Breathless (2 page)

“It’s late, you know. If you leave now, you’ll disturb the concierge.”

“But you’re married.” The concierge was the least of my concerns.

“Anne has gone to the mountains with our son. She won’t be back for two weeks.”

“But wouldn’t she mind?”

“That’s my problem, not yours. If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother you?”

I knew from the French movies I had seen that the more you talk about it, the further you commit yourself to doing the very thing you say you neither wish nor intend to do.

“I’ll be careful,” Philippe continued, softly, taking advantage of my silence. “So what can happen?”

“But,” I lamely started and stopped. Philippe had a subtle voice that ranged between irony and caress that was hard to resist.

“Darling, you’re not a child. Tell me, what could happen?”

“Nothing.”

“So if nothing can happen and no one finds out, no one will get hurt, right?”

“Right,” I said, reluctantly, though I knew it couldn’t be that simple.

“So why not?”

I could never find a strong rejoinder to “Why not?”

Philippe drew me a bath in the most beautiful bathroom I had ever seen. The walls were painted a dark eggplant lacquer. They gleamed. Philippe sat on the edge of the tub in his white terry cloth robe, smoking and pouring a capful of Obao bath oil beads that turned the water turquoise blue. After watching me for a while without speaking, he brought me a robe that matched his (the kind I had only seen in the expensive hotels my parents liked to stay at), and holding hands, we walked slowly down the carpeted corridor in silence to the bedroom.

We lay on the bed, kissed lightly, and shared a last cigarette. Still not speaking, Philippe climbed on top of me and, within a matter of minutes of intense activity, rolled off neatly with a small groan. He took a cigarette out of his pack, tapped it lightly, and lit up.

“Et moi?” I asked, startled by the smoke signals that suggested closure. Philippe dragged on his cigarette, and offered me a puff. It wasn’t about smoking, but I couldn’t find the words. I took a cigarette from my own pack instead, and lay silent in the darkness. This was not what happened in any of the foreign movies I had seen.

“Débrouillez-vous,” he said, after a while, propping himself up on one elbow. He pointed languidly to my other hand, which seemed to mean that if I wanted more, the rest was up to me.

“Do it myself? Is that something French?” I finally asked, torn between humiliation and curiosity.

“Oh,” Philippe said fondly in English, “American girl,” as though the answer should be obvious.

“Only until I know whether it’s going to be
a passade,”
he added, “or something serious.”

A passing fancy. I wondered how he decided. As I fell asleep, I forced myself not to think about Philippe’s wife.

The next morning the Swedish au pair brought us breakfast in bed: café au lait and warm croissants with butter and jam. I was stunned as much by the elegance of the breakfast (beautifully laid out on the tray, with simple white bowls and pitchers of coffee and hot milk) as by their complicity. (When did he tell her what to do, and wouldn’t she mention his overnight guest to his wife?) But I didn’t ask these questions (Did he sleep with her too?) and instead acted as though I understood the rules of the game, as though I did this sort of thing all the time. After breakfast, Philippe placed the tray outside the bedroom door, as if we had spent the night in a hotel, and started up again. Afterward, he took my face between his lovely long hands and wiped away the crumbs on my lips.

“You’re a sweet girl. You turn me on,” Philippe declared, kissing me.

Then he walked down the hallway that led to his day as a doctor in the other part of the apartment. “Let yourself out,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. “You’ll come to dinner when Anne gets back. I’m sure she’ll want to meet you. You’ll like her. She adores your parents,” he added, as if to reassure me.

I walked back slowly through the elegant streets of Saint-Germain. It was briefly sunny that morning and I sat for a while on a rented chair in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the children sail their tiny boats in the pond despite the cold. Was this the beginning of a story or a one-night stand? A passionate affair or a
passade?
When would I know? This was, I had begun to see, the problem with “experimenting,” my parents’ code word for what they took to be my vast sexual experience. By definition, there was no way to know beforehand how an experiment would turn out. If Philippe was typical of French lovers, I was headed for disappointment. He seemed to have performed better on the tennis court with my mother.

“I went to a party at Anne and Philippe’s house last night,” I reported the next day in my weekly letter. “They served blanc de
blanc and foie gras.” (I actually wrote
“foie de gras.”
Those were early days.) “I met a charming Japanese painter, who wants me to teach him English.”

