She Matters Read online

  It had been two years since I’d lived with Esther when she visited, and how epic those many uneven months since we’d dissolved our arrangement. I’d lived in France, moved in with my boyfriend (the one she didn’t like), fallen in love with someone else, graduated, returned to New York. Dressed starchily, I’d interviewed for jobs; I’d filled out tax forms. I left the office late with the other interns for cheap Indian meals. I assisted a junior editor at a publishing house, where no one was a “secretary.” My own missions the consuming memory, I can’t remember what Esther was doing in that time, how often we talked. She sat with her legs crossed on my bed, inspected my tapes and books (“Don’t you read anything beside novels?”), as she told me the details of her life, which I have now forgotten. Her same cynicism and indignation tired me, felt like the worn furniture I’d left behind in our Waltham apartment, for her to donate to a thrift shop or women’s shelter when the lease was up.

  But we’d fought? And so badly that she’d left recklessly in the middle of the night for Penn Station to wait until dawn and her train? And that was it, we never spoke again, until now, tensions dismantled by twenty years’ forgetting? My sons ran past my bedroom door and shouted to each other about what to do next—Come to my room! No, you come to mine! When I was done with this unexpected call, I’d remind them about math homework, get Jack to finish his piano practice. I’d start dinner. I’d learned to roast a chicken in the apartment I shared with Esther, to have it turn out well, the crisp, salted skin infused with the flavors of garlic and rosemary. I made this routinely for my family, and I couldn’t recall what it was like to be decided by drama and argument, what it was like in our very early twenties when so much was effected by flash impulses, doors slammed. I had become the woman I’d been trying to be in that apartment. No: I’d become someone I had yet even to consider. In photo albums put together after college, pictures of Esther still show her in the sun on our constricted porch, holding up the cat to kiss his whiskers, rare frivolity; Esther in a row of women at her graduation, major passage. She’d invited me to attend, our roommate relationship nine months mature by then, almost a year. We’d been real, we’d been there.

  • • •

  When I moved in, Esther noticed I had a lot of opera recordings. She didn’t know opera, she said, interested. A few months later we spent a Sunday on our stomachs, listening to Don Giovanni, the libretto open between us. The rug was scratchy under our elbows as we propped ourselves up. We played the first five sides of eight with meticulous concentration. The hours passed. We understood we were engaged in a sacred act. We rolled over and lay on our backs, not speaking. But some interruption that afternoon—my boyfriend came over, or I needed to wash my car, or she had to finish a paper—made us stop, and we left the last three sides for the following weekend. We postponed again, our infinite future of Sundays. We never finished, an essential note unsounded in our friendship, dramatic action suspended. That’s where I left us.

  Homesick

  Everything was awful in France. “Junior year abroad” had arrived, reality instead of proposal and application, but my roommate’s voice chained us to the States, her nasal rasp and pancake vowels unable to pull off French. She was nice, which I appreciated, but we had nothing in common, Linda and I. At dinnertime, Madame called us from our room—the once grand sitting room with high ceilings, now used for boarders—and we sat down to tough meat and what was left of the breakfast baguette. The crust scraped the roof of my mouth, scars for the next day. Madame’s dining room overlooked a tidy park, but it was nearly winter, and she kept the shutters closed and the chandelier on through the day. To sleep, we heaped layers of faded batting over our beds. I turned to the wall, where at the slightest touch the brown paper with the gold fleur-de-lis pattern chipped away. I kept my hand on it as I whispered to it, “I hate you.”

  In the mornings Linda and I left the apartment and walked to the college along a generous boulevard. The shops were shut, but the cafés had cane chairs set out, and birds hopped among the tables. We noticed the impeccable women pulling the hands of their children, a scold and murmur hurrying them forward. The children’s voices rose and broke against their mothers’ in a French we couldn’t hope to have, clipped, modulated. We wanted to tie our scarves that way, that easy style at the throat. But it wasn’t easy. Nothing was easy.

