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Lessons in French
Hilary Reyl


A delicious coming-of-age tale set in the most romantic city on earth.On the cusp of the nineties just as the Berlin Wall is falling, Kate is about to pursue her dream and become an artist. But she’s just graduated from Yale and when an intriguing job offer comes her way, to work as the assistant to Lydia Schell, a famous American photographer in Paris, she cannot say no. She will get to live in Paris again! And Kate has not been back to France since she was a lonely nine-year-old girl, sent to the outskirts of Paris to live with cousins while her father was dying.Kate may speak fluent French, but she arrives at the Schell household in the fashionable Sixth Arrondissement both dazzled and wildly impressionable. She is immediately engrossed in the creative fever of the city and surrounded by a seductive cast of characters. Amidst the glamorous, famous and pretentious circle that she now finds herself a part of Kate tries to fit in. But as she falls in love with Paris all over again, she begins to question the kindness of the people to whom she is so drawn as well as her own motives for wanting them to love her.A compelling and delightful portrait of a precocious, ambitious young woman struggling to define herself in a city a million miles from home amidst a new life that is spiralling out of control. Lessons in French is at once a love letter to Paris and the story of a young woman finding herself, her moral compass, and, finally, her true family.





















For Charles, mon grand amour


Table of Contents

Title Page (#u78f29059-88b4-5fd7-ad79-806fff820241)

Dedication (#ua557b50c-3832-535c-b414-35fc4ff17939)

Chapter One (#u1cee2285-b927-57b3-a6f0-5225d46a02c3)

Chapter Two (#u737c27e9-1402-5ead-8776-16ed815ebca4)

Chapter Three (#u0d78a09f-c329-55dc-a1f6-fbeba4506ecc)

Chapter Four (#u3bf70578-058a-5c8f-b13d-b2dd1273d3df)

Chapter Five (#ua4bc7ffc-1c70-5573-9de5-49fd02cf3126)

Chapter Six (#uba4f957b-739f-52e1-a8c4-c5354a7ea4d1)

Chapter Seven (#u1d10d315-cd1e-5323-a881-168d7ac708dc)

Chapter Eight (#uc3888743-50f5-5155-8873-d11e5bab682d)

Chapter Nine (#uc5594914-f5bf-5202-9c4e-e95ff1b0b859)

Chapter Ten (#u1e18f362-069a-53fd-82eb-8df69cbadebb)

Chapter Eleven (#u0cd22fec-2244-52a6-9278-d5410b72e204)

Chapter Twelve (#u25975d4d-4017-5780-a28c-e728d715a039)

Chapter Thirteen (#u87573c4d-82fc-5c8b-b558-530405ad42c3)

Chapter Fourteen (#ubc86b144-b40e-54d1-9fa1-275cc6a5b695)

Chapter Fifteen (#uddf89454-22c5-559d-acb3-d330856a928e)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




one


They say I have no accent and that this is a gift. Sometimes, people can detect a lilt in my voice, which makes them wonder which rural part of France I come from, or maybe which Scandinavian country. But no one can hear that I’m American. And yet, because I am not French, I show almost no signs of belonging to any group or class. In Paris, I am virtually transparent. A gift, perhaps. Un don, so to speak, voilà. But, when you feel invisible, there is no end to the trouble you can get into.

My trouble began in 1989, on a wet September morning at Charles de Gaulle Airport, when I decided to splurge on a taxi into town. The worn smells of leather and tobacco were deeply reassuring, the precise blend of odors I craved at the edge of the unknown.

But I probably shouldn’t have taken that taxi. Mom claimed that you had a much higher chance of dying on the way to or from the airport than you did on the plane. However, you had more say about how you traveled on the ground. You could go by car, bus or subway. You could slow down, look both ways, watch your back. On the ground, you could take responsibility. In the air, worry was nothing but a production.

I had just graduated from college, and was trying to ignore most of what Mom said, but I was secretly proud of her, pretending to be as callous as she would have been to any signs of fear in myself as my plane flew to Paris.

The driver asked me where I was returning from. Where had I been on my vacances?

I told him I hadn’t been on vacation anywhere. I had been a waitress in New Haven all summer. That was a town on the East Coast, near New York.

Ah, New York!

But I was returning to Paris for the first time in ten years. Though I wasn’t French, my grandfather was, and I lived here once, for two years, with cousins, in the Nineteenth Arrondissement.

He laughed. Today, he wasn’t driving me to the Nineteenth but to the Sixth. A much more chic quartier. More central. Mademoiselle was moving up in the world!

We glided through the industrial ring around the city. We had just permeated its first layer when the taxi was rear-ended at a stoplight. There was a shock, a screech, swearing.

I felt so vindicated for Mom that I was strangely overjoyed by this accident, proof-positive of her theories of relative danger. I sidelined the fact that she would have told me to take the Métro because it was cheaper, and safer. I had wanted a driver to be my own personal shepherd into my new life.

This was my moment in the sun. So what if it was drizzling? Experience was going to transform all.

The driver punched the steering wheel—“Merde!”—as I flew into his headrest.

“Ça va?” he asked, rubbing his own forehead. “Are you hurt?”

No, no, I was not hurt, and I would wait uncomplainingly on the sidewalk of this outer arrondissement for him to exchange the necessary information with the woman who had hit us.

We were by a news kiosk. I had forgotten that the news kiosks here were green and suppository-shaped, that the newsprint was denser than ours, that there were Chupa Chups lollipops and Hollywood gum for sale, a magazine called Figaro Madame, headlines about a pop star named Johnny Hallyday, erotic ads for coffee and chocolate, small posters for chamber music concerts in Ste-Chapelle, dog shit. It was all coming back.

Looking hard at the familiar candies and magazine covers, I saw their colors and meanings bleed into lines and shapes. I pulled a sketchbook and pencil from my bag, keeping half an ear to the words between my driver and the offending woman. He wrote down her details. She lit a cigarette.

Because I sensed the conversation wrapping up, I did not put pencil to paper. There was too much to draw in a few moments, and I hated resorting to quick symbols and tricks. I was uncannily good at reproducing what I saw, but only in the fulness of time. If I couldn’t do it right, I would rather simply stare. I slipped my sketchbook away.

The drizzle was lightening into the gray gauze I recalled well but hadn’t thought of in years.

In Germany, the Berlin Wall was about to come down. A photo on the front page of Le Monde showed a rock band playing a concert in front of big bright graffiti on the West Berlin side. I looked into the crowd that filled out the Le Monde photo. People were dancing ecstatically, sensing the coming demolition, except for the photographers, who were still, their flashes going off.

I scanned the photo for my new boss, Lydia Schell, the woman I had come here to work for. She was a photographer, a famous one. Mom had not heard of her, but once I was able to prove her credentials, Mom was impressed that I would have the opportunity to be the Paris impresario to someone with such a name. “Impresario” was Mom’s term. When I had interviewed with her in her Manhattan town house a few weeks ago, Lydia had called me her assistant.

Now she was in Germany capturing the momentous happenings. There was a chance, wasn’t there, that she was in that crowd, peeking through her lens at me in welcome?

“You made it,” she would say, if only I could spot her. “Bien-venue!”




two


My dented taxi stopped on a beautiful street that flowed toward the Luxembourg Gardens, stonework giving way to rich green. This was a new angle on Paris for me. Le Sixième. Even the cigarette smoke was elegant here, twirling above well-groomed bodies in a velvet calligraphy quite foreign to the noxious haze of my youthful memory. There was no confusing this cigarette smoke with car exhaust just as there was no confusing the clatter of high heels on this pavement with the street sounds outside my cousins’ subsidized building. What had those sounds been again? I couldn’t remember. They were muffled now by the luxurious revving of a Citroën’s engine, by the calm rustle of nearby leaves, by the voluptuous exhale of an impossibly petite woman in two-toned heels, which even I knew were Chanel, her shoulder pads broad enough to soften any blow.

The taxi was gone. I was outside No. 60 with my suitcase, forgetting the exorbitant fare as I looked down my new street, repeating the building code, 67FS, which I would have to punch in order to open the door to the interior courtyard, “a hidden gem,” according to Lydia, “although my husband Clarence likes to complain that it’s dark and depressing.” As I was preparing to punch the keys that would work this magical door, it opened by itself.

“Ah, c’est mademoiselle Katherine?”

“Madame Fidelio, je vous reconnais de votre photo!” It was true. I recognized her overhanging brow from a photograph of Lydia’s. Her plumpness did nothing to soften her sculptural face. I knew that skull, those imposing eyebrows. She was an intimate, the Portuguese concierge who also helped with Lydia’s housework. “C’est vous, non?”

“Oui, c’est moi. Enchantée, Mademoiselle.” She gave a short laugh, overshadowed and outlasted by the suspicion in her eyes. Was I going to be a slut like so many of Madame’s other assistants? Was that what she was looking to know from my brown ponytail, pale pink lip gloss, jeans, leg warmers, t-shirt frayed and ripped to reveal one shoulder?

I wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about. I was a serious young woman who could not afford to be careless. I needed this job. I still wasn’t quite sure what it entailed, but whatever Lydia’s “little bit of everything” was, it would become my mission because Lydia was my first step into a real future. I had no intention of being a disaster, of dragging strange men up to my maid’s room or coming to work hungover. This wasn’t throwaway time for me like it had been for the other, more privileged girls. This time was real, Madame Fidelio.

“You have no accent.” Her tone hovered between mistrust and admiration.

“I lived in Paris when I was younger. I had cousins here, cousins of my father’s. My grandfather came from France to America but his brother stayed here, and his children were my dad’s favorite relatives. His only relatives really. I stayed with them for two years.”

“They will be happy to see you again, no?”

“They have retired and moved away. They were teachers in Paris, because they were sent here by the school system, but they always knew they would go home, to Orléans. So, I’ll have to take the train to visit them sometime.”

“That is a good thing, to be attached to your roots. My husband and I, we return to our family in Portugal every August.”

Watching Madame Fidelio’s slow understanding nod as she spoke, I was struck by the force of my cousins’ nostalgia. As a kid, I never thought much about the fact that Solange and Jacques were always scrimping and saving to build a small retirement house in a development outside their native town despite the fact of forty working years in Paris. It was simply the state of things. But it now struck me as incredible to have so concrete a vision of the future guiding your every youthful move, to know you will go home again, to live your life in a loop.

I thought Madame Fidelio might begin to tell me more about herself, perhaps her own plan to return home someday for good, but instead she said that I was prettier than the last girl and repeated that my French was impressionnant.

Relief sunk in. Along with gratitude to my cousins for their patient teaching. When Lydia arrived, she would learn from her faithful concierge that I had told the truth about my fluency back in New York, and our first bond of trust would be forged.

But, even more striking was the fact that I had impressed the impressive Madame Fidelio. I must, in fact, be someone.

She looked at me, smiled.

I read my substance in her eyes.

“I do not know if the young monsieur is awake yet,” she said. “Perhaps we should not ring the doorbell. I have a key to the apartment, of course. Allons.”

It took me a few seconds, as we walked across the interior courtyard toward a staircase at the back, to mentally match “young monsieur” to Olivier, boyfriend of Lydia’s daughter, Portia, who was a couple of years younger than I. Olivier was going to show me around the apartment before he left later today for the final leg of his European trip. Madame Fidelio’s hushed and reverential tone suggested a prince.

“Does he like to sleep in?” Although I had quite forgotten his existence until now, my curiosity was suddenly acute.

“He is often pale. He has many soucis, I think. But he is charmant.”

“Ah, bon.” What kind of soucis? What troubles?

I could see why Lydia had said the courtyard was precious. It was cobblestoned and planted with manicured trees in ornate pots, with dignified doors and tall windows rising all around. The building’s inner walls formed a plush lining to this jewel box, known only to its owners and their secret guests. I felt a thrill of initiation. I also saw Clarence’s point. There was almost no sunlight. It was indeed a little dark and depressing.

The apartment was on the ground floor. As Madame Fidelio turned her key, I recognized the firm, if vaguely tender, expression from the final plate in Lydia’s latest book, Parisians. It was a book of portraits that began with the famous literary critic Jacques Derrida, in a bathrobe, in front of a bowl of coffee at the white plastic table in his suburban garden, and ended with this Portuguese concierge. The book had been criticized. They said Lydia Schell had lost her edge. Parisians was a mixture of Who’s who and noblesse oblige. But it had sold better than anything else she had done.

We came into an entry hall half-painted a color I could only call eggplant. The painting work must have stopped suddenly because the last brush-stroke of purple dripped down the creamy primer.

Madame Fidelio clucked at the unfinished walls. “Pauvre Madame Lydia,” she said cryptically. Then she signaled me to follow her down a long paneled hallway with many doors, some closed, some ajar enough to give me clues as I passed, a swatch of fabric, the pattern of a rug, the flicker of a mirror.

Only one door was fully opened. I saw an unmade twin bed with a pale blue ruffle in the same fabric as the drapes. I could not tell whether there were flowers or little figures on the fabric, but something was going on, something delicate and complicated. There was a dressing table strewn with bottles and tiny baskets.

“C’est la chambre de la jolie petite.”

La jolie petite must be Portia. I thought of the fine-boned blond girl in the red leather frame back in the dining room clutter of the Greenwich Village house. As I wondered how Madame Fidelio might describe me, I tried to tread lightly down the hallway, a girl accustomed to bed ruffles that matched her drapes. A girl with a dressing table perhaps.

After a time, the hallway forked. That door down to the right, said Madame Fidelio, was Monsieur Clarence’s study. We veered left into the kitchen, which, on first glance, was less substantial than Lydia’s kitchen in New York. The appliances here were white, not stainless, and they appeared half-sized.

On the wall was a framed series of Lydia’s magazine covers. There was a Rolling Stone cover of Jim Morrison and one of Yoko Ono crying, holding a single wildflower in Central Park. There was a Time cover of Nelson Mandela. There was a Life cover that was probably the March on Washington. Martin Luther King was moving in a sea of signs. “Voting Rights Now!” “End Segregated Rules in Public Schools!” The March on Washington took place in 1963. That would make Lydia about my age when she took this photo. I wondered if she had felt young.

