Breathless (29 page)
Authors: Nancy K. Miller
À bout de souffle
, the expression in the French title of the movie that had set me gasping after experience, means two things: breathless with anticipation and out of breath. Between the time I saw the movie in New York and the time I returned from Paris, I had exhausted the dictionary definition. In Europe I thought I would rid myself of the American girl rooted in me and be free. I didn’t turn into the person other than myself I thought I wanted to become. I wasn’t sure how to grow out of what had failed to happen. As in the dream where you keep panting as you try to move forward but find yourself running in place, in the end I ran out of breath.
H
ANS DIED OF A STROKE
that probably was due to a heroin overdose—Leo wasn’t sure. At sixty-five, cool as ever, Leo opened a jazz bar in Montparnasse, fulfilling the ultimate hip expatriate dream. Jonathan remarried and died of a heart attack a few years ago. Sarah opened a school for martial arts in Chicago.
Around the time that Hans died, Jean Seberg was found dead in the backseat of her car in Paris. The police reported a large dose of
barbiturates in her system. Some say the FBI hounded her to death. She is buried in the cemetery at Montparnasse, near Leo’s bar, near where I first lived with Jim; Beauvoir and Sartre are buried there, too. The American girl whose early movie credits told a French-accented scenario of female daring—
Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, À Bout de Souffle
—paid a heavy price for her high icon adventure. I don’t think there’s necessarily a lesson here beyond an infinite sadness for the transatlantic romance gone bitterly wrong—and the poignancy of being remembered for a haircut when you wanted so much more. It turned out that even with her beauty and fame, Paris was a tough scene for an American girl who had no one to copy but herself.
In Monday night yoga class, the teacher always tells us not to look at anyone else’s pose. Everybody’s practice is different, she explains. Naturally, I can’t help staring at the young woman with the fabulous body doing a headstand in the middle of the room.
S
OON AFTER
I
RETURNED TO
New York, Jim married Nathalie, with whom he had a child they called Isaac. The man who wanted to be Jewish got what he wanted and never left Paris. Monique married Alain, became an art historian, and raised two children in Paris, one of whom is my goddaughter and a philosopher. Sixteen years later, I married another unsuitable man with a beard. I’m still married to him.
Not long after I finished the memoir, but long enough after it had settled in my mind as the truth—or at least as much of the truth as I could make mine in a narrative—I received a letter from Nathalie telling me that Jim had died a few months earlier, at age seventy-seven. She had just found my address. The letter from Paris arrived in New York on my birthday.
The last year of his life, she wrote, was long and difficult, but his last weeks were calm and without suffering. She enclosed a recent photograph and, printed on a card bordered in black, Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” that a friend, she said, had recited at the funeral. I could not read past the first line, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.” I was suddenly choked with grief for the man who,
like the poet, never stopped mourning the loss of an Ireland that never would be truly his. I recognized instantly how much Yeats’s wish to “live alone in the bee-loud glade” was also Jim’s longing for a country he had never possessed, a longing that made the Paris he loved a poor substitute for a native land, though better than exile in America, where he had been born.
In the snapshot taken at an outdoor café, Jim—of course I now desperately want to call him by his name—is wearing a white shirt and tie, as he always did, and a black raincoat. He is heavy, heavier still than when I knew him, and his beard and hair are white. There is just a trace of reddish color in his eyebrows, the remains of a younger palette. His left hand holds the glasses he was always too vain to wear in photographs (I can see the mark made by the nose pads), and in his right, the silver handle of a dark wood walking stick.
Do I know this man? Can you know someone you haven’t seen in—in practically a lifetime? The pain in his eyes tells me yes, I do know him, and that, like Colette, I’ve never gotten over him. I didn’t want to say that at the start of my memoir. I substituted Paris for the first husband. It wouldn’t have been truthful to say that I was somehow still in love with him. But sitting in my kitchen, as I stared at the photograph, I thought it was true that I never got over the dream we shared: of being the people we never were meant to be in the city we both loved.
So it really happened, I said to myself. The letter from my ex-husband’s wife—that must be a modern genre—from my old friend, proves that. She apologizes for sharing her thoughts and memories, but invites me to be in touch when I’m in Paris.
F
OR A LONG TIME,
I didn’t miss Paris and stopped returning. But recently, on a brief stay in London, I made a day trip to Paris on the Eurostar to visit Monique, my old roommate from the Foyer. She was dying of pancreatic cancer, and time was short. Then, last winter, I traveled to Paris and stayed in the apartment where I had once lived too. I slept in the study where Monique wrote her art history books, now a
guest room. It was one of those spiral twists that feels like a circle closing, but where you only almost return to the same place. The neighborhood, once shabby and drab, had become chic and fashionable. There was even a café that abutted the apartment building called, in English, the “No Stress Café,” a name that would have been incomprehensible in the 1960s, when the resistance to English words was fierce (even if already a losing battle).
Many of the people in this story who mattered to me are dead. I keep losing friends, and that makes me both a mourner and a survivor. But how long before it will be my turn? Sartre said somewhere that the one thing we can’t imagine is our own death. And yet it is almost as difficult to take in the death of our friends, our contemporaries, since we are so much like them, since they were so much a part of us.
There’s a line I’ve always loved in
Casablanca
when Humphrey Bogart sadly recognizes that he will not have a future with Ingrid Bergman. “We’ll always have Paris,” he says, bidding her farewell at the airport. I know what he means.
Many friends have read versions
of this narrative of my Paris years, and I thank them all for their insights and provocations. I am especially grateful to Chris Beels, Maurice Biriotti, Marissa Brostoff, Catherine Cusset, Susan Gubar, Annabel Herzog, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Marianne de Koven, Nancy Kricorian, Min Jin Lee, Louis Menand, Tahneer Oksman, Sandy Petrey, Molly Pulda, Victoria Rosner, Elaine Showalter, Alix Kates Shulman, Sarah Russo, Aoibheann Sweeney, and Kamy Wicoff for equal doses of criticism and encouragement.
I am indebted to Brooke Warner for her deft editorial interventions, and to my wonderful agent Cecelia Cancellaro for her excellent judgment.
Laura Mazer at Seal Press has been an exemplary editor.
I thank the Bogliasco Foundation for its generous support during the crucial phase of this project.
I miss my beloved friends Carolyn Heilbrun and Diane Middlebrook, who believed in my book early on, and Michèle Haddad, who belonged to the story from the beginning.
N
ANCY
K. M
ILLER IS THE
author or editor of more than a dozen books, including
What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past
, winner of the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012, and the story of a quest to re-create her family’s lost history. A well-known feminist scholar, Miller has published family memoirs, personal essays, and literary criticism. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoir, graphic novels, and women’s studies.
Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also coedits the Gender and Culture series at Columbia University Press, which she cofounded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.
Visit her at
nancykmiller.com
.
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