Stories We Tell Ourselves Read online

  STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES

  Sarah Françoise

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Stories We Tell Ourselves

  Frank and Joan’s marriage is in trouble. Having spent three decades failing to understand each other in their unfinished house in the French alps, Joan’s frustrations with her inattentive husband have reached breaking point. Frank, retreating ever further into his obscure hobbies, is distracted by an epistolary affair with his long-lost German girlfriend. Things are getting tense. But it’s Christmas, and the couple are preparing to welcome home their three far-flung children.

  The children, though, are faring little better in love themselves. Maya, a gender expert mother-of-two, is considering leaving her family for a woman; Wim is on the cusp of breaking up with his first love; and Lois, who spends her time turning war documentaries into love poems, is facing a change of heart.

  Written with a rare precision and insight, the book explores the thorniness of familial love and its capacity to endure with warmth, wit and disarming honesty.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Stories We Tell Ourselves

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. Salt

  Chapter 2. Leaps and Bounds

  Chapter 3. Verbascum

  Chapter 4. Green Carpet

  Chapter 5. The Nativity Scene

  Chapter 6. Apron

  Chapter 7. Oysters

  Chapter 8. Christmas Eve

  Chapter 9. Christmas Day

  Chapter 10. Capon

  Chapter 11. Boxing Day

  Chapter 12. Historical Monument

  Chapter 13. In Love and War

  Chapter 14. Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About Sarah Françoise

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  To my parents

  1. Salt

  ‘THE FAMILY THAT consumes somuchbloodysalt together, stays together,’ said Joan, more than once. It was one of the time-honoured love reprimands she serenaded them with at the dinner table.

  Her husband Frank sprinkled the stuff liberally on his red meat and hypertension. The children, too, were heavy consumers. Maya, the salt snob, had taken to carrying a precious little tin of Cypriot pyramid crystals around in her purse. At night, Lois ran home from work to float in tubs of unscented Epsom salt, like a drowsy Ophelia trying to dissolve her lumbago. And William’s senior-school cloud-tank experimental video project had left concentric white rings on the salt-intolerant screed of the basement.

  In the early days of love, the husbands were told of the time Maya had taken up silk-painting, and made her way through bags and bags of ice melt. Lois, said Joan, got a taste for samphire on a school trip to the French island of Noirmoutier in 1988. So taken was she with its rubbery pickled stalks that she turned her bedroom into a salt marsh, and started growing it in Joan’s mail-order Tupperware. Joan fed the new husbands her grown daughters’ childhood fixations fast and furiously, like tide alerts.

  Once, Frank followed the doctor’s orders, and cut salt out of his diet completely. When he realised that, without salt, nothing tasted good, he simply readjusted his pleasure/mortality equation. No matter the variables, death was always its own number. ‘You’ll live longer,’ coaxed Joan. Frank saw his long, unsalted life stretch out ahead of him like one of those interminable garden-centre lunches with Joan’s father.

  The first exception he made was for soft-boiled eggs, which he crowned with just a few flecks of kosher salt. He extended the indulgence to steak. The doctor had also placed a moratorium on steak and, in fact, on all red meat. ‘If you keep eating like that, you’ll have a heart attack,’ said Joan. Frank thought of his heart. His heart without salt.

  Joan searched online for what to do in case of a heart attack. ‘Have the person sit down, rest, and try to keep calm.’ It seemed to her she’d been doing that since the seventies.

  ‘The family that consumes somuchbloodysalt stays the same,’ said Joan to her soured husband and to her three pickle babies, who had not been babies since the eighties. One of them – the one with the appetite for salt flakes – even had babies of her own.

  She gibed tenderly, reminding them of the boy on the barque, the one who’d forgotten the magic word, the only word that could stop the bewitched salt mill from grinding away. Because of him, the oceans were for ever briny.

  ‘You’re practically preserves,’ she told them with a snort, ignorant that, in all corners of the family, saline was evaporating and hearts were draining to the beat of new currents.

  *

  In September 2015, Frank started frequenting an inexpensive restaurant behind the train station called Chez Josée. The restaurant had a white formica bar, a Pacman pinball machine out front, and a small, windowless dining room in the back. It also had Wi-Fi and beef heart on the menu. The beef heart was served braised, with a garnish of green beans or lamb’s lettuce.

  Frank started frequenting the restaurant not because of the heart, but because of the Wi-Fi, and because they tolerated the dog. The heart came later.

  Every Wednesday, he sat at the back of the restaurant and opened his laptop to work on one of two projects: 1) the ‘bor’ project, or 2) the Caspar David Friedrich project.

  The ‘bor’ project was an exhaustive compilation of French place names derived from the aforementioned pre-Indo-European root. Its purpose was to settle once and for all the toponymic debate surrounding the precise meaning of the syllable ‘bor’, itself a rare derivation of the root ‘bar’. Many etymologists espoused the theory that the inclusion of ‘bor’ in a place name suggested a protruding geographical formation. There was a certain degree of discord even within this group, and a broad spectrum of interpretation of the word ‘protruding’, which included everything from escarpments to huts, copses to knolls, via good old-fashioned hills. A smaller number of fantasists on the fringes of the field pretended that ‘bor’ meant apiary, citadel, etc. – opinions that were refuted in unison by the other camps.

