Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick Page A

lit by sharp slashes of sunlight and crowded with staccato British chirps and the low catarrh of German. She drank the very good coffee, nibbled at a bit of brie and a croissant, and set out.She had left behind her guidebook — it was useless for her present confusions — but had extracted from its pocket a compact map of Paris. The map was a mystery anyhow — you could see the names of streets, and where they met or diverged, and, in spread-out red type, the Roman numerals that identified this or that arrondissement: all of it meaningless. In New York you readily knew the difference between the glittering Fifth Avenue of the museums and the impoverished Fifth Avenue of the tenements, though no street map could hint at what a mere two miles’ distance might signify. Here in Paris, what was it to be mad about Proust (she had brought her yellowing copy of
Swann’s Way
to read on the plane), or bookishly familiar with history and kings and revolutionaries and philosophers? It counted for nothing when you were puzzling over how to get from the IXth to the VIIth on an unexceptional Tuesday in the middle of your unexceptional life, and when you were feeling dismissed by the conscientious weekday faces streaming past, faces that had mundane tasks and were set on exactly what they were and how they were to be done. She could not understand this city, it was an enigma, or else it was Paris that comprehended whatever passed through its arteries, and it was she, the interloper, who was the enigma.
    She was an enigma to herself. She had come away calmly enough, a curious calm, a sleepwalker’s calm: the bus to the bank, the hypnotic mechanical packing, the interview with her rough-hewn principal.
    — You ask this
now?
At the last minute, just at the start of the new term?
    — Mrs. Bienenfeld says she’ll cover for me, won’t that take care of it?
    — It’s too much, she has her own classes. And she isn’t credentialed to teach English, you can’t mix puddings!
    — She’ll be fine. She’s glad to do it, she’s a friend.
    — You mean she’s your patsy. Well, if she’s that willing, she can take two of yours, but for the other two it’ll mean an extra teacher from outside and extra pay, and we’ve got guidelines and a budget. All right, you’re worth something around here, you give us someclass, so I’ll go for it, but Mrs. Bienenfeld better keep your guys in line, you’ve been good about that. Hell, what’s this really about, Bea, another run to Paree, you got a French kisser hidden away over there? Miss Nightingale, lady of the night, oo-lala!
    And then Laura:
    — Bea, I can’t do your syllabus the way you have it, all this Whitman and Hawthorne and God help me,
A Tale of Two Cities
, they’ll spit it out! Can’t you change it to stuff I can handle?
    — Wing it, Laura, wing it.
    Her rough-hewn principal, rough-hewn Laura. Her own life ragged and low, scorned by Marvin, scorned by Leo — by Leo, who had put her there! Then why hadn’t she climbed out of it?
    On the rue Mouffetard (she saw this on the side of a building) she stopped and looked all around. She had been walking in the wrong direction — she was nowhere near the numbers on the back of Iris’s envelope. The morning cool had begun to retreat. Despite the growing mob, a frenetic swirl of tourists with their cameras and bags, she was sickeningly alone. She had smuggled herself into this unnatural scene, displaced, desolate, and to what end? Marvin, hollow Marvin — she hadn’t answered his letter, she had told him nothing. She was all contradiction — resentment and indifference — and then this . . . this harebrained plummeting into Paris. To do what? To rescue whom? Marvin from his torment, the brother who abused her? Bea from a low and ragged life? That note, that broken blow, as of glass splitting, a wallop to the brain — she had thought herself content, reconciled, resilient, orderly days, an orderly life: until Iris’s finger hurled