Paris Adieu

by Rozsa Gaston

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PARIS ADIEU. Copyright © 2012 by Rozsa Gaston. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2012910568

  Gaston, Rozsa.

  Paris Adieu: Coming of Age in the City of Light/ Rozsa Gaston.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 0984790616

  EAN-13: 9780-9847906-1-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9847906-0-9

  1. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—20th century.

  2. Americans—France—Fiction

  3. Dating (Social customs) —Fiction

  4. Women—France

  5. Self-perception—France

  6. Paris (France) —Description and travel

  7. Food habits—France—Paris

  I. Title

  Cover design by Rob Mohan

  www.parisadieu.com

  CONTENTS

  PART I BECOMING

  CHAPTER ONE

  Escape

  CHAPTER TWO

  Au Pair in Paris

  CHAPTER THREE

  Springtime in Paris

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fake it Till You Make it

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Le Petit Cochon (The Little Pig)

  PART II BEING

  CHAPTER SIX

  Paris Four Years Later

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Anna Karenina Understood

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Life in the Present Moment

  PART III BEING WHERE I BELONG

  CHAPTER NINE

  Paris Five Years Later

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mad Summer Night

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Huitres à Volonté (All-You-Can-Eat Oysters)

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  La France Profonde

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  L’Amour à la Folie

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Je T’adore, Je T’aime

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  La Décision

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Being Where I Belong

  GLOSSARY OF FRENCH TERMS

  BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  For Ardeo

  Je t’aime éternellement

  (It’s all fiction)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest thanks go to the following:

  Sharon Belcastro, my agent, for passionately loving this book and bringing it to the light of day. Terri Valentine, my friend and mentor. Ella Marie Shupe, for her encouragement and support. Rob Mohan, for his inspiration and artistry. Laura Mews Brengelman, without whose careful edits, I would have been sunk. Ariana Csonka Kaleta, Baroness von Trautenegg, for critical feedback and scintillating friendship. Edie Glass, my memoir-writing teacher, who got me hooked on writing.

  Leslie Gueguen, Victoria Kann, Caroline Leavitt, Susie Piturro, and Laurence Siegel. My daughter Ava, who inspired the name of my main character. Most of all, thank you Bill – please don’t read the book.

  PART I

  BECOMING

  CHAPTER ONE

  Escape

  The year I turned nineteen I came down with lack-of-plan-itis. It was a long-drawn out illness with no apparent end in sight, made worse by constant solicitous inquiries from family and friends of family.

  “Ava! Nice to see you. Home from school?”

  I’d shrug, hoping they’d get the message to lay off. Mostly they didn’t.

  “Not at school? What are you up to then?” neighbors out tending their lawns would ask in one form or another as I passed their houses on my way to the house where I grew up on a horseshoe-shaped drive in West Hartford, Connecticut.

  I was working as a cashier at a twenty four hour self-service gas station – which I didn’t really feel like talking about – so I cut back on visiting my grandparents to escape the nonstop questions that started even before I made it into their house. Once I was inside, things got even worse. My grandmother would punctuate her stone-cold silences with snappy references to the year’s worth of college tuition they had just thrown away on me at music college where I’d been studying to become a music teacher until I dropped out.

  It wasn’t my fault their plans hadn’t been mine. I’d been trying to hint at that all along, but the symphony of my grandmother’s own perfectly laid goals for my life had drowned out the tiny tinkling of whatever ideas of my own had been slouching toward self-expression. They held the moneybags, and I didn’t. That was the gist of most of my grandmother’s lectures. It was hell not to have a plan at age nineteen.

  I had screwed up since finishing high school in Maine. And that was after I had screwed up beginning high school at a private school.

  I had loved ninth grade at the all-girls’ private school. But at home, there’d been endless fights with my grandmother. “This is my house, and you’ll do as I say as long as you live in it,” didn’t offer much room for maneuvering. We sparred over why I couldn’t wear blue jeans, “Young ladies do not wear blue jeans.” How I should wear my hair, “Nancy Shelton told me the other day you could be such a pretty girl if only you’d stop hiding your eyes with that shaggy hair.” As well as why I couldn’t do just about anything else a normal teenage girl might want to do in the late twentieth century.

  Finally, I got shipped off to Maine to stay with my aunt and uncle for my remaining high school years. I’d made the best of it and graduated fourth in my class at a public high school Down East (that’s the area along Maine’s coast from Penobscot Bay to the Canadian border) then returned to Connecticut to attend music college, where I fancied myself some sort of budding concert pianist. It took only one week of classes to know I lacked both the talent and focus to consider a classical performing career at the keyboard. By spring semester, even my piano teacher, a vivacious Pole who bounced and grunted on the piano bench when she performed, suggested kindly to me that I might have more strengths as a writer than a pianist after reading yet another of my well-thought-out notes explaining why I had not been prepared for our lesson. The simple fact was I didn’t have the concentration necessary to sit around and practice a Bach fugue or any other piece of classical music hour after hour, day after day. I enjoyed playing pop songs or improvising on chord progressions, but contemporary music was scorned at my traditional, classical-music curriculum college. Besides, I was too distracted by the whole, wide world out there, just waiting for me to discover it.

