by Jo Piazza
When a husband comes shopping with his wife, Poupie encourages the woman to show her man the bras as she tries them on. “The men should be involved. American women do not understand this. They would never bring their husbands with them into the shop and ask them what they like,” Poupie said. “I compare it to a woman who cooks only potatoes. Potatoes every single week, even though her husband hates potatoes. In France we care what our husband likes. We have a confident relationship with what our husband likes. We let him come and see and choose. And then…we let him pay. French husbands always pay.”
She leaned in conspiratorially, her red-rimmed designer glasses bouncing cheerfully on her perfect Roman nose.
“I am going to tell you a story now. I had a client. Very wealthy. Very elegant. Complete bitch. She came to see me four times a year with her husband. She picked out what she wanted and then she was the one signing the checks. Well, later in the afternoon the same husband always came back to my shop with his mistress. It was the same woman, just thirty years younger. Same bitch. Except the difference was that he picked things out. He wrote the checks.”
Treat your husband like your lover and your wife like your mistress.
The prolific author, essayist, and quintessential Frenchman Honoré de Balzac once wrote that passion is an essential part of the happiness of marriage. “But to be passionate is always to desire,” he wrote. “Can one always desire one’s wife? Yes. It is absurd to pretend that it is impossible always to love the same woman as to say that a famous artist needs several violins to play a piece of music and create an enchanting melody.” But, as I was learning over and over again, maintaining that passion requires effort and work.
I thanked Poupie. When she asked me if I wanted to come with her to pick out a bra, I smiled coyly and said, “I think I’ll need to bring my husband to see what he would like.” She clapped her hands and nodded approvingly.
“You know what you’re doing,” she winked.
I still had no idea.
I made a reservation that Friday night at Lapérouse, a historically famous haunt for adultery in Paris with intimate private dining rooms where men have been meeting their mistresses for more than 150 years. A French law passed in 1870 made adultery legal if it happened in a public place. The owners of Lapérouse took full advantage of the loophole and welcomed men and the women who were not their wives into les petits salons on the second floor for their amorous trysts. Secret back entrances into the restaurant led to tunnels connected to the French Senate building so politicians could meet their mistresses without the shame of walking through the front door.
A scratched mirror adorns the restaurant’s wall: the marks are from over a century of courtesans testing the authenticity of diamonds given to them by their lovers on the glass. Some bold women would even use their rings to carve their names into the crystal.
While I was hoping for a carefree night of lust and love, things were tense between me and Nick as we got ready to hit the town. Earlier in the day I had grabbed a T-shirt off the rack at my favorite French shop, Merci, without paying attention to the price tag. After we checked out and left the store, Nick glanced at the receipt.
“You spent two hundred euros on a T-shirt.”
“Nooooo,” I said. Now, I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of money on clothes, particularly yoga pants, in the past, but on this particular occasion I hadn’t planned to spend that much, particularly not on one T-shirt.
“Yes, Squeak. Two hundred euros on a T-shirt. What’s it made of? Baby seal?”
“I don’t know. I think I read the price tag wrong. Don’t yell at me.”
Nick has never blinked at any of my shopping habits or chastised me for spending money on nice things for myself, but even I had to admit that $250 for a T-shirt was excessive, especially at a time when we were so house poor we couldn’t afford a dining room table.
“Whatever. I’ll just return it. I just got it.”
The store refused to let me return it.
I e-mailed Marianne.
“What would you do if you accidentally bought a $250 shirt on your husband’s credit card?”
The reply was nearly instant. “Give him a blow job. Ha ha ha.”
And then she sent a follow-up. “Tell him you deserve it.”
I got very dressed up for our date night at Lapérouse, carefully applying eyeliner, which I hadn’t worn since our wedding, to create the perfect smoky eye. I put on a teensy black dress that hugged my ass, and I curled my hair with care. I even shaved my legs, despite the fact that the shower in our Airbnb was the size of a shoebox and shaving required an elaborate mixture of yoga and courage.
