A Four-Course Lunch
by Rozanne Charbonneau
|
Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Paris, April, 1972
“Mademoiselle Sophie, je dois pisser !” shouts the American girl in French slang. Her haircut looks like a boy’s. Did her mother go mad with the gardening shears?
The other children in the dining hall howl with laughter. I have a choice. I can feign outrage at her use of the word “piss.” Or I can ignore her antics and savour my crème caramel. I opt for the latter and dip my spoon into the flan.
Chef Jacques, the cook at this private elementary school for foreigners, is a master. Since the beginning of the school year in September, my tongue has not encountered one air bubble in his unctuous crème. And his caramel? It tastes of honey and rhum.
I glance at the clock on the wall. It reads twelve thirty. “You may be excused, Lucy. But hurry up. We are leaving for the Bois de Boulogne in five minutes,” I say.
Her face falls in disappointment. She wanted a row. Each day she elbows her classmates out of the way to sit at my table. She always asks for two servings of the hors d’œuvre, dissects the fish into flakes, refuses to eat the rind of the camembert, and wolfs down the dessert as if she were a gypsy beggar.
The young boy from Ethiopia sits up straight and struggles with his fork. At home, he eats with his hands. The girl from Japan once brought chopsticks into the dining room. They failed to seize the chunks of her bœuf bourguignon. But Lucy is different. She fancies herself as a French mademoiselle. She plunges her baguette into the sauce of every stew I put before her. However, only a Yank would tear through their lettuce with a knife. In France, this is the ultimate faux pas. No matter how large the leaf, one must spear it with the tines of the instrument in the left hand.
Let me tell you about her stare. Her eyes take in every mole and pore on my skin. Her mother, Mrs. Jones, is a fleshy woman who wears a coat made of extinct cats. She once introduced herself to me in rudimentary French and confessed, “My daughter sleeps halfway down the bed at night. She thinks that if her feet reach the bottom, she’ll wake up as a beautiful teenager like you.”
I should be flattered. But last week I caught this eleven-year old girl gazing at the hair in my armpit. As if she were ogling my sex. I am eighteen years old and come from a small town on the coast of Normandy called Luc-Sur-Mer. My parents were thrilled when the Sorbonne offered me a place to study French Literature, but their pockets are not deep.
My chambre de bonne is situated on the fifth floor of a building in the Marais. I always sprint across the landing on the fourth. Several Algerian men live together in a room no larger than mine. They are street sweepers. I can tell by the brooms of twigs that they leave outside the door. If they pass me on the stairs, they offer to carry my burdens. I thank them and pretend I need the exercise. With none of their women in France, their eyes are too lonely, too hungry.
I share a bathroom on the landing with the young couple who lives across the hall. The woman is clean, but the man sometimes forgets to use the toilet brush. Thank God there is a shower for the three of us. Many of my fellow classmates need to bathe at the public pool.
When I enter my room, the hotplate and sink stand to the left. The plastic wardrobe to the right. The wall with the window is slanted at forty-five degrees. Fortunately, my desk fits underneath. I do my best work here.
My mind expands at the sight of the rooftops spreading out like a country all its own. At night, the coils of the electric heater burn a violent, orange hue. The heat travels one meter deep into the room. Don’t get me wrong. I would never complain. This inexpensive dwelling and my job at the school help to make ends meet. All I want is to arrive at noon, serve the children lunch, eat, take them to the park, and leave at 14h00 with as little drama as possible. I need my energy for more important things, like boys and Baudelaire.
* * *
I walk behind the two lines of children in their navy-blue uniforms. They fall into single file when a pedestrian approaches. If the other boys and girls were a perfectly cut hedge in the garden of Versailles, Lucy is the weed that blows in the wind. She skips outside of the procession, stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. Sometimes she regales us with an eerie rhyme in English, threatening to break her father’s back.
Spring has come early. The trees flaunt their neon coats of green. Purple and yellow crocuses scatter over the earth. Each one seems to whisper, “Look at me.” I sigh at the sight of the bushes. They have grown lush and unruly, the perfect shelter for the depraved.
The children scatter in every direction. I sit on a bench and open my copy of Anaïs Nin’s Une Espionne dans la maison de l’amour. I keep one eye on the text and the other on my wards. If they stray out of my sight, I blow the whistle that hangs around my neck. They are an obedient brood. One shrill note and they run back to me. Soon the page goes dark as familiar fingers cover my eyes.
“Gilles!” I say, grasping onto the wrists. He leans down from behind and puts his cheek on mine. His stubble feels like linen on my skin. “Surprise, surprise.”
“If I knew you were coming, I would have brought you bread and cheese from the dining room.”
He sits down next to me. “You’re so maternal.”
“But you’re always starving. I didn’t mean—”
He puts his hand on my thigh. “Relax. I like it.”
Gilles is in my French literature class. We are presently studying the Symbolist poets. Many of the men can’t wait to tackle Verlaine, but Gilles’s thoughts on Baudelaire’s poems in Les Fleurs du mal are original, almost intimidating. He grew up in Paris, and sometimes I feel like a rube in his presence. We have been spending time together for three weeks now, and soon he will want sex. I am falling in love with him, but I want the romance to last a little longer before the sap-ridden reality sets in.