  At the end of my first year, I dropped out. My grandparents wanted me to become a music teacher, but I wasn’t the teacher type. Who wanted to put up with nasty public school children who might not want to be in a music class anyway? One of two things I took away from music college was that teaching surly junior high-schoolers would be a surefire way to lose one’s love of music. The other was that I wasn’t a specialist. I was a generalist. Liberal arts colleges were created for people like me.

  After spending the summer cashiering at the gas station, I needed to come up with a plan for the next school year while I went through the winter-through-spring process of applying to liberal art colleges – the ones I should have applied to during my senior year of high school instead of letting my grandmother talk me into music college. If I got into a good school, maybe my grandparents would help pay for it. If not, there were student loans and scholarships I could apply for. But if I didn’t get into a top college, I knew what was waiting back in West Hartford for me – secretarial school.

  I’d rather kill myself.

  My grandmother’s idea of a career path for a woman consisted of teaching, secretarying or m
arrying up. I’d heard her talking to my grandfather behind closed doors one Sunday afternoon when I’d arrived early for a visit and let myself in unannounced.

  “And that’s the last penny we spend on her,” she’d said as I crept to the other side of the dining room wall where she couldn’t spot me through the entryway to the sun room.

  “Well, Helen, we’ll see if she’s interested. Maybe she doesn’t want to go to secretarial school.” My grandfather’s mild voice warmed my heart.

  “We’ll do no such thing, Walter. She needs to learn a trade so she can get out and support herself.”

  “First, she needs to figure out what it is she wants to do.”

  “Not with my hard-earned money she won’t.”

  My grandmother hadn’t worked a day in her life, unless you count a year or two spent as a part-time teenage fashion model before she’d married – up, of course.

  I tiptoed back to the kitchen and let myself out the back door. It was best to make an announced appearance at a moment like this. I ran around to the front of the house and rang the doorbell. My grandfather let me in, and I silently blessed him as I kissed his cool, smooth cheek. He’d been my champion. But no one could oust my grandmother from her high horse.

  Now that I knew what she was cooking up for me, I began to work on a plan to leave my current job behind in the dust without getting roped into becoming a secretary. Not that there was anything wrong with being a secretary, but these were times of feminist awakening – I wanted to become someone in my own right – not an adjunct to someone who was someone.

  I began to think about what I could do to support myself that would allow me to get away from my grandmother’s endless disappointment.

  At night I prayed God would show me a way to escape my current stalemate. I was too young to have my soul deadened by my grandmother’s bitterness with life. Her minor-key dirges didn’t sing to me at all. I needed out as soon as possible.

  About two weeks later, on one of those aimless days that figured largely in my life at that time, I took the bus to downtown Hartford for pretty much no reason at all.

  I was wandering around the Woolworth’s Five and Dime store when I got a very bad idea to shoplift a pair of dangly pink and gold earrings. The second I got the idea, I knew I needed to get out of the store. But I didn’t.

  Fingering the delicate filigreed hoop earrings, I held them up to my ears and looked in a mirror, then made a great show of putting them down again. The trick was that I only put down one pair of gold and pink earrings, not the two pairs I’d picked up. Don’t ask where I’d learned that technique – this is a story about my future, not my past.

  I walked up and down the aisles of the main floor, passing the jewelry, cosmetics, sunglasses, and sewing goods sections, until there was pretty much nowhere else to go other than out the door or back to the jewelry section to return the pair of earrings. Attached to a small rectangle of plastic backing, they nestled in the palm of my right hand, dangling next to the big, roomy right pocket of my green army pants.

  They were mighty close – those earrings and my loose, empty pocket. All I needed to do was relax my grip for those earrings to deposit themselves deep in the folds of my pants. I decided not to think about it, just see what happened.

  “Hey,” a deep, male voice said close behind me. A smell of hair grease assailed my nostrils.

  I jumped sideways, almost smashing into the display case I was standing next to. Every muscle of my body tensed, including my right hand. Instantly I put both hands up to my chest to protect myself. I could feel the posts of the hoop earrings digging into my palm. Ouch.

  “Hey sweet thing, how ‘bout a kiss?” The man before me was in his forties or fifties, graying, disheveled, and glassy-eyed. Yuck. His right arm shot out and grabbed my own. I struggled to get away from him as he leaned toward me, leering.

  “How ‘bout it, honey?” The smell of his breath was even more nauseating than the smell from his greasy hair. He pushed his face toward mine until I could feel the air expelled from his mouth on my lips. Revolted, I twisted violently, then stamped my right foot on his as hard as I could.

  “Bitch, watch it!” he yelled as I pulled my arm free. I bolted down the aisle, followed by a string of foul epithets.

  “You got it coming, girlie. You was asking for it. I’m gonna get you and your sweet pussy.”

  I ran to where I thought the nearest exit might be, dropping the earrings on the floor of the store.

