I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  —

  FRANÇOISE’S FATHER came to visit her in New York in March, on his way to St. Barths. He asked to meet her friends. Françoise had a party, and as the loft filled up with her new friends, she was surprised at how many there were. Paul schmoozed happily with the crowd. He radiated pride for his daughter and her space.

  Her mother came to visit in June, with Louis Guérin still in tow. She was also, suspiciously, on her way to St. Barths. The second that Josée stepped into the apartment, it lost its luster. Everything—the salvaged posters and flyers, the furniture scavenged from the street—seemed to shrink. Everything seemed to be covered in dust.

  “You’re living here?” Josée said. “The neighborhood is awful. You don’t even have a chair. Why don’t you come live on my house boat? You’ll be much better off. Don’t you miss Paris?” She reminded Françoise that her return ticket was valid for only a year. Besides, Josée said, SoHo was not safe. She pointed out that Françoise had been robbed a few weeks before.

  Even after Josée’s departure, the magic did not return to the loft. Her mother had transformed it from an enchanted fortress into a barren foam mattress and a rusty hot plate. She didn’t even have a chair. Although it would never have occurred to her to ask to move in with her mother—had never seemed that her mother might want her there—now that she had offered, the draw was irresistible. Paris glittered through her mother’s words: the Seine, the quiet streets now held a nostalgia she’d never felt before. Here was Françoise’s chance to have a relationship with her mother. She booked her flight home.

  —

  THERE WAS THAT CLICHÉ about how people kissed the ground when their plane landed. Josée said she had seen that once, long ago, when she was a flight attendant, bringing the first Jews from America over to Israel: bent over in their winter furs, kissing the sticky-hot tarmac. But when Françoise landed in Paris, exactly a year after leaving, kissing the ground was the last thing she wanted to do. She felt like a magnet polarized to repel.

  In the airport, Paul was waiting for her by the gate. When they reached the arrivals area, Jean-Michel ran up to them with a bouquet of flowers. “You go home with him and I’ll never speak to you again,” Paul threatened.

  “You go home with him and I’ll never speak to you again,” Jean-Michel shot back.

  Françoise hated being forced to choose between the two men, but it was her father, not Jean-Michel, whom she’d asked to come get her, and so her decision was made.

  Paul drove her to his place. He’d invited a young surgeon, his protégé, to lunch.

  “Why don’t you put your things away?” Paul said, gesturing toward Andrée’s room.

  “Actually,” Françoise told him, choosing her words carefully, “Josée offered that I could stay on the boat with her for a while . . .”

  “What? You’re going to go live with that bastard whore?” Paul asked, veins popping with instant rage. He ordered her to leave immediately. Françoise, too tired for emotions, picked up her suitcase again. The young surgeon offered to drive her to her mother’s.

  “You know,” he said to Françoise in the car, “you have very beautiful eyes.”

  “Thank you,” Françoise said.

  “You really could be quite pretty if you just tweezed a bit, between your eyebrows,” he said. “They’re conjoined.”

  On her mother’s boat, a luncheon party was in full swing. Josée turned to greet her with a warm “Ah, there she is!” She explained to her friends, in exaggerated detail, how she’d saved her poor daughter from a rat-infested hovel in the dingiest part of New York City.

  After the guests departed, they fought all evening. Françoise barely lasted the night. She had forgotten how few defenses she had against her mother. In the morning, Françoise repacked her suitcase and left, unsure where to go.

  A friend from architecture school offered her the couch in the beautiful, light-filled duplex her mother had just bought for her. She was a gracious host, but she had just found herself a boyfriend, and the apartment had few walls and little privacy to offer. From the couch, Françoise listened to the two of them laughing in bed together. She stared up at the high ceiling and struggled to sleep, embarrassment burning hot in her stomach. She felt like an overlay on the world rather than a part of it. The small hole she had once made in the fabric of the city had been filled in without a trace. Paris had erased its memories of her.

  —

  WE WERE IN THE KITCHEN TOGETHER, my mother and I, our bodies moving in synchronicity. She stirred the pan I had placed on the flame, I cut the onions she would need before she thought to reach for them.

  “Can I help?” my brother asked as he opened the fridge to get himself a glass of water. He had started college this year and I had just finished it. Each time I saw him he was more of a man. He had a beard now, torn pants that slouched low on his hips, muscles that rippled up his arms. I wondered what it would be like to become taller than my mother. I envied him that.

  He sat on one of the stools where we’d eaten breakfast as children, and his knees danced up against the edge of the counter. “Can I ask you for your advice on something, Nadja?” he said as he popped his thumb into a grapefruit to peel it.

  As a younger child, my brother had believed me to be the ultimate authority on a great many things. After school in our living room, my friends and I had sorted out our understanding of women’s rights by lecturing him. Do buy her flowers, but don’t hold open the doors. Do pay for the meal, but also let her pay for yours. Later, he’d hung on my every word as I’d explained about gay rights and trans issues, nodding along, eager to get it right. “What about me though?” he’d said in despair. I told him he had it easiest, but it seemed to bring him little comfort. My sweet, conscientious brother wore his straight white male privilege like an albatross.

