Do I want to kiss my French tutor because I’ve had a fight with my wife, Jeremy thinks, or did I fight with my wife because I suddenly desire my French tutor?
It’s his last day with Chantal, and all he can think of is his mouth on hers.
Every other day he thought of conjugations and obscure nouns and colloquial expressions. Now he thinks of the space exposed by her open blouse, that blush of skin, the heat he feels when his eyes dip into the hollow of her neck.
During last night’s argument, while he and Dana walked along Paris-Plage, too late for the last métro, too drunk for safe conversation, he said, “I need quiet. Your life is too noisy.”
Did he mean that? Where did that come from? Had four days with Chantal-long, leisurely days of conversation-led to this clamoring in his mind?
In the middle of sloppy, drunken, angry sex, the kind of sex he and Dana never had, the kind that left them raw and panting, Dana had asked, “Are you leaving me?”
“No,” he assured her. “No. I love you. I’ll always love you.”
And now this: Chantal standing in front of him at the entrance of the métro station, her hair slipping out of its barrette so that wavy tendrils trace the lines of her long neck. Her sideways glance at him, as if to say, I know you now. I know something’s up. Her smell. He fell asleep last night imagining the smell of jasmine and green tea, some heady mix that he yearns for as he leans toward Chantal now, kissing her on both cheeks, no handshake today. It’s their last day together. In Paris.
Maybe it’s Paris that has me acting like a fool, Jeremy thinks. He looks around him and again, in an instant, he has that uncanny feeling that he’s seeing everything for the first time. It’s the surprise of it all, the non-Los Angeles of it, the new light, the old buildings, the discovery of learning a city by walking its streets.
Immediately he’s hounded by guilt, as if Dana can hear his thoughts. No, his life with her is certainly not bland. It’s not her. It’s Los Angeles. It’s Hollywood. He’d feel this way if he were suddenly transported to the Teton mountains.
But Chantal would not be standing in front of him in the Teton mountains.
“Our last day,” Chantal says in French. “Are you ready?”
There are so many things he can say. No, I am not ready for my French lessons to end. Yes, I am ready for you. No, I am not ready for my life to change. Yes, I am ready for you. No, I am not ready for Lindy, my stepdaughter, who showed up unexpectedly at the apartment last night with a newly shaved head. I am not ready for another night with the insufferable film crew.
“Qui,” he says. “Je suis prêt.”
The French tutor smiles her beguiling smile, and Jeremy relaxes for the first time this morning.
They are standing outside the métro in the Fifth Arrondissement. Each morning they meet at a different métro station. Chantal and Jeremy stroll the streets of Paris while they speak French. Jeremy likes this system and wonders if Chantal always does this with her students or if she invented this program when she first met Jeremy, four days ago, and saw that he was more comfortable while in motion. If only I could have learned while on the move when I was a kid, he thinks. I might have liked a walking school.
He doesn’t doubt that Chantal would be capable of knowing this about him in a few short hours. In these four days, she has found out that he likes to talk about architecture, about wood, about politics and literature. And so she has steered their conversations as well as their meanderings around Paris, suiting his needs without ever seeming to ask him what he would like to do.
Yesterday’s brilliant summer sky is gone and clouds have moved in. Chantal carries an umbrella. The air is thick with humidity and rich odors.
“We will start at the market,” Chantal says in French. “I will introduce you to the language of food.”
Jeremy had not told Chantal that he loves to cook. He smiles at her and nods, pleased to be at her side.
“I bought my husband a beautiful French girl for our anniversary,” Dana told their dinner companions last night.
“Not exactly,” Jeremy added.
“I wanted him to come with me on this shoot,” Dana explained, leaning conspiratorially toward the men and women at the table, her voice lowered as if sharing a secret. But they were the last patrons at the restaurant. Dana hadn’t finished filming until after ten o’clock. They began their dinner at 10:30 or so, and it was now almost one in the morning. The waiters lingered at the doorway to the kitchen, anxious to leave. “It’s our tenth anniversary-I wasn’t going to spend it alone in Paris.”
Dana is never alone. She has fellow actors and directors and agents and fans, so many fans that she is even recognized in this foreign city.
“I just finished a restoration project in Santa Barbara,” Jeremy said. “I was happy to come along.”
He cursed himself for feeling the need to remind their dinner companions that he too works, that he does have a life-and an artistic one at that. He doesn’t just follow Dana around from one movie location to the next. But they paid no attention to him. They waited to hear about the beautiful French girl. Jeremy wished he were back at the hotel with Dana, in bed, alone at last.
“But what could he do all day in Paris while I’m filming?” Dana said to the group. “Well, Pascale gave me the name of a language school and I set him up with a full week of private tutoring. While I’m working he’s learning the language of love with someone named Chantal.”
She spread the name open like it too was a gift: “Chan-t-a-a-al.”
“Not quite,” Jeremy said. He’s accustomed to his wife’s stories, the way they grow. By tomorrow night Chantal might be the most beautiful woman in all of France. “We haven’t yet discussed love,” he explained.
Everyone was charmed.
“Thank God I trust you the way I do,” Dana added.
“My stepdaughter would like to meet us for coffee,” Jeremy tells Chantal, in French, as they walk toward the steep hill of rue Mouffetard. Jeremy can see the long line of food stalls ahead; he can hear a man calling out, “Cerises! Melons!” Jeremy can understand Chantal’s French with surprising ease, but he’s lost with heavy accents or rapid-fire patter.
“How old is your stepdaughter?”
“She’s twenty,” Jeremy says. “She left me a note this morning. I haven’t even talked to her yet. She arrived sometime in the middle of the night. If you think it would be too difficult-”
“No, not at all,” Chantal says. “I’d love to meet her.”
Jeremy glances at Chantal. She is poised, elegant, a proper young Parisian woman. Suddenly he can’t imagine her next to wild Lindy. He hears loud voices ahead and turns his attention to the market. He’s not sure he wants to enter the noise and tumult-for the first time he considers suggesting something other than what Chantal has planned. A quiet street, someplace they can talk without shouting. They might talk about their lives, something they haven’t done all week. Who is this woman? He wants to know her-where she is from, where she lives now, what she wants in her life.
Why shouldn’t they talk about matters of the heart? In French! He has always known that his French is good, but he’s not one to take risks, to try out unsure sentences on strangers. And he doesn’t like to make a fool of himself. With Chantal his sentences seem to come out fully formed, as if he has been waiting for twenty-five years, since his college French classes, to speak with this woman.
And of course, whenever they come to Paris, it’s Dana who speaks. She had spent a year at the Sorbonne and fell in love with an Algerian man who returned with her to UCLA, living in her dorm room until her parents found out and disposed of him. Dana even looks French, or maybe it’s the short skirts and black tights she always wears. She urges Jeremy to speak in French when they shop or dine, but he finds that it takes too long to find the right words. Eventually she jumps in and helps him out.
“Will you buy me a pastry, monsieur?” Chantal asks, and that’s the first stall they come to, a baker’s table, with pastries laid out in delectable rows-croissants, brioches, pains aux amandes, pains au chocolat, éclairs, palmiers.
“What would you like?” he asks, turning to Chantal. It feels surprisingly intimate, this simple act.
She looks for a moment and then points.
“Deux palmiers, s’il vous plaît,” he says to the baker. There is no hesitation in his voice-he doesn’t sound like the tourist who’s unsure if he’s said it right. Usually when he speaks French, his voice is too soft and he is asked to repeat himself. Simple, he thinks. It’s just a question of confidence.
The baker is a man his own age, too slim to be very interested in his own creations. He eyes Chantal and then smiles at Jeremy. Jeremy needs no translation here.
He pays for the pastries and turns to Chantal.
She looks away. Did she see the other man’s appreciative glance? She is suddenly shy with Jeremy.
“Tell me about the food,” Jeremy says, pointing up the street at the stalls lining the narrow road. “We’ll talk about my stepdaughter later.”
He feels oddly unfaithful talking about Lindy. She belongs to his life with Dana. And she’s complicated. She dropped out of school, stopped talking to her mother, and pulled Jeremy into her secrets. The fact that she appeared some time in the middle of the night, unannounced, and newly bald, has him worried. He has no idea what to expect from her. Easier to talk about eggplants and olallieberries.
Jeremy hears music and looks past the baker’s table. How could he have missed the sounds of the accordions? Again he hears the shouts of vendors hawking their fruits and vegetables, and in the mix, the sweet voice of someone singing. There’s too much to hear, too much to see. He focuses his eyes on a small circle of people gathered in a tiny square at the foot of rue Mouffetard. Three men play accordions, a woman stands with a microphone and sings, and in the middle of the circle a couple dances.
“Let’s go watch,” Jeremy says, and he leads Chantal through the market crowd to the performers. He glances at Chantal while they wrangle for space at the edge of the circle; her eyes are wide, a smile spreads across her face. He feels as if he’s created this Édith Piaf world.
The dancing couple is elderly-early seventies, he’d guess. And yet they move nimbly, gracefully, keeping perfect time with the music. They’re both tall and slim and look as if they’ve spent a lifetime in each other’s arms, spinning, bending, pulling out and back again. The woman is dressed in a fifties-style dress, with a full skirt that billows while she twirls. She wears shoes with straps that lace around her ankles. The man wears all white-a white cap, white shirt, white slacks, white shoes. He’s dapper and delicate.
A woman walks the perimeter of the circle, handing out sheets of paper. Jeremy takes one: it’s a song sheet. Already, he hears voices joining in song.
“Do they do this every day?” he asks Chantal.
“I’ve never seen it,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”
Another couple steps out to dance. They’re younger, less talented, but thoroughly pleased with themselves. And a woman with an enormous floppy hat joins the circle to dance on her own, her arms gracefully floating in the air around her, perhaps circling an imaginary partner.
“Would you like to dance?” Jeremy asks Chantal.
“I’m a terrible dancer,” she says.
“That’s impossible.”
He takes her hand and steps into the circle. He places his hand on the narrow curve of her waist and feels her fingers lightly land on his shoulder. He lifts his other hand, and she curls her fingers around his. She looks up at him with a nervous smile.
He begins to move her around the small space, listening to the sound of the accordions, testing her response to his gentle pressure on her back. She looks worried, unsure, and glances down at her feet.
“Look at me,” he says. He knows how to dance-not skillfully, like the man in white. But he knows how to hear the music and move in its rhythm. This is what he does best: not talking, not storytelling or confessions or late-night arguments. He knows how bodies talk to each other.
He sees Chantal’s worried frown disappear-he lets her spin and sees a smile stretch across her face.
He imagines her in bed and pulls her closer. The music stops. She steps away.
“Merci,” she says, but she doesn’t look at him.
She steps off the makeshift dance floor and into the crowd of spectators.
He waits a moment before following her. It would be so easy, he thinks, to take her hand and pull her back. One more dance. Give yourself up to the music. Give yourself up to me.
But he thinks of Dana, of her body under his in bed, of the hunger in her eyes. He feels something stir inside him-desire, need, frustration-whatever it is, he’s in love with his wife. He’s just spending the day with a French tutor. Get back to the lesson, he tells himself.
He follows Chantal and they wind their way through the crowd. A new song has begun, something about le petit vin blanc. New dancers take the stage. But Chantal’s on the move and soon they’re back on rue Mouffetard, and the noise of the marketplace drowns out the accordions.
They walk along the row of stalls that line both sides of the narrow street, most covered with colorful awnings, the tables piled high with fresh vegetables, lush fruit, bowls of olives, a profusion of flowers. Chantal discusses the cuts of meat, the varieties of fish, the classifications of cheese. Jeremy asks good questions-he wants to understand why the quality of the cheese is so superior in France, why there are vegetables and fruits he has never seen before, and what does one do with ramp leaves?
Chantal unbuttons her cardigan sweater-the market is crowded and hot. People bump into them and push them against each other. She is wearing a pale pink blouse. Jeremy realizes that she has never worn any color before. All of her clothing seems to come in shades of gray and black.
She looks at him; his eyes are on her neck. He looks away quickly.
