Breathless (7 page)

I resumed my quest after breakfast the following day. This time, I considered only Jewish-sounding names. I elected Dr. Abraham Friedman. When I bought an underground ticket for Golders Green in North London, the agent behind the counter queried with a smirk, “Goldberg’s Green?” I answered politely, “No, Golders Green,” until I finally understood the success of my research. I had found not just a Jewish doctor, but an entire London neighborhood famous for its population of Jews.

Dr. Friedman was my first gynecologist. After measuring me for the diaphragm and inserting it inside me on the examining table, he asked me to stand up and walk around the room to make sure he had achieved the proper fit. I chatted with Dr. Friedman, as though I were not half undressed, about London Jews and the approaching High Holidays. On the long ride back to my hotel room, I contemplated the freedom I had just purchased with a kind of anxious joy.

W
HEN
I
RETURNED TO
P
ARIS,
I found myself thinking about me and Jews, now forever associated with my powdery new diaphragm.
But it wasn’t just the office visit with Dr. Friedman, which in retrospect seemed more and more peculiar. Alain was Jewish—Monique admitted that she could not have married someone who wasn’t—and I began to wonder whether that mattered to me, beyond the parental hysteria that the very
idea
of marrying a non-Jew would invariably provoke. Living in Paris made me feel both more and less Jewish. Except for the neighborhood around the rue des Rosiers in the heart of the Marais, whose landmark was Goldenberg’s (a New York–style deli), and Belleville, Jews were almost invisible in Paris. That absence of obvious signs of Jewish life made me feel strangely cut off from my upbringing, a severance I wished for, or so I thought most of the time.

My parents had both grown up in Orthodox Jewish families. When they were first married, they kept a kosher home for their parents, and because it was what they had grown up with. Little by little they drifted away from orthodoxy and down to the more relaxed practices of Reform Judaism. But they drew the line at Christmas trees and still held to the importance of The Holidays, which were always capitalized in their discourse. The Holidays produced an annual crisis over my attendance at Temple Israel.

“But I don’t believe in God,” I’d say every year, in my adolescent righteousness.

My mother offered the pavement compromise: to turn up (nicely dressed) outside the synagogue when services were over. That way her friends could see that her children were still in the family picture.

I accused her of hypocrisy. Didn’t she demand complete honesty from us?

After a while, my mother gave up the battle, though the war continued. My father researched the location of synagogues in Paris.

Yom Kippur fell in early October that year. Monique and Alain persuaded me to accompany them to services. I wondered whether, translated into French, the experience made foreign, the holidays would feel different.

I walked with Monique and Alain, and Alain’s cousin Bernard, whom I had met during the Year of the Foyer, to Kol Nidre services at Temple Victoire, the biggest synagogue in Paris, in the ninth
arrondissement behind the Opéra, not far from the big department stores. So here was where the Jews were! They looked familiar, I thought, as we approached the crowd. Expensively dressed women and men—all in hats—talking about their summer vacation (the main topic of the
rentrée
, the return to social life that was almost a season itself). The Rothschilds’ Rolls Royce was parked in front of the synagogue entrance on the rue de la Victoire, which was being patrolled by the police. At first, I wasn’t absolutely sure what the gendarmes were protecting. I had not until then associated bombings with synagogues, but this was the fallout from all the unresolved issues of the Algerian war. Despite the bevy of uniformed police, in style the scene resembled Manhattan sidewalks on the High Holidays. I could read the letter home forming in my head. My parents would be surprised.

The crowds inside replicated those outside, groomed and guarded. Unused to the geography of Orthodox synagogues, I climbed the stairs with Monique to where the women were sitting in a crowd of their own. The women were chattering among themselves, oblivious to the chanting going on downstairs, where men draped in prayer shawls swayed back and forth, beating their breasts in atonement. In Sunday school, I had spent so much time protesting that I didn’t believe in God that my knowledge of Hebrew was almost nonexistent. But I didn’t need to understand the words of the chant: the body language of the breast-beating was clear.

I begged Monique to leave with me, but she had promised to meet Alain when services were over. After a while, I walked out by myself and headed straight for the metro. What made me think God would be more attractive in Paris? Was it about religion or about my parents? Being Jewish had defined me when I was growing up; so had being my parents’ daughter. I wanted to be free (my mantra) and I was afraid of being cut off. I couldn’t untie the knot.

