Foreign Tongue Read Online Free

une clope au bec, added job postings to the blackboard by the entrance.
    “Any of these jobs worth checking out?” I asked.
    “Depends,” she said and shrugged, pushing hair out of her eyes. “Do you speak French?” I nodded. She looked at a card in her hand, and I noticed her nails were bitten down to the pink. “This guy always needs translators,” she said. “Pays pretty well.” She handed me an index card from the stack she was transcribing onto the blackboard. EditionsLaveau, on the rue de Condé, needed a translator, “English mother tongue.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “I’d go now. By this afternoon, you’ll be too late,” she said and clicked at me, like a gunslinger to a horse.
    Pocketing the card, I sped over to the Sixth and up the rue de Condé. I knew a bar there, little more than a black tunnel lined with leather seats and a glittery white gravel floor. The décor consisted of spotlit stone statues of Buddha and Ganesha. Back when I’d lived in Paris after college, Clara and her then-boyfriend had taken me there for swimming pool blue cocktails and killer rounds of backgammon. Another time, I’d taken a date, a redheaded rock-climber, there. When he’d told me I was mysterious and beautiful, I’d kissed him, because he’d made me feel like I was. We’d strolled along the banks of the Seine, making out under bridges until early in the morning.
    At number seventeen, I found Editions Laveau, a small bookstore with yellow anti-glare film on the glass. As I walked in, a cowbell affixed to the door pealed, rattling my teeth. There were antique books everywhere: leather-bound, crumbling, piled waist high on the floor, displayed on mismatched tables. A tall, pointy-faced man who looked like Jean Rochefort’s mean older brother emerged from a back room.
    “Puis-je vous aider, mademoiselle?”
    “Vous êtes Monsieur Laveau?” I asked.
    “Lui-même.” He inclined his head, an owl at a dinner party.
    “Je suis venue à cause de l’annonce.”
    “Je regrette, mademoiselle, mais je cherche quelqu’un qui parle anglais comme sa langue maternelle . Bonne journée .” He was looking for a native English speaker. With that, he dismissed me and turned on his heel.
    I squawked in protest. “Excuse me, I don’t think I made myself clear,” I said, switching to English. He turned around. “While I’m flattered that you consider my French good, English is my native tongue.” He knit overgrown eyebrows and looked me up and down. Feeling less thanfashionably Parisian in my slightly sweaty T-shirt and jeans, I raised a defiant eyebrow in response.
    “You read the announcement, did you not, mademoiselle ?”
    “Of course.” I pulled the index card out of my back pocket and reread it. “Serious French author requires excellent translator for”—My face grew hot. I’d mistaken an “r” for an “x.”—“erotic novel. Discretion, humor, and a refined sense of nuance required.”
    On how many levels can you blush, and are they discernible? What did that blush give away? That I hadn’t read the ad carefully? The fact that the translation was for an erotic novel? The fact that, when I was twelve, I’d found a paperback copy of Emmanuelle in the garage, among a pile of old Newsweek s, and had read it in secret? Monsieur Laveau looked at me with a superior, half-amused expression, as if he’d read my mind. I tried to compose myself, making my face blank, expressionless.
    He looked disappointed. I had a sensation I’d had before in France, that not everyone finds a blank slate charming and guileless, the way we do back home. Here, they prefer complexity: an acknowledgment that we are all guilty; or at least, no one is innocent. Nevertheless, he gestured toward the back, and I followed him into a book-lined study with an espresso machine, a large desk, and two windows looking out onto a leafy courtyard.
    He offered me coffee in thickly accented English. I sat on a worn leather club chair, the