Paris Adieu

by Rozsa Gaston

  Coffee was served, and predictably, the mood was gloomy.

  “How long is April staying?” I asked. Anything to break up the silence.

  “Who knows?” Grumpy Gaul responded.

  “I thought she said a week.”

  “So if you know, why’d you ask?” he snapped.

  “I really liked her.” I ignored his tone.

  “So did I,” he said, not looking like he liked anyone or anything at the moment. He glared at me, then raised his finger in my face. “But she’s changed. She was a nice girl. Comfortable in her skin. Now she’s different.”

  Even more comfortable in her skin perhaps? Less willing to be led around like a docile cow? I nodded. What was there to say? I applauded the new April, my approval in direct counterpoint to Jean-Michel’s disgust. Her arrival had shown me that Jean-Michel and I would be moving in different directions soon. Perhaps starting that very evening.

  “Ready?” He stood up, tossing some bills on the table.

  I got up, more than ready to get out of there and away from him as soon as possible. I didn’t want to be the person on whom he took out his dissatisfaction with April that night. Or stubborn girlfriends in general. Ones who wouldn’t follow his party line. After that night, I had Jean-Michel’s number. And I wasn’t sure I’d be calling it too many more times.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fake It Till You Make It

  Over the next two weeks, following my meeting with April, I received the four college admissions office letters I’d been waiting for. Bates and Bryn Mawr accepted me but offered no financial aid. Bowdoin turned me down.

  When the letter from Yale arrived, I knew something was up. It was bulkier than the others. I went upstairs before opening it, ignoring Mrs. Griffith’s curious stare, encouraging me to open it in front of her as she handed me my mail that early evening on my way back from a day of classes. No way.

  Upstairs, I unlocked the door to my room and sat down on my bed. This was big. Very big. The envelope in my hands was big, too. I began to sweat. I knew I had a chance. A lively Japanese-American lady in the office of American College in Paris had interviewed me, and we’d clicked.

  I’d told her about being lost and confused the summer before when I’d been so ashamed about dropping out of music college. I’d been in between gigs, I explained, out of high school, self-ejected from music college and ready to experience life, not books or Bach. When I’d mentioned wandering around Guatemala on my own until a priest enlisted me to accompany him on visits to mountain-dwelling parishioners, I’d seen her eyes widen. She’d been intrigued by my story, which had the added advantage of being true, thanks to my father slipping me an employee-pass plane ticket to escape my grandparents while I figured out what I was doing with my life. Our conversation lasted over an hour, and at the end, my gut told me she’d liked what she heard.

  That evening, Mr. Griffith asked how the interview had gone. I said, ‘well’ to which he replied that my interviewer was a former member of the Yale Admissions Committee. Her word would be gold back at headquarters in New Haven.

  I said a short prayer. Then, I opened the letter from Yale Office of Admissions.

  Yeow! I was in. Sacré bleu de putain! I’d come across the oath, meaning sacred blue of a whore, in a Victor Hugo novel. I’d never heard it spoken aloud in France. Thank you, thank you, thank you, God.

  The news was so monumental, I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t just that I’d been accepted. After the acceptance page, another letter from the Office of Financial Aid informed me Yale College would put together a financial aid package that would allow me to attend no matter what my financial resources were. Putain du diable! This meant whore of the devil, another French oath I’d seen in a book written over three hundred years earlier and never heard anyone in Paris ever say.

  The rest of the evening was poignant. Bursting with the best news of my entire life thus far, I had no way to share it with anyone. First, I wanted to frame the letter and send it to my grandparents. My grandfather wouldn’t be surprised, but my grandmother would figuratively fall on the floor. Then, she’d rush out, and in the guise of taking a walk around the block, share the news with every neighbor she bumped into.

  I’d let my parents know next time I sent either of them a postcard. Not having anything to prove to them, there was no rush.

