Lessons in French: A Novel

by Hilary Reyl

  I stood up. “I, but I didn’t actually do—”

  “What you did is unconscionable. Sit down.”

  I found myself next to Clarence. In a stolen glance, he searched me through the flecked thickness of his glasses. Did he think I might be angry with him? Was I?

  Lydia continued. “I can’t believe you’ve had access to my files, my correspondence. I’ve opened everything to you. I’ve been completely disarmed by you. I feel so violated.”

  “Lydia, I’m sorry, but I’m not the one who had an affair.”

  “Let me finish, Katherine. What you’ve done is treacherous, but I understand that you may have been getting very confusing messages about where your loyalties should be, and that maybe you were a lot less mature than you seemed, stupider than we thought. I have to believe that this wasn’t all malice. I’ll try to give you the benefit of the doubt. So, this doesn’t have to be catastrophic for you. Not if you’re willing to take yourself in hand and think about what you’ve done. You’re not necessarily finished yet. Clarence and I have been talking the situation over, haven’t we, Clarence?”

  Briefly, he squinted up at her. I could not imagine him doing much talking since Lydia’s big discovery. In fact, I could not imagine him ever talking again. What could he possibly say?

  “Clarence and I have decided to give you another chance. We’ve been saying for months that we’d like to keep you on, pay you more and out of our own pocket, let you develop here a little longer. Maybe this is absurd of me, but, without ever truly forgiving you, I could find a way to live with what’s happened. It’s been a very confusing time for all of us. We could work through this, like a family. As I say, maybe this is absolutely the wrong decision, but I’m making it on instinct.”

  As she spoke, my waves of shame and anger succeeded one another. Orlando’s chest rose and fell with eerie peace.

  Had I done something terrible? Or was I nothing but a distraction from the true blame?

  I tried to grasp the offer that Lydia was making. And then it hit me: this wasn’t an offer. It was a trap. It was sham forgiveness, fake generosity, and I did not need it. No, Lydia, I wasn’t that poor.

  “I think I should go,” I said.

  She took a violent step toward me. “Then you’re fired!”

  “Lydia, please,” begged Clarence.

  “Clarence, you have absolutely no moral authority here. None whatsoever. Shut up.”

  • • •

  To give immediate direction and weight to my decision, I ran up into my room and began to pack. I would leave now. I would go to Christie’s. Or to Étienne’s.

  As I pulled my clothes from their wire hangers, different reactions pierced my consciousness, each as sharp as the next, the points of a blaring star. I was guilty of the inability to distinguish right from wrong. I had sided with emotion over duty. I had been exploited. I had been narcissistic, believing myself so large in the hearts and minds of these people, when in reality I could have been anyone, and there would be a string of Katies after me and I should get over myself. I had acted to defend the romance and true love that Clarence would prove too cowardly to live out.

  These people were crass. These people were tragic. These people were ultimately ordinary. Lydia would sacrifice everything for art. She would channel Clarence’s affair into her work and never be the worse for it. Lydia was a human being first and foremost. She was traumatized.

  I was traumatized. I was humiliated. I was the wiser. Mom would be proud, ashamed, understanding, furious. She would say, make sure you get recommendations for some kind of job because you need a future, get letters of introduction, get something no matter what it takes because otherwise it will all have been for nothing. She would say, learn and move on and take care of yourself.

  I was scared. I was strong. Maybe I should stay. What, was I crazy?

  My room emptied quickly, most of it fitting into a couple of suitcases, until it was little more than a frame for its own rooftop view with its patch of Luxembourg in the lower right corner.

  I took the elephant bedspread from the futon and rolled it into a backpack. I winked at my dad before wrapping his picture in the same tissue paper it had crossed the Atlantic in. I peed in the electric toilet one last time.

  I still hadn’t figured out exactly where I was going. I supposed I should walk to the pay phone and make sure someone was home to take me in before I embarked with my luggage. I probably needed a cab. But the urge to get my things out of this place was so violent that I pushed the larger of my bags through the door and began to jostle it down the stairs.

  After one flight, I heard footsteps rising heavily toward me.

  I abandoned the suitcase on a landing and bolted back to my naked room.

  I had barely closed the door when there was a knock.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Katie, it’s Clarence. Let me in, please.”

  Clarence had never once set foot in my room. I assumed that, like Lydia, he didn’t quite want to acknowledge how I lived.

  His eyes looked inward, taking me in just enough to place me in the cosmology of his own dilemma.

  “Katie, you’ve got to stay. I can’t imagine her forgiving anyone the way she’s willing to forgive you. She needs you. If you go, the whole thing is too disruptive, too real.”

  “But it is real, Clarence. We can’t pretend it isn’t real.”

  “Of course it is. You and I know that. But you and I aren’t Lydia. She can recraft this situation if we let her. She’s a bloody genius. And we are bloody responsible for her. Please. We really can pay you more if that’s an issue,” he said, with a quick glance around the maid’s room. “You know, you don’t only owe it to her to stay on, but to yourself. Your opportunity here is only beginning. You have so much to learn. It’s going to all be wonderful again soon.”

