I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (16 page)

There were days when she pulled out my old baby clothes at morning meetings and told stories about my bowel movements, and days when she scolded me like I was fifteen for not emptying the grounds from the coffee machine. But later, privately, she listened to me and apologized. More often there were days when we sat side by side in front of manuscripts, each with a red pen in hand, riffing on each other's ideas, each of us feeling the excitement as a story fell into place. I learned a new kind of awe for my mother. She knew how to edit images with the same ease that others could tweak sentences. She would alter small details and, as if by magic, the meaning of a picture would snap into focus.
She shaped each project around each artist's strengths, so that their visions shone through and her own efforts remained invisible. She worked constantly with her hands—printing, cutting, taping manuscripts in place. She gave of herself to her projects without any sense of self-preservation. She never settled for good enough. She drew on every last reserve of her energy until each book was best-it-could-be, and knew, too, when that was. Often the staff came into the office in the morning to discover that overnight she had made entirely new designs, new layouts, new covers. She would lay out our assignments for the day, then leave for her job at
The New Yorker
. When she returned, at seven or eight p.m., she would again sit for hours, tweaking and fixing our work, always easy with her praise, always in places it felt deserved.

I began to understand why, when my brother and I were young, coming home to a dinner still unmade, a table still unset, my socks on the bathroom floor had made her explode into such fireworks of frustration and fury. I envied how few minutes she lost of each day. Even her train rides to and from her Times Square office were time she spent thinking about her work. I struggled to imitate her and yet could not stem the slipping away of my own hours into periods of blankness, lapses of mindlessness when I blinked to discover I had overspent my lunch hour on our stoop, staring into the sunshine, watching the models and tourists walk by, merely happy to be alive.

—

F
RANÇOISE
'
S FATHER
came to visit her in New York in March, on his way to St. Barths. He asked to meet her friends. Françoise had a party, and as the loft filled up with her new friends, she was
surprised at how many there were. Paul schmoozed happily with the crowd. He radiated pride for his daughter and her space.

Her mother came to visit in June, with Louis Guérin still in tow. She was also, suspiciously, on her way to St. Barths. The second that Josée stepped into the apartment, it lost its luster. Everything—the salvaged posters and flyers, the furniture scavenged from the street—seemed to shrink. Everything seemed to be covered in dust.

“You're living
here
?” Josée said. “The neighborhood is awful. You don't even have a chair. Why don't you come live on my house boat? You'll be much better off. Don't you miss Paris?” She reminded Françoise that her return ticket was valid for only a year. Besides, Josée said, SoHo was not safe. She pointed out that Françoise had been robbed a few weeks before.

Even after Josée's departure, the magic did not return to the loft. Her mother had transformed it from an enchanted fortress into a barren foam mattress and a rusty hot plate. She didn't even have a chair. Although it would never have occurred to her to ask to move in with her mother—had never seemed that her mother might want her there—now that she had offered, the draw was irresistible. Paris glittered through her mother's words: the Seine, the quiet streets now held a nostalgia she'd never felt before. Here was Françoise's chance to have a relationship with her mother. She booked her flight home.

—

T
HERE WAS THAT
CLICHÉ
about how people kissed the ground when their plane landed. Josée said she had seen that once, long ago, when she was a flight attendant, bringing the first Jews from
America over to Israel: bent over in their winter furs, kissing the sticky-hot tarmac. But when Françoise landed in Paris, exactly a year after leaving, kissing the ground was the last thing she wanted to do. She felt like a magnet polarized to repel.

In the airport, Paul was waiting for her by the gate. When they reached the arrivals area, Jean-Michel ran up to them with a bouquet of flowers. “You go home with him and I'll never speak to you again,” Paul threatened.

“You go home with him and I'll never speak to you again,” Jean-Michel shot back.

Françoise hated being forced to choose between the two men, but it was her father, not Jean-Michel, whom she'd asked to come get her, and so her decision was made.

Paul drove her to his place. He'd invited a young surgeon, his protégé, to lunch.

“Why don't you put your things away?” Paul said, gesturing toward Andrée's room.

“Actually,” Françoise told him, choosing her words carefully, “Josée offered that I could stay on the boat with her for a while . . .”

“What? You're going to go live with that bastard whore?” Paul asked, veins popping with instant rage. He ordered her to leave immediately. Françoise, too tired for emotions, picked up her suitcase again. The young surgeon offered to drive her to her mother's.

“You know,” he said to Françoise in the car, “you have very beautiful eyes.”

“Thank you,” Françoise said.

“You really could be quite pretty if you just tweezed a bit, between your eyebrows,” he said. “They're conjoined.”

On her mother's boat, a luncheon party was in full swing.
Josée turned to greet her with a warm “Ah, there she is!” She explained to her friends, in exaggerated detail, how she'd saved her poor daughter from a rat-infested hovel in the dingiest part of New York City.

After the guests departed, they fought all evening. Françoise barely lasted the night. She had forgotten how few defenses she had against her mother. In the morning, Françoise repacked her suitcase and left, unsure where to go.

A friend from architecture school offered her the couch in the beautiful, light-filled duplex her mother had just bought for her. She was a gracious host, but she had just found herself a boyfriend, and the apartment had few walls and little privacy to offer. From the couch, Françoise listened to the two of them laughing in bed together. She stared up at the high ceiling and struggled to sleep, embarrassment burning hot in her stomach. She felt like an overlay on the world rather than a part of it. The small hole she had once made in the fabric of the city had been filled in without a trace. Paris had erased its memories of her.

—

W
E WERE
IN
THE
KITCHEN TOGE
THER,
my mother and I, our bodies moving in synchronicity. She stirred the pan I had placed on the flame, I cut the onions she would need before she thought to reach for them.

