waving bunches of flowers, reaching through the fresh gap toward a row of police officers on the other side. From the thrust of their bouquets, I guessed that the West Germans were singing or chanting. The East German soldiers, in olive hats, were looking through the hole in the concrete, out over the flowering hands, toward the other Berlin.

Paris Match
was preparing its special issue dedicated to the history of the Wall. It would include this shot of Lydia’s in my hands. The space in the concrete, a slice of light and of movement, was a strip of hope, Lydia said, right before everything was leveled.

The doorbell rang and I excused myself to go answer.

It was Madame Fidelio with a package for
la jolie petite,
who was coming tomorrow with the brother. Madame Lydia must be very happy
, non?
And all the painting in the apartment was finished? She stepped through the foyer doors into the hallway, peered into the living room where two workmen were finally hanging the brass clock up over the mantel where it belonged. The living room walls were now a few shades lighter than a papaya. You might call them apricot.

Madame Fidelio turned to me and clucked.

“Katherine!” Lydia called me back into her office. “I need you
now
.”

I felt a surge of anxiety about an amorphous task she had set me a few days back, Research on the Muslim religion that I hadn’t started for lack of a clear idea how. Was she going to call me on it already?

The mock-up of the upcoming
Match
was on her desk. The cover was going to be a wide shot of a huge mixed crowd, hanging out under what I now easily recognized as the Brandenburg Gate.

Just above the Brandenburg Gate photo was a half-eaten container of the spring rolls from the great Vietnamese takeout place on the rue du Bac. She had made me promise not to let her have those anymore. Who could have picked them up?

“Lydia,” I said, hoping to preempt disaster with an earnest question, “I don’t understand what exactly I’m supposed to do about the Koran scholars in England. I’m not sure where to begin.” She had told me to summarize the thoughts of a few modern Muslim scholars, but hadn’t told me why or which ones. “I mean, do you want me to go back in history or just stay in the present? What is this for?”

“You’re smart. You’re well educated and resourceful. And
verbal
. It’s all a question of words. I know you’ll figure it out.”

So much trust was staggering. I wanted direction. I wanted to do a good job. To be taken on faith, with no guidelines, made me deeply nervous. I began to formulate another question, but she interrupted me.

“All right,” she sighed. “We have two days to pull Thanksgiving together. In theory, Portia is smuggling in the cranberries from the States. We’ll see if she remembers. We have the turkey ordered and the sausage for the
farce
from that wonderful
charcutier
right off of Montparnasse
.
I like to do a hazelnut and prune stuffing. We can get the fruit and nuts at Hédiard. And for the rest, the vegetables and what have you, we’ll go to Bon Marché and have a big
livraison.
Is it terrible if I don’t bake pies? Maybe you can stop by Mulot and order one of those chestnut Mont Blanc
fluffy cake things. Portia loves a Mont Blanc and you can’t get them in New York. But for the apple tart, go to Poilâne.”

“Where’s Poilâne?”

“On the rue du Cherche-Midi, right around the corner from that awful Futurist sculpture of the soldier on the horse.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Of course you will. You find everything, don’t you? Do you think we need a soup to start? Does your mother do a soup? How does your mother do Thanksgiving?”

The way Mom “did” Thanksgiving was so foreign to all this that I felt a sad sense of righteousness and was relieved when Lydia did not wait for an answer and segued straight into her wine anxiety.

“I’m going to send Sally into the
cave
even though I’m loathe to. But she’s a terrible wine snob and I have to trust her because we may have Rushdie’s French publishers at the table. They’ve had bomb threats, you know, poor souls, and they may leave the country. But if they’re still here on Thursday, then we can’t have anything less than a Margaux, and I don’t trust Clarence further than I can throw him with Bordeaux. He can work his way around Burgundies and Rhônes, but he’s hopeless with the Bordeaux. He has this ridiculous notion that they’re overvalued, so he refuses to pay attention to them. You’ll see, when he sees we’re drinking Margaux for Thanksgiving, he’ll sulk all night . . . Or maybe I’ll send Harry down to the
cave
. What do you think? Harry’s even better than Sally for this sort of thing.” She handed me a legal pad. “Let’s make a list. Then maybe you’ll take it to Clarence—he’s been locked in his study all day, working, we hope—to see if he thinks we’ve forgotten anything.”

As I took Lydia’s dictation, black felt on yellow paper, the fact of Thanksgiving, which was really the fact of Portia, became inevitable. So much of this fuss was for her. She
was
the occasion.

“As I say, Portia loves chestnuts. Let’s put some in the Brussels sprouts. You can get them already roasted at the é
picerie
in the Bon Marché. Add chestnuts to your list for our long-suffering Portia.”

As I wrote the word “chestnuts,” a dam burst inside me. A long slow buildup of guilt and fear, come to its tipping point, flooded my conscience. I looked down at my shaking hands and couldn’t believe they still held their shape.