  It didn’t seem right to share the news with Mrs. Griffith first. After all, she was a Brit. What did she know about how significant it was to get into an American Ivy League college? Jean-Michel was out of the question. He was at work, I didn’t have a phone, and I hadn’t spent the past two months with him not to know how utterly provincial his outlook on such news would be. He’d probably sniff and say something like, “So when are you leaving?” as if he didn’t care and just needed to make plans for his next round of American girlfriend hunting on the Boulevard Saint Michel.

  It was a strange sensation to receive great news and have no one to share it with. Too excited to sit in my room, I decided to share my joy with Paris at large. Putting on my stiletto boots, I applied red lipstick – something I didn’t ordinarily wear – and went out for an early evening stroll.

  Paris would be happy for me. Another American here today, gone tomorrow. At least I’d be leaving with a flourish and a plan. And what a plan it was. I couldn’t begin to fathom what four years at Yale College would mean, but I had a clue. It would be life changing.

  As I walked through the Champs de Mars, my exultant mood turned to panic. I had met enough hot-shot prep school types in my years growing up in Connecticut to know how cool, composed, and self-assured they’d all act on campus. How could I compete? I had spent ninth grade at a private, single-sex school, and it had been an eye-opener. The girls were cut from some other cloth than girls I’d known in public school. The private school girls possessed a sort of unassailable smugness, a sangfroid, a je ne sais quoi. If one of them said something patently false, say “the sky is red,” she’d say it with so much self-assurance I would want to believe it. I spent the entire year studying them, far more assiduously than academics.

  Down East, it had been all about smoking dope by the river during lunchtime and scoring acid tabs at concerts in Bangor or Augusta on weekends. I was out of my element, so I retreated into books, eating lunch in the library, since I couldn’t think of anyone to sit with in the cafeteria.

  Fair Isle sweaters, pool parties at upper-class-women’s homes during the summer, and traveling to prep schools all over New England as a cheerleader for away football games were over for me. But I had gotten a glimpse into the rarefied world of private secondary school education. I knew the prep school sophisticates would have it all over us poor public school slobs once we arrived on the Yale campus that fall.

  My one advantage was that I would be coming to New Haven from Paris. Perhaps I’d get stuck taking another summer job as a self service gas station cashier along the way, but who needed to know that? I vowed to apply myself to picking up style tips everywhere I could before leaving Paris. I could swing the story of my own history to my advantage if I really applied myself.

  Mindful of my vow to drop fifteen pounds before showing up on campus the first week of September, I marched past the pastry shop on the corner, averting my eyes from the succulent window display. Never mind ninety percent of my nutritional needs were met by frequenting the shop. Buying a baguette and no other item, not even one hot, flaky pain chocolat or pain aux raisins would be the first test of the new me. On my way back from my celebratory walk, I’d stop in, buy a demi-baguette and nothing else. Never mind that I would desire desperately to pick up the usual two-pastry supplement to my daily half-loaf of bread. I would pretend I only wanted a demi-baguette.

  The phrase “fake it till you make it” suddenly sky-wrote itself across my brain. I saw its meaning in a whole, new light. It wasn’t about being honest or genuine or not. It was about knowing where you were going, then pretending you were already there while you were on your
way. Or in my case, still in the starting gate.

  “Fake it till you make it” was my passport to the future. It would be my secret credo maneuvering around those other Yale freshmen, all fresh out of boarding school or summer internships at the Rockefeller Foundation or the National Quantum-Physics Lab, if there was such a thing.

  Would there be any other poor, public school grads like me? I had a hunch there would, but I vowed not to walk around looking like one of them. I would be Ava Fodor, straight off the plane from Paris, daughter of a Hungarian poet/writer. Never mind all the other New England, Episcopalian stuff from my mother’s side. That would be too common a background to put forward first. There would be dozens of New England, Episcopalian undergrads on the Yale Campus, all more polished, moneyed, and self-assured than me.

