Breathless (5 page)

“You should have downshifted,” Leo repeated, extracting another joint from deep inside his jacket pocket, inspecting it for damage.

Valerie fumed. No words, just steamy puffs of cold air fogging her gold-rimmed glasses like angry smoke signals. I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t figure out what to say. We stood on the side of the road, stamping our feet, trying to get warm, silently casting blame on each other and hoping a driver would stop for us. I was pulled between my feelings of guilt toward Valerie and anger toward Leo for not understanding that we couldn’t expect Valerie to be our chauffeur. Both of them were mad at me and hated each other.

“You should go back to Venice now, Leo. I’ll stay with Valerie. I’m sure an Italian will be happy to help us with the car if you’re not here.”

Leo and Valerie shook hands without speaking. Valerie turned away to examine the damage to the car, while Leo and I said good-bye. We hugged, and I could still sense the warmth of his body through the leather. I felt sad, as though something had stopped before it started. I watched him cross the road, the collar of his jacket turned up against the cold. A truck filled with chickens heading for Venice picked him up almost immediately. He waved casually, making the little squeezing hand sign that meant
ciao
, from the passenger seat. A week in Italy, and we were so Italian.

A few minutes later, a man driving alone in a red Alfa Romeo stopped and beckoned us to the car. Valerie and I climbed in. She sat in the front, leaving the cramped backseat position to me. “My Italian’s better,” she threw off by way of explanation. The man behind the wheel was wearing a trench coat with a plaid wool lining and beautiful driving gloves, dark tan leather and beige mesh cut out on the top, revealing flat black hairs. I had only seen men wearing driving gloves in foreign films. In stilted but correct English, our rescuer told us he was a count. He certainly could have played one in a movie. He was a dead ringer for Vittorio Gassman, I thought. In our literary Italian, we tried to make a joke about being like the narrator of Dante’s
Inferno
—lost in the
“selva
oscura,”
the “dark wood” in the middle of life in which the poet’s journey begins. Naturally, the count knew the entire poem by heart. As he recited the famous lines from the first canto, I tried to get Valerie’s attention, but she seemed lost in rapture. Where were we going? What about the car? The few things we had bought in Venice were in the trunk, which was wedged into the ditch. Would we get back to Paris in time for classes? I wondered miserably as I gazed out the window. We could have been anywhere, the count a Mafioso or a serial murderer on the loose. Not a car passed. “How stupid can you be?” my father’s voice echoed across the ocean. The question, which took itself for an answer, was becoming the leitmotif of the trip. It was only four in the afternoon, but it was rapidly growing darker. The count turned on his lights.

“Signorine,” the count interrupted himself, moving seamlessly from the sublime poetry to the prose at hand, inviting us to spend the night at his house. It was Sunday, and too late to have the car repaired; he would take care of everything the following day. The count lived on the outskirts of Padua on the road to Vicenza, he told us. His wife was still in Venice with their daughter, but the maid would make us something to eat and give us something to sleep in; we would each have a room to ourselves. Valerie accepted for both of us. This sounded like a total con job to me, but Valerie, who had told me she thought Leo was a phony, seemed to believe the count was for real. After a short ride, the count pulled up in front of what looked like a Renaissance palace. A maid in uniform showed us to our rooms. Mine was at the top of the stairs, Valerie’s at the end of the hall near the bathroom. I fell asleep under a huge white duvet, hoping Valerie was right about the count.

The next morning when I came downstairs, Valerie was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a man’s bathrobe over men’s pajama bottoms, a long white terry cloth robe that stood out against the terra-cotta tiles. She looked very pleased with herself, the way she had when the count was reciting Dante in the car. The maid was making fresh coffee. Bread and butter were already on the table. I could hear the count’s voice on the telephone, alternately laughing (“due americane”) and business-like (something to do with “accidente”), making arrangements for the “macchina” to be repaired and brought to a garage in town.

