Breathless (20 page)

My father wrote to us angrily to express his outrage that Jim and I both seemed to approve of my sister’s choice:

From drop-out to record salesman and now to waiter in a jazz dive. He hasn’t a skill nor education. And he is too small to become a policeman or fireman. What kind of future is in store for him? What possible happiness can result from a union with such a boy?

If this boy were white and Jewish he would still be all wrong
.

We strove to educate her for independence and made some small progress. So with the arrogance (displayed ever since she left here) she surrenders her most precious asset
—
her independence. She can be dumped at a moment’s notice
.

Jim and I had tried to defend my sister or at least point out to my parents the weakness of their arguments. Independence, the key to their mythology of parenthood, meant wanting their children to want
their
life. It did not include living it in one room in a bad neighborhood with “such a boy,” too short to become a policeman or fireman (my father was being thorough in his catalogue of defects). But what if that’s what
she
meant by independence?

My parents were caught in a drama in some ways of their own making, but the family story was shaped by a much larger transformation of urban life. Unlike their friends, who in the 1950s had moved to the suburbs, my parents stayed put in Manhattan and sent us to public school. At Booker T. Washington Junior High School, located at 108th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, we met Irish kids and Puerto Ricans who lived in tenements on the east (wrong) side of Broadway. We learned to dance the cha-cha and the mambo in gym, where all the students came together. The white kids did it by the numbers, counting each step, while the Puerto Rican pupils snickered openly at our pitiful performance. In assembly, we heard about education and democracy
and, by my sister’s time, in Social Studies about segregation and integration. My sister took the lessons in democracy to the letter. If all people were the same, had the same rights, then all people were acceptable playmates and ultimately, as she saw it, soul mates.

Meanwhile, Jim and I were getting closer to the ranch. As a favor to my parents, their old acquaintance Jean, Philippe’s pal, with whom Jim and I sometimes socialized, had found us a place where Jim could have a base of operations for ELF and where we could also live. Out of the blue one evening when we were all having dinner, Jean offered us a long-term lease on a large apartment in a fabulous location near the Stock Exchange. We pitched the idea to my parents who, we hoped, would be willing to supply the five thousand dollars for the
pas de porte
, the key money required to take over the lease from the previous tenant. Jim sketched out the floor plans and enclosed them in a letter to my parents so they could begin to visualize their investment. They were convinced by the blueprint for redesigning the apartment from a shop where leather bindings for books had been made by hand into a language school. Think of all the money we had saved them by eloping! Wasn’t this a much better deal? Their money made our fantasies concrete and official through a financial compact sealed by a lease and approved by a notary. (In France, the notary—not the lawyer or the agent—is the ultimate middleman without whom nothing official can take place.) We were entering the royal road to the epicenter of high bourgeois culture: real estate.

This time, it really was the ranch. This was what we had talked about endlessly—how it would be, how it could be, if only. “Jim could have a secretary and office—a language lab—a classroom in the
center
of Paris! In terms of living space for us, it would be about the same with the difference that the study wouldn’t exist, but it won’t be necessary if Jim has an office. And until we have a child, the small room at the end could be a study for me. We would miss the view, but you can’t have everything.”

You can’t have everything.

Of course I would give up my study to make it a child’s room.

In America, all my friends were having babies. Not having children meant, Judy wrote in one of her chiding letters, that you weren’t
“delivering,” as she put it, as a woman. I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I stopped taking the pill. After so many years of fearing I was pregnant, I was amazed now not to be, now that I was prepared for it to happen. “No news on the family scene,” I informed my parents. Dr. Hirsch said he was sure there was nothing wrong, but we would explore the situation.

The Carpenter

O
NE AFTERNOON
, L
EO INTRODUCED US
to Hans, a carpenter who was experienced at renovations. Leo had found a huge empty space near Les Halles that Hans had turned into a beautiful loft. Hans was German, and had come to Paris with his Swedish girlfriend Ingrid, who worked as an au pair for a rich American family.

