The Good Girl's Guide to Bad Men (29 page)

"I really want for you to come visit, though," he was saying. "As often as you want."

But I was hardly listening. I was too busy trying to contemplate the words that were bubbling up inside me, ready to pop out of my mouth without regret, without consequence, and most of all without looking back.

But there was really nothing to think about. Contemplation is only necessary when you're faced with multiple options. A crossroads of numerous possible paths. For me, there was only one.

"I'm coming with you."

The only person I contacted before I left was Lauren Ireland. And the only reason I called her was to tell her that I was closing the doors of the Hawthorne Agency and could she please relay the news to everyone else. She begged me to reconsider, but I was resolved in my decision. I no longer wanted anything to do with that world. It had chewed me up and spat me out and made it very clear that I wasn't welcome. So I was leaving.

When I refused to change my mind, Lauren suggested that perhaps she could take over the agency instead. I agreed without reservation and told her I'd have my lawyers transfer everything to her name. I warned her about the situation with Katie and Dean Stanton, and she took the news in stride. For some reason, it didn't seem to bother her as much as it had bothered me, and she calmly stated that she would take care of it.

Who knows, maybe she would be better suited for this business than I was. Maybe it would treat her better than it treated me. If she could cope with the pressure and the drama and the way it all messed with your head, then maybe she'd have a shot at surviving it. Or maybe she wouldn't. Either way, it wasn't my problem anymore. And that was more liberating than anything I had ever experienced.

Everything happened very fast after my late night soul-baring session with my dad. He was leaving in less than a week, and I was determined to leave with him. It didn't make sense for me to stay around any longer than I had to. The agency was gone. Jamie was gone. There was nothing left for me in Los Angeles.

I emptied my savings account into traveler's checks and paid some guy on Craigslist fifty bucks to unlock my iPhone so that I could use it abroad. I didn't pack much, just a few essentials and some of my favorite clothes. In staying true to my vow for a fresh start, I wanted everything in my life to be new, even my clothes. So much of my wardrobe and material possessions were tied to my old life. And I figured it would have been counterproductive to drag the past with me five thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

Besides transferring ownership of the agency, there wasn't much left for me to do. And by Thursday morning, I was gone.

I didn't tell anyone I was leaving because I knew it would have made it harder. It would have led me to doubt my decision. And I didn't want to doubt it. I just wanted to go and not look back. I just wanted to do the first unpredictable, spontaneous thing I'd ever done in my life. And I didn't want anyone talking me out of it.

Because God knows they all would have tried. My mom, my niece, Hannah, Sophie, John, maybe even Zoë if she decided to pick up the phone and talk to me. They all would have told me I was being rash and overreactive and that I should allow myself some time to stop and think things through before I moved to any foreign countries. But I had been thinking things through my entire life. For once, I just wanted to do something and not think about it. For once, I wanted to let my emotions guide me instead of my head.

And if I called them from Paris, then it would be too late to convince me to stay.

From the moment we landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I felt an overwhelming mix of sadness and relief. Paris had always been my favorite city in the world, and I immediately found comfort in its sights and sounds and smells. It was
nothing
like Los Angeles. The culture, the language, the landscape. But I figured the more foreign the better.

I quickly fell into a new routine. After my dad left for work in the mornings, I would get dressed and stroll down to the cafe on the corner to enjoy a
thé au lait
(tea with milk) and a brioche while making small talk with Pierre, the friendly French waiter who worked the morning shift. Then I would turn on my iPod and just walk. I never planned where I would go. I never once looked at a map. I'd just start walking until I didn't want to walk anymore. And then I'd find my way back home using the Eiffel Tower as my guide.

Sometimes I would be gone for ten minutes, sometimes a few hours. It's amazing how Paris can kind of suck you in like that. Where you feel as if you could stay forever and be perfectly happy. I don't know any other city in the world like that. And the more I walked, the more I started to believe that I could one day be happy again. I guess that's why they call it a "magical" city.

