Paris Letters (22 page)

She said that marriage was much more thorough than just getting a visa.

I thought back to my boobie episode at the visa office. How much more thorough would getting married have to be?

Christophe and I started in earnest to gather our papers. First on the list was an official copy of our birth certificates, translated by an official translator. Fine. We had the birth certificates already. They just needed to be translated. Check! Photocopies of our passports? Easy.

Then we had to get piles of forms from our embassies. Off we went. We walked out of each embassy not with papers but with appointments to return a month later to ask for the papers, which would arrive a month or so after that. All of these documents required translation, too, which required more appointments and more time.

Spring became a flurry of paperwork. Luckily, I had Mary from Ontario to remind me that the season was happening at all.

May, Canada

Dear Janice,

Spring has finally arrived here in the north after two weeks of summer heat and snow on Mother’s Day. Now we have sunny, spring-jacket days with nights that are staying above zero.

It’s lovely to walk and see all the different shades of green. We were remarking on how red the new maple leaves are in contrast to the rest of the bush. Today’s delight was a large patch of yellow marsh marigolds. I saw bear, raccoon, and deer tracks in the mud on today’s walk.

We are anxious to get seedlings into the garden, but know from experience it’s still too early this far north. My husband has his greenhouse planted and we are hungrily watching the plants in his “salad bar” planter.

Bruce has guaranteed his continued inclusion on the Christmas list with this renewal. All the “second-hand” readers of these letters are thrilled, as am I.

Many thanks,

Mary

By May, six months after our first visit, we were able to return to City Hall with our bursting folder of papers. The lady went through them all with her lips pursed, hovering over each form with a red pen like a stern teacher. The official copy of our birth certificates had to be issued within six months and ours were expired. Off we went again to order new copies of the copies, which were to be translated by a translator again. The old translations wouldn’t work. They had to be redone and stamped with an official stamp of an official translator. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a make-work project just to keep the eighteen city halls of Paris busy.

When we returned to the City Hall with our new papers, she informed us that there were other issues with other papers. She couldn’t have mentioned this before? Off we went again for another few weeks. By the time everything was approved, she said we had to get married within two months or half the other documents we had gathered would expire. I thought of my gay friends who had recently won the right to get married in France. They didn’t even know what they were getting themselves into. Poor lads. But Christophe and I were fine with getting married within two months. We didn’t want to start gathering paperwork all over again.

After our complicated dossier of papers was approved, we started telling people the date of the wedding. All the French gave us congratulations, but not for the wedding. They congratulated us on getting our papers approved. The man at the post office summed it up nicely. “L’administration est coo-coo!” Complete with hand gestures.

As I made decisions about the wedding, I realized just how baffled a bride I could be. I was asked to provide the photos of what kind of wedding paraphernalia I liked: bouquets, wedding cakes, cake toppers, invitations, meal options, party favor preferences. I was clueless. What kind of bachelorette party would I prefer? Would I like a wedding shower too? It started to dawn on me that other girls had thick wedding dossiers bursting with wedding photos and decisions already made years before the engagement ring was ever purchased…or in some cases, before the man was even met! So I relied on Pinterest and people who cared deeply about wedding details to make decisions for me.

I wanted a small, simple wedding. How quickly it mushroomed into three ceremonies: one legal wedding in Paris with a handful of friends and the Polish family; one religious wedding outside of Calgary on a lake with the friends (we had planned the vacation before the wedding date); and we would have one large wedding reception with my family in Ontario.

My mother and sisters planned the Ontario wedding, with my artistic sister Carla creating the invitations for all three. No small feat! My friends in Calgary planned the religious wedding, and I planned the Paris wedding, but really Melanie did most of the planning, which suited me just fine. She was my translator when visiting the florist and the restaurant, but she was also the decider. “You don’t want that. Believe me. I’ve seen it. Looks terrible. You want this.” I would nod, grateful for her advice and good taste. Maureen, Alison, and Shannon were the fashionistas. For dresses for wedding-related events (you mean there are events that I need dresses for too?) they sent me to the Karen Millen boutique at 6 rue des Francs-Bourgeois. I walked into the store and explained that I was a bride and would need fancy dresses for wedding-related events.

