Now I make my living teaching French, the language I learned from my mother.
Her name was Martine. She was Parisian in every way a woman could be. Elegant and sophisticated, with a finely tuned intelligence. She adored her native language and spoke it beautifully. It rolled off her tongue like music, each word a rich and subtle note.
I remember sitting on her lap, listening delightedly as she repeated the numbers, the days of the week, the seasons.
It was like hearing her sing.
At night, when she tucked me in, she’d say, A demain. Je t’aime très fort. Bonne nuit.
Her voice transformed these ordinary phrases into a lullaby.
She died when I was seven, leaving my father to pursue another woman and me to continue with the language she’d taught me to love, every word a memory of her.
I know that for some of my clients, French is a fantasy language, the gateway to a different and far better life. They imagine moving to Paris. City of Light. City of romance. They would sip wine in a bistro. Talk about art. Find a love that stops time and never knows betrayal.
If it were that simple, why would anyone live anywhere else?
I’ve learned that a language is a way of confirming who you really are and what you really feel. From time to time I would say Je t’aime to Max, and though he didn’t speak French, he knew what “I love you” meant.
I said the same to Simon during our first years together, as we both watched Melody mature.
My life is different now.
To Simon I have only one thing to say: Je vais me battre.
It’s a defiant declaration, because I know he wants me to surrender to his power and his threats.
What he wants is for me to disappear, one way or the other.
His dream is that I will let him do whatever he wishes.
I won’t do that.
Je vais me battre.
I’m going to fight.
•
I started my new life as a French teacher with a flyer. In it, I’d planned to assure prospective students that I would pattern my lessons to their needs, provide a relaxing atmosphere, be flexible with regard to time and place.
My friend Ava warned me that men would take flexible the wrong way. Also relaxing.
“Everything turns them on,” she said.
I took her warning seriously, and thus my flyer reads: Claire Fontaine, French Teacher, with no mention of flexibility or relaxation.
I include my email address and my phone number, but I don’t reveal my actual address, though I understand that, given access to the internet, anyone can find it. I do the same for my posts on Thumbtack and Craigslist and other online job sites.
As I drive, I try to focus on the time when I wasn’t watchful or distrusting, when the way ahead didn’t seem fraught with danger or the past an accusation.
I remember when I was a student in Paris, walking those fabled boulevards, going to museums, speaking a language that made me feel at home. It was my city of refuge, beyond the reach of childhood terror. While there, I read a line from a Greek philosopher whose name I no longer recall. We don’t do what we want, he wrote, we do what we can’t avoid. In Paris, the grim nature of that statement didn’t strike me as either true or inevitable.
Now it does.
•
Today I’m headed for Playa Vista. I drive a white PT Cruiser that spends a lot of time being repaired. It’s like an old body. Wheezing. Leaking. Breaking down. Ava laughed when she first saw it. She called it a “loser’s car.” And yet I feel a strange closeness to things that shake and rattle, that have been bumped and battered but still manage to hold together.
Ting.
I keep driving, trying to ignore my message alert. It’s probably only a client canceling a class. Or a new contact looking for a French teacher. But in the wake of Simon’s threat, this ting now comes to me as a disquieting intrusion.
I pull over, snap my phone from its dashboard clamp.
The message is from someone named Phil.
He has seen my profile on OkCupid, the matching service I signed up with one evening when the loneliness was just too much.
U seem like an interesting person. And U speak French. Wow!!!! U say U R 42, but U look younger. Wood U like 2 Meat?
I know that Ava would counter with a hard, sarcastic Know, Eye Wood Knot.
What would be the point of such derision? It would only provoke a nasty response. Ava enjoys goading men in this way. She often shows me their heated retorts to the mocking rejections she hurls back at them. Inevitably, tempers rise. Texts shoot through cyberspace like flaming arrows.
Ava finds this game of escalating insult quite amusing.
I see only how quickly hurt turns to anger in the men she antagonizes.
So I choose a gentler answer: Soon leaving LA, but thank you.
I have no such plan, of course.
And yet I imagine myself rushing toward a hastily packed car, racing for the freeway in the middle of the night. The air around me brightens as another car closes in from behind. Am I already a woman in full flight?
Is it this thought that causes me to notice the SUV that suddenly pulls in behind me?
It’s black and very large, almost tanklike. As I head down Sunset, it draws closer, then holds back in a strange rhythm, like a dance. It’s never near enough for me to get a look at the driver, and there is no front license plate. I would have to get behind it to read those numbers, but each time I slow to let the SUV go ahead of me, it pulls back.
Is the driver carefully keeping his distance, or is it only the normal ebb and flow of traffic?
Just once, at a light, it pulls up alongside, but its side windows are darkly tinted.
I can’t see the driver, but I visualize his face. Grim. Calculating. Recording my features, studying his target.
The word seems appropriate.
A moving target.
When the light turns, I accelerate, then make a quick, almost violent turn onto the next side street. In my rearview mirror I watch the SUV sweep through the intersection.