“What happened?” I asked, staring at the bathrobe. Valerie still wasn’t talking to me; she wouldn’t even look my way. I reviewed the evening we had spent together after arriving at the villa the night before, our supper of vegetable soup and cheese, the discussion over wine of the famous Giotto frescoes in Padua that we should be sure to see before we left. Did we know that Dante had stayed in Padua, and Petrarch had too? While we were bantering about literature and art, Valerie and the count must have been exchanging signals I had failed to pick up. Leo must have been wrong about her being lesbian. Could it have started in the car? That was why Valerie had seemed so unafraid. But when had they decided? I wondered about the count’s wife, remembering Philippe’s shrug when I asked about Anne. Maybe the contessa didn’t mind either.

Later that morning, the count drove us into Padua. The damage to the car had been less extensive than it appeared. Fiats were sturdy, the mechanic explained, with a touch of national pride. The count insisted on paying for the repair, refusing the offer of my remaining traveler’s checks, the pale blue currency of American dollars that had diminished dramatically with our Italian misadventures.

“An American father would do the same for my daughter,” the count said, dispelling the ambiguity of the sleeping arrangements after the fact.

Valerie smiled. I hated her. Whatever had gone on between them, the count had preferred Valerie to me. I was jealous, of course, but there was more. I felt stupid. I had failed to grasp the story I was in while it was unfolding. This wasn’t the first time I had found myself missing the cues. On the drive back to Paris, I pressed Valerie about the count, but she refused to reveal the secret of her night in the palazzo.

“The count was active in the Italian resistance during the war,” was all she said, as if they had spent the night talking about politics, or Giotto.

W
HEN
I
PLAY
N
O
S
UN
in Venice
, on vinyl, as they say now, the music crackles literally because of the scratches, but the metaphor works too. I hear the riffs I’ve listened to hundreds of times, but the sound isn’t perfect. Like memory, the tracks of the album are slightly warped. I will
never love any music as much as the jazz on my first LPs, and certainly never on CDs, which, free of scratches, carry nothing but the sound of music. I recently had my turntable and amplifier repaired to play this record and others that hold my past. But when I heard the Quartet at the Café Carlyle in the early 1990s, I couldn’t feel anything. I recognized the melodies in their polished performance, but the sounds that had made me quiver left me still—moored in the present of a middle-aged woman well beyond her jazz age. The album was commissioned in the late 1950s as the soundtrack for a movie called
One Never Knows
. You never know what is going to happen, the opposite of believing in consequences. Now, of course, when I’ve played most of my cards, everything in my life seems an effect of those consequences I longed to banish from my horizon.

Jean Seberg’s Fingers

W
HEN CLASSES RESUMED AFTER
C
HRISTMAS,
we had entered the short, dark days of January. I seemed to be gaining weight, and my period was late. Where would I have an abortion, if I was pregnant? How would I pay? In
Breathless
, Jean Seberg’s Patricia, thinking she might be pregnant, examines her face in the mirror and counts the future on her fingers with an enigmatic smile. She looks pleased with herself, confident in that self-contained American-girl way. As I counted the days, I kept sliding a finger up between my legs and rooting around hopefully every time I felt the slightest twinge, scanning my nails for that precious sliver of blood that would spell release from the nightmare.

I wrote to Leo telling him I was afraid I was “in trouble,” as the girls in
True Confessions
, whose destinies had terrified me in junior high school, would miserably confess as they saw their dreams crumble. Unlike Patricia, who contemplated the possibility of pregnancy with a modern girl’s equanimity bordering on indifference, I reverted to the
scenarios of dread and punishment I had grown up with. My father would immediately follow a lecture about virginity with the specter of a paternity suit in which I would have no credibility, as a willing participant in my wretched fate. “Who would believe you?” he’d demand rhetorically, as if he had already taken the putative father of my unborn child to court.

In my letter I didn’t exactly blame Leo for what had happened, but he understood the place I was assigning him in the story. He sent a long reply from Rome, exiting from the script: “I just can’t accept the role of guy-who-knocks-up-girl-and-cuts-out. Maybe some think that fits. I’m not sorry I made love to you, but that it wrought unhappy consequences.” So what did that mean? “What do you want me to do?” he asked at the end of the letter, as if he had no ideas of his own.

