*
That night in Monaco, I left the hotel wearing a silk nightgown with Will’s coat jacket thrown over it. No one seemed surprised by a woman in a slip dress. Night walks were still my favorite things to do in foreign places—a micro example of France translating into the source of my sensibility—and Will was used to such erratic behavior. I think it intrigued him, along with the story of my childhood. That was one of the side effects of being “different” that I hadn’t counted on: it made men curious.
When I was young, I thought that the perfect woman was Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley. Then I discovered there were some men who liked a little torture translated into madness—and Ashley may not have been so sane after all. “She’s crazy” sometimes meant she took every kind of passion too far. Beyond Miller, Casati, and Castaing, I’d recently read about Nancy Cunard* and her rebellion against the aristo-expectations of her English mother. Like Miller, she captivated artistic men. There was also the French-adopted American Jean Seberg,* once married to diplomat and writer Romain Gary. He divorced the established Lesley Blanch for Seberg, a high-stakes trade winning him a partner with youth and instability. Miller, Casati, Cunard, and Seberg all dealt with depression toward the end of their lives, which meant it’d been hiding all along. I obsessed over their stories, searching for evidence to support the happy ending of my own.
Will once said, “I’ll never be bored a day in my life with you.” He’d tried to pass the backhanded compliment off as a joke, but I knew he meant every word. My problems had been behaving themselves as they had when I was very young, though there was always the chance of resurrection. France was the trigger the first time around.
I continued walking, pulling Will’s blazer down on my shoulders. It had taken years for me to see the childish selfishness of my behavior and childhood depression, but also the innocence of it. My poor parents had suffered because I’d been sad and spoiled with their love. I often thought about how my mother had to take care of herself as a teenager and how this led to her resilient and optimistic spirit. I hadn’t meant to be unappreciative. I never would have believed I would have found someone to love, to take back to France with me. And I had left him alone in a hotel room, our first night away.
There was a café at the end of the path, which was still open. I sat down.
“Can I help you, my butterfly?” the waiter asked, looking up and down the length of my dress.
“A tea, please.”
“Where are you from, you speak such good French?” he said. I felt an odd sensation when he brushed by my arm to pick up the menu.
“New York,” I lied.
“Ah, New York, a little beauty from New York.” He turned away from the table.
When he returned, he was carrying a bright yellow ceramic cup of hot water and a tea bag* with EARL GREY written in white letters on a navy blue paper square. “I brought you English tea,” he said, “because you are English girl.” He was confusing ethnicity with language. I shook my head.
“You don’t like it?”
“No, I am American,” I said in French, “not English.” I used the word that described someone from England, rather than the tongue.
“Ah, I see. We do not have any American tea.”
“It’s okay,” I said lifting the cup. He brought over some milk and sugar.
“You are alone here?”
“No.” I smiled with apologetic eyes and pulled on the lapel of Will’s oversize blazer, surprised at my confidence.
I drank my tea in silence, allowing my mind the rare freedom to wander back to Le Vésinet, and then asked for the check.
“It is on me,” he said. I did not refuse him.
Paris
Sometime around 2010
I have a funny relationship with Paris taxi drivers. We either instantly bond because they recognize I speak French with a native accent, or we get in terrible fights. The latter happened when I told the driver to take me to rue du Mont-Thabor and he thought I had said rue de Montalembert. When we arrived at the wrong destination, I asked him to please take me to the right spot. I explained that he had misunderstood the address. He shook his head and refused to move the car. I told him I’d pay whatever he wanted. He told me it was out of principle and that I should get out and walk. I sat in the car for half an hour and he still refused to drive me, which left me no choice but to call another taxi. I waited for the second taxi to arrive while sitting in the first.
I decided it was best to call a driver for the following day of appointments and shows. Paris was harder to navigate with the traffic of everyone in town for the fashion collections. I too had come for this reason. Vanya was the name of the driver. He spoke with a thick Russian accent. I knew I’d understand his French better than his English. From the start, he had his own assumptions about me.
“You are from New York?” he asked as soon as I settled in the backseat. “So you know De Niro?”
“Robert De Niro?”
“Yes, yes.”
“No, not really.”
“I was in a film with him once. I am an actor, also high security.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was shot three times once. I used to be in charge of the security surrounding the Eiffel Tower.”
“That’s a big job.”
“Yeah, I know. One day a crazy man came with a gun and was threatening everyone, so we had a standoff. It happened at the southwest leg of the tower. He was about to shoot and I slid on the ground and grabbed his leg and then knocked his gun out of his hand.”
“Oh my goodness.”
“I then went to be bodyguard for movie stars, which is how I know De Niro. I worked on many movie sets. You know that guy who plays Bond?”
“Pierce Brosnan?” He shook his head. “Daniel Craig.” He nodded.
“I was in that movie, they said they liked the way I looked and I played a bodyguard.”
I giggled a little in response.
“What do you do?”
“I work in fashion.”
“Are you a model?”
“No, a writer.” He looked disappointed.
“You know Kate Moss?”
