Paris Times Eight Read online

  He was exactly my age, I discovered, but he couldn’t have been more different. He partied all night, slept until noon, spoke incessantly on the phone, smoked all the time, and was never without the season’s item of cool—which at that moment happened to be pointy snakeskin cowboy boots. He could speak English fluently, and with a British accent (finishing school, no less), but he rarely spoke to me. Jenna and Nigel whispered behind his back that he was so rude! So French! They were convinced that he never bathed and, worse, that he was some kind of drug addict. Look at the dark circles under his eyes! His suite of rooms was just beyond ours, separated by French doors that he sometimes left open. I could see him late in the afternoon slouched in an armchair intently reading a book. I assumed by the cover that it was real literature, and this intrigued me. French layabouts are different from you and me: they have a grand tradition to defend, ideas, books, art, late-night assignations. These are a Parisian’s birthright.

  I was strenuously not attracted to him. Still, I wanted him to recognize in me a similar yearning for adventure and fun. We were of the same generation. I had grown up in North America, thinking that meant something. I wondered why he never asked me to go to the nightclubs he bragged about after a night of revelling, sleep thick and yellow in the corners of his eyes. I wasn’t ugly. Why did he brush me off? Why did he butter his toast in front of me in our crowded kitchen (and who had invited him?), with an insouciance bordering on disdain?

  But then I found out. After a couple of weeks of him avoiding me, even as we brushed up against each other in the apartment’s tight squeeze of a kitchen, I mentioned to him that I’d like to go dancing. That stopped him cold. Turning to me, he said, “The au pair does not go to the nightclubs.”

  I thought I would die.

  It was Jenna’s fault. She told him I was the au pair. Jenna hadn’t ever said those words, au pair, to me. In Paris, I learned, the words au pair were equivalent to “servant.” I was beneath an aristocrat’s contempt.

  Soon after that I started hearing the words au pair a lot. Jenna now felt comfortable in her new domain of Paris. In bookstores, where she would order me to carry her piles of hardcover purchases, she would wave her hand gaily in my direction and tell the strangers behind the counter that there I was, the au pair, the staff. Except that I wasn’t being paid. That had been the arrangement. I paid my own way there, and in exchange for room and board I was to look after the children, which should be pleasant enough because I genuinely adored them. Jenna had called me a member of the family, the daughter she’d never had. She had promised me that I would see Paris, experience it like a local. She had never before used the words au pair. Tra-la-la-ing it in Paris, she waited to hear the stony-faced shopkeepers repeat au pair back to her, with as much enthusiasm as they might reserve for the word merde, or shit, with hardly a glance in my direction. I got the impression that I was supposed to just sink into the book-lined walls, disappear from view. I wished that I could.

  Eventually Jenna barely spoke to me at all except to issue orders. I had beds to make, floors to sweep, dishes to wash, baguettes to buy—before she woke up in the morning. One day she wrote the house rules on a piece of paper. I had a half-day off during the week to EXPLORE PARIS ON YOUR OWN. Those were her capital letters, not mine. I cleaned in desultory silence. I didn’t know what I had done wrong. But I wanted desperately to make things right.

  I went out later that day, alone, a copy of A Moveable Feast in hand (Jenna had dismissed Anaïs Nin as being all wrong for my Paris education), feeling very lonely as I attempted to retrace Hemingway’s steps through the city. I had no one my age to talk to. My mother was an expensive long-distance call away, and, anyway, what would she say other than I told you so? She hated Jenna, hated her for taking me away from her—which was how she put it, but it was more that my mother had driven me into the arms of another mother, one who was more cultured.

  For a long while I sat by the Medici fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The waters were as deep and dark as my mood. It was quickly becoming become my favorite place in Paris—away from the crowds, the laughing faces, that now seemed to mock my ineptitude.

