The Liar's Wife (15 page)

Mlle Weil blinks. “I do not know what spitballs are,” she says.

“Spitballs, let me see. Well, you take a little piece of paper and you roll it up into a ball, and then to weigh it down, so that the paper holds together, you add a little spit, or maybe I should say saliva, and then you throw it across the room and try to hit someone in the back of the head.”

Do you know who you are speaking to, Joe? Genevieve wants to say. This is Simone Weil, a very great intellectual, a very great thinker. And you are explaining spitballs to her. You are talking about spitting into paper just as we are about to eat.

“That's very interesting. Amusing,” Mlle Weil says. Genevieve knows that she is neither interested nor amused, but at least she isn't offended, and that's better than it might be. It is possible that the encounter will not be a disaster.

Joe reaches into the sack and takes out four small wooden baskets of raspberries. Genevieve relaxes about her black market worries: fruits and vegetables aren't rationed.

She takes the raspberries into the kitchen and puts them in a pure white bowl, her favorite of all the pottery Howard's mother has provided because it is plain. The others with their fussy pattern of rosebuds—of course she is grateful for them, she can see that they are well made, perhaps even called fine, but she would not have chosen them. But this, this pure white bowl, unornamented, well proportioned: she can think of it as hers. She puts her face to the beautiful dark red of the fruit, disappointed that there is no fragrance. She doesn't have much opportunity for sensual pleasure these days. Except with her son. She breathes him in … the yeasty smell of his hair, when he is sweaty after sleep.

“I think we can save our sugar ration; these are sweet as sugar. And speaking of sweet as sugar,” Joe says, squeezing Lily's shoulders.

To Genevieve's enormous relief, Mlle Weil doesn't seem to notice.

“Aren't these just beautiful?” Joe says, passing around the bowls of fruit. “Aren't they just perfect? There's got to be a God somewhere out there; this is the proof. But then there's Hitler, so I guess it's up for grabs.”

“Are you interested in the proofs for the existence of God?” asks Mlle Weil.

A sour taste comes to Genevieve's mouth. She wants to beg her old teacher: Please, Mlle Weil, don't begin with the ontological argument. Not with Joe.

But Joe doesn't miss a beat. “Nope, I guess I'm not. I just shut my eyes, hold my nose, and hope for the best.” He offers Mlle Weil a bowl of berries.

“No thank you, I am not fond of fruit,” she says.

Joe seems genuinely puzzled. “I never heard of that,” he says.

“You see, Joe,” says Mlle Weil, “one of my shames is that many kinds of food disgust me. I have been very held back from being the kind of person I want to be because I seem to be susceptible to both fatigue and disgust.”

Genevieve wants to rush across the room and put her hand over Mlle Weil's mouth. Don't talk like this, she wants to say. Nobody talks like this. Not to someone they've just met. You are impossible.

But Lily, who usually says very little, responds immediately. “I can't stand fat on meat,” she says. “And I am often so tired that I just want to die.”

Mlle Weil nods. “It is very difficult to work through fatigue. What is your work?”

Lily says she's a beautician, and this is another English word that has to be explained to Mlle Weil. She nods and asks Joe about his work. He tells her he's Lily's boss but that he used to be a farmer, that that was what he really loved. That the raspberries came from his family's farm in New Jersey, but his father lost the farm in the Depression and it was taken over by his cousins. That he is really happiest there, but he had to learn a trade so he got a job in a beauty salon that another one of his cousins owned. But that he really misses the farm. Genevieve has never heard him speak this way before.

“I'm sorry you won't be enjoying the fruit. But what you say makes a lot of sense,” he says. “Only I never heard anyone say it before. Fatigue and disgust. You're completely right, Simone. It's okay if call you that?”

“Of course. And I will call you Joe.”

“Sure thing. You know, you really know how to go to the heart of things.”

And then she does something else unheard of, something that ought to be unacceptable. She asks Joe to read a poem. She reaches into the large pocket of her overlarge trousers and takes out a folded piece of paper, which Genevieve can see is covered by her tiny writing.

“This is an English poem which I love very much. And I like your voice. Its inflections. It is a voice of kindness, a good man's voice. I have wanted to have this poem read by a native English speaker, but I was embarrassed to ask. But with you, Joe, I couldn't be embarrassed.”

“Okay, Simone, but I don't know if I really speak English. My first language was Sicilian, and I came to English by way of New Jersey and the Bronx. But here goes nothing.”

“It will not be nothing,” says Mlle Weil. “Whatever it will be, it will not be nothing. It is a very beautiful poem by a great English poet, George Herbert, who lived in the seventeenth century.”

“So he's even older than me,” Joe says, putting on his glasses to read the poem.

The easy feeling in the room has gone. Genevieve sees that Joe is uncomfortable. He hasn't understood the poem. Mlle Weil wants to talk about it, wants to explain it to him, wants to become his teacher, but he doesn't want it. He wants to be upstairs with Lily.

“I'm not much of a one for poetry, but it sure was swell meeting you,” he says, and Lily, embarrassed to be in the same room with poetry, says nothing, but lowers her beautiful eyes.

“
Tiens
, I am once more late. My mother will be furious,” Mlle Weil says, and rushes out the door without saying goodbye.

Genevieve picks up the cups and saucers, then sets them down and sits down herself on the sofa.

“She's impossible. Impossible. I could kill her for making Joe and Lily feel uncomfortable.”

“Well, yes, GeGe, he was perhaps uncomfortable for a moment. But he will remember this time, remember meeting her, remember what she allowed him to think, what she allowed him to say. Lily, I think, will especially remember it. Remember how the workers she taught loved Mlle Weil, how Mama told us she would carry fifty pounds of books on her back so they would be able to read Greek poetry and geometry. Perhaps if she has more time with Joe she will convert him to Metaphysical poetry. You heard what he said—she goes to the heart of things.”

