Lessons in French (27 page)

I ripped my chocolate croissant and gave her half. She almost smiled. We were finally alone, outside the Bastille apartment, sitting on her suitcases, waiting for her taxi to the airport. Étienne had gone to spend a few days with his parents in Orléans. He had said he didn’t want to be here at the moment Christie left. It would be too hard to watch her disappear.

“Are you excited about Stanford?” I asked. “You seem like part of you is already there, or already gone from here anyway.”

“You’re such a nut. I’m going to miss you.” She looked up. Last night while we were dancing, thunderstorms had washed the sky. She shook her head and kept looking into the pale blue, but she did not find what she was after because she finally turned back to me and said, “Katie, I’m at a loss.”

“No you’re not. It’s only the transition. You feel like you’re making this break, but you’re still going to be you and we’ll all be friends and Étienne will steal you all kinds of great things and I’ll mail them to you. Life will go on.”

I could tell she was going to tell me something terrible, and all I wanted was to stave it off.

“Do you remember when Étienne destroyed the letter you wrote him?”

“Destroyed? I thought he threw it away. What do you mean, destroyed?”

“He burned it. He burned a lot of things.”

“See, he has a cruel streak. I keep trying to tell you. Ever since we were kids. He used to torture me those years I spent here. He and his friends used to tease me in the playground, on the street, everywhere. I mean I know he’s grown up into a fine upstanding person, but that nasty little boy still peeks out sometimes. I’m not surprised he’s torching people’s letters.”

“Katie, Étienne has AIDS.”

“What?”

“He’s HIV-positive. And he’s starting to get sick. That’s why he’s so tired all the time.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I’m sorry.”

Frantically, I scanned the street for some sign that this wasn’t the real world, that I was going to wake up and life would fall back into place. But the street held no answers.

I grabbed Christie’s shoulders.

“Breathe,” she said. “You’re not breathing.”

“It’s not fair. It can’t be true.”

She touched my ring.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I moaned. “Why didn’t I guess?”

“I thought he would tell you himself when he was ready. It felt like it wasn’t my information. But I think now that he’s waiting for me to tell you. I hope he is. I hope I’m not wrong.”

We cried in each other’s arms until the taxi took Christie away.

fift
y
-four

It was eight-thirty in the morning. Raw with sleeplessness, I stood outside Clarence’s study with two notes that I had forgotten to deliver the day before, one from him to Lydia, one from her to him.

Étienne was going to die, and here I was nudging a missive under a doorway with my big toe.

Next I went to Lydia’s office, still locked at this early hour, with the letter from Clarence, the first he had dictated in a while. I hoped she would not realize it had been delivered late. I had been in such a rush to get to Christie’s going-away night that I had let things slide.

There was a big space between Lydia’s door and the floor. Clarence’s message sailed through.

Lydia’s was in a fat blue envelope from one of the beautiful handmade paper stores in the Fifth Arrondissement that she patronized. It was a list of things that needed to be fixed in the apartment and garden.

Clarence’s was in a thin white business envelope. It was a stream of discussion points that I had taken down on a legal pad. “These are in no particular order,” he had assured me, “1: Replace Joshua’s therapist; 2: Throw book party for Harry Mathews in New York or Paris this fall; 3: Insurance for the wine in the cave here; 4: . . .” These talking points persuaded me that he was not envisioning leaving Lydia anytime soon, that the story with Claudia was truly over. Folding the paper and slipping it into the thin envelope, I had had the impression of finally sealing her doom.

It was the thin envelope that I had just pushed under Lydia’s door, wasn’t it? I lay on the floor and peered, but the letter had glided far into the room and I couldn’t be sure.

Mom had a particular affection for a silly Danny Kaye picture about the Middle Ages called
The Court Jester.
We watched it whenever it ran on TV. There was a scene where our hero, the knight (Mr. Kaye), was trying to remember which vessel had the poison in it so as to hand the right one to his enemy and not die himself. “The chalice with the palace has the pellet that is poison, the flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true.” I think that’s right. But could I be absolutely sure? Who was that philosopher, long ago, freshman year, who talked about radical doubt?

