We move around a lot, on account of Gee’s job. Most often the focus is on what we stand to gain. And usually, it’s financial. But also, you lose things in a move. It’s inevitable. Sure, some of it is just stuff, books and kitchen gadgets, but some of it is more ephemeral. Things you can’t hold in your hand or pack in a box. Sometimes you don’t even know what’s at stake.
Year one was a mess. I sad-sacked around Paris, living my life like it was a jail sentence. Trying to keep it all together. Trying to get the family settled, open a bank account, learn the language, and understand the layout of the city. Trying, above all other things, to make my marriage work and raise well-adjusted children. Often these goals seemed at odds with each other. The kids had been happy in Los Angeles. Paris was exciting for about ten days, like any vacation: Kids, look! The Tour Eiffel! And then, pretty quickly, the shine wore off. The Eiffel Tower was just something we passed on the way home from the international school, when we got off the metro at Trocadéro and walked through Champs du Mars toward our temporary housing, an old and musty apartment with little light and even less heat. Every day Ruby and Rio dropped their backpacks at the door and immediately ran to their room and crawled under the covers. The apartment was dark; the children, exhausted from trying to fit in at a new school, regressed into afternoon nappers. I spent my days hunting for an apartment, preferably one with lots of light, and shopping for little gifts for the kids, just so I could see them smile: a new Lego set for Rio, a bedazzled Paris T-shirt for Ruby. I’d make mac and cheese for dinner. With ice cream for dessert. No veggies! No Daddy, either—Gee’s commute was long; usually he came home after the kids were asleep.
Year two, I got busy with the PTA and the tagalong crowd: three-hour, Michelin-star meals in the middle of the day. (There’s an expat tip for you: When you go to Paris, forget about fancy dinners and splurge on lunch at the best restaurants instead; they offer amazing set menus at affordable prices.) Spent every euro Gee made eating and shopping. And I took a writing class with one of the other moms from the kids’ elementary school. “It’ll give us something to do besides eating.” She laughed, tugging at the waistband of her slacks. She had an engineering degree from MIT that put my business degree to shame, and she was not an ounce overweight—she was bored. I was bored and lonely, so I decided to join her. As it turned out, I have a knack for storytelling: A few of my pieces were published in a literary journal, and I was invited to read at a club near the Bastille.
Gee couldn’t make it—something about an executive team dinner. We were living in Paris together in only the most basic sense: We shared a bed, but our lives had gone in different directions. I was in charge of cooking, cleaning, and kids. He was bringing home the bacon. That wasn’t the deal when we got married. There was no deal, no prenup on my career aspirations; we just fell in love and got married. We were both in the music industry. I never imagined that his job would trump mine. Or that he’d ever choose dinner with a bunch of suits over a live gig at a club. Especially one that was headlining me.
“You’ll have other readings,” Gee said. “I’ll come to the next one,” he promised. But this was my first, and it wasn’t just a big deal—it was a once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list sort of thing. I wore a beret and read a story called “Chloe Has a Bad Day,” a piece I wrote about presexualized girls in LA and parents who weren’t paying attention. I worried, it being Paris, that people wouldn’t care about spoiled California girls. But they laughed. I was standing behind a podium in a bar near the Place des Vosges, reading my story out loud, and the room was humming along with laughter. A person could get high on a thing like that.
Gee wasn’t around to share the experience, but the poet was there. His hair unkempt, kind of disheveled, like he had just tumbled out of bed. His presence reminded me to slow down. “You’re going too fast,” he noted time and again when coaching me for this reading, trying to get me to deliver a more theatrical performance. He was grinning at me from the back of the room, as if I were his protégée. His undiscovered talent.
“You’re like a mushroom,” he once observed. When I asked why, he said because they grow in the shade. He held this idea of me living in the shadow of my husband’s international career. He called me Madame because I was married, sneering ever so slightly when he said it, just enough so I knew he was being sarcastic. I called him Bleu because he wore blue shoes; it seemed a sartorial choice. Later, I realized he bought those shoes on sale, like everyone else who wasn’t a tourist, because they were all he could find in his size. Blue shoes.