The word bride turns regular saleswomen into giggling, gleeful teenagers. They zipped around like kids in a candy store, grabbing dresses left and right, pulling out all the dresses that fit my description. Many options I pulled from the racks were no-gos. The lead saleswoman would do this finger wag and say, “Not for your body, but we try.”

She led me to the change room and waited outside for me like a good girlfriend. Almost everything fit except for the dresses I had picked myself. See, they had sized me up the moment I walked into the store and knew exactly what would look best on my figure. They weren’t trying to sell me everything. They were fitting me. That’s the difference with the French. These aren’t some girls who have a summer job in a clothes shop. These are women who work in the fashion industry in Paris. There is a difference. And they weren’t trying to make me look younger or thinner. For the French, there is no problem to solve, only a chance to make something more beautiful, to bring out its essence. My saleswomen were enhancing.

“Je suis professionnel!” my saleswoman boasted when I complimented her on her choices.

I walked out of the store with three dresses that were me, but better.

Friends had warned me that the French were unkind. But if you let them be, meaning if you let them do their thing and trust that they take national pride in making everything more beautiful, you’ll end up being more beautiful yourself. The reason you see so many beautiful French women of all ages is because they have teamed up through various divisions of labor to make everything and everyone a little more beautiful—from top to toe.

For my hair, I would go to Sylvie Coudray. Her atelier was just down the street from Chanel’s first Paris shop on the famed rue Saint-Honoré, in the same apartment where Maximilien de Robespierre lived during his reign of terror after the French Revolution. In fact, she cut hair in his bedroom. I can just imagine him waking up and deciding whose head to chop first. And centuries later, Sylvie doing the same, but with hair and not heads. Sylvie is a tall, strong, blond woman. I liked her immediately. The first time I went to see her, she sat me down at a chair in front of a mirror and took me through a one-hour consultation before she even picked up her scissors. She explained that there was only one perfect hairstyle for me and she was going to give it to me. She pulled my hair up, pulled it back, moved it here and there to illustrate how other hairstyles wouldn’t frame my face as well as this one haircut. “Why do most stylists concentrate on the back of the head when they should concentrate on the front? I don’t understand this,” she would say, shaking her head. She had big opinions about hairstyles that go through fads. “The worst was the Jennifer Aniston hair!” She rolled her eyes. “It looked good because it framed her face nicely. HER FACE. It wouldn’t do the same for others, and yet women of the world insisted on it.” She shuddered. “That was a dark time in my career.” She started snipping away at my mane and proceeded to give me the best haircut of my life. It was me, but better. It was so lovely that I became instantly miffed by every hairstylist I’ve ever had. They just didn’t know what they were doing! Sylvie understood. “No thought put into what would actually look good!” She took a breath and dropped her arms in fatigue. “Don’t people know how to imagine what is beautiful and what is not?” I wasn’t going to trust anyone else with my wedding day hair. Sylvie was a true artist.

I would need a wedding gown too. After cleaning out my closets back in Los Angeles, which seemed like another lifetime by now, and after seeing my friends shopping, I had low self-esteem with shopping. Melanie and Alison would walk down racks of clothes like two prongs of a divining rod, senses perked, searching and gathering, searching and gathering. I would follow, walking down the middle, looking calm on the outside, but inside I was a bubbling volcano of overwhelm. I didn’t know where to start. I was picky and couldn’t make decisions. I couldn’t even pick out Christmas tree ornaments. And now I would have to pick out a wedding dress?

While I lamented to my mother about the prospect of having to buy a wedding dress in French in France, she said one thing: go to Belgium. Now this may not seem like sound advice to the average onlooker, but going to Belgium was going to solve all my angst about the dress. See, my cousins have a wedding dress shop in West Flanders, in a city called Roeselare. I would try on dresses in English in Belgium with help from my cousins. Knowing it was family, I was walking out of the joint with a gown for my big day. This was happening. One decision made.