  The fountain was in a long shallow pool that stretched out before a sculpture showing Polyphemus, a cyclops in Greek mythology, spying from an overhead perch on the young lovers Actis and Galatea. It was tucked into a corner of the gardens, bordered by elegant stone urns containing brightly colored flowers whose reflection danced on the water. No one ever seemed to go there. It was hidden, romantic, soothing, its beauty heavy and melancholy. It felt perfect for the person I was that summer in Paris. What I really wanted was to be accepted for myself, but I didn’t have that insight, yet. I spied a fleuriste and bought some paperwhites, or white narcissi, for Jenna. I had always bought presents for my own mother, even when (or was it because?) she behaved callously toward me.

  When I arrived back at the apartment, I knocked at the door instead of walking straight in. Jenna answered and I pushed the flowers toward her and said, “Ça ne fait rien” (it doesn’t matter), a phrase I had learned in high school and had rehearsed that day in my mind, thinking it would endear me to her. I hoped she would think me clever. She listened to me, looking at me as if I were daft. She had that perfect hostess face on, the one with the magnanimous smile and the blank eyes. Her prolonged silence said to me, “You are a complete imbecile.”

  Looking bemused at the proffered bouquet, Jenna purred, “Oh, they’re lovely.” She flashed a smile like scissors, little white teeth cutting a look of irony into her face. I felt so defeated. I had never understood sophistication to be mean, but it is. If you look up the origin of the word (something Jenna would have approved of), there you find it—a hardening of innocence. My own process of becoming sophisticated could not have happened in a more appropriate place than Paris. A center of enlightenment for centuries, it was where countless people before me had come to get the bumpkin kicked out of them. Paris was my salon, with Jenna playing hostess. She was exacting, reproving me every time I fell short of the Paris ideal of the smart, refined, artfully cunning female.

  Under such stress, much of it self-imposed, an anxiety born of the need to be more than perfect around such apparently faultless people as Jenna and Nigel, every corner of Paris seemed to taunt me with images of sublime perfection—the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Élysées, Napoleon’s tomb ensconced under the golden cupola of Les Invalides, the futuristic Centre Pompidou with its building’s guts hanging on the outside. Even the art began to weigh me down, as I discovered the afternoon I visited the atelier of the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, located on the tiny Place Furstenberg, down the street from the apartment. It had been his residence, and studies for his enormous canvasses now hanging in the Louvre were on display. But even though these preliminary paintings were smaller, they were just as magnificent and decadent as the final paintings, each dripping with blood and morbid sensuality. They intimidated me, made me feel small, made me feel acutely my own mortality, and I was just nineteen.

  MY LAST SIX and a half weeks in Paris were one long and inglorious existential moment. I should have been enjoying myself, should have been relishing my first time in Paris as a young woman. This was the capital of feminine charm! But instead I too often worried about doing and saying the right things. I felt this mostly when confined to the apartment, with its strange ménage à trois brewing inside its stuffy rooms. Outside that oppressive apartment I liked my relationship with Paris. I pursued a growing relationship with the city itself. I found that if I let it, Paris could seduce me, make me feel alluring. At the Louvre one day a young Parisian in a dress shirt and tailored pants, blonde hair combed back and smelling of an expensive woodsy cologne, cruised me while I was eyeing the Grande Odalisque by the French painter Ingres. He invited me, at the instant, to run away with him to his family château in the country. I didn’t go, of course. But inwardly I wanted to abandon all responsibility, embrace what he was obviously embracing: a vision of
me as desirable.

  My only real companions in Paris were the two boys under age ten whom I was there to mind. They were also my only hope of feeling I was good at something. I was, if nothing else, a gifted babysitter. I loved children. As a teenager I had happily volunteered at the Catholic Children’s Aid in the newborn division.

  I took both children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where there were swings and a sandbox—a real park by Canadian standards. That was where the other children of Paris were—never scattered in the street but enclosed in leafy green spaces where you could admire them, as you did the outdoor sculpture ringing the periphery. I stood by, watching little girls in starched white dresses, patent shoes, and ribbons in their neatly plaited hair, little boys in seersucker shorts, knee socks, and handsome cotton vests worn over their linen short-sleeved shirts. As they ran up and down the ladder of stairs connected to the slide, stern-faced adults supervising their every move (and quick to shove their charges into sweaters at even a suggestion of a sneeze), I wondered why Parisians ritualized child’s play, kept it in a special place. My mother let my brother, Kevin, and me play outside for hours and we always knew to return home at dusk.

