“That sounds a lot like how we don’t refer to the US as a melting pot anymore. We’re supposed to call it a salad bowl now,” I said, slathering taramasalata on a piece of fresh crusty bread.
“What does that mean?” Pascal asked.
“Nothing,” I mumbled, my mouth full of pink caviar.
It was Friday night in Paris; we were enjoying a delicious spread from the Greek shop on Rue Bretagne. Pascal had brought a bottle of wine for me and a bottle of Pastis for himself and Gee. They would be drinking and smoking at the courtyard window long after I went to sleep. Gee’s not really a smoker, but in Paris the guardrails were off. The kids were watching a movie in the other room and ducked in occasionally to grab some food.
“It means,” Gee explained, “that people from all over the world mix it up in the States, but they keep their cultural identities. Like how ingredients in a salad bowl blend together but maintain their original flavor.” He was happy to have the topic move from women’s issues to immigration and assimilation. But I was feeling feisty, so I didn’t let it go.
“It’s just PC jargon,” I countered, adding that nothing changes for women or immigrants; we just change the way we talk about it. Then Gee said something about how language informs attitudes, and attitudes inform change, so it’s a step in the right direction. And I said, goading him on, “Okay, so we’re a functioning unit.”
“Yep.” Gee grinned. “If you look at it that way, Em, our marriage is actually quite modern. We’re a functioning blend of work and family.”
“Lemme get this straight,” I responded, “just for the sake of clarification.” The sporting disagreement among friends is a French pastime, but this was becoming something else—we were on the verge of slipping into a real argument. Fortunately, all we had on the table were cheese knives. “Are you saying the functioning whole may be the sum of unequal parts? Is that what this new term implies?”
“I’m saying,” Gee said slowly, übercarefully, with the dawning awareness of someone who’s just stepped on a land mine, “that each partner brings different things to the marriage. Different. Not disequal. Is that a word?”
“I don’t think so, buddy, but grammar is the least of your problems.”
“Bah! You are lucky, no?” Pascal concluded. “You experience a different culture. So, you don’t work. This is no malaise. This sounds like blah-blah-blah—more whining.”
Maybe I did sound like a whiny, white-privilege bitch. Poor me, I had to live in Paris, Tokyo, and Seoul, not just overseas but global capitals. So what if my residence status was attached to Gee’s working visa and I wasn’t allowed to work? I get it; it was a fucking First World problem if ever there was one. But the thing is, I couldn’t succumb to that way of thinking. If I allowed my voice to be shut down, it would be like being twice annihilated, first by my husband’s career and then again by my own self-awareness, by the silliness of my so-called predicament. A passport stamped non travaille pas. After all, a woman without a career is like a fish without headphones. It’s not really a dilemma, is it? Especially if that woman is married with kids—oh, for God’s sake, isn’t that enough? Greedy little bitch wants everything. Marriage, kids, and a career. Well, yeah, that was the promise, but the promise turned out to be not so much a fantasy as a setup for failure, so now the women’s magazines, the tied-up-with-a-bow online articles, are saying that you can still have everything, just not at the same time. Sequentially.
Only nobody says that to men.
At first I felt guilty for not deriving pleasure from following my husband around the world. Then I felt conned by feminist ideology and began to self-identify as an antifeminist. It took me a while to figure out that wasn’t supposed to work. That’s the point. Make women miserable enough doing everything, instead of having everything, and we’ll retreat back into the home, where we belong. It’s systemic. And it could pretty much be fixed with one thing: affordable childcare. Which they have in France. But I digress. This is not a feminist story. Or is it? I used to stare at my pay stub and calculate my actual take-home, net pay, less the cost of daycare and after-school babysitters. It didn’t add up to much. If you’re Sheryl “Fuck All” Sandberg and you’re the COO of Facebook, you can lean in till you’re flat-out horizontal on the massage table at the end of the day, because you can afford a nanny with legit paperwork who drives a Volvo, can even have her do the grocery shopping and cook, but for the rest of us, it’s a grind and Pollo Loco for dinner. I was basically working fulltime as a placeholder just to keep my résumé current. Who wouldn’t quit and run off to Paris for a reprieve? But once you’ve had a career, you just might have an existential crisis and wonder, Who am I if I don’t work?
