Ellen Sussman: French Lessons

Nico looks across the street. Still no sign of Philippe.

“I have news,” he says. He wants to tell her before Philippe comes. He leans forward, ready to share his secret. He has told no one. “I sold my poetry collection yesterday!”

“Bravo!” Chantal says, her eyes wide. “And I didn’t even know you were a poet!”

“I don’t tell many people.” In fact, he has only confessed his creative aspirations to his parents, who complained that he should give it up and devote himself to a real career. And so he didn’t share the news with them last night. Besides, he’s not sure how they’ll react to the poems when they finally read them.

“What do you write about?” Chantal asks. Her face lights up-this is the Chantal he fell for weeks ago, the woman who listened to him tell a long story about his first girlfriend in Normandy and who asked him, with so much kindness, “Will you always love her best?” “No,” he had told her, “I hope not.” He did not say: Maybe I will love you best.

“It’s a series of poems that are all about the same story. A boy is kidnapped from his home. He’s gone for twenty-four hours. Each poem is a different version of what happens to him in those twenty-four hours.”

“Who was kidnapped?” Philippe asks, dropping into a seat at their small, round table. He sets his messenger bag on the ground beside his chair.

Nico feels a tightening of his chest-he has lost the chance to tell her more.

“Were you kidnapped?” Chantal asks.

“It’s just something I wrote,” Nico says. Another time, he’ll show Chantal the poems. He’ll tell her the story of his day in the root cellar. In a quick moment, he feels the terror that he has lived with for so long. He’s a child standing on the top of a tower of wooden wine boxes. The air smells of earth and potatoes and wine. He peers through the gap in the top of the hatch and can see the legs of policemen, dozens of policemen, their black boots stomping through wet mud. Even now, years later, he’s not sure whether he’s more scared that they’ll find him or never find him.

He hasn’t told anyone about that day. Now he’s written thirty poems, inventing and reinventing that single experience of his childhood. Last night on the phone the editor told him, “This book will be a gift to us all. The rest of us have our childhood experiences. You have your childhood experience and your bounteous imagination. Every day can be re-created countless times. In the end, we don’t know what’s true. And yet it’s all true, isn’t it? It’s a lifetime of possibility in one day.”

Nico didn’t know how to answer her. Now he wonders, will this book set him free? The experience itself matters so little after all these years. But the secret has become enormous, foul, rotting. Now he has swept up the mess of it and created poems. Could she really have called the poems lovely? Breathtaking? Nico wants to tell Chantal all of this.

“Is it like a mystery? A thriller?” Philippe asks.

“Who’d you get today?” Nico asks Philippe. Philippe lights up a cigarette.

“Bof,” Philippe says. “No one. I’ve got my regular at eleven. No one else. Clavère is trying to fuck with me. He wants me out and he won’t fire me. So he keeps telling me that he doesn’t have students for me. I am so fucking done with this school.” Philippe blows out a stream of smoke. His cheekbones hollow and his face changes-for a moment, he looks haunted. Then he smiles and again he looks handsome and self-possessed. Nico imagines that he comes from money, despite his cheap shirt and ripped jeans.

“You going to get another job?” Nico asks.

“I’m going to focus on my music. I’ve got better things to do than babysit some American girl who can’t conjugate the verb être. ”

“The one with the tits,” Chantal tells Nico.

“Ah-hah,” Nico says. Philippe has told them that if it weren’t for the woman’s breasts, he would not be able to stand his two-hour sessions with her.

Nico looks at Philippe and Chantal across the small table and notices something different: Chantal has edged her chair slightly away from Philippe. She will not look at Philippe. Did she see the kiss? he wonders.

Philippe and Chantal are lovers; Nico knows that. And yet he can’t quite believe it, now that he’s spent some time with them. They’re shadow and sunlight. What would draw Chantal to the dark corners of Philippe’s life? But then he remembers the first time he saw them together at a meeting at the school. They stood against the wall in the back of the classroom. Philippe wrapped his arms around Chantal and she leaned back into him. They both looked dreamy and slow, as if they had spent the day in bed together and had thrown on clothes at the last minute to make it to the meeting. As their boss droned on about the challenges of teaching the Japanese, Philippe whispered in Chantal’s ear, and Chantal closed her eyes, snaked her arm around Philippe’s back, and let her lips part as if ready to make a sound too intimate for such a public place. Nico remembers thinking: I want to know her.

Now they’re both looking at him across the table, as if waiting for something.

“You got enough gigs to carry you?” Nico asks. He doesn’t really know what Philippe does, music-wise.

“I auditioned a lead singer last night,” Philippe says. “She rocked.”

“And so you fucked her,” Chantal says.

Nico has never heard Chantal curse. Finally, Chantal and Philippe glare at each other. Nico thinks: I shouldn’t be here.

“I had a dream about you last night,” Philippe says. “You were standing in the middle of the Champs-Élysées. Naked. A crowd of tourists were cheering and tossing coins at your feet.”

“I slept with Nico last week,” Chantal tells Philippe.

Nico looks at Philippe but says nothing. He hadn’t imagined this. What had happened that night with Chantal was so personal, so private and contained, that he never thought about the possibility that she would tell Philippe.

“No problem, man. I don’t blame you. She’s hot. Look at her. You’d think that she’s an uptight bitch. But she’s really hot.”

“Philippe,” Chantal says. Her voice is mournful.

Nico remembers the surprise of Chantal’s skin. He undressed her slowly that night while the boat rocked and the light of the summer moon filtered through the porthole. He had imagined a different terrain-white skin untouched by the sun, a long, thin body. But her skin was tanned and her body dipped and rose in lovely curves. She lay on her side and they faced each other. Though he waited for her to stop him, to change her mind and ask him to leave, she gave him permission with her watchful eyes, with her playful smile, with her silence. He ran his fingers along the rise and fall of her body, neck to shoulder to waist to hip to the long stretch of her glorious leg. The landscape of Chantal, he thought.

Revenge sex, he reminds himself. Chantal didn’t need this morning’s display on the street corner to confirm what she already knew.

“Tell us about your book, Nico,” Chantal says.

He looks at her, surprised. She offers a strained smile. Has he lost her? Of course he lost her. He never had her.

“Not now,” he says. “Tonight. I’ll buy a bottle of champagne at La Forêt.”

Nico remembers the euphoria he felt after the phone call yesterday from the editor. I’ll tell Chantal, he had thought immediately. And through the long, restless night, he had imagined her pleasure at his news. He imagined her gentle questions, her admiration, her new respect. He had guarded his poems with a fierce secrecy and now, instead of enjoying the expansive pride he expected, he feels an odd sense of loss. Did he think he’d win her with poetry? Had he foolishly thought he had already won her with a night of sex?