Breathless (27 page)

I proposed that the three of us go out to dinner together when I returned to Paris, but in the meantime, to follow two basic rules and she’d be fine: always order a vegetable as an appetizer, and never skip the cheese course.

After I said good-bye to Nathalie, I was overcome by sadness. I was leaving. She was going to live at the ranch.

I told Mark about my dinner with Nathalie. He said it was a cruel thing to do to a friend. People weren’t literary characters for me to move around. Why was I pushing someone I cared for into a relationship with someone with whom I had almost lost my life, or wanted to, at least? Why did I think she would be happy with Jim when I had been so miserable?

“She’s tougher than I am. She’s a mother. Maybe she’ll figure out how to make it work.”

By leaving Jim the apartment, by putting Nathalie in my place, I was giving him the chance to have the ranch without me. He could still make the school happen if he wanted to, I said. The last few months didn’t have to be fatal to his dream.

I didn’t have to feel guilty about falling out of love and wanting what I couldn’t have with him.

N
ATHALIE AND
I
MET AT
a Vietnamese restaurant near my hotel.

“What happened?”

“He doesn’t remember anything. He has a fractured skull and broken ribs. He has to lie completely still for ten days. Then there will be three days of observation.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“He doesn’t want you to come to the hospital.”

“Why? He’s been writing me endless letters.”

“You know how he is.”

I wasn’t sure how far to go in telling Nathalie what I had learned about Jim. “You know how he is” meant she already understood the bargain she had struck.

“So you stay with Jim,” I said finally over jasmine tea, “and have
another child.” Nathalie smiled but looked sad. I knew she was wondering whether I had regrets about not having had a child with Jim, and about the life in Paris I was giving up.

“Do you think you’ll like the teaching job in New York?” she asked, almost politely.

“No, I’m sure I’ll hate it, but at least I’ll be busy.”

“Busy is better than Valium.” Nathalie smiled again. It was one of her best lines.

J
IM LOOKED FRAGILE UNDER THE
white bandage that swathed his square head.

“I told Nathalie I didn’t want to see you,” he said angrily. Nathalie and I exchanged glances. You know how he is.

“There isn’t any money, you know. I owe everybody.”

Jim closed his eyes. I thought he might have gone to sleep.

“I brought you a book,” I said, finally.

“What?” he asked, his voice flat.

“A Spaniard in the Works
. John Lennon’s second book. I saw it in the window of Shakespeare and Company. I don’t think you have it.”

“Nathalie doesn’t know anything about books,” Jim said.

“She’ll learn,” I said, holding on to the last shreds of conjugal complicity between us.

Jim had closed his eyes again. Nathalie pulled the curtains around his bed. I felt grateful to her for being there, in the place I had vacated, without ever fully knowing why.

She walked me slowly to the door of the hospital room and we kissed good-bye for the last time as friends.

I left Paris for New York the next day.

A
T THE END OF
B
REATHLESS
, when Jean-Paul Belmondo lies dying on his back in the street, he looks up at Jean Seberg, who has betrayed him. “Dégueulasse,” he says as life drains out of him.

“Dégueulasse,” she queries the policeman watching the scene,
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, dégueulasse?” The policeman says the word means she is “disgusting.”

When I first saw the film with David in New York, I was proud of having a better vocabulary in French than Jean Seberg. I knew what Belmondo meant without the subtitles.

When I walked away from Jim in the hospital, I couldn’t help feeling that the word now described me.

Paris in New York

I
WAS BACK IN
N
EW
York for good, sharing an apartment on the Upper East Side with a stranger—Karina Heath, a girl my age who needed a roommate—and teaching French at a high school in an expensive part of Westchester. Karina resembled the neighborhood women in style, if not income: blue blazer and Gucci loafers (also blue), Black Watch plaid, pleated skirt. She deftly tied an Hermès scarf over her straight, streaky blonde hair every morning on her way to work in a large mid-town travel agency, buoyed by that inimitable air of WASP sublime that only her bad English boyfriend could dent. Kevin had commitment issues. He also smoked in the shower.