“Ah, monsieur!” Madame Fidelio smiled appreciatively, a woman who approved of men.

Young Monsieur was sitting at the kitchen table. He was tousled, and there was a fresh warmth to him, a waft of the morning bread from the boulangeries I could remember from my childhood.

He must have just emerged from that soft rustled bed I had glimpsed from the hallway, Portia’s bed. Without being able to look straight at him, I knew he was the most attractive person I’d ever seen. He was reedy and lithe. His hair tumbled like light over features of brushed elegance, light brown eyes, cheekbones curved and quick as the paws of a cat.

“Bonjour, Madame Fidelio.” He had an American accent.

There was a flicker of annoyance in his face, surely at the invasion of his last private moments in the apartment, but the flicker disappeared as his gaze lit on me, and in the lifting of Monsieur’s irritation I felt myself uplifted, blessed, sun-kissed.

“You must be Kate. I’m Olivier.”

“Sorry to bother you so early.” It was just before ten o’clock. “Lydia says you’re leaving for Italy today. You probably have a lot to do.”

“Tomorrow, actually.” He smiled. “I don’t fly to Venice until tomorrow morning. And I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to pick up most of my stuff before I head out for good. So, I’m mellow.” He flung a wave of brown curls out of his eyes and looked at me again. Then he rose and put the kettle on. “Tea? Madame Fidelio? Kate?”

Madame Fidelio said she would leave us. Here was my key to the main apartment. Here was the key to the maid’s room on the sixth floor where I would live. But not the sixth floor on this staircase. The escalier de service. Monsieur would show Mademoiselle, please.

“Pas de problème, Madame Fidelio,” he said.

“Merci beaucoup, Madame!” I added. “Vous êtes gentille de vous occuper de moi.”

“Bonne journée, mes petits.”

The three of us smiled indulgently at one another. Again, I felt a certain pride in sensing I had made a favorable first impression on regal Madame Fidelio. I had passed through my first gate.

“How do you like your tea?” Olivier asked once she had gone.

“I like milk, if there is any.”

He took a carton from the small refrigerator.

My cousins’ refrigerator had been an even tinier affair, drawer-less, without a working light. But I had bright memories of the food packages inside, and they were revived in a flurry by the box in Olivier’s slender hand. It was longue conservation milk, the kind everyone here drank. It could sit in that box for months until you snipped one of the corners and began to pour. It had a chemical smell that used to make me nauseated. I hated it. I had never told Mom because she had had more important things on her mind at the time, but the milk here was terrible.

“I got some honey at the farmers’ market on Boulevard Raspail. Would you like some in your tea?”

I had forgotten I liked honey but was suddenly longing for it.

“Sure. Honey would be great. I’ve never been to the market on Raspail. Is it wonderful? I haven’t been to Paris in over ten years.”

“Where did you get that accent? You sounded totally native talking to Madame Fidelio just now.”

I fell back on well-rehearsed lines. “I think the timing of when I learned was perfect. I was here between the ages of nine and eleven, young enough to get the accent and old enough to intellectualize the language.”

“No, you must be gifted. I’ve spent years here on and off and my mother’s French and I sound awful.”

“I doubt that.”

He laughed gently. “Spend some time with me then.”

I felt brave enough to glance into his eyes.

“So you’re fresh off the plane,” he said. He made my freshness sound like the quality of a flower or an apple. “Lydia says you’re a painter. Is there anything you want to see today, any art, anything in particular in Paris?”

“She told me you’d only have a few hours before you caught your plane and you’d barely have time to show me the alarm and the washing machine and such.”

She told me you were charming.

“But I don’t leave until tomorrow, remember? I love Lydia, but she has a lot on her mind. We can’t expect her to remember other people’s schedules. I have a whole day. I thought maybe I’d just walk around. I have to pick something up in the Sixteenth. Figured I’d go to the Marmottan. You know, where all the Monet waterlilies are? I haven’t been there this trip. I know it’s not very cool or contemporary, but I’m a nostalgic person.” He sighed. “I’m about to start a job in New York. Investment banking. I doubt I’ll have time to flâner in the foreseeable future. So I’m open. What do you want to do?”

“Can we get a croissant?”




three


At the pâtisserie on the corner, Olivier asked what I would like.

A plain croissant, please.

He bought it for me, and ordered a pain au chocolat and a pain aux raisins for himself.

We wandered over into the Seventh Arrondissement. On the rue du Bac, we passed the luxurious grocery store Hédiard, and I smiled inside because Hédiard had been a joke in my cousins’ house. When Étienne and Jacques would refuse second helpings of Solange’s food, she would say, “If this isn’t good enough for you, changez de restaurant! Allez chez Hédiard!”

I wondered now if Solange knew that Hédiard wasn’t a restaurant, but a famous store with Art Nouveau windows framing pyramids of fruit and pastries against a luscious depth of cheeses and exotic teas in red-lacquered drawers. But what caught my eye, as we floated by, was a silver tray of croissants à la crème de marron. I loved chestnuts, and imagined chestnut cream to be something otherworldly. These chestnut croissants, with their dusting of powdered sugar, struck me as the most delicious things I could possibly eat, but I wasn’t sad that I didn’t have one at this moment. I still had half of the plain croissant that Olivier had bought for me, and I knew I could wander to Hédiard on my own anytime from now on. I lived nearby.

My lack of covetousness toward today’s uneaten treasure was so marked that I wondered if I hadn’t become a new person. So often I was defined by what I could not have.

Olivier veered away from me into Hédiard. I moved to follow him, but he told me to give him a second. When he reappeared, it was with two of the chestnut croissants. “Second breakfast.” He winked.

When we reached the Seine, I gazed across to the Grande Roue, the giant Ferris wheel that comes to the Tuilleries a couple of times a year.

He saw me staring. “You’d like to ride in it too, wouldn’t you? It’s a great way to get the lay of the land if you haven’t been to Paris for a while. Let’s go.”

We had a compartment to ourselves. Our knees grazed in the metal seat. Whenever the wheel stopped, we rocked into each other, pretending not to notice, talking too much.

After the ride, we were altered and unsteady. We walked quietly along the Right Bank all the way to the Sixteenth, where we picked up a small paper bag that he said was for Lydia.

“I get along with her pretty well,” he ventured. “But she’s complicated. And the family is complicated. You’re in for some interesting times. I hope you’ve been taking your vitamins.”

I wanted more information about Lydia and her mysterious family, but I also didn’t want to be reminded that this boy across this café table from me sipping Belgian beer, drawing glances from all around, belonged to them.

I reminded him that he had mentioned the Marmottan museum with the Monets.

“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked.

“I would love to.”

“That didn’t sound entirely convincing.” He looked at me with an attention I had rarely felt. “Are you being polite?”

“No, no, I’m strange about the Impressionists, the style. I don’t have my own style yet, so I get a bit wary, and impressed, so to speak.” I giggled lamely. “But I’d like to go. I’d like to look at the actual paintings. I’ve seen so many reproductions.”

“You can’t not have a style.”

“Think about mirrors. No style, right?”

“You’re funny,” he smiled, making my funniness into an appreciable quality, a style of its own.

He told me his mother used to take him to the Marmottan on trips to Paris when he was a boy. It was her favorite museum because it was small and perfect, a bijou. He always made at least one pilgrimage when he was in town. “She loves the place and the paintings, and it’s hard for her to travel these days. Her circumstances aren’t what they used to be. Hopefully, I can start bringing her back once I’m working and I can afford it. Anyway, her favorite thing about this museum is the series of footbridges over the lily pads. I think you’ll see why.”

As we walked uphill to the end of the rue de Passy and through a dainty park, Olivier’s eyes gleamed with what I took to be memory.

“What are your parents like?” he asked.

“Well, my dad died when I was eleven. While I was living in Paris actually. The whole time he was dying of cancer, he kept writing me letters about how happy he was that I got to be here, living with his cousin Jacques whom he adored, and learning French. He never really got fluent in French. His own dad didn’t speak it to him—I guess he wanted him to fit in in America—and Dad had this idea that my learning the langauge would somehow make my life complete.”

“You must miss him.”

“I think about him all the time, try to guess what he would say if he could see me, especially here.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I shook my head. “It’s okay.”

“So, did your mom bring you up? I mean, after?”

“Basically. I guess you could say my mom is wonderful. I mean, she was supposed to have another kind of life. My dad was an up-and-coming movie director when she married him. She probably thought she was going to have fun, but ended up taking care of him when he got sick and then working hard as a secretary, an executive secretary in a law firm, but still a secretary, when she could have done something truly interesting with her life. She’s slaved all these years to send me to good schools and she’s proud of me. It’s been just the two of us since I came home from France. She lets me do these things that make her seem almost liberal, like coming to Paris to work for Lydia, but it’s because she believes in some form of well-roundedness to prepare you for life. Actually, she’s obsessed with me becoming a corporate lawyer because what she wants for me more than anything is security, and she knows that you can’t rely on anyone but yourself for that. And I feel terrible about not wanting to be a lawyer. But I really don’t. I don’t think that way at all. Logically, I mean. I don’t think logically. It would be torture.”

I was suddenly embarrassed. Had I been talking this whole time? Did I seem disloyal to Mom? Was I?

“You know, Kate, I’ve only just met you, but you appear to me to be many things at once. So, you may not have the luxury of diving into your dreams right away. Almost no one does. I’ve thought about this a lot. Not everyone can do everything in the ideal order. That’s what children of privilege don’t have to face.”

I imagined that he too dreamed of the freedoms of privilege and I felt intensely jealous of Portia, but only for a second because the next thing he said was, “They get so hedonistic sometimes, it makes them soft. Portia and Joshua have their good points, but they are incredibly spoiled. They just don’t get it like we do.”

At the mention of Joshua, I was startled into recalling that Portia had a problematic younger brother. I felt the onrush of all I had yet to know.

We stood in a room full of different colored impressions of the footbridge in Monet’s Japanese garden at Giverny. Olivier explained that his mother had told him that it was impossible to know that this was a bridge from looking at only one of the paintings by itself. You needed the series of views superimposed in your head for the true image to take shape.

“I see what she means,” I said. “It’s a beautiful trick. Pretend you don’t know what they are supposed to be and walk around until the bridge comes out at you.”

These paintings were gorgeous, but they made me uncomfortable. Even though they had become classics, they took an intimidating leap of faith, painting the light instead of the contours of the thing itself, letting the subject slowly emerge on a magical surface. I was convinced I could never do such a thing. I was too literal. I loved the Monets, but I didn’t entirely trust them.

In a nearby tearoom, over the tiniest and most expensive of tomato tarts, which Oliver treated me to, he finally told me what was in the bag he had just gotten for Lydia. “Papaya extract pills, probably mixed with speed. She gets them from a diet guru up here.”

“Why are you picking them up?”

“She likes to involve people she feels close to in her fetching and carrying. It’s an emotional thing. She’d never ask Clarence because she would feel too judged, but I’m sure she’ll want you to do it. She starts by asking you to pick something up somewhere without telling you what it is. But she always ends up blurting it out sooner or later. She can’t not confess eventually, but she controls her timing.”

“Maybe that’s what makes her such a great artist.”

“Yeah, that’s what you have to remember when you’re tempted to make fun of her for wanting to funnel baguettes and cheese all day, then sending you out for these damn pills. She’s amazing at what she does.”

We made our way back across the Seine and over to the Sixth with a detour through the Rodin Sculpture Garden, where we sat on a bench and watched children feed ducks in the shadow of Balzac. How lucky to grow up here, we agreed.

I asked him about the signet ring on his finger.

It was a chevalière with the coat of arms from his mother’s side of the family. He wore it for her.

“Is that castle on there your long-lost château somewhere deep in the Dordogne?”

“The Loire, actually.” He laughed. “But you’re right, it’s long-gone. The land is gone too. They sold it when my mother was a child. The only piece of it left is the ‘de’ in her name. It’s my middle name. I’m Olivier de Branche Craft.”

Suddenly, I felt light among the statues in this venerable garden. Amid all these voluptuous stones straining toward life, just short of breathing, here I was so very alive without even trying. The simple stupid joy of it was overwhelming.

I stole a glance at Olivier. I felt my throat catch. I had to say something to make sure that I could still speak.

“Olivier de Branche,” I said, with emphasis on the particle, and I reached to touch the golden ring. “Maybe you’ll be able to rebuild the château for your mother one day.”

“You’re sweet, but I’d settle for a pied-à-terre in the Sixth.”

I pulled my hand into my lap.

Back at the apartment, we sat in the half-painted living room and drank Lydia’s white wine infused with a crème de pêche. She had gotten Olivier hooked on her peach Kirs while they were here together last month. Olivier had been traveling in Europe all summer, mostly without Portia, who I gathered was interning at a fashion magazine in New York and was now headed back to college for her junior year. I wanted both to picture her and to block her out, so that I had a filmy image of her as a drowned princess or a girl frozen in a magazine.

Being in the Schells’ living room, among their many possessions, cast a sheen of formality back over Olivier and me, and we started conversing seriously. I tried hard to ignore the fact that each of his words was a little drumbeat between my legs.

“Lydia and I were good roommates,” he said. “She got me on this routine of starting with her Kirs around five.”

We looked at an ornate clock that had been taken down by the painters and was leaning against a striped silk ottoman. A fraying wire connected the clock to a hole in the wall above the mantel. It was quarter to five.

“We’re knocking off early,” I tried to laugh.

I had to stop myself from drinking too quickly and asking too many questions. My curiosity about this household was intense, but so was my awareness that Olivier was completely bound up in it.

After three Kirs with no food, I began to feel dizzy. Struggling to my feet, I said I had to go to bed. I couldn’t even count the hours since I had last slept. The jet lag was catching up to me.

Didn’t I want some dinner?

“No thank you.” Mom had taught me what a waste of time it was to long for the unattainable.

“Goodbye, then.” But I couldn’t quite close the door. “Maybe when you’re back between Italy and the States? Are you staying in Paris for a day or two then?” I hoped I sounded nonchalant. “Will you stay here?”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

I blushed.

