Breathless (10 page)

“I don’t know.”

“You’re living with the guy, aren’t you?”

How could I explain that I was living with Bernard precisely in order to find out what I felt about him? I knew that would fall under the category of experimenting, one of my biggest crimes in my parents’ eyes, along with not thinking about consequences.

I looked out at the other booths and wondered what conversations were going on behind their closed doors. I lit a cigarette and opened the door.

“For the moment I want to be with Bernard,” I said. “I explained that in my letter.”

I squashed the cigarette butt under my foot and shut the door to the booth again. I could tell my father was trying to calculate the cost of the phone call along with my feelings.

“Well, don’t make any decisions until we come to Paris,” he finally said.

My ear was starting to sweat.

“And don’t tell any of our friends about your living arrangements.”

I told him they already knew. I wasn’t addicted to the truth. But I figured they would find out sooner or later. I started to tell my father that Bernard’s parents thought I was great, but he had stopped listening.

My father followed up on the theme of the phone conversation in his next letter. “I don’t give one shit what Bernard’s parents’ viewpoint is,” he wrote, never losing the thread. He fantasized the reactions of friends and even strangers, not just in Paris but also in New York. People coming up to him in the street and shaking their heads in sympathy, then going off to gloat.

One thing is sickeningly clear. Now all I am waiting for are expressions of pity or consolation. Try to recall that Philippe and Anne are our friends, not yours. You talk about being happy for the first time etc. etc. Well, bully for you! Did you ever give a fleeting moment’s thought to our happiness?

You wish to marry
—
go ahead. But don’t talk to us about marriage and prospective fornication for at least 3½ years in the same breath
.

The heat wave of July 1963 made Paris as hot as New York ever gets in summer. The French call the miserable, humid, sticky weather
la canicule
—dog days. They always seem surprised when the dog days arrive. The French don’t believe in air-conditioning because despite the evidence, they maintain that it doesn’t really get hot in the summer.

My parents flew to France, and I went to their cool room in the Castiglione, a small, elegant hotel on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I’d been dreading this moment and, in a strange way, longing for it, too. The letters were brutal. I hated being on trial. I hated the language of moral sanction they both indulged in: we cannot
condone
your situation. Fornication.
Prospective
fornication.

So there they were, my mother and father, smaller than in their letters but more alive too. My father dapper in a fresh, light blue seersucker suit, my mother tan from weeks of tennis and bursting with energy for the social whirl with their old friends in Paris. In their division of emotional labor, my father composed the prose, and my mother handled the face-to-face confrontations. My mother turned to me and said with the tone of resigned exasperation she had perfected for dealing with my crises: “Are you sure you really want to marry this boy?”

There were no words. Just tears. I could not stop crying. No, I didn’t want to marry him; I didn’t want to go to Tunisia with them; I didn’t want to hurt him; I didn’t know how to get out of this. But mainly, I was sobbing American
jeune fille
tears.

Bernard and I had both feared the arrival of my parents, their opposition and resistance. We had hoped that when they traveled with me to Tunisia that summer, the two families would embrace. We knew there would be difficulties to resolve, especially financial ones, but neither of us had imagined the collapse of our future through the prick of the single question from my mother: “Do you really want to marry this boy?” Bernard was hurt and baffled by my withdrawal, but he consoled himself by mocking the materialist views of my American parents, for whom he was
not in economic terms “un parti,” as he wrote to Monique and Alain. My rejection came for Bernard on the heels of failed exams, the certainty of the army, and the misery of a sunburn from days spent stretched out on the beach as he waited for me in Tunisia.

I felt guilty, but at least I had written a letter and not telegraphed an adieu, as my parents had urged me to do. “Get it over with,” my mother said, echoing my silent thoughts. “No matter how you say it, he’s going to feel hurt.” I compromised, sending a telegram saying I wasn’t coming to Tunisia with my parents after all, and that a letter would follow. I was extremely fond of him, I said in the letter, but it wasn’t a great passion and I wanted to experience that. He deserved better. I took the blame on myself, my famous complications. I hoped he wouldn’t have too many regrets. I asked him to forgive me.

