French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan Page B

my father, not yours. Don't you ever forget it."
    "You don't even appreciate him. If I had a father like
him. . ."
    "How much do you appreciate him? You acted like he was
your father. He took you to Aspen, he showed you Paris.
And now, suddenly he's a 'capitalist pig.' How dare you!"
    She was right-I hadn't written to Mr. D for two years, I
hadn't thanked him. He had taught me to be active, not just
brood about life, and I was being active in Berkeley. It would
have been hard to explain to him exactly what I was doing,
but I should have tried. I could have risked it.
    Whenever I thought about the Ds in the years that passed
before I finally wrote to Mr. D, a single painting would flash into my head in its exact details in situ: the red, yellow, and
blue Mondrian, hanging over a white love seat in the D living
room. A needlepoint pillow stitched to match the design of
the painting was propped on the left cushion of the love
seat.

    On a summer night when Louise and I were sixteen,
Louise, her brothers and sister, Mr. and Mrs. D, and I played
a game called "trust," with the Mondrian-its rigorous
straight lines and demand for balance and harmonystaring us in the face. Six of us interlocked our hands in a
net. The seventh player let herself fall onto us, taking the
risk, feeling the support. We formed another net, and another, until each of us had had the sensation, both of supporting a falling player and of being the one who falls.
    Three years later I walked into the waiting room at the San
Francisco airport, a newly declared "French major." Ann
Smock was sending me off on my junior year abroad with a
present-Raymond Queneau's Le Journal de Sally Mara, the
intimate diary of an Irish schoolgirl, written in fractured
French (Queneau, a wicked parodist, had perfected the way
French might be butchered by an anglophone adolescent). I
was part Queneau, part Sally Mara; part precocious student
spoofing my own lessons, part enthused adolescent wanting to please her teacher. Ann acknowledged both sides:
"Here," she had said when she handed me the book, "you'll
like these language games."
    I sat in the airport lounge, examining my fellow students
over the top of the beige Gallimard/nrf book jacket that I
held in front of my face like a flag. I wanted the other students on the program to see that I was no tourist. I was going
to live in France.

     

Andre
    I met Andre at the first party of the year in Pau, where our
junior-year-abroad group had a six-week orientation before
settling down in Bordeaux. He came bounding into the
room at me. He was long and wiry with shiny black hair and
a devil smile on his face. He sat me down on the couch, put
one hand on each of my shoulders: "Alors, ma petite americaine, to t'appelles comment?" The room was packed with
noisy foreign students. Andre's voice drowned them out
completely. "Serre-moi," he said, taking his arms off my
shoulders and holding them out toward me. I didn't know
those words in French but I figured out exactly what they
meant from Andre's body: "Serre-moi" meant "hold me."
Ten minutes later I went with him into the nearest bedroom-I was in love with my own recklessness-and he
put his shirt on a lamp for just the right amount of light. We
got into bed and his shirt caught on fire. It was like that with
him, sudden blazes; he was always jumping up to put out
some fire or other, leaping and howling at his own antics.
His main activities were mountain climbing (the Pyrenees),
painting, and chasing women. He was twenty-seven and he worked for a graphic arts firm, but it was impossible to think
of him as an office worker.

    I used to wait for him to come into the cafe around seven.
He entered the room like a mannequin, one shoulder
slightly behind the other and his legs in front of him. His
smile was subtle and controlled; no teeth showed. He had a
way of stopping to survey the room before coming over to
my table that made me hold my