Breathless (6 page)

I was writing to Leo. I was also writing to David, who was following my adventures with characteristic ambivalence. In every letter he lectured me about the fallout in Paris from the Algerian war, the acts of terrorism and repression that punctuated daily life and that he
concluded I hadn’t noticed. “Very concerned for your apolitical frailty in the midst of
grèves
and
manifestations
: stay indoors,” he wrote, demonstrating his mastery of the French political vocabulary he’d been reading about in
Partisan Review
—the strikes and mass demonstrations that had snarled traffic and filled the newspapers all through the long, dark, winter days.

After Sartre’s apartment on the rue Bonaparte was blown up, David fretted that I didn’t seem to care about the terrorism in the streets, the explosions orchestrated by the Organization of the Secret Army, known by its acronym, OAS. It would have been impossible not to hear the slogans chanted rhythmically at demonstrations—
OAS Assassins
—and to read the writing that covered the walls of the city:
ALGÉRIE FRANÇAISE.
It meant “Keep Algeria French” or “Peace in Algeria.” I was for Algeria’s independence, of course, but it was true that in my letters the struggle for independence I described was mine.

What did I want? The less I believed in Leo’s return, the more I lobbied for David’s arrival. Why couldn’t he finish his master’s essay in Paris? Maybe we could reinterpret our past failure, start over in Europe. David mistrusted my motives. He didn’t believe that what I wanted was life with him. “I am really afraid that all you are hoping for is a way back,” he wrote, as I sketched out the new plot for our future. I wasn’t in love with him. I was just scared of being alone and I was in love with our past, now idealized. He kept taking my side of the argument against me, the one I had used during the breakup, about why I had to get away, be on my own—the desire for independence that on the long gray days in Paris I was almost ready to relinquish. I sometimes wondered if he had been seeing someone else, but hadn’t gotten around to telling me. I couldn’t blame him for that since we were supposed to be free, but despite the breakup I wanted David to feel that our attachment to each other was the main deal—that no one else really counted. As long as we were exchanging letters, I figured, our bond, like our history, was still alive—at least on paper.

David wanted a story told in the present tense. My letters were less about Paris, he complained, than about me, and the part of me that had chosen Paris over him: “I wish you would write me a letter of
its own time and place, not of its past and future, so I can cram some reality into the formal idea of your being ‘away,’ and get rid, once and for all, of that Jean Seberg who keeps crawling into your clothes, if not your accent.”

I wasn’t ready to get rid of Jean Seberg.

Monique, who had given me a copy of
The Portuguese Letters
for my birthday, was skeptical about my penchant for epistolary romance and about American boys who couldn’t get their writing done. She didn’t see Leo as an improvement over David. She inscribed her warning on the flyleaf, the key words of the message highlighted in her newly acquired English. “Tell all the boys, ‘fuck you’ and think how wonderful it is to be twenty-one like the Portuguese nun and filled with passion.” Being like the Portuguese nun was not what I had in mind when I imagined turning twenty-one in Paris, though saying fuck you “à tous les garçons” would have been a good place to start.

“What do you want to happen?” Monique asked one afternoon at the
salon de thé
, as she poured out the remainder of the dark tea.

Monique could not return to live in Tunisia; the rest of her family would soon join the general exodus of Jews out of North Africa, where life was becoming more and more difficult. She had to find a way to stay in France. My boyfriend problem seemed a luxury to her. So did my chance to return home.

My parents kept pressing me to say when I planned to return home after graduation from Middlebury. My contract with the lycée where I had been teaching English would expire at the end of the school year. How was I going to earn money? I had felt almost from my first day in Paris that I wanted to stay in France for a second year, and I had applied for a Fulbright teaching fellowship. I had learned that it was bad strategy to bring up possibilities for discord in advance. They would leap into the breach with a long list of counterarguments designed to quash my desire. I’d just drop the news of the fellowship casually when the time came, I decided, as if it had been offered to me without my trying—if, of course, I was lucky enough to be chosen.

It sometimes seemed that I did nothing but wait that year—for Leo to return, for David to change his mind, to hear about the fellowship, to
finish my master’s essay on
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
and graduate. I was attached to the mail like the wretched Portuguese nun whose lover failed to match her desires and never wrote back.