“Tell me about olive oil,” he says. In front of them are a dozen bottles of olive oil, and a beefy man urges them to taste one. Jeremy dips a wedge of bread into a small bowl of oil. When he tastes the oil on his tongue he realizes that it is the first thing he has eaten today and he is suddenly ravenous. He tastes all of the different selections of oil, dunking slices of baguette into each bowl, and Chantal laughs at his eager appetite. He then buys two bottles of the best oil, one for Chantal and one that he will take home with him. The taste will always remind him of this odd breakfast with Chantal.
By the time they leave the market, they are both carrying plastic bags on their arms, as if they had set out on a shopping spree rather than a French lesson. Chantal tucks a baguette into her tote bag. They have not spoken about lunch, but Jeremy imagines a pique-nique in one of the hidden parks they have passed on their many walks.
They turn down a side street-a kind of medieval pedestrian alley-and in an instant the noise of the market dissipates. They are quiet for a moment and then Chantal tells him that they will walk to the Jardin des Plantes, where there is a museum of natural history. She thinks he will find it interesting.
“Yes, I’m sure I will,” he says, pleased with the idea.
On their second day together they walked through a neighborhood filled with antiques stores so that Chantal could teach him the language of furniture and jewelry and art. When she saw that he paid close attention to the kinds of wood in the best of the period furniture, she arranged for the two of them to speak with a man who restores antiques. They stood in the charming clutter of the old man’s atelier, with the man’s low, steady voice in his ear and the odors of the wood and solvents and Chantal’s fragrant perfume in his nose. The late-afternoon light filtered through the small, high windows of the shop, and Jeremy thought: I’m happy here. This is where I belong.
What a strange thought for him to have. He has never wanted to live abroad.
He has lived in California all his life and only began to travel when he met Dana eleven years ago. He’s a homebody; he wants his dog and his house projects and his books and his chair by the fire. He and Dana live in Santa Monica Canyon, and he only joins her for Hollywood events when she insists, which luckily she rarely does. He owns a couple of suits but lives in his work clothes. When he spends days on a project out of the house-restoring something that can’t be transported to his shop-he feels unsettled, as if he has stepped out of his skin. He can’t wait to get home in the evenings. So why should he now feel like he belongs in a foreign city?
He thinks about what has happened in this week that he’s spent with Chantal. He has looked at Paris with new eyes. It’s not only his view of his surroundings that has grown sharper, more vivid. He feels different in his own skin. He’s someone else when he speaks French-someone more intriguing, more mysterious. It’s invigorating, as if he is capable of anything in this new place.
He could take a woman’s hand and lead her onto the dance floor.
“While we walk to the museum,” Chantal says, “tell me about your stepdaughter.”
Jeremy wishes for a moment that they could walk in silence. But that’s absurd-this is a French lesson, after all.
He likes having Chantal next to him, her tall, slim body such a surprise to him after years of walking with Dana, who is petite and compact, a kind of miniature woman who seems to be in motion even when she is standing still. He shouldn’t compare his wife with his French tutor-it’s not as if he’s dating this young woman-but he’s become unaccustomed to the attentions of a woman. She’s paid, he reminds himself. His wife is paying her to be with him. The thought turns his mood sour in a quick second.
“Lindy is my wife’s daughter,” Jeremy says. “I came into her life when she was nine.”
“And you are close,” Chantal says. “I can see something in your face when you speak of her.”
“I love her,” he says, simply. It is true. He had not wanted children, and when Dana told him she had a child he had briefly considered ending the relationship. He was thirty-five when they met and every woman he dated wanted to have a baby-immediately-regardless of love or compatibility. Dana told him that she didn’t want another child, but that she hoped he would want this ready-made family. Lindy was a child-sized version of her mother, the same kind of radiance, the same kind of charm. He was doubly smitten.
And over the years he learned to be a father to the girl. Her own father was a portfolio manager, specializing in international real estate-he was always in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney. Lindy had a room full of souvenirs but no picture of her father on her bureau. Instead she framed one photo of the three of them taken in Costa Rica four or five years ago. They are rafting the wild Pacuare River, bundled in orange life vests, the thick green jungle surrounding them. Dana is in the front of the raft, her eyes open wide with astonishment that some drop in the river is about to claim them, and behind her, sixteen-year-old Lindy leans into Jeremy, both of them smiling with pure delight.
Jeremy tells Chantal about Lindy’s recent rebellion-when she dropped out of college she disappeared for a while, sending her mother into a fury. Jeremy received an email from Lindy saying “I’m safe. I need to do this. Tell Mom not to get too wigged out. I love you.” Jeremy can’t translate “wigged out,” so he says the words in English and Chantal seems to understand. Funny. He doesn’t even know if his tutor speaks English.
“I think she needs to find her own path,” Jeremy says. “Her mother is very successful. I think that makes it hard for her to know how to define herself.”
“Does she want to be an actress too?” Chantal asks.
“Yes,” Jeremy says. “I can’t tell her not to try.”
“Is she talented?”
Jeremy nods. For a moment he thinks ahead of himself, in a rush of translated words that bump into one another. “I don’t know the word in French. She has talent but she doesn’t have the aggression-no, the spirit-I can’t explain it.” Aggression, he thinks. What an ugly word for what drives his wife. Drive, that’s it. But he’s too bewildered to try to explain himself.
“She’s only twenty,” Chantal says. “Most of us do not have direction at that age.”
“How old are you?” Jeremy asks. The minute he says it, he wants to take it back. It sounds like they’re on some kind of date.
“Twenty-eight,” Chantal says, unruffled. “And still searching for my own direction.”
“I always knew what I wanted,” Jeremy tells her. “I wanted to work with wood even as a child. I had a first job out of college with a contractor. But I didn’t want to build new things. I learned that very quickly. I’m drawn to old things, broken things. I take great pleasure in bringing them back to their original beauty.”
Chantal smiles at him. “I am not surprised,” she says.
“And you?” Jeremy asks. “What are you drawn to?”
Chantal doesn’t answer for a moment. Finally, she shrugs. “Language. Words. No, not teaching. Perhaps one day I’ll write something.”
“Poetry?”
She shakes her head. “I tell stories to my nephew when I visit him. About a dog who speaks many languages. It’s not very poetic. But it’s a good story.”
“Children’s books.”
Chantal shrugs. “I’m just dreaming.”
“You should. We all need to have our dreams.”
“For now, I pay the bills.”
Jeremy winces. He’s paying her bills. A rude reminder that this is not a date. Is he so out of practice that he can no longer tell when a woman might be interested in him? Before he met Dana he knew that he could win a woman if he wanted to-he simply paid attention. And he was good-looking. Now, ten years later, he assumes he is still good-looking, even if his hair is peppered with gray and his body is thicker. Women still glance in his direction, and sometimes try to charm him. He has never responded to any of those flirtations-he has fallen into a life he never expected, with a woman and child he loves.
Nothing has changed, he tells himself. It’s the week in Paris that has so disoriented him. It’s the fight with Dana last night-a rare fight-that has him on edge.
They had walked through Paris at two in the morning, passing up the offer of a ride from Pascale, the director. “We’ll walk,” Dana shouted to her crowd of admirers from across the street. “I want to be alone with my handsome man. Now all of you go away!”
After a block or two, she took Jeremy’s arm and leaned into him.
“This is what I want,” she said. “You.”
“Then why do you fill our lives with everyone else?” he asked.
“That’s work, my love. You know that.” Her voice was sleepy and drunk; she pressed herself against him.
“I shouldn’t come on these film shoots,” Jeremy said. “I feel like I lose you every time.”
“You’ve never said that before.”
“We want such different things.”
“No, we don’t. We both want this.”
She was right. He knew that whenever they were alone together, whenever their bodies found each other in bed, whenever they sat across from each other at the small table in their garden in the canyon and shared a bottle of wine. But at the restaurant earlier that evening, Jeremy had felt as if he’d married a movie star. He wanted Dana, not the star attraction.
“I have a blister on my heel,” Dana said, reaching down and rubbing her ankle. “I can’t walk in these damn things.”
“Let’s find a cab.”
“No, let’s walk. I drank too much. We can walk along the quai. Paris-Plage is set up for the summer. We’ll walk on the boardwalk. We’ll build a sand castle. We’ll pretend we’re at the beach.”
“It’s a long walk. You’ll kill your feet.”
“I don’t care. Tomorrow I’ll have a hangover and broken feet. Tonight I’ll have my head on your shoulder.”
Jeremy wrapped his arm around her.
“Don’t get tired of me,” she said quietly.
“I’m tired of the noise,” he said.
“What noise?” She stopped and pulled away from him. Her face hardened and she pulled off her shoe, hopped on one foot, bending the back of the shoe.
“You’ll ruin the shoe.”
“What noise? What are you talking about?”
“I need quiet. Your life is too noisy.”
She threw the shoe at him. He wanted to laugh-she looked small and furious-and he caught the shoe as if catching a grenade. He tossed it back at her.
“This happens a few times a year,” she said, her voice too loud in the dark street. A window slammed shut in the apartment beside them. “I shoot a film, get crazy busy, and then I come home and it’s all over and we have our life together. This isn’t my life. It’s my job. You’re my life, goddamn it! What are you talking about?”
He stared at her, amazed. He imagined her onscreen, those big emotions, those wild eyes, the husky voice. “You don’t have to scream,” he said softly.
“Yes, I do!” she shouted. She stuffed her foot back in the shoe and stormed off. He followed her.
Even off the screen, he was married to drama, he thought. He felt weary and angry with himself for starting something out of nothing. He imagined Chantal, somewhere in Paris, reading a book by the window, hearing the angry shouts of a married couple on the street below. She would quietly close the window.
“There it is,” Chantal says, pointing to the museum up ahead.
“Bon,” Jeremy says, and they cross the street to the Muséum national d’histoire Naturelle. It’s a renovated old building, partially covered with a bold blue banner announcing all the exhibition halls in the Jardin des Plantes. Apparently, they’re headed to the Grande Galerie de l’évolution. Beyond the museum Jeremy sees long stretches of green lawn and well-tended gardens.
Inside, a double line of schoolchildren wait to get in. The teachers stand at the ticket booth, arguing with the agent, while the children stand obediently, shuffling their feet, talking quietly to one another.
“American children would be running all over the place,” Jeremy says. “This is amazing. The teachers don’t even have to scold them.”
“Oh, we follow so many rules,” Chantal says, “until we have had our fill. By the time we reach twenty we rebel like wild horses on short leads.”
“And you? Did you rebel?”
“No,” Chantal says. “Not yet.”
They both smile, and when she turns around quickly the baguette in her bag smacks Jeremy on his head. The kids burst out laughing and Chantal looks back at Jeremy, her face a sudden pink.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll survive,” Jeremy says. “If I have a black eye tomorrow I’ll have to invent a much better story.”
“Tell your wife I punched you,” Chantal says.
“Did I give you good reason?”
“Oh, yes,” she says.
And then she hurries off to buy tickets. The schoolchildren have filed into the museum ahead of them and she is next in line.
Jeremy glances at his watch. Ten forty-five. They will have only forty-five minutes before they meet Lindy at the café. He calls Lindy on his cell phone. She doesn’t answer, but he’s connected to her voice mail.
“Bonjour, chérie,” he says happily. She’ll be impressed. Like her mother, she speaks French with ease. Good private-school training, a summer program in Aix-en-Provence during high school. Jeremy continues with his message in French. “Meet us at the mosque. It’s across from the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes in the Fifth. You can’t miss it.” He had noticed it on his walk here with Chantal. “There’s a tearoom inside. I can’t wait to see you, sweetheart. I peeked in this morning while you were sleeping. I-” He can’t think of how to refer to the bald head. Her new haircut? Her latest rebellion? He coughs and then hangs up as if their connection was lost.
He didn’t mention the shaved scalp to Dana. She’ll be furious.
“On y va,” Chantal says. She takes his arm, something she has never done before, and leads him into the grand entrance of the museum.
