I knew it was incredibly thoughtful. The little blossoms looked perfect on my vanity’s glass shelf next to the whale’s tooth and tiny frog figurine. My collection had grown too large for the windowsill. I sat on the carved wooden stool in front of the round mirror and combed my tangled hair. I was newly aware of a tingling in my stomach and thighs that made me crazy to find someone, to think about sexual affairs, a fantasy love life. I wanted to be a player in the adult world. I imagined that a special man would give me the hope and confidence I lacked on my own. Yet instead of leaving my room to find him, or even make a friend, I shut myself inside. I preferred to sit on my bed Indian style and reread my worn copy of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. I liked to learn the details of each deity and try to pair him or her with someone I knew. It was a way of organizing everyone, fitting them into a system. The Greek gods were like people, but more beautiful and could do nothing terribly wrong.
I imagined I would like to be Iris. She seemed so lovely and carefree, wearing a dress of iridescent water droplets, making her way along the rainbow. And if I were a greater goddess, perhaps I would be Aphrodite emerging from a shell, my naked body covered in pearls.*
My match was more Persephone, though, kidnapped into the underworld. Even her name sounded like mine.
At the top of Olympus was a girl in my grade named Charlotte. She had been at our school the longest, since kindergarten. Brought up in Switzerland, she spoke perfect French and was very pretty, with a small nose and ample chest. Her father was a powerful banker, her mother somehow connected to royalty. They lived in a two-floor town house, and her bedroom was still decorated with Ludwig Bemelmans’s characters from Madeline. She always had crumpets from Marks & Spencer, the English store with shops throughout Paris. Her sister had already graduated and gone on to Lawrenceville in New Jersey for high school. When her sister visited she always wore punk-grunge clothing, like shirts from the brand Fuct or Stussy, or one of those orange-lined green bomber jackets from an army-navy store. I believed Charlotte led the other girls against me. She’d been there forever. It was easy to trust her word.
Then there was Natalie. Perhaps less interesting than Charlotte, though more beautiful, she was an army brat from California who had moved around her whole life. She was known for French-kissing under tables in the cafeteria and twirling her hair. She was the real Aphrodite. I admired her sexy, brazen ways. She sometimes talked back to Charlotte and always to our teachers.
Sarah’s father was the CEO of some company that made things no one understood. She had moved to France from Connecticut, not far from the town where I had lived back in the States. Her thin blond hair was always pulled back in one of those silver clips you’d find at an American drugstore in the nineties. Sarah was Athena, smart and sturdy.
As for the boys, there were three who were particularly intriguing, and sometimes kept company with the above. Jake had moved to France from Tokyo and his father ran an American bank. He loved Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Quentin Tarantino, and Pamela Anderson. Navy blue sweat suits were his uniform of choice. He and I had similar spirits, and it may have been this bond that made me a little uncomfortable with him. Instead of embracing his quirkiness, I was sometimes repelled by it, because it mirrored so much of my own. Jake was American and best friends with Raees, who was half South African, half American. The two of them were inseparable, always making movies together with Jake’s camcorder. I had fallen in a teenage love-obsession with Raees. Whereas Jake was just like me, Raees wasn’t at all. He seemed stoic and confident and didn’t really know that I existed, unlike Jake, who, in his own weird way, seemed to care about me. Raees’s mother was a purported spy, newly married to a Swedish prince. Maybe she knew my father. Here were Apollo and Aries.
Michael, I knew only for a little while, as he decamped with his family to Rome soon after my arrival at school. He played Zeus, at least from what I had heard, for the duration of his rule.
Other classmates included Aashif, whose father was the ambassador from Kuwait, and Akiyo from Japan with his rocket-scientist mother. He was close with Seiya, who was also Japanese, and best friends with Palat, a Thai prince. They always seemed to have the latest gadgets and technology. They were the Three (Eurasian) Fates.
In the older crowd, there was a brooding boy named Tim, who was Hades. Then there was Sophie, who was Helen of Troy, beautiful and cool. She was dating a boy who was a skater—rough and rather grown-up and the brother of her best friend.
Among the younger children were Titans like Melanie, the daughter of the founder of the most fashion-forward store in Paris, and Henrik, the son of a famous tennis player and a model. He would grow up to be a professional basketball player, celebrated in his own right.
After some consideration, I decided that if I could choose, I would want to be Artemis, a waiflike virgin hunting goddess, rather than Iris. The mythology game worked well as a method of classification and exposition on character. That is, until everything went upside down. Problems started in our teenage lives because there wasn’t the security of a Poseidon character to summon rain,* wipe out tragedy, and pacify uprisings and betrayals. We realized authority governed only in theory and as a construct of its own creation. We became aware that teachers and parents couldn’t control what we thought they could when one of our classmates died of cancer and someone’s father committed suicide. Around the same time, one of our teachers explained that when Kurt Cobain sang “Rape Me,” he meant it metaphorically, which became useful in social studies as a way to understand Rudyard Kipling’s feelings about imperialism. I learned to play basketball in an empty pool at the American Church. Instead of crossing guards, men with machine guns sometimes stood watch at the school gate.
