Foreign Tongue (25 page)

I
caught the 96 bus, crowded with morning commuters, and arrived at Editions Laveau before it opened. A vellum-colored shade inside the door blocked my view. I paced on the sidewalk, longing for an
express
and a
tartine beurre
at a nearby café. I promised myself breakfast if Monsieur Laveau didn’t show up by ten-fifteen. At ten-thirteen, as I was picturing a frothy
grand crème,
he came up the street, wearing a beige trench coat and his perennial frown.

“Entrez, mademoiselle,”
he said, after unlocking the door.

“Monsieur,”
I answered, by way of greeting. He indicated the club chair in his office, but I sat on a caned chair. He hung his coat on the door and dropped his worn leather satchel on the floor.

I looked on in happy anticipation as he made espresso. We’d almost become cozy. I smiled at him when he handed me a demitasse cup. He didn’t smile back, but that was nothing new. He sat and placed his hands flat on the desk.

“Alors, je vais aller droit au but,”
he began. At the grave tone in his
voice, I stopped drinking my coffee. “It has come to my attention that you have some kind of intimate relation with one of my clients.”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, with
froideur
. My personal life, shambles or not, was none of his business. He hesitated a moment and shot his cuffs.

“This is most unpleasant for me,
mademoiselle,
” he said. A muscle in his cheek twitched. Monsieur Laveau managed to look both distressed and contemptuous, as if he were girding himself for a repulsive task beneath his dignity, like removing a dead rat from a dinner at the Académie Française.

“You will recall that our project is highly confidential, and yet, you are consorting with an extremely interested party.” In French,
“intéressé”
connotes “self-serving.”

The conversation felt surreal. “
Consorting
?” I repeated, half-laughing. Just what century did he live in? Next, he’d accuse me of plotting to overthrow the king.

“I demand you take this matter seriously,” he said.

“Putting aside the weirdness of you trying to dictate the company I keep, the only thing I take seriously is your insinuation that I would not keep a confidential matter confidential—” I started, but he cut me off.

“And yet, you described the plot of the novel to Olivier Vallant, who in turn repeated it, which is how I came to hear of it, and how my writer came to hear of it. Though the notion that you are translating Rémi Le Jaa,
alors là, c’est totalement absurde,
” he said.

“But I thought you said—” I began, confused, remembering Olivier had told me that Bernard had hinted the author was Le Jaa.

“Enough!” he said, raising his voice. “You have put me in a difficult situation, professionally and with regard to my personal friendship with the writer,” he said. “Even if I were to find another translator, the damage has already been done.
Mademoiselle, c’est grave!
” He thumped the desk for emphasis.

Seventeen kinds of embarrassment ripped through me. My face
flushed; I felt acid sting my stomach. I put the cup and saucer on the side table with a clatter. I didn’t know where to look, and I felt the worst kind of stupid. What a very small world it was, when your former lover’s lover was connected with half of literary Paris.

I thought back to what little I’d told Olivier about the translation. I couldn’t remember saying anything specific.

Then I remembered. That night. I’d described the plot and read him a scene.

My hand flew to cover my mouth as my lower lip started to tremble. I didn’t know what to say. Bernard drained his coffee in two neat sips.

“How? When?” I managed, my voice wobbly. He rested his elbows on the desk and put his fingertips together, his face granite above them.

“
C’était indirect, bien évidemment
. It came to my attention this weekend. A social occasion,” he said with distaste. I winced.
“Eh oui,”
he added, tilting his head. In that gesture, I saw how aggravated he was. I pictured a dinner, a cocktail party, Estelle leaning toward Victorine, the whisper traveling as swiftly as a snake in the grass.
My dear, you’ll never imagine what our dear Bernard is up to now. He’s hired a translator for a mysterious new novel. Shall I tell you what it’s about? Or who it’s by?
I pressed clammy hands to my hot face. I saw Estelle in bed, her head on the pillow, Olivier’s arms around her, and I heard his voice in her ear, her laugh, like shattering crystal—

“Mademoiselle?”
Bernard’s voice poked at me.

This seemed worse than finding out about Olivier and Estelle. Not just because it put an effective, definitive end to any ragged hope I might have harbored about mending things between us, but because it involved other people. I clenched my jaw. I would not cry in front of Monsieur Laveau.

