French Lessons (3 page)

“I have a boyfriend,” she tells him. It slips out of her mouth.

“Of course you do,” Nico says. He’s unstoppable.

She’s oddly pleased. For six months she could never say “I have a boyfriend.” She couldn’t say: “I’m having dinner with my boyfriend Wednesday night. My boyfriend is meeting me in San Francisco for the weekend. I’m going with my boyfriend to Paris.” For six months her happiness was a secret. Now her grief is a secret. She had no right to the boyfriend. And she has no right to this grief.

Nico lifts the shoes from the box and hands one to her. It’s an astonishing thing, this stiletto. She holds it in both hands, loving it.

“Put it on,” Nico says.

She takes off her sneakers and slides one bare foot into the shoe. It fits; in fact, it hugs her foot and feels as sleek as a new skin. She needs a new skin. Maybe her new skin is a turquoise “fuck me” shoe. She puts on the other shoe and stands.

Her feet wobble. She giggles and the sound of her own laugh surprises her. She looks at Nico and feels herself blush.

“Look at you,” he says.

She looks in the mirror. She’s wearing jeans and a black tank top. The electric blue shoes transform her into someone else. She stands tall in the mirror, taller than she’s ever been. She’s lost weight in the past few weeks and she sees her own cheekbones, the clavicles below her neck. She’s not a schoolteacher. She’s a woman with a boyfriend on a trip to Paris. He couldn’t come but she’ll bring back some shoes that he’ll love. Josie smiles and the woman in the mirror smiles back. It’s a devilish smile.

“I’ll take them,” she says.

Nico laughs. “I wish I could buy them for you.”

“Seriously,” Josie says. “I want them.”

“They cost four hundred euros.”

Josie’s stomach somersaults; she thinks she might throw up. And in that second, instead of calculating the impossible cost of this pair of shoes, she counts weeks, weeks since she made love with Simon, weeks since her last period. She is pregnant. She knows this when she lifts her eyes in the mirror—from her wobbling feet to her belly. It’s the same taut stomach, the same narrow waist. But now she’s carrying Simon’s baby.

“Let’s go,” she says to the French tutor. She can’t remember his name. She teeters back to the bench on the perilous heels and drops down beside him. She can’t get the shoes off fast enough. The saleswoman is smirking, leaning back against her perch by the desk, a pink-snouted pig hovering about her head.

Josie drops her head between her legs.

“Are you all right?” the tutor asks. He places his hand on her back. His hand is on fire and the heat spreads through her thin top, wraps around her body, and heats up her belly.

“No,” she tells him, taking in deep, slow breaths.

“Hey, Josie. C’mere,” Brady called from across the room.

She looked up. Brady usually called her Ms. Felton. She insisted that her students call her Josie and watched as they struggled with the name, a kid’s name for a teacher, a young teacher who dressed like they did, a teacher who hated claiming authority for any reason other than that she earned it.

He was standing next to the snack table, holding a plastic glass as if it were a gin and tonic, his arm thrown around an attractive older woman. This was the new Brady, the star of the show.

Josie walked toward him, thinking, Yes, he’ll be his father’s son after all, there’s the bold smile, the look-at-me tilt of the head. Josie stopped and someone bumped into her from behind. The attractive woman under Brady’s arm was his mother. Josie was walking to meet her lover’s wife.

“Mom, this is Josie. Ms. Felton. The director!”

Josie shook the woman’s hand, looking at her hand, and then, seeing a diamond there, looked up, into warm eyes, a wide smile. A tiny half-moon scar on a high cheekbone.

“I want to thank you,” the woman said. Her voice was deep and honeyed. A beautiful voice.

Josie, who always had something to say, was struck dumb. The woman’s hand moved to her arm, holding her there.

“You did so much for him,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Mom,” Brady complained.

“He’s good,” Josie said, stupidly, as if that was all she could muster.

“He’s amazing,” the woman said. “But until today, no one else knew that. Just his father and I. Brady didn’t even know it.”

Josie stared at her.

“But you must have known,” the woman insisted.

“Mom.” Brady shook his head. “Parents and teachers should never meet. It’s a mortifying experience.”

“Have you met my husband?”

“No.”

