Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  I woke up a few times at night, alternately panicking as I felt him in the bed—What are you doing? You barely know him!—and grinning—What are you doing? You barely know him!

  In the morning, he crept out of bed and got dressed. I pretended I was still asleep. He tiptoed down the hall, and I heard the front door click. A getaway! Not very gallant, I thought, but probably just as well. I’m bad at breakfast, let alone first ones; I’m barely civilized until I’ve had coffee, and even then, I feel raw and clumsy.

  In the living room, his jacket was draped over the sofa; the door was propped slightly open. I glanced out the window and saw him walk into the boulangerie across the street. I made coffee and waited for him to return with a mounting sense of dread.

  He came back with a baguette, croissants, and newspapers. He leaned over to kiss me at the same moment I lifted my coffee mug to my mouth, so he got my cheekbone instead of my lips. I made a big show of searching the cupboards for jam.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked my back, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “No!” I snapped. He looked taken aback. “Did you?” I asked, softening my tone.

  He shrugged and sat down. “I bought you the Herald Tribune,” he said. “For the crossword puzzle.”

  “How did you know?” I asked, sounding suspicious. He bit into a croissant.

  “The bathroom,” he mumbled, his mouth full. I remembered the pile of crosswords between the toilet and the tub. I was being prickly again.

  “Olivier, le matin, je suis sauvage,” I said, switching into French to explain that I wasn’t a morning person. Sauvage doesn’t just mean sav age. It also means uncivilized, timid, shy, unsociable, rude, and/or barbarous.

  “Pas que les matins,” he observed, splitting open a length of baguette. He pushed the newspaper over to me. I relaxed a fraction and settled down to read the front page. Olivier read Libération. I opened the paper. He didn’t look up. I turned to the crossword puzzle.

  “What are you doing this evening?” I asked.

  “A rehearsal, but it’s over by nine.” He opened the jar of marmalade I’d unearthed in the pantry. “And you?”

  “My friend Althea’s birthday party. She’s half-American, like me. An old, dear friend.” I bit into my tartine. There was another silence. “Have you always liked marmalade? I’m conducting an informal survey. I believe it’s an acquired taste,” I said.

  “Yes. I have liked it since I was a very small child,” he said gravely.

  With that, the rest of my tension dissipated. “Would you like to come to the party with me? It’s in the Twentieth, a cute little house in Ménilmontant,” I said.

  “Or perhaps I can call you on your portable and meet you later, after my rehearsal? If you remember to take it,” he said and ruffled my hair.

  “You can do that,” I said, beaming. I liked this. Birthday party and Olivier. Cookies and cream. Having cake and eating it: le beurre et l’argent du beurre. The hair ruffle made me feel tousled and sexy, like I should have been wearing his pajama top and nothing else. The faint taste of bitter oranges lingered on my lips after he left. Perhaps I could learn to like marmalade.

  I scooped up the bra and panties off the bedroom floor and dropped them in a sink full of bubbly Woolite. I thought about my friend Marielle in New York, and her affair with a real estate attorney. He usually called her on Thursday afternoons before coming over after work. After the call, she would perch on the edge of her tub and shave her legs. It became such a ritual that the mere smell of mentholated shaving cream turned her on.

  Mentholated shaving cream, lingerie. It wasn’t about underwear per se—underwear qua underwear—but about the anticipation, the ephemeral idea the object elicits. People used to cast spells. Now we buy things and invest them with magic. I rinsed out the lingerie and left a message for Clara. I sat in front of the computer intending to look at the last six pages of the chapter, but I got to Googling, starting with Bernard and Editions Laveau.

  It turned out Bernard had published several books under his own imprint in the last two years, among them a few polars, or thrillers, a biography of André Malraux, a new history of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, and two novels. Next, I Googled Estelle, who turned out to be pretty famous. She’d started off in a long-running TV series in the eighties; had made the leap to film in a Rohmer movie that I’d actually seen, though she hadn’t been the lead; and had subsequently been in dozens of French and Italian pictures. She’d served on the jury at Cannes a few years back and was frequently photographed with her husband, the popular, charismatic minister. In their wedding picture, Romain Chesnier was short and broad, with a pugilist’s build, a mane of silver hair, and a large, broken nose. They looked good together.

