Paris Was Ours (9 page)

I didn’t really believe my mother when she said it had been hard to be alone. In Paris she worked for Air France. Because of her gift for languages, she was given a job behind the check-in desk at the airport, and I would imagine her, fetching in her uniform, having conversations with a long line of handsome travelers, each en route to another mysterious destination. My mother tried to tell me that it hadn’t been that exciting. But then there must have been other times, I countered, of going out in Paris, of being young and beautiful and unattached. My mother explained that beneath the glamour of being single there had been a lot of sorrow and anxiety, even a few mishaps. During that year, for instance, a friend of hers called her up
and asked her if she wanted to be in the Audrey Hepburn–Fred Astaire movie being filmed around town. The day my mother arrived on the set it was pouring, and as an extra in the train station scene, she was soon completely drenched. She couldn’t help noticing that Miss Hepburn, as the star of the movie, got whatever she desired—a cup of hot chocolate, a fresh pair of shoes. My mother, however, got nothing, other than pneumonia, which meant that her last three months in Paris were spent in an extremely unglamorous fashion—sniffling in bed.

For the rest of her life, my mother loved Paris. Everything about it inspired her—the city’s rich past, its magnificent buildings, its vibrant intellectual scene. She appreciated the French dedication to life’s refinements, and spent hours truffling through the city, unearthing the best handbag maker, the bakery where you could get the most delectable coffee éclairs. Whether on a trip with my father, my sister, and me or, if we couldn’t join her, on one of her regular solo jaunts, she would pack her days with lunches and dinners and teas, interspersed with visits to museums, galleries, and all kinds of specialty boutiques. Some of the women she knew there would refuse to go out to dinner with her unless a few men were invited, too, not wanting to be seen in public unescorted, but my mother had no compunction about navigating Paris on her own. (Why would she? She had my father, that sturdy anchor, waiting for her back at home.) Bursting with presents and stories and energy, my mother would come home to our Manhattan apartment with beautiful new clothes for me and my sister, a handsome homburg for my father, and, invariably, another batch of funny, self-deprecating tales.

The few times we went, just the two of us, my mother insisted
on only one rule: there was no being tired. There were too many plays and exhibits to see, haunts to revisit, places to discover. Typically, we’d arrive at the hotel, drop off our bags, and then head out on the town, walking and shopping and stopping for lunch at someplace like the Bar des Théâtres, a lively bistro on the avenue Montaigne. I loved going there with her. On one such trip—I was seventeen, my mother was fifty-two, just having recovered from a round of chemotherapy for the breast cancer that had struck her, and by extension our family, out of nowhere—she and I found ourselves seated in the front room next to a table of older men, who leered boisterously at every young girl who walked by, only to turn back to their own conversation, which consisted mainly of listing their aches and pains and complaining, each one more insistently than the last, about their various doctors. As we observed that combination of braggadocio and old-man resignation, my mother and I, without saying a word to each other, started laughing. We couldn’t stop. When we left the restaurant a few minutes later, she explained to me, wiping a few tears from her eyes with a tissue, that if people spoke loudly in a restaurant, it wasn’t eavesdropping—they
wanted
you to hear them.

After briefly going back to the hotel to change for the evening, we went to see Tina Turner in concert. Afterward, proudly toting our oversize programs, we went to La Coupole, feeling “branchées,” as the French say for “hip,” as we walked through the rows of bustling, well-lit tables to our own. We were so high on the thrill of being in Paris, of spending time together, of doing all the things we loved to do, that it was no problem for either of us to stay up so late. Of course the fact that I was seventeen probably had something to do with it in
my case. For my mother, I think it was the sheer excitement of being alive.

It wasn’t such a huge leap, then, for me to decide that I, too, should go to Paris at the age of twenty-three. My mother had been gone for a little more than three years by then. I had graduated from college and had a year on my own in Washington, D.C. (a place I was drawn to because it had no connection to her in my mind), and, I, too, was ready for a change. Most of all I didn’t want to be at home in New York without her.