I tighten my grip on the wheel and try to convince myself that the driver of the SUV is just another motorist. And yet, as I make a U-turn and head back toward my usual route, I continually check my mirrors. At each cross street I glance left and right, expecting to see the same black SUV lurking at the curb, ready to renew its pursuit, its driver accustomed to such simple evasive maneuvers as mine.
When I don’t see it, I let myself imagine that the driver really was one of Simon’s minions.
I am pleased and proud that I have eluded him.
Just like the women in noir films.
I glance at my face in the mirror.
To my surprise, I’m smiling.
•
I continue down Sunset. There is no further sign of the black SUV.
My brief instant of exhilaration has passed.
I’m again tense and vigilant when I arrive at my client’s apartment a few minutes later.
Her name is Mia. She is thirty-one years old. Small, with something vaguely fragile about her even though she is a corporate lawyer. She has recently acquired a French boyfriend. She is learning the language in preparation for meeting his parents.
“Hi,” she says as she opens the door.
She steps back to let me in.
“Coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
The apartment is large, with a generous amount of sunlight flowing through two skylights. She has decorated it in bright colors, but the pouring light bleeds away their vibrancy, so that the room looks old and faded. The corpse of a dance hall.
We sit in her office. Mia has her usual mug of coffee, white with big red letters: I CONTROL THE UNIVERSE.
“I’m not going until December now,” she says.
She means that Remi, her boyfriend, has decided to delay their trip to France, thus putting her target date for learning French six months further off.
Mia
offers her edgy smile. “I’ll have more time to learn.”
She has resisted our starting with the most basic vocabulary. She prefers to focus on what she calls the “love words.” Only the romantic phrases appeal to her. The French of lovers.
So instead of teaching her to tell time or order food or get directions, I concentrate on the warm, starry-eyed expressions she wants to learn.
“Embrasse-moi. Enlace-moi. Aime-moi,” I say very slowly. Kiss me. Hold me. Love me.
While Mia repeats the French haltingly, I find myself recalling my first meeting with Simon. Melody was ten. We were at LACMA. Melody was walking among the lampposts outside the musem. Simon was standing nearby. He seemed unsure of whether he should approach me, but in the end he made his way over to where I stood.
“Your daughter?” he asked.
“Yes.”
His smile was warm, beckoning. A smile that could be trusted.
“She’ll be a beautiful woman.” His eyes drifted over to me. “Like her mother.”
Delivered in that way, I should have read it as a hokey line. And yet he seemed sincere. As if we were at the beginning of a great romance.
Simon the lonely man in search of love.
The first of his many masks.
I recall the rose petals he placed on my pillow, along with an occasional French chocolate.
How false all of that seems to me now.
Like the staging of a house for sale.
So much so that when Mia asks for an appropriate phrase with regard to falling in love, only one answer occurs to me:
Fais attention.
Be careful.
3.
It’s noon by the time I meet Ava at Little Next Door in West Hollywood. She’s a transplanted New Yorker. Utterly contemptuous of LA. She calls it “empty,” “brain-dead.” A city so vacuous she once circulated a mock online petition to take away its zip code.
We meet for lunch every Monday, and during most of that time together we talk like veterans of what she still calls “the war between the sexes.” Each of us has been wounded, but in different campaigns. Her divorce was long and brutal, though she claims to have come through it triumphantly. I got the mine, he got the shaft, was her later mantra. She had it made into a bumper sticker and pasted it to her flashy new Audi.
She has said many times that she never found the “love of her life.” She suspects that I did in Max, and she is right. He was kind, loving, patient, and understanding. He had all the big-ticket virtues. Never more than in his long dying. Melody was only five during that final year, and each time I took her to him, his pain and anguish fell away, and he seemed, for all his sorrow, for all that he was losing, very grateful for what he had.
And so was I.
Despite the long, hopeless treatment, his wasting away.
What I recalled in the following years was how gracefully he had died, how tender he had remained. At the end he’d had just enough strength to whisper, “You are very kind” to a hospice nurse.
They were his last words.
It’s comforting to remember his tenderness and generosity.
But I also know how profoundly disappointing he would find what I did on Simon’s boat that night.
“What’s new, Claire?” Ava asks brightly.
Before I can answer, I notice a man take a seat at a table not far away. He is tall, powerfully built, wearing dark glasses. His body looks hard, muscular. A wrestler disguised as a businessman. I envision him earlier behind the wheel of that black SUV. Is he now quietly amused by how cleverly he gave me the false illusion of having escaped him?
I force myself to look away and return my attention to Ava. By then I’ve forgotten her question.
“What?” I ask. “What did you say?”
Ava looks at me oddly. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. You asked me something?”
“I asked you if anything is new,” Ava says.
I don’t want to tell her about Simon. Either my letter or his call. She is on my side, but at the same time, the specter of my confronting Simon again frightens her. He is a hornet’s nest I shouldn’t kick over. She considers any effort to stand in his way to be a lost cause.
“No, nothing new,” I tell her.
“Okay, well, before we get into anything else and I forget it, I want to give you this.”
She takes a business card from her purse and hands it to me.
“He came into my office just this morning. We talked. It turns out he’s interested in learning French.”
