Breathless (11 page)

The late summer encounter with Jonathan seemed to reassure my parents that I wasn’t a lost cause. It was as though his familiarity—they didn’t know his parents but they might have—consolidated the rapprochement the vacation had brought about. They could recognize me as their daughter again, and, in the moment, I was willing, or at least lonely enough, to be reclaimed.

Back in Paris, I wondered about Jonathan, whether I’d see him again. I wondered almost peacefully since the idea of him in my life seemed more like a transition, a pause in the downward spiral caused by the breakup with Bernard, than like the marker of a new departure. Dancing in the dark offered an unexpected, even comedic coda to the little melodrama of betrayal in which I had played so shabby a part. I couldn’t help feeling that whatever happened with Jonathan would be yet another variation on the theme of my man-to-man drift. I could not see what good might come to me from following his star (his established career) rather than Bernard’s flops, beyond a dollop of prestige.

And yet despite my doubts about a future with Jonathan, I suspected that I would end up sleeping with him if he came to Paris as promised, on his way back to South America. I was embarrassed in my own eyes by the feeling of inevitability that a new liaison might be starting in the wake of the old one barely over. And yet I found myself deciding to find a doctor who would give me a prescription for the birth control pill, since if I lacked the will to say no, I had learned enough from the experience with Bernard to know I couldn’t risk putting myself in danger again so soon.

A
LL FORMS OF CONTRACEPTION HAD
been banned in France since 1920, but a few brave doctors had been willing to run the risk of breaking the law. I had read about a doctor who had been involved in making the pill available to women in France through
le planning familial
. Dr. Pierre Hirsch was a famous gynecologist and an expert on birth control. Jewish too, I figured, judging by his name, and I made an appointment to get a prescription.

This was the first time I had been to a gynecologist in France. Dr. Hirsch’s office was located in an elegant building on the boulevard Saint-Germain. When I rang the bell, a maid in uniform came to the door and ushered me into the large foyer of what appeared to be a huge apartment. Unlike American doctors, who had deliberately impersonal waiting rooms, French doctors almost always practiced in residential apartments, often their own. The living room in which patients waited their turn to see Dr. Hirsch was
his
living room, with comfortable furniture, real paintings, and fresh-cut flowers. It was quiet, so quiet that I began to wonder whether he lived alone, whether there was a Madame Hirsch and little ones, not to mention other patients. The taste and expensiveness of it all were intimidating, raising my already high anxiety about gynecological examinations. But after a few minutes, the door to Dr. Hirsch’s office opened, and he motioned me to cross the threshold. As I sat across from him and gazed at the glass-enclosed, built-in bookcases behind the Louis XV desk and answered questions about my periods and how often I had sex, I wondered about which books he read and which were for show.

Dr. Hirsch led me to the door of a separate room, where I removed my clothing, hopped on the cold examination table, and waited anxiously for him to come in. I hoped the experience wouldn’t be as creepy as my London gynecological excursion, and I was at first uneasy at being alone with this impeccably tailored, over-six-foot tall French doctor—the tallest man in France I had ever seen. If he had been wearing a white coat, it might have felt more normal for me to undressed. My strategy for coping was to pretend that it didn’t faze me to be stretched out naked on the table, even though I never stopped worrying about every exposed part of my body. While Dr. Hirsch ferreted around inside checking me out,
we discussed theater or music or the comparative state of medicine in the United States and France. I would look up periodically and watch his dark eyes and thick brush mustache, rather than looking down where his long fingers were probing and prodding.

I left with the coveted prescription.

J
ONATHAN CAME TO
P
ARIS AS
he had told me he would in Barcelona, stopping off on his way back to Argentina. We met in the bar of the Pont-Royal, a luxurious hotel on the rue de Montalembert. The hotel belonged to the same category as the Castiglione across the river where my parents liked to stay, but with an aesthetic that said more men’s club than palace. Nothing ornate, nothing braided, nothing gold. In the early 1950s Simone de Beauvoir had gone there to write sometimes, when the big cafés on Saint-Germain had become too crowded—and she too famous. We sipped whiskey neat in heavy tumblers and sat for a long time in round, dark gray armchairs, deep in smoke, as deep as his emotional dilemmas: Was divorce fair to the children?

