Breathless (3 page)

The Foyer cast itself as the custodian of our virtue, the guardian of future wives and mothers. Madame Carnot, the cleaning woman, shared the Foyer’s mission. One morning she knocked at the door at 7:30 while we were sitting on our beds, facing each other in our long flannel nightgowns. Monique opened the door, cigarette in hand.

Plunging her hands into the pockets of her smock, as she looked past Monique at the books and papers strewn across the floor, Madame Carnot threatened to report us to Madame la Directrice for bad conduct. She shook her head gravely to emphasize her point, and adjusted the little gray scarf she always wore to protect her hair.

I conjured up Jane Eyre’s little friend Helen Burns wearing the sign for “slattern” in punishment for her untidy room.

“We are trying to form
femmes d’intérieur,”
Madame Carnot added, unembarrassed by her identification with the
directrice
, who would have shuddered to share the pronoun.
Femmes d’intérieur
was one of those expressions that sounded better in French, more glamorous and seductive, but wasn’t when you thought about it. We didn’t want to be perfect housewives.

“Merci, madame.” Monique shut the door, thanking the cleaning woman for the warning.

We didn’t want to stay home and receive our husbands’ guests. We wanted to read books during the day and go out every night. We wanted to have orgasms when we had sex. We didn’t share that desire with Madame Carnot, of course. We barely admitted it to ourselves. But that was the only way in which either of us wanted to be women of the interior.

Nice Girls Don’t Whistle

S
TUDENTS LIKE ME WHO WERE
working toward a master’s degree with the Middlebury program were required to attend a year of weekly lectures at the Sorbonne on
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. The lectures on the novel were meant to provide the background for the
mémoire
, the research essay that was the cornerstone of the master’s degree. We were expected to submit the outline (
le plan)
for the essay to a tutor early in the semester before starting to write. Unlike the American system in which you discovered what you thought while writing, feeling your way to an idea, in France you were expected to think first. I wasn’t used to this.

I had been assigned a tutor who lived on the rue Lanneau, one of those dark streets behind the Pantheon, a short walk from the Foyer. We were encouraged to meet with our tutors once a week for two hours. Normally, those meetings took place during the day in the school offices at Montparnasse, but I had canceled my appointments for weeks because I couldn’t find a topic, let alone write an outline. Finally, I was running out
of time, and one day, as a special favor, my tutor, Monsieur Petitot, told me to come to his apartment after dinner to discuss the situation. We sat at the long oak table in his living room that served as a desk. Monsieur Petitot looked to be in his thirties, I thought, or maybe older, judging by his receding hairline and his gold-rimmed glasses. When he lit his pipe, I reached for my pack of Disque Bleu filtre and my notebook.

“So, mademoiselle,” he began, still puffing on his pipe, “the outline?” I took a deep drag on my cigarette.

“That’s the problem, monsieur. I don’t have one.”

The tutor frowned and played with his pipe. I noticed that his bottom teeth were turning brown at the top edges from the tobacco. I revised my estimate of his age. He must be pushing forty.

“Do you have a topic, at least?”

I said I was thinking about the women in the novel.

“Women aren’t a topic.”

I explained my idea that each of the three women characters is betrayed by the images others have of them and that they each have of themselves. I wasn’t sure you could combine existentialism (that I more or less remembered from summer school) with libertinism (a big subject in the Laclos course), but the tutor nodded imperceptibly and told me to write it down.

As I fleshed out a proposal at the table, asking for approval at each stage before committing it to paper, Monsieur Petitot rose from his chair and walked around the room, pulling books off the shelves of his glass-enclosed bookcases and flipping through the pages, culling references for me as I scribbled. I could feel myself flying off on my own now, speeding, enthralled, dazzled by my insights. As I sat at the table bent over my notebook, I sensed the tutor’s presence close to me. Monsieur Petitot came up quietly behind my chair, swiftly opened the first two buttons of my blouse, and cupped my left breast in his hand. I was still holding my pen. It was as if the tutor had taken me for Cécile, the ingénue in the novel, the girl who wore her feelings on her skin, the girl that all the characters manipulated with sickening ease. I was not as dumb as Cécile, but Monsieur Petitot was my teacher, and my whole plan for the future (not just
le plan)
depended on finishing my degree.
What was worse, saying no or saying yes? The hand circled slowly, cleverly inside my bra. I removed the hand.