The minute they step through the door, Jeremy takes a deep breath. It’s a spectacular space, vast and open, dark yet eerily beckoning. On the ground floor of the central exhibition space he sees the march of animals, life-size, regal and elegant-elephants, giraffes, zebras. He’s awed by their size, their numbers, their beauty. He and Chantal move forward and look up. The four-story space is open in the middle as if the animals need room to breathe.
Jeremy is distracted by the light touch of Chantal’s hand on his forearm. It’s as if all his energy and attention has rushed, like blood, to this one part of his anatomy. His skin feels warm, and he imagines her hand making an impression on his skin, as if he were made of clay. She is saying something and he hasn’t been listening.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “What did you say?”
She looks at him, surprised. Of course, he always pays such close attention.
“There was a word I didn’t understand,” he says, finding a feeble excuse. “And so I got lost.”
“I will find you,” Chantal says, smiling. “Perhaps you were lost with the penguins?”
He looks to the right-there’s a display of penguins staring at him.
Her hand leaves his arm and she steps toward the magnificent march of the animals. She gestures toward them and names them all, slowly, as if Jeremy is not only lost but a little slow.
He laughs. “I feel like I belong with the schoolchildren.”
“You are not well enough behaved,” Chantal says.
“That’s not about to change now,” he tells her.
But that’s not true. Jeremy has not behaved badly in years. He has been a perfect partner to Dana since he met her. That first time-a chance meeting-changed him; he knew that by the end of the day, when he told her: “Come home with me.”
He had been working on a house in Bel Air, restoring a library that had been built in 1901 and neglected for more than a century. The owner of the house had warned him: A film crew was shooting a scene in the house, but the library was off-limits to them. No one told Dana that, and she had wandered in while the director was working on a scene that didn’t include her.
She had walked around the library quietly, and finally stood beside Jeremy’s ladder, watching him. He was fitting a delicately carved cornice onto the built-in breakfront bookcase. He had replicated the piece from old photos. It had taken weeks to shape, carve, and finish the intricate pierced form from a piece of mahogany.
He glanced at her, nodded, and returned his attention to his work.
“That’s very beautiful,” she said finally. “Do you live here?”
“No,” he said. “An actor lives here. Someone with enough money and enough good taste to save this place instead of tearing it down.”
“You don’t know who the actor is?”
“I don’t know much about that world,” Jeremy told her.
He noticed how her smile grew.
“I’m Dana Hurley,” she said.
“Jeremy Diamond,” he said, stepping down from the ladder.
“Would you like a glass of champagne?” she asked. “I can get it for you. Or something to eat?”
“You’re on the film crew?” he asked.
“I’m an actress,” she said.
“Somehow I bet I’m the only man in America who hasn’t heard of you,” he said.
“Can I hide here with you?” she asked, still smiling.
“Yes,” he said.
He set his chisel and wooden mallet aside and wiped his hands. They sat in the two club chairs by the bay windows and talked for a long time.
“This could be our house,” Dana said at one point.
“I would build us a much nicer house,” Jeremy told her.
He discovered in the first weeks after meeting her that he was more than ready to give up short-term relationships and one-night stands. Dana offered so much more than all of those many women he used to date. And then there was something new: real love, responsibility, taking care of someone. Fatherhood-that, too, changed him and made him want nothing else than what he had.
“What are those?” Jeremy asks Chantal, interrupting his own thoughts. He’ll be the good student again, pointing at some ratty thing nipping at the heels of a graceful deer.
Chantal offers vocabulary words that he’ll never use. He thinks of his dog at home, a pet sitter taking care of her and promising long walks in the hills. He needs a long walk in the hills. He’s been city-bound too long. These animals remind him that he needs air, space, motion. Everything about this beautiful museum is wrong. The animals are trapped inside.
“Let’s move outside,” Chantal says.
Jeremy glances at her. Does she read him so easily?
“The grounds are beautiful,” she says, as if he needs further urging.
She’s right, and Jeremy breathes more easily. Once they’re through the front door, the Jardin des Plantes spreads out before them. They walk through gardens that represent different ecosystems while Chantal offers the French names for different flowers, trees, wild ferns. On a central path in the large park, the children follow their teachers in two straight lines, like Noah’s animals. The air is thick with woodsy smells, and Jeremy remembers the evening after the rafting trip in Costa Rica. They had camped in the jungle along the side of the river, and the river guides had cooked fish wrapped in banana leaves on an open campfire. Lindy told Jeremy that she had a crush on their river guide, a wiry, dark-skinned young man who had taught them to spin the boat in the rapids. “Don’t tell Mom I like him,” she had said. “I won’t,” he told her. It was the first time she had offered a secret. He held it close to him, an extraordinary gift.
“I want to live in the country one day,” Chantal says.
Jeremy is surprised. She has told him so little about her life.
“Why not move?” he asks.
“My boyfriend loves Paris,” she says. “Though he told me this morning he’s thinking of moving to London.”
“And you?” He tries to ignore the twinge of jealousy. Of course she has a boyfriend. And what does it matter?
“I spend a lot of time in this garden. This is my favorite spot in the city.”
Jeremy looks around with different eyes. He wants to know why she loves this particular garden and yet he won’t ask. He thinks he might come to know Chantal if he knows this garden.
“Will you move to London with this boyfriend?” Jeremy asks.
“I saw him kissing another woman this morning,” Chantal says. “Maybe I deserve a better boyfriend.”
The sky darkens and then flashes white. A growl of thunder follows immediately.
“Let’s go inside,” Chantal says.
“No. We’ll duck under the trees,” Jeremy tells her. “Let’s watch the storm.”
She looks at him, surprised, and then her face lights up. They can hear the high-pitched shrieks of the children, who dash back into the closest exhibition hall as the skies open.
Jeremy wraps his hand around Chantal’s upper arm and leads her deeper into the woods. They step over a low fence-a sign reads INTERDIT!-and under the wide canopy of trees. The rain hits the back of Jeremy’s neck in sharp little stabs. And then they’re protected, the thick shelf of leaves and branches above them sheltering them from the downpour that surrounds them.
It is wild. The sky is almost as black as if day had changed to night. Peals of thunder roll across the sky, bumping into one another without a break. And the rain! It comes down in solid sheets, loud, crashing on the paths, the lawn, the tree canopy above them.
Chantal presses against Jeremy’s side as if frightened. But he sees her face-she is thrilled by the storm. He smiles to himself, glad that they didn’t run for cover.
And finally there are no words-even the jumble of French and English in Jeremy’s mind slows and quiets. There is only this: the lashing of wind at the trees, the pounding of the rain on the earth, the clamor of the sky.
Jeremy can smell Chantal’s shampoo-something like tangerines. He breathes her in.
He made love with Dana last night when they returned from their street fight sometime after three in the morning, having walked all the way from the Marais to their hotel near Saint-Sulpice church. She had turned to him as soon as they climbed into bed.
“I need you,” she whispered, and he glared at her. Did she need sex or him? He pushed her back on the bed and, pinning her shoulders down, climbed on top of her.
“What do you need? Say it,” he said.
“You.”
“Sex,” he said.
“You.”
“You don’t need me,” he said. He leaned close to her and she reached up for his mouth-their kiss was full of hunger and rage. They tore at each other, tangling themselves in the sheets, and at one point Jeremy felt Dana’s mouth on his neck, her teeth sharp. They turned each other over and pushed each other back, each fighting to overpower the other. They had never done this, never been rough or scrappy in bed. Their lovemaking was always tender, intimate; their eyes always locked on each other. This time, they barely looked at each other.
When Jeremy came, his orgasm seemed to go on for a long time. And then Dana didn’t wait for him to pleasure her-she took his hand and pressed it between her legs. She held it there and moved against him, her body scrambling for release. When she found it she called out his name.
“Are you all right?” he asked her, when they slid into their sleeping positions, his body curled against her back, his arm wrapped around her and curled between her breasts.
“I need to come home to you,” she said softly.
The storm stops as suddenly as it began. Chantal moves away from Jeremy’s side. It makes him catch his breath, as if he might stumble without the weight of her against him.
“Merci,” she says simply.
“Avec plaisir,” he tells her, smiling.
“Regarde,” she says, pointing out toward the expanse of gardens. New light spreads across the lush greenery, bouncing off drops of rain as if electric. Everything looks newly sprouted, astonishingly different. It’s as if he hadn’t even seen the garden before.
She does not name what they are looking at.
They step carefully through the wet grass and over the small fence and back onto the path. Chantal lifts her closed umbrella and laughs. “What a silly thing it is.”
“I hate to leave,” Jeremy says with real regret, “but we need to meet my daughter.”
“Of course,” Chantal says.
“I asked Lindy to meet us across the street at the mosque.” He pauses, searching her face. “If that’s okay with you.”
“That’s a very good plan,” she says. “I would have suggested it myself.”
Jeremy feels a swelling of pride, as if he has written an A paper. A schoolboy’s crush, he thinks. What a fool.
And yet there is some comfort in naming these odd sensations swirling through him today. As if now he can put it in its place. It is translatable, after all.
He wonders suddenly: Did Lindy sleep with the river guide that night? The next day, at the airport in San José, she had sobbed before they boarded the plane, and she wouldn’t talk to her mother. When Dana went to the bathroom, Lindy whispered to Jeremy, “I want to stay with Paco. I can’t leave him.” Jeremy kissed the top of her head. “Is this love?” he asked, smiling. “Of course it’s love!” she shouted, and stormed off.
Why does naming a thing give it so much power? Jeremy wonders.
Chantal glances at her watch. “It is almost eleven-thirty. I am the only person in Paris who is always on time. Let’s not ruin my good record.”
That, too, pleases Jeremy. Of course, Dana is always late-the meeting ran over, the photographer didn’t show up, the director demanded twenty takes of the same damn scene. He brings a book with him whenever he sets out to meet her. And he expects to wait. When she finally arrives, he usually forgets any annoyance as soon as she begins to tell him about her day. Her days are filled with stories. He works quietly with his wood and his tools and his silence. At the end of his day, it’s as if Dana opens the window and lets the world in.
They walk quickly through the gardens. Jeremy feels breathless, as if the storm might reappear at any moment. But no, the sky is light, the clouds gone. Chantal has shifted the bags on her shoulders and now, instead of feeling her body brush against his, it is only her tote bag that bumps his hip as they hurry along.
“Jeremy!” Lindy shouts when they reach the gates of the Jardin des Plantes. She dashes across the street and throws herself in his arms before he even gets a good look at the girl. She squeezes tight and he finds himself laughing. His child. There is no question she is his, even though she has only spent half her life with him. She has chosen him, which is even better than what most dads get.
“You’re beautiful,” he says when words come. He holds her out in front of him. It is still true: the shockingly bald head makes her green eyes even more luminous. Her smile is radiant.
“En français!” she scolds. And then she turns to Chantal and offers her hand. “Je m’appelle Lindy.”
“Chantal. Enchantée.”
“Does he really speak French?” she asks conspiratorially, in French, as if Jeremy is not there.
“Very well,” Chantal says. “As do you.”
“Bof. I’ve forgotten my French. I need practice-I need a French boyfriend. That would help.”
“You can have mine,” Chantal says.
Jeremy looks at her-she is smiling effortlessly. Jeremy feels as if he’s lost control of this conversation. He doesn’t speak girl talk in any language.
“Shall we find the tearoom?” he asks in French.
“Oh, you sound different in French!” Lindy exclaims.
“How so?” he asks.
“I don’t know. You’re so-sexy.”
“Apparently I’m not sexy in English,” Jeremy explains to Chantal.
“No, not that,” Lindy says. “You’re like someone I don’t know. You could be anyone.”
“Not your stepfather.”
“My stepfather wouldn’t be out on the town with a beautiful young Frenchwoman.”
Chantal looks away quickly.
“Lindy,” Jeremy says, then stops. The girl’s smile looks devious. But Lindy is never devious. She is so truly an unaffected girl, even with all the flash and glamour of her mother’s life thrust upon her. She is always unfailingly honest.
“This is a French lesson,” he explains, his voice low and serious.
“Well, of course it is,” Lindy says.