  At the school we trotted up the wide stairway to our respective classrooms. Light poured in from the windows that loomed at each landing, Americans on their ways up and down, commandeering the space. Nobody said that things were not as they’d hoped. Linda took French, to improve. I had history of French architecture, and the young teacher wore thin black trousers every day and a navy pullover with cuffs that came down over his wrists. Every detail was worth notice, meant something I did not yet understand. During class, I kept my notebook open and wrote letters to my boyfriend in Boston, explaining that all the notebooks were filled with this sort of graph paper, the French interest in order as evident on the page as in the parks. We couldn’t wait for Paris, where, we were sure, we would forget the musty routine of this provincial town and finally feel French. Linda and I were sent to separate arrondissements. I missed the ready companion and guard, the act of loyal care we had completed each night and morning.

  I lived in the apartment of Mme and M. de Chambord, their two grown children, Hugues and Marie-Christine, and their dog, Orane. Hugues had the front room, next to the salon. Through the dining room, past the bathroom, Marie-Christine’s room faced the courtyard, sunlight shafting in. My room, further along the narrow hall and beside the kitchen, was a sliver, as thin as an envelope. A cot sank under cotton duvets, and a desk was shaded by a shelf, where someone had left a dictionary. The tall window had two glass panels joined together by an ancient metal fitting. It looked out on the courtyard, too, but the gray side, with a glimpse of eastern daylight that grew thinner through the winter. There was a basin behind a curtain, where, it was made clear, I was to confine my toothbrush and soap. “Bon!” Madame said, as she pushed my suitcase into the room and stepped into the kitchen, busy on thick-heeled shoes. She clattered and slammed her way through her tasks.

  With my door closed on the sounds I couldn’t decipher, I sat down, an exhaustion of homesickness overtaking me. I cried with more effort than I’d done anything up to that point. I didn’t know where I was, didn’t know my new metro station, hadn’t been able to follow as Madame peppered me with instruction before leaving the room—something about Easter?—didn’t know what we’d have for dinner. Lunch, she had emphasized, one finger pointing at me, was not her responsibility. She’d mentioned their house in the country. Perhaps we’d be going, but I didn’t know when. I set up tiny speakers and my tape deck and put in the Jacques Brel cassette I’d listened to back home. But I hated him now. So French.

  Madame rapped on my door the next morning and told me to hurry for breakfast. “Tout de suite,” she said, coming down hard at the ends of her words. I dropped jam from a spoon on my toasted baguette and held a bowl of café au lait as she cleared things up around me. She showed me how to light the pilot light on the bathroom water heater, hurled the spent match into the toilet, and then she left, the apartment bristling with quiet. I didn’t know where Monsieur was. He seemed to talk only to the dog.

  After the next strained dinner I fled the apartment and met Linda in Les Halles. Just the sight of her jacket helped, data my brain already stored. She’d phoned some others, people I knew a little—Frankie showed up, drenched in his new Drakkar Noir, Will from New Orleans, lanky Meg with her pop haircut, and Ben, deadpan sarcastic; and Miriam, whom I didn’t know at all. We toppled into one another, shut the world out with our shoulders, scalded our hosts as we ate pommes frites and drank Stella Artois mixed with lemonade, a discovery perplexing weeks before, now so casually desired.

  “We’ll do this chaque vendredi!”

  “Il faut!”

  We were thrilled to use our French in real conversation. Maybe we
’d be mistaken for French.

  “Anyone know the word for ‘pillow’?”

  “Comment-dit-on, ‘Who cares?’” We laughed.

  “Ça m’est égal,” said Miriam. It was the first time she spoke. She was our exotic, living in a pension rather than with a family. “You’re so lucky,” said everyone but Linda, who liked her guardians. They had cousins for her to meet, train trips they’d take her on. Will wanted to tell me about jazz, some Paris–New Orleans fraternity, while Miriam, on my other side, was rude about him in chaotic, vernacular French he couldn’t follow. She leaned back in her chair, one skinny leg snapped over the other. With a cool, knowing purity, she was bitchy, which made her seem gutsy. We stayed out till three and I took a taxi home. I had not passed enough days here to feel money’s value yet, to understand how soon it would be spent. The Haitian driver told me my accent was good. He smiled all the way to my neighborhood, knowing something but not telling me.

