by Jo Piazza
“But what if he did?” I pressed.
She pondered that for a bit. “I love my man dearly. I do hope he’s going to be sitting next to me tomorrow,” she said. That was true. The two of them were obsessed with each other. “But it’s work. He still needs to conquer me every day and I need to make him want me every day. I need to put in the effort,” she said in her low and guttural voice, a voice so sexy it made me want to take up smoking again. “And here’s what’s important: I want to do the work.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to seem like I didn’t want to do the work. But that sounded stressful, making sure your husband wanted you every day! One of the things I loved about being married was that the constant conquest was over. I no longer dressed to please men. I dressed to please me, not worrying about how my ass looked in a pair of jeans or whether the plunge of a top would preclude me from being invited home to meet a boyfriend’s mother. I’d thrown away all of my thongs. It was one of the best things about getting married—tossing those recalcitrant strings in the trash.
Eliminating these worries gave me more energy to do other things. I could read entire novels, go to yoga class, binge-watch Broad City, and build a drought-resistant herb garden. But Hélène would not be deterred, and maybe she was right. Maybe some marriages fall into a rut because we allow that sense of relaxation to turn into laziness. Maybe we all need to be more honest about what it takes to maintain passion and love in the long term.
Hélène continued. “I don’t want him to come home at night and kiss me on the lips without even looking at me. I’m not interested in having the average relationship. I won’t accept it.”
“I won’t accept it either,” I agreed with sudden fervor. Vive la France!
The symbol of the French Republic is a woman, Marianne, a warrior goddess with a bayonet in one hand and the French flag in the other. Not only is she armed and vaguely dangerous, but her gravity-defying breasts are bare to the world. She’s fierce and brilliant and sensual and nurturing—all at once. I learned this fact from my own friend Marianne, another Parisian woman. We’d met when she lived in the United States for a decade after attending school in New York. She’d recently moved back to France with her husband, Jean Paul. A couple of days after Nick and I landed in Paris, Marianne invited a coterie of her very French friends, of all different ages, all of them married or in a long-term relationship, to have coffee with me at a cozy little café in the Marais. It was one of those places with red wicker chairs where you can still smoke cigarettes without someone glaring at you. French women are incredibly social creatures but skeptical about outsiders, and I was pleased to be invited to one of their gatherings.
I’d carefully selected my outfit of skinny jeans, a red and white striped shirt, and conservative yellow loafers to emulate Parisian chic. “Stripes look good on you, Coco,” Nick said before I left. “You look like a French girl.” But when I arrived at the café the other women were decidedly more elegant in linen pants, crisp button-down shirts, and sweaters that really did fall effortlessly from their shoulders. Each of them painted a sophisticated silhouette, their look a part of their public performance. It made me feel like a child who’d just learned to dress herself.
As everyone settled in, the small talk ranged from French politics and the current climate talks to the disturbing rise of Donald Trump in American politics.
“He looks like a large leprechaun, yes? He’s practically orange,” one woman noted. French women have strong opinions about everything from fashion to politics to recipes for coq au vin. They’re always game for a debate, and I suspect their curious minds and readiness to verbally spar keeps their husbands on their toes, another facet of what keeps their partners so interested in them in the long term.
“I feel sorry for his wife,” another woman chimed in about Donald Trump. “What’s in it for her except for the money? How can she stand it? What does she tell herself when she goes to bed with him?”
From here our conversation shifted to marriage, first Donald Trump’s, then more generally. The very first thing I learned from this Parisian cast of characters is that marriage is not the institution in France that it is in America. Men and women in France, particularly in the urban areas, engage in long-term relationships for years, live together, have children together, but may never officially marry.
“We don’t need a piece of paper to prove we are in love,” said Elena, a woman in her twenties with alarmingly short bangs that she was really pulling off. “French women don’t believe in your silly fairy tales.” In Paris, although not necessarily in the rest of France, women are often the ones to propose to men (or they simply say, “It’s time to get married”) if they do choose to get married, and they don’t wear a large diamond engagement ring, opting instead for a simple gold band. They prefer a small wedding at City Hall in a sexy dress they’ll wear over and over again, and afterward they’ll have a champagne toast in their favorite neighborhood bistro.
From talk of weddings we moved on to the advice-gathering portion of the afternoon, or rather, the instructing of the American girl in the art and science of French partnership.
“Sleep apart at least once a week to make him miss you,” said another of Marianne’s friends, whose name sounded like a breathy whisper I desperately couldn’t pronounce.
“Flirt with your husband. Really flirt with him,” chimed in Alix, a fortysomething doctor who’d been married for fifteen years.
“In fact, flirt with everyone. You Americans are such prudes about flirting.” I had noticed that both members of French couples tend to be flirtatious with members of the opposite sex, particularly when their spouse is around. A French host would never seat a couple next to each other at a dinner party. Mingling of the sexes is encouraged, as is healthy flirtation.
“It releases some of the tension, and men think it is sexy to see that another man wants their wife,” Breathy Whisper said.