“Excusez-moi un instant.”
I stood, knocking over the side table, sending the cup and saucer, an ashtray, and two books to the floor.

“Merde!”
I muttered, bending down to retrieve them. Monsieur Laveau came around the desk and grasped my arm at the elbow.

“Laissez, laissez, je m’en occupe,”
he said gently and took the china from my hand. My eyes welled up, and I darted into the little bathroom before he could see.

I turned on the faucet. A couple of tears squeezed out of my eyes, but I averted a complete breakdown. I thought about the French expression for uncontrollable weeping,
“pleurer comme une madeleine,”
and wondered how Proust’s little lemon sponge cakes could sob. I had to remember to look that up.

A dusty window gave onto the courtyard. It started to rain, wetting a trio of children’s toys: a red tricycle, a green plastic alligator, a pink hula hoop. I blew my nose on a wad of toilet paper, turned off the tap, and came out. There was a glass of water on the side table, and I drank it. Something vibrated in my ear, a small instrument thrumming under the ocean, a creature trying to kick free. I took a deep breath.

“
Monsieur,
in a moment of unthinking idiocy, I told”—I stopped. I couldn’t say his name—“the person you mention a sketchy plot description, which I thought innocuous at the time, and a love scene. I see that was a horrible mistake, and you have my deepest apologies for it, and for the discomfort it caused you,” I said, swallowing.

My speech didn’t have the desired effect. I waited for Monsieur Laveau to lecture me, to shout, but he didn’t. Instead, he deflated: even his chest seemed to cave in. For the first time, he seemed fragile, his wiry physique worn out.

“Je vois,”
he said blinking rapidly. “I’d hoped there was some other explanation.” He looked over my shoulder, his eyes not meeting mine. He’d actually had faith in me; he’d imagined a mistake, perhaps, or a purloined chapter. But no, I’d let him down, embarrassed him. My toes curled in my sneakers.

“You must decide whether you’d like to continue our professional association,” I said, my words formal and stilted. “But I can guarantee this will never happen again. It was a huge error, but one that will not be repeated.” I clenched my hands in my lap.

He exhaled, puffing out his cheeks in the French blowfish manner that can mean exasperation, fatigue, impossibility, difficulty, or reluctance. In this case, it meant all of them. He turned his silver letter opener over in his hands. “What guarantee do I have?”

“Because I’m never going to talk to him again,” I said, unable to keep the waspish tone out of my voice. “Our relationship ended—badly—on Friday.” If this came as a surprise, he didn’t show it. He swiveled away to look out the window. I watched, waiting for a reaction, but he merely looked sad and withdrawn, which was worse.

When he still didn’t say anything, I picked up my bag. “
Je vais m’en aller, monsieur.
I’ll assume that if you want to get in touch with me, you will.” I stood up. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whispered and walked to the door on wobbly legs, wondering if this was going to be the last time I heard the cowbell.

Ignoring the drizzle, I walked past cafés draped with Halloween decorations, and bought a pack of cigarettes and matches at a small
tabac
. I turned and walked down to Saint-Sulpice. The church, stained by the rain, looked heavy and forbidding in the gray light.

On the square, most of the Café du Marché’s outdoor chairs were piled on top of one another and chained together, like victims of a giant furniture roundup. Under the awnings, a few loose chairs and tables huddled near two heat lamps for warmth, the setup for smokers. It felt like someplace I could hide. I sat down, ordered a large
double express,
and lit the first of many cigarettes.

The tears I cried felt bitter and brown, like oversteeped tea, and I wiped them away with a grimy, balled-up tissue I found in my pocket. I stewed in a caustic bath of embarrassment, shame, and disappointment. I felt terrible about Monsieur Laveau, and I railed against my own carelessness. What was worse, I knew Olivier hadn’t told Estelle out of malice. He’d told her out of a casual disregard for me.

I could feel myself spiraling down into a familiar vortex of self-loathing. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, because it felt destructive and hurtful, staring at the passing buses in the damp air as the heat lamp burned my scalp. And I fell inward, like a brick off a building, further and further out of reach.

It was still raining when I left. I bought a flimsy umbrella and walked back to the Eleventh. My cell phone rang a couple of times, but I didn’t answer.

