Breathless (8 page)

Albert’s wife, Edith, spent most of her time shuttling back and forth between the kitchen and the round dining room table to check on the progress of the meal. Monique and I sometimes followed her, miming a female solidarity we didn’t remotely feel. Edith was pregnant with twins and huge. It was hard to imagine all of them living together in their one-bedroom apartment. Their first child, a six-year-old boy who sat in front of the television whether it was turned on or not, playing with his toy car and chanting “Vroom, vroom” as he revved its wheels, already made the rooms shrink.

The first time I went to Sunday dinner with Bernard’s family, I picked up a roast chicken leg with my fingers. No one commented until I started gnawing on the bone, as we did in my family, sucking the sweet marrow out of the knobby end. Bernard looked at me askance, gesturing for me to put the bone back on my plate. The line between mock horror and genuine indignation was hard to distinguish. Before Bernard could speak, Monique sensed the great Franco-American battle about to begin and decided to take my side. She put down her knife and fork and started to eat her chicken leg with her fingers, daring Bernard by her gesture to say anything.

On the train back to Paris, Bernard couldn’t resist. “In France one doesn’t eat with one’s fingers, even
en famille
.”

“And in America one doesn’t spend the entire afternoon watching television.” That probably wasn’t true, of course, except in my parents’ house where television itself was taboo, but I figured I’d make the point about having to watch people watch a soccer match for two hours.

After the third visit to the suburbs, I told Bernard he had to choose between me and
le foot
. He looked hurt.

“Say I have to take the train to Poitiers on Sundays. I have classes Monday morning.”

Bernard would never have admitted it, but my solution appealed to him. He could be himself with his family, saved from my obvious expressions of boredom, without losing face.

By the time I started traveling to Poitiers, I had formed an attachment in Paris I needed but that I didn’t fully understand myself. Bernard was—the word I kept tripping over—different. “The essential thing, though,” I wrote, “is that I’m very happy and feeling far away from all things American.”

On the other hand, I was teaching what I was feeling so far away from: things American.

A Fine Fly

F
ULBRIGHT TEACHING FELLOWS WERE EXPECTED
to lecture on the history and geography of their home state. Without a book on the subject issued by the U.S. government that my father had found for me, and that clearly divided New York State into different geographic and economic regions (complete with maps), my course would have been a total fiasco. Instead, I would stand at the bottom of a small amphitheater and weekly hold forth before fifty or sixty master’s students who took notes assiduously, as though I were an authority. This excited me. No one had ever written down what I said. I lectured about the importance of the Hudson River; the role it played in revolutionary history; and the strange fact that as an estuary, it flows in two directions: down from the Adirondacks and up from the Atlantic Ocean, from Manhattan.

The river of my ambivalence, in a word.

I loved my days in the medieval university town, “and when I’m there,” I wrote, “everything is perfect. Little narrow streets, old churches,
etc. I go everywhere on foot. My ‘kids’ (who are certainly older than I am), come to class with an astounding regularity.” I was especially eloquent on the subject of Indians, their unfortunate fate in American history. The French, I knew, were always well disposed to groups like Indians they perceived as persecuted in America, and I shamelessly flattered their prejudices.

I quickly made two good friends among the students in my class at Poitiers, Thomas and Micheline Gauthier, who were completing their degrees in English. They had married when Micheline found herself pregnant in their first year at university. They named their son Fabrice after the charming hero of Stendhal’s novel
The Charterhouse of Parma
—their favorite novel. Micheline’s parents, who lived in Tours, an hour away, took care of their exquisite blond child while they finished school. I was surprised that Micheline had not had an abortion. She said she was lucky: her parents loved taking care of Fabrice. I tried to imagine the reaction of my parents, faced with the news of a pregnancy out of wedlock, as they liked to say. My mother had already warned me she had no intention of babysitting for grandchildren, if that was what I had in mind.

