Foreign Tongue (28 page)

I didn’t like this ending much, either. It was almost sweet, but it was too thin to have any real impact. I saved my work and called Clara to ask how her ankle was doing.

“It’s better. A lovely shade of green,” she said. “Do you want to come over? My mother bought out the Italian
traiteur
and rented
Quand Harry Rencontre Sally
yet again.”

“No, but thanks,” I said, laughing at her exasperated tone. “Tell me, what’s it called in French when a film ends happily but in a way you don’t believe?” I asked.

“An American ending,” she said.

I looked at the screen again, but my eyes smarted. Instead, I fixed myself a dinner tray with the fish and its gooey herbed sauce, vegetables, and a glass of white wine, and carried my rectangular tableau of early-twenty-first-century solitary angst, complete with white paper napkin, into the living room.

On the television, I surfed past
Star Academy,
and the live-action movie of the comic book
Astérix et Obélix,
set in ancient Gaul. Another channel was showing a program about irrigation techniques in the Pyrenees, complete with close-ups of black tubing and pressure valves. I thought about ponying up for cable. On M6, attractive mutants kitted out in customized leathers gritted their teeth, flared their nostrils, and accelerated menacingly on motorcycles: an American TV show.

The only acceptable option was the movie on Arte, the PBS-like French-German channel: a German drama about a mild-mannered scientist who falls in love with an art dealer, only to find out she’s the daughter of the hit man who killed his father. It looked watchable. I took my tray into the kitchen.

When I came back, Olivier was on-screen. I froze in the doorway. Much younger, he had long hair and razor stubble. He wore a paint-splattered T-shirt and jeans, and he played the painter boyfriend of the art dealer. Over dated synth pop, he posed in front of an abstract canvas trying to look intense, a hand-rolled cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth.

He wasn’t convincing. Not the slightest bit. He was awkward and mannered, and I felt a rush of tenderness for this puppy version of him—overeager, cocky, unformed. When the camera zoomed in for a close-up as he tried to convey tormented artistic genius—
in German
—I laughed. When the art dealer girlfriend stopped by, he dropped his paintbrush in a jar and gave her a knowing, wolfish grin.

My indulgent mood snapped. I knew that smile. I knew it intimately. Tense, muscles rigid, I watched the rest of the movie. When he wasn’t on-screen, I got impatient, wanting a fast-forward button. I took an in
tense hatred to the actress who played his girlfriend, a freckled redhead who, by any other standards, would have been an appealing heroine. I liked her better when she told Olivier she was leaving him. He broke down and cried.

I’d never seen him cry. Watching him now, I felt an odd combination of nausea and pleasure, at once voyeuristic and unsettling. It didn’t occur to me that he was acting. I thought I was looking through a window, able to see what he looked like when he was really hurting.

After the credits rolled, I got into bed in my clothes. In my head, I played an endless cinema of loss, remembering a hundred moments that had slipped through my fingers like sand: Olivier with me in the kitchen, at the movies, in restaurants, cafés, in bed.

I curled up in the dark, insulated by my own misery. I felt still and small. Even my breathing seemed diminished, as if I needed less air. As if I’d folded myself into a small space, the way I sometimes folded paper into halves, then quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, until the paper was a tough, tiny Chiclet.

All I wanted was to sleep. No, scratch that: all I wanted was to be unconscious.

I dreamed I was alone on the rocky beach of a river. People paddled by in kayaks and yelled out to me. I plugged my ears and sang “la la la la” at them. The pebbles beneath my feet began speaking, and as I ran away, they shrieked at me.

I woke early, to walls that were a pale blue, as thin as eggshell, and wiped the sweat off my face with the bedsheet. It was an odd dream, but strange things happen in dreams. In the past, I’d dreamed that I was a bar of soap, that Edward G. Robinson was both a French bulldog and my long-lost uncle, and that flying was a matter of breathing properly and bobbing, like being perfectly weighted when diving.

I shivered and changed into a dry T-shirt and sweats. My skin still
felt clammy. Maybe I was having a flu relapse. Clara had given me the name of her internist, and I searched for it now, sifting through the small mountain of miscellaneous notes, receipts, postcards, and business cards I kept on the marble mantel. I pulled a dark red card out of the pile. It was an addition to my collection of African witch-doctor cards. This one was for Professeur Moro. I skimmed the text, reading,
“Protection contre tous les mauvais esprits.”
Maybe a bad spirit was giving me the bad dreams.

It was getting lighter and noisier outside, but I put on an airplane eye mask I kept on the bedside table and stuffed orange foam earplugs in my ears.

This time, I dreamed of the childhood summer weekends I’d spent at the beach in Ventura with my best friend and her family. We used to play on the man-made jetty, an accident of concrete cylinders shaped like giant plumbing pipes, and collect hermit crabs from the tide pools.

It was cruel what we did, collecting the hermit crabs in a plastic bucket with an inch or two of seawater. I couldn’t remember if we dumped them back into the ocean or if we forgot about them, our new pets, and left them to rot and die in the bucket.

Not remembering doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, came the thought, distant, faint. I rolled over and pulled the duvet over my head. When a jackhammer began tearing up the sidewalk, I gave up. I took a shower, made coffee, and turned on the computer to start work on the third ending.

M
idday, I took a break and went to the organic market to buy Clara her favorite pears and a box of chocolate truffles and then hopped on the bus to her apartment. She greeted me at the door, still hobbling but in good spirits.

I followed her into her spotless white kitchen. I chopped herbs while she beat eggs for an omelet.

