Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  Newly powerless, women across Europe used Marie’s text to turn themselves into perfect coquettes, harnessing their seductive powers to move up the political and economic ladder. They became well-versed in the intricate and highly stylized dance of seduction, and masters in the art of pleasing, both in dress and manner. By the fourteenth century, France was the fashion and perfume capital of the Western world precisely because of the critical role appearance played in the art of seduction.

  And appearance didn’t necessarily mean beauty, nor did pleasing imply anything sexual; wit, charm, intellect, and style counted far more. Upper-class women were educated not just for their own benefit but because it gave them an edge in the art of conversation and courtship. The incredibly powerful mistress of King Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, rose to power thanks to her exquisite charm and good taste, and Ann Boleyn, attractive but no great beauty, used the coquetterie she learned growing up in the French court to snag the title Queen of England.

  Women in those days had to learn to make men their emotional pawns because, legally, we were theirs. Clearly, women aren’t men’s legal pawns anymore, but I wonder to what degree we’re cultural pawns. Until the rise of advertising and male-driven corporate culture, salons—which were almost exclusively run by women—created and determined culture. Which writers, philosophers, or artists came to prominence was largely determined by who was invited the most frequently to the most influential salon. Maybe it’s time to bring some of this back.

  If you were standing in Place Saint Didier right now, you’d be treated to this little performance: a young couple banging on one of the closed glass phone booths, yelling Frelon d’Asie! Frelon d’Asie! at the madwoman sealed inside, who is bouncing off the glass, flailing one arm and hollering.

  The city is alive with scenes like this, actors performing bits of their plays to entice you to attend. Many integrate themselves into city life so well it takes a moment to figure out that the drunk on the carousel hollering epithets is acting out a scene.

  Most are definitely not part of everyday life: a group of prisoners bound together by a rope marches through the streets begging their cause on one block, screaming curses on the next. A dozen flight attendants in matching red suits scurry about as if on a secret mission, whispering in the ears of passersby. A somber, doomed noblewoman in eighteenth-century finery sits imprisoned in a wooden cage carried by a few scruffy citoyens. Following them is a poker-faced priest in a voluminous black robe billowing in the wind, handing out flyers for her cause (and the playwright’s).

  The woman in the phone booth, however, is not an actor, she is me. One minute I’m on the phone with a friend, next I’m screaming with pain and confusion, because out of nowhere it’s like a humongous red-hot poker was shoved up into my armpit! I don’t know if I’m bitten, have blown a blood vessel, or been shot.

  “Frelon d’Asie!” the couple outside keeps yelling, pointing at some great big moving thing by my feet. “Frelon d’Asie!”

  I smash my foot down on it. Frelon (hornet) my butt! Whatever it is, it’s so big that by the time I’m done stomping on it, it looks like a flattened Hershey bar. And what the heck does Asia have to do with anything?!

  “Arrêtez (stop), madame, arrêtez!” they urge me, which I finally do. They shove the door open and I fly out of there like a bat outta hell. I take off for the studio, flapping my arm up and down and sobbing unashamedly. I’m such a big hit with the crowds, I swear I hear clapping.

  Sssst!”

  That sucking in of breath through closed teeth that the French do when shocked is what the cute little pharmacist does upon seeing the cantaloupe that is now my armpit. I actually had to walk here with my arm held up.

  Last night when I stumbled into the studio after the hornet attack, Mia and I couldn’t find any stinger or bite marks. There was, however, a small hole. No pharmacies were open, we couldn’t find a doctor, and we couldn’t reach Chrystelle. So we disinfected it, I took four ibuprofen at once with a huge glass of wine to knock myself out, and I went to sleep with an ice pack strapped on. By morning, voilà, un melon.

  Oh lá lá, cluck, cluck, cluck, the pharmacist says, the hornets from Asia! Poor thing, cluck, cluck, cluck, you are very lucky, it can kill you, this one! Comme ça—like this, she holds up her fingers to demonstrate almost three inches big. No kidding.