At home, I took a quiche out of the freezer. I bent to put it in the oven and nearly fell over from the head rush. If a walk across Paris had that effect, I was seriously out of shape.

The phone rang, and my mother spoke into the answering machine like it was some kind of annoying flunky blocking access to her daughter. I picked up. She and my father were leaving for Hawaii, and she wanted to say hi before they left. I hadn’t told them about Olivier and couldn’t bring myself to do so now.

“Darling, are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, just tired,” I said, leaning against the refrigerator.

“Well, get some rest. I’ll call when we get back. I e-mailed you the number in Maui, just in case.” We said good-bye and hung up.

I sat on the kitchen floor, near the warm oven, and wrapped my arms around my knees, shivering. I slid my fingernails between the floorboards, digging up lint and crumbs. My eyes blurred; probably all that cigarette smoke. Maybe I was delirious. My head hurt; it felt hot against my hand.

I found a fancy digital thermometer in the bathroom. It beeped when it was ready, the display flashing Celsius and Fahrenheit. I had a fever of 102.

I changed into a T-shirt and pajama pants and padded into the kitchen when the oven timer rang. I stuck my hand in, trying to drag the quiche
out with a dessert fork, then leaped back when I felt a searing pain, accompanied by a small sizzle. I’d burned the back of my hand on the electric coil. My skin turned red, and a transparent layer puffed up into a white crust. I fished ice cubes out of the freezer and held them to my hand while I ate a slice of quiche.

There was something in the medicine cabinet for
“brûlures,”
so I applied a thin gel to my hand, bound it in cotton gauze, and fell into bed.

I woke up fifteen hours later, my hand throbbing.

S
omething bad happened in the night. Someone spoke to me: a stranger, a tearful, accented woman’s voice, telling me bad, horrible, irreversible things. I stared at the wall, racing through recent memory, trying to remember, but it was like trying to see around a corner.

My hand smarted. I peered under the bandage. The burned skin was goopy and red. It was hard to tell what was human goop and what was oily burn ointment, but it looked bad. I stood up, my damp T-shirt clinging to my back, and my legs shot out from underneath me. I fell back on the bed as the room spun. Little black shapes, like commas, darted soundlessly through my peripheral vision like warning punctuation. Not good, I thought, holding the walls for balance as I shuffled to the bathroom; not good, not good, not good. The thing I couldn’t remember gnawed at me. What the hell was it? I stepped on something sharp
and yelped. It was a baguette crumb. In fact, there were bread crumbs all over the hallway. This was totally unacceptable. I tore open the hall closet and grabbed the broom. Too tall for the space, it was shoved in at an angle, stuck, the bristles bent over. I wrestled with it, gave one powerful yank, and knocked myself in the face with the wooden handle, missing my eye by half an inch.

“Putain de merde!”
I yelled, clutching the tender bone of my eye socket. What next? Choking to death on leftover quiche? I sat on the floor, letting loose a torrent of frustrated tears.

The pigeons on the windowsill fluttered their wings and crooned avian love songs. They were probably billing and cooing and grooming each other. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. My face hurt. My hand throbbed. I was jealous of pigeons.

I put some ice in a towel and held it to my cheekbone. It was two in the afternoon, and I could barely wrap my brain around anything other than the fact that I was a wreck. And I’d forgotten something. Someone’s birthday? Did I forget to pay a bill? I looked through my date book, but the page was blank. The nagging feeling didn’t go away.

I looked up
“pleurer comme une Madeleine”
in the dictionary. It didn’t refer to Proust’s lemon cakes at all: the expression derived from Mary Magdalene, who’d cried at Christ’s feet, and was spelled with a capital “M.” This was what I got for being ignorant about religion. The danger of homonyms.

I put the dictionary down and grasped the desk as another wave of dizziness made the room spin. The answering machine light was blinking. I pressed the button.

“Message effacé,”
the automatic voice announced.

“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I yelled. Thanks to the miracle of digital answering machines, the message was gone, irretrievable. I punched the button again, but the awful digital voice repeated
“Vous n’avez pas de messages.”
I wanted to rip it out of the wall: now I was sure whatever I needed to know had been on the answering machine. I raked a hand
through my knotty hair, deliberately snapping individual strands. My eyes welled up with the pain.