The rent-controlled apartment at 4 East 74th Street had been home to a succession of young hopefuls who had come to Manhattan to find work, while also dreaming, like the career girls in Rona Jaffe’s
The Best of Everything
, of finding love. The layout of the miniature two-bedroom apartment on the top floor was perfect for sharing. You entered directly
into a long hallway. The kitchen, barely the size of a closet (which it originally was), was off to the right, followed by the bathroom, and then, an unexpected European touch, a separate toilet. At the end of the hallway was the living room (which was also the dining room), and through it, Karina’s bedroom. Just opposite the kitchen was my minuscule bedroom. Its windows were covered with iron gates and heavy drapes because they faced onto the narrow terrace of a duplex apartment occupied by an heir (tall, WASP, and blond like Karina) to a family fortune (the grandparents had created a famous brand of mattress) comparable to that of the Stetsons, for whom the limestone townhouse had been designed at the turn of the century. At 3
AM,
his guests smoked and laughed on the terrace outside my window.

I lived in my sunless room like a solitary cave dweller.

When I returned to America in the fall of 1967, I resembled a work in progress, I thought on my better days, trying to emphasize the forward motion. But I had spent more of my so-called adult life in Paris than in New York and I was still attached to Paris by loose ends that I could neither tie up nor sever. I might have changed continents, but Paris kept arriving by mail.

In late September, I received a letter from Dr. Hirsch, my gynecologist. When I said good-bye to him in Paris, he told me that he might be spending a few days in New York for a medical convention. “It would give me pleasure (if it is shared),” he wrote in the elegant handwriting I recognized from my prescriptions, “in having dinner with you, or at least to meet, if you are free.” The caveat of reciprocity embedded in the parentheses was endearingly humble, considering the fact that the man was a doctor and French. I appreciated the courtesy, even though I assumed that once I said yes to dinner, he would expect me to go to his room afterward and share that pleasure too.

I dialed the Americana Hotel and left a message with the operator saying I would meet Dr. Hirsch at the restaurant in the hotel lobby the following evening. I could hear the nervousness in my voice. I was relieved to have missed him. As soon as I put the receiver down, I wanted to pick it up again to cancel. I was flattered by the invitation and curious about the man who was, after all, a pioneer in the medical
world, but what, really, was I going to find out? How many more experiments did I need to convince myself that I was—what was I? Attractive? Or was I just available? There was still time to take it back. There was always coffee.

That June in Provence I read an Aldous Huxley novel Jim had sent me from Paris. I wasn’t sure why—he always had a didactic reason for his literary recommendations—but I had noted down a quotation from the main character’s diary in my own. “Like all other human beings, I know what I ought to do, but continue to do what I know I oughtn’t to do.” I had trouble not doing what I knew I shouldn’t do. But how could I be sure I didn’t want to without trying? That reasoning wouldn’t wash with Dr. Mendelsohn, but for the time being, I was still gathering experience to submit for inspection.

I hadn’t committed to change, only to thinking about what should change.

At dinner, the conversation languished between courses. The doctor had seemed more alluring when we tried to talk past the awkwardness imposed by the probe of the latex-gloved hand. An office visit, unlike dinner, was a matter of carefully calculated minutes of attention. Maybe you couldn’t eliminate the stirrups and the speculum at the heart of the relationship. By the time the waiter arrived with the check, we were eating in silence. The doctor cleared his throat and pushed his half-eaten dessert to the side. I lit a cigarette and waited warily, wondering how he’d make his next move. He picked up the check as well as my hand across the table.

“Chère amie,” he finally said, gazing into my eyes, “I have a wonderful view of the city from my room.” It wasn’t as if I imagined Dr. Hirsch (as I continued to think of him, even though he had asked me to call him Pierre) wanted to discuss the results of my fertility tests in depth.

“You know it’s late.” Why couldn’t I have left his letter unanswered? “I leave for work very early in the morning.” Dr. Hirsch frowned the way he did in the office when he palpated something unexpected with his long fingers.

