The Liar's Wife (14 page)

“No, Laurent, it wasn't like that, it wasn't like that at all. I wanted to run away from her. I was hoping she didn't see me. I dread having to spend time with her. It brings back too much. Too much I'm not strong enough to think about. A person I no longer recognize whom I have, somehow, to understand is still myself. I think I will be a very great disappointment to her when she learns about my life. I didn't pursue my studies. I can hardly remember a word of philosophy, to say nothing of mathematics. My days are spent trying to make sense of my ration books, studying various ways of curing colic.”

“Caring for your brother, a helpless cripple.”

“Laurent, I hate it when you talk like that.”

“My bitterness, Mama called it. She would say, ‘Bitterness curdles the digestion, Laurent.' ”

“You aren't often bitter. You are very good.”

“I am not very good. I am, however, often a good actor. Unlike you, I have no mixed feelings about seeing her. She was an extraordinary teacher. When she was with you, you felt you had the attention, the complete attention of an incandescent mind. She was tremendously patient. And when she would quote the
Iliad
, her face—which I never,
I must confess, thought beautiful—was also incandescent. I knew what it meant when people said a person was lit up. But you, my God, GeGe, you worshipped her.”

“It was very long ago.”

“It was a different world.”

“She'll be very interested in your work. She has no small talk, and I don't think she'll care to hold the baby. So I will make tea, try to find something for her to eat—although as I recall she almost never ate—and I can disappear and leave her to you. Bring the board home tomorrow. It will give you something to talk to Mlle Weil about. So I won't have to think about it.”

OCTOBER 8, 1942

Genevieve knows she is spending more time than it is worth considering what to serve Mlle Weil. It will be tea rather than coffee; coffee is severely rationed, and Laurent absolutely needs his morning coffee. She decides that she will serve peanut butter on crackers; this will be an entirely new food for Mlle Weil, and, when she is told they are eating peanut butter as part of the war effort, she will be enthusiastic. Genevieve will take special care making the tea, in the way that an English friend once taught her. She will use her best china. She is very aware that it is likely Mlle Weil will notice none of this.

Laurent has arranged for one of his students to help him home, to carry “the board.” The young man sets up the easel on which the board rests; he places it in the direct center of the room. Like a god to be knelt to, worshipped.

The student, whose name Genevieve doesn't know, goes out to the hall and brings in a wooden box of wooden blocks. She's met him before and, knowing that she should know his name, can't ask it again, and so she doesn't address him, just nods and smiles like a simpleton. Perhaps he thinks her English is very bad. Well, let him think that; that would be better than his believing she is rude, or knowing that she has forgotten his name. He has not taken off his hat, and he tips it to Genevieve and then backs out of the room, uneasily, as if he were ashamed
to have entered the private quarters of the Master. The student has been gone less than five minutes when the bell rings.

“Mlle Weil at the gates.
En garde
,” says Laurent.

She is wearing exactly what she wore the day before. Her clothing gives off an unfresh smell. She takes off her beret and cape and hands them to Genevieve without a word, without even a greeting. She heads directly for Laurent, her hand outstretched. Genevieve wonders if she notices the spasms that are racking his body, whether she will acknowledge it in shaking his hand, or in withdrawing her extended hand because of it. But no, she seems to be unaware of the tremors. Or she is a very great actress indeed. But Genevieve knows that is impossible; dissembling, dissimulation are simply not things that would occur to Mlle Weil. It must be that she is unaware. Unaware of her unawareness. Always. Yes.

“Genevieve has told me about your wonderful work,” she says, cutting right past any pleasantries, any inquiries in regard to health, any comments on the weather, even the state of the larger world.

“I brought my board along to show you. I was hoping you would be interested,” Laurent replies, taking up her tone.

“Indeed, I am extremely interested. I have been looking forward to learning about this very much. Please explain everything to me, slowly. I am not very good at understanding things in space. With time, I am much better.”

Is Mlle Weil making a joke? In case she is, they should laugh. In case not, they ought not to. Genevieve says, “I am going to make tea.” She leaves the decision to laugh or not to laugh to her brother, whose face, often distorted, is sometimes incapable of clear signals, in this case, a mercy.

