I remembered the time in Florence when Stefano had taken me at night down the alleyways that surrounded the old basilica, Santa Croce. Inside the doorways were cross-dressers with mascara-smudged eyes and frothy wigs of shoulder-length curls. They had nodded to Stefano when we had passed by, as if they knew him. I remember that he seemed proud to show me off to them. His girl. His gladiator.
Transvestite. In French, un travesti. Travesty. Yes. That was us. Two poorly rehearsed players struggling through a farce. Had the fruit man seen through the charade? I imagined him chuckling as we had walked away, delighted to have pushed our affair to its comical conclusion. In any event, Stefano found it funny. For the first time that night he seemed completely at ease. He took my hand in his. “They are just following their passion. They love as we love,” he said. But, unfortunately, I didn’t love him back. I wanted out of there. I didn’t belong, not to Stefano, and not to the sisterhood, though they had served us a round on the house. Santé. My Paris fantasy had become a joke.
STEFANO HELPED ME get all my luggage into the taxi. He said he wanted to drive with me to the airport. I said no, but he insisted. I think that’s when I got flustered and made the mistake of telling the driver to go to Orly airport when it was really Charles de Gaulle that I needed. I realized the error only when we were nearing the terminal and read the sign, and knew I had gotten things even more terribly confused.
Upset, I started shouting that we had to turn around, quick, and head in the opposite direction. I thought I was going to miss my flight. “Calma, calma,” Stefano said, speaking to me in Italian. I told him to shut up, to leave me alone. All the pent-up emotion of the last few days came pouring out of me like hot lava. I instantly regretted being so explosive. It was all a big stupid mess. I said sorry. What else could I do? He said nothing. The silence in the cab was deafening.
The taxi driver drove like a fiend and got me to Charles de Gaulle with minutes to spare. I ran to the gate, Stefano running behind me with my luggage, sweating, panting. The airport personnel told me to hurry. “Vite!” I scrambled over to security and then realized that this was it. I would never see him again. But it was too late; I was being pushed through the door. I turned to look at him. I swear he was crying. I shouted at him from over my shoulder, good-bye.
On the plane I strapped myself into my window seat and asked the attendant for the day’s newspapers. I folded them into the pocket in front of me. The plane nosed into the air, piercing through the clouds. Paris faded into the distance. I took out my Walkman and popped in a tape by Madonna. “Material Girl.” I turned up the volume, much to the irritation of the portly businessman next to me. I bopped in my seat, willfully frivolous. I sang along. This could be my anthem, I thought, trying not to think of the pleading look on Stefano’s face.
A month or so later I heard from him again. Another wispy letter from far away. I was back in the newsroom, churning out the bylines, working the phone. I took a moment to read the handwritten script. “In Paris we had only a bad time. It will pass. I am waiting for eternity,” he wrote.
This time I picked up the phone to call him. “Stefano,” I said. “Don’t.”
FOUR
Daughter
· 1986 ·
AFTER I LEFT Paris in February, the city went through a series of cataclysmic changes. Bombs exploded in the streets, and scores of people were wounded and in some cases killed during the blood-soaked Paris spring. The series of indiscriminate terrorist attacks was said to be linked to France’s military presence in the Middle East. In March, though a bomb was diffused on the third level of the Eiffel Tower and another inside the Châtelet metro station, others exploded inside a Left Bank bookstore and in the Forum des Halles underground shopping arcade, injuring dozens of people. Violence was in the air. That same month bombs also exploded in a TWA jetliner over Greece, killing four Americans, and in a West Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. In April Reagan ordered retaliatory air strikes against Libya, saying the Libyan leader, Mu’ammar al-Gadhafi, was behind recent attacks against Americans. In solidarity, France in the meantime expelled four Libyan diplomats from Paris, an act that seemed only to increase the number of bombs wracking havoc on the city. In early July a car bomb blew out windows in a five-storey building on the same street that housed the French Foreign Ministry offices. No one was injured. But a few weeks later another bomb ripped through the offices of the police-run Anti-gang Brigade in central Paris, on the Quai des Orfèvres, killing one man and wounding eighteen.