  The pharmacist is the first line of defense for the French. Many go years without ever seeing a doctor. Pharmacists here can diagnose, prescribe most medicines, give shots. Though they’re well-trained in holistic remedies and recommend them, the French love Western drugs. I had a raging sinus infection last time I was in Paris with a fever of 104 degrees and a very real desire to shoot myself in the head. I was prescribed, and took, no fewer than five powerful drugs, two of which are still not approved in the United States. I was stoned out of my mind but better in one day.

  Without a doctor’s visit, this petite young woman has given me antibiotics, something probably stronger than morphine, and the promise of a shot if it isn’t better by tomorrow. All for the cost of a cappuccino and a croissant.

  Once we tell her how much more drugs cost in our country, I leave there with a year’s supply of hormone replacement therapy. The hormones actually require a visit to a doctor but, Bouf! she says with a wave of the hand, you ’ave a right as a woman, you don’t need a doctor to tell you what you need! And voilà, a year of hot-flash relief for one-eighth the cost.

  It’s another thing about the French I just adore. They love to make lots of rules and then they love to break them if they’re seen as unnecessary or an affront to their rights as a citoyen. Strangers will argue passionately with one another in defense of their rights at the drop of a hat. Last time I was at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, a très petite woman in a pink Chanel suit got into it about her rights with a brawny young customs agent (in the States you wouldn’t say boo to any official who can throw you in jail). Four of his massive, handsome coworkers came, all waving les fingers, poufing, and yelling at her in unison with him. But, let me tell you, she held her own. In five minutes, they all reached agreement, which is what they desire after all, and she was waved through with a smile, which she returned as she clicked her sling-backs through the turnstile. Typical.

  They’ll also argue your rights. Chrystelle argues for ours regularly. She recently admonished a librarian who wouldn’t let us use their Internet. They are writers, madame, artistes! Last week we were walking on a nearby trail when a restaurant appeared smack in the middle of the path, with a sign forbidding passage. “Bouf!” a diner exiting the place told us as she waved us in. “Who do they think they are? It is your right!”

  Sitting at Bar les Célestins at night feels like having drinks at the office. Except instead of sitting in the dim recesses of the bar waving our laptops around to pick up le wee-fee (wi-fi), we’re at a wobbly table in the plaza, where festival-goers and performers swirl around us in every direction. Roman whisks over with our drinks, snaking (as only those long, skinny legs can) between tables and humans.

  Across the street, a shirtless man who looks like Popeye leans out his third-floor window, tattooed arms crossed on his sill; his plump, elderly neighbor peers down over her geraniums. Three hundred years ago you could have gazed up and seen this exact same scene. Except, of course, for the posters plastered on the building wall between them, portraying two actors, one of whom looks remarkably like Rupert Sewell, with his finger up the nose of the other.

  The trunk of the giant plane tree in the plaza is wrapped with flyers and posters for concerts, recitals, classic plays. In the theatrical equivalent of the Salon des Refusés, the exhibit the Impressionists held after being refused into official salon, Festival Off is held outside the walls, and includes every other kind of play—lower budget, experimental, fringe; from the looks of the posters, most seem to involve a lot of yelling.

  Just beyond us, a young woman sing
s “La Vie en Rose” to little applause and even littler tips. She’s not bad, but Avignon’s academies turn out dozens of world-class vocalists every year. Avignon during the festival is an even tougher crowd. It doesn’t help that she dressed with little thought. It’s one thing to the French to look like you’ve dressed with little thought, quite another to actually dress with little thought.

  Two men sit at the next table laughing and drinking; a freckled, wiry fellow with a red crew-cut, and a suave East Indian guy around my age who suddenly turns to us and asks, in perfect English, why two pretty young women are sitting alone on a Saturday night when they could sit with them. Who could refuse such a charming invitation?

  Kamal, an Avignonais of twenty years, was born in India, speaks several languages, and seems to have lived many lives. Ryan is a gay Irish engineer around forty, who once lived here with a lover. He returns every few months to visit his friends.

