by Edmund White
I was so happy, feeling something inside me growing, something ancient (related to crusaders) and brand-new (my baby). Addy told his mother, who made an appointment with the family gynecologist—a man, of course. He’d been to dinner once and I’d heard him say, “I work where other men play.”
Being American, I marched right into his office and took off all my clothes; when the nurse came in she said in broken English, “But miss—I mean, missus. Madame la baronne, the Frenchs were—were?—this little robe,” and she presented me with a paper gown, tied it at my nape and lower back, leaving my buttocks hanging out, then handed me up onto the examining table, sheathed in clean paper, and put my raised feet in the stirrups. I felt ludicrously pornographic, like one of those red-assed estrous baboons in the zoo who are always “presenting.”
The doctor came in, robed, gloved, and smoking a cigarette. He gave me a curt “bonjour,” then tore a hole in my paper smock at vagina level. He inspected my organ carefully, his breath, even filtered by the mask, warming my nether parts in a disagreeable way. He was still smoking. He touched my vagina and lingered over it. Then he listened to my belly with a stethoscope (this was all before scans).
“You’re having twins,” he said, lighting one cigarette from another. “Your vagina definitely reveals you’re pregnant and you must be at least nine weeks pregnant since I can hear the heartbeat. Or rather two heartbeats. Do you have any twins in your family?”
“My sister and I are twins. Identical.”
“I can’t determine if they’re identical or fraternal now, but they are twins,” he said. He took a deep breath, and, as if casting aside his professional role for a friendlier one, he said, “Congratulations!” Holding his cigarette between his lips (the smoke was burning his eyes), he eased my feet out of the stirrups and I sat up. Suddenly I liked him much more than before, as if we were intimates, not patient and doctor. I felt waves of gratitude toward him, as if he’d been the one to induce my pregnancy. “I assume you’ll be the one to tell the baron.”
Of course, I thought. Did he imagine I was too modest to mention pregnancy to my own husband? Sometimes I felt we were living in the nineteenth century. And yet it seemed acceptable for everyone to have lovers. If I chose one, I thought, it would be a woman. I wondered why all men weren’t heterosexual and all women lesbian. Women were so beautiful, and everyone seemed to agree. Their skin was so soft, their hair so lustrous, their lips so pouty and adorable, their breasts just begging to be cupped. In society women’s charms were constantly on display, which seemed so unfair, since so few of us were allowed to touch them. I was certain I could never fall in love with a man for more than a day. Who wanted a man, with their rough beards, their big, awkward hands, the charcoal squiggles on their chests, the barbed wire encasing their legs like fishing waders, their big yellow feet with dirty blue nails, the hair on their backs, their nipples like dried currants, those absurd penises that were always poking their wet, dripping noses in everyone’s business, their leathery ball sacs carrying unevenly hung balls like back-up ammunition, spare cannon fodder? And the smell of all this heavy equipment compared to a woman’s daintiness? And men’s blunderbuss assertions compared to a woman’s delicate coquetry? I love the girlishness of girls, their feline independence and playfulness compared to the male canine way of grasping you with their front paws and mounting you, wiggling till they spurt, their penis impossible to extract.
Compare Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Rear Window. She is so appealing—fashionable, her eyes startling, her jawline clean, her movements ravishing, her voice caressing—that anyone would prefer her with her full bust to his pale, scrawny body, his scarcely expressive face (all his acting is in his glances up through his eyebrows), his dull, droning voice; if someone hadn’t tried to forgive all that leaden immobility and drawling and that unappetizing appearance by dubbing it “masculine,” the poor man would never be allowed to touch, much less kiss, such a dazzling, pivoting divinity. Everyone, man and woman alike, should be enamored of Woman! I thought the doctor, despite professional ennui, must be enthralled by this flourishing Texas woman (épanouie): me!