“Only some people have hearts of stone, perhaps no hearts at all. And so yes, Laurent, her students loved her, the workers loved her, but many people hated her. Hated her with an almost insane violence, and sometimes for no reason.”

“Joe and Lily are among the kindest people in the world.”

“But she might have been with people who were not kind, not kind at all. How can she always be opening herself up as she does? She creates no shelters for herself. She's as vulnerable as a newly hatched chick. It's disgustingly easy to hurt her.”

“Another vulnerable creature it is your responsibility to protect. Like your son. Like me.”

“No, not like you. You, Laurent, I never think of as a child.”

“And yet, of course, always in need of extravagant attention. Like a child.”

The real child in the house cries out, and she is happy to go to him, knowing how easy it is to provide him with the necessary comfort.

OCTOBER 11, 1942

Genevieve is struggling with the perambulator, awkwardly carrying it down the four front steps, when her eye falls on Mlle Weil, making her way down the street towards her. She had not said she would be coming, and Genevieve is taking advantage of the last hours of light in this October, when light is increasingly precious, increasingly another commodity which seems to need rationing. She wonders what Mlle Weil would have done if she had rung the bell and found no one home. Walked away to another destination? Or planted herself on the stairs, perhaps taking a book from one of her wide, deep pockets, lighting a cigarette, just sitting, waiting, not knowing how ridiculous she looked.

Genevieve hadn't been outside all day, so she decided to be safe, to put a sweater on the baby and a hat. She often puts sweaters and hats on him when he doesn't really need them, because all of Howard's female relatives seem to have worn themselves out knitting hats and sweaters. She is not ungrateful. They have taken her in. A French woman, a non Jew. Howard had told her the name for a non-Jewish woman.
Shikse.
An ugly word, she had thought, like spitting on the sidewalk. She had never heard any of the family use it, but she doesn't know if they do when she's not around. She chooses to believe that they are kind people, and do not.

Of course, Mlle Weil doesn't help with the baby carriage. She is looking up at the sky, lighting a cigarette.

“I'm afraid Laurent won't be home until late tonight,” she says.

“Oh, no, it's you I wanted to see. And now we can go for a walk. Excellent.”

Not asking if Genevieve wanted her company. Genevieve is annoyed and yet secretly pleased: “It's you I wanted to see.” The old allure still in place, still in force. Genevieve condemns herself for an immature impulse. She is a grown woman, a wife, a mother. And yet the words “It's you I wanted to see” still make the skin on her forearms ripple like the skin of a horse in a light breeze.

The late sun sparkles on the river. She has not given up the habit of trying to find the right words for the color of the sky. Pearl grey, she thinks, and then changes from pearl to oyster, the inside of an oyster shell. And all at once, there is something like a rip in the matte greyness, and light pours through, as if someone had slit a grey cloth bag of sugar, and the sugar had spilt out. Only one tree is singled out by the light, and that one called a sugar maple. It amuses her to say to herself, “The sugar light falls on the sugar maple,” and then she wonders if she thought of sugar because of rationing. She believes that she spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the food she can't have. She has been told the sacrifice is honorable, and she believes it is, and is glad to do it. Only sometimes she yearns, ashamed, for the taste of sugar.

Mlle Weil says: “The tree looks like a torch thrown down by an angel.”

Once more, in relation to Mlle Weil, Genevieve finds herself abashed and feels she must accuse herself.
She is thinking of angels and I of sugar.

“I very much like New York. If France's situation didn't obsess my memory, my stay in New York would be pleasant and interesting. The skyscrapers are like cliffs and crags; I like the chaotic quality of the beauty: it is a new way of thinking about beauty. Whether the streets are beautiful or ugly, I always find them attractive. Especially Harlem. I attend a Baptist church in Harlem.”

Genevieve cannot imagine what the Negroes in the Baptist church would make of Mlle Weil. She has almost no contact with Negroes, but some Sundays when she is walking with the baby she has seen whole
families making their way to church, beautifully dressed, the women resplendent in dramatic hats. What do they think of this scarecrow of a white woman with flapping trousers and, instead of a beautiful hat, a not entirely clean beret? Or perhaps, she thinks, because their lives are difficult and they must have seen many things, they welcome her as respectable white churchgoers would not. Genevieve hopes that they do; once more, she feels she needs to worry for her.

Mlle Weil is standing now under the blazing tree. She lifts her hand, and spreads her arms out, as if she were ready to take flight. She closes, then opens her eyes. She seems almost young. The worn look, the look of tired discouragement, the bent skeleton—they've disappeared. And then she says, “The presence of beauty in the world is the surest sign of the presence of God.”

The words are shocking to Genevieve. When she knew Mlle Weil as her teacher, God had not seemed important to her unless it was the abstract God of Plato. When the question of God was raised in class, she refused to discuss it “on the grounds of insufficient data.”

In that world, the world of left-leaning intellectual Frenchmen, the use of the word “God” as she used it would have been rejected with derision. Genevieve wonders what Laurent would make of it, both she and her brother priding themselves on being “pagans” among the “unbaptized.”

Genevieve longs to ask her, why she had begun speaking in this way. But she feels she has no right. She can only think of Mlle Weil as her teacher.

They sit on a bench looking at the river. All Genevieve can think of is that in a few weeks, at this hour, it will be completely dark. She dreads the coming of winter, the four o'clock fall of night, a knife blade dropping straight down to the cold stone. She can't get used to New York winters. She worries for the baby.