They cross the street and enter the mosque. It’s a Moorish building with an impressive minaret, all white on the outside, coolly inviting. They pass through the outside café and enter the inner courtyard. It’s beautifully tiled, with tables set around fig trees and fountains. Arabic music plays in the background; Jeremy can smell incense. He feels transported to Morocco and remembers a trip with Dana to shoot a movie in Marrakesh. One evening they walked through the medina, and even though Dana wore jeans and a tunic, every man turned his head to watch her pass. Jeremy never relaxed his guard, watching and waiting for trouble while Dana shopped for trinkets, oblivious to the stir of male attention around her. By the end of the evening he was exhausted but oddly pleased. It was his job; she needed him there.
“Une table pour trois, monsieur?” the waiter asks. Jeremy looks up, surprised. The young man seems inordinately pleased with the sight of these two young women at Jeremy’s side.
“Oui. S’il vous plaît.”
The man ushers them to a table at the edge of the courtyard. They’re next to a fountain, and suddenly the noise-of the cascade of water, the incantatory music, and, oddly, the squawk of a bird trapped inside the room-makes Jeremy feel claustrophobic. He should have chosen to sit outside.
The waiter says something in rapid-fire French and Jeremy looks at Chantal, completely lost.
“No,” she tells the waiter. “We’ll only be having drinks.”
They settle into their chairs and tuck their bags of cheese and fruit and meat under the table. Jeremy notices that the baguette is soggy from the rain. He looks up and sees Lindy, eyes on him.
“Tell me about your adventures,” he says to her.
“Well,” she begins, but then the waiter is there, speaking too quickly for him to understand. Is it the Arabic accent? Too much noise? There’s a pause. Chantal orders tea. He does the same. Lindy orders a citron pressé.
“Spain? Portugal?” he prompts when the waiter is gone.
“Tell me about your French lessons,” Lindy says. “What are you learning? French conjugations? The imperfect tense?”
She’s looking back and forth between Chantal and him. She’s got a mischievous gleam in her eyes, as if she’s taunting him.
“Lindy,” he says, his voice low.
“Jeremy and I have conversations about the things we see as we walk around Paris. I teach him new vocabulary. I correct his mistakes. I encourage him to practice what he already knows.”
Chantal is remarkably calm, as if she is often confronted by irrational twenty-year-old bald daughters. Jeremy begins to relax.
“What fun,” Lindy says, as if it’s not fun at all.
“Your mother set up these lessons for me,” Jeremy explains. He doesn’t mention that it’s an anniversary gift.
“How gallant of her.”
Gallant, Jeremy thinks. Lindy’s French surprises him. She, too, sounds like someone else, someone more sophisticated. Someone with an edge.
“Tell us about your travels,” Jeremy urges.
“Well, here I am,” Lindy says. “All roads lead home.”
“But you’re not home,” Jeremy says.
“I’m with you,” Lindy tells him. “That’s home.”
He reaches out and places his hand over hers. She flinches but doesn’t take her hand away. He sees her glance at Chantal and back again, quickly.
The waiter arrives and sets tea in front of them, lemonade in front of Lindy. He makes a grand gesture of pouring tea for Chantal but leaves Jeremy to serve himself.
“Did you see your mother this morning?” Jeremy asks.
Dana was still sleeping when he left for his French lesson. Her filming doesn’t begin until late this afternoon-they’re shooting evening scenes on the Pont des Arts. He has promised to come watch tonight, something he doesn’t often do. But tomorrow is their anniversary and he needs to make up for last night’s fight. Before Lindy called to say she would arrive in the middle of the night, they had thought they would take a train to Chantilly and explore the château. But now Dana wants to stay in Paris, just the three of them, roaming the city. “I haven’t had a chance to walk the streets of Paris,” she had said last night. “You’re the one who’s having all the fun.”
“Mom was sleeping,” Lindy says. “My mother is an actress,” she tells Chantal.
“So I’ve heard,” Chantal says.
“You’ve mentioned her?” Lindy asks Jeremy.
“Chantal taught me the words for director and cinematographer and film editor,” Jeremy tells her. “Apparently I know more words about food than I do about film.”
“Mom could teach you those words.”
Jeremy looks at the teacup in front of him. He has the uneasy feeling that his French lesson has ended. He and Chantal have worked until three every day. Should he let her go early? But today is his last day with her. He wants to start over. He would tell Lindy that he can’t meet her until late afternoon, that he’s busy all day. But of course, he’s never been too busy for his daughter.
“Alors,” Lindy says. “Mom was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her. Her note said that we should meet her at the Pont des Arts at six this evening.”
“We’ll watch them film a couple of scenes,” Jeremy says. “Should be fun.” He’s lying; it’s never fun. It’s slow and boring, and each scene is so out of context that it’s hard to know what’s actually going on. Lindy usually hates film shoots unless a sexy young actor is on the set. Even then, she resents that her mother is more often the object of the young man’s attention than she is.
Last summer, Lindy decided she wanted to be a theater actress. It’s more serious, she said. It has more substance, more weight. Jeremy worries that it’s even harder to succeed in the theater. He wishes his daughter would find something less daunting, something that is not filled with rejection and criticism and ego-driven competitors pushing you aside. Lindy is not made of the same stuff as her mother, he worries.
“Will she come?” Lindy asks.
Jeremy looks at her, confused. She’s gesturing with a nod of her head at Chantal. Will Chantal come to Dana’s film shoot? Of course not.
But it’s Chantal who answers. “No. I have to meet some friends when our lesson is done.”
“Quel dommage,” Lindy says.
Jeremy wonders if something has happened to Lindy on this European trip. She has sharp edges, something he has never seen before.
The waiter appears and places a plate of little cookies in front of them. He says something to Chantal-Jeremy can’t understand a word he says. Did they order cookies? Is the waiter showing off for Chantal and Lindy? Chantal thanks him. Jeremy sips his tea. He’s surprised by its sweetness.
When the waiter leaves, Chantal asks Lindy where she has traveled.
“I’ve been in a monastery,” Lindy says. “In the South of France.”
Is she lying? In her emails she wrote that she had bought a Eurail pass. She and a couple of friends were traveling through Spain and Portugal. In her phone calls she talked about youth hostels and parties on the beaches and getting lost in Lisbon. When he heard lots of background noise in one phone call, she told him she was at a pizza restaurant and it was someone’s birthday party. Monastery?
She won’t look at him. She’s telling Chantal this story. He’s the stranger now, listening in.
“I dropped out of college in March. I didn’t know why I was studying anymore. To learn what? Environmental science? What was I going to do with that? The literature of the sixties? Cool, but so what? I just needed to know why. I don’t mean I needed to know what I was going to be when I grew up. I mean, I needed to know why I needed to learn. To take a test? To get an A? To please Papa?”
“No,” Jeremy says, interrupting her. “I never put any pressure on you-”
“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with you,” Lindy says, waving him off. “You’re easy. You just love me no matter what.”
“That’s important,” Chantal says. “To be loved like that.”
Jeremy looks at her, and it’s as if his bones settle in his body again. He needs to hear Chantal’s voice, he thinks. Even Lindy’s French, which is very good, makes him work too hard. He has to grapple with words, to make sure he understands what she’s saying. And it’s so important that he gets this, that he hears her story. For the first time, he wants to say, Let’s speak in English. I don’t understand. A monastery?
But he doesn’t say a word. Lindy is talking again, words flying by too quickly.
“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with who loves me. I have this photo of me as a child with my mother. We’re sitting on a couch in our old house and she’s gazing down at me with a look of pure motherly devotion. That photo? Her manager came to dinner one night and swiped the photo and cropped her face and put that adoring gaze up on the cover of some stupid magazine. Now she’s smiling down on the whole damn world. I’m nowhere in the picture.”
“So it does have to do with love,” Chantal says.
“No. It’s got to do with my disappearing act. Poof, I’m gone. I’m no one, I’m everyone. I’m in college. I’m in Spain. I’m in a monastery.”
“You could have talked to me about this,” Jeremy says quietly.
“I needed to stop talking. That’s all I did in college. Talk, talk, talk. There are plenty of words. You can fill hours with them. And then when you stop talking, time stops. You sit there and everything opens up and you can hear your thoughts for the first time.”
They stop talking. But Jeremy’s mind feels like it’s closing down. He can hear nothing in his brain but a low buzzing sound, as if there’s static in there, a bad connection, a radio that can’t pick up a station.
“I think I understand,” Chantal says softly.
Jeremy looks at her beseechingly. Help me, he wants to say. He wants to understand his daughter. He wants to know Chantal. But it’s not a question of understanding the words. He can translate each one.
In the silence, glass shatters on the other side of the courtyard, startling him. He looks up-a teacup has slipped from the waiter’s hands. For a moment, he had forgotten the rest of the world, this corner of Paris, these other patrons, the sweet mint tea on the table in front of him.
“Someone told me about this monastery outside Arles. I went with a friend, but the girl left after a week. I stayed for two months.” She stops and smiles. “Maybe that’s why I’m talking so much.”
Jeremy puts his hand on her arm.
“I’m listening,” he says.
“No one ever told me I needed to be like Mom,” she says simply.
She smiles at him, the sweetest smile he has seen yet. Then she turns to Chantal.
“My mother is a force of nature,” she says.
Chantal nods.
“I’m not her.”
She says this to Jeremy. He nods, then leans over and kisses her cheek. She smells like someone else, a grown-up woman. Maybe it’s a new French soap or a perfume that she’s bought. For a moment, he yearns for a younger Lindy, one without a shaved head and a flash of anger. One without such a complicated quest. But he has grown up with her. He, too, is someone else now. Ten years ago he tumbled into love with Dana and her daughter. Five years ago he thought he had it nailed-he was their rock, the one who would hold them together. And now he’s not sure of anything. Only last night he pushed his chair back from the dinner table and watched Dana tell a long story about their trip to Argentina and how they climbed to the top of a mountain in the Andes and the clouds parted and the glory of the world was revealed. Jeremy listened and thought: Have I lost myself in her?
“Your monastery sounds like a very good place,” he says.
“The food sucked,” Lindy says in English, sounding very much like a child again. With that, she pops a cookie into her mouth.
Chantal looks at Jeremy over the rim of her teacup. Her eyes are amused, as if she has forgiven the girl her churlishness.
He wants to ask her if she is close to her parents. Does she tell them about the secrets of her heart? Even as Lindy offers him something-a glimpse of her life for the past months-she is telling him something else. I’m not yours anymore. You don’t know everything about me anymore.
“When I was twenty-one I moved to an island in the Indian Ocean,” Chantal says. Her eyes move from Jeremy’s to Lindy’s and back again. “I wanted to be something-I don’t know, something other than what I was.” Jeremy notices that it is the first time Chantal can’t find the word she wants. “You know what I discovered living in my hippie beach commune without running water and electricity? That I am a Parisian.”
Jeremy tries to imagine Chantal, with her prim cardigan sweater, her neatly wrapped umbrella, her tiny pearl earrings, this lovely composed woman-living in a tent on the beach? He smiles at the thought.
“You’re laughing at me,” Chantal says.
“No, not at all. Did you come home right away?”
“Not right away,” Chantal explains. “But sometimes we have to run away from ourselves in order to find ourselves.”
A few days ago, Chantal and Jeremy had walked through the Parc Monceau during their French lesson. A woman and a man had stood near the crepe stand, arguing loudly. “Je suis Américaine!” the woman yelled. “Je suis Américaine!” Jeremy had told Dana the story later. “What happens to your identity when you take it away from everything familiar?” he had asked. “You know yourself better,” she replied assuredly.
Not me, Jeremy had thought. I know who I am when I am home in my shop. When I’m in bed with my wife. When I’m preparing dinner in my kitchen.
Already, in a few days in Paris, with a strange woman at his side, Jeremy feels like he is unmoored.
“Will you go back to the monastery?” Jeremy asks Lindy. He is a little frightened of the answer.
“No,” she says lightly. “I need sex.”
“Spare me,” Jeremy says, in English, and both women laugh.
