Breathless (13 page)

Teaching was one of those narrow but secure paths into the future for nice girls, a step up from typing or shorthand. A woman could always fall back on teaching, as my mother put it. You could teach if your husband fell on hard times; you could teach while waiting to get married. There was no teacher—certainly not a French teacher—I remotely wanted to be, and yet teaching had always seemed my fate. When I needed to earn money, teaching was the only thing that came to mind. In my senior year at Barnard, I had succumbed to the logic of the “fall back on” model and had taken courses in the education program. But what I liked about teaching had nothing to do with security. Standing in front of a class of junior high school students for practice teaching at New Lincoln, a progressive private school on the Upper West Side, I was shocked the very first day to experience an almost
archaic pleasure. The structure in which
I
was the teacher and
they
were the students felt immediately right—like being the bossy older sibling, but authorized to push the younger kids around.

I still remember from that first class—no doubt because of his famous father, Zero—the responsive face of blond, curly-headed Josh Mostel, as the rhythms of French verb conjugation registered in his brain. Mainly, though, I was pierced by the sensation of standing there and being in charge.

With a different body, I might have become a dominatrix.

November 22, 1963

I
HAD FALLEN ASLEEP WAITING
for Jim, listening to the evening news in my room on my new transistor radio. We were supposed to have a late supper in Montparnasse and, as usual, he was late. We’d been talking over long lunches and flirting. Jim was nothing like the French men I had met, when I was still hoping to find myself in a nouvelle vague film. They made me feel that I was no more to them than the sorbet that arrives in the middle of a banquet: I refreshed their palate between courses. Jim was both different from them and unlike anyone I had known in New York. At the same time, he seemed to be a composite of previous American boyfriends who belonged to the Superior Man department—acting like one, at least. “I really, really like him—think he’s great, etc. Jim is American from Boston, intelligent, sensitive—in a way, David’s qualities of mind (he’s read absolutely everything) and has political awareness. But unlike David he also has maturity and social ease and charm. You can imagine! Everyone adores him. He’s the most wonderful person I’ve
known in years.” I was flattered by Jim’s attention and only occasionally wary. Sometimes he was too charming. Around the edges of my consciousness, I felt a kind of danger—like the constant brush with local traffic when you ride a scooter, a faint breeze of urban anxiety. I couldn’t tell whether I was attracted to him or to the idea that he had been sketching out what a great team we’d make. He seemed to be talking about the future of ELF, but sometimes when he held my hand for emphasis, I wasn’t sure.

By the time Jim knocked at the door of my room, he had already heard the announcement of Kennedy’s assassination. He walked in without saying a word and knelt on the floor next to my bed. He put his head on my lap. I thought he just wanted comfort, to feel close, and I put my hand on his head. Instead, Jim looked up and lifted my skirt, burrowing in between my thighs. I was startled by the sudden move to intimacy. I stood up, smoothing down the pleats of my plaid skirt. His eyes flickered hurt. “Not now,” I said, catching his hand. “We have to find a television.” We drove to an Irish bar where we could watch the news coverage of the assassination with others.

We spent the night at Jim’s place in Montparnasse. I wasn’t ready to sleep with Jim, but neither of us wanted to be alone. The assassination pushed us forward. When I watched him sleeping afterward, I couldn’t help thinking that he looked vulnerable the way beached whales do when they’ve lost their way and wash up stranded on the shore. Undressed, Jim’s body, I saw, was pear-shaped—the low and wide center of gravity inherited from generations of peasant ancestors that I feared for myself. I preferred him tweeded and professorial, his corpulence disguised by the forgiving lines of a custom-made suit.

Early the next morning, Jim woke me up while it was still dark, holding a cup of tea. He was wearing a raggedy, dark blue terrycloth bathrobe against which the pale skin around his collarbone almost gleamed. I reached out to touch the soft, unprotected spot beneath his Adam’s apple, always covered by his shirt and tie, even on Sundays. I wanted to explore this white patch on his body. He took my hand and brought it to his lips. “Ma petite femme,” he said gravely. I didn’t ask him what he meant.

