I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  When my grandfather passed away, in the summer of 2007, a weight had lifted off me that I hadn’t known I was carrying. Each time a whiff of cigar smoke or Hermès cologne sent unbidden memories straight through my central nervous system, I would remember with relief that he was not in Paris waiting for me but nowhere, nowhere, he was gone. But here he was now. His leather briefcase. A carved piece of ivory. He’d been waiting for me after all. I put his majestic red glass ashtray in the center of the table and told myself that it was not my grandfather. It was a beautiful object and nothing more. I stubbed out a cigarette butt in it to prove it. I had a lot within myself to unpack, I realized, but maybe this was a start.

  —

  I WANDERED AIMLESSLY in an ever-increasing radius from the apartment. I thought I knew the city well enough, but I soon discovered that my childish mental map had always been upside down. The Seine was south of the apartment, not north as I had assumed. I confused east for west for months.

  Days passed where I spoke only to shopkeepers and café waiters. I discovered that I could wake up at one in the afternoon and no one would know. America was still sleeping. I became afraid of disappearing. Major construction work was being done on the building, and I lay in bed with my hands over my ears while the walls shook, jackhammers pounding into my skull. Men stood on scaffolding outside my second-story windows and shouted to one another as they ripped the bricks out of the walls. I became afraid of going crazy. I threw myself into a whirlwind of drinks and coffee dates with every tenuous connection I had to a friend of a friend. I had been warned that Parisians ran in tight-knit circles, that it would be very difficult to meet anyone. But when I said I used to live in Brooklyn, people’s eyes lit up. “Brooklyn!” they sighed wistfully. The rooftops, the speakeasies, the artisanal hamburgers! Why would I come here? I asked questions constantly—about slang words, the names of streets, why the waiters were so rude—and my new friends answered eagerly, talking over one another. I soon learned that in France it was rare to admit ignorance on any topic. My open naïveté was a novelty. And I, in turn, enjoyed having my accent and customs gently teased. “Très Brooklyn,” my friends would say, impressed, when I served them glasses of water in jam jars I had rinsed. I found myself completely comfortable in my new identity as an outsider, more comfortable than I’d ever been before.

  —

  FINALLY, I COULDN’T put off calling my grandmother any longer. I paced my apartment as the telephone rang. “I’d like to come over,” I told her, my voice squeaking.

  “But of course!” she said. “I’ll make you a little lunch.”

  “I thought, perhaps, you cook so well, maybe you could teach me a few things?” I said. “Cooking lessons?”

  “Cooking lessons?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “and to see you, also. And to talk a bit, maybe, about my mother. About your childhood. I’d like to know.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I don’t know what I can tell you about Françoise. But we’ll see all that when you get here. It will give me great pleasure to see you.”

  The day of the visit, I looked at myself in the mirror. I smoothed my dress over my hips. I tried to see myself as my grandmother would see me, but instead I saw only my mother scrutinizing herself, the expression I’d seen on her face so many times.

  On the subway, I made a game of the things my grandmother might say to me. Ten points if she told me I’d gained weight. Fifteen if she insulted my sweater. But when I arrived, she hurried to the door to embrace me.

  “Look at how beautiful you are!” she exclaimed. “Paris must suit you. You’ve melted away.”

  She took a white-fleshed fish from the fridge and had me place it in a bouillon she had already prepared.

  “Your fish is delicious,” she told me as we ate.

  “But it’s the bouillon that’s good,” I said, embarrassed by the wave of pride that flushed my cheeks. I asked her if I might record our conversation.

  “Would you like my tape recorder?” she said. “I brought it down from my closet for you; it’s right here.”

  “Oh!” I said, startled. “Um, thank you. But actually, I can do it on my phone.”

  “On your phone?”

  “Yes, see? It’s recording now.”

  “Well don’t put it there. It’ll catch all the vibrations of the table. On top of this book is better. Doing interviews was my job for quite some time, you know.”

