Graduates in Wonderland (15 page)

She cut me off with a slice of her hand through the air.

“If you're registered for the class, I can't stop you from taking it, but you will not do well with French like that. Next!”

I waited for break, which doesn't come until an hour later, and I glowed red with shame the whole time. Then I snuck out to the balcony for a cigarette. A girl who looks like a friendly elf (tiny, feathery blond hair) came up to me.

“It's so hard to talk in front of so many people,” she said. “And everyone knows that professor's a bitch. Take the Tuesday section instead. I'm Marie, by the way.”

And that is how I dropped my first French class—­and made my first French friend. We go to the Tuesday section together and have coffee afterward. Because she is in her second year, she tells me gossip about all of the students in her year: who's an idiot, who is secretly smart, whom to avoid. And I mostly understand her: I'm much better one-­on-­one than in an enormous group.

I have to confess, though: She is my only friend in Paris. It's strange to walk around all day and then come home to an empty apartment. No respite from myself. How did you make friends in Beijing?

Your image of women in Paris is partially on target. I know you think Frenchwomen wear scarves everywhere, but only the old women do this. French girls our age wear close-­fitting jeans with worn old beautiful sweaters or simple short dresses that flare at the thigh, with heels. They also put on very little makeup—­maybe just a trace of eyeliner.

Taking a cue from them, I've started to wear heels everywhere, even in the face of treacherous cobblestones. It's a performance. I want to feel like I'm contributing
something
to the beauty of the city, rather than detracting from it in ugly old flip-­flops.

Today, I went to the Tuileries Gardens to read and look out at the tourists, the couples walking hand-­in-­hand, and the groups of students sitting and laughing. The Tuileries are formal and manicured, but if you go down any side path, you reach squares of green grass surrounded by couples kissing on every other bench. I sit alone and when some sleazy man inevitably approaches me, this is what I do: just say “
non
” to whatever he asks and stare straight ahead until he goes away. Also, cover my purse.

Love,

Rach

SEPTEMBER 25

Jess to Rachel

Okay, the simplest way to make friends is to send out a mass e-mail to all of your friends back home titled, “You Can Stay in My Apartment in Paris If You Set Me Up with Friends Here.” I guarantee everyone will reply and you'll get responses from people you haven't heard from in YEARS.

Well, I think I may be dating Ray, but I actually have no idea. He always keeps me guessing. A few days after our drunken encounter, we met up for dinner at a Japanese restaurant and it felt strange to sit across from each other completely sober. A silence fell over both of us after the waitress took our order and I could feel us both sizing each other up and thinking, “What are we doing here?”

At dinner, there were distinct differences between dating him and the other guys I've been with. He kept refilling my glass and he was very concerned that I liked the food. He kept asking if I was cold or not.

Boys just don't do this. All of this felt brand-­new to me, but I kept wondering about how many first dates Ray has had. How many times has he told another woman about his past life as an unsatisfied lawyer? Is this empty Japanese restaurant his go-­to place? That joke he just told—­has he used the same exact one on other women? Or is he tailoring it to make it age-­appropriate for me?

So in this relationship, I'm the incredibly insecure one. He's forty-­one; I'm almost twenty-­four. I moved here over a year ago and I already feel like I'm ten times smarter than I was when I first arrived. But he's nearly
twenty
years older than me, so what does
he
know? I won't know for another twenty years! I'm never going to catch up with him.

He paid for me, and I didn't protest because I'd ordered less than he had and I didn't know if that's just how he does things. And then, despite his being forty-­one, we made out like high schoolers outside the bar. I guess some things don't change. I know if I could see myself from afar, I wouldn't understand the situation. What am I doing with him? I don't know, but of course he can charm me! Because he has been doing it since 1979.

I feel at once really young and really old. I leave work feeling secure and authoritative in my new role and then I revert into a shy version of myself with an older man who seems to want me to take on this role.