I read the majority of these stories in the pages of the International Herald Tribune, one of several foreign newspapers regularly delivered to The Globe and Mail in Montreal, where my editor had shipped me that summer to fill in for the cultural bureau chief, who was off on a book leave. The paper had rented me an apartment in the city, and in the mornings I walked to the office on the top floor of a turn-of-the-century building with a wall of west-facing windows overlooking Mountain Street and the blue expanse of the St. Lawrence River. I had no friends in Montreal, and work became my refuge. I commanded my desk sometimes well into the night, filing stories, reading the wires, and scouring the piles of newspapers delivered daily to the door to stay abreast of world events, Paris increasingly being front-page news.
Daily reports of the killing and maiming in the French capital made me wonder all over again at how dangerous a city Paris was, with violence simmering just below its surface beauty. The entire city, I was learning, was on edge. No one knew where the next bomb was going to explode. But my year and a half at a top-ranking newspaper had made me fearless. After reading about these latest assaults, I picked up the phone and dialled the Tribune in Paris, asking to be put through to the editor in chief, Walter Wells. I figured there was plenty of work there for a journalist like me. Besides, I was eager for change.
Although wonderful, my Globe and Mail job had lately made me think of being elsewhere. For all the travel, excitement, and opportunities to develop my craft, my position at the paper was insecure. I was on a renewable contract, paid by the piece instead of a full-time salary. For the past year and a half the arrangement had worked well for me. I had been prolific, and so my weekly paycheck often exceeded that of a regular staff member. But I had no paid vacation time, no benefits, no guarantees that all my hard work would eventually get me a full-time position. When I repeatedly asked my editor when he planned on bringing me fully into the fold, he always gave me the same answer. “Sorry kid, hiring freeze,” he said, scratching his thinning hairline. “But don’t be going anywhere. We like the thought of you being around.” That wasn’t enough for me. I needed to think of my future.
Wells’s secretary had intercepted my call to him. When I told her I was interested in working for the paper, she advised me to fax my resume with a cover letter to the Trib’s offices in Neuilly. In my fax I wrote a little white lie, saying I was soon going back to Paris and could meet up for a face-to-face interview. Wells had no reason not to believe me. Within a few days he had written back, saying he had the highest regard for The Globe and Mail and would be happy to get together with me to discuss a possible future at the Tribune. It felt like a lucky break. I hadn’t a real plan in hand for returning, but his letter made me start organizing my trip back to Paris in earnest. I settled on a departure in mid-September, just a few weeks off, following the end of the 1986 Toronto film festival. My contract was due to expire then. My editor had said he expected to be able to renew it for another year, but I told him I had made other plans.
In my final days in Montreal I gazed out the window, toward the mouth of the Atlantic. I worried less about terrorists and more about where in Paris I would live once I got my new job. My daydreams honed in on the fully furnished apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower in the tony 7th Arrondissement that I had visited months earlier, on the last trip, one night when I was on my own and feeling in need of companionship. Its occupant at that time was an American businessman, a friend of a friend. The person in
Toronto who had scrawled his number on a piece of paper, shoving it into my hand in advance of my departure the last time, had described Sam as a budding gourmand who loved exploring the restaurants and bistros of Paris where his company had posted him for a year, paying most of his expenses. We had met inside his beaux arts–style apartment, where he served me drinks on a silver platter in front of a fire. The Eiffel Tower twinkled just beyond picture windows draped with rich silk curtains that puddled over what looked like miles of polished hardwood floor. The apartment belonged to an elderly French widow whose habit was to rent it out, fully furnished, to foreigners who reminded her of her late husband, also an American businessman. Sam was darkly handsome and gregarious, and must have fit the bill. She gave him not just the keys to her former home, with its incomparable view, but also her long-serving maid, who still came in weekly to clean the silverware, fluff the brocade cushions.