“What a farce!” I wrote at the end of my letter that night, as though we were back arguing about Temple Israel. “It really doesn’t mean anything to me.” As usual, my worst battles were with myself.

Les Cousins

A
LAIN AND HIS COUSIN
B
ERNARD
shared a large apartment in a nondescript neighborhood just below the hills of Montmartre. While they were still living in Tunisia, Alain’s grandparents had bought the apartment both as an investment and as a hedge against their future dispossession, thinking that they might have to leave the country on short notice and that this space would give them a safe base in France. In the meantime, Alain had the keys.

The cousins celebrated getting the keys to the apartment with a
boum
—a dancing party. Alain’s younger brother played DJ, changing the records on
le pick-up
, the tiny turntable essential to creating the right atmosphere, alternating twists with mambos, but, as the night wore on, playing more and more “slows,” as they were called in French. Eventually, most of the couples had almost stopped in their tracks, draped over each other as if they lacked the strength to move. At one point, after being glued together during several slows in a row, Monique and Alain withdrew to one of the
little bedrooms and bolted the door. I danced with Bernard a while longer. Bernard was sweet. We kissed briefly. The kisses, standard
boum
behavior, were sweet, too, if not irresistible. I wasn’t sure about Bernard. He was French, I reasoned, in language at least—wasn’t I tired of American boys?—and he was there. Not in New York, where David and Leo were, but in Paris, where I was alone.

Two days after the party, Monique knocked at the door of my maid’s room. She had deep circles around her eyes and looked exhausted. “Alain and I have decided to be together,” she said quickly, as if to get it over with.
Ensemble
. That word. Not a passing fancy, the real thing.

I wasn’t completely surprised—I had seen them disappear into the bedroom together the night of the
boum
—but I was almost speechless with disappointment. Because of her parents, Monique had to maintain the fiction of the room she rented, but Alain was coming over that afternoon to help her move her things into the apartment.

“Aren’t you even happy for me?” she asked, hurt by my silence.

“Of course, I’m happy for you,” I said. “I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”

“You know, the night of the
boum,”
Monique began, looking down. I knew what she was trying to tell me. She trailed off, weary from the effort to say without saying. We had been talking about sexual passion for a year, and now it had happened to her.

“It was just like the books,” she said. “You know.” Monique smiled mysteriously. Neither of us was ever specific, though we both knew what was supposed to happen, where and how, but that still never had for me. I envied Monique’s new attachment, so I began to spend time with Bernard, who was feeling abandoned too.

Table conversation between Bernard and me tended to flounder, except when he talked to me about growing up Jewish in North Africa and about his family, which seemed oddly like mine minus the exotic location. I thought I might like his mother, Sophie, who sounded sensitive and intelligent.

Bernard was addicted to Baby-Foot, the popular table soccer game many big cafés had set up toward the back of the room. He claimed that the game was his way of unwinding after classes. Although I had never
seen much evidence of heavy study activity, Bernard swore that he did nothing but study when we weren’t together.

“I don’t know about Bernard,” I said to Monique, who was promoting the relationship so we could be two couples together.

She insisted that he was perfectly intelligent, just not a
littéraire
like us. As far as I could tell, Bernard read nothing but crime novels by San Antonio, the French version of Mickey Spillane. I couldn’t help comparing him to my old boyfriends.

Monique accused me of succumbing to nostalgia. I was remembering only the good times.

“That’s what nostalgia is,” she said. “Selective memory.”

With Alain and Bernard, I had entered another movie,
Les Cousins
, the first new wave film I had seen with David in New York. An earnest country cousin (Gérard Blain) comes to live with his cynical city cousin (Jean-Claude Brialy) in Paris. Both are law students. The country cousin studies all the time and writes letters home. The city cousin has affairs and never cracks a book. The country cousin falls in love with the city cousin’s girlfriend. This piques the city cousin, who decides to prove to the country cousin that the girl can’t be trusted, that she will always come back to him. To make his case, the city cousin takes the girl’s hand—pulling her away from the country cousin—and he places her hand inside his shirt, open at the collar. Once the girl puts her hand on Jean-Claude Brialy’s chest, it’s all over. She melts into his caress. Love, Brialy smugly explains to a crestfallen Blain, is just a matter of skin.

