Breathless (18 page)

I
F
J
IM AND
I
WERE
less world-weary than the depressed poets we both admired, the novelty of running after cows and washing from an outdoor faucet soon passed, and we had literally read all our books. We left our green retreat for a long literary weekend in Dublin. Jim booked a room at a hotel he knew on Dawson Street, around the corner from his tailor and his favorite bookstore—Hodges Figgis, farther down the road.

The room had an en-suite bathroom—for once no bathroom down the hall, no waiting for the neighbor to finish. The hot water came dribbling out in a trickle, but just the act of turning a knob and seeing the tub fill up was almost erotic—good plumbing is pleasure’s twin, I had started to think. So what if that made me hopelessly American? The first night, Jim had fallen asleep by the time I emerged bright red from my prolonged soaking in the claw-footed tub. I wrapped myself in the white towels and peered out of the windows at the dark streets. The only lights came from the ornate wrought-iron lampposts.

The next morning we wandered into a cavernous dining room and
sat down to a beautifully laid table: a heavy white linen tablecloth, linen napkins, tall crystal water glasses. Breakfast was Jim’s favorite meal, and he intended to have a “Full Irish” breakfast. When the waiter asked me what I wanted, I chose what I thought would be simplicity itself. A three-minute boiled egg. Toast. Orange juice. The waiter arrived with Jim’s breakfast—fried eggs, fried tomato, blood pudding, fried bacon, all soaking in shining grease—and my solitary egg in a pristine white porcelain cup. I lightly tapped the top of the egg, afraid that too strong a motion would cause the yolk to spurt over the tablecloth. I needn’t have worried. The yolk was completely hard, solid yellow. I could have peeled the egg. Jim was halfway through his full plate and the
Irish Times
, but looked up to order another soft-boiled egg.

The waiter shortly returned with a new egg. I tapped the top. The surface crackled slightly. No yellow fluid oozed. I burst into tears. Jim calmly finished his coffee, dabbing at his lips with the napkin and ignoring my tantrum. He would never let a scene ruin a meal. That was the rule of all rules. I could not imagine a meal without a scene. That was how I had grown up: mealtimes were always a battleground. Was it the egg, was it the sex, or were my tears about something else? I had wanted this, this man, this story. Why couldn’t he be the way I needed him to be? I wanted to punish Jim for not guessing what I needed and giving it to me without my asking. Part of me knew this wasn’t fair.

T
HE LAST DAY IN
D
UBLIN,
we drove north of the city toward Howth, until we came to a stretch of beach with a stone jetty reaching out into the sea. Jim parked the car and we walked out in silence, watching the waves lap up at the rocks, at the birds landing and taking off along the strand. It was windy and too cold to stand still, but Jim was in a kind of trance.

After a while he asked me if I remembered the scene in
Portrait of the Artist
in which Stephen has the epiphany. I confessed that I had never gotten past the first few pages of the novel, but during my artistic phase in college, I had danced in a theater department version of
Finnegans Wake
. Did that count? When Stephen sees the bird-girl, Jim
explained, he realizes that he is not going to become a priest. I had no idea where this was going.

“My mother wanted me to be a priest,” Jim said finally, as if relieved of a burden.

I should have felt happy about this confession. Jim almost never told me anything intimate. He expected me to guess his feelings. I shared that desire to turn away from the expected path, the thrill of finding in Paris a world that seemed to keep me at a safe distance from the family that locked me in and that he now adored. Jim offered me extra resistance against that story: marrying him meant marrying out. I looked at his florid complexion, his tight, thin lips, and saw the portrait of his Irish mother, whose photograph he had finally shown me when we got married. We had made our pact on this shared refusal to be our parents’ children—but maybe it wasn’t shareable. Maybe it wasn’t enough.

It was August, but the wind was bitter and my hair was whipping my face. I ran back to the car and lit a cigarette to get warm.