This was ridiculous. I would never have confused those envelopes, and the fact that I entertained the idea that I might, and that such a slip could be my downfall, was some kind of sign. And not only that I was living in a farce. Mom would say it was a proof that I wasn’t taking care of myself. “You’re overtired,” she would say, “and you’ve lost perspective.
You
shouldn’t be worried about swapping messages in a house full of people who can’t be bothered to talk to each other.”

Even if I had mixed up the damn letters, it was of no great importance. Not Berlin. Not a fatwa or an act of anti-semitic violence. Not the life and death of someone I loved.

Quietly, I went to the kitchen and filled myself a big bowl of yogurt with muesli. I sprinkled on the last of the raspberries in the refrigerator. Then, at the garden table, before the house had woken up, I spooned my breakfast slowly into my mouth.

I had almost finished when Lydia came upon me in her bathrobe. She looked at me eating as though I might be a rat. Under her gaze, I saw that I had been hiding out back with my pilfered food. I had made it, furtively, for myself, and I was eating it alone, wanting nothing more than to stay unseen. This glare of hers was precisely what I had been avoiding. Was I nothing but an animal, afraid of getting caught scavenging? And was Lydia a beast too for being so territorial about the contents of her kitchen? Was Mom right to say that Lydia was exploiting me, because that’s what animals do to each other?

My stomach lurched.

Maybe it was time to go and make my own way.

Lydia peered into my dish. “Did you leave enough food for Portia?”

I blushed at the image of the empty raspberry carton in the garbage.

“You know that muesli and yogurt mixture is practically the only thing she can eat.” Lydia was whispering. A sudden delicacy on behalf of her daughter had taken hold of her. “She’s lost so much weight. She’s so very weak. I hope you’ve left something for her breakfast.”

A tear for Étienne ran straight onto one of Portia’s precious berries. Then another and another.

Lydia first looked incredulous. Then she took a beat to soften her eyes, cocking her head to reframe the scene, to recast me. “Oh, Jesus, you silly girl,” she put her hands on her hips and half-smiled. The tone of the moment was as changed as by a sunburst over the garden.

She walked over and put her hand on my shoulder. It was the first time she had ever touched me, besides the occasional drunken double peck at the end of an evening. There was a tremor to her fingers.

“Not you too,” she said gently. “First my New York daughter is sobbing because she’s had a big night out in Paris and all it does is make her miss Olivier. And now my Paris daughter is crying into her breakfast, God knows why, probably for this French boy who has been dropping off flowers for you with Madame Fidelio. What is it with you girls of today? When I was young, in the sixties, we didn’t take sex this seriously at all. Not remotely. Come on, Katherine, look on the bright side. It’s a beautiful morning in Paris.”

“Lydia, it has nothing to do with boyfriends. It’s my cousin, my cousin Étienne. The one who makes the Berlin Wall jewelry. I found out he’s HIV-positive. He’s one of my very oldest friends. And he’s my flesh and blood. And it’s hard to care about anything else right now.”

“That’s terrible, dear. I’m sorry. Is he sick yet?”

“He’s getting sick. He’s with his parents right now. Maybe he’s telling them.”

“Are you going to Orléans then?”

“Of course.”

“I hope so.” She looked at me, my tired features, my empty bowl. “Katherine, you do have your own family, you know.”

“You’re right,” I murmured. “I should have gone to see them forever ago. But being here,” I gestured around the secret garden, “has been—”

“Go during your vacation.”

My time in Versailles with Olivier? I couldn’t bear to cancel it. I needed his empathy now more than ever. But I had to see Étienne. And Solange and Jacques.

“Can I take another week? You and Clarence will be in Italy. And Orlando is boarding, right?”

“I can’t promise you that. You have your time off set already. I may well need you here to hold down the fort. I don’t like to leave the place empty that long, especially with Madame Fidelio away. You should choose what is really important to you. Hanging out with dime-a-dozen boys? Or seeing your cousins whose son has AIDS? You can’t always have everything all at once. Think about it.”

fift
y
-five

I had never seen Lydia and Clarence so united as they appeared in the kitchen when I returned from photocopying early fashion magazines at the Bibliothèque Nationale on a sticky afternoon. Side by side at the table, they had rounded shoulders and unsteady hands. Their fury, taut over their despair like the skin of a bubble, gave fresh vibrancy to the room.

