French Lessons (14 page)

“You’re the only one I ever talk to.”

“You don’t talk to your husband?”

“No, Ma. Not much.”

“He’s never there. Who takes his bride to the other side of the world and leaves her all alone?”

“Vic.”

“Oh, baby.”

Luckily Cole is staring out the window so he doesn’t see the tears pouring down Riley’s face.

“I’m coming home,” Riley says.

“No. Stay where you are and fix your problems. You have two babies. You can’t just go gallivanting across the world every time you have a little fight with your husband.”

“It’s not a little fight. And it’s not across the world. It’s an ocean. It’s a six-hour flight.” Riley’s mother never left the United States, never jumped on a plane at a moment’s notice, never served a cheese course after dinner.

“Tell Mr. International Businessman to pay a little attention to his wife. Tell him his mother-in-law said so.”

“It’s not so easy, Ma.”

“Nothing’s easy, Riley. No one ever said life is easy. You kids—”

“Don’t start that.” Riley hates the “you kids” lecture. No one ever served her her life on a silver platter anyway.

Her mother is quiet again, and it begins to worry Riley. Her mother has never waited for words to come to her. They just spill from her mouth.

“Your father came home to eat dinner with his family every night of the week,” her mother finally says.

Riley has heard this chant for years, and though she knows it’s not true—he worked late and she usually ate dinner hours before he came home—she loves the memory of her father’s entrance each evening. At the front door, he’d take off his suit jacket and place it over Riley’s shoulders. He’d perch his hat on her head. She’d smell his aftershave, his sweat, the stuffy air of his accounting office, and she’d feel the weight of him as the jacket pulled on her small shoulders.

“I miss Dad,” Riley says. It’s not something she ever says to her mother. She remembers the years of her mother’s grief after her father died ten years ago, years when she worried that her mother would suddenly grow old. But then her mother moved to Florida and forged a new life for herself—grief was no match for her. Riley’s own sense of loss became quiet, hidden, as if now, as an adult, she doesn’t have a right to miss her daddy the way she does.

“I miss him, too,” her mother says. “It’s quiet in an apartment all by yourself. I leave the TV on all day just for the noise.”

“Who’s taking you for your surgery?” Riley asks.

She has no idea if her mom has boyfriends, though she seems to have a lot of men in her life. There’s Art, the trainer at the gym who might be gay, but if he isn’t, go get him, Mom! And Stitch, the construction worker who has dinner over a few times a week, even though there isn’t any more work to do at the condo. Last Riley heard, a guy named Al was swimming laps with Mom every morning.

“Wally,” Mom finally says.

“Who’s Wally?”

“You know about Wally.”

“Never heard his name.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s just driving me to the hospital. I’ll be fine.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

“Who he is. He’s just a ride.”

“Does he know he’s just a ride?”

Philippe is just a ride, she thinks. Why didn’t I listen to my mother years ago?

“Go take your prince to one of those fancy bakeries. Tell him Nana wants to buy him one of those French pastries you keep talking about.”

Riley nods and mumbles something and hangs up the phone. Cole is still spellbound by the chanteuse below. Riley looks out the window.

The girl in the courtyard finishes her song and takes a bow. She blows a kiss and Cole catches it, a trick Nana had taught him six months ago. He is in love, Riley thinks. For the rest of his life, this will be love.

“Nana wants to buy you a
pain au chocolat
,” Riley says.

“How? Nana in Florida.”

“She told me to buy you one. When Gabi wakes up, we’ll go for a walk, sweetie.”

“Mama cry,” Cole says, looking at her for the first time.

“Runny nose,” Riley says. “Gotta catch it.” And she heads for the Kleenex box on the kitchen counter.

With Gabi in her Snugli and Cole by her side, Riley decides to embark on a quest: to eat the best damn
pain au chocolat
in all of Paris. At the last expat moms’ group—another miserable experience—everyone swapped favorite parks, favorite children’s clothing stores, favorite child-friendly restaurants, favorite pediatricians, and of course, favorite pâtisseries. Next meeting, Riley imagines herself spreading the word: Best tutor for a midday fuck fest—Philippe!

