Authors: Nancy K. Miller
Breathless (15 page)
That May I was named to the Sorbonne as a
lectrice d’américain
for one year, renewable to two. I took the appointment as a sign that I was meant to stay. Now that I had a job with a regular salary paid by the French government, it felt safe enough to return to America for a few weeks during the summer. Not alone, but with Jim. We would briefly join the parents in Provincetown. Maybe meeting face-to-face would change the tone of the conversation. If I had never known anyone like Jim, neither had they.
W
E ALL WENT OUT TO
dinner at one of the big noisy lobster places for tourists on the pier that served the ultimate in high kitsch nonkosher food (my mother had long abandoned keeping a kosher kitchen to please her parents). The tables were covered with red-and-white-check tablecloths, and straw-wrapped Chianti bottles hung from the beams in the ceiling. The waitress fitted out each of us with a plastic bib.
My father moved right in with his questionnaire about Mixed Marriages.
“Nancy tells us you have a cousin who’s a nun in Ireland,” he said, cracking open a lobster claw. “Is religion important to you?”
I realized my father was jumping ahead to the foreskin of future offspring. Jim did too. I could tell by the way he had flushed above his beard, his cheeks pink with embarrassment. We had rehearsed this.
“Actually,” Jim said, “my real allegiance is to Reason.”
My father looked blank. “Reason?”
“Yes, like
the philosophes,”
Jim said.
My father knew about the Enlightenment, but Jim had left him nowhere to go.
I wanted to explain that Jim was enamored of all things Jewish,
wished he had been born Jewish, but I knew the conversation was doomed. And how could I say I loved the fact that Jim wasn’t remotely Jewish, whatever his crossover fantasies and his laments over his uncircumcised state
(sans coupure
, as he referred to it)?
“How about dessert?” my father finally said, in temporary retreat.
After dinner, I walked Jim back to his room.
“So what do you think?” I asked as we strolled along Commercial Street, the long narrow street leading to the Provincetown Inn, at the east end of town.
“They don’t think I’m good enough.”
When I got back to the cottage they had rented not far from the inn, my parents were still awake, watching television in the bedroom.
“So what do you think?” I asked, sitting down on the sofa bed they had made up for me in the living room.
“The beard,” my mother said, “makes him look as if he’s hiding something.” My mother could never resist a negative comment on people’s appearance.
“But he’s interesting, right? You weren’t bored at dinner.”
“He’s too old for you.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“That stuff about the Enlightenment. It sounds like Peter Gay.”
When I was at Barnard, I babysat for Ruth and Peter Gay, who lived near us on the Upper West Side. My mother had long conversations with Ruth on the corner of West End Avenue and 103rd Street.
“But he’s not Peter Gay.”
“Don’t get married,” my father said unhappily after a while. “Just live together, if you have to.”
I
DECIDED TO TAKE MY
father’s grudging “live together”
à la lettre
, even though I knew he did not approve of what he called “shacking up.” Jim wanted me to move in with him (“Wouldn’t it be more convenient? Closer to the Sorbonne”), and after a few weeks of hesitating (it wasn’t that much closer), I agreed. Monique was living with Alain. Wasn’t this the next step? True, living with Bernard (and briefly with Leo) hadn’t worked out, but did that mean forming a couple with Jim was doomed? How else would I find out? Still, I did not give up my lovely new maid’s room and, as with Bernard, kept the address for writing letters home.
Almost exactly a year after the Kennedy assassination, I packed a suitcase of books and clothing and moved into Jim’s
deux pièces
, a tiny two-room apartment without a bath, in a tenement building near the Montparnasse train station that was about to be torn down. A faded sign on the building’s facade advertised
gaz à l’étage
as an inviting modern feature. Gas meant that the tiny kitchen was supplied with a hot-water
heater over the sink and a stove with two burners, but no oven. We had no refrigerator either and, like my neighbors, I shopped daily, hanging perishables outside the window in a
filet
.
