Billy’s attempts to solve her food needs were complicated by the intuitions she had developed during her eighteen years of life, intuitions about having and not having.
Without possessing the slightest notion of cash value, she nevertheless knew to a fairly exact degree the amount of money a person had relative to the amount of money other people in their circle had. She was able to judge which of her cousins were richer, which less rich, which richest; which of the girls at Emery were really rich, which were merely quite rich, and which were barely rich. All of her life had been spent dealing with the problems of entitlement. She, Billy, was not an entitled person and never had been. Some people were entitled, without question, to everything they chose to want. Still others were partially entitled—thus far and no farther. She had absorbed this into her value system. Billy had pondered for many years over why some were entitled and others were not and had never reached a satisfactory answer. It was revoltingly unfair. But it was.
Therefore she felt, in all its strength, the taboo on the subject of food that existed in the home of Lilianne de Vertdulac. The amount of available food—it was communicated to Billy from some source she recognized and immediately acknowledged—was as much food as Madame could afford to serve. It was as much food as there was or was going to be. It was also perfectly understood, without words, that it would have been most grossly and crassly impolite to indicate that this amount of food left Billy empty and aching with hunger pains. The only time she felt able to ask for a second helping of meat was when the Comtesse’s carefully carved portion, which indicated to the others how much they could take, was less than one-fourth of the food on the platter. At these times, the leftover meat would be evenly distributed among the three girls.
Billy cried herself to sleep every night. Her days were agony. And she lost close to a pound a day. She was living on at least three thousand calories a day less than she had absorbed since her childhood days. If she had been at Maine Chance or the Golden Door, they couldn’t have kept her there at gunpoint, but her increasing interest in the mysteriously charming Comtesse and with the French language kept her in thrall. In any case, she had nowhere else to go.
After the first month Billy started to dream in French. She began to catch the meanings of stray phrases in the conversations around her. Timidly she began to point at things and ask how to say their names in French. She tried to answer questions at the table and committed the corrections of her French to her excellent memory. Since she had no experience in French conversation she had no wrong accent to unlearn. Her spoken French was atrocious, barely literate, but her accent and her intonations were those of Lilianne de Vertdulac.
One evening, during the fifth week of Billy’s stay, Danielle and Solange had their first argument about her. They had become so indifferent to their mother’s paying guests that they rarely mentioned them to each other.
“It’s curious,” Danielle said, in her clear, pure voice, “we’ve had lots of thin girls before who got fat, drinking up all the wine and going out to restaurants every night with their boyfriends, but we’ve never had a fat girl before.”
“One is enough,” snapped Solange.
“Don’t be horrid. Perhaps it isn’t her fault, perhaps it’s a question of glands,” suggested the softer Danielle.
“Perhaps it’s a question of greedy Americans who eat everything in sight.”
“Solange, I believe she is getting thinner. Truly.”
“That would be difficult. Haven’t you noticed that she always takes three tartines for breakfast—she’d take four if possible—and I’m sure that she steals sugar. When I took the coffee tray back to the kitchen last night the sugar bowl was almost empty and Maman always drinks her coffee black.”
“Even so, notice that her skirt is too big all over. And her blouse as well.”
“They never fit to begin with.”
“Idiot! I tell you she is getting thinner. Just look at her for yourself.”
“Ah, no thank you! Go back to work, little imbecile, you are keeping me from my Racine.”
During the occupation of France and the hard years that followed the end of the war, Lilianne had developed a habit of seeing things that distressed her and immediately blocking them from her mind. She had not looked directly at her new pensionnaire since that first day, from which she retained an impression of an immense grotesquerie, truly out of bounds: lots of dark hair untidily flopping around a puffy face, eager dark eyes, impossible clothes, surprisingly excellent shoes, and a good wristwatch. Although she did her duty as a temporary guide to Paris, taking Billy to all the obligatory historical sites, she showed her about in a perfunctory way without watching for Billy’s reactions. She had no intention of making a habit of these outings. Her other paying guests had soon learned to fend for themselves, and she always waited eagerly for the inevitable day when they would not come back to Boulevard Lannes for meals because they had more amusing things to do. But this Boston hippo, Lilianne reflected, seemed to have attached herself to the household, borrowing her copy of Le Figaro every morning after she had finished with it, reading Colette in her room all afternoon, hanging around in the salon before lunch and dinner, never missing afternoon tea, taking occasional walks in the Bois but not venturing far enough from the neighborhood to miss a single meal. And now Danielle had some notion that this Billy was losing weight.
