French Lessons (15 page)

“So who’s the actress?” she asks.

“Dana Hurley. She is making a movie with the great director Pascale Duclaux.”

“Dana Hurley’s the real deal,” Riley says. “I’d love to see her.”

Philippe is staring at her, his mouth slightly parted.

“Where are they filming?” Riley asks, glancing in the courtyard at Cole, who swings his leg out to kick the ball, misses completely, and falls back on his butt with a hoot of laughter.

“On the Pont des Arts. Soon. We will have a glass of wine first.”

“I thought you drink beer.”

He looks confused. “Oh, the apartment. I am sorry. I did not know—”

“Wine is good,” she says quickly. “Let’s have wine.”

They order two glasses. Riley looks around. The café is crowded, of course, and all the tables seem to be filled with couples. One young couple has locked lips and, for a bewildering moment, Riley thinks the woman looks like a very young version of herself; the guy could be Vic before he grew up and became The Victor. Did we ever paw each other in public? she thinks. Never.

She remembers one time she kissed Vic in front of his parents the first weekend she met them in Ohio.

“My parents aren’t really comfortable with that kind of thing,” he had whispered, taking her hand so as not to upset her. They were sitting on the couch, mid–Super Bowl party.

“What kind of thing?” she whispered back.

“Sex.”

“That was a kiss. You want sex, I’ll show you sex.”

“Later,” he promised. He asked his father to turn up the volume on the TV so they could all hear the football announcers instead of his crazy girlfriend.

Philippe leans toward her across the table.

“Ce soir,”
he murmurs.

“
Ce soir
I’m making macaroni and cheese.”

“Feed me,” he whispers.

“Five’s a crowd at the dinner table,” she says, though there will only be three of them, of course. She points at the baby—as if Gabi could possibly understand this conversation—but Philippe either ignores her or she’s not using the international symbol for “Shut the hell up.” She remembers her father often saying “Not in front of the children,” which meant to her:
Pay attention! Parental drama ahead!

“I want to see you again,” Philippe says.

Riley spreads her arms wide
—lookee here
. But what’s here is a baby girl staring back at him. Girls are so damned intuitive—maybe she knows what’s going on. Who needs words when a guy has sex written all over his face?

“Let’s talk about your life,” Riley says, patting Gabi’s head. She spends so much time patting the baby’s head that she’s surprised the kid has any hair at all. Maybe that’s why the stuff whirls around her head like it’s hula dancing.

“Bof,”
Philippe says.

“Okay. Translate that. I’ve been here a year and every damn person I meet says
bof
in every conversation.
Bof. Bof. Bof
. What’s up with the
bof
?”

“There is no translation,” Philippe says.

“What kind of tutor are you?”

“The best kind,” he says, smiling his Satan smile. The shirt is definitely not cool. It is shiny-smarmy, not shiny-hip. I’m learning, Riley thinks. I may not know words, but I know my shirts.

“So. You got a girlfriend?” she asks. There was no sign of a female touch in that lovely abode she visited earlier, but who knows? The girl could be a beer hog.

“Elle s’appelle Riley,”
Philippe says.

“Got that wrong,” she tells him.

“Pourquoi pas?”

“
Parce que
I’ve got this load of love in my lap and the other running in circles over there.”

“It is not the same kind of love.”

“We’re talking love?”

“We do not need to talk. We need to love.”

“You’re talking about s-e-x.”

“
Faire l’amour
. To make love.”

“In our country—”

“You are not in your country.”

“And in your country love and s-e-x are the same thing?”

“Perhaps.”

“Un-fucking-believable. I love this city.”

“C’est vrai?”

“Today. Right now. This second. I heart Paris.”

With that the waiter pours their wine and they clink glasses.

The sky darkens; thick black clouds have moved in again. Riley puts her monster shades up on her head.

“I used to think that every time I had s-e-x I loved the guy,” she tells Philippe. “Now I know. It’s s-e-x that I love.”

“But it is the man. It is always the man.”

“What’s always the man?”

“You have loved him. You have loved me.”

“Sorry, Charlie.”

Philippe looks confused.

“It’s an expression. I know your name.”

“Bon.”
Philippe looks unhappy, as if she called him the wrong name in the heat of passion.