“Oh, monsieur,” I sighed, meaningfully, I hoped. “I have so many ennuis right now . . . I . . .” I trailed off, hoping the “now” would do the temporizing for me, afraid to anger the tutor with a no. He slowly removed his hand and squeezed my shoulder. I tilted my head toward the hand in a gesture of mute sympathy, as if I shared his regret. Monsieur Petitot showed me to the door, handing me my notebook and my copy of the novel. We shook hands politely and I promised to send him a draft in two weeks. When he closed the door behind me, I raced down the stairs and back to the Foyer.

Immediately inside the lobby of the Foyer was a desk with a switchboard and a sullen receptionist, who took messages and a dim view of the girls living there. I crossed the lobby floor to the staircase, whistling under my breath, jubilant with relief. I had a topic for my essay, and I had avoided sleeping with the tutor. The receptionist called me over before I could climb the stairs. “Mademoiselle.” I approached the counter with a smile. “Mademoiselle, les jeunes filles ne sifflent pas.” Nice girls don’t whistle? Smoking in the street, I had already learned, was a
jeune fille
taboo. Not whistling was a new addition to my education.

Monique didn’t think Monsieur Petitot would give me a bad grade, but I had read enough books to know that stories of girls who sleep with their tutors usually didn’t end well.

Belmondo’s Nose

D
OWN ONE FLIGHT OF STAIRS
from the Foyer lobby was a restaurant open to all students, male and female—provided you had the
carte d’étudiant
, the precious student card that was our passport to the discounted life. Everyone complained about the food, of course, especially the gristly bits of stew that reminded us why the French were so devoted to sauces; we covered everything with mustard and washed it down with milk. But we were always hungry. Some afternoons, too ravenous to wait for dinner, Monique and I would head for a
salon de thé
not far from the Foyer to fill up on our favorite snack, a
vol-au-vent
. If we loved the way the heavy cream and mushrooms drenched the pastry shell, we loved as much being women on our own in a tearoom.
Parisiennes
, not just nice Jewish girls, as we had discovered in our first serious conversation at the Foyer. Women of the world, talking about men.

I had been invited to dinner a few times, as Philippe had said I would. I met Anne and several of their friends. Philippe would always
kiss me good-bye at the door, pull me tight, say he’d be in touch, and ask to be remembered to my parents. But after a few weeks of silence, I realized that I must have turned out to be a
passade
.

“I think he prefers playing tennis with my mother to sleeping with me.”

“Forget Philippe,” Monique said, lighting a cigarette. Monique did not approve of affairs with married men, but she knew it was part of my libertine fantasy.

T
HREE LARGE BLACK MOTORCYCLES WERE
often parked out in front of the Foyer at mealtimes. They belonged, we discovered, to three Americans who wore heavy black leather jackets and leather pants that hugged their legs. Everyone eyed the group as they ambled back to their bikes after lunch. After a couple of deep tokes on what looked more like dope than cigarettes, they would roar off down the boulevard Saint-Michel, weaving between the trucks and buses, never looking back at their little crowd of admirers still gathered on the pavement.

Early one afternoon, lured into the street by the unexpected warmth of Indian summer in late October, Monique and I stood outside the Foyer door, debating about taking a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens instead of going back upstairs to study in our room. One of the trio came over to us and asked me for a light—in English.

“Only if you take us for a ride,” I said.

From certain angles, I thought, Leopold Gold (Leo, as he later told me to call him) resembled Jean-Paul Belmondo, especially the pouty fullness of his lips under a boxer’s flattened, broken nose (Belmondo’s, not Leo’s, though it created the same impression). Leo’s body was slender, and like Belmondo’s radiated impatience. The hair, however, definitely was not French. The tight wave in the front said New York. I had spent years trying to eliminate the tribal kink from my own. It always came back, a rigid canopy over the forehead instead of a sexy, rebellious lock.

