French Lessons

“You know about Wally.”

“Never heard his name.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s just driving me to the hospital. I’ll be fine.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

“Who he is. He’s just a ride.”

“Does he know he’s just a ride?”

Philippe is just a ride, she thinks. Why didn’t I listen to my mother years ago?

“Go take your prince to one of those fancy bakeries. Tell him Nana wants to buy him one of those French pastries you keep talking about.”

Riley nods and mumbles something and hangs up the phone. Cole is still spellbound by the chanteuse below. Riley looks out the window.

The girl in the courtyard finishes her song and takes a bow. She blows a kiss and Cole catches it, a trick Nana had taught him six months ago. He is in love, Riley thinks. For the rest of his life, this will be love.

“Nana wants to buy you a pain au chocolat,” Riley says.

“How? Nana in Florida.”

“She told me to buy you one. When Gabi wakes up, we’ll go for a walk, sweetie.”

“Mama cry,” Cole says, looking at her for the first time.

“Runny nose,” Riley says. “Gotta catch it.” And she heads for the Kleenex box on the kitchen counter.

With Gabi in her Snugli and Cole by her side, Riley decides to embark on a quest: to eat the best damn pain au chocolat in all of Paris. At the last expat moms’ group-another miserable experience-everyone swapped favorite parks, favorite children’s clothing stores, favorite child-friendly restaurants, favorite pediatricians, and of course, favorite patisseries. Next meeting, Riley imagines herself spreading the word: Best tutor for a midday fuck fest-Philippe!

She heads toward numero uno on the patisserie list. It has stopped raining and she needs to shake the spooks from her psyche. Somehow between now and late tonight when The Victor crawls into bed, she’s got to figure out what to do with her life.

Her cell phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Riley.”

“Philippe?” His voice sounds different, as if it’s been dipped in honey.

“Meet me for a glass of wine.”

“You’re speaking English.”

“The French lesson is over.”

“You speak English. All this time you speak English.”

“Not so well. But your French is-how you say-it sucks.”

His accent is not Maurice Chevalier charming but kind of high and whiny. He’s not sexy in English. In fact, he’s Philip in English. She would never fuck a Philip.

“I’ve got the kids, Philippe. Real life and all of that.”

“Oh.”

She thinks of his uncircumcised penis waving in the air above her. She almost runs into a street light but Cole shouts, “Maman!” Weird. On the street Cole calls her Maman. In their apartment he calls her Mama. How does a two-year-old navigate such complicated terrain?

“Sorry, baby.”

“No need to be sorry,” Philippe says.

“I was-”

“Bring the children. They are filming on the quai. Some famous American actress is here. We can watch, all of us together.”

One quick fuck-all right, two-and he’s creating a new nuclear family, Riley thinks. Let’s blow that one up before it even hits Code Orange.

“Listen, Philippe-”

“T’es belle. T’es magnifique, cherie.”

“Okay,” Riley says. She shakes her head. In some distant country her old friends scream at her: Pathetic fool! “Where?” she asks.

He gives her an address and whispers something in French. In a quick moment, he is her sexy lover again.

But she doesn’t want a sexy lover! She just wants someone to walk next to her in Paris, someone taller than three feet.

She leads the kids toward the nearest metro, already scrambling in her brain for a way out of this mess.

Cole used to love the metro, used to pull Riley toward the swirly green gables beckoning them to the underworld of speedy trains and flashy billboards. He watched the people who moved from car to car, making speeches, playing guitar, juggling balls, a wacked-out subterranean circus.

“What he say, Maman?” he’d ask when the homeless man would stand at the front of the car and recite some story to the captive audience.

“I don’t know,” she’d tell him honestly.

Then, as his French got better, he understood their terrible stories: Ladies and gentlemen. My wife has a broken leg. There is no heat in our apartment. My oldest children are sick from the cold, the youngest one has a rare disease. I can no longer work because my child is at the hospital. Cole would bury his face in Riley’s coat, hiding his tears, worried that the child in the hospital would die and the man would never get work and the poor maman could not walk. “We’ll give the man money,” Riley would say, as if one euro would solve the problems of the world.

“We have to take the metro,” Riley tells Cole now, urging him down into the underworld of misery and hardship. We have to go see my lover, she won’t say, but she presses her hand on his small back and he’s such a good boy that he heads dutifully down-down-down the stairs and toward her own personal Satan.

Thankfully there are no speeches on the metro today, just a boy doing some kind of break dancing-though Riley thinks they call it something else now. Already she’s too old for the latest fads. Cole applauds when the boy is done, and Riley fishes out a euro for Cole to put in the boy’s filthy palm.

Gabi pokes her head out of the Snugli, watching the world. She’s a quiet baby and Riley loves her for it. She loves the weight of the baby pressed against her chest, the smell of her powdery scalp, the tufts of strawberry- blond hair that swirl on her head like a halo.

They climb the stairs from the metro and for a moment they’re blinded-it has stopped raining again, and the brilliant sun reflects from all the puddles that have gathered in the street. Riley finds her movie-star sunglasses and hides behind them. In Paris the women wear small, dignified glasses, arty things with frames of red, purple, bronze. She won’t give up her oversize tortoise-framed specs. They make her feel like Gwyneth dashing over to Paris for a little shopping expedition.

She pulls out her plan, the little blue book of maps that she carries like a Bible, and finds the First Arrondissement-then rue de Rivoli, where Philippe awaits. She has never arrived anywhere in Paris without getting lost. The streets are treacherous, evil places that might deliver you to a canal instead of a street corner. She will not ask directions-it’s useless, all that finger-pointing and hand-waving and word-flying.

But miraculously, the entrance to the courtyard of the Louvre is across the street, and in front of it is Philippe.

He waits for her to cross the street, then he steps toward her and leans forward to kiss her.

She pulls back.

“Les enfants,” she says.

“Aha. So now you speak French,” he says.

He shakes her hand. That is what they do when he comes to her apartment for her French lessons. And he shakes Cole’s hand and says, “Bonjour, monsieur.”

“Bonjour, monsieur,” Cole repeats, his accent perfect.

Philippe leans forward to kiss the top of Gabi’s head, and while he does it he sneaks a hand onto Riley’s neck. Both Gabi and Riley make some kind of whimpering sound.