Ellen Sussman - French Lessons

“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.”