  Clarence smiled, and for a second filled the outline of the father in my heart. I could feel myself bending. But I did not want to.

  “What about Claudia?” I asked.

  “We will have to cut ourselves off from Claudia, you and I both. And she will cry suicide perhaps but we have to realize it’s rubbish. She has to understand.”

  “Understand what exactly?”

  “That there is such a thing as real life.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it, Clarence. I don’t know if I can ever be comfortable here again. I feel so terrible now.”

  “Don’t,” he squeaked, then looked longingly out into whatever vista he perceived across the expanse of my electric burner. “Please, Katie. Please. I’m sorry. And if you feel sorry too, then the thing to do is stay.”

  I wanted to hug him, to tell him we would all survive, but instead I fidgeted with the handle of my suitcase and said I needed time to think.

  forty-one

  No further mention was ever made of my raise.

  After I told Lydia I would stay, she was dry and business-like for about a week before drifting into a postapocalyptic détente with me. She did not speak directly of Claudia or my treachery again except to tell me in no uncertain terms that I was not to say anything to Portia. Portia had enough to worry about. Of course, the children had to know eventually, but Lydia herself would tell them, when the time was right. Probably when they were here for spring break, although that was none of my business. My business was to help her to get ready for her upcoming gallery show in March. She had decided to make it openly political. She would include recent work from Germany and England.

  I stayed in part because I did not want to miss the flow of history, of Berlin, of Salman Rushdie, of the strange and frightening new rumblings from the far right in the South of France. I still didn’t know what any of it meant. To leave now would be like giving up before the end of a novel. And I stayed because Clarence had made me feel I was part of the family, the child who was neither spoil
ed and ethereal nor spoiled and defiant. Even though I knew with every conscious fiber that I was a servant, I suspended my disbelief in the face of his affection. Our relationship was not dead yet. Neither was his with Lydia. Or Lydia’s with me. Or his with Claudia. No matter how unhealthy the view, I was compelled to look on. The story was not over yet.

  The fact that I had decided to remain meant that I could also decide to leave. And while it was hard to believe I would ever follow through with such a drastic measure, I had shown myself that I could take greater risks than I had ever imagined. No stance was impossible. My drawing was beginning to show evidence of style. Somehow, this gave me courage, made me less timid with Lydia.

  By mid-February, buried in preparations for the big show, the surface of life in the Schell household was close to normal, if punctuated with dizzying reminders of recent trauma. Lydia had repainted everything to the point where the original colors were virtually erased. Claudia did not exist. I was Lydia’s faithful servant. Clarence was harmless if profoundly annoying.

  But there were moments when the old paint would suddenly appear, blood from a fundamental crime seeping through the walls. Even if it vanished as fast as it had come, we all saw. I was reminded in a thousand ways that I still existed in Paris only on the whims of Lydia’s grace.

  It was strange, this hairlined normalcy, but it was tenable. Lydia was, if anything, more jocular than before. A strident and lordly jocularity. She had won, after all. On all fronts.

  Several times, I had tried to call Claudia from my phone booth, but there was no answer. And I didn’t have the time these days to stake out her shadowy building on the Île St-Louis. Once when Lydia was out to lunch with Harry Mathews, I dared to ask Clarence if he knew where Claudia was. I hoped she was all right. Perhaps she really had gone to Berkeley this time? Or to Morocco?

  He had given me the blankest look I had ever seen.

  I had written to Olivier in great detail about the unraveling of events, but his letters in return made no mention of it. I figured the ugliness of the situation was one he would rather not touch.

  • • •

  The invitation to Lydia’s opening on the rue du Four in St-Germain was double-sided, with a diptych on either face, one pair of German photos, one pair of British ones. On her desk were the two mock-ups alongside a half-eaten container of the evil spring rolls. She had given me an exemption from my ban on buying them today because we had a lot of stressful material to cover. We had to sign off on the invitation and make the guest list.

  “Katherine, your job today is to keep me focused,” she said.

  “Thanks for finally telling me what my job is.”

  “Don’t be facetious, young lady.” Her tone might be light, but her protuberant eyes rolled to see me in a new way. For a moment, they lingered, half-impressed, half-suspicious. I had never been fresh with her before. Then she turned back to the task at hand.

  She examined the German side of the invitation. There were photos taken a few days after the one of November 9 for Paris Match. They showed the same bunch of bananas, on either side of a wide gap in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. In the left-hand photo, a young man in a biker jacket, with sunglasses and a briefcase, was holding out bananas, smiling. His gesture was luxuriant, full and stretched. In the opposite photo, a man closer to middle age, having accepted the bananas, held them to his chest. His eyes were downcast and apologetic.

  The impetus for this exchange, according to Lydia, was an article in Die Welt reporting that East Germans had never had access to imported fruit. So, the West Germans thought it was a beautiful gesture to hand out bananas to their suddenly visible neighbors. They drove over the border with carloads.

  “My question,” said Lydia, “is do I need a title here?”

  “What would the title be?” I asked.

