Foreign Tongue (26 page)

P
ascal and Florian stopped by to check in on me on their way to an art opening. Pascal handed me a goody bag filled with beauty products, and Florian brought two cartons of Picard Surgelés sorbets and herbal tea. Pascal took one look at me and stepped back.

“T’as pas bonne mine,”
he said, shaking his head.

“Ben, évidemment,”
I replied, exasperated. “I’ve just spent four days in bed, I bruised my face, and I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep. You’d look like shit, too.” He gave me a puzzled look and sat down to page through a
Vanity Fair
Tante Isabelle had left behind. I forget the French think that they’re being helpful when they criticize you. Saying nothing, or telling me I looked fine when I didn’t would be the equivalent of blowing smoke up my skirt, which is tantamount to hypocrisy. Of course, hypocrisy has its place in France, as it does anywhere else, but between friends it’s a crime.

“Ginger tea, with lemon and honey,” Florian said, prescribing treatment. “Every hour on the hour. At night, you can put something medici
nal in it, like this.” He picked up a bottle of rum from the liquor trolley. I nodded, resting my head on the sofa arm.

“I brought you
de l’herbe,
” he added. “So you can sleep.”

I blinked at him. “You brought me pot?” I asked.

“Oui,”
he said, inhaling the word in that peculiar French manner that can mean resignation, vexation, fatigue, or nothing at all. Pronounced that way, it doesn’t resemble a word so much as a sound effect, the short flight of a swift paper airplane:
fweeh
. “Be careful,” he said, removing a cigarette case from his jacket pocket, “this is very strong stuff.” He took out two neatly rolled joints and placed them on the coffee table.

After they left, I ate a bowl of
soupe au pistou
and watched TV. I smoked half a joint. It was past ten, though it seemed later. My limbs felt sluggish, my arms too heavy for my shoulders. The dull throbbing in my head increased, a jungle tom-tom, and I went to the window to press my forehead to the cool glass.

Down below, the orange streetlights cast dramatic tree shadows that seemed to bend and climb like spiders over asphalt and sidewalk. I studied the wrought-iron balconies of the buildings across the street, fascinated by their seemingly infinite, lacy designs. Was there a book on wrought-iron balcony designs? Was there a union for wrought-iron forgers? Were there people who invented patterns all day? Did the patterns have names, like Elisir and Arpeggio? I was more than a little stoned.

Down the street, a tall, stooped man in a trench coat walked underneath the trees.

“Bunny!” I whispered, craning my head. He went around a corner and disappeared. I stumbled, steadying myself with a fold of curtain. I turned off the lights in the kitchen and living room, calculating the fastest route to bed. I could almost taste the exquisite pleasure of my head sinking into the pillow.

I pulled on a fresh T-shirt and pajama bottoms and stretched, grasping the top of the doorframe. A couple of bones in my spine cracked, and
my fingertips came back coated in gray dust. I wanted to press myself into a hard, flat surface, roll myself out like clay. I sat on the floor and uncurled my back, yoga-style. I fell on the floor with a thud.

A series of contractions started in my face, as if all my features decided to twitch in concert. My lower lip trembled. The contractions moved to my throat, shoulders, and arms. My stomach tightened, then my inner thighs. Uncontrollable impulses shot down my legs. My kneecaps contracted and released like cap guns. I felt tight knots, like cramps, in my calves, shins, the arches of my feet.

It stopped. I was aware of a tingling in my body, as if the muscles were humming, ready to pounce, but not on my command. I wondered what it meant to have muscles that were usually voluntary respond involuntarily.

It started again, this time in my feet.

The contractions were stronger, more specific. Each muscle gathered itself into a knot, then released like a blast of hot water, pins and needles and sparks. My heels drummed on the floor as my calves, tight as baseballs, contracted and released. It felt like my body was climbing up inside itself of its own volition. I broke into a sweat.

I saw myself from the ceiling, flopping around on the floor like a fish on dry land. My quadriceps tightened, my hamstrings like bows, buttocks like fists. Goose bumps swept over my skin. I ricocheted between panic, fear, and a misplaced fascination about what was happening.

The contractions continued up my body, clenching and unclenching. My fingers curled into my palms. Shooting convulsions wrapped around my neck, tightening like a noose. The spasms crept, like little paws, up my face. It’ll be okay, I tried to whisper. My breath caught in my throat, and I coughed, choking on my own spit.

