Hilary Reyl - Lessons in French

He told me his mother used to take him to the Marmottan on trips to Paris when he was a boy. It was her favorite museum because it was small and perfect, a bijou . He always made at least one pilgrimage when he was in town. “She loves the place and the paintings, and it’s hard for her to travel these days. Her circumstances aren’t what they used to be. Hopefully, I can start bringing her back once I’m working and I can afford it. Anyway, her favorite thing about this museum is the series of footbridges over the lily pads. I think you’ll see why.”

As we walked uphill to the end of the rue de Passy and through a dainty park, Olivier’s eyes gleamed with what I took to be memory.

“What are your parents like?” he asked.

“Well, my dad died when I was eleven. While I was living in Paris actually. The whole time he was dying of cancer, he kept writing me letters about how happy he was that I got to be here, living with his cousin Jacques whom he adored, and learning French. He never really got fluent in French. His own dad didn’t speak it to him—I guess he wanted him to fit in in America—and Dad had this idea that my learning the langauge would somehow make my life complete.”

“You must miss him.”

“I think about him all the time, try to guess what he would say if he could see me, especially here.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I shook my head. “It’s okay.”

“So, did your mom bring you up? I mean, after?”

“Basically. I guess you could say my mom is wonderful. I mean, she was supposed to have another kind of life. My dad was an up-and-coming movie director when she married him. She probably thought she was going to have fun, but ended up taking care of him when he got sick and then working hard as a secretary, an executive secretary in a law firm, but still a secretary, when she could have done something truly interesting with her life. She’s slaved all these years to send me to good schools and she’s proud of me. It’s been just the two of us since I came home from France. She lets me do these things that make her seem almost liberal, like coming to Paris to work for Lydia, but it’s because she believes in some form of well-roundedness to prepare you for life. Actually, she’s obsessed with me becoming a corporate lawyer because what she wants for me more than anything is security, and she knows that you can’t rely on anyone but yourself for that. And I feel terrible about not wanting to be a lawyer. But I really don’t. I don’t think that way at all. Logically, I mean. I don’t think logically. It would be torture.”

I was suddenly embarrassed. Had I been talking this whole time? Did I seem disloyal to Mom? Was I?

“You know, Kate, I’ve only just met you, but you appear to me to be many things at once. So, you may not have the luxury of diving into your dreams right away. Almost no one does. I’ve thought about this a lot. Not everyone can do everything in the ideal order. That’s what children of privilege don’t have to face.”

I imagined that he too dreamed of the freedoms of privilege and I felt intensely jealous of Portia, but only for a second because the next thing he said was, “They get so hedonistic sometimes, it makes them soft. Portia and Joshua have their good points, but they are incredibly spoiled. They just don’t get it like we do.”

At the mention of Joshua, I was startled into recalling that Portia had a problematic younger brother. I felt the onrush of all I had yet to know.

We stood in a room full of different colored impressions of the footbridge in Monet’s Japanese garden at Giverny. Olivier explained that his mother had told him that it was impossible to know that this was a bridge from looking at only one of the paintings by itself. You needed the series of views superimposed in your head for the true image to take shape.

“I see what she means,” I said. “It’s a beautiful trick. Pretend you don’t know what they are supposed to be and walk around until the bridge comes out at you.”

These paintings were gorgeous, but they made me uncomfortable. Even though they had become classics, they took an intimidating leap of faith, painting the light instead of the contours of the thing itself, letting the subject slowly emerge on a magical surface. I was convinced I could never do such a thing. I was too literal. I loved the Monets, but I didn’t entirely trust them.

In a nearby tearoom, over the tiniest and most expensive of tomato tarts, which Oliver treated me to, he finally told me what was in the bag he had just gotten for Lydia. “Papaya extract pills, probably mixed with speed. She gets them from a diet guru up here.”

“Why are you picking them up?”

“She likes to involve people she feels close to in her fetching and carrying. It’s an emotional thing. She’d never ask Clarence because she would feel too judged, but I’m sure she’ll want you to do it. She starts by asking you to pick something up somewhere without telling you what it is. But she always ends up blurting it out sooner or later. She can’t not confess eventually, but she controls her timing.”

“Maybe that’s what makes her such a great artist.”

“Yeah, that’s what you have to remember when you’re tempted to make fun of her for wanting to funnel baguettes and cheese all day, then sending you out for these damn pills. She’s amazing at what she does.”

We made our way back across the Seine and over to the Sixth with a detour through the Rodin Sculpture Garden, where we sat on a bench and watched children feed ducks in the shadow of Balzac. How lucky to grow up here, we agreed.

I asked him about the signet ring on his finger.

It was a chevalière with the coat of arms from his mother’s side of the family. He wore it for her.

“Is that castle on there your long-lost château somewhere deep in the Dordogne?”

“The Loire, actually.” He laughed. “But you’re right, it’s long-gone. The land is gone too. They sold it when my mother was a child. The only piece of it left is the ‘de’ in her name. It’s my middle name. I’m Olivier de Branche Craft.”

Suddenly, I felt light among the statues in this venerable garden. Amid all these voluptuous stones straining toward life, just short of breathing, here I was so very alive without even trying. The simple stupid joy of it was overwhelming.

I stole a glance at Olivier. I felt my throat catch. I had to say something to make sure that I could still speak.

“Olivier de Branche,” I said, with emphasis on the particle, and I reached to touch the golden ring. “Maybe you’ll be able to rebuild the château for your mother one day.”

“You’re sweet, but I’d settle for a pied-à-terre in the Sixth.”

I pulled my hand into my lap.

Back at the apartment, we sat in the half-painted living room and drank Lydia’s white wine infused with a crème de pêche. She had gotten Olivier hooked on her peach Kirs while they were here together last month. Olivier had been traveling in Europe all summer, mostly without Portia, who I gathered was interning at a fashion magazine in New York and was now headed back to college for her junior year. I wanted both to picture her and to block her out, so that I had a filmy image of her as a drowned princess or a girl frozen in a magazine.

Being in the Schells’ living room, among their many possessions, cast a sheen of formality back over Olivier and me, and we started conversing seriously. I tried hard to ignore the fact that each of his words was a little drumbeat between my legs.

“Lydia and I were good roommates,” he said. “She got me on this routine of starting with her Kirs around five.”

We looked at an ornate clock that had been taken down by the painters and was leaning against a striped silk ottoman. A fraying wire connected the clock to a hole in the wall above the mantel. It was quarter to five.