I climbed onto the hard leather seat behind Leo, Monique behind me. He headed down Saint-Michel, turning left on Saint-Germain,
crossing the Seine to come out on Place de la Concorde, and then running up the Champs-Élysées to the Place de l’Étoile. Leo had taken us the tourist route to Paris’s ultimate traffic jam, whose center was the Arc de Triomphe. Cars streamed into the circle at the center from the twelve streets that fed into the roundabout like the spokes of a wheel.

He turned to mouth “Dig this!” over the roar of traffic as he wove in and out, leaning into the turns. I clung to his waist; Monique squeezed mine. My contact lenses were burning from the dust of the hot afternoon. I knew my eyes were red. As we circled for the third time, a policeman hailed us. Leo pulled over and stopped the bike, his hands still on the handlebars, his heavy black boots lightly grazing the pavement. He looked up at the policeman with tiny pupils—the gaze of stoned, periwinkle innocence. “Deux, oui, trois, non,” the officer began, glaring at the three of us. Faced with our smiling, blank faces, he kept repeating, “Deux, oui, trois, non!” gesticulating with his fingers to make the point, nodding and shaking his head for emphasis. It wasn’t hard to catch his drift: according to the law two could ride on one bike, not three. We threw up our hands and chorused in English that we didn’t understand what he was saying. Finally, the policeman waved us on in disgust, muttering about
les américains
. It pained me to pretend I didn’t understand French, but better to be taken for ignorant American tourists who couldn’t speak the language than have to produce our papers—all of us foreigners who could be thrown out anytime. The fear was real, even if Americans weren’t among the most undesirable foreigners around.

“I think we can take the metro back,” I said, when Leo started up the bike again. “It’s only one change of trains.” I would have been happy to change trains twice rather than mount his stallion, as he had referred to the bike with a straight face before taking off.

“As you like it, baby,” Leo said, playing Belmondo to my Seberg.

Monique and I headed down the avenue, arm in arm, the picture, we hoped, of nonchalance, still trembling from the ride.

“I wonder if we’ll see him again.” Monique didn’t answer. I knew she was thinking about Leo’s friend, the blond biker.

“Do you want to?”

“I’m not sure.” Something had happened on the ride, as though the danger had jump-started a relationship that suddenly felt sexual. Maybe it was just the enforced proximity, my breasts pressed against the back of a stranger.

It was November before we saw the bikes again. The weather had turned cold, and I remembered that Leo had talked about going to Italy before the days started shrinking into darkness. I was surprised that he hadn’t already left town. When I went downstairs to the restaurant, I realized that I was looking forward to seeing him.

“Ça va?” Leo tapped me on the shoulder at the serving counter, as though we were picking up a lost thread. He pulled a tray off the top of the pile and put it down next to mine. I noted that Leo didn’t seem to feel the need to explain his absence.

“So you live in the Foyer?” We had exchanged very few words on the bike. I nodded.

“And you?”

“Rue Monsieur le Prince,” Leo said, smiling at the woman behind the counter, who piled up the meat and potatoes on his plate until they formed a small mountain.

“The Stella?” Monique’s cousin also had a room there.

“I stayed at the Beat Hotel when I first came to Paris.” I admired the almost seamless way he had worked the reference into the story. “But I never got to meet Kerouac.”

I couldn’t bring myself to admit I hadn’t liked
On the Road
. It was such an American book, I thought, and all about guys in cars looking for their fathers. Still, Jack Kerouac was hip. That much I knew.

“Ginsberg and Corso were around when I was, though,” he added, naming the Beat poets without their first names, as if I’d know. I nodded again.

“So what about dinner sometime?” Leo asked, as we separated at the end of the cafeteria line. “I’m going to Italy at the end of the month. I can’t take the weather here. It’s so fucking depressing.” Leo was the first person I had met who placed “fucking” into a sentence as though it were a normal adjective. “How about Chez Ali?”

I had been to Chez Ali with Monique many times. One of her cousins knew the owner, who came from their town in Tunisia. The restaurant was a ten-minute walk from the Foyer.

W
HILE
L
EO AND
I
WERE
waiting to be served, I played with the curtains at the window next to our table, draping a linen panel over one side of my face.