French Lessons

by Ellen Sussman

  “Bon,” he says, settling into the seat across from her, pulling out his books from his very distressed leather messenger bag, ordering something from the waiter who says something in response, and then he turns to her and smiles.

  She smiles back.

  He asks a question.

  She smiles back.

  He shakes his head, unleashing that lock of hair. She looks away.

  “Bon,” he says again. Though nothing is good. Even the coffee tastes like burnt tongue.

  “Okay, listen,” she says in English. “Maybe we try something different. Maybe we get to know each other a little bit, figure out something we’d both like to talk about-I mean, I don’t know a thing about you-and then we could, I don’t know, talk about that. In English. And then eventually I’d be speaking in French because it would be just so interesting that the French words would squeeze their way into my little brain and pour right out of my mouth. Whaddaya think?”

  “En français,” he says. He’s smiling though. Either he’s a nice guy or he understood every word she said.

  That’s the other thing. She doesn’t know how to read people here. Back in the States, she had a sharp ear-she could figure out who was worth knowing by how they spoke, how witty they were, how observant and caustic and wry. She chose her best friend because the woman used remarkable metaphors, inventing them on the spot. She chose her first boyfriend because he skewered the sociology professor for his foppish mannerisms. She chose her husband because he was the first guy to beat her at Scrabble. She imagines a Scrabble game with Philippe. How often could she use the word bon?

  And forget about words-she’s lost the cultural clues! Is Philippe’s shirt cool or dorky? It’s kind of shiny-that wouldn’t pass muster in New York. And he’s got one earring that looks like a cross, but maybe it’s an X. Does that mean something? Is he charming or creepy? Doesn’t matter. She likes to look at him. He’s handsome and that seems to translate well enough in any language.

  He opens his book to a page that has a picture of a house. Pictures she likes. Pictures she can read. She feels like Cole, watching intently while Papa reads the text. If Philippe keeps this up for long, she’ll need her blankie and a nap.

  Philippe stops talking and points to a picture of a bedroom. He’s pointed right at the bed! Yes, she wants to say: Let’s go!

  But she says, “lit.” Amazing. When it matters, the words come to her. The important words.

  “Le lit,” Philippe says.

  Who the hell cares? Feminine, masculine. When will the gender revolution come to France? Maybe it’s a cross-dressing bed. Riley looks up. Philippe’s watching her. Why does she have this goofy grin on her face because she’s looking at a bed? Well, no fucking chance she can explain this one.

  “Où est le lit?” she asks.

  “Dans la chambre,” Philippe says.

  “Où est la chambre?” she asks.

  He looks at her. Is he so pleased because they’re having an infantile conversation or because they’re talking about sex?

  No one’s talking about sex, Riley reminds herself. It’s just in the air, wafting toward her.

  “Dans la maison,” Philippe says.

  “Where is your maison?” Riley asks.

  “En français,” Philippe says.

  “I know it’s in France. Where in France?”

  He shakes his head. But he’s still smiling. He’s left a couple of buttons open on his shiny shirt. Riley can see that he has a boy’s chest, hairless and lean.

  She has never cheated on Vic. She once desired a man who worked in the art department at her PR firm and she told Vic, and Vic told her he desired a woman who worked in the finance department of his company and that was the end of that. Tit for tat. Well, she hoped there wasn’t any tit involved. There certainly wasn’t any tat for her.

  Is Vic cheating on her now? Is he really meeting boring French businessmen every hour of the day and night? She asked him once-mid-dinner on a date night-and he said, “My God, Riley. Can’t we even spend one night out without your ruining it?”

  She had a sudden image of herself as a shrew, the kind of woman a husband complained about to his office mates. Wasn’t she the siren a few years ago, the woman Vic boasted about? “My wife loves sex,” he once told a friend of theirs. “You lucky fuck,” the friend said. Whenever they finished making love, Riley would whisper in Vic’s ear: “You lucky fuck.” And he would fall asleep with a smile on his face.

  She hasn’t seen that smile in a long time.

  “J’habite près du Centre Beaubourg,” Philippe says.