She heads toward
numéro uno
on the pâtisserie list. It has stopped raining and she needs to shake the spooks from her psyche. Somehow between now and late tonight when The Victor crawls into bed, she’s got to figure out what to do with her life.

Her cell phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Riley.”

“Philippe?” His voice sounds different, as if it’s been dipped in honey.

“Meet me for a glass of wine.”

“You’re speaking English.”

“The French lesson is over.”

“You speak English. All this time you speak English.”

“Not so well. But your French is—how you say—it sucks.”

His accent is not Maurice Chevalier charming but kind of high and whiny. He’s not sexy in English. In fact, he’s Philip in English. She would never fuck a Philip.

“I’ve got the kids, Philippe. Real life and all of that.”

“Oh.”

She thinks of his uncircumcised penis waving in the air above her. She almost runs into a street light but Cole shouts,
“Maman!”
Weird. On the street Cole calls her
Maman
. In their apartment he calls her Mama. How does a two-year-old navigate such complicated terrain?

“Sorry, baby.”

“No need to be sorry,” Philippe says.

“I was—”

“Bring the children. They are filming on the quai. Some famous American actress is here. We can watch, all of us together.”

One quick fuck—all right, two—and he’s creating a new nuclear family, Riley thinks. Let’s blow that one up before it even hits Code Orange.

“Listen, Philippe—”

“T’es belle. T’es magnifique, chérie.”

“Okay,” Riley says. She shakes her head. In some distant country her old friends scream at her:
Pathetic fool!
“Where?” she asks.

He gives her an address and whispers something in French. In a quick moment, he is her sexy lover again.

But she doesn’t want a sexy lover! She just wants someone to walk next to her in Paris, someone taller than three feet.

She leads the kids toward the nearest métro, already scrambling in her brain for a way out of this mess.

Cole used to love the métro, used to pull Riley toward the swirly green gables beckoning them to the underworld of speedy trains and flashy billboards. He watched the people who moved from car to car, making speeches, playing guitar, juggling balls, a wacked-out subterranean circus.

“What he say,
Maman
?” he’d ask when the homeless man would stand at the front of the car and recite some story to the captive audience.

“I don’t know,” she’d tell him honestly.

Then, as his French got better, he understood their terrible stories:
Ladies and gentlemen. My wife has a broken leg. There is no heat in our apartment. My oldest children are sick from the cold, the youngest one has a rare disease. I can no longer work because my child is at the hospital
. Cole would bury his face in Riley’s coat, hiding his tears, worried that the child in the hospital would die and the man would never get work and the poor
maman
could not walk. “We’ll give the man money,” Riley would say, as if one euro would solve the problems of the world.

“We have to take the métro,” Riley tells Cole now, urging him down into the underworld of misery and hardship.
We have to go see my lover
, she won’t say, but she presses her hand on his small back and he’s such a good boy that he heads dutifully down-down-down the stairs and toward her own personal Satan.

Thankfully there are no speeches on the métro today, just a boy doing some kind of break dancing—though Riley thinks they call it something else now. Already she’s too old for the latest fads. Cole applauds when the boy is done, and Riley fishes out a euro for Cole to put in the boy’s filthy palm.

Gabi pokes her head out of the Snugli, watching the world. She’s a quiet baby and Riley loves her for it. She loves the weight of the baby pressed against her chest, the smell of her powdery scalp, the tufts of strawberry-blond hair that swirl on her head like a halo.

They climb the stairs from the métro and for a moment they’re blinded—it has stopped raining again, and the brilliant sun reflects from all the puddles that have gathered in the street. Riley finds her movie-star sunglasses and hides behind them. In Paris the women wear small, dignified glasses, arty things with frames of red, purple, bronze. She won’t give up her oversize tortoise-framed specs. They make her feel like Gwyneth dashing over to Paris for a little shopping expedition.

She pulls out her
plan
, the little blue book of maps that she carries like a Bible, and finds the First Arrondissement—then rue de Rivoli, where Philippe awaits. She has never arrived anywhere in Paris without getting lost. The streets are treacherous, evil places that might deliver you to a canal instead of a street corner. She will not ask directions—it’s useless, all that finger-pointing and hand-waving and word-flying.