He casually dropped in how women lose their shit when it comes to him and that's why he's still single. Although older British men don't really say “lose their shit.” It was probably “go mad about him.” He offhandedly mentions that so many women become obsessed with him and he'd love to get married and settle down, if he could just find one with a stable head on her shoulders. If someone our age said something this outlandish, I would challenge them. But I didn't fight him on it. Because...I don't want to be one of those women.

Thoughts:

He might be too old for me.

George is funnier, but Ray is far sexier.

He must be damaged, right? A forty-­one-­year-­old good-­looking straight man who's never been married?

Or is he just a commitment-­phobe?

Gray pubic hair?

We had a second date a few days later and conversation seemed to flow better because he got to talk about his work and I got to sit enraptured, both of us playing our roles perfectly. He's lived in Beijing for four years and he's one of the foreign correspondents for a UK national broadsheet. The last article he wrote was about the fight against AIDS in China and the importance of sex education in this country. I did not tell him that I just wrote about the fifty most kid-­friendly restaurants in Beijing.

Ray goes to lots of fancy journalist parties and seems annoyed at the reporters who get more attention than him. I made some joke about how I imagine him trying to catch the eyes of passersby and they brush him aside to reach the
New York Times
correspondent instead. At this, he broke his charismatic demeanor and seemed irrationally mad. He breathed heavily through his nose and poured more sake. I reverted back to Shy Polite Amazed Girl and in a few minutes, he reassumed his preferred role of Worldly Seducer.

And even so, I still like him so much—­he's intelligent and sharp and I feel like he keeps me sharp. And he's handsome. Intense gray eyes and black hair.

And because all we've done is kiss, I feel like I'm being courted.

Doubts still creep in, though. He feels unattainable, because he won't commit to plans more than a day in advance. It's beginning to make me feel insecure, just like all the other women who have loved Ray and then “gone mad.”

Work, at least, is one place where I finally feel in control. I never knew how different it would be to be the boss of the magazine. I cared about my job before, but if things went wrong, I still felt like the blame always fell on Victoria. And now, I suddenly care so much about every single thing. I lie awake thinking about what would make this the best magazine ever and in the shower I find myself reeling off a hundred headlines for the cover feature and then fretting about the perfect one.

I ended up hiring our intern as my replacement. Isla is a really enthusiastic waif-­thin Australian who is equal parts hyper and wise. She's tall with short white-­blond hair and I'm short with long dark hair—­I'm trying to ward off comparisons that she is a bowling pin and I am the bowling ball. Despite towering over me, she's younger than I am, so I feel free to have very outward freak-­outs in front of her. Before leading my first editorial meeting, I confided, “Isla, I don't even know what I'm doing!” And she's like, “Nobody does! We're all bluffing!” Great advice.

We sit next to each other and the rest of the office calls us, collectively, “The Kids,” because we are the youngest team in the office and we're also writing about children a lot. Sometimes when we are being too loud, we'll hear a cranky Scottish guy yelling across the room, “Shut up, Kids!”

Because I am adjusting to my new responsibilities and because we are understaffed, Isla and I spend nearly every waking minute together, sometimes coming in on weekends. She has a tendency to bang her head on the desk when we clash with our bosses, and I love her for this audacity. She's brave in a way that I aspire to be. But I'll never tell her that, especially because sometimes when we argue about our editorial vision, I want to shout, “I AM THE BOSS OF YOU!”

The power has gone to my head.

Ohhhhh God, Ray text. “I know it's improper to text the day after, but I'm looking forward to kissing you again. And again. I can't stop thinking about you.”

You see? I am helpless in the face of this honed charisma. I wonder if this is an auto-­reply to every woman he goes on a date with.

Love,

Boss

OCTOBER 2

Rachel to Jess

To understand Ray, I think I should tell you about what my former colleague Sally told me about older men dating younger women. It's not just about sex. They like to feel superior. As in, “Why not be with someone hotter than you AND who looks up to you?”

I know that I would be so seduced by Ray as well, but he's had so much longer than you to practice his craft. The fact that he thinks girls go crazy on him is a big warning sign to me. This may be his veiled way of telling you, “I am going to make you crazy.”

