An
EXTRAORDINARY
THEORY
of
OBJECTS
A MEMOIR OF AN OUTSIDER IN PARIS
STEPHANIE LACAVA
With Illustrations by Matthew Nelson
Dedication
To those who unwittingly taught me about wonder in the world, to not be afraid of the dark, and to talk to strangers.
To Bryan, who taught me how to find them.
Epigraphs
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
—W. B. YEATS
But men should not be too curious in analyzing and condemning any means which nature devises to save them from themselves, whether it be coins, old books, curiosities, butterflies, or fossils.
—MARK RUTHERFORD
Contents
Dedication
Epigraphs
Introduction
New York: Fall 1992
New York: Spring 1993
Le Vésinet: Spring 1993
Le Vésinet: Fall 1993
Le Vésinet: Spring 1995
Paris: Fall 1995
Paris: Spring 1996
Le Vésinet
New York: Fall 2009
South of France: Sometime around 2010
Paris: Sometime around 2010
New York: Sometime in 2011
Paris
Paris: More recently …
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I was always strange. Born with red hair to parents without it, I always thought I was a changeling—swapped at birth because some perfect couple knew they didn’t want me, even before I could talk, before I could tell them they were right. As a baby, I was disturbed by the quietest sounds and shadows on the wall. When I was older, a lover would call me out for odd behavior. “It must be a pretty planet you come from.” He’d laugh at how I hated loud music and chaotic places. “You’ve fooled everyone,” he’d say when I begged to go somewhere private. “People think you’re normal.” Years later, a friend would tell me a story about the time a well-known writer asked how exactly to “hang out.” An anecdote meant to mock my lack of social ease. I imagined there was nowhere on earth where I could feel settled.
*
My outsider status was confirmed when my father took a job in France and my family moved from New York to a cold, empty house in Le Vésinet. I was twelve years old. From then on, I would never be quite American and, by virtue of my birthplace, never truly French either. The unsuccessful transplant began one April in the early nineties. Everything that represented my past life and its predictable ways—my geode collection, a jar of shells from summers in Cape Cod, a box of empty cicada skins—had been packed and placed on a containership slowly crossing the Atlantic. I arrived with my mother and brother, Zach, two months ahead of our belongings, and for that time I slept on a cot and wore the same shirt and pants every day to school. I started to obsess over my missing objects as evidence of what I’d lost. All I wanted was something to look forward to, someone beyond my family to want me, and to capture and tame the forces that caused this change. So, I started a new collection.
Back then, I trusted everyone and everything, but in particular the things I could hold. Most children latch on to the security of objects, but I went further. I was obsessed with cabinets of curiosities, historical efforts to catalog and control nature’s oddities. A favorite example was the encyclopedic collection of rare flora and fauna that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II kept at Prague Castle in the seventeenth century. I had a twin passion for ancient mythologies. These stories were another way to make sense of the nonsensical. Alone and unaccepted by other girls, I also loved biographies or fiction about alluring and iconoclastic women who would come to feel like real-life companions. Reading was a Pascalian diversion; stories and facts were a distraction from spiraling thoughts. I had always hated loudness. It was loud enough inside my head.
This mania extended to animals, people, and places—a city, even strangers in the street. I had a game where I liked to imagine what sort of pajamas each passerby might wear. This came from a belief that the more I know about the inner lives of others, the more I might understand the world. Collecting information and talismans is a way of exercising magical control. You can hold a lucky charm and know everything about nature’s creatures yet still be terribly lonely.
*
When I fell apart at thirteen in France, I didn’t lose my unfounded trust in others and the naïveté that ruled my youth, but I did misplace innate excitement, hope, and a will to live. A loss of control in my surroundings contributed to an active, throbbing depression. Spending those first full days in Le Vésinet alone—cut off—led to interactions with only objects and stories, which came to form the map of my breakdown and survival. What saved me, in the end, was my fear of change transforming into raw wonder and wanderlust. Intense sensitivity can be debilitating, or it can increase the upside of chance and the power of whimsy—a need for storytelling, strangers, and odd encounters. My strength with the written word is the ability to make unlikely subjects somehow connect, a capacity that has never been my strong suit in life. I had never been patient enough to believe that looking back my sadness would all make sense. But it does now.
It is with all apologies to my mother and father that I tell this story, as our family has always been intensely private. Growing up, I had plenty of love from my parents and brother, but I wanted another kind of comfort. In our family, value was placed in working hard, being compassionate and open-minded, not in frivolities or material indulgences. For me, though, there was safety and security in lovely little objects that appeared in the form of tiny souvenir-like tokens found over the years. My father found this same magic thinking in antiques or museums. Always gone for work, he became a treasure hunter in my imagination, a mustachioed pirate sailing across the world; it was my mother who kept order. As parents, they did nothing wrong, except encourage a lack of cynicism and foster creative spirit. It never occurred to me to be careful of life as a small child, to cultivate a second system of defense aside from my unusual instincts, to be guarded, aware, and patient with people in showing themselves. When I was little, it was sweet to lack social inhibitions and common sense. It became a handicap soon thereafter.
