Hungry Woman in Paris

by Josefina López

  “Stay with me at the hotel,” I begged Rosemary. “It’s a honeymoon package and I don’t want to use it alone.”

  We arrived at a fancy hotel off the Champs-Élysées and a doorman opened the taxi door. The woman at the reception desk looked at Rosemary and me and had to ask, just in case she was making a mistake, “You’re in the honeymoon suite?”

  “Yes,” I assured her. I could have gone on and on about how I’d broken off the engagement and what a terrible mistake my mother thought I’d made and how I’d decided to use the plane ticket anyway, but I decided to save the story; this woman didn’t get paid enough to listen to me.

  Rosemary couldn’t help but add her two centimes: “Yes, we bought the honeymoon package back when our marriage license was legal in San Francisco. Then the law changed, but we decided to come anyway.” The woman put on a fake smile, not sure what to say. We left the counter holding in our laughter.

  A bellhop escorted us to the honeymoon suite and flashed us a kinky smile. It wasn’t the first time Rosemary and I had been mistaken for a couple or had men fantasize about us being one. Rosemary gave him a tip and wished him well with all her charm. She was good at small talk and being friendly to strangers. I hated bullshit. I always got to the truth of the matter. What can I say; I sucked at parties.

  Rosemary and I hopped on the double-decker tour bus and stayed on it for the two hours it took to go to the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, the Musée d’Orsay, Notre-Dame, the Louvre, Concorde Plaza, the Galeries Lafayette, and back to l’Arc de Triomphe, on the Champs-Élysées. During the two hours she gave me a brief history of how she’d fallen in love with a Frenchman named Antoine while studying French in graduate school, and their wild romance that brought her all the way from Berkeley to Burgundy. She didn’t know he was part of an aristocratic family until she got to his town. Her future mother-in-law acted kindly toward her at first, but when she realized how serious he was about marrying Rosemary she proceeded to poison the well. My brother used to joke, “Adam was so lucky—he was the only man who didn’t get a mother-in-law.” Why can’t all women get along? Why can’t we all just get along?

  “But it’s over. He chose his château over me,” Rosemary said, still hurt by the whole thing.

  We got off the bus and walked down the Champs-Élysées like real tourists. We passed a giant store where people were waiting in line in the freezing cold to go in.

  “Is there a celebrity in there?” I asked Rosemary.

  “No, it’s the Louis Vuitton store.”

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked.

  The next day Rosemary had to go to work and left me to visit the Eiffel Tower on my own. Even in January, with practically no crowd, I still had to wait half an hour. When I got close to the elevator, two men in military uniforms informed everyone that the Eiffel Tower had to be shut down because of a possible bomb threat. They’d found a mysterious package. Probably another vibrator in a garbage can someone was too embarrassed to carry, I figured, or something equally innocuous.

  They say it takes three days to do the Louvre, but I was interested in only three things: the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Venus de Milo. The hall in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa was caged in a clear, bulletproof box was as hot as a sauna. It was packed with obnoxious tourists like me snapping a million photos with our digital cameras. It was like a red-carpet affair at a Hollywood premiere, except the Mona Lisa wasn’t signing autographs. A crowd of people came in on top of everything else and everyone had to readjust themselves, like an amoeba. A large man with a commanding voice welcomed everyone to the first stop on the “Da Vinci Code tour.” I got nauseous with all the international smells and sweat and had to run for air.

  On the fifth day of my visit I strolled by myself on the Seine and an Arab-French man in stylish clothes walked up to me. He asked me if I was an Arab, because if I was, I was pretty liberated not wearing a veil on my head and therefore was his kind of gal.

  “No, I’m Mexican-American,” I responded.

  “Mexique? ¡Ah, viva México!” he exclaimed. He proceeded to flatter me and call me jolie until I made up a lie about being married after he asked me to have coffee. I even pretended my French was so bad I couldn’t understand the word for coffee. Silly, but it worked.

  Eventually my week was over and I had to check out of the hotel. Rosemary had said good-bye and gone back to her tiny apartment and I was walking toward the door. The Croatian doorman asked me if I needed a taxi. I was about to say “Yes” when a deep voice from within me said, “No.” I sat down by the bar to figure out who’d said it. A cocktail waiter came over and asked in English if I wanted something to drink. I asked for a margarita, but they didn’t make them, so I just ordered tequila. Three shots later, I was crying for Luna. Had Luna been alive she would have joined me on this trip in a second. We should be exploring Paris together, like we’d said we would. Maybe if I had been there for her she wouldn’t have… I couldn’t even be at her funeral! I looked at my watch and knew I had to leave that minute or miss my plane. I picked up my cell phone and called Rosemary instead.

  “I can’t do it… No, I can’t go back. I hate my life. I hate the war. I hate what is happening to the U.S., and I just can’t go back.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Hiding Out in the Sixteenth

  Une chambre de bonne, explained Rosemary, is a tiny room intended for maids or nannies. She rented this room on the sixth floor because it was cheap. But she hated living in the Sixteenth Arrondissement because it was the most boring part of Paris. Paris is divided into twenty neighborhoods, or arrondissements, and in Rosemary’s words, the Sixteenth was the Beverly Hills of Paris. “Avenue Foch has more millionaires than dog shit,” she claimed.

