The Liar's Wife (18 page)

Genevieve suddenly understands, in a way that she knows will be permanent, that it is possible for Mlle Weil to be wrong. Grievously, dangerously wrong. Including but not limited to a category that could be called mistaken. She knows it because she knows her brother. He loves life. He doesn't want to die. He would never imagine that it is his duty to die. He has struggled with everything in his power to keep alive. This is his greatness.

Is it possible that her brother is greater than Mlle Weil? And she wonders: Which is greater, to be willing to die, or to fight death in the name of life?

The broom is leaning against the wall that separates the kitchen from the living room; Genevieve left it there to answer the door. She carries it into the kitchen, where she will make the tea. Mlle Weil follows her.
Genevieve apologizes for the clumps of hair on the kitchen floor, which she is sweeping as the kettle boils.

“Joe just cut my hair,” she says. “He's only just left.”

“I see,” Mlle Weil says, as if this were something that required a lot of consideration. “You've got your hair cut. It will be more convenient.” She says nothing about how she thinks Genevieve's hair looks. “I would like to ask you a favor. Will you cut my hair?”

What can she possibly say? The request is so strange that she can't come up with a response, and Mlle Weil goes on talking.

“I have long understood that people respond more favorably to a woman if they consider her attractive. I have never imagined for a minute that anyone could consider me attractive, but if I conformed more to the conventional idea of a proper lady it might help me at the consulate, where I must go to arrange my papers to get back to Europe. My mother usually washes and cuts my hair, but I'm trying to train myself not to be so dependent on my parents. Soon I will be living without them, far away.”

A bubble of nausea forms behind Genevieve's lips. She doesn't want to wash Mlle Weil's hair. She doesn't want to be touching Mlle Weil's body, particularly knowing how much she dislikes being touched. And the truth is, she does not smell good. The truth is: Mlle Weil stinks. But Mlle Weil is a hero. So how can Genevieve not do this thing, this exceedingly simple thing?

“I will be happy to do it after I feed the baby and put him down for his nap.” What is there about this woman, so devoted to the truth, that requires the telling of so many lies?

She puts her mouth and nose to the baby's scalp: the smell of his hair is a pleasure. Silk and bread and milk, safety, nourishment, desire without danger, no prospect of harm. But Mlle Weil's hair is not silky; it is almost a solid wire triangle from crown to chin. Possibly she never combs it. Genevieve opens her blouse, offers her breast to the baby, hoping he will take a long time today so that she can, in good faith, postpone the thing she dreads. Always for a mother, the unassailable moment: I have a baby at my breast. There is nothing else I can do.

While he nurses, Mlle Weil reads a newspaper. She is making notes.

Genevieve puts the baby in his crib and goes to the bathroom to get the one clean, dry towel. Olive green. A color she has never liked. A gift from Howard's parents. Kindness. Blindness. In English, the words rhyme.

She tries to duplicate everything that Joe did, hoping that she can provide the kind of pleasure Joe provided. Something in her lifts: she is pleased at the prospect of pleasing.

She bends Mlle Weil's head back to wash it. The thinness of the bones of her shoulders alarms her. How easily those bones could break. As if all the energy in her body went into the task of creating this uselessly lively, thick wire triangle of hair. No strength to spare for the necessary skeleton.

Her hair is so thick, and perhaps so dirty, that the water won't penetrate it. It is impossible to make a lather. Mlle Weil's eyes are closed. It is the first time Genevieve has ever seen her without glasses, and it seems almost indecent, as if those eyes without glasses are too naked, too vulnerable. Genevieve hopes Mlle Weil will not open her eyes. If she does, Genevieve will turn her own eyes away.

She begins humming to cover her unease.
Il était une bergère, et ron, ron, ron, petit patapon.

To her astonishment, Mlle Weil joins in.
Il était une bergère, qui gardait ses moutons.

And Genevieve thinks: As long as we are singing, it will be all right. It will be possible. Her hair is a disaster of tangles. Panic. Breathe in, breathe out. She thinks of the difficult things people are doing at home in France, the difficult things Howard might be doing. Soldiers facing horrifying explosions, corpses, bloodied in ditches. Surely she can untangle Mlle Weil's hair.

“My hair drives my mother wild. I am very grateful to you.”

Genevieve pretends she's Joe and snips the tangled hair: if she cuts through the tangles, the process might be easier.

“It is my pleasure.” Another lie, a kind of lie Mlle Weil would never think to tell.

Genevieve offers her a mirror. She barely looks at herself. “It's fine,” she says and covers her still wet hair with her black beret. “But now I have another favor to ask you. I don't own a lipstick. May I borrow yours for just a day, just the day I must go to the consulate?”

What Genevieve wants to say is no, no, no, you may not have my lipstick. I haven't much left and when it's gone it may be difficult to get more. It is never predictable, in wartime, what will be difficult to get. You'll probably lose it or use it in some way so that it will have lost its goodness. No, you may not have my lipstick.

But how can she say that to someone who is on her way to make plans for the formation of a group of nurses, parachuting into battlefields, most likely to death? Including her own.

“Of course.”

“Genevieve, you are a very good friend.”

She wants to say, No I am not. I am good not out of friendship but because I fear your disapproval as I did when I was just a girl. Now I am a wife and mother. But you bring me back to being the girl I was. She thinks that Mlle Weil was never a girl. Or never girlish. A daughter, yes. But a girl? Never, perhaps.

She goes into the bedroom to get the lipstick. She uncaps it, screws up the fingertip of solid red; Cherries in the Snow, the lipstick is called. She puts some on her own lips, then twists it down, carefully, recaps it, feels the cool gold in her palm, then caresses it, as if she were petting a beloved animal she was consigning to extermination. A lamb to the slaughter.