I arrived in September and stayed in a cavalcade of apartments, finally moving to the rue Saint-Sulpice just as the rainy season was ending and it was beginning to get cold. My studio, which I discovered through a friend of a friend, was small, but I found it charming, with slanted wooden eaves and recessed windows covered by brown velvet curtains. Each piece of furniture had its own sense of humor: an uneven little table, two chairs whose legs splayed at odd angles, an armoire whose door wouldn’t close.

I wanted a job, a life, a circle of friends. But most of all, I was on a mission to find my mother, to try to relate to her as a young woman. For some reason, during that year in Paris, the search to rediscover my mother, to know her in all her aspects—both as she was when I knew her and as she must have been long before I was born—took a geographical bent. In pursuit of my mother’s memory, I stopped before the odd, silvery green of the city’s art nouveau Métro signs that she had admired so, went back to museum rooms to spend time with paintings we had seen together, sat for long spells at her favorite people-watching cafés, wandered down the little shopping streets in the sixth arrondissement where she had loved to go, all in an attempt to
feel her effervescence once again coursing through me. Sometimes, if I was in the wrong mood, the beauty of a place would turn cold on me. I could see in the site of some former or imagined happiness only my mother’s absence, and I felt even more alone. Then Paris became for me like a vault to which I had no key. Instead of repositories of treasure, I had access only to a series of chill, blank exteriors.

Other times it worked, and I felt an urge to laugh, her spirit a gorgeous secret known only to me. Standing before a butcher’s window to watch the care with which he placed a row of frilly paper flowers on the tiny bone stalks of a prized rack of lamb, I appreciated his delicacy and patience all the more for being certain they would have delighted her.

When I started looking for a job in Paris, I sent my résumé to someone my mother had known socially, a woman in her fifties, and arranged for an interview. She was curt on the phone, but quite engaging in person. She looked at me intently with her clear blue eyes, and I saw warmth and interest. She asked me about my mother, and when I told her she had died, she stood up and kissed me in the French way, on both cheeks. I told her I would work very hard for her. She said, “We’ll try each other out for one month. If you’re happy, and I’m happy, we’ll take it from there.” I knew that she was in public relations, that she represented the best chefs and restaurants and hotels in France, and that she was friends with the likes of Polanski and Paloma and Isabelle. Her office was in her apartment, and there were photographs everywhere of her hanging out with celebrities.

I was impatient to start. My new boss seemed plugged in to every interesting cultural event and personality in the city. It would be glamorous and exciting, everything I secretly wanted
for my year in Paris. I was flying high, barely able to downplay my excitement to friends who asked what I would be doing.

When I arrived for work at the beginning of September, she was away, so I met the two other girls with whom I would be working. One had been there for six months and wisely kept calm in the face of our ignorant enthusiasm. The other girl and I spent a lot of that first week smoking (even though we had been told it was absolutely forbidden) and discussing our near, bright future, what happenings we would be attending, whom we would meet there.

Walking through the place on the first day my boss was back, I noticed the atmosphere was charged, electric. For one thing, the apartment was full. She had brought back her eighty-two-year-old mother, an ill, complaining woman whose one solace in life—aside from her daughter’s great success—was her parrot, Coco, whom she had had for forty years. As I walked in, I saw my boss on the phone. Her eyes flashed at me. She was wearing three watches and a dozen chain necklaces around her neck, and I immediately knew that the nature of the job—along with my dreams of it—had changed.

Gone was the charm of our interview. With her staccato commands and short hair, she was a drill sergeant and school-mistress rolled into one. On her orders, she addressed us informally as “tu,” and we responded formally, with “vous.” I had never known the word
minable
before, but I learned it quickly. It means “of a pitiable mediocrity.” She used it anytime we asked a question, or if she caught us using anything but her signature brown ink. There was brown ink in the copy machine, the fax machine, the printer. We even took messages with brown pens. I went home in a stupor.