Mlle Weil sits on the couch next to Laurent's chair. He pulls the easel closer to both of them. He reaches into the box and takes out one of the blocks.

“The blocks are six inches square. Any one of them can be placed into one of the depressions on the board, where it will rest secure because the board is leaning back. The block can be easily grasped and
removed because it protrudes slightly above the face. This is important for the people I work with; the articulation of their fingers can be very limited.”

“Yes, yes, go on,” says Mlle Weil, lighting a cigarette.

“Would you like to try using the board?” he asks.

Genevieve is happy to be in the kitchen, watching the baby play on the floor. She has seen the demonstration a thousand times. She continues to be deeply moved, enormously proud of the work her brother has done. Giving hope to hopeless people. Giving language to the entirely mute. Freeing them from a terrible prison. But she doesn't need to see the demonstration yet again. Whereas every action of her beautiful baby—rolling a ball, hitting a pot with a spoon—seems to her entirely riveting.

Mlle Weil, though, is entirely absorbed.

“Mlle Weil is a good pupil. She has gone through three sets. She seems to be baffled. You would do better, Mlle Weil, if you had begun at the beginning and progressed to this point.”

“Well, then, let's start again.”

“Next time,” Laurent says. “Next time we'll begin from the beginning. For now, tell us about your time in New York.”

Genevieve pours the tea. She passes the plate of peanut butter and crackers.

“This is a new food. It is called peanut butter. It was just recently invented, meant to encourage people to eat less real butter.”

Mlle Weil picks up a cracker, looks at it as if it were an exotic, possibly dangerous animal, and puts it back on the plate. She lights yet another cigarette. Genevieve sees that her two middle fingers are stained brownish yellow from nicotine.

“I fear I have made a very great mistake in coming to New York. I did it because I feared my parents would not leave France without me, and I didn't want them to be in danger. I, of course, know it is my duty to be in danger, but I also know it is not their duty. So while I am here, all I do is try to make contacts that will allow me to leave and go back
to Europe. I have worked on a plan for parachuting nurses into very dangerous battle zones. At the moment, I am taking a training course in first aid myself, because I wouldn't dream of proposing a scheme in which I was unable to take part. I have written to many people, seen many people. I am at the French consulate almost daily. I have been in correspondence with a very fine naval officer, an Admiral Leahy. I have written to President Roosevelt. His office wrote back, expressing interest, but offering no help. I am even in touch with a French naval officer on a ship in Cuba. If I had to pretend to be a Nazi to get back to Europe, I would do it.”

Genevieve and Laurent do not even want to meet each other's eyes. “We will talk later,” they say silently, without gesture, in the way of brothers and sisters. The baby fusses in Genevieve's lap.

“I myself have just had a little niece. My brother's child. I call her Patapon. She is in Pennsylvania.”

“Are you fond of babies, Mlle Weil?” asks Laurent.

“Simone, you must call me Simone. Of course I am fond of babies. Do you think of me as that unnatural?”

The real answer to that, Genevieve thinks, would be yes. It is the answer that Mlle Weil would give. But Laurent only laughs, and Genevieve says, “I'll put him down for a nap.” She will never be able to call her Simone. She will address her as nothing. But in Genevieve's mind she can only and forever be Mlle Weil.

“Ah, then we mustn't wake him. But I hope I will come back. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

“Unless President Roosevelt agrees to meet with you,” says Laurent.

“No, that will not happen, I'm afraid.”

“He's rather busy,” Laurent says.

Genevieve makes a threatening face at him: Don't tease, the face says, and he can read it, and is silent.

“Tomorrow, then,” says Mlle Weil.

Most people, Genevieve thinks, would wait to be invited. But Mlle Weil is not like most people. She is entirely herself. Unlike anyone else. Barely human. Barely inhabiting the world.