Lindy leans toward Chantal and says something to her under her breath. More laughter. Jeremy feels his hangover for the first time. How many bottles of wine did they all drink at dinner last night? He needs food, he needs sleep, he needs to think about something other than his daughter needing sex. He thinks that she slept with her high school boyfriend, though that relationship only lasted a month or so. Dana speculated that they were “fuck buddies” after that, a horrible thought in Jeremy’s mind. Unlike most men he knows, Jeremy has always wanted love with his sex. When he knows someone in bed, he wants to know her out of bed. And when he loves her in bed, well, the rest should follow.
And here is his daughter-at twenty, beautiful and lost-looking for sex. Jeremy knows that men prey on this kind of girl and it terrifies him.
“I’m going to meet some friends,” Lindy says, “at the Champ de Mars. They’re having a picnic.”
Jeremy remembers his imagined picnic with Chantal. Now his feet press up against the wedges of cheese, tomatoes, olives. What happens next? he wonders. When Lindy leaves?
She stands up, leans over and pecks Jeremy on both cheeks. “À bientôt,” she says. And then she says something in French that Jeremy doesn’t understand. But Chantal smiles and shakes her head.
Lindy dashes off. Did she say something rude? Should he even ask for a translation?
“She is a beautiful girl,” Chantal says.
“Thank you,” Jeremy says foolishly. For of course he has nothing to do with her beauty. “I’m sorry if-”
“No, it was fine,” Chantal says.
He doesn’t even know what he was going to apologize for, and now it has passed. Lindy is gone. The teacups are empty. The girls have eaten their cookies. Even, somehow, the bill is paid.
“On y va,” Chantal says. And they are walking again.
Chantal has led them down to the Seine and while they stroll through the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air, a garden with modern sculptures dotting the landscape, they don’t talk about art but about love.
“Earlier this morning I was thinking about Lindy’s first love,” Jeremy says. “A river guide in Costa Rica.”
“How romantic,” Chantal tells him.
“Oh, it turned from romance to heartbreak in a day,” he explains. His mind jumps to sex with Dana last night. Pain, love, lust-sometimes it’s a package deal.
“So tell me,” Chantal says, “about your first love.”
“My first love?”
“Please. I’d like to hear the story.”
And so he tells her, in easy French, since all the words slip off his tongue-yes, it’s the language of romance-while they linger by the river. A photographer is taking pictures of an Asian couple in their wedding clothes. A little girl in a pink dress with a bouquet of flowers hides behind the bride. It’s a charming scene, with the stone walkway, the languid river, Notre Dame looming beyond them on the Île de la Cité. The air is thick with humidity and time seems to have slowed down.
“I met a girl at summer camp. I was thirteen. She was sixteen and much, much taller than I, with hair that fell to her waist. She wore it in one long braid that lay on her back like a thick rope. She was a swimmer and I would watch her race across our New Hampshire lake, and I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world.”
“Was it love? Or-” Chantal says the words: “avoir le béguin pour quelqu’un.”
“What does that mean?” he asks.
“When you yearn for someone. They’re unattainable. But you can’t get them out of your mind.”
“A crush,” Jeremy translates. “So when does a crush become love? When you attain this girl?”
Chantal shakes her head with a sly smile on her face. “One should never attain the object of a crush.”
“Why not?”
“You will be disappointed. A crush is about desire. It’s not about love.”
“But how do you know until you’ve tried?” Jeremy asks.
The bride and bridegroom lean toward each other and when their lips touch, the photographer snaps a photo and the flower girl giggles.
“I know a place for our picnic,” Chantal says.
They walk along the Seine, leaving the photo shoot behind. Jeremy tells her his story.
“One day, toward the end of the summer, a girl came up to me and told me that Sarah liked me. Sarah, the object of my affection. I was out of my mind with excitement. I planned to kiss her that night. I wouldn’t talk about it with the other boys in my bunk who boasted about their meager fumblings in the dark-this was love of a higher order. I had waited for weeks, watching her, learning her every stroke. I knew how many twists on her braid, I noticed when a new bathing suit didn’t match up with her tan line.”
“A romantic,” Chantal says.
“A fool,” Jeremy tells her.
“We’re almost there,” Chantal says.
The stone walkway follows the edge of the Seine. Their bags bump against their legs as they walk. Chantal’s pace quickens. This is not the way they usually stroll-slowly, effortlessly, meandering around corners. He lengthens his stride to keep up.
The river is high from days of summer rain. Someone at dinner last night said that there was a threat of flooding, and the conversation turned to Hurricane Katrina. At home, Jeremy had been quick to accuse the Bush administration of doing everything wrong, but here, among Europeans, he is oddly defensive. He found himself arguing that it is impossible to protect a city built below sea level, and he thought to himself, even as the words slipped from his mouth: What am I saying? Do I even believe this?
Later, on the walk home, before the fight, he told Dana, “I’m not sure what that was all about. With these foreigners I find myself rethinking everything I took for granted.”
“In Paris, it’s still embarrassing to be an American,” she said.
“That’s not it,” Jeremy said. “I mean, I was thinking about it in a brand-new way. What I said made sense to me. I wasn’t just making excuses.”
She wrapped her arm around his waist and pressed her head into his shoulder. “I’m tired,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to be so sure of myself all the time.”
“You?” he said, and kissed the top of her head.
“Especially me,” she told him.
The water of the Seine licks the side of this low road. Jeremy doesn’t see anything ahead that might provide a spot for a picnic, if that’s what Chantal is looking for. Halfway across the river, on the Île Saint-Louis, long stretches of riverbank provide sunbathers a place to stretch out. Jeremy glances at the darkening sky. He imagines the almost naked boys who are lying on the grass at the edge of the island running for cover in a thunderous moment.
But Chantal is not headed for the bridge, which is on the higher road. And Jeremy doesn’t ask her plan-that has been one of the delights of his days with Chantal. He gives it all up to her. She leads the way in conversation and in their peregrinations through the city. So why is he feeling anxious all of a sudden? It’s not as if they’re lost. It’s impossible to imagine that they’ve run out of things to talk about or sights to see.
But there’s nothing ahead, just a long stretch of road. They walk, quickly, Chantal’s low heels clicking on the cobblestones.
Jeremy remembers the story he was telling-the girl at summer camp-and feels a rush of relief. They are in the middle of a conversation. He can find his way back after all.
“That night, at camp-” he says, but Chantal interrupts him, something she never does.
“Wait a moment,” she tells him. “We’re almost there. Save your wonderful story.”
Jeremy worries-it is not a wonderful story. It is barely a story at all. The girl didn’t show up, the other girls teased him, and he avoided the lake for the rest of the summer. Why did he choose to tell this story at all? First love? He could have talked about Dana, because of course, even though there were plenty of girlfriends along the way, she was the first to claim his heart.
“Nous sommes arrivés,” Chantal says proudly. Here we are.
She has stopped walking and stands there, her arms open. Jeremy looks around. There is no patch of grass, no tree to sit beneath, nothing that bears noticing.
Until Chantal steps toward the river and then keeps going, down a few steep stairs and onto a short plank. Une péniche! She is leading him onto one of the many old boats that are moored along the river. This one in particular is badly in need of painting, though it was once a bold red, with the words JARDIN BLEU painted in yellow on the side. It’s not as long as many of the other boats-maybe forty feet-and it looks like it hasn’t budged from its spot in years.
Jeremy glances up and down the long stretch of boats and sees immediately what makes this boat different-it is a garden! The deck is covered with potted plants and flowers and ferns, bursting with them, in fact. Flowering tendrils spill over the sides of the boat and hang down, sometimes dropping as low as the water. And a deep, lush jungle smell rushes at him-there’s something wild and untamed here.
Chantal is already stepping onto the boat, her long, lean legs easily maneuvering the gap from the quai to the boat. She leans back and gives him a hand. He takes it, though of course he could make this step without her help. The bags on her arm bump against each other and she says, “Let me put these down. Come in. Welcome to my home.”
Her home.
He stands with his feet firmly planted on the boat’s deck and feels a momentary shift-of course, they’re on water-and the boat rolls as a bateau-mouche goes by. He catches himself with a hand on the rail. Chantal reaches out her hands and he’s confused until he remembers his packages, draped over shoulders and forearms. He unloads them into her hands.
“Please. Take a seat on the deck. I’ll be right there.” She gestures with a tilt of her head to the back of the boat.
He sees a table and two chairs in the middle of the garden. The table sits under a trellis; wisteria, in full bloom, drapes the wood, cascading down. Jeremy has never seen anything like this before. He must say something, but when he looks back, Chantal is gone. He sees the back of her head as she descends some steps into the belly of the boat.
Again the boat rocks; again Jeremy grabs the rail and widens his stance. I need sea legs, he thinks.
He walks back to the table and chairs, winding through the pots of flowering bushes and exotic ferns. Everything is newly watered from the storm, and the smell of damp earth fills the air.
Chantal’s home. Jeremy could have imagined many places where she might have lived-a chambre de bonne near the Eiffel Tower, a small apartment on the Left Bank, maybe even a loft in the Marais-but this is beyond his imaginings. And yet it is perfect. That is what it is like to learn someone, he thinks. You know many things about them, and then one new bit of information takes all the knowledge you’ve gained and shifts it so completely that you begin again.
He walks around the boat, weaving through the planters. Some hold single plants, some hold a wild mixture of foliage that tumbles over the sides of the pots, verdant and alive. There is much color in these plants-shades of purple, from pale to vivid. And the blue! He fills his lungs with a deep breath, taking in the rich, loamy smells.
He hears music-Nina Simone-and he sees the speakers set in the very back of the boat. She is making lunch for him. She has invited him to her home. The boat rides a wave and his hand grabs the rail.
Suddenly he thinks, Will he tell Dana? Of course he will. There’s nothing to hide. His French tutor took him for lunch on her houseboat. They sat at a lovely table in the back of the boat and she taught him the words for flowers and plants and river life. He imagines telling this story at a dinner party. Amazing! And your wife bought you the French tutor!
Then he remembers Lindy and her reaction to Chantal. Was she jealous? Protective of her mother? Worried about losing Jeremy? Impossible. He will assure her that the lessons are over. There was nothing to worry about.
If he even needs to mention it at all.
He hears Chantal making her way up the stairs and he takes his hand off the rail.
“It is wonderful,” he tells her as she emerges, carrying a large tray.
She smiles at him, a smile as full as any he has seen. She is home, he thinks. She is where she belongs.
“Our lunch,” she says simply.
But it is far from simple. Jeremy follows her to the table, where she sets down the tray. He sees a bottle of red wine and two glasses, a plate of cheese, a basket of bread, a saucer of olives and cornichons, a bowl of sliced apples and pears. Every item of food looks perfect-or perhaps Jeremy is seeing the food as it should be seen, presented almost as a celebration of itself. The plates and bowls are creamy white ceramic, without design, the napkin in the bread basket is a pale rose color.
“A feast,” Jeremy says.
He is extraordinarily hungry. He sits at one of the chairs and offers to pour the wine while Chantal sets out the plates.
Then she sits across from him and lifts her glass.
He imagines a toast-last night at dinner there were almost a dozen toasts-to his and Dana’s anniversary, to the film, to France, to someone’s new book of art criticism, to the great director.
But Chantal simply reaches her glass across the table and clinks it against his. They smile and sip. The wine is delicious.
“Tell me your love story,” Chantal says.
“It’s nothing,” Jeremy says. “I’d like to hear about the boat.”
“First, love,” Chantal insists.
And so Jeremy begins his story. Or begins again. And this time, his story becomes a fairy tale, an enormous lie. He has never invented stories before.
“That night I went to the canteen at the camp, the place where we all hung out after the evening activity. She was waiting for me. She wore her hair down for the first time and it covered her back like a blanket. I had never seen such beautiful hair.”
Chantal looks pleased and so Jeremy continues, his voice deep, the French words spilling from his tongue as if he often sat on a houseboat with a young woman in Paris and fabricated impossible love stories.
“I was shy-I’m still somewhat shy-but then I was often silent in crowds of children, uneasy about myself in ways that made it hard to be free. With Sarah I felt bold, I felt older and wiser and more handsome than I really was.”