The Fulbright commission had provided me with a letter of introduction for Madame de Rosemonde, a tiny, elderly woman whose house was a short walk from the Poitiers train station and the university. When I arrived in town at the beginning of the fall term, she showed me a large square bedroom, twice the size and half the price of my maid’s room in Paris, with a big window facing the street. The room was furnished with a chest of drawers, a double bed covered with an eiderdown quilt, and a large desk. A flowered, porcelain chamber pot was tucked away behind the door of the night table; it matched the pitcher and basin on the washstand.

A simple black crucifix hung on the wall directly over the bed.

My first night I contemplated the crucifix and the chamber pot uneasily. Both presented a novelty. I wasn’t sure, and had failed to ask, whether the chamber pot was meant to be used. But at night it was so cold in the staircase and in the
cabinet
at the bottom of the stairs that necessity resolved the quandary. The crucifix posed a problem of a
different order. I had never slept under a crucifix, and now this would be a regular feature of my life. I could have taken the cross down, I suppose, and put it back up when I returned to Paris. I could have explained my discomfort to Madame de Rosemonde, but what would I have said? It’s not as though I didn’t know France was a Catholic country. The crucifix, I concluded, was just a symbol, like the national flag, and it did not prevent me from sleeping.

Madame de Rosemonde, approaching eighty, had trouble walking and so her confessor, Father Anselme, came to the house once a week. He was tall and wore a cassock that looked rather elegant, I thought, even if I couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a dress. He seemed quite sophisticated, though I had no point of comparison, of course, having never known a priest. I sometimes talked with him over the tea that Madame de Rosemonde served in the salon—about America, especially about President Kennedy. I cherished my conversations with Madame de Rosemonde and Father Anselme. I never mentioned that I was Jewish, but my ignorance about things Catholic no doubt gave me away.

One day Madame de Rosemonde reported one day that Father Anselme told her that I was “une fine mouche.” A fine fly? As always, when confronted with a new expression, I pretended to know what it meant until I could look it up in the dictionary: shrewd, clever, the opposite of a ninny. I was pleased, even though shrewdness, according to the dictionary examples, could also shade into the less flattering zones of ruse.

No Tomorrow

A
S FAR AS MY PARENTS
knew, when I wasn’t in Poitiers, I was living in my maid’s room, which I always used as my return address. But in early December, I entrapped myself. I had requested my bankbook from the New York branch to be sent to Paris. When it didn’t arrive, I asked my father to inquire. I thought he’d be pleased that I was taking care of money matters on my own. The officer had just mailed the bankbook, he told my father, in care of Bernard Alvarez, as per my instructions.

Not a very clever fly, after all.

The evidence unleashed my father’s patriarchal zeal: I had “shacked up” with Bernard, and in a dangerous neighborhood (near Pigalle) to boot. The
appearance
of disgrace (my father pretended to give me the benefit of the doubt) was horrifying, enough to raise “suspicions which would scare even a liberal French father to say nothing of an English, German, North African, or any other kind of father.” Looking to rise above our own particular relationship, he located the
drama on an international stage, turning up the volume, in case I missed the point: “I will quit moralizing if you can get me a single expression of approval from any father of any nationality whatever who will condone in his daughter what you are doing in Paris,” “doing in Paris” having been crossed out and replaced by “what you seem to have let yourself in for.”

As usual, my father was both right and wrong. I had more or less “shacked up” with Bernard. Little by little, without quite intending to, I found myself spending more and more time at the cousins’ apartment, only going to my room for the mail. It seemed lonely and pointless to heat up my dinner on the little Butagaz stove in my maid’s room. True, the apartment was in a seedy neighborhood. But what his daughter had “let herself in for” was less timeless international epic than early 1960s student domestic.