Being pregnant made me miss my mother, who’d been dead so many years. I wanted her by my side to help me through the nausea of morning sickness (Adhéaume’s mother, as the offspring of Crusaders, couldn’t tolerate signs of weakness). To whom would I turn? Yvette was unreachable in the hills of Colombia or the jungles of Venezuela. Bobbie Jean had never had a baby, was too selfish to help me—and, besides, didn’t really like me and wouldn’t travel. I asked my gynecologist if he could recommend a nurse.
“But why? You don’t need a nurse. In another week your nausea will go away. Try to take a nap every day and don’t run in the Bois de Boulogne” (he laughed his way through a phlegmy smoker’s cough).
My only confidante was Geneviève, the maid. When she wasn’t busy cleaning or mending or ironing or running errands, she’d come into my room after knocking, mutter “Madame la baronne,” sketch a curtsy, and sit beside me on the love seat, but only when I insisted. She was very good for my French. She’d grown up near Montoire-sur-le-Loir (not the Loire, a different river). Her parents were peasants; she had six siblings. She was the second oldest. Her parents made goat cheese, grew hay for the animals, had a huge vegetable garden, owned a tractor (which Geneviève had bought for them with two years’ wages), owned an old Renault 5; her older brother restored the tile roofs of barns in the area. Her middle brother grew sunflowers on the land his grandfather owned but was too old to farm; the flowers would raise their golden crowns and then he’d starve them for water until they turned black, could be harvested, and the seeds pressed for oil. He was in love with a local girl but was still too poor to marry her. It seemed he would inherit the grandfather’s cottage and land when he died; then for sure he could marry. His fiancée was from a richer family and studying to be a nurse’s assistant in Vendome.
“How far along is she in her studies?” I asked.
“Christine’s in her last year and will graduate in June. It’s just a two-year program.”
“Maybe she could come work here during the last months of my pregnancy.”
“She knows a bit about how to be a midwife (une sage-femme). I wonder what my brother would say, but if I watched after her and she lived with me it might be all right.”
“And you?” I asked. “How did you end up here?”
“I have an aunt who cooks for the baron’s mother. After the young baron married your highness (votre altesse), she ‘placed’ me in your household.”
“Oh, please, I’m not an altesse but from a family probably very much like yours, except my daddy first struck it rich from oil, just pure luck, nothing else. Does your aunt like working for the baron’s mother?”
“Yes, of course,” Geneviève said quickly, blushing. She wasn’t used to lying.
When I repeated a few things about Geneviève’s family over lunch, Adhéaume said, “I wish you wouldn’t talk to the servants …”
I pounded the table. “Then who should I talk to?!!”
“Don’t shout. You mustn’t get upset in your condition.”
“Geneviève is my only friend.”
“How sad (comme c’est triste). I’m afraid she’s already taught you some vulgar expressions.”
“What! Vulgar like dirty?”
“No, vulgar like common (populaire).”
“Tant mieux.”
“I can’t have the mistress of my castle speaking like that.”
“My château, you mean.”
“See what I mean? Only a fishwife (une poissonnière) would say that.”
I leaped up from the table, went into the kitchen, and told Geneviève that I would take my coffee in my room. When she arrived with a cup of chamomile (“grandmother’s pipi,” as I called it), I objected and she said, “The baron’s instructions. He said it would calm you down for your nap.”
“But I don’t feel like a nap!”
Poor Geneviève looked startled into helplessness; I imagined her instinct would be to shrug, but she dared not lest it seem disrespectful. I couldn’t help but feel like a horse, a multimillion-dollar Triple Crown winner, owned by a corporation and that could be put out to stud for more millions. La baronne must not become anxious, la baronne must rest, the rich Texas baronne must give birth to rich Courcy baronettes. Don’t argue, just eat your hay and let us groom you till you foal. I’d heard about these new tranquilizers, Miltown, that would stun you into submission.
I wanted an abortion.