Every day brought new horrors. I heard her say, after hanging up on the best florist in Paris because she couldn’t get her way with him, “I will destroy that man.” I would go into her bedroom in the morning to tell her she had a call, and she would look up at me with fifty needles in her face from the acupuncturist. I lost weight. I woke up in the middle of one night in a panic, realizing I had forgotten to take out the mail. It didn’t matter that I had left after dark, long past the last pickup. The next morning it was without much joy that I pressed the downstairs buzzer—marked, ironically, by a giant red heart—that rang up to the apartment. The minute I got to the top floor, I was castigated for my stupidity by the maid, the mother, and finally the boss herself.

I tried to comfort myself by thinking of one of my mother’s sayings for not letting things get to you — “Let it glide over the back of your indifference” — but it didn’t work. It got to the point where I talked of nothing else with my friends, as if nothing existed but my boss and her insane behavior. It finally made sense to me that she had had sixty assistants in less than six months. If old assistants called, to try to ask for moneys owed them, she would say, “Only if you come in person,” which usually settled the matter. One assistant did come back, and even brought a man with her for protection. I had stayed late and got to experience the tumult from another room. I overheard my boss screaming that she would ruin the girl’s chances in all of Paris. Luckily, as far as I know, none of these threats were actually carried out.

Although I wasn’t happy about the idea of leaving before the month was up—I thought of myself as a good girl, after all, someone who didn’t quit—after about two weeks I had had
it. This was not at all how I had envisioned my year in Paris. I went into work in the morning and asked if I could speak with her. “When I have a minute,” she replied. It was eight o’clock at night before she turned to me and asked what I wanted. In the meantime, I had gone out to lunch and had a steak and a glass of red wine to fortify myself.

I planned to tell her I would be leaving. I looked her in the eyes and began to speak. I said, in a very calm voice, that I was not stupid, and that I was willing to work very hard for her, but that I thought the way she treated us sometimes was just not acceptable. She replied, zinging my words back at me, that she thought the things we
did
sometimes were not acceptable, and not only that, but she thought that my mother would think she was right, and I was wrong, and that she would be ashamed of me. I felt as though I had just been hit by a truck. I managed to stammer, “Maybe I should just leave.” She replied, “No, no maybes. Do you want to
stay
, or do you want to
go
? Because if you
don’t
want to stay, I would rather just close the office for the next couple of days and have
no one
here.” She was leaving on a trip to Texas the following morning, so that her mother could visit a heart specialist recommended by Jerry Lewis. Before I even knew what I was doing, I stood up and said, “I’ll stay.” We shook hands across the desk.

What followed was utterly bizarre, like a scene out of an army movie. She led me around the office, calling things out to me and waiting for my reply. She stood next to the bulletin board and yelled, “Now what happens when a journalist calls for the such and such hotel?” I yelled back the correct procedure. We did this for a while, until we ended up in the copy room at extremely close quarters. She started waving her
hands around, pointing to the many files stacked up on the wire shelves. “I did all of this, this is all me. I came from nothing. If you do things the way I say to do them, you will be doing them right. I had no fancy education, I had no parents spoiling me. Everything I have I built myself.” We were so close I could see her facial muscles straining. I felt a new regard for her. I felt that I could handle the challenge she was offering me, that maybe she wasn’t so bad after all, just some kind of crazy perfectionist. If I could only follow her system to the letter, I would be OK. When I left that night, it was as if we had reached a new understanding. “Je compte sur toi” — “I count on you” — she said as we shook hands again by the door.

I lasted two more weeks, and although things improved, and I felt she treated me with a kind of gruff respect, ultimately it wasn’t where I wanted to be. The purported glamour wasn’t worth the price. A few days before my month was up, I told her my plans would be changing. She said, without flinching, “You won’t have it as easy anywhere else. It’s not everyone in Paris who will give you your Jewish holiday.” (I had taken the day off for Yom Kippur.) I pretended not to hear her. I left that apartment for the last time on a rainy night. I’d had an appointment in the Saint-Germain area, but by the time she let me go I had missed it. The soft rain coated my face, soaked through my clothes. I was shivering a bit when I got to the friend’s house where I was having dinner. She gave me a glass of brandy, the way you do with someone who has just experienced a shock. I had made it out alive, but my confidence that I could make the right choices in my mother’s absence, take as good care of myself as she had always taken of me, had been badly wounded.