Breathless (19 page)
Authors: Nancy K. Miller
S
OON AFTER THE
SOS
FIASCO,
around my birthday in February, I sent my parents one of my stocktaking accounts. These lyrical narratives, which I volunteered periodically, were part of an elaborate strategy of self-justification; the endlessly proliferating demands of domestic life supplied a conflict-free zone of epistolary material. There was something reassuring about sharing the concrete facts of daily existence that served as a buffer against my persistent uncertainty about what I was supposed to be doing in my life that moving continents had aggravated rather than assuaged. “I’m cooking up a storm, French and Jewish, rabbit with mushrooms and white wine and stuffed cabbage. Farfel (Jim’s passion). Planning to make your daube recipe soon.” (Clearly, there was no escaping the
daube.)
It was as though, after loudly announcing how completely I had left
my parents behind, I willingly set out to replicate their life. After much back-and-forth, and returning an illustrated questionnaire my mother had designed, I succeeded in getting her to make curtains for the new apartment, “exactly the same ones,” I stipulated, hanging in their living room in Manhattan. We didn’t need curtains for privacy—we had no neighbors staring at us from across the street—and all the apartments came fitted with folding metal shutters. But curtains were essential to a certain idea of a living room, my mother thought.
P
ART OF ME
—
THE COOKING AND
curtains part—wanted to be like my parents. Of course, my parents, like their own, were also trying to be other people. My mother’s father wanted only to be a Yankee; he even voted Republican. For my parents, becoming the Americans they wanted to be took the form of disparaging others. My mother managed to find something wrong with everyone, except for a chosen few who all seemed to live on the Upper East Side and whom she envied. Finding the fault—and once named, the fault could never be forgotten—was her strategy for tamping down the intractable anxiety about who she was, who we were as a family, a survival mechanism that they had passed on to me. What else was that constant doubt that kept me twisted in my gut?
“Our anniversary is coming up soon,” I wrote in early April, radiating pride. “But unfortunately this year it will be a working day—until 9 p.m.! It’s all so unreal. I really think I made a good choice—the right decision.” I had learned to drive and acquired another degree. I taught at the Sorbonne, earned my own money. But having chosen Jim and establishing a household of my own were what finally made me a grown-up.
I wanted to prove them wrong about me, even more than I wanted their approval. They could finally talk about me to their friends without shame.
I had inherited my parents’ tendency toward condescension, which was matched, if not surpassed, by my new husband’s. “Jim and I find most people basically a waste of time,” I declared from the height of my bridal sublime. “So many people are pleasant to spend time with but it’s
as bad as watching television. You get so little from it. There are some exceptions, but very few. And then, Jim resents women who don’t cook as well as I do, so that limits dinner invitations. We dread being invited back! (The other night we were served meatballs and spaghetti!) The meal ended with packaged supermarket cheese with the price still on it.” Jim refused to continue having dinner with those friends of mine who had committed, he insisted angrily, a veritable crime against cheese—buying it packaged at the supermarket and serving it cold. Cold! Becoming French required getting the food exactly right, down to the rind.
When my parents visited us in Paris that summer, we gave them our bedroom and slept on air mattresses. In a snapshot my father took of my mother and me at the Saint-Quentin market, the two of us are contemplating a small mountain of oranges and grapefruits. I’m wearing my Irish cardigan and carrying my woven straw basket over my arm. My mother is rummaging in her purse for change. We look like matching housewives, except for my mother’s silvery hair.
W
E WERE ALWAYS BROKE AT
the end of August, when classes at ELF were suspended because all of Paris was on vacation. “The Soup of the Gods”—garlic cloves boiled in water, a recipe I had discovered while we were still living in Montparnasse (Elizabeth David has a more elaborate version of it)—became a regular first course during summer’s end. Being short of cash had turned Jim surly during my parents’ visit. My father had made it clear that he expected Jim to be a more lavish breadwinner, and Jim snapped at my father whenever questions of financial planning arose. I blamed both of them. After all, hadn’t there been difficult periods in my parents’ life between my father’s winning a case and getting paid? The money my mother earned from her days of substitute teaching was what we had lived on in the interstices. But then the fees would arrive. Still, I took my father’s point. With Jim the cash flow followed invisible channels. I never knew how much money came in, how much went out, how much there was, how the business worked.
