Foreign Tongue (18 page)
Authors: Vanina Marsot
I turned the page. There were only three sentences.
One moment, she was there.
Then she was gone.
I never saw her again.
I groaned and tossed the pages in the air. I went into the kitchen and found the Nutella, right where I’d hidden it, behind the canned kidney beans. Spoon in one hand, jar in the other, I went back to find out what happened to Eve in the next chapter. I suspected something bad was imminent: maybe she was going to die or throw herself off a bridge into the Seine. My cell phone twittered. A text message from Olivier read, “I’ll b back soon. I miss u. Love, yr French lover.” I laughed and wrote back: “Which French lover?” A minute later, he sent back “Steve McQueen,
bien sûr
.”
Daphne wasn’t there when I returned to the apartment. I deposited my bags and went for a walk by the river to clear my head. The wind agitated the surface of the Seine, and I thought of the giant waves of Biarritz, where I’d spent summers with my grandparents after my mother died. My father lived there now, with his second wife, in the old stone house near the water. He liked Daphne; he was pleased I was finally building a life.
I stood on the Pont Neuf and looked out at the fading light. Cars zoomed by on the embankment. The wind whipped my skin and cut through my coat, and there was an unpleasant metallic taste in my mouth. At the place Dauphine, three small boys careened between trees and benches as they kicked an orange ball around the triangular square. Brightly lit restaurants beckoned, but the tables were empty. It was too early for dinner, too late for tea; it was, in fact, the hour of the
aperitif, the right time for a drink with your lover, if she hadn’t just left you, in a way that felt definitive.
I sat on a bench and shoved my hands in my pockets. Even though thinking it felt like a curse, I knew she’d ended it between us. The thought of never seeing her again was unfathomable. I wanted to believe I was merely imagining the worst, but that was a childish ploy to allay my feelings. An ache manifested itself in my chest, to my surprise, and I heaved forward. My head dropped into my hands…
I knew the
place
: I could picture it. I felt bad for Jean-Marc. As much as it was a fine place for lovers, Paris for the heartbroken? Not so great.
I flipped open my phone and reread Olivier’s messages, giggling like a teenager.
Le verbe aimer est difficile à conjuguer: son passé n’est pas simple, son présent n’est qu’indicatif, et son futur est toujours conditionnel.
*
—
JEAN COCTEAU
Eve vanished from my life.
I stewed in my anger, convinced I’d been right about her—she was an opportunist, a heartless manipulator who felt nothing for me. But when my anger wore off, and I still hadn’t heard from her, I began to wonder what had happened. It didn’t seem possible that she’d left me because of one ugly scene.
She didn’t answer the phone. She didn’t answer my letters. At night, I waited outside her building. The lights were never on. The concierge hadn’t seen her.
On the landing, I accosted the cleaning lady, Madame de Sousa, a Portuguese woman of fifty in a tartan coat, toting a matching carrier
with a black poodle inside. When I introduced myself as a friend, she smirked and told me she hadn’t seen Madame in weeks. The poodle leaped out of its carrier and danced around my ankles.
I persisted, asking if there was any sign of Eve, dishes in the sink, for instance, or used towels in the bathroom. She raised a sharply penciled black brow.
“You are not the police?” she asked. I shook my head. “So, you are some sort of lunatic,” she continued, “and me, I am supposed to help you? Ah, no!” She made a ferocious sound of disapproval, pulled her hat down, and marched away. The poodle trotted behind her. I watched as my only connection to Eve strode down the stairs.
“Please, madame, I’m not crazy, I’m not the police, I just need to see her—I’m very unhappy without her,” I pleaded, chasing after her. Madame de Sousa looked me up and down, scrutinizing my appearance. “You are my only hope,” I added.
“You poor man,” she relented. “Your feelings are evident on your skin.”
N
o, no, no.
I can see your distress
?
Your sentiments are plainly visible to me
?
I can tell you are distressed
?
It’s written on your face
? I circled the expression I was having trouble with:
“à fleur de peau,”
meant visible, obvious, apparent; literally, it meant “at the flower of the skin.” It was used to describe a feeling so vivid you could see it on someone’s face, as if the emotion had blossomed there. I’d always found it poetic, almost exquisitely so.
Perhaps it wasn’t poetic in French. Maybe it was just an ordinary expression, a convention. But even some conventions had connotations. I rubbed my forehead, willing the words to speak to me. Was the expression pretty because it was pretty in French, or was it just pretty to me? Had the figure of speech become so common that its poetry had drained out of it? Or was it only pretty because, when I translated it into English, it seemed novel and pleasing?
Was I translating backward, reverse-engineering? I’d explained the expression “to nip something in the bud” to Clara once. She’d found it a lovely image, but it’s not particularly lovely in English. In fact, finding it lovely seemed particularly French—the tragi-romantic death of the young bloom, as opposed to English, where it’s merely a gardening metaphor. Not every figure of speech had a translation. Maybe I was searching for a kind of verbal refinement whose equivalent didn’t exist in English.