Later that afternoon, instead of doing the smart thing—leave the hotel, look at antiques on the rue du Bac, or go down to the Seine—we took the elevator to his hotel room. The charm of our days in Barcelona had started to fade. Jonathan wasn’t divorced; he didn’t know what he wanted. Did I? I was seduced by the idea of the hotel scene, especially the canonical
cinq à sept
, the stolen hours when French people who are married to others have affairs before returning home to dinner. Doing something for the first time was a temptation I could rarely resist, almost as a matter of principle, especially if it seemed quintessentially French.

In the room we undressed quickly as if we both wanted to get the newness over with. Jonathan’s attraction diminished as he removed each expensive item: the subtly striped silk tie, the well-cut, full-bodied shirt, the cleverly pleated gabardine trousers. I watched the progression in the mirror over the sleek, art deco bureau. I winced when I saw his naked belly, wide, swollen, covered, as I had suspected, with dark curly hair. This was familiar territory, like the bellies of my father and the
men at the beaches of my childhood. My heart skipped an Oedipal beat. The bear-like chest was a pull, tempting me to lean into his arms. But when I reached out instead to touch and to see, I felt the smallest penis I had ever encountered. Admittedly, I had a very limited sample, but Jonathan’s was like a thumb. Jonathan read the question in my hand. “Don’t worry, it works,” he said, as though we were in high school hygiene class learning what happens when the Penis Becomes Erect. Finally, we just merged quickly, aggressively, to cover our upset. It wasn’t remotely like dancing in Barcelona.

Nothing had turned out as I had imagined.

When we said good-bye, Jonathan mentioned casually that his visit to Paris was not only to see me. There was another woman he had become involved with on an earlier trip, and he had to see her to figure out what he wanted. Later I reported to my parents that he was still involved with his wife. “I was, of course, disappointed at the time, but my experience is useful occasionally. If Jonathan couldn’t be honest or strong at this stage of the game, he wasn’t worth the effort. I’m not interested in this kind of emotional weakness. In fact, it makes me sick.” What made me sick was the shock of rejection. I wasn’t going to tell them about the real hurt of the Other Woman. The Wife was bad enough.

That winter, Jonathan sent me pictures he had taken of me in Barcelona at Gaudí’s Parc Güell, which we had both loved. In his letter he said how much as a photographer he admired the one of me in profile. Despite the flattering camera angle, I could see a deep line forming between my eyebrows. I looked slightly pained, as though I were about to burst into tears. I remembered worrying as I watched him snap pictures of me whether I could desire him the way he said he desired me. I was tired of boy-children and he was a man. After praising his talent as a photographer, Jonathan struck an apologetic note: “I have been thinking of you often and kicking myself for what I did in Paris. But one must take the consequences of one’s actions.” And then, in the spring, a telegram. He was stopping in Paris on his way to New York to see his children. Would I meet him at Orly between planes? Maybe we could have another chance.

Meeting in an airport appealed to me the way movie scenes always did—I had wept uncontrollably when I said good-bye to Bernard there earlier that summer—but Jonathan had wounded me and I didn’t think that it would be the last time. His life was complicated by geography and children. It would be just like the libertines in eighteenth-century novels: they’d hurt you, apologize, and then do it again. I was more enchanted by the concept—older, accomplished, worldly—than by the reality of the man I had gone to bed with at the Pont-Royal. I sent a telegram saying that I would be out of the country.

Etiquette

I
BRAGGED ABOUT EXPERIENCE, AND
I knew how stories turned out in novels. I was still a slow learner when it came to men.

Philippe had a close friend, Jean, with a hyphenated last name, aristocratic origins, and family property; because of the intimacy between the two men, my parents met Jean almost as soon as they met Philippe, just as I did. Jean and I had been having lunch occasionally, in a casual, friend-of-the-family way. (He was, in fact, another of the friends who had met Bernard, but I had not mentioned this to my parents; their knowing about Philippe and Anne was bad enough.) Jean seemed to know I had slept with Philippe. Even with the intervening years, I was devastated when Jean told me that the night I spent in Philippe’s apartment, from the piano playing to breakfast in bed, was part of a routine.