His desk was as messy as my father’s, and he procrastinated like my father, but that had not yet produced anything resembling my father’s success. Could you run a business from the scraps of paper in your back pocket? That was Jim’s gamble.
That summer, I stopped drawing a salary from the French government. My teaching contract with the Sorbonne had expired in June and I decided that I had to earn money independently of Jim’s school. I was nervous about waiting for things to work out at the ranch. Sometimes I felt I was losing faith in the ranch altogether.
Early in September Jacques Couderc, one of the senior professors at the Sorbonne’s Institute for American Studies, described an editorial project to me and Mark Rothberg. Like me, Mark had taught as a lecturer, and Couderc thought we’d make a good team. He wanted us to provide an American version of a book he was putting together for a French audience. He had traveled to the States and interviewed a star lineup of writers. The anthology would be a tapestry of excerpts from some forty American authors—Ellison, Mailer, Baldwin—that he had loosely stitched together with commentary and interviews, showing how contemporary American writers grappled with questions of identity. Since there were no footnotes, quotation marks, or indications of what he had excerpted, our task was to track everything down, working backward from the French translations. As translators, we would get to write our own preface. Of course, we weren’t translators—unless finding the original for the translating could be called translating—but Couderc took the view that he knew more about American literature than we did since he had studied it for twenty years, so we couldn’t be called editors. Besides, we were translating his introduction.
Mark was planning to apply to a PhD program when he went back to the States, and he was convinced that Couderc possessed the keys to the academic kingdom he wanted to belong to. He urged me to sign on with the project. Couderc promised us royalties, in addition to the equivalent of $1,500 on delivery of the manuscript, and we concluded that the book would be good for our respective futures as academics—if we had futures.
JIM THOUGHT COUDERC WAS USING
us, especially me; he was sure Couderc wanted to get into my pants, as he liked to put it. Jim didn’t care about my spending time with Mark, of whom he was only occupationally jealous, as he was of all my male friends, even though I had told him I was pretty sure Mark was homosexual. Jim maintained that Couderc was an operator and not a true intellectual, the kind of academic who would do anything to get quoted in
Le Monde
and interviewed on the radio. Naturally, Jim also resented the fact that I was investing my time on someone else’s project, instead of devoting myself to making the school happen: working for him! Still, Couderc needed us and we needed money. We would finish the book the following summer before Mark returned to the States. He could tie up any loose ends there; I would deal with Couderc in Paris. We sealed our partnership with a drink at the Select, not far from Mark’s hotel on the rue Delambre.
Jim wasn’t completely wrong about the sleaze factor. When Mark and I initially discussed the USA project, as we referred to it, we went to Couderc’s apartment near the Jardin des Plantes for a drink. He insisted that working for him would put us on the academic map as he had already done with a rapidly rising critic and writer. He led us into the bedroom, opened the American-style closets he had had built in, and proudly showed us the wardrobe—rows of dresses and shoes, neatly lined up according to season and style—of the famous French woman writer whom he claimed to have transformed from a dowdy housewife living in the south of France to a sophisticated
parisienne
.
I defended the USA project to Jim, but I did not tell him about the closet full of shoes.
I
NSIDIOUSLY
, M
ARK
’
S ACADEMIC AMBITION WHETTED
mine. I decided to get a doctorate in France. What another degree would mean for my ability to earn money was not entirely clear, but going to the next academic level was a Jewish way of moving into the future that felt familiar and comfortable.
