I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (22 page)

I was struck with a visceral childhood memory of how much I had once wanted to touch all the forbidden objects on my grandfather's shelves. I ran my fingers along the books gratuitously, touching for the sake of touching, and picked out another. It was a small book, with the words
DICTI
ONARY OF MEDICINE
barely visible on the spine. It was stuck to the three books beside it, their spines fused. I
pulled all four out together and something rattled. The books were a box. The top two opened away from the bottom two. Inside, set into a leather-colored compartment, was a small crystal decanter and three shot glasses. There was a hole for a fourth glass, but it was missing. Was this from the 1700s as well, or only designed to look so? I had no way of knowing. I opened it, closed it, opened it, removed the shot glasses and decanter and lined them up on a shelf. It was exactly the sort of object I had always loved, with its hint of the untoward. I had had a book that contained a flask, far less elegant than this one, in my Brooklyn apartment. I twisted the stopper out of the decanter and smelled it: a faint whiff of alcohol.
Sillage,
I thought. It was a French word I had recently learned. It had a beautiful sound,
see-yaj.
In its first definition it meant the wake left behind by a boat in the water. But it could also describe the perfume that lingered in the air after its wearer had left the room. I sniffed the decanter again but the smell had dissipated. There was little of my grandfather left to forgive, and perhaps, I thought, this was all I would ever find: the ripples in the water, the lingering smell.

—

A
FEW DAYS
LATER
, my grandmother called. “Do you like Hopper?” she asked. The Edward Hopper show was the event of the season. Two-hour lines snaked outside the Grand Palais even on weekday afternoons, and the young people I knew all talked about how they were going or had been. Hopper's work had been relatively unknown in France until then. I loved him like he belonged to me. It was in front of a Hopper painting at the Museum of Modern Art, my father talking to me quietly about how the image worked—the lines that guided your eye, the way light entered the room like a person—that I had first felt moved by a painting.

“Yes,” I said. I had a sense that interactions with my grandmother were as strategic as chess games. When she was a ghostwriter, she picked her subjects up at the airport, brought them straight to her boat, interviewed them for two or three weeks straight, and only later let them leave to see the Eiffel Tower. I wished I could do the same to her now, but Paris wasn't my city.

“I've reserved two places for us,” she said. My grandmother belonged to an association of ex–airline stewardesses, the Broken Wings, which organized group outings and cultural events. Usually she placed Sylvie and Andrée in competition for the tickets, doling them out as rewards for cleaning her Jacuzzi or helping her winterize her boat.

I met Josée at the houseboat for lunch, and we took her car to the museum. As she drove, she told me about how she'd been pulled over the day before.

“This young cop signaled at me to buckle my seat belt and I just . . .” Josée wagged her finger no with a coquettish smile. “He tried two more times, then shrugged his shoulders—
You're asking for it
—and pulled me over. I showed him my doctor's dispensation—he'd never seen anything like it!” she said. “I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head. He called his friend over to show it to him.” She laughed gleefully. Her seat belt was buckled around the back of the driver's seat so that the car's warning mechanism wouldn't chime. It didn't actually hurt her to wear it; she just didn't like being constrained. Her doctor's dispensation was her grand prize for surviving breast cancer, ages ago.

“I'll use my cripple card to get us past the line,” she told me, getting out of the car. “We'll have to pretend so that nobody causes a fuss.” As we approached the museum, Josée's walk became a limp.

“Give me your arm,” she said, leaning her weight on me and
coughing pitifully as she shuffled forward. As we walked past the line of people who stood in the rain, a smile broke across the feigned concern on my face. I'd always been a terrible actress.

I was surprised to discover that we were early. The rest of our group hadn't yet arrived. This never happened with my mother. I left Josée on a bench in a window and went off to find the bathrooms. I passed the museum cafeteria and considered buying Josée an espresso. She usually had a coffee after lunch, but today she had said we didn't have the time.
You're only opening yourself up to punishment,
I scolded myself silently as I washed my hands. But as I walked back past the cafeteria, I got on line.

I came back balancing two plastic espresso cups in hand.

“What a genius idea,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “
Quel amour!
”

She sipped. “I think this is the best coffee I've ever had.” Very little brought me more pleasure than having somebody appreciate a gift or a gesture. Those were the moments I held on to, turning them over in my mind like sun-warmed stones. Could Josée know me so well already?

“Do you know the happiest moment in my life?” she said into the comfortable silence between us.

“No, when?” I asked.