I could argue all I wanted that my meeting Olivier had been an amazing coincidence, that I had put myself in the way of chance, that he would have left her anyway. But try telling that to Portia, who had asked me to count the pills in her Valium pack and report the number back to her before leaving them in the drawer of her dressing table. The top right drawer please.

Portia was coming tomorrow, for real. Everything was about to change. The wall between us was coming down.

twent
y
-seven

Portia was impossibly thin, short but willowy, otherworldly as a surrealist watercolor. The explanation for her great delicacy did not remain a secret very long.

“Heartbreak,” she said when she saw my eyes drop to her sagging suede pants the first time we were alone. “I don’t usually look like this. I can barely stand to eat.” There was accusation in her voice.

I stiffened. Was she waiting to pounce on me? Was it conceivable that Olivier had told her? Or that Madame Fidelio had seen the two of us wandering in and out of the courtyard that first day, guessed, and taken Portia aside to say that this assistant was even more of a slut than the last one?

Although Portia’s blond hair and blue eyes were recognizable from her pictures, I could not match her expression to the voice on the phone. She didn’t look officious. She looked dramatically sad.

“Your mom told me you’ve been pretty upset.” My instinct was to be nice, but being nice made me queasy. This moment of meeting her was the moment I became a liar. Passing through it, seemingly unscathed, was bizarre. It was the abruptest change of season I had ever been through, like getting off a plane in the Caribbean in February, which I’d never actually done, but I bet she had.

A surge of jealously steeled me. “Your mom says you’re having a hard time getting over your ex-boyfriend.”

“Really?” The roll of her eyes was suspicious, but I could not tell whether she suspected me, suspected her mother, or was simply in the habit of mistrust. “What exactly did my mother tell you?”

In a flailing attempt to hide my fear, I clung to the rules of conversation and answered her as normally as I could.

“Well, she told me that she’s worried about you, about your breakup and how hard it’s been. I think she’s worried you don’t feel like you can talk to her. Typical mom stuff. She wants you to feel better.”

“I wish it were typical mom stuff. I wish she were truly worried about me. I wish she could be.” Her words were as airy as she was, but her eyes were solid, big globes shining at me with what might be the beginnings of gratitude. They bulged like Lydia’s, but they were deeper set and in such contrast to her fairness that they leant a shadowy quality to her beauty.

Clarence had described Portia as pure and ethereal, a Raphael. No, Claudia had disagreed, from her photographs Portia was a Caravaggio, but no man could say that about his own daughter. Because Caravaggio’s models were prostitutes.

In any case, I began to think that she was a work of art, with all of art’s signifying power, and that right now that power was concentrated in those big strange eyes, which seemed to say, “Thank you for letting me know that my mother has asked you to spy on me. I understand you’re going through the motions of your job, but I also get that I can trust you, right?”

I felt a perverse compunction to stop the bleeding from my own misfired gun. This was not at all what I expected.

But just as I was beginning to think I might like her, Portia pulled herself together and asked how I was enjoying Paris. “Isn’t the shopping out of this world?”

The shopping? On six hundred dollars a month minus four hundred for rent? Did she know she was being deeply rude? Was she clueless or was she trying to show me who was on top?

No, it was none of those things. She was simply attempting to place me. And I felt so unplaceable that her appraising glance did not so much offend as depress me.

What could she see? A brown-haired girl with pretty eyes and apple cheeks, broad healthy shoulders and long legs. I had a high bouncy ponytail. I probably looked like a nice, sympathetic person. I wore a short denim skirt with leggings and leg warmers and an asymmetrical sweater several years out of style. I had on shoes that Christie had bought in the last round of Parisian sales which had proved too small for her. They were two-toned olive and red. I did not look like an idiot. I did not look threatening either.

“The Parisian women certainly are out of this world.” I let out a lame giggle. “They’re so put together compared to us Americans, or compared to me I mean.”

I sat down on the couch and began to knead a cushion.

Portia smoothed the buttery seat of her floating pants and joined me. From the hallway, smells of fennel sausage and onions curling in underneath the door began, softly, to knot us together. Lydia was working on the stuffing for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

The living room, like Portia’s bedroom, was in a perfect state of readiness for her arrival. She knew nothing of the messy preproduction that the rest of us had endured.

“I haven’t had time to shop much,” I added. “There’s been a lot going on here. It’s been interesting though.”

“It’s a madhouse. Still, I can see why it might be interesting from your perspective. Dad says you have a great attitude.”

“Your dad’s sweet.”

She filled her face with meaning. “Listen, did my mom happen to mention, when she was telling you how worried she is about poor me, that she’s still close with Olivier?”

I dug my nails into the couch. “Well, no, not so much. I mean she did say that it might be your perception that she’s close with him because she and he used to get along. She may have thought he was charming while it lasted, but, but, but
really
she is
your
mother. So I can’t imagine she’s too worried about staying friends with an ex-boyfriend of yours.”

“Of course you would assume that, wouldn’t you? Any normal person would. Mothers are supposed to be loyal to their daughters, right?” She was tearing. “Olivier was here, you know, spending time with her, right before you came, going to restaurants with her and drinking wine. They were talking about me together in my own house, concerned about me like I was some child. It’s her fault he can’t take me seriously. She has no boundaries.”

