Foreign Tongue (31 page)

“A plus tard,”
I called out. He shook an irascible hand in the air, like he was shooing away a fly.

I was near three multiplexes, plus the revival houses in the Fifth. There were also several cafés nearby. I contemplated my options, watching Bernard’s retreating back. If he could get the missing pages this afternoon, maybe he was lunching with the author.

I darted down the street, following him. He walked down the rue de Condé and veered into a café with orange awnings called Les Editeurs.

I knew the place. The food was good, and, as befitted the name, the walls were lined with books. Clara and I had sat there once and flipped through a comic book of rebuses. She’d explained the expression
“tiré par les cheveux.”
Literally, it meant pulled by the hairs, but it really meant overworked or far-fetched, “like a joke that requires too much information to be funny,” she’d said. “Or this book.”

I stopped to think. If Laveau and Monsieur X were eating on the ground floor, in the café, my excuse would be that I’d stopped in for an innocent
express
. But they could be in the upstairs restaurant, which posed a problem: if I went up there and Bernard saw me, he’d know I was stalking him. I stood to the side and scanned the clientele in the café. No sign of him; he had to be upstairs. I could pretend I was looking for the ladies’ room, but I knew it was in the basement…though I could pretend I didn’t know that. Or I could have coffee downstairs and wait for them to come out. But if Bernard and his lunch date didn’t leave together, my waiting for them would be useless.

I paced up and down the sidewalk, losing my nerve. Who was to say I’d even recognize the author? I wouldn’t be able to identify him unless he was really famous. Bernard certainly wouldn’t introduce us. Maybe I could ask the maître d’ who Bernard was eating with. I fumbled in my pocket. How much did one tip for information?

This was getting too complicated. Best to pretend I was looking for an imaginary friend who just happened to be free for an impromptu lunch at this very restaurant. That would be my cover. I went inside.

A quick but thorough sweep of the café confirmed that Bernard was
not seated there, not even in the back. I climbed the narrow circular staircase to the upper dining floor, which was divided into two rooms. In the first, there were four tables of couples and one table of six, four women, two men. No Bernard.

In the other room, I glimpsed white hair and ducked behind a rubber tree. He sat facing me, talking to someone half-hidden by another potted tree. I poked my head out. The formidable eyebrows slammed together as he leaned his head out, trying to see around the tree. I half-crouched, shrinking back. Their waiter opened a bottle of wine, and Bernard’s companion put an elbow on the back of his chair, like he was going to turn around. A waiter stopped in front of me. I straightened up.

“Vous cherchez quelqu’un?”
he asked. Bernard looked right at me.

“Uh, non, enfin…je voulais voir…euh…”
I mumbled. The jig was up. Exit, stage left, but it was blocked by a group of elderly men trudging up the narrow circular staircase.

I stole another glance behind me just as Bernard’s date turned around. It was Olivier. He looked stricken, as if the sight of me wounded him, or maybe that was how I felt about seeing him, but I didn’t wait. The last man barely cleared the stairs, and I squeezed past him, ignoring his taken-aback
“Mais, enfin!”

I ran down the boulevard Saint-Germain, trying to outrun embarrassment itself. Olivier. Having lunch. With Bernard. And they’d caught me spying.

Drops spattered my head. I looked up, half-expecting to see spiteful pigeons, but it was only rain. I went inside Saint-Germain-des Prés.

It was cool and dark in the church. I sat on a wooden pew, my heart pounding. A thin woman in a purple coat knelt and crossed herself, whispering as she hurried past.

Bernard and Olivier. They were friends, it was true. Friendly. Acquaintances, at least. How crazy to assume Bernard was lunching with my author. I’d been so stupid, and I’d thought myself so clever. I took
out a tissue and wiped my forehead. I was a first-class twit. Bernard would be supremely irked.

A few people sat in front of me, and a couple of tourists strolled up the aisles, reading from guidebooks. Spotting the back of a tall, familiar head seven rows up, I nearly laughed with relief. Because of his height, Bunny was always easy to pick out in a crowd. I slid next to him, nudging him with my shoulder.

“What’s a lapsed Catholic boy like you doing in a place like this?” I asked.

“Mais—”
said a gaunt man with sunken cheeks, looking at me askance.

