“You are so American,” I said. He looked at me and smiled, shaking his head. A gesture he did often. I pushed him out the door.
It was easy to find a taxi at that early hour. The Parisian streets were empty except for a middle-aged man smoking a cigarette. Will nodded at him and raised his hand in hello. The taxi the hotel had called was waiting outside.
“Marché aux puces de la Porte de Vanves, s’il vous plaît,” I said to the driver, who smiled at me in his rearview mirror. Will shook his head again. “They love you.”
“They just don’t know what to do with me. It doesn’t make sense—American girl, French accent.”
It took nearly an hour to get to the market. Every stall was already set up, and deals were being brokered on either side of the walkway.
“Isn’t it amazing? Look!” I pointed to a group of objects set up nearby.
There were ceramic frogs, a silver-dipped lobster, two scallop shells* on top of podiums, and giant, fragile branches of coral all spread on a purple carpet. “It will break when we try to bring it back,” Will said before I could ask what he thought of the piece. We walked on and found a lady with a case of jewelry that held hundreds of antique rings* and a tiny bracelet made of five strands of coral beads with an antique diamond closure. “May I see that?” I asked her in French. She explained to me that though it dated back to the gaudy days of Napoléon III, it was understated and quite delicate. “Isn’t it lovely?” I asked Will. “Or should we try to smuggle those coral branches?”
“I don’t know about that. Remember the guy with the pods.”
The old woman behind the jewelry stand looked at Will and asked him in French if he’d like to see any rings.
“No, thank you.” he said. “Steph, we really don’t need anything here. You’re like a little kid, crazy over souvenirs.”
“Fine. Then, I want to go somewhere where I can …”
“Oh no,” he said smiling.
“I haven’t even told you what it is—”
“I’m already sure it’s hard to find.”
“I know you’re bored. Do you want to get something to drink?” I asked him.
“Sure.” We walked to the nearest café and sat at a table out front.
The waiter came over, and Will spoke to him in English. “I’ll have a beer and she’ll have a tea. Do you have that flavor, er, that one with the v?”
I interrupted him. “Verveine.” French for the herb verbena. The waiter nodded and left us alone.
“You need to calm down,” Will said. “You claim to be sensitive to such small, pretty things, but you’re giving yourself too much credit, you’re obsessed with the past.”
I started to get angry with him. He, like my mother, called out my selfishness.
“Why do you love these markets? We could be walking around Paris, enjoying the weather.” The waiter came back with our drinks. He placed two primary blue–colored coasters on the round table and then set down the beer and teapot, cup, and saucer.
“You’re okay,” Will said. It wasn’t a question. “You don’t have to find all these random objects or read all these books to distract yourself from what’s happening in your life. How many did you bring this time?”
I’d carried three with me and packed four hardcovers in my suitcase.
Will took a sip of his beer and looked out onto the sidewalk. “Do you want to eat something?” he asked with a little exasperation in his voice.
I nodded.
“The usual?”
Another nod. I couldn’t speak.
He motioned to the waiter. “Haricots verts for her and a croque monsieur for me. Thanks.”
“Vous voulez une autre bière?” Will shook his head.
“Don’t think so much,” he said, pushing back from the table to extend his legs. “You’re missing everything.”
The waiter brought two plates of food and set them on the table. I pushed aside the green beans. “Instead, I’ll have a salad Niçoise.”
Epilogue
My strangeness proved to be chemical, which meant objects would exist in and out of France, in and out of childhood. Chemistry can be played with, however; a catalyst here, the introduction of a new compound there—and neither necessarily of the medical variety. Science doesn’t usually allow for matter to disappear, but rather for it to transform into something else altogether. Many of my enduring objects, both literal (the Nirvana CD, the skeleton key) and ephemeral (the ghost of a rotted mushroom and now-dead lilies of the valley) remain with my parents in Westchester. The latter I associate with each of them: the mushroom recalls my father, and the flower, my mother. Whenever I would visit from New York City, a trip similar in length to that from Paris to Le Vésinet, I risked falling backward to assigning the collection the same meanings. I began to research the lovely and unusual side of the list as a means to exorcise the past, to own the objects rather than the other way around. The whale’s tooth and coral are in my Manhattan apartment, and the women sometimes appear, if only tangentially, in much of my writing. Once I replaced the space in my head with facts, figures, even the anxiety over crafting them into a narrative—a book!?—that would expose private pain to others in order to share a story, the inanimate objects were no longer important. Arguably it was rational maturity that drove me to recast them as fond memories rather than as voodoo talismans capable of conjuring up unwanted emotions. But even with this distance, I don’t think we’re ever too far from our younger selves. We still make mistakes. We continue to place value in new things (this can be good or bad), and we learn to live alone, on our own. This doesn’t mean objects can’t have worth, especially in their histories. Take, for example, the masking tape unicorn.