It feels like all of a sudden you are being expected to grow up really fast. You're running a magazine and dating a real man. Like, maybe you
should
be in your forties now. Which is weird, because usually
I
am the one you say is acting old for my age (I still read mystery novels and I just knitted a hat, so you might still have me there).

I do feel more adult now that I'm living alone. I love it so much that it makes me worry about getting married or moving in with somebody because I love waking up and not having to confront aggressive questions about how I slept (all questions seem aggressive to me in the morning). I love having the bathroom available whenever I want and not having to worry about what previously went on in the shower and what is still okay to touch.

However, living alone does have its problems. The neighbors next door played loud music until four in the morning and I had an 8 
A.M.
class (it was a Wednesday), and I found myself alone, banging on the wall with a broom. It's actually funny to go through this stuff with a friend, but alone, it's a little sad. Also, there's no Rosabelle to steal food from or remind me when my rent is due.

I've been seeing my friend from class, Marie, a lot. She knows all the good bars in my area, where she also lives. She's very direct and says the things I think about Paris but had no one to tell. When we were chatting, I felt tension release from my shoulders. I cannot explain how relieved I am to have met this kind of friend this early on. They're like gold dust.

And also, she helps me with my homework.

I still have downtime right now. French schoolwork isn't spread evenly over the year. Each class has either one final paper or one final exam. So while I'm coasting now, January and June are going to be a frantic effort to study and write. But for now, I'm devoting myself to writing in cafés (a secret pastime I hide from Marie, because it is so embarrassing to be an American writing in a Parisian café). My story has officially inflated into a novel, which is at once overwhelming and exciting.

I don't know if it's any good because I haven't shown it to anyone except my dad. I wrote to him asking him if he'd read it, but his feedback is so opaque and sometimes just frustrating. Last week, as a response to my chapter 3, he wrote: “Have you read
Shane
? Go read
Shane
. It's incredibly well plotted.”

Shane
is a 1950s Western.

He put me in contact with a good friend of his from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has a fancy literary agent and has been on Oprah discussing his book. I e-mailed him because, as Claudia loved to remind me, nothing was ever accomplished by someone who sits in their apartment alone waiting for life to begin.

I took your advice and sent out a mass e-mail to our friends seeking out their French connections. Platonic Nick wrote back, putting me in touch with his old roommate Jacques, a filmmaker. Finally—­a night out with a real French person. I can't seem to force hot Frenchmen to have drinks with me any other way, it seems. I know that I live in the capital of Hot French Men, but it seems impossible to actually be a part of their world. Waiters who are expecting a tip and professors who grade your papers don't really count.

In the end, I stalked Jacques online (obviously) and he's drop-­dead gorgeous, but the Internet told me that he also has a hot girlfriend. However, boys lead to boys who beget boys, as a wise roofied girl once told me.

Not to worry—­a million Maries shall not replace you.

Love,

Rach

OCTOBER 9

Jess to Rachel

Oh, Rach, you are literally a little old lady now. “Eh, what's that? TURN YOUR MUSIC DOWN.” Bangs broom on wall. “Fucking kids,” you mutter as you kick off your slippers and slather on your night cream.

Anyway, beware of Jacques and all good-­looking men—­Ray just stood me up. HE STOOD ME UP. Second time this week. Stand me up once, shame on you. Stand me up twice, I fucking hate you. I canceled plans to meet Isla and her friends for karaoke and now I'm writing to you while wearing lipstick, which just feels wrong to me. I cleaned my entire apartment thinking tonight could be the night. And now what am I going to do with this clean apartment? Total waste.

I had two more semidates with Ray, dates that I had to completely bend over backward for and orchestrate on my own. It's like he hooked me and now I'm chasing him. I'm making all the effort: running out of work to catch him in time before he had a flight to Hong Kong, staying out late one night because he could only meet at 10 
P.M
. So far, there's still been nothing but kissing. Old-­school rules?