“Don’t I look sexy?” I said to Nick, coming out of the bedroom.
Nick looked up from his computer.
“I’m just checking out this menu. It’s expensive, Squeak.”
“Like how expensive?”
“Like between sixty and a hundred dollars an entrée.”
“Shit.” That’s the last thing you want to hear after you spent $250 on a T-shirt.
He could see I was nervous. Nick hates making me nervous. “We can splurge for one night.”
Everything inside of Lapérouse looks breakable. It’s what I imagine the inside of Jackie Collins’s living room must have looked like, all gilded mirrors and red velvet everything. I glanced at the menu. Was that $100 for a filet of pigeon? A birdlike woman with a clipboard approached us. She was wearing a tight black lace bustier with perfect half-moon B-cups peeking out.
“You have a reservation?”
“Of course we do,” I replied.
“Aster,” Nick said.
“Um, Piazza…Sorry.” I was still getting used to using my new last name for things like reservations and bill signing and introducing myself to small women with clipboards.
“No,” Clipboard replied.
“No?”
“No reservation.”
“I have one. I swear. Is it under Aster?”
She ran a red-manicured finger down the page.
“No.”
I grabbed my phone to look for an e-mailed confirmation and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Here it is. Piazza. Reservation for eight p.m.”
She looked it over. “Wrong night.”
“What?”
“Your reservation is for tomorrow.”
I snatched the phone away from her. She wasn’t wrong. Our reservation was for the next day. I couldn’t imagine it would be that big of a problem to fit us in that evening. “Well. We are here now and we are all dressed up and we took a taxi and it is a special date night.” I wanted to add, And I shaved my legs!
“I am sorry. It is impossible.” With that she disappeared into the folds of a red velvet curtain.
“I’m sorry, baby.” Nick smiled and shrugged. “It’s fine. We’ll come here tomorrow night.”
“You have a work dinner tomorrow night,” I whined. A mistress would not be whining right now.
“I’ll change my work dinner and we’ll have a special night tomorrow.”
I pouted for no reason other than I didn’t feel like shaving my legs again, and I knew I’d never replicate this smokey eye.
I broached the idea of lingerie shopping as we strolled the medieval alleys of the Marais the next afternoon. The sidewalks were packed with Parisians holiday shopping and dragging Christmas trees wrapped up like sausages down the street.
Nick was more excited by the prospect of shopping for bras and underwear than I expected him to be, and he agreed to accompany me.
The two of us were welcomed into a warm shop (a slightly less expensive one than Cadolle and handily located in the neighborhood where we were staying) by a kindly woman in her sixties with a bowl cut of steel hair and fragile-looking wire-rimmed glasses. When men walk into a Victoria’s Secret in America, they are generally treated like perverts and sex offenders, but here the clerk smiled warmly at Nick as she pulled beautiful lacy things out of gilded drawers. No pattern
of lace was exactly the same, and the silk was fine yet raw, with a slightly rough feel like the tongue of a kitten. I wanted a beautiful bra. Just a beautiful bra. There was no point in buying something with confusing ties and straps and openings in the fabric where there should not be openings. I wouldn’t wear those. I would wear a nice bra.
“Do you like these?” I asked Nick, holding up three brassieres at once.
He liked a sincere navy blue with a tiny border of lace.
“Not too much lace. Lace looks itchy, baby,” he said. “I want you to be comfortable.”
My arms piled high with French lingerie, I made my way through the imposing curtains in the back of the shop to the dressing room. Nick lingered in the middle of the store, uncertain whether to follow or to walk out the door and into the nearest pub for a pint.
“Come along, dear.” The clerk grabbed Nick by the hand in a motherly kind of way and led him behind the curtain. “I’ll get you a chair.” When is the last time that happened in Victoria’s Secret? The answer is: never.