“I think you’re wrong,” Riley says. “You’re just a ride.”

“Je ne comprends pas.”

“You made me feel good today. Thanks. But it ain’t love.”

“We need each other. All of us. We cannot be alone.”

Riley looks around. Philippe must be talking some kind of Parisian truth, at least in this café. Not a solitary soul in sight. The make-out couple looks ready to tear up some bedsheets.

“Anyway,
c’est fini
. I’m not heading your way tomorrow for an afternoon delight. If you know what I mean.”

“
Pourquoi pas?
A few hours ago you were very, how you say, with passion.”

“But I’m not with passion now. I’m with kids now.”

The littler of those kids starts to squirm in her Snugli.

“I don’t want to breast-feed her in the middle of the café,” Riley mutters, fishing for a pacifier in her backpack.

“I will be very happy to see you breast-feed.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“Americans believe in groups,” Philippe says. “You have all your expat groups and your
maman
groups and your book club groups. Do your groups make you not lonely?”

Riley shakes her head. She is most acutely aware of how lonely she is every time she enters someone’s apartment for one of her many group meetings and hears the clamor of so many voices and sees the spread of food and tries to find a place for herself in the middle of it all.

Riley tried to befriend someone at the last expat meeting. While most women boasted about their husbands’ positions as CEO of World Bank or editor in chief of
Newsweek Europe
or head of Apple’s international division, a shy bohemian woman introduced herself by saying, “I have to be here while my husband plays in Paris.” Riley assumed the woman was mocking the guy. But no, he was the new lead violinist of the Paris Symphony Orchestra.

“Want to get together one day?” Riley had boldly asked the woman. “I don’t know many people here.”

“Sorry,” she had said, “but I’m immersing myself in French life while I’m here.”

Riley felt like a fifth-grade misfit. She wanted to kick the woman’s shins. Instead, she wandered back to the smoked salmon canapés on the dining room table and drank a fast glass of cheap white wine.

“Here in Paris we believe in two people,” Philippe says. “It is only two people who can
faire l’amour.
”

“Let’s start walking,” Riley says, standing quickly. “I want to settle the baby down.”

She rocks the baby, standing in place. Philippe finishes his wine in a gulp and tosses some money on the table.

“Do not be angry,” he says sweetly as they walk out to the courtyard.

“I’m not angry,” Riley says. “I’m confused.”

Cole leaves the group of kids and races to Riley’s side. He looks up in her face.

“It’s okay,
Maman
,” he says, taking her hand.

What goes on in that complicated little mind of his?

“I love you, sweetheart,” Riley says. “Let’s take a walk to the river, okay?”

“The river,” Cole says happily. And off they go, the four of them. Sleep with a guy and
voilà!
You’ve got yourself a spanking new family. Would Vic notice if he slid between the sheets tonight and bumped up against Philippe? Again, that penis waves jubilantly in Riley’s mind, and she shakes the image away.

“What happens if it rains when they’re filming?” she asks.

“On verra,”
he says.

She doesn’t ask what that means. Whatever it is, it sounds better in French.

The crowd is enormous at the quai du Louvre. As far as Riley can see, people are lined up at the side of the promenade, staring out toward the river.

“I didn’t know the French were starstruck like this,” Riley says to Philippe. They’re pressed together at the street corner, waiting for the light to change. Everyone seems to be headed for the same place, and when the light changes they shuffle along with the crowd.

“We love the cinema. We love art. We appreciate the work of our great directors.”

“Face it, Philippe. You’re all star-fuckers.”

“I would fuck the star, yes.”

“She’s a middle-aged woman,” Riley says.

“In our country, we love all women.”

“Love, love, love. If the French do so much loving all the time, why is everyone so angry?”

Philippe leans over and kisses Riley, missing her lips and brushing against her cheek.

“Arrête,”
Riley says. She looks at Cole, who is singing to himself, ignoring his mother and her tutor.

“Je suis méchant,”
Philippe whispers.

Riley knows that expression—another common playground phrase. Bad boy. Man, is he ever.

They cross the street, step over the low fence that is supposed to keep pedestrians from walking on the grass but is apparently ignored by everyone at times of international crisis like filming in progress, and they gather with the hordes of people near the river.