The building’s toilets were Turkish and located on the landing, halfway between each floor. A permanently open window high on the wall of the air shaft made sweaters a necessity in all seasons. The toilet paper consisted primarily of slick brown sheets, sometimes replaced with torn squares of newspaper, which were less sanitary but more effective. The moment I heard footsteps on the stairs while I was carefully poised squatting over the hole, I instantly pulled the chain and scooted out, trying not to get my feet wet. After a while, I perfected my timing.
In
Breathless
, Belmondo’s thuggish but charming character Michel pays Jean Seberg’s Patricia the sublimely new wave courtesy of asking for permission to piss in her bathroom sink. That was the option favored by Jim, not that he asked.
Once a week we went to the Bains d’Odessa down the street, where the rooms of sparkling blue-and-white tile radiated cleanliness. Bath attendants in white coats hosed down the tub and the tile floors between clients. Only the attendant was authorized to open the door from the outside. While I loved the strangely peaceful sensation of sinking into the huge tub filled with steaming water, naked in a space I did not control, I never completely relaxed. On the coldest days, I consoled myself with the notion that by going to the public baths, I was shedding a layer of bourgeois propriety along with my week of Parisian grime.
F
ROM THE BEGINNING, OUR LIFE
together was a lot like school. Teacher and pupil, homework and lessons. Elizabeth David’s
French Country Cooking
for food, Georges Bataille’s
L’Érotisme
for sex.
One of Jim’s many food rules was that a meal at home should start with a vegetable. For guests, the preparation of the vegetable demanded an obvious degree of complexity. Glazed turnips satisfied Jim’s demands: they were cheap, but prepared à la Elizabeth David, they offered an
elegant surprise. David’s English hymn to the ingredients of the French countryside combined a commitment to peasant, rather than haute, cuisine with a certain degree of effort required in following the recipes. Good food, she explained in her introduction, is “always a trouble and its preparation should be regarded as a labour of love.” David was the perfect mediator during my apprenticeship in the kitchen. Neither complicatedly French nor blandly American, she made me feel I might one day cook like a European.
The recipe for
navets glacés
seemed simple enough. Boil the turnips (the little purple and white ones) and when they are almost ready, put them in a buttered skillet with some of the water they have cooked in, add more butter, and sprinkle them with sugar (using large amounts of butter was one of Elizabeth David’s primary cooking strategies). When you cook the turnips at the right temperature (low but not too low) with the right amount of liquid (a little, but not too little), the sauce caramelizes. The tension between the slightly bitter taste of the turnips and the sugar glaze produces an interesting ambiguity, Jim liked to say.
Navets glacés
were one of Jim’s favorite appetizers. I had made the dish many times and mastered the process, I thought. One fall evening, I set out to glaze the turnips for Jim’s oldest French friend, Paul, an unmarried schoolteacher, who was also a member of the Communist Party. Jim had never joined the party, but he always bought their newspaper
L’Humanit
é as a gesture of solidarity. The conversation between the two men could have come straight from the pages of Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
. Like the Marxist characters in the novel, Jim and Paul took themselves for men who bore the weight of the world on their shoulders, figuring out how it should be run. They respected women, of course—that was the party line—but somehow women missed most of the conversation by being in the kitchen.
That night, while the men were having drinks and olives in the living room, I bent over the stove watching desperately for a positive sign. No matter what I did, the turnips just lay there, staring back at me, stubbornly pale and resistant. They refused to glaze; it was war, and I was losing. I could smell the anxiety rising from my armpits. Why was this happening now in front of company? Finally, as I was about to
leave the stove and confess my failure, the glaze took. I quickly sprinkled parsley over the turnips and raced around the corner into the living room to serve them. In the flush of culinary triumph, I skidded on the shiny black linoleum floor (previously washed and waxed by me). The earthenware dish in which I had arranged the turnips to complete the peasant effect slipped from my hands and the turnips scattered in all directions. One rolled under the couch. I looked at Paul, hoping for sympathy, while Jim charged furiously into the kitchen himself to improvise Elizabeth David’s
tomates provençales en salade
—“poor substitute,” he muttered apologetically to our guest. But Paul rose from the couch, swiftly scooped the turnips off the floor and, sitting down at the table, declared them “délicieux.”