We celebrated my literary debut at Le Petit Bofinger: classic French decor, crisp linens and cherrywood banquettes, on the ceiling a flying saucer–size Tiffany lamp, all fragmented glass and mirrored walls. “What will you have, Madame?” Bleu asked, his voice low and deep, a saxophone dipped in molasses. He spoke just above a whisper, forcing me to lean in to hear him, compelling me to stay there to respond.
“Everything,” I said. “I want it all.” I didn’t fancy myself the kind of woman who made the kiddies dinner, put them to bed, and waited for her husband to come home with tales of corporate intrigue and ten-course meals. I had my own dragons to slay.
We ordered the raw platter, french fries, and a carafe of chilled Chablis. And mi-cuit au chocolat. Molten chocolate cake. Hot lava cake. The kind of cake that is meant to be shared and eaten with a spoon. We were upstairs, tucked away in a back booth. He smelled of cigarettes and dirty laundry. I knew sex with him wouldn’t be tidy. We weren’t having sex; I was just thinking that if someone did, with him, it wouldn’t be. And if someone were going to, well, this would be a fairy-tale beginning.
His smile said, I know what you’re thinking.
I shot back a look that said, Show me.
It was like the time my brother stood in the middle of our parents’ living room, holding a Mexican cherry bomb in one hand and a match in the other, and my sister dared him to light it. For one brief moment, after he blew up the stained-glass windows and before we knew how much trouble we were in, I looked at him and said, “That was awesome!” We were singed, glowing from the inside out; his fingers were hot to the touch. That’s how it felt with the poet. After dinner, I stumbled home and slipped into bed next to Gee. He draped his arm around me reflexively, without even waking. He’s a sound sleeper.
CORSICA
If this were another kind of expat story, I’d be telling you about all the places I’ve seen, the stamps on my passport, the slide show of my life. FYI, that’s the reason expats have such a hard time repatriating: because their friends back home don’t really care about their road trip through the South of France, sleeping in funky castles. Or that the monkeys in Ubud will come right up to you, sit on your shoulder, and groom you if you let them. If you want to hear about riding elephants in Chiang Mai, the street food in Hanoi, or the jungle ruins in Siem Reap, there are plenty of other books you can read.
But let me tell you about Corsica. Corsica is an itty-bitty island in the Mediterranean that’s technically French, surrounded by Italy, and attracts a ton of German tourists. And us. Me and Gee. On holiday while living in Paris. We dropped the kids off for summer camp at a run-down château in the Loire Valley and flew to Corsica. Landed in Ajaccio, on the wrong side of the island, and had to drive all day to the apartment in Bastia I had booked for the week.
I thought Gee would shoot me. But here’s the thing about him: He’s pretty easygoing. So we rented a car and made our way through dense forests and wild horses and backwoods country so beautiful that Gee said it was the best mistake I’d ever made. At one point we had to stop and wait for a herd of sheep to cross the road. We got to Bastia around dusk, drove by our flat on some ancient cobblestone street, looked at each other, and shook our heads no, deciding to explore the beach instead. So we dumped the flat, forfeited the deposit, and headed south to find a place that was so beachy, we woke up with waves slapping at our sliding glass door. We were in heaven.
I’m gonna come righ
t out and admit that if this were opposite day and Gee had planned that trip and we had landed in the wrong city and had to drive eight hours across the island to a flat in a walled-in medieval town that we didn’t even want to step foot in, let alone sleep at, I might have been pissy. But not Gee. He woke up happy.
“Let’s go find coffee,” he said, giving me a morning hug.
Gee and I have always traveled well together. No plans, no guidebooks, no agenda, content to wander aimlessly. A few days of that, and I was falling in love with him all over again. We ambled south to Porto-Vecchio, hitting every beach town on the way, lying in the sand, slathering sunscreen on each other’s backs.
I’m a pretty good swimmer, but Gee’s a beach potato. He grew up in Maine, where all they do is sit and watch the water ebb and flow, like an animated postcard, the ocean too cold to wade in. I grew up in the Mitten, where you get dirty-sweaty wet canoeing in rivers and swimming in lakes, so I went out way past the buoys, where the water was still like glass, beautiful and calm, and then—boom—sharks!
Do they have sharks in the Mediterranean? I wondered.
Maybe that was why the buoys were so close to the beach. My heart started to race; my mind filled with pointy teeth lurking just under the glassy surface. I turned and headed toward shore, but then I thought how silly it was to be afraid of sharks in this most idyllic and calm paradise, so I turned around and started swimming farther out, past the buoys, again. Alone. Freestyling. Occasionally diving like a dolphin, my hair slicked back straight, black like oil, when my head came up for air. I’ve got a swimmer’s body: broad shoulders, my torso an inverted triangle, lean hips and legs. I’m completely at home in the water, but I’m used to the Great Lakes and lap pools, no undertow. Or sharks. Then the whole shark thing popped up in my head again and I circled back toward the beach, slagging myself for being such a weenie. Around and around I flipped, a few strokes farther out, followed by a sudden retreat, at war with the monster in my mind, eventually coming to a dead stop, treading water, doing 360s, my head and body whipping one direction and then the other, before finally and in a complete panic I made a mad sharks-on-my-tail dash for the beach, heart pounding so loud I could hear it thumping when I lay down next to Gee.
“Sharks,” I said.
“I know,” he replied. “I was watching you.”
Gee knows better than anyone the misfire in my brain. Knows but doesn’t understand. I was still in that second-honeymoon fantasy, thinking our marriage would work if I just asked for what I wanted, so I sat up and said, in the sanest, most rational voice I could muster, “I need you to sit behind me, straddle my body with your legs, wrap your arms around me, and whisper, just whisper into my ear, ‘There are no sharks.’ Tell me I’m safe.”
“There are no sharks, Em,” he said in that flat, facts-only tone of his that shattered the fix.
“Please, Gee.”
“It’s all in your head, Em.”
“I know, Gee. I know there are no sharks. Of course it’s all in my head—that’s why it’s called anxiety. But I didn’t bring Xanax to the beach. So I need a hug. Please.”
“I’m not going to pander to your neurotic fears,” he said, listing them under his breath, as if to emphasize the ridiculousness of it all—cockroaches, elevators, spider bites, small spaces, and now sharks—before returning to his LA-noir gumshoe-detective story.
In all fairness, Gee doesn’t believe in God, either. Things you can’t see, touch, or weigh don’t exist in my husband’s world. I curled up in a tight ball, arms wrapped around my legs, head tucked into my knees, and rocked back and forth, hugging myself, feeling crushed by the whole Should I stay or should I go? question of us, the clash, the dead end of me going back to an empty well, over and over again. Just breathe, I told myself, digging my fingers into my own flesh, until the only pain I could feel was real, until I could see the imprint of my nails on my skin. My mind focused on the sensation of the sun burning the back of my neck. You’re okay, I assured myself. There are no sharks.
REPATRIATION BLUES
Moving home is never as easy as it sounds. I was standing in a supermarket, holding a purple vegetable in the shape of a giant teardrop, trying desperately to remember the word for aubergine in English. It was summer in Los Angeles, and even though it was hot outside, the market felt like a walk-in refrigerator.
“Eggplant!” I blurted out loud like a crazy person. No one noticed.
I missed the shops on Rue Bretagne, the street vendor who sold rôti chicken on a spit, potatoes broiling in fat dripping beneath the birds. Cheese shops and wine shops and baguettes so warm and crusty, the kids devoured them like candy. I had to buy two at time: one to savor fresh, the other to save for dinner. Forget about keeping them overnight—they’d be stale by the next morning. This memory made me want to go home, and I don’t mean our rental in LA. Putting the eggplant in my basket, I grabbed a bottle of wine to take to Nadia’s. She was hosting a welcome-back dinner for us, and I had promised to bring this vegetarian caviar dish I learned how to make in Paris.
Let’s back up a few months, to when we found out that Gee’s overseas assignment in Paris was coming to an end. I called an emergency family meeting at Chez Omar, the Moroccan restaurant a few blocks from our apartment in the Marais. Nothing fancy—couscous and shish kebabs—but they didn’t mind that we brought our pooch, Chandler, and let him sit on his fuzzy sheepskin pad by our feet, eating table scraps. We had gone native. It happens to expats. We weren’t just living in Paris; after four years, we fancied ourselves locals. Tourists walked up to me on the street and said excusez-moi before asking directions in really bad French.
“Guys,” I said in total seriousness, “we cannot move back to Los Angeles.”
Round the table we went, taking turns imagining where we should go next. Rio said he wanted to stay in Paris. That’s so Rio; he does not like change. Ruby said she wanted to move to Ohio. Ohio! She’s never even been to Ohio. Said she wanted a house with a white picket fence and a yard for the dog to play in. It hit me that Ruby was describing my own childhood. We gave her the world, but all she wanted was a normal American life. Gee was the only one who said Los Angeles. Not because he wanted to go back to LA; he just wanted me to get with the program and accept reality. I said Spain, because my Spanish is better than my French. But of course, Gee was right. We were moving back to Los Angeles.
“You really fucked up,” Nadia’s husband said to us as soon as we walked in the door of their house for dinner. I know, I was thinking. We never should have come back to the States.
“Never shoulda sold your house in Silverlake,” Willy continued.
It was an odd sort of greeting, just this side of gloating. He’s so American, I thought. Big and dumb, no boundaries. That’s how they view us overseas. He was wearing a retro ’50s flowered shirt, tailored, not oversize—kitsch elevated to Los Feliz cool.
“Your house in the hills,” Willy continued. “What’d you sell that for?” Like a dog with a bone, he was not going to let our real estate fiasco go unnoticed. For years, we lived in the hills and they lived in the flats. That irked them big-time. They paid attention to stuff like that: who has what, shops where, lives in the hills or the flats.
“We did okay on the house,” Gee said, sidestepping the conversation. My husband does not like to talk about finances in public.
“Well, whatever it was then, you could never afford to buy it back now.” Willy laughed.
Nadia gave me a hug. “Good to be home?” she asked.
Nadia and I were friends through our daughters, Zoey and Ruby. We carpooled, babysat each other’s children, and traveled together as families so the girls would have someone to play with. She was a fashion editor, the kind of woman who kisses your cheek and inhales your whole outfit—shoes, hair, and clothes—in one breath, doesn’t miss a thread, then passes judgment before you’ve even had a chance to say hello. During awards season, she freelanced as a stylist. I suspected she spent a lot of time
on her knees, pinning hems and sucking up to celebrities, so I let it slide. The constant comparisons. The backhanded compliments. The jealous, bitchy shit.
“Ooh! This is nice,” she said, fingering my brightly colored cotton blouse with bell sleeves. “Where did you get it?”
“Senegal,” I told her, relieved to have passed muster.
“Whaaaaat! Senegal! When did you go there?”
“Last year,” I said. “On the kids’ winter break. I wanted to go somewhere warm. …” My voice faded out—she wasn’t listening anyway. She didn’t care when I had gone; she was just registering that I had gone somewhere so exotic, somewhere so not Mexico or Hawaii. Somewhere fabulous where she hadn’t been. My living in Paris was bad enough, but Senegal? It was too much for her to handle.
“You’re too much!” she exclaimed. “Senegal!”
She didn’t ask a thing about the trip, so I didn’t bother telling her that we stayed in Somone, a town so off the grid that goats ambled down Main Street. Not a word of English spoken—just Wolof and French. I had tons of pictures of the kids all over the world, looking like little bored travelers: ho-hum—another church, another castle. But this was an adventure. Kids! Look! A bird sanctuary! We’re in Africa!
We stayed a block from the beach at the most unpretentious, totally chill hotel called Club Djembé. At night it had drumming and dance performances with tiki torches. It was authentic, too, not a tacky, hipster, Hollywood hangout. But Ruby and Rio were not happy on that trip, even though Ruby got to go deep-sea fishing and Rio collected cool stamps for his school project. We had to taxi to M’Bour, the only nearby town big enough to have a post office, to buy the stamps. It was packed with women wearing colorful headdresses and men in long flowy garb. The kids were out of their comfort zone, they huddled together on a bench in the back, pouting.
“Kids, c’mon—we’re on a family vacation!” I tried to cajole them later over soft drinks and chips, hoping to rally their spirits.
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