  • • •

  This was our group. Miriam and I would meet the others at galleries or for coffee after classes, but if I discovered a little park, a new plaza, I phoned only her, cultivating privacy. “I’ve got to show you this perfect place,” I’d say. I put the franc Madame expected in the dish next to the phone. Or Miriam called me. “You’re not going to believe this,” she would say, “something else named for Victor Hugo.” I’d jump in on the crest of her laughter so that we’d both be laughing the same way, both saying “Him, again!” We met on benches, my tired heart glad as she came across the raked gravel of the Jardin de Luxembourg. The gardens are beautiful! Why don’t they have gardens in the States! She would give me the kiss on each cheek, take up my hand in hers, our bodies finding rest. We shared our information, tucked it away together, furtive. When she came to my place the first time she said, “There’s me,” and pointed at the group photo from the first days in the small city, that staging ground. The entire group was arrayed in tiers on the front steps of the college, forty helpless recruits. I was standing next to Linda, who had been my friend, or at least necessary. Three months later I could hardly remember her. Miriam and I studied pictures taken at the châteaux and the vineyards, at the roadside picnics, half our tour bus nosed into the frame, and Miriam was in them, sometimes not far from me, slim and straight in her gray trench coat. I hadn’t noticed her before Paris, and even that first rude incarnation now seemed ghostly and gone, someone else, because now she was my intime. She liked it when I played with her hair, liked to whisper to me, and with her I felt indomitable, awake to every city surprise.

  We both had boyfriends at home, fading from relevance. They had the same birthday, that must mean something, about us being friends. We both attended universities near Boston. We shared packets of chocolate biscuits as we walked, split long sandwiches of ham and Boursin, agreeing without a word on which sunny spot to choose, which bench. She knew a restaurant near school where you ate the meal du jour, a plate set in front of you. You paid almost nothing. Each of us had wine in a short, clouded glass. We flirted with two foreign boys who sat nearby, asked the one to teach us words in Dutch and the other to name German towns. They loved us, and we loved that. They wanted to see us again and, smiling, we walked away from them. I knew the weeknight soups at her pension, and she knew my uncharitable thoughts about ungainly, adolescent Hugues. Nasty secrets were glue. Throwing ourselves into the pronunciation of Hugues was glue. Miriam lent me Talking Heads: 77, which became my catechism, salvation in repetition; so she took me to see Stop Making Sense, which seemed to play all over Paris, any neighborhood likely to have a theatre where we could see David Byrne at 14h00, at 16h20, whenever we decided we wanted that. We must have seen it twelve times, our trance.

  Eventually, exploring with Miriam, I came to know what I needed to know—the nearby patisseries, the metro stops. We liked chaussons aux pommes, we liked pain aux raisins. We carried bottled water and stamps, knew where to get cheap omelettes in places where they let you stay at your table. We came to feel natural as the grocer handed over plums in a thin paper bag. I bought cheese by the half kilo, grabbed my stiff metro ticket as the machine spit it out, pressed in the code for my building each evening. I no longer heard the clop-clop-clop in the late-night street made by my footsteps as belonging to someone else. Eventually, conferring with my confidante, I figured the age of each person in my French family, and that Hugues was embarrassed like an eighth grader by women, and that Marie-Christine snuck out every night with her red scarf knotted around her neck to go to her fiancé’s. I knew to leave the butter on the table. I knew the family did have a country house and that they wouldn’t invite me.

  • • •

  On my tight cot one night Miriam and I hustled and giggled about Mme de Chambord. Sprays of laughter kept shooting up. “Shh, shhhh!” The center welt in the bed forced our bodies, our inside hips. We held each other’s faces, her skin soft, like nothing else in the house. Our fingers in each other’s hair, we were kissing light kisses, the edges of our mouths, until we kissed fully, the taste a stronger version of her familiar breath. Her tongue was a tiny point, sharp and fast. I felt her breasts against mine, and our yield, and thought, Oh. I raised the edge of her sweater and grazed her belly with my cheek. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I ran my hand down the leg of her jeans, and up, and over the heat between her legs, tapping my fingertips on the surface of the denim. Like that, she came. Like that. I didn’t know it was possible. I could make her come so easily, or at least she made me feel it was my doing. And with that deft tip of her tongue inside me, I came too.

