by Hilary Reyl
Then he said, “Maybe you will tell us where the actors are staying and if there is any love between them?” He laughed. “Maybe you will even invite us to a party where they will be?”
I took a quick glance up from his shoes toward his face. I saw pointed eyebrows, an upturned nose, and high cheekbones. He is Bloch from Search.
Bloch is Marcel’s intellectual friend. He gives Marcel books by a writer named Bergotte. Marcel goes crazy for Bergotte’s writing. One day Marcel’s brilliant neighbor, Mr. Charles Swann, sees Marcel reading a Bergotte novel under a tree, and asks where he got it. Marcel answers that the book is a present from his friend Bloch. It turns out Mr. Swann is friends with Bloch too. Mr. Swann describes Bloch’s pointed eyebrows, upturned nose, and high cheekbones. He says they are exactly like a portrait of Mahomet II by Bellini. “Once he grows a goatee, he will be the same person,” says Mr. Swann.
One of the reasons I love Mr. Swann is that he recognizes people through pictures he studies and loves. Matching up people with pictures makes perfect sense to me.
Simon looks like Bloch, who looks like Mahomet II. This made me want to be his friend. But I wasn’t ready.
Walking down the hallway past all the bright-orange doors, I got anxious. I wanted to text Elisabeth to come rescue me. But I’d promised her I would do everything I could to at least make it through lunch today. So instead I texted Layla, even though it was the middle of the night back home. Mom has given me an unlimited texting plan. I am much more skilled at writing than at talking out loud.
I’m spending the morning with a moth named Simon.
Layla wrote back immediately, Is he a colorful moth or a gray one?
Maybe colorful. He is exactly like Bloch, from Search. What are you doing up so late?
I’m watching Matthew’s accident.
Matthew was a character in Downton Abbey until he was killed off the show in a car accident. He was married to Lady Mary. She is the oldest, the most glamorous, of the three Downton sisters. Matthew had a World War I wound that seemed like it would leave him paralyzed. Only it didn’t. He recovered, got married, had a baby, and then he died in a stupid car accident. The final shot of the last episode of Season Three shows Matthew’s lifeless, bleeding face on the side of the road. This is one of the episodes Layla has gotten me to watch a few times. Layla has watched it over one hundred times. She says that in every repetition she sees something new in Matthew’s dead eyes.
I didn’t answer Layla right away because Simon was asking me if I had met Peter Bird when he starred in Mom’s Sherlock Holmes movie. It took all my politeness to say, “Yes, but I’m not sure what he’s like.”
“How come you speak French so well?” asked another boy walking next to Simon.
I’m used to being taken for a freaky genius with mental superpowers, like the ability to learn whole languages in a few days. For all these kids know, I might have mastered French last week. But I don’t have what they call “savant syndrome.” The only thing unique about me is my own bubble that I mostly live in. I’m good at math and I have a good memory for certain details, but nothing special. I can’t surprise people, seconds after they tell me their birth date, with the fact that they were born on a rainy Tuesday or a sunny Sunday. I’m not cool that way. That’s not me.
When I didn’t answer him, the boy in the hallway, blue Converse high-tops, tried again. “It’s crazy for an American to speak French like this, no?”
“My dad is French,” I blurted.
“Sympa,” said Simon. “Is your dad here too?”
“No, he’s back in the States.” This is true.
“He has to work in America?” Simon asked.
“Sort of,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining to Simon about Papa.
Now I really wanted to text Elisabeth to get me out of here, because things were starting to move too fast. “Come on. Just make it through lunch,” I said to myself, out loud, in English. The scuffed white of the hallway floor filled my eyes.
“What’s on your shoes?” blue-Converse boy asked me.
“Oh, those are moths that a friend of mine drew.”
There was a silence, and then Simon said, “Sympa.”
I was grateful.
We arrived at history class.
Gotta go, I texted Layla, with a tearful emoji to show that I wasn’t ignoring the sadness of her dead-Matthew episode.