  I looked up at her in surprise, eager for her to continue.

  “I was a ghostwriter for many years,” she said. The word for this in French is nègre, and for a quick moment I wondered if she was being racist. She enjoyed being provocative, her comments sometimes so shocking that it was difficult not to laugh. “Look, black and yellow have made a little bumblebee,” she said once, as we passed an interracial couple and their child.

  “Do you have the books you wrote?” I asked her.

  “Oh, I’ve put them well away, under my bed. You have to get down on all fours to reach them. The first was about the legionnaires. It’s very difficult to make those men talk. But still, it was exciting. Every experience they described, we had to try ourselves to make sure it was possible. If they said it took so much time, carrying so much weight, to get down to the riverbank, then we timed ourselves doing it,” she said. “I even got my mother to help.”

  I tried to imagine Josée and Mina running down a steep embankment with heavy loads on their backs. It seemed to me an apt metaphor.

  “What tricks did you learn to make people talk?” I asked.

  “Looking at them,” she said with a charming smile, then pursed her lips and looked at me, batting her eyelashes. I noted that my grandmother understood the power of a small simple answer, and most likely, too, its ability to be accurately transcribed. My mother, by contrast, spoke in paragraphs rather than sentences, and while sometimes her responses wound toward an increasingly precise answer, they more often unfolded in directions that surprised us both. I nodded at Josée, waiting for her to continue.

  “And always here!” she said, gesturing to the bar in her kitchen at which we both sat. “So many secrets have been told at this bar. It must be located on a karmic center of energy. Here, this is a good trick. You offer them some wine, some saucisson, some tea. They sit like this.” She slumped back in her chair, letting her arms fall wide and lazy on the table. “They come out with all sorts of boring things about their family for hours. And then all of a sudden they tell you the interesting things.”

  “It’s the things about family that I’m interested in hearing,” I heard myself say, because the opening was there.

  “Yes,” she said, “the tables have turned. Would you like some more tea?”

  I held out my teacup for her.

  “What was my mother like as a girl?” I asked.

  “So,” she said evenly. “When you pass something, like a cup, you always pass the plate underneath as well. Like that. You give it all. It’s much easier for the person serving. She aims and you don’t move. And it’s more refined.”

  “Okay,” I said, surprised that she’d rebuked me in a way that didn’t sting.

  As I was preparing to leave, pleased that our first session had gone so well, I noticed a black-and-white photo propped against the wall by the table. Josée was beaming, her cheek pressed to an odd, soft object in her arms. My mother, aged eight or nine, stood behind her, her face transformed by a radiant smile. I picked it up. This was not the childhood my mother had told me about. I asked Josée what she was holding in her arms.

  “It’s a pillow with an embroidery of a dog,” she told me—a pillow Françoise had made for her. It was so sweet, so dear to her. But after the divorce, my grandfather had sold it to the auction house, along with most of Josée’s other belongings.

  “I bid on eight or nine lots of pillows, just to try and get it back,” Josée said, laughing.
“But it wasn’t in any of them.” She took the photograph from my hand, looked at it, and replaced it carefully against the wall.

  From the houseboat, I had a long walk back along the Seine to the subway station. I called my mother immediately, breathless with triumph. Josée had not disdained all of my mother’s gifts after all. My mother had forgotten the dog pillow. The dog pillow had been loved. This might fix everything, and so easily.

  “Well,” my mother said eventually, with a sigh. “If she’d really loved it, she wouldn’t have left it behind.”

  I stifled my disappointment, and we talked of other things. It wasn’t until later, listening to the recording, that I noticed how few of the questions I’d asked about my mother Josée had actually answered.

  —

  I STUBBED OUT another cigarette in my grandfather’s ashtray, which held a great many butts now. I wondered about the fate of the dog pillow, if the person who had bought it had thrown it away. Very few physical traces of my mother’s childhood remained. Josée had told me, without a hint of shame, that she had no photographs of my mother between the ages of six and nineteen.