“You must be Gee’s wife,” the guy in the green felt hat said, extending his hand to shake mine.
“Must I?”
“Huh?”
“Must I be Gee’s wife? I mean, it’s a fair question.”
“Maybe I’m mistaken,” Green Hat said. “I thought Gee pointed at you.”
I scanned the bar, looking for Gee, and spotted him nose to nose with a green-streaked blonde.
“Him?” I asked, pointing at the two of them, so close their foreheads were almost touching. My husband. The man you say I “must” be married to.
Green Hat got this look on his face like he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. But I was just getting started.
“So, if I must be Gee’s wife,” I asked Green Hat, “who must be yours?” And I pointed to an emerald-colored dress. “Her?”
He started to back away from me. That’s right, back away from the bomb. The one that’s about to explode.
We were on a St. Patty’s Day pub crawl. I was invited out with Gee’s team, an appearance in the flesh of the bitch wife from hell. Untamed. Noncompliant. Crazy. A woman now referred to as Must Be Gee’s Wife. My name had mutated into The Wife Of, The Mother Of. Gee took my coat when we got to the bar. A gallant gesture or a way of controlling my exit? And he bought me a green draft, even though I don’t drink beer.
“C’mon,” he insisted, before merging into the crowd. “Get in the spirit.”
I caught a glimpse of him, over a sea of drunken conversations, holding court. An American businessman in Paris. I sipped the green beer while weighing my options: stand in the corner like a disapproving schoolmarm, or conjure a fake smile and charm his colleagues. To cope or leave. Someone yelled, “Next!” The crowd began to move, and I was swept up and out into Les Halles, en route to another pub. This time, I held on to my coat. Somewhere between the third or fourth bar stop, I disappeared.
Gee came home a few hours later, sloppy drunk, and climbed on top of me like an octopus, all arms and legs, smothering me with kisses. I was squirming under the weight of him, which he mistook as desire.
“Where’d you go, Emmy?” he asked, kissing my neck.
“Gee!” I exclaimed, pushing him off me, “I can’t breathe.”
TOM AND JERRY
“You are a woman in desperate need of adult conversation,” Jerry said the first time we met. We were sitting on the couch, our daughters playing in the bedroom. It was the beginning of the school year, and we were both new to Paris. The couch was not mine, we were living in a temporary furnished apartment. Old and dark, not quaint. It had the musky smell of strangers.
“Will you be my friend?” I asked Jerry.
“Yes, of course, Emmah, but I’m not talking about that,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” she asked, covering my hand with hers. She let it sit there for a beat too long, long enough that it was uncomfortable. Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but her daughter was Ruby’s first friend in Paris, so I played along.
Jerry pronounced my name Emmah, real formal, in this fancy Jamaican lilt. She liked to put on airs, wore a proper pin-striped walking suit just to pick the kids up from school, her dreads hanging down her back, and spoke in this island-born British accent, even though she moved to Pa
ris from the San Fernando Valley. We’re talking deep in the Valley too. Strip malls. Jerry had an unnerving way of penetrating your most private thoughts and pulling them out to examine over afternoon tea. Always tea. She didn’t drink coffee or wine, could not even tolerate the smell of tobacco. Why someone who didn’t smoke, drink, or eat meat would move to Paris was a mystery to me. But her body was her temple, her Zen Buddhist shrine; she read the Sufi poets and was into love big-time, not the pumping, sweaty kind, but the touchy-feely, deeply spiritual stuff. Past lives and the universe. Rumi.
She said she’d come to Paris to write a book, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was about. She said she was happily married, but she’d left her husband in California. She said she wanted her kids to be around French-speaking people of color, but she didn’t speak a word of French herself. She started sending me messages addressed to Tom and signed her emails as Jerry. I thought it was cute, because I hadn’t seen those cartoons since my own childhood and I didn’t know Tom was the dumb one, and that mouse, Jerry, was always tricking him into jumping off the edge of a cliff, scrambling in air before he fell into the abyss.
I’d see her every day after school, picking up the kids, and she’d tell me how many pages she’d written. I stopped asking what the book was about; she wasn’t gonna tell me. Thought it was bad luck.
“Meet me for tea,” she suggested one afternoon.