In the end, David never came to Paris. The way he saw it, we were like the lovers in his favorite French movie
Children of Paradise
, who lose one another in the streets of Paris, held back by crowds pulling in opposite directions. David chose his closing metaphors from
Children of Paradise
rather than
Breathless
, but in fact neither film turns out very well. Whatever the movie, David couldn’t come over to where I was, and I couldn’t go back.

“Je suis très indépendante, tu sais,” Seberg says defiantly to Belmondo, when he tries to put the American girl in her place. I wanted to prove that I was very
indépendante
. The word now appeared in my letters home with the French spelling, as if I had lost mastery over English and confused the two languages.

The war in Algeria was winding down and
indépendance
was the order of the day. Something was ending along with colonial regimes: the regime of the
parents terribles
. In the meantime, with another year away from home, I started to feel braver. My letters became my bombs.

A Room of Her Own

I
STARED AT THE
E
IFFEL
Tower outside the window of the maid’s room I had inherited from Valerie when she returned to the States, wishing for the next installment of my American-girl-in-Paris movie, which naturally meant a new boyfriend. Without him, there was no story. I might fancy myself a marquise in Laclos’ eighteenth-century novel (played by sultry Jeanne Moreau in the updated movie version), but even she, especially she, as it turned out, needed a companion to execute her plans.

The seventh floors of bourgeois apartment buildings like my new home on rue de l’Université were originally conceived as servants’ quarters, with a communal toilet and a bathroom for which you needed a key. At some point after the war, apartment owners who could no longer afford live-in maids decided to rent out the rooms at prices no maid could afford. Typically, a
chambre de bonne
had a small sink with running water—usually just cold—and enough space for a
bed, a cupboard, and a small table. Students, especially foreign students, who were in no position to make any demands and who could be thrown out with no warning, were the ideal tenants for the minuscule rooms at the top.

The irony was not lost on me that I was back living in a maid’s room, but at least it wasn’t located within my parents’ apartment, where in my last year of college I had fashioned a bedroom for myself out of the sliver of space designated for the putative maid who would live conveniently next to the kitchen. In Manhattan, I had a view of the Hudson River that almost made up for the cramped dimensions of the tiny enclosure, where David and I had spent many intense hours eating pizza in the dark and watching the lights on the George Washington Bridge. In the mornings, the empty, grease-stained pizza boxes in the garbage confirmed my mother’s worst suspicions about the nature of our relationship.

The Eiffel Tower had replaced the bridge, but no one had replaced David.

Alone in a space of my own for the first time in my life, I entered into a fervor of unprecedented domestic activity. I housecleaned with a passion I couldn’t explain. “Speaking of my room,” I wrote home proudly, sketching a detailed floor plan, “you won’t believe it, but
I
, N.L. Kipnis, have spent the past two weeks sewing, washing the floor (me!), cooking, ironing! My room looks wonderful. I miss Leo immensely. David thing more or less over. Tonight Monique and I see
Hamlet
with Jean-Louis Barrault at the Odéon.”

Sewing by hand with huge stitches, I made rudimentary curtains and pillow covers. Curtains transformed an alcove into a closet. The kitchen table was also my desk. My metal trunk from summer camp served as seating for friends. Bullfighting posters from Spain on the wall, a lambskin throw rug from Tunisia, and flowers in empty Chianti bottles completed the look of classic 1950s bohemia. My cooking repertoire was limited since the windowsill doubled as refrigerator, but with my little blue camping stove, I turned out meals, sometimes warming prepared food from the expensive charcuterie around the corner, more often boiling pasta to save money.

September, when you lived in academic rhythms, had a way of making the summer seem attached to another incarnation. After trying to finish his master’s essay on the little table in the maid’s room, Leo had returned to New York. “You know, baby, I really could have stayed, been with you—but I had to
do
something,” he wrote from the BOAC departure lounge at the airport, contemplating with dread his trip back home. For months, I would find notes scrawled on scraps of paper and hidden in the room. But “Kissing your face” and “Write me, baby!” mixed in with my underwear made me sad. I didn’t want any more relationships by mail. My parents were correspondents enough for an entire novel. When I told them that Leo, the great expatriate, had returned to New York, they resumed their campaign to find out how soon—after the school year that hadn’t even started—I would be coming home. Did I want help looking for a job? “Oh, I don’t know if I’ll ever come back,” I answered flippantly. “Obviously, the person I marry will have a good deal to do with it.” Only marrying would put an end to the discussion.