The cousins’ apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up without an elevator, was a warren of once separate small rooms that had been hurriedly assembled. This layout guaranteed a minimum of privacy, or a maximum of sharing, depending on your view of communal life. You could shut the bedroom doors, but to go anywhere in the apartment you were obliged to pass through a common room that someone always seemed to occupy. The toilet was located in a chilly cupboard-like space between the kitchen and the front door. No sooner did you sit down on the wooden seat and slide the bolt into the lock than a fight about how long to cook the pasta would break out in the kitchen, or the front doorbell would ring and five more cousins would joyously announce their arrival in time for dinner. Compared to the elegant duplex the French movie cousins enjoyed, we were living in a slum. But compared to the run-down hotel rooms of the Latin Quarter and the overpriced maids’ rooms Monique and I had managed to find in much nicer neighborhoods, this five-room apartment was luxury and a piece of luck. The government had requisitioned all available apartments for the French citizens returning from Algeria; without a political connection there was little chance of finding anything at all.

The apartment’s centerpiece was the green-tiled bathroom, a hint that the original owners had had dreams of grandeur for their
uncertain future. They had designed a
salle de bains
with a double sink, a long tub, and a bidet. But the plans for remodeling had been interrupted when the owners ran out of cash. There was no running water in the tub, and only cold water in the sinks and bidet. The North African cousins were not deterred by this minor drawback. Adept at the
système D
(the art of improvisation), they installed extra-long hoses, which ran from the kitchen sink, where a gas-driven
chauffe-eau
produced hot water, to the bathroom; the hoses snaked their way through the living room and down a small hallway, finally reaching the tub. Of course, you couldn’t be in any kind of hurry for your bath, and the hot water had a way of cooling off by the time it had filled the tub, but still, the bathroom was
inside
the apartment, and that was a thrill in itself. How many people did I know who lived
with
a bathroom? Not to mention a bidet.

Bernard and I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. We had our best conversations in the peaceful green-tiled room, separated from the traffic in the apartment. Filling the tub itself was such a production that not to take full advantage of having the hot water didn’t make sense. Once you had climbed over the steep edge of the tub and lowered yourself into its enameled length, there was a distinct sense of well-being. The sound of the
chauffe-eau
turning on with a kind of deep chug promising future warmth always gave me a small frisson of pleasure that matched the little blue flame, like the sound of pipes clanking when the heat first comes on in Manhattan apartments in early fall. One of us would sit on the bidet and smoke while the other took a bath. Then we’d switch. We didn’t mind sharing the water. Alone in the bathroom, we speculated about what would happen the following year when I no longer had my fellowship. Maybe the lycée would take me back. The
directrice
had told me to come and see her if I decided to stay on in Paris.

I asked Bernard what he would do if he didn’t pass the exams. He had already failed once. If he failed again, he would have to do his military service.

“Maybe I’ll be assigned to Tahiti,” he said, dripping water down my back. “And you could teach English to the natives.” It wasn’t completely
a joke. Thomas, my friend from Poitiers, had just been posted to Tahiti, where he would be teaching French. Micheline and Fabrice were planning to accompany him.

I imagined the notice in the
Barnard Alumnae Magazine
. “Nancy Kipnis has married Bernard Alvarez. She will be living in Tahiti while Bernard completes his military service. Nancy looks forward to hearing from all alums living in the area.” Right, I could start a Barnard club in Polynesia.
South Pacific
. “Some Enchanted Evening.” I knew the song by heart. My father loved to croon the words as he stood at the edge of the living room, even when we begged him to stop.

M
Y FATHER MOVED IN HIS
brief from questions of struggle between the generations to even loftier zones of universal value and morality. True independence, which was always the pole around which my struggle for freedom revolved, was about consequences. My sleeping arrangements seemed to suggest that I had missed the essential lesson of my upbringing: living “as if there is a tomorrow, because there is one. I’m not suggesting a cloistered existence, but surely between it and libertinism there is an area of human satisfaction and gratification that need not stifle the most restless spirit.” My father signed his letter, “As ever (because you can’t change it), D” (
ad
crossed out).

Was there or wasn’t there a tomorrow?

I was tempted to tell my father about a famous eighteenth-century story titled “No Tomorrow,” in which a married woman has a one-night stand, experiences great pleasure, and does not get punished for it. But I figured that would just make his case. I was neither married nor a French countess.