“He always does that when Anne is in the south,” he explained. I tried to look cynical, or at least indifferent.

Physically, Jean was the opposite of Philippe—plump and lackadaisical. Men, I had concluded, came in two modes: fat and thin, bear and stork, manly and boyish. Bears always seemed more comforting, as though they were offering safety and protection, but in the end that didn’t make them more reliable. Look what had happened with Jonathan! He had that teddy-bear look, but teddy bears can knock you down with a blow. Unlike Philippe, Jean didn’t grope me in the car. In fact, he didn’t seem attracted to me at all. It was relaxing to be outside a sexual scenario after my experiments with Jonathan and Philippe.

Jean took me to expensive restaurants near his office (he worked for his father and didn’t seem to work very hard) at the Place de la Madeleine, where he instructed me in the finer points of French table manners. You sip wine, not swallow it with big gulps like milk; you don’t put your knife down when you eat—you keep fork and knife going at the same time and you place them both neatly on the plate when you are done. You never cut your salad with a knife; you fold the leaves like an envelope. When you put cheese on bread, only small pieces of each, of course, you take a small bite of the bread with the cheese, not a big chunky bite, the way we ate buttered rye bread at home, for instance. These were refinements well beyond not picking up a piece of chicken with my fingers. All in all, meals with Jean took a long time (one lunch lasted from 1 to 5
PM,
as I reported to my parents), not only because every course had its own difficulties to negotiate, but also because wine in the middle of the day was relaxing. Besides, we found each other amusing.

Jean sometimes took the occasion to instruct me in matters of the heart, as if I were still an absolute beginner in these matters of French men and love: the difference between
aimer bien
and
aimer
, those crucial gradations of feelings. When he said, “Je vous aime bien,” which he often did, that only meant he was fond of me. But even
very
fond of me was not the same as just plain, unmodified by an adverb,
aimer
. There was the difference between
aimer
and
être amoureux
, love and being in love. And then there was
plaire
(this one was the hardest to get), “to please,” as in “You turn me on” (what Philippe had said about his feelings, if you could call that feelings). Jean liked me a lot,
he wanted me to understand, but wasn’t in love with me, and he was almost engaged to be married.

In late September, after a particularly successful meal—almost no mistakes in food etiquette—Jean took me to the Hermès shop on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and rewarded me with a big square silk scarf—the classic thirty-six-inch
carré
that Grace Kelly had made famous. Although I wasn’t entranced by the Hermès style—saddles, stirrups, nooses—standing with Jean at the counter as he selected the right combination of colors and images without a thought to price, I felt a kind of thrill, as if I had been magically transported into a world I had never imagined. My mother bought designer scarves at a huge discount from one of the perfume places in the ninth arrondissement, geared to American tourists, where you climb one flight up to do business. I had never gone shopping with a man, not to mention an older man, and been given an expensive present. Jean showed me how to tie the scarf, a gift in itself.

I enjoyed being led around and feeling out of my depth. I didn’t have to make anything happen.

One afternoon, having polished off a bottle of Bourgeuil, Jean was too tired to go back to the office and asked if he could rest in my room. We walked across the Pont Alexandre III, another relic of Third Republic extravagance, like my beloved Eiffel Tower. As we crossed the bridge I decided I wouldn’t sleep with Jean if he wanted to share me with Philippe, after the fact. Was I utterly without will, drifting from one bed to another, hoping that these signs of affection would turn into something more intense? Hadn’t the man told me he was almost engaged? So then why did he want to come to my tiny room?

Jean fell asleep on my bed. He left in time for dinner with Marthe, his fiancée-to-be, the youngest daughter of his father’s business partner. “But let’s keep having lunch,” he said, as he rushed out the door, embarrassed at having dozed from five to seven. “You have a lot to learn.”

Soon after the siesta in my room, Jean and I had dinner with Philippe and Anne in their apartment. I brought them a hostess gift my parents had asked me to deliver—an ashtray with a goofy ceramic frog wearing glasses and smoking. Their note said that the animal reminded
them of Philippe, their favorite “frog” friend. Everyone loved it, I told my parents, especially Philippe.