He smiled sadly. “But I might not be able to help myself,” he said. Flecks of green melted in his brown eyes as he leaned in for what I realized in the nick of time was a double-cheek kiss. The curls that only this morning had seemed such a rare vision actually brushed my neck, and then it was over.

I stumbled backward.

“Not sure of my exact dates yet,” he whispered, “but I’ll see you in two or three weeks.”

As soon as I reached my own tiny space, I knew I was too tipsy and tired to unpack. But I did manage to rummage for a half-eaten turkey sandwich I had leftover from the plane. My first dinner in Paris, alone, staring out at a sea of blinking windows. I had no idea what I was doing here. This was not the Paris of Jacques and Solange, bound by all the limitations of decency, where I first discovered how faithfully I could draw in the illustrated letters I sent home. This was a city whose shapes were still unclear. I had no idea what tomorrow would look like, except that it would be empty of the only person I thought I needed to see.

I forced down a final chalky bite.

I wondered what Olivier might have whipped up for me in the kitchen downstairs. A recipe of his mother’s? Of Lydia’s?

In a couple of weeks, he would pass through my life again, on his way back to Portia, whom we had hardly touched upon all day. Slender Portia of the toile and the bed skirt. Portia who was not me.




four


Lydia had told me that my sixth-floor maid’s room, the garret that came attached to “every Paris apartment,” would have a view of the Luxembourg Gardens. When I woke that first morning to the alarm on my digital watch, I looked out to the promised sliver of green visible through rain-glossed rooftops.

I had not told Lydia that my cousins had not had a maid’s room, or a cave for their wine for that matter, nor had I told her that it might be a problem for me to pay the $400-a-month rent for her maid’s room out of my salary. I had said that, of course, I understood, and I had implied that I was among the lucky few who did not have to worry about such things. The world was elitist, and this was a funny if slightly embarrassing fact. Common knowledge. The chambre de bonne with a view, c’était normal, normal at any price.

The rooftops and the little corner of Luxembourg trees in my line of sight were glossy and trembling. The room was spartan, but I took my time in arranging it with my few things. I had an hour before Lydia was to call me with my first instructions.

On an old trunk, I made a neat pile of books next to a framed black and white snapshot of my mother and father with me as a plump five-year-old with short hair, outsized eyes and an unsure smile for the camera. Dad was already sick in the picture. His own smile was strained, but he was still trying. Mom had unimaginably long hair and a roundness to her that I couldn’t actually remember, but the firm set of her mouth was the same as today.

I put my clothes on wire hangers on a bare metal bar, next to the single futon on the floor.

“We bought the futon for the last assistant because the springs in the old bed were simply gone,” Lydia had said. “It’s so comfortable that I’m a little jealous. Maybe we’ll get one for Portia. Can you imagine? Portia on a futon on the floor? She’d probably love it. She’s always saying she hates her bedroom in Paris, that it’s too precious.”

My bathroom was tiny and strange, a shower stall with a curtain that didn’t quite reach the floor and an electric toilet that made an alarming suction sound. The door was plastic and folded like an accordion. The sink was outside, next to a camping stove and a tiny refrigerator. In the cupboard by the refrigerator, I found a few dishes and a box of verveine tea bags. There was still sugar in the sugar bowl, but otherwise there was no sign of the disastrous assistant who had preceded me.

The string of events that led me to this garret was so tenuous that I believed it might snap at any moment and send me hurtling back across the Atlantic to the nothingness from which I’d come, to Peter, the noncommittal boyfriend who finally called it off, to the professors who told me that I had to outgrow my delusion that accurate contour drawing was art, to the mother who said she would hire me an LSAT tutor if I promised to get my act together.

It was only this past May that Lydia called me at school to say she had gotten my letter and résumé. She liked the fact that I had been a volunteer lifeguard in Nicaragua. Was my French really fluent? She needed to fire the assistant she had in Paris because she wasn’t working out. “I am far from uptight, but this girl has no morals.” Her voice was hoarse and breathy. So could I take the train into the city as soon as possible to meet with her? “I’m in the Village,” she said.

“Of course. I’ll come tomorrow.”

I was stunned that she had responded to me.

One of my college roommates had told me about the job with Lydia Schell. “I used to be friends with her daughter, Portia. They’re both kind of crazy, mother and daughter, but pretty brilliant. She always needs an assistant in Paris and it’s probably an interesting gig. Write to her. You can use my name.”

So, I had gone to the library and found books of Lydia Schell’s photographs. I had quickly learned that she had been a part of everything that mattered in recent history. I had written to her.

Lydia had made her name photographing the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests. Now she traveled all over the world, but she was based in Europe as a magazine correspondent, mostly for Vanity Fair of late. She was famous for a framing device whereby her pictures looked like they were from the point of view of one of their own subjects. They felt very intimate, but they told far-reaching and important stories.

After initial skepticism, Mom had been suitably impressed by my reports of Lydia Schell’s fame to support my effort. This was why she had sacrificed to send me to a good school, so that I would have this kind of opportunity. But I shouldn’t simply drift on it. I should make sure I always knew where the opportunity was taking me because people like us could not afford not to be practical.

“So, you’re telling me she’s in the big leagues,” said Mom, with the beginnings of approval.

“Mom, she probably won’t even answer my letter.”

“Well, then it won’t have been for you, will it? And you can use your French in a law firm. Max said he would be able to get you a paralegal job in any major city in the world in a heartbeat.” She took a rare pause. “But they do say,” she went on, “that law schools are looking for variety these days. Think about how that week in Nicaragua helped you get into college. You wrote such a great essay about it, remember? So your law school application may end up stronger if you work for this woman.”

“Is that why you let me go to Nicaragua? To give me a better shot at college. Well, Mom, don’t get your hopes up.”

But when Lydia did answer me, I took the train from New Haven into New York City the next day and found my way from Grand Central Station to the Christopher Street subway stop. I had only been to Manhattan a handful of times, had no mental map of it, and did not picture it this cozy and leafy. The streets were sun-dappled and people looked friendly.

Lydia’s New York home was a four-story townhouse. I rang the bell and was let into a foyer by a maid who turned quickly away. It smelled like wet paint.

“Hello! Is this color terrible?” Lydia came toward me, hand outstretched. She swallowed audibly and looked alarmed at the lavender walls. There was a slight bulge to her eyes that made them catch light like fruit in a still life. They glistened with the sheen of the fresh paint. Although I did not know what color the insides of townhouses were supposed to be, my instinct told me that she was displeased with the lavender and that I should be too.

“It might be a little too Eastery,” I ventured, “for a first impression of such a great house.”

“I couldn’t agree more. My husband has no eye for color. But this is far from the worst of it. You have to come see what he’s done in here.” She led me into a living room with tarps over the furniture and gestured to the walls. “This looks like a melon, doesn’t it? The man wants me to feel like I’m living inside a melon.”

“You think it’s on purpose?”

“So you agree that it looks like a goddamn cantaloupe in here? We see eye-to-eye on this? I have to know so he doesn’t think it’s just me being difficult.”

“Well, it’s definitely fruity. Maybe a little darker than a cantaloupe, though? Maybe you could tell your husband it looks like a papaya.”

“Don’t get me started on papayas. Have you heard about this papaya diet? The enzyme that’s supposed to make you lose weight? I’m going to start again as soon as I get back to Europe. Have you ever done it? It’s disgusting, but it works.”

“I like papayas.”

“Well maybe we can do it together, then. You and me and Portia. We’ll do it when she comes during her school breaks. Then it won’t be quite so miserable. Anyway, I’m sorry the place is such a shambles. Let’s go into the dining room and sit down. They haven’t started on this room yet. It’s not going to be green anymore. Green is supposed to be an unappetizing color. I don’t know what we were thinking. We haven’t painted in about ten years. We’re going to do red this time. Maybe you could take a look at the swatches on the table. And there’s a menu there. I hope you like Chinese food. I was going to order lunch.” She began rummaging through papers on the dining room table. “God, I can’t find it! No one puts anything away around here.” She walked to a doorway and yelled up a mahogany staircase. “Joshua! Joshua! Where’s the Excellent Dumpling House menu?”

No answer from Joshua. Lydia’s eyes shone a sad pale green. “I think I know what happened,” she said. “The maid is on the rampage against us ever since Portia’s boyfriend started sleeping over. It’s breaking her heart. She’s been with us since before Portia was born, and suddenly I’m a terrible mother in her eyes and my lovely daughter is turning into a slut. It’s more than she can take, I think. She can’t keep track of anything. And she’s throwing stuff out right and left as though she owned the place.”

“Is this the menu?” I asked.

“You godsend, you. So have a seat and tell me what you’d like and then we’ll get down to business.”

Not wanting to seem indecisive or difficult, I read out the first dish I spotted under the lunch specials. “Beef with broccoli.”

“Are you sure? The orange beef is better.”

“Orange beef is probably more interesting. I’ll try it.”

“It comes with spring rolls. Do you want spring rolls?”

“Absolutely!”

“Because if you don’t want them, my son Joshua will eat them. I’m going to give him mine. Spring rolls are one of the few things he’ll eat. He’s in a phase.”

“I’m sure I don’t need my spring rolls. Chinese food is always so big.”

“Yes, but in a few weeks we’ll be living on papayas, remember? Give me a second.”

She went through a swinging door into a kitchen with a big island in the middle, stacked with magazines and newspapers. Cast iron pots hung dangerously over her head as she dialed the Excellent Dumpling House.

I looked around the dining room. An arrestingly pretty and delicate blond looked out at me from a red-leather-framed picture on the sideboard. This must be Portia. I took a step toward her, saw that she had her mother’s overround eyes and that there was a bitter undertone to her smile. She had a golden dusting of freckles, which made me think the picture had been taken during the summer, on some exotic vacation. I had always wanted freckles.

Lydia ordered our lunch without ceremony and came back to me.

“So I take it you know nothing about photography, which is good. I’m not looking for an apprentice. That’s part of the problem with the girl I have now. She wants to be me and she can’t believe it might take a little work. That and she acts like she was raised by wolves. Wakes up with a different boy every morning. But anyway, you’re a painter? You have an eye?”

“Not really. Not that kind.” My eyes skidded over the green walls. In my letter to her, I had written that I was interested in fine arts, in all that Paris had to teach me. I hadn’t been specific. But she had paint on the brain, and besides I was twenty-two and I ought to have an ambition by now. Something beyond the simple love of drawing. By this point in life, you had to want to be something, even if it was going to change. You needed direction.

“I do dream of being a painter,” I stammered. “But I love photography too. I mean I appreciate photography. I could never do it myself. I’m inspired by it though. I think your work is amazing. And your writing about photography. Your books. Everything. I grew up with Changes and Human Landscapes. So, I feel like I know you. And through you, ever since I was little, I feel like I knew Martin Luther King.”

“What a lovely thing to say. So, were you really a lifeguard in Nicaragua? I was down there, you know. I did some great work on the Sandanista Literacy Campaign.”

“I saw your photo of Ortega getting the Nobel Prize for vaccinating so many children.”

“You liked that shot? My family hated it. They thought it was creepy.”

“I thought it was moving. And something about the angle—I can’t explain it—it felt like it was taken from the perspective of a young child.”

“Nice to know somebody notices things. Anyway, what about your French? It has to be good, you know. All my business in Europe is done in French. All the important agencies are French now. I need you to promise it’s decent.”

I thought about breaking into French, but decided not to because something told me that hers might not be so great, even though she was a genius.

When our lunch came, we ate on Limoges china that she said she had just inherited and was on the fence about. The china was kept in a piece of furniture that was called a hutch, I learned. I did not touch my spring rolls.

“I’ll put these away for Joshua,” she said, then she yelled up the stairs again, “Joshua!” In the ensuing silence, she cleared her throat. “He’ll be down to forage after dark. So, do you have any questions about the job? As I say, it’s a little bit of everything.”

I had no idea what she meant, but I wanted it. “It sounds fantastic.”

“But I haven’t told you about the money yet, have I? Condé Nast is so cheap—and they’re my only steady client these days, because you can’t count on the agencies for anything—that I’m embarrassed to say this is the kind of job you can’t take unless you have another means of support. Jesus, it’s so elitist to talk like this I should be shot, but you know how it is.”

I nodded.

“So, they give me a hundred and fifty a week for an assistant. But they only pay part of the rent on my Paris apartment and the assistant has to rent the maid’s quarters, you know the chambre de bonne up on the sixth floor. It’s a great little garret, very romantic, with a sublime glimpse of the Luxembourg through a dormer window. You’ll love it. That’s about four hundred a month, which doesn’t leave a whole lot. So, you’ll need help from your family.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I lied again.

Lydia told me the house in Paris was being painted too and would surely look like Beirut. She might not be there when I arrived in September to begin work, but her husband, Clarence, surely would because he was taking a sabbatical this school year to write in Paris. She hoped I would stop him from doing anything too hideous with the walls.




five


It was ten-fifteen. The phone was beside me on the kitchen table. I kept touching it.

I sweetened my tea with Olivier’s honey.

With my first sip, the kitchen grew a shade homier. The Washington marchers lowered their eyelids toward me, less imposing than intimate despite being on the cover of Life. I felt the flicker of their benevolence. Even Jim Morrison was beginning to know me. But my place in this wonderful web was tenuous. If I messed up this phone call, I might “not work out,” and then what would I do?

It was ten twenty-two.

The phone rang. I picked up and gave my cheeriest, “Allo?”

“Listen, Katherine, I’m pressed for time, but you arrived okay? Was Olivier still there when you showed up?”

“Just barely.”

“Madame Fidelio was decent? She takes a while to warm up. The last girl quite threw her. I’ve told her you’re vastly different, but she’ll take her sweet time. Anyway, I have a meeting in two minutes, but here’s what I’d like you to do. Can you clip and précis anything in Le Monde or Libération on Germany for the next few weeks? There’s a box of petty cash in the far right drawer of my desk to buy the papers with. Don’t forget to put all your receipts back in the box. Start today. I have to keep a time line for the photos.”

“A time line? What exactly—”

“Use the files in my office. Start a new one for the Wall. And you can clip Le Canard enchainé too, but only if you see something interesting. I find it so hard to follow, don’t you? Oh, and did Olivier mention a package for me?”

“There’s a bag in the kitchen with your name on it.”

