Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  On the street, a garbage truck shrieked to a halt. Hydraulic arms shrieked as they lifted and emptied the green recycling bin. The unmistakable sound of shattering wine bottles put an end to my reverie. Still, even after it faded from my mind, I felt a pang of nostalgia for my pretty little scene.

  I flopped back on the couch with the chapter, staring up at the ceiling molding as the garbage truck groaned down the street. He wasn’t a bad guy, my author. “My” author, I thought wryly; I liked him now—or, he’d become someone I liked. Someone who could look at the woman he’d loved years before, and love her more.

  She told me about her lovers, her travels, her marriage and divorce. I told her about mine. We talked about our careers, the ambitions we’d fulfilled, the ones we’d regretted, the ones we’d left behind.

  There we were, in the most romantic city in the world, and we chose to barricade ourselves in our hotel room, ordering room service and drinking Barolo. She still had an endearing penchant for sweets and disposed of the Toblerone chocolates in the minibar.

  I untied my shoelaces. She’d long since kicked off her shoes, tucking her feet underneath her. Now we both lay down on the enormous bed, yet another island in the liquid city.

  “Do you remember that place we met?” she asked. “What was the name of it?”

  I could see it, the restaurant with the yellow walls, the long table, but the name wouldn’t come to me. “I don’t remember,” I confessed.

  “Ah, memory,” she said ruefully. She turned, sliding a pillow underneath her head. Her hair fell to one side. “We could have stayed in London or Paris for this,” she remarked with an impish smile.

  “Yes,” I agreed. As if to refute us, a water taxi sped by on the canal below, throwing sparkling lights on the ceiling. “But I’m happy we’re here,” I said. A moment passed. She toyed with my cuff link.

  “They have a phrase for it in the Venetian dialect, the lights playing on the ceiling,” she mused.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’ve forgotten,” she said, working the cuff link free. She bent down, pressing her cheek to my wrist. We fell asleep in our clothes, holding hands like children.

  I don’t require much sleep anymore. I wake at dawn. Sometimes I read, sometimes I write. I stood at the window. There was mist on the horizon, obscuring everything but the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. I thought about waking Eve so she could see it, but she lay asleep, a faint frown on her forehead, as if she were impatient in a dream, and all I wanted to do was memorize her face. She smiled, her eyes still closed.

  “And if I returned to Paris?” she asked.

  “Nothing would make me happier,” I murmured.

  “It won’t be easy…I have certain obligations, certain attachments,” she said.

  “I make no demands,” I said. An idea of us thickened from a mist of imagination and took form.

  In the late afternoon, I went for a walk through the Marais down to the Seine to catch the sunset. On the way back, I stopped in a boulangerie to buy my favorite licorice candy, shiny, slightly oily black tubes stuffed with sugar paste. They were stale, just the way I liked them: tough and chewy.

  On the rue des Archives, a hard chunk of licorice caught in my teeth, and I stopped to pry it free from a molar with my fingernail. In front of a store I must have passed a hundred times but never noticed, I looked at the windows, displaying various old magazines: a sixties Vogue with Twiggy in striped kneesocks, a Paris Match with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, and a yellowing Paris Soir newspaper about the war in Algeria. The shop was full of old periodicals, a reference treasure trove for pop culture historians as well as fashion and design people.

  I pocketed my bag of licorice and went inside. Mountainous piles of magazines, some so old the edges of the paper were tobacco brown, made up a haphazard maze. The air was thick with a fug of cigarette smoke, and I heard two male voices argue heatedly about the recent insider trading scandal.

  I saw them when I rounded a tower of milk crates. The owner, seated behind a table, tapped his ash out in a Cinzano ashtray. Beneath him, a Yorkshire terrier sat on a chewed-up fleece cushion. The other man wore a suit. I muttered a hasty “Bonjour.”

  I wandered through the chaotic piles of publications, trying to determine the logic, if any, of the organization. Every conceivable French magazine was there: political journals, fashion magazines, sports, interior decorating, music, gardening, crafts, and knitting. Remembering Clara’s birthday was coming up, I stopped in front of a table of fashion magazines. Maybe she’d enjoy an Elle from the year she was born.

