I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  As I leaned in to kiss his cheek, my grandfather grabbed my breasts. Then he grabbed my shoulders and held me at arm’s length and stared at my chest.

  “You’re much too round,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Bye.” My mother and I walked to the elevator.

  As the doors closed, my mother laughed.

  “What was that?” she said, grinning as if we’d both just been through a wacky caper.

  “That’s why I never particularly want to see my grandfather,” I said. I wasn’t smiling. I was annoyed.

  Her smile faded. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Oh.” We were both silent as we left the building.

  On the street she asked, “But why did you never tell me?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Of course you didn’t,” she said. “I would remember.”

  “I did,” I insisted. “You said he was a plastic surgeon and that’s just how he treats women.”

  “But he’s your grandfather,” she said. “He’s not allowed to do that to you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I guess I know that.” But I hadn’t known it, really, before then.

  —

  MY MOTHER WAS UPSET, but when she told my father, he was furious. It was a surprise to me that this should make anyone so angry. I felt very cozy beneath the black blanket of his outrage. I have always felt at my safest around anger directed at someone not present.

  “You don’t ever have to see that asshole again,” my father told me.

  “Really?” I said. I looked at my mother. She nodded confirmation. I felt as if I had received an undeserved gift.

  In conversations that happened behind their closed bedroom door, my mother asked my father to talk this out with Paul. My father refused, saying that if he saw the man it would only be to break his jaw. My mother begged him to call Paul