That evening Lilianne took her second good look at Billy. She believed her eyes. A Frenchwoman always believes her eyes, whether it is a fresh pullet she is inspecting or the new collection at Yves Saint Laurent. Lilianne saw a grossly overweight girl, much too heavy, heaven knows too tall, but a girl with some small possibilities. The other girl, the one who had arrived from Lady Molly, had had no possibilities. None.
A Frenchwoman likes possibilities almost more than perfection. They give her a chance to arrange things, and arrangements, of all sorts, are a Gallic passion.
Arranger, s’arranger, verbs used in France to include the successful disposition of anything from a complicated legal problem to a worn-out love affair, from the resolution of a change in government to the choice of the right button. “Ça va s’ arranger,” “Je vais m’arranger,” “L’affaire est arrangée,” “On s’arrangera”—the key phrases of France, the promise kept, the assurances given, the obligations met. No people on earth, except, perhaps, the Japanese, arrange matters as well. Difficult circumstances are merely a question of more complicated arrangements.
Lilianne decided that the matter of Billy Winthrop must be properly arranged. It looked to her as if the girl had lost as much as twenty pounds, perhaps more, although on one so fat it was hard to know for certain. If she could do that in five weeks, in two or three more months she might, just, be made presentable, and if she were presentable, who knew what might then arrange itself? Meanwhile there was the question of her clothes. She could not wear that brown cotton skirt, which, Lilianne now noticed, was held together by a large safety pin clumsily attached inside the waistband. Also that blouse! A horror. Typically Boston, without doubt.
“I find this a very chic combination, don’t you?” Lilianne asked Billy. They were at a shop on the Avenue Victor Hugo where elegant women of the Sixteenth Arrondissement did much of their moderate priced ready-to-wear shopping. Billy was bewildered. She did not know what was chic. Chic was not a word that she had ever supposed could be used in relationship to anything she could wear. Serviceable and appropriate were words she understood. How could she estimate if something were chic?
“Yes, Madame, very chic,” she answered, because she could tell from her expression that she had made the decision already. Billy, from as far back as she could remember, avoided looking at herself in a dressing-room mirror. She was an expert at just standing there in a cross-eyed dream, docile and unresisting, while the saleslady and one of her aunts picked out her clothes. She had no opinions. There was no reason to care.
Her tone of voice, attempting enthusiasm but not attaining it
, made Lilianne notice, for the first time, how young Billy was. She was a child really, only one year older than Solange who was still a schoolgirl. Her Pygmalion impulses, disappointed by self-assured paying guests who had rejected her hints or advice, had never entirely withered. She felt an impulse of her old kindness.
“Just look, Billy, how well this gray-flannel skirt hangs. It is truly very cleverly cut; it makes you look so much thinner that I can hardly believe it. Turn around and look at yourself and you will understand. The disposition of the pleats here—they take kilos off! And these dark red sweaters are really an excellent color for you. Just see how they warm your skin—”
Billy turned unwillingly. This was the humiliation she feared the most, the confrontation with her image that she had managed to escape at all times, cleverly spotting potential reflections in shopwindows blocks away. But she realized that Madame was not going to be content until she seemed to really interest herself in the skirt and the sweaters. The Comtesse could not be easily satisfied, like an aunt. In fact, Billy had never heard her speak in such an intent tone of voice, as if affairs of state were being settled there in the shop.