  There was, in the apartment, a large oil painting too big to fit in the closet. My mother had taken it from Paul’s apartment because she’d remembered it from her childhood home. It was in the French pompier style and it depicted, in fact, a raucous firemen’s picnic. Drunken men slumped against trees, gave goblets of alcohol to children, groped women’s rears. It was garish, but the frame was nice. I had put it on the floor behind the dining table, but now I worried for its safety. I hung it above the bed. It looked stately, if you didn’t examine it too closely.

  —

  THE FIRST TIME it happened, I was eight years old. I’d gone to Paris by myself, to visit my grandparents. Even then, I’d wanted to prove I was old enough—old enough to travel alone, old enough to have experiences that were mine alone. I was to spend the first half of the week with Josée and the second half with Paul.

  On the houseboat, Josée scolded me for washing dishes incorrectly, for stealing the lumpy cane-sugar cubes from the silver sugar bowl at night, for eating too much bread with my meals. “It expands in your stomach,” she said. I slept on a mattress in the room that doubled as her massage room. One day, the masseuse came and my grandmother lay naked on the massage table next to me, moaning. I had never felt so homesick before. But there was also an afternoon when Josée taught me how to fly a kite, and an evening when she told me, in front of her friends, that my dress made me look “as skinny as a string bean.” There were ducks that made their nests on the houseboat, and Josée showed me how to throw them stale bread out the kitchen porthole. Behind a plant by the Jacuzzi I found a baby duckling that had died the spring before. Josée had had it poorly taxidermied by a friend. I fell in love with the soft still thing, cardboard jutting from its neck, and she told me I could keep it. I took it with me when I left.

  One of my aunts drove me from the houseboat to the luxury apartment building on Avenue Foch where my grandfather lived. In honor of my visit, he had made his small office into a room just for me, with a rosebush in the window. He had hung a painting of two terrifying white kittens on the wall.

  My first night, he took me down to dinner in the lavish restaurant on the ground floor. After dinner, a man rolled a cart of desserts over to our table and I politely said I was full. But my grandfather must have seen my eyes go wide at the île flottante, a meringue floating on vanilla cream, and he insisted I order it. When I’d scraped the last of the cream from the plate, I looked up to see him watching me with horror.

  “You fat little pig,” he said. “How could you have eaten all that?”

  That night, I sat on the bed in my room as I listened to him on the phone in the living room.

  “It’s not just a bubble in her stomach that’s going to pop and go away. We need to do something about her,” he said.

  He didn’t come to say good night. I fell asleep staring warily at the ominous blue-eyed kittens. Hours later, I heard the door to my room open and my grandfather come in. I was lying on my stomach on top of the blankets, my face turned toward the wall. He sat down at the foot of my bed. He gently lifted my nightshirt. He began to stroke my butt. I kept my eyes shut so that he wouldn’t realize I was awake. I don’t know how much time passed. Eventually, he left.

  The next morning, he told me to eat plain nonfat yogurt with artificial sweetener for breakfast. He had filled the fridge with it just for me. When I bathed, he remained in the bathroom. At eight, this was something my mother or grandmother might have done with me as well, but his presence made me uncomfortable without my knowing why. I noted it in my diary, in a childish scrawl. “I know he’s my grandfather,” I wrote, “so it’s okay. But I just wish he’d leave me alone.”

  I didn’t tell my mother. What would I have told her?

