Little Known Facts: A Novel (28 page)

The teacher was a blond woman named Camille Moreau
(Madame Moreau, s’il vous plait,
she said to her students). She was petite and trim with large dark eyes, and the night of the first class, she wore a flattering beige shirtdress cinched at the waist. Her heels were the same color as the dress, and she wore a double strand of pearls and small matching earrings. Will had trouble keeping his eyes off her, but if she noticed, she did not seem to mind. The only time he spoke directly to her, however, was when she asked for his name. “Comment vous appelez-vous, Monsieur?”

“Will,” he said, his voice breaking.

“Will?” she said, smiling slightly. “Ici nous avons les noms français. Maintenant vous vous appellez Guillaume. D’accord?”

“Yes.” His face burned. “I mean
oui
.”

“Bienvenue à la classe, Guillaume. Vous êtes américain?”

“Oui.” She spoke a little quickly, but he thought that he understood her. He was American, and it seemed he had a new name. Before now he had been Billy, then Will, and now in France, he had become the more complicated (all of those vowels, he thought) and possibly more distinguished Guillaume.

“Vous venez de quel état?”

He hesitated, working up the nerve to reply. He could feel his face reddening.

“Which state are you from,” someone a row away translated unnecessarily.

“I’m from California, from Los Angeles,” he said.

“Ah, très bien, Guillaume. Beaucoup de soleil là-bas, n’est-ce pas?”

“Oui,” he said. “Beaucoup. We do get a lot of sun there.”

“En français, Guillaume! Alors, et vous, madame?” the teacher said, looking now at the other pretty woman in the class. “Votre nom?”

“Jorie,” she said. “Je viens de Boston.”

“Jorie,” said Madame Moreau. “Alors, c’est un nom assez français. Tres bien.”

Will glanced at Jorie, but she did not turn her face toward him, her head with its long black braid tilted slightly downward, but he could see her in profile, her cheeks pink, their teacher’s attention making her blush too.

The classroom had three overhead rows of fluorescent lights that were so bright Mme Moreau had turned off the middle row within a minute after entering the room, a book bag on her shoulder and a black wool coat thrown over one arm. No one complained about the dimmer lights, but Will did not think that anyone would, especially if the complaint had to be made in French. There were a dozen students all told; most of them close to his age, a few a little older. He felt contented in this uncluttered classroom, looking at his nicely dressed teacher, waiting to learn from her. He had not been a student for so long and felt hopeful and welcome sitting alongside his classmates: four Americans, three Koreans, three Canadians, and one Japanese couple, as if whatever he would learn over the next eight weeks would change his life.

Yet once the class ended, everyone quickly scattered into the cold night. He had hoped that someone might suggest a drink or a late dinner, but no one did, and he did not feel bold enough to suggest it himself. He was slow gathering his papers and putting on his coat, but when he saw that Mme Moreau was waiting for him to leave the room before she locked the door, he hurried to wrap his scarf around his neck. She nodded to him on their way out and said, “Bonne soiree, Guillaume. A jeudi.” Thursday seemed far away, but it would have to do. He couldn’t think of a question to ask to forestall her departure, especially one in French, and left the building feeling like a fool.

It was stupid to think that he could make friends in one evening, that his classmates would find space for him, unprompted and trusting, in their lives. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to go back to the class on Thursday, even if it was the only consistent social contact he could expect. “Aren’t you lonely in Paris?” his mother had asked the one time they had spoken since his arrival. Anna had asked too. “Who do you talk to? Cashiers?” He had talked to Luca’s father a few times, and they had met for dinner twice. Mr. DeGrassi had also told him that he should drop by his apartment any time that he wanted to. Maybe he would like to watch TV or play chess or read some of his magazines or books? He had many in English. But Will was reading a book of his own right now, his stepmother’s memoir of her marriage to his father.