  That past winter, during a trip he and I had taken to Berlin, he had realized with a violent jolt that I wasn’t the perfect older sister he had imagined me to be. I could be uncool, I could make mistakes, I could lead us both, unwittingly, into danger. I don’t know which of us this hurt more. Now we were building a wary new relationship. I leapt at the invitation to give advice.

  “So I know you’re not supposed to hook up with girls when they’re too drunk to say yes,” he began. He explained that, at school, there had been many orientation sessions impressing upon the students the importance of consensual sex.

  “But what about when I’ve been drinking, too?” he continued. How many drinks did she have to have before it became not okay? If she’d expressed interest before, and they went out drinking together, was that okay?

  I began speaking loudly and authoritatively. I had a lot to say, and I was conscious that my mother was listening, even though her back was turned.

  “You can trust yourself,” I said. “It’s not a hard-and-fast rule that if a girl has had a drink, she’s off-limits. But there are many men who use alcohol to take advantage of women. Follow your instincts and don’t do anything that feels questionable. If you don’t think she’ll remember it the next day, then wait. If she’s repeating the same questions or can’t walk correctly, then she’s too drunk to consent.”

  My mother sighed. She wrapped her arms around my brother.

  “Oh, my poor little boy!” she said.

  “Why?” I said, the word coming out more confrontation than question.

  “They’ve gone and made it all so complicated for you!” she said to him, rubbing his back as he leaned into her. “You poor thing.”

  My anger rose sharply. I tried to tell my mother that she couldn’t possibly understand the binge-drinking culture in American universities. I tried to tell her about the many young women I’d known who’d woken up in unfamiliar beds with bruises blooming on their thighs and the knowledge that their bodies were no longer safe.

  My mother and my brother were still touching, his head
on her shoulder. I was still talking about frat parties and roofies and grain alcohol, but then my voice was cracking. I put down the knife I was holding. I felt aware of my own melodrama, and in equal measure I both wanted and did not want my mother to see it.

  “I can’t talk about this right now,” I said and pushed past them. I made it to my room before I began to cry, but left the door open as I began to do so, with air-gulping, shoulder-shaking sobs.

  My mother’s footsteps soon followed. “Oh, Nadja,” she said, sinking down to the floor next to me, “what on earth is wrong?” I kept my head on my knees.

  “Did . . . something happen to you, mon poussin?” she asked with infinite tenderness. She put her arm around my back and brushed the curls away from my neck. I wished in that moment that something had. It would be so much easier to explain.

  She’d been admonishing me since I was twelve. Wear higher collars, say no more forcefully, if it bothers you just ignore it. All I had ever wanted was her anger on my behalf. I’d wanted that hug she gave my brother. I’d wanted that Oh, my poor little girl. I still wanted it, so badly.

  “Sometimes you’re just so . . . unfeminist,” I said.

  “Oh, mon amour,” she said. “It’s not that simple . . . These young girls of today . . . they allow their whole lives to be ruined. They decide that they’re the victims, they decide that they’re damaged.”

  “They are victims,” I said. “It’s a terrible crime.”

  “Maybe, but . . . practically? What good does it do them?”

  She was looking at me earnestly but I couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t already said twice. I felt a gulf yawn between us and a swimming feeling, like vertigo, at the impossibility of changing her mind.

  “You know,” she said, after a long pause, “I suppose you could say that it happened to me once. In a sense.”

  “With Éric?” I asked. “Before you left for New York?”

  “Oh no!” she said, surprised. “No, no. That wasn’t . . . no,” she said. “Another time.”

  —

  BACK IN PARIS, Françoise returned to architecture school halfheartedly. She had rented herself a tiny maid’s room in a desolate neighborhood, far from everyone she knew. She was suffocating in self-loathing. Every outfit seemed to clash. She dragged herself to parties but her thoughts drowned out the buzz of the room. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape a constant longing to be someone else, somewhere else. Doing anything was excruciating. Doing nothing was excruciating.

  She continued to go to the Aquarelle, the café where she and Jean-Michel had always gone, a few streets from the Beaux-Arts. The same people were there, talking about the same things. She felt like screaming. She had changed profoundly, and they didn’t even seem to notice. She needed something new, broader circles, different people. She wanted to expand Paris for herself, approaching everything with the same sense of adventure she had felt in New York. There was an old Greek man who was a regular at the café. He was in his fifties, twice the age of any of the students. He was fat and unattractive, neither quick nor witty, but the students tolerated him interjecting in their conversations from time to time. He cornered Françoise one afternoon and told her about his records. He had a huge collection of records. Come and see them, he said.

  He didn’t live close by, but she went anyway. It was public enough. They knew so many people in common. They saw each other every day.

  He locked the door from the inside. It hadn’t occurred to her that there could be a situation where she wouldn’t be able to fight someone off. That was a surprise. She had thought of herself as strong. But when it became clear what was physically inevitable, she played dead. It interested him much less that way. It was over quickly.

  My god, she thought, how pathetic. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. It was just her body. It was easy enough to leave her body.

