Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  Foreign Tongue

  A Novel of Life and Love in Paris

  Vanina Marsot

  For my parents

  I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE,

  Letters to a Young Poet

  L’histoire est entièrement vraie, puisque je l’ai imaginée d’un bout à l’autre.*

  BORIS VIAN,

  L’Ecume des jours

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1

  I could start like this, third-person omniscient: “She chucked it…

  2

  When running away, I recommend arriving with keys. Makes you…

  3

  Before they left on their respective summer vacations, Althea, Clara,…

  4

  How I loved reference books: their heft, the joy of…

  5

  When Pascal, an old friend I’d met during an internship…

  6

  There was a message from Francis, an entertainment lawyer, on…

  7

  I fought through layers of consciousness to wake up. It…

  8

  The day I printed out my much-revised translation of chapter…

  9

  The novelty of la rentrée faded, and by the end…

  10

  A few pages into chapitre deux, I came to the…

  11

  I toyed with the idea over the next few days,…

  12

  At Odéon, the late-afternoon light burnished the limestone buildings a…

  13

  I pondered my plight as I walked home from the…

  14

  The sheets were cold and the memory came to me…

  15

  Great. Just peachy. No sign of Olivier, and here was…

  16

  The rain stopped, leaving the night air damp and velvety.

  17

  Alors, dis-moi tout,” Clara demanded. I gave her a detailed…

  18

  My phone rang, blaring with tinny majesty. I pushed Derek’s…

  19

  The week passed in a blur, despite the fact that…

  20

  I climbed the stepladder in the kitchen and put the…

  21

  It’s funny how quickly life can change, I mused one…

  22

  I woke up with Fred’s words ringing in my ears.

  23

  No, no, no. I can see your distress? Your sentiments…

  24

  In the morning, Olivier whispered something in my ear and…

  25

  I didn’t ask Olivier about Estelle. The more I thought…

  26

  Once we passed the suburbs and the centres commerciaux, the…

  27

  It would be a lie to say I cried all…

  28

  Lucy and I caught a taxi and rode into somewhere…

  29

  I caught the 96 bus, crowded with morning commuters, and…

  30

  Something bad happened in the night. Someone spoke to me:…

  31

  Pascal and Florian stopped by to check in on me…

  32

  Hungover and fuzzy from the pot, I sipped lemon-ginger tea…

  33

  I recognized the giant sneakers. There was a plastic WHSmith…

  34

  Midday, I took a break and went to the organic…

  35

  I fastened the narrow straps of my kitten-heeled Mary Janes…

  36

  A few days later, I took a long walk to…

  37

  When I got home, there was a message from Olivier.

  38

  I had nightmares every night. Which was odd, because during…

  39

  I spent the next morning checking and double-checking the translation.

  40

  The next day, I met Bunny in the Parc des…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Il n’y a pas de malheur pire que celui qu’on a.*

  —ARAB PROVERB

  I could start like this, third-person omniscient: “She chucked it all and moved to Paris.” I like “chucked it all,” as if you could shove chunks of your life out the door of a moving vehicle, say a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro, newly restored on fat tires, vintage Beastie Boys playing in the background. Or how about “She picked up and left,” with its faux-folksiness, a hair away from “she jes’ plum picked up and left, Jed.” As if one could pack one’s possessions in a skirt and hoist it up, hoops and crinoline, and take off. Then there’s that slightly perplexing “picked up.” It reminds me of my childhood jackstraws game. All those plastic, bone-colored pieces. A hoe jimmied up by a rake or a sword or a trowel. The first few rounds are always carefree, reckless. It’s only near the end when precision and silence rule the game. When everything hinges on the last move.

  Or no dodge-and-weave, no embroidery, no third-person, no all-knowing voice: I left. It was easy for me to move to Paris, and I had to leave.

  Like that. One day, my life became unbearable: straw, camel, back, and the unmistakable sound of splinters, or whatever a broken heart sounds like to the possessor (for the record: shattering glass, snapping tennis racket strings, the braying of world-weary donkeys, the high-pitched, internal bat-squeak of air being forced through congested sinuses, to name a few). I called my gabby travel agent. Many minutes and credit card numbers later, I had a ticket and a week to pack and get my life in order.

  It wasn’t as wacky as it sounds. I had dual citizenship and some mad money stashed away; my copywriting gig for an entertainment PR firm was portable; and, in a neat trick, I sublet my apartment to my landlady’s son. I let my parents know I needed a change of pace. I knew better than to tell them the real reason I was leaving town. If I told my mother, she’d worry the entire time I was gone, and I couldn’t tell my father. He was so unnerved by any display of emotional distress that he invariably shut down, his eyes either glazing over or darting back and forth in search of the nearest possible exit. All of my friends figured a change would do me good. Except Lindsay.