I hadn’t seen my father in months when he called to let me know that he was retiring. I wasn’t sure what that meant, as he also explained he’d stay contracted to certain overseas jobs at least for a little. During our talk, he also told me he and my mother would be moving to Cape Cod soon and that until then he would come to the city to see me for a weekly date.
That Wednesday the buzzer sounded, and I went to the panel on the wall to see who it was. My father was looking back at me smiling, making a funny face, knowing I’d be checking the camera before letting him in. He’d shaved his mustache sometime ago. It took him a few minutes to ride the elevator before it opened to my apartment, and he stepped inside.
“Stephie?” After pushing the button on the panel to call him up, I’d gone back to typing on my computer.
“Hey, Dad.”
“I can’t see you underneath all those books.” I got up and went to him for a hug. He was carrying a large plastic case and two cardboard boxes. He took off the backpack he’d been wearing and placed it on the table, searching for something inside. “I brought you a gift.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yup, but first let’s get something to eat, I’m starved.”
I picked up my handbag and followed him, now wearing his backpack again, into the elevator and down to the street. New York’s own version of a Parisian brasserie, Balthazar, was just around the corner. I took his arm as we walked over the cobblestones.
Once inside, we sat at my usual table tucked in the far left corner. A waiter with a French accent took our drink order.
“So, are you ready for your surprise?”
My father unzipped his bag and pulled out two rolls of blue masking tape. One had a slightly larger width than the other. He placed the circles side by side on the table.
“Masking tape?”
“Yup,” he said, smiling. I was disappointed.
“You didn’t buy that for me. You had the tape in your backpack.”
He shook his head. “I got it for us. It’s for your bell jars.”
I had ordered seven large glass bell jars for a dinner party, and aside from flowers—anemones, ranunculus, and poppies—I had asked for his help in finding objects to capture inside. “I brought you an old film projector that your mom and I fou
nd at a flea market,” he said, referencing the object he’d hauled upstairs in the case. “There’s also an old Life magazine with the Beatles on the cover, a sea star, and some horseshoe crabs.”
“Remember when we used to find them on the Cape, paint them, and you’d hang them on the wall?” I asked.
“I still have the one we spray painted silver for the beach house.”
“I named that one Charybdis, after the sea monster in Greek mythology. She was Poseidon’s daughter.” He smiled.
“So, what’s the masking tape for?”
“You’ll see.”
We ate our lunch quickly and talked about Zach, Blake, and my mother. I asked my father if she was sleeping. He knew what I meant and assured me she was fine. I apologized to him again for all the trouble I continued to cause them.
When we arrived back at the apartment he tore into one of my magazines that had been stacked perfectly in a pile, all the spines aligned and arranged by date. He rolled the glossy pages into a head, four legs, a belly, a tail, even a single spiraling horn and started covering the horse made of paper with blue masking tape.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my editor, Maya Ziv, and to Billy Kingsland, Nicole Tourtelot, and David Kuhn for all their patience, hard work, and trust. Thank you, Julia Cheiffetz, for believing in me, and to Claire Austin for making it all happen. Claire, I still cannot understand how I found you. I am the luckiest girl in the world. Thank you, Laura McLaw Helms, for your kind help in searching magazine archives and special books.
For love and sharing our story, thanks to my parents, Robert and Sandra LaCava, and my brother, Garret LaCava. For love and letting me share their story, thanks to Helene, Ronald, and Alexandra Weiss and my husband, Bryan Weiss. I am also thankful to Ashley (Mooney) Cooper and Meredith (Faltermeier) Brewer for their unconditional friendship. Thank you to Caroline and Mary Robertson for being the earliest readers and supporters—Sweet Caroline, to think we met in a basement over a trash can. For their wisdom and brilliance, thanks to Indre Rockefeller, Aimee Mullins, Dodie Kazanjian, Ilana Darsky, Agathe Borne Rouffe, Chino Maurice, and Virginia Tupker.