  It was amazing how the articles in women’s magazines hadn’t changed much in thirty-odd years: “How to Dress for That New Job,” “How to Tell If He’s the One,” “Interview with Sylvie Vartan.” Even-featured girls and women posed stiffly, smiling up from yellowing paper. They were touching, those models, trapped in a dated archness, a bygone vision of femininity—especially the ones from the fifties, with their headbands and vacuum cleaners and recipes for béchamel and mousse au chocolat.

  I found an issue of French Vogue from August 1975. Perfect for Clara. I tucked it under my arm.

  Nails tapped on varnished wood. The Yorkie came around the corner and barked, a high-pitched yap followed by a pint-sized growl. I tried not to laugh.

  “Venez, César!” the owner called, addressing his dog in the formal second-person plural. The little dog gave me another yap and clattered away.

  As I straightened up, I saw a hoard of Figaro Madame magazines in a box beneath the table. I picked one off the top: from 1989, with Iman on the cover, stunning in a white linen dress and dangling, gold earrings. When I’d lived in Paris as a student, my grandmother used to save me the fashion magazine from her Sunday Le Figaro.

  I flipped through the pages, looking at the fashions of the late eighties: huge shoulder pads, Flashdance off-the-shoulder sweaters, and Anaïs Anaïs, a perfume I used to wear. I remembered the department store bombings, the student riots, the year the Seine flooded, making the quai highways unusable, and later, when I studied in Paris, the seminar I took with a famous French political scientist who smoked a pipe in class—and the curly-haired philosophy student I fell in and out of love with, who had a face like an Italian cherub and worshiped the Ramones.

  I flipped past a photograph of a woman with familiar, exotic features and pink frosted lipstick, and then turned back without thinking. There it was, proof the brain is faster than the eye: an article titled “Estelle Bailleux: sa vie, ses amours.”

  My once rival. My nemesis, if I wasn’t being too grandiose or present-tense. I had to read it.

  In 1988, she’d completed a successful run of Private Lives in the West End and had made a film with Alain Resnais. Recently divorced, she’d started a new relationship with a man she described as “l’homme de ma vie.”

  It’s such a romantic expression from the English-language point of view: “the man of my life,” the “of” and “my” implying a whole life, the single most important man of your life. The French equivalent of “the one,” or “my soul mate,” but lacking the pop-culture shorthand of the former and the gooey romantic aspect of the latter. The expression is simple, concise, and direct.

  I turned to a two-page spread of Estelle wearing a pink gown embroidered on the back with two black squiggles of sequins shaped like the curvy openings on violins. Meters of duchesse satin flowed out behind her. The dress was Christian Lacroix; the choker of diamonds and rubies at her neck was Mauboussin. Seeing her at roughly my age, in a getup worthy of the court of Louis XIV, I found it hard not to feel outclassed.

  I devoured the interview, looking for information about her personal life, but it was mostly about her new film, her passion for the theater, and her country house. She refused to name her mysterious new man, saying only that he was recently divorced and that they’d known each other for years.

  I kept hoping I’d stumble across some lurid morsel of information, but the intervie
w was full of the usual platitudes.

  “Avez-vous besoin d’aide?” a voice called out, asking if I needed help.

  “Non, merci, monsieur,” I called out, feeling like I’d been caught with pornography. On the last page, the interviewer, determined to worm another snippet of information about her personal life, asked how she knew her new love was Mr. Right.

  Estelle replied that, now that she was in her thirties, she understood her previous relationships had been shallow. “It is true,” she mused, “that you do things differently when you get a little older. You waste less time, but you are more cautious—you’ve learned enough not to expect the world.”

  She went on to confess that the first time they’d spent a weekend together, she’d had a terrible nightmare. To comfort her, he’d told her about a summer he spent as a child with some relatives in Brittany who owned a small farm. He’d never been away from home, he barely knew his relatives, and in the middle of his first night there, a large spider had crawled on his face.