“Could you look inside?”

“It’s a bottle of what looks like vitamins.”

“What does the bottle say?”

“Extrait de papaye.”

“God, that’s a nice accent.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to have to have you make all my French calls. Anyway, you’re sure that’s what it says? Good. What about the paint?”

“It looks like the entryway and the living room are about half-done.”

“Listen, do me a favor. When Clarence shows up tomorrow, do a walk-through with him and get him to tell you the names of the colors. He won’t tell me, but I’m sure he’ll tell you and I need to know what he’s up to.”

“The names of the colors?”

“Yes. Find out what he thinks the colors are. Find out what is going on in his mind. Then you can tell me what they really are, but right now I have a very important meeting. I don’t mean to be abrupt, but you’re fine, right?”

“Great, I’m great. Thanks for everything.”

“Your chambre is clean? She didn’t sabotage it?”

“No, she left me tea and sugar.”

“I’m sure she didn’t mean to. Anyway, Olivier didn’t say anything in particular? Nothing going on?”

“I barely saw him. He had to leave right away.”

“Well, good. I’m glad you’re settled. Now, call your mother. She’ll want to know you’ve landed. Do you know how to make a collect call from France?”

“Sure. I just have to wait until it’s late enough in California.”

“Listen, my German translator has shown up. Tell Clarence, when he gets there, to expect a call from me tomorrow evening, around five.”

Clip and précis. Knowing the definition of the words didn’t illuminate Lydia’s meaning. How did one keep a time line? How could she trust me to synthesize international events and to fathom her husband’s ideas about paint color? And which part of my job was the more important? All the tasks she listed sounded equally urgent. “A little bit of everything.”

I went into Lydia’s office, off the main hallway, to investigate. The room’s two windows framed the small interior garden, one degree further removed from the street than the quiet courtyard, the gem within the gem. Almost no one ever saw this garden, with its pleasantly overgrown geometric plots, outlined in pale stone, and its wrought iron table with a glass top where someone, Olivier surely, had left a china cup that must be full of rainwater by now.

Despite its harmonious view, the office was unsettling. Its topography was like nothing I had experienced. There were piles of papers everywhere. There were file cabinets, an enormous desk with a giant computer, an armoire full of supplies, a Rolodex. There were envelopes from Condé Nast and from a photo agency called Maxim. There were proof sheets full of people I had never seen and places I did not recognize, all marked up in white china marker, in a mysterious and beautiful code of circles and X’s and arrows.

I picked up a magnifying glass from Lydia’s desk and looked through it. At first, all I saw was a close-up of a boy in a knit hat with a faraway look in his eyes. Then I noticed a guitar strap over his shoulder, then a tank rolling behind him. There was a Post-it above the boy that read, “learning English from Bob Dylan records, hopes to go West.”

There was another sheet of soft circles of light over shadowy-colored backgrounds. It proved to be a candlelight vigil on the West Berlin side of the Wall. A bearded man held a white candle up in front of a silver-gray vulture with clenched claws and an alarmingly focused downward glare. A baby in a pouch slept in the glow of her mother’s candle, behind them the word TRACE spray-painted a ghostly outline over layers and layers of bold block letters. There was a couple sharing a candle by a soaring Japanese manga boy, with a lean muscular chest, white wings and red hair whipped upward by the wind into the shape of a flame. There were German names and cartoon animals bathed in candlelight. An old woman smiled behind her candle, her teeth sparkling from the depths of her shawl. So this was how people looked in Berlin.

But what about clipping and précising?

In the top drawer of the first file cabinet I opened, I found a manila folder labeled “Germany Time Line.” I smiled. On the front of the folder was a magazine cutout of a pillared monument. On closer look, there was a rushing bronze chariot on top. I didn’t recognize anything about it until I read a quote below: “‘The German Question will remain open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed.’—JFK. The Brandenburg Gates.”

Mom had a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos that she had played during breakfast on almost every morning of my childhood in order to make me smart. Now I realized where those concertos came from. I opened the Brandenburg file. There were Xerox-ed clippings and a date-by-date summary of the articles. The summary ended a little over a week ago, when the last girl must have gone. A time line. Perhaps I could be trusted after all.

I took some cash from the box in Lydia’s drawer, went out, found a news kiosk, bought Le Monde, Libération and some strawberry Hollywood chewing gum.

It had stopped raining.

The German story of the day was about a hundred arrests at a demonstration in Liepzig. Helmut Kohl, the prime minister of West Germany, had denounced them.

Back in the office, I turned on the electric typewriter. Lydia had told me not to touch her computer. It was easily sabotaged, she said.

I found the scissors in a mug that said VOGUE.

I took a moment to feel impressed by my new boss. She was creating art that would refract for years through millions of eyes and brains and hearts. Even though she was probably driving some poor translator in Germany crazy right now, she was giving meaning to her times.

My own mother back home, what was she doing? She was smoothing things over for a powerful man, a lawyer who was not her husband. She was organizing lives, his, mine, hers to some extent. But what was she making? What did she mean?

I stopped cutting Libération and picked up the proof sheet closest to the computer, all close-ups of a half-smiling man labeled “Portraits of Salman” in red crayon.

Even I knew who Salman was. Muslim extremists had put a price on his head for “offensive” passages in his novel The Satanic Verses. In these images, he appeared quiet and resolved. I gazed into his sympathetic eyes.

My communion with Salman Rushdie was short-lived. When the phone rang, I dropped the pictures, leaped to the ringer on Lydia’s desk. It was touch-tone. Modern.

“Allo?”

“Who is this?” It was a young woman’s voice, soft and faintly accusatory.

“This is Kate. I’m Lydia Schell’s assistant. Can I help you?” I asked, pleased with my imitation of professionalism.

“I’m Portia, Lydia’s daughter. My mother is very busy right now so she has asked me to call you with some instructions for the house.”

‘’Hi, Portia.”

She came back quick and breathy. “Hi, listen, my mother asks that you call the plumber—his name is Monsieur Polanski and you’ll find him in the Rolodex—because the toilet in her bathroom is running and also to tell Madame Fidelio to have the window washer come as soon as possible. Apparently the windows in my bedroom are filthy. Also, look out for a delivery for me from Maud Frizon.”

“Maud Frizon?”

“Shoes”—she sounded as though she could barely mask her surprise at my ignorance. “Boots actually. A pair of boots I ordered last time I was in Paris. They’re finally in.”

“What should I do with the boots?”

“Oh, send them please. They’re fall boots. I won’t be in Europe before Thanksgiving.”

“Sure.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind. Really. Listen, nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too.”

So, Olivier dated a girl who liked her windows clean, who summoned window washers even though she lived on the ground floor, or rather had her mother’s assistant summon them by way of her concierge.

Olivier must have been the one to tell her the windows were “filthy.” After all, he had spent the last few nights in her ruffly room. Despite what he’d said about being an outsider like me, he must really be on her aesthetic plane.

It was all I could do not to hate her.




six


Nobody had told me that Clarence was British. Olivier’s use of “pompous” to describe him, which I quickly found inaccurate, was probably meant as a synonym for British, but I had not caught on and was startled by his accent.

“Lovely to meet you. What do you go by, Katherine? Kate?”

I liked him immediately. “My friends call me Katie.”

“Katie it is. I hope you were welcomed. Madame Fidelio can be a bit daft, but I trust she hasn’t been too hostile. You are settling in?”

He was gangling, but with a fleshy face, full quivering lips and unruly curls that were turning silver. There were specks of dandruff on his glasses.

“Oh, Madame Fidelio was quite nice to me, and I’m fine. I absolutely love it here. It’s unreal.”

“Lydia will tell you it’s a bit of a shambles, but I adore the place, even if the courtyard is sunless. How long have you been here now?”

“A week today. It’s such a fantastic neighborhood.” Could I sound any more like I had never left Southern California? Why did I always revert when I was nervous?

But he didn’t seem to mind. My enthusiasm swept across his face. As he smiled almost youthfully, his glasses hopped. “So, I trust you’re finding your way around?”

“I’ve been doing some exploring. Paris is the greatest city to walk in. I guess that’s a cliché, but I mean it. It’s the best city to wander around alone because it’s so beautiful you feel like it’s hugging you.”

“An embrace, yes. Nicely put. These are the most satisfying streets to experience on one’s own. And even when one arrives at this empty apartment, one feels welcomed, despite the vicious Portuguese sentry!”

We laughed.

Right away, I was comfortable with Clarence. Having spent long stretches of my adolescence imagining what life with a father would be like, I was emotionally primed for this man with his ripe, knowing face, as he took off his blazer in his half-painted entryway and ushered me into his living room with a gallant “please.”

The leafy motif of his ascot matched the celadon stripe in the cushion where he rested his elbow as he settled into an armchair. The cushion was of the same striped fabric that covered the ottoman. I was beginning to notice patterns in the apartment where before there had only been striking, singular images. Was familiarity like this?

“Lydia said you teach comparative literature and that you’re on sabbatical writing?”

“Did she happen to say what I was writing about?”

“Well, I don’t know if she mentioned it, but I—”

“Oh, bloody hell!” His calm rippled furiously, then resettled.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing. Just that ridiculous old clock. It’s rubbish, but Lydia is very attached to it. I suppose it’s valuable rubbish if such a thing can be. Expensive rubbish anyway. Why did the painters put it on the floor like that? Bloody idiots, all of them.”

I had only looked at this clock to check the time with Olivier while we were drinking. I had not noticed that the clock face was set in a black tree ornamented with Rococo branches. Wrapped around the tree was a polished snake. And beside the tree, standing on the bronze base, was a fairy, fondling the snake with one hand and offering it a drink from a half-shell in the other. The snake was arching into the fairy’s caress.

“It’s not ticking, is it?” Again, a slight erosion of calm, then he chuckled. “But it serves her right. It’s so hideous, that object.”

“You’re right, it’s not ticking. I think it must have stopped. It was working when I got here. Last time I checked. A week ago.”

“It’s appalling-looking, don’t you think? I mean, didn’t it strike you as hideous when you first entered the room? That’s not to say that it’s uninteresting, historically. It’s probably very revelatory of the 1830s, but that doesn’t mean we need it in our living room, does it? For goodness sake, swastikas are revelatory.”

“Well, it’s not my taste, but there is something very French-looking about it.”

“You’re kind. Lydia did say that about you, that you seemed like a kind person.”

“Goodness, thanks. So, what are you writing about?”

He looked at me as though he were about to pull a big box of chocolates from behind his back. He may have even winked.

“In a word,” he said “‘fashion.’”

I glanced at him, ascot askew in the collar of a rumpled Oxford shirt, brown cords, old-man shoes, a white flake on the glasses.

“Wow.”

The telephone rang.

“That will be Lydia.” He picked up a cream-colored rotary phone from a black-lacquered side table.

“Hello, my dear. Are the Huns brandishing their pickaxes yet?” He began to pace within the limits of the phone coil. “Yes, she’s fine…. Yes, Olivier appears to be gone, thank God. And he doesn’t appear to have murdered Katie or stolen or ransacked anything, although I did have to rescue a piece of your faience from the garden. He’d left one of your cups out there to the mercy of the elements. It was full of rainwater and dead leaves. Selfish twit. … As I say, Lydia, she’s fine. Why don’t you ask her yourself?” With a meaningful look at the stopped clock on the floor, he put his finger to his lips. Then he handed me the receiver.

Lydia sounded awash in happiness, but a happiness that had nothing to do with Clarence and me and everything to do with faraway events. The Wall would break soon, she said. There was monumental pressure from both sides. That was all anyone was talking about. She was getting unbelievable shots. She kept interrupting herself to say “hello” and “wonderful to see you” so that our conversation was populated by prominent German ghosts. She told me that her Paris printer would be stopping by tomorrow to introduce herself and that the two of us should have a coffee—“keep the receipt”—because we would be working together from time to time. “She does all my black and white work in Europe.” There was a loud social rumble. “Thank you!” she said away from the receiver, and I heard a clink and a cool rivulet down her throat. “Listen, I’ll call you from somewhere quieter tomorrow, but I have to know, have you told Clarence about Yale yet?”

“About Yale?”

“He can’t stand the Deconstructionists. They’re his nemesis. He’ll die when he finds out that I’ve hired a Deconstructionist from Yale to come work in the apartment. He’ll just die. He’ll moan that there’s a traitor in his midst.”

“But—”

“Just tell him. It’s a joke, sweetheart. He’s trying to be a Historicist.”

“Of course, yeah.” I giggled nervously.

“Listen, the prime minister has just arrived. I’ll call you later.”

Deconstruction was a joke? The form of literary criticism I had felt so terrible not mastering in college, hell, not even grasping, except to understand that all language pointed nowhere but back upon itself, which wasn’t very helpful. This concept that had walled me out with its jargon, these lit majors who had hurt my feelings so many times, this momentous testament to my lack of sophistication was really a gag. Here in the land of jet-set intellectuals, it was a mere farce between husband and wife. I felt my world gelling anew as if I had finally found the right prescription for a pair of glasses. So, this was the point of view of choice. Deconstruction was not glowering and intimidating. It was funny.

“What’s so amusing?” Clarence asked. He was annoyed, but not with me.

“Lydia wanted me to pretend I was a Deconstructionist because I did some literature at Yale. I was an art major, actually, but I did try some theory courses because you kind of had to in order to know what anyone was talking about. She said you would think it was funny because you’re a Historicist.”

“I hope she said I was a ‘New Historicist.’”

“I’m sure she did.”

“Probably not, but it’s not your fault. Anyway, is that her idea of a joke?”

“Well, she said the Deconstructionists were your nemesis, that I was the enemy.”

He practically spat. His trembling lips were a comical version of Portia’s gorgeous pout from the leather frame.

“Where is the woman’s sense of nuance? My nemesis indeed! She likes to pretend I’m some sort of reactionary. I am a cultural critic. I incorporate deconstruction into my work. I appreciate the text-only approach for what it meant to its time, but it’s passé, you understand.”

“Not exactly.”

Clarence explained it to me in fatherly tones. He said that it was simply the jargon that got you. Most critics should be shot. Their writing was rubbish.