“How do you like yours?
Baveuse?
” she asked, adding the herbs. She poured the mixture into the pan and shook it back and forth over the flame.

I made a face. “That’s such a gross word,” I said.

“What,
baveuse
? It’s just runny.”

“It means runny, but it’s the actual word for ‘drooly,’” I said. “
Bave
is drool.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re spending too much time translating.”

“Maybe. But it’s kind of keeping me sane,” I said. “Clara, can I ask you something? How do you stand it? With your friend, I mean?” She served the omelet onto two plates. I breathed in herbs and butter.

“What do you want me to say?” She tossed aside a dish towel and sat next to me. “Yes, of course, there are times when I am inconsolable, when I can’t stand it anymore, and I think of ending it. But other times…if he left his wife, I’m not sure I’d want him.”

“Really?” This was a surprise.

“The qualities that I like in him are a lover’s qualities. He is attentive, always happy to see me. I get the best of him. I’m not so sure I would like him so much if I had to look at his dirty laundry or argue about housework.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. I hadn’t gotten to the laundry or housework stage with Olivier. I took a bite of the omelet. “This is delicious,” I said.

“And what would I do in Antwerp?” She made a face. “His company is there. Antwerp! It’s nice for a weekend, but to live?
Ah, non! Je suis Parisienne, moi!
”

This was the second variation to dispatch Daphne, I noticed.

I scribbled a note: is “shabby” right? Maybe “lame” or “stupid” or “like an idiot” would be better. The sentence was
“Je me sentais con.”

This was the third version of Eve, with yet another name.

I paused, hands hovering above the keyboard, confounded. To drink something down in one gulp in French was to swallow it
“cul sec,”
literally “dry ass,” another variation on words derived from
“cul.”
“Chuga-lug” didn’t quite capture it. It was the Franglais syndrome again: I couldn’t remember the expression in English. I wrote “I downed a shot of whiskey.”

People keep dying in this woman’s life. Often in snow.

Interesting that he felt so shocked. Just because there were other people in her life? Because her life was more exotic or scandalous than he’d expected?

I drummed my fingers on the table. This version seemed just as flimsy, albeit in a different way, as the other two. It was as if they were all sketches, cartoonish, opera buffa rather than sweeping sagas. So far, I couldn’t tell whether this was intentional or an error in tone. Perhaps it was my error—this was where translating got iffy.

Or maybe they were supposed to be flimsy, like transparencies or thin coats of lacquer, meant to be layered on top of one another.

I thought back over the previous versions and made a chart: in the first version, he marries Daphne in some kind of vaguely Oedipal fantasy in which Daphne mothers him just as his own mother dies. He eventually forgets about Eve and burns the report.

In the second version, the Fear of Intimacy version, he and Daphne break up, Eve runs away, he stalks her, she turns out not to be Beaufort’s mistress, and they get back together after she confesses her feelings for him had overwhelmed her.

The third version was shaping up to be the Femme Fatale story, what with her history as a dancer, her many lovers, and the scabrous novel. It had elements of
Camille,
and I was already anticipating someone dying and the obligatory deathbed scene: tears, confessions, swooning violins, a trip to a cemetery under gloomy skies…or it could veer into film noir, something with gangsters, guns, and nightclubs.

I leaned back, making the chair creak, trying to picture Eve, what she looked like, what she wore. On childhood visits to Paris, I used to beg my grandmother to buy me French fashion magazines, claiming they would improve my vocabulary. My favorite was
Vogue,
with its thick, glossy paper and risqué photos. One photo stayed with me, a black-and
white Guy Bourdin, which I saw again many years later, at an exhibit at the Jeu de Paume. It was of a woman in a flowing, printed chiffon dress, which fell off one shoulder and revealed her entire right breast. She was photographed from above, and her eyes were closed, her lips dark and shiny. I was twelve, and the photograph represented everything that was glamorous and mysterious to me about being a woman. That was Eve, I decided: sexy, a little undone, lost in another world.

The clock said 12:34. I wondered if Bunny was up for a late lunch. Though his answering machine beeped, there was still no message. “Hey, it’s me. Are you around? Call me,” I said. I went to the kitchen and rifled through the cupboards. Definitely bare.

I left another message. “I’m thinking Café Beaubourg. Maybe an exhibit afterward,” I said. “Please come if you’re free.”

I walked through the Marais to the café by the Pompidou. There was no sign of Bunny, but a banner on the museum advertised a new exhibit on Surrealism. I ordered a quiche and a green salad, wolfing them down while reading the paper. Afterward, I spotted Bunny’s head outside, towering over a crowd gathered around a fire juggler.

“You got my message,” I said, walking up to him. He grimaced.

“I could barely hear you. That machine is a stupid piece of shit. Probably assembled by some exploited ten-year-old in Guangzhou after he ate a rancid fried turnip cake, poor kid, which explains why it is a piece of
merde
and I had to throw it out the window,” he fumed. He turned back to the juggler, his eyes following the flames.

“That’s a lot of anger you’re carrying around there, big fella,” I remarked.

“Insomnia,” he explained. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“I had a strange dream,” I said, falling into step next to him.

“What was it about?” he asked. We stopped on the corner of the rue du Temple to watch a parade of clowns in rainbow suits zoom by on scooters. One clown with a pink Afro and extralong shoes grinned and
tooted his horn at us. Bunny laughed and waved back, the worn, tired look erased from his face.

“Bunny, promise you won’t go to Italy again,” I said instead, my tone urgent. He exhaled. It sounded like a gust of wind over the ocean.

“I’m not going anywhere for a while, kid.”