T
HE
F
RENCH HAD BEEN EXCITED
by Kennedy and entranced by Jackie, whose French origins seemed to explain her spectacular sense of style. De Gaulle made a joke of referring to the American president as though he were only the man who had accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris. The French were mystified by how the protection of a president could be so inefficient. They immediately imagined a conspiracy theory.

I wrote home the following day, proud to share the news from my side of the Atlantic.

I hadn’t had time to send my letter when the news of Kennedy’s assassination came over the radio. I was able to follow the reports from the first “flash” to the confirmation of his death. Today the radio has not ceased to talk, speculate and lament. People were stunned and heartbroken. Everyone seemed to have admired and more, liked Kennedy, finding him “jeune et sympathique.” Even the vegetable sellers are upset and talking about it
.

At the lycée, pupils and teachers came up to me in the hall and expressed their sympathy, shaking their heads in disbelief and pressing my hand as though I had personally suffered a tragic loss. Until then, Irish American associations had had almost no content for me. There was only Marilyn Wisely, a girl I had liked in junior high school, whose nose, to my amazement, pointed straight up into the air. I realized that through Jim, the Kennedy story had become unexpectedly close.

The fact that we had experienced the assassination together in Paris gave our couple narrative a ready-made history that had nothing to do with sex.

Steak Tartare

I
THOUGHT
I
HAD LEARNED
all there was to know about eating in restaurants from Jean, but Jim brought a foreigner’s intensity to the table. He had grown up eating boiled meat and overcooked vegetables; meals were to be endured, not savored. His Irish mother seemed to have perfected the same cooking skills as my father’s Jewish one, whose broiled liver, according to my mother, had the consistency of shoe leather. In photographs, the two women resembled each other: bitter widows with sullen faces whose older sons had fled their presence.

Unlike my father, who always defended his mother’s culinary efforts, Jim had no nostalgia for home cooking. The first of Jim’s restaurant-eating principles in fact required that you order only something you couldn’t possibly make yourself. You might crave something absolutely simple—a piece of grilled fish and boiled potatoes, for instance—but you had to choose the complication: sole wrapped in sorrel, swimming in cream. Otherwise, what was the point of going
to the restaurant? Jim would ask rhetorically. He wanted to feel the effort that had gone into making a dish. Sometimes, on the same principle—ordering what you would never make for yourself—we would work our way through a huge
choucroute alsacienne
. In the beginning, I guiltily went along with this dish—a favorite of Jim’s—to prove to myself that I had transcended the dietary rules that had regulated my childhood. But I was not happy consuming an entire inventory of pork products; I could almost see the diagram of a whole pig floating above the steaming platter of sauerkraut.

Jim demonstrated a certain eccentricity in relation to the order of a French menu. Violating protocol, he would scorn the appetizers, for instance, and replace them with a vegetable, say,
haricots verts
, meant to be a side dish. The waiters looked down their noses at us—one doesn’t eat string beans before the main course—but in the end they capitulated to Jim’s manner. Whatever strangeness manifested itself in the sequence of dishes was compensated for by his knowledge of
the plateau de fromage
and his authority about the wine list. He always chose a runny cheese, usually dirty-sock smelly like Époisses; a tiny goat cheese, chalky without being dry (my favorite); and a firm cheese like Morbier, with its distinctive stripe of ash down the middle, to provide a mild hiatus between sharper tastes. (The waiter commiserated with Jim over the fact that one really couldn’t have a separate wine for each cheese.) At first I cringed when Jim lingered over the cheese, but cheese talk is a language and Jim loved talking it. He was the chooser; I was the taster. If we were to continue as a couple, I had to be educated. With Jean, the point of my table instruction was manners; he cared less about what I ate than how. With Jim, the target was my palate.