My head hurt. Translating was getting more difficult, though I couldn’t tell if it was because the author’s voice had become more complex or because my translating skills, along with their limitations, were becoming clearer to me. Or maybe I was trying harder because I didn’t dislike the narrator anymore.
Madame de Sousa confessed, “I don’t know where she is. There is no sign of her.”
“Since when?” I asked.
“Going on three weeks. Half of her clothes are gone. I picked up her dry cleaning, a dress and a coat, and put them in the closet, the bedroom armoire, not the one in the hall—she usually keeps coats and hats in that one,” she said. I didn’t interrupt her: I was hungry for any details concerning Eve, even the organization of her clothes.
“That’s when I noticed the closet, but I don’t know when she left,” she said. “Sometimes, it goes on for months like this,” she added. “Madame travels a lot. The accountant pays me—he sends checks.”
Though it seemed desperate, I asked, “Can you give me his name?” Madame de Sousa pursed her lips and shook her head.
“She will contact you when she returns to Paris. If she cares to. But now, you should leave. It’s not right for you to be here,” she said.
“Please,” I begged. “If I knew the name of her accountant, perhaps I could send her a letter there—it might get to her sooner,” I said,
scrambling for a reason. I held on to the banister, squeezing it as if my grip could force the information out of her. Madame de Sousa pulled on her gloves and scooped the poodle back into the carrier.
“Monsieur Richebourg, Cabinet Verlet-Stein,” she said, and walked away.
“Merci, madame,” I called after her. Her heels clicked across marble.
Her accountant? He’s going to track her down through her accountant? That was so lame. I scribbled “lame” in the margin.
I went downstairs for a baguette sandwich and sat on the sofa to eat it, yet again bemoaning the lack of French words for “lame,” “rude,” and “confused,” three words I happened to use a lot. There were various phrases you could use to convey the same meaning, but no one-word correlation. Lame was sometimes
“ringard,”
or tacky,
“nul,”
worthless, bad, or “
bidon
,” phony. “Rude” was either
“mal-élevé,”
raised by wolves, more or less,
“un manque de politesse,”
which was only the absence of politeness, or
“désagréable,”
which wasn’t accurate either, but if delivered with the right tone of voice, it could be devastating.
I thought about how French had polite ways of insulting people. Only in France could you actually say
“Je vous emmerde, madame.”
In English, saying “I suggest you go to Hell, madam,” already far more polite than the French phrase, was the stuff of drawing room comedy. We don’t usually observe form when insulting others, whereas in French, doing so increases the injury. As for “confused,” I tended to substitute
“je ne comprends pas,”
I don’t understand, but while that usually conveyed what I meant, it wasn’t an accurate translation.
I turned on the midday news. Romain Chesnier, the Minister for National Education and Research, was filmed leaving Lariboisière Hospital days after a minor cardiac incident following a vacation in the country. He was accompanied by his wife, the actress Estelle Bailleux. Wearing dark glasses, she put up one gloved hand, either to hide her face or to
wave, I couldn’t tell, as the cameras filmed them pulling away in the back of a chauffeur-driven car.
So that was who Bernard had gone to visit. It was the phrase his sister had used, “a cardiac incident.” I took another bite of my
jambon-beurre,
the crisp baguette shredding my soft palate. A pigeon waddled along the window ledge.
And there it was. The thought was unbidden, unwelcome, snakelike and scaly, but coiled in my head nonetheless: perhaps those weren’t airport sounds I’d heard on the phone; maybe Olivier had gone to the hospital as well.
Later, when he called and suggested a late dinner after his rehearsal at the theater, I wondered if he’d mention it.
I met him at La Cafétéria, a restaurant with fancy wallpaper and mood lighting. He sat at a table, smoking a cigarette and scribbling on a graph paper
carnet
.
“What are you writing?” I asked, leaning over to kiss him.
“Notes for the actors—things I must remember.” He poured me a glass of wine. I draped my coat over the back of the chair. There were dark circles under his eyes.
“You look tired,” I said, resting my chin on my hand.
“Quelques jours compliqués,”
he said.
“Do you want to tell me about it—the thing you needed to take care of?” I asked. He shrugged. “Is it the play? Or something else?” I asked. He gave me an odd look. “I mean, what with your actress’s husband in the hospital,” I said, watching him.
“That, yes,” he said. He tapped his cigarette in the ashtray, not looking at me. I turned to study the chalkboard menu, but I didn’t see the items written in French elementary school cursive; instead, I saw Olivier in a hospital corridor, his arm around the lovely Estelle as she cried on his shoulder and wiped—no, dabbed—her eyes with an embroidered
lace handkerchief. I saw him there; I knew he’d been there, with her. There was nothing wrong with it, except that he hadn’t told me and I knew. I took a long, slow sip of wine.