  “That’s the real question. I don’t have it yet. I need something that captures the symbolism of Berlin. The West Germans are condescending and the East Germans are self-conscious. They feel incompetent and they are on the verge of feeling very bitter about it. So, after that initial moment of unity between the countries, there is this total lack of recognition, right? And in Berlin it’s much more potent than anywhere else because there the two peoples are literally face-to-face. These two banana moments are like the last moments of an illusion . . . Can you come up with anything, Katherine, anything about the power of illusion? The death of illusion? You should know something about trickery by now. Do you want a spring roll?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Mind if I interrupt?” It was Clarence standing in the doorway. “May I come in for a minute, Lydia? Can we have a moment of mutual recognition in empathy with the Germans, please? Just this once?” He did not wait for an answer, but strode up to her desk. “I couldn’t help but overhear you two talking titles, and I have a thought. How about, ‘Habits of Deceit’?”

  Lydia honored the suggestion with a moment of silence.

  “It’s rather perfect.” Clarence gathered steam. He was hellbent on pretending he hadn’t done anything wrong. “If you think about how both sides have lived so long in deception about the war, but each with a deeply different deception.”

  “Deceit, yes, deceit,” Lydia muttered. “Coming from you, that’s not bad. In fact, it’s downright rich, Clarence.”

  Either he wasn’t going to bite, or he simply wasn’t listening, because he went on with undampened enthusiasm. “It gets better! The East Germans think they are about to have the jeans and the televisions and the motorcycles and everything they’ve ever heard or dreamed about. They are deluded. I think it’s unimaginable for us. We three in this room have no idea what it feels like to be an East German. And neither does this guy in West Berlin with his damn bananas. I mean, we’re all exactly like him if we’re honest with ourselves. We’re all clueless and condescending. And we’re going to lose patience with our poor relations in about five minutes.”

  Lydia rolled her eyes. “You don’t see the irony in this, do you, you poor man?”

  Clarence blushed, but pushed hoarsely on. “So, ‘Habits of Deceit’ it is. Don’t you like it, Katie?”

  I looked at Lydia. She was very still, eyes rounded out in concentration. Then I looked away and figured out what I myself thought of Clarence’s suggestion.

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Come on, Lydia, don’t get mired,” said Clarence. “Admit it’s a good idea.”

  “It’s not bad. I’m thinking about it.”

  “That’s marvelous, dear. Thank you.”

  When the two of them began to get along like this, bright threads of hope surfaced in the family fabric. Perhaps the reason Clarence and Lydia could afford to be so mean to each other was that these threads were in fact strong. If they could see that they did love each other, then she would stop calling Olivier when she was drunk and lonely, and Clarence would never cheat on her again. Maybe everything was about to get a whole lot healthier around here.

  I hatched a plan to have Clarence write the catalog notes for Lydia’s show. It could be their Paris collaboration. Their true rapprochement. I could help with the work. The family I might once have helped to ruin could be whole again.

  “Can I see that invitation?” asked Clarence.

  She handed him the German mock-up.

  “These are excellent photos, my dear. What idiocy was going through Georges’s mind when he rejected these?”

  Georges was one of the heads of Agence France-Presse. He had originally turned down several of the images that were going to appear in the show.

  “Georges is trying to turn the whole agency against me. It’s disgusting. After all we’ve done for him. I introduced him to everyone he knows in the States. Everyone. Talk about having no memory. The traitor.”

  “Bloody traitor. We’re not inviting him to the opening, are we?”

  “Are
you kidding? I’ve crossed him off the list. First round of cuts.”

  It struck me that Clarence and Lydia were a united front. They were going to stay together. I knew it.

  To make the moment tactile, I touched Étienne’s ring.

  Although I had been wearing the ring for weeks, Lydia chose this moment to notice it in grand style. Her eyes widened over the bright pink chip. “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”

  “A piece of the wall, yeah. My cousin makes them,” I answered proudly. “He’s into objets trouvés. He’s doing rings and chokers and bracelets and pendants. He has a friend who went to Berlin and brought him back some rubble to work with.”

  “Fascinating,” said Clarence. “Instant pillage.”

  “So you have finally seen your cousins?” Lydia fixed her gaze on me. “I’m glad.”

  “Not Jacques and Solange in Orléans, not yet, but I see their son Étienne all the time. He has this idea of making jewelry from historical waste products, things that aren’t treasures anymore become treasures again.”

  “Could you get me some samples?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he would be thrilled!”

  “Any idea what he’s asking? I’m feeling flush.” She laughed.

  Clarence had lost interest in Étienne’s ring and was focusing again on Lydia’s invitation. “This is vintage Lydia,” he sighed, staring into the banana photos.

  She snatched the invitation back. “I hate it when you use wine words on me. It makes me feel old.”

  “It’s simply a figure of speech, Lydia.”

  “Thank you, Clarence. Thank you for clearing that up. A figure of speech, of course. Deceit is also a figure of speech. Very convenient, I’m sure. Now, Katherine and I have work to do here. Please leave us alone.”

  But, Clarence would not go. As though acting on some fevered resolve to change the state of things, some sleepless promise he had been making to himself to purge bad blood, he stood his ground .