“We’ve had terrible news,” Clarence told me. The gray of his skin was two shades deeper. He had not shaved. There was a fungal quality to the sprouting on his chin. He looked ill again.

Lydia nodded, letting him speak for her. As he shook his head, she steadied her fingers on his silver curls.

I put down my stack of photocopies.

Clarence inhaled deeply. “Our son has enlisted in the army. He has the bloody insane notion that he will go to Saudi Arabia to defend American interests in the Middle East. He says he hopes they send him to Kuwait for an invasion. It’s a death wish.”

“A death wish,” echoed Lydia, grimacing at a sip of dissolved papaya mixture. I could tell she hated herself for continuing in this rite when her son’s life was at stake. And yet, one must go on.

“How awful,” I said, realizing how much I missed Joshua. I could not believe that this wasn’t another of his black jokes. He would have let me know if it was real. “I’m sure you can talk him out of it, though. He doesn’t mean it.”

“But he’s done it.”

Gone was their debate about how to respond to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Ever since the attack of August 2, Lydia had been calling Clarence a hawk for saying that we should “bomb the daylights” out of Saddam. Did he actually believe all these nonsensical Hitler comparisons? Couldn’t he see that this was nothing more than a war to keep the price of oil under control? Did he honestly think that Saddam was suddenly the “world’s most dangerous man,” “the butcher of Baghdad?” Christ, Clarence sounded like Bush himself, talking about “land grabs” and “naked acts of aggression” when we had been supporting Saddam against Iran for years. No one was arguing that Saddam was good, but to suddenly cast him as our worst enemy? Didn’t Clarence see the hypocrisy? Where did all this anti-Arab “nipping in the bud” rhetoric come from? Who was racist now? Who had she married anyway?

Clarence’s insistence that an unambiguous show of force was required when a crazy tyrant attacked had vanished.

“It’s bad enough,” he bleated, “that Joshua might be sent to Saudi Arabia, but there’s going to be a war in Kuwait. It’s obvious. And that will be terrible.”

“He’s right,” said Lydia, brushing lint from his glasses with something like affection. “Saddam has completely miscalculated the effects of what he’s done. He’s insane. He doesn’t realize that his transgression is immediately felt around the world. Everything affects everything these days. There are no isolated acts.”

“Yes,” said Clarence. He cleared away her murky glass for her, carried it to the sink. “Joshua has been trying to tell us, in his inarticulate way, that now that the Cold War is over, there’s a new world order, with all kinds of power poles. We can’t be angry with him. He’s taking his own argument to the point of absurdity, poor child.”

“But it’s not his argument!” Lydia stiffened. “He’s had a terrible influence.”

“That fucking bitch,” said Clarence.

“Bitch?”

They both looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Claudia,” said Clarence. “Serpent. Killer. I’ve always sensed. She told our own son that it was the right thing to follow his instinct to betray us, that enlisting would be good for him. Can you imagine? She told him it would be a truer way to see the world than anything our son could experience with us. The whole thing was transparent and despicable.”

“Can you believe this woman ever pretended to wish Clarence well?” Lydia patted his hand. “Can you imagine anything so heartless? Our son told us she is like a sister to him. Bitch.”

I shook my head, recalling Joshua’s silhouette on the Île St-Louis. The ice-cream cone smashed on the street. He must have gone to see her after following me. How many times?

With all the blood sport drained from their marriage, Lydia and Clarence’s bond was revealed. They were terrified of losing Joshua.

How could Claudia have done this? I had felt sorry for her, helped her. What the hell? My image of her was utterly confused. Where I was concerned, she had been calm and insightful, about my family, my art, my feelings. How could someone this sensitive do something so patently bitter and blind? I felt myself knocking hard against the limitations of our friendship, a bird banging into the glass of a lovely window.

But worse than my own disappointment was the dawning fear that Joshua might take this prank to its extreme. What if he really did go to war?

“When is he supposed to leave?” I asked.