  Jenna and Nigel raised their children differently. They were always supervised; there was an understanding that these children were to be intellectually guided every step of their young lives. But when I was out of Jenna and Nigel’s sight, I let the children run wild. I forbade them to read out of doors. I dressed them in T-shirts and shorts. They were a stark contrast to the French kids, perfectly pressed and in linen. We looked like vagabonds, loitering around the large fountain pools, making smacking noises at the large gold carp swimming brightly beneath the surface. Christopher once threw a handful of sand into the pool, eliciting stares and hissing sounds. I pretended I didn’t hear. Later in the evenings, as was the house rule, I slept with the children in their room. Edward kicked me in the belly. Christopher lay wrapped tightly in his dreams, holding my hand. I felt at times they were my children, and because of them I vowed, once I grew up, to have a house full of boys for myself.

  I wrote my mother impassioned words on picture postcards of Paris, feigning delight in my new surroundings. But my messages inevitably ended with, “Wish you were here.” I meant it. I wanted to share with her what I was experiencing, not the angst, but the aching beauty of the place.

  The Paris gardens were graceful oases of picturesque charm, open at all times to the public and punctuated by an obelisk or a decorative arch or the visual folly of a fountain that made its waters perform arabesques against a serge-blue sky. There were always chairs scattered about—thin and made of faded wrought iron. No one ever stole them, it seemed, or dirtied them with graffiti. People seemed to respect that the chairs were there for their enjoyment. And they looked as if they did enjoy them, taking for granted, I sometimes thought, their city’s largesse. Paris exalted people with all sorts of sensual gifts. This wasn’t true of all cities, certainly not my own city of Toronto, where chairs, if they were made available at all to the public, would be bolted down and made of ugly prison-issue concrete. Toronto underscored that people were inherently bad, not to be trusted, while Paris, embracing a Rousseauian point of view, allowed that people, whether rich or poor, were good and deserving of all the fine things in life, like a pretty garden view.

  I thought everyone should see Paris, if just once. Paris galvanizes you, makes you think of better things, be a better person. I wanted my mother to partake in that, to grow as well. Grow with me, not against me. Grow closer.

  But she was about as good a writer as she was a reader. The one letter I received from her, almost at the end of my trip, ignored my veiled screams for help. She wrote, “Hi there. Having an okay summer. Some rain. Mother.”

  In the meantime I felt as if I were sinking in mud. My shoulder-length hair lacked the bounce and shine of the hair belonging to other young women I saw in Paris that summer, whom I also envied for their apparent nonchalance, the ease of living well inside their own skins.

  Certainly they exuded confidence, and even if they weren’t beautiful their belief in themselves made them so. They plucked their eyebrows to frame their expressive eyes and were never seen without lipstick—pink for day, red for night. They wore heels with their jeans and walked with heads held high, miraculously avoiding the dog poop that clotted the city’s sidewalks. Their earrings were small and discreet, pearls or small gold hoops. Ostentation they left to the North American women who, during a gathering of the crowds at the Place de la Concorde on Bastille Day, stood out for wearing garish T-shirts instead of starched blouses, rumpled shorts instead of sleek skirts. French women were all pencil thin. I furtively watched them in the cafés, eating salade niçoise and drinking red wine. When they exited, they walked tall, and their hair fell coyly over their shoulders. No au pairs here. I felt that my hair constantly betrayed me by underscoring how hopelessly unchic I was. It was my dunce’s cap, my beanie of defeat.

  And my clothes! I had a suitcase full of hand-me-downs from one of my girlfriends, who had generously given them to me on the occasion of my trip abroad. All wrong! They were several sizes too big, and besides, embroidered granny dresses were not my style or the prevailing style of Paris. I felt ragged in these second-hand clothes. I really was the au pair, living off the avails of others. But I was in no position to complain. I had no real wardrobe of my own.