But miraculously, the entrance to the courtyard of the Louvre is across the street, and in front of it is Philippe.

He waits for her to cross the street, then he steps toward her and leans forward to kiss her.

She pulls back.

“Les enfants,”
she says.

“Aha. So now you speak French,” he says.

He shakes her hand. That is what they do when he comes to her apartment for her French lessons. And he shakes Cole’s hand and says,
“Bonjour, monsieur.”

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
Cole repeats, his accent perfect.

Philippe leans forward to kiss the top of Gabi’s head, and while he does it he sneaks a hand onto Riley’s neck. Both Gabi and Riley make some kind of whimpering sound.

“Arrête,”
Riley says.

“Your French is very good,
madame.
”

“It’s the only damn word you learn here in the playgrounds.
Arrête, Antoine. Arrête, Marie-Hélène. Arrête. Arrête.
”

“You are spending time in the wrong playground,” Philippe says. “Follow me.”

He leads them into a passageway with windowed sides that show displays of ancient art—sculptures and relics, half-excavated buildings. Riley glances to each side as they hurry by. She still has not visited the Louvre. In fact, in a year of living in Paris, she has missed most of the tourist spots. That’s not where you go with two babies in Paris. These are adult playgrounds; again the day feels foreign and thrilling to her.

They enter the courtyard of the Louvre, and even though Riley has walked through here once, with Victor on a Sunday morning, both babies in strollers, she remembers only their argument about an office party that didn’t allow spouses.

“Why not?” she had asked.

“The French keep their private lives and public lives separate,” Vic told her.

“Why?” she asked. She felt like Cole—
why-why-why?

“Maybe the wife shouldn’t meet the pretty assistant,” Vic said.

“Whose wife? Whose pretty assistant?”

“Theoretically.”

“That’s absurd. That’s crazy,” Riley insisted. “That’s so—so blind.”

“Blind is good,” Vic said.

“You think everything they do is good,” Riley argued.

“Sometimes we have to see the world through different glasses,” Vic explained calmly, as if talking to a two-and-a-half-year-old.

Riley has found a new pair of glasses.

Now she’s awed by the daring of I. M. Pei’s modern glass pyramid in the center of these lovely, ancient buildings. She looks around, eyes wide open. She hears a storm of language—French, English, Spanish, German, Arabic—and turns her head in each direction. Everyone comes from a different country, everyone speaks a different language, everyone gathers to look at this. History. Art. Grace.

“There is a café here,” Philippe tells her, leading them to one side of the courtyard.

“Do we have time before the filming?”

“I think so,” Philippe says. “We will sit for a moment and I will buy you a drink.”

They enter the arcade of the Louvre. Café Marly fills the vaulted space with lush red decor, gold and teal tones. It’s stunning and glamorous and it’s crowded with well-dressed people. No babies here, no wild two-year-olds, no breast-leaking moms. Riley looks at Philippe with a worried expression.

“We will not stay for very long,” Philippe says.

“Maman,”
Cole says, pointing to the group of children playing with a ball in front of the fountain.

“Go ahead,” Riley says. “I’ll watch you from the café.”

Cole dashes off, his arms turning into airplane wings.

Philippe and Riley are seated at a small table with a perfect view of the courtyard and the pyramid. Riley keeps Gabi in her Snugli and pats the baby’s head as if to reassure her that
Maman
can have a glass of wine with her French lover at this fabulous café in the center of grand Paris.

“This
pain au chocolat
comes from the best pâtisserie in all of Paris,” Riley says, digging into her backpack and producing a somewhat squished bag.

“J’aime pas,”
Philippe tells her.

“What?”

“I can’t eat chocolate.”

“That’s impossible.”

He makes that peculiar French face—raised eyebrows, puffed lips—that seems to mean all things:
Who cares? What do you know? I think you’re grand
.

Riley takes a bite of her pastry. It is perfect but so is every other
pain au chocolat
she eats.

“I wanted to look at you,” Philippe says. He’s looking at her, all right. Did she forget to get dressed when she ran out the door? Is there not a baby perched right there on her mountainous chest?