Breathless (14 page)
Authors: Nancy K. Miller
For one thing, he loved to alternate between the high- and low-culture pleasures of Paris. One day I’d receive a
pneu
from Jim telling me to join him at the still-newish Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées for a hamburger, followed by the latest James Bond movie, another that he had managed to get tickets for Beckett’s
Happy Days
at the Odéon with Madeleine Renaud. I cherished the tiny folded missives covered with Jim’s equally tiny, crabbed script. I was allowed to refuse the summons that sometimes felt like a subpoena—but I rarely said no.
I liked the extremes of his tastes, even when they made me unhappy.
On special occasions, Jim took me out for a very expensive meal that would be billed to the business. I would be given a menu with no prices—as though I were a mistress or even a wife. Jim would never tell me the price of the dishes; those appeared only on his menu, since he was the bill payer. He wanted me to choose purely on the grounds of desire. The first time this happened, we had gone to Chez Garin, a small two-star restaurant not far from Notre-Dame, to celebrate a contract with a new company. The selection was limited, but I found it almost impossible to decide what to eat without seeing the prices. I had been trained in childhood never to order the most expensive thing on the menu, which meant I never really knew what I wanted. I closed the large cloth menu. Since Jim was convinced I didn’t understand anything about French food anyway, he was happy to order for me. Besides, I knew he wanted me to model my desires on what he wanted my desires to be. Maybe that was my desire, too, or part of it. How could you know what you liked or didn’t like if you didn’t know what you were supposed to like?
“Madame,” Jim began, looking at the waiter and referring to me in the third person. We weren’t married, but I was promoted to the category as a sign meant to inspire respect.
“Madame,” Jim informed the unsmiling waiter, “will begin with the
terrine de canard.”
I didn’t really care for terrine—like pâté, terrine reminded me of chopped liver—but it was a house specialty listed as such in the
Guide Michelin
.
“For the main course, a
truite soufflée
.” Jim knew I prefer grilled fish but again, it was highlighted in the
Guide
, our secular bible. Besides, you could have grilled fish at any brasserie, or even at home. Jim might be a food iconoclast, but he worshiped the guides for restaurants with stars and memorized their special features before arriving at the restaurant. At Garin, where you could feel the chef’s domination in every detail, Jim seemed intimidated. He docilely ordered the
côte de boeuf vigneronne
(also in the guide) at the waiter’s suggestion (via the chef, of course), even though he had told me he didn’t want to have beef. The waiter nodded approval; he didn’t need to write down the order.
We were the only Americans that night, and I could hear our conversation above the murmur of the French diners.
Why did expensive restaurant versions of food matter so much to Jim? It was as though every mouthful of haute cuisine took him further from the good Catholic little boy he thought for so long he was doomed to be. Every elegantly wrought morsel was proof that he had escaped his mother’s kitchen. Still, the escape had been a narrow one, I thought, embracing him from behind as I hung on at the back of the scooter in the dark winter night.
We didn’t always eat at fancy places. Sometimes we’d go to a student-run Vietnamese restaurant in the rue des Carmes, behind the Pantheon. The food collective was one of the cheapest places to eat in Paris, and a lot less depressing than the government-owned Resto-U, which we still went to with our student cards at the end of the month when we were broke. (With his habitual resourcefulness Jim had managed to finagle a student card, even though his student days belonged to a distant past.) At the collective you ordered from a window when you came in and then moved on to a long communal table. A waiter would bring your dish to the head of the table and call out your name. We cringed when the foreign sound of our American names rang out above the clatter of plates. But Jim’s friend, Danh, a Vietnamese philosopher living in Paris, reassured us that the Vietnamese distinguished between the evil American government and the peace-loving American people. Jim took the French view, which had converted its own history in Indochina to wisdom, and I took his, especially when I wrote to enlighten my parents, borrowing his rhetorical flourish: “From here the situation in Vietnam seems absolutely insane—there’s a feeling of wonder that American policy can be so blind to reality. All the American columnists with any brains at all have realized that the Vietnamese are only interested in peace, that democracy and communism are unimportant issues by comparison, and that the psychological make-up of the Vietnamese is completely different from ours.”