I knew Sam’s term in Paris would soon be coming to a close. I thought that perhaps I could sublet the place from him once he went back to New York. Although I had only been in it once, I remembered that it was spacious and opulent, Paris as it must look to a privileged insider. I picked up the phone at my desk in Montreal and asked Sam if he’d put in a good word for me with his landlady. He said he would, on one condition. That I’d see him again, the first night I was back in Paris. “Because I’m thinking you need to try out the bed,” he teased. “To make sure it’s to your liking.”
I returned to Toronto from Montreal at the end of August, with less than two weeks to go until my trip. I hadn’t any trouble getting a last-minute ticket. The attacks in Europe had made Americans stay away in droves. Airplanes were empty, and so were hotels. Paris, when I researched it, was going for half price. I told my mother that, when I visited her before my departure. She had always loved a bargain. It was my theme as I sat at her kitchen table, trying to have a conversation with her. But she turned her back to me as I told her about my hopes for my upcoming trip to Paris. She was in one of her moods; anger enveloped her like a second skin. She had lately been gambling on the real estate market, her latest get-rich scheme. Her nerves were raw from worrying about foreclosures. But she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything. Her aggressive body language did all the talking while I raved about the city.
“I’ve always said you should see Paris, haven’t I? There are chestnut trees. Flowers on every street corner. And the museums. You’d love the museums.”
She was opening and closing cupboards, loudly. She couldn’t remember where she had put the scissors. She was cursing under her breath.
“The biggest is the Louvre,” I continued, raising my voice to make her pay attention. “And it’s next to the Tuileries Gardens, an enormous and beautiful park unlike any you’ve seen, filled with fountains and statues and men in berets making crêpes, people in the latest fashions.” I was selling her a postcard version of Paris, not the Paris in the headlines.
“You think me stupid, or something?” She glared at me, hands on hips.
“Let me finish,” I said hurriedly. “The Tuileries Gardens.”
She turned her back to me again.
“The Tuileries Gardens,” I repeated, shouting above the clashing of utensils in drawers. “They have these conical trees, sculpted, not at all like our trees. Reined in.”
“Stunted, you mean.”
“No, lovely, and, well, let me finish, and at night you go walking and see men sitting on a wall camouflaged by them, dangling their feet, waiting for love, for a love adventure, behind the trees. Paris is like that, places where love happens.” What I was trying to say was, come to Paris, love what I love, love me.
The clatter stopped. She faced me, seizing the scissors that had been eluding her these few minutes.
“All right,” she said.
“All right, what?” I said.
“I’m coming.”
“Coming where?” I felt my stomach pitch and dive, blindfolded, into the depths of my being.
“To Paris.”
I stared, dumbstruck. I didn’t think she would do it. But more to the point, I didn’t think she’d do it then. “Um, you know that I am supposed to be meeting um, that guy I told you about, um, Sam? That I am supposed to, um, stay at his apartment?”
“I’m nobody’s third wheel, I’ll have you know,” she responded, sharply. “I’ll get my own hotel room. Do Paris on my own. Don’t you be thinking to be taking care of me.”
“Do Paris on your own?” I exclaimed. “But you don’t even speak the language!”
“Before you were born, young lady, I was in London on my own. I managed there. I think it will be fun bombing around Paris by myself. I’ll rent a car.”
“You can’t drive in Paris!” I protested. “The driving there is treacherous!”
“You organize your trip,” she said, slamming a cupboard with a kick of her foot. “And I’ll organize mine.”
True to her word, she stubbornly organized her upcoming trip without consulting me. In the phone book she found a Toronto travel agency specializing in trips to France, and thought it better to seek the advice of a woman squeezed behind a desk in a downtown office, instead of me. She also didn’t ask me what to pack and so, when the time came, packed almost everything in her closet into four large suitcases plus a carry-on. She didn’t ask me many questions about Paris at all, except for the details of my flight so that, on the plane ride over, we could sit together. I meanwhile telephoned Sam and told him of the change in plans. I wouldn’t stay with him, but with my mother, in a hotel of her choice. He insisted we still rendezvous the first night and also the second, given that it would be the weekend. He said he wanted to meet my mother. He was organizing a night on the town. A threesome. My mother fussed for a few days about what she should wear ignoring all my suggestions. We took a night flight to Paris and sat next to each other in the dark, barely speaking.