“Can you believe that Derrida was the first photo in Lydia’s last book?” he asked. “You must have seen it. A travesty. I nearly convinced her not to do it, but you’ll learn how stubborn she can be. Anyway, I can help you sift through the jargon if you’re interested. Then you’ll see how easy it is to move beyond it.”

My perspective adjusted again. So, deconstruction wasn’t a joke exactly. Instead, it was a historical phase that I would master because this lovely professor, whose eyebrows did not frown and who did not assume I knew what hermeneutics were, was going to help me. Yet another vista to take in. There were cocktail parties where the German chancellor was giving you the inside scoop on when the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down and a room full of Monets that made your mother sigh as though she had once possessed them in her boudoir. There was faience abandoned in a secret garden, chestnut croissants at Hédiard.

The doorbell rang. Clarence jumped out of his seat, then sank back.

“Who could possibly be here now? Are you expecting anyone?”

I shook my head.

“Shall we go see?”

We were just intimate enough by now for me to know perfectly well that he knew perfectly well who was at the door.




seven


“Are you sure these people aren’t exploiting you?”

“Mom, it’s a different world here. Things don’t work like that. It’s not like I’m punching a time clock and they aren’t paying me for my overtime. It’s a full situation I’ve moved into. You should see this place. I’m in the heart of Paris, Mom. Henri Cartier-Bresson stopped in yesterday for tea. This world-famous old man just dropped by the house. He’s a friend of Lydia and Clarence’s. Apparently, Lydia has already mentioned me to him. She told him I was an artist in the making. He asked about my work because he’s started to draw as a second career. He said he likes the exertion. He’s questing, Mom, at his age, and doing something he’ll never be nearly as famous for only because it’s interesting. He looked at my Paris sketchbook and said my work was beautiful, almost without flaws, he said. People like this are talking to me. They like me.”

“I’m sure they do. What’s not to like? All I’m saying is that you’re paying a ridiculous amount for one room and you have almost no salary and you’re transcribing notes for the husband and running errands at all hours. You have to learn to protect yourself. I don’t want you to get to a year from now and feel like you’ve wasted your time.”

“It’s not wasting time. It’s experience. This is what experience is. I’ve only been here a couple of weeks and I’ve already learned so much.”

“I’m telling you, if you’re not careful, you’ll be a dog-walker before you know it.”

“The dog isn’t even here yet. Clarence is getting him from the country tomorrow. He’s been boarding at some farm in Normandy. Nice, huh?”

“You mean there is a dog? I was kidding, darling. It was a manner of speaking. Listen, if this Lydia person says that her fancy magazines can only pay you so much, then she asks you to walk her dog, she should supplement your salary. And if you end up working for her husband, then he should pay you too.”

“Mom, you’re being cynical. These people aren’t petty. I’m telling you, it’s not a tit-for-tat world. They feed me and it’s not like they send me bills. Clarence and his friends even take me out to eat with them sometimes, and I know Lydia will too when she gets here. She already said there are all these places in the neighborhood where we’ll be regulars. I could never afford that if it was just me working in an office. And it won’t be so bad to walk a dog in Paris, anyway. I can take him to the Luxembourg.”

“So, you are going to walk the dog. You know that already. They’ve prepared you to walk their dog. It’s part of the deal. Admit it.”

“They bought the dog for their son, and he doesn’t take care of it anymore and the whole thing breaks their hearts. So, he’s become sort of a family project. Everyone pitches in. I will too. Apparently he’s cute. He’s some big sheep dog. And, by the way, if I worked in a law firm, I’d pick up dry cleaning and make coffee and do all kinds of stupid errands. You know I would. Only they’d be boring.”

“You’d be paid for it and it would lead somewhere. I don’t want you to get exploited and hurt. I’m not denying that these people are interesting. I’m just saying they’re fishy. Watch out. Now, have you called your cousins?”

I reddened. I fingered the brown suede of Portia’s Maud Frizon boots, which had been delivered several days ago but which I hadn’t managed to send. They lay in their open box on Lydia’s desk.

Jacques, Solange and Étienne knew I was here. Before I had arrived, they had written to say how thrilled they would be to see me again. They would be confused by my silence. How could I explain it?

“I haven’t had a whole lot of time.”

“Well, I’ve called them for you. Solange told me they are worried about Étienne in Paris. They’d love it if you reconnected. Maybe you could let them know how he’s doing. It sounds like he’s losing touch.”

“Mom, Étienne thought I was the biggest loser he’d ever met. I’m sure he has no desire to talk to me.”

“That was over ten years ago. Give him another chance.”

“He always walked way ahead of me in the street on the way to school and pretended not to know me.”

“You said he was nice to you in private. He asked you if you weren’t sad about your father.”

“Once or twice.”

“Well, Solange tells me they are worried about him and would you please call? We owe them a lot, you know.”

“Of course I know.”

“I have Étienne’s number for you. They feel very cut off from him in Orléans and they would appreciate some news.”

“Mom, you don’t pronounce the s in Orléans.”

“I’m too old to start pretending I can speak French, dear. I have other skills. Do you have a pen for the number?”




eight


In the three weeks between Clarence’s arrival and Lydia’s appearance, life was Clarence and me and Orlando, the brown dog with the giant yellow eyes that looked like Métro headlights, with constant visits from Claudia, the passionate graduate student who had been at the door that first day when Clarence pretended not to know who was there, and the friendly Moroccan housepainters cracking the windows so that the late September breezes mingled with the music of a tape of Lemchaheb, playing over and over.

Claudia, who was half-Moroccan and half-French, was writing her dissertation for a professor at Berkeley about comparative dream analysis. She was petite, although her dramatic clothes and elaborate shoes could make you forget it. The first impression she made was one of strange and striking beauty, but once you looked at her for a few minutes and all the signs fell into place, you realized that the one beautiful thing about her, the thing that instantly stood for everything else, was her long straight black hair.

She had rented a cheap studio apartment in Montparnasse, which she could not stand to work in, but it was all she could afford. Ever since meeting Clarence at an anthropology and literature conference at Harvard, she had had trouble staying away. Most mornings, she showed up to work before breakfast time and stayed into the evening. Clarence would read over her work, discuss it with her endlessly, feed us both.

Her thesis covered a year she spent in a Moroccan village, keeping a dream journal. She was interpreting her dreams both from a Freudian point of view and a traditional Moroccan one. Clarence was not working with her in any official capacity, but he was a brilliant student of culture, she said, and it helped her to write in his house, to be able to talk things over with him as they occurred to her, because she couldn’t stand her adviser back in the States.

“He is the worst kind of imperialist,” she said one evening, the day’s paint fumes fading, Orlando napping at my feet, Clarence opening a cheap bottle of wine that Lydia would never notice missing from the cellar. “The man stumbles along in benevolent self-interest.” Not so Clarence. She gulped her wine. “Clarence is a theorist, not a critic, you understand. He can see that the position of my dreams in this thesis is like a horizon between east and west. He gets that it is both a dividing line and also a joining place. Clarence, he knows so much, he is so wise and yet he has such a youthful mind. Nothing is set in stone for him. Nothing is fixated. Not language. Nothing. He is truly agnostic, this man, which takes so much more strength than dogma, you know. It is so easy to be dogmatic. But you grasp that, Katie.”

Clarence excused himself to see about dinner and Claudia continued. “We can both tell, Clarence and I, that you are a very open-minded young woman.”

I blushed. “I feel like I’m made out of hot wax and I’m taking impressions of you guys.”

“Oh, no, there is more to you than that. Much more. I can see it and Clarence can see it. You have a complex moral structure.”

“I do?” No, I wanted to say, but being in the room with you two makes me look good. It’s like hitting with skilled tennis players. I’m not even sure I know what a moral structure is.

“Of course, he sees your complexity and your lovely intuitiveness. You have such instincts. You draw with perfect pitch and he makes the analogy to your character. You are gorgeous and this reflects an inner beauty.”

I tried to protest, but she waved me silent.

“Yes, he is very understanding in his way.” Here I thought she looked at me woman-to-woman. “Now, some things he does not comprehend and it frustrates me, right? Sometimes he has a colonialist bent that he doesn’t recognize. For example, take the women in Morocco. He does not grasp their nuances. He can’t see how privileged they are to be left alone among themselves. He has the Western prejudice that they are miserable and somehow can’t see it, as though they were thick in the head. But he is coming to see the bias. I keep explaining to him, and he listens. You’ve heard us discussing it? He is so very open-minded for a man with his stature. It makes him sexy, no? That kind of intelligence?”

Clarence came back into the room to say the lamb was almost done. He was attempting Lydia’s gigot recipe, with a mustard coating.

“You see,” Claudia smiled. “He is interested in everything. No meal is too low, no theory too high.”

“Not everyone would agree with you, Claudia,” Clarence laughed.

Clarence had recently published an abstract of the book he was working on about fashion as the nexus of high and low culture in the late nineteenth century, “fashion as horizon if you will.” Some imbecile had written that the abstract was “jargon-heavy” and he hoped the book would lighten up, considering its subject matter.

“Such a fool, that critic!” Claudia’s gaze flickered between us. Whenever she defended his work, she jumped up in a flame of bright clothes and dancing hair. “What is jargon? It means nothing. The word ‘ego’ is jargon. ‘Original sin’ is jargon. ‘Soufflé’ is jargon!” She turned her fire decisively on me. “You just wait until the book comes out! Clarence writes so elegantly that he will bring the so-called jargon into the street and the street will never be the same.”

“I know, I know,” I flushed. “It’s going to be a great book. I’ve been hearing bits of it.” Clarence had a hand-held tape recorder that he slipped to me every morning so that I could transcribe his thoughts for the book when I had time, and only after I was done with my work for Lydia, of course, and with the various tasks that Portia called with on her behalf.

The toilet was fixed now. The windows were clean. The boots were sent. The Thanksgiving turkey was preordered from the butcher. The new linens to match the toile were on Portia’s bed. The tulip bulbs had been planted in a row of stone pots in the garden. Since the gardener was not “entirely trustworthy,” I had personally counted eighty bulbs, which was exactly the number Portia told me had been ordered from Holland.

Was I sure? Yes, I was. Had I remembered to reserve La Coupole for her mother and father on October 12, their wedding anniversary? Yes, I had.

Clarence’s chuckle brought me back to the living room. “I wouldn’t quite say I’ll be bringing anything to the street per se, not with my book anyway, Claudia, but I will say there’s nothing wrong with a little pleasure in your seriousness. Always remember that, my girls.” Here he refilled our wineglasses.

When he had to leave the room to take a call from Lydia, Claudia confided in me that she worried Lydia might not be the kind of woman who could value Clarence. “She is very conventional in her fame, you know, very utilitarian, very puritanical.”

“Her photos don’t look puritanical to me.”

“No, no, you miss my meaning. She thinks that anything that doesn’t work or sell or have immediate impact is a little sinful. She’s materialistic in that way, that insidious American way. They call it pragmatism. She’s too American for him. He deserves a European sensibility.”

Clarence came back into the room flush with the excitement of his long-distance conversation. There was a whirl of names and terms—Perestroika and Walesa and Stasi and Ostpolitik—all meant to show how the German uprising had been building for years, all twirling, bright and somewhat abstract in my head, like the first leaves of fall. I knew what they were, but indistinctly.

“You realize,” said Clarence, “now is the most exciting time to be in Germany, right before the East Germans go west. Because it is going to happen anytime now. The Wall is coming down. I mean, East Germany has essentially collapsed. They’ve got fifty thousand people ‘on vacation’ in Hungary, going through to Austria. It’s all on the verge.”

Claudia and I hung on his words.

“People,” he continued, “can watch their revolution on TV as it happens, and it excites them no end. The image of progress engenders progress. It’s all about the image. Last time Lydia was there, she took a whole series of a family in Leipzig one evening watching the day’s protests on an illegal satellite channel. It’s one of the best things she’s ever shot.”

Claudia’s eyes were sweeping the living room. “Such an ugly clock,” she said.

But Clarence was not done with Germany. “No, no, no, don’t you see that Germany is her moment to flourish again? She’s got a chance to save herself here because it’s not as if the demolition of Germany as we know it is going to be some kind of disaster and she’s going to be called a sadist for looking on at the beauty of the destruction. It’s not as if she’ll be filming children dying of starvation. It’s not exploitative or colonial at all. She’s going to be able to show how Germany is our shared destiny, even if we aren’t there with her. She’s got to seize this opportunity to reconnect and to redeem her career.”

“What do you mean ‘redeem’?” I asked. “Redeem from what?”

“Oh, that last book about the Parisians. People are saying she’s become a celebrity-watcher and that she’s lost all sense of responsibility for her point of view. I mean, to lead with Derrida? To put Naomi Campbell facing a striking English coal miner? I think she was trying to make some comment on the death of photojournalism, but the point is she doesn’t truly believe photojournalism is dead, nor should she. So the whole thing came off as disingenuous, and the criticism from people she cares about was brutal. Magnum almost didn’t publish it.”

“But it sold, right?” I tried to sound as if I weren’t sure.

Claudia flashed her eyes at me as if to ask, why was I so afraid of allowing what I knew?

I promised inside to do better.

“It didn’t sell as well as Lydia would have you think. But I’m more worried about her career as an artist, and the work she’s doing now in Germany is so good, so bloody good. I want her to keep at it and not get sidetracked by this Rushdie rot. That man is simply another celebrity tangent and I don’t want her to fall for him. That Olivier character, little star-fucker, got her all excited about Rushdie. He has some crackpot theory about Rushdie’s significance. He’s stopping by tomorrow by the way, Katie. From what I gather, he’s finally leaving Europe.” Clarence’s face melted into a sneer. “He wants to come around noon to pick up his things from Portia’s closet. I won’t be here. I’m meeting Henri for an early lunch. Can you make sure he leaves behind his keys to the apartment? I don’t like the idea of him having keys to my home. He has some nerve, that twit.”

Olivier rose in me, freshly bright. He hadn’t even bothered to let me know he was in Paris. Yet the news that he was here set my inner sky aflame.

I had lost my focus on Clarence. He was saying something about Salman Rushdie again, about Rushdie being beside the point of the Muslim question. Then he was onto Germany and the moment of tension right before the collapse. How poetic such a moment was.