  A woman eyeballed me as I sauntered confidently down the Rue de Grenelle. It was a shopping street, so she carried her fishnet shopping bag on one arm, half full of produce, as well as a bottle of wine, wrapped in brown paper. I was reminded of the evening I’d brought a bottle of red wine over to Jean-Michel’s to accompany our dinner. I’d picked it up at the grocery store on the corner of his street. As usual, they hadn’t offered a bag, so I’d held it unwrapped under my arm. As I came in his door, Jean-Michel took one look at me and scoffed that only prostitutes carried unwrapped bottles of wine in the street.

  I hadn’t yet acclimated to the fact that in France, one shopped with one’s own shopping bag. The first time I’d gone to the grocery store, I stood like a dummy waiting for someone to bag my groceries, wondering why people in line behind me were grumbling and glaring. Finally, someone poked me, letting me know in angry French I needed to gather up my groceries and get out of there so the line could proceed. The cashier looked at me for the first time, immediately comprehended I was a foreign moron and held out a plastic bag, which she would not release until I gave her ten centimes. From then on, I tried to remember to bring my own fishnet, expandable bag, but it wasn’t second nature. I frequently forgot and needed to buy a bag at the counter, the very thought of which burned my New England penny-pinching sensibilities.

  Walking to the Seine, I descended the stairs to the cobblestoned pathway directly along the muddy, brown water. In a minute, I realized this wasn’t a good idea in my high-heeled boots; the ones I’d bought for my meeting with April.

  I took them off. Picking my way over the cobblestones carefully, I walked toward the next staircase at the other end of an underpass under the Pont d’Alma, where I planned to re-ascend. It was about seven in the evening, the shadows deep, with just a hint of daylight remaining. Scents of spring surrounded me on all sides. Another scent did too as I entered the underpass.

  The usual urine aroma combined with something more. I picked up my pace as I made out something move against one wall. Then it moaned, a female voice, low and panting. As I hurried past, I couldn’t help but notice the back of a man pinning a woman to the side of the cool, stone wall. Her legs were around his waist. Mon Dieu, it was barely dark! But this was Paris, and it was spring. I sped up, trying not to trip, intent on getting out of there before they noticed me – not that they would. Before I tiptoed away, the woman’s moans picked up speed. Something was happening to her I didn’t understand, aside from the obvious.

  I wanted to know more.

  Exiting the underpath, I slipped around the corner of one of the bridge’s massive stone girders and stopped, listening. The moans were now catching in her throat. A moment of silence followed, expectant and ripe. Then, she screamed in the most unearthly way I’d ever heard. It wasn’t the scream of someone being hurt, but rather being sent somewhere. Glimpsing into another world, I waited, while another kind of silence descended. This silence possessed weight. It was as if the heavens parted, and I was witness to something sacred I couldn’t comprehend. The faceless woman behind me had just ascended to the summit of somewhere I’d never been.

  Quickly I moved off, my stocking feet silent on the cobbled stones. In a minute, I had climbed the next staircase from the river pathway. At the top, I put my boots back on and resumed walking along the quay.

  What happened for that woman that never happened to me? I wanted to know, desperately. Was it because she was French, and the French make love better than everyone else? But my boyfriend was French, and I’d never felt the way she obviously had. The moans I could fathom. The unearthly scream, I could not. Yet I sensed it was a scream worth screaming. Another clue on my path to understanding why Anna Karenina had thrown herself under a train.

  On my way home, I stopped at a café for a coffee. I needed to think. Inside, I was shook up. My college acceptance letter of earlier that day no longer held center stage. Something big, very big, had happened to that woman, and I needed to get to the bottom of it. Using a napkin, I wrote down how the sound of her scream made me feel, to transfer to my journal when I got back to my room. I was afraid I’d lose the memory of it, the way I lost the thread of most dreams the moment I woke up. The scream was so different and otherworldly it was as if a message from another realm had been sent directly to me.