Even David was impressed enough to grow his hair long and get a jacket like the one the sexy cousin wore. I started wondering about skin.

Virtue is rarely rewarded in nouvelle vague movies. The city cousin passes his exams; the country cousin fails his. I feared that Bernard was going to fail his exams, given his city cousin study habits. It worried me that he assumed he would be lucky like the city cousin in the movie, without a care in the world.

What fascinated me in
Les Cousins
was the moment of instant, melting turn-on, when the girl touches the city cousin’s chest. I had never had that experience, certainly not with Bernard, so I probably should have bailed out of that movie plot right then. The truth was that I was
working on sex with Bernard, just as I worked on my French. At least the two worked together. I was as determined to come as he was to make me come, and it annoyed both of us—competitively—that it happened for Monique so quickly.

I wanted Monique’s orgasm.

Mediterranean in looks and personality, Bernard was dark, with curly hair and brown eyes. His body, graceful and muscular, looked as though it would be at home on the beach, where he had grown up playing volleyball on the sand, but bed was not the beach. Bed was more like boot camp. Bernard assured me that what I wanted would happen only if he rid me of all my bad habits (
le système américain)
, my years of training as a demi-vierge. All those exquisite caresses had short-circuited my capacity for real pleasure, he said. His project was to make me come without touching any part of my body with his hands. (Bernard had not read D.H. Lawrence on the subject, but he was as doctrinaire.) No caresses until we got to the next stage. Bernard would position himself above me and, holding himself aloft athletically, move around inside me. This is going to take a long time, I sometimes thought, admiring his stamina, as the nights wore on. But what was the point of not being a virgin if you didn’t come?

This single-minded focus on coming was different from evenings in my room with Leo, which we mainly spent talking; coming was not a topic of conversation. “It will happen,” he’d say reassuringly, “you’ll see.” Finally, one Sunday afternoon, when I thought the thrusting would never end, it happened. Not the magic I had dreamed of, true, not the earth moving, but I had to admit there was something palpably new, a head-to-toe spasm, something like an inner release. We emerged from the bedroom with our announcement. Bernard has conquered the American girl’s frigidity, compliments all around. Alain broke out the champagne. The cousins congratulated each other.

I lifted a glass—undeniably, something had happened—but I felt embarrassed, diminished somehow, in my own eyes. (Was this what caused Monique to look shattered?)

“I had no wish to enjoy,” the Marquise de Merteuil explains to her partner in crime, when she narrates her sexual history. “I wanted
to know.” I was chagrined to discover that for me, like the Marquise, thus far the
idea
of coming had been more exciting than the act; even so, she seemed to have reached the enjoyment part rather quickly. Maybe it wasn’t the act but the partner. Maybe I was in the wrong movie again. It was hard to know. In the meantime, I would go along with Bernard’s sex program, keeping my skepticism about it to myself. I wouldn’t fake frigidity (what the Marquise said was the best way to find out what she liked; that way no man could ever think he had power over her) or orgasm, but I would stop reporting.

Practicing sex as I practiced the piano when I lived at home, for every new sensation, I gave myself invisible gold stars like the ones my Viennese teacher used to paste on my music pages.

Le Foot

F
AMILY WAS THE SUPREME VALUE
for Alain and Bernard. In practice this meant Sunday lunch with Bernard’s older brother in the suburbs. The four of us would take a train around eleven in the morning and arrive in time for the ritual of the
apéro
. Drinks were the only time the television wasn’t turned on for the afternoon soccer game (
le foot)
. Bernard was the star of this interval, since as a group we had little to say to each other beyond exchanging anecdotes about family members, none of whom I knew, and telling jokes. Sometimes I recognized the jokes as borscht belt stories I had heard growing up. Bernard told the stories well, and I smiled hearing the punch lines in translation, even though joke telling itself made me nervous, as though I was being dragged back into the very past I had come to France to escape. Not the Jews exactly, but the humor of adults who joked instead of talking. The culture of the punch line was, I
thought, so—the word bubbled up, that French word in English—so
bourgeois
.