At least once a month, there was a bomb threat and we had to evacuate a few times. The news often reported the Algerians clashing with the French. Every time there was a Métro bombing, I worried that my father had been among the casualties. It mattered little that he was usually not in Paris at the time; I always assumed the worst.
*
It was the sound of rain starting to fall slowly outside my window that made me finally leave my room come nighttime. I stood up, unhinged, and pushed open the rusted shutters to look into the garden. It was the perfect weather for a walk. I padded quietly down the marble stairs, through the kitchen, to the back door, which opened quietly. I was barefoot and the stones on the landing felt cold beneath me. I walked slowly with my head lifted to the sky, catching the raindrops in my hair. The shower was still soft enough that I could sit in the garden without shelter. There was a circular cement pedestal littered with birdseed offerings nearby the shed. I pulled myself up onto it. Again, I lifted my head to the sky. Something started to crawl over my foot. I looked down, and there was a beetle,* its shell burnt red with black markings. I tried to pick it up, but it opened its wings and flew away. Then I noticed all the other beetles. They were everywhere—shiny chartreuse shells, big black monsters, ladybirds, and tiny brown ones. I watched them tour the slab I had sat down on before escaping into the backyard at large. One went straight for the lilies of the valley. The rain began to fall harder around me. I had once read that beetles were the most diverse and populous species. I was comforted knowing there was nowhere I could go where I wouldn’t be able to find some kind of beetle to keep me company.
Paris
Fall 1995
“Stay there,” Jake said. He was waving his beer bottle at me with his left hand. In his right hand was a camcorder. I was sitting in the grass of a park just outside of Paris trying my unsuccessful best to be enchanting. Jake and I were sort of “going out,” but I translated that into trying to play muse to him and Raees. I liked him very much, but not in the same way I lusted after Raees. There was no way I could have said no when he asked me out (it didn’t mean on a date, but rather to officially be his instant-girlfriend). He and Raees were my friends, and I couldn’t risk losing them. That and I desperately wanted to be like Lee Miller* w
as to Man Ray—the video cameras and seventh-grade screenplay version. Miller had been troubled kind of like me and still managed to find someone, an artist, to love. She was beautiful, stylish, and independent, everything I was not. I tried my best too: a pale nude slip* with a striped, ratty lime green cardigan I’d found at the vintage store Kiliwatch, in Paris. There was nothing to fill the bodice of the dress, save for my efforts at charm. The outfit was chosen for my screen test as Lady Macbeth in Jake and Raees’s next film collaboration, Macbeth: The Dice Decides. They had just shown their short of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the school auditorium. I knew the audition would involve some drinking, smoking, and filming, so I’d tried to dress accordingly, my only sources of style inspiration: my mother and my magazines. I knew all about the current models, like my favorite, Karen Elson, with her bright red hair and pale skin. She was sometimes referred to as Le Freak, which worked for me. Then there were Guinevere van Seenus, Shalom Harlow, and Trish Goff. I loved all of them, especially Amber Valletta in the Prada ads, as she floated away on a boat in Southeast Asia. I didn’t distinguish between advertisements and editorial. My floor was covered in glossy, torn-out pictures, like those of Harlow wearing neon stripes in Gucci ads alongside a redheaded model with her hand suggestively on her lap.
“There’s a hole in the elbow of your sweater,” Jake said as he changed the CD from Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to Nirvana’s* “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Nevermind. He and Raees often talked about the music videos they’d seen on MTV, one of the few English-language channels. Music seemed to be the main way American culture seeped into France. I always felt I was experiencing a little of the life I would have had back in the States when we listened to certain bands. Perhaps this wishful nostalgia is the reason I fell in love with fashion too. That and I was painfully skinny and awkward-looking, like a tall elf, and so were the models of the time.
I ignored Jake’s comment about the hole. He had transitioned from sweatpants to broken-in corduroys, which he wore with flat skater shoes and four layers of T-shirts in different washed-out colors with a long-sleeve thermal underneath. Raees had on a similar look, but with torn jeans and a blazer he told us he’d found in his father’s closet. I thought he was beautiful. It wasn’t his blond hair or height, but a certain stillness within him, a calmness I craved for myself. I had noticed he wasn’t quite like the other boys but more laid-back and witty. He was the brain behind the Abott Charles Dingie Administration, a faux group of jester pundits, which had grown into a full-blown political ruse that now included campaign posters hanging in the halls at school. No teacher took the flyers down, complacently encouraging the whole scheme. I liked Jake and his quirky sensibility and creativity, but he was like me—introspective and creative. This was the problem.
“Steph, you want a beer?” When we were among friends we always spoke in English, even though most of us were fluent in French. I could understand everything I read, though my writing, especially verb conjugation, could stand some improvement.
“Sure.” When he turned away to film the trees behind us, I spilled the can’s contents onto the ground.
“So, guys, what do you think of this setting for the witches scene?”
“It’s cool,” Raees said. “Though, we would have to film at night.”
“I love parks when it’s dark. Remember that night in the Bois de Boulogne?” Jake asked. I wasn’t sure if I should mention my night walks, maybe they were weird.