  She understood him! The Pompidou Center! But they call it whatever he said. She remembers standing on the top floor of the museum and looking out at the rooftops of Paris and thinking: Everyone else is having a wonderful life. Just look. Charming attic apartments, sex in a single bed, the smell of bouillabaisse and hashish floating through the air.

  Now she knows: Philippe is one of those people.

  I had a wonderful life, she wants to say. She remembers the bon voyage party her friends threw for them a few weeks before they moved to Paris. She and Vic wore matching berets and striped shirts (hers stretched over a pregnant belly). Mid-party they had a fencing match with baguettes as weapons. They were grown-up kids embarking on a grand adventure. “Will you be lonely over there?” one friend asked her. “Not with Vic and Cole and little Miss Wiggle Worm. Besides, it’s Paris,” she said.

  Wonderful slips away, day by day. Why, even yesterday she was more wonderful than today. Yesterday her mother didn’t have cancer. Riley has lost her mind in a tangle of thoughts and Philippe has asked a question.

  She smiles.

  He repeats it.

  She shakes her head. “No comprendo.”

  “Je ne comprends pas,” he corrects her.

  Why bother trying to explain it’s an expression in English-well, not in English exactly, but something everyone says in English even though it’s in Spanish.

  “Right,” she says. “What you said.”

  Vic speaks French. He speaks it so well that he’s now changed his name to Victor. He says that the French don’t use nicknames and so he’s now Victor. “The Victor.” That’s what she calls him when she’s really annoyed, as in: “Will you be home for dinner, The Victor?” To which he usually responds no. He used to say “Don’t call me that.” But now he doesn’t bother. “No” takes care of everything-it’s an all-purpose word. In fact, it’s the same word in French even if they do put an extra unnecessary letter on the end. Non! I won’t be home for dinner!

  But Riley is Riley in any language. “What am I supposed to call myself now,” she asked The Victor. “AllRiledUp?”

  “Clever,” he said.

  Of course he calls Gabi Gabrielle, which is her real name, but damned if Riley’s going to start burdening her daughter with a name that’s longer than she is. Cole is Cole is Cole is Cole. Thank God.

  Does anyone call Philippe Phil? In bed, maybe? A kiss here, my Philistine? Sometimes sex draws a thing out, doesn’t it?

  So they’re back to the lit and the lampe and all things de la chambre. Riley learns a few new words while gazing at the book. Then she imagines her mother in the bed in the picture. When Riley was little she would climb in bed with her mother and they would read, side by side, their cottony arms rubbing up next to each other. Her mother often hummed, but she said she didn’t. And now Riley hums while she gives Cole a bath. It’s the same tune. How can she ask her mother what the tune is when her mother says she never hums? Riley feels a kind of urgency and peers at her mother in the bed. The image begins to fade until poof-she’s gone-and a goddamn tear splashes on the page.

  Philippe says something, real alarm on his lovely face, and Riley wipes her eyes, shakes her head and says, “Rien, rien.” Amazing what words appear when she needs them.

  But in a quick moment, Philippe is packing up. Men and tears. She half expects him to dash out and leave her behind, but at the last minute
he gestures for her to follow him.

  Whatever.

  They stand outside the café, in the middle of the Marais, looking at each other.

  Philippe says something.

  Riley smiles.

  “Bon,” he says.

  He takes her arm and they start walking down rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

  For the first time in a year, Riley feels French. She’s walking next to a Frenchman-a handsome Frenchman at that-and instead of doctor’s appointments and playground visits and pain au chocolat shopping, there is only this: mystery. She has no idea where they’re going. She’s been dropped from her life into a French novel.

  Never mind that Riley looks pathetically American. Before she moved to Paris, everyone told her “Whatever you do, don’t wear sneakers.” She left them all behind. And now, in a swift change of fashion trends, every goddamn Frenchwoman is wearing little white sneakers. But it’s not the clothes, it’s the breasts. No one in France has breasts this size. She tried buying a new bra and got tired of the way the saleswomen rolled their eyes and sadly shook their heads. And then there’s the hair! She has long, curly hair, messy hair, hair that won’t be contained in rubber bands or hair clips. It explodes from her head like confetti. “Cut it,” Vic said. “Non!” she told him. She loves her hair.