“Not really.” He looked even more disappointed. “You have a boyfriend?”
I nodded.
“What does he do?”
“Oh, um, finance and a little film.”
He got very excited. “He is film producer? Here, take my picture with your iPhone. Wait, actually give me your e-mail.”
“Okay,” I said. He handed me one of his cards and a pen, and I wrote down my e-mail.
“I will e-mail you my headshot and you give to your boyfriend and he can help give to casting agent. You know I play taxi driver in Julie Delpy’s film. They like my look also for these tough spy movies.” We were driving down the Champs-Élysées, past the theaters toward the Hôtel de Crillon and the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. “We need to take a detour,” he said.
“Why?”
“Too much traffic this way, trust me.”
We drove down a few streets and stopped across from a line of people winding around the corner of a lovely stone building.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“French people are curious. They like to see people they think are intelligent do stupid things.” I realized he was referring to Jacques Chirac, who was awaiting trial. The bystanders looked like Eddie Vedder groupies waiting for Pearl Jam tickets.
“You aren’t like this in America,” he said.
I shook my head and stared out the window as the top of the obelisk* on the Place de la Concorde came into sight. “We are almost there,” Vanya said. “Will you need me tomorrow?” he asked.
“No, thank you. I have something else to do.”
*
The following morning I called a cab to take me to Le Vésinet. I had intended to take the RER train, but it looked as though it would rain and Vanya was likely already dispatched.
“Rue Ampère, please,”
I said to the cabdriver as I got inside. “Le Vésinet… . Actually, can you take me to Les Ibis, instead, near the Palais Rose?”
“Okay,” he said in English, completely uninterested in me. I fell asleep on our way.
“Mademoiselle, we are here,” he said. I looked out the window and saw the rue Diderot street sign* before offering my credit card. “Have a nice time. I hope you get through on the other side.” Perhaps he’d meant something else but hadn’t known the proper English equivalent. I stepped out of the car onto the path to the Palais Rose’s gold and black gates on the corner of Allée des Fêtes.
I didn’t need to go any closer to the mansion. There was no longer someone looking at me through the window, and the swans had gone elsewhere. I knew the architecture by heart. So many times I’d lain awake alone in bed and imagined one of the Marchesa Casati’s absurd theme parties playing out on the sprawling lawn covered in carpet and black candles. She used to have illuminated signs set up all the way from the bridge over the Seine to the Palais Rose to guide her guests. This was the same path she would take in her blue Rolls-Royce when she grew bored of Le Vésinet, which was often, and decided to go on treasure hunts for amusement. Her friend, photographer and diarist Cecil Beaton, recounted a story of the marchesa deciding she wanted to find an object in a certain shade of orange to relieve her boredom. My father would have liked this game but would have been unable to see it as evidence of the isolation of living in Le Vésinet. The marchesa is now long gone, relegated to bizarre, lost stories, much like my childhood.
As I walked away from the palace, I noticed there were four mushrooms clustered together at the edge of the road. I knew better than to try to pick one. I remembered how after our visit to the museum of natural history, my father never forced our agreement that I throw away the mushroom. It had stayed in my collection until we moved back to the States. Its shriveled little body was then lost somewhere along the way. My other objects and collections still existed, though they’d started to morph to represent real, critical, connected themes rather than random things. People were no longer classified like the deities of Greek mythology, or the tidy trays of insects at Deyrolle. I’d kept all the objects because they were evidence of the beauty in the unusual, not as empty souvenirs of France. I thought about meeting Will and laughing at all his jokes, thinking they were original material until someone said they were from Seinfeld. I’d missed that moment in American television culture, just as I’d missed growing in the States in favor of deceased women and lucky charms.
*
I was worried that I wouldn’t know how to get back to our old house. I’d taken the walk so many times, though at night and so long ago.
“Excuse me, is this the way to rue Ampère?” I asked a man walking by.
He shook his head and pointed in the other direction. I didn’t listen and walked past a green painted gate and a roundabout before taking two lefts and then a right. There it was: rue Ampère and a few meters down, our house. There was someone standing in the window of the upstairs bathroom. I stood there in the middle of the street and started to cry.
New York
Sometime in 2011
“I’m still the same,” I said to my mother. We were sitting on a bench in Central Park. She took a drink from the paper coffee cup in her left hand as she watched a little boy run by. My mother had done everything to give Zach and me an upbringing unlike her own. Forced to be independent as a child, she wanted us to be able to rely on her. She’d come to visit me in Manhattan that afternoon, sensing I was relapsing into my old ways, to try to protect me from real complications, not the angsty delusions of Le Vésinet.
My mother put down the cup.
“You’re selfish, Stephie, you don’t think of how your actions affect others. I stopped sleeping that last year in France and I’d never had insomnia before.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It all exploded on me last week. I’m sorry I haven’t been to visit you. I thought the sooner I got away from what reminded me of France, I’d be cured. Only the opposite occurred. New people came into my life and I treated them like old friends, because I had none.”
“People aren’t going to understand your eagerness. It’s okay to be alone and patient. You have to trust.”