I
N
T
OURS THAT
J
ULY, MY
friend Nicole married Laurent, the French engineer she had become engaged to while she was still at Barnard. It was my first church wedding. The bridesmaids wore matching dresses: sleeveless pink linen sheaths with pumps dyed to match and white gloves that covered the wrist
(très
Jackie). In the wedding pictures, we all primly carry missals in our left hands and hold our partners’ arms. With my hair teased high in a beehive, I walked down the aisle with Guy Dubosc, one of the groom’s friends; he was short and blond and not for me. Nicole wore a long white dress and a lace mantilla; she carried white lilies. Laurent had finished his degree; his future was assured and predictable.

I envied Nicole’s happiness.

“Everybody who is anybody is married with ten children,” I wrote to Judy, after seeing my news reported in the
Barnard Alumnae Magazine
by a classmate who had passed through Paris. “And I feel strange.” All my close friends had married; some were pregnant. I had just exited from my own bridal fantasy script, and all it had taken was my mother’s “Do you really want to marry this boy?” to utter the “no” that had been forming in me but that I couldn’t admit to myself. Why did what seemed simple for them seem so difficult for me?

“Do you think I’m immoral?” I asked Judy, when I wrote to tell her
about breaking up with Bernard. The pleasure we had in bed seemed like an introduction to a story that had never progressed, I said.

After the emotional reconciliation with my parents, I regressed to, if I had ever left, dependent-child mode. Since ending the relationship with Bernard, I had been unable to decide anything. What didn’t I want, the marriage or the boy? When my parents offered to take me with them on their vacation, I renounced my principles of independence and tagged along, weeping periodically in the backseat of their rental car. They were driving to the French Pyrenees and across the border into Spain. It was a minor consolation to be out of Paris in August, where you felt like a second-class citizen or worse, a tourist, if you were still in town—which you were. We stopped in France for the weekend at the little beach town of Collioure, along the Côte Vermeil.

When she couldn’t find a tennis partner, my mother became absorbed by chess, which I taught her to play, having just learned myself from Thomas and Micheline, the student friends I had made at Poitiers. From her very first game, my mother beat me because she couldn’t help being good at everything, especially if it was a game. I lacked both the talent and the emotional juice to compete seriously; I was resigned always to lose to her. There was actually a kind of comfort in surrendering to her power—at least, temporarily—and to the family frame. While the girls, as my father referred to my mother and me in his diary, went shopping and to the beauty parlor, my father looked for a place to buy the
New York Herald Tribune
.

One rainy day at Argelès-sur-Mer, a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by pine trees in southwest France not far from the Spanish border, my mother decided I needed a dress for dinner at the hotel. She bought a tablecloth of local black and white Catalan fabric and cut it into a sheath, sewing it by hand, fitting it on me in the hotel room. On the first try, the armholes were so high that I couldn’t lower my arms, and the neck was so tight I could barely breathe. Seeing me imprisoned by her handiwork reminded my mother of a joke about garment district Jews, which made her laugh so hard she could barely tell it. I stood choking in the dress as my mother interrupted herself to tell the story, overcome with hilarity in anticipation of the punch line.

My mother couldn’t stop laughing; then my father started, and finally, I gave in. The three of us fell out on the bed, almost in tears. I hated myself for laughing with them—not only because the joke was cruel, but also because laughing at the punch line of a story that belonged to them made me feel that I still hadn’t left home.

That night, I wore the dress to dinner. It fit perfectly. The maître d’ gave both of the girls a rose.

I
LOOK AT THE PICTURE
taken by a Paris street photographer that I had sent my parents as a down payment on the face-to-face encounter—still months off—that they would be having with Bernard, when we all went to North Africa. The photographer has stopped us (we’re such an attractive couple—engaged?—we must want a picture of ourselves) and here we are posing near the Place de l’Opéra, not far from American Express, where I had gone to buy traveler’s checks. Bernard is clearly producing his picture smile, though smiling is something that comes easily to him—it’s his best feature—but I am smiling, too. The photographer must have trotted out his best lines, or maybe I really was happy.

