Free Lessons in French by Hilary Reyl

Italians playing peasants who were at once beatific and disillusioned, I recounted it to Olivier in my head. I saw his eyes react, his chin cocked in its listening pose. I had never been so focused—or so distracted.
    Several times, the heat of Claudia’s gaze lit my face, and I swiveled to see her expression like that of the people on the screen watching Jesus suffer. Their eyes deepened to the swell of the gorgeous choruses, so that they looked both infinitely wise and clueless. Claudia’s pupils burned me with the same idiot understanding, blessed somehow, but also brutally judgmental.
    I squirmed. Yet I was touched by her attention. I knew she could sense an obsession under my skin. I wanted to describe it to her, to tell her about Olivier, to begin to forge a real bond. And even though I couldn’t talk to her, her growing friendship was a comfort.
    “What did you think of the film?” Claudia asked at a traffic light on the way home.
    “Clarence was right. It was beautiful. The music and the faces were so full.”
    She kept staring at me, waiting for me to break through my own babble.
    “It seemed so innocent that I feel like it was kind of deceptive,” I blurted.
    “Is it bad to be deceptive?” She was pushing me to confess whatever my secret was. I wanted to believe it was out of a growing intimacy, but I couldn’t be sure.
    “It’s hard not to be a little deceptive,” I owned. “I’m not talking about lying really. Just that you can’t always bare your feelings like the people in that movie. You can’t be moved all the time. For me, it would be like I was always drawing, having this intense scruple about getting it exactly right. With no blurs. I’d go crazy. Life isn’t like that.”
    “Ah, but you also go crazy in life with too much hiding. I think you will learn to be more relaxed as you get older, Katie.”
    “I’m trying.” By this point, I had little idea what we were talking about, only the conviction that she was boring into my soul, and that, no matter how well-meaning she was, and how much I enjoyed her companionship, I wanted my soul to myself for the time being.
    “I know you are trying,” she said gently.
    Deciding perhaps that she had gone far enough for one evening, she let me be the rest of the way home.
    Grateful for the simple sounds of traffic and footfall along the boulevard Raspail, I returned to my inner arguments about Olivier.
    It wasn’t as if by going to the Fer à Cheval tomorrow, I might betray a friend. Portia was not my friend. She was a thin and imperious telephone voice with high boots, a blond face in an expensive frame in a house in New York City that had nothing to do with me. And Olivier did not love her. He’d made that very clear.
    I told myself that seeing Olivier wasn’t wrong. It was my own business. If I were to give in to the temptation to confide in Claudia right now, she would tell Clarence, and I had a strong feeling that no matter how much he liked me he would not be sympathetic to my falling into the arms of his daughter’s ex-boyfriend.
    Clarence and Claudia seemed the types to condone a romantic secret. Only not my particular one.
    When Claudia and I arrived at the apartment, she made a lamb couscous, with raisins and chickpeas, while I clipped and read articles on Germany. I was familiar now with the names of the players, with Kohl and Honecker.
    What had we thought of the Pasolini? asked Clarence as we ate. Did we like cinéma vérité? Did it make us feel truthful?
    I said that there was something infuriating about the gorgeous actors: they were totally innocent and yet they had an almost creepy all-knowing quality, kind of like children in a horror movie.
    Again, Claudia’s gaze seared me with suspicious concern.
    Clarence laughed. “Horror, you say? Not bad. And Claudia,” he turned to her as to the next pupil, “what did you think?” His tone with her was no different from with me. We were his little girls.
    “I think what’s