  It seemed that ‘bor’ was all things to all people – the kind of generous imprecision that kept Frank awake at night. And so Frank took it upon himself to resolve the issue once and for all, through exhaustive, map-based research of the Hexagon.

  To do this, he combed through the country inch by inch, circling ‘bor’ hamlets, villages, hills and plateaux on blue French ordnance survey maps. He travelled an average five miles per hour, walking his index finger and tiring his eyes over the blue-green 1:25,000-ratio atlas. Sometimes his eyelid would start to twitch, and Joan was called to squirt artificial tears into Frank’s feverish eyes. He organised the place names he stumbled upon in a sophisticated maze of Excel spreadsheets, and highlighted some of his breakthroughs in online cartography forums under the alias Borax.

  The Caspar David Friedrich project was a dissertation on the topography of Romanticism that was now twenty years in the making. Forty, if you counted the research. Sixty, if you took into account the conditioning of Frank’s childhood. About a year ago, Frank had started publishing instalments of his thesis on a blog, which was followed by a handful of scholars, and almost as many webcam models in the US and Eastern Europe.

  Frank saw these projects as his service to humanity – his humble contribution to the keeping of mankind’s history. After all, what was geography if not history in relief? Mountains pushed up out of the earth’s crust, and then eroded. Their names, too, erupted from language, over time picking up letters and syllables which might later be shed. As for his
interest in German Romanticism, it too was born of a seismic vibration.

  As a boy growing up in a village of brutalist high-rises just north of Paris, Frank benefited from municipally sponsored summer camps (courtesy of the town’s Communist administration), and discovered a love of nature until then untapped. For years he visited the seaside and the Alps, along with other boys and girls whose parents worked on the line in the tyre factory.

  Frank loved the ocean but he grew infatuated with the mountains – with their perpetual snow, icy blue steeps, and great solitude. Back home, Frank shared an apartment with his mother, stepfather, brother and sister, and four step-siblings. At summer camp he had his own bunk, carved with the names and obsessions of those who had enjoyed the same high-altitude privacy before him.

  From this top bunk he had an exclusive, endless view over the least populous landscape he’d ever encountered. Even when hiking or climbing with his peers and the camp counsellors, Frank felt that his communion with each trail or rock wall was his own private affair.

  Years later, as an architecture student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he discovered Friedrich, and recognised in the man’s paintings a personal, memory-like quality – almost like the recollection of oneself through and by another. The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog was a ten-year-old Frank on his first ascent of the Dents de Lanfon, the Alpine valley below tucked in beneath a blanket of clouds. The young couple on The Sailing Ship were Frank and his shipmate Joris – two twelve-year-old working-class boys on a subsidised boat, watching the black sardine sloops skim by in the Baie de Douarnenez.

  When he graduated from architecture school, Frank kissed his mother goodbye, packed all his belongings into a red mountaineer’s rucksack and bought a one-way ticket to the Alpine town where, forty years later, he now had a weekly date with an animal’s plated ticker.

  When the starter came out (often an endive and walnut salad), Frank closed the laptop, put it back in its shock-absorbent case and into the leather satchel he’d bought himself last spring while visiting his eldest daughter, Lois, in New York. At home, he slid the satchel into a satchel-shaped shelf on a desk he’d built from breeze blocks and planks. Later, Joan came to think that Frank’s matryoshka-ising of his laptop was perhaps the first red flag.

  After the salad was gone, Josée herself – a woman with hair the colour of paprika and chenille jumpers in every shade of blue – came out from behind the bar to take Frank’s empty plate to the kitchen. She reappeared shortly with his heart (four slices of it), spread out like a fan.

  ‘Votre cœur, Monsieur Frank,’ she said, putting the plate down before him. Frank looked at the steaming organ, picked up the salt shaker that was positioned in the centre of the table, where it shared a gondola with the mustard and pepper, and dropped a minuscule tornado of salt onto the meat.

  It was in this restaurant that, on 13 October, one month after he got hooked on heart, Frank received a message from his long-lost German girlfriend, Heide.

  *

  ‘You’re ordering from a prix-fixe menu, and you have the choice between a starter and an entrée, or an entrée and a dessert – which do you choose?’ Lois asked Nick on their third date. They were having dinner at an Egyptian restaurant in Queens that Nick had read about online. Lois tried to season her baba ganoush, but the salt had calcified in the tiny, cube-shaped shaker. Above its compacted relic, three brown grains of rice rattled against each other.

  ‘I’d have to see the menu,’ said Nick.

  ‘You can’t,’ said Lois. ‘You just have to commit – salt or sugar?’

  ‘I don’t know. It depends.’

  ‘It’s to see if we’re compatible,’ she added. ‘In a restaurant setting.’

  ‘What would you choose?’

  ‘Starter. Salty,’ she said, waving to the waiter. ‘Every time.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Nick.

