Do I want to kiss my French tutor because I’ve had a fight with my wife, Jeremy thinks, or did I fight with my wife because I suddenly desire my French tutor?
It’s his last day with Chantal, and all he can think of is his mouth on hers.
Every other day he thought of conjugations and obscure nouns and colloquial expressions. Now he thinks of the space exposed by her open blouse, that blush of skin, the heat he feels when his eyes dip into the hollow of her neck.
During last night’s argument, while he and Dana walked along Paris-Plage, too late for the last metro, too drunk for safe conversation, he said, “I need quiet. Your life is too noisy.”
Did he mean that? Where did that come from? Had four days with Chantal-long, leisurely days of conversation- led to this clamoring in his mind?
In the middle of sloppy, drunken, angry sex, the kind of sex he and Dana never had, the kind that left them raw and panting, Dana had asked, “Are you leaving me?”
“No,” he assured her. “No. I love you. I’ll always love you.”
And now this: Chantal standing in front of him at the entrance of the metro station, her hair slipping out of its barrette so that wavy tendrils trace the lines of her long neck. Her sideways glance at him, as if to say,
Maybe it’s Paris that has me acting like a fool, Jeremy thinks. He looks around him and again, in an instant, he has that uncanny feeling that he’s seeing everything for the first time. It’s the surprise of it all, the non-Los Angeles of it, the new light, the old buildings, the discovery of learning a city by walking its streets.
Immediately he’s hounded by guilt, as if Dana can hear his thoughts. No, his life with her is certainly not bland. It’s not her. It’s Los Angeles. It’s Hollywood. He’d feel this way if he were suddenly transported to the Teton mountains.
But Chantal would not be standing in front of him in the Teton mountains.
“Our last day,” Chantal says in French. “Are you ready?”
There are so many things he can say. No, I am not ready for my French lessons to end. Yes, I am ready for you. No, I am not ready for my life to change. Yes, I am ready for you. No, I am not ready for Lindy, my stepdaughter, who showed up unexpectedly at the apartment last night with a newly shaved head. I am not ready for another night with the insufferable film crew.
The French tutor smiles her beguiling smile, and Jeremy relaxes for the first time this morning.
They are standing outside the metro in the Fifth Arrondissement. Each morning they meet at a different metro station. Chantal and Jeremy stroll the streets of Paris while they speak French. Jeremy likes this system and wonders if Chantal always does this with her students or if she invented this program when she first met Jeremy, four days ago, and saw that he was more comfortable while in motion. If only I could have learned while on the move when I was a kid, he thinks. I might have liked a walking school.
He doesn’t doubt that Chantal would be capable of knowing this about him in a few short hours. In these four days, she has found out that he likes to talk about architecture, about wood, about politics and literature. And so she has steered their conversations as well as their meanderings around Paris, suiting his needs without ever seeming to ask him what he would like to do.
Yesterday’s brilliant summer sky is gone and clouds have moved in. Chantal carries an umbrella. The air is thick with humidity and rich odors.
“We will start at the market,” Chantal says in French. “I will introduce you to the language of food.”
Jeremy had not told Chantal that he loves to cook. He smiles at her and nods, pleased to be at her side.
“I bought my husband a beautiful French girl for our anniversary,” Dana told their dinner companions last night.
“Not exactly,” Jeremy added.
“I wanted him to come with me on this shoot,” Dana explained, leaning conspiratorially toward the men and women at the table, her voice lowered as if sharing a secret. But they were the last patrons at the restaurant. Dana hadn’t finished filming until after ten o’clock. They began their dinner at 10:30 or so, and it was now almost one in the morning. The waiters lingered at the doorway to the kitchen, anxious to leave. “It’s our tenth anniversary-I wasn’t going to spend it alone in Paris.”
Dana is never alone. She has fellow actors and directors and agents and fans, so many fans that she is even recognized in this foreign city.
“I just finished a restoration project in Santa Barbara,” Jeremy said. “I was happy to come along.”
He cursed himself for feeling the need to remind their dinner companions that he too works, that he does have a life-and an artistic one at that. He doesn’t just follow Dana around from one movie location to the next. But they paid no attention to him. They waited to hear about the beautiful French girl. Jeremy wished he were back at the hotel with Dana, in bed, alone at last.
“But what could he do all day in Paris while I’m filming?” Dana said to the group. “Well, Pascale gave me the name of a language school and I set him up with a full week of private tutoring. While I’m working he’s learning the language of love with someone named Chantal.”
She spread the name open like it too was a gift: “Chan-t-a-a-al.”
“Not quite,” Jeremy said. He’s accustomed to his wife’s stories, the way they grow. By tomorrow night Chantal might be the most beautiful woman in all of France. “We haven’t yet discussed love,” he explained.
Everyone was charmed.
“Thank God I trust you the way I do,” Dana added.
“My stepdaughter would like to meet us for coffee,” Jeremy tells Chantal, in French, as they walk toward the steep hill of rue Mouffetard. Jeremy can see the long line of food stalls ahead; he can hear a man calling out,
“How old is your stepdaughter?”
“She’s twenty,” Jeremy says. “She left me a note this morning. I haven’t even talked to her yet. She arrived sometime in the middle of the night. If you think it would be too difficult-”
“No, not at all,” Chantal says. “I’d love to meet her.”
Jeremy glances at Chantal. She is poised, elegant, a proper young Parisian woman. Suddenly he can’t imagine her next to wild Lindy. He hears loud voices ahead and turns his attention to the market. He’s not sure he wants to enter the noise and tumult-for the first time he considers suggesting something other than what Chantal has planned. A quiet street, someplace they can talk without shouting. They might talk about their lives, something they haven’t done all week. Who is this woman? He wants to know her-where she is from, where she lives now, what she wants in her life.
Why shouldn’t they talk about matters of the heart? In French! He has always known that his French is good, but he’s not one to take risks, to try out unsure sentences on strangers. And he doesn’t like to make a fool of himself. With Chantal his sentences seem to come out fully formed, as if he has been waiting for twenty-five years, since his college French classes, to speak with this woman.
And of course, whenever they come to Paris, it’s Dana who speaks. She had spent a year at the Sorbonne and fell in love with an Algerian man who returned with her to UCLA, living in her dorm room until her parents found out and disposed of him. Dana even