The first few weeks flew by rather quickly. My dad and I went to dinner together almost every night and spent the weekends visiting nearby sites like the Versailles, Mont-Saint-Michel, and the dark, musty champagne caves of Reims, where the world's finest bottles of champagne are born. We would talk about everything from religion to politics to culture and even relationships. There were no more taboos. No more minefield topics to step around. It was real and raw and authentic. The kind of father/daughter relationship I used to see in other people's lives but never dreamed I'd ever experience in my own.

The city seemed to welcome me with open arms. As if I were a lost, wounded soldier returning from war and Paris was the kind, gentle-hearted countryside woman who took me in, gave me shelter and food, and helped me heal. And it wasn't long before memories of Ashlyn, the agency, and everything that happened there faded into the background noise of people, traffic, and French sirens.

But the problem wasn't forgetting about work. Those memories left quietly and without a fight. The problem was Jamie. He was everywhere. In the drive from the airport to the city, in the beautiful stone monuments that I passed on my morning walk, sitting next to me in the cafe at breakfast. The memory of the trip we had taken here together only a year ago was still fresh in my mind, as if it had happened just yesterday. And seeing those same places that we had visited—standing in front of them, walking
through
them—only made it worse. And as much progress as I was making getting past everything else, the wounds that Jamie had left behind seemed to reopen every day, with every step. As if someone were constantly tearing out the stitches that had promised to hold me together. And every night I would find myself bleeding again.

Sophie and I e-mailed often, despite the fact that she vowed never to forgive me for skipping the country without telling anyone. In every e-mail, she asked me how long I was going to stay, and I repeatedly answered the same thing: "I don't know. As long as it takes, I guess."

Most of John's correspondence was laden with long-winded accounts of the local L.A. gossip. The biggest news, of course, was the story of Dean Stanton, the powerful head of New Edge Cinema, who had recently separated from his wife, was now dating one of his former nannies, and was rumored to have cast her in his studio's next film. I assumed this meant that Katie would no longer need her job at the Hawthorne Agency after all. Not when she had someone like Dean Stanton on hand to help launch that acting career she'd always wanted.

I sent numerous e-mails to Zoë over the first few weeks, most of them saturated with apologies and lengthy soul-searching paragraphs describing everything that I'd come to realize since we'd last spoken (or, more accurately,
screamed),
but I hadn't received a single reply. I wanted to believe that her e-mail simply wasn't working or that she had changed addresses and forgotten to tell me, but I had entered a new phase of honesty in my life. Refusing to lie to anyone . . . most of all myself. So eventually I had to admit that Zoë's e-mail was working fine. She just wasn't responding.

The only person I didn't attempt to contact was Jamie. And the memory of the last time I saw him—walking into his loft with another woman—continued to haunt me. But the fact that he had yet to reach out to me only confirmed my belief that he had moved on. And now it was time for me to do the same.

Sometimes during my walks, I would sit on a bench in a park or a garden somewhere in the city and just watch people as they passed. Paris is the most wonderful city in the world for people watching. Because everyone is out on the street. Everyone's reaction to life is out in the open. From the moment I got here, I noticed that my ability to read people's minds had severely diminished. Maybe it was the foreign language or the unfamiliar culture, or maybe my burning desire to let go of all my attachments to the past had forced me to block it out, but the minds of the French men passing by me were unusually quiet. At first it terrified me. I had never heard such silence. But after a while, I came to appreciate the stillness and the mystery of strangers. It made people watching that much more fun. A challenge. For once I wasn't inundated with other people's problems. Other people's stories. And I hoped it meant I could concentrate on unraveling my own. Because God knows I hadn't done a very good job of it thus far.

When my Parisian sojourn reached its one-month mark, I decided that I needed to find something to do with my time. I had been wandering around the city for three weeks straight, and I was starting to crave some kind of direction. Although my dad had been paying the rent on the apartment here, I was still paying my mortgage back in L.A., and without a steady income I knew my resources would eventually run dry.

When I told Pierre, the waiter at my regular morning cafe, that I was looking for a way to make money, he told me that the week-night bartender had just quit and the owner had been looking to replace him.