  In daylight we were established friends, les deux copines, but a new demand crept in. I had to account for my time, hours not spent together. “What did you say about me?” she’d ask, head cocked. She would be almost smiling, not friendly. We agreed the sex was a secret, which made it easy to ignore, until we were alone in her room, the lock turned quietly; or back at my family’s apartment, hands over our mouths as we came, Madame battering the evening meal in the kitchen next door. Since we maintained our identities as straight girls with boyfriends in the States, we had no problem when those boys visited. We pretended to forget how we’d be together after they’d gone, talking at their expense, coming at their expense.

  No longer companion, moviegoer, art student, Miriam was the person who made me come. I needed this velvet hold more than anything, its crucial addition to make the rigid facades and planned gardens friendly. Out of bed, she turned petty over plans, whiny when she tired at the Musée de Cluny. She had to be cajoled at each turn, could brighten as soon as she saw a slice of tarte. Once, as we walked across the Pont des Beaux Arts, the Académie Française spread wide and white ahead of us, overornamented and exhausting, I turned my head to look at the water, and she drew in and cupped my ear to sing, “I’ve got a girlfriend who’s better than that . . .” I was sick of Stop Making Sense. I knew I was wasting my precious months of Paris. I was wasting them standing at the turnstile in the metro, arguing over which stop we’d get off at, arguing over how long I spent on the phone with my boyfriend. We argued about disappointments that hadn’t even happened yet.

  I wished she’d go away, wished that I could have more friends, blend into groups instead of being sequestered, except I couldn’t give up the skin, the tight tongue, the sating kisses. Our hands warmed inside unsnapped jeans as we lay in the dark. The secret wasn’t lively anymore. We’d been through the stories of firsts, knew every opinion formed in France. I wanted a graceful extrication, but her whine grew shriller, her grip tightened. It was too much work to resist, and too lonely.

  • • •

  That summer, in the States a month, I missed French. Disoriented, I couldn’t get interested in bland, local rules, things I’d known for years. My boyfriend and I moved in together, a first-floor one-bedroom in a town on the green line. But with Miriam, I had tamed a whole country! I missed the ritual of ordering coffee, school bags at our feet, the cubes of sugar plucked out of the bowl. I missed how
we measured rudeness in the waiters and targeted the strangeness of others so we could ignore our own. The cigarettes outside cinemas at dusk, we’d done that, smoked, the stately blue box passed between us. “T’as un feu?” we liked to repeat, pretending absolute ease with the colloquial. My boyfriend was irritated when I made obnoxious puns in French, and I was irritated with him, his failure to laugh Miriam’s short, derisive laugh, his inability to be new. As we had sex, I thought of her small, light body and of her breasts. “He doesn’t even care about the Talking Heads,” I told her on the phone, wondering if I loved him. I was homesick for the bite of her saliva.

  At the end of the summer, I flew to North Carolina, and she was waiting for me in the airport. “Salut,” we said, but it was wrong. I was not myself. We were not each other. Never mind. At the house, she introduced me to her parents, and later we used the dark of her bedroom, trying not to be heard again, blocking out the footsteps and chair gratings from nearby rooms. “Remember Mme de Chambord,” we said when we paused, “remember the pension’s fatty soups,” our war stories. The next morning, she cooked breakfast with her mother, waiting for her to turn away so we could exchange cagey glances. As she slipped food onto my plate, she bent and gave my shoulder a silent kiss, and I shivered it off. I thought we’d be bold with our many willful identities, but we were two little girls, costumes abandoned. “I’m going to take Susanna to that place?” she told her mother. To me, she said, “It’s the best coleslaw in the whole wide world.” “D’accord,” I said.