Breathless (12 page)

I was beginning my third year in Paris. The concierge from rue de l’Université had told me about a maid’s room coming free just around the corner. My new room was located in an art deco building on avenue Sully Prud’homme, a quiet street near the Quai d’Orsay. Unlike the creaky, claustrophobic affair at rue de l’Université, the building’s wood-paneled elevator, set back in the embrace of a wide curving staircase, could hold more than two people, and also took you down. The room was furnished with freshly painted furniture and the sink had hot running water.

I loved my room, but I didn’t love my life.

The fellowship interlude was over and I had resumed my old job at Lycée Racine. Going back to the lycée felt like a holding pattern, something to do while taking stock and recovering from the failures of my sentimental education. I was good at school, teaching, and passing exams, but what, really, was I becoming? I couldn’t see a bigger picture, a map that led anywhere. Paris offered me the possibility, I had hoped, of being someone
not
my parents’ daughter. And yet everything I did to separate from them tied me to them more tightly. Jean’s siesta in my room was another example of how not to get what I wanted, if only I knew. Instead, it kept me anchored in their story.

“The Flesh Is Sad, Alas”

R
ETURNING TO THE LYCÉE MIGHT
have represented a step backward in my career narrative, had I been pursuing one. But I settled for liking the girls and the free lunch that was served daily in the teachers’ common room. This time I made a friend, Nathalie Lévi. Nathalie was from Morocco. She taught Spanish, and we shared some of the same pupils. An immediate connection sprang up between us, as if we had been related or had known each other from elsewhere. We even looked something alike, people said. We were certainly the only teachers under twenty-five and, as far as we could tell, the only Jews on the faculty.

One Friday afternoon as we were leaving the building together, I suggested we get together over the weekend.

“I never do things on the weekend,” Nathalie said. “I have a little girl who is taken care of by a family just outside of Paris.” Nathalie lived in a
foyer
for
filles mères
and their infants, but after the age of three the children had to leave.

“You can come with me, if you’d like,” Nathalie added. “It’s just a short train ride from Saint-Lazare.”

I was surprised by the casual tone in which Nathalie described her situation. We were less alike than I had imagined.

“You didn’t want to have an abortion?”

“I tried, believe me. I even went to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. They could have done it then and no one would have known. But the surgeon was Catholic and refused. He told me so after the operation.”

“What about the father?”

“He had already left town. He doesn’t know he has a daughter, and I doubt that he would care.”

I hesitated to ask whether her family knew.

“Look, this child wanted to be born. And when she’s older, I’ll take her to Morocco to meet my mother. For now, I’m on my own.”

I measured the distance between us. We were the same age, but Nathalie was an adult.

“I don’t see how you manage on our salary,” I said.

“Oh, I do tutoring jobs,” she said. “It works out.”

I could never finish the month. Even without a child to support like Nathalie, the lycée salary was not enough. Despite my Seberg fixation, I was not about to peddle the
Tribune
on the Champs-Élysées. Determined, after my declarations of independence, not to ask my parents for money, I answered a want ad in the
Tribune
for “dynamic, experienced, and reliable” English teachers. I wound my hair into a librarian’s chignon and ironed a white Oxford button-down shirt for the interview.

T
HE
E
NGLISH
L
ANGUAGE
F
OUNDATION
,
OTHERWISE
known as ELF, was a one-man operation. James Donovan had been living in Paris long enough to have figured out that there was a growing market for anglophones who could teach English to French businessmen with jobs in companies where knowledge of English was key to advancement. Unlike the Berlitz schools, which held courses in their own locales, ELF
sent out a small army of young native English speakers to the workplaces themselves, to the suburbs of Paris, sometimes as far as Normandy, where several major oil companies with ties to the United States had settled. The office itself had a good address—a quiet street near the Eiffel Tower—but the interview was held in a room whose furniture seemed to have been rented by the hour. The only thing that looked fresh was the letterhead with “ELF” emblazoned across the top of the page in bold capital letters. James Donovan sat behind his desk dressed in a brown herringbone tweed jacket, white button-down Oxford shirt (like mine), and brown gabardine pants, looking the part of an American academic: his calling card. The only thing missing was the pipe.