FROM THE AIRPORT we took a taxi to the Left Bank hotel she had booked. It was tucked away behind Saint-Séverin, one of the most beautiful churches in Paris, in the Latin Quarter. Situated near the lively Boulevard Saint-Michel, a hub for students attending the nearby Sorbonne, it was a good location if you were young, but hardly desirable if you were middle-aged and wanting sleep. As my mother quickly discovered.
She had booked a corner room on the ground floor, and the streets on both sides roared with the most ferocious traffic. I had never known Paris to be so noisy. Motor scooters ripped past, hauling hearts into throats. The bedroom held two double beds and a writing desk. The bed’s coverlet was the knotty rayon kind that you see in cheap hotels everywhere. It looked worn and wrinkled. She sat down on it, and the bed seemed to sink with the weight of her disappointment. A television was mounted on the wall over the minibar. Soon after entering the room for the first time, my mother turned it on. I had never watched television in Paris before, and it shocked me. The screen showed images of Paris streets on fire. There were police cars and cordons and batons and blood. The telecast was in rapid-fire French. I could clearly make out the word terroriste. There must have been another bomb. But that’s not what bothered me; it was that my mother had turned on the TV at all. Instinctively, like an old habit. This was not what one did in Paris—one did not replicate the customs of home. In Paris, one started afresh.
“You watch too much television,” I said, my voice dripping with disapproval.
“I do not,” she replied matter-of-factly. She had lain down on the coverlet, her legs stretched out before her, and she continued watching the screen.
“Why do you have it on when you don’t understand a word of what’s being said?”
In the silence that stretched between us, I heard my echo. I sounded intolerant and patronizing.
“It relaxes me,” she said, her voice steady but defiant. She aimed the converter at the screen and turned up the volume. A scooter zipped past the window.
I retreated into a sulk. It was morning, but she said she was too tired to go out and explo
re Paris right away. She suggested we both get some sleep, and rolled fully clothed on to her side, her back to me once more.
I had been sleeping only a short time when the phone rang. It was Sam, calling from Paris. Oh, but I was in Paris. I forced myself to focus. We were supposed to meet for dinner, Sam said. Dinner. I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. My mother stirred next to me. “What is it?” she asked.
“My date,” I hissed. She laid her head back on the pillow. In Paris time it was past five o’clock in the afternoon. Sam wondered if I could be ready in an hour. I cupped the receiver and asked my mother if it was okay if I left her alone. She had said on the way over that she had no interest in going out with me, with him, that first night, saying she was no one’s third wheel. Still, I didn’t like the thought of leaving her alone. But she held her ground, or rather her pillow.
“Of course,” she replied, sounding suddenly awake. “It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
I took a bath, hoping to wash away my fatigue. I had brought a black velvet dress for my evening out. I hung it up on the back of the bathroom door to let the steam from my bath smooth away its suitcase wrinkles. A tip I had read in a fashion magazine—how to look chic after a transatlantic flight, or something like that. Except I wasn’t feeling chic. Getting ready for a man I barely knew felt like a chore. I dried my hair and applied my makeup. I looked at myself in the hotel-room mirror. The face looking back at me felt foreign.
Sam stood in the lobby with a black umbrella in one hand, a briefcase in another. It was Friday, and he had just come from work. In his pin-striped suit he looked more strictly controlled than I remembered. His round face was the color of the raincoat he had folded neatly over one arm. Both his brows and mustache were thick and black, dispelling any impression of blandness. His lips were thin, but his smile amiable and easy. When he saw me, his brown eyes danced. He dropped his briefcase with such a bang that it caused the woman behind the counter to utter a tiny scream. He reached out a hand to grasp mine. I saw the glint of his cufflinks, the stark whiteness of his cuff. His grip was strong, eager. An American in Paris, not afraid of a thing. “Hi,” he said enthusiastically.
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