French Lessons

the apartment beside them. “I shoot a film, get crazy busy, and then I come home and it’s all over and we have our life together. This isn’t my life. It’s my job. You’re my life, goddamn it! What are you talking about?”

He stared at her, amazed. He imagined her onscreen, those big emotions, those wild eyes, the husky voice. “You don’t have to scream,” he said softly.

“Yes, I do!” she shouted. She stuffed her foot back in the shoe and stormed off. He followed her.

Even off the screen, he was married to drama, he thought. He felt weary and angry with himself for starting something out of nothing. He imagined Chantal, somewhere in Paris, reading a book by the window, hearing the angry shouts of a married couple on the street below. She would quietly close the window.

“There it is,” Chantal says, pointing to the museum up ahead.

“Bon,” Jeremy says, and they cross the street to the Museum national d’histoire Naturelle. It’s a renovated old building, partially covered with a bold blue banner announcing all the exhibition halls in the Jardin des Plantes. Apparently, they’re headed to the Grande Galerie de l’evolution. Beyond the museum Jeremy sees long stretches of green lawn and well-tended gardens.

Inside, a double line of schoolchildren wait to get in. The teachers stand at the ticket booth, arguing with the agent, while the children stand obediently, shuffling their feet, talking quietly to one another.

“American children would be running all over the place,” Jeremy says. “This is amazing. The teachers don’t even have to scold them.”

“Oh, we follow so many rules,” Chantal says, “until we have had our fill. By the time we reach twenty we rebel like wild horses on short leads.”

“And you? Did you rebel?”

“No,” Chantal says. “Not yet.”

They both smile, and when she turns around quickly the baguette in her bag smacks Jeremy on his head. The kids burst out laughing and Chantal looks back at Jeremy, her face a sudden pink.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll survive,” Jeremy says. “If I have a black eye tomorrow I’ll have to invent a much better story.”

“Tell your wife I punched you,” Chantal says.

“Did I give you good reason?”

“Oh, yes,” she says.

And then she hurries off to buy tickets. The schoolchildren have filed into the museum ahead of them and she is next in line.

Jeremy glances at his watch. Ten forty-five. They will have only forty-five minutes before they meet Lindy at the cafe. He calls Lindy on his cell phone. She doesn’t answer, but he’s connected to her voice mail.

“Bonjour, cherie,” he says happily. She’ll be impressed. Like her mother, she speaks French with ease. Good private-school training, a summer program in Aix-en-Provence during high school. Jeremy continues with his message in French. “Meet us at the mosque. It’s across from the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes in the Fifth. You can’t miss it.” He had noticed it on his walk here with Chantal. “There’s a tearoom inside. I can’t wait to see you, sweetheart. I peeked in this morning while you were sleeping. I-” He can’t think of how to refer to the bald head. Her new haircut? Her latest rebellion? He coughs and then hangs up as if their connection was lost.

He didn’t mention the shaved scalp to Dana. She’ll be furious.

“On y va,” Chantal says. She takes his arm, something she has never done before, and leads him into the grand entrance of the museum.

The minute they step through the door, Jeremy takes a deep breath. It’s a spectacular space, vast and open, dark yet eerily beckoning. On the ground floor of the central exhibition space he sees the march of animals, life-size, regal and elegant-elephants, giraffes, zebras. He’s awed by their size, their numbers, their beauty. He and Chantal move forward and look up. The four-story space is open in the middle as if the animals need room to breathe.

Jeremy is distracted by the light touch of Chantal’s hand on his forearm. It’s as if all his energy and attention has rushed, like blood, to this one part of his anatomy. His skin feels warm, and he imagines her hand making an impression on his skin, as if he were made of clay. She is saying something and he hasn’t been listening.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “What did you say?”

She looks at him, surprised. Of course, he always pays such close attention.

“There was a word I didn’t understand,” he says, finding a feeble excuse. “And so I got lost.”

“I will find you,” Chantal says, smiling. “Perhaps you were lost with the penguins?”

He looks to the right-there’s a display of penguins staring at him.

Her hand leaves his arm and she steps toward the magnificent march of the animals. She gestures toward them and names them all, slowly, as if Jeremy is not only lost but a little slow.

He laughs. “I feel like I belong with the schoolchildren.”

“You are not well enough behaved,” Chantal says.

“That’s not about to change now,” he tells her.

But that’s not true. Jeremy has not behaved badly in years. He has been a perfect partner to Dana since he met her. That first time-a chance meeting-changed him; he knew that by the end of the day, when he told her: “Come home with me.”

He had been working on a house in Bel Air, restoring a library that had been built in 1901 and neglected for more than a century. The owner of the house had warned him: A film crew was shooting a scene in the house, but the library was off-limits to them. No one told Dana that, and she had wandered in while the director was working on a scene that didn’t include her.

She had walked around the library quietly, and finally stood beside Jeremy’s ladder, watching him. He was fitting a delicately carved cornice onto the built-in breakfront bookcase. He had replicated the piece from old photos. It had taken weeks to shape, carve, and finish the intricate pierced form from a piece of mahogany.

He glanced at her, nodded, and returned his attention to his work.

“That’s very beautiful,” she said finally. “Do you live here?”

“No,” he said. “An actor lives here. Someone with enough money and enough good taste to save this place instead of tearing it down.”

“You don’t know who the actor is?”

“I don’t know much about that world,” Jeremy told her.

He noticed how her smile grew.

“I’m Dana Hurley,” she said.

“Jeremy Diamond,” he said, stepping down from the ladder.

“Would you like a glass of champagne?” she asked. “I can get it for you. Or something to eat?”

“You’re on the film crew?” he asked.

“I’m an actress,” she said.

“Somehow I bet I’m the only man in America who hasn’t heard of you,” he said.

“Can I hide here with you?” she asked, still smiling.

“Yes,” he said.

He set his chisel and wooden mallet aside and wiped his hands. They sat in the two club chairs by the bay windows and talked for a long time.

“This could be our house,” Dana said at one point.

“I would build us a much nicer house,” Jeremy told her.

He discovered in the first weeks after meeting her that he was more than ready to give up short-term relationships and one-night stands. Dana offered so much more than all of those many women he used to date. And then there was something new: real love, responsibility, taking care of someone. Fatherhood-that, too, changed him and made him want nothing else than what he had.

“What are those?” Jeremy asks Chantal, interrupting his own thoughts. He’ll be the good student again, pointing at some ratty thing nipping at the heels of a graceful deer.

Chantal offers vocabulary words that he’ll never use. He thinks of his dog at home, a pet sitter taking care of her and promising long walks in the hills. He needs a long walk in the hills. He’s been city-bound too long. These animals remind him that he needs air, space, motion. Everything about this beautiful museum is wrong. The animals are trapped inside.

“Let’s move outside,” Chantal says.