Quickly she ventured a glance into the triple mirror and turned away again. Puzzled, she dared another look. She stared at her mirror image face on. Then she looked at herself from one side, turned awkwardly and looked at the other side. Finally she arranged the panels of the mirror so that she could see herself in a back view. Tears flooded her eyes, blurring the miraculous vision. She looked OK. Really OK. It was the only time in her life that she had thought so. She reached for the fragile Comtesse and embraced her for the first time, rupturing forever the formality between them.
“Vive La France!” Billy sputtered, laughing and crying at the same time. Lilianne de Vertdulac could not imagine why, but she was weeping too.
The birth of an obsession can be a beautiful thing—especially when it involves first love and hope. Billy had not loved herself for many years, and for as many years, hope had been slowly extinguished in her. Paris was her last act of hope and now, seeing herself in the mirror of the shop on the Avenue Victor Hugo, she felt her first glimmer of self-love.
As if she had been using them all of her life, Billy began to exercise her father’s Winthrop characteristics: total dedication to a cause, stern self-discipline, the willingness to struggle toward achievement at all costs, the determination to move relentlessly toward an ideal of perfection. All of these obsessive-compulsive qualities are as necessary in becoming a great medical researcher as they are in the successful transformation from a fat girl to a thin one.
Billy had always been intelligent, but she had fled any impulse toward introspection. She ate to avoid thinking about herself and why she was not loved. Now, with great shyness at first, and then with more and more freedom, she became her own love object. Soon she loved herself enough to welcome hunger and discover that, for her, it was a necessary feeling. Within weeks she developed an obsessive terror of ever leaving the table feeling comfortably full, a feeling that would last all her life.
On the return from that first shopping expedition, Lilianne had presented Billy to her daughters with triumph, as if she were giving them a gigantic, unexpected Christmas present. Danielle danced around her in a jig of glee, filled with self-congratulations, and even cool, caustic Solange had to admit that their paying guest was slightly less embarrassing to have around at one hundred and eighty pounds than at two hundred and eighteen. Lilianne found a bathroom scale in a closet and installed it in her bathroom. There, each week, the four women held a weighing-in. Billy was modestly wrapped in a toweling peignoir, which they determined in advance weighed a kilo in itself. Living on their normal diet, Billy maintained a steady loss of just over five and a half pounds a week, for which she was rewarded, each Sunday, by an extra piece of lean roast chicken without its skin. As she approached one hundred thirty-five pounds, the weight loss tapered off until it stabilized at one hundred and twenty-seven pounds on a five-foot ten-inch frame.
As her fat melted, Billy discovered her bones. They were small bones, like those of her mother’s family, and long bones, like those of her father’s family. “Small, long bones—long, small bones,” she murmured to herself like a mantra, over and over for hours—“small, long bones.” Soon she discovered that she didn’t have any muscles, except in her legs, thanks to years of compulsory field hockey and bike riding up the steep hills of Emery. She joined a daily afternoon modern dance class in the Rue de Lille, several miles from home, and she never missed a class.
Many rituals, all connected with her body, took her over. She must walk at least one way to class, or if she missed a day, both back and forth on the next day. She must never take the third tartine at breakfast. She drank her coffee black. She must brush her hair exactly two hundred strokes every day. The new underwear she had bought must be washed every night before she went to sleep no matter how tired she was. Billy wrote down the contents of each meal in a secret notebook and estimated how many ounces of food she had consumed each day. She embraced the religion of thinness as if she had had a spiritual conversion. If a hair shirt had been necessary, Billy would have worn it joyfully.
Her new gray skirt had to be taken in and taken in again by Lilianne’s little dressmaker. Soon Billy’s dark red sweaters hung on her, but she was determined not to buy others until she had finished losing weight. She threw out all her old clothes except for her winter coat, made of dark brown nutria, which Aunt Cornelia had given her as an eighteenth birthday present. While she was still shrinking, Billy and the Comtesse made an expedition to Hermès, where Billy bought a wide belt to hold in the coat and a narrow one to rope in the sweaters. In addition, she bought her first Hermès scarf. Lilianne had taught her that with a well-cut skirt, a good pair of shoes, a decent sweater, and that one indispensable Hermès scarf, any Frenchwoman may consider herself as well dressed as the Queen of England, the Queen of Belgium, or La Comtesse de Paris, the wife of the pretender to the French throne, because it is thus that those royal ladies have always dressed in their private lives.