That day Bernard had dressed for an interview at the firm of a friend of his father’s in case he didn’t pass his exams. He is wearing a three-piece suit, and his
collier
, the standard-issue student beard that connects the jaw line to the mustache, looks recently trimmed. I’m wearing pumps and sheer stockings, a gray suede coat with raglan sleeves my mother had bought for me on one of her shopping sprees. She bought the same one for herself in beige. I wanted to look older, my mother wanted to look younger—it was a moment in history when that meshing of the generations worked, in clothing, at least. In a snapshot of my parents taken in front of the Opéra by one of their friends, my mother and father strike almost the identical pose.

In the picture, Bernard and I do not appear to be as ill suited to each other as we in fact were.

Dancing in Barcelona

F
OR YEARS, WHEN
I
WAS
growing up, I fantasized that over the summer I would become, as if by magic, the person I always wanted to be when school started again: thin, tan, popular, with long hair. Then, I would meet someone. That September in Paris I was thin and tan and my hair had grown as long as it ever would, grazing the tops of my shoulders.

I was waiting to see whether Jonathan Alterman, whom I had met during the vacation with my parents, would turn up in Paris as he had promised.

A bipolar shopper, my mother alternated between extravagance and extreme frugality. On our first day in Barcelona, we headed for a wholesale leather shop on the Ramblas my parents had discovered on an earlier trip. This was bargain time, literally in a basement. While my mother and I tried on the black leather skirts and vests that hung in multiples along the movable racks, my father struck up a conversation with our counterparts in the store, the Altermans: Jewish, middle-class,
from Maplewood, New Jersey, traveling with their adult child. Jonathan Alterman and I entered into a parallel exchange. Although he was already married and separated, as I rapidly learned (Jonathan was working in Argentina for the U.S. government while his two sons were living in the States with his wife), he was as stuck as I was in the kid role. We both stood around awkwardly, shifting weight from one foot to the other, checking each other out and rolling our eyes at various parental exclamations. Not only were we all staying at the same hotel, the Ritz, but his parents and mine knew a lot of the same people, the predictable map of Jewish geography. My mother and I chose exactly the same knee-length black leather skirt. My father paid for the skirts, peeling off several traveler’s checks. Jonathan’s parents, having progressed to grandparent condition, bought leather jackets for his boys. We all ate lunch at a place famous for its tapas that had been recommended by the hotel concierge.

The next day Jonathan and I met in the lobby of the Ritz at 9
PM
—a little early by Barcelona standards, but after all we both had grown up eating dinner at 6:30. (My father noted in his diary without comment that Jonathan had called to invite me to dinner. He seemed unfazed by the fact that Jonathan wasn’t divorced yet, or perturbed by the idea of Argentina after Tunisia. At least Alterman was earning a living.) Over wine we talked about Gaudí’s buildings, his unfinished masterwork, the Sagrada Familia, and Jonathan’s family crisis. He was on the verge of divorce and felt sad being separated from his blue-eyed, blond-haired boys, aged four and six, neither of whom looked remotely like him. Jonathan wore thick, tortoiseshell owlish glasses, which I didn’t mind too much, even though he was the first man I’d ever gone out with who wore glasses. He was tall, heavyset, with regular features, a good nose and chin (I could never resist the genetic inventory for prospective children). He might have been handsome, I calculated, if he were thinner. But he wasn’t—thinner, that is. He was also the first man with children I had ever dated, if this was a date, which it seemed to be.

We were moving smoothly across the dance floor of the hotel restaurant following the rhythm of old American tunes. I felt a slight pressure
in the small of my back as Jonathan guided me gracefully, so expertly that I couldn’t help wondering whether he had taken ballroom dancing lessons. There was something to be said for a man who could dance well. Wasn’t that one of the secrets of my parents’ marriage? David, on principle, didn’t dance, and in Paris, Bernard, who was an excellent partner, danced the mambo and the cha-cha (you couldn’t really count the slow). Jonathan pulled me in closer, romantically, as though for him we were people in a musical, and he whispered, movie-like, holding me tight and squeezing my hand, “I knew it would be like this.” It was true that we moved well together.