Ellen Sussman - French Lessons

They walk past the turnstile. There is no one to take their tickets. When Josie looks back, the boy is reading his comic book again. For a moment, he looks like Brady, serious and shy. Brady before he became a star. Brady before.

She puts her hand on her belly. The nausea has passed, but now she feels light-headed, a little dizzy. She has never been pregnant, has never yet considered having a baby. She had thought that would be years away, when she was married and had moved from teaching to playwriting, her real passion. She had imagined a young husband, a cottage in the country, a couple of big dogs, and a vegetable garden.

But she’s pregnant without the guy, the job, the house, the dogs. In fact, it’s all she has. This baby.

She has no right to this baby. She thinks of Simon’s wife at the funeral, her skin the color of ash, her eyes as flat as a lake. The woman didn’t remember Josie. She nodded, accepting condolences that meant nothing. Nothing could penetrate that grief. What right did Josie have to her grief?

“She is tragic, no?” the French tutor asks.

Josie looks up. Marilyn Monroe stares back at her, her mouth slightly open, her eyes half closed. She looks drunk on sex, on booze, on death. She looks luscious and ripe and ready to die. Josie’s eyes fill up. She steps back, away from the seductive stare. They’re in a gallery space, full of Marilyn. Every photo-and the photos are huge, pressing the limits of each room-is of Marilyn. Marilyn with her head tilted back, a sated smile on her face. Marilyn drawing on a cigarette. Marilyn puckering up. Marilyn with her hand resting on the curve of her hip, stretched out on a couch, offering herself up. Love me .

“She killed herself three days after this photo shoot,” Nico says, reading from the brochure.

“You can see that she was ready,” Josie says.

“To die?”

“To give herself up to death. It looks like she was already dying.”

“You will have the baby, yes?”

Josie looks at him. Nico. He has the kindest eyes. She imagines his sweet child with eyes like this. It’s a boy and he’s holding his mama’s hand, walking through the market in Marrakesh. He’s got a swoon of sand-colored hair and everyone stops to stare at the lovely child.

“Yes,” she says. The minute she says it, she makes it true. “He’s mine.”

“It’s a boy?”

“I think so,” she says. She has Simon’s boy in her belly. It’s not fair. His wife has nothing. And she has this.

“Your boyfriend is very lucky.”

She smiles. Her smile breaks and tears spill from her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Nico says.

“No, no. It’s the photographs,” Josie tells him. “They’re so sad. Look at that one.” She turns back to the wall and Marilyn’s shadowed face. She can hear the rain against the glass roof that covers the courtyard. It sounds like an ominous movie score-there’s an army approaching or a madman about to break into someone’s house. She wraps her arms about herself. Her skin is still wet from the rain and she’s suddenly chilled.

“Didn’t she have an affair with your president Kennedy?” Nico asks.

“I think so,” Josie says. “Apparently back in those days American presidents could get away with their indiscretions.”

“Not anymore. Here we laugh at what happened to Clinton. Why should anyone care?”

“Except his wife,” Josie says.

“Yes. It’s a private problem. Not a public one. It has nothing to do with politics.”

“I wonder,” Josie says, staring into Marilyn’s dreamy eyes, “what it has to do with. Why men cheat. Why they fall into bed with pretty girls.”

“For the time that they’re in the arms of a beautiful woman, they’re invincible,” Nico says.

“Then they should stay there,” Josie says quietly.

“Are we still talking about your presidents?”

Josie doesn’t answer. She wanders down the wall of Marilyn. She feels drunk on Marilyn, sexed up and sloppy, as if her own sheets have been thrown off the bed, exposing her.

Once, after making love with Simon at her cottage, she fell asleep. She woke up and saw him standing at the side of the bed, watching her. He was dressed, ready to leave, waiting to say goodbye. He couldn’t wake her. He told her he stood there for a half hour, already late for a meeting, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Come back to bed,” she had said.

He did.

It’s in Marilyn’s mouth, it’s in her eyes, it’s in the curve of her generous hip. Come back to bed .

Nico’s by her side.

“Do you have a girlfriend now?” she asks. Une petite amie . She loves the phrase in French. Little friend. Even a boyfriend is a petit ami . On her lips, the words taste as sweet as they sound.

“No,” Nico says. “I was waiting for you.”

“But I’m taken,” she tells him. Their tone is as light as the smoke drifting from Marilyn’s cigarette.

Here, in the room with Marilyn, everything reeks of sex. It’s as if they’ve just done it and now, once again, are about to do it. Come back to bed .

“If you were taken,” Nico says, “you wouldn’t be so very sad.”

“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” Josie’s father had asked, showing up at her cottage the morning after she returned from San Francisco, the morning after her stay with Simon at the Clift.

He was sitting in her tiny kitchen, drinking coffee, probably his fifth or sixth cup of the day. He had driven up from San Jose to Marin to surprise her. It was the anniversary of her mother’s death, but they would never speak of that. It would be there, the idea of it, in the air between them, all day. They would talk about her fancy job at the prep school, his lousy grocery store, her old best friend Emily who lives next to her old ma, his middle-of-the-night heart murmur, but they would never talk about her late mother, his wife.

“I don’t have time, Dad. I’m working too hard.”

“A young girl shouldn’t work so hard.”

“I like it,” she told him, sitting across the table from him. “I love it.”

“Love. Love is for boyfriends, not jobs.”

He looked old, her father, his hair mostly gone, his skin mottled with age spots, his face jowly. She calculated: thirty-five years older than she was-and just ten years older than Simon. Impossible, she thought. Simon was fit and firm, though when he slept she saw that his skin relaxed in a way that surprised her. It seemed to let go of his bones and suddenly he was vulnerable, soft. Something about that moved her, as if he too needed someone to watch over him.

But her father was old and cranky and out of touch with her world. Simon didn’t seem old to her. True, he was a world apart from the boys she usually fell for-the long-haired, rumpled, mumbling boys. The boys who come too quickly. The boys who throw on yesterday’s clothes. The boys who live in basement apartments and smell of pot and beer.

“Are you taking care of yourself, Dad? You still go for walks every day?”

“You think I sit around and do nothing? You think I’m getting fat?”

“You’re not getting fat, Dad. You look great.”

“You’re full of shit.”

She smiled. This was what her parents did, this squabbling. He looked pleased as punch, as if he’d just flexed his muscles for an admiring crowd.

“I worry about you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t worry,” she said gently. “I take care of myself.”

“So who’s the boyfriend?”

“There’s no boyfriend, Dad. I told you.”

“You got any cake? Coffee cake or something?”

Josie stood up and walked to the pantry. She took a loaf of whole wheat bread and sliced a couple of pieces, put them in the toaster. While she gathered jam, butter, plates, and knives, her dad told her about Emily’s new boyfriend, a lawyer in San Jose.