“Can I help?” my brother asked as he opened the fridge to get himself a glass of water. He had started college this year and I had just finished it. Each time I saw him he was more of a man. He had a beard now, torn pants that slouched low on his hips, muscles that rippled up his arms. I wondered what it would be like to become taller than my mother. I envied him that.

He sat on one of the stools where we'd eaten breakfast as children, and his knees danced up against the edge of the counter. “Can I ask you for your advice on something, Nadja?” he said as he popped his thumb into a grapefruit to peel it.

As a younger child, my brother had believed me to be the ultimate authority on a great many things. After school in our living room, my friends and I had sorted out our understanding of women's rights by lecturing him.
Do
buy her flowers, but don't hold open the doors.
Do
pay for the meal, but also let her pay for yours. Later, he'd hung on my every word as I'd explained about gay rights and trans issues, nodding along, eager to get it right. “What about
me
though?” he'd said in despair. I told him he had it easiest, but it seemed to bring him little comfort. My sweet, conscientious brother wore his straight white male privilege like an albatross.

That past winter, during a trip he and I had taken to Berlin, he had realized with a violent jolt that I wasn't the perfect older sister he had imagined me to be. I could be uncool, I could make mistakes, I could lead us both, unwittingly, into danger. I don't know which of us this hurt more. Now we were building a wary new relationship. I leapt at the invitation to give advice.

“So I
know
you're not supposed to hook up with girls when they're too drunk to say yes,” he began. He explained that, at school, there had been many orientation sessions impressing upon the students the importance of consensual sex.

“But what about when I've been drinking, too?” he continued. How many drinks did she have to have before it became not okay? If she'd expressed interest before, and they went out drinking together, was that okay?

I began speaking loudly and authoritatively. I had a lot to say,
and I was conscious that my mother was listening, even though her back was turned.

“You can trust yourself,” I said. “It's not a hard-and-fast rule that if a girl has had a drink, she's off-limits. But there
are
many men who use alcohol to take advantage of women. Follow your instincts and don't do anything that feels questionable. If you don't think she'll remember it the next day, then wait. If she's repeating the same questions or can't walk correctly, then she's too drunk to consent.”

My mother sighed. She wrapped her arms around my brother.

“Oh, my poor little boy!” she said.

“
Why?”
I said, the word coming out more confrontation than question.

“They've gone and made it all so complicated for you!” she said to him, rubbing his back as he leaned into her. “You poor thing.”

My anger rose sharply. I tried to tell my mother that she couldn't possibly understand the binge-drinking culture in American universities. I tried to tell her about the many young women I'd known who'd woken up in unfamiliar beds with bruises blooming on their thighs and the knowledge that their bodies were no longer safe.

My mother and my brother were still touching, his head on her shoulder. I was still talking about frat parties and roofies and grain alcohol, but then my voice was cracking. I put down the knife I was holding. I felt aware of my own melodrama, and in equal measure I both wanted and did not want my mother to see it.

“I can't talk about this right now,” I said and pushed past them. I made it to my room before I began to cry, but left the door open as I began to do so, with air-gulping, shoulder-shaking sobs.

My mother's footsteps soon followed. “Oh, Nadja,” she said,
sinking down to the floor next to me, “what on earth is wrong?” I kept my head on my knees.

“Did . . . something happen to you,
mon poussin
?” she asked with infinite tenderness. She put her arm around my back and brushed the curls away from my neck. I wished in that moment that something had. It would be so much easier to explain.

She'd been admonishing me since I was twelve. Wear higher collars, say no more forcefully, if it bothers you just ignore it. All I had ever wanted was her anger on my behalf. I'd wanted that hug she gave my brother. I'd wanted that
Oh, my poor little girl
. I still wanted it, so badly.

“Sometimes you're just so . . . unfeminist,” I said.

“Oh,
mon amour
,” she said. “It's not that simple . . . These young girls of today . . . they allow their whole lives to be ruined. They decide that they're the victims, they decide that they're damaged.”

“They
are
victims,” I said. “It's a terrible crime.”

“Maybe, but . . . practically? What good does it do them?”

She was looking at me earnestly but I couldn't think of anything I hadn't already said twice. I felt a gulf yawn between us and a swimming feeling, like vertigo, at the impossibility of changing her mind.

“You know,” she said, after a long pause, “I suppose you could say that it happened to me once. In a sense.”

“With Éric?” I asked. “Before you left for New York?”

“Oh no!” she said, surprised. “No, no.
That
wasn't . . . no,” she said. “Another time.”

—

B
ACK IN
P
ARIS
, Françoise returned to architecture school halfheartedly. She had rented herself a tiny maid's room in a desolate
neighborhood, far from everyone she knew. She was suffocating in self-loathing. Every outfit seemed to clash. She dragged herself to parties but her thoughts drowned out the buzz of the room. No matter what she did, she couldn't escape a constant longing to be someone else, somewhere else. Doing anything was excruciating. Doing nothing was excruciating.

She continued to go to the Aquarelle, the café where she and Jean-Michel had always gone, a few streets from the Beaux-Arts. The same people were there, talking about the same things. She felt like screaming. She had changed profoundly, and they didn't even seem to notice. She needed something new, broader circles, different people. She wanted to expand Paris for herself, approaching everything with the same sense of adventure she had felt in New York. There was an old Greek man who was a regular at the café. He was in his fifties, twice the age of any of the students. He was fat and unattractive, neither quick nor witty, but the students tolerated him interjecting in their conversations from time to time. He cornered Françoise one afternoon and told her about his records. He had a huge collection of records. Come and see them, he said.

He didn't live close by, but she went anyway. It was public enough. They knew so many people in common. They saw each other every day.