“When you and your mother were pulling me through the ocean a few years ago, each of you on one arm. I just floated on my back and you were like my two dolphins, my two mermaids. I had such a feeling of comfort and well-being. I could have died happily right then.”

Yes,
I thought,
better even than I know myself.

The airline stewardesses were easy to spot, even among the many other older women gathering for tours. They were slender
and elegant, with fur coats and impeccably coiffed hair and face-lifts. Josée introduced me as her granddaughter from New York, pride in her voice.

I found comfort in Hopper's paintings of New York, the glimpses of familiar architecture out the windows, the bright rays of sunlight that I craved in that gray Parisian winter. But it was a painting of Paris that held me longest. The title was
Soir Bleu,
always in French even when it hung in America. I'd never seen it before. It was different from everything else. Hopper's paintings were often of empty rooms and empty streets. But here, the painting was of a crowded cafe terrace: a sailor, a prostitute, a bourgeois couple, a sad clown all in white. The space itself was only barely described—two strips of blue, light and dark, defined land and sky—and the Chinese lanterns that dotted the top of the painting cast no light. I was surprised by its lack of emotional depth. Hopper painted it in New York, four years after his return from Paris, the tour guide told us, and then I understood the painting differently: perhaps, I thought, it was of the exaggerated archetypes people become in your memory, and how large and flat they then loom.

“There you are,” Josée said, having left the group to find me. She glanced at the painting. “You like this one?” There was some skepticism in her voice.

“It's not the most beautiful one,” I said cheerily, and I slipped my arm through hers.

The afternoon went by quickly. Josée made me laugh with her asides about the other museumgoers. Her commentary on the paintings was reserved but invariably astute. She dropped me off at home and gave me a hug, her blue eyes warmer than I'd ever seen them before.

“It's so good to have you in Paris, my little dear,” she
said.

H
ow is it going with your grandmother?” my new Parisian friends asked me. I didn't know how to answer. Things were going well. They were going almost too well. I had had a script in mind—she would be cruel to me, I would persevere. After hours and hours together, I would eventually uncover the sweet doting grandmother I had always wanted. But here she was already, that woman I'd longed for, taking me to museums, showing me off, praising me. It was almost too easy.

My first months in Paris unfolded in a haze. There were days when I did nothing, all of my energy consumed by navigating the city. I had fluency in the language, but I was surprised to find how much of the culture evaded my grasp. I did not know then that I must say “bonjour” before asking for directions, when entering a store, to each cashier, that not to do so was as inexcusable as not saying “thank you.” Cashiers slammed my items into shopping bags, people turned away from me without a word. My differentness radiated off me, profoundly irritating to others, my French too fluid to excuse it. There was a special harshness older French women reserved for younger women who did not meet their expectations. Rarely a day went by when I did not find myself
scolded by a stranger. I braced myself and yet still often found myself fighting back the sting of tears.

“I'm going to forget all this. I need to write it down,” I wrote in a notebook I kept during those months, but I wrote little else. I let days blend into nights and back into days, sunrise hitting me like a racing pulse. When I tried to remember the day before, it was only streaks, like a watercolor caught in the rain.

My whole life, I'd lived in a city that reinvented itself as constantly as I did. New York was a blur of rising skyscrapers and changing storefronts. But Paris held time like a lake. It piled on like sediment, in geographical layers, invisible striations up the unchanging façades. I visited all the places my mother had once lived. On Rue Dauphine, in the heart of the Left Bank, I slipped into the interior courtyard of the building where she and Jean-Michel had once shared a studio apartment. I counted up to find her windows, half expecting to see the ghost of her young self peering out from behind the curtains.

I was often lonely, and to be so in Paris felt new. One afternoon, my mood heavy, I wandered the city tentatively. I longed to see the water and so I denied myself that. I went into an artist's squat on Rue de Rivoli, its doors thrown open to tourists, and climbed the graffiti-covered stairs. I found myself in a corner that had been piled thick with scavenged objects: a plaster cast of a hand, a taxidermied monkey, empty birdcages filled with spray-painted plastic bottles. Handwritten signs dangled from the ceiling on strings.
YOU KNOW YOU'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO
FEED THEM, SO WHY DO
YOU HAVE CHILDREN?
one read. I snuck out again, ignoring the artists who beckoned to me from behind their drafting tables. I walked a few more blocks toward the Seine.