  —

  IT WAS YEARS before anything happened again. I kissed my grandfather on the cheek when he bought me too-expensive Christmas presents, just as I was supposed to. His skin was strangely, worrisomely soft, but I remember very few of the actual moments I spent with him. Mostly my brother and I sat quietly on his brown leather couch, or didn’t sit quietly and were scolded. Then we sat down to elaborate catered meals—plates of oysters, lavish cakes—and I was inevitably reprimanded for eating incorrectly, or too much. His girlfriend was a marquise who wouldn’t marry him in order not to lose her title. Once, I was invited to her castle, where the stairways were tight, winding stone affairs and I slept in a princess bed with a red velvet canopy. At high noon, all the children were locked into a cabin filled with bunk beds and made to nap. Through the windows we could see the adults drinking cocktails by the pool in the sunshine. The other children did not see this as a grand injustice, but I tried to argue my way out and was spanked by the woman who was minding us. This I did tell my mother, my voice trembling with outrage. I liked the marquise, but she told me gently that I could not call her grand-mere because she already had too many grandchildren of her own. I had no memories of my grandfather from that visit beyond one breakfast, when he lectured me on butter knives.

  Then I was fourteen, and the way his gaze and hands lingered on me made me uncomfortable. But I was often uncomfortable in my body then, and there were many men who made me feel that way. My grandfather had invited the family out for dinner. I hated the mannered extravagance of those meals. My grandfather flirted with the waitress outrageously. He slipped an enormous bill into her hand as a tip. I felt her discomfort acutely. The conversation was strained, with both my aunts trying to convey their polite dislike for the marquise, whom they suspected of being after their father’s money. I went to the bathroom to have a moment alone.

  The bathroom was very small. There was a vestibule with a sink and a mirror, perhaps two feet wide, then two doors that led to toilets. As I was washing my hands, my grandfather came in. I backed up against the wall to let him pass. He stood facing me, pushed up against me. He touched my stomach.

  “You stick out here,” he said. I put my head down. I could smell the stale cigars on his breath.

  “But not as much as you stick out here,” he said, putting both his hands on my breasts. I laughed politely and pushed past him, out of the bathroom.

  At the end of the meal, my mother said, “Thank your grandfather.” I kissed him on the cheek and thanked him.

  Back in New York, I told my mother. I told her about the bathroom and that night when I was eight years old, and the vague discomfort I had no name for. I was leaning in her doorway, watching her get ready to go out. She was wrapped in a towel with her hair dripping wet, applying lipstick.

  “But he’s a plastic surgeon!” she said. “You don’t understand. He’s just used to touching women.” She turned back to the mirror, clipping earrings on her ears.

  “It’s a professional deformation,” she said. “It’s just the way he is.”

>   “Okay,” I mumbled and went to my room.

  —

  THE LAST TIME it happened, I was nineteen. My mother wanted to go have lunch at his apartment once more before we left. She wanted me—me specifically, though my father and my brother were also in Paris—to come along. Your grandfather is dying, she said. This might be the very last time you see him. This possibility seemed sad to me only in the most maudlin, abstract way. But when my mother decided that I was going to do something, it was very difficult to alter that path.

  My grandfather had been on the verge of death for three years and would go on to live another two. He had bladder cancer and he wore diapers. He refused to hire a nurse, preferring to have Sylvie and Andrée change him. It was made clear to my mother that she was the delinquent daughter, the one who was not doing enough.

  His maid had procured lunch for the three of us. I used the oyster fork incorrectly. After we’d finished eating, my mother went into the back room, the office still decorated as my bedroom, to talk to the maid in private. My grandfather got up and stood behind my chair. He put his hands on my shoulders, his grip surprisingly firm, and pulled me upward.

  “Well, let’s have a look at you,” he said.

  My mother came back into the room.

  “We’ve got to run, thank you so much for the marvelous lunch, Papa,” she said, giving him a hug.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said as I leapt for my coat. “Good-bye!” I waved and walked quickly down the hallway to the elevator. My mother and grandfather stood in the doorway to his apartment.

  “Not even a kiss good-bye?” he asked, calling out to me.

  I hesitated, shifting my weight, trying to think of something to say that meant no but sounded like a friendly joke. My mother said, “Come give your grandfather a kiss,” so I walked back.