  How stupid of her it had been, she thought later, to go to his house. Lesson learned. From now on, she wouldn’t go to someone’s house unless she was sure she wanted to have sex. But she wasn’t going to let one unpleasant experience change her. He didn’t deserve such power. It was years before she spoke of the incident to anyone.

  She told me this calmly. She seemed more worried about my reactions than her own. But I wasn’t reacting. I felt numb all over. My thoughts were replaced by a buzz like the low hum of a generator.

  “Mais, Maman,” I said, “he had no right to do that to you.” Even with the rest of me shut down, the words jerked out of my mouth automatically.

  “It was my responsibility to know better,” she replied.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. Though I wondered what good it could possibly do her to acknowledge all the anger and hurt I felt she should feel.

  “Fault and responsibility aren’t the same thing,” she said. “It was my responsibility. It was much more traumatic when someone broke into my loft and stole my radio. That was my space. I didn’t particularly want to have sex with Meister either but—”

  “You slept with Meister?” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “I admired him, intellectually, as a mentor, so it was . . . okay. It was fine. I waited for it to be over so that we could go back to talking. The Greek guy, though, he repulsed me, physically. But mostly it was just a revelation—there were people who needed to force others to have sex with them. I felt bad for him.”

  I could feel how stiff my body had gone and knew that I was glaring at her. I was furious. With the Greek guy. With myself. With her.

  “Come here,” she said and pulled me into her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. My poor girl.”

  “Why?” I said miserably. “Why should you be sorry?”

  “Because,” she said, “I’m your mother. I’m supposed to protect you from all this.”

  —

  IN PARIS, Françoise sank into a deep depression. She spent days without leaving her small maid’s room. It was dark and cramped. The ceiling was slanted. There was a twin bed, a small high window that let in a glimmer of light, and a wooden wall that created a separate area for the sink. The toilet was down the hall. She sat on the floor, staring at the wall by the sink that unnecessarily divided her small apartment. She needed open space. She needed to breathe. She could think of nothing but tearing down that wall. She sketched an architectural plan. She would turn the sink into a bathtub, install a hot plate, create a kitchen.

  But she didn’t own the room, she kept reminding herself. She couldn’t tear down the wall.

  One day, there was no longer a choice. With a hammer and an X-Acto knife, she forced a window into the wall. It looked awful. The edges were jagged and the floor was covered in splinters. The landlord would be furious. Françoise sat down in the corner, shaking. She was still holding the X-Acto knife, and she pressed it now to her wrist. Her body resisted her. She breathed deeply and steadied her arm. She pushed harder, as hard as she could, using her right hand to cut across her left wrist. A bead of blood appeared, and then another, until blood trickled across her arm. She thought about leaving a note, but what would it say? I’m killing myself because I made a hole in the wall? She pressed down harder and more blood came. But she was still in her head, watching herself. “Harder,” she coached herself, mumbling the words. “Harder than that.” But she couldn’t make the knife slice through to her veins.

  I can’t even kill myself, she thought. She threw her head back against the wall and shut her eyes, drifting off to sleep in the splinters of her room.

  My mother told me about trying to cut her wrists late one night in her children’s book office, on the ground floor of our four-story building. I was still in college then and still eager to prove myself. Her voice was unwavering, and her tone resigned yet matter-of-fact. I tried to match her. I was tough, I wasn’t shocked, I looked her in the eyes. I asked her if she knew then that you have to cut your wris
ts in a vertical line, straight up your forearm, not horizontally across. She looked at me, surprised, and said she hadn’t. It was information I’d inhaled like New York City smog. How to cut your wrists, how to create dreadlocks, how to slip keys between your fingers to make brass knuckles—these were just things you absorbed in high school. I shrugged and she continued, almost conspiratorially, describing the details, the blade pushing its way through her skin. I barely flinched. But later, writing about it, my hands cramped up and I sucked in sharp air through my teeth. I paused every few words to rub away the ache in my wrists.

  —

  FRANÇOISE LEFT PARIS four months after she’d arrived. In her dreary maid’s room she’d stared at the ruined wall and dreamed of her loft as it had been when she first moved in: the spacious rush of freedom, the honking of the cars outside on Canal Street, the wooden floors she’d laid herself stretching half a city block. But when she returned to New York, her loft was still the shattered illusion she had left behind: the loft as her mother had seen it. The light was gray and meager now, whole swaths of the center of the space left dark. She’d given up her job selling cigarettes, her job at the architecture firm, in the avant-garde plays. She could have tried to get them back, but she couldn’t find the courage. She had a few odd jobs but she went less and less often. Instead she huddled by the industrial gas blower in her sleeping bag, trying to stay warm.

  At first, her phone rang sometimes. It had a jarring, insistent jangle. She stared at it until it stopped ringing, until eventually her friends stopped calling.

  She slept eighteen hours a day. She hardly ever left the house. When she was awake, she read from a dense philosophy textbook. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. The letters swam and rearranged themselves. She read certain pages over and over, until ideas pierced her with astounding clarity, then left her devastated. She couldn’t tell if the text had begun to make more sense or if she was beginning to make less. She ran out of food. She ate raw oats by the handful. She began to write letters, her hand moving with furious speed, letters addressed to no one, letters that she knew she’d never send.