As an evolving adult, I am left with what happens when you grow up filtering the world through a very particular point of view—images are enlarged and cataloged with a classification dreamed up from my crazy years of a short life. I traffic the world using my idiosyncratic senses, so it follows that I’d document my life through a narrative illuminated with objects and their respective stories. The truth is, I can’t relay everything exactly as it happened, because I’m not even quite sure of what happened. I remember that time in France in cinematic flashbacks filled with scenery and elaborate sets but rarely any actors. When I first wrote the narrative strand of this story, the objects came to me within the memories. I did not plan for so many connections or for the themes that emerged in this collection. When I was young, I didn’t know all of this history. If anything, the only original link was my taste for these objects, an odd sensibility honed from the very events and scenes in which they first appeared. Then a web started to slowly show itself, a net to soften the fall from my memories. I researched the objects to own them by giving each new meaning and exorcising the old. During this process, I found peace in the lack of randomness of what I thought were childish fixations.
The t
ies between entries came in three distinct ways, and certain people reappeared throughout the stories. There was Lee Miller finding solace in photography and serving as a muse to Man Ray. Meanwhile in Le Vésinet, the Marchesa Casati fashioned her own immortality, captivating and entertaining artists and writers, Ray among them. When I think of a shell, I remember a scene in Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, which is in itself a story of a precocious teenager learning about the world and sexuality, which also calls to mind Jean Seberg (see Seberg footnote on page 137). Both battled premature success and the pitfalls of fame and projected public adoration. Furthermore Miller was from a small town outside New York City, which happens to be the same place I was born—all three of us found identity in France. I am in no way comparable to these women, but what we share is a tendency toward eccentric or creative takes on our own circumstance.
There was also Oscar Wilde, with a taste for lilies of the valley; scarab rings on both hands; his residency and death at L’Hôtel; and even his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as an example of the haunted pictures and phantasmagoria popular in the nineteenth century. The Victorian age and its archaeological obsession and revival of Greek and Egyptian styles lent another common facet to the list, as did the increase in the study of natural sciences like zoology. There was also the nineteenth-century thinkers’ obsession with optics and the occult. It was during this time that famed French taxidermist Deyrolle established his business, due to the popularity of entomology and animal curiosities.
I had people, an era, and then finally a theme—an extraordinary theory of objects. As humans we crave beauty and we attempt to hold on to this experience through physical evidence. For religion it may be a relic, for the curious, a found talisman. For me, it is my story of conquering another world, a place where in order to survive I needed to seek out wonder. It was this unchecked romanticism that evolved into an adult skill to challenge sadness with words and a belief that what you experience isn’t what is simply handed to you. Maturity means allowing for change and ephemeral feelings. It took a study of objects for me to see that if we are patient and gentle in observing ourselves and others, we will find connection. That has been the greatest comfort of all.
*
I never imagined I would live as I do today; I don’t think I even believed I’d make it past twenty. Romantic love and calm were the great, elusive intangibles. I can now sit still for the length of a film, though my mind wanders. Love has come in unlikely forms and continues to surprise me. And the objects are still there, but only as mementos of more profound observations.
*
Here is my story, but told in a strange way.
*
Consider the source.
New York
Fall 1992
When I was eleven, I decided to buy land in Brazil. It cost around fifty dollars, brokered through a mail-order conservation society. Two weeks after sending in payment, a sheet of paper arrived entitling me to an acre of rain forest. I thought that if I ever needed to run away, the plot would be there, undeveloped, with hundreds—thousands—of poison arrow tree frogs* surfing in wait for me. In the meantime, I had created the Amazon in my bedroom. Little figurines of the neon creatures were arranged throughout my bookshelves, while my walls were painted jungle green bordered with my best attempt at illustrated macaw parrots. My mother had let me decorate however I liked. I spent hours setting up my plastic frogs, finding the perfect spot for my favorite blue-and-yellow-speckled one. My love for him led me to lie on my bed, with its banana leaf sheets, and daydream of where I’d find his family and other crazy beasts. I didn’t know then that I would soon have to leave this safe, make-believe rain forest.
*
I learned of the upcoming change in the parking lot of a strip mall just outside of Boston. We were in Massachusetts for Thanksgiving with my grandmother, at the grocery store for some milk and life-changing news.
“You’ve always wanted to go to Paris,” my father said, staring at me from the driver’s seat of the car. I knew his face as a composition of two brown dots and a neat half-moon of facial hair that moved whenever he spoke. Sometimes I would watch his mustache* instead of looking at his eyes. He was always calm, measured, and unflappable, like a spy from the movies. Based on his demeanor, elusive work, and routine travels, I believed he was a real-life secret government agent. My father was rarely in the States for longer than three weeks, and I spent so many hours imagining him that he’d become something of a myth.
“We’re moving to France,” he said.
I laughed. He did not.
“Seriously, Stephie.”
“Why?” I asked.
“My job. I have an assignment overseas.”