“Excusez-moi, monsieur,”
I whispered and got up, my face burning. That was twice I’d embarrassed myself today.
Jamais deux sans trois,
the French say. Never two without three. I dropped a euro in the donation box and lit a taper. Please make this day get better, I thought, wishing hard, like a child in front of a birthday cake.

Later, seated under a tropical fresco, complete with parrots and peacocks, in Ladurée’s Left Bank
salon de thé,
I lost myself in rapt admiration of the twelve-euro plate of eight silver-dollar-size
macaron
cookies before me: orange blossom, caramel
à la fleur de sel,
rose, chestnut, strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, and pistachio.

The waitress showed an elderly American couple to the table next to mine. She was Asian, with short black hair and a dark green pantsuit over a turtleneck. He was African-American, with a neat, gray beard and a tweed jacket over jeans.

“Look at what she’s having,” the woman said softly, tilting her head toward me. I made short work of the chestnut
macaron
.

“What did we have yesterday?” he asked, looking at the menu. “The chocolate thing, with the layers, the coffee?”

“An opera.” She shook a pill out of a bottle. His mouth turned down.

“No, I want that thing you used to buy at the bakery in Park Slope. A napoleon,” he said, scanning the menu again. “El, there are no napoleons here,” he complained.

Unable to resist being Information Lady, I leaned over. “Excuse me,” I said. “In France, they call a napoleon a
mille feuille.
” They looked at me warily. “It means a thousand leaves, like layers. Here, they make three different kinds: the classic, with rum; another with raspberry jam; and a
praliné
version. They used to have a licorice-caramel flavor, the mere idea of which upsets me,” I said, giving a shudder. “But they took it off the menu.”

He nodded and said, “
Meal foy,”
attempting to pronounce it.

“Close enough,” I said. He smiled and leaned over to introduce himself.

It was their first trip to Paris. For almost an hour, I didn’t think about Bernard or Olivier as David and Ellie and I chatted. He was a retired professor of music history at NYU; she was a lawyer. They’d traveled extensively in Africa and Asia, but it was their first trip to France, and so far, they’d seen the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Picasso, and the Musée du Quai Branly.

The waitress placed a
café crème
in front of Ellie and a
mille feuille au rhum
in front of David. “I’m guessing the trick is eating them,” he said, looking at the layers of
pâte feuilletée
and
crème patissière
in mock despair. I ate a rose
macaron
.

“And what do you do here?” Ellie asked.

“I’m doing some freelance translating, but that’s going to end soon,” I said and changed the subject. “What else are you planning to see?” I asked.

“We’re going to an experimental art piece in Bobigny with some friends. It’s a combination of dance, poetry, and opera. I can’t wait,” Ellie said, clapping her hands together. I tried to hide my look of surprise, but David saw it.

“What’s that about?” he asked.

“I think it’s wonderful that you’re going to see experimental art,” I said.

“Because we’re old?” he asked.

“That’s not what I meant!” I protested, but I blushed, because he’d caught me. I couldn’t see my parents going to a dicey suburb at night, let alone to see anything with the phrase “experimental art” in it. David reached across the table to hold Ellie’s hand.

“People think that beauty is what is pleasing to the eye,” he mused, talking to me but looking at her. “It’s not. Beauty is seeing without bias.”

His words stuck with me after they left. I pushed
macaron
crumbs around my plate, wondering if I knew how to see without bias. I tried to figure out if it meant convincing my parents to go to experimental art pieces or not judging them for not going to experimental art pieces; or maybe it meant not having any preconceived notions about experimental art or its audience until I saw a piece myself. Or maybe it meant trying to have an open mind all the time, and not just when it was easy, like with nice strangers in a
salon de thé
.

I walked back to the bookstore. I thought about calling Bernard and inventing an excuse not to face him, but I couldn’t do it: somewhat to my regret, I had a backbone.

I stepped aside to let a messenger with a helmet exit, and walked in, sounding the cowbell of shame. Bernard sat at his desk, studying figures in a ledger. He didn’t look up. Not taking off my coat, I sat down.

“Monsieur, je me sens ridicule—”
I began, but he held up a finger to stop me and totted up numbers on a calculator. I sat like a truant. The desk clock ticked “tsk, tsk.” When he finished and looked up, I took it as my cue to speak.