During the Korean occupation, Jim had worked in the army kitchen. He hated the military, but he came out of the war adept with chopsticks.
Jim and I fascinated each other, almost as categories. He was a philo-Semite; I was a nice, middle-class, Jewish girl from the Upper West Side of New York, whose immigrant origins had been transformed by a generation of professionalism and education. Jim’s parents had not been educated. His father, who had immigrated to Boston from Ireland as a teenager, died when Jim was eleven. We shared a resistance to the stories our parents had made for us. We couldn’t bear to be the people our families wanted us to become.
Europe offered us an escape from our family plots. Jim should have grown up to work for the post office like his father, or, since he was smart, become a priest. I was destined to teach high school French in Manhattan, a small notch above teaching elementary school as my mother did for years when money was tight. Jim had already married and divorced a girl from his neighborhood; I vowed I would never marry anyone from my shtetl.
In what we didn’t want, we were a match.
With each other, we left America behind. By early December the attachment precipitated by Kennedy’s death had become a relationship I wasn’t sure I could define but I knew would displease my parents. As usual, my anticipation of their resistance made me defiant, ready for battle. In the past, they had found ways to make me give up on things (going away to school) and people I thought I loved (David); and, often every cleverly, as they had with Bernard, they had punctured my plans with what sounded like a simple question. I was determined not to let that happen again. It wasn’t hard to guess what my parents were going to say about Jim (He’s not Jewish; He’s too old, What does he do for a living?), but I also knew I had to defend myself in person if I didn’t want to continue writing a serial novel by letter.
I had vaunted Jim’s qualities, declared how happy I was, painted a glamorous picture of our life together in Paris that convinced even me. It wasn’t that I didn’t have doubts about Jim. Sometimes he was too persuasive, too intent on his way of doing things. Yes, I was happy, but I was also anxious, and I couldn’t quite say why. But if I was captivated by a story that often felt beyond my control, I wasn’t going to let my
parents interrupt the narrative just as it was getting started. At the very least, I wanted to see where it would go. Time, I figured, was on my side. I was only twenty-two.
That Christmas, I flew to New York by charter. It took twelve hours and cost $250. I hadn’t been home in over two years.
“W
HAT DOES THIS GUY DO,
exactly?” my father asked in a predictably skeptical tone, as the four of us sat down to dinner in the kitchen the first night of my return. My younger sister Andrea was still living at home, but she had warned me that I couldn’t count on her in a showdown. She was secretly dating a Negro, as we said then, and biding her time until graduation from Barnard, when she planned to move to the East Village and live with him.
“I told you in my letter. He runs a language school.”
“Like Berlitz?”
“On a much smaller scale.”
My father cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“What kind of an income does the school generate at this point?” my father asked, reaching for a yellow-lined legal pad, ready to calculate our economic future.
I had no idea.
“My parents were not overly enthusiastic,” I wrote in my first letter to Jim, “but I haven’t given up.”
Jim’s letters arrived almost daily. Chagall’s painting
Les Fiancés de la Tour Eiffel
had just been issued as a postage stamp. Chagall had left Russia for Paris. His immigrant past gave him the material; the freedom of Paris, the chance to paint the way he wanted to. In Chagall’s topsy-turvy universe Paris and the shtetl coexisted within a single vision. The couple lifts off in a tilted pas de deux across a sky populated by fiddlers and horses. A chuppa figured in miniature moves backward into the time of memory under the protective arch of the Eiffel Tower, which seems to disappear upward beyond an invisible horizon.
Every envelope from Jim had the Chagall stamp on it. Jim was always kind of a literalist, in this case taking Marshall McLuhan, who was all the rage, to the letter: the medium is the message. Jim was putting the idea of our marriage on the map by stamp, as it were, without ever asking, bypassing language completely. He wanted my parents to perceive the seriousness of his intentions. My mother would drop the letters on my bed without comment. If she got the message, she wasn’t saying.