  I leaned back and stretched, then turned to the translation.

  Later, that night, in our fourteenth-century Venetian hotel room, under a fresco of frolicking putti, we made love while Chopin played all night, the CD player stuck on repeat…

  No, no, no. I backspaced over the paragraph, yawning. It’s always hard to sleep that first night with someone. You’re not used to each other; you roll over and there’s a body in the space where you used to roll over. Arms fall asleep, body parts get smushed, you worry about drooling and morning breath and blobs of eye makeup congealing in the corners of your eyes. But there is also the pleasure of waking up with someone you like, someone you perhaps wake up before…

  …for the pleasure of seeing her face as she stirs and opens her eyes. Eve didn’t sleep like a child, innocent and bow-lipped. She slept like a mermaid, a sea creature on a busman’s holiday, seducing men as she would dolphins and submarine deities. I ran my fingers along her back. Like a dancer, she had a beautiful curve to her spine—

  Ew. How did someone sleep like a mermaid? And “curve to her spine” sounded like something on a chiropractor’s chart. I looked up the French word, “cambrure.” I’d heard it used to describe the curve of a woman’s back, usually right above the rear, as in “une jolie cambrure.”

  In the bilingual dictionary, I found “camber,” a word I didn’t know, defined as “bend; arch; curve; instep.” The English dictionary defined it as “1.a. A slightly arched surface, as of a road, a ship’s deck, or an airfoil. 1.b. The condition of being so arched…” Not quite a faux ami: they meant the same thing but were used differently in each language.

  Here again was a phrase—to describe a part of a woman’s body—that didn’t exist in English. I made a note in my journal, adding “cambrure” under “la chute des reins.” There was something intriguing about the mere existence of these words and phrases, as if the subconscious personality of the French language was that of a fastidious geographer, who’d mapped and named every square inch of a woman’s body. Was it a scientific attention or an obsessive one? Or both? Or was it like Eskimos having twenty-two different names for snow, even though I’d heard that was a linguistic fallacy? Still. It seemed to point to the development of a complex vocabulary for the thing you think about most: le corps de la femme.

  I stared at the apartment across the street. A woman leaned over the balcony to shake out a tablecloth. I could make out mustard yellow walls so old they were fashionable again. Some of the cafés in the neighborhood had similar yellow paint, a vintage, shiny latex egg yellow, deepened by years of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes. It had become trendy to leave them intact, with their air of 1959; “tel quel,” as is, described both the thing and its aesthetic.

  I looked back at the screen, seeing the words but not reading them. I was useless. My lips were puffy and sore, my skin tender. Even when I wasn’t thinking about Olivier, I was thinking about Olivier. I saved my work and turned off the computer.

  17

  Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.

  —JEANETTE WINTERSON
, The Passion

  Alors, dis-moi tout,” Clara demanded. I gave her a detailed account of my evening with Olivier, including my aberrant behavior, which she laughed at. We sat at Mariage Frères, the Seventeenth Arrondissement outpost of the venerable house of tea, done up in teak, rattan, and vintage maps in some designer’s notion of luxurious colonial charm. It was a decorating theme I called Rangoon Racquet Club, after a similarly decorated but now defunct restaurant in Los Angeles my parents used to take me to.

  “They make these very nicely,” Clara said, taking a small bite of a delicate almond tuile biscuit. She ate with both a voluptuary’s enjoyment and an ascetic’s restraint, savoring food so profoundly it was as if she were gleaning information from it. Next to her, I felt ham-fisted and uncouth. “You look happy,” she remarked. I blushed. “Quoi? Tu rougis?” she exclaimed.