If I had gone to Paris to escape from my parents, it had not taken me long to return home in my mind, even through my lies.

Waiting for Godard

I
HAD LEFT
N
EW
Y
ORK
for Paris still under the spell of
Breathless
. Godard’s new wave movie, which my boyfriend David had taken me to see on my twentieth birthday, had made everything French infinitely desirable, as if I needed any persuading. Jean Seberg’s character, Patricia, seemed self-possessed, independent, and unafraid, three things I desperately wanted to be. Patricia looked as if she had happily traded innocence for experience some time ago. She had cropped hair, a tight tee-shirt over capri pants, and lovers she wasn’t even sure she loved.

Playing a girl from New York on her own in Paris, Jean Seberg was the quintessential gamine, and then there was her bad boyfriend. Within minutes of seeing them on the screen, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg eclipsed the Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir couple ideal I had nourished in college: the template for the intellectual life that included sex while excluding marriage. Belmondo’s character
Michel was the opposite of intellectual, of course, but I was attracted to the danger he brought to their relations.

Patricia was enrolled in courses at the Sorbonne as I would be (the price of parental financial support), but it was obvious from the start that going to school didn’t take up much of her time. She was too busy trying to be a journalist. I loved the idea of the girl in the black-and-white-striped (Dior) shirtwaist dress jumping out of a stolen car and rushing off to a press conference for a celebrity novelist at Orly. During the interview with the great man, who sported dark glasses and a hat, Seberg veiled her ambition behind her own sunglasses, chewing nervously on her pencil, before daring to ask the writer whether he thought women had a role to play in the modern world. But when asked what she was doing in Paris, Patricia replied that she was writing a novel. I studied my expression in the bathroom mirror as she did and, holding my breath, rehearsed her answer. I discovered that if the words went by fast enough, I almost believed them. If I didn’t write a novel, at least I would live one.

In Paris, I would leave my boring Barnard-girl self behind in Manhattan along with my parents. France was my hedge against the Marjorie Morningstar destiny that haunted American girls in the 1950s: marriage to a successful man and then the suburbs with children. In exchange for financing the year in Paris, my parents had exacted their particular pound of flesh: an account of my comings and goings in the form of a weekly letter. Letter writing seemed a small enough price to pay for the thrill of being in Europe. The harder part was the promise, in their words, not to hide anything from them. I promised, figuring that there was no way for them to ferret out any hidden items now that I wasn’t living under their roof. Besides, I was a literary girl. I had read epistolary novels. I could easily turn out the kinds of letters that would dazzle with detail while omitting the truth. I had written enough of them from summer camp where the weekly letter home was obligatory, considering how much it had cost the parents to pack the kids off to the Adirondacks for eight weeks.

When I emptied my parents’ apartment after their deaths, I found my letters from Paris tied in a little bundle sitting in a drawer next to the letters from my years at Camp Severance. Seeing the two packets
of epistolary history, arranged in chronological order, adjacent to each other in my mother’s dresser, made me think that for her the two correspondences were comparable objects—and perhaps they were, even if in my mind the experiences, each lasting six years, belonged to entirely different eras, not to say selves. Both sets of letters home seemed designed to produce a certain effect—to make my parents think their daughter was having a good time, and that beyond the long string of items necessary to further survival that only they could supply, I didn’t need them or miss them. I was away: a happy camper. Happy at age nine, or twenty.

When I reread the Paris letters, I quickly saw the fatal flaw in my decision to hide what my parents wanted to know. What exactly was I concealing from scrutiny? I sensed, hidden in the landscape of elaborate detail, the traces of the very feelings I passionately wanted to recover in order to reconstruct my past. Naturally, as a writer I loved the documentation: the pale blue sweater I bought at the Galeries Lafayette (“I feel so authentic when I wear it!”); the play by Brecht, the Resnais movie I saw (so avant-garde); the new, darker, “Russian” color of my hair. But if I wanted to know what the hyperbole (wonderful, marvelous, fantastic!!!) and the exclamation marks—my favorite form of punctuation—were masking, I would have to reimagine my life as the American girl I was, except in my own eyes.