I found it in me to nod.

Claudia nodded too. Her hair undulated.

After she left that night, as Clarence and I were finishing the last of the dishes, he said, “You know, Katie, your father would be very proud of you.”

“You mean for going to a good college?”

“No, no, that goes without saying, my dear. The point is that you are adventurous, intellectually adventurous. You’re not after a way to turn your education into quick money. You’ve taken on something rather difficult and unwieldy, and you are doing a beautiful job.”

“But I don’t really understand what the job is.” For the first time, I felt safe admitting this.

“Of course you don’t. If you thought you did, you’d be an idiot.”

I laughed with relief, said goodnight, climbed the stairs to my attic, turned my skeleton key, saw at once the red envelope slipped under my door, my name written big across the front.




nine


“Dear Kate, So looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. Á bientôt, Olivier.”

Even though I had no way of getting one to him, I composed several versions of a short answer. Letters were my main means of communication, the phone being so expensive, and it was impossible not to respond to one, even in my imagination.

“I hear you are coming at lunchtime. Perhaps we can grab a tomato tart. Can’t wait to hear about life on the Venice canals.”

“Look forward to seeing you too. Hope you won’t feel too landlocked.”

“Don’t let me forget to take your keys. Clarence made me swear to get them back. By the way, why does he hate you so much?”

“Will be good to have closure tomorrow before you go home to Portia. It’s been nice knowing you.”

“Mon cher, I have such trouble not smiling and laughing that I will surely be pleasant when you stop by, but know, even in the fantasy space of my writing, that you abscond with a little piece of my heart.”

I couldn’t sleep. At one point, I sat up and sketched my left hand with devilish accuracy, getting every skin crease, every suggestion of bone, leaving nothing undrawn, with the fantastic idea that I would give it to him as a keepsake and a proof that, despite my ramblings, I had consistency. Then I lay down and spun more lunatic words under my breath. Somehow I made it to morning.

Noon passed. It was almost twelve-thirty. I had looked into the courtyard several times to see the door to the street as shut as a sleeping eye. Twice, I noticed Madame Fidelio peering from her own curtains. Had she also been alerted to Olivier’s arrival? Was she too waiting for his return from Italy and his final farewell? Did she also long for closure?

Roaming the empty apartment, I fingered my precious note.

Again and again, I returned to Portia’s closet, where, beside a neat stack of shoe boxes, I stared at his duffel bag, unzipped, his neatly rolled socks, a swatch of soft gray sweater.

Above the bag hung the three shirts Portia had had me pick up from the pressing on the rue de Vaugirard. “You can put them in my closet. You should see a duffel there. Hang them above it.” I had detected a wisp of melancholy in her tone, as if she might somehow intuit how left-out she made me feel, as if she might be human.

With all these possessions here, Olivier couldn’t not show up. I took comfort in the socks, the sweater, the worn leather luggage tag whose writing matched the writing in my hands. Even if it was going to make me feel terrible, I was going to see him again.

The doorbell rang. The hallway pulsed as I moved toward the entryway. I opened the door. He had grown a beard, golden and slight. It tickled when he leaned in for the double kiss.

“I’m going to have to shave it off in a couple of days.” He laughed. “And I guess I should probably cut my hair.”

“How was Italy?” I managed.

“Amazing. Are you going to let me in?”

I realized I was frozen in the doorway. I let him pass, followed him into the kitchen.

“Anyone else around?” He cast his eyes about. “Clarence here?”

“No, just me. Would you like something to drink?”

“No thanks, let’s get out of here. Can I take you to lunch?”

“Sure.”

Lunch. It must be okay to get lunch. Lunch was only a moment. Why not enjoy it?

Olivier said he didn’t like to stay in the apartment while Clarence was here so he was in a hotel room in the Marais. Did I know that part of town, the winding old Jewish quarter that was getting so funky? He could show me around if I had time. He was going to be here until Friday.

So not just a few more minutes. Two more days.

He took me to a narrow Italian restaurant called the Cherche-Midi. Our table was so small that our knees almost touched underneath.

We shared a tomato and mozzarella plate. Then I had spaghetti with baby clams and red pepper, which I tried to eat as neatly and prettily as I could.

“It’s such a pleasure,” he sighed, “to be with a woman who actually eats. So many women just play with their food.”

I flushed as the specter of impossibly delicate Portia rose between us, batting pasta around into little piles with a silver fork. I wanted to be her, and I wanted to be the opposite of her.

I took a tiny bite and got a burst of garlic.

“Sensing my discomfort, he changed the subject, “What was your French family like?”

The question caught me off guard.

“They were great. My cousin Solange taught preschool and she was really energetic. And Jacques always made these corny jokes about how everyone in the world was really a Balzac character from The Human Comedy. He was a teacher too, a literature teacher in a lycée. And they had this wild son, Étienne, who I had this love-hate relationship with. They were lovely. I mean, they are lovely.”

“But you haven’t seen them yet? Not since you’ve been here this time?”

“How did you know?”

He smiled indulgently, tossed back a curl. “I know something about moving on. You’ll look back eventually.”

“There’s something kind of martyr-like about them that makes me sad. Maybe because they are so pure. Solange has these firm, busy arms, always in motion like the kids she taught. And Jacques is quieter, with a dark mustache and a slow smile and an absolute certainty that Balzac was the greatest writer in the history of the world. He knows it’s funny—he’s onto himself—but it does nothing to shake his conviction. They took me in when my dad was sick and made me so much part of the family that I felt kind of guilty for how attached I got to them, disloyal to my own parents.”

“But your own parents sent you away.”

“They had to,” I almost snapped. I stared into the olive oil shining up from my plate. Why had my parents left me in Paris for so long? In a trough between two waves? Learning French? Life had traded me fluency for my father’s last touch. Not the bargain I would have chosen. But, as Mom would say, there you have it. Instead of asking so many questions, go make something of your gifts.

“Sorry,” Olivier said. “You shouldn’t call them until you feel ready.”

No, I wanted to protest. Ready or not, I was going to call them later today.

“Although you may not get around to much of anything,” he continued, “after Lydia gets here. It’s hard to get out of her orbit once you get caught. She and the family can be pretty overwhelming. They can erase everything else.”

He told me that I would surely be conscripted to deliver letters between the offices of husband and wife, as they preferred to speak through third parties.

I replied that while Lydia remained mysterious to me, so different from anyone I had ever dealt with, Clarence was quite knowable despite being so erudite. He never appeared shocked by my ignorance. He often liked what I had to say. And he was available to me.

Olivier warned that Clarence could be devious and that I should be careful.

“You’re wrong there,” I said, refusing to get upset. “But then again he’s wrong about you too.”

“Oh, so he talks about me, does he?” Olivier grinned, suspending a fork full of penne.

“I’m sure it’s complicated,” I tried to sound light and knowing. “I mean, you’re dating his daughter. Fathers and daughters can be close.”

“I’m going to break up with Portia,” he declared, putting down his uneaten bite.

I dropped my fork. The wall between us crumbled to lace. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Why do you think, Kate?”

I thought of Portia’s voice, so taut and wiry, its oblique mentions of Olivier, never by name, making sure his luggage was in order, managing his shirts, having me go to Hédiard for a gift bag of foie gras and several jars of the jam of a green plum impossible to find Stateside. “Reines Claudes, they’re called. It can’t be any other kind of jam. And get goose foie gras, not duck. One bloc with truffles and one without. Make sure they put a bow on the bag. A red bow. The color is important. You can leave it on the dressing table in my room.”

The dressing table.

“Does Portia know you’re breaking up with her?” I asked.

“On some level. She can’t not. But you must have noticed that the truth is not exactly an obstacle in this family. Portia has inherited this sort of sad romantic version of her parents spoiledness. She’s really not a bad kid, and I care about her. But I can’t do it anymore. I can’t take the sense of entitlement, the cluelessness, the assumption that her jet-set intellectual parents make her someone. She’s always saying someone in italics to indicate all the people she hangs out with by proxy and all the parents at the New York prep school she went to. And I think she thinks I will be someone too by virtue of some inherent prestige. It’s all very flattering and pathetic and I want out. Besides,” he smiled, “I’ve met another girl.”

In spite of myself, the idea that I might be that girl washed through me, stunningly warm. I took a sip of water, choked, looked away from him.

“Wait. You’re not responsible for anything,” he said. “Don’t get that guilty wrinkle in your forehead.”

Was he already familiar with my facial expressions? Of course I was guilty. This conversation was wrong. But I was also elated. These were two feelings that should not exist in the same picture, a travesty. I was out of my depth.

He pressed on. “All I meant was, you opened my eyes that day we walked around together. You’re making your own way as your own someone and I’m impressed by that. You’re also very, very pretty. You have eyelashes like tarantula legs. And I’d love to spend a little more time with you before I disappear into the mines.”

The only release I could find was laughter, which he took as encouragement because he made me promise to meet him in the Marais the following evening at seven. There was a tiny horseshoe-shaped bar he liked, called Le Petit Fer à Cheval.

I said I would be there. I refrained from asking why we couldn’t meet tonight. Now that I was on this insane path, I wanted heedlessly to find out where it led. I was scared, and preferred to know the worst rather than be in the dark.

After lunch, he kissed me briefly on the lips.

We walked our separate ways down the rue du Cherche-Midi. I had to get back to my time lines for Lydia. He did not say where he was headed. I turned to look at him a couple of times, his back maneuvering through autumn’s trench-coated crowd, shouldering the duffel into which he had packed the clean shirts and the gifts from Portia, which now seemed pathetic rather than intimidating, her desperate stab at buying his waning affections.

Much to Clarence’s irritation, I had virtually emptied the “petty cash” drawer to pay for these presents. “Portia asked you to do what?! Poor thing …”




ten


Moments after I slipped back into the apartment, the phone rang. Clarence handed me the receiver in the kitchen. “A young man for you,” he said.

I was confused. The only young man I knew who had this number was Olivier, and Clarence would surely have recognized Olivier’s voice. I supposed my mother would have given the number to my ex, Peter, if he’d asked, but I couldn’t think what reason he would find to call me long-distance. He had never shown any urgency toward me. Why now? The mere thought of his indifference made me sure that no boy would ever telephone. There must be some mistake.

It was my cousin Étienne. He seemed to feel none of my trepidation about our cruel past. There was a familiarity in his voice that suggested memories on his part that had nothing to do with mine. He sounded as though we had always bantered playfully and were simply taking up where we had left off. He was, it turned out, a very good actor.

“Alors, c’est chic ta nouvelle adresse.”

“Assez chic, oui.” My new address was chic enough.

Who was this lady I was working for in such a posh part of town? Was she rich? Did she buy lots of jewelry? Because Étienne was about to start a jewelry line, part precious, part objets trouvés.

Very postmodern, I said.

Did he actually want to engage with me? Why was I so afraid? I was no longer the little girl he could tease in a Paris that belonged to him.

He sang the word “postmodern” back to me several times before he declared that he would call his jewelry line “PoMo” and thanked me for the inspiration although he wasn’t exactly sure what the term meant (I did not believe him) because he hadn’t gone to college (probably true). He hadn’t even gotten his high school baccalaureate. Had I heard? His parents were devastated. They had always seen him as a fonctionnaire, somewhere deep in the postal system or maybe a prof de gym. They hoped he would follow them back to his roots in Orléans, build his own little house down the street from theirs. Here he made himself laugh very loud, and I could see his eleven-year-old neck arched way back, his tongue halfway out and shining.

At ten in the morning, he sounded like he was on speed. I understood why Solange and Jacques were worried.

“I’m just home from a big night,” he said. “Hey, we should go clubbing together sometime.”

“With pleasure.”

So, he was going to court me now. How odd.

“Yes,” he said, “you’ve always been eager to please.”

Was it that simple? I winced.

This was the slender and harsh boy with the pitch-dark lashes who had made it clear that he did not want to know me in the schoolyard, me, the milk-fed American cousin who did not know the élastique routines of the other girls and had visible knots in her hair and who studied so hard that his parents never stopped asking why he couldn’t be more like me. They pointed to the big books I read and my promising drawings. He was forced to be polite to me because I was a pauvre fille, a poor girl who was losing her father. Didn’t he know how lucky he was, they whispered, not to be abandoned? Mais elle me barbe, he said. She bores me.

Did he remember that I had gotten lice and he had called me dégueulasse? Did he recall that I would do anything for a chocolate éclair, even slip him the answers to a math test or hold hands for ten seconds with the dirty old man on the bench outside the hardware store while his friends watched? Did he know now that it wasn’t for the éclair but for love of him that I had been willing to prove so brave? I had simply been more mortified by my love than by the base act of accepting a pastry for my favors. Shame is good cover.

Now, though, over this phone eleven years later, he wanted to know me.

What was I doing this weekend?

He was having un petit dîner chez lui on Friday night. Would I come?

Two nights from now. I took a deep breath and asked what I could bring.

He said he loved champagne and that it would be great to see me after all this time. He hoped I was still cute. He gave me an address. The closest Métro was Bastille. And by the way, did the woman I worked for shoot publicités?

Absolutely not, I said. She’s not that kind of photographer. Then I told him I loved champagne too, although I’d only had the real kind once or twice. Maybe we would discover some affinities after all.

Once I had seen him, I would call his parents and make a plan to visit them in Orléans.




eleven


That evening, Clarence sent Claudia and me to a Pasolini movie about Christ’s life, scored with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He said it was heartbreakingly beautiful. He wanted to know how we would react.

As the movie played, black and white, lyrical, unstudied, cast with ordinary Italians playing peasants who were at once beatific and disillusioned, I recounted it to Olivier in my head. I saw his eyes react, his chin cocked in its listening pose. I had never been so focused—or so distracted.

Several times, the heat of Claudia’s gaze lit my face, and I swiveled to see her expression like that of the people on the screen watching Jesus suffer. Their eyes deepened to the swell of the gorgeous choruses, so that they looked both infinitely wise and clueless. Claudia’s pupils burned me with the same idiot understanding, blessed somehow, but also brutally judgmental.