  Wake up, Ava. There’s something you’re missing. Something you don’t yet know. You’ll scream like that one day, too, if you don’t forget this moment.

  On my way back to my room, I called Jean-Michel from a pay phone.

  “Bon soir?”

  “Bon soir, it’s Ava. I’m calling because I got big news today. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. What’s your news?” His voice was even, neutral.

  “I got into Yale. It’s the college I told you I’d applied to, along with a few others. My first choice. I’ll start in September.”

  There was a grunt. Then he spoke. “Are you coming to meet me at work on Friday?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Good. You can tell me about it then.”

  “Five o’clock?”

  “That’s it. See you then.”

  “See you Friday. Good night.”

  “Bon dodo,” he concluded, his usual evening sign-off. He hung up.

  Now, at least, he knew. He’d have a few days to digest the news, which he knew was on the horizon. Shortly after we met, I told him I was waiting to hear back from colleges I applied to. I vowed to be careful at our upcoming meeting not to make a big deal about news that for him meant one thing only – I’d be leaving soon.

  I walked home in the dark, my thoughts moving again to the image of the man and woman in the underpass. It afforded me a window into an adult world I knew almost nothing about. Almost, but not entirely. I wondered why Jean-Michel wasn’t moving me in that direction. Was it because I didn’t love him? Or was it because he didn’t know my body well enough? There were so many things to find out about before the world of academics swallowed me up again.

  Over the next few days, I threw myself into babysitting duties at the Griffiths. Cole, the youngest, begged me to take him to the guignol show in nearby Champs de Mars. The weather was mild, and I felt nostalgic about my time with the children now its end was near. On Tuesday afternoon, when the two older children were at after-school activities, I grabbed Cole and headed for the park at the end of our street. We took in the show seated close to each other on a wooden bench, his head burrowed into my shoulder in his usual unabashedly affectionate way.

  “I like to snuggle you. I love your squishy arms,” he said, digging his chubby fingers into my equally chubby arm at intermission.

  “Thank you, Snuggle Bunny,” I replied, my heart catching at the six-year old’s comment. Lord, I’d always hated my plump, non-Audrey Hepburn-like arms. But Cole meant to compliment me. Why couldn’t I take his remark as such? Both grown men and little boys liked my squishy body. Why couldn’t I? Fake it till you make it, a voice out of nowhere advised.

  “Renoir liked squishy arms too,” I whispered to Cole, giving him a squeeze. He looked like a little Cupid with his rosy round cheeks and golden curls.

  “Who’s Ren Wah?” the boy asked.
“Is he your boyfriend?”

  “No, Snuggle Pie. He was a painter. He painted pretty girls with squishy arms and blonde hair.” I stroked Cole’s cheek at its rosiest point.

  “Like you!” he exclaimed, bouncing up and down on the bench.

  “Exactly. Like me,” I agreed as the curtain came up for the second act.

  While we watched the final act, I pondered the pearls of wisdom the chubby, blond cherub at my side had handed me. Why was I still fighting with my body type? I was who I was. I should be bien dans ma peau instead of trying to transform myself into an Audrey Hepburn lookalike. It was never going to happen. Surrender to who you are, Ava. Surrender. I shifted uneasily trying to figure out how to accept myself the way my adorable charge did. “I love your squishy arms,” he’d said. Why couldn’t I love them, too?

  On Friday, I arrived at the Palais de Chaillot a few minutes early. As I leaned over the parapet of the grand terrace overlooking the skateboarders on the sloping pathways of the gardens below, something felt different. I’d stopped fighting myself. Without huge sacrifice, I’d eaten only one pastry over the past three days, a pain aux raisins I rewarded myself with after spending two days on a fromage maigre regime. Fromage maigre, which means literally, weight loss cheese, was a high protein form of tofu-like white cheese with zero percent fat. It came in flavors, making it palatable. I’d eaten three of the strawberry-flavored ones each day for the past three days, surprised at how satisfying they’d been.