“Trust what?” I asked.
“Things.”
She lifted her coffee cup and pointed at a young boy carrying a sailboat* and a long stick to push it through the pond. “He reminds me of your brother. Do you remember he used to sail boats in the bidet whenever we wouldn’t take him to Les Ibis?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to him recently?”
“No.”
“He’s been spending much of his time with Blake restoring that old sailboat up at the house in Cape Cod.” I had one real friend in college, and she and my brother had fallen in love. It was during a late-night conversation at university that Blake shared with me her own parallel childhood: her father was an oil executive and her family moved around the world from Texas to England, where a young Diana Spencer was her nanny, then to Jakarta in Indonesia. Years later she would know me so well, well enough to tell me, “You’re a beacon for crazy people.” I told her I wouldn’t want it any other way, and she agreed, laughing. Blake and my brother had found each other because she too obviously had a taste for the gentle and borderline insane.
“Zach loved boats even when we were little.”
“He still does, but they’re real now.”
Paris
“You catch up nicely,” Adelaide said, sipping her espresso and staring back at me over the tiny café table. We’d been set up by a mutual French acquaintance who thought we should meet. She knew Adelaide from winters in Saint Moritz and summers in Ibiza. Somehow I ended up telling this stranger about not having many friends as a child, spending lonely months in Le Vésinet and weekends in Paris or Versailles. Her comment was flippant. She meant to say that now it seemed I have plenty of social engagements. I didn’t care anymore about having many friends. “And what a lovely way to grow up.” She pulled her blond hair back into a ponytail, patting the sides perfect. “You were living here around the time of the Concorde, non?” she asked.
I nodded.
“That was so amazing, you would sit down to a meal and arrive to Paris at dessert.”
“I never went on it,” I said. Some of my classmates had spoken of flying on the Concorde. When I’d mentioned it to my parents as an option for returning to New York during summer vacations, they’d laughed and asked, “When did you become so entitled?”
“Oh. Where are you staying now?” Adelaide said, switching the topic as she gestured to the waiter for the bill.
“L’Hôtel.” I always stayed there, on the Left Bank in room 44, walking distance from where we were, at Café de Flore. The small hotel was once part of the palace of La Reine Margot and the last residence of Oscar Wilde.
“You don’t have family here anymore?”
“No.”
“No friends to crash with?”
“I’d rather not impose.”
“I like your bangles,”* she said, changing the subject.
Alone was better than Adelaide.
*
That night at the hotel on rue des Beaux-Arts, I sat staring at my computer screen. It was 2 A.M. An hour earlier, I’d gone for one of my walks to nearby rue Jacob to pass by the site of Madeleine Castaing’s shop, which had closed years ago, on the corner of rue Bonaparte. In its place was an autograph store run by her son. No one else had been outside at that hour, though it was a lovely July night. I peered into the window, looking for evidence of Castaing, an opaline glass or fading stripe wall, but there was not much to be seen from the street. So I turned back to the hotel. Even in the dark, it was easy to find, with the silver ram’s head hanging over the door.
Once inside, I walked the four flights of leopard-carpeted stairs to my room. The walls of chambre 44 were painted mauve and hung with a delicate expanse of dark fabri
c suspended from rosettes. Black silk curtains hid some windows while others were draped in lace covered in thick velvet. The bed was beneath a violet canopy trimmed in deep mauve. My desk flipped open like a drawbridge suspended by a gold chain.
I sat down, lit a candle* smelling of roses and black currants, and opened my computer. There were e-mails to read, one message from an old boyfriend. He asked where I was. I said Paris. He knew L’Hôtel was where Oscar Wilde had died, and he also knew that I might fall apart in France.
“I picture you there. Always have. I can relate. Not sure if something is consuming you but if so, stay the course and handle it within, take the bullet up to Mont St Michel and get through it. Go out on a limb here … YouTube the White Stripes’ ‘Jolene.’ Do it Steph!!! It’ll kill four minutes.”
I Googled the video and listened to the song. It reminded me of our connection, of him. We were both a little dark, a little fucked-up. All we shared was a love for Hemingway and an odd understanding of each other, enough for him to know I should take a trip away from here.
Paris
More recently …
“You still want to go to the flea market, right?” Will asked, pushing his dark hair back behind his ears.
“Yes, we have to get there early, before everyone else.”
“I didn’t sleep last night, I was too worried about losing you to the Paris night. You worry me sometimes. Even I wouldn’t walk around the city streets after hours.” I laughed. He was six feet five, whereas I was elfin-looking, tall but frail. He might have been right to fear for my safety. The Parisian darkness had taken a few of my girls—Cunard, Seberg. Self-critical, introspective women court tragedy. They don’t care about making friends.
Will knew there was potential for explosions with me and unpredictable, irrational behavior, but he stayed. Who knew how such extraordinary opposites could coexist—even love? Will clearly did not want to go to the flea market, but he understood it meant something to me.
“Steph, remember when we get there that there’s a limit; we have to carry it all back.” He wanted nothing to do with any sort of treasure hunt.
Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris Page 6