  “Anna, you’re running away,” she said, point-blank on the phone. As if the accusation, like a bullet, would stop me in my tracks. I could picture her in her stainless-steel kitchen, baby Ethan balanced on her hip, while she edited a movie trailer on three iMacs and puréed organic bok choy. Ever since she’d become a mother, she’d had no time for anyone’s bullshit, least of all mine.

  Figuring there was no point in arguing, I trilled, “Yes, I am,” nearly like a country singer. I felt giddy. “And righteous about it,” I added. I emptied a box of chewy caramel calcium supplements into a Ziploc bag and listened to her exhale long and impatiently. Surveying the somber piles of clothing around me, I thought of something Hank Williams Jr. had said about black being good for funerals and everything else.

  “Remember when I was having a rough time? How I wanted to get in a boat and take off? But I knew that once I got in the boat and put out to sea, all my problems would crawl out of the woodwork, I knew they’d find a way onboard as stowaways.” She was relentless, a Sherman tank of run-on sentences. My nose twitched. There was a prettier way of telling it, and she’d butchered the metaphor. “You have obligations, responsibilities,” she added.

  “Actually, I don’t,” I uttered, a tad bit waspishly. “I don’t have any commitments, and being in this city has become
unbearable. I can’t stay here.” The last sentence came out like a low howl, barely restrained from being frightening. I could have used the word “keening.” It would have been right.

  She was quiet. Remarshaling forces. “What, you think they don’t have People magazine in Paris?” she countered.

  “Don’t.”

  “I bet they even have Entertainment Tonight. Dubbed, but still.”

  “Now you’re being mean,” I tried.

  “Just move on! Deal with it!” she yelled. “You’re not the first person in the world this has happened to!” Very, very gently, as if in slow motion, I put the phone back in its cradle and tiptoed away.

  It was going to be a while before she forgave me; we weren’t hang-up-acceptable sorts of friends. I was setting fire to lots of bridges. I mulled this over as I stuffed socks into shoes. It was probably simplistic, but I had a notion that the universe worked in a few key ways and I wasn’t ready to give up on them. I believed most people were supposed to find each other and, if they were so inclined, have kids; that is, people who wanted to do that sort of thing. Not that it was supposed to be perfect. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes someone died, or they broke up, or random tragedy struck (though I could get paranoid about driving on the freeway, I tended to confine this line of thinking to natural disasters and times of war). I was a late bloomer, but I’d finally figured out that I wanted to be part of that world.

  So, when I met and fell in love with Timothy, I thought I was following the master plan, the great scheme. (“Yay!” the lemmings cry as they rush the cliff en masse.) And I fell hard: I thought Timothy was The One. But the relationship conjugated itself differently: I met Timothy, I fell in love with Timothy, I had my heart broken by Timothy. Amo, amas, amok. It took less than six months.

  In the past, my former boyfriends had disappeared obligingly into the woodwork. Our paths didn’t cross. It was as if we unconsciously divided up the city between us: you take Echo Park, Downtown, Culver City, and the South Bay, I’ll take Santa Monica, Venice, and Hollywood; give my regards to Rajee, the chef at that Punjabi dive you love, and in return, I expect never to run into you renting movies at Vidiots.

  Okay, not really. But L.A. was big enough that I never ran into Ned, Paul, or Phillip. Not even the crazy mime, whose name I can’t remember. I could imagine them dead, though I mean that in a benign neglect/off-my-planet way, not in the blue/toe-tag way. Now, here’s the kicker: Timothy became famous. Magazine-cover famous. Pop-culture famous.

  With a mounting sense of panic crossed with nauseated curiosity, I listened as friends called to warn me about page 207 in this month’s Vanity Fair, page 54 in Entertainment Weekly, and page blankety-blank in Newsweek, not to mention the various websites and blogs. It wasn’t awful merely because he looked good on those pages but because he was photographed with beautiful, famous women, none of whom was me.

  It started slowly—an article in the Los Angeles Times—and snowballed. After the two-page story in Rolling Stone, the interviews in both Los Angeles magazine and the New York Times, not to mention the appearance on E! Entertainment Television, I had a T-shirt printed up that said “Ionesco is my copilot.” No one laughed, except for the goateed anarchist who pours java at my local coffeehouse, and that was more of a snigger.

  This is how it happened that last night in his crumbling, rented, Mediterranean-style house in the hills. Something was off, had been off for a few weeks, but he’d been traveling, and I thought I was reading too much into the silences and awkward moments on the phone. But at dinner in a loud Italian restaurant shortly after he got back, I felt something funny in the way he kissed me. A kiss is almost like a person—it can be sly, guilty, and apologetic in the same mouthful. This one was also overconfident, like it had a couple of new tricks up its sleeve and was showing off. And yet, disguised as it was in the person of the man I thought I knew, I disregarded it.