After history, I tried lunch. The cafeteria was hard. Gilberte wasn’t there. In the food line, I recognized a slice of familiar cake called a “quatre-quarts,” which means “four quarters” because it has four ingredients: butter, flour, sugar, and eggs. It’s almost the same as pound cake. It was the only thing I felt like eating. I took a slice and went to sit down at a table with Simon.
“Is that all you’re having?” asked Simon.
“I like quatre-quarts,” I said. I forced myself to look at his plate of hot food and then up at his face. It was definitely the portrait of Mahomet II by Bellini. I have a postcard of it in my collection.
“I like quatre-quarts too,” said Simon. I recognized his words as an example of friendliness, a way to find common ground. “They remind me of when I was a kid and life was easy.” Then he changed the subject to Gloria Seegar. He asked if I knew what she likes to eat.
“She likes sashimi and avocados with lime juice,” I said.
I was burning to ask Simon if he happened to be friends with a beautiful strawberry-blond girl named Gilberte. Then a wave of people crashed all around us with trays and teenage slang that I mostly didn’t get since I learned my French first as a young kid and then from an old novel. All I had to hold on to was my cake. I took tiny bites because I had to make it last through the lunch period or I might go under.
“Ça va?” Simon asked.
“Ça va.” I made a lame smile into space and kept up my super-slow chewing.
The cake reminded me of being a kid too. Papa and I used to bake quatre-quarts together all the time. We were supposed to branch out and bake many different kinds of cakes. But after a few disasters trying to vary our routine, we stopped pretending.
When I was six, a speech therapist told Papa that my thoughts were like the ingredients of a cake. I could line them up beautifully, one next to the other on the kitchen counter, measured, counted, and repeated, but I couldn’t mix them together to create something new.
Papa refused to believe I would never be more than a list of ingredients. And so we started baking cakes together. They were delicious, golden, and buttery. The whole family loved them at first, and Papa and I loved them unconditionally. We baked almost every day.
Mom started to get annoyed that the kitchen was always dusted in flour and the mixing bowls were sticky. Once she yelled at Papa, “Is this really what you quit your job to do?!” And he yelled back, “This is my goddamn job!” Then he smashed an egg on the floor, which Mom said was a pathetic gesture. She said the cake baking was a kind of voodoo superstition, but then she took me aside and said she didn’t mean it.
I wiped up the egg with a dishrag. I enjoy the circular movement of a rag.
I miss Papa’s and my quatre-quarts. I miss the measuring, the pouring, and the stirring, but mostly the way they tasted. So much better than this cafeteria version.
The other kids in the cafeteria were glancing at my tiny bites, but I didn’t make them any bigger. I made the cake last all the way through lunch.
Saturday, May 21
11:30 a.m.
Mom was excited about the croissants she bought at the boulangerie this morning. She said they were “flaky and fresh,” that they “managed to make butter seem airy.” She squinted while she ate hers. The sun shone on her hair, which is long, thick, and wavy, light brown with a few gray streaks. The sun made the gray streaks silver.
We ate the croissants on our stone terrace in the sunshine. Mom was smiling, but not her tight smile that makes her cheekbones pop out, not her smile for when she is working hard to get people to do
what they need to do. This was her other smile, where her teeth show and the skin wrinkles around her eyes. This is the smile that relaxes me. I tried to smile back at her with the same soft lips and crinkly eyes. I like it when we are similar.
The cottage we’ve rented is on a hill. It is made of uneven, sand-colored stones. It has two chimneys. It has four windows in front, four in back, and two on each side. The shutters are painted red. There is ivy growing halfway up the façade. There is a big lilac bush with white flowers by the door, which is red like the shutters. At the front of the cottage is a terrace with a green downward-sloping view to a river. I call the river the Vivonne because that’s the name of the river that Marcel follows on his afternoon walks.
Today at breakfast, an actress named Fuchsia came over. Fuchsia has large, distracting breasts. She said she didn’t eat flour or butter but she would eat our croissants because they looked “special.” This made no sense to me, but I have learned that most of the people Mom works with are inconsistent. They are different things to different people at different times, like many of the characters in Search. And this is how I’m able to understand them, by knowing I can’t.
