French Lessons (5 page)

Now a ridiculous memory of her mother’s death has unmoored her. And the French tutor has galloped in on his white horse.

They leave the museum in a hurry, as if chased by Marilyn’s hungry eyes. The boy at the front desk doesn’t even look at them as they leave.

“I know a restaurant,” Nico says, and he takes her arm, moving her quickly along the slick city streets. The sun reflects off puddles and wet cars; Josie digs into her purse for her sunglasses. She’s disoriented, her mind swimming in too many dark holes: her mother, Simon, Marilyn. She needs to come up for air; her lungs are bursting with the effort.

“Voilà,”
Nico pronounces, as if he created this restaurant on this corner, as if he’s responsible for its charming yellow walls, the pale blue tablecloths, the profusion of flowers. He’s transported them to Provence and Josie takes a deep breath.

“You like it?” he asks proudly.

“Very much.”

“I knew you would,” he says.

They’re seated in the back corner of the small room, and Nico orders a
pichet
of rosé wine.

While he speaks to the waitress, Josie follows the dark path of memory to his funeral. Even this cheery restaurant can’t save her.

She remembers Simon’s wife—Brady’s mother—standing in the front of the church. The woman stepped away from her sisters and mother and friends and stood in front of the two coffins. No one dared to join her side. This was her grief, her devastating loss. She fell to her knees and wailed, a sound that echoed in the church. Josie turned and walked back to her car, parked almost a mile away since the crowd was so enormous. In that long walk she clenched her hands until her nails dug into the skin of her palms and bled. She had lost Simon and now she had lost the right to her grief.

Love me
. Josie had never known that she needed the kind of passion in life that tipped her off balance, that carried her aloft. She had always thought of herself as a little too flimsy for love. With Simon, she lost her bearings, she gave herself up to love. And it filled her, made her weightier, fuller, richer.

“My boyfriend died,” she says aloud.

Nico looks at her, surprised. The waitress arrives with the
pichet
of wine and they are silent while she fills their glasses. She places menus on the table and walks away.

“I lied,” Josie says. “I’m not here with a friend. I’m alone. I was supposed to come to Paris with him. Simon.”

“What happened?” Nico asks gently.

“Three weeks ago he took his son, Brady, down to Santa Barbara to look at the university. Simon flies his own plane—he’s good, he’s been flying for years. They don’t know what happened. The plane went down in the hills above Santa Barbara. Both of them were killed.”

“My God.”

“I haven’t been able to talk about it with anyone. First he was my secret. Now my grief is my secret. I was his lover, not his wife.”

“It’s his baby.”

“Yes. I didn’t know. But I’m sure I’m pregnant.”

Nico reaches a hand across the table and places it on Josie’s hand. Her face is streaked with tears again.

“He has a lovely wife. She lost everything. I lost a lover. I don’t have a right to this grief. He wasn’t mine. Brady wasn’t mine. I was stealing someone else’s love.”

“I don’t think you were stealing love.”

“His wife deserved his love. His wife deserves this grief. I’m nobody. I went to the funeral because I was Brady’s teacher. But that’s a ruse, that’s a lie. No one knows about me. And if they did, they’d hate me.”

“It doesn’t matter what anyone else knows. Or what they think.”

“You’re a stranger. You’re French. What do you know?”

Nico laughs and suddenly Josie laughs, surprising herself. She drinks her wine, which is as light and cool as a breeze.

“Let’s go to Provence,” she says.

“For a French lesson?” Nico asks, smiling.

“Yes,” Josie says. “Run away with me.”

“Avec plaisir,”
Nico says, and the waitress stands before them, her pen poised above her pad.

Nico orders for the two of them, though he glances at Josie to make sure she agrees. She nods her approval.

“Today?” Nico asks when the waitress leaves. “On the next train?”

“Why not?”

They clink glasses.

“Maybe I shouldn’t drink,” Josie says. “The baby.”

“In France they say a glass or two of wine is good for the baby.”

“Bien sûr,”
Josie says, and she drinks.

She feels giddy, as if the wine has already made her lightheaded. Maybe it’s the words that echo in her head:
My boyfriend died
. She finally has spoken the words.

“There is no friend at the art galleries today?”