Jim took Hans through the apartment and showed him what he had in mind. Hans had a theory for every aspect of the renovation. Jim accepted the need to knock down walls in order to create new spaces for the school that would occupy the front end of the apartment. But why dismantle the floor in the back? It was just for us. Hans insisted on taking up all the boards, examining each one, ordering new pieces, and refitting them one by one.

“It’s all connected,” Hans said, shaking his head, when Jim said he wanted just to patch up the broken floorboards and put throw rugs over the bad spots.

“No one will know the difference.”

“I will know,” Hans replied, with a slight accent. Leo had warned Jim that Hans was not an ordinary carpenter. Jim was beginning to discover what that meant. After Leo and Hans left, Jim announced that I would oversee the work on the new apartment while he concentrated on developing the school. The division of labor made a kind of sense, despite the fact that I knew nothing about renovation.

I gave myself over to supervising the work in the apartment and abandoned the idea of writing a dissertation. I had wanted the ranch. Maybe this was just as important as writing something no one would read anyhow. Maybe this is what the son of the famous writer meant by my “spiritual economy.” It was hard to know. “Somehow life is simplified,” I wrote home, “since it is impossible to clean and people are constantly coming in and out. Everything is necessarily casual. I spend half my time in dungarees.” I made lunch for Hans, the carpenter, and his helper, but I told them I wanted to be more useful. Reluctantly, Hans assigned me the task of scraping the layers of old wallpaper between the beams in the long corridor that formed the entranceway. When I finished a section of the wall, I’d go find him at the other end of the apartment so that he could see the progress I was making. While I waited for him to come to my end of the apartment, I would dip my scraper in one of the buckets filled with water he always kept near him for the plaster and for rinsing brushes. I loved watching how carefully he took care of his tools. One day, Hans started calling me his “little fish.” I had told him I was a Pisces. He said he was an Aquarius. I found myself checking the horoscope.

Hans worked slowly. He explained to Jim that he could go faster, but that would just be a cosmetic job. You’d be satisfied at first, but you’d only have compounded the problem by hiding it. His theory about painting, for instance, was that if you prepared the base properly, opening all the cracks as far as you could, filling them in, sanding, and re-sanding, and created the right foundation, the walls would not just hold the paint but
embrace
it. The walls would glow instead of shine, especially with a lacquer finish, which was what he had chosen for the kitchen. I defended Hans’s progress to Jim, who
couldn’t fathom why it was taking him so long to complete the painting, or why I was scraping wallpaper in the hallway, which was the helper’s job.

Jim told my parents that I was overindulging the workers.

“They’re really like teenage children,” he complained, objecting to their hours and their music.

You Are Killing Me

O
NE AFTERNOON IN EARLY FALL
I accompanied Hans to the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, the huge department store on the rue de Rivoli that specialized in home furnishings. It was time to choose new wallpaper for the apartment and Hans said that the BHV, as everyone referred to it, had the best selection of patterns. Turning the pages of the sample books together, our faces almost touching, I realized with a shock that I had been falling all over the man Jim had hired to renovate our apartment, stumbling into him as though pushed by a crowd, trying to inch closer and closer to his body.

“The patterns are making me dizzy,” I said, almost to myself, putting my hand to my throat. “I have to leave.”

Hans steered me by the elbow through the labyrinthine aisles of stacked wallpaper rolls toward the
sortie
. When we finally exited from the BHV, he sat me down at the closest café table.

I stared mutely at Hans’s face, as if I were seeing it for the first
time. He had the head of the man the heroine in Harlequin romances always falls for. All bones and hollows, sculpted lips, blue eyes deeply set in their sockets, fringy black lashes. Seated at the table, Hans appeared slight, even delicate, but I had seen him lift rafters, floorboards, and sacks of plaster at the apartment without straining. I thought he resembled Horst Buchholz (a.k.a. the German James Dean) in
The Magnificent Seven
, one of the few American movies David would have admitted to admiring, probably because it was a remake of
The Seven Samurai
.

We both ordered coffee and smoked in silence until the waiter reappeared at the table.

I observed his strong, graceful hands, which could fix almost anything, as he slowly stirred sugar into his espresso. Hans waited for me to speak.

“Did you see anything you liked?” I asked, jolted back to the official script by the bitter taste of the coffee.

