Extraordinary Theory of Objects (8 page)

Paris

Sometime around 2010

I have a funny relationship with Paris taxi drivers. We either instantly bond because they recognize I speak French with a native accent, or we get in terrible fights. The latter happened when I told the driver to take me to rue du Mont-Thabor and he thought I had said rue de Montalembert. When we arrived at the wrong destination, I asked him to please take me to the right spot. I explained that he had misunderstood the address. He shook his head and refused to move the car. I told him I'd pay whatever he wanted. He told me it was out of principle and that I should get out and walk. I sat in the car for half an hour and he still refused to drive me, which left me no choice but to call another taxi. I waited for the second taxi to arrive while sitting in the first.

I decided it was best to call a driver for the following day of appointments and shows. Paris was harder to navigate with the traffic of everyone in town for the fashion collections. I too had come for this reason. Vanya was the name of the driver. He spoke with a thick Russian accent. I knew I'd understand his French better than his English. From the start, he had his own assumptions about me.

“You are from New York?” he asked as soon as I settled in the backseat. “So you know De Niro?”

“Robert De Niro?”

“Yes, yes.”

“No, not really.”

“I was in a film with him once. I am an actor, also high security.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was shot three times once. I used to be in charge of the security surrounding the Eiffel Tower.”

“That's a big job.”

“Yeah, I know. One day a crazy man came with a gun and was threatening everyone, so we had a standoff. It happened at the southwest leg of the tower. He was about to shoot and I slid on the ground and grabbed his leg and then knocked his gun out of his hand.”

“Oh my goodness.”

“I then went to be bodyguard for movie stars, which is how I know De Niro. I worked on many movie sets. You know that guy who plays Bond?”

“Pierce Brosnan?” He shook his head. “Daniel Craig.” He nodded.

“I was in that movie, they said they liked the way I looked and I played a bodyguard.”

I giggled a little in response.

“What do you do?”

“I work in fashion.”

“Are you a model?”

“No, a writer.” He looked disappointed.

“You know Kate Moss?”

“Not really.” He looked even more disappointed. “You have a boyfriend?”

I nodded.

“What does he do?”

“Oh, um, finance and a little film.”

He got very excited. “He is film producer? Here, take my picture with your iPhone. Wait, actually give me your e-mail.”

“Okay,” I said. He handed me one of his cards and a pen, and I wrote down my e-mail.

“I will e-mail you my headshot and you give to your boyfriend and he can help give to casting agent. You know I play taxi driver in Julie Delpy's film. They like my look also for these tough spy movies.” We were driving down the Champs-Élysées, past the theaters toward the Hôtel de Crillon and the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. “We need to take a detour,” he said.

“Why?”

“Too much traffic this way, trust me.”

We drove down a few streets and stopped across from a line of people winding around the corner of a lovely stone building.

“What's that?” I asked.

“French people are curious. They like to see people they think are intelligent do stupid things.” I realized he was referring to Jacques Chirac, who was awaiting trial. The bystanders looked like Eddie Vedder groupies waiting for Pearl Jam tickets.

“You aren't like this in America,” he said.

I shook my head and stared out the window as the top of the
obelisk
*
on the Place de la Concorde came into sight. “We are almost there,” Vanya said. “Will you need me tomorrow?” he asked.

“No, thank you. I have something else to do.”

*    *    *

The following morning I called a cab to take me to Le Vésinet. I had intended to take the RER train, but it looked as though it would rain and Vanya was likely already dispatched.

“Rue Ampère, please,” I said to the cabdriver as I got inside. “Le Vésinet. . . . Actually, can you take me to Les Ibis, instead, near the Palais Rose?”

“Okay,” he said in English, completely uninterested in me. I fell asleep on our way.

“Mademoiselle, we are here,” he said. I looked out the window and saw the rue Diderot
street sign
*
before offering my credit card. “Have a nice time. I hope you get through on the other side.” Perhaps he'd meant something else but hadn't known the proper English equivalent. I stepped out of the car onto the path to the Palais Rose's gold and black gates on the corner of Allée des Fêtes.