“Whitney doesn’t approve of affairs and she can’t stand contemporary art. She’s at home in San Francisco, thinking I got what I deserved.”

“Leave her there,” Nico says. “I’m glad we won’t have to bring her to Provence with us.”

“And there is no one expecting you home for dinner tonight?” Josie asks. They are flirting—it’s a game, a life raft, a way out of the mess she’s in. She is talking again, she’s crying, she’s even laughing. What could be wrong with this? She sips her wine and leans close.

“Sometimes I meet two other tutors for drinks in the Marais. We complain about our students and drink too much. Sometimes we go home and have sex with each other.”

“All three of you?” Josie’s eyes open wide.

“No,” Nico says. “I’m not very interested in the other man. It’s his girlfriend I love.”

“My God,” Josie says. “We’re a mess. All of us. Why is love so complicated?”

“Today isn’t complicated,” Nico says, raising his glass. “This is the first day I have enjoyed myself in a very long time.”

They clink glasses again. The waitress arrives and places bowls of mussels in front of them. She tucks tall glasses packed with
frites
between the bowls. The table is suddenly filled with wonderful-smelling food.

“I haven’t eaten in a very long time,” Josie says.

The first time Josie met Simon, alone, the day after Brady’s rehearsal, they sat for a short time at a restaurant in a town far from where they both lived. They ordered drinks—martini for Simon, white wine for Josie—and then ordered dinner: steak for Simon, grilled salmon for Josie. The food sat there, untouched, while they leaned toward each other and talked. Simon asked questions—Who are you? Where do you come from? Why do you teach?—as if he were feasting on her rather than mere food. And Josie talked, as if she had never talked before, never told her story. When she said her mother died, he didn’t skip on to the next subject the way her boyfriends had. He asked her about her mother’s final week, about her father’s sadness, about the gold wishbone she wore around her neck that had belonged to her mother. The waiter asked them if there was anything wrong with their dinners.

“No, no,” they both said. “We’re fine. Everything’s wonderful.”

And still, they barely touched their food.

“What do you do on a perfect day?” Simon asked.

“I hike into the hills,” she told him. “I pack a picnic lunch and book and find a place to read by the river.”

“Take me,” he said.

He told her about flying, about the remarkable feeling of space and lightness and speed. He told her how he felt both reckless and safe at the same time—as if he could go anywhere, do anything, and yet he was master of his universe, completely in control.

“Take me,” she said.

But the only place they ever went was to bed—her bed, hotel beds, motel beds, a futon bed he carried to the middle of a field in the hills of West Marin. That first night they left the food on the table and too much money thrown onto the check and they drove for a long time. They found a country cabin, one of a small group of log cabins for rent on the side of a lake. Josie stayed in the car while Simon went into the office, but she could see the woman peering at her through the window. Josie looked away, fiddled with the radio, worried that her body would never stop trembling from so much desire.

When Simon returned to the car with a key in hand he said, “She asked if I was traveling with my daughter.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no. I don’t want to get arrested for what I’m going to do to you tonight.”

“She’ll never know.”

“She’ll know. The whole world will know.”

Josie was never loud in bed. She once bit the neck of a boyfriend in college. Better that than scream. She liked sex—it was a kind of game, a kind of athleticism that she was good at. But she didn’t know what it was to give herself to someone, to abandon herself, to take someone in.

That night she made enough noise for the woman to ask Simon in the morning: “Was everything all right in there?”

“Fine,” Simon said. “Everything was perfect.”

“How did you know?” she asked Simon weeks later. “That first time. How did you know what would happen when we made love that night?”

“I couldn’t stop trembling,” he said. “All through dinner. While we drove to the cabin. My body was electrified. I had never felt anything like it.”

“That never happened to you before?” Josie asked.

“You never happened to me before.”

Josie and Nico feast on mussels and fries. They lick their fingers, they toss shells into the bowl, they sop sauce with the hearty crusts of bread. When they are done the waitress brings a tangy green salad and a cheese plate, and more bread, this time filled with walnuts and cranberries.

Nico tells Josie about his childhood in Normandy, on a small farm, how once he got drunk on Calvados and fell asleep in the root cellar until morning. When he woke up he saw the police were everywhere, combing the grounds of the house, talking to neighbors, leading dogs into the woods.