Chantal laughs and Jeremy takes a sip of the wine.
“Sarah asked me if I liked her. I told her yes. I told her that I thought she was the prettiest girl in the camp. I said that I wished I were old enough to be her boyfriend. She told me that she didn’t like the older boys, that they were full of themselves. She liked that I was quiet. So many boys talk about themselves all the time, she said.”
Jeremy realized that he was suddenly one of those boys, talking about himself. And none of the story sounded true-it was ludicrous that an older girl would choose such a boy. But Chantal waited for the story to continue, and Jeremy couldn’t imagine how to back out of his mistake.
“I asked her if she had ever swum in the lake at night. She said no, that it wasn’t allowed, that she once heard about a girl who went for a night swim and never came back. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘It’s safe. No one will find us.’ ”
“Brave boy,” Chantal says.
No, Jeremy wants to shout. I am not that brave boy! I have never been that brave boy.
“We walked down to the lakeshore. There was a dance that night, so everyone was in the dance hall or the canteen-there was no one else at the beach. And it was so dark we could barely see each other. This is deep in the countryside of New Hampshire, far from any city lights or noise.”
“Sounds lovely,” Chantal says. She closes her eyes at one point, and Jeremy imagines that she is at the lake with him, standing at the water’s edge, conjuring up the nerve to take off her clothes.
“I was the first to undress. We walked out to the edge of the dock and I left my clothes in a bundle on the wood planks and then dove in a nervous rush into the water. When I came up for air she was mid-dive, naked, incredibly beautiful. I had never seen a naked girl before.”
Jeremy stops talking. He hasn’t eaten and somehow his first glass of wine is gone. He has had nothing to eat today but a few scraps of bread with olive oil. Maybe it’s the slow roll of the boat, but he feels off balance.
“Let the naked girl stop mid-dive,” he says, “but I need some of this cheese.”
Chantal laughs. “Poor Sarah,” she says. “Exposed like that.”
“Sarah can wait for the cool splash of the water. I can no longer wait.”
He reaches for some bread and slices into the Camembert that has run onto the plate. He spreads it onto the bread and fills his mouth with its pungent taste. Chantal takes a slice of pear, a slice of chèvre, lays one on top of the other, and passes it to him.
“Merci,” he says. The food seems to dissolve in his mouth.
“Please,” he says. “Tell me your story of first love so I can eat instead of talking.”
“But this is a French lesson,” Chantal says, smiling at him. She seems to be teasing him, but he’s not sure how. “You are supposed to talk.”
“Challenge my French with your story. Tell me a very complicated love story.”
“When you are done,” Chantal says.
For four days Jeremy has wished he could charm Chantal with stories, but he is not that sort of man. He is a listener, something that always made women respond to him as if he were better than the rest of his species. And now? He’s worse than the worst of them. He’s lying. And he can’t stop himself.
“She dove in a perfect arc, the moonlight revealing enough of her long, slim body for me to see her small breasts, her slim hips. And then she was in the water and racing toward me. I was treading water, caught in my Peeping Tom stare, and I thought she would swim right at me and pull me under. But she swam past me and kept swimming. I had to chase her and so I did, though of course she was faster and stronger than I.”
The boat wobbles and Jeremy grasps the table. Chantal laughs.
“The bateau-mouche,” she explains. “Even in the middle of the night I find myself thinking I’ll tumble from my bed and drown.”
For the first time, Jeremy considers that below deck is Chantal’s home. There will be a bed in the room. He looks away from her and out toward the river. On the deck of the bateau-mouche tourists wave at them, insistently. And foolishly, Jeremy waves back.
They think I’m French, he thinks.
But of course Chantal is not waving. How silly, he thinks. If you live here, you would never wave back.
I’m behaving like a thirteen-year-old boy, Jeremy thinks.
“You are swimming for dear life,” Chantal says.
End the story, Jeremy says to himself. Now.
“I would never have caught her. She was much too strong. So she must have slowed down for me, kind girl that she was. And when I caught her, somewhere out in the middle of the lake, I didn’t know what to do with her. I was so young. And she was beyond me in every way.”
“She showed you,” Chantal said.
“Yes,” Jeremy agreed. “She showed me what to do.”
They sip their wine. This time Jeremy prepares an apple slice and a piece of Roquefort for Chantal, who takes it gladly and eats it with pleasure. He refills their wine.
He feels an odd combination of relief-his story is over-and horror, as he is a man who invents himself to impress a young woman. At forty-five! Only a week ago, while lying in their bed in the Santa Monica Canyon, he had traced his fingers over Dana’s body and said, “I know every inch of you.”
“No surprises?” she had asked. “No chance to discover a scar on my leg, a tattoo on my hip?”
“I don’t want surprises,” he had said, pulling her closer. “I want just what we have. Nothing more.”
Dana hadn’t said anything. And for a quick, uncertain moment, Jeremy had thought, Maybe she wants more. She’s a woman of big emotions, a woman who lives life on a grand scale. And then she comes home to me. He felt an ache in his chest. Talk about it, he thought. But as so often happened, words didn’t come-they jammed up against one another somewhere inside him. He did what he knew how to do. He took Dana in his arms and made love to her, covering her small body with his own.
When they were done, he wrapped his arm around her familiar body and pressed himself against her back. Now he wonders: Was last night’s argument a way of twisting around his own fears? Is this part of his unease these last days in Paris? After ten years of loving Dana, has he lost his faith in their relationship?
“Tell me the story of your first love,” he says to Chantal, pushing his thoughts away.
She looks toward the river for a moment and seems almost shy again. Then she busies herself with the cheese and the pears.
“Or tell me the names of all the plants in your garden,” Jeremy says quickly.
“You’re kind,” she says. “An escape is offered.”
“If you’d like. I can’t even remember how we got to the dangerous topic of love.”
“My fault,” Chantal says, smiling. “The head of the language school would fire me.”
Jeremy smiles. “I won’t tell.” He wonders if lunch on her houseboat would also be interdit. Of course. The thought pleases him. She’s breaking the rules for him.
“I fell in love for the first time a year ago,” she says. She stops as if that is the end of her story.
“No stormy adolescent romances?” Jeremy asks.
“Plenty of storms. No calm after the storm.”
Jeremy nods. Yes. He knows what she means. He loved falling in love with Dana, but then, to his great surprise, he found that he enjoyed being in love with her even more. The calm.
And now? Is he creating a storm out of thin air?
“I met Philippe at the language school. Every spring there is a party to celebrate the director’s birthday. It’s a silly thing-the director is like a child in many ways. He would like all of us to teach our classes with games and prizes and songs. I’m not very good at that and so he uses me for the private lessons.”
Jeremy cannot imagine Chantal in front of a class of adults, singing a French ditty and tossing bonbons to the best student. And of course, he can’t imagine himself in such a class. How lucky, he thinks, that we found each other.
“Philippe was new to the school. He is very handsome-I am not usually drawn to men like him.”
Men like him. Jeremy has always been told that he is handsome. But because he is shy, or quiet, or less bold than most good-looking men, he has always felt that he has little in common with a ladies’ man, a Romeo.
“He spoke to me at the end of the party. I had been watching him, of course-every woman had her eyes on Philippe. And then his eyes were on me. He has that ability to make you feel that you’re the only one.”
She stops and her gaze drifts off-she follows the passing of a tugboat along the river. She looks sad, as if this isn’t a love story at all.
“I’m sorry,” she says, looking back at him. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have started this.”
“Go on,” Jeremy says.
“Enough new vocabulary,” she tells him. “It’s our last day together.”
She reaches for the wine and refills their glasses. Her story continues with a surer voice now.
“We left the party and went to a café, had another drink together. He’s a charming man, of course-he knows how to win a woman’s heart. And I suppose I was waiting to give mine away. Twenty-eight years old. I’m a little out of step with my generation.”
“Except for the hippie commune in the Indian Ocean,” Jeremy says.
“Oh, that. An aberration. A desperate attempt to be youthful and wild.”
“Look at you here,” Jeremy says. “This is wild.” He opens his arms to the jardin she has created on the Seine.
“This is just my refuge.”
“From what?”
“From the busyness of the world. I come here to hide.”
Jeremy thinks of himself in his workshop. He is happiest there, whether he is working on a project for a client or building a new armoire for their home. He likes the smell of sawdust, the sound of a plane trueing the edge of a plank, the steady focus of design. When Dana goes to work she is surrounded by people and words and passions so large that they move others to tears. So what happens at the end of the day? Does she really want what he offers? Why is he suddenly worried about this, after so many years of confident love?
“Philippe and I dated for a while and I enjoyed his attention. He’s a funny man-I think he truly believes he falls in love with every woman he dates. In fact, I think he’s merely in love with love. It fills him up for a while, makes him think life is grand. And it is grand. He’s very good at love.”
“But you-you said you fell in love.”
“One weekend we went to visit his parents in the Loire. They have a weekend home near a grand château, one of those the tourists like to visit. This one offers classical concerts in the summer. They’re lovely, really. Everyone sits on the great lawn under a canopy of stars and the air fills with the music of some wonderful symphony.
“Philippe took me to one of these concerts. We brought a picnic-not unlike the one we have here.”
Jeremy feels a pang of proprietary jealousy, as if this might be the only time Chantal had offered such a display of food. Idiot, he thinks.
“We ate and drank and listened to the music. At one point, in the middle of the concert, Philippe took my hand and gestured for me to follow him. We made our way through the crowds of people while the orchestra played. I started to ask him where we were going, but he put his finger to his lips. He looked positively delighted with himself, so I let him lead me away.
“We circled behind the château. The building was closed and only the dramatic outdoor lighting was in use-illuminating the turrets, the massive entrance, the balconies, the guard towers on each end. No one lives in the château anymore. It is used for tours and is rented out for weddings and business functions. Perhaps someone lives in the caretaker’s cottage at the entrance, but this evening there was no sign of anyone patrolling the place.
“Philippe knew of a door in the back-a part of the servants’ quarters-that had a broken padlock. I wondered if he had taken other women here before me, but I pushed the thought away. We sneaked into the château and climbed the many stairs to the master bedroom, guided by Philippe’s flashlight. We stepped over the rope that blocked the entrance to the room and Philippe took me to bed.”
Chantal is looking at her hands, which rest on the table in front of her. She has long, tapered fingers and pale skin. Jeremy imagines those hands on his face. And then Chantal looks at him, breaking her own trance. Her eyes are bright and wide.
“I had never done anything so daring in my life. I loved him that night.”
She stops speaking and shakes her head.
“Crazy. Imagine if we were caught.”
“Did you love him or did you love danger?” Jeremy asks.
Chantal looks puzzled.
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy says quickly. “It’s none of my business.”
“It’s a good question,” Chantal says. “I can answer it.” She pauses and sips her wine. “I loved him.”
“And you still love him?”
“I don’t know,” Chantal says.
“Does he make you a more daring person?” Jeremy asks.
“For one night,” Chantal says with a sly smile. “And for that I loved him.”
Jeremy doesn’t understand. He wants to ask questions but he feels that he has intruded enough.
And then, like a sudden storm, he feels irrationally angry: What does breaking into a château and making love in someone else’s bed have to do with love?
For a moment he confuses Chantal with his daughter. He wants to give her advice, tell her that she’s wrong, that Philippe is the wrong man, that love has nothing to do with danger. And then a loudspeaker breaks their uneasy silence and he hears a static-filled roar of words-something about Notre Dame and the Île Saint-Louis. It is the bateau-mouche again. And again, tourists are waving madly. Why? What would it matter if he waved back? He turns away from them and reaches for more cheese.
She places her hand on his. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It was an inappropriate story.”
“I remember what you said at the café earlier,” Jeremy says. “That sometimes we have to run away from ourselves to find ourselves. Maybe Philippe helped you do that.”
Chantal smiles. “I like that. And so I have learned once again that I am truly a good girl at heart. And I should find myself a better man.”
He looks at her hand and she takes it away.