  When Rosemary arrived in Paris, after she’d broken up with Antoine, she started working as a nanny and was provided that room. She liked that building because she could walk around naked in front of the windows and it wouldn’t matter. The Iraqi embassy was across the street, facing her window, but because it was abandoned only the pigeons would stare back.

  “I know it’s an eyesore, but it’s nice not to have to worry about nosy neighbors. Check it out.” I went to the window and looked at the embassy. I could swear I saw Saddam Hussein hiding out in the abandoned offices.

  “Is that… ?” I started to ask.

  “Yes, that’s a poster of Saddam Hussein from when he was in power, back before they invaded Kuwait. After they invaded Kuwait, France broke ties with them and they just abandoned the building.”

  “Why are there police officers in front of the building next to this one?”

  “Because they reopened the Iraqi embassy.”

  “I thought you just said it was abandoned.”

  “Yes, but both of the buildings belong to the Iraqi embassy. That one across the street is still abandoned.”

  “What about the building next to this one on the other side?”

  “That’s Pakistan,” she casually informed me.

  “So this building is between the Iraqi embassy and the Pakistani embassy?”

  “Yeah, most of the embassies are in the Sixteenth. That’s one of the reasons it’s so boring. Well, the occasional bomb threat shakes things up now and again.”

  “Bomb threat?” I repeated.

  “Yeah… Oh, that’s actually why I lost my nanny job. I used to work for an American couple, but one day they came home and found a device close to the fireplace. They called the police, and the bomb squad confirmed that it was a bomb and everyone was evacuated from the building. Someone, maybe the maid or someone related to the maid, had allowed someone to put a bomb there so they could blow up the Pakistani embassy. I don’t remember what political bullshit was happening at that time. The American couple quickly got rid of their apartment and they went back to the U.S. They made the new owners promise them they would let me keep the room and for the same amount of rent.”

  I put my suitcase down and Rosemary offered me he
r single bed. I insisted that I could sleep on the floor, so she laid out a yoga mat for me. She covered it with thick blankets and made me a bed.

  “You’re lucky I’m Mexican-American and don’t have issues with personal space, because this apartment is too small for two people,” she said. I took this as a hint and told her I would rent a place if she could help me find one.

  “No, don’t worry about it,” she protested. “I love company, and if you don’t mind me, I certainly won’t mind you. I like being out most of the time. I am not a homebody.” I settled in and got acquainted with her tiny bathroom and hot plate. She had turned a dingy room into a cosy casita. I asked her where her fridge was and she showed me a little box where she only had room to keep milk and eggs and a moldy cheese.

  “Your cheese is rotting,” I pointed out.

  “That’s the way I like it… I know, I’m all French now, eating rotten cheese, n’est-ce pas?” We laughed.

  “Don’t buy anything around here. Paris is expensive, but the Sixteenth is ridiculously overpriced,” Rosemary advised me, like one barrio girl to another.

  She gave me a tour of Victor Hugo Avenue and showed me the McDonald’s. “I know you just got here, but eventually you’ll break down and have to eat it.” I assured her I was against globalization and had started boycotting McDonald’s many years ago. Still, we walked past it and I had to laugh when I saw their version of a drive-through window: a walk-through window with at least ten people waiting. And I thought we were the fat Americans.

  “Don’t go to Bois de Boulogne by yourself at night,” Rosemary said, continuing with the tour.

  “Where is the Bua de Bolo—?” I tried pronouncing it at first, then just asked, “What is that?”

  “It’s a big park, but it used to be the hunting forest, reserved for the kings of France. Bois de Boulogne is right around here. When you get off the Porte Dauphine metro stop, if you cross the street, that’s where it is. There are a lot of transvestite prostitutes, drug dealers, perverts, and things you don’t want to discover alone.” I took a mental note and said to myself, No Bois de B after sunset for me.

  “By the way, how long do you plan to stay?”

  Rosemary startled me with that question, but I nonchalantly said, “I don’t know…” She assured me that I could stay with her as long as I needed to, but that technically I could only stay in France for three months before I would be en situation irrégulière—a nice way of saying “wetback” again. Hey, I can use that word because I was undocumented for many years, before I stopped being an irregular situation… or a sans-papiers—without papers. I told Rosemary that I probably wouldn’t stay more than three months and I could pay her rent money. She laughed, saying, “I’d feel like a slum landlord if I charged you rent for my hole-in-the-wall.”

  I always heard about the French existentialist writers and the American writers who hung out in cafés pondering the meaning of life and having sex with prostitutes and doing all the things they couldn’t do in a sexually repressed country like America. I read in my tourist book about Hemingway’s hangouts when he lived in Paris, where he and F. Scott Fitzgerald drank. Man, he got around! I had to go to Deux Magots—big disappointment. A fancy place with French-movie-star-looking people and tourists like me trying to pretend they’re brilliant artists on the verge of greatness. But unlike them I was really having an existential crisis, and I felt a little superior because my internal suffering was apparent on my face. I sat down and looked at the menu and thought how ironic it was that back then starving artists came to cafés like these because they lived on wine and street pigeons to survive, and now the same cafés are famous because of them and no starving artist can afford to eat there. It’s hard to have an existential crisis when a glass of wine costs more than nine dollars. So I took my existential crisis someplace else.