He hid for a day, and at night he sneaked out and back into the woods. He wandered home minutes later and his parents rushed to embrace him.

“Where were you? What happened? Did someone take you?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

They determined that he had blocked out some terrible memory and for years after that, his parents, his friends, the neighbors, all treated him as if he carried some dark secret within him. His secret was his shame, that he had fallen asleep in a dark corner and that he had caused so much commotion over nothing.

“Did you ever tell them?” Josie asks. “Wouldn’t they now rather know that nothing bad happened to you?”

Nico shakes his head. “I’ve written a series of poems about that night,” he says. “Eventually they’ll read the poems. But even then, there’s no true story. I can’t undo the lie.”

They eat three kinds of cheeses—a runny, pungent Camembert, an aged chèvre that tastes like the earth, and a Roquefort that reminds Josie of her father, a man who eats bland food and sprinkles his salad with blue cheese.

“Our parents don’t know us,” Josie says. “They can’t know us. We hide ourselves from them. Once they knew everything about us and in order to escape them we keep our secrets, our private selves.”

“Did you escape your parents?” Nico asks.

“I had to. I was desperate to. They wanted me to go to San Jose State College and live at home. But I wanted to be a continent away from them. I thought they were old-fashioned and uneducated and—
quelle horreur!
I wanted to be a French girl! I wanted to be a sophisticate! I went to NYU and a year later my mother got sick. I should have stayed closer to home. I should have taken care of her that year. My father needed me.”

“You couldn’t have saved her.”

“No, but I could have saved my father.”

“I doubt it, Josie. You might have helped the burden, but you wouldn’t have made a bit of difference when it came to what he lost.”

Josie looks at him, surprised.

“How do you know?”

“I’m listening to you. I’m imagining your life.”

“But it’s more than that. How do you know about grief?”

“I don’t know,” Nico says. “My parents are alive. I’ve never lost someone I loved. I just think I know about you.”

“Is that because we’re strangers? I can tell you about Simon and you can tell me about your night in the cellar. We’ll disappear. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like talking to a stranger on a plane.”

“No. I’m right here. I’m listening to everything you’re saying.”

Josie looks around the restaurant. For a long time, the noise of other people’s conversations had faded, along with the clang of silverware, the soft music of a violin concerto. She had lost the world and found Nico—not a lover, not even a boyfriend for a night or two, but someone to talk to.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Don’t think I do this for all my students,” he tells her, smiling.

“You haven’t even corrected my French.”

“Your French is perfect.”

“Now you’re lying. Let’s not tell any lies today.”

“Then you should make your vowels more precise. They tend to float between consonants.”

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t lie.”

“All these years I’ve been speaking French with floating vowels?”

“You had no one to show you the way.”

Josie looks down, suddenly shy. He is smitten and she will leave him. She’s just promised that she won’t lie. And yet there is a lie in everything they share today. Because she won’t go to Provence with him. It’s another Josie who could catch the next train and curl up in a
couchette
with this blue-eyed Frenchman. This Josie—the one who lost Simon and quit her job, lied to her father, flew to France by herself—this Josie isn’t capable of anything more than a day with a French tutor.

But she has finally eaten a meal and had a conversation.

“I won’t ask for my money back from the school,” she tells Nico. “You’ve taught me something after all.”

“We’re not done,” he tells her.

Simon called her at school though she had told him not to. She could no longer focus on her work. She whispered into her cell phone, “I can’t talk. I have class in two minutes.”

“Meet me at the lake,” he whispered back. “At four.”

“I can’t,” she told him. “I have advisory.”

“Cancel it,” he said, and he hung up, so sure he was in the knowledge that she’d risk her job to see him. She canceled her meeting. She had canceled so many meetings, she had cut out of soccer practice even though she was supposed to be the assistant coach, and she had told the senior drama class that they should prepare their one-act plays on their own and that she’d step in to supervise in the final week. After three years as star teacher she was suddenly the slacker, the fuckup. She kept telling herself that she’d make up for it—this affair can’t go on forever—and besides, she needed Simon more than she needed this job. There are other jobs.