French Lessons Read Online Free PDF Page B

covers the courtyard. It sounds like an ominous movie score—there’s an army approaching or a madman about to break into someone’s house. She wraps her arms about herself. Her skin is still wet from the rain and she’s suddenly chilled.
    “Didn’t she have an affair with your president Kennedy?” Nico asks.
    “I think so,” Josie says. “Apparently back in those days American presidents could get away with their indiscretions.”
    “Not anymore. Here we laugh at what happened to Clinton. Why should anyone care?”
    “Except his wife,” Josie says.
    “Yes. It’s a private problem. Not a public one. It has nothing to do with politics.”
    “I wonder,” Josie says, staring into Marilyn’s dreamy eyes, “what it has to do with. Why men cheat. Why they fall into bed with pretty girls.”
    “For the time that they’re in the arms of a beautiful woman, they’re invincible,” Nico says.
    “Then they should stay there,” Josie says quietly.
    “Are we still talking about your presidents?”
    Josie doesn’t answer. She wanders down the wall of Marilyn. She feels drunk on Marilyn, sexed up and sloppy, as if her own sheets have been thrown off the bed, exposing her.
    Once, after making love with Simon at her cottage, she fell asleep. She woke up and saw him standing at the side of the bed, watching her. He was dressed, ready to leave, waiting to say goodbye. He couldn’t wake her. He told her he stood there for a half hour, already late for a meeting, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
    “Come back to bed,” she had said.
    He did.
    It’s in Marilyn’s mouth, it’s in her eyes, it’s in the curve of her generous hip. Come back to bed .
    Nico’s by her side.
    “Do you have a girlfriend now?” she asks. Une petite amie . She loves the phrase in French. Little friend. Even a boyfriend is a petit ami . On her lips, the words taste as sweet as they sound.
    “No,” Nico says. “I was waiting for you.”
    “But I’m taken,” she tells him. Their tone is as light as the smoke drifting from Marilyn’s cigarette.
    Here, in the room with Marilyn, everything reeks of sex. It’s as if they’ve just done it and now, once again, are about to do it. Come back to bed .
    “If you were taken,” Nico says, “you wouldn’t be so very sad.”
    “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” Josie’s father had asked, showing up at her cottage the morning after she returned from San Francisco, the morning after her stay with Simon at the Clift.
    He was sitting in her tiny kitchen, drinking coffee, probably his fifth or sixth cup of the day. He had driven up from San Jose to Marin to surprise her. It was the anniversary of her mother’s death, but they would never speak of that. It would be there, the idea of it, in the air between them, all day. They would talk about her fancy job at the prep school, his lousy grocery store, her old best friend Emily who lives next to her old ma, his middle-of-the-night heart murmur, but they would never talk about her late mother, his wife.
    “I don’t have time, Dad. I’m working too hard.”
    “A young girl shouldn’t work so hard.”
    “I like it,” she told him, sitting across the table from him. “I love it.”
    “Love. Love is for boyfriends, not jobs.”
    He looked old, her father, his hair mostly gone, his skin mottled with age spots, his face jowly. She calculated: thirty-five years older than she was—and just ten years older than Simon. Impossible, she thought. Simon was fit and firm, though when he slept she saw that his skin relaxed in a way that surprised her. It seemed to let go of his bones and suddenly he was vulnerable, soft. Something about that moved her, as if he too needed someone to watch over him.
    But her father was old and cranky and out of touch with her world. Simon didn’t seem old to her. True, he was a world apart from the boys she usually fell for—the long-haired, rumpled, mumbling boys. The boys who come too quickly. The boys