  I headed to a café near Notre-Dame and Shakespeare and Company to write… Write what? I scratched the pen to paper, hoping words would come out… What does this all mean? Nothing. Who the hell cares? No one. Where am I? I’m somewhere between heaven and hell and nowhere on the map of reality. When am I going back? Why am I here? And how the hell am I going to make a living now that I don’t have the answer to the five big W’s of life? Since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a journalist. Being a journalist and going to Paris were the two things I wanted the most in life. I wanted to be like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and roam around Paris writing a novel or a literary work that would live on past my life. As a writer and journalist I wanted to tell the truth and light up the world with it. After “W” got reelected, an article I wrote about the first Latino soldiers to die in Iraq, along with another I wrote about vaginas in a teen magazine, got censored. I realized that a lot of people in America were not interested in the truth. They were interested in… something else, something only a Jungian analyst could explain. If I can’t write the truth, I can’t be a journalist. So if I am not a journalist anymore, then what am I? What am I going to do with my life? Since what I write makes no difference in the world, why bother killing myself for a story? I try to remember what Deepak Chopra and all the other gurus say: “The world is perfect as it is; everything is as it should be—ohmmmmmm…” I don’t believe that, so why try? The world sucks, the war sucks, and I can’t do anything about it. Going to protests doesn’t change anything. Writing to Congress doesn’t change anything. So what the hell is the point of trying to change the world when it’s hard enough to get someone you love to change their point of view?

  Maybe I should just go back to L.A. and face my family and go to therapy and then tell my family I broke off the wedding engagement because I discovered… I was a lesbian… Yeah! How do I explain all the men in my past? I know: I was experimenting. I was compensating… Yeah, right! Sure, they’ll believe that! Inside I knew I could go home only when I’d come up with a good enough reason for breaking my engagement to a successful surgeon. I just didn’t want to go back and face the disappointment on my mother’s face.

  I looked up at the sky filled with dirty clouds and my hand began to write a sentence: Clouds above me, clouds all around me… is it depression or just my life going nowhere like stale water in a fish tank? I stopped writing. It hurt to write. I didn’t want to write anymore. Every time I tried to write, the stupid editor’s voice from my old newspaper would say, “You lost your objectivity,” and I would practically throw the pen out of my hand. So what do I do with my life now? I’ve always said that if I couldn’t write anymore, I wouldn’t want to live.

  Rosemary arrived early from work and found me on the bed recovering from my sightseeing. She announced that she was taking me to the Lapin Agile in Montmartre to see a cabaret that I couldn’t miss.

  “I love taking people to this cabaret because it truly captures the spirit of Paris and Montmartre.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a neighborhood that’s on a hill; a little seedy, but back in the eighteen hundreds it was the place to go for can-can dancers and drinking and all the illegal things. I really like that neighborhood, and if I could find a chambre de bonne I would move there.”

  We took the metro and got off at the Lamarck-Caulaincourt stop. We climbed up what seemed like endless stairs to a house with a gate. When we walked in through the front door, the attendant told us to speak softly. A beautiful voice sang in French like Edith Piaf. It was a woman named Cassita, one of the regulars. To hear her sing transported me back in time, back to my teenage years, when I still believed in love. When the song finished we were escorted into another room, which looked like a cozy cabin filled with tourists and real French people. For over 130 years a family of singers has sung traditional French songs every night at this cabaret. We were given a special cherry brandy, or something like it, a few minutes after we arrived. The head singer welcomed us and people sang their hearts out.

  After two hours of this I wanted to go home. French is such a beautiful language, almost as beautiful as Spanish, but aft
er an hour it was difficult to remain interested. I pinched myself to stay awake—I didn’t want Rosemary to think I was not appreciating French culture at its best. The ensemble of loyal singers would continue until the wee hours of the morning, but Rosemary, who was now beyond tipsy, decided we should go home. I held her arm so she wouldn’t go rolling down the hill and tumble down the stairways of concrete. Her cell phone went off; she searched all over herself for it until she finally found it buried in her bra.

  “Hello? Rudy? Hey, what’s going on? You’re serious? When did this happen?” Rosemary hung up and broke down crying. She hugged me, practically falling in my arms.

  “What happened? What did he tell you?” I asked delicately.

  “My mom… she’s in the hospital… I have to go see her,” uttered Rosemary between gasps of emotional breaths.

  We took a taxi home because the metro was already closed and it was urgent to get back to the apartment and call for whatever little details would keep Rosemary’s hopes alive. Her mother was in the hospital in a coma. She booked the earliest flight she could get and left the next morning for Los Angeles. I should have gone with her on that plane ride back home, but I was a coward and hid out in her tiny room instead.