The Piano Tuner

Winter Term

Winter Term That January everyone in Paris was under thirty. The streets bustled all day, but about 10:00 P.M., when the first movies emptied, they began to hum with a special youthful energy. Knots of young people clustered around street musicians playing American rock songs, and others—like Sara, Giselle, and Nancy—sat in the windows of the cafes, nursing small coffees or inexpensive wines. "I love Renoir/7 Sara said, her round face inscrutable behind large dark glasses. "He makes fat women so attractive/7 That afternoon they had been to a special Renoir exhibit with their art class and had agreedto meet in the eveningfor a blowout. It was Friday and they were tired of art. All morning they sketched, all afternoon they listened to lectures or attended exhibits. On weekends they took excursions: Chartres, Versailles, Rheims. And they had to do reading at night, all of it in French! This was an intensive one-month course, and though it was almost over—only the individual conferences with the instructor remained—Nancy felt she had bitten off more than she could manger. Her French was still minimal; she had trouble with languages, that was all there was to it. Back in the U.S. she had even tried a hypnotist. "You are a little French girl/7 he told her, "learning to count: un, deux, trois, quatre . . ,77 It worked well for lists, even for verb declensions , but she was never able to put together whole sen122 Winter Term tences in actual conversations. She could only throw in nouns or verbs where they seemed most appropriate. "Les pommes/' she said to her concierge this morning, pointing at a bowl offruit in the concierge's kitchen. "J'aime les pommes." "Vous pailez fran$ais ties bien, Mademoiselle Nancy/' said the old lady, who was overcharging her ten francs per night. But she didn't offer Nancy an apple. Sara, on the other hand, spoke French fluently, almost as well as Giselle, who was married to a Frenchman and who had lived in Paris for six years. He called her Gigi. 'There are only three reasons why I stay in Paris/' he told them one night in his soft accent. "Gigi et Gigi et Gigi. A young girl like her doesn't want to live in the country. But Paris is no longer the same." He often spoke of himself as an old man, because at thirty-five he was ten years older than Giselle. Nancy had disgraced herself that night by being unable to finish her dinner after Giselle announced, halfway through, that they were eating calves' brains. "It's a specialite of the region where Henri is from," she said. "You were eating it before, what's the difference now that you know what it is?" But Nancy thought she might get sick. "I know it doesn't make any sense; it's very good, really. I guess I've just had enough, is all." They made an odd threesome, thought Nancy, who admired the others' sophistication, linguistic and otherwise. Sara was fat (as Sara herself said, there was no getting around it), and Giselle was headed in that direction, though she still could be described as lush. She was sexy, and dressed to show it. She had posed nude for Nancy and Sara; she enjoyed doing that, whereas Nancy would have fainted if they had made her do it. Maybe it was simply because, next to Sara and Giselle, she was built comparatively like a bird. In high 123 The Piano Tuner school and college, shower time was never her favorite. Giselle's luxurious hair of groin and armpit somehow made Nancy nervous and self-conscious. Her sketches had been terrible. Nancy had won an art contest in Providence, and the prize had been a round-trip ticket to Paris. A month was all she could afford, so when she found out about this Winter Term course she arranged with her university to get credit for it: it wasn't costing her much at all. In fact, compared to Giselle and Sara, she was the rich one, with her credit cards, checks from her parents, savings from her part-timejob,Giselle was a full-time student and Henri an underpaid English teacher in a private Parisian high school; there was much talk of a book for children that Henri was working on and...