  Except, there it was again, later, in bed, that same guilty kiss. I pulled away from him and sat up. My grandmother’s locket, a rose-gold heart with a smaller heart picked out in diamond chips, a piece of jewelry I almost never wore but had fastened around my neck on a whim that very afternoon, swung back and rapped me on the sternum like a knock on a hollow door. In the next moment, the words were out of my mouth.

  “Are you sleeping with someone else?” I asked in a strangled voice.

  I hadn’t suspected anything. I’d never even thought it, but there it was, and as I asked it, I realized I knew the answer. Or knew that I’d asked because I knew the answer—or because my grandmother’s locket, a gift from my grandfather (“For my dearest Ninon, with all my love, Aurélien”), heavy with symbolism, spoke to me. In that moment, I felt an eerie chill, a voodoo moment when time slowed down, and questions and their answers walked hand in hand up a garden path. I could hear the silent, yawning space between each heartbeat as I got smaller and smaller, fuzzier and fuzzier, Alice in Blunderland.

  He kept talking, but I couldn’t hear. I put on clothes and left, driving down the hill and across two freeways back home to Santa Monica, where I cried for the next month.

  I did have some better days, when I heard a whisper of optimism, believed that finding real, lasting love was possible. But this is the twenty-first century, and I lived and worked in the entertainment capital of the world, and some weeks, the realest thing I felt was followed by a credit crawl and end-title music.

  Timothy and I never talked again. It was shortly afterward, in some malevolent twist of fate designed to drive me batty, that he became It Boy in the media. Maybe I should have hung around, because no one stays It Boy forever. But three months was about all the stamina I had. You don’t get over someone when you’re constantly being reminded of him. The fact of his ubiquity made it impossible to pretend he was dead. I had no other coping maneuver, so I did what any sensible woman would do.

  I ran away.

  2

  There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.

  —VINCENT VAN GOGH,

  The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh

  When running away, I recommend arriving with keys. Makes you feel like you’re actually in control of the situation instead of on the lam from your life. When the immigration official at Roissy asked me where I’d learned to speak French so well, I slid out my carte nationale d’identité, revealing my dual citizenship. He smiled as if I’d shared an intimate secret and said, “Welcome home.”

  I took a taxi to Tante Isabelle’s apartment in the Eleventh Arrondissement, sandwiched between the Bastille and the Canal Saint-Martin on one axis, République and Belleville on the other. My father’s sister and my favorite aunt, she lived in San Francisco most of the year. Fed up with the rental agency she used to rent her pied-à-terre to tourists, she’d FedExed me the keys to her fourth-floor flat, no questions asked. I walked into the late-nineteenth-century limestone building, scrunched myself on top of my suitcases in the minuscule elevator (capacité: trois midgets), and rode up.

  Inside, it was dark and smelled of old books, furniture polish, and mothballs. The French don’t like to see front doors, maybe because they like to pretend the outside world is that much farther away, or to hide the sight of the inevitable electricity and gas meters. So they put up curtains or separate the entrance from the rest of the house by French doors, as Tante Isabelle had.

  The doors opened onto the living room, a mix of antiques and IKEA. Under a rectangular, ormolu mirror was a black leather sofa, its stuffing flattened with use. A coffee table strewn with old issues of Figaro Madame and Télérama sat in front of it, flanked by a pink velvet bergère and a kilim footstool like an obedient pet. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase took up one wall, with a niche for the stereo and television. A leather-topped desk and chair stood on the other side of the room, in front of a bar trolley, and another large mirror stretched almost to the cei
ling above the white marble fireplace mantel behind it.

  Tante Isabelle’s bookshelves contained a thorough collection of France’s greatest hits of the nineteenth century, gold-tooled and bound in morocco leather: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola. I pulled Madame Bovary off the shelf and flipped through the thin, crisp pages, liver-spotted and dense with print. There were also art books, various Paris guides and maps, and paperback novels in English.

  A worn Oriental rug covered the point de Hongrie wood floor. Two windows gave out onto balconies—ledges, really, with wrought-iron guardrails—above the busy street.

  Off one side of the living room was the kitchen, well-equipped with gleaming appliances to attract renters, including a stainless-steel fridge (contents: one bottle of champagne, two frozen Weight Watchers dinners au saumon, crusty with ice), and a sturdy pine table that seated four. Down a small hallway was the remodeled bathroom, pristine and sparkly white (again, to attract renters), and a bedroom, dominated by a large bed with a fluffy white duvet and an armoire.

  I fell backward onto the duvet and sank into goose down. Everything I needed.

  Except Timothy.

  There he was, just like Lindsay had warned me, a stowaway on the escape boat.

  I rolled onto my side, clutching my knees to my chest. We’d talked about coming to Paris together. One of the many late-night conversations we’d had about the future by the aqua-blue light of the digital clock. Two weeks in September, my favorite month, la rentrée, when everyone returned from vacation and the city woke from the summer sieste. “I want to see Paris through your eyes,” he’d said, his arms around me, his chin digging into my shoulder. “I want to know it the way you do.”