French Lessons

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 Musee 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 plait,” Riley insists.

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

“Naked.”

“Bien sur.”

“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.

“That’s three times in one day,” her mom says.

“I’m coming home. I’m your ride. Don’t argue,” Riley says.

“I’m fine-”

“Listen,” Riley says. “In a few months you’ll come visit me in Paris. You’ll love it here. I’ll take you to the Eiffel Tower, we’ll ride on a bateau-mouche. I haven’t done any of those things. But right now, I’m coming to Florida.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Because everyone’s watching some film being made. Dana Hurley is in it. Oh, I think I can see her. She’s standing next to a bed on a bridge, and there’s some bare-assed chiquita doing some sex-kitten act on the bed.”

“Where’s Cole?”

“Watching. It’s art, Mom.”

“I don’t understand how you kids raise kids these days.”

“Yeah, well.”

“You can’t come rushing home, Riley. You’re married.”

“I hate it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Not it. Him. Vic.”

“Oh. Vic.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. Finally her mother says, “I thought so.”

“I want something else. I don’t know what.”

Riley hears something whirring in the background.

“What’s that noise?”

“I’m making a smoothie. It’s an anti-cancer smoothie. Think it will work?”

“Yeah. We’ll make it work.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” her mom says, and she’s crying, making gulping sounds that blend with the whirring sounds so that it’s an orchestral event on the other end.

Riley doesn’t cry. She smiles and lets Gabi suckle and watches Cole gawk. This is love. She’ll go home with her children and take care of her mother who won’t let anyone in the world take care of her. Maybe she’ll even let her mother take care of her.

Then there’s a roar of thunder, a gasp from the crowd, and the skies open up. Cole steps back and the three of them-she, Gabi, and Cole-huddle together under the canopy of the tree while the rain soaks the bed, the actors, the crowd, Philippe, and Paris in all its glory.

Jeremy and Chantal