“It’s up to you,” Hans said, with his characteristic mixture of deference and irony.

I was flirting in that silly-woman-who-spends-her-husband’s-money mode that I had begun to adopt with the workers over whom I felt no authority. I wanted to be one of the kids, not married to the boss. I reached out impulsively and took Hans’s hand. He looked surprised but did not withdraw his hand. I could feel a question rising to my lips. It had nothing to do with wallpaper. As I rehearsed the question in my mind, I knew I was flushing.

“Why don’t you come to the old place tomorrow night for dinner after work?” I finally found myself saying. “Jim will be out of town,” I added, answering his quizzical look. I had met his girlfriend, Ingrid, who sometimes came to pick him up at the end of the day. She was tall—taller than he was—and the Nordic type that appealed to the French. She had come to Paris with Hans from Germany on a student visa and was working as an au pair. She seemed kind.

After a long pause, as if calculating the losses and gains to his job situation, Hans shrugged and said he would come at eight, since the heavy
travaux
of renovation were not allowed after that hour. Jim paid
by the hour and was fanatic about a full workday. Hans didn’t mention Ingrid and neither did I.

I bought some
plats cuisinés
at the charcuterie near the train station and set them out on the Spanish table in the living room. At the ranch, I cooked for Hans and his helper. Away from the chaos of renovation, I wanted to shed the kitchen image. I was trying for something more worldly, less domestic: more
femme du monde, less femme d’intérieur
. Waiting for Hans to arrive, I checked myself in the mirror several times and saw a cliché.

I frantically cleaned the apartment several times to distract myself from the fear that Hans would have a change of heart. What could I do if he didn’t come? I could hardly force him to want me. I could ask Jim to fire him (maybe he knew that), but what I longed for was this: I imagined his hands—hands I had watched at work for hours—touching me. I would be the plaster.

I was still looking in the mirror when Hans knocked. I quickly closed the door behind him and leaned against it, the way the woman always does in the movie when she’s passionate, blocking the exit. While we were still in the entryway, I reached up for his face, touched his cheek, the chisel of his lips with my fingers. He caught my hand and pulled me toward him. A rush came over me, a strange mixture of adrenaline and languor radiating through every part of my body. Just standing close to Hans I felt liquefied, as I had at the BHV. I wanted to pour my body over his. Lava. I led him by the hand, past the food arrayed on the table, straight through Jim’s office into the bedroom, pulling him after me, like a child.

Making love removed all the abstract questions about desire, whether I was capable of feeling it, the puzzle behind the oblique conversations with Monique. “You were made for being caressed,” he would say, smiling. A woman in one of Colette’s novel comments to another on a lover’s technique: “You couldn’t do it better yourself.” Hans would immobilize me with his hands and mouth, then with an unexpected shift of position push me over the edge. How could he have known just when to make the move, when I didn’t? He knew, though, because he always looked at me with a sweet complacency when I finally stopped
shuddering. Sometimes I’d feel guilty about receiving so much pleasure with no return, but that was how he seemed to want it most of the time. Over and over again, as though that was all he wanted to say or do, he created a circuit of ecstasy that I had only read about or guessed at from the movies in my repertoire.

Whenever Hans said with his slight accent, “It feels so good. It feels so good to touch you,” I would think, finally, yes, it feels so good, I don’t know where I am anymore. I’m leaving home, really going somewhere. Lying next to Hans felt like a foreign film. This time I was reliving
Hiroshima Mon Amour
. The movie imprinted on me from its opening shots when you see two bodies—but at first you don’t know you are looking at bodies, just sandy shapes, curved forms moving slowly, moving together. At the same time, you hear two voices speaking to each other. The woman is French and the man is Japanese but he is speaking French, slowly, as if he hadn’t mastered the language, pausing between words, giving equal weight to each syllable: “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima.” The woman’s voice says quietly, “Tu me tues. Tu me fais du bien.” You are killing me; you are making me feel good. You are good for me. When I watched the movie with David in New York, I did not understand what that meant: “You are killing me; you are making me feel good.” How could being killed be good? I was afraid to ask David since the dialogue was what he hated most about the movie.