  “Serves me right, serves me right,” screamed in my head, drowning out the feeling of the man’s fingers digging into my arm, his fetid breath inches from my mouth.

  Outside, I fled down Main Street, looking wildly for a safe place; somewhere the man behind wouldn’t follow. I passed the library then Hartford’s largest department store, G. Fox & Company. He could follow me inside both places, so I kept running.

  “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. I’m sorry, I’m sorry about the earrings, I’m sorry.” Then I switched to “God help me. Help me now.”

  Past the department store, a dark, stone building with large, marble columns in front loomed ahead. It looked vaguely familiar. I glanced at a small, elegantly lettered sign on the front wall, Hartford Racquetball Club. It was a place my grandfather had taken me once for some sort of reception with our next-door neighbors the Sheltons – a private club for Hartford’s finest families.

  Up the steps I ran with the speed of light, almost colliding with the uniformed man opening the door for me.

  “Yes, Miss?”

  “Excuse me, but may I use your restroom?”

  “This is a private club, Miss. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, I know.” I pulled myself together, straightening my back and looking him right in the eye. “Listen,” I lowered my voice, “I’m being followed. A man is chasing me, a homeless guy. Just let me use the ladies’ room. Please.” My eyes bored into his, willing him to understand and respond.

  He hesitated, looking less certain. I could bet they didn’t care for scenes in a place like this.

  “Please. He won’t follow me in here. I’ll just be a minute.” I tried to look like the kind of person who wouldn’t make a scene, the daughter of the kind of person who might belong to a club like this.

  His face blanched as he shifted uncomfortably. “Well, if it’s just for a minute.”

  “I promise, thank you.” I craned my neck around him to see where the ladies’ room might be.

  “To the left at the end of the hall,” he said quietly, his eyes discreetly indicating which way.

  I flew down the hall and around the corner. The Ladies’ Room sign was on the left. I ran to open the door.

  Locked.

  Ugh. Turning, I looked around. On the other side of the hallway was another door with a sign over it, Ladies’ Locker Room. As I watched, a trim, blonde woman with a ponytail walked out, duffle bag and large handbag in hand. She reached into her handbag for something. As she did, I grabbed the door handle to hold it open for her.

  “Thank you,” she said, not making eye contact, still rummaging in her bag.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, a tight, WASPy smile on my face in case she looked up. She didn’t. And thank you. I sped into the locker room and entered the nearest bathroom stall to recover myself.

  After a few minutes, I calmed down. Conflicting emotions chased each other through my head and nervous system: guilt, disgust, relief. I was disgusted by the gross man who had accosted me in the store. But hadn’t my own actions before his arrival been just as gross? Which was worse, being a lecherous homeless guy or a shoplifter?

  Had God used that repugnant man to save me from breaking a commandment? “Thou shalt not steal” had no qualifiers attached such as “Thou shalt not steal items valued over five dollars.” I’d been rescued from my scumball self by a gross, homeless person. They weren’t kidding when they said that God moves in mysterious ways.

  Exiting the bathroom stall, I moved to the sink to wash the guilt
off my face. The mirror told me that I looked the same. It lied. I was older and scummier than I was an hour earlier. I shook my head in disgust at the image of my round, unmarked pink and gold face – the same colors as the earrings I’d almost stolen.

  I passed into the anteroom between the washroom and the door. A vanity stood on one side, a couch and two chairs on the other. I glanced at the notice board.

  Announcements of candidates for membership were posted: Gerard Aldrich (Vice-Chairman - Travelers’ Insurance Corporation) and Penny Aldrich (wife) have been recommended for membership by Gaddis Newton. They have three children and reside in Avon and Nantucket.

  Farther down the board, a summer home in a place called Provence was listed for rent. Below that, more mundane listings for housekeeping and childcare were posted. My eyes swept over them: Mature nanny, F/T for two children under age four in Farmington, five years experience min., must drive. Housekeeper available; excellent references. Au pair wanted for Anglo-American family in Paris; native English speaker only.

  Au pair? I had heard the term before. That was a babysitter for a family in another country. Most of the au pairs I’d heard about were college students or in their early to mid-twenties. Just where I was headed. My hand tingled. The same one that had squeezed then released the pink and gold earrings less than an hour earlier.

  Looking around, I spotted a notepad and pen next to the house phone on the vanity table. I grabbed them and jotted down the phone number for the au pair listing.

  At the front door, I nodded to the doorman as I slipped out. He looked relieved to see me go.

  On the steps I scanned the sidewalk; my drunken rescuer from commandment-breaking was nowhere in sight. I shivered, thanking God for saving worthless, pathetic wretches like myself from myself as well as homeless lechers. Then I went straight home where I took the longest hot shower of my life as soon as I got inside the door.

  Right before leaving for work I called the number for the au pair. A voicemail message came on, a woman’s voice with a clipped, airy British-inflected accent. I left my name and number, careful to speak clearly to exhibit that not only was I a native English speaker, but one with a best-in-breed American accent.