I
N THE PHOTOGRAPHS, THE GIRL
on her honeymoon is hard to read. She looks uneasy in the landscape, looking toward the sea, a question mark in her eyes. In Jim’s favorite picture, I’m crouching outside the cottage doing laundry by hand in a big metal pail and a small plastic basin. That was the snapshot he sent to my parents. Once during that summer, Jim let me take a picture of him without a jacket. Dressed in the cardigan we had just bought but still wearing a shirt and tie, he smiles fully into the camera without the sadness that usually filtered his gaze, happy to be in Ireland.

On our way back to Paris, we stopped in London to stock up on books: Forster, Wilson, Svevo in translation. We were Francophiles, but our reading pleasures still came in English. While we were shopping in Foyle’s, our new car was clamped and towed away.

Housekeeping

I
N
N
OVEMBER
1965
A COLD
wave swept through France—the lowest temperatures recorded since 1885. The only heating in our tenement was provided by an expensive radiator on wheels that burned oil. We were lucky to get it on special, the man in the hardware store had said, when he saw Jim’s hesitation. The heater worked remarkably well in the small space, except during the coldest weather when I retreated to bed. Wrapped in my Irish knee rug, I would sit under the covers with the radiator rolled up next to me, grading papers from my translation class and smoking Mecarillos. I liked thinking about George Sand, the only woman I knew of who had smoked cigars. The little cigars were hard to get used to, but I thought I might smoke less if I smoked cigars, particularly without inhaling. Alternatively, I hoped that I’d become a writer someday, not just a grader of student translations.

One Sunday morning Jim and I woke up early, coughing. The air in the bedroom was fogged with soot rising from the sputtering heater.
Jim grabbed my heavy winter coat and wrapped me in it. I pulled on my boots, still dressed in my nightgown. Jim covered his mouth and nose with his handkerchief, turned off the heater, flung open the bedroom windows, and dragged me out of the apartment. We climbed on his scooter that was parked out front and headed for the Bois de Boulogne to breathe fresh air. I clung to Jim’s back as he sped through the empty streets.

In the black-and-white photographs Jim took of me that day, I look like one of those reckless women in Antonioni movies in which the heroine has gone to the edge of an emotional abyss, dazed and pained—her face blank and drained of emotion at the end of a long night. We could have suffocated, we told friends when we dined out. Jim, who had decided to document every aspect of our life together, brandished the pictures of my appearance that day as proof. He was proud of having captured my pallor.

The near-death episode with the oil heater finally persuaded Jim that it was time to leave Montparnasse. I found an apartment in a brand-new building located in the unfashionable tenth arrondissement around the Gare de l’Est, and we moved in just before Christmas. The eleven-story apartment house, around the corner from the train station, was set back in a cul-de-sac, flanked by small textile factories that looked as though they were going out of business at any moment. Like most modern construction going up in Paris, the apartment building was made of concrete, not the noble
pierre de taille
that gave the city its characteristic look of elegance. Adorned only by cast-iron grids, from which some tenants, hoping to impart a personal touch to their anonymous dwelling, had hung flowerpots with geraniums, the façade rivaled the dismal look of the HLMs, the low-income housing projects subsidized by the government. From our ninth-floor perch, though, we had a view of Parisian rooftops, with the dome of Sacré-Coeur in the far distance. I liked seeing the landmark from my window—another icon of my chosen destination.

Except for the Canal Saint-Martin—and even it was discouragingly seedy—the neighborhood, we were forced to admit, lacked charm. At night, for consolation, we sometimes went for walks along the canal,
always stopping at the spot where, in the movie
Hôtel du Nord
, the great actress Arletty, standing on a little footbridge, utters the famous line of sublime indignation to Louis Jouvet, who thinks he can get away with saying that he’s leaving town (her) because he needs a change of scene: “Atmosphère? Moi, atmosphère!” A decrepit Hôtel du Nord was still standing on the far side of the canal, visible from the bridge, but the movie hadn’t been shot on location, I was crushed to discover after perfecting my Arletty imitation.

The shoddy architecture and the shabby surroundings made it possible for us to afford a miniscule two-bedroom apartment. The so-called second bedroom was no more than a tiny passageway, presumably designed for an infant. In the meantime, Jim would make the space his office. The glossy wood floors were warm from central heating. I walked around in bare feet again. But the bathroom alone, I explained to French friends who couldn’t fathom how we could have left Montparnasse for the Gare de l’Est, made up for the neighborhood. Only Americans, they said, could care that much about plumbing.