Not really. I felt my womb was filling up and I was about to bring two children into the world, twins like my beloved sister and me, solid Crawford brambles grafted onto prizewinning roses, like those at the Bagatelle, with names like Lady Jane Grey, saffron yellow and as large and drooping as a dying butterfly. If I’d married the wrong man—a spendthrift, unloving, snobbish popinjay—at least I’d have my noble children to keep me company. With Yvette I’d never been alone; our identical genes communed with each other mystically, but I’d lost her and we were growing apart. Now I’d have my own babies, and though Kahlil Gibran (whose The Prophet Jane Beth had given me on my twenty-first birthday) warned, “Your children are not your children” but more like arrows you’ve shot into the surrounding darkness, nevertheless I thought of them as life companions, little friends I’d never lose.
One advantage of being enceinte is that Adhéaume thought he should stop having sex with me after the first trimester. He had some Gothic superstition that if the twins were boys they would be born homosexual if they became too familiar with their father’s penis, if they worshipped it as much as their mother did. Besides, the ecstatic pleasure supposedly ripping through my bloated body might induce a miscarriage. The little mother must be coddled, kept warm like a broody hen, oiled, and massaged.
Luckily Christine did come to work for us as I became mountainous. Adhéaume thought I shouldn’t go out into society after I began to show. He thought it wasn’t proper, not comme il faut. I didn’t mind staying home with Geneviève and Christine and watching television while the baron went out to his clubs (the Jockey Club, the Automobile Club) or to visit his mistresses. I didn’t really know about the mistresses, but I understood that Addy couldn’t bear to be alone. He’d sooner die than read a book. To literary people he always talked about a novel he’d dipped into once and only once. When I suggested he watch television with me in my room, he said, “I couldn’t bear to watch the same programs my servants were looking at.”
I valued what was cozy, but I was told coziness was as boring as innocence, whereas he prized what was “distinguished” or “magnificent.” I quickly learned the supreme importance of the non-dit, what was left unsaid. He liked grandeur, I liked simplicity.
If he’d been a Texan we would have hashed out his infidelities, starting with the conviction that what he was doing was wrong. Since he was part of the gratin, it was assumed that marriage was for dynastic reasons alone and fidelity was for ploucs, or “hicks,” or the pious or the seriously undersexed.
I hoped that since I was spawning twins, his family ambitions would be satisfied and he would leave me alone with the children and the maids. He wouldn’t be attracted to me until my vagina healed and I’d regained my figure. Now that I was so pregnant and wearing giant smocks and running constantly to the bathroom, he couldn’t bear the sight of me. He’d enter my boudoir off my bedroom, and, seeing us “girls” (les meufs in verlan, the slang that spelled everything backward), he waved his hands in front of his face as if to erase the image of three women sprawling and giggling. I was happy for the first time in Paris, happy to be with other young meufs, happy to be free of the toxic, scheming Courcys and Castigliones, happy to be hatching my two giant golden eggs, happy to be watching terrible TV programs and having the maids explain the soap opera plots. I was learning how to be an average French woman in France while Addy attended auctions and came home exultant about buying a forty-two-piece set of Sèvres that had once belonged to Madame de Sévigné.
“It would be fun to have an Italian-style fight,” I said, “and to smash it all against the wall. How much did it cost you? Ten thousand dollars?”
“Add a zero.”
I gasped. Since he spoke English alone in front of the maids, I had to translate everything for them into my newly fluent French; Addy said I was acquiring an Auvergnate accent, which was terribly vulgar.
I was careful never to criticize the baron in front of the help, tempting as that might be. We could laugh at anything and everything but not at the baron de Courcy. I saw his august personage through their lowered eyes for a moment and felt a new, if fleeting, respect for the “quality.”
It didn’t last long. I smelled the mistress’s Shalimar on his hand, saw that she’d been feeding him his favorite croissants au beurre in industrial quantities and that his tush was getting more and more cherubic in his tight, bespoke trousers; they were splitting at the seams. We were both swelling; it was a bit like the “freshman fifteen,” the extra pounds a college girl puts on once she is away from her mother’s watchful eye.
I suppose there was something squalidly gynecological about a harem of three young women idling and, in my imagination, licking loukoum and ingesting drugged sherbets as they sat out a dynastic pregnancy. The eighty-seven wives of a Persian king who happened to prefer boys—those obese ladies grew mustaches or glued them on, coaxed one wide eyebrow across their faces, ate gluttonously, and showed off their delights in ballet skirts without panties, not really sure how to rekindle his interest (they hadn’t found the right way).