From then on we were a threesome, a strange ménage à trois. I would struggle into a brassiere and then shyly pull back the curtain to show Nick. At first he laughed as I shimmied my boobs. The clerk would bustle past Nick and frown, always frown. I was doing it all wrong. She loosened the straps and, without asking, reached her hand into the cup of the bra to scoop my boob up and toward the center of my body in a mammary tsunami, her index finger expertly flicking my nipple into place. Her hand swooped through a second time to usher my armpit fat firmly into the bra. She’d cluck and then beckon Nick forward to look again.
“Better, yes?”
Nick nodded.
“Bon!”
And so it went for over an hour until we’d narrowed down the choices to that same beautiful navy blue demi-bra with delicate light blue lace along the bottom that Nick had chosen in the first place. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins. I was excited, not turned on, but amped up the way I would be before a race or a particularly competitive episode of The Voice. I felt a sense of accomplishment out of proportion to the fact that I’d just spent the past sixty minutes in a two-foot-by-two-foot closet.
Old habits do die hard. I am a woman who is used to paying for things. I’d been doing it for more than fifteen years by the time I met Nick Aster. “Honey, can you get my wallet?” I asked Nick from inside the dressing room.
“No,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
“You?” I was surprised to see him taking to this Parisian sensibility so easily.
“Me. It’s the nature of things. It’s my duty to buy you lingerie. Yeah. I’ve got this.” He winked. He was joking, maybe, but it did remind me of the time he told me that he wanted to take care of me. I heard a little voice inside my head, a voice with a distinctly French accent. Let him buy you lingerie. You will not set the women’s movement back fifty years just by letting your husband buy you a blue bra.
“So be it.” I smiled. “You really like it?”
“Of course I do. It looks comfortable and practical.”
“And sexy?”
“Yes, darling, and sexy.”
For the rest of the day, while we wandered around adorable neighborhoods and finished our Christmas shopping, I kept wondering: Was I putting in enough effort? Was I doing enough to make my husband happy? Just asking the question made me feel a little icky. I felt like I’d been trained to be concerned with my happiness first. But Nick definitely considers my happiness in just about every decision he makes. He was willing to shell out nearly $100 for a baked pigeon at Lapérouse if it made me smile, and he would change a very important work dinner to go to that same restaurant two nights in a row. He spent half the day shopping for wildly expensive underwear the day after I accidentally spent $250 on a T-shirt. And he paid for it.
I kept thinking: Did my husband really want to go to this fancy-schmancy restaurant and blow our mortgage money on odd, fatty French food? Would that make him happy?
“Hey, Monkey,” I said when we returned to our cozy little Airbnb. “How about we skip Lapérouse tonight? Let’s go down the street and have a pizza and some cheap red wine in the Marais.”
“Really?” he said. “No hundred-dollar pigeon?”
I kissed my husband.
“If we’re going to get a hundred-dollar pigeon, I would like it to do much more than just sit on my plate. Perhaps we can find a dancing pigeon or one who sings reggae or does my taxes! We can do much better things with a hundred dollars than purchase a buttered street rat. Maybe we can buy our first dining room chair.”
So we ate pizza and we drank cheap wine. And we went home and I wore the sexy lingerie my way—paired with my husband’s boxer shorts.
The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.
—PAULO COELHO
The genetic mutation that caused my dad’s muscular dystrophy lives on an obsure region of his fourth chromosome called q35. Growing up, our family doctors told me different things about whether or not my own q35 was faulty. First they said a blood test I’d been given as a teenager didn’t show any signs of the disease. Besides, they told me, women rarely developed symptoms of this kind of muscular dystrophy. They claimed the chances were so low I didn’t have to worry about it.
They were all wrong.
I don’t remember much about the morning I got on the phone with Violet, the strangely chirpy genetics counselor, who told me I had reason to worry.