  “I think I’m a little embarrassed by how much I enjoyed myself.” I could feel my face grow hotter as I pictured his face, his mouth, his hands on my skin. I shivered. “I’m overwhelmed. It’s too much. I need to pull myself back.”

  “Quelquefois, la tendresse est douloureuse,” she observed, a little sadly.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Of course. I just miss it. The delicious way it feels when you fall in love, how it turns you back into a hopeful child.”

  “I’m not in love,” I protested. “That’s way too big a word. Infatuated, maybe.”

  “Que tu peut être chiante!” she said, rolling her eyes as she called me a pain in the ass. “Your American overanalyzing everything. Or Puritanism. En tout cas, of course you’re in love. It’s a kind of love, anyway. ‘Infatuation’—pah!” She looked impatient, which was one way to conceal discomfort.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “I’m wondering if I should’ve taken things more slowly.”

  She swirled a spoonful of rock sugar crystals into her thé au caramel. “I think, dans la vie, en général, you should be romantic, even impetuous, about falling in love, and pragmatic about getting over it, and not l’envers,” she said. “This idea of caution, it’s stupid. As if you can control it.”

  She played with her teacup. “I’ll tell you a story, about when I lived in Spain. I was twenty, beautiful and arrogant—do you remember what being twenty was like? I was staying in Barcelona with friends of my parents. They had a son my age, Luis, and he fell in love with me. I had a boyfriend in Paris, and even though things weren’t perfect with Julien, I didn’t want to be with anyone else. I was cruel. I toyed with Luis. One night, we drove to the beach. It was just the two of us, and I could feel how much he loved me…perhaps I was perverse; maybe I enjoyed making him suffer. I went back to Paris, but I had a secret inside, no one could touch it. I stayed with Julien because I had that secret.” She looked down at her hands and twirled a ring around her finger.

  “I ended it with Julien when I heard Luis was getting married. I regretted it for years, not seizing the opportunity with him. But when you’re young, you think such things are common, frequent.” She shook her head, her mouth twisting. “The truth is, I have never seen a man look at me the way that boy did.” With a trace of anger, she added, “And no man ever will.”

  “Clara—” I protested, but she cut me off.

  “No, it’s true.”

  “I refuse to believe that isn’t possible anymore!” I said firmly.

  “You misunderstand. I don’t think that love is impossible, just that kind of love. There are things that belong to a certain age, they are attached to certain moments, c’est tout. You can’t relive them. And no one else can tell you what they mean.” She tilted her head back, lifting her chin.

  “I still think it’s a sad story,” I said. She sniffed and looked away. I wondered if I’d misunderstood her. Perhaps her careless attitude about her romantic life was a pose, a protective device.

  “And you see? Of course it was love. This is a stupid word, ‘infatuation,’” she said. “Tu vois, here’s an answer to your constant questions about le mot juste. We may have fewer words in French, but they mean more. The context is everything.”

  “Clara, about that story…” I started, but she was done.

  “Let’s talk about something else.” Her face shuttered. “Even if nothing comes of it, I think Olivier has erased Timothy,” she noted.

  “Good point,” I said, nibbling on a lacy tuile.

  “My mother says men always remember their loves, but for women, it takes only one man to make her forget everyone who came before.”

  “I wonder how men feel about that comment,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Bof. For men, their former loves are like stamps or butterflies. They like to look at them and remember the chase, how they found them and added to the collection. For women, former loves are too often like train wrecks. Bad feelings linger long after they’re done cataloging the damage.”

  “That’s terrible!” I said. “Do you really think that?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I’m in a bad mood.” She actually said “de mauvais poil,” of bad fur, like a cat rubbed the wrong way.

  “You know,” I said, changing the subject, “I did have this realization about lingerie—it’s not frivolous in the slightest—”

  “La frivolité est un état de révolte violent,” she quoted.

  “Who said that?” I asked.

  “Je ne sais plus,” she said, puffing her cheeks out in blowfish mock exasperation. “Baudelaire, peut-être, ou Proust.”