  After an hour, we’ve covered the usual cultural differences, with Kamal prefacing most of what he says with “You Americans . . .” and Ryan half-listening, half-lost in his own internal orbit. Once Kamal scoots his chair over to engage Mia in conversation, Ryan scrapes his chair over to me.

  “Aie knew yair hair mother an all, but ken aie tale ye soomthing?”

  He leans so far over there’s nothing between us but his breath, rich with his tenth beer. I have no idea what he wants to tale me but his expression is suddenly deeply earnest. He puts his fingers in a V and taps under his eyes.

  “Et’s raight heer, ai’m tellin’ ye,” he taps and nods in Mia’s direction, “aie ken see it heer,” tap, tap, nod, “in the shadoos oonder hair eyes.”

  “Oh, that. She has allergies, they’re allergic shiners. It’s the pollen here.”

  He shakes his head at my apparent ignorance. He sighs and leans in again.

  “Aie knew yair hair mum, aie knew, but sumwun has to say et. The gairl needs sumthin,” he sighs, holding up the V sign again. Only this time he leans closer and taps them under my eyes.

  “Et’s raight thair in the shadoos. Ai’m sorry te have te tail a mum, but thair ye have it.”

  “Have what—I have shadows, too? We both have allergies,” I manage, completely bewildered.

  He sucks in his breath and then blurts, “Sayks! The gairl needs sayks! Ken ye not see et, woman?”

  Lord, have mercy on me. Somebody have mercy on me. I have a fire-breathing gay Irishman in my lap telling me, loudly, that my daughter needs sex.

  He sits back in great relief. Yooo knoooo, he says, a nice loover, just for the soommer, her being in France, after all.

  I need WHAT?!” I sputter.

  I wondered why that man from last night was trying to poke my mom’s eyes out, but that certainly wasn’t on the list of possibilities. Yes, it’s been a while, but (a) is it that obvious and (b) what the heck’s she supposed to do about it? Order Roman for me instead of my next glass of wine?

  “I know,” she exclaims, “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

  “But what do your eyes have to do with anything??”

  “Doon’t ye mean tha shadoos?” she says, tapping them. “Oh, who knows! Men usually think that everything has to do with sex. The first therapist I ever saw asked me halfway through the session—completely out of the blue—how often I was having sex. He said it was an important part of patient history. Right.”

  “That’s what Tracey’s did, too!”

  Tracey is a family friend, a very successful writer in a very happy marriage.

  “She said that every male therapist she ever saw asked about her sex life no matter what she was there to talk about.”

  We both shake our heads, laughing as we weave through boulevards crowded with street performers, doing our best not to inadvertently walk through the middle of someone’s play.

  “So. Have you ever thought—” my mom pauses—“you might meet someone here?”

  “Meet someone . . . ?”

  “Come on, Mia, you’re twenty-five, you’ve got to feel like going on a date or something.”

  “Oooh, you mean do I need sayks!” I laugh.

  “Don’t talk so loud,” she says, scowling. “I don’t know. I mean, if you were living here by yourself you might take up a . . . a, oh I don’t know, a sooomer loover.”

  I know she was going for nonchalance but hearing my mom say the words “summer” and “lover” in the same sentence is painful, no matter how close we may be. Maybe Kamal’s right, maybe Americans are more uptight. Maybe if we were French this conversation would be as natural and breezy as deciding on what to buy for dinner. What about a lover, honey, you need one of those? Oh, thanks for the reminder, I’m fresh out.

  Of course Ryan had a point, and when I studied abroad in France during college I did have a summer boyfriend—something facilitated by the fact that my mother was across the Atlantic.

  Kamal can call me American, a Puritan, or Cotton Mather for all I care, but asking my mother to vacate for the night so I can take up a lover is one line in the mother-daughter relationship I’ll never cross!

  I myself am no stranger to being asked to vacate the premises. College kids call this being “sexhiled,” which I know because my sophomore year it happened to me so often that I was a near-permanent fixture in the student lounge.