Almost there, I ducked into one of the many pet stores on the
Right Bank. Perfect puppies and kittens pawed at the Plexiglas of their small cages. A young girl Rollerbladed down a corridor of fish tanks. At the back of the store, where there were fewer children, I stopped to look at a fat golden hamster. She stood slowly and beneath her I saw a mass of babies, pink and larval, their eyes still hidden beneath bulges of gray. The hamster scratched at the straw lining of her cage, burying the babies deeper, pushing them into place, then sat again. Only a few small pink limbs escaped. An American boy near me screamed, “Look, Mom, the mouse is using his wheel!” I knew I should share this with him, or with his mother who smiled serenely at her son's manic joy. But I did not. I kept the secret for myself.

I left the store and finally I allowed myself to walk out over a bridge into the middle of the water. The limestone buildings turned rose-gold as the sun set and shards of color scattered across the Seine. But as I sat, hugging my knees in one of the bridge's stone alcoves, all I smelled was urine, all I saw were the flashing cameras that imperfectly captured the night. My mood did not lift. And I felt Parisian at last, still sad in the face of all that beauty.

—

S
HORTLY AFTER
I moved to France, my mother came to visit. It was prearranged, a business trip whose timing she couldn't control, and while I might have been annoyed at this push-pull freedom (my dramatic departure, our tearful good-byes, seemed ludicrous now), I was relieved to see her. I ran to the bakery before her arrival and prepared a spread of croissants and fruit and cheese. I made her a cappuccino and then, when I saw how her eyes drifted shut, coaxed her into taking a nap in my bed. I felt peaceful, working in the early-morning light while she slept. It brought me a deep pleasure
to coddle my mother—
la chouchouter,
as they said in France. Whenever I managed to slow my mother down long enough to indulge in sleeping or eating, it alleviated my guilt at my own slow pace.

With my mother by my side, there were no obstacles. Everything sped up. Each day she spent in Paris was filled to the brim. Time was no longer quicksand, it was an ice pick with which to dismantle the world. On the first day of her visit, she gave a radio interview, bought me a coffee machine, saw a friend for lunch, met with an artist about his
New Yorker
covers, gave another interview to a print journalist, called the mayor's office about the brothel our neighbor was opening on the ground floor, negotiated the details of the ceremony later in the week where she would be given the French Legion of Honor, showed me how to scrub the toilet bowl white and oil the wood counters, then sent proofs of the latest children's book she was publishing to the printer in China. Each night I fell gratefully into the bed we shared and slept soundly.

One afternoon, we briefly parted ways. I went into a shop, intending to buy a gift for a friend. The male shopkeeper followed me to the back of the store. He hovered near, commenting on my body, his hands almost touching, then touching, my shoulder. I left empty-handed, blushing and upset. When I told my mother later that day, she listened with a sympathy she'd rarely shown before.

“I know it's hard,” she said. “But you have to find a strategy. Tell yourself that this is what you wanted, even if it isn't true. Tell yourself you make yourself pretty for a reason. Tell yourself you win each time, because otherwise it feels like losing—and I never want you to feel that way.” I heard her advice, and it was useful. It marked a turning point for me. Now when I walked through groups of men who had watched me coming from half a block
away, I did not bow my head. I looked them in the eyes. I dared them to speak. I wanted them to. They never did.

On the eve of her birthday, my mother visited Josée alone. She told me she needed a moment with her mother. She spent the night on the houseboat and came back looking soft and vulnerable.

As we walked through Paris the next day, she insisted on avoiding the main boulevards. We ducked instead through small streets and covered passageways, winding our way toward each destination. It seemed to me she was avoiding the streets she knew too well, the streets where time stood still.

The alleyway we had taken dead-ended into a private courtyard. I sighed with annoyance. My mother said softly, “I feel like a piece of paper when I'm in Paris.” As we turned around, she looped her arm through mine.

“I have no weight here,” she said. “I could blow away at any moment. Everything in this city, it's . . . it's as they say in English, it's ‘heavy' here.”

We cut down another small street and came across a small Korean restaurant bustling with customers. “I don't think I've had Korean food before,” she said as she pushed open the door. The restaurant was loud, and yet, as usual when we were just the two of us, my mother and I slipped easily into intimate conversation.

“Last night,” she said, “Josée asked me if my father had ever . . .” She paused. I waited. “What was the word she used?” my mother asked herself. “It was very specific.
Inconsiderate . . . immodest . . . indiscreet!
She asked if my father had ever made indiscreet gestures toward me.”

“As in . . . sexually?” I asked, trying to make sense of this.

“Yes. I told her no. But she didn't seem to believe me.”

“Why would she ask?” I said. My mother shrugged. She seemed more perplexed than perturbed.