OCTOBER 9, 1942

She comes the next day, at teatime. Four o'clock. Genevieve wonders if she understands that tea is rationed and her coming for tea means there will be less for her and for Laurent. An old instinct of hospitality makes her hope that she does not realize it, and the same instinct brings to birth a clutch of shame that there is nothing good to serve with the tea. It should make things better that Genevieve knows Mlle Weil would probably not eat anything with her tea. She remembers that Mlle Weil ate almost nothing that was served to her by Genevieve's mother, who was, she very well knows, a much better cook than she. She is used to believing that, but now she wonders: How would my mother cope with wartime New York? Would she do better with rationing than I? With almost no butter. With bread so soft you could squeeze it to nothing in your hand.

“I see your brother is not here. I was hoping he and I could work again with his board.”

Genevieve tells Mlle Weil that Laurent should be home shortly, but that he will probably not have his board with him, since he has to enlist a student to carry the board when he wants to bring it home.

“That is too bad. I am disappointed,” she says.

Genevieve is annoyed with Mlle Weil's self-absorption, but she has to remind herself that no one who has not lived with a disabled person understands the endless calculations that must be made, how to ask for help without overstepping some kind of mark. A mark that is invisible, but once crossed, impossible to cross back over.

“I am eager to talk to you about my plan to parachute nurses into battle zones. But we will wait for your brother.”

This is my home, Mlle Weil, she wants to say, and you are taking it over, dictating terms. She hears Laurent's key in the door, and her relief is enormous. She hates the thought of being alone with Mlle Weil.

“I will just get the tea,” she says, and Mlle Weil waves her away like a distracting fly.

When she comes in, she sees that Laurent is beginning to be bored, has nothing to say when Mlle Weil asks him if he knows a place she could train as a parachutist. She thinks of Mlle Weil's clumsiness and
she can't imagine her being able to open a parachute. Laurent's boredom can be a danger in a social situation. When he's bored he becomes sarcastic. Ironic, he calls it: my knife of irony cutting through the fog of excess and confusion. He teases. And Mlle Weil is not a good person to be teasing.

The doorbell rings. Genevieve doesn't know who it is, but whoever it is, the air in the room will be changed, and there is very little air that is right for Mlle Weil to breathe. She answers the door, and her heart contracts.

Joe and Lily. Of all people, the wrong ones to be in a room with Mlle Weil.

Usually, Joe is the person she most wants to be in her home. He laughs, he makes Laurent laugh, he praises her hair, he throws the baby in the air and catches him as Laurent cannot and as she is afraid to do.

Joe owns a beauty parlor on the East Side. She would love to go there sometime, but he has told her it's very “pricey” and so she would never suggest paying a visit.

What will Mlle Weil make of Joe and Lily? Genevieve hopes she can count on him not to start talking about his great love, the miracle of his great love for the beautiful Lily, who enters on his arm, and then almost leaps across the living room to kiss Laurent. Lily, beautiful Lily, never seems to actually walk anywhere. She leaps, she floats, she dances. Lily, young as Genevieve knows herself no longer young, with her wonderful, full, red lips and her hair like a glossy chestnut and the whites of her eyes so clear, never reddened by fatigue, and her black emphatic eyebrows. Lily, Joe's mistress, twenty-five years younger.

Genevieve prays to a God in whom she cannot believe that he won't talk about the wife he loathes, with whom he lives most of the time in an overlarge apartment in the Bronx, a section he calls Belmont (“ ‘Beautiful mountain,' right, isn't that French?”), his children grown and gone. That he won't talk about the apartment upstairs he rents for Lily. “Imagine me, a grandfather and madly in love with this princess here.” And she hopes, desperately, that Mlle Weil won't question whatever it is that Joe has in the paper sack, treats he always brings from “his cousin who owns a farm in New Jersey.” She and Laurent speculate that Joe has contacts in the black market, but they agree not to look
into it too closely. She tells herself that Mlle Weil isn't familiar enough with the ins and outs of American rationing to notice anything amiss.

“And how's the most beautiful mama in New York?” he says, kissing Genevieve on both cheeks.

“Joe, this is our old teacher from France, Mlle Weil,” Laurent says.

“Uh-oh, I'm in for it. My French is lousy. I got bumped from French class for throwing spitballs.”