“When you said you’d have the pages this afternoon, I thought you might be having lunch with Monsieur X,” I explained. “I know, dumb conclusion, but I couldn’t resist the thought of seeing him. When I saw”—I stopped. Pronouncing Olivier’s name evoked the memory of
the last time his name had come up between us—“who you were eating with,” I continued, “I realized how foolish I’d been.”

“C’est tout?”
he asked, his face expressionless. I nodded.
“Bon,”
he said, but I heard it as “Scram.” He handed me a manila envelope. Instead of accompanying me to the door, or even saying good-bye, he turned back to his ledger.

Bernard was angry.

I left, pulling the door open as slowly as I could and closing it gently behind me. The cowbell didn’t sound at all.

W
hen I got home, there was a message from Olivier. The sound of his voice was so unexpected, so profoundly weird, that I thought it was a wrong number. Or that I was imagining things. When I was thirteen, I’d fallen in love with a pair of suede boots I’d seen in a fashion magazine. I’d wanted them so much, I’d dreamed I’d gotten them, and I’d checked my closet in the morning to see if they were there.

The machine clicked and replayed the message. I looked up at the ornate corner moldings, the marquetry pattern along the edge of the desk, the marble elephant on the bookshelf. I was cataloging details, as if doing so could make time slow down, so I could catch up. I pressed Play again. My finger left a smeared print on the black plastic.

It really was Olivier, and his voice was like something I could hide in. “It was a shock to see you,
un choc fou
. I can’t stop thinking about you. Nothing has changed for me.
Tu me manques. J’ai envie de te voir
.”

I sat on the floor, boneless, and played it again.

By the fourth time, I had a minor sobbing fit, crying not the way you
do when you’re sad but the way you do after you’ve narrowly missed being hit by a car or a falling boulder: a trembling, hyperventilating kind of crying that you would label hysterical if you passed someone on the street crying that way. By the fifth or sixth time, the words ran together, ink in rain, sound smeared with language.

I curled into a ball, pressing my cheek to the cool wood floor while I listened to his voice. Even as I did it, I had an image of myself lying on the floor, listening to his voice wash over me, and it was sort of glorious, like opera, except I kept having to reach up to press Play, as the answering machine didn’t have a repeat function.

Olivier missed me. I thought about that weird French construction that still confuses me: not “I miss you,” but “You are missing to me.” Because that’s how I hear it, it’s somehow more direct and poignant at the same time, though the French don’t hear it that way. To them, the construction is just another convention; they say
“Tu me manques”
and hear “I miss you.” But I always felt a kind of melancholy in the form, as if missing someone wasn’t an action but rather an awareness, the observation of a loss. Also, the fact that the French switches the direct object and the subject throws me. I understand it, but it’s always foreign: I can’t get inside the French to see out of it.

I was missing to him. He missed me. It wasn’t just the construction that was foreign but the sentiment, too. My own sense of loss had occupied all the space in my head that had anything to do with Olivier. Now I had to consider that he was suffering in some way. I remembered the look on his face in the restaurant, then pictured him sad, then sadder, then very sad, like Pierrot with white face paint and black tears.

I reached up for the phone and called Althea.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I saw Olivier today—by mistake,” I added when she groaned. “Then he left me a message on my machine, saying he misses me,” I said.

“Too bad for him. He should sort out his life,” Althea said. “Uh-oh
are you going to brood about this?” I didn’t answer, because while I wouldn’t have used the word “brood,” I was considering mulling, dwelling, maybe some light agonizing. “You are, you broody cow!” she exclaimed. “Listen, come to this thing Fred invited us to—”

“What thing?”

“An art opening at some posh gallery. Meet us there at seven—”

“Can I dress up?”

“Yes, we’ll go out for dinner after. It’ll be fun.”

I lolled on the floor awhile longer. I blew away a dust bunny and pretended to debate calling him back, but I knew I would. I was just luxuriating in the question of when.

There was already a small crowd on the rue de Seine when I got there. I was wearing my pink coat over a black dress and high heels and feeling very French. Althea wasn’t there yet, so I looked at the art, a collection of black-and-white portraits that had been painted over with bright tribal patterns. Fred was talking to a skinny, waiflike woman on the sidewalk. I overheard a snippet of their conversation.