I didn't need to go any closer to the mansion. There was no longer someone looking at me through the window, and the swans had gone elsewhere. I knew the architecture by heart. So many times I'd lain awake alone in bed and imagined one of the Marchesa Casati's absurd theme parties playing out on the sprawling lawn covered in carpet and black candles. She used to have illuminated signs set up all the way from the bridge over the Seine to the Palais Rose to guide her guests. This was the same path she would take in her blue Rolls-Royce when she grew bored of Le Vésinet, which was often, and decided to go on treasure hunts for amusement. Her friend, photographer and diarist Cecil Beaton, recounted a story of the marchesa deciding she wanted to find an object in a certain shade of orange to relieve her boredom. My father would have liked this game but would have been unable to see it as evidence of the isolation of living in Le Vésinet. The marchesa is now long gone, relegated to bizarre, lost stories, much like my childhood.

As I walked away from the palace, I noticed there were four mushrooms clustered together at the edge of the road. I knew better than to try to pick one. I remembered how after our visit to the museum of natural history, my father never forced our agreement that I throw away the mushroom. It had stayed in my collection until we moved back to the States. Its shriveled little body was then lost somewhere along the way. My other objects and collections still existed, though they'd started to morph to represent real, critical, connected themes rather than random things. People were no longer classified like the deities of Greek mythology, or the tidy trays of insects at Deyrolle. I'd kept all the objects because they were evidence of the beauty in the unusual, not as empty souvenirs of France. I thought about meeting Will and laughing at all his jokes, thinking they were original material until someone said they were from
Seinfeld
. I'd missed that moment in American television culture, just as I'd missed growing in the States in favor of deceased women and lucky charms.

*    *    *

I was worried that I wouldn't know how to get back to our old house. I'd taken the walk so many times, though at night and so long ago.

“Excuse me, is this the way to rue Ampère?” I asked a man walking by.

He shook his head and pointed in the other direction. I didn't listen and walked past a green painted gate and a roundabout before taking two lefts and then a right. There it was: rue Ampère and a few meters down, our house. There was someone standing in the window of the upstairs bathroom. I stood there in the middle of the street and started to cry.

New York

Sometime in 2011

“I'm still the same,” I said to my mother. We were sitting on a bench in Central Park. She took a drink from the paper coffee cup in her left hand as she watched a little boy run by. My mother had done everything to give Zach and me an upbringing unlike her own. Forced to be independent as a child, she wanted us to be able to rely on her. She'd come to visit me in Manhattan that afternoon, sensing I was relapsing into my old ways, to try to protect me from real complications, not the angsty delusions of Le Vésinet.

My mother put down the cup.

“You're selfish, Stephie, you don't think of how your actions affect others. I stopped sleeping that last year in France and I'd never had insomnia before.”

“I know. I'm sorry. It all exploded on me last week. I'm sorry I haven't been to visit you. I thought the sooner I got away from what reminded me of France, I'd be cured. Only the opposite occurred. New people came into my life and I treated them like old friends, because I had none.”

“People aren't going to understand your eagerness. It's okay to be alone and patient. You have to trust.”

“Trust what?” I asked.

“Things.”

She lifted her coffee cup and pointed at a young boy carrying a
sailboat
*
and a long stick to push it through the pond. “He reminds me of your brother. Do you remember he used to sail boats in the bidet whenever we wouldn't take him to Les Ibis?”

“Yes.”

“Have you talked to him recently?”

“No.”

“He's been spending much of his time with Blake restoring that old sailboat up at the house in Cape Cod.” I had one real friend in college, and she and my brother had fallen in love. It was during a late-night conversation at university that Blake shared with me her own parallel childhood: her father was an oil executive and her family moved around the world from Texas to England, where a young Diana Spencer was her nanny, then to Jakarta in Indonesia. Years later she would know me so well, well enough to tell me, “You're a beacon for crazy people.” I told her I wouldn't want it any other way, and she agreed, laughing. Blake and my brother had found each other because she too obviously had a taste for the gentle and borderline insane.

“Zach loved boats even when we were little.”

“He still does, but they're real now.”