The next day, I was showered with a flurry of
pneus
at my room and at school from the director, wanting to follow up, he said, on the interview. Most people still lived without telephones. The pneumatic mail system was astonishingly efficient, but also incredibly romantic. Telegrams could be romantic too, of course, but they had been ruined for me by my parents, who fired one off every time they hadn’t heard from me in a week: “What’s wrong? Send news immediately.” Telegrams had started to feel like anonymous death threats, pasted words complete with misspellings as the messages went through from English to French operators. But
pneus
, handwritten notes propelled by compressed air, traveled instantly through tubes to the post office nearest the home of the person you wanted to reach. The mail carrier hand-delivered your personal missive to the door within the day, sometimes within hours. Jim Donovan’s
pneus
seemed somewhat excessive in number and tone; they were also strangely persuasive. He was sure I would like the teaching. Couldn’t he tell me more about it over a drink?

We met at Ruc, a big café situated on the square opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare, just down the street from Lycée Racine. I had passed by the café, easily recognizable by the black letters that spelled out its name on a bright red awning, many times on my way to the bus stop. It was clever of Jim, I noted, to choose a place near school, removing one of my excuses for saying no. He was grading papers at a table near the window in the corner of the café. I observed him through the glass panes and almost didn’t go in. ELF teaching was likely to mean a lot of dark
early mornings, which I hated, and I had just successfully eliminated my 8:00
AM
classes from my schedule at the lycée. I lingered on the threshold. I needed the money. Teaching businessmen couldn’t be worse than tutoring failing lycée pupils, or translating the reports of experiments from a lab in experimental embryology, a well-paying job that my friend Nicole had told me about. At least businessmen were adults—and men. You never knew. Anyway, another interview didn’t commit me to anything. I opened the heavy glass door toward me and entered the café.

Donovan was smoking Mecarillos, little Swiss cigars, without inhaling. I sat down and took out a fresh pack of Disque Bleu filtre. I loved the idea of the hard-core Gauloises that Sartre smoked, but the bitter little bits of tobacco and paper sticking to my tongue had finally defeated me.

“I’ve never seen a woman smoke as much as you do,” he said, lighting my cigarette from a large box of wooden matches. “Is that an act?”

“Why would I put on an act?” It annoyed me that he thought I was trying to impress him, but I decided to take the smoking remark as an awkward compliment. Maybe his aggressiveness was more a style he affected out of shyness than an actual assault on my personality.

“Your background impressed me at the interview, but I have one concern,” he said, striking a warmer note. “Do you think,” he asked, almost paternally, “you might be a little young to deal with men in their late thirties and early forties?”

“I can handle French men,” I said, with my best imitation Seberg smile.

Jim was heavy, though not quite so portly as Jonathan. In his case, it was more professorial paunch than Michelin tire. His beard and hair, which had started out red, were flecked with gray, and he looked old, older than he actually was. I was shocked when he said he was only thirty-four. He had grown up in a Boston suburb, the oldest of four brothers and sisters in a working-class Irish family, and had been living in France since the mid-1950s, after a stint in Korea.

Taking each other’s measure at the café table, we proceeded to argue about everything, almost coming to blows about which poet wrote the line “La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres.”

“Baudelaire, of course,” I said quickly, thinking back to the seminar I had taken in my first year, and desperately trying to remember what poem the line came from. Who else would have written, “The flesh is sad, alas, and I’ve read all the books”?

“Mallarmé,” Jim said, without hiding the palpable pleasure that being right gave him. “It’s true that the themes are Baudelairean,” he added faux-ruefully.

I recognized the signs of the Superior Man, the smile that couldn’t be completely repressed, and the mocking little tilt of the head that David never resisted either. I asked Jim where he had gone to school. He said he had read all of French poetry by himself, at night, while he was in the army. I supposed that was possible. I’d studied with a professor at Harvard summer school who said he had read all of Proust in the navy. I had planned to leave the interview in time to finish registering for classes at the Sorbonne that afternoon, but I accepted Jim’s offer to take me to lunch and then to drive me to the Latin Quarter on his scooter.