I squirmed. Yet I was touched by her attention. I knew she could sense an obsession under my skin. I wanted to describe it to her, to tell her about Olivier, to begin to forge a real bond. And even though I couldn’t talk to her, her growing friendship was a comfort.

“What did you think of the film?” Claudia asked at a traffic light on the way home.

“Clarence was right. It was beautiful. The music and the faces were so full.”

She kept staring at me, waiting for me to break through my own babble.

“It seemed so innocent that I feel like it was kind of deceptive,” I blurted.

“Is it bad to be deceptive?” She was pushing me to confess whatever my secret was. I wanted to believe it was out of a growing intimacy, but I couldn’t be sure.

“It’s hard not to be a little deceptive,” I owned. “I’m not talking about lying really. Just that you can’t always bare your feelings like the people in that movie. You can’t be moved all the time. For me, it would be like I was always drawing, having this intense scruple about getting it exactly right. With no blurs. I’d go crazy. Life isn’t like that.”

“Ah, but you also go crazy in life with too much hiding. I think you will learn to be more relaxed as you get older, Katie.”

“I’m trying.” By this point, I had little idea what we were talking about, only the conviction that she was boring into my soul, and that, no matter how well-meaning she was, and how much I enjoyed her companionship, I wanted my soul to myself for the time being.

“I know you are trying,” she said gently.

Deciding perhaps that she had gone far enough for one evening, she let me be the rest of the way home.

Grateful for the simple sounds of traffic and footfall along the boulevard Raspail, I returned to my inner arguments about Olivier.

It wasn’t as if by going to the Fer à Cheval tomorrow, I might betray a friend. Portia was not my friend. She was a thin and imperious telephone voice with high boots, a blond face in an expensive frame in a house in New York City that had nothing to do with me. And Olivier did not love her. He’d made that very clear.

I told myself that seeing Olivier wasn’t wrong. It was my own business. If I were to give in to the temptation to confide in Claudia right now, she would tell Clarence, and I had a strong feeling that no matter how much he liked me he would not be sympathetic to my falling into the arms of his daughter’s ex-boyfriend.

Clarence and Claudia seemed the types to condone a romantic secret. Only not my particular one.

When Claudia and I arrived at the apartment, she made a lamb couscous, with raisins and chickpeas, while I clipped and read articles on Germany. I was familiar now with the names of the players, with Kohl and Honecker.

What had we thought of the Pasolini? asked Clarence as we ate. Did we like cinéma vérité? Did it make us feel truthful?

I said that there was something infuriating about the gorgeous actors: they were totally innocent and yet they had an almost creepy all-knowing quality, kind of like children in a horror movie.

Again, Claudia’s gaze seared me with suspicious concern.

Clarence laughed. “Horror, you say? Not bad. And Claudia,” he turned to her as to the next pupil, “what did you think?” His tone with her was no different from with me. We were his little girls.

“I think what’s interesting is the way the power of chance plays such a strong role in Christ’s destiny. He doesn’t have our modern egotistical notion of self-determination. He follows a path.”

Happenstance and fate, I was learning, were among Clarence’s favorite themes. He expressed annoyance at the common assumption that we do everything for a reason, however conscious, that we are actually capable of guiding ourselves through life and therefore have most of the responsibility for our situations.

He thought that way too much power was attributed these days to psychology. As he experienced more and more of life—he was in his fifties now—he felt a growing respect for the random as well as for Greek tragedy. So much, indeed most, of what happens is beyond our control, he argued. And it is both self-aggrandizing and self-flagellating to maintain otherwise.

I agreed with him and gave an example straight from the mouth of my cousin Jacques: “Madame Bovary was such a victim of circumstance. She only committed adultery because of the limits of her situation. How can you blame her?”

“Precisely!” There was a happy camaraderie in his voice, the professor letting the student in.

“Of course,” he continued, “I’m not advocating passivity, per se. That would be preposterous. No, not passivity, but there is a wisdom to acknowledging fate, and the modern world is losing sight of it, don’t you agree? Claudia, you’re awfully quiet.”

“You know what I think,” she sighed with mock mystery. “Or at least you should.”

I told them I had never had a couscous before, that it hadn’t been in Solange’s repertoire and that it was delicious.

“I’ll teach you how to make it,” said Claudia.

The phone rang. Clarence picked up, grinned, then frowned. “No, my dear, I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing Olivier off for good, but his things are gone and he’s left the keys, thank God. I believe he’s in a hotel for a couple of days before he flies to New York, but I’m not privy to his schedule, nor do I wish to be.” His frown deepened as he listened. I could hear the higher tones of Portia’s voice. “No, Portia. I have no idea what he said. Would you like to speak to Katie? She handled it, I believe. Or else Madame Fidelio dealt with him. As I say, I wasn’t here.” He rolled his eyes in Claudia’s and my direction. The notes trickling from the receiver grew shriller. “Listen, Portia, I love and admire you and I have to tell you that boy is an idiot and you are better off without him.”

Had Olivier done it already? Had he told Portia goodbye over the phone?

Clarence grimaced. “I tell you I don’t know. Here, I’ll pass you to Katie.”

I braced myself but was saved by Portia’s shriek of “Don’t you dare!” sailing out into the kitchen.

I understood her. Why would she want to share her heartbreak and humiliation with a total stranger?

When Clarence hung up, he clucked, shook his head, sat down to his couscous. “Portia says,” he chuckled sadly, “that she senses Olivier pulling away.” He popped a chickpea into his mouth. “Rubbish, I say. Rubbish, Portia.”

“Don’t you think you should be sympathetic to your daughter if she is in pain?” asked Claudia.

“Yeah,” I echoed lamely.

“I suppose I should try,” he answered. “But it’s hard when I know the pain will seem absurd in a matter of weeks.”

Sighing, Claudia reached for his hand, which he whipped away with a significant glance at me. A tiny suspicion peaked, but I let it flow away.

“Is everyone excited to see Lydia?” I asked cheerfully, realizing as I spoke that I was testing the waters to see whether or not Claudia would stick around when Lydia finally arrived day after tomorrow.

“You’re going to be rather busy, my dear Katie,” quipped Clarence. “Lydia can be a bloody slave driver when she’s working. You ought to rest up tomorrow night.”

I reddened. I had other plans.

“I will clean up all of my papers and my affairs.” Claudia’s voice was a hiss of escaping steam.

“Perhaps you should, dear. Lydia’s a bit of a stickler for tidiness.”

As he began to hum the opening theme of the St. Matthew Passion, she rose impatiently from the table.

Once Claudia had left for Montparnasse, I teased Clarence gently that she had a schoolgirl crush on him. “She’s even worried that Lydia doesn’t appreciate you enough because she’s too American to get you. It’s classic, right? Oedipal? She’s fascinated with you.” Possessed by my own impossible infatuation, it was a relief to talk about someone else’s.

“You’re both very imaginative young women,” he said, smiling his dough-lipped smile and drumming his fingers on his wineglass.




twelve


I reached the little horseshoe bar at dusk. Olivier was there already, sipping something brown that I guessed was whiskey. As I caught his eye, I could feel my face a confusion of deep blush and the pink chill of the first really cool day of fall. The only coat I had that didn’t embarrass me was too thin for this weather. I had walked fast to stay warm. My whole body was pumping.

There were half a dozen people sprinkled around the old wooden U-shaped bar. When Olivier pulled me in for a kiss in front of all of them, I was stunned. He introduced me to the bartender, Michel, dark and foxishly thin. He said that since it might be tricky for me to get mail from him at the house, he would write to me in care of Michel. He untied the old black and white plaid scarf that had been Daddy’s. Mom had given it to me when I headed to college on the East Coast, saying she had saved it all these years because she always knew it would come in handy.

“I love this,” Olivier said, rubbing it to his cheek. “It’s so soft.”

“Thanks. It was my dad’s.”

“It is your dad’s.”

Michel asked me what I would like to drink and all I could think of was a Kir.

From the bar, Olivier walked me to the Place des Vosges, the sixteenth-century red brick square with geometric grass and black iron benches. Victor Hugo had lived here. It was Olivier’s favorite square in all of Paris. He took me to a bench under a chestnut tree where he made me promise to sit and read his letters. He wanted to picture me there.

He felt me shiver and draped his coat over mine. Then he gave me his hand. He began to massage my palm so that his chevalière pressed and rose, rose and pressed.

“Your ring is like a hint of lost treasure,” I laughed, “like the one thing that was saved from the shipwreck.”

He laughed too. “It’s all very tragicomic, isn’t it? I could have had this whole other life like you could have had a completely different childhood with your dad being some kick-ass movie director. We can’t take anything for granted, can we?”

“And Portia can?” I ventured.

“I told you she’s spoiled. She thinks she has desires, but they’re all just about acquiring more to pile on to what she already has. There’s nothing burning.”

“At least she has good taste.”

“There’s that.”

“Have you actually told her you’re breaking up with her?”

“She’s not stupid. She knows.”

When he kissed me, he whispered, “This is true. We understand one another. On se comprend.”

But I didn’t understand anything except what I felt like doing there and then. Which was so obviously what he felt like doing too.

The old family crest pressed softly into my ear and then into my back, my legs. His hands were running through my hair.

I pulled away so that he could look at me. “Olivier, what are we doing? What about Portia? Are we doing something terrible to her?”

“People are meant to follow their hearts. There’s nothing else.” He gave me another whiskey-sugared kiss.

I succumbed to the magic of selfishness and went with him back to his quirky room on the third floor of his hôtel de charme, steps away from the Picasso Museum.

At six the following morning, after a last kiss and a whispered “See you again tonight? Promise?” I padded down the hotel’s narrow red-carpeted stairs, past the darkened reception desk and out into the cold rose-tinged city. I decided to walk home.

I wound through the Marais back to the Place des Vosges, ran my fingers briefly over our dewy bench, and resolved, as I buried my hands in my coat pocket, to treat myself to a pair of gloves the next time I was paid. I went through the brick archway leading out onto the rue de Rivoli and headed for the small bridge to the Île St-Louis.

While crossing the river, I formed a perverse desire to come clean with Lydia. What better time than today, when she was finally to arrive in Paris? After all, she was a mother and mothers forgave and she obviously didn’t think Olivier was right for Portia and maybe she would be grateful to me for taking him away, or at least understand. I had already lied about having the money to afford this job, and about knowing her work my whole life. Yet there was still time to explain. I did not want to lie any more. You could only do so much to please people. When I saw her, I would tell the truth.

But the shuttered shops and cafés of the tiny island, with the hidden worlds and lives they suggested, filled me with a very different idea: to keep my own life private, to carve out a space for myself in this new Paris I was inhabiting. I was going to see Olivier one more time, tonight. And it would be our time.

Mom’s voice floated to mind. “Separate the personal from the professional, Katie. It’s one of the fundamentals of a healthy life. Never mix. Keeps you straight.”

As I reached the tip of the Île St-Louis, the Île de la Cité came into view. The flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, so imposing in their silence, offered a fresh perspective, the beauty of Olivier’s sleeping face, the perfect stonework of his chest. On principal, I had never drawn from memory, but I thought for the first time I might be able to.

At the cathedral, I faced off with a gargoyle and was struck by the potential ugliness of my actions. But then I heard Olivier: “Please, Kate, I know you would never want to hurt anyone. Believe me that it’s over between Portia and me. I’ve been trying to tell her for months, but she won’t hear it. She’s never not gotten her way, and it’s a shock to her. She’s a casualty of privilege. They’re all casualties, Lydia, Clarence, Josh. It’ll be a shock to all of them for Portia to be left. It might take a little time to sink in. Portia’s unstable. But she’s not your responsibility.”

“I suppose not.”

“I can do this,” he had said across an inch of pillow. “I can get out of this situation. This family is a vortex. But we can’t let them rule our lives. Not after I just spent weeks in Italy thinking about you.” Another kiss. “This is our twist of fate.”

I smiled at the gargoyle and continued on my way toward the Left Bank.

At the base of the boulevard St-Michel, I looked at the sleeping giant, Gibert Jeune, the enormous yellow-awninged bookstore I was coming to love. Like the novels it housed, it filled me with a sense of hope all tangled up with impending tragedy. My chest tightened at the memory of Olivier’s finger scrolling across my breasts.

What if all that playful scribbling on my body vanished, along with our magic spot? What if there were no letters? Or the letters were not warm? Or he went home and found he was in love with Portia after all? What if he tasted the Hédiard goose liver while contemplating one of his perfectly pressed shirts and slipped back into the life he deserved?

A drunk resting against a thick tree told me it couldn’t be that bad. “Allez, mademoiselle!” he grunted. “Give us a smile.”

As soon as his voice had broken the morning silence, I began to hear other noises, small cars coughing into the fog, the rustle of falling leaves, various footsteps. All the way home, the day grew in my ears so that I had to struggle to keep a pocket of silence hidden inside me, a place to return to later on my own.

As I became fully aware of the action of the sky, cloudy and dramatic, I finally came to terms with the fact that Lydia was coming home from Germany today. This was no time to brood.




thirteen


A few hours later, I set out for the Luxembourg with the ever-sympathetic Orlando. I was afraid. I realized that the paint colors in the house, which had been congealing all around me as in a dream, might be very wrong. Lydia was going to hate the entryway. She was going to say the living room was too pale and the dining room was depressing. She was going to ask why anyone would paint a bedroom pea green. Why hadn’t I been more vigilant? But what could I have done? Maybe I felt guilty because I liked the Moroccan painters so much, loved their music and the way that Claudia spoke Arabic to them, but I knew they probably weren’t up to Lydia’s standards. “Who are those people Clarence has found? Not professionals?”

Would this disaster turn out to be my fault? I had never done the apartment walk-through with Clarence that Lydia had asked for, comparing his vision of the wall colors to mine, giving her a report. But she had mentioned the idea only once and I hadn’t thought it was my place to bring it up again.

I pulled Orlando down chestnut-lined allées, dragged him brutally fast to judge by the cross looks I drew.

Shit, were my German time lines all wrong? Had I hidden the Rushdie photos well enough? Lydia didn’t want Clarence to see them at this juncture, and Clarence, she warned, was always snooping. And what about the envelope of proof sheets, the one labeled “Book Burning in Bradford, January 14, 1989?” with the close-ups of the word “Satanic” as the flames were beginning to lick it, right before it was engulfed? Had I buried those proofs in the right drawer?

