Ellen Sussman - French Lessons

“You could have talked to me about this,” Jeremy says quietly.

“I needed to stop talking. That’s all I did in college. Talk, talk, talk. There are plenty of words. You can fill hours with them. And then when you stop talking, time stops. You sit there and everything opens up and you can hear your thoughts for the first time.”

They stop talking. But Jeremy’s mind feels like it’s closing down. He can hear nothing in his brain but a low buzzing sound, as if there’s static in there, a bad connection, a radio that can’t pick up a station.

“I think I understand,” Chantal says softly.

Jeremy looks at her beseechingly. Help me , he wants to say. He wants to understand his daughter. He wants to know Chantal. But it’s not a question of understanding the words. He can translate each one.

In the silence, glass shatters on the other side of the courtyard, startling him. He looks up-a teacup has slipped from the waiter’s hands. For a moment, he had forgotten the rest of the world, this corner of Paris, these other patrons, the sweet mint tea on the table in front of him.

“Someone told me about this monastery outside Arles. I went with a friend, but the girl left after a week. I stayed for two months.” She stops and smiles. “Maybe that’s why I’m talking so much.”

Jeremy puts his hand on her arm.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“No one ever told me I needed to be like Mom,” she says simply.

She smiles at him, the sweetest smile he has seen yet. Then she turns to Chantal.

“My mother is a force of nature,” she says.

Chantal nods.

“I’m not her.”

She says this to Jeremy. He nods, then leans over and kisses her cheek. She smells like someone else, a grown-up woman. Maybe it’s a new French soap or a perfume that she’s bought. For a moment, he yearns for a younger Lindy, one without a shaved head and a flash of anger. One without such a complicated quest. But he has grown up with her. He, too, is someone else now. Ten years ago he tumbled into love with Dana and her daughter. Five years ago he thought he had it nailed-he was their rock, the one who would hold them together. And now he’s not sure of anything. Only last night he pushed his chair back from the dinner table and watched Dana tell a long story about their trip to Argentina and how they climbed to the top of a mountain in the Andes and the clouds parted and the glory of the world was revealed. Jeremy listened and thought: Have I lost myself in her?

“Your monastery sounds like a very good place,” he says.

“The food sucked,” Lindy says in English, sounding very much like a child again. With that, she pops a cookie into her mouth.

Chantal looks at Jeremy over the rim of her teacup. Her eyes are amused, as if she has forgiven the girl her churlishness.

He wants to ask her if she is close to her parents. Does she tell them about the secrets of her heart? Even as Lindy offers him something-a glimpse of her life for the past months-she is telling him something else. I’m not yours anymore. You don’t know everything about me anymore.

“When I was twenty-one I moved to an island in the Indian Ocean,” Chantal says. Her eyes move from Jeremy’s to Lindy’s and back again. “I wanted to be something-I don’t know, something other than what I was.” Jeremy notices that it is the first time Chantal can’t find the word she wants. “You know what I discovered living in my hippie beach commune without running water and electricity? That I am a Parisian.”

Jeremy tries to imagine Chantal, with her prim cardigan sweater, her neatly wrapped umbrella, her tiny pearl earrings, this lovely composed woman-living in a tent on the beach? He smiles at the thought.

“You’re laughing at me,” Chantal says.

“No, not at all. Did you come home right away?”

“Not right away,” Chantal explains. “But sometimes we have to run away from ourselves in order to find ourselves.”

A few days ago, Chantal and Jeremy had walked through the Parc Monceau during their French lesson. A woman and a man had stood near the crepe stand, arguing loudly. “Je suis Américaine!” the woman yelled. “Je suis Américaine!” Jeremy had told Dana the story later. “What happens to your identity when you take it away from everything familiar?” he had asked. “You know yourself better,” she replied assuredly.

Not me , Jeremy had thought. I know who I am when I am home in my shop. When I’m in bed with my wife. When I’m preparing dinner in my kitchen.

Already, in a few days in Paris, with a strange woman at his side, Jeremy feels like he is unmoored.

“Will you go back to the monastery?” Jeremy asks Lindy. He is a little frightened of the answer.

“No,” she says lightly. “I need sex.”

“Spare me,” Jeremy says, in English, and both women laugh.

Lindy leans toward Chantal and says something to her under her breath. More laughter. Jeremy feels his hangover for the first time. How many bottles of wine did they all drink at dinner last night? He needs food, he needs sleep, he needs to think about something other than his daughter needing sex. He thinks that she slept with her high school boyfriend, though that relationship only lasted a month or so. Dana speculated that they were “fuck buddies” after that, a horrible thought in Jeremy’s mind. Unlike most men he knows, Jeremy has always wanted love with his sex. When he knows someone in bed, he wants to know her out of bed. And when he loves her in bed, well, the rest should follow.

And here is his daughter-at twenty, beautiful and lost-looking for sex. Jeremy knows that men prey on this kind of girl and it terrifies him.

“I’m going to meet some friends,” Lindy says, “at the Champ de Mars. They’re having a picnic.”

Jeremy remembers his imagined picnic with Chantal. Now his feet press up against the wedges of cheese, tomatoes, olives. What happens next? he wonders. When Lindy leaves?

She stands up, leans over and pecks Jeremy on both cheeks. “À bientôt,” she says. And then she says something in French that Jeremy doesn’t understand. But Chantal smiles and shakes her head.

Lindy dashes off. Did she say something rude? Should he even ask for a translation?

“She is a beautiful girl,” Chantal says.

“Thank you,” Jeremy says foolishly. For of course he has nothing to do with her beauty. “I’m sorry if-”

“No, it was fine,” Chantal says.

He doesn’t even know what he was going to apologize for, and now it has passed. Lindy is gone. The teacups are empty. The girls have eaten their cookies. Even, somehow, the bill is paid.

“On y va,” Chantal says. And they are walking again.

Chantal has led them down to the Seine and while they stroll through the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air, a garden with modern sculptures dotting the landscape, they don’t talk about art but about love.

“Earlier this morning I was thinking about Lindy’s first love,” Jeremy says. “A river guide in Costa Rica.”

“How romantic,” Chantal tells him.

“Oh, it turned from romance to heartbreak in a day,” he explains. His mind jumps to sex with Dana last night. Pain, love, lust-sometimes it’s a package deal.

“So tell me,” Chantal says, “about your first love.”

“My first love?”

“Please. I’d like to hear the story.”

And so he tells her, in easy French, since all the words slip off his tongue-yes, it’s the language of romance-while they linger by the river. A photographer is taking pictures of an Asian couple in their wedding clothes. A little girl in a pink dress with a bouquet of flowers hides behind the bride. It’s a charming scene, with the stone walkway, the languid river, Notre Dame looming beyond them on the Île de la Cité. The air is thick with humidity and time seems to have slowed down.