When we weren’t watching soap operas or variety shows (most of the French singing stars seemed to be elderly), we were flipping through Paris Match; the girls told me that the royal family of Monaco had an exclusive contract to cook up a new scandal every month to be reported and photographed by the magazine. Nothing could keep us from giggling for long. Christine gave me long massages with heated baby oil. Following the most modern practices she’d just learned, she had me doing stretching exercises to remain in good shape (en pleine forme).
Eventually my gynecologist, smoking all the while, delivered my twins. Addy said he was “allergic” to blood and might faint, so I didn’t see him until I was bathed and holding the babies in my arms. He dropped in an hour late, brought white roses, inspected the little girl and boy as if they were prize pigs, told me of the arrangements his mother had made for a wet nurse from the Morvan and of his dismissal of Christine, who wouldn’t be needed anymore.
“You what! You dismissed my darling Christine? How dare you,” I said indignantly with my last energy.
“We don’t need her anymore, my beloved.”
“You don’t need her. She was my friend and helped me during most of my pregnancy.”
He laughed with his little sneer. “May I point out that Madame la baronne is no longer pregnant.”
I brooded and at last said, “I hope you gave her a handsome bonus at least.”
“Bonus? Why ever would I do that? You’re too generous with the servants. She was well paid, got to see the Eiffel Tower, and was blanchie et nourrie (her clothing was washed and she was fed) at my expense for months.”
“My expense,” I growled. Then I remembered something. “I’ll get her address from Geneviève; I promised Christine money for her dowry to marry Geneviève’s brother.”
Adhéaume made that puffing sound of exasperation. “First you’ll have to find her. I dismissed Geneviève as well.”
I burst into tears and sobbed and sobbed and the nurse had to rush to take the babies from my arms. I assumed they were being bottle-fed in the room next door. Adhéaume sneaked away, always the coward. Undoubtedly he was rushing off to another auction. Somewhere in Paris there must have been a magnificent desk by Boulle of rare woods and gold fittings for sale for just the price of two downtown city blocks in Dallas. Or a selfish woman willing to trade her pussy for a tiara.
We’d squabbled over the children’s names. I wanted to name the little girl Yvette after my sister and the boy Paul after my father. Those were both recognized names at the mairie. It turns out that if you were Irish and you wanted to name your children Deirdre and Cuchulain, you couldn’t. In those days, at least, there was an official list of saints’ names and only those were legal in France. Not for France, any of those poetic one-of-a-kind names chosen by black Americans, like Nakesha, as a unique handmade identity, a sort of haiku label, a magic ring. If you were Muslim, your son became Joseph, even if you preferred Karim or Abdellah. If you were German, your little Greta became Marthe.
“Yvette,” Addy said, “is an accordionist’s name.”
Addy and his mother held out for Ghislaine for the girl and Foulques for the boy, medieval family names. “And what will their nicknames in America be? Gristle and Fuck? Fuckface?”
“Why would they have American nicknames?” Addy’s mother asked, genuinely puzzled.
“They might want to go to university there. American schools have a very lively campus life.”
“That will never happen,” the old baroness said. Addy had told me that when he was a child she’d given him a very short list of acceptable playmates. She was very snobbish, he said with a smile, as if it were a virtue.
The wet nurse arrived from the Morvan the next day and started to feed my babies right away, one on each breast. My own breasts were so full of milk they hurt; if one of the babies cried (it was usually Foulques), the milk would spurt out of me, which Addy thought was distastefully “primitive.”
The wet nurse was very young, a bit stupid, nineteen at most, with hyperthyroid eyes and lips so swollen they were always parted; for some reason they reminded me of her swollen breasts. Apparently she had just had a little girl of her own, whom she farmed out to a neighbor lady who was also nursing an infant. That way she could come to the big city and feed my babies. Her name was Marguerite, which Addy said was perfect since it was a name for a cow.