French Lessons

film shoot? Of course not.

But it’s Chantal who answers. “No. I have to meet some friends when our lesson is done.”

“Quel dommage,” Lindy says.

Jeremy wonders if something has happened to Lindy on this European trip. She has sharp edges, something he has never seen before.

The waiter appears and places a plate of little cookies in front of them. He says something to Chantal-Jeremy can’t understand a word he says. Did they order cookies? Is the waiter showing off for Chantal and Lindy? Chantal thanks him. Jeremy sips his tea. He’s surprised by its sweetness.

When the waiter leaves, Chantal asks Lindy where she has traveled.

“I’ve been in a monastery,” Lindy says. “In the South of France.”

Is she lying? In her emails she wrote that she had bought a Eurail pass. She and a couple of friends were traveling through Spain and Portugal. In her phone calls she talked about youth hostels and parties on the beaches and getting lost in Lisbon. When he heard lots of background noise in one phone call, she told him she was at a pizza restaurant and it was someone’s birthday party. Monastery?

She won’t look at him. She’s telling Chantal this story. He’s the stranger now, listening in.

“I dropped out of college in March. I didn’t know why I was studying anymore. To learn what? Environmental science? What was I going to do with that? The literature of the sixties? Cool, but so what? I just needed to know why. I don’t mean I needed to know what I was going to be when I grew up. I mean, I needed to know why I needed to learn. To take a test? To get an A? To please Papa?”

“No,” Jeremy says, interrupting her. “I never put any pressure on you-”

“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with you,” Lindy says, waving him off. “You’re easy. You just love me no matter what.”

“That’s important,” Chantal says. “To be loved like that.”

Jeremy looks at her, and it’s as if his bones settle in his body again. He needs to hear Chantal’s voice, he thinks. Even Lindy’s French, which is very good, makes him work too hard. He has to grapple with words, to make sure he understands what she’s saying. And it’s so important that he gets this, that he hears her story. For the first time, he wants to say, Let’s speak in English. I don’t understand. A monastery?

But he doesn’t say a word. Lindy is talking again, words flying by too quickly.

“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with who loves me. I have this photo of me as a child with my mother. We’re sitting on a couch in our old house and she’s gazing down at me with a look of pure motherly devotion. That photo? Her manager came to dinner one night and swiped the photo and cropped her face and put that adoring gaze up on the cover of some stupid magazine. Now she’s smiling down on the whole damn world. I’m nowhere in the picture.”

“So it does have to do with love,” Chantal says.

“No. It’s got to do with my disappearing act. Poof, I’m gone. I’m no one, I’m everyone. I’m in college. I’m in Spain. I’m in a monastery.”

“You could have talked to me about this,” Jeremy says quietly.

“I needed to stop talking. That’s all I did in college. Talk, talk, talk. There are plenty of words. You can fill hours with them. And then when you stop talking, time stops. You sit there and everything opens up and you can hear your thoughts for the first time.”

They stop talking. But Jeremy’s mind feels like it’s closing down. He can hear nothing in his brain but a low buzzing sound, as if there’s static in there, a bad connection, a radio that can’t pick up a station.

“I think I understand,” Chantal says softly.

Jeremy looks at her beseechingly. Help me, he wants to say. He wants to understand his daughter. He wants to know Chantal. But it’s not a question of understanding the words. He can translate each one.

In the silence, glass shatters on the other side of the courtyard, startling him. He looks up-a teacup has slipped from the waiter’s hands. For a moment, he had forgotten the rest of the world, this corner of Paris, these other patrons, the sweet mint tea on the table in front of him.

“Someone told me about this monastery outside Arles. I went with a friend, but the girl left after a week. I stayed for two months.” She stops and smiles. “Maybe that’s why I’m talking so much.”

Jeremy puts his hand on her arm.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“No one ever told me I needed to be like Mom,” she says simply.

She smiles at him, the sweetest smile he has seen yet. Then she turns to Chantal.

“My mother is a force of nature,” she says.

Chantal nods.

“I’m not her.”

She says this to Jeremy. He nods, then leans over and kisses her cheek. She smells like someone else, a grown-up woman. Maybe it’s a new French soap or a perfume that she’s bought. For a moment, he yearns for a younger Lindy, one without a shaved head and a flash of anger. One without such a complicated quest. But he has grown up with her. He, too, is someone else now. Ten years ago he tumbled into love with Dana and her daughter. Five years ago he thought he had it nailed-he was their rock, the one who would hold them together. And now he’s not sure of anything. Only last night he pushed his chair back from the dinner table and watched Dana tell a long story about their trip to Argentina and how they climbed to the top of a mountain in the Andes and the clouds parted and the glory of the world was revealed. Jeremy listened and thought: Have I lost myself in her?

“Your monastery sounds like a very good place,” he says.

“The food sucked,” Lindy says in English, sounding very much like a child again. With that, she pops a cookie into her mouth.

Chantal looks at Jeremy over the rim of her teacup. Her eyes are amused, as if she has forgiven the girl her churlishness.

He wants to ask her if she is close to her parents. Does she tell them about the secrets of her heart? Even as Lindy offers him something-a glimpse of her life for the past months-she is telling him something else. I’m not yours anymore. You don’t know everything about me anymore.

“When I was twenty-one I moved to an island in the Indian Ocean,” Chantal says. Her eyes move from Jeremy’s to Lindy’s and back again. “I wanted to be something-I don’t know, something other than what I was.” Jeremy notices that it is the first time Chantal can’t find the word she wants. “You know what I discovered living in my hippie beach commune without running water and electricity? That I am a Parisian.”

Jeremy tries to imagine Chantal, with her prim cardigan sweater, her neatly wrapped umbrella, her tiny pearl earrings, this lovely composed woman-living in a tent on the beach? He smiles at the thought.

“You’re laughing at me,” Chantal says.

“No, not at all. Did you come home right away?”

“Not right away,” Chantal explains. “But sometimes we have to run away from ourselves in order to find ourselves.”

A few days ago, Chantal and Jeremy had walked through the Parc Monceau during their French lesson. A woman and a man had stood near the crepe stand, arguing loudly. “Je suis Americaine!” the woman yelled. “Je suis Americaine!” Jeremy had told Dana the story later. “What happens to your identity when you take it away from everything familiar?” he had asked. “You know yourself better,” she replied assuredly.

Not me, Jeremy had thought. I know who I am when I am home in my shop. When I’m in bed with my wife. When I’m preparing dinner in my kitchen.

Already, in a few days in Paris, with a strange woman at his side, Jeremy feels like he is unmoored.

“Will you go back to the monastery?” Jeremy asks Lindy. He is a little frightened of the answer.

“No,” she says lightly. “I need sex.”

“Spare me,” Jeremy says, in English, and both women laugh.

Lindy leans toward Chantal and says something to her under her breath. More laughter. Jeremy feels his hangover for the first time. How many bottles of wine did they all drink at dinner last night? He needs food, he needs sleep, he needs to think about something other than his daughter needing sex. He thinks that she slept with her high school boyfriend, though that relationship only lasted a month or so. Dana speculated that they were “fuck