“My dear little wife,” Jim wrote in his first letter, “do you know what you are letting yourself in for?” Jim imagined us as selves without borders, bound without boundaries. I was his exclusive possession, not to be shared with the world. Fusion and exclusion. A
folie à deux
, as the French like to put it. I had never heard this language before from him, or from anyone else, for that matter, though in some ways Jim’s desire to blot out the rest of the world reminded me of David’s burlap-bag fantasy, his idea for what I’d wear, ideally, if I were not looking to please others—the couple unto itself.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles sang sweetly as our couple story began to unfold.
“From now on, I’m taking you in hand,” Sartre said to Simone de Beauvoir in the early days of their relationship. I was waiting for someone to do that for me. Take me in hand and project me with him into a future. True, the two of them never married or actually lived together, but their lives were inextricably linked—that was the main thing.
Here was a man with an idea of how to be two, how two could be one. Jim’s fantasy was the motor I needed to become independent of my parents. With Jim on my side, I would have a powerful counterweight to my parents’ couple. With Jim, I could stay not only away from them, but away from an America that I now saw through foreign eyes.
Maybe I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, as Jim put it, but that was precisely the appeal. Jim’s fantasy had a kind of narrative thrust and that was what I needed. I’d worry about the content of the story later.
S
OON AFTER MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY,
my parents resumed their campaign for my permanent return to the United States. We had arrived at almost exactly the same point we had one year earlier when I was lobbying for Bernard. In the short term, they wanted me to visit with them over the summer at the Cape; I had refused. My father suggested that we discuss the situation over the phone. Jim drove me to the Hôtel des Postes near the Louvre, the main post office where there wasn’t a long wait to make a transatlantic call. He positioned himself near the booth, ready to cheer me on.
The receiver felt heavy in my hand.
“How can you say you are independent,” my father began with no preamble, “when you can’t even imagine being separated for the space of a summer? I thought you wanted to be independent.” We were back to the old struggle.
“You seem to think ‘independent’ means my doing what you think is right.” I positioned the receiver between my ear and neck and waited for his comeback. We were having what the French call
un dialogue de sourds
. We were deaf to each other. But that didn’t stop anyone from talking.
“I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just making a suggestion. There’s a difference.”
“So what’s your suggestion?”
“Come back and spend the summer here.”
“Listen,” I said, gazing desperately at Jim, whom I could see leaning against one of the empty phone booths, reading
Le Monde
. It was like one of those Ionesco plays where people keep repeating the same sentences without noticing. “I already told you, I’m not in the mood for an eight-week separation.”
“Then how can you say you’re independent?”
“I earn my own living,” I said, hoping my father wouldn’t remember that they had bailed me out of the previous summer’s misery by taking me on vacation.
“Being ‘independent,’” I said, “doesn’t mean not caring about the person you love.” It was hard not to mimic my father’s sententiousness. “Jim counts in the equation.”
“Of course, he counts,” my father said in the deceptively reasonable tone he adopted whenever he totally disagreed with me, “but so do you. You need some perspective.”
I didn’t want perspective. This was exactly how they had always undermined my decisions. Are you sure? Are you sure? Of course, I wasn’t sure. Jim had asked me the right question. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t that the definition of freedom? At the very least, I was in love with the idea of me in love with someone who was in love with me and had made his life in Paris. I didn’t know more than that, but I didn’t want to know.
I had decided to stay on in France if I found another job. I wasn’t making enough money to support myself with ELF. Jim’s school was still more of a good idea than a source of financial security. Besides, teaching English to businessmen, or the lycée girls, for that matter, had already
lost most of its charm. I was halfway through a second graduate degree, the equivalent of a master’s in English that I had begun in Poitiers, when for the first time foreigners with advanced degrees were allowed to work in the French university system. Dominique Reza, a professor I had known since Middlebury summer school, encouraged me to apply for a position at the Sorbonne.