by Hilary Reyl
“You’re a good swimmer,” Marianne said from two towels away. Her hair covered half her face like a dark sheet. “Can I take a picture of you?”
“Sure.”
Marianne stood up and pointed her phone at me. The other kids nodded and mumbled that yeah, this American can swim. Kevin popped a Coke can.
“Thanks,” I said. “I swim on a team at home, in the States.”
“So, is it true,” Simon asked, “that Peter Bird is leaving already? He must have a small part?”
“Yeah, he goes next week,” I said. “He doesn’t have that many scenes. So, they can shoot them all in a few days.”
“You mean, they don’t shoot the scenes in order?” asked Marianne.
“No, you idiot,” said Simon. Then he changed his tone to ask me another question. “He plays Henri II, right?”
“Yeah,” Gilberte chimed in. “My dad saw him dying in the Green Garden yesterday. Well, not really dying, but staggering around from his wounds. I guess he was about to die. Dad said it was cool.”
“Your dad was at Chenonceau yesterday?” I asked, too loudly. I couldn’t help it.
“He works there,” she said. “Both my parents do. They’re gardeners.”
“That’s where they plant? At the castle? At Chenonceau? That’s incredible!” I yelled.
Everyone laughed except me.
“Why is this incredible to you?” Simon finally asked. “A lot of people’s families work at the château. It’s boring. You’re the one whose family is doing something that’s interesting.” He tried to make eye contact with me. I was almost able to meet him. “By the way,” he said, “we were wondering if there is going to be any kind of party when Peter leaves? Have you heard about anything going on for him?”
Moth wings were beating around me, but I didn’t care. These kids were cool. And they were talking to me. “I’m sure my mom will plan something. Maybe it will even be at our place. If it’s at our place, do you want to come?”
There was silence from the towels. I figured they weren’t interested in something as unglamorous as dinner on our terrace. But then, when Simon spoke for the group, I heard nervous excitement. “Yeah, sure, we’ll come,” he said. Then he added, “And, by the way, I’m having a party at my place a week from Saturday. You’ll come, right? My mom is leaving town with my brother, and my dad is never here.”
I did not ask why his dad is never here, because I know he is in jail. But then Simon said, “My dad’s a trucker. He’s always on the road.”
I did not contradict him. All I said was “My dad’s not around either.”
Simon did not get angry. “So, you’ll come?” he asked.
“Sure, I’ll come to your party,” I said.
“Okay, good,” said Simon.
Gilberte asked if I wanted to go to the snack bar with her. I said that would be great.
In line, I told her, looking right into her freckled face, how awesome it is that her parents plant flowers at Chenonceau. I said I would look up the names of the plants there and go see Mom on set tomorrow so that I could check out the gardens.
“Let’s be clear,” she said. “It’s much cooler that your mother is shooting a movie with Baxter Wolff, Fuchsia Davis, and Gloria Seegar than that my parents are planting flowers.”
“I disagree,” I said.
She laughed. She said Mom’s movie was way more important than her parents digging the same holes and planting the same plants every year. “Your mother makes decisions about how everyone looks in a movie and what everyone does in a scene. My parents put flowers exactly where they are told. It’s no big deal what they do.”
I would not back down. I said her parents’ jobs had “prestige.”
She shrugged. “What do you want to eat?” she asked.
“I want a Nutella crêpe, please,” I said. “What I mean about your parents is that whatever touches on your life is interesting to me.”
She laughed again, this time with what I recognized as discomfort, but I couldn’t stop myself. I said I’d be interested in where her father went to the dentist. I’d like to follow her mother around while she shopped. “Don’t you see, it’s because they get to live with you? That makes them wonderful to me.”
“You don’t even know me!” As she said it, she came two steps closer so that I could see the pores in her skin. Which must mean that she could see my pores too. Wasn’t this knowing each other?
“You’re right. I don’t know you in a normal way,” I said. My breath was brushing up against her face and rustling her damp hair. I loved having her this close. “I feel like I’ve been friends with you for a long time. That’s why I am comfortable inviting you to my house for the party or any time you want to come. Usually it takes me months or years to open up to people. With you, there is no time. I recognized you in the hawthorn bushes from the feel of your eyes.”
“The hawthorn bushes? What hawthorn bushes?” Her eyes left my face and started darting all around, like mine when I want to escape.
I stuck to my version of things. “Last week, when you watched me in that patch of hawthorn bushes near where I live. You must have been taking a walk?”
“Oh, yeah, the hawthorn bushes,” she mumbled. She looked down at the ground. “So, that’s why you’re inviting us to the party? Because of when we almost met in the hawthorn bushes?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
She didn’t say anything, and I got scared she would run away, so I tried to say something normal.
“Do your parents like their work?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away. Then she took a deep breath. “It’s a precise job and they are precise people. So I guess it fits their personalities. The vacation time is good, and the retirement is as good as if they worked for the state. So that’s good too, I guess. Mostly, they can be precise, which they like. I wouldn’t like it, but they do.”