I let Jim persuade me to take over an evening class that one of his teachers had to give up for family reasons. The teacher was getting married and his wife expected him home for dinner. My reward for teaching at night after a long day at the lycée was that Jim would pick me up at the end of class on his scooter and take me to dinner at La Coupole, around the corner from his apartment. Steak tartare was one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, and it became our ritual for late supper after the class. The formally dressed waiter would position himself by
the table, and from a special stand mix chopped onion, capers, Worcestershire sauce, and a raw egg into the raw, chopped meat on his silver tray. Steak tartare represented the worst possible combination of ingredients for my delicate digestive system, but I had decided that what mattered was not
what
I ate but the mood in which I was eating. This wasn’t exactly scientific, nor what Dr. Finkelstein had recommended, but it felt true. In fact, the mood theory, as I saw it, was somewhat more complicated. If it was all a question of mood, I reasoned, it was not so much the mood I was in while eating as it was the previous mood. Sometimes the
crise
would come on in response to what had happened earlier that day. I might feel relaxed contemplating the steak tartare, but if my stomach had been in knots two hours before while I was teaching, I would soon be feeling the effects of my anxiety. Pay later, the famous rule of consequences. I could fool my brain but not my gut. Invariably, halfway through dinner I would wend my way to the romantic art deco
toilettes
and behind the dark doors quickly insert two suppositories of muscle relaxants, the embarrassing French solution to pain. The little waxy yellow bullets, as I thought of them, shot their relief with astonishing speed.

In the Coupole’s cavernous space, where smoke and loud conversation made me feel at the center of something ineffably fashionable, I would always take my place on the banquette, leaning into the padded leather backrest at an angle sufficient to release the pressure around my waist. Naturally, it never occurred to me that eating with Jim was making me anxious. I wanted badly to prove to him that I was (or could become) his equal at the table, that I could keep up with eating and drinking, that I could eat what repulsed Americans—raw meat, brains, sweetbreads, kidneys. (I actually got to like kidneys, even though in the beginning I ate them just to show off.) I wanted Jim to see me as an equal, despite the fact that in his eyes I was a novice eater as well as a novice teacher.

Eating what was bad for me was my way of showing love. I hoped that I was eating my way into his heart.

Jim periodically observed my classes, as he did with the other teachers, and often at dinner, he would grade my performance according to the
pedagogic principles he had elaborated for the school. It was a relief and a torment to review the lessons and draw the moral. I wanted to be a better teacher, but I hated being corrected. The contradiction pulled me in and pushed me out.

Three glasses of Burgundy and the required cheese course later, the waiter would serve my weekly reward, one of two elaborate desserts: Baked Alaska (that the French name moved to Scandinavia,
l’omelette norvégienne
), which had to be ordered at the beginning of the meal, or, if I hadn’t felt up to deciding,
le hot fudge
—vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate sauce and shaved, toasted almonds. Both combined warm and cold sensations of sweetness, which made me shiver with delight and dissolved the lingering tensions of the workday.

My pleasure in these treats, which were designed for adults but satisfied childhood tastes, was old as well as new. My mother made a dessert she called a bombe. The recipe, which came from an old New York Italian restaurant, involved scooping out an orange, cutting up the fruit, and returning it to the hollowed orange with ice cream. Then a meringue would sit on top of the orange, which was set in a pan surrounded by ice cubes and heated in the oven. The warm meringue melted the ice cream as the ice cream cooled the fruit, suavity itself. The bombe was the crowning touch of my mother’s many dinner parties, grand affairs for large groups of friends that lasted late into the night. My sister and I loved the bombe, but that didn’t prevent us from complaining—“that again?”—when the orange appeared twice in one month. There was something about being with Jim, who was in manner so quintessentially adult, that triggered the memory of childhood tastes in me.

At the end of the Coupole dinners, Jim would have a shot of Armagnac; he preferred to drink his calories. Logy with food and wine, we would weave the few blocks home on the Lambretta. I rested my cheek on the rough tweed surface of Jim’s wide back, feeling safe, even though he was usually quite drunk.

“Marry Someone Interesting”

“M
ARRY SOMEONE INTERESTING
,”
MY MOTHER
used to say (resigned to the fact that a doctor or lawyer would never appeal), but someone interesting who was also independently wealthy. That was the path to becoming a woman of leisure thanks to one’s husband’s income (her dream). When pressed, my mother never came up with a good example of such a person. Jim at least was interesting, and disarming.