I drank a glass of water that tasted like metal. Or my mouth tasted like metal and so did everything else. I swallowed three aspirin and went back to bed.

I knew how to take care of myself when I fell ill. I cosseted myself with comfort food and bad television. But the real battle was against the feeling that I’d never be well again. My thoughts drifted. The last time I saw Olivier, at the train station. Was that only days ago? Stop thinking about Olivier. Must exile Olivier from my mind. The last time I kissed Olivier. No, stop, I admonished myself. The last time I heard his voice. The last time Olivier and I made love—

I drifted off and dreamed I found Olivier on the beach, drawing in the sand with a piece of driftwood. His hair was messy, longer, and he looked almost gaunt. I held him, and savored the feeling of being held. In my dream, I gave myself permission to luxuriate in the memory; even so, it felt like something forbidden, something beautiful and careless, a bolt of red silk tossed down a flight of stairs.

I woke up, famished, at four in the afternoon. I seemed to be reverting to L.A. time. I reheated the rest of the quiche and ate it in the kitchen, listening to the ticking of the oven clock and making a list of things to do.

Change the burn bandage. Sweep up the bread crumbs. Take a bath, wash my hair. But then what? Beyond frying my eyes on TV until I fell asleep again?

Even when I was miserable about Timothy in Los Angeles, I still had to eat, sleep, work, pay bills, and guilt myself into going to yoga class. I followed a routine, and it kept me sane. Going through the motions, however mechanically, gave me a semblance of progress, at least movement through time.

Up to now, I’d had a similar—if pseudo—schedule, organized around regular work hours translating for Monsieur Laveau, long walks
hanging out with friends, and seeing Olivier. Funny how quickly I’d gotten used to it. But now? No more Olivier. Probably no more job. I lived in a borrowed apartment. I didn’t have to be anywhere, anytime. My friends here had led regular lives before I came, and they’d continue to do so whether I stayed or left. I didn’t intersect in any real-life way, and with no job, I’d have to go home pretty soon.

The piteous lowing of dying calves wafted up through the floorboards. The downstairs neighbor was practicing his clarinet. The upstairs neighbor closed his shutters, alternating shrieking hinges with slamming metal. All around me people went through motions and actions with purpose, with rhythm. I’d come to a standstill. I was stuck in place, treading water, while the rest of the world swam by.

The fever persisted, giving me body aches and a dull headache that wouldn’t ease up. And I got no respite, because whenever I did sleep, I had nightmares, about fires and accidents, sirens and ambulances wailing through the night. A woman sobbing, repeating the same unintelligible phrase. Aspirin and sleeping pills didn’t help. My eye developed a yellow-plum halo.

The washing machine deliveryman and his teenage assistant removed the old model and replaced it with a stainless-steel number while I sat on the sofa in Tante Isabelle’s
robe de chambre,
catatonic in front of the world’s most boring detective,
Inspecteur Derrick,
a German series dubbed into French, and the news, which kept showing the same aerial shots of a tunnel on the A8 between Ventimiglia and Nice, the scene of a massive car pileup over the weekend.

I didn’t hear from Monsieur Laveau, and I didn’t hear from Olivier, and it was hard to tell which felt worse. I missed Olivier and hated myself for it, because that was easier than hating him. I fantasized about him breaking up with Estelle and begging me to take him back. Like that was going to happen. I knew that if I wanted Olivier back, I would
have to accept the Estelle situation, which I considered at least five or six times a day before hating myself for that, too.

As for Monsieur Laveau, the thought that I’d disappointed him made me miserable. I’d enjoyed our antagonistic relationship as well as the translating work. I’d grown attached to him, the way you grow fond of an eccentric relative or neighbor, particularly once he or she dies or moves away. I felt a pang every time I thought of his bushy eyebrows and forbidding stare over our shared espressos. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the second ending, the one I’d gotten last Friday, which seemed like a century ago. I wondered if I should mail it back to him.

And I dreaded sleep. My nightmares morphed into claustrophobic horrorscapes of being trapped in a large metal box, hammered in on all sides, or less specific but equally violent scenes of explosions and natural disasters. After three days of this, I felt brittle and frail, as if the only thing holding me up was a scaffolding of twigs.