  In his sleep, he’d slapped it, flattening the spider to his cheekbone. The sound had woken him, and he’d fled in a panic to the kitchen, running into his eldest cousin, a young woman who’d snuck in after a late night. She’d cleaned his face and made him hot milk.

  “‘To this day,’ he’d said, ‘the smell of hot milk and vanilla brings back that night, a roaring country fire, the kind of comfort you could get as a child.’

  “When he told me that,” Estelle said, “this successful, dynamic man, when he shared this story, I knew I loved him.”

  I gripped the magazine, my fingertips sweaty on the glossy cover.

  Hot milk and vanilla. A spider, squashed on his cheekbone. I knew this story.

  I reread the paragraph.

  Cette femme merveilleuse. The woman who’d made the hot milk and vanilla was cette femme merveilleuse. I don’t know why I knew that, but I did. It rang a bell. Not in a hackneyed, figure of speech kind of way but in a distinct, familiar way: a cowbell.

  I would need to look at my computer files to confirm it, but I knew. It was an early chapter, the one about his childhood friend, the kid with the hot mom, staying at their country house, waking up with the insect on his head. My author.

  I knew who my author was. He was married to Estelle.

  As calmly as I could, I walked to the table where the owner sat. Without a word, I handed him the Figaro Madame and the Vogue. The Yorkie yapped at me again.

  “Ça suffit! Couchez!” he said to the dog and coughed, making a honking sound, thick with phlegm. I vowed never to smoke again.

  “Vous avez trouvé ce qu’il vous fallait?” he asked.

  “Parfaitement, monsieur,” I said. He charged me only eight euros for the Figaro Madame. Dirt cheap.

  I walked to the Italian place for a cone of stracciatella and crossed over to the place des Vosges to savor my discovery on a bench in the late-afternoon sun.

  My author was Monsieur le Ministre, Romain Chesnier. Eve was Estelle. It was probably the minister’s second marriage, as I was betting he’d previously been married to a woman very much like Daphne, but that would be easy enough to verify.

  Funny how Olivier didn’t show up in the book. The minister had to know about him, especially if he’d gone to the hospital to be with Estelle in her hour of need. Unless he was the sculptor in London in the third ending, a very minor role indeed.

  Did Estelle know what her husband was writing about? They were already a celebrity couple. Quel scandale if anyone ever found out!

  I wondered why Chesnier had written it, why there were four different endings, and why he didn’t want to publish it anymore. Had something happened, aside from the “minor cardiac incident”? Cold feet? Was he afraid its subject was so obvious that people would recognize him even if he published anonymously or under a pseudonym?

  Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be a scandal. Literature was a big deal in France—it would probably be a feather in his cap: aging politician publishes sensational, thinly veiled account of his love life with glamorous actress. He’d get invited onto all the literary and pop-culture shows. I could picture Estelle in the audience, beaming in Prada or vintage Saint Laurent. Media picnic! The press would try to get him to say it was the story of his life with her, he’d avoid answering in that eel-like, evasive way of politicians—which in France always includes repeating the interviewer’s full name (“Je vous dirais, Michel Denisot”)—and everyone would assume it was rooted in fact.

  Which it probably was. Though the best word for it, I thought, licking a dribble of melted ice cream from my thumb, was “juicy.” I pictured the look on Bernard’s face when I told him I knew. He’d be so very, very annoyed, and I knew what very annoyed looked like on him, I’d seen it often enough. “Hah!” I said out loud, as if I’d been clever instead of freakishly lucky.

  The downside was that I couldn’t actually share my secret with anyone aside from Bernard. I could hardly tell Olivier. No doubt Antoine and Victorine would relish knowing, but I wouldn’t betray Monsieur X to them. My friends might find it interesting, but I couldn’t see any of them getting excited about it.

  Except Bunny. Of course, Bunny. Bunny always loved a scoop; even surly retirement couldn’t take the newspaperman out of him. I finished off the cone. The sun cast long shadows across the seventeenth-century square.

