by Hilary Reyl
Although I’m not used to sophisticated emotions in myself, I am ready for them from all my reading. It might not look like it, but people like Layla and me are pretty well equipped to deal with melodrama.
“Do you want to sit together at lunch?” Gilberte asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Okay. See you later in the cafeteria.”
“Okay.”
After math and history, Gilberte found me at the entrance to the cafeteria. She said she was sorry, but she had to grab a sandwich and take off. She needed to go study for a contrôle, which is a test. She’d only found out about it this morning on account of missing school these past days. She asked if I was on Facebook. I said no. So she told me her number and I added her to my contacts. I immediately texted her: coucou from Marcel. Then I sent another, corrected message: coucou from Martin.
So who are you? she wrote back. Marcel or Martin?
I’m Martin. Nice to meet you, Gilberte.
You think I look like a Gilberte? she typed. She was smiling, and her freckles—she really does have freckles—glittered.
Oui.
Okay A+
It took me a while to figure out A+. A+, or À plus, is short for À plus tard, which means “Until later” or “See you later.” French kids use it the way American kids use later, as in “Later, dude.”
I’m not so up on abbreviations. Simon seems to have figured this out from the start. He always spells stuff out for me in his texts. To Gilberte I must seem normal enough to be okay with French texting shorthand. I’m flattered.
She said she would text me later about a plan for tomorrow after school. A group of kids might be going to the pool.
After school, to distract myself from the crazy anticipation of Gilberte’s text, I put on my headphones, took a walk down the road, and picked a bunch of hawthorns from the bushes. I found some pink blossoms mixed in with the white ones. I put them in a vase on the kitchen table. Their odor is bitter and sweet like almonds. They remind me of something. Everything reminds me of something right now. The whole world is full of meanings.
Back at home, I waited for her message. I was in the kitchen staring at my blank phone screen, smelling the pink and white hawthorns. I was alone. Elisabeth was at the château with Mom, watching a scene that was shooting in one of the bedrooms with the canopies and Flemish tapestries she used to dream about.
I tried to stop myself from imagining what Gilberte might write, because anything that I came up with could never become real. And even if she did send one of the texts I was trying not to write in my head, I would then be upset because it wasn’t original.
The phone vibrated. It was Gilberte.
Piscine demain 17. Pool tomorrow at 5:00 p.m.
I need to answer her in a way that is poetic, yet cool. I want to make her understand that I have seen her before many times in my dreams, that we are actually meeting again, and not for the first time.
How about, Like the odor of hawthorn, I keep losing and finding you again?
Nope. Too flowery. Maybe something about the flow of water in the pool? The perpetual alliteration between the water, without consistency, which our cupped hands cannot capture, and the clear plastic of our goggles . . .
Nope. Nope. Nope. That’s way too many words. I don’t have a model for this. The greatest work in French literature at my fingertips and there’s nothing I can use. This is crazy.
Maybe an emoji? A thumbs-up or a smiling face?
No. I can usually rely on emojis, but they don’t feel right here.
I need Elisabeth to help me. Or Layla. I message them together: What should I text the girl of my dreams?
Are you talking about Gilberte? writes Layla, who is familiar with my characters, even though she hasn’t read Search.
Yes, I answer. Gilberte Swann.
How is she?
She’s great. I need to answer a text from her about meeting at the pool. There’s a big public pool here that is kind of a hangout place. She asked me to go tomorrow. Help!
Now Elisabeth chimes in: Keep it simple.
Nothing more from Layla, which is not like her.
Elisabeth’s advice to keep it simple appears as a giant poster in my mind. I stare straight at it, search my soul for simplicity, and find it.
I answer Gilberte’s text: A+
Thursday, June 2
1:15 p.m.
I barely got any sleep last night.
Layla sent me four piano videos. Her fingers danced easily over the black and white keys. The first song was “Michelle” by the Beatles. She wrote a tag-line for it: Sorry, this was the closest I could come to an appropriate love song. Gilberte seems to be an unsung name. How do you explain this?