“Can’t you just travel like you already do? Make a lot of conference calls? You could use that computer mail Prodigy-thing you just installed?” Before we left for the holiday, my father had shown me some strange device called a modem, which he plugged into the computer to send written notes over phone lines.
He shook his head. There was nothing for me to read. He rarely showed physical evidence of emotion. I was the opposite. The tears came immediately.
“I—I’m not sure I want to leave my friends.”
“You never stop talking about travel; and you tell us how you don’t really get along with the girls here, except for Ashley and Claire.”
I bit my bottom lip and shook my head. He was correct. “Yes, but this is different.”
“Not so much. It’s a great opportunity for you and your brother.”
“How?”
“Stephie, you will get to live in another country and understand it in a real way.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Trust me, it’s different from taking a trip. You know little of what else is out there.” The mustache did not move. I had no choice but to trust him.
He didn’t know that for all that opportunity there would be just as much pain.
New York
Spring 1993
I clutched my backpack to my chest as we cleared security at the airport. My long, unruly red hair kept getting tangled in the straps. My mother was occupied watching my brother as he tried to run ahead to the gate. She didn’t ask why I chose to hold the bag so closely. The man at security didn’t either. He waved me past. No one looked inside to see what I was carrying with me. Buried beneath two stuffed frogs, an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus*–shaped metal pencil case, and a Discman was a large, curved whale’s tooth.*
My father had given the ivory piece to me some time ago, knowing I would keep it safe in my collection. I was told I had started stockpiling pretty things when I was three, beginning with a foil-covered egg I didn’t realize was chocolate until a friend took a bite. The whale tooth was a souvenir from one of my father’s Nantucket holidays as a child. I loved it. Not only did it belong to him, to his mustache and gentle heart, but the tooth also symbolized fantasy. To me, it could have been the horn of a narwhal, or part of a Minotaur, though neither was as exotic as my father. I could read about these creatures, whereas there was no guidebook for my parents. Before my father left to go ahead of my mother, brother, and me to France, we had all sat together at the kitchen table to discuss our strange future.
“Where are we going to live?” I had asked.
“We found a house.” The mustache did not move.
“A house? Don’t people live in apartments in Paris?”
“We’re going to be just outside the city, in a town called Le Vésinet.” It suddenly made sense why my father and my mother had gone overseas a month ago and left us to stay at my friend Claire’s house. “Zach will have a backyard to play in, and you will love the park there, Les Ibis. It is filled with swans and there is a special pink palace, the Palais Rose.” I couldn’t listen. I was angry with him for not asking us, for not even telling us, until the arrangements were all settled.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It didn’t make sense to share the ne
ws until it was all set. You will go to a small international school in Neuilly-sur-Seine.”
I felt as though I was being briefed like one of his colleagues, which made me feel grown-up.
“We will leave the third week in April. You will start school the day after your birthday. You will fly with your mother and brother, as I will already be in France, working and making sure everything is ready. The movers will come and pack what we won’t need right away to be shipped in a container at sea and arrive in a few months. Put aside what you’ll need sooner. We are keeping our house here, so you can leave certain things behind.”
I didn’t answer. Anything I would have said would be cut with sarcasm, which my father would not appreciate.
Again came the tears.
*
The whale’s tooth lay hidden in my backpack as we boarded the plane.
“Stephie, are you ready?” my mother asked. She tried to take my hand. I pulled away. The move could not have been an easy decision for her; she would play single parent much of the time in a foreign place. Yet I blamed her, because it was easy—she was emotional, but not fragile. I was both.
“I’m fine.”
I held the tooth beneath a blanket the entire flight.
Le Vésinet
Spring 1993
Upon arrival in France, I unpacked my little sack on the wooden floor of my new, empty bedroom. There was a large arched window on the left wall covered in rusty white-metal shutters that I couldn’t figure out how to open. I stayed in the dark, exhausted to the point where I could barely sit up. One, two, three, there they were: my whale tooth, my poison arrow frog, and the sarcophagus pencil case. I lined the objects up around me on the floor where there was a little light coming through the slits of the shutters, so each one sat on a sunbeam. I spoke to the frog, “Welcome to France, I know it’s not quite the rain forest.” He didn’t say anything in return.
*
I woke up later that night with my head nestled on my backpack. It was completely dark and very cold. A blanket was at my feet. My mother must have come in while I was sleeping. I had no idea what time it was or if anyone else was awake. There was a little light in the hall outside the door. I stood up and lifted the blanket, wrapping it around my shoulders. It was quiet; everyone was sleeping. I walked softly through the hall and down the stairs. There was another light coming from outside. I went across the kitchen and unlatched the back doors. A half-moon was in the sky over a broken-down little house that must have belonged to the gardener. I decided to have a look, trampling a few yellow tulips before finding myself at a rotting gray door. It opened easily, letting some little creature out with a gust of stale air. Inside, the floor was covered in shards of terra-cotta pots and remains of a stained glass window. I kicked something that made a sharp clang as it hit the wall. It was a skeleton key.*
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