  So somehow she has arrived at a point in her life that she looks like a porn star. She has big hair and high heels and enormous breasts. In New York, everyone would know that she’s not a porn star, because she’s smart and funny and the clothes she wears are sophisticated and she has her sneakers. But here, there’s only one way to translate this: “Fuck me!”

  Maybe that’s what Philippe plans, Riley thinks. She tucks thoughts of her mother away-no, Mom, you’re not coming along for this ride!-and clicks her heels as she struggles to keep up with Philippe’s long stride.

  The sky darkens as suddenly as a full eclipse of the sun and then, in a flash of lightning and thunder, as if God is screaming, Get sex out of your mind right now!, the heavens open up. Philippe’s grip tightens on Riley’s arm and he leads her under the canopy of a corner restaurant. In a second, a crowd of people huddle under this teeny canvas, and they are squeezed together.

  The crowd oohs and aahs as if God were a fucking superstar. Riley can barely see the street anymore-they’re sandwiched between so many people. Someone smells as if they had garlic oatmeal for breakfast; someone else has the hiccups and the whole crowd seems to jerk with each gasp of breath. Riley feels her heartbeat racing-she’s not sure if it’s the drama of the heavens or Philippe’s arm pressed into her breast. And for once, she doesn’t have to speak. She gets this: it’s weather and it’s wild. No need for a running commentary. Just take it in.

  Riley remembers a camping trip with Vic in Vermont-pre-kids, pre-marriage-when a storm woke them in the middle of the night, pounding their tent so loudly that they knew it was hail, a freak midsummer hailstorm, and Riley began to tremble, suddenly sure that the thin fabric would give way and they’d be iced to death. Vic climbed on top of her and in a quick moment their sleeping bags were unzipped, their clothes pulled off, and their bodies pounded each other in the most violent, urgent, ragged sex they ever had. Afterward, the hailstorm too had ended and they lay there, gasping, staring at the roof of the tent in the dark, side by side, their hands clasped together. They never spoke about it afterward, as if there were something shameful about the way they tore at each other. Riley wonders now: What would it take to bring Vic back to me?

  A clap of thunder and Riley transports herself on a transatlantic journey from Vermont to Paris, from Vic to the French tutor, from the smell of pine trees to the smell of wet wool. The rain stops as abruptly as it started. The sky lightens. The crowd doesn’t move as if they’re not ready for the show to end. No one says a word. Riley almost expects a call: “Encore!” But eventually the first few people break away from their tight little gathering, and then the next, and then Philippe’s arm leaves her breast. She sags a little-not her breast, which is firmly ensconced in an American 34 DD bra with underwire and wide straps-but her whole body feels a little post-orgasmic. The show is over.

  Philippe looks at her. She feels closer to him now, as if they have shared something. And to her delight, he doesn’t speak. He wraps that wonderful hand around her upper arm and leads her onward.

  The sidewalks are crowded with people, everyone on the move again, and the city streets glisten with light reflecting off the puddles. Riley thinks of Cole and his new green rubber boots with the frog eyes on the tips-he should be splashing his way to the Place des Vosges instead of sitting in front of the TV with Fadwa or Fatah or Fadul’s mother. Bad Mama! And tonight, when he wants Daddy to put him to bed, she’ll have to explain: It’s you and me, babe.

  But no time for children! I’m off on a Parisian adventure! It’s all about me-me-me!

  How odd that a person can lose herself in a city, in a family, in a marriage. How odd that she never felt lonely when she lived alone all those years in New York, and now, wrapped in the tidy package of nuclear family, a member of every fucking expat group that exists in Paris, every moms’ group for English-speakers, every wives’ group for expats, she feels like she’s the kid standing outside the school and everyone’s gone home and her mother has forgotten to pick her up.

  Do they call it nuclear because it’s bound to explode?