She wiggles through the crowd—a hard thing to do with a baby on her double-D chest, Cole in front of her, Philippe behind her with a hand on her rump—and she finds an unpopulated patch of grass under a tree. Front-row seats.

“Bravo,” Philippe says, and his hand slips away.

They all gaze out at the river. Across the way is the Left Bank, with its grand old apartment buildings, and to the right, the majestic Musée d’Orsay. Farther down, the Eiffel Tower peeks out above the rooftops. Riley’s mouth hangs open. Paris. For a year she’s been living somewhere else, somewhere dark and bleak. It’s like she’s just arrived, freshly fucked and wearing rose-colored glasses.

“Bed,
Maman
,” Cole says.

Riley pulls her eyes away from the view across the river and gazes down at the pedestrian bridge. There’s a bed in the middle of the bridge. In fact, it looks a little like it too has been freshly fucked. A tangle of sheets sprawl across the mattress.

“A bed?” she says.

Philippe mumbles a rush of words in French.

“
Expliquez
everything,
s’il vous plaît
,” Riley insists.

“I don’t know,” Philippe says. “But I have the great hope to see Dana Hurley in that bed.”

“Naked.”

“Bien sûr.”

“In front of the children.”

“It is art.”

“It is weird.”

“They’re making a movie,” Riley tells Cole. “They’re going to film a scene and put it in a movie. It’s not real.”

No one says anything.

“That makes no sense,” Riley tells herself aloud. “It’s perfectly real. We’re looking at it.”

“C’est vrai,”
Philippe says.

She puts her hand on Cole’s head. He looks up at her, wide-eyed.

“You know how when someone dies in a movie, they don’t really die? It’s an actor pretending he’s dead? So if someone does something in that bed, they’re just pretending.”

Cole keeps looking at her, waiting for something better. She hasn’t got it.

“You explain it,” she says to Philippe. She says the same thing to Vic often. When he comes home at the end of a long day, she’d like him to answer all the questions that Cole asks. Sometimes it is too hard for her to explain the simplest things: “Why Daddy have to work?” “Why Daddy go away?” “Why Mama cry?”

“On
verra
,” Philippe says.

So much for men and their explanations.

But Cole is happy with that, and he goes back to watching the bed.

There are a couple of tents at one end of the bridge and a swarm of people around the bed. Riley spots a director’s chair and a red-haired woman perched in it. She’s waving her hands and shouting.

“There’s your great director,” Riley says, pointing.

“Mais oui,”
Philippe says, sighing, as if he has attained nirvana. He didn’t sigh like that in bed, Riley thinks. He must save his sighs for art.

And then, in a blinding flash, the lights around the bed all illuminate and the bed itself becomes a kind of holy site, an oasis of white, a beckoning, a call. The crowd heaves a collective sigh—whatever the hell is going on out there, Riley is missing it. So it’s a mattress on a bridge in the middle of the river. What’s up with that?

Out of the absolute silence of the wondrous crowd comes a squeak, then a squall, then a bellow. Her baby is bawling.

“Shhhh,” Riley says, patting Gabi’s head.

Philippe shoots her dagger looks; even Cole looks up as if he’s about to belt her for failing to observe this sacred ceremony without the proper decorum. Fuck decorum, Riley thinks. The kid is hungry.

She slides down along the trunk of the tree until she’s sitting on its roots. She pulls Gabi from the Snugli and quickly unbuttons her blouse. She pulls her bra up and over her breasts and lets the baby latch on for dear life.
Ahhh
. Now Riley releases her own deep sigh. This is love.

While Gabi suckles and everyone else watches some stupid-ass scene on the bridge below—between Philippe’s legs Riley can see a naked young woman writhing on the bed, a pompous ass circling the bed as if he’s Elvis Presley incarnate—Riley thinks about love.

It’s not s-e-x, though s-e-x is a grand substitute for love. It’s this child, this breast, this flow of milk. It’s Cole, watching his first naked woman in his life, only a short time after listening to the love song of a young girl in the courtyard below. It’s her mother in Florida, who has asked her every day if she could come visit, knowing that Riley is unhappy even though Riley never said a word. And in that moment, Riley knows what she has to do. Love doesn’t just sit around watching. Love jumps on a plane and shows up.