Jeremy is not accustomed to so much talk. If he were younger, he would take her hand and lead her downstairs to her bedroom. No, it has nothing to do with age. He would do it now. This is the moment he has waited for since he arrived at the métro this morning.
He thinks about sex with Dana. In bed with her, he finds his truest self. Their lovemaking is deep and rich-they rarely speak in bed, and yet he feels he knows her best when they’ve made love. She gives herself to him, he gives himself to her. In ten years, their passion has not quieted.
“Let’s walk,” he says to Chantal.
She stands too quickly and knocks the table. Her glass of wine topples and Jeremy catches it before it falls to the deck. But wine spills on Chantal’s sandaled feet.
“Oh, how clumsy!” she says, and her face turns the same shade of pink as her blouse. She flees-Jeremy can hear her feet clattering down the stairs of the boat and into the space below.
Jeremy cleans up. Most of the wine landed on her feet, and he mops what landed on the deck with a napkin dipped in water.
He gathers the bowls and plates and basket and puts them back on the tray. Much of the food is gone-and so is the wine. He’s surprised to see the empty bottle.
He’d clear the dishes, but he knows that the kitchen is below-along with Chantal and her bedroom. No, he’ll leave it all here.
His cell phone rings. He pulls it out of his back pocket. It is Dana.
For a moment he feels caught-but then he shakes his head. I’ve done nothing wrong. A lunch, some wine.
“Allô?” He says it with a French accent-she’ll be amused, he thinks.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly, and then in French: “I have the wrong number.”
She hangs up before he can stop her.
He calls her back.
“It was me,” he says in English. “I was pretending to be your dashing French lover.” And then Chantal is standing there, in front of him. He looks down. She is wearing white sneakers-Keds-and again he thinks of his daughter.
Dana laughs, her movie laugh-rich and deep. Chantal takes the tray and walks away.
“I’d like to meet her,” Dana says.
“Who?”
“The French tutor.”
“Why?”
“Lindy says she is very pretty.”
“You saw Lindy?”
“Not yet. She called. Bring your tutor to meet me.”
“The lesson is almost over,” Jeremy says, though it’s not. He glances at his watch. Two P.M. “There’s no reason to meet her.” He lowers his voice to a whisper.
“We’re shooting early. Pascale called a couple of hours ago. Something about the rain. She’s setting up now. I want you both to come.”
“Where?”
“The Pont des Arts. Your little friend will enjoy it.”
“Dana.”
“Lindy says you’re smitten.”
“She didn’t say that. That’s not even a word she would know.”
“Maybe we’re all taking language lessons these days.”
“Dana.”
“I’ve got to go, sweetheart. Come by soon. We start in half an hour.”
“Where’s Lindy-”
“She’ll be there.”
“Did she tell you about the monastery?”
“Monastery? I have to throw clothes on and dash over there. I’ll see you soon.”
She hangs up.
Chantal is gone. So is the food, the wine, the momentary illusion of a different Jeremy.
No, he thinks. He will not bring her to meet Dana. Lindy was behaving like a petulant child. That’s all.
He remembers Chantal’s hand on his.
He thinks of his house in the Santa Monica Canyon, his dog, his shop, and he wishes he were home.
He walks to the front of the boat. He sees the stairs-a steep ladder really-that lead below. He can’t hear anything-no dishes being washed, no water running.
“Chantal?” he calls.
“J’arrive,” she says. I’m coming.
She appears at the bottom of the ladder and looks up at him. Has she been crying? Did he say something on the phone that would have upset her? There’s no reason to meet her.
He steps back and lets her pass by. She keeps on walking and he follows her to the edge of the boat and then onto the quai. This time she does not offer her hand as he leaps from the boat to the land.
“My wife invited us-” he begins and she turns to him. She has put on lipstick. Her lips are moist. I can go back, he thinks. I can take her hand.
“Yes?”
“-to watch them film. She thought you might be interested.”
“How nice of her.”
“We don’t have to.”
“Of course,” Chantal says.
“It’s very slow. It’s nothing as glamorous as Hollywood would like us to believe.”
“I’d like that very much.”
Lindy meets them at the entrance to the Pont des Arts. A huge crowd has gathered behind barricades on both sides of the river. Lindy hands them badges on twine that they hang around their necks.
“Mon papa!” she tells the young guard, who has not taken his eyes off the girl. Jeremy looks at his daughter through this man’s eyes. She is luminous, despite the shaved head-the word “ripe” comes to mind, and Jeremy hates himself for the thought of it. She’s wearing a tight tank top over breasts that seem to have grown since last fall. She’s gained a little weight, which becomes her-her face is fuller, her body less waiflike. Jeremy looks back at the guard and wants to deck him.
Lindy leads them through the opening in the barricade and past the guard. She takes Jeremy’s hand as if she were a child. His heart swells. She is still his child, he thinks.
He feels the tug back to his life, this daughter he never imagined he’d have, ten years of girldom, a complicated path through the teenage wilderness and now this, a quest to a monastery and back. All his. He squeezes her hand.
Ahead, in the middle of the bridge, is a whirlwind of noise and commotion and equipment and lights-in the center of it all a petite, wild-haired redhead, Pascale, shouts commands. Jeremy likes Pascale. She’s a director Dana has worked with before, and she seems to keep her sanity in this crazy business. Pascale catches his eye and blows a kiss. She points toward a tent at the other end of the bridge. And then she goes back to yelling at a couple of ponytailed guys carrying a bed. A bed on the bridge?
“Did you meet your friends?” Jeremy asks Lindy as they walk toward the tent.
“No friends,” she says. “I was leaving you to your French lesson.” She glances back at Chantal, who follows a step or two behind. “Why is she here?”
“Your mother invited her,” Jeremy says quietly, hoping Chantal cannot hear.
Jeremy looks back at Chantal. She is distracted by the set and the crowd-her eyes are wide, her face aglow. She moves up closer to them.
“Maman!” Lindy calls.
Dana is standing at the entrance to the tent, watching them. Jeremy, caught between Chantal and Lindy, in the middle of the thick crowd, feels Chantal’s arm against his. He can’t move away. Dana smiles as if she knows what he’s thinking.
She’s a mess, his beautiful wife. She wears no makeup-or is she wearing makeup to distort her perfect features? Her tan skin is pale, her hair flat and dull, her clothes baggy and worn. Is this a costume?
For an impossible moment, Jeremy thinks she’s someone else-his wife’s ugly assistant-and in a moment the star will emerge from her tent.
But Dana steps toward him and kisses his lips. Then she extends a hand toward Chantal.
“Enchantée,” she says, her voice that buttery movie voice that everyone loves. At night, Jeremy hears a different voice: her bed voice, he calls it. He thinks of it as a voice she saves for him, unlike the voice she shares with the world.
“So pleased to meet you,” Chantal says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Lies, Jeremy thinks. He has invented a gorgeous wife, a glamorous wife, a larger-than-life wife. He has invented himself today as well. A boy who dives into a summer lake with a naked girl. A man who seduces a woman on a houseboat on the Seine.
What if everything you’ve always been sure of-your wife’s beauty, your own fidelity-gets shaken?
“You look awful!” Lindy says.
Dana rubs her hand over Lindy’s head and then pulls her daughter to her and embraces her. It is a powerful hug; the girl is engulfed in her mother’s arms.
“What’s this?” Dana asks, pulling back and peering at Lindy’s scalp.
“It will grow back,” Lindy says.
“You look gorgeous,” Dana tells her.
“Really?” Lindy says, truly surprised.
“Really.”
Lindy throws her arms around her mother. Over Lindy’s shoulder Dana rolls her eyes, her smile broad and happy.
“Is this your costume?” Lindy asks. “What are you?”
Dana laughs. “I’m a wreck, apparently. I’ve just lost my husband to a younger woman.” She glances at Chantal. “And I’ve been caught in a rainstorm. We’re hoping it rains again. Though I can’t imagine looking any worse than this.”
Her role, Jeremy thinks, and he feels his shoulders relax, his chest expand. Of course. It is makeup-he can see now that new lines have been etched into his wife’s flawless skin.
He can’t remember the story of this film, though he’s sure that she’s told him. Have I not been paying attention? he thinks. But that’s who he is-a man who listens. When did she tell me the story? Last night at dinner? Months ago when she got the script? Why have I forgotten?
“Why is there a bed on the bridge?” he asks in French.
“See,” Dana says. “I knew you spoke French beautifully. Never with me, though.” She turns to Chantal. “I talk too much. See what happens if I stop talking?”
“I’ve been making mistakes all day,” Jeremy says. It is another mistake. Suddenly everything has two meanings. Jeremy feels off balance.
“Le lit?” he repeats.
“Ah, the bed,” Dana says.
“Attention! Atten-ci-on!” Pascale shouts over the loudspeaker. The movie is a French and American collaboration. The cast is half French, half American. Even the dialogue is a jumble of both languages. Jeremy remembers that much.
“I must go,” Dana says, while Pascale shouts something over the loudspeaker. “I’m on right away. I hope we can talk later.” She says this last to Chantal, who seems inordinately pleased to receive the attentions of this actress, even if she is homely, poorly dressed, and the wife of the man who has spent the day pining for her.
I mean nothing to her, Jeremy thinks, and then he catches himself. Of course not. I’m this week’s student. On Monday she’ll meet another student.
Dana hurries off.
“Come on,” Lindy says, breathlessly. “I want to be in front.”
She sounds like a little girl at her first shoot. She should know better-that it will take longer than they anticipate to set up the scene, that something will go wrong right away and they’ll have to find a new lens or bring in the jib or reset the lighting. And if it does rain, they’ll need tarps above the cameramen and director, even while the actors get soaked.
Lindy dashes ahead through the crowd.
“Are you sure-” Jeremy says. He wants Chantal to say, Let’s leave. Let’s go someplace quiet.
“Oh, I can’t wait to see them film!” she says. Of course, she is starstruck. Everyone is. Except for him. Can he love his wife and hate the star?
Jeremy takes Chantal’s elbow and they maneuver through the crowd. Pascale has cleared a large space in the middle of the bridge. The bed sits there, with a single rose-colored sheet covering it. No blanket, no pillows. The sheet is rumpled as if already used.
The sky darkens and thunder rumbles-the crowd lets out a collective Ooooh! They are waiting for drama and the approaching storm feeds their expectation. Nothing is happening yet on the set, but onlookers have quieted. Jeremy sees that gawkers on both sides of the Seine, lined up three or four deep, are obediently following the demands of the signs that have been lifted by young crew members. Silence!
Jeremy finds Lindy at the front edge of the set and he helps Chantal squeeze in beside her. He then fits himself in the space between them. He knows only a few of the film people who hover near Pascale-he recognizes them from the last film Dana made with her, four years before. One of them was at dinner last night-a young Frenchman who worked with Pascale on the script. “He’s brilliant,” Dana told Jeremy while the young man told a long story about the immigrant revolution brewing in the banlieue of Paris. And pompous, Jeremy thought, but he didn’t say a word. Now the young man fixes Dana’s oversize shirt, unbuttoning two of the top buttons. He’s not from the costume department, Jeremy thinks. What business is it of his? But Pascale looks over and nods-apparently Dana should look horrible and bare her breasts at the same time.
Pascale calls out some commands and then takes her seat on her director’s chair. The chair reads BIG BOSS. It was a gift from an earlier crew and Pascale uses it for every film now. It is the “big” part that Pascale likes. She is barely five feet tall.
Again, the sky grumbles and Pascale claps and raises her hands to the heavens. A few people laugh.
And then they are ready to film the scene. Jeremy wonders how it has happened so quickly, but perhaps things have changed since the last time he watched a shoot. We’ll watch a scene or two and then move on, he thinks.
There is quiet and then a man and a woman walk onto the set. They are wearing bathrobes. They take off the robes and hand them to a young woman at their side. They are naked. There is a muffled gasp from the crowd. Pascale raises a hand and everyone quiets. A woman smacks the clapper board and the cameras roll.
Jeremy glances at Chantal-she is transfixed. And then Lindy-her mouth has fallen open. Jeremy wants to cover her eyes. But of course, she’s twenty, she’s seen naked boys before. Men.
