Extraordinary Theory of Objects (7 page)

New York

Fall 2009

I hadn't seen Jake since years ago, when we had met at the Guggenheim before going away to college. I remember only one scene from the encounter: spinning around the museum's spiraling staircase with our arms spread like wings. When we reached the ground floor, we ran out as fast as we could before anyone could have a word with us about our behavior. I don't recall talking about France, because I don't think we really did. I remember just twirling with abandon. He had been the only one to understand my kind of crazy. I wouldn't see him again for five years.

*    *    *

Our second meeting was in Manhattan at the Odeon restaurant. Jake looked the same as he had in France, though a little taller, a little more handsome, but the same sandy hair and flashing eyes. Except more than ten years of maturity had lent him the calm that had eluded us both back then. He seemed at ease with himself and happy with his work in filmmaking. I couldn't understand why I hadn't appreciated his attention as much as I should have when we were young, which meant I'd grown up as well. Instead of fixating romantically on Raees, I should have accepted and cultivated my friendship with Jake—that's really all it was. Raees was no longer tall and he was an art dealer, having left behind dreams of working in cinema.

“If you'd have asked me then what you'd end up, I thought you'd be a hippie, a free spirit poet,” Jake said as he picked apart a piece of bread. “You were like a flower child obsessed with
butterflies
*
—you had this really funny handwriting and drew insects on everything. You had a very beautiful spirit. You were strange, but it didn't really bother me. I thought it was endearing. You weren't like the other girls, and they definitely didn't like you.” He laughed. “Sorry. You know what I mean. It seems as though you're doing well now.”

“Thank you.”

“How's your family?” he asked.

“Fine. I don't see them very often. My brother loves the outdoors and spends much of his time working in Vermont or Colorado.”

“What does he do?”

“Disaster relief–something, or so he says. I think he actually works with my father,” I said.

“I remember your father did something strange?”

“He says it was ‘international business,' ‘consulting,' IBM, maybe. I think Sophie's dad said the same thing. They both went to work in La Défense at this building you had to enter through
Star Wars
–like capsules.”

“I bet he was a spy, like Raees's mom.” Jake had sensed my childhood hunch about my father's profession without my ever explaining any details to him. “She once told us she worked for the Dutch National Science Foundation, the DNSF. We were like ‘What the fuck's the DNSF?' Whenever we hung out at Raees's place it was always a little freaky. There were these Russian icons with gold-lined eyes. I think they were painted in some sort of wax technique. Raees's mom always warned us about smoking around them. I swear, one started to melt once when he lit a cigarette too close. Freaky. We thought maybe we could sell a couple on the black market,” Jake said, laughing. “Whenever we went out she'd warn us to ‘Watch out for wild women.' Everyone's parents were interesting. Do you remember when I didn't come to school for a little while?”

“Yeah, I never knew what happened. No one seemed to know. You just reappeared one day. I remember the teachers whispering. Considering you were my boyfriend, I thought you'd share if you wanted me to know.”

Jake laughed.

“My mom woke me up one morning and said we were going away and I couldn't tell anyone. We were going to take the train to find my dad in Nice. He'd gotten a call from the CRS. They were like a special branch of the French government like the FBI.

“They'd told him, ‘You need to get out of Paris for a while.' They'd intercepted a threat to an American executive at an American bank. ‘We will let you know when you can return. Go as far away as you can, but stay in France and check into the hotel under a different name. We'll find you and contact you when it's safe to come back.'

“So, we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in Nice.”

“Wasn't that bizarre?”

“I don't know; it was normal. We were there with other kids too. They had thought my father was the most at risk, as he worked for United Bank of America. I guess if you were a terrorist you'd choose that over Chase? Anyway, after ten days passed, we received a call.

“ ‘The threat has been neutralized' was all they said.”

“That's so crazy. My father was gone most of the time. My only vivid memories from back then are of what happened when he would come home. I forget almost everything that happened after I lost it.”

“Lost it?” Jake asked.

“Yeah, I was severely depressed about a year before we moved back to the States. My mother found this American doctor in Paris that I used to see each week. I didn't let anyone help me until I decided to get better on my own. My recovery was faked when we returned to New York after my father's assignment. I tried to be normal, all-American: played lacrosse, dated football players, wore jeans. No one bought it, least of all myself. Every time I try too hard it falls flat. I had to finally accept I was different and figure how to get through the world alone this way. There was no cure. I never actually got better.”

“To be honest, I had no idea.”

“No?” I asked.

“It's true. Like I said before, you were this beautiful spirit. What may be off is your point of view. Most of us were alone a lot. I got a lot of teenage stuff out of my system over there. We had so much freedom. Raees and I would just go out and get wasted. We drank and smoked, and then when I moved back, there wasn't any desire for any of that partying anymore. By the time I got to prep school, it was like I had done all that stuff. We'd all grown up alone and so fast.”

South of France

Sometime around 2010

Will was lying with his book on the bed, his back to me and my back to the Mediterranean Sea.

“Where are you going?” he asked, feeling me lift off the bed and toward the door.

“To walk around.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No.”

We had arrived an hour ago from the Nice airport. I knew I would become restless in the hotel room. From the moment we landed, I felt uneasy. There had never been a Will when I had been living in France over ten years ago, and it felt strange to have his comfort in a place I had only known alone. Still, it wasn't Paris. I wasn't prepared for that yet.