“Yeah,” Brady said. “At rehearsal that day.”

“I forgot. Did he come tonight?”

She knew he was in San Francisco. She would drive in and stay with him at his pied-à-terre tonight.

“He’s got a meeting in the city,” Brady said. “He’ll come tomorrow night.”

“You did a wonderful job,” the woman said, her hand still holding Josie’s arm. “At the point when Brady says, ‘Do you love me’—or ‘Will you love me’—what is it …”

“ ‘Love me,’ ” Brady says, his voice soft, his eyes hidden behind his curtain of hair.

“That’s it,” his mom went on. “When he said that to the girl—who was very good, what a beauty she is—well, I almost cried. I don’t know why. It just … touched me somehow.”

“It’s a good moment in the play,” Josie said.

The woman was lovely. She was warm and straightforward and vibrant. Josie had wanted a shrew. Instead, this woman smiled and said, “You have a gift.”

They climbed the stairs to the third floor. Josie looked at every apartment door of this Russian Hill town house and silently pleaded,
Don’t come out
. She couldn’t imagine what Simon would say to his neighbors. This is my son’s teacher! This is my lover! This is Josie. I just met her a couple of weeks ago and now I’m bringing her home for a quick fuck!

He unlocked the door to his apartment and she dashed into the dark room. He reached for the light switch on the wall and flicked it on, closing the door behind him. Then he wrapped his arms around her from behind.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

“I’m scared. I feel like a thief breaking into someone’s house.”

He turned her around. “Look at me.” He lifted her chin.

She looked into his eyes and smiled. He made it easy. He looked so sure about this, as if there was no question in the world they should be standing here, wrapped in each other’s arms, gazing at each other. Maybe her fears were childish, immature. An older woman would be able to do this without trembling knees.

“I met your wife,” she said.

“Shh,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. She could feel her heart pounding against his chest. And then, lost in the kiss, she forgot everything for a moment. When he pulled his mouth away, she caught her breath.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“This is her place,” Josie said.

“No. It’s mine, really. I mean, it’s ours, but she rarely uses it. I stay here when I have late meetings or early meetings. On a rare occasion we stay here when we come in for a show or dinner.”

Josie pulled away from him and looked around. The room was masculine—all leather and dark wood, with a cool blue ocean painting that filled one wall. A model airplane hung from a wire in the middle of the room. Josie reached up and touched a wing; it spun in the air.

“I have a pilot’s license,” Simon explained. “That’s a model of my Cessna.”

Josie looked at him. “Your wife is perfect,” she said. “I mean, she’s not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone I could hate.”

“I didn’t fall for you because I hate my wife.”

“Why did you fall for me?” Josie turned away from the long, cresting wave of the painting and looked into Simon’s eyes.

“I couldn’t help myself,” he said simply. “I saw you onstage that day—I don’t know—I was starstruck. Can that happen?”

“Have you brought other women here?”

“No. I told you. I’ve never done this before.”

“I’m an idiot. I believe you.”

He pulled her into his arms. “I promise you.”

They kissed and she pressed herself into his body, wrapping her arms low around his waist, pulling him closer. She felt too many layers of clothes between them. She started to pull off his coat.

“Wait. There’s a Murphy bed. I have to pull it down.”

She turned around, surprised. It was a one-room studio and, sure enough, there was no bed.

Simon walked to the wall unit, then slid the bookcases aside, revealing a bed built into the wall.

“Amazing,” she said.

He pulled a cord and the bed descended gracefully. It was neatly made, with pale blue sheets and a gray blanket.

“I can’t,” Josie said. She could feel her throat tightening.

Simon looked at her.

“It’s her bed. It’s where you sleep with your wife.”

“Josie.”

She shook her head. “I feel like Goldilocks in someone else’s house. I can’t do this.”

“The sheets are fresh. I made the bed this morning.”

“No.”

He came toward her and took her in his arms again.

“She’ll never know,” he said.

“Let’s go. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

Later, in their room on the fourteenth floor of the Clift Hotel, they lay in each other’s arms after sex and Ghirardelli chocolate and scotch and more sex.

“How did Brady do?” Simon asked.

Josie looked at him. “I wondered why you hadn’t asked.”