I asked him to send me some money before he left for Greece. The vacation in Italy had used up my emergency fund of traveler’s checks. The next time I could expect money from my parents was for my birthday later in February. I hinted in my letter home that I’d like a large sum for my twenty-first birthday to replace the clothing stolen in Venice. I actually had no idea how much money an abortion in Paris would cost. Five hundred dollars was what I remembered from friends “in trouble” in New York. I had decided I would ask Philippe for a name and to lend me the money if necessary. At least he was a doctor.

“What do you want Leo to do?” Monique asked, one afternoon when she found me sobbing on my bed.

“I don’t know. I can’t believe I’m in this situation. It’s such a cliché.”

From the beginning Leo was on the move: we were parting, it sometimes seemed, even as we got together. The road itself was the romance. I couldn’t go on his trip; he had made that clear. Was I even in love with him?

Early one morning, a few days after the “unhappy consequences” letter, I was sitting alone at the café next door to the Foyer staring at my
tartine beurrée
as it soaked up the hot chocolate. I knew the hot chocolate was fattening on top of the bread and butter, but what difference did that make if I was already pregnant? The patter of the
balayeurs
, the street cleaners, who were mainly African—tall, thin, black
men in dark blue jumpsuits, sweeping the gutters with their brooms of twigs—caused me to look up. Through the plateglass window of the café I saw Leo standing under a chestnut tree on the boulevard. I could barely make out his silhouette in the still dark hours of the Parisian winter morning.

“You didn’t think I’d come, did you, baby?” he asked, when he sat down. He had caught a ride with friends, he told me. They had driven all night, and it showed on his face behind the smile of triumph. He signaled the waiter, as though this were an ordinary morning.

The fact that Leo had come from Rome was the most romantic thing that anyone had ever done for me. It was almost worth getting pregnant, I thought fleetingly, as I watched him sip his
petit crème
.

“I have an eight o’clock class at the lycée.”

Leo stood with me at the bus stop on the boulevard Saint-Michel, his arm around my shoulder. He kissed me good-bye and I climbed on the bus. As the 27 bus crossed the Seine at the Pont-Neuf, I suddenly felt that familiar tug low on my belly, then a tiny cramp. My body prickled with excitement. I had escaped again. It was like surviving the car crash in Italy, a shuddering excitement laced with guilt. I had gotten away with something, but I might still be punished, I felt, in the nervous recesses of my nice-girl soul.

We met at Chez Ali that night, the couscous restaurant where we had had dinner on our first date. I told Leo about getting my period. It’s not my fault, I wanted to say. How could I have known that I was only late, not pregnant? I felt embarrassed that I had panicked. Leo smiled, clearly torn between exasperation and relief. He ordered another carafe of red wine and we had second helpings of couscous, too. Leo was leaving the next morning. From Italy, he would be heading for Greece, returning to Paris only in the spring. When we kissed good-bye in front of the Foyer, he seemed almost sad that we were parting again.

A few weeks later, Leo wrote a long letter from Athens. He had figured out our relationship, he said, and what I meant to him. When he saw me through the café window in Paris, he realized that he could leave Europe and make his journey in peace, knowing that someone—that is, me—would be waiting for him. “You’re a Person, a Riverside
Drive, Jewish, Barnard, Penelope, one to whom I can write and tell of my odyssey.” I was pleased that “Person” (capitalized) headed the list. But somehow, Leo hadn’t seemed to notice that I had left New York too. I had moved out of Riverside Drive, and Barnard was behind me. As for Jewish Penelope, she didn’t plan to wait for Odysseus, at least not past the summer. Naturally, I didn’t say any of that, including the reminder that in the
Odyssey
Penelope and Odysseus were married. As long as I was waiting, I liked getting the letters.

Wars of Independence

T
HE
A
LGERIAN WAR OFFICIALLY ENDED
in March, and April in Paris resembled the Paris of the song. The chestnut trees on the boulevard Saint-Michel near the Foyer and in the Luxembourg Gardens blossomed. The horizon suddenly brightened from gray to pink. Despite the signs of the new season, as the spring wore on, Leo kept moving farther east, delaying his return. There were no promises between Leo and me, no words of love. I was waiting without expectation. Neither of us had scripted a scenario that put us into a shared future, though neither of us was willing to let go of the thread of affection that connected our stories until this point—Americans in Paris, the accident in Venice, the pregnancy scare.