  She has not mentioned to her mother that her husband has gone AWOL on their marriage, that he’s rarely home, that he barely touches her, that the last time she told a funny story about the crazy woman who yelled at her for breast-feeding in the park he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t be breast-feeding anymore.” When Riley found out that her pet name for Vic, “coo-coo,” is something French people say to their infants, he told her, “Maybe you shouldn’t call me that anymore.” She has not mentioned to her mother that she wakes in the middle of the night with something like terror lodged in her chest. No wonder her mother forgot to metaphorically pick her up-she’s a fraud and her mother knows it. She used to tell her mother everything and now she has spent a year telling her mother not to visit her in Paris, and now her mother has cancer.

  “Comment?” Philippe asks.

  She looks up at him. Has she said something? In what language? The language of grief?

  “Rien,” she assures him. “My mother hums when she’s thinking and apparently I do that, too.”

  “En français,” Philippe says.

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” she tells him.

  He laughs. Fuck-the international language.

  He slides his hand on her lower back as he presses her in front of him. The crowd is so thick on the sidewalk that they can’t walk side by side and he keeps his hand there, guiding her forward, like a dancer, leading her through complicated moves on the dance floor. She is a terrible dancer; she doesn’t know how to follow a guy, or maybe she’s never been with a guy who knows how to lead. Before their wedding she and Vic took a couple of dance lessons and they were dismal failures, bumping into each other, turning the wrong way, smacking into each other’s shoes. One night they got stoned and danced in the empty living room of their new apartment and suddenly they could do it-they were Fred and Ginger-they spun and dipped and swooned. A week later, at their own wedding, they had to bear-hug through the first dance, too embarrassed to fumble through a merengue in front of the crowd. “I can’t feel your lead,” Riley had whispered to Vic. “What do you want, a steamroller?” Vic asked. “Steamroll me, baby,” Riley whispered in his ear when they made love that night.

  Philippe’s hand slides around her waist and pulls her to a stop.

  “Nous sommes arrivés,” he announces.

  She looks around. They’re in the middle of the block; all around them people walk in every direction and cars blast their horns. She looks at Philippe, who’s gazing up-at a building that might have been built in the fifties and hasn’t been washed since. It would look like just about any building except it’s in the middle of
Paris and every other building is a piece of art. This is not. It’s got a flat surface that is dull and soot-covered, the windows grimy and dark. Who lives here?

  Apparently her dashing French tutor lives in this dump, because he’s tapping in a code and opening the front door. Riley’s feet are frozen in place. She hears a chorus of voices-Vic, her mom, Cole, Gabi-all shouting at her. She’s being stoned by words.

  “Riley,” Philippe says, and the voices vanish, her feet thaw, and she’s hurrying inside the door. She was never a pushover before-now the sound of her name in this man’s mouth turns her into a hussy.

  The elevator smells of dirty diapers. It’s hard to think about sex, and Riley tries not to breathe, as if she’d be allowing Gabi to enter her mind if she thought about dirty diapers. How does she know the babysitter’s mother will change Gabi’s diaper? She once left Gabi with her mother on her last visit home, six months ago, and came back from the beach with Cole to find Gabi drenched and soiled. “I thought they made diapers stronger these days,” her mother said, unbothered by the mess. “Next time, you take care of the baby and I’ll go to the beach with the munchkin.” Riley’s mom prefers Cole to Gabi, and has never tried to hide it.

  So the not breathing on the elevator didn’t work. She’s got Gabi and Cole and her mother all living in her head now. Go away, she wants to scream. There’s no room for you in this bed!

  The bed turns out to be a futon, and an unmade one at that. Philippe throws open the door to his apartment and Riley sees immediately that she has made a terrible mistake. There is nothing romantic about a loser. And Philippe must be a loser-who else could live like this? There’s the pea-green futon, the beer cans (why would anyone drink beer in the land of Burgundy and Bordeaux?) strewn all over the floor, the poster of Angelina Jolie, the guitar in the middle of the floor. At least that’s a sign of culture. The guy must strum on his guitar, then drop it like a sack of potatoes.

  Philippe tosses his jacket on the floor and walks into the kitchen. Riley stands there, waiting to flee. It’s easy, she thinks. Turn around, walk out the door. Send a check to the language school. Never see this man again.