“I suppose I could come up just for a minute,” I said, resigned to the evening’s inevitable denouement, which would also entail admitting that
I seemed to have developed an infection over the summer. I knew the appropriate vocabulary, but when I imagined the balloon dialogue over my head, those words did not fit the space. I let the doctor usher me into the elevator.

The view of Manhattan skyscrapers at night from the thirty-second floor of the Americana Hotel resembled the romantic skyline of movie trailers. After contemplating the spectacle of the bright city lights from the window for a while, honoring the fiction of the view, we sat down on the bed. Without speaking, the doctor pushed me gently back on the bedspread and moved to kiss me. I loosened his tie and opened his shirt at the collar. His chest was surprisingly smooth. All his hair seemed concentrated in his very thick mustache. As Dr. Hirsch stretched out next to me, his long legs dangling over the edge of the mattress, I speculated about how old he was, what he liked to do, but most of all, when, despite the familiar throb of curiosity our proximity had produced, I was going to come clean.

He laughed when I told him, though I could hear a slight choke of irritation in his voice. “That happens a lot with women on the pill,” he said in doctor mode, “especially in hot weather.” Even so, he gallantly slipped his hand under my skirt and caressed me expertly, professionally, I thought later, worthy of a gynecologist. I gestured toward returning the favor, remembering what he had said about shared pleasure. “Another time,” he said gently, both of us knowing the moment had passed, and put the cab fare in my hand. I forgot to ask him about my test results.

Dr. Hirsch was the first man I had been to bed with since the fiasco with Mark. This was a fiasco in its own right, of course, and “bed” a figure of speech, but I was relieved that I could still
plaire
—that irregular verb whose meaning I had finally understood: the turn-on minus love, and sometimes even affection. I had also begun to understand
that plaire
would take me only so far on the map of tenderness, certainly not to a place of happiness.

1968

I
N
F
EBRUARY, RIGHT BEFORE MY
birthday, I applied to graduate school at Columbia, in part because more school was always my remedy for despair, and in part because Dominique, sending New Year’s wishes from Paris and bored with my installments of epistolary misery, had challenged me: Why Mark (who had entered a PhD program already) and not you? she wanted to know. I had always thought the PhD was a boyfriend affair: David would get a doctorate. I could marry one. Why not be like Dominique instead, free and independent, with an apartment of my own? Dominique didn’t offer herself as a model, of course, but the example of her career helped me see past the door I had closed out of fear. True, most of the professors at the university were men, but not all. She taught American literature at the university in France. I could live Dominique’s life in reverse.

I was already enamored of her perfume and her perfectly tied scarves.

As I fanned out the documents on the bed, I felt crushed by the disparity between the girl on paper and the other me gathering evidence. Viewed through the categories of a curriculum vitae, the last six years looked like an almost uninterrupted stream of academic accomplishment. I had gathered the names of well-known professors willing to write enthusiastic letters of recommendation from France. I could even list the book with Couderc as a future publication (no one needed to know how unlikely that actually was). But if she was something (serial degrees), I was nothing (serial men).

I was an ex-heroine with an ex-husband, a girl without a plot. My list of boyfriends, lovers, and even husband was the narrative of my sentimental education in France, abruptly brought to an unhappy ending.

On the last Sunday in March, I was sitting on the floor of my room polishing my shoes for school, watching television and drinking vodka. Sunday nights were always the hardest, even with the vodka-Valium cocktail I had perfected, a numbing balanced out by the jolt of Ritalin in the morning. I loved my little nine-inch black-and-white Zenith, the first television set I had ever owned. Television, I quickly discovered, was the perfect partner, the ideal companion for the weekend nights alone, when my roommate Karina went to Vermont with her boyfriend, and the apartment filled with her absence. Suddenly, Lyndon Johnson appeared on the small screen. In his address to the nation, Johnson sorrowfully declared that he would not be the Democratic Party candidate for president in the fall elections. He announced a pause in the American bombing of Vietnam. Johnson’s sense of personal failure looked like a turning point in the story of the war that until now the administration had presented as almost won. I imagined the crowing of French intellectuals, the headlines in
Le Monde
, as if the casualties of the American quagmire erased the memory of France’s own bloody battles in Indochina.