“I appreciate precision very much,” I said.
“I’m not sure I do,” she said. “It bugs me sometimes, how neat the French gardens are, all those perfect triangles and straight lines of plane trees. It doesn’t ever bug you that it’s so artificial? It seems old-fashioned and boring.”
“I love artifice. I’d much rather have artifice than those pretend fake-natural English Romantic gardens. With a French garden, there is romance.”
She interrupted me. “Here are our crêpes.”
She let me pay for them.
Hers was filled with crème de marrons. Chestnut puree.
I debated asking Gilberte what her last name is, but I didn’t. I am putting off the not-Swann-ness of it for a little longer. We sat down on a bench to eat.
Through mouthfuls of my crêpe, which was good, I kept insisting that the gardens of Chenonceau were way more epic than any costume drama full of American actors.
“Okay,” she finally said, flapping her crêpe at me. I thought I recognized the exhaustion that I get from Mom and Elisabeth when I’ve been rambling.
I had an idea to get us out of our rut. “Do you want to hear something pretty?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
I went to get my iPod from my swim bag. I handed her the right earbud and put the left one in my left ear. She put hers in her right ear and said, “I’m ready.”
I started playing my sonata. At the beginning, her eyes moved all around. Then they settled on something high up and distant.
I watched her listen. Gilberte and I were having the same experience, but we were also having different experiences. I don’t know her well enough to feel how this music affects her. Maybe I’ll never know anyone that well. But I want to try.
After four minutes, she whispered, “This is beautiful. I love violins.” Then she did not speak again for the entire twenty-three minutes that remained of the piece.
We ate our crêpes slowly while we listened. She looked at her high place and I looked at her. Thin wires connected us and kept us close.
When it was
over, she took out her earbud and handed it to me slowly. Her fingers stayed for a beat in my palm. She said, “Thank you,” very softly. Then, louder, she said the music was very familiar, but she couldn’t remember where she had heard it. She said she only ever liked classical music if she had heard it before.
I said I was the same way. I almost told her Marcel was too.
I was so happy, I knew it couldn’t last, so I said I should get going soon.
She touched my palm again. “Maybe if you are so interested in the gardens at Chenonceau, we could go together sometime?” she said.
I couldn’t answer out loud, but I smiled.
Saturday, June 4
11:00 p.m.
Since I learned about Gilberte’s parents gardening at Chenonceau, I have been reading about the different gardens. A guidebook I found in the cottage where we are staying calls the château’s grounds “a veritable theater of green, covering over 12,000 square meters.”
The names of its gardens are glowing in my head. Here is a list: the Green Garden, the Italian Maze, the Garden of Wonders, Diane’s Garden, Catherine’s Garden.
Here is a list of some of the flowers for the summer planting: petunias, tobacco, Lilliput dahlias, impatiens, verveine, begonias. And here is a list of the trees in the Green Garden: three plane trees, three blue cedar trees, two magnolias, one Spanish fir tree, one catalpa, one chestnut tree, two Douglas fir trees, two sequoias, one two-hundred-year-old holm oak tree, one white acacia, one black walnut tree.
The fact that Gilberte’s parents are gardeners at Chenonceau is the most amazing coincidence. My own mother happens to be filming in the exact place where the people closest to Gilberte spend their days. The chances that Mom and her crew have crossed paths with them are excellent. In fact, they are probably crossing paths a lot because this is the busiest time of year in the gardens. And it’s a time when Mom is shooting lots of exterior scenes. Gilberte’s mother and father are helping to plant one hundred thirty thousand plants for summer, getting the place ready for tourist season. They couldn’t miss work, which barely happens in France, even to take care of a sick baby. I’m hoarding this information like treasure.
Monsieur and Madame Gilberte are so lucky to be inside Gilberte’s life. They know the details that escape me because I only get to see her in glimpses. I picture Gilberte’s father high on a ladder, pruning the acacia. Her mother is planting petunias in a bed. Her parents are historical figures in the garden, as real as Diane de Poitiers, Henri II, and Catherine de Médicis. It’s like I’ve read a series of books on them and am fascinated by every fact I can find out about their lives. Nothing is too small.
Now my family has a connection to Gilberte’s family. I have a real chance to become an intime. I can go to Chenonceau any time I want, in order to spot her parents, without looking like I have a weird motive. I have a perfect excuse: my mom is directing a movie there. I can roam the place. I can brush up against Gilberte’s parents, say hello, ask them about the flowers, then start a conversation about Gilberte and what she eats for breakfast and what they talk about at home.
This is what it’s like to be a moth.
I texted Mom at work today to ask if there is going to be a party at our house for Peter Bird before he takes off.
She texted back, Let’s do something mellow for Peter, at home. Would you want to cook?
Sure.
What will you make?
Fish soup, I answered. Can I invite some friends?
OF COURSE!
Sunday, June 5
3:40 p.m.
I don’t want to talk about my dream, but I will mention it. I’ve been dreaming about Gilberte for two years. Now that she’s real, the dreams are stronger. This one involved the pool and the towels.
