Breathless (28 page)

The president’s address caused a momentary ripple of political optimism about ending the war. Even I felt a brief lift of hopefulness through the fog of my own despair. I drained my glass of vodka-on-the-rocks in the darkened room.

Later that week, in early April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.

I taught my classes in intermediate French as if nothing had happened. The required textbook featured dialogues between “Jean” and his younger sister “Marie.” They lived on a farm in Normandy. Except for the parents of “Jean” and “Marie,” the other characters were mainly cows and the occasional Camembert. The students had no vocabulary for death or race—we were living in Normandy, after all, where everything ran as smoothly as ripe cheese—and politics, the principal had already explained to me during my interview, did not belong in the classroom.

The demands of teaching French at a fancy public high school in Westchester proved to be almost exactly what I had imagined, dreaded, and, in a way, needed. The vocation of high school teacher was precisely the nice-Jewish-girl fate I’d hoped to escape by moving to France, but I was forced to recognize that the daily preparation for the long hours of high school teaching, compounded by the extra time the commute to the suburbs entailed, absorbed some of the spreading panic the breakup with Jim had set free. An existence with no time for feeling was what I wanted. “I must stay busy,” I underlined in my diary, “or havoc sets in.” I had signed the contract in the countryside of Provence as I listened to the cry of the cicadas. There, I was afraid not to. The position at Chappaqua was also the only one I had found open in my frantic visit to New York the previous Easter.

I was teaching, it often seemed, the grammar of something I had lived when I was someone else—when I believed in the ranch. In part, my confusion was a matter of tenses. The
passé simple
, the definite, literary past of completion and fiction, the simple past in which the narrative of my French life was over, was now the
passé composé
, the indefinite past tense of ordinary human activity, where beginnings and endings sometimes shade into each other. Despite the drama of the overdose, my life had not ended in the little back room of the unfinished apartment. Still, I couldn’t see even the outline of a new story. I felt like the reduction of a former self I no longer recognized, but not like the reduction of a French sauce that by dint of cooking becomes more intense. No, I was diluted—or maybe just stretched too thin, attenuated by the teaching and the drugs.

My favorite student in the Intermediate French class wrote me a letter about what the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. had meant to her. The woman she thought of as her mother, the woman who had taken care of her when her own mother died, was black. Sarah described this woman as a figure of love. She mourned the lost dream of racial harmony. She said she could tell, even though we hadn’t discussed it in class, that King’s murder had upset me, too.

Soon after, in the early days of June, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed.

During final exams, Sarah wrote again, this time to say good-bye—she was moving to Los Angeles because of her father’s career in television; she hoped things would go better for me. I was doing the right thing in leaving the high school, she said. She knew I wanted something else.

By the time I returned to France in August and collected my belongings from the apartment Jim had kept, the events of May 1968 in Paris had become part of France’s revolutionary mythology. Traces of the upheaval still could be read on the city’s walls. “The more I make revolution, the more I make love.” The scrawled yearnings of youthful desire, sometimes witty, sometimes obscure, kept the memory of hopefulness alive. I prowled the bookstores in the Latin Quarter where the students had rioted when the police invaded the territory of the Sorbonne. Books about the events of May and souvenirs were proliferating, already objects of kitsch, like little Eiffel Towers, as though what had happened only months before was already history. The Sorbonne, where I had spent many hours taking notes during lectures, had become a symbol of political dissent—the courtyard a battleground of warring forces. It was obvious from the books alone that the effects of the student rebellion would last beyond the actual violence. So would the memory of the burned-out Citroëns whose battered carcasses had dotted the devastated neighborhood landscape, images captured in the black-and-white photographs that were also for sale. I bought posters recycling the graffiti of revolution:
TAKE PLEASURE WITHOUT LIMITS. FORBIDDEN TO FORBID
.

I planned to tack the posters on the walls of my bedroom in New York.