  On the lawn, a man in baggy pants and a sweatshirt counted out steps, practicing some kind of balletic martial art. I watched as he balanced on one leg, leaped through the air, and landed in a warrior stance. He was lithe and sinuous as he repeated the routine.

  “He’s good,” Bunny murmured, leaning over the back of the bench.

  “I was just thinking about you!” I exclaimed.

  “Shh,” he said, walking around to sit next to me. He dropped his WHSmith bag on the ground, stretched his legs out, and folded his arms across his chest, his eyes focused on the dancer in the distance.

  The setting sun backlit the dancer’s dreadlocks, giving him a fuzzy, golden halo. He dove, rotating fluidly in the air, and landed in a somersault. Two couples, crossing through the park, also stopped to watch. He continued dancing after the light faded, until the streetlamps came on around the square. Then he gathered his jacket and backpack and left.

  “Fermeture du jardin,” someone called out. Park closing. “Nous fermons, mademoiselle,” intoned a uniformed park guard behind me. Bunny and I walked out.

  “What are you doing this far east?” I asked.

  “I hadn’t been to the place des Vosges in a while. I miss the old square,” he said, looking at the red-brick façades, lit by streetlights. We turned onto the rue de Turenne.

  “Listen, have I got a scoop for you!” I said, gleefully pulling out the magazine.

  “She is one fine-looking creature,” he remarked, gazing at Estelle in the pink gown. “I mean,” he corrected, catching the black look I gave him, “for an old bat.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “But isn’t it wild? I’m translating Romain Chesnier’s life story! Le Ministre de l’Education Nationale! Amazing, no?”

  “Hold on! No one says it’s autobiographical,” Bunny cautioned.

  “But it has to be!” I put the magazine back in my bag. “Remember what Bernard said? How it was the story of his great love?”

  “Yeah, but maybe this was some other guy she was in love with back then,” he suggested, then shook his head. “Nah, they’re a famous couple. Been together for years. Still,” he added, “Laveau could be misleading you, and you could be jumping to conclusions. It’s still fiction, remember? That means he made it up. Besides, how great can the love story be if his wife has your guy on the side?” he asked.

  “He’s not my guy,” I muttered. Bunny peered into an art gallery. “Maybe he’s writing it for Estelle,” I suggested. He made a rude sucking sound, pushing air through his teeth. “Like a declaration, a testament to all they’ve been through. A present,” I said.

  “Give me a break,” he
said. He pointed at an oil painting of a barbed-wire fence. “Do people pay money for that?”

  “C’mon, Bunny,” I pleaded.

  He thought for a moment, his mouth working. “Maybe,” he said. “But you can’t know for sure, you have to prove it.”

  “I can’t prove it!” I wailed. A French couple in front of us, carrying groceries and a baguette, turned around, startled. “I just know,” I said. “I have a hunch.”

  “Well, I ain’t gonna argue with a hunch.” He gave me an indulgent smile. “Funny, I always thought Chesnier was a sour old windbag. Never read any of his books on ancient Gaul. Who knew, eh?” We stopped in front of the République métro entrance. “Here’s where I leave you,” he said and went down the stairs.

  I walked the rest of the way home thinking about Eve and the author, Estelle and the minister, the four of them, the two of them, Olivier a footnote.

  I was a footnote, too, in a way; a footnote to a footnote. How funny that Olivier had wanted to turn the novel into a film; how funny that Laveau had deliberately misled him. Once you knew why, it made sense. How funny, too, that I’d ended up translating it, and that my nemesis turned out to be my heroine. Good old Bernard. Wile E. Bernard. “Ce sacré Bernard,” Olivier had called him. He didn’t know how right he was.

  39

  You are now out of your text.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

  I spent the next morning checking and double-checking the translation. Maybe he didn’t want to publish it anymore, but I wanted it to be as close to perfect as possible. I printed out a rough draft, read it aloud, made a few more corrections, and set it aside.

  I called Editions Laveau and left a message, saying I would swing by later. I didn’t mention I knew who the author was; I was no longer sure I would. Bernard wouldn’t congratulate me on my intrepid sleuthing, and I didn’t want to piss him off.