W
ITH A NEWLY INSTALLED HALF-SIZE
refrigerator in the kitchen, I launched into a full-scale French housewife impersonation. Always dressed as though I were going to teach, always in a dress, I would take my woven straw basket to the Saint-Quentin covered market a few blocks away and wander through the array of stalls. After several weeks of cruising, I chose my people, crucially the
maraîcher
, a tiny old man who made me feel that I had a chance of passing. After I pointed to the head of lettuce I had chosen, the vegetable man would wrap the leaves, heavy with sandy dirt and the occasional slug, in newspaper that I then carefully placed on top of the vegetables in my straw basket. Every time, the vegetable man asked me if I knew how to make a salad dressing, and every time he reminded me how to make it: lemon juice and olive oil blended together with the tiniest hint of mustard. I was always especially gratified when my choice—pale soft
laitue
or crispier
batavia
, depending on the season—was rewarded by the offer of “un peu de persil, madame?” It became a point of honor with me never to pay for an entire bunch
of parsley when I needed only a few sprigs. I learned how to make the ritualistic conversation that constituted a requirement for being served correctly. The vegetable sellers were pedagogues in their own right, never letting you choose your own melon or tomatoes. They alone would adjudicate. When is the melon for, madame, or even what time of day? Ripeness calibrated to the hour.

I secretly vibrated to being called “madame,” although I also worried about being old, the strands of gray hair that I covered with henna. I wanted to be an adult, but what was supposed to happen to a woman after she got married? The movies that had nourished me did not point in the direction of groceries. The only thing Jean Seberg seemed to shop for (besides the Dior dress, of course) was a Renoir reproduction of a young woman in profile to tack up on her hotel room walls.

A
T THE HUGE
P
RISUNIC ON
Champs-Élysées, a mini–department store that sold home furnishings in addition to almost everything else, we bought, at prices suggested by the name, inexpensive Italian pieces made of wooden slats and foam rubber cushions—a loveseat and chairs—that you assembled yourself. But the heart of the living room furniture was a solid, cherrywood bookcase we found that worked with floor-to-ceiling poles and combined our books. I loved the long shelves of books that looked like the beginning of a serious library.

Now that there was an actual bathroom, toilet, and kitchen, someone had to assume the job of cleaning it all. Jim considered the household work the woman’s responsibility. I thought so too, but once we had married, I didn’t seem to want to do it anymore. My initial enthusiasm for floor washing had begun to wane. A few weeks after we moved in, I found Aysha, who worked for the neighbor across the hall. I shared the news with my mother: “I now have a
femme de ménage:
a woman from North Africa. She spent yesterday and today scrubbing the toilet and kitchen and is starting on the bathroom today. The walls were black and she did a great job.” Aysha had showed up the first morning with a bucket and a
serpillière
, a thick, absorbent cloth for mopping. She poured large amounts of water all over the floor and went
down on hands and knees, flicking the edges of the dampened cloth against the floorboards. I had seen women wash this way in Tunisia, where the floors were tiled. Were you supposed to put all that water on wood? I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question—presumably this is what she did for the neighbor—but I was mortified to have a woman on her hands and knees in my apartment, even if, in emulation of my mother, who always insisted on her right to have “help” whether or not she was working, I assumed it was normal for another woman to do the housework I didn’t want to do.

One evening, a few weeks after Aysha started cleaning the apartment, I was unable to turn on the lights in the entry when I returned home from work. I frantically dialed SOS Réparations. An electrician arrived within the hour carrying his toolbox and a meter. It turned out that the electrical circuits, insufficiently protected by the brand-new floorboards, had been drowned by Aysha’s watery zeal. The repairman fell to work. I watched him mutely, mesmerized by the ticking, like the meter of a taxi stuck in traffic. The francs kept adding up.

“You have to let the wiring dry for a couple of days,” the electrician said three hours later when he had finished. “Next time buy a vacuum cleaner. It’s cheaper,” he volunteered sympathetically.