It was a Thursday. Nick had to take a conference call, so he went into the office early and I worked from home. It was raining and the dog didn’t want to pee, so I was soaked and freezing when I got on the phone.
That’s when Violet told me I had a fifty percent chance of having muscular dystrophy. I’d read once that some people swoon, actually pass out, when they hear bad news. My joints turned to butter and I sat on the floor.
If I had the mutation on my chromosome, it meant I’d develop the same symptoms as my father, a gradual degradation of my muscles that would make my body weak and frail and eventually put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. The really shitty thing about muscular dystrophy is that you can’t do anything to prevent it. If you have it, the muscles just start deteriorating one day. But the condition rarely affects your brain, just your body, trapping a fully functional mind in a body that slowly stops working.
Modern genetic testing raises a host of questions, the majority of them centering on what you can live with knowing. If you knew you were going to get a disease that would kill you, would you rather know and plan, or would you rather wait and see? Personally, I would rather wait and see. But now that I was married to Nick, and we would eventually want to start a family, the decision wasn’t only mine to make.
Two voices fought for supremacy in my head.
The first: You should just give up. Stop working. Fuck it! Let your roots grow out, dye your hair green, and sit with the gutter punks down on Haight-Ashbury smoking crack…because why not?
And the second: It doesn’t matter what the tests say. You’ll fight. You’re strong. You’re stronger than you know.
The first voice was so clearly mine. The second was Nick’s.
I want to be one of those people who allows adversity to make them better. But I fear I’m the other type of person, the kind who surrenders in the face of misfortune, closes the shutters, and wanders her dark and dusty house wearing her wedding dress for eternity like Miss Havisham.
This new information from Violet was what led to my hysterical and admittedly dramatic plea to Nick that he should divorce me and marry a healthy wife.
“Maybe the good of being married to me doesn’t outweigh the bad anymore,” I said to him the night after I talked to Violet. “You should find a hot and healthy new wife.” I paused. “Maybe not hot. But find someone nice, maybe a little plump.”
He looked at me like I was nuts and scratched his head. “You know, I measured it. I had these tools to measure the good and the bad of being
married to you, and I set up the machine and I did all of these calculations and you know what happened? The damn machine broke, the good outweighed the bad so freakin’ much.” Nick insisted he would never divorce me and said things like “Aren’t these interesting and uncertain times we are living in.” I had to trust him and accept the fact that he wasn’t going anywhere.
But I began having nightmares where I was confined to a wheelchair, my legs useless, where I couldn’t breathe on my own and had a tube shoved down my throat to do it for me.
We went back and forth about how much we wanted to know about my chances of having muscular dystrophy, but in the end we needed to find out. So I went to the hospital and handed over my arm, allowing them to take many, many vials of blood, during which time I distracted myself by watching YouTube videos of baby bulldogs trying to climb into a Cheerios box. Those vials were shipped off to a lab in the middle of Iowa.
That’s when Nick and I first started talking about doing something big and scary and hard and physically taxing on my still fully intact body.
“We could climb a mountain,” Nick suggested.
“Which one?” I asked, searching his face for signs he was kidding.
He shrugged. “There are plenty of mountains we could climb in California. Or in Colorado. Or we could do something serious. We could climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.” At the time my entire knowledge of Mt. Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, came from the lyrics of the 1982 classic rock song “Africa” by Toto: I know that I must do what’s right, sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.
“Sure, honey.” I smiled, convinced he was kidding. “We’ll climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
More than a month later Violet called me again. Her voice mail went something like this: Hi, Jo! This is Violet, your genetics counselor. I’m calling to go over your test results, so if you can call me back at 415-833-****. Again, my number is 415-833-****. Hope to talk to you soon!
I went to yoga before I called Violet back. My yoga instructor, Roy, a handsome gay Asian man who plays movie soundtracks instead of yoga chants during his vinyasa classes, put on the score to Forrest Gump. Tears slid down my cheeks.