Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,93

they were more than six thousand miles apart.

He had not been lying about the French class at the American School. He had stopped by there on one of his many long walks and signed up for a class that would meet on a Tuesday night for the first time, which was a few days after Elise’s e-mail and the phone call to his father. He did not have high hopes for the course, but when he walked through the door of the classroom and chose a seat two rows from the front and along the wall, he was pleased to see two pretty women there, one of them a student, the other their teacher, both probably not much older or younger than he was. He had not yet written Elise back. He had forced himself to wait until after the first French class, but he had spent more time than he should have staring at the printouts he had made of the photos he had taken of her during their afternoon in Santa Barbara. These were the second copies; the first he had handled so much over the past several months that they had become grimy and wrinkled.

One good thing since coming to Paris, aside from how it had cleared his head about a couple of things and made him feel less inert, was that he had gained back some more weight since he had been in the hospital. He was close to one fifty-five again, about six or seven pounds short of his normal weight. He had not intended to get as thin as he had before the October collapse, but his appetite had so often been poor, and even though he knew that he was losing too much weight and his mother was constantly harassing him about it, he had had trouble forcing himself to eat enough to make up for all of the calories he was burning. The chocolates and pastries and baguettes and croissants in Paris, along with the many good restaurants where actual French people rather than tourists ate, had restored the color to his face. An added benefit, related or not, was that he no longer seemed to be losing much hair, and the places where it was thinning did not seem to be as sparse as they had been in L.A. He wondered if he might be imagining this, but it didn’t seem like it.

The teacher was a blond woman named Camille Moreau (Madame Moreau, s’il vous plait, she said to her students). She was petite and trim with large dark eyes, and the night of the first class, she wore a flattering beige shirtdress cinched at the waist. Her heels were the same color as the dress, and she wore a double strand of pearls and small matching earrings. Will had trouble keeping his eyes off her, but if she noticed, she did not seem to mind. The only time he spoke directly to her, however, was when she asked for his name. “Comment vous appelez-vous, Monsieur?”

“Will,” he said, his voice breaking.

“Will?” she said, smiling slightly. “Ici nous avons les noms français. Maintenant vous vous appellez Guillaume. D’accord?”

“Yes.” His face burned. “I mean oui.”

“Bienvenue à la classe, Guillaume. Vous êtes américain?”

“Oui.” She spoke a little quickly, but he thought that he understood her. He was American, and it seemed he had a new name. Before now he had been Billy, then Will, and now in France, he had become the more complicated (all of those vowels, he thought) and possibly more distinguished Guillaume.

“Vous venez de quel état?”

He hesitated, working up the nerve to reply. He could feel his face reddening.

“Which state are you from,” someone a row away translated unnecessarily.

“I’m from California, from Los Angeles,” he said.

“Ah, très bien, Guillaume. Beaucoup de soleil là-bas, n’est-ce pas?”

“Oui,” he said. “Beaucoup. We do get a lot of sun there.”

“En français, Guillaume! Alors, et vous, madame?” the teacher said, looking now at the other pretty woman in the class. “Votre nom?”

“Jorie,” she said. “Je viens de Boston.”

“Jorie,” said Madame Moreau. “Alors, c’est un nom assez français. Tres bien.”

Will glanced at Jorie, but she did not turn her face toward him, her head with its long black braid tilted slightly downward, but he could see her in profile, her cheeks pink, their teacher’s attention making her blush too.

The classroom had three overhead rows of fluorescent lights that were so bright Mme Moreau had turned off the middle row within a minute after entering the room, a