Ellen Sussman - French Lessons

Riley felt like a fifth-grade misfit. She wanted to kick the woman’s shins. Instead, she wandered back to the smoked salmon canapés on the dining room table and drank a fast glass of cheap white wine.

“Here in Paris we believe in two people,” Philippe says. “It is only two people who can faire l’amour. ”

“Let’s start walking,” Riley says, standing quickly. “I want to settle the baby down.”

She rocks the baby, standing in place. Philippe finishes his wine in a gulp and tosses some money on the table.

“Do not be angry,” he says sweetly as they walk out to the courtyard.

“I’m not angry,” Riley says. “I’m confused.”

Cole leaves the group of kids and races to Riley’s side. He looks up in her face.

“It’s okay, Maman ,” he says, taking her hand.

What goes on in that complicated little mind of his?

“I love you, sweetheart,” Riley says. “Let’s take a walk to the river, okay?”

“The river,” Cole says happily. And off they go, the four of them. Sleep with a guy and voilà ! You’ve got yourself a spanking new family. Would Vic notice if he slid between the sheets tonight and bumped up against Philippe? Again, that penis waves jubilantly in Riley’s mind, and she shakes the image away.

“What happens if it rains when they’re filming?” she asks.

“On verra,” he says.

She doesn’t ask what that means. Whatever it is, it sounds better in French.

The crowd is enormous at the quai du Louvre. As far as Riley can see, people are lined up at the side of the promenade, staring out toward the river.

“I didn’t know the French were starstruck like this,” Riley says to Philippe. They’re pressed together at the street corner, waiting for the light to change. Everyone seems to be headed for the same place, and when the light changes they shuffle along with the crowd.

“We love the cinema. We love art. We appreciate the work of our great directors.”

“Face it, Philippe. You’re all star-fuckers.”

“I would fuck the star, yes.”

“She’s a middle-aged woman,” Riley says.

“In our country, we love all women.”

“Love, love, love. If the French do so much loving all the time, why is everyone so angry?”

Philippe leans over and kisses Riley, missing her lips and brushing against her cheek.

“Arrête,” Riley says. She looks at Cole, who is singing to himself, ignoring his mother and her tutor.

“Je suis méchant,” Philippe whispers.

Riley knows that expression-another common playground phrase. Bad boy. Man, is he ever.

They cross the street, step over the low fence that is supposed to keep pedestrians from walking on the grass but is apparently ignored by everyone at times of international crisis like filming in progress, and they gather with the hordes of people near the river.

She wiggles through the crowd-a hard thing to do with a baby on her double-D chest, Cole in front of her, Philippe behind her with a hand on her rump-and she finds an unpopulated patch of grass under a tree. Front-row seats.

“Bravo,” Philippe says, and his hand slips away.

They all gaze out at the river. Across the way is the Left Bank, with its grand old apartment buildings, and to the right, the majestic Musée d’Orsay. Farther down, the Eiffel Tower peeks out above the rooftops. Riley’s mouth hangs open. Paris. For a year she’s been living somewhere else, somewhere dark and bleak. It’s like she’s just arrived, freshly fucked and wearing rose-colored glasses.

“Bed, Maman ,” Cole says.

Riley pulls her eyes away from the view across the river and gazes down at the pedestrian bridge. There’s a bed in the middle of the bridge. In fact, it looks a little like it too has been freshly fucked. A tangle of sheets sprawl across the mattress.

“A bed?” she says.

Philippe mumbles a rush of words in French.

“ Expliquez everything, s’il vous plaît ,” Riley insists.

“I don’t know,” Philippe says. “But I have the great hope to see Dana Hurley in that bed.”

“Naked.”

“Bien sûr.”

“In front of the children.”

“It is art.”

“It is weird.”

“They’re making a movie,” Riley tells Cole. “They’re going to film a scene and put it in a movie. It’s not real.”

No one says anything.

“That makes no sense,” Riley tells herself aloud. “It’s perfectly real. We’re looking at it.”

“C’est vrai,” Philippe says.

She puts her hand on Cole’s head. He looks up at her, wide-eyed.

“You know how when someone dies in a movie, they don’t really die? It’s an actor pretending he’s dead? So if someone does something in that bed, they’re just pretending.”

Cole keeps looking at her, waiting for something better. She hasn’t got it.

“You explain it,” she says to Philippe. She says the same thing to Vic often. When he comes home at the end of a long day, she’d like him to answer all the questions that Cole asks. Sometimes it is too hard for her to explain the simplest things: “Why Daddy have to work?” “Why Daddy go away?” “Why Mama cry?”

“On verra ,” Philippe says.

So much for men and their explanations.

But Cole is happy with that, and he goes back to watching the bed.

There are a couple of tents at one end of the bridge and a swarm of people around the bed. Riley spots a director’s chair and a red-haired woman perched in it. She’s waving her hands and shouting.

“There’s your great director,” Riley says, pointing.

“Mais oui,” Philippe says, sighing, as if he has attained nirvana. He didn’t sigh like that in bed, Riley thinks. He must save his sighs for art.

And then, in a blinding flash, the lights around the bed all illuminate and the bed itself becomes a kind of holy site, an oasis of white, a beckoning, a call. The crowd heaves a collective sigh-whatever the hell is going on out there, Riley is missing it. So it’s a mattress on a bridge in the middle of the river. What’s up with that?

Out of the absolute silence of the wondrous crowd comes a squeak, then a squall, then a bellow. Her baby is bawling.

“Shhhh,” Riley says, patting Gabi’s head.

Philippe shoots her dagger looks; even Cole looks up as if he’s about to belt her for failing to observe this sacred ceremony without the proper decorum. Fuck decorum, Riley thinks. The kid is hungry.

She slides down along the trunk of the tree until she’s sitting on its roots. She pulls Gabi from the Snugli and quickly unbuttons her blouse. She pulls her bra up and over her breasts and lets the baby latch on for dear life. Ahhh . Now Riley releases her own deep sigh. This is love.

While Gabi suckles and everyone else watches some stupid-ass scene on the bridge below-between Philippe’s legs Riley can see a naked young woman writhing on the bed, a pompous ass circling the bed as if he’s Elvis Presley incarnate-Riley thinks about love.

It’s not s-e-x, though s-e-x is a grand substitute for love. It’s this child, this breast, this flow of milk. It’s Cole, watching his first naked woman in his life, only a short time after listening to the love song of a young girl in the courtyard below. It’s her mother in Florida, who has asked her every day if she could come visit, knowing that Riley is unhappy even though Riley never said a word. And in that moment, Riley knows what she has to do. Love doesn’t just sit around watching. Love jumps on a plane and shows up.

She takes out her cell phone. She clicks her mom’s name and in moments her mother’s voice is in her ear.