A few days later, we were at Mariage Frères, surrounded by gilded mirrors and fancy ladies, spoons tinkling on bone china, whispers floating like smoke in the air. I was dying for a cigarette. She wanted to know everything—about my marriage, my husband, and my kids.
“What’s it like to be a tagalong?”
I told her how I missed working, how sometimes I’d drop the kids off at school, go back home, and crawl right back into bed. I was starved for girl talk.
“You need a man,” she announced, staring deep into my eyes, way past the humor that charmed most people.
“I’m married.”
“Oh, that,” she replied. “What? Him? The International Businessman?”
“Tom!” Jerry emailed me in November. “We need coats!”
It was too cold for our Cali-gal gear. For a while I got by with just a jean jacket; then I switched to leather; then I layered up, with the jean jacket under the leather. That’s my signature move, always trying to work with what I already have.
“Let’s go to Galeries Lafayette,” she suggested.
We must have tried on every damn coat they had in the store, giggling like schoolgirls. If this had been a movie, they’d have cued the montage. It was raining coats, peacoats, overcoats, and big, puffy down jackets. I had high expectations and no budget. That coat, it needed to do everything: fit over sweaters yet not look too bulky, keep my legs warm but not drag at the heels. It needed to be stylish, but also practical and not frivolous. I sensed that, only for me, did it have to be affordable.
I tried on this one coat: calf-length cashmere, greenish brown like my eyes, so soft it could have been a blanket.
“Pas mal,” the saleslady said.
Pas mal? Not bad. At those prices, a coat needed to be more than not bad. It needed to be super bon. Oh, the things I didn’t understand about Paris, about life—that pas mal was French for “pretty damn good.”
The next time I saw Jerry, she was wearing a long wool coat, coffee-colored like her skin, and cinched at the waist with African print ribbon. It fit her perfectly too. I was jealous.
“You bought a coat without me!”
“Emmah,” she said, “It’s cold. I needed a coat.”
A week later, she was wearing a puffy silver down jacket. And I was still standing there outside the kids’ school in my leather jacket, freezing.
“Two coats!” I exclaimed.
“Emmah,” she said, “you are impossible. You want one coat to satisfy all of your needs. Sometimes it’s a bit chilly; sometimes it’s bitter cold. Some coats keep you warm. Some coats make you feel special. One is not enough.”
“Are we talking men or coats?” I laughed.
I ended up buying a wool coat at a resale shop. It checked all, or most, of the boxes—affordable, practical, warm, passably stylish—but I didn’t love that coat. It didn’t make me smile. It didn’t even fit me. Rather, it fit only when I wore it over a sweater. So it was an overcoat. The rest of the time it was oversize, but not in a good way; my body got lost in it. Jerry was right: I expected too much from one coat. A few months later, after I’d worn that big, ill-fitting coat all winter long, I bought myself a second coat, gunmetal leatherette with black felt cuffs and matching collar, snug and chic. I looked good in that coat, I felt good in that coat, and I wore that coat whenever it wasn’t actually cold out, because that coat did a lot for me, but it didn’t keep me warm. That’s how I discovered scarves. And silk long underwear and all the things French women use to stay warm while looking chic. But the thing I really learned, the takeaway, was, it’s not cheating on an overcoat to buy a parka. Or, in my case, to acquire a second coat simply because it makes you smile when you slip your arm into its sleeve.
It was Jerry who introduced me to the poet, said we’d get along like peas in a pod. “He’s in touch with his feminine side,” she said. “He’s like a girl. He’s the male version of you—he tells everything. If he spent more time writing than he did talking, he might get something published.” She let out a low grumble of a laugh. “If he spent more time editing than drinking, I might get something published,” she added.
That last part wasn’t a joke. The poet was editing her book of secrets. Jerry dragged me to a poetry event, somewhere on the Left Bank, to hear him read. The only other time I’d been to a poetry reading was in Detroit. Patti Smith was hiding out, living the married-mom life with Fred “Sonic” Smith, somewhere on the east side of the D. She was rumored to attend poetry readings, real low-key. So I’d frequent these underground dives in Hamtramck, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, alive and in the flesh, and convince her to do a comeback concert for the radio station where I worked. I’d sit in the back of the room, plugged into my iPod, searching for the High Priestess of Rock and Roll; when she didn’t show, I’d leave. That was pretty much the sum total of me and my interest in poetry.