I look at the card: Ray Patrick.
The card says that Ray owns an art gallery in Melrose. It gives no indication of the sort of art he prefers. I suspect that its off-white walls hold canvases of California Impressionism.
Seascapes.
The desert.
Sailboats resting languidly in the marina.
“I gave him one of your flyers,” Ava tells me. “Expect a call.”
She adds a small, collusive wink.
“You have art in common.”
I don’t address my friend’s relentless matchmaking. Despite her confrontational attitude toward men, she still considers a woman with no one in her life somewhat pathetic. I know that in her eyes I’m a bit shaky and in need of repair. Like my PT Cruiser.
“Just don’t be too bookish, Claire,” Ava says, half scolding, half pleading, in every way nudging me toward a less solitary life.
She reaches over and touches my hand.
“Let the poor guy get to know you first. Think love, Claire, not books.”
I think of a book I recently read. It was about falling in love. The author is trying to find the essential element that defines this act. It is not fulfillment of desire or the joy of discovering your missing half. It doesn’t provide warmth or comfort or any sense of permanence. Just the opposite, in fact. The core of falling in love, he says, is jeopardy. When you fall in love, you place your heart and soul on a single number and spin the wheel. Reading this, I’d felt only how fully I’d lost my taste for gambling.
I reluctantly glance over at the man in the business suit. He has not taken off his sunglasses. He is studying the menu. Or at least pretending to study it. I notice that at times he seems to be looking over it. At me? I can’t be sure, and yet I feel a vague tightness all over, my skin drawing in, as if I’m becoming my own straitjacket.
To avoid this disturbing sensation, I look at Ray Patrick’s card, then quickly pocket it as the waiter steps up.
I choose the cheese plate, Ava the foie gras. She also orders a Sauternes. I have my usual sparkling wine.
“Let’s start again,” Ava says. “Anything new in your life?”
“They found a girl floating near the pier this morning. I saw it on the news before I left the house.”
Something in Ava’s eyes suggests I’ve tripped an alarm.
“I never watch the news,” she says.
The implication is that I should avoid this, too. Perhaps she thinks my mind is too frail to confront the cruel realities of life
“It’s always something depressing,” she adds. “War. Car accidents. Disturbing.”
“They’re always finding them, aren’t they?” I tell her. “Murdered women.”
In photographs they look haphazardly discarded.
Tossed into ditches.
Dragged into woods.
Dredged up from lakes and rivers and canals.
Human litter.
“Who says this girl was murdered?” Ava asks. “Maybe she slipped. Maybe she jumped. You always go to the dark side, Claire.”
She reaches for her glass.
“You’ve got to stop thinking about stuff like that.”
“Simon’s getting married,” I tell her.
“Ex-husbands always do,” Ava says with a sardonic laugh. “To someone younger, prettier. Some airhead dumb enough to worship them. It’s how they get even.”
“His fiancée has a little girl named Emma. She’s ten years old.
That’s the same age as Melody when I met him.”
Ava looks at me apprehensively.
“Don’t go there, Claire.”
“There was a picture of them all together,” I continue determinedly.
“A picture?”
“I saw it online.”
“Online? You’re . . . spying on him?”
“I wouldn’t call it that.”
“No? Checking on someone online is spying, Claire. What else would you call it?”
Before I can answer, she rushes ahead.
“Why are you doing that? What does it get you? For God’s sake, move on with your life. There’s nothing you can do about Simon. You took him on once. Remember what it got you? You were arrested, Claire. Arrested! You want that to happen again?”
“No, I don’t. But how can I ignore the fact that Emma looks exactly like Melody when she was ten? Am I supposed to just close my eyes and forget it?”
I lean forward.
“Everything about her is the same, Ava,” I say insistently. “The color of her eyes. Her hair. The shape of her body. Everything.”
My voice is louder than I mean it to be, my tone more frenzied. A few people glance over at me, then, as if unsettled by what they see, return to their food and companions.
Ava takes a quick sip from her glass.
I ease back in my chair and try to calm myself.
“I know what he’s going to do, Ava,” I tell her in a much quieter voice. Controlled. Reserved. Like a woman who has given her soul a sedative.
“You don’t have any proof, Claire,” Ava reminds me in a much less combative tone.
She is trying to lower the volume, cool the fire in me.
“Not a shred of proof,” she adds.
She’s right, at least technically. I have no proof of what Simon is going to do. But I know the man behind his collection of poses. I have seen his real face. If I could paint his portrait with the colors of the truth, he would have horns and fangs.
Ava will understand none of this, of course, and so I make no further argument.
The food arrives. It looks very French, each plate presented with a little dash of style.
When I was six, my mother and I went to Paris together to visit my grandparents. They had lived in the city all their lives, seen it through its most melancholy days. My great-grandmother had waved goodbye as my great-grandfather boarded the train that would take him to the fiery slaughter of Verdun. Twenty years later my grandparents had mutely watched, heartbroken, as German troops paraded down the Champs-Elysées. It is the City of Light, my grandmother once said, but it is also the City of Tears.
An Inconvenient Woman Page 2