  “How can frivolity be a state of revolt? Let alone a violent one?” I asked. “I mean, by its nature, frivolity is trivial.”

  “Trivial compared to what?”

  “Ordinary life, I guess—birth, death, love—the biggies.”

  “Précisément. It’s a revolt against all these inevitable aspects of life,” she said. She got up to take a call on her cell phone while I chomped down on the last almond tuile. This concept of frivolity seemed another particularly French idea, a contradictory puzzle that, to them, made perfect sense. I couldn’t figure out if it was the vocabulary of the idea that startled me or the idea itself. The French always seem so practical, so logical, so able to explain everything rationally…except when they can’t. In the realm of emotions, all that Cartesian logic goes out the window, and they leap to wild, euphoric, contradictory conclusions that they justify with poetic phrases. I couldn’t tell if it was a profound, heartfelt examination of emotion or a sinuous exercise in rationalization via word arrangement.

  Clara came back transformed, her face pink. “What time is Althea’s party?”

  “Eight. Aren’t you coming?” I asked, guessing.

  She shook her head. “His plane arrives at eight.” Her up and down romance seemed to have taken a turn for the better. “I have a thousand things to do!”

  She opened her bag and took out a small, gift-wrapped box. “Will you take Althea my present? With my apologies?” she asked. We cheek-kissed good-bye.

  I went around the corner to buy Althea a large box of dark chocolate pralinés from her favorite chocolatier.

  “C’est pour offrir?” the saleswoman asked. She had dyed blond hair and the overly but expertly made-up face of a beautician.

  “Oui, merci,” I said. She wrapped a ribbon around a dove gray box with a gold seal. She slid the box into a similarly emblazoned shopping bag and offered me a chocolate. I picked a dark chocolate rocher, a jumbo truffle with crunchy bits of nougat.

  I inherited my sweet tooth from my mother. We have a similar weakness for chocolate, but her favorite candies are Jordan almonds, dragées. Years ago, I’d found a tiny boutique on the boulevard Haussmann, where they sold little else. The saleswoman always used the same dated paper, a rust-colored medley of autumn leaves, and wrapped the box with knife pleats, ribbon, and no tape.

  I strolled down the boulevard now, passing the late-afternoon shoppers emerging from les grands magasins, and saw that the dragée store was still there. I thought about the cafés that hadn’
t changed since the fifties, clothing shops and umbrella stores that hadn’t changed in decades, sometimes centuries. When I was a student, I bought my cigarettes from La Civette, where Casanova had bought his tobacco. I’d gone to a nightclub in a basement cave on the rue de la Huchette, where the band played swing music and the kids danced le rock, a kind of jitterbug. It turned out my father had hung out there as a college student as well.

  Plus ça change.

  I could hear the party before I rounded the corner. Walking into Althea’s little house, I spotted Ivan first. A large, broad-shouldered man with thinning brown hair, blue eyes, and an air of benevolent preoccupation he was sweaty and bristly with stubble when I kissed him hello. He directed me to the kitchen, where I found Althea, struggling to open a bottle of champagne, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her multicolored hair—now streaked with violet and blue—was held in place with a dozen plastic clips.

  “Happy birthday!” I yelled over the music. I set the box of chocolates and Clara’s gift on the counter.

  Althea thrust the bottle into my hands. “It’s good stuff, so if you can open it, you get the first glass,” she said. She pressed the box of chocolates to her nose and inhaled, then hid them under the sink.

  “Who’s got such extravagant taste?” I asked, reading the vintage label. I threw a dishcloth over the cork, grasped it through the cloth, and twisted the bottle, not the cork, the way my French father had taught me when I was twelve.

  “Patrick, my boss. He brought his rugby cronies,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Ça y est. Their theme song,” she explained, as the old House of Pain song “Jump Around” blasted through the speakers, accompanied by the thunder of people obeying the lyrics.