* * *
My best friend’s brother was five years older than I and out of my league. I fawned over him for as long as I can remember. When he came home to Luc-Sur-Mer from the military last summer, I followed him to the local bar where he was meeting his friends for a drink. We finally had sex in the front seat of his Peugeot 504. I had just turned eighteen: fair game. His hands stank of burnt matches. The diesel must have leaked while he was filling up the tank. Maybe he tinkered with his car, but not with me. I pretended to enjoy myself anyway. At the time, I would have done anything to keep him.
He could barely look at me when I dropped by the family house to say goodbye to my friend. His girlfriend offered me tea and a madeleine with a certain irony. “Paris will change you. By Christmas, you will feel like a stranger in this town.”
Everyone treated her as if she were already part of the clan. I have never felt so foolish, so used.
* * *
Gilles grabs my book and raises his eyebrows. “Oh là là.”
Anaïs Nin is notorious for her erotica. She deserves better. “I think she is a great writer. Her descriptions of the emotions are so raw.”
He bursts out laughing. “That’s like me telling you I bought Oui for the articles.” His hand goes higher up my thigh. “Has she taught you anything new?”
I look out at the children. The boys shoot one another with imaginary guns. The girls stand near a cluster of trees, talking in loud voices and giggling. Lucy has picked up a stick. Everything seems to be under control.
Gilles leads me behind a tree and begins to kiss my neck. His erection bears onto my pubis like a fist in a leather glove. I kiss him again. Why can’t this moment last all day?
I finally pull away and smooth his dishevelled hair. It is black and curly, like the coat of a lamb. “Do I look alright?” I ask, touching my own.
“Like you just got out of bed.”
I pull a rubber band out of my pocket. A ponytail should hide my sin.
We walk back to the bench. The boys are still nearby, but where are the girls? I blow my whistle and call their names into the emptiness. My chest tightens as I run towards the foliage. Where are they? O God, please let them be safe.
My legs cut through a patch of nettles. In the clearing, I find all the girls laughing at Lucy. With her stick, she is beating a man who kneels on the ground. Her victim wears a houndstooth jacket, the perfect cloak of respectability. His body trembles, as if touched by the Holy Ghost. The eyes in his skull have rolled upwards in ecstasy. But Jesus would never approve of the oversized maggot sticking out of his zipper.
“Lucy!” I shout.
She thwacks him one last time. Her spell is now broken. The man zips up his fly, then hurries away from the clearing.
“Mais ça va pas, Mademoiselle ?”
The other girls grow quiet.
“Why should we always move for these men? They bust up our games every day,” says Lucy. “We’re sick of it.”
I pull the stick out of her hand and throw it on the ground. “You know these men can be dangerous.”
“The woods are ours, too.”
“These men are sick. Do you want to become sick like them?”
“Dangerous, sick... What’s the difference? We hate men.” The girls grumble in agreement. “Yeah. We hate men.”
“Stop this now. I have a mind to report you to Madame Castagné.”
A shadow creeps over Lucy’s face. She may think I’m the cat’s meow, but she respects the Directrice of the school: Madame Castagné.
* * *
“Never show shock or disgust when a man in the park displays his wares,” advised Madame Castagné during our first interview. I wanted the position as child minder at her school. “If you reveal any emotion, you have lost the game.”
“I once saw a man urinate in the sea, but he didn’t know I was there.”
She leant over the desk and looked me in the eye. “You live in Paris now; your sheltered life in the provinces is behind you.” Her tone was kind, with no trace of condescension.
I admired her oat-coloured hair swept into a bun. It reminded me of the conch shell on my windowsill back home. How old was she? Perhaps fifty? Her name, Castagné, originated from the province of Gascogne in the southwest of France. But her accent was devoid of lilt or twang. She could have been born and bred in Neuilly. I had at least managed to erase the Norman greeting “boujou” from my speech. Would I ever speak like her one day? I truly hoped so.
“You will be confronted with perverts every day of the week. I will count on you to shield the children from these men with sangfroid. No child should become either traumatised or blasé at the sight of a phallus. If you strike the right balance, you will save them from many sessions on the analyst’s couch in years to come.”
How would I walk this tightrope? I had no idea. “Yes, Madame, I understand.”
She studied my letters of recommendation from families in Luc-Sur-Mer. They all confirmed that I was reliable and good with children. I was glad that no one had written “wonderful” with their brood. Exaggeration leads to unrealistic expectations. I minded kids only because it was easy pocket money. Dogs made my heart melt infinitely faster than infants.
One day I hoped to find a husband who did not want to sow his seed. Why the reticence? My mother worked part-time as a secretary in the town hall. She wanted to greet my sister and me each day when we returned from school. She always served us a snack, maybe some fruit or a slice of homemade yogurt cake. At the table, she asked us about our day. “Did you raise your hand when you knew the answers? Were you kind to the children who feel they don’t belong?”
We never walked into an empty house, and I will always be grateful to her. But money was tight. My sister is only twenty and already married with her first child on the way. I am the first in my family to go to university. I want to have a career and be able to afford nice things. The patter of tiny feet could hold me back.
Madame Castagné fingered her pearls. “You will like some children more than others, but you must be fair to them all.”
Professional distance sounded perfect to me. Plus, a four-course lunch would be included in the renumerations. “I promise to be vigilant and impartial at all times, Madame.” I smiled, hoping to impress this woman. She had class and compassion, two qualities I wanted for myself.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Rozanne Charbonneau