It stopped. I lay still, waiting. The contractions didn’t come back. I stayed on the floor, a blind rabbit listening for a fox: my mind the blind rabbit, my body the fox.

I’d had all kinds of nightmares as a child, but the worst were when
I’d wake up paralyzed with fear, unable to move or speak, and I’d have to talk myself down. It came back to me like an old habit, the gentle cajoling of an internal voice that spoke to an unyielding body until it relented.
It’s all right, pick yourself up, shhh, everything is fine.

The phone rang; the machine answered. No one spoke. I sat up, my limbs trembling, numb with the kind of cold that makes you think you’ll never be warm again. I squinted at the clock. Who calls at midnight and doesn’t leave a message? I pulled on a wool sweater, a pair of wool socks, and a thick terry bathrobe.

My stomach hurt with a hollow, precise ache, as if I could trace its outline with a felt-tip pen. I heated milk in a saucepan, stirring in vanilla and sugar with hands that looked blue. I sat at the table with a mug. My eyes smarted, and the buzzing of the overhead light seemed to crowbar into my ears.

I put my head down and slumped over the kitchen table, pressing my forehead into my forearm. In the dark angle of my elbow, I shuddered. That was scary, I admitted to my arm. I’d been afraid and alone. I peered underneath the bandage at my injured hand. The edges of the wound seemed puckered and hard. Gangrene, probably.

I needed sleep. Restful, uninterrupted sleep would cure me. I smeared on fresh burn ointment and pressed the bandage back into place. I climbed into bed in the sweater, socks, and bathrobe, wondering what the fuck was in the pot.

H
ungover and fuzzy from the pot, I sipped lemon-ginger tea and read the scrap of paper I’d found on the kitchen floor. The list, scrawled in a handwriting that sort of looked like mine, but was more likely mine on drugs, reminded me of a Lewis Carroll word puzzle where you had to transform one word into another, for instance, “love”
to “hate,” by moving one letter at a time. The trick was to do it in as few steps as possible, but each letter shift had to create a legitimate word. This list seemed to be an attempt to build some kind of French-English word chain, based on meaning and sound.

I looked at it again. What was disturbing was the fact that I couldn’t remember writing it in the first place. Was there some kind of hallucinogen in the pot? Would I have flashbacks? Or was it merely an idiopathic reaction?

I love the word “idiopathic.”

I called Pascal and Florian to ask them about it, but they weren’t answering. I checked my temperature. I still felt weak, but I’d slept peacefully and I couldn’t take being cooped up in the apartment anymore.

I pulled opened a drawer, looking for a bra. There it was, my expensive lingerie. I’d worn it exactly twice. The first time, with Olivier—that first time. A second time, also with Olivier. It hadn’t stayed on long, but wearing it had made me feel, for lack of a better term, gift-wrapped. I’d hand-washed it, as Clara had told me to.

I fingered the taupe silk: it was unbearably soft, so delicate it made the backs of my teeth hurt. I crushed the panties in my fist and breathed in the smell: Woolite, with a top note of lavender, from the sachet in the drawer.

It was only underwear, after all, not the repository of memories. How stupid was it to spend a small fortune on it and only wear it twice? I pulled on the panties, fastened the bra and tugged on the straps. I layered on warm clothes, tucked my music player in my pocket, and caught the 96 bus. I figured I’d sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg, then treat myself at the gelateria on the rue de Buci.

I sat by the window on the bus and leaned my head against the glass until the rattling over cobblestones made my ears itch. I got out at Odéon and felt a pang as I looked up the street toward the rue de Condé and Editions Laveau. My vision blurred as I stared into the middle distance between the statue of Danton and me. It was a moment of unguarded
confusion, as if I’d left a door open, and a feeling, as unpleasant and familiar as a bad habit, crept across the threshold of my thoughts: the sense that I was guilty of coasting, or worse, escaping.

Once in the park, I could tell venturing this far from home had been overly ambitious: it was cold, and my legs were shaky from the short walk. I plunked myself down on a green chair, by a bed of limp yellow flowers. Just then, my player shut down; I’d forgotten to recharge it. A couple of joggers went by; an old couple walked arm in arm, in matching beige
imperméables
and brown hats. An airplane bisected the sky.

I wondered if I’d overstayed my Paris welcome. Perhaps I should’ve only stayed long enough to lick my wounds, not develop new ones. On the other hand, I did have the right to be here, and I didn’t want to leave. Did that justify my staying? If I never heard from Monsieur Laveau again, would I look for another job? Come to think of it, who was I, if I wasn’t
doing
something? Was my sense of identity based only on doing things—reading, eating, working, walking, seeing friends, going to movies or museums, et cetera? Even now, I was sitting in a park, making resolutions. How did I want to define my life?