  Four years later, Nick discovered the made-up French word ‘combattable’ while peering over Lois’s shoulder one day. She was subtitling a documentary about a renowned kora-player from Timbuktu, and had entered the word as a placeholder until she could think of the proper translation. Nick remembered the look of the word, with its two pointed swords in the middle, like a gate between ‘combat’ and ‘table’. He remembered its epiphanic feel, too.

  Three years after the word, seven years after the question, he wondered at what point he’d transitioned from compatible to combattable. And it wasn’t all passive. Wasn’t just something that was being done to him. Nick was aware he’d become unfascinated with Lois. It might even have predated the affair. She seemed to think so.

  They’d met almost eight years ago on the 5 a.m. ferry from Fishers Island to New London, Connecticut. Lois was catching a train back to New York after a long weekend at her room-mate’s parents’ house. Nick had just spent the week dog-sitting for his parents, who owned a house on the private side of the island. There were only three other people on deck that morning. There was no need to share a bench but they did, and later Lois wondered whether it was the exacting intimacy of witnessing the sun rise next to a complete stranger that compelled Nick to break the silence. They found that they had visited the same beaches, on the same days. Attended trivia night at the American Legion on Friday. Sat in the library with their laptops within a day of each other. It was both the first holiday they ever took together, and the last they took apart.

  When they got to New London, Nick offered Lois a ride back to the city in his Jeep. His J’Heap, he called it. The car smelled like burning Kevlar, and there was a rusty hole in the floor of the passenger seat that framed the interstate whizzing by.

  The rest – as is the rest of any and every thing – was history.

  Back then, she was the great coincidence of him – irresistible like any windfall. She moved into his apartment that autumn. Bought him a pillbox in the dollar store to organise the love notes she left for him Monday to Sunday, morn, noon, eve and bed. Painted votives on the bedroom wall to commemorate acts of kindness. One for making dinner and doing all the dishes that Thanksgiving, one for putting up shelves for her poetry books, one for grabbing her with hot summer hands on the Williamsburg bridge in August, and telling her they should get hitched. Turn that graduate student visa into a green card, and keep on keeping each other for themselves.

  Lois stole a dish every time they had a meal in a Chinese restaurant. Kept the soaps from cheap weekends upstate and motels on the Jersey Shore. Gathered pine cones when they went camping in state parks. Mementos, she said. You’re too good to be true (to me), he said.

  This self-preserving intensity lasted about four years.

  And then one day, Lois found that Nick could, in fact, resist her – and she him. Over the next three years, the intervals between the remarkable moments of their relationship stretched out, and a mutual resistance infiltrated the landscape of their love. The miscarriage didn’t make things easier. It shone a light on their bad bits and poor doings, left the taste of death in their relationship, and a gaping want in the memory book.

  They were still one year away from the seven-year itch when she met the Historian at a friend’s wedding.

  The Historian had written some books about France during the Occupation that Lois later sought out and read. He taught history at Columbia, but preferred to be known as a Historian, rather than a professor of history. His wife didn’t fuck him, or fucked him poorly, and needed him, yes, but in a way that was material and cold.

  For a while Lois craved only the Historian. The sexiest thing was his pity. He pitied her for her loss – for all the losses. For him, she resurrected traumas from forever ago, like the time she capsized a catamaran in the middle of the lake, and watched the life preserver bob away from her. Or that call at college, from the mother of a boy who’d been found dead in his dorm room. They’d met in a club a few weeks before, and had fooled around on his bed later that night. She left through the window, for added drama, forgetting her bra and socks. The boy’s parents h
ad found her number on a Post-it note on the desk and called it. These things from her past, she posited, they explained a lot. ‘Hmm,’ said the Historian, warming his cold hands on her neck.

  The Historian emboldened Lois with his gratitude. He was grateful for her voice, her body and her time – which was never more than the confirmation of his own availability. She made him want, he made her wait. They kept each other busy.

  The affair lasted just under a year, although the point at which Lois broke her emotional curfew – the moment at which their communications started to contain the acceptance of the situation they had got themselves into – occurred after four months. According to Nick, the affair lasted ten months. For Lois, it lasted six.

  A bit more than a year had passed since Nick found out about the affair, forcing Lois to tell him about the affair. The end of the affair was sudden and violent, like a bout of food poisoning. One day, Nick opened Lois’s computer and found the emails. Hundreds of them, tracing her complicity with another, confirming an absence he had long suspected. He hadn’t gone in there looking, he said, but then again, he couldn’t be sure.

  The decision to reignite that great coincidence of theirs after what Lois had gone and done was brutal, perhaps even reckless. For Nick it felt like forgiving a stranger. And for Lois there was no adjustment – no Dear John letter, no parting reassurance to fuel the pilot light in case things with Nick didn’t work out. No chance to miss a man who wasn’t her husband.

  In the weeks that followed the end of the affair, Lois slept on the living-room couch. She fell asleep each night staring up at the brown spots of rust that haloed the painted tin ceiling. She came to know those muzzy circles by heart – the way they faltered with the receding light until they were only shadows, straddling other shadows. During those weeks, she wished she too was a stain. A stain was never welcome, but eventually it was accepted, and then forgotten about.