“I told her that, well, it
had
made me very uncomfortable that he used to walk around our house naked. But Josée said she used to walk around our house naked, too, which is true. Both my parents have always been nudists.” In fact, as they'd been having this conversation, Josée had been naked in the Jacuzzi. My mother was getting undressed. Josée remarked that Françoise had developed a gut and warned her that at her age any pounds she gained she would never lose. My mother seemed more upset by this comment than by Josée's earlier question.

“But what did she mean about your father?” I said, steering her back.

There had been some moments of awkwardness with her father, my mother said. Though nothing like what Josée was hinting at. When my mother was nineteen, Paul brought her to St. Barths for a vacation. My mother remembered standing in the doorway of the hotel room. There was only one room, only one bed. Paul slept naked.

“Papa, I don't want to share a bed with you,” she'd said. He'd asked why.

“I don't know,” she'd said. “It just makes me very uncomfortable.”

“But it doesn't bother me at all!” he'd said magnanimously, as if he were excusing her for something.

My mother laughed. It was on that same vacation that the two of them had been seen together by a friend of Josée's. The friend later reported to Josée that she'd seen Paul with a very young girlfriend.

“Oh, no,” Josée had corrected her. “He was with Françoise. That's his daughter.”

“No,” the friend had insisted. “The way they were together, the two of them, the way he touched her . . . I don't believe that that was his daughter.”

It was this last that Josée had told my mother in the Jacuzzi, this that had led her to ask about the indiscreet gestures.

I said, “But it wasn't? . . . it wasn't . . . the way he was with you . . . it wasn't disturbing to you?”

No, my mother told me. What disturbed her were his very young girlfriends.
That
, she said, made her very uncomfortable.

“Was that all that made Josée suspicious?” I asked. “That her friend had mistaken you for your father's girlfriend?”

No, she said. Around the same period, in her early twenties, my mother told me, she had spent some time assisting her father at the hospital. His secretary had later reported to Josée that the two kissed on the lips in the break room.

“Was that true?” I asked.

“I don't remember it,” my mother said. “We might have kissed on the lips, but it wasn't in a way that should have made anyone uncomfortable.” What she remembered of that time, she said, was fainting over and over at the sight of blood and her father forcing her to keep trying. She resented that.

We'd finished our drinks. She suggested another round. I suggested that we go home, drink wine, and continue the conversation privately.

At the apartment, my mother lay down on the couch with her feet on my lap. She closed her eyes, wineglass aloft.

“We don't have to keep talking,” I said softly.

“No, no,” she said. “I'm just resting my eyes. I'm not going to fall asleep. What were we talking about?”

“Les gestes indiscrets,”
I said.

“Right. Well yes, then Josée said that when I was living in my father's apartment, I'd slept with him in his bed. I told her no, I slept in Andrée's room. But she insisted, she said, the suicide, she said, I found you naked in his bed.” My mother sighed and propped herself up to drink.

That was only for the suicide attempt, my mother told me now. And it was true, she acknowledged, that perhaps there had been something strange about this, about how she had lain down on her father's side of the bed that morning. But she didn't want to die in Andrée's bed, where she had often been miserable.

“And you think it was only that?” I asked in a small voice.

“Well
of course
Freud would tell you otherwise,” my mother said.

She was silent a moment. Her lips twitched. She looked scared. She put her fingers to her mouth and pulled out a shard of glass. She looked at it, glistening between her fingers, and stood up to throw it away. She rinsed out her glass and poured herself more wine.

“You want the same bottle?” I asked. I let myself hope that the shard had somehow come from the bottle; that it hadn't been, from the start, in the wineglass I had handed her.

“No point opening a new one,” she said. “But you shouldn't buy this brand anymore.”

She sat back down by me on the couch, her arm over my shoulder as I leaned against her chest.

“No, clearly there was something . . . something strange,” she continued. “But I remember what was in my head at the time. It had nothing to do with my father. I got very close to throwing myself off the balcony. I was just too scared.” She turned to me with an apologetic grimace, as if embarrassed by this cowardice.

“Of course,” I said reassuringly. “But—the decision to be in your underwear . . . ?”

“My last moments were precious to me. I thought,
Well, merde, this act is for myself. I might as well be as comfortable as possible.
”

“So you took off your clothes?” I asked.

“I slept in my father's bed when he wasn't there. And I slept in my underwear. And my . . . I didn't really have pajamas. I did when he was there, and not when he wasn't. And it was . . . it was May, and the windows looked out over the Seine.”