  Wanting me to vacate was Nina, my roommate, and when we first met I’m not sure who thought she had it worse. Me for having to room with the female Casanova, or her for having to live with a celibate who dressed like Ted Kaczynski (a year and a half in a Montana boot-camp school means you own a lot of plaid, flannels, and fleece).

  Nina never left the room without darkly lining her emerald eyes, glossing her lips to a luscious shine, shaking out her long brunette waves, and arranging her most notable feature—all-natural, perfectly shaped double Ds—into a traffic-stopping display. People couldn’t help but gawk and she reveled in it, something that amazed me because of how uncomfortable I was with catcalls or any form of sexual attention.

  Moreover, Nina had quite a sexual appetite. Who knows how many partners she had over the year we lived together, but the most memorable included an El Salvadoran with family ties to a former guerrilla president, the navy cadet who later went AWOL, the five-foot-five Italian self-made millionaire, and, my favorite, her doctor (who turned out to be married). Clearly, their initial consult went well. I quickly learned when I heard Andrea Bocelli or opera music blaring (both disguised other kinds of wailing well) from our room, to come back later.

  I heard a lot of Bocelli that year.

  Nina was comfortable with and open about sex and sexuality in a way many women aren’t. And she didn’t sleep with so many men because she had daddy issues, or for acceptance and approval. She truly enjoyed it and felt—not just pretended to feel—fantastic the morning after. While most girls did the Walk of Shame quickly and quietly back to their dorm after spending the night in a guy’s room, Nina catwalked it like a runway model. At the time, this fascinated, intimidated, and appalled me.

  Not that it took much to scare me off; as a one-of-the-guys kind of girl, I never wore makeup, owned nary a hair product, and when I wasn’t wearing L.L. Bean, I lived in a pair of shapeless, sexless Thai fisherman pants (they’re amazingly comfortable). Which is why, fortunately, Nina blockaded the door when I went to meet a cute boy from my history class for dinner and a movie.

  She took one look at me, ordered me to sit down, and rummaged through my closet until she came out with a long skirt and a tank top. While I changed, she pulled out her makeup kit, and only then did she let me out of the room.

  And that’s how I met Graham, my first long-term boyfriend. It was the first time either of us had been in love or dated someone for more than a few months, which was perfect, because it meant we both entered into it without any expectations. We wrote our own rule book based on what felt right to us, a
djusting as was necessary, particularly for me, given I’d been sexually abused. There was an innocence to us that reminded me of a high school relationship (or at least how I imagine them to be), where everything is new and you’re shyly negotiating and renegotiating everything. It was like a virginity do-over, only with a best friend with whom there was mutual trust, affection, and respect. We were together for two and a half years, by the end of which (it ended very amicably, and we’re still good friends to this day) I learned how to be in a healthy romantic relationship.

  Dating Graham helped me immeasurably when it came to intimacy. Heineken, however, was instrumental when it came to the polar opposite. For women who are deathly afraid of catcalls or overt sexual attention (I froze at either), I highly recommend donning a green polyester minidress, white patent go-go boots and matching cap and parading through a bar passing out beer to mildly intoxicated men. Heineken had just launched their first light beer and, as a promotional model for the campaign, we were seventies-era stewardesses right off the plane from Amsterdam—we actually had to fake accents—to bring you this new beer! Hey, I was newly graduated with steep student loans, and promo modeling paid $25 an hour and consisted of handing out free beer.

  It gave me an entirely new skill set, and, ultimately, it was a good experience for me. I used to respond to catcalls with an expletive-filled sentence or totally ignore them. Working for Heineken, we couldn’t do either, and what I learned was that the classier and more polite I was in reply, the more embarrassed and subdued guys became. For the most part, catcalling has little to do with you and everything to do with impressing the other guys, and when you recognize it as the pathetic ego-boosting ploy it is, you’re far more relaxed. In a strange way you almost feel maternal toward them. And because you’re not flustered, angry, or embarrassed, they don’t get the reactions they’re hoping for and quickly lose interest.