“Next week. In theory.”

I decided to fax him a short letter.

Dear Josh,

I don’t mean to belittle your beliefs even if I don’t share them, but I wanted to let you know that I personally don’t think you should put yourself in the way of a war in the Persian Gulf. You have a lot to give to the world, smarts and insight. We all make mistakes trying to assert ourselves, especially people like you and me who aren’t very practiced at it. You tend to affect cynicism and I tend to contort myself into dishonest poses in order to please, but we’re both groping, aren’t we? And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when lately I’ve been off the mark, my real true friends have been there to point it out. You’ve been one of those friends. I hope I can be one to you at this time.

Love,

Katie

•   •   •

Lydia and Clarence’s fear for Joshua and fury at Claudia were displacing the drama of Portia’s departure this evening, but she appeared stoic about it while she packed, except for a tremble in her lips that was typical of Clarence, the expression of a paternal gene under duress.

“Can you please help me zip this suitcase?” Portia asked me softly.

“Do you want me to sit on it?” I supposed she was never going to acknowledge what I had overheard at Bastien’s. But I did not care. I knew what I knew.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you can stay here as long as you want. My mother and father like you a lot and they don’t want you to have to feel like you’re outgrowing the job. Mother is thinking of different ways to give you more responsibility. She may even teach you to print negatives and maybe have you start traveling with her. Nobody wants you to go.”

“Thanks” was all I could manage.

Even through the fog of her privilege, she was able to sense and exploit my desire for family.

She looked up toward her moldings. She glanced at a small yellow and gold shopping bag on her dressing table, then at me, then at the overstuffed suitcase, then back at me. More trembling lips. A widening of the eyes.

“I—I have a present for you. I wanted to get you a gift to say goodbye. I know that our relationship is a little awkward sometimes because you work for my mother, but I want you to know I consider you a friend.”

She handed me a bag with a bottle of Annick Goutal perfume in it. I almost took it, accepting the warmth of the gesture out of context because anything you framed could be beautiful. The foot of a murder victim could be sublime. Ethereal blond bitchy Portia’s giving me the Eau de Charlotte perfume I had coveted ever since arriving in Paris, the perfume that Étienne had promised and failed to steal for me, was, in isolation, a beautiful thing. But I did not want it from her.

“You told me you liked it on me, remember? The night you had me over for dinner? I hope you’ll use it. I love it, although it’s not very strong. Olivier thinks it’s too ephemeral, that it only works in intimate settings.” As she saddened at the thought of him, her eyes became her mother’s.

“I hate to say it, but maybe Daddy was right about Olivier. Maybe he is a horrible opportunist who has finished using us and wants to close the door. Maybe he’s an egomaniac. So, why can’t I stop loving him?”

“Portia, thanks but I am getting my own perfume. I mean, my cousin Étienne is getting it for me. I’m not in a position to accept this.”

“But why?”

“It’s not my style.”

The doorbell rang. “Darling,” Lydia’s voice came down the hall, “it’s Henri. He’s come to say goodbye to you.”

As Portia glared at me with uncomprehending suspicion, the two of us went to greet Henri. Lydia’s voice floated from the living room. “Poor thing,” she was explaining to Henri, “we haven’t paid nearly enough attention to her leaving Paris today and going back to New York on her own, to work no less, with this whole Joshua fiasco. She must feel terribly sidelined, but she’s being quite mature about it. She’s grown up a lot this summer.”

“Yes, she has,” Clarence agreed.

•   •   •

Portia ran in front of me and put her arms around Henri’s neck like a little girl.

“I planned my walkabout today so as to be able to stop by and give you a kiss,” Henri said to her.

“You’ve always been the loveliest of men,” said Portia, letting go of him to stand resolutely between her parents. “What do you think about the terrible news?”

“We can have no idea where this decision will lead him,” said Henri, lowering himself gently onto the ottoman as we all sat. “He may never go overseas. He’s at the very beginning of the process, you know.”

“Yes,” sighed Clarence, “but this is the kind of process that sweeps you along. The boy is in way over his head.”

