“Alors, c’est chic ta nouvelle adresse.”
“Assez chic, oui.” My new address was chic enough.
Who was this lady I was working for in such a posh part of town? Was she rich? Did she buy lots of jewelry? Because Étienne was about to start a jewelry line, part precious, part objets trouvés.
Very postmodern, I said.
Did he actually want to engage with me? Why was I so afraid? I was no longer the little girl he could tease in a Paris that belonged to him.
He sang the word “postmodern” back to me several times before he declared that he would call his jewelry line “PoMo” and thanked me for the inspiration although he wasn’t exactly sure what the term meant (I did not believe him) because he hadn’t gone to college (probably true). He hadn’t even gotten his high school baccalaureate. Had I heard? His parents were devastated. They had always seen him as a fonctionnaire, somewhere deep in the postal system or maybe a prof de gym. They hoped he would follow them back to his roots in Orléans, build his own little house down the street from theirs. Here he made himself laugh very loud, and I could see his eleven-year-old neck arched way back, his tongue halfway out and shining.
At ten in the morning, he sounded like he was on speed. I understood why Solange and Jacques were worried.
“I’m just home from a big night,” he said. “Hey, we should go clubbing together sometime.”
“With pleasure.”
So, he was going to court me now. How odd.
“Yes,” he said, “you’ve always been eager to please.”
Was it that simple? I winced.
This was the slender and harsh boy with the pitch-dark lashes who had made it clear that he did not want to know me in the schoolyard, me, the milk-fed American cousin who did not know the élastique routines of the other girls and had visible knots in her hair and who studied so hard that his parents never stopped asking why he couldn’t be more like me. They pointed to the big books I read and my promising drawings. He was forced to be polite to me because I was a pauvre fille, a poor girl who was losing her father. Didn’t he know how lucky he was, they whispered, not to be abandoned? Mais elle me barbe, he said. She bores me.
Did he remember that I had gotten lice and he had called me dégueulasse? Did he recall that I would do anything for a chocolate éclair, even slip him the answers to a math test or hold hands for ten seconds with the dirty old man on the bench outside the hardware store while his friends watched? Did he know now that it wasn’t for the éclair but for love of him that I had been willing to prove so brave? I had simply been more mortified by my love than by the base act of accepting a pastry for my favors. Shame is good cover.
Now, though, over this phone eleven years later, he wanted to know me.
What was I doing this weekend?
He was having un petit dîner chez lui on Friday night. Would I come?
Two nights from now. I took a deep breath and asked what I could bring.
He said he loved champagne and that it would be great to see me after all this time. He hoped I was still cute. He gave me an address. The closest Métro was Bastille. And by the way, did the woman I worked for shoot publicités?
Absolutely not, I said. She’s not that kind of photographer. Then I told him I loved champagne too, although I’d only had the real kind once or twice. Maybe we would discover some affinities after all.
Once I had seen him, I would call his parents and make a plan to visit them in Orléans.
eleven
That evening, Clarence sent Claudia and me to a Pasolini movie about Christ’s life, scored with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He said it was heartbreakingly beautiful. He wanted to know how we would react.
As the movie played, black and white, lyrical, unstudied, cast with ordinary Italians playing peasants who were at once beatific and disillusioned, I recounted it to Olivier in my head. I saw his eyes react, his chin cocked in its listening pose. I had never been so focused—or so distracted.
Several times, the heat of Claudia’s gaze lit my face, and I swiveled to see her expression like that of the people on the screen watching Jesus suffer. Their eyes deepened to the swell of the gorgeous choruses, so that they looked both infinitely wise and clueless. Claudia’s pupils burned me with the same idiot understanding, blessed somehow, but also brutally judgmental.
I squirmed. Yet I was touched by her attention. I knew she could sense an obsession under my skin. I wanted to describe it to her, to tell her about Olivier, to begin to forge a real bond. And even though I couldn’t talk to her, her growing friendship was a comfort.
“What did you think of the film?” Claudia asked at a traffic light on the way home.
“Clarence was right. It was beautiful. The music and the faces were so full.”
She kept staring at me, waiting for me to break through my own babble.
“It seemed so innocent that I feel like it was kind of deceptive,” I blurted.
“Is it bad to be deceptive?” She was pushing me to confess whatever my secret was. I wanted to believe it was out of a growing intimacy, but I couldn’t be sure.
“It’s hard not to be a little deceptive,” I owned. “I’m not talking about lying really. Just that you can’t always bare your feelings like the people in that movie. You can’t be moved all the time. For me, it would be like I was always drawing, having this intense scruple about getting it exactly right. With no blurs. I’d go crazy. Life isn’t like that.”
“Ah, but you also go crazy in life with too much hiding. I think you will learn to be more relaxed as you get older, Katie.”
“I’m trying.” By this point, I had little idea what we were talking about, only the conviction that she was boring into my soul, and that, no matter how well-meaning she was, and how much I enjoyed her companionship, I wanted my soul to myself for the time being.
“I know you are trying,” she said gently.
Deciding perhaps that she had gone far enough for one evening, she let me be the rest of the way home.
Grateful for the simple sounds of traffic and footfall along the boulevard Raspail, I returned to my inner arguments about Olivier.
It wasn’t as if by going to the Fer à Cheval tomorrow, I might betray a friend. Portia was not my friend. She was a thin and imperious telephone voice with high boots, a blond face in an expensive frame in a house in New York City that had nothing to do with me. And Olivier did not love her. He’d made that very clear.
I told myself that seeing Olivier wasn’t wrong. It was my own business. If I were to give in to the temptation to confide in Claudia right now, she would tell Clarence, and I had a strong feeling that no matter how much he liked me he would not be sympathetic to my falling into the arms of his daughter’s ex-boyfriend.
Clarence and Claudia seemed the types to condone a romantic secret. Only not my particular one.
When Claudia and I arrived at the apartment, she made a lamb couscous, with raisins and chickpeas, while I clipped and read articles on Germany. I was familiar now with the names of the players, with Kohl and Honecker.
What had we thought of the Pasolini? asked Clarence as we ate. Did we like cinéma vérité? Did it make us feel truthful?
I said that there was something infuriating