“I should have been there.”

“You’ll come tomorrow.”

“I didn’t want to be there with my wife. I didn’t want to stand next to her and shake your hand. She knows me too well.”

Josie climbed on top of him. She looked down into Simon’s face.

“We can’t do this, can we?”

“We have to do this.”

He pulled her face to his and kissed her.

“Why?” Josie asked.

“Because I have to trust this. I know what love is—I love my wife, I love my son—I won’t lie to you. But I’ve never felt this—I don’t know—
need. Desire
. I’ve never known this”—he pressed her close to him, finishing his sentence as a whisper in her ear—“before.”

Josie watched him for a moment. “I don’t know what this is,” she said. “I’ve had boyfriends, but this is not what that was. What is this?”

“Kiss me,” Simon said.

• • •

Josie can hear the shoe saleswoman and the tutor talking to each other. She hears the words
petite amie:
girlfriend. “Does your girlfriend do this often?”

The tutor doesn’t correct her. “No,” he says. “She’s not feeling well today.”

Josie rinses her hands in the tiny sink in the back of the store and considers slipping a pair of shoes into her bag. She has never shoplifted in her life, but who knows what she might be capable of now? The saleswoman didn’t want her in the bathroom of her piggy store, but Josie had marched through the curtains anyway and found a toilet to throw up in rather than the white marble floor. She picks up a pair of red shoes—Dorothy-in-Oz shoes—and clicks the heels.

There’s no place like home.

Why should she fly home on Sunday? Why not stay in Paris and become Nico’s girlfriend and shoplifter of expensive shoes?

She puts the shoes back on the shelf. She steps back into the showroom.

“Ça va?”
Nico asks. He looks concerned. Most of his students are not pregnant, crazy ladies, she assumes.

“Ça va,”
she sighs, and offers a smile. Poor guy. He deserves better in a girlfriend.

“I don’t want the shoes,” she tells the saleswoman. “I seem to be allergic to them.”

Nico nods and takes her arm, guiding her out of there.

“Does your boyfriend know?” he asks her when they are on the street, standing close to each other in the middle of a crowd of shoppers, all of them wearing extraordinary shoes.

She is not surprised; this tutor seems to be a jack-of-all-trades. Why shouldn’t he also be able to guess her secrets? She shakes her head.

“Will he be happy?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, assuredly. “He will be very happy.”

“Good,” Nico says. “I once had a girlfriend who broke up with me and then, a month later, called to tell me she was pregnant. She wanted to have the baby. I told her I’d raise the baby with her. She said she was moving to Morocco and that she would send me pictures of the kid from time to time. I never heard from her again.”

“That’s awful.”

“I think about it all the time. The kid would be three now. I wander through playgrounds looking for him. Or her.”

Thunder rumbles through the skies.

“Let’s find someplace to go,” Nico says, “before it rains.”

But the skies open immediately and the rain blasts them. Josie feels Nico’s arm wrap around her back and move her along rue de Grenelle. She doesn’t mind the rain; she doesn’t mind his arm around her. She’ll give herself up to this, she decides. It is easier than every day of the past weeks.

Nico opens a door and leads her inside. It is a small museum, though it looks nothing like a museum. It has vaulted ceilings and pale marble walls and floors. A sign reads:
MUSÉE MAILLOL
. A teenage boy chews gum behind a counter; he doesn’t even look up. Josie glances around—she doesn’t see anyone else in the building. Ahead of them is an enormous statue of a nude man.

Nico leads her to the desk and buys two tickets.

“I can pay,” she says.

“No. Please.”

The boy cracks his gum and pushes his comic book under the counter. He passes them the tickets and a brochure:
Marilyn Monroe: The Last Photographs
.

They walk past the turnstile. There is no one to take their tickets. When Josie looks back, the boy is reading his comic book again. For a moment, he looks like Brady, serious and shy. Brady before he became a star. Brady before.

She puts her hand on her belly. The nausea has passed, but now she feels light-headed, a little dizzy. She has never been pregnant, has never yet considered having a baby. She had thought that would be years away, when she was married and had moved from teaching to playwriting, her real passion. She had imagined a young husband, a cottage in the country, a couple of big dogs, and a vegetable garden.