Mai soixante-huit. May 1968. A date almost instantly, internationally magical made the idea of my going to graduate school at Columbia, where I had been accepted into the French department, seem sexy. The student occupation of administration buildings at Columbia that spring had taken place almost simultaneously with the events in Paris. On television, from my room, I had watched, lying in bed, anesthetized but fascinated, the police invade the campus I had crossed many times, always feeling intimidated, as though as a Barnard girl I didn’t quite belong on that side of the street. I wished I had been there, emblazoned with a black armband, standing on the steps of Low Library in solidarity with my fellow students, and dreamed of dressing like a revolutionary.

Before I left Paris, I bought a pair of jeans with an inset of soft black suede that ran down the front of the legs and up into the crotch: a French interpretation of American blue jeans. The pants were already broken in and looked as though their owner had spent time on a ranch. Urban cowgirl after the reign of LBJ. Perfect for classes in the fall.

I hadn’t surrendered the keys to the apartment when I moved out, but I was sure that Jim had changed the locks. I waited on the landing for Nathalie to let me in. I had become a guest in my own home. Jim would not speak to me, and Nathalie had arranged for me to come to the apartment one afternoon while he was teaching. I noticed her paella pan on the stove. I didn’t resent her presence exactly. After all, I had chosen to leave and chosen her, as I liked to tell people, as my replacement. She was my hedge against total guilt. At the same time, there was something just a little too easy about this calculus according to which Nathalie acquired a father for her daughter, Jim found a new wife, and the happy family got to live in the two hundred square meters my parents had leased for Jim’s fantasy language school. My father had subsidized the disaster in dollars, as he never failed to mention whenever the subject of the marriage came up. The cost to me was less easy to assess because I was still struggling with the turn everything had taken. In the beginning, when he thought the marriage still had a chance of survival, Jim had assumed some of the blame. Gradually I became solely responsible. My leaving eclipsed all faults of his, from lies to drinking to the financial ruin of the company.

As I wandered through the apartment, packing the stone menorah made in Israel and the antique candle snuffer from my cousins into an empty suitcase, I could no longer remember why I had been so determined to retrieve the wedding presents from a marriage beyond saving. All spring, Jim and I had argued by mail about what was mine and what was his. (Wedding gifts from my family were a priori mine: including my copy of
The Joy of Cooking
and a complete set, not that a set was ever complete, of blue-and-white Corning Ware casserole dishes.) Jim would keep the floor-to-ceiling cherry bookshelves; in exchange he would let me take the Spanish dining room table.

Nathalie told me that H., whose name had become a precious initial in my private shorthand, was still in town. I had no wish to see him again. I had always known he was the accident in my path, not the path. But his presence was palpable throughout the winding labyrinth of rooms, especially in the back of the apartment, when I was his “little fish.” I could see where he had repaired the floorboards that Jim had ripped out in rage. I admired the new kitchen counter he had built. I said good-bye again to Nathalie at the threshold of the apartment. We kissed each other on the cheeks, as sadly as lovers who meet after the end of an affair only to part again.

I loved Paris, even in August, when real Parisians had left town. Cabs cruised everywhere and you could have a chair in the sun at the Deux Magots, if you didn’t mind sitting next to camera-toting Americans. I had already become a tourist.

Crossing Broadway

W
HEN
I
FIRST WENT TO
Paris, I was younger than everyone I knew. By the time I entered graduate school, the six years of my twenties that I had spent in Paris suddenly became a gap, a blank in American chronology that I never filled in without alluding darkly to my European past. I had forfeited my role as ingénue. Compared to some of the students who had just graduated from college, I could easily pass for a woman of the world, the fantasy identity that had eluded me in Paris. I didn’t like feeling old, and yet I couldn’t completely regret the journey. I had proved to myself that I could get married—as important as losing one’s virginity at an earlier stage. I could count the number of my lovers on my fingers. I knew how to say, not to mention do, things in French that young women my age were not supposed to have in their repertoire. (That made me alternately proud and embarrassed.) I was a minor expert in French cheese and wine.