The next three songs came with no messages and were in this order: “Wild Horses,” “Memory Motel,” and “Angie.” They came at ninety-minute intervals. Each time, I responded with my usual thank you.
Halfway between “Wild Horses” and “Memory Motel,” I sat up in a panic because I realized that I’d completely missed something major Gilberte had told me. I’d been so into my connection between her baby sister and Simon’s baby brother that I hadn’t paid attention when she’d said that her parents were “doing some important planting.” In between Layla’s songs, I suddenly remembered. Questions about planting kept me awake. Are they farmers? Landscape architects? I need to know.
In the third section of Search, which happens in Paris, Marcel finally meets Gilberte. They cross paths in the Champs-Élysées, where they both go with their governesses on sunny afternoons. They start hanging out in the same group of kids. He’s always taken her for more of a fantasy than a reality. And suddenly she’s in his world. He gets curious about every part of her life. His happiness each day depends on whether or not she shows up in the park. He’s in love. She’s nice to him, but she also makes it clear that she has a lot going on outside the park that he is not part of. She has a whole other life, and this drives him crazy.
Marcel gets fascinated by every detail about Gilberte. He stares at the map of Paris to find the address of her house. He imagines the lives of her parents. Her father, Mr. Swann, starts to seem like a major historical figure. And Marcel follows her mother, Odette, around on her strolls through the Bois de Boulogne in her fancy clothes.
Marcel starts acting like Mr. Swann did back when he was in love with Odette. He obsesses over the parts of Gilberte’s life that he is shut out from. He loses interest in anything that isn’t about her. Everything he does is a ploy to get people to talk about her and her parents. He wants to hear their names and cross their paths.
I’m obsessed too. I want to know all about her family. I love the fact that her parents do “planting,” even if I’m not sure what kind or what it means. It’s exciting to get closer. Because it makes me feel like I could actually touch her. Pull her into me.
My body craves the unknown. I’ve never craved the unknown before. I’ve always hidden from it. This is totally new.
And yet there is also something disappointing about the “planting,” because planting parents obviously aren’t Mr. and Mrs. Swann. The Swanns were not any kind of professional planters. They weren’t professional anything. They didn’t have jobs. Odette was a “kept woman” before she became Mrs. Swann, and Mr. Swann was just plain rich.
Gilberte does not look rich. She wears cheap clothes, even if they are fantastic on her. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need a rich girl. It’s just that not being rich takes Gilberte a step away from Search.
Is getting to know Gilberte going to break too much with my story? Worrying about this, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed around in my bed. I kept going over stuff.
At 4:00 a.m., I found a new way to think about it: So my Gilberte doesn’t match the original. But she can still give me the same emotions that Marcel’s Gilberte gave him. This is all I need. The bigger story says that I love everything about her, that I care about all parts of her life and the people she’s closest to. Even
if they are planters.
By the time Layla played “Angie,” I felt a little better about Gilberte. But I still couldn’t sleep because there was something else.
Asparagus Man was in our cottage. From not looking at him, I know his voice better than his face. I heard him talking and laughing with Mom after her car and his noisy equipment van pulled up last night at 11:45. Then I never heard him say good-bye from outside my window. I never heard the van start again and then fade away. So, unless I fell deep asleep without realizing it, he is still here. I can’t see the driveway from my window to check right now, but I’m positive the stupid black van hasn’t left.
This sort of thing has happened a few times before. It doesn’t last. Even so, I hate it.
When Elisabeth knocked on my door to wake me up for school this morning, I asked her to come into my room. I told her I couldn’t go to school today because I hadn’t slept and I needed to rest up for the pool later, at five. Then I asked her if there was a man here.