Was Marine, the snotty black and white printer, going to tell Lydia that I was a ditz when it came to photography? Would she say that my look was blank when she mentioned Magnum? That I did not know that Picto was the only photo lab in France? That I had no lay of the land? And would Lydia defend me while secretly wishing she had hired someone more with it? Or would she fire me on the spot?

Orlando was miserable. He didn’t like to run. “Your dog is dying of thirst!” snapped a passing businessman.

I stopped. Orlando’s tongue was hanging low and puckered. There was white phlegm webbing the corners of his mouth. Of course he was thirsty. How could I be so blind? I lead him to the closest puddle, which the poor dog began to lap furiously, and where I immediately drew more indignation. “C’est dégoûtant!” “Pauvre bête.” I burrowed my hands into my jacket pocket and fidgeted stupidly with the red note that Olivier had left under my door.

“Hey, you went to Yale, didn’t you?” It was a jogger.

Before I could answer, I realized with blinding certainty that I had to destroy Olivier’s letter before anyone saw it. I started to crumple the paper. I thought I looked like I desperately had to go to the bathroom because a shadow of disgust crossed the jogger’s face. But I quickly saw that she was not watching me squirm but focusing on the passersby.

“The people here can be so rude. That’s nothing but rainwater he’s drinking. It’s fine for a dog.”

I wanted to hug her.

“I totally recognize you,” I said. “You were in Branford, right? I’m Katie.”

“Christie.”

It turned out she was here doing the sort of paralegal job Mom wished I had. And she seemed so cheerful and blond and unconfused that I thought maybe Mom was right. Here Christie was jogging in the park before a normal day’s work, while I was subjecting a panting sheep dog to one of my anxiety attacks.

She and I had surely passed one another thousands of times in college, with no flicker of conscious recognition. To say she was a pressed and pretty WASP from prep school, and that I was a mutt who still could not place Groton and Choate, was too reductive. There had been more blending of worlds than that at Yale. But perhaps not so much that she would have felt this friendly, immediately locking me into a drink date at Les Deux Magots two Fridays from now, were we not the only ones of our species in the Luxembourg this morning. As I took in the pert ponytail and perfectly open smile, the INXS lyrics “You’re one of my kind” unfurled inside me. I remembered a passage from Proust where the narrator goes to a seaside resort for the summer and realizes that people from classes that would never interact in the city are delighting in one another’s company in a foreign atmosphere. The Proust, the INXS, the beautiful girl who wanted to know me, the river of Parisians going by, I suddenly saw it all in a Baroque X-ray.

As I fumbled in my bag for a pen to write down Christie’s number, I felt for the fifty-franc note that Clarence had given me to buy lunch on the way home. It wasn’t there! I felt again, found it, recalled my shock of shame at the tremble in Clarence’s voice as he had gone over what to buy with me.

“Get a poulet rôti, well done, and some céleri rémoulade. She likes jambon cru, but for goodness sakes don’t get any regular cooked ham. She can’t abide the stuff. Says it’s watery. You might pick up some of those puff pastry things with the béchamel and the chicken. She loves those when she’s not dieting.” No ham, nothing with mushrooms. No eggplant or peppers. No egg.

The man was terrified, reduced. He would have no time today for my musings about the Luxembourg as art, and neither should I. We were both in grave danger of fucking up.

I told Christie I would call her to confirm that I was free as the evening of our drink approached. I wasn’t my own master, I explained. “Well, I’m off at six every day,” she said with sweet certainty. “So great to run into you.” And she jogged away.

I pulled the crumpled money from my pocket. I walked to a poubelle with every intention of throwing away Olivier’s note, but buried it in the pocket of my jeans instead.

Then I led Orlando out of the park toward the food shops on our list. One by one, we hit them.

The baker slipped him one of yesterday’s croissants. The traiteur had a sliver of pâté for him, but none for me.




fourteen


Apparently, I did not err buying lunch because Lydia ate with pleasure, chattering about how each taste brought Paris back to her, how good it was to be here.

She did not mention the paint colors. She talked instead about the perfect crisp weather and how telling it was that Orlando liked me because he was such a good judge of character and would I mind spending a couple of hours with her in the office after lunch? She had some letters to dictate.

She was framing the day to make it pleasant, getting Clarence and me to smile. We agreed with her that the poulet rôti from the rue du Cherche-Midi was indeed the best and the most evocative of our little corner of Paris. Where in the States could you find a chicken like this?

“Have you explained the office system to her yet?” Lydia asked Clarence.

“I wouldn’t call it a system, exactly, my dear. ‘System’ is a trifle too serious, don’t you think?”

“Call it what you like,” she turned to me, “but Clarence and I are very private about our workspaces. He doesn’t come into mine, and I don’t go into his. It’s respectful, if you will. But it does mean that you, Katherine, as a neutral party, will have to carry messages from time to time.”

I almost said, “I know. Olivier prepared me for this.” And the deliverance I felt at not having slipped made me fear I could never come clean.

“So,” Lydia looked at me mischievously as we sat down in her office after lunch, she at her desk, I in a nearby chair, “I’m going to do something simply awful and I hope you won’t mind.”

I couldn’t think of anything funny to say back.

She gestured to a pile of envelopes. “I’m sinfully late answering some of these people. I’ve missed about ten invitations this past month, given no word, no sign of life. With Germany and Rushdie side by side, my social life is starting to look like Beirut. So, here’s where you come in. I’d like to blame some of this on you. Our line will be something like, ‘My new assistant is a Deconstructionist from Yale. She doesn’t do the date and time thing very well yet, but she’s a quick learner and we have high hopes for the future. So sorry your invitation had to be a casualty of literary theory,’ something like that. You can refine it. I’m sure you’re a better writer than I am. Is this terrible? Do you mind? I mean you don’t know these people. You don’t begrudge me a little scapegoating for a good cause?”

“Are you kidding? Blame me for anything!”

We had a hilarious afternoon going through her pile of neglected correspondence, pretending I’d misplaced letters and inverted dates. As I scribbled her responses on a legal pad to type up later, she painted me as a distracted intellect. It was flattering in a backhanded sort of way. With each completed reply, each fresh easing of her conscience, she grew more buoyant and more brazen in the lines she dictated until finally I had used some poor woman’s invitation to a chamber music concert as a bookmark in my Foucault and forgotten all about it.

With the opening of every envelope she gave me a quick portrait of the sender so that I would be able to recognize him or her when we did meet. The cast of characters sounded fascinating. And the events we had missed were fabulous. There was a soirée where we almost definitely would have seen “Sam” Beckett. There was a note from Salman Rushdie’s French publisher. We had to answer that one carefully. There were art openings and wine tastings, some in New York, some in Paris, a hunting party in England, a cocktail party for the New Yorker in Rome. It all blended into an enticing swirl of missed faces and events gone by, the stuff of future dreams.

“Thank you, Katherine. I could never have faced all that alone,” said Lydia as the sky through her office window started to darken. “Now, I think we’ve earned a peach Kir, don’t you?”

I dared to look at my watch to see how much time stood between me and Olivier. It was almost five o’clock. Three hours. I would have a drink with Lydia, excuse myself around six, spend half an hour showering and dressing, head back to the Marais and our horseshoe bar.

“Absolutely, it’s time for a Kir. We have earned it,” I echoed, flooded with relief at my complicity with Lydia.

“Listen, before we go knock off, I have to mention something. I couldn’t help but notice in your notebook some jottings about fashion journalism. I know Clarence is getting you to help out on his book. He’s having you transcribe the things he says into that little tape-recorder thing of his, isn’t he?”

I nodded.

“Well, I don’t mind,” she continued. “Really, it’s okay. It means he trusts you and I’m happy for him that he has someone he can rely on a little so he doesn’t feel so at sea in this whole process. This book is a big deal for him. He needs to publish. Nothing has happened in his career in years and it’s very, very hard for him. Very hard for a man with his intelligence, especially since I’m so visible. You understand, don’t you? This sabbatical is a crucial time for him. And there’s a big risk that he’s going to lose his focus on the fashion thing, for which he already has a book contract and which is where he needs to be concentrating his energy. He could blow it and start trying to publish articles on the whole Muslim fundamentalist fiasco. He keeps talking about translating his theories about capitalism into some explanation of what’s going on. And he’s in so far over his head he has no idea. If he tries this he will be a laughingstock, an absolute laughingstock. I love the man, but current events are not his strong suit, and what he needs right now is a critical academic success. So, anything you can do to help him stay on target and in the nineteenth century has my blessing. Does that make sense to you?”

“Absolutely.” My alliance had so shifted to my boss that I too saw Clarence in shades of pity.

“And there’s no need for him to know we’ve had this conversation. Obviously, we both want what’s best for him.”

“Obviously.” Line for line, I was reflecting back to her. I couldn’t help myself.

“Oh, and, if I’m not too tired, we may have to do a bit more work this evening.”

“A bit more?” My inner world shook.

“I doubt I can handle it, but if the force is with me we should begin transcribing some of the interviews of my German subjects. There’s a massive amount to do.” She dug her eyes into my face. “You look pale. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of work?”

“No, not at all. It’s just that I had plans tonight, but—”

“Oh, I see,” she snapped. “Well, never mind then. No work if you have plans.”

“Thanks.” I found I could still breathe. “I could do it late tomorrow night if that’s good. Or any other night or through the weekend.”

“You know,” she clucked, “we may just have to do tonight. We’ll see. We have a deadline tomorrow. But I’ll make a call to my editor. You should probably be fine for your plan. And I’m exhausted anyway. Although I feel better now after dealing with that avalanche of mail.”

Lamely, I aspired to buoyancy. “Cool.” But my voice cracked.

“Well now, it’s time for that drink. What do you say?” And she stood up, opened the office door and yelled down the hallway, “Clarence, darling, Katherine and I are ready for our crème de pêche!”




fifteen


After Kirs with Clarence and Lydia, and her joking assurance that he and she were going out in the neighborhood tonight for a proper bourgeois grande bouffe to celebrate her arrival, pity I couldn’t join them, I went to dress for my final date with Olivier.

I showered and primped. I even dabbed perfume from my free sample collection. Chanel No. 5. Then, after two applications of lotion, I dressed. Black leggings and an off-the-shoulder gray dress in softest sweatshirt material. I put on mascara. I pulled on heels.

I slipped a fresh pair of underwear and some flats into my bag, locked my door, unlocked it to get a lipstick and a book to stare at on the Métro. Then I headed down flight after flight, my heart skipping to the music of the unaccustomed heels.

As I hit the bottom stair and faced the marvelous prospect of the courtyard, the door to Lydia’s apartment swung open. It was as though my first step into the night air had triggered a spring. Out popped Lydia in a silk paisley bathrobe.

“Christ, it’s freezing,” she said. “Come in! Come in! Hurry! The heating bills on this place are killing us.”

“I was just heading out actually.”

“Yes, I can tell. Nice shoes,” she added, ushering me into the foyer. “But you might want to take them off. We have a long night ahead of us, my dear. You have to understand that you did not sign on for a nine-to-five job. No time clocks here. No punching in and out.” She gave my face a look that managed to be both cursory and searching. “Of course, if that’s not what you want …”

“No, no, no. I mean yes.”

Although I had no idea what I meant, she took my words as a declaration of my readiness to get down to business. We had to transcribe those German interviews right now. History was marching forward and we couldn’t afford not to meet it head-on.

Steadying a tremor as I hung my coat, I asked if I could have a couple of minutes to call and leave a message for the cousin I was supposed to meet. I didn’t want him to worry.

This was not, I assured myself, a total lie, as this was the night I had promised Étienne to go to his dinner party. I was breaking two dates.

She said fine, showing no interest. But I felt compelled to add, as we walked down the hallway right past Portia’s room, all lavender and perfume bottles, that Étienne had invited me to his apartment near the Bastille tonight, that he was the one whose family I’d lived with as a kid, whose parents had retired back to Orléans, and that he was in Paris now, doing some kind of art.

“Oh, well that makes me feel a hell of a lot less guilty. You can see your cousin anytime if he’s local, can’t you? Tell him you are standing him up in the name of truth and beauty.” She laughed, closing her office door behind us.

I went to the phone book beside the Rolodex to look up the Fer à Cheval, wondering if Portia would be waiting for Olivier tomorrow at the airport in New York, ditching school, holding some expensive bottle of champagne.

There was a knock at the door. Clarence.

“Lydia,” he said. “This is ridiculous. This can wait until tomorrow and you know it. The poor girl has plans of her own. She’s been working all day.”

“Clarence, you have no idea what you’re talking about. If you did, you would eat your words. Things are happening too fast in this world for us to pause now. There will be time later. Now leave us be.”

“But I thought you and I were going out to dinner. I thought you wanted a grande bouffe tonight. What happened to the bouffe?”

“Look at me, Clarence.”

“You look fine.”

“I’m wearing my bathrobe. I am obviously not going anywhere, not with you or anyone else. We have plenty of roast chicken left over if we get hungry. The Berlin Wall could come down tonight. Now get out.”

I managed to find the number for the bar while, just feet away, Lydia busied herself with contact sheets and notebook pages.

I remained remarkably steady.

“Fer à Cheval, bonsoir!” Background jazz felted over a hum of voices. I wondered if one of them was Olivier’s, if he had shown up early to meet me. I looked at my watch. I was supposed to be there in half an hour.

I tried to sound casual. “Bonsoir, Michel, this is Kate, the American girl you met on Wednesday night.”

“La copine d’Olivier?”

“Yes.” A copine could either be a girlfriend or friend who was a girl. There was no way to tell. “He’s my cousin,” I said meaningfully.

Had Lydia heard Olivier’s name through the receiver? If she had, she gave no indication, and I had to assume that she was too consumed with her place in history to bother about my social life.

“Ah, bon? Your cousin?” Michel laughed.

“Yes, just please tell him that Kate cannot make it to the dinner party tonight. I have to stay at work. Something important has come up.”

Would I like to speak to him, Michel asked? He was right here.




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