Mom also brought some local jams: rhubarb, apricot, and green plum.
“Rhubarb is my favorite!” I said.
“Martin,” said Mom, “rhubarb is my favorite. Now, can you tell me what your favorite is?” Her smile went away and her forehead furrowed into lines. Mom worries a lot about my pronouns.
Until I was eight years old, I called myself “you” because that’s what everyone else called me, and I called other people “I” because that’s what they called themselves. Once I finally learned to read, I was mostly able to get it straight. But still, I can’t say pronouns right when I’m nervous, and Fuchsia was making me nervous.
“I don’t know,” I said. And then it came out again, in a perfect echo: “Rhubarb is my favorite. Now, Martin, can you tell me what your favorite is?”
Mom looked away.
“I sense a teaching moment, Martin,” Elisabeth said. I didn’t understand why the teaching-moment thing was funny in this situation, but I could tell it was supposed to be funny from her joking tone, and so I laughed.
“Let’s do a blind taste test,” she said. “Close your eyes.”
I closed my eyes. I was happy to be getting her attention. Even when I can’t see Elisabeth in real life, I can see her perfectly in my head. She has gray eyes, like Papa’s and mine, and pale skin but almost no freckles, and a very high forehead with a widow’s peak. She has a thin, pointy face. Her hair is redder than Mom’s. It would fall down past her shoulders if she didn’t pull it back into a ponytail.
Because her hair was up, I could see her ears. They were golden at the edges where the sun touched them. She was wearing a royal-blue bathrobe. She looked like a holy figure from one of the medieval paintings in my collection. Mr. Swann loved medieval paintings.
With my eyes still closed, I heard Fuchsia talking. “The geraniums in these pots are such a marvelous color. What gorgeous stone pots,” she said. “Did all these Provençal dishes come with the rental? These bowls with the ear-shaped handles on either side are fantastic. They call them elephant ears.” She tried to pronounce “elephant ears” in French—“oreilles d’éléphant”—but it sounded so out of tune that I winced.
Three spoonfuls of jam came into my mouth, one after the other.
“Keep your eyes closed,” said Elisabeth. “Don’t cheat. Concentrate on the flavor. Is it sweet? A bit sour maybe? And the texture. Are there strings, berries, flecks of fruit? Which one do you prefer?”
The first two were very sweet and unfamiliar. I didn’t like them. The last spoonful I recognized. It expanded inside me into a giant memory of Papa. He loved this taste too. Our old kitchen sprung up behind my closed eyes. We were sitting there at the breakfast table, with crumbs and jam smears on our plates. We were back together having toast with butter and jam. He was touching a light-yellow napkin to his chin, which was dark from stubble because he was working from home. I was thirteen. He was handing me the first volume of Search, Swann’s Way. It was a Folio Classique paperback with a picture of a little boy in a blue-and-white-striped shirt and navy sailor jacket. In French, the title is Du côté de chez Swann. The boy on the book has dark hair and gray eyes, like Papa and me.
Papa said, “This is the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.” His voice was deep and a little shaky, like a lake in a breeze. He was speaking softly, even though there was no one in the house to be quiet for since there were only the two of us. “Between us, let’s call it Search. In my opinion, it’s the greatest book ever written. It says the most about life, the most about pain, and the most about the way our minds can make us happy.”
Two years later he was gone. I miss him more than anything.
I opened my eyes and made the effort to say, “Elisabeth, I prefer the third jam.”
“You see, Mom.” Elisabeth laughed. “He does prefer the rhubarb after all. You don’t have a monopoly on it. Martin has his own mind. Give him some credit!”
“Yay, Martin!” Fuchsia chimed in.
Fuchsia is not a total stranger because I have watched her seven times in Mom’s movie about Henry VIII. She hovers on the skin of my bubble. I can see her, but not for very long.