All through lunch, I had a case of the severe cramps that had become my frequent companion ever since I had moved to Paris. I had undergone a series of tests, but after many sessions in which chalky liquids were pumped backward into my body with Sadean vigor as I shivered on stainless steel tables, nothing seemed identifiably wrong. Dr. Finkelstein, whom Philippe had recommended, concluded that my
crises
were probably caused by “unconscious tension.” I shrugged off his diagnosis—I was living the life I wanted—but I took the prescription for Valium.

“Great literary discussion, a very charming guy,” I reported to my parents after meeting Jim.

I was a sucker for men armed with facts, no matter what they looked like. At the same time I also felt diminished by their knowledge. It wasn’t enough to know everything though, I’d console myself every time I missed a reference or a date. Didn’t you also have to be able to do something with it? David was paralyzed by all the books he had read. It was too early to tell what else was in Jim’s library, and what he could do with it.

I took the job.

I fell in love with my first class: five men classified in the French business world
as jeune cadre dynamique
. These success-oriented men in middle management were around Jim’s age, married, with kids. Learning to speak English fluently was essential if they were to keep climbing the corporate ladder. Classes were held at company headquarters three days a week before the workday; if dark 8
AM
mornings were hard for me, they were harder still for the men, who all lived in the suburbs. But they were motivated, and I was captivated by their motivation. I crossed the flirtatious ingénue persona ironically with that of the strict schoolmarm and it worked. We all sat around a glass-topped table and pretended to make business conversation. I brought long white sheets of paper that I draped over an easel and wrote out my examples with colored markers.

When later that winter Leo returned from his sojourn in New York, I introduced him to Jim. By then Leo and I were more pen pals than ex-lovers (in the end, he was much better as a friend than as a boyfriend), and I hoped he would like Jim. More than just liking, I wanted to know what he thought of Jim. I hadn’t made up my mind—there was something strange, hard to place about him—and despite the initial awkwardness of the situation, I brought the three of us together for drinks a few times at Le Dôme, Leo’s favorite café, not far from Jim’s apartment in Montparnasse. The two men, both determined ex-pats, quickly appreciated each other (“I dig him,” Leo actually said), and I took Jim’s acquiescence to Leo’s place in my life as a sign of approval.

They shared the exile’s passion for Paris, a Paris that was never fully Parisian, dotted as it was by American outposts—Le Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées, Haynes’s soul food restaurant near the rue des Martyrs, the American library on Place de l’Odéon, the American Hospital, Le centre américain on boulevard Raspail, and above all, American Express, the most reliable place to get mail when you were between addresses, with the warmest bathrooms in Paris (the only public bathroom Leo used, he said). These locations provided a kind of internal set of references, a map within a map that ex-pats had constructed as a safe geography within the city.

Jim asked Leo, who had shown us photographs taken during his Easter odyssey, to come to a few of the classes and shoot pictures of me
teaching, pictures Jim could use to create an advertising brochure for the school. In every shot, a pack of cigarettes and a large box of wooden matches sit on the table along with a copy of
Essential English
, a daily calendar, a pencil sharpener, and my Woody Allen–style glasses with black plastic frames. Most of the men smoked as much as I did, and the ashtrays were always overflowing with butts. The French believed that only
les blondes
—cigarettes made from light tobacco (American, English, Dutch)—were bad for you.

The one man in the class who didn’t smoke was also my pet. In Leo’s photographs he beams at me with the eager intensity of the good student, wanting to know, wanting to please. He was the smartest in the bunch, the best at English, and the natural leader of the little group of men who had been selected for the English classes. The others looked up to him, as if seeking his approval, as if he were their boss. He sported the snappiest ties, the crispest white shirts, and a blazer with slacks instead of slouchy suits shiny from wear. Monsieur Kirili—we were always “Monsieur” and “Mademoiselle”—was the kind of intensely gentle man I never got involved with in my out-of-school life, even though I sometimes could feel the pull. I was disarmed by the man’s sweetness. Marry someone nice, my father repeated, whenever I asked who might meet his standards. “Nice” was not in my emotional vocabulary. Teaching, it turned out, was.