According to the terms of the pact we made in New York, they would fund my master’s degree and supplement my ridiculous salary as a teaching assistant, in exchange for which I would write them weekly letters. Once I decided to remain in France for a second year, that bargain was over. My parents weren’t required to send me dollars, and I wasn’t obligated to carve slices from my pound of writer’s flesh to pay my debt. Thanks to the Fulbright that had come through at the end of spring semester, I could afford not only my place in Paris, but also a room in Poitiers, where I had been assigned to teach—as well as the commute, just under three hours from Paris by train. The fellowship provided more than money, though. Radiating an aura of international prestige, it converted what my parents considered an irresponsible whim into a narrative that they, committed to the education plot that had structured their own lives as the children of immigrants, could not resist. The grant offered both sides an alibi. I would never have admitted it to my parents, who were baffled by my determination (“Why do you always have to want more?”), but I was relieved to have begun another legitimate school chapter—a fancy fellowship, not an iffy boyfriend.

I longed to stay, even if I could never quite say why. Everything was just so, well, you know, French, I’d end up babbling. Didn’t they coin the phrase
je ne sais quoi
for what you couldn’t quite define but whose evidence was palpable? I wanted something from France—that “I didn’t know what”—something besides the marriage story playing in our local movie theater. What else was a nice Jewish girl circa 1962 supposed to do? Desperate to be on my own, I had slithered out from under my parents’ roof without releasing myself from their expectations for me. Or mine, for that matter. The embarrassing fact was that I needed someone to stay with in order to feel independent—to break the bonds tying me to home, to the girl I was trying so hard to leave behind.

Released from the contract, I kept the epistolary connection out of habit and anxiety, revealing and concealing, telling too much and not enough. For every good daughter narrative, a secret bad-daughter subtext competed. I wrote letters because I was afraid not to. I was afraid to let go of the person my parents thought I was—and that I thought I was, too—despite my also knowing that trying to please them or believing they were right would inevitably lead to more unhappiness for me.

I was a daughterly rat in a maze of ambivalence. I couldn’t figure out which way to go without getting stung and flung back on myself without a reward.

Yom Kippur on the Right Bank

E
ARLY THAT FALL
, M
ONIQUE FELL
in love with Alain, a young law student from North Africa. We met him at the Danton, a café on Saint-Germain where we often went for drinks after dinner during the Year of the Foyer, as we referred to the first year of our friendship. Monique quietly vanished into an erotic haze, despite the fact that she lived nearby, around the corner in a room like mine, only with less freedom—a rented room in the dark apartment of a
vieille dame
. After Alain, Monique was there and not there. On a good day, her example inspired me—maybe I would fall in love, too. Mainly I felt deserted by her in a city that barely was returning to life after the shuttered month of August.

The semester in Poitiers didn’t begin until November. Despite the unread volumes of Proust’s long novel (my summer project), I decided to make a trip to England—and while I was there, to get a diaphragm, even though I had no immediate plans for its use. After the scare with
Leo, I wanted to be prepared. There was no planning for what had just happened to Monique—
le coup de foudre
—the lightning bolt that struck her with full force, just like that.

Le planning familial
, as I had already discovered, was still illegal in France. But England was different. I flew to London—student flights were cheaper than the ferry and train—and found a B&B in a row of shabby brick hotels off Gower Street that catered to students and young tourists who didn’t mind exchanging comfort for the Bloomsbury location. The room was barely wide enough for the narrow bed and tiny night table, but I didn’t expect to spend a lot of time studying the flowers on the wallpaper that seemed to have absorbed the distinctive odors of Full English Breakfast. I consulted the phonebook at the front desk, picked the name of a doctor in a nearby neighborhood, and made an appointment for the following morning. After a long hour flipping through old magazines in the waiting room, I finally saw the doctor, who informed me with a friendly smile that birth control ran counter to his beliefs: I had managed to find an ardent Catholic in a country of Anglicans.