I turned my face downward to the pathetic, but lovely, suede pants. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

No, this was not how I expected to feel.

The living room door opened and in popped Lydia. She was wearing a yellow Provençal apron. Her voice rolled gravelly and flirtatious. “My girls, you have to come taste this. We may have to send Clarence out for more tarragon and more sage. It might be a little bland
.
But you’ll tell me. Come, come.”

We followed her into the kitchen, where a bowl of cranberry sauce was cooling in the center of the table.

The lovely smells were coming from two blue Dutch ovens, one large, one small. Lydia danced in their steam. She did not want us looking so perturbed in her festive kitchen. “You girls are much too serious. Portia, you look like death warmed over. When was the last time you ate?”

“I eat ice cream every night, Mother.”

Lydia sighed at me. “Her roommate spoons it into her mouth. A few bites of ice cream, and that’s it. How do you study on that?”

“It’s the only thing I can stand to swallow right now.”

“I wish I had that problem!” Lydia dipped two teaspoons into her stuffing, blew on them long and loudly, then held them to our mouths. “Tell me! Tell me!”

As we tasted the stuffing, I saw a flicker of pleasure in Portia’s face. It was over as soon as it began, but it was enough to show me that she could stand to eat, and that maybe there was hope for her.

“It’s great, Lydia,” I said.

“More herbs? More port? Speak now.”

“No, it’s perfect.”

Portia looked at the smaller pot. “What’s in that one?”

“Your brother’s stuffing.”

“He can’t eat our stuffing?”

“He’s announced he’s a vegan. And I can’t have my son with no stuffing on Thanksgiving. What kind of
mère indigne
would I be?”

“Unbelievable!” Portia fluttered on a gust of anger. Her voice grew bigger than she was. “I cannot believe you are catering to his every whim, always catering to him. You’re creating a monster! Besides, vegans don’t eat turkey.”

“I know that. I’m going to stuff him a pumpkin and I’m happy to stuff one for you, too, darling if you’re feeling left out. Would you like one too? A pumpkin for my pumpkin?”

“I can’t fathom this!”

“How did you make Joshua’s stuffing?” I asked cheerfully.

“I’m glad somebody’s interested. I used bread cubes and lots of celery and nuts, some vegetable stock. It’s not half-bad. Would you like to taste?” And she took back my spoon and dipped it into the smaller pot.

“Mother, stop!” But it was too late. “Mother, how can you be so completely disrespectful? He’s a vegan for Christ’s sake! You can’t plunge a sausage-covered spoon into his stuffing!”

A spasm coiled through Lydia, halting in a crazy electric smile. “He’ll never know, will he?”

“It’s all for show with you, isn’t it?” Portia left. Seconds later, we heard the door to her room slam shut.

I took the spoon from Lydia and tried the vegan stuffing. “This one’s good too,” I said. I still had not met Joshua. He had vanished to his room immediately on arriving. So far, this celery and nut mixture was all I had to go on. I began to picture someone squirrely.

“Of course it’s good.” She shook her head to relax her mouth. “It’s good because I made it for my son. You don’t think she’ll tell him about the spoon, do you?”

“Oh no, she wouldn’t,” I said. “She wouldn’t say anything.” Portia’s forgotten all about it. I was fairly certain that her brother’s potential offense was simply one more path back to her own sorrow.

“How do you think she’s doing?” asked Lydia. “Has Oliver been just terrible to her? Maybe you’ll be able to give her some perspective, engage with her about Paris, do museums, do some shopping, go out. I can tell she likes you.”

“Of course. I’d love to.” The fact that I
had
to be nice to Portia would save me from total hypocrisy, wouldn’t it? It was part of my job to be polite even though she made me feel awful about the way I dressed and the fact that I could not afford to be like the magical women here in Paris any more than I could afford to fly home to my own mom for Thanksgiving. I needed to smile at her, no matter that she would consider me her worst enemy if she knew where I stood with Olivier, because my desire to be loved was stronger than my guilt. And because, despite her irritating qualities, I was already drawn to her. “I’ll try my best to cheer her up.”

“Tell me, Katherine, does she blame Olivier?”

“No,” I said in a horrible rush of relief, “I don’t think she can blame him yet.” She blames you, Lydia, ridiculous as it seems, you and you alone.

I excused myself, ran up the five flights to my room.

From the family photo on my packing chest, I felt the enduring light of my father’s approval. His eyes were beaming. The set of his mouth was gentle.

During our weekly phone calls from Jacques and Solange’s house, his voice had grown progressively more positive and all-forgiving, as though he were realizing that time was too short for criticism, that the only thing worthy of passing on was unconditional love.

It was a love I returned every day of my life. But was I proving worthy of it?

As he died, Dad also grew more nostalgic for the myth of his French origins. He referred with outsized intensity to the two summers he had spent with Jacques camping in the South of France. He said that if he had to miss me, he loved knowing that I was getting back to our roots.