I am so amazed at the work of Matthew Nelson and that he was willing to bring my objects to life in line drawings. Thank you also to Pamela Love. For his enduring spirit and vision, thanks to Henry Joost and to Mary Pittman Jones (Mrs. Jones) for her very special gifts. Thank you to Maggie Betts for listening and her knowledge of Yeats. For being awesome family, thanks to Shala Monroque and Jenke-Ahmed Tailly.
Notes
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader’s search tool.
14 “The great lesson of Dali’s mustaches”: Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman, Dali’s Mustache: A Photographic Interview (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 124.
19 With kerosene readily available: Donald Ridley P.E., personal interview, May 10, 2011.
24 An agitated king: Eric Monk, Keys: Their History and Collection (UK: Shire Publications, 1999), 16.
28 He considered himself above all a scholar: Terence K. McKenna et al., The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Tributes to R. Gordon Wasson (Rochester, VT: Park Street, 1997), 49.
40 “Some opali carry such a play”: Allan Eckert, The World of Opals (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), ix.
46 In 2007, scientists found the most complete dodo skeletons: “In Search of the Dodo,” BBCKnowledge.com, BBC Corp., Web, Dec. 22, 2011, http://www.bbcknowledge.com/nz/liberating/in-search-of-the-dodo.
53 The blossom was also the namesake for Lily Bart: Sharon L. Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 156.
64 Oscar Wilde wore a green scarab ring on his left hand: Barbara Belford, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).
64 Charles Darwin was a devoted beetle collector: Arthur Evans and C. L. Bellamy, An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 137.
64 The natural history museum in Paris houses the greatest collection of specimens: Ibid., 22.
68 At the end of her life she is said to have grown depressed: Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), xiii.
72 Critics have said he chose this image as a means to hold on to innocence: Michael Azerrad, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (New York: Broadway, 2001), 182.
72 It was the grunge band Mother Love Bone that was poised for stardom: Jeff Kitts and Brad Tolinski, Guitar World Presents Nirvana and the Grunge Revolution: The Seattle Sound: The Story of How Kurt Cobain and His Seattle Cohorts Changed the Face of Rock in the Nineties (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard in Cooperation with Harris Publications and Guitar World Magazine, 1998), 7.
85 once documented, a human skull: Max Bauer, Precious Stones; a Popular Account of Their Characters, Occurrence, and Applications, with an Introduction to Their Determination, for Mineralogists, Lapidaries, Jewellers, Etc. with an Appendix on Pearls and Coral (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 601.
92 The Allied governments encouraged daytime pajamas during the First World War: Mary Schoeser, Silk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 163–64.
92 “They’re the most adorably moon-shiny things on earth”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), 14.
94 “What the series’ narration does best”: Matt Zoller Seitz, “Never Trust a Narrator Who’s Under 16,” New York Times, October 30, 1994, 34.
96 “I love how he’s always leaning against stuff”: “Pilot 1.1” My So-Called Life: The Complete Series. Dir. Scott Winant. BMG Special Product, 2002. DVD.
96 “If you made a book about what really happened”: Bruce Weber, “The So-Called World of an Adolescent Girl, as Interpreted by One,” New York Times, August 25, 1994, C15/C20.
137 Seberg committed suicide in 1979, allegedly prompted by an FBI conspiracy: Jean Russell Larson and Garry McGee, Neutralized, the F.B.I. vs. Jean Seberg: A Story of the ’60s Civil Rights Movement (Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2008).
147 “Each name ought to be the vehicle of a thought”: Priscilla Ferguson Parkhurst, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 27.
154 “Think of a country where an old man”: Michael Grimwood, Heart in Conflict: Faulkner’s Struggles with Vocation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 32.
158 “You don’t really care what happens to them; you can’t care”: James de Givenchy, personal interview, Jan. 25, 2011.
160 “She often wore bangles, when we knew dinner was coming all you could hear was the bangles coming down the stairs”: James de Givenchy, personal interview, Jan. 25, 2011.
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