I remembered from the movie that she was pretty with sparkly blue eyes and those big breasts. I knew I should look at her, since she had congratulated me. I tried for her face, but ended up staring at her chest instead. The breasts were confusing now in a white T-shirt instead of squished forward and laced up in period costume, but they were recognizable.
Fuchsia does not drink coffee, so she was having a verveine infusion with breakfast. I wished I could smile up at her blue eyes, but it wasn’t happening. Instead, I forced myself to shift focus from her breasts to her herbal tea. At first, this wasn’t easy. Then I got interested in watching the dead leaves. They were expanding in the boiling water as though they were coming back to life. “Those leaves of yours are embalmed spring evenings,” I said. I was quoting Marcel.
“Wow,” she said to Mom, “you did tell me he was special. He sure is!”
Special is one of the words I have no picture for. It doesn’t attach to anything in my mind. People call me “special” a lot, and I can’t understand it. When I hear “special,” I see blobs.
I stopped worrying about Fuchsia. I put rhubarb jam on my croissant and winked across time at Papa.
10:15 p.m.
This afternoon, I felt Gilberte’s eyes on my back, and I whipped around to look for her.
I was wandering through the hawthorn bushes down the road from our cottage, listening to Vinteuil’s sonata, when her gaze landed. I turned, but there were only the white flowers with white spray in their centers. Thousands of white flowers and no girl.
When I couldn’t see her, I even took my headphones off in the middle of the second movement so that I could hear her if she crunched the ground running away. I hate interrupting my music. It hurts. So there was something very important going on to make me do it.
I took off my headphones and let my brain rip as the music pulled away from it. I had to suffer to give myself the chance to hear her footsteps or to catch sight of her face. In her own strange way, she was saying hello, and I had to show her that I was paying attention. I started pushing branches aside, like I could somehow rustle her up if I made enough commotion. I had to meet her.
Only I didn’t meet her.
I met Elisabeth, who usually makes me happy, but not this time, because she was not Gilberte. Elisabeth came walking up to me in the hawthorns, holding her giant chemistry book with the blue molecule on the cover. Her ponytail was looser and lower than usual, so that her free hair made a pretty red-gold spray around her face. I noticed that her arms, neck, and legs were less pale than usual. They are turning a dusty gold, probably because she is doing most of her work on the terrace or by the pool.
Elisabeth was wearing her red dress, which I have seen eight times and have grown to love. She sewed it herself. It has little white flowers shaped the same as the blossoms on the hawthorn bushes. She saw me looking from the blossoms on her dress to the real live ones on the bushes and back. I liked the repetition of the patterns.
“Can you tell I’m trying to blend into the landscape with my flowery dress?” She smiled. She smiles a lot, and when she does, her upper lip pulls way up to show her gums. She says she can’t help it. She’s a mostly happy person even though she has a brother who is fixated on a hundred-year-old French novel and repeats a lot of what she says back to her. “You, of all people, should appreciate my effort to celebrate the flowers,” she said.
“Celebrate the flowers,” I repeated, because it sounded so nice.
Elisabeth is very smart. She’s becoming a psychiatrist, like Maeva. She finished high school a whole semester early so that she could come on location with Mom and me before she does her summer internship in a hospital and then goes to college at Stanford. After Stanford, she will go to medical school. I don’t want her to leave us, and that’s one of the reasons she has come to France: to say good-bye to me.
I did not finish my year at The Center early. I am following along with my classwork from here, emailing assignments. The Center is still my school. It’s a very small school for kids with challenges. I’ve been there since kindergarten. Mom is very involved and helps with fundraising by inviting all of her famous friends to the annual benefit. Papa used to be involved too. He used to volunteer every Tuesday and Thursday morning in the library.
The lycée in Chenonceaux is not my real school. It is the place I go to practice French and perhaps to make some friends. I could never actually do the work there. I’m not general-ed enough.
In the bushes today, Elisabeth told me, “You’re lucky you have your bubble because you can keep me inside, close to you all the time. I’m not going anywhere!”