I had nearly gagged when we arrived at the airport, on the walk down the clinical white border to customs. Neither Will nor I said a word. There was a small queue, because of a dirty-looking man holding up progress. A woman in a pressed blue shirt and ill-fitting black pants had unzipped his suitcase to find a disgusting pile of rotting black
pods
*
that reminded me of the ones I had collected when I was young, as they fell off the trees with the change of seasons. She was lifting them up one by one with a silver caliper. Another agent was ushering people along. I couldn't help but stare backward, causing my duffel bag to fall off my shoulder. Will picked it up.

“What is that?” I asked, craning my neck. Will was carrying all of our luggage.

“I don't know, but they don't want it in France. And I don't blame them,” he said. I imagined someone must have once said the same of me. Even though Will and I had been together for a few years, I was still afraid to explain to him in particular what had happened when I was thirteen. Everyone knows these sorts of conditions never fully go away. I'd presented my childhood as full of whimsy and mystery rather than sadness, so much so that I'd started to believe this version as well.

We found our way quickly to the car that would take us on to Monaco. I had a special love for the tiny country, and it hadn't escaped me that once we arrived, we'd no longer technically be in France. Some of my best memories of my grandparents weren't memories at all, rather imagined scenes pieced together from photographs and stories. A bon vivant, my grandfather was a Sinatra-singing businessman and actor who loved to take my grandmother away from Massachusetts to Monte Carlo. During the evenings, she'd dress up in a long Yves Saint Laurent skirt and blouse, according to pictures, and smoke, always with her gold bangles, one for every child, on her right arm (I wear them now; my mother gave the five to me when I was in college) and a long, brown plait of hair down her back. She was a beauty, and he was a charmer who liked to sing songs from Old Blue Eyes in the kitchen, at parties, or between puffs of a smoke. He once told me about eating dinner next to Grace Kelly on one of their trips to Monaco.

On the wall of my first apartment in New York, I'd hung a picture of my grandfather looking out of a boat with a drink on the rocks in one hand and a cigarette in the other, a windswept American flag behind him. He is wearing a sweater with red-and-blue stripes at the neckline, and his hands are flung upward, against the backdrop of the Mediterranean. On the same wall was another picture, of my mother on the runway of a tiny airport standing next to her younger brother, who was nearly a foot taller than she was. They are about to board a small plane to meet my grandfather and grandmother at their house in Saint Martin. My mother seems a little sad and lonely. This image sometimes reminds me of how ungrateful I'd been growing up. How hard France must have been for my mother too. I think my grandmother's sense of aesthetics and entertaining style influenced my mother. But they didn't talk much.

*    *    *

That night in Monaco, I left the hotel wearing a silk nightgown with Will's coat jacket thrown over it. No one seemed surprised by a woman in a slip dress. Night walks were still my favorite things to do in foreign places—a micro example of France translating into the source of my sensibility—and Will was used to such erratic behavior. I think it intrigued him, along with the story of my childhood. That was one of the side effects of being “different” that I hadn't counted on: it made men curious.

When I was young, I thought that the perfect woman was Hemingway's Lady Brett Ashley. Then I discovered there were some men who liked a little torture translated into madness—and Ashley may not have been so sane after all. “She's crazy” sometimes meant she took every kind of passion too far. Beyond Miller, Casati, and Castaing, I'd recently read about
Nancy Cunard
*
and her rebellion against the aristo-expectations of her English mother. Like Miller, she captivated artistic men. There was also the French-adopted American
Jean Seberg
,
*
once married to diplomat and writer Romain Gary. He divorced the established Lesley Blanch for Seberg, a high-stakes trade winning him a partner with youth and instability. Miller, Casati, Cunard, and Seberg all dealt with depression toward the end of their lives, which meant it'd been hiding all along. I obsessed over their stories, searching for evidence to support the happy ending of my own.

Will once said, “I'll never be bored a day in my life with you.” He'd tried to pass the backhanded compliment off as a joke, but I knew he meant every word. My problems had been behaving themselves as they had when I was very young, though there was always the chance of resurrection. France was the trigger the first time around.

I continued walking, pulling Will's blazer down on my shoulders. It had taken years for me to see the childish selfishness of my behavior and childhood depression, but also the innocence of it. My poor parents had suffered because I'd been sad and spoiled with their love. I often thought about how my mother had to take care of herself as a teenager and how this led to her resilient and optimistic spirit. I hadn't meant to be unappreciative. I never would have believed I would have found someone to love, to take back to France with me. And I had left him alone in a hotel room, our first night away.

There was a café at the end of the path, which was still open. I sat down.

“Can I help you, my butterfly?” the waiter asked, looking up and down the length of my dress.

“A tea, please.”

“Where are you from, you speak such good French?” he said. I felt an odd sensation when he brushed by my arm to pick up the menu.

“New York,” I lied.

“Ah, New York, a little beauty from New York.” He turned away from the table.

When he returned, he was carrying a bright yellow ceramic cup of hot water and a
tea bag
*
with
EARL GREY
written in white letters on a navy blue paper square. “I brought you English tea,” he said, “because you are English girl.” He was confusing ethnicity with language. I shook my head.

“You don't like it?”

“No, I am American,” I said in French, “not English.” I used the word that described someone from England, rather than the tongue.

“Ah, I see. We do not have any American tea.”

“It's okay,” I said lifting the cup. He brought over some milk and sugar.

“You are alone here?”

“No.” I smiled with apologetic eyes and pulled on the lapel of Will's oversize blazer, surprised at my confidence.

I drank my tea in silence, allowing my mind the rare freedom to wander back to Le Vésinet, and then asked for the check.

“It is on me,” he said. I did not refuse him.