“The more you love yourself, the more your husband will love you,” Marianne added, as though she were explaining something absurdly simple to a very small and not terribly bright child. “American women think that they need a man to fulfill them. We fulfill ourselves, and then we find a man to come along and be a part of our journey. It’s very simple. Your husband needs to know that you are comfortable in your own skin. Then he will be comfortable. None of the whining, ‘Ooohhhh, I look fat in this dress. My face has spots. I look old!’ He will believe what you tell him to believe about you. You tell him you feel beautiful and thin and young and sexy and that is what he will think of you. This is what will make him feel content and happy.”
How many times had I bemoaned my love handles to Nick or talked about a giant blotchy zit on my face or said that the wrinkles on my forehead were beginning to make me resemble Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude?
“Your husband wants you to tell him what to do and how to think. It’s like how you program a computer,” Alix said. “Or train a dog.”
“Look at him like you want to fuck him,” laughed Marianne.
“Sex heals all wounds.”
“Stop peeing with the door open. Why do you American women pee with the door open? Keep some things private!”
“Our bathroom is really small,” I muttered in my defense.
“Play the role of the perfect woman even when you are a disaster on the inside.” This was the opposite of what Nick and I had learned in Mexico from Bobby Klein, who had instructed us to talk about everything that was on our minds all of the time. But maybe there was a fine line. Maybe you could take it too far. I thought back to a conversation I’d had with Nick that morning that maybe I should have kept to myself.
ME: I think I forgot to put on deodorant this morning. Do I smell weird?
NICK: No.
ME: Can you smell me?
NICK: No.
ME: Come on.
NICK: You always smell good to me.
ME: I still think I might smell gross.
I liked talking to these
French women. They forced me to flip over some of my long-held notions on womanhood, wifeliness, and marriage in a way that was uncomfortable and exhilarating. But I couldn’t keep up with their rapid answers in a hybrid of English and French and I was having a hard time balancing my notebook and glass of wine on my lap, so I finished the wine and focused on writing down what they said.
One woman quoted the famous French novelist Camille Laurens: “When you have desire, words are excess baggage. Speaking, in fact, eliminates desire.”
This seemed a paradox, since French women are so outspoken, and I said as much.
“You don’t get it. What we mean is that you choose your words. Speak about things that are interesting, but leave the nagging to his coworkers. Don’t pick small fights; don’t speak of small things. And above all else, never be boring.” It reminded me of the hygge oath—Do not complain unnecessarily, share fun and uplifting stories, leave your drama at the door.
“When you go out to dinner, put down your goddamn phone and don’t talk about the home things. Don’t talk about work or the laundry or the broken toilet. Would a man talk about a broken toilet with his mistress?”
“So does everyone in France have a mistress?” I said in the same unprejudiced tone I’d used to ask all of my other questions.
I might as well have made the mass generalization that all women in France kill puppies. The room went silent and I stared at the floor, first slightly ashamed and then distracted by all of their sharp-toed shoes. Marianne was the first to break the silence, and her response echoed Hélène’s.
“No one wants to be cheated on. No one wants their man with another woman. Does it happen? Sometimes. We don’t want it to. You behave like his mistress and it is less likely to happen.”
The other women unanimously agreed. No one wanted their husbands to cheat. They claimed none of them had ever cheated. Would they admit it if they had? I don’t know. But I do know they took honest and aggressive puffs of their very thin cigarettes as they swore they’d been faithful.
“Would I like to fuck another man?” one of them said. “Of course I would. Who wouldn’t at some point? But it is much more interesting to keep myself from fucking someone else.”
Their thoughts on the subject were clear and final and, not wanting to alienate my new friends, I quickly steered the subject back to how I could keep my husband enthralled with me.
“What does it mean to behave like his mistress?” The closest I’d ever come to being someone’s mistress was a bumbling flirtation with a middle-aged grad school professor that never went beyond a few embarrassing text messages.
“Walk around naked or in beautiful underwear, but do not let him see you in sweatpants,” Marianne said. She said “sweatpants” the way some people say “toenail clippings.” I don’t think these women understood how much money I’d invested in cute yoga clothes.
“Spend a fortune on lingerie,” asserted the unassuming steel-haired matriarch of the bunch, so chic in her skinny jeans and a wispy scarf.
I recognize that some women may be offended by this call to look pretty and feminine all the time. It made me think about the many drawers I had at home filled with sweatpants and how I’d spend entire weekends wearing nothing but sweatpants. The truth was it didn’t matter what I wore. Nick makes me feel sexy as hell all the time. Even with the twenty-five pounds I gained after the wedding and a zitty face and a sometimes-bloated cheese belly, even with a new haircut that made me look more like the little boy from The NeverEnding Story than I would have liked and even when I’m wearing shitty sweatpants.
For some women feeling sexy and confident might mean lingerie. For some it might mean something totally different. And that was my takeaway from these sophisticated French chicks. Dress in a way that makes you feel sexy and alive and wonderful.
The older woman, the one who mentioned the lingerie, looked at me with a slight frown. “You think it’s silly. I can tell. It’s not silly. I’ve been happily married forty years.”