“Entre moi et la Havane, c’est une histoire d’amour,”
she said, her voice throaty. She exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke and pouted. He murmured something I didn’t catch. “I lived with artists in Cuba. I went into the worst ghettos to buy grass, man,” she said. She pooched her lips out like she was blowing on a cup of tea. He grimaced.

The word that came to mind was
poufiasse,
somewhat stronger than “bimbo,” with elements of “poser” and “twit,” though
pétasse,
a rather rude word for “tart,” would’ve been just fine as well.

I walked over to them and kissed Fred on both cheeks. He was wearing a turtleneck and jeans, and he smelled of citrus. “Fred! How lovely to see you! I’ve been meaning to call and tell you how helpful your translation theory advice was,” I gushed. The waif narrowed her eyes at me. “Hello,” I said. “Are you one of Fred’s students?”

“Anna, this is Muriel,” Fred said.

I smiled at her and took his hand. “Do you mind if I borrow him for a moment?” Not waiting for an answer, I pulled him inside. I helped myself to two glasses of wine and handed him one.

“Cheers,” he said, clinking my glass. “What was that all about?” he asked.

“You looked like you needed rescuing,” I said. “And I need practice flirting.”

“You’re doing just fine,” he said. His eyes crinkled in amusement. “In fact, you look like the cat that ate the canary.”

“I could be,” I said, looking at him over my wineglass. Althea and Ivan joined us, along with Charles-Henri and Justine, and two other couples, and we went down the street looking at other galleries, drinking more glasses of art gallery wine. We ended up at a tapas place in the Fifth, at a large corner table.

After we’d ordered, Ivan stood up and cleared his throat. “Everyone, I have an announcement to make. Althea has agreed to marry me, reckless woman that she is, and I’m officially moving in so we can live in sin until the big day!” There was cheering and clapping. I looked over at Althea and smiled, and she smiled back, looking flushed and happy. Someone called out, “When?”

“We’re thinking late summer,” Althea said, looking at Ivan.

“In Provence, in the garden at Charles-Henri’s house,” Ivan added.

“I’m paying for the champagne,” Charles-Henri announced, to more applause.

I went over to congratulate them, and there was a round of kissing and hugging before everyone sat down again. I glanced across the table, seeing Ivan and Althea holding hands. I thought about how their two worlds intersected, and how that intersection was full of secrets and stories that knit their lives together.

I had a secret, too. And I was going to call him back.

Althea came over and sat next to me. “You’ll come, won’t you?” she asked.

“To the wedding? All of us gloriously drunk and celebrating you and Ivan in the lap of luxury? I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “How are you doing about Olivier?” she asked.

“I was just about to call him,” I admitted.

She gave me a careful, even look. “I can lecture you until your ears bleed, but only one question counts: What do you want?” she asked. I gave an involuntary shudder, like a cat shaking water from its paw.

“The things I want, I won’t get. Olivier without Estelle. An Olivier who hadn’t lied to me,” I said. “Or maybe I just want a proper ending.”

“Sweetie, you know you deserve to be with someone who can give you more,” she said. “That said, and I’m not judging you, sometimes we take what we can get.” She kissed my cheek.

I went outside and called him. It was late, and I knew the play would be over.

“Viens. Je t’attends,”
I said. I’m waiting for you.

At home, I perched on the sofa, nervous, my heart beating wildly. I thought about taking a shower and changing. I thought about putting on music, something appropriate, or heavy-handed, or symbolic. I thought about opening a bottle of wine. I thought about all the other times he’d come over, and I thought about snipping, once and for all, the invisible spider silk thread between us.

I thought all of those things, and I did none of them. Thinking them was a distraction, a scrim to disguise myself from myself, a pointless ploy because I did know what I wanted. I also knew that when you made a deal with the devil, you wrote your own draft, and mine said “One more night.”

In the bathroom, I took a good look in the mirror. I wanted to make sure I knew what I looked like. Under the harsh, white light, I memorized what I saw, and the face that looked back at me was determined and old enough to know what I was doing:
majeure et vaccinée,
past the age of consent and I’d had all my shots.

I put my fingers on his lips. They were soft, damp, a little chapped. I pressed my face to his neck, breathing in the scent of him, musk and skin, a whiff of tobacco, a trace of aftershave, something new I couldn’t identify. I raked my fingers through his hair, feeling its length and thickness, the shape of his skull.