I figured their new project would be a little like the upcoming version of Romeo and Juliet with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio I’d seen previews for, rather than the Zeffirelli version we’d watched in class, the teachers stopping and restarting the film to explain the play. Their argument was that it was akin to going to the Globe Theatre and seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company. But how does one translate Lady Macbeth into the nineties?
“Steph, do you have a costume to wear?” Jake asked.
“I have this dress that’s a Scottish plaid, which I could wear with red Doc Martens?”
“Scottish, like Scotland. Good. Red, like blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. Excellent.”
“So, what now?” Raees asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m satisfied with this spot, and we’re out of beers, and we’ve listened to both albums in full.”
“I guess we go back,” Jake said, reaching for my leg. I inched away from him into the puddle of beer on the ground.
I saw Raees the next day at school, but Jake never turned up.
*
“Your father’s in the basement,” my mother said when I got home one afternoon from school. It was a month after Jake’s weeklong disappearance. He’d returned to school as if nothing had happened. We all knew it had to be something serious by the way the teachers whispered and nodded. Of course, I was supposed to be his “girlfriend,” but he didn’t mention anything to me, so I thought better of asking him. Clearly we had a healthy, normal relationship. I was in love with his best friend and didn’t know how to communicate with either of them.
I rounded the corner down the stairs to find my father. “Daddy?”
“Stephie!” he called to me.
“I am so happy you’re back. Why do you go for so long?”
“Work,” he said, bending down to pick up a stud that had fallen out of his hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked. He had a hammer in one hand and squat nails in the other. There were silk foulard scarves all over the floor where he’d dismantled the base of three antique chairs.*
My mother had warned him against buying the trio, but he’d believed he’d find the fourth one somehow, somewhere. He was busy reupholstering the seats with scarves he’d stolen from her drawer. I had no idea where he got this idea or if my mother had any idea it was happening. Nonetheless, her Hermès carousel scarf was being tacked onto the seat of a dark wooden frame. My father gestured for me to hold the corner of the fabric while he pinned it down. “Do you want to go with me to the brocante to look for the other chair?”
“You actually think you’ll find it?”
“Why not? It could happen.”
“You’re serious?”
He nodded. “I had an idea earlier, why don’t you decorate the library here however you like? You can do some research and make the room whatever you imagine. It will be the perfect place to put our Minotaur and Hydra.” One of our activities when my father was in town was to create papier-mâché animals. We used assorted materials—tape, balloons—anything to construct the bodies of the beasts I’d read about in my mythology books. We then covered these creatures in wet sheets of plaster of paris, which hardened to life as cardboard skins.
I liked this idea, especially as I’d just read about this eccentric decorator named Madeleine Castaing.* Unlike many of the women who captivated me, she had been alive the year we moved to France. I wish I had known to ask my father to take me to see her. He would have loved that she would sell her own flea market finds based on the value she felt for them or the desire of the potential owner, regardless of the object’s material worth. This is how my father conducted his treasure hunts.
“I need to tell Zach to get ready. He’s coming too, no?” I asked.
“Sure,” my father said. I ran up the blue stairs from the basement to look for my brother.
“Zach,” I yelled.
“What?” he said, poking his head out of the bathroom where he was wearing swimming goggles while sailing miniature ships in the bidet. I laughed.
“Get ready.”
“Should I bring my goggles?” he asked. I shouldn’t have laughed, considering his odd behavior was further evidence of our shared genes.
“Your goggles?”
“To see the sea monsters.”
“We’re not going to Versailles.” He’d always wanted to stick his head into the Grand Canal to see the fish there. “We’re going to look for antiques.”
“
So boring.” He rolled his eyes behind the blue plastic before running upstairs to put on some clothes. My mother came out of the kitchen carrying the wicker basket she sometimes used as a purse. “I packed a little picnic,” she said.
My father walked the white marble stairs from his bedroom, looking like a vagabond with torn corduroy pants, a denim shirt, and an old Scottish sweater. Dressing down was one of his tactics for haggling with sellers. He took the picnic basket from my mother and gave her a kiss. She was wearing very long trousers that dragged on the floor over her heels and a silk blouse with a bow at the neck. Very seventies, very Yves Saint Laurent, very my grandmother. She was also wearing her mother’s armful of gold bangles.
“Where’s your brother?” my father asked.
“Coming!” Zach yelled as he slid down the stairs in his socks.
“That’s dangerous. No socks on these floors,” my mother said.
He rolled his eyes again. “Do we really have to go to this antique thing?”
“Yes, we are going as a family,” my father said. We followed him out to the car.
*
When we arrived at the market, my father stopped us at the entrance for a briefing. “Okay, so before we split up there are a couple of things we are in search of. One: I need an armoire for the dining room. I want something old, intricate, and carved with fish! No other sea creatures; no mermaids. Two: we need an animal of some kind, discounting the fish on the armoire. Finally, whoever finds the fourth chair missing from our set will be able to buy whatever they want within reason. Understood?”
We nodded. My mother smiled and squeezed my father’s hand.
“Since this is a competition, we can’t be together the entire time,” I said to my father.
Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris Page 3