  My situation was complicated by a food fetish that had flowered in Paris, city of sybaritic pleasures. I thought that if I could only be thin enough, no one would notice what a North American oaf I was. I wanted to shrink from scrutiny and the burden of feeling that I wasn’t good enough.

  The irony was that we were all in Paris to make sure that Jenna got fat. She was certifiably anorexic. Her doctor had told her not to come back to Canada unless she gained at least ten to twenty pounds. And so she was on a mission to eat all the ice cream she could stomach. I watched from the sidelines, my arms tightly wrapped around my body, my fingers furtively counting every rib.

  We were, consequently, all expected to eat fattening foods—frites, crêpes aux marrons, Brie on baguettes, mayonnaise with everything. Such a diet made me quite thin, almost as emaciated as Jenna, which is probably what I wanted, as subconsciously I wanted to be like her. I couldn’t eat this food. It would make me fat, and fat to me was letting go, giving up control. And so I subsisted on omelettes nature, undressed eggs, with unbuttered bread. For dessert I once ordered an orange (it was on the menu), and Jenna hissed at me to cut it with a fork and knife. She watched, steely, as I tried to carve it into eight perfect bite-sized pieces. I ended up squirting both of us in the eye. From that day on, even fruit in Paris became a challenge for me.

  One night when I was feeling oppressed by the coldness in the apartment, I decided to go for a walk through Saint-Germain in the dark. As I walked down the streets where Joyce had wandered half blind—he had once lived in the neighborhood—I became aware of the Friday-night crowd, consumed by a voluble joy. Their joviality startled me; I had become so used to gloom. Out of nowhere a man started walking next to me, speaking to me charmingly in French, a proposition to drink with him, I think, to share in the beauty of the night. His advances terrified me. I was like a bug under a stone suddenly exposed to the assault of daylight, and I squirmed and looked left and right for a place to scurry away to, to flee. It was an unexpected response. The poor man became alarmed and in the most polite of terms begged my forgiveness. He gave me a tiny bow and walked away. He probably thought I was mad.

  I went to a coiffeuse to get my hair cut and styled. After I returned to our borrowed apartment, I saw myself in the large Louis XV mirror in Luc’s sitting room; I can’t recall why I was in there. But Luc didn’t comment on my new, chic look. Nigel noticed, however, and said, “Have you done something with your hair?” I froze. I waited for a compliment to follow, prayed there would be one. “Pretty,” he said. That’s when I caught my reflection. I looked at myself, hard. Yes, pre
tty. For a day.

  Jenna took me to the Rodin museum, where, like Miss Jean Brodie with one of her kilted schoolgirls, she educated me on the fecund possibilities of art. “Look at the thrust and curl of the body.”

  It was a tiny carving, entitled A Dryad and a Faun, and it depicted two nude forms in an arabesque of desire. I wanted to reach out and caress the marble, so smooth and sensually inviting. As Jenna said, there was raw sexual energy pulsating just beneath the surface of the polished stone.

  She moved on to the next in a series of amorous couplings. I stared, transfixed, at one carving that showed a male penetrating a female with such force that the ramrod form of the penis could be seen jutting out in the flesh on the female’s back. “I’m getting horny,” Jenna said. Her words shocked me. I was amazed that such smut could come out of such a supercilious mouth. I was also discombobulated by her response to the art, all wrong, of course, according to what I had learned in high school: art that excites feelings of desire in us is improper. Surely Jenna knew this Aristotelian rule of aesthetics?

  I thought to say something, assert my knowledge. I coughed. Jenna laughed. She called me a prude.

  “Oh, you’re a lot of work.”

  She said it in a way that sounded affectionate, like I was a pet cause. I nodded in agreement. I had much to learn. I knew nothing of sexual freedom. I was afraid to fall. Art had been sheltering me from libidinous sin, and here was Jenna, of all people, tearing down the walls, exposing me to the elements of my own fears and apprehensions. So maybe she was a good teacher after all.