He put his arms around me, but I didn’t want to be held, not just yet. I pulled back. He moved to kiss me, and I turned my head. I pushed him against the wall and sniffed him like an animal. I pressed my face into his neck, his chest, his arms. When he groaned, I put my hand over his mouth, feeling the heat of his breath against my palm.

I undressed him in the bedroom. I slid his coat off his shoulders and unbuttoned his shirt, slipping my fingers between the buttons to touch the skin underneath. I pulled his shirt off and traced his shoulder with my tongue. I unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans, reaching my hands inside to hold his hips. When I slid my hand inside his pants to grasp his cock, I heard his sharp intake of breath. I pushed him back on the bed.

And then I was thirsty. I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. I felt powerful, hungry. I poured another glass of water and walked back to the bedroom. He lay flat on his back, his arms outstretched on either side. I gazed at him, prone on my bed: his profile, the matte, olive skin, the curved angles of his muscles, the line of his hip, the soft, curly hair on his chest and legs. I was no painter, but I wanted a canvas and palette, I wanted to paint him there, naked, waiting for me.

I put the glass down on the bedside table. I pulled off my dress, un
clasped my bra, stepped out of my underwear, and felt goose bumps prickle across my skin. Still I watched him, letting the tension cloud the air, making it difficult to breathe.

By unspoken agreement, everything was on my terms. He waited for me to approach him, and I took my time because I’d never been here before. I’d always been where Olivier was. I’d been the naked object in bed, while someone else watched. Timothy had watched me. I could see where he’d gotten off.

It was almost like being with someone else, and though I didn’t know if it was because I was really seeing him for the first time or because I felt like a different person, I finally understood what it was to own my desire, instead of being swept up in someone else’s.

I climbed on top of him, sliding my limbs over his, and kissed him. I pressed his shoulders down with my hands and explored his mouth with my tongue. He pulled my hips down. He slid his hands around my back, around my waist, up to my breasts. His hands were warm, but I shivered. He wound his hands in my hair, pulling me closer.

I reached down between my legs and grasped his cock, guiding it inside me. I leaned into him, moving against him, barely hearing the sounds we made in the dark.

I woke up in the night. Olivier slept with his cheek pressed to the nape of my neck, his arm like a safety belt across my waist. I slid out of bed. In the bathroom mirror, my lips were puffy and my hair was a Medusa-like tangle, but I still looked like me. I heard the sheets rustle. A trapezoid of light appeared on the hall floor when he turned on the lamp.

“Tu as soif?”
I called out.

“Oui,”
he said. I brought him a glass of water. He sat up to drink, and the shiny glint of his watch, still on his wrist, caught my eye.

“You are frowning,” he said. “I don’t like to see you frown.” He pressed his thumb between my eyebrows.

“How do you say ‘frown’ in French?” I asked. “I’ve forgotten.”

“Je ne te dirai pas,”
he said. When he leaned forward to kiss me, his lips were cold and wet, like a boy’s.

It would be light in a couple of hours, but right now, it was still dark, and Olivier was still here. We made love again. Afterward, I listened to him sleep, feeling twinges, flutters in my body that would translate to soreness in the morning. When I closed my eyes, random images flashed through my head: the crazy carpet patterns you see when you rub your eyes, the faces of strangers, grassy hills, fanged monsters, old-fashioned glass jars of milk that shattered on pale green tile floors. Spasms of the imagination.

Olivier’s eyebrows were thick and dark, the eyelashes short and curved. In sleep, his nose looked bigger and beakier. A sigh escaped from me, a tender little sound. I slid my leg between his, feeling the soft curls of his hair against my skin.

My attempt at an exorcism was slipping away from me.

“Don’t be here in the morning,” I whispered.

When I woke up, I could hear him rooting around in the kitchen. There would be
viennoiseries
on the table, France Inter on the radio, a pack of cigarettes next to
Libération
and the
International Herald Tribune.
These were things I knew.

I sat up. Other things I knew included the fact that he was still involved with Estelle and nothing had changed. I’d known it last night, but it hadn’t mattered last night; last night had been about last night.

It wasn’t such a bad thing, if you wanted to share your lover with a married actress nearly fifteen years his senior. I stretched, pointing and flexing my toes. In the space of one night, he’d become a lover, not a boyfriend, not a man I was seeing or dating, not
“mon amoureux.”