I gnawed at a ragged skin flap around my thumbnail until I could peel it off like wallpaper. I got it between my bottom and top front teeth and worried it into small pieces. Some people just eat raspberries. I have to split the seedy bits in half before swallowing them.

Across the
allée,
a man sat facing me. He had wispy, light brown hair and one of those jutting jaws that make me think of determined farm animals. He walked over.

“Je peux m’asseoir?”
he asked, pointing to the chair next to mine.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked.

“You were looking at me, I was looking at you,” he said, as if it were obvious.

“I wasn’t looking at you, I was staring into space,” I protested.

“A woman alone is always waiting for someone,” he purred, with a knowing look. “Why not make a new friend?” It wasn’t just what he
said but the unctuous way he said it, as if we were playing a game, as if what I said didn’t matter. Wracked by a wave of nausea, I hoisted myself out of my chair.

“Monsieur, vous faites erreur,”
I said and walked toward the exit. At the tall gates, with iron spears shaped like arrows, I felt a pebble in my sneaker. I bent down to undo my shoelace. My vision blurred, and I fell over, scraping my knee and both palms on the concrete. A teenage boy reached down and helped me to my feet.

“Mademoiselle? Ça va aller?”
he asked. My eyes welled up at his kindness.

“Merci, ça va,”
I said and limped into the métro station. I opened my palms: they were scratched, the abrasions black with dirt.

I got home and drew a bath, dialing Bunny’s number while waiting for the tub to fill. His voice wasn’t on the machine, but I left a message anyway. “Are you still in Italy? I don’t know if you’re checking messages, but would you please please please call me? I miss you.” My voice caught in my throat and I hiccuped. I pulled off the lingerie. My period was early; there was a dark red stain on the crotch where I’d bled into the silk. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I muttered, dumping the panties into a sink filled with cold water. I draped the bra on the window handle and climbed into the tub, cursing again as the hot water stung my hands and knee.

I sat in the tub until the water grew lukewarm, then went to bed. What I wanted most in the world, in that very moment, was to collapse into a deep sleep, the kind that would fix everything.

Under the fluorescent light above the mirror, my face looked bloated and haggard. I didn’t look like myself, though perhaps no one does at three in the morning, after an intense crying jag. It was a preview of what I would look like in thirty years, if I never used moisturizer again and went to work in a coal mine. I couldn’t remember what I’d been crying
about, just that I woke up sobbing, beset by an unidentified sense of loss. I splashed water on my face and slunk back to bed, falling into a restless sleep.

In the morning, I made coffee for the first time in days. The phone rang, but I’d turned the volume on the answering machine down too low to hear the caller. I remembered snippets of my dream: horrible images of an explosion, plus the shrieking of twisting metal, sirens, a voice I didn’t know, cacophony. I wondered how long I’d keep dreaming the same nightmare.

I used to have a recurring dream. It took place in a house I’d never seen in real life. It had a stone fireplace in the living room, with a ledge I liked to sit on, and a rickety, screened-in porch, with a back wall lined with books and a desk facing the ocean. The house was raised, on stilts, to accommodate the tide, and I imagined it was somewhere in Georgia or South Carolina, places I’d never been.

Over time, my dreams had furnished it. A circular staircase led to a bedroom under a pitched roof. The sheets were printed with extravagant cabbage roses, not my taste, but I got used to it. In one dream, I’d thrown a party: there was a fire in the fireplace, music, lots of people, noise. I could draw the house’s architectural plans, except I didn’t know where the bathroom and kitchen were.

I’d grown fond of it; it was cozy and ramshackle. But one night, I dreamed someone broke in. It was night, too dark to see, but I knew my way around, and despite the crash of waves breaking on the sand, I could hear creaking sounds. I crept onto the porch, and someone wrapped a cloth around my neck and tried to strangle me. I woke up, the way they say you do, because you can’t die in your dreams. I never dreamed of the house again. Now I wondered if something awful had to happen to me in my recurring nightmare for it to stop.

I went into the living room to listen to my message.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle. Ici Bernard Laveau. Auriez-vous la gentillesse de passer me voir ce matin, de préfèrence avant treize heures. J’ai un nouveau
chapitre à vous confier…”
Monsieur Laveau had a new chapter for me! I’d almost given up hope. I played the message again to make sure those were really his stentorian tones, summoning me with that familiar, politely veiled condescension. A new chapter! I was forgiven!