This gallant gesture completely changed my mind about Communists.
J
IM WORE ONLY BLACK SHOES
and black socks. Soon after I started spending time in the apartment, I voluntarily preempted the task of washing his socks. I would pile up a load of black socks in the pasta pot to soak and simmer them over a low flame. When I had wrung the socks out in the sink and dried them on the line strung outside the kitchen window, the real work began: making pairs out of almost, but perversely never completely, identical socks. I studied the long black socks as carefully as a text, looking for the pattern, the clocks or arrows that would distinguish one pair from the other.
I think I knew the socks were not a text.
Sundays Jim cruised the flea markets at the gates of Paris for his personal collections: Majolica plates, wooden shoe molds,
porte-couteaux
in the form of animals. Being with Jim was entering a world already designed, complete with
objets
.
All I had to do was fit myself into it.
Outside the apartment, free from the domestic script both of us had fallen into, Jim was the companion I had fantasized about. We pursued his tastes and followed his enormous appetite. We drove to Deauville to hear Jacques Brel sing “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” We sat close enough to see him sweat. In Brel’s honor we traveled to Belgium to eat mussels and
frites
.
More often, we traveled south by scooter. I’d be squeezed in between Jim’s large back and the camping gear, my nose burning in the sunlit air. The scooter lacked the thrill of Leo’s motorcycle, but maybe that was the right metaphor for a relationship with a future: the scooter was slower, but steadier. We’d stop at
un camping
, pitch a tent, stand in line to shower, and then ride into town on the scooter as though we just happened to be in the area. I always packed an Orlon dress that rolled into a ball. Jim would put on a fresh white shirt and a tie, and the hours of noise and fatigue on the scooter fell away. After dinner, he would theatrically puff on a Cuban cigar as we walked through the streets.
On one of our trips, we spent the night in Marseille, at La Cité Radieuse, an apartment building designed by Le Corbusier in the 1950s and made out of reinforced concrete. Jim had discovered that a few studios were available for tourists. French friends were always amazed at Jim’s insider information. I loved that he knew so much, almost as much as he did.
In the photographs from that stay, Jim’s brow is heavily furrowed; the ridges look like tracks made by heavy tires in the sand. He is wearing his terry cloth bathrobe, drinking coffee outside on our balcony from which we could gaze at city views with the Rhône in the background. In the picture he took of me, I’m drinking from a deep white cup and gazing off into the distance. His tie is hanging from the doorknob. Next to the breakfast tray is a half-empty flask of the Irish whisky that always traveled with us. Jim liked to pour himself a nightcap before he went to bed. Sometimes he drank again in the middle of the night if he couldn’t fall back to sleep.
We never talked much in the mornings. Jim tried to help me enter the daylight world by bringing me tea while I was still in bed. By that time, he would have been up for hours.
Those were our best times, before the day’s activities set our anxieties in motion.
J
IM HAD OFTEN SAID HE
loved and admired me, but whenever the topic of the future came up, marriage was always shrugged off into a vague inevitability. Of course we were going to get married. I wasn’t to take the vagueness as a lack of feeling. Jim wanted to be able to provide for me, he said, and things with the school simply weren’t at that point. In the meantime, his favorite term of endearment was “my little wife.” We even bought an antique gold ring with a tiny amethyst, my birthstone, in Portobello Road on one of our trips to London. I used to spin the ring on my finger, making it look like a wedding band. I didn’t care about being married, I said. I could earn my own living.
One day, emptying Jim’s pockets to take his jacket to the cleaners, I found a letter from the woman I thought was his ex-wife, writing to Jim as if they were still married, as though he might return to the States to be with her in the near future. I thought this woman was completely in the
past tense, but there she was, fully in the present. I sat in the apartment all day waiting for Jim to come home, rigid with rage at the betrayal.
“What does this mean? When we met at Ruc after the interview, you
told
me you were divorced.”