Billy had a secret. She was beginning to understand almost everything that was said at the table. She did not speak often to the others, for there was all the difference in the world between understanding and actually venturing out into the dangerous high seas of conversation. But every day she was sure, inside, that she was making progress. It filled her with a tremulous, quaking feeling of frightened expectation, which she tried to push away. The rules of grammar and lists of vocabulary words that had once been memorized and consigned to exam notebooks started to spring back into her mind. Now they lived, they jumped, they sang, and even verb endings took on an air of absolute rightness, necessity. It all seemed, suddenly, to make perfect sense. Billy felt that French was her miser’s treasure, the secret hoard that would unlock the entrance to a kingdom. But she wasn’t ready to test herself yet in front of a group.
Danielle was the first to notice.
“Maman?”
“Yes, chêne?”
“I think Billy has the ear.”
“Truly?”
“Yes, I’m certain. We were alone the other day for just a few minutes and I complimented her on her loss of weight and then she answered me and we had a little talk. She has the ear. Her grammar and her vocabulary are not good yet, she does not understand the subjunctive at all, but the ear is there.”
Lilianne felt a spurt of triumph. The ear was everything. A person can live in France for twenty years and speak impeccably correct textbook French, but without an ear for the language, it will never be accepted as French by the French themselves. The French, unlike Americans, do not think it is charming in the slightest to hear someone speaking their beloved language with a delightfully foreign accent, unless that person is obviously noble and English, in which case it is understandable, even forgivable, if not agreeable. If Billy truly had the ear, and Danielle could not possibly be wrong about a thing as important as that, it was b
ecause she, Lilianne, had insisted that no one speak English to her. Her own daughters, who were sent to live in the homes of English friends every summer, spoke perfect upper-class English. As everyone knew, a second language was the foundation of any good education. But Billy had never guessed that she could communimicate with them in her own language and be understood. That would have ruined everything. Indeed, things did seem to have an air of arranging themselves.
Toward the end of December, the Comtesse received a gift of four fine, plump rabbits from her nephew, Comte Edouard de la Côte de Grace, who had bagged them in the fields of his Ile-de-France hunting lodge, about forty miles outside of Paris. Louise, who had been famous for her traditional regional cooking in the lavish days before the war, made an especially important trip to the shops one morning and came home with all the ingredients for both a classic ragoût de lapin and her specialty, an open-faced apple tart glazed in syrup. The Comtesse invited her distinguished aunt and uncle, the Marquis and the Marquise du Tour la Forêt as well as another middle-aged and amiable couple, the Baron and the Baronne Mallarmé du Novembre, whom Billy had met before at one of the Comtesse’s small, infrequent dinner parties, which had been made possible by the gift of game from one or another of her hunting friends.
Lilianne de Vertdulac was motivated no less by hospitality, for she cherished her circle of old friends, as by the desire to show off her achievement Billy, she judged, would reflect credit on her. True, the girl still had no chic. If all it took was one Hermès scarf, the whole world might be chic. But she had attained something far more important in the Comtesse’s mind. She had quality. Her skin was absolutely clear, her teeth, thanks to Aunt Cornelia’s insistence on an orthodontist, were perfect, her long, dark hair, pulled back in a simple ponytail, was thick and well cared for, and her skirt and sweater were of good enough material to suffice, just. Her manner was modest, her posture, since she had been taking dance class, was excellent, and she looked exactly like what she was, une jeune fille américaine de très bonne famille. The Comtesse knew her friends well. They judged by the highest and the oldest of patrician standards; they could not be fooled by an imitation, even the cleverest. She would never have invited them to dine, in intimacy, with the girl from Texas or the girl from New York, but the girl from Boston was another matter. She could pass inspection. Her muteness in company would pass for reserve, and, most important of all, she was no longer fat, a thing unheard of in people of quality unless they were very old or very royal.
Scruples Page 7
