Adam's Daughter (31 page)

It had been a tremendous party. He had
sat at his window table at La Tour d’Argent, half-listening to the murmurings of his business associates as he watched a young man below on the quay march through the parade brandishing a dummy’s head on a spike in symbolic memory of the politician Foullon who had been beheaded for saying of the Parisians, “If this riffraff has no bread, they’ll eat hay.”

The man had smiled to himself, thinking about Foullon as he had turned his attention back to dinner. In all his years of coming to Paris, he had learned one truism: You could insult a Frenchman’s wife, his honor, or his country, but you could never question his cuisine.

Which is why the man had kept quiet about the pressed duck he had been treated to by his hosts. After so many rich meals, he had longed for something simpler, like the plain old fish and chips from the shop he frequented on Waterloo Road back in London. But he said nothing. And when the fireworks began, lighting up Notre Dame and eliciting polite oohs and aahs from the restaurant patrons, he found himself looking wistfully down to the people kissing in the street.

Now, at nine in the morning, he was prowling the streets of the Latin Quarter, looking for some place that sold chips.

He turned down rue St-Andres des Arts, a narrow street of shops and galleries, watching the students speed by on scooters. He wasn’t that much older than them yet he felt out of place.

He thought that his discomfort might be caused by his current business deal. It was the first time his father had sent him to handle a deal alone, and though it was a minor business matter the responsibility was a new and strange weight on his shoulders. It wasn’t an unwelcome duty; he had been waiting for years for his father’s trust. But now that he had it, it made him feel suddenly older than his thirty-three years.

The man tucked his newspaper under his arm and walked on. The street opened onto a five-cornered intersection. There were three crowded cafes, and as he approached one he smiled.

There on a table, he saw what he had come for
—- a plate of skinny, greasy frites. They weren’t true chips, but they would do in a pinch.

He found an unoccupied table, but a group of students had appropriated the chairs. He looked around and finally saw a chair at a nearby table whose only occupant was a young red-haired woman. He went over to the table. He noticed the book she was reading, a French translation of Marshall McLuhan’s
Understanding Media
.

"
Mademoiselle, puis-je
?" he asked, gesturing toward the empty chair.

The girl lowered the book, slipped off her sunglasses and looked up at him. He was struck with the clarity of her green eyes, and by the blatantly appraising look she gave him.

“
Oh, faites, m’sieur
,” she said finally, with an elaborate gesture at the chair.

He thanked her and carried the chair back to the empty table. After he had ordered, he glanced at the girl. The
mocking tone in her voice had irritated him. He didn’t particularly like Parisian women. They were all so snippy and so damn self- assured. Even the young ones. And especially the beautiful ones.

He glanced at the girl once more then unfolded his newspaper with a snap.

Across the cafe, Kellen lowered the McLuhan book and, over the top of her sunglasses, stole a glance at the man in the suit. He had buried himself behind a copy of
Le Monde
.

That figures, she thought. He’s probably a fascist attorney, or the head of a Renault plant, or just a petty bureaucrat.

No, he can’t be, she decided. His suit is too good. It’s Savile Row.

She
put her sunglasses back on and stared at him. He was astonishingly handsome, with thick black hair and elegant, even features. She supposed that was why she had been a bit sharp with him. She didn’t care much for men who were too good-looking; they always assumed women were ready to fall at their feet. She watched him, trying to imagine what he did for a living.

Too old for a model, she thought. Too well dressed for an actor. She wondered what nationality he was; his accent hadn’t given her a clue. He didn’t look like a Brit, though that look he gave her was laced with that British irony she found so annoying. Too smooth for an American. Maybe he was French...

The man turned and saw her looking at him. He smiled. She looked away quickly. After a minute, she glanced his way again, but he was absorbed in his newspaper.

Just as well, she thought. The last thing I need right now is another Frenchman complicating my life. She shut her book and picked up her copy of the
Herald-Tribune
, the English-language paper published for Americans abroad. She turned to an inside page and scanned the “People” column. It was fine, just the way she had written it. Kellen folded the paper and put it aside.

She realized suddenly that next month she would celebrate her fifth anniversary working at the Trib and her sixth year living in Paris. The realization made her remember the letter from Stephen that was in her bag. It had arrived yesterday, but she had been in a hurry and had forgotten to read it.

She felt slightly guilty. She had not written to Stephen in more than a month. She pulled out the letter and began to read it. It was short —- his letters were getting shorter every time -— and he talked mainly about the newspaper. He was about to be promoted to managing editor. He signed it in his usual way:
Love always, Stephen
.

It
was strange how far away he seemed, how far away everything about San Francisco seemed. For six years now, Paris had been her home, and she had forged a new life that had nothing to do with the one she had left behind.

But that was the way she wanted it. She had come to Paris at first as an escape, a way to put some distance between herself and her father after the ugly scene at her birthday party. After the party, she had told no one of her plans, not even Stephen. A week later, she simply got on a plane and left.

She had called Stephen from New York. He was upset and said he didn’t understand why she had to leave.

“I have to get away for a while,” she told him.

“But what about us?” he said.

“I love you, Stephen,” she said. “But I have to be on my own for a while.”

It was the truth. She did love him, but she was not sure she wanted to marry him. She knew she had blurted that out just to anger her father.

“Tell my father not to worry,” she told Stephen. “I’ll be home in a month.”

But after several weeks, she felt herself being drawn into Paris. She liked the anonymity it offered her, and she decided impulsively to stay. She wrote her father a short letter explaining her decision and sent for her clothes, a few books, and a small amount of money from her bank account. Adam wrote back, saying he only wanted her to be happy and that he would send her whatever money she needed. He said that he loved her with all his heart. He regularly deposited money in an account for her in Paris. She didn’t touch it.