First Elisabeth came back at me with her own questions: “Why don’t you ask Mom yourself?” “Why don’t you go down and see?” Then she realized she was being mean because she was in a bad mood. I could tell because she suddenly made her tone more gentle. “Yes, Joe’s downstairs having breakfast with Mom. He’s actually not that bad. Even so, my guess is you’re not up to seeing him right now. Don’t freak out. He and Mom will leave soon. They are doing a big garden scene today. He’s the head cameraman, in case you were wondering.”
All I could think of to say was, “Hide the rhubarb jam! It’s almost gone!”
She burst out laughing. At least I was cheering her up.
“We can get more jam, Martin,” she reassured me. “They have it in the village. At the bakery. Where they have beautiful madeleines, by the way.”
“You have seen the madeleines in the window.” I took a beat to try to fix my pronoun from you to I, but it was no use. “That jam is yours and your mother’s. Asparagus Man can have the other kinds. He can have the apricot or the plum. Not the rhubarb.”
“Whoa, personal-pronoun alert! Where did I go? And what do you mean about asparagus? Who’s eating asparagus?”
This was too much.
“Sorry!” I screamed. “I mean the jam is my—you know what I mean! It’s also Papa’s. Papa’s rhubarb jam for toast with butter with me. You happy with the pronouns now?”
She tried to distract me. “Is that supposed to be Gilberte?” she asked, looking at the postcard I was holding. I was staring at it to block out visions of Asparagus Man in my house.
My postcard is from the Botticelli fresco in the Sistine Chapel called Events in the Life of Moses. It shows Zephora, the same Zephora that Mr. Swann pictured when he fell for Odette. She’s by a well with her sister. Moses is there too, helping them give water to their sheep. Zephora has big eyes; a delicate face; very pale skin; long, shiny curls; and long, tired cheeks.
“It’s a painting of Gilberte’s mother, Odette,” I said, relieved to be back in the world of facts. “This is what makes Mr. Swann, who is Gilberte’s dad, understand that he loves Odette. At first Mr. Swann isn’t even attracted to Odette. Then he notices that Odette looks like Zephora from this fresco by Botticelli. He changes his mind and starts to love her. It’s magic. At first, Mr. Swann loves Odette because she looks like this painting, but eventually Mr. Swann loves the painting because it is a painting of her. Isn’t that cool? Proust calls it transubstantiation!”
“Wow, dude. I’m not sure I follow you. Why do you care so much about Gilberte’s mother? Have you even met her mother?”
“I’m very, very interested in her mother.”
“Kinky,” Elisabeth said.
Then I identified embarrassment followed by a flight instinct. “You sure you’re not going to school?” She talked quickly, not even waiting for an answer. “I’ll be downstairs working if you change your mind.”
There is so much stuff that people don’t want to say.
Proust doesn’t tell everything in Search. He focuses on a few scenes. He goes into such detail that it feels like they have covered years instead of moments. Most everything else that happens is left out, but you don’t miss it, the way you don’t miss all the stuff that isn’t in your favorite painting or all the rooms that aren’t in your favorite house. Sometimes the absent stuff turns out to matter in the end. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Friday, June 3
6:30 p.m.
Yesterday, even though I didn’t go to school, I went to the pool to meet Gilberte. Simon was there too with some other kids.
I felt comfortable enough with Gilberte and Simon that I was able to take in their friends: Georges, Michel, Kevin (that’s a popular American name here, from TV), and black-and-purple-haired Marianne. There was the usual volley of Ça va, which gave me time to adjust.
The boys are as narrow and hollow-chested as figures from a Giotto painting. It must be all the smoking. Marianne is a bit fuller, but not much. I had already hung out with these kids in the cafeteria, the hallways, and the classrooms at school, so I wasn’t freaking. There wasn’t nearly as big a crowd at the pool as on the weekend. The towel mosaic around the deck wasn’t so hard to get through.
There were a couple of cracks about how I had ditched school but had somehow made it to the pool. I was able to smile at these cracks, which gave me hope. Still, I got nervous. So I put on my goggles and swam some hundreds in individual medley order—butterfly, back, breast, free—while my “friends” splashed around and sunbathed. The pool is twenty-five meters here instead of the American twenty-five yards. This makes it two strokes longer than at home.
