Foreign Tongue by Vanina Marsot Page A

information like Scrabble tiles, wondering if I could arrange them to make sense. Was Olivier the writer? He couldn’t be: Monsieur Laveau had described a famous intellectual, not an actor. Though the French did consider some actors intellectuals. Maybe Olivier knew the writer. Or maybe Olivier was his important client? Nothing fit together in any illuminating way.
    On the other hand, three hundred euros a week under the table wasn’t a bad income for someone who wasn’t paying rent. I stopped in front of a boutique window and stared at my shadowy outline in the glass as I twisted my neck to unkink it.
    “Puis-je vous aider?” asked the store clerk, a young woman in a miniskirt and high heels standing in the doorway. Startled, I realized I’d been standing in front of a window display of silk and lace lingerie, all the time wondering what the hollow at the base of Olivier’s neck tasted like.

10
    Je t’aimais inconstant, qu’aurais-je fait, fidèle? *
    — JEAN RACINE , Andromaque
    A few pages into chapitre deux, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t needed to buy a dictionary of slang for this project. I needed a medical textbook. For every word I knew ( “frenulum,” “vagin” ), there were others I hadn’t heard before, accompanied by descriptions of such scientific rigor that I began to wonder if the author wasn’t either a doctor or a humorless obsessive-compulsive.
    “Why settle for one?” Bunny asked when I told him on the phone. “Let’s assume he’s a humorless, obsessive-compulsive oncologist, specializing in colorectal cancer. And let’s call him Heinz. I once had a terrible doctor in Munich named Heinz. Never get a colonoscopy. I’m sure dying is better.”
    “But he’s French,” I protested. “What are you up to?”
    “Waiting for pizza from Speed Rabbit. They deliver it on farty little mopeds,” he said. “You gonna read me something, or do I have to watch the porn channel to get a thrill tonight?”
    I gave a long-suffering sigh.
    “And don’t take that long-suffering tone with me, young lady. Canal Hot is showing Paula and the Randy Martians in half an hour,” he added.
    “Okay, okay.” I skimmed the next page. “Oh,” I said.
    “What?”
    “It turns into a childhood memory. Apparently his father was a gynecologist, and he used to sneak into his office and pore over his medical textbooks, copy out the racy words. It’s kind of sweet,” I admitted. Bunny’s intercom honked.
    “That’s the door,” he said. “Call me later.”
    I found a website with a medical dictionary, looked up the words, and typed.
    I copied the terms into a notebook, as if having them in my own hand was some kind of erotic communion. Ah, the pleasure of words! They were magic, conjurations and conjugations from the mysterious world of adults. Of course, the pictures helped. There was one book in particular, from the nineteenth century, with detailed engravings and faded colors. Multichambered, more intricate than a nautilus, a woman’s anatomy was so complex. It was hard to imagine how everything fit inside…
    A couple of pages on the vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries ( like flowers on stalks of fallopian tubes —ugh) followed. I skipped ahead.
    My first great love was Madame Ronet. She looked like the angel in my catechism book. My schoolmate Raymond’s mother, she wore her thin platinum blond hair in a small chignon and painted her lips a bright red. Her curvaceous body and tiny waist, wrapped in tight-fitting suits, made me think of a fist squeezing a tube of toothpaste. When she ruffled my hair, I suffered alarming aches. The fact thatshe was one of my father’s patients gave us a special bond, I felt. Once I stayed home from school feigning illness because I knew she had an appointment. After she left, I crept into the downstairs examination room and pressed the used cotton sheet to my face before Martine, my father’s nurse, could clean up. It smelled of tuberose and