In the window of a book and music store that took up close to an entire city block near the Seine, he had been startled to notice a display that featured both Melinda’s and his father’s faces. Beneath the photo were several stacked books, all identical, the French title more melancholy than the American:
Quelques-uns de mes regrets.
Some of her regrets, though Will wondered if the word would be more accurately translated as sorrows.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t bought Melinda’s book in L.A. right after it had been published, but he supposed that part of his reluctance was because he did not feel like reading about his father, even if much of what Melinda had written was undoubtedly critical, though he did wonder what she had written about Anna and himself, if anything. Anna hadn’t read the book either, as far as he knew.

That morning, however, he went into the Fnac to buy a copy but soon realized that they would only have the French translation. He asked the clerk for the English version anyway, but as he suspected, it wasn’t there. The clerk told him to try Shakespeare & Company across from Notre Dame, and after he rode the Metro east to this small, crowded store with its resident cats and laid-back sales-clerks, he quickly found
This Isn’t Gold.
They had three copies, all of them, to his surprise, signed by Melinda. Had she done a book tour? Apparently so, and he had missed her by only four days. He wondered if she was still in Paris but wasn’t sure how to contact her, and he also didn’t know if he wanted to. He hadn’t seen her in several years, not since his father had divorced her and she had retreated up the coast to Big Sur to nurse her wounds and allegedly to drink, which she had also done while she was married to Renn but not to the embarrassing extent, as far as Will knew, that a few particularly mean-spirited gossip columnists had accused her of.

As he remembered her, she had been kind to him and his sister, and often fun to be with. Despite their guilt over liking Melinda, which he and Anna knew upset their mother, they couldn’t help themselves after the first few months of trying to ignore Melinda’s attempts at friendship. Their young stepmother had known which rock bands they liked and seemed genuinely to like them too. She had let them eat pizza three nights in a row and have ice cream for lunch or breakfast when their father wasn’t home. She had not tried to make them talk when they didn’t feel like it, but when they did, she had told them tasteless, hilarious jokes and had given them surprise gag gifts like Silly String and a machine that made fart noises and Halloween masks at times of the year nowhere close to October 31. She had cooked them special meals and braided them friendship bracelets that their school friends had envied and wanted for themselves. She had told them about her childhood and what had seemed to her an interminable adolescence, the boys she’d had crushes on in high school who hadn’t noticed her, the sports she was too uncoordinated to play, the way her mother, off-kilter since Melinda’s father left when Melinda was seven, had sometimes made her give the dog and her little brother a bath together in a steel tub in the front yard on hot summer nights, something that had embarrassed her almost as much as it had delighted her.

The first sentence of her book saddened Will, but he had half expected this:
Every little girl wants to grow up and marry a prince, and I guess that I was no exception.
The whole book saddened him, and he felt like finding her and telling her that he’d had no idea that she had suffered as much as she had. No surprise that he hadn’t much noticed her misery though—he had been a teenager most of the time she’d been married to his father—but he still felt bad that she seemed to have lived through a hellish era of jealousy and self-doubt and emotional abuse, if her accounts of Renn’s treatment of her were to be believed. He had to assume that there was some, if not an inordinate, amount of truth to them. He remembered his father and her arguing several times and Melinda crying once or twice, but he knew that she had tried to hide their disagreements, had smiled after Renn had left the house in a huff, had told them they could go out to eat or she would teach them how to drive her car, which was a Jaguar and beautiful, even though they hadn’t yet gotten their learner’s permits. If their father had known about these lessons, he would have been angry.

What she wrote about Anna and him was generous: that she had thought they were sweet kids, well behaved for the most part, a few temper tantrums but that was to be expected. They had always remembered her birthday and had once baked her a banana cake, which was her favorite, and it had been a good cake too. (How had his mother felt, he wondered, reading this passage? He and Anna had never told her about the banana cake, and Will knew that she had read Melinda’s memoir, even though she had not wanted to discuss it with him, other than to say that some of it had surprised her. Some of it had upset her too, though she had anticipated as much.)

He wondered if Melinda regretted publishing the book now that it was out all over the world. If she regretted the fact that she would now never be able to reach Renn again, because in the rarefied realm where he lived, as she had put it in one section, “very few people had kitchen privileges.” She had probably made him an enemy for life, if he hadn’t felt that they already were enemies. All that his father had said to him about Melinda’s book was, “It’s out there and I have to live with it. Or rather, now I have to ignore it. It’ll die down though. After a few months, most books drop out of sight, especially the trashiest ones.”