I
HAD BEEN DESPERATE TO
leave home for college and live on campus as most of my friends were planning to do. But with their uniquely Jewish brand of casuistry, their uncanny ability to make me disbelieve my own reality, my parents conned me into accepting their bargain: rather than buy into the expensive clichés of dormitory life—how American!—with the money they would be saving for me, I could study in France after graduation. Wasn’t Europe the dream? (Yes.) Didn’t that make more sense? (Not really.)

I lived at home and attended Barnard.

How did they convince me that I didn’t want what I wanted? The pattern had set in when I was young, and years of being talked out of my
desires (patent leather Mary Janes were vulgar; so was tap dancing) had produced the desired effect. Together my parents had planted the seed of self-doubt in me so deeply, that no sooner did they question my wishes than I self-sabotaged. Was going away to school a waste of money? Was I too young? I no longer knew. I was suffering from a kind of Jewish Stockholm syndrome. I had to get away but somehow could not leave my captors, my parents to whom I was overly attached.

Paris was the consolation prize for four years of bitter daily skirmishes over the limits to my freedom.

The fact that only girls lived in Le Foyer International des Ètudiantes made the arrangement acceptable to my parents, who seemed to hope I might still be a virgin, even though they talked as if I were already beyond the pale. Inspired in part by foreign movies and in part by
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, the eighteenth-century libertine novel that the more literary boys at Columbia considered a handbook for seduction, I scorned the demi-vierges of our acquaintance, who at Barnard were majoring in virginity, as the phrase went. I set out to lose mine with David in my sophomore year, when I read the novel and declared my major in French. Still, there was a lot to learn. What counted after graduating from virginity was going further. I couldn’t have said why—or how.

That was part of the plan for Paris. Finding out.

When I crossed the iron-gated threshold of the Le Foyer, carrying my pale blue matching suitcases, I quickly realized that I could redeem the time of my captivity by becoming someone I could not have become, doing what I could never have done—then.

Roommates

I
WAS ASSIGNED A ROOMMATE
, Monique Nataf, who came from a small seaport city in Tunisia.

“It’s true that Mademoiselle Nataf is a foreigner,” Madame la Directrice admitted reluctantly when I told her I would have preferred a French girl, “but she speaks French perfectly. In North Africa they do, you know,” she added in a low voice.

Monique arrived a few days after I had settled into the room. Her first gesture was to cover her side of the room with reproductions of Renaissance paintings, portraits of women, mainly madonnas, looking inward and melancholy.

“Bellini?” I asked.

“I love Bellini, and you?”

“And me?”

“Who is your favorite painter?”

“Chagall,” I said, anxious about the madonnas, and wishing I had said Matisse.

“I’m Jewish, too,” she said, reading the question behind my answer. I blushed, but it was the first thing my parents had asked about Monique.

Monique had been born in France and lived in the Pyrenees during the Occupation. Her mother was Polish and grew up in Berlin; her father was from North Africa. Because she was born in France, Monique had a French passport, but in the eyes of the French French, we were both foreigners.

We were the same size and wore each other’s clothing, playing at being sisters or even twins, despite the fact that Monique was as blonde as I was dark. It was the game of identification we liked. Monique’s mother had been a
petite main
, an apprentice to a famous designer, when she was young. The dresses she made for Monique were a step above what my mother knocked out on the Singer sewing machine that provided the white noise to my childhood, and I coveted them.

One chilly afternoon, a street photographer snapped a picture of the two of us arm in arm. In the photograph, we are strolling down from the Foyer along the boulevard Saint-Michel, where girls were regularly pursued by relentless young men. “Vous êtes seules?” they would ask rhetorically, oblivious to our self-sufficiency. Alone! We’re with each other! In the snapshot, Monique is wearing a double-breasted blazer, a straight skirt that falls just below the knee, sheer stockings that show off her slender legs, black pumps, leather gloves, and a perfectly tied scarf. She looks Parisian already and, like French girls, doesn’t seem to feel the cold. Our arms are linked, but I’m dressed for another season, wearing the brown tweed wool dress with velvet piping that her mother made that fall (for both of us, we joked) and a beige, baggy corduroy coat I had still not realized was completely out of style in Paris.