As I walked up the rue de Condé, I shivered, despite the layers I’d piled on: a hint of winter hung in the late October air like a premonition. But the chill couldn’t dampen my mood: I wanted to throw my hat in the air, skip across sidewalks, even smile at strangers, an activity usually associated with Americans and the developmentally challenged.

I pushed the bookstore door open and shook it, so the cowbell would clang repeatedly. Monsieur Laveau called out,
“Un instant, je vous prie.”

As usual, he was on the phone. I cleared a stack of books off a chair and sat by the door. Bernard raised his voice.

“Ecoute, j’ai fait de mon mieux! L’autre traductrice n’est pas disponible, et celle dont on a parlé voyage en Amerique Latine, alors que veux-tu? Soit on utilise celle-là, soit tu te débrouilles, mon vieux, parce que moi, je n’en peux plus!”

My elation went flat, a needle to a carnival balloon. Bernard was talking about me. He was on the phone with the author, and I wasn’t his first choice of translator. Not even his second. The first one wasn’t available; the other one was in South America. Moreover, he was fed up with trying to find someone. I was the
solution de secours,
the emergency exit, the last resort.

My fingertips felt cold, as if all my blood had drained into my shoes. I stared down at my feet. I wanted to disappear.

I thought about sneaking out, but the office door swung open. Bernard sported a recent haircut, his silver hair trimmed close to his head, but the bushy eyebrows were as splendidly arachnid as ever. He wore a blue shirt under a gray V-neck sweater.

“Entrez, mademoiselle. Merci d’être venue,”
he said, gesturing for me to come in. His voice was polite, almost warm, but I didn’t waste any time.

“Ecoutez, monsieur, j’ai entendu votre conversation.”
My voice trembling despite myself, I confessed that I’d overheard him.

“Oui?”
he asked, as if to say, so what?

I glared at him and said, “Maybe you should wait until one of your
other
translators becomes available.” He straightened out a pile of books on the table. “While I’m not a professional translator, I had thought I was doing a decent job. But now I find out I’m your third choice and your writer doesn’t like my work. Well, I prefer not to be foisted on anyone,
monsieur,
” I said reproachfully.

He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms, narrowing his eyes at me as if he were trying to remember what ill wind had blown me through the door.

“I don’t know if your mother warned you about eavesdropping,” he said conversationally, “but one of the obvious dangers is that you might misinterpret what you overhear.” A two-syllable “uh-oh” tolled in my head. I caught a pea-size chunk of my lower lip between my teeth.

“I was on the phone with a client of mine,” he continued, eyes gleaming, “a writer of supernatural thrillers set in the American South. Because he speaks French adequately, and also because his main character is a
Louisiana Creole
and employs both the
Creole
language and slang,” he said, his voice escalating in volume as I flinched, “he is
extremely demanding
when it comes to the translation of his books into
French
!”

Pausing to let the words sink in, he removed a linen handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. My neck disappeared into my shoulders.

“Now,” he added silkily, folding the handkerchief, his voice resuming its normal pitch, “as I believe I have already mentioned to you, it is enough work for me to massage the temperamental egos of my writers without having to do the same for my translators. For the second time
would you do me the supreme kindness of stepping into my office?” He smiled, revealing a row of small, square, ivory teeth.

It was the first time I’d seen Bernard smile, at least at me. I walked into his office and sat. Though I’d been chastised like a snotty-nosed twelve-year-old, I felt a thrill at being lumped in the category of one of “his” translators. Until that moment, I hadn’t known exactly how much I’d been thirsting for a reason to stay in Paris, and here was Bernard handing me one, ready-made, prêt-à-porter: I was a translator.

He poured me a cup of fragrant espresso. “A special blend. A friend of mine brought it back from Milan,” he explained.

“Merci,”
I said in a small voice.

The phone rang, and he sank down in his chair to answer it, glaring at me in mock severity. I grinned into the coffee cup, the heat tickling my nose.

“Ah, c’est toi. Oui. Je suis avec elle en ce moment, cher ami,”
he said, giving me a pointed look. This time, it really was my author. I pantomimed getting up, gesturing toward the door, but Bernard waved at me to stay put.
“Sans faute, sans faute. Evidemment. A plus tard,”
he said and hung up.