As the years passed, she called her father occasionally, but their conversations were strained. She wrote to Stephen often at first, asking him to come to Paris for a visit, but he never seemed to have enough time to get away from the newspaper. After a
while their phone calls stopped, and now the letters were growing infrequent.

She put his latest letter in her bag and ordered another cafe au lait. She felt a small ache as she thought of Stephen, but she recognized that it was not a longing but a bittersweet memory of what might have been. She knew now she had made the right decision in coming to Paris.

It hadn’t been easy at first. She got a job waiting tables at a cafe near the Sorbonne and lived in a gloomy chambre de bonne that she rented from an old woman and her bachelor son for forty dollars a month. Everything was fine until one night when the son tried to crawl into bed with her. Kellen fled to a hotel.

The episode turned out to be just the impetus she needed.
There was nothing glamorous about the student life, she had decided, and she was getting bored waiting tables. Now she was forced to find a better apartment and a job to pay for it. She didn’t need much money, really. Living well in Paris, she had found, was more a question of attitude than finances. She was happier sitting in the park with friends eating a fresh baguette than she ever had been in any restaurant back in San Francisco.

But she did need enough to support herself and didn’t want to touch what her father sent. She was searching through the
Herald-Tribune's
apartment ads when she was struck with the idea of applying to the newspaper for work.

She went to the offices, located in a nondescript building on rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Elysees. The newsroom was small and dingy, filled with scarred wooden desks, dilapidated bookcases, and scuffed Royals. There was a sea of paper, on the desks, the walls, and the floor. A motley collection of characters lounged around the copy desk engaged in a loud debate over whether to use “mister” or “monsieur” in a story. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and cheerful misanthropy.

Kellen was taken to an editor, and she told him she wanted a job. His eyes traveled from her head to her toes. “You’ll make a great Golden Girl,” he said.

The Golden Girls were young women who hawked the
Herald-Tribune
on street corners wearing bright yellow sweaters emblazoned with the paper’s name in black letters. Kellen knew that no Frenchwoman would ever stoop so low as to be a Golden Girl and that only the English and crazy Americans would work for such small wages. She told the editor she wanted to be a writer.

When he asked about her experience, she lied and told him she interned on the
San Francisco Times
. It was then that the editor, focusing on her name, realized she might be connected to the Bryant newspaper chain. He gave her a temporary job as assistant to the fashion editor, who needed a backup during the couture shows.

With a grand salary of fifty dollars a week, Kellen found an apartment on rue de Seine for seventy-five dollars a month. It was more an artist’s atelier on the top floor, with a small fireplace and large windows that flooded the rooms with light.

The temporary fashion job led to a permanent position writing features for the “Mostly for Women” page. After a year, she was assigned to write the “At Home Abroad” column, in which she wrote reviews of art events or movies and scouted out restaurants and events of interest to Americans. She branched out into writing personality profiles, showing a knack for getting interviews no one else could.

When the man who wrote the “People” column decided to return to the States, Kellen was given the plum job. She found she was good at mingling at social events, mining quotes from the celebrated or recalcitrant. She proudly wrote a letter to Clark Able and joked that she would come back and steal his job.

She didn’t tell her father about it, however, afraid that his reaction would be just censure, not the approval she wanted. She told herself she would someday go home with a folder of clips and prove to him that his daughter was, indeed, a writer. Not a poet but a journalist.

But for now, the Trib gave what she needed
—- a sense of achievement and belonging.

She loved the newspaper’s cerebral atmosphere and clannish camaraderie
. It never seemed like work. The newsroom was the place to go to find a dice game or a spirited debate on Stendhal. And a steady stream of starlets, movie directors, visiting novelists, newspaper people, jockeys, and expatriates paraded through the office. 

Many people knew who her father was, but
no one really cared. The Bryant name was useful only when it came to her “People” column, an impressive accessory that she could slip on as needed, like a Hermes scarf. The Kellen Bryant she had created bore little resemblance to the girl back in San Francisco. She saw herself now as a sophisticated, free-thinking bohemian.

The freedom extended to sex as well. Men of all ages, types, and income were attracted to Kellen. At first, she had been bewildered by their passionate overtures; it was so different than Stephen’s quiet adoration. But she quickly became intrigued with testing her sexual power.

First, there had been the French doctor. He was a skillful lover who, during their first night together, while riding home from the opera in a taxi, gave her first orgasm. The affair lasted one exhausting month before he announced that he was returning to his wife, whom he had never bothered to mention.

There were others after that. A young communist s
tudent who liked to gather pink chestnut petals from the streets and sprinkle them over her body before he made love. An American novelist who, after two months, begged her to marry him but then left the country abruptly when he received his first advance check. And a sexually inspired, indefatigable Italian actor, whom Kellen finally sent on his way because he wanted to initiate a ménage a trois with his understudy.

Kellen finished her cafe au lait, smiling slightly as she thought now about her lovers. There was no one in her life right now, but she didn’t care. Someone interesting always came along. That was the way it was in Paris.

She glanced at her watch. She had to stop by the British embassy to pick up her invitation to the reception that evening. She thought briefly about skipping it —- the British always threw the worst parties —- but she knew she had to go. She would get there early, grab a few quotes, and leave. Her friend Nathalie was giving a party later, one that she didn’t want to miss. Nathalie had promised “a surreal adventure” and added only to bring champagne and a flashlight.