Chantal shifts her weight and he feels the pressure of her arm on his. She doesn’t move away.
The woman is very young, barely older than Lindy. She’s blond and her skin is ghostly white-she looks like some cross between angel and child prostitute. Her body is impossibly perfect-small and curvaceous with breasts as round as apples. Jeremy sees that her pubic hair is shaved! No wonder she looks like a child. There’s something unsettling about what she offers-sex and innocence-something pornographic, he thinks.
She walks to the bed and lies down. She doesn’t seem to have any self-consciousness about her nudity. Jeremy wonders about children along the quai watching this. But we’re in Paris, he thinks. And for a moment, he wonders what kind of rating this movie might have. Of course, Dana has never done an X-rated film-it would kill her career. She’s a classy actress, like a younger Meryl Streep with a little more sass. She has never even done a sex scene in the nude.
Will someone cover the girl’s bare crotch?
The man walks around the bed, looking at the girl. He, too, is comfortable with his naked body. He has a large uncircumcised penis that weaves as he walks. Jeremy’s body tenses. He shouldn’t be here with these two girls at his side. Dana should not have invited them. He feels like a prude-this shouldn’t even be a public event.
He looks up. A camera moves in close. Dana is hidden from sight. No one has spoken a word.
The man is older than the girl, by a good twenty years. In fact, his body is a little slack-Jeremy sees with wicked pleasure that the man has a bit of extra weight around his waist. But it doesn’t concern him; he’s circling the bed and the naked girl as if he’s a lion tamer. Or the lion himself. The girl is his prey.
Dana steps forward. Someone has poured water on her and she’s dripping wet. Her clothes cling to her; beads of water drip from her chin. This is no summer rainstorm-it looks as if she’s stepped from the shower. Jeremy expects Pascale to stop the filming, to yell at the person responsible for overdoing the effect this way-but the camera keeps moving, Dana keeps walking toward the man, and the man keeps circling the girl on the bed.
“Look at me,” Dana says, her voice a throaty whisper.
The man doesn’t look. He walks by her and keeps walking. The girl on the bed makes a moaning sound as if she’s already having sex. Jeremy is disgusted. What is this? The girl follows the man’s eyes with her own-her pleasure comes from his attention. She’s aroused; even her nipples stand out from her perky breasts. How did she do that? Can a woman make her nipples erect as part of her acting training? She can’t possibly be aroused by this fool with the big dick, Jeremy thinks.
“Regarde,” Dana says, her voice more insistent.
Thunder, right on cue. Was that real? Everyone looks up-except for the actors, who ignore the low rumble and the first drops of rain.
A few of the technicians look at Pascale, who gestures with her hand: Keep going, keep going.
The man sits on the edge of the bed. The girl curls toward him. Dana stops and watches them. Her face shows confusion, then pain.
The man takes the girl in his arms and lies down next to her. It seems as if the girl is a half second from orgasm already. Her body is writhing, her low moan is rising. Jeremy thinks she should be pulled from the movie-she is overacting. She belongs in a porn film, not in a serious film of Dana’s!
The man strokes the girl’s body, petting her as if she is, in fact, his cat. She purrs. Oh, God, stop! Jeremy wants to scream. What is this?
Then Dana circles the bed, watching them. Her expression changes-is she enjoying this? Jeremy hopes that someone will let him in on the joke. Has Pascale made her first comedy?
Dana sits at the edge of the bed. She reaches out her hand and lets it rest on the man’s hip. He’s facing away from her, covering the girl with his caresses. He doesn’t seem to notice Dana.
It’s a fantasy, Jeremy decides. The bed, the naked lovers, the distraught woman. She’s imagining this. And in a rare moment of poor cinematic taste, Pascale has brought the fantasy to life. On a bridge in the middle of the Seine.
Spare me, Jeremy thinks.
He turns to Chantal. He’ll shake his head, show her his disgust. But she doesn’t take her eyes from the scene in front of her.
The rain gathers force. No one moves. A red umbrella appears above Pascale’s head. The crowd along the Seine leans forward over the barricades and peers-what can they see? Jeremy wonders. Do they see the man’s cock, the girl’s shaved vagina? Do they see Dana’s look of desire? What does she desire? The man? The girl? He wants to scream “Arrête!”
And then-thank God!-Pascale yells, “Cut!” and calls, “Bravo!” The crowd applauds, as if they were at the ballet and the performance was exquisite. Jeremy can’t imagine what everyone is so goddamn pleased about. He’s the only one not cheering.
“It’s art,” Chantal says, almost breathlessly.
“What?” Jeremy barks.
Chantal looks at him, surprised.
“That was beautiful. She has the most expressive face.”
Jeremy feels like a prude. Maybe everyone was looking at his wife’s face when all he could see was a penis and a vagina.
Dana walks over to them, grabs Jeremy’s arm, and calls, “Follow me!”
She wraps one hand around Jeremy’s elbow and the other around Chantal’s arm. She maneuvers them toward her tent at the far end of the bridge. Only then does Jeremy realize that the skies have opened and the rain is pounding on them.
“Lindy!” he shouts. He feels a sudden panic, as if she has disappeared in the middle of this chaos.
“I’ll be there in a minute!” Lindy calls back.
Jeremy turns-she is right behind them and then she turns toward a young man with a clipboard and begins talking to him in French.
“Let’s get out of all this!” Dana shouts.
“All this” is the storm, the relentless grumble of thunder, the clatter of rain on the iron bridge, the movie people herding equipment in every direction. And Pascale is braying over the loudspeaker. Jeremy can’t understand a word she says.
Dana’s assistant opens the flap of the tent as if she’s been waiting all day to save her boss from the rain, and Dana shouts, “You’re a love!” as they rush through-first Dana, then Chantal, then Jeremy. The assistant follows them and leads Dana behind a screen, where she helps her out of her wet clothes. Jeremy knows the young woman-she’s been with Dana for a couple of years now. He likes her more than most, because this is all she wants-not her boss’s job, just this: to make her boss’s job a little easier. She’s a simple girl, and there aren’t many of those in the movie industry.
“Don’t say a word,” Dana says from behind the screen. “I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re horrified.”
“You’re horrified?” Chantal asks Jeremy.
“He’s horrified. I warned him. But still-I wanted you to come. Wait. Let me dry my hair. Go on, Elizabeth. Would you get them hot tea? I can do the rest.”
Elizabeth emerges from behind the screen. She hurries to a makeshift kitchen: hot pot, small fridge, all set up for a few hours’ shoot on a bridge in the middle of the Seine. Jeremy is still amazed by what the film industry can pull off-not only on the screen, but for the working lives of its stars.
“Is it the nudity?” Chantal asks Jeremy quietly. Does she not want Dana to hear? No, she is encouraging me to speak, Jeremy thinks. She knows that in a moment Dana might answer for me.
And oddly, he wishes Dana would answer for him. He doesn’t quite know why he’s so upset. It’s not the nudity-it’s the absurdity of the scene. It’s something else: It’s Dana.
“You would not do that,” Jeremy says to Dana as she steps from behind the screen, wrapped in a plush robe, a towel turban around her wet hair.
“What would I not do?” Dana asks.
“You would not sit there and watch them.”
“You don’t know my character,” she says simply.
“No one would watch them.”
“It’s a fantasy.”
“But it’s a playing-out of someone’s inner desires. To watch her husband and his lover? That’s absurd.”
“What would I do?” Dana asks.
“I don’t know,” Jeremy says quickly. “I guess-you’re right-I don’t know your character in this film.”
“What is she like, the role you play?” Chantal asks. She leans forward, eagerly taking it all in. For a moment, Jeremy had forgotten about her. They have switched to English. Chantal speaks perfect English! She has an American accent! Again, everything shifts in the kaleidoscope that is this young woman. I know nothing about her, Jeremy realizes. And I thought I-he stops his own thought. What did he think? That he wanted to sleep with her? That he wanted to love her? It seems ridiculous to him now. He’s as foolish as the man swinging his dick on the set.
Dana takes a teacup from her assistant and sips at it. “I play a wealthy American woman who has come to Paris with her husband. She shops while the husband has his business meetings. But at some point during the day she finds him strolling through the park with a young girl-”
“Who wrote this film?” Jeremy asks, interrupting her. His heartbeat is fast, his palms are damp. It’s clammy in this tent and the rain beats heavily on the canvas, creating a kind of hum like a beehive nearby.
“Claude,” Dana says. “The young man you met at dinner.”
“He’s a kid,” Jeremy snorts.
“A very bright kid.”
“What does he know about love?”
“You’re so funny, darling,” Dana says.
Jeremy looks at her, surprised.
She is smiling at him, her wide, gracious smile. She reaches out and touches his arm. “Not everyone knows love like we do.”
Jeremy is lost. He can’t find any words-in any language. His mind churns and comes up with nothing.
And then the flap of the tent flies open and Lindy dashes in, laughing.
“Oh my God, that was wild! Wild! How did that happen? I mean, the storm in the middle of the scene! It was like you planned it that way.” She shakes her body like a wet dog and water flies everywhere. She is radiant-the shine of her scalp seems to light up her face.
“And that girl on the bed,” Jeremy says. “That was pornography.”
“You’re still here,” Lindy says, staring at Chantal.
“Lindy-” Jeremy says.
Chantal stands. “I must go.”
“No,” Dana says. “She’s being rude. You’re my guest now. Please stay.”
Chantal looks at Jeremy. He nods. “No reason to leave,” he says weakly.
Chantal looks at her watch. “The lesson is over anyway. And I will be meeting two other tutors.”
“How do you speak English so well?” Jeremy asks.
“It is a long story,” Chantal says.
“I bet she had an American boyfriend,” Lindy says. “That’s the way to learn a language. In bed.”
Chantal smiles and her face flushes.
“I will walk you out,” Jeremy says.
“No need-”
“Please,” he insists.
She nods. She turns back to Dana. “It was a pleasure to meet you,” she says in French. “Thank you for the opportunity to watch you work.”
Dana steps toward her. She kisses Chantal on both cheeks.
“You are a lovely girl,” she says. “I’m glad my husband had a chance to spend his week with you.”
Again, Chantal’s cheeks flush. She turns to Lindy. “Au revoir et bonne chance.”
“Why do I need luck?” Lindy asks.
Chantal just smiles.
She walks out of the tent and Jeremy follows.
The rain has stopped and the bridge is in the process of a remarkable transformation. A group of young men in black T-shirts that read Boss’s BOYS shovel sand on the wooden deck of the bridge. The bed is gone and someone has moved a palm tree into its place.
“Pascale has lost her mind,” Jeremy mutters.
Chantal laughs.
“This is like magic,” she says.
“I guess it is,” Jeremy says with a smile. “I’m a little too serious.”
“I like that,” Chantal says.
They are speaking French again-it is the language they have shared all week and Jeremy finds it hard to speak to her in English. He wishes she didn’t speak English at all; somehow that has changed things between them. If he gets stuck, he could have an out. But he didn’t know that all week. He just kept pushing on, into unfamiliar territory.
“You didn’t really need French lessons, you know,” Chantal says. “Your French is excellent.”
“But I needed you to guide me along the way,” Jeremy says as they walk away from the set and toward the Louvre on the Right Bank. “In French. And in Paris.”
“Sometimes I forgot that it was a language lesson,” Chantal says.
“Yes,” Jeremy tells her. “It felt more like-” He can’t think of a word, in either language.
Chantal glances at him, waiting.
“Thank you,” he says.
He has stopped at the end of the bridge. She will pass through the barricade and return to Paris; he will turn back and return to the wild world of his wife and his daughter and a bed on the bridge in the middle of the Seine.
He kisses Chantal on both cheeks. She presses her hand on his arm as he does so.
And then she turns and walks toward the crowd, who are waiting for the next scene.
He watches Chantal disappear into the throngs of people. Then he turns back. He thinks about later tonight, when he will be in bed with Dana-it doesn’t matter what bed in what country. He will wrap himself around his wife. He will be able to say what he wants to say to her, without words.