“You hope,” Will had said.

His father had given him a considering look. “Yes,” he’d said, “but I’m ninety-eight percent sure I’m right.”

Will had allowed an entire week to pass without replying to Elise’s message about the proposal she had turned down. During his silence, she had not sent him another message. He went for his runs, did his shopping and eating, went to the Centre Pompidou twice to stare at the Basquiats, and attended his second French class on Thursday evening. He looked at his pretty French teacher and the pretty girl from Boston, and no one tried to talk to him either before or after class, other than one of the Korean students who had said hello to him and everyone else, nodding his head agreeably and laughing when one of the Canadians started to sing “Frère Jacques” before the teacher arrived. In these first two classes, Will had refreshed some of his school French, and could now ask with more confidence where a Metro station was or if he could have ice cubes with his Coca-Cola. He had already known how to ask these questions, or at least he had thought he did. Jorie spoke better French than he did; his accent was embarrassingly discordant to his ears, the trademark American honk that made Mme Moreau purse her lips as she tried to suppress a smile, or so it looked to Will. He could not get the soft, gliding vowels and consonants to flow from his mouth, though some of the vowels were surprisingly nasal. Mme Moreau had told the class on the first night that if they could master the vowels, they could master the language. There were thirteen French vowel sounds, and some of them were difficult, but with practice, they would be able to speak
très bien, comme un Français.
Right, thought Will. As if. As if I’ll be able to speak one word of French and pass myself off as a native.

The weekend after his second French class, he wrote to Elise.

Dear Elise,

I wasn’t sure what to say about your last note, and I also wasn’t sure if you’d want to hear from me again. I hope that you’re doing fine and that my father is too. You’re on my mind a lot. I know that this has to stop, especially because you’ve said it has to. I am having a good time in Paris, though I do wish that I knew a few more people.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately—I haven’t really understood why you’ve ever given me the time of day, from day one, but I think that maybe you sense that we’re alike in some ways. At least I think we are. You have a conflicted relationship with one of your parents, as do I. (I guess a lot of people do, but still. . . ) I think sometimes that we both worry we’ll never be happy. (Am I wrong about this? I don’t think I am—why else did you seek me out the few times that you did? You don’t seem like someone who likes making trouble for herself—if you did, I think we might already have slept together.)

I’ve grown up in Hollywood but have never been important there. You didn’t grow up there and are suddenly very important but you’re probably wondering how long it will last or if you deserve it. I don’t really like people looking at me, which is one of the reasons I never tried too hard to go into acting. I also didn’t want to compete with my father. It’s not like I could hope to do as well or better than he has either.

All right, I think I’ve probably said too much.

Love, Will

She did not reply the next day, nor did she write to him the day after that. He checked almost hourly except when he was running; he even checked in the middle of the night a few times, because he worried now that his assumptions had offended her. He wished that he could take back the message, his complacent attempts to psychoanalyze her, to impose his own shortcomings and hang-ups on her. Maybe she had changed her mind about the proposal too. Maybe she and his father had already set a date and she was busily making preparations for a June or July wedding in Monterey or Santa Barbara (the thought of a wedding in Santa Barbara made him feel ill)—buying an elaborate and expensive dress, scouting reception locations, going over the guest list (would he be invited? He had to assume that he would be—his father did not like controversy, at least not more than was necessary, and so of course he would invite both of his children and expect them to be prominently there).

He called Anna to find out what he could, but she didn’t answer and he didn’t feel like leaving a message. He thought about calling his mother too, but since his breakup with Danielle more than a year ago, things with her had been strained. He knew that his mother loved him very much, but sometimes she suffocated him with her affection and her desire for him to do something happily with his life that would also make her happy. He could say, however, that he was no longer unhappy, that Paris with its many architectural marvels, its well-dressed residents and their unabashed worship of beauty and pleasure, seemed to have a place for him, or at least it didn’t appear to mind another visitor, seeking who-knew-what. Inner peace? If you were at peace, Will thought, how could you fail to be at least a little happy?