She hears Laurent's key in the door and hears from his greeting, “
GeGe
, lock up your jewels, it's a dangerous burglar.” He is in a good mood. He greets Mlle Weil enthusiastically, and asks her if she'd like to test out a new set of blocks he's experimenting with.

“Only if you'll let me smoke,” she says.

“Ah,” he says, “we have come to the limits of your asceticism.”

“Laurent, do not be cruel to me,” Mlle Weil says. Her tone is almost playful. “Come on, then, let's get started.”

And Genevieve thinks: Perhaps she does not always want to die.

OCTOBER 25, 1942

It's the first time she's left the baby with anyone else, and she's doing it for what she knows may be a frivolous reason: she's going to the movies. Joe had planned everything. He has a friend, a piano player, who told him about something he calls a gig. Tonight, he is doing the piano accompaniment for a showing of Chaplin's
Modern Times
that a church in the Bronx is putting on as a fund-raiser to get money for Christmas packages to send to their relatives overseas.

Lily will babysit (she doesn't want to go to the Bronx, she hates being anywhere near it, he says, and of course Genevieve knows why: the Bronx is where Joe lives with his wife), and he's brought rye bread and salami, which he knows Laurent loves. And besides, Joe says, Laurent (he pronounces it “Lorront”) isn't the kind of guy who cares that much about what he eats.

How wrong you are, Joe, she wants to say, but of course does not, because she will not betray her brother. And because she knows he will like the bread and the salami, and he likes Lily, and, although she feels a bit guilty, she will be happy to have an evening out.

The doorbell rings. It can only be something to interfere with her pleasure; she doesn't know who or what, but the doorbell can only indicate an obstacle. The university. The War. She will have to stay home.

She is only half relieved to see that it is Mlle Weil.

“I don't want supper,” she says. “I was just passing your door and I thought I would say a quick hello.”

“Simone,” Joe says, and Genevieve stands between them so he won't be able to clap her on the back or embrace her. “We're on our way to the movies. All the way up to the Bronx. Your friend here is having her first night out. We're going to see Chaplin.
Modern Times.
”

“But that is my favorite film in all the world. I will phone my mother.”

Mlle Weil automatically assumes that she is included in the invitation. Which, of course, she is, but Genevieve doesn't understand that in the light of what she said about believing that no one wants to be her friend.

She argues with her mother but only for a moment.

She pushes her beret down firmly onto her head; she's ready to leave. “I believe that Chaplin is the only really great Jew since Spinoza.”

“Jeez, I didn't know Chaplin was Jewish. But I'm not surprised. Ninety percent of the really smart people I've ever known are Jewish. Which is why Hitler is scared to death of them. He knows they could run rings around those dumb Krauts.”

“We must remember,” says Mlle Weil, “that Germany has made enormous contributions in literature, in philosophy, most particularly in music.”

Joe replies in song. “Grab your coat and get your hat.”

Genevieve allows herself to wear her mother's pearl earrings, and to use some powder. Mlle Weil never returned the lipstick, and she misses it. She's sure if she told Joe he'd provide some, but she doesn't know how and from where, so she doesn't ask. It pleases her when Joe calls her pretty. But she knows she will never again be as pretty as Lily, whom she does not envy. A difficult life.

She shows Lily how to prepare Aaron's bottle, which she hopes he won't need. She will wean him soon. Perhaps in the spring, when it is warmer.

Mlle Weil is very talkative on the subway, and she is talking much too loud.

“I love the subway, all the different faces, particularly the black ones.”

Genevieve is embarrassed for the Negroes in the car; she hopes that Mlle Weil's accent is so strong that they can't understand. She goes on and on about her parachute scheme, and doesn't notice that Joe's eyes have closed; he has fallen asleep, for which Genevieve envies him.

The trip takes more than an hour, and the streets are, of course, dark. Blacked out. Joe has a flashlight. He says this is his home territory and he is like an Indian in the forest, which encourages Mlle Weil to talk about some Indian myths. Something about a corn god.

They stop in front of a large church, meant to be in the style of the Baroque. These failed imitations always sadden Genevieve. She wishes
Americans would do what they do best. The Empire State Building lifts her heart.

Sitting at a table in the church vestibule is a woman collecting “donations.” Genevieve is hypnotized by her hat: a wearable shrine to the basic food groups. Fruits are represented by a cluster of blood red woolen grapes; there is a dark purple bonbon, perhaps a petit four—can it be crocheted?—and then the meat group, solid chestnut coils. Are they wooden? Whalebone? She can only imagine they are representing sausages.

Joe grabs her hand, and they run down the stairs to safety. They are desperate to laugh. But it isn't really laughing, it's giggling. And she's back to being a girl again, but not the girl she was when she was Mlle Weil's student, the girl giggling with her friends, that wonderful drunkenness that can be induced by almost anything in young girls: a single shoe on the side of the road, a dog that looks like its master.

Mlle Weil has been left behind, as she was left behind when her students giggled. But no, Genevieve remembers, she wasn't left behind; we were suddenly silenced when she approached. We couldn't giggle in front of Mlle Weil. But she tells herself that Mlle Weil is no longer her teacher, and she can go on giggling with Joe if she likes.

Except that she can't. She finds Mlle Weil at the top of the stairs, standing at the table of the woman with the amazing hat. Like a child who has just found his mother, having lost her in a crowded store, Mlle Weil smiles an expression of pure relief, pure gratitude. Is it that she is always ready to find herself abandoned?

Joe greets his friend the pianist and finds seats in the middle of the room. The room is overheated, smoky; the smell of fried dinners clings to people's clothes, mixing with the smell of mothballs and some woman's scent—lily of the valley,
muguet
, a scent she'd worn as a young girl but had grown tired of.