The dream made me upset because it gave me the feeling that I wanted something different from what Gilberte wanted, and that I was pushing her around. I felt violent in a way that isn’t me. At least not when I’m awake.
I called Maeva as soon as it was late enough. I told her I’d had an upsetting dream about Gilberte. She said you can’t control dreams.
I said I knew that, but what if my dreams are showing that there’s something wrong?
She didn’t ask me to tell her the dream. She asked what was going on with Gilberte in real life.
I told her about the pool and the gardening and about sharing the sonata. This made me feel better because I realized how different reality is from what I was picturing. While I was talking, I felt the way I did when we were Skyping with the life-skills group. Like I was already a different version of me from the Martin who called Maeva up in a panic.
I told her thank you.
She said to try not to be too literal-minded about my dreams.
I hung up. I started thinking. Even though we seem out of touch with reality, Layla and I are both what they call literal-minded. But we are literal-minded about stories that aren’t real, and this can be confusing. It would seem more logical to people if we were excellent at math, for example. But we are not especially good at math. The only way I can put it is this: we take our stories literally.
The best way for me to explain is to give an example from Layla’s life. This is how she came to grips with Matthew’s death.
When Layla first saw the images of Matthew after his car accident, things made no sense.
After a few seconds, she could decode the blood, the glazed-over eyes, and the body on the side of the country lane as “dead Matthew.” She saw it all too large to understand how it fit the plot of Downton Abbey. She had an insect’s view of the scene. Way too much detail. No perspective. It was upsetting because she loved Matthew. She got that what was happening was bad, but she didn’t understand what it meant. She told me there was a rush of red behind her eyes along with confusion. Would Matthew vanish now? It took going over all that had happened leading into the scene for her to see that there was “tragic irony” here. There was tragic irony because Matthew had just come from seeing his wife and newborn baby son, and over the past year he had survived World War I. He’d miraculously recovered from an injury that had almost left him paralyzed. So his death was a cruel twist of fate. For us to understand this took a lot of time and concentration. It was not automatic at all.
The next level of understanding for Layla to work through was this: she learned from fan sites that the actor who played Matthew, Dan Stevens, wanted to be off the show to “pursue other projects.” He had a part in a movie called Summer in February. He apologized to his upset fans for dying on them so suddenly.
When Layla read this on the internet, she recognized a pattern: other actors make this same choice once they get famous on TV. For example, the actress who played Sybil, the youngest of Downton’s three sisters, Jessica Brown Findlay in real life, also decided to pursue Hollywood projects, and so she also died on the show. She died while she was having a baby. This is called “killing off” a character. It happens because an actor wants to leave a show or because a show wants to fire an actor. Regular people know all this without even realizing it. It is second nature. Layla had to learn about killing off characters from the inside out. And then she had to teach it to me.
Now I’m trying to teach myself not to believe my dream of doing things to Gilberte with towels at the pool while she is wearing her white bikini. It’s all just images. Like TV.
Monday, June 6
7:20 p.m.
School is less uncomfortable. It’s happening in fast-forward.
I don’t participate in class, but none of the French kids do either. Teachers here don’t care what students think. Students in France are supposed to absorb information, not experiment with self-expression. Which suits me fine. Besides, since I’m sending in my work to The Center, I’m not doing any actual work in the lycée. I don’t hand in papers or take tests or get grades. I’m only going along for the ride. I sometimes do my Center work during class, but mostly I try to soak in all the French. I mean, French the way people actu
ally speak it these days, not a hundred years ago. Concentrating on following subjects in another language gives me a distance that I like. Translation is a perfect buffer for a kid like me. The force field between French and English. It protects me.
At first, I was a shadow presence in school. I’m getting more solid now. I have my little lunch crowd that I sit with. There are six kids I say hi to regularly in the yard and the hallways. And I’m not only saying hi to their shoes anymore. I wouldn’t call myself “adjusted,” but I would say that I am getting used to general-ed. None of it seems quite so drastic.
Layla doesn’t seem happy about this. Today, when I texted her about the party at our house for Peter and told her that my friends are going to come, she texted back: Beware of moths.
I answered: They may be moths, but they are also friends. Like you are a moth and a friend.
It is rare to be both.
How can you be sure?
Do you think our phones are instruments of communication or torture?
Before I could text her back again, Layla called me. I stared at the ringing phone in disbelief. Even Layla and I get that teenagers don’t talk on the phone. Our life is epistolary. So the ringing, with a close-up of her big green eyes and clumpy lashes filling up my screen, was totally weird.
I answered.
“Layla, what’s up?” I tried to sound casual.
“Please, don’t get all neurotypical on me, Martin. I’m worried about you. I’m calling to warn you. They are moths, Martin, and not friends. They only want you around because of who your mom is. They are probably laughing at you behind your back.”
I could picture her curled up on the enormous brown suede sofa facing the giant screen in her basement. She looked very small, and she was kneading her big hands together the way she does when she is anxious, so that her knuckles went up and down uncontrollably, like waves.