One thing that helps me pass in a general-ed world is that I’m coordinated. I’m strong and pretty good at sports. This is thanks to Papa.
When I was diagnosed, the psychologists told my parents that passing a ball back and forth with me was the most basic form of therapy. It forced me to look at the person I was catching from, follow the ball, and again look at the person I was throwing to. Keeping eye contact was key, they said. They also explained that playing catch is something done by two or more people: it’s started by one person, finished by another person, and so on. The game would teach me that I was a body separate from my parents and that we could perform tasks by working together.
To Mom and Papa, this ball thing sounded absurdly obvious. Then they tried it. And they saw right away that it wasn’t obvious to me at all. That’s when they realized that I had no idea what was going on in the world outside me, even though I could sing “Au clair de la lune” perfectly and recite the whole book Goodnight Moon.
Papa said that, at first, even throwing me the ball was much too complicated. One of them had to roll it while the other one held me in place to catch it. If I wasn’t held facing the ball, I would look away or even wander off. I didn’t get it. Mom and Papa were told to roll the ball toward me. If I didn’t react, they were supposed to put the ball in my hands and help me hold on to it, then to react with loud praise as though I had caught it myself.
The positive reinforcement, the psychologists said, would eventually work backward. In the end, I, myself, would want to play catch.
Papa has told me this was a scary time for Mom and him. It was a time when they understood that they’d been fooled—or had been fooling themselves—into believing I was a normal kid who happened to have a rich inner life. When they let themselves see that I wasn’t going to be okay unless they burst my bubble, they had to change the whole way they thought about raising kids. They couldn’t sit back and let me be me. They had to interfere. It sounded horrible. Violent.
Papa said that the therapists turned out to be right about what they called “physical prompting.” He’d been skeptical about moving my body into position like a puppet’s. But it worked. I learned very fast to throw and catch the ball and to point in Goodnight Moon to the mittens, the socks, the toy house, and the little mouse, instead of staring into space, reciting the rhyming words like m
usic.
Papa said I finally began to look at him for more than a few seconds at a time. He has talked a lot about my early years. Explaining it all to me helps him. I’ve always tried to understand what he means and then to repeat it back to him.
It’s hard to figure out which memories are Papa’s and which are mine, but I do have one clear and happy memory of standing in a small circle in our living room, with Papa, Mom, and Elisabeth, passing a ball. Everyone is saying “Bravo” to everyone else. It’s great.
Now I’m pretty good at tennis. And softball, basketball, and volleyball. Nothing special, but I’m never the last one to get picked for the team.
Another thing that they told Mom and Papa to do was to take me to swimming classes. They said it would be good for my self-awareness if I learned to follow directions with my body. And a pool, where I couldn’t run away and had to give in to being held and having my body moved in time to the teacher’s directions, was the perfect place for me to get started. Mom couldn’t take me to swim class because of her career, but Papa was already working at home by then—he was managing money, part-time, for a fund—so that he could be there for me. He took me to the swimming lessons, which were a big success. Even if, according to Papa, the first thing I did was memorize the songs—“The Engine on the Bus Goes Splash Splash Splash” and “Everybody Do the Monkey in the Swimming Pool”—the classes worked.
Now I swim with a team for normal kids, although I avoid swim meets because of the commotion (all those loud whistles and strangers’ bodies). Swimming keeps me fit. Not that I’m super muscular, but I’m not as skinny as the French Giotto boys. I think Gilberte has noticed.
Gilberte’s very brown eyes were on me when I pulled myself up out of the water after my laps. They grazed my back, the same as in the hawthorns. This time, she was still there when I turned around. I lit up inside.
I had done about a kilometer in the pool. Not far, but enough to steady my nerves. I lay my towel near Simon’s and Gilberte’s. My towel was light blue. His was gray with white stripes and hers was yellow with big purple stars.