I wanted to write a thesis on Boris Vian, a fashionably marginal but notorious French writer whose work I loved. Vian had died tragically young of a heart attack in 1959, while watching the botched movie version of his novel
I’ll Spit on Your Graves
—a fake translation from the American. Vian had been fascinated by the mythological America that French people had created for their own satisfaction: jazz, Negroes, hard-boiled detectives. I wanted to study his translations of American crime writers—James Cain and Raymond Chandler—whose books had appeared in the
Série noire
, the French crime series Gallimard began publishing right after the war. But no sooner had I officially registered
my subject than an American professor of French published a study on Vian, introducing him to an American audience. I would have to expand my original interest in Vian’s work to a broader project, an analysis of all the American detective novels translated in the French series.
I worked up the courage to present my topic to Roland Barthes, the literary critic famous for his brilliant analyses of cultural myths. He received me during his regular office hours. He sat at a distance, leaning away from his desk—an old, long, elegant wood table—looking past me at the view outside his window.
“What can I do for you, madame?” he asked, bored, or maybe just languorous, yet polite. He looked at me as though he might have seen me before—one of those mute presences filling seats in his overflowing seminar that I had been attending at the school of Hautes Études, where he was director of studies. I told him I was sitting in on his seminar. Barthes nodded briefly, politely, and looked past me again out the window. I explained that I wanted to study the translations of the first books in the
Série noire
. The translations made the tough-guy world more violent than it already is, as if to produce an image of America that flatters the French worldview. The French have culture, I concluded, pleased with my idea, Americans, anti-culture. It’s all about language.
Barthes crossed and uncrossed his pale hands, which he held clasped on the table.
“That might be interesting,” he said finally, lighting another cigarette. “I’ll have to trust you,” he added with his famous half-smile that seemed to forgive my blatant parroting of his latest work, “on the nuances in English.”
As Jim pointed out in Educating the Parents, his weekly letter to my mother and father, my idea about language as content was in fact wholly indebted to Barthes, whom he likened to his hero, the Canadian cultural critic Marshall McLuhan, so they would have a North American analogue. This was probably more information than they needed.
I had no idea how to write a thesis; Jim didn’t either. The only person I knew working on a dissertation was Hannah, and she had returned to New Haven after completing her research in Paris. But Hannah was getting a degree in history; her bibliography was already longer than
anything I had ever written. I hadn’t written anything since my master’s essay on Laclos and women. I had trouble imagining the leap from the protective arms of American standards, even with my lecherous tutor, into the egregiously hands-off approach of the French professoriate. Once they signed your application for a topic, you were on your own.
After visiting us in Paris, one of Jim’s best American friends, whom we always called by his initials, and who was the son of a famous writer, wrote me a two-page, single-spaced, six-point letter about how to write a dissertation. I hadn’t asked for his advice, but I must have seemed in need of it. Having spent years on an unpublishable dissertation, and not acknowledging that being the Son of a World Famous Writer (you could feel the capitals like an uncomfortable jacket he wore, too tight) might have something to do with his failure, he sent his guide to thesis writing. The most important thing, he concluded in his final point, was to be sure that the topic mattered to me “personally and emotionally,” and that it was important to me generally, within my “spiritual economy.”
I wasn’t sure I had a spiritual economy. Maybe I would find one along the way.
I
HAD BECOME THE GOOD
daughter. Granted, Jim was not your dream husband—older, not Jewish, divorced—but the glamour of Paris, and the assumption that things were different, less conventional “over there,” added a cachet that seemed to balance, if not entirely cancel, the obvious negatives of my choice. Despite its foreign location, my little rebellion had been integrated by my parents into a safe domestic model.
Back in New York, my younger sister Andrea had assumed the position of the bad daughter. She had moved outside the bourgeois borders of the Upper West Side to the bohemian grunge of the East Village. Taking reverse immigration literally, she headed to the zones of the Lower East Side where my paternal grandparents had started out. My sister had fallen in love with a person so unsuitable in my parents’ eyes—“a Puerto-Rican-Negro drop-out,” as my father put it—that all my past boyfriends and present husband combined now appeared closely related to Prince Charming. My parents were in shock. If I was still
tethered as they were to the values of the 1950s, my sister had already migrated into the 1960s.