Hilary Reyl - Lessons in French

“Bonjour, Madame Fidelio.” He had an American accent.

There was a flicker of annoyance in his face, surely at the invasion of his last private moments in the apartment, but the flicker disappeared as his gaze lit on me, and in the lifting of Monsieur’s irritation I felt myself uplifted, blessed, sun-kissed.

“You must be Kate. I’m Olivier.”

“Sorry to bother you so early.” It was just before ten o’clock. “Lydia says you’re leaving for Italy today. You probably have a lot to do.”

“Tomorrow, actually.” He smiled. “I don’t fly to Venice until tomorrow morning. And I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to pick up most of my stuff before I head out for good. So, I’m mellow.” He flung a wave of brown curls out of his eyes and looked at me again. Then he rose and put the kettle on. “Tea? Madame Fidelio? Kate?”

Madame Fidelio said she would leave us. Here was my key to the main apartment. Here was the key to the maid’s room on the sixth floor where I would live. But not the sixth floor on this staircase. The escalier de service. Monsieur would show Mademoiselle, please.

“ Pas de problème, Madame Fidelio ,” he said.

“Merci beaucoup, Madame!” I added. “Vous êtes gentille de vous occuper de moi.”

“Bonne journée, mes petits.”

The three of us smiled indulgently at one another. Again, I felt a certain pride in sensing I had made a favorable first impression on regal Madame Fidelio. I had passed through my first gate.

“How do you like your tea?” Olivier asked once she had gone.

“I like milk, if there is any.”

He took a carton from the small refrigerator.

My cousins’ refrigerator had been an even tinier affair, drawer-less, without a working light. But I had bright memories of the food packages inside, and they were revived in a flurry by the box in Olivier’s slender hand. It was longue conservation milk, the kind everyone here drank. It could sit in that box for months until you snipped one of the corners and began to pour. It had a chemical smell that used to make me nauseated. I hated it. I had never told Mom because she had had more important things on her mind at the time, but the milk here was terrible.

“I got some honey at the farmers’ market on Boulevard Raspail. Would you like some in your tea?”

I had forgotten I liked honey but was suddenly longing for it.

“Sure. Honey would be great. I’ve never been to the market on Raspail. Is it wonderful? I haven’t been to Paris in over ten years.”

“Where did you get that accent? You sounded totally native talking to Madame Fidelio just now.”

I fell back on well-rehearsed lines. “I think the timing of when I learned was perfect. I was here between the ages of nine and eleven, young enough to get the accent and old enough to intellectualize the language.”

“No, you must be gifted. I’ve spent years here on and off and my mother’s French and I sound awful.”

“I doubt that.”

He laughed gently. “Spend some time with me then.”

I felt brave enough to glance into his eyes.

“So you’re fresh off the plane,” he said. He made my freshness sound like the quality of a flower or an apple. “Lydia says you’re a painter. Is there anything you want to see today, any art, anything in particular in Paris?”

“She told me you’d only have a few hours before you caught your plane and you’d barely have time to show me the alarm and the washing machine and such.”

She told me you were charming.

“But I don’t leave until tomorrow, remember? I love Lydia, but she has a lot on her mind. We can’t expect her to remember other people’s schedules. I have a whole day. I thought maybe I’d just walk around. I have to pick something up in the Sixteenth. Figured I’d go to the Marmottan. You know, where all the Monet waterlilies are? I haven’t been there this trip. I know it’s not very cool or contemporary, but I’m a nostalgic person.” He sighed. “I’m about to start a job in New York. Investment banking. I doubt I’ll have time to flâner in the foreseeable future. So I’m open. What do you want to do?”

“Can we get a croissant?”

At the pâtisserie on the corner, Olivier asked what I would like.

A plain croissant, please.

He bought it for me, and ordered a pain au chocolat and a pain aux raisins for himself.

We wandered over into the Seventh Arrondissement . On the rue du Bac, we passed the luxurious grocery store Hédiard, and I smiled inside because Hédiard had been a joke in my cousins’ house. When Étienne and Jacques would refuse second helpings of Solange’s food, she would say, “If this isn’t good enough for you, changez de restaurant! Allez chez Hédiard! ”

I wondered now if Solange knew that Hédiard wasn’t a restaurant, but a famous store with Art Nouveau windows framing pyramids of fruit and pastries against a luscious depth of cheeses and exotic teas in red-lacquered drawers. But what caught my eye, as we floated by, was a silver tray of croissants à la crème de marron. I loved chestnuts, and imagined chestnut cream to be something otherworldly. These chestnut croissants, with their dusting of powdered sugar, struck me as the most delicious things I could possibly eat, but I wasn’t sad that I didn’t have one at this moment. I still had half of the plain croissant that Olivier had bought for me, and I knew I could wander to Hédiard on my own anytime from now on. I lived nearby.

My lack of covetousness toward today’s uneaten treasure was so marked that I wondered if I hadn’t become a new person. So often I was defined by what I could not have.

Olivier veered away from me into Hédiard. I moved to follow him, but he told me to give him a second. When he reappeared, it was with two of the chestnut croissants. “Second breakfast.” He winked.

When we reached the Seine, I gazed across to the Grande Roue, the giant Ferris wheel that comes to the Tuilleries a couple of times a year.

He saw me staring. “You’d like to ride in it too, wouldn’t you? It’s a great way to get the lay of the land if you haven’t been to Paris for a while. Let’s go.”

We had a compartment to ourselves. Our knees grazed in the metal seat. Whenever the wheel stopped, we rocked into each other, pretending not to notice, talking too much.

After the ride, we were altered and unsteady. We walked quietly along the Right Bank all the way to the Sixteenth, where we picked up a small paper bag that he said was for Lydia.

“I get along with her pretty well,” he ventured. “But she’s complicated. And the family is complicated. You’re in for some interesting times. I hope you’ve been taking your vitamins.”

I wanted more information about Lydia and her mysterious family, but I also didn’t want to be reminded that this boy across this café table from me sipping Belgian beer, drawing glances from all around, belonged to them.

I reminded him that he had mentioned the Marmottan museum with the Monets.

“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked.

“I would love to.”

“That didn’t sound entirely convincing.” He looked at me with an attention I had rarely felt. “Are you being polite?”

“No, no, I’m strange about the Impressionists, the style. I don’t have my own style yet, so I get a bit wary, and impressed, so to speak.” I giggled lamely. “But I’d like to go. I’d like to look at the actual paintings. I’ve seen so many reproductions.”

“You can’t not have a style.”

“Think about mirrors. No style, right?”

“You’re funny,” he smiled, making my funniness into an appreciable quality, a style of its own.