His suggestion intrigued me. Not only for monetary purposes, but for the experience of it all. My French was improving every day, and this would undoubtedly help. Plus, I liked that it was different. I liked that it was something that six months ago I never would have dreamed I'd be doing.

So the next morning, I took Pierre up on his offer and met with Carlos, the Spanish owner of Cafe Bosquet, and ten minutes later the job was mine. I didn't have a work visa, but Carlos seemed more than happy to pay me under the table in cash, and I was just happy to have a place to belong again.

I started working five nights a week. I would come in at six in the evening and leave a little after midnight. The cafe was never too busy, a dinner crowd that shuffled in around eight and fizzled out before ten and a few late night customers after that. It was a relatively quiet restaurant, in a relatively quiet section of town tucked away between the Eiffel Tower and l'École militaire (the Military School) in the seventh arrondissement. The neighborhood, or
quartier,
as the French call it, had a reputation of housing many French politicians and foreign ambassadors, earning it the nickname "the Washington, D.C., of Paris."

From day one, Pierre helped me learn the ropes. He introduced me to the staff, taught me how to use the impossibly confusing cappuccino machine that I swear you need a Ph.D. to operate, and corrected my floundering French when I made comical grammar mistakes.
Faux amis,
he called them. False friends. English words that you'd think would translate directly into French because they're so similar but in fact have completely different meanings. Like
préservatif,
which actually translates into "condom" and not the stuff the American vineyards put in red wine to help lengthen the shelf life. A mistake I made only once.

The job at Cafe Bosquet wasn't anything glamorous or important, but I found contentment in its simplicity. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end to every task that I undertook. I poured a drink, someone drank it, I cleaned the glass, and I placed it back on the rack for the next customer. When the icebox was empty, I went to the back to refill it. Small, uncomplicated cycles. No broken hearts, no crying, no betrayals. The most disappointing part of my night was when someone forgot to leave a tip. But even then Pierre explained that most French people don't tip.

I enjoyed the people aspect of the bartender life as well. Conversing with someone new every night. It was actually a much bigger part of the job than pouring drinks. And without fail, the conversations always found their way to the subject of relationships. Nearly every customer who made conversation with me would eventually talk about love. What's wrong with it, why they can't find it, why they can't manage to stay in it.

Maybe it was just me. Maybe lonely hearts sensed something in my past—an understanding of human nature—and were inevitably drawn to it.

Pierre and I would talk a lot, too. He normally worked the breakfast shift, but he would come by the cafe for a drink almost every night after the dinner rush and sit at the bar and chat with me until it was time to go home.

I quickly got used to his company. I considered him my first real friend in Paris. He was sweet and funny and easy to talk to. Plus his hilarious French antics and unusual sense of humor made me laugh. I've always loved how jokes vary from country to country. What's funny in French may not be as funny in English. Something about that unique French charm just gets lost in the translation.

It eventually got to the point where I would look forward to Pierre's visits. Especially on slower nights when there was nothing to do but stare out into the gradually emptying cafe and watch people clear out and return home to their lives.

One Monday night in early January was shaping up to be like that. It was just after nine-thirty, and the only people in the cafe were two businessmen—one French, one American—at the far end of the bar. They were speaking in English, which made it easier to catch bits and pieces of their conversation as I went about my side work behind the bar. Shining glasses, scrubbing down the cappuccino machine, and wiping down the leather-bound menus.

From the chunks of dialogue I was able to passively pick up every time I came by to check their drink levels, it was evident these two men were in the middle of an important business deal. And not a very interesting one at that.

I checked my watch and glanced toward the door. Pierre usually made an appearance between nine-thirty and ten, and I was anxious for him to show up and keep me company on such a dull night.

I studied the two businessmen out of the corner of my eye. The French man was dressed in a light gray suit, a coral pink shirt, and a powder blue tie. It had taken me a while to get used to the French's colorful fashion sense. Especially when it came to the businessmen. When I first arrived in Paris, I'd actually found it quite comical. They looked more like they were going to the circus than the office. But Pierre had explained to me that the French just liked and appreciated color. And that to a French person, the traditional American corporate attire looked drab and dreary. As if they were going to a funeral every day of their life.