There was more, I thought, looking back. Despite the epistolary chains, I had lived far from home on Riverside Drive. At times I might have seemed to resemble Penelope, waiting for my wandering hero to return, but I too had had my odyssey, heard the songs of the sirens, dallied with Circe, if these things were reversible. But maybe the
Odyssey
was not the right literary model, no more than
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, for what I was trying to do. I still didn’t know what was.

From my years on the Barnard side, Columbia seemed contained and bounded on the east side of Broadway, its entrance marked by wrought-iron gates, as, of course, was Barnard’s. I had crossed Broadway at 116th Street many times when I was an undergraduate, but Broadway then was so much more than a New York street to cross. The Columbia side of the street was David’s way, not mine. In 1968 the distance between Barnard and Columbia that once had seemed immense shrank to the size of the mere urban avenue that separated the two schools. You still had to watch out for the traffic, but the distance lacked symbolic dimensions.

When I strolled into my first graduate seminar dressed in my tight Parisian jeans, I wondered why it had taken me so long to get there. All I needed to do was cross the street.

In my application to graduate school I said I wanted to concentrate on eighteenth-century literature. I chose that period because it had so much to teach us, I explained, about the desire for individual freedom. I wanted, though I didn’t say it because I couldn’t have said it then, to stop trying to live in books and to write about them instead. Ultimately, I completed a very long dissertation about eighteenth-century novels of seduction and betrayal and coldly analyzed the destiny of the unhappy heroines who had held me in thrall during my Parisian interlude. After a while, my life in fiction became an object of study, as I became a professor of French literature.

“After a while” sounds a bit too much like a fairy tale to account for the academic rites of passage, as well as the struggle to believe that there was someone or something to become, and not just a blind hope for yet another romance (not that I had given up on romance) or marriage. As the 1960s morphed into the 1970s, I finally started to figure out that it was time for something new. But it required a leap of faith, and the
invention of feminism, for a girl who had grown up in the 1950s to imagine herself as a professor, as a person having a profession. What seems harder to believe now is that I had lived so many years without realizing that if I was ever going to be happy (or at least not desperately miserable), I needed to do something, not just be someone—least of all, someone’s wife (not that I had given up on that, either).

Epilogue: Out of Breath

P
ARIS IN THE
1960s
WAS
full of Americans suffering from the disease of imitation. Jim, who couldn’t write, took himself for James Joyce in exile from a country that his parents had already left. Jim thought marrying a Jew would save him from the priests. I thought marrying him would save me from the rabbis. In some ways, Dr. Mendelsohn was right: Jim was not the worst choice I could have made. But we were so busy using each other in order to avoid our fates that we missed recognizing who
else
we were—what we wanted from the world when we weren’t reading books, or eating. I couldn’t stay married to someone who was making up everything all the time, including me.

My copycat adventures had always been doomed to failure because that was precisely what had to happen for me to grow up. The point I kept missing—and that got me in trouble—was that whatever I was going to become, or however I was going to become someone, required my not imitating someone else. Wasn’t that really the lesson of
Breathless?
It’s
not for nothing that the movie begins with Belmondo copying Bogart’s trademark gesture of passing his thumb over his lips. Belmondo’s character Michel can’t even make it as a successful hood, as my father would have said then. I might have followed Jean Seberg as Patricia to France, the way other, more literary (and nicer) girls followed Henry James’s Isabel Archer to England, but after that start, I was on my own for the rest of the plot.

At the end of
Breathless
, Seberg walks away from the scene of the crime. The movie doesn’t let us know whether her character will ever write her novel, whether she’ll go home again after she finishes school at the Sorbonne to please her parents, who are paying for it, or just keep selling the
New York Herald Tribune
until the next man comes along—we already know she won’t have to wait long. We don’t find out whether she’s really pregnant or what she’ll do about it. But we figure she’ll make out. That’s one of the things about this American girl and why I liked her so much: she thrives on experience, no matter how devastating.