I took a train. Four in fact. After all my traveling throughout Europe, getting to a small city in Belgium proved the most challenging of all. I arrived in Lille and had to buy train tickets for the local lines. Generally, in major ports, the signs all offer the local language and English, but here I only had French and Flemish as choices at the ticket booth. I was actually grateful to be able to communicate in French. Progress! But once fully in Flanders, I had a few stressful moments at some podunk outpost train platform in WhoKnowsWhere when I had four minutes to transfer trains. Finally, I ended up in Roeselare where my cousin was waving and running to greet me.

We got busy. I was in town for twenty-four hours and I would need to find a dress, get it altered, and leave the next day with it in hand. My cousin Véronique was fantastic. She whipped out everything in my size. I said yes, no, or maybe. All the yeses and maybes were set aside. In the big change room, standing in my delicates, I stepped in and out of many dresses, whittling the pile down to two lovely gowns. She was a pro. She knew what looked good and what didn’t look good. She was not putting me in anything that didn’t flatter my figure. When we made the final decision, the seamstress arrived to pin it in all the right places then took it away to sew, and we went out for a tour around town.

The next day, I hopped back on the train with my dress in hand. Adding the time limit helped me make decisions. Progress!

My bachelorette party, or a hen party as my English expat friends called it, became a cock and hen party as I invited Simon as well. We sat around a long table at our favorite wine bar, 5 Cru at 5 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, and sipped wine as one by one they prepared me for marriage.

Alison advised me to enjoy everything. The good, obviously, but there are lessons in the bad and joy to be had there too. The bad helps you set your course and informs you of what you don’t want so you can veer toward what you do want. Melanie advised us to drink more wine. The maître d’ and owner of the wine bar agreed and brought over another bottle. Simon advised me to be myself, to not try to change. Sometimes we can get flustered and fall out of line with our true desires. If I ever felt myself getting flustered, I should stand back, observe the moment, and center myself. There is wisdom there that can help me deal with a situation. Julie said that I must go to Vienna and attend a ball in my wedding gown. I didn’t even know this was what people did. I added it to my list. Shannon’s advice was to prioritize each other. When her grandfather came home from work, her grandmother would make him a drink and they would sit alone in the salon, away from the seven children who knew to stay away during this sacred apéro. Carole sat with her arms crossed and said that she had no clue what made a good marriage. “Good luck,” she concluded. But then it dawned on her. “Maybe that’s what it takes to have a good marriage. Good luck.” Glasses were raised with wishes for good luck.

Tipsy and happy, I made my way home at the end of the evening armed with my list of wisdom from my friends. I was no longer baffled. I was ready to get married.

Dear Áine,

May 1st is Labor Day here in France. This means that those who have jobs don’t have to work and those who don’t have jobs attend demonstrations to scream about it. May 1st is also the day when you can buy small bouquets of lily of the valley from the street vendors dotted all over the city. The idea is to give the flowers to friends, but I didn’t know about that until later, so my little bouquet is adorning my window and honoring my friendship with myself. My windows are finally open, and I can feel a warm breeze. Since winter lingered in Paris, the city was slow to turn on the fountains. For months, they were dry and silent, crusted with last year’s fallen leaves. But now they are gurgling, spitting, and splashing, inviting wishes and centièmes. I’m not sure how the city manages the urban décor, but I’d like to think that a big meeting is called at City Hall. The who’s who of Paris gather and agree that NOW would be the ideal moment to turn on the waterworks. The mayor nods and saunters over to a giant switch on the wall. Everyone holds their breath as he turns it on. Cheers, applause, and champagne follow. Meanwhile, water rushes through the labyrinth of underground pipes, along the Métro tunnels and catacombs, to reach the hundreds of thirsty fountains that explode in joyful rapture. And there I am, waiting with a wish in my heart and a centième in my hand.