“I don’t actually know anything about it,” I remarked. He gave me a sharp look. “The play,” I said. “I mean the play.”
“It’s in three acts, with three characters, but the same thing happens in each act. Because each act is told from a different character’s point of view, they are totally different.”
“Like
Rashomon
?”
“Un peu, oui.”
“And what happens?”
“A husband and wife spend a weekend in the country with an old friend of hers, a man. During the weekend, the husband finds out that his wife and her old friend had an affair, before she was married. Even though it’s been over for a long time, there is still a mysterious connection between the wife and her former lover, and it means something different to all three of them.”
“And what does it mean?” I asked, wondering how close to home the play was.
“I can’t tell you. It will ruin the surprise!” he exclaimed.
“Ah, so there’s a surprise ending,” I said.
He smiled and reached out to stroke my fingers. I looked down at his brown hand against my paler one.
“I will be curious to know what you think. You’ll come to the opening?” he said.
I didn’t answer right away; I was picturing his hand next to Estelle’s.
“Yes.” I smiled, not quite meeting his eyes. A plate of sautéed mushrooms appeared in front of me, shrunken ears in a fragrant butter and herb sauce.
After dinner, we went back to my place. I loaded a tray with two pale pink cups and saucers decorated with grayish white cranes. I’d read that
cranes mated for life. If you ever saw a solitary adult crane, you could be sure it had lost its mate. I poured hot water over loose mint tisane and carried the tray into the living room. We sat on the sofa, and for the first time, I couldn’t think of anything to say, probably because all normal conversation was being drowned out in my head by the clamor of all the things I couldn’t bring myself to say. I put my feet up on the coffee table. He lit a cigarette.
“Would you like to go away this weekend?” he asked. “It’s a holiday weekend, we won’t rehearse. There’s a place I love that I want to show you,” he added.
“Sure,” I said, looking up. “Where?”
“Normandy. A friend of mine has a house near Trouville. We could drive out on Friday afternoon.”
“I’d like that,” I answered. Olivier described the town, the beach nearby where he’d spent summers as a kid. We went to bed a short while later. Despite some awkward, fervent kissing, we didn’t make love.
Olivier slept on his back, with one arm wrapped around me. I rested my head on his chest, listening to my breath with one ear, his heartbeat with the other. When I was little, I’d listen to my breath, the inhale and exhale, and watch my chest rise and fall. Thinking about it too much made it impossible to do naturally, and I’d panic, fearing I’d have to remember to breathe for the rest of my life, and what if I forgot? Unconscious, reflexive behavior, when observed, became fraught with difficulty.
I tried to breathe normally. It was impossible.
I thought about how hard it is to unlearn something you’ve been doing wrong all your life. Trying to stand up straight when you’ve always been a sloucher, for one. My third-grade teacher used to chastise me for not holding my pencil properly. “Look at that ugly callus on your middle finger,” she’d said. Up until then, I’d liked my callus. I’d liked touching it, feeling its contours, the self-made bump of it, the indurate
surface like orange peel. But after Miss Brendan pointed it out in class, I tried to bite it off, nibbling off bits of toughened skin. It didn’t work. I still hold my pencil the same way.
I drummed my fingers on Olivier’s chest. He didn’t move. I wondered if he was pretending. Sometimes, I pretended to be asleep, mostly so I could find out what people would do around me. It usually just led to tiptoeing. In the rare cases when someone tried to wake me up, I’d have to pretend to wake up. It’s always intriguing to watch actors do this on film. The ones who wake up too easily make me suspicious. Of course, the ones who do it well get no love either, because it seems like they’re merely waking up. A siren wailed in the distance.
I eased out of bed and tiptoed into the living room. Olivier’s pack of Camels sat on the coffee table. I hadn’t smoked in years, but I lit one of his cigarettes. It was strong, and it burned my throat in a way I liked. The paper crackled as I inhaled, and the smoke hung in the room like a blue ghost. Smoking and sitting naked on the sofa made me feel like someone else.
Something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but I couldn’t shake it. Something about the translation, or something Olivier had said. Or something he hadn’t said. He seemed a little bit far away, out of reach. The image of him at the hospital with Estelle flashed through my head again, but maybe I was being paranoid. I watched part of TF1’s evening newscast on the computer, freezing the frame on the minister and Estelle leaving the hospital. She ducked her head and held up her hand. Hiding, not waving. There was no sign of Olivier, but then, there wouldn’t be.
It was four a.m. and I was thinking too much. I took a sleeping pill and slid back into bed. Olivier mumbled something in his sleep. I tucked a pillow under my head and lay on my back, waiting for the narcotic, floaty feeling to kick in.
I pictured the drive home in Los Angeles. As I wound down the sinuous, moonlit road, a host of white moths shook themselves free from the trees and flew at the headlights. It was like being in a snow flurry.