They wanted me to know when to be silent and yet interesting. I needed to be in control of my husband while maintaining a calm confidence. They despised adultery in their own lives but accepted it in others’ and even recommended behaving like a mistress and flirting with other men. The paradoxical mystery of French women was enough to keep me intrigued. No wonder it worked so well on their husbands.
I needed to understand more about the French woman’s obsession with sexy (and wildly expensive) lingerie. What I’d learned so far was that lingerie is not simply underwear for Parisians. It’s an art, a necessity, and it could be one of the many reasons French husbands gaze upon their French wives as though they are the most perfect creatures on earth. They’re intrigued by the things they cannot see.
That’s how I found Poupie Cadolle—the expert on French lingerie.
According to Poupie, her great-great-grandmother Herminie invented one of the very first bras.
Herminie was a revolutionary, an anarchist, a badass chick who, Poupie told me, was expelled from the country in the nineteenth century for her radical views on feminism and fled to Argentina. Before leaving, she was quoted in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro saying that she didn’t expect to be an equal to a man, but she did expect to make as much money as him. In Argentina Herminie broke into the corset business, but she soon grew to see the corset as yet another constraint placed on women by the patriarchy. The stomach should be free, she thought. Women deserved to be able to breathe. And so, at the Universal Exposition in 1889, Herminie unveiled an ingenious creation. She’d cut a traditional corset in half, thus inventing one of the world’s very first modern bras, built from lace, elastic straps, and underwires made of whalebone that Herminie had heated and shaped all on her own.
It was a spectacular failure.
But Herminie wouldn’t be deterred. She traveled all over the world to extol the virtues of freeing a woman’s belly from the bind of the corset, but no one would listen. Soon the First World War broke out and women all over the world began working. Hard labor was nearly impossible when you couldn’t breathe. This is one of the tales of how the bra, as we know it today, went from bust to your bust.
Herminie’s great-granddaughter Alice grew the bra business and became a legend for outfitting both Coco Chanel and the Duchess of Windsor with the Cadolle brand of fine undergarments, bras, underwear, and slips bedecked in the most delicate French lace and bows in every color of the rainbow.
Today Poupie runs the business. An exclusive clique of very wealthy and very fashionable women regularly travel to Paris just to see Poupie at her couture atelier across from the Chanel shop on rue Cambon. Over a six-week period they attend three different fittings for their custom-made underwear—more fittings than most women have for their wedding dress. Poupie studied as a lawyer, which is clear when she fixes you with her intense prosecutor’s stare to determine exactly the right fit and fabric to complement your particular bosom and shape. Poupie had recently turned sixty-nine when we met. I complimented her on how good she looked for her age, and she wrinkled her nose and made a sine curve with her elegant hand to inform me this was not an achievement of any merit. Women should continue to look good well into their seventh decade. Poupie didn’t believe in letting yourself go.
One of the first things I tried to explain to Poupie was that Nick has no interest in sexy underthings.
“I’m just going to take it off of you,” he always says with his trademark practicality, and adds, “I think you’re cute when you wear my boxer shorts.”
I’ll sleep in anything, but more often than not I fall asleep in some version of Nick’s boxers, tattered lacrosse shorts from high school, a T-shirt worn thin from hundreds of washings, or, in the winter, plaid flannel pajamas that I stole from my father. Nick sleeps naked as a baby. I’m terrified of sleeping naked, in case there’s a fire or natural disaster in the middle of the night. My fear has only intensified now that we live in Northern California, where an earthquake coul
d strike at any moment. When that happens, I will be fully dressed and ready to help drag survivors from the rubble. Of course, Nick will also spring into action, save all of the neighbor children and dogs, and will probably end up on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle as the hero without pants.
For my bachelorette party my well-meaning girlfriends played that game where they bought me racy lingerie, hung it along the wall with clothespins, and made me guess who bought me what. Everyone bought underwear that perfectly matched their own personalities. My girly friend Danielle bought something pink and frilly and complicated where the underwear was just three pieces of string. My sexy friend Jaclyn gifted something black and slinky. The sophisticated one, Jackie, purchased a simple cream and lace slip that felt expensive. The Megs, my very practical lesbian friends, bought me Patagonia hiking underwear and sports bras. I wear those all the time.
I had a drawer filled with pretty things that I rarely put on because they often made me feel more embarrassed than sexy.
When I explained this to Poupie she informed me I was committing a cardinal sin for my marriage.
“Lingerie, beautiful things worn under a woman’s clothing, should be something shared between a man and his wife,” she went on. “I think that is love.” Poupie wouldn’t dare wear a piece of underwear that her husband didn’t like if she knew he would see it.
“Why would I do that?” she scoffed. “A man shouldn’t be disappointed. If a man doesn’t want his wife to wear a T-shirt for sleeping, she shouldn’t do it. Poor American men. They are not spoiled.”
Poupie loves spoiling men. She welcomes them warmly into her shop, inviting them to inspect the fine silks and laces as she coquettishly but assertively asks them what they like.
Poupie has great pity for the women who come lingerie shopping alone.
“If a woman leaves and says, ‘Let me ask my husband what he would like me to buy,’ then I know they will last forever,” Poupie said. “If she buys something on her own, who knows!”