“I wish I could soothe you.” Henri’s eyes were clearer than ever. There was an absolute modesty to him. Despite all his experience of life and war and tumult, he had nothing but respect for a family centering on its own crisis. For me, he had a kind smile, but no touch. Our
géométrie
was a distant, half-invented memory. There was nothing now but the grief tightening in this room, nothing but the nuclear family and its age-old friend, Henri.

The doorbell rang again. I went to answer it.

“Hi, Harry.” I smiled.

“Hello, you. I’ve come to say goodbye to Portia.”

You too? Come for her? No joking with me today about the umbrella I still haven’t managed to buy?

As I led him to the living room, he did not speak to me directly, but began to stage-whisper about Kuwait and Saddam Hussein. “Obviously, we’re going in! I’m sure even our friends Clarence and Lydia are stunned at this chain of events. Turns out our worst enemy is one we didn’t know we had until this moment! Fascinating. It honestly comes as a complete surprise to some, but perhaps not to all, ahem, that Mr. Hussein is a full-fledged criminal.” He winked charmingly into a passing mirror.

I thought about trying to communicate to him how unfortunate his joking around might sound in light of Joshua’s enlisting. I considered putting a finger to my lips, but I felt slighted enough by his coming only to see Portia that I let him go on with his loud teasing about the CIA to see how badly it would all turn out. Besides, he was not even looking at me as we walked but toward the gaping living room door through which his audience was, presumably, entertained. He would not have been able to read a sign from me even if I had given one.

“Oh, shut up, Harry!” cried Clarence as we came into the room.

Lydia burst into tears.

Harry sunk into the couch and looked to Portia for help.

“Harry,” she trembled, “we can’t joke about the war right now because Joshua may be in it.”

Before Harry could respond, Henri stood up from his perch on the ottoman. “I was just leaving,” he said, shaking hands with Harry and Clarence, embracing the sobbing Lydia. He gave me a quick double peck. Then he turned to Portia, the real object of his visit. “Dear Portia, we’ll miss you,” he said.

She put her arms around his neck again. “I’ll walk you out.”

Henri and Portia had not seen each other more than two or three times this summer. All their affection rested on years of intimacy. There was history to their embrace, and I was outside of history.

I was sure these two men with whom I thought I had become friends, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Harry Mathews, wished me well. But I saw now that they did not love me. For a second, I felt as if I had no past. But there is a difference between no common past and no past at all. I
did
come from somewhere, had memories all my own, places to revisit and people who would hug me this warmly were I ever to go to them.

•   •   •

The final person who came to pay her respects to Portia was Sally Meeks, slimmed to waifdom by a diet of bio-lite,
the Frenchwoman’s secret potion that Christie had spoken of all those months ago at Les Deux Magots. Sally was wearing heavily constructed black linen. She felt bloated after last night’s farewell dinner for Portia at La Truite, where she had broken her diet, “shattered it so to speak, and today I can barely move
.”
Artichokes were in season again. There was a lethal new chestnut soufflé on the menu. No one had told me about the meal.

“I’m so glad we had our
grande bouffe
before you got so very upset about Joshua,” said Sally. “Otherwise it would have been ruined for you. Such a low, low blow.”

Lydia, who had dried her eyes by now, grimaced.

“Portia, darling,” Sally continued, “you can’t wear those teeny pumps on the plane. You won’t be able to get your feet into them by the time you land.”

“My daughter doesn’t swell,” said Lydia, with the first hint of levity I had seen from her today.

Sally laughed too loudly. “I’m glad you haven’t completely lost your sense of humor. This Joshua business looks bad, but I’m telling you he’ll come around. And the one who’ll be sorry is that Claudia woman. She’s obviously delusional.” She giggled.

“Sally, Sally,” sighed Clarence. “What matters here is Joshua. It’s not as though he’s made some silly gaffe or bad fashion choice. This is bloody serious. Stop taking it so lightly.”

“You know, Clarence, I’m not taking it lightly. I’m refusing to believe in Joshua’s idiotic pretend decision. That’s my position. Because the most intense truths change on a dime, and it’s ‘in with the new!’ ” She gestured feverishly up and down her own altered body. “You, of all people, Clarence, should know that it’s all fashion in the end.”