Until I met the poet.
He was standing at the podium, wearing suit pants, his shirt untucked, and those signature blue shoes. Which is why I started calling him Bleu. The place was packed; he was a bit of a local celeb, an enfant terrible. He had groupies too—this one girl, an angora pom-pom, followed him around in a pouf of pastel. He stopped by our table to say hello, but that girl was like a powder-puff magnet, pulling him away from us and into her web.
“I don’t like that,” Jerry said.
Jerry didn’t like a lot of things. Like when I told her how the poet opened his front door looking like he’d just woken up, even though it was after noon, his shirt buttoned wrong, his belly showing above his pants, running his fingers through his hair, trying to make himself presentable.
“I don’t like that,” she said.
“What do you care?” I asked. “I’m the one who was there.” I was the delivery girl, dropping off Jerry’s pages and picking up the poet’s edits.
“But he was expecting me,” she said. So she took it personally. She thought it was unprofessional. It’s disrespectful, she complained. “It’s rude.”
It was a ruse, that’s what it was, just to get me and the poet to meet.
“How do you know Jerry?” Bleu asked.
“Our kids go to school together.”
“Are you a writer?” he wanted to know.
No one had ever asked me that before. I didn’t know how to answer. “Yes” would have been a stretch; “no” would have been a cover-up.
“Sort of,” I said. “I write some.”
“About what?” he pressed.
“Just stories, personal things, girl stuff,” I told him.
“I’d like to read your wo
rk sometime,” he said.
My work. As if my stories could be construed as work. It felt good, though, to consider them as something someone might read, as having a life outside my laptop. It made my pulse race and my cheeks flush. It was exciting, like rock and roll used to be, every part of me switched on. Alive. That’s how it felt from the moment I met the poet. From the moment he opened his door—when I handed him Jerry’s pages and he asked to see mine—I walked around in a fog of him. Dogs came up to me on the street and sniffed between my legs. I was oozing desire. I was practically drooling in some reptilian, club-waving, cave-girl, “me want him” kind of way. Every person, every conversation, every daily transaction, big or small, was an interruption of me thinking about him. I picked up the kids from school, Ruby excited about the school play, Rio upset by the substitute teacher from hell, me nodding my head, uh-huh, all the time thinking about him.
“You’re not listening to me,” they complained. They were miffed; I said I was sorry. She retreated into her shell. He went back to Gameboy. I returned to my fantasy—the one where I was a writer and the poet loved my work. And my writing, it was on fire, burning up the pages.
“I think I have a crush on a poet,” I told Gee, hoping it would get his attention, hoping he might tap into some of the smoke that was leaking from my pores.
“It’s just transference,” he said. Gee was happy that I had found something to fill the hole. He was torn between the demands of his new position and the need to be present in our daily lives. My passion for writing made his life easier.
The blood-type party was Jerry’s idea. The Japanese believe you can tell a lot about people by their blood type, everything from personality traits to compatibility. Sort of a plasmatic zodiac chart. Kiko, one of the moms at the kids’ school, told us about this, and Jerry thought it would make a perfect parlor game. She immediately set about hosting a blood-type party, an intimate gathering of expatriates and artists, two writers, and a Rastafarian DJ. The poet and me. No spouses. “Know your blood type” was all the invitation said, and it listed the invitees like a proper literary salon. I’m type O, universal donor. I get along with everyone. We sat on cushions on the floor, ate spicy Caribbean lentils and rice. Jerry was a laid-back hostess, cooking and serving, a brightly colored scarf around her forehead. She had recently cut off her braids and was sporting a bleached blonde afro. Kiko explained blood-type theory. Annari read a series of poems about love and loss. The guy with the dreads put Santana on the stereo. Jerry pulled everyone to their feet and started doing some sort of conga line. After we had exhausted our artistic selves, everyone started talking about vacation plans. Travel is the conversational staple among expats: who’s going where, what to take or buy when you get there, when to go. Kiko was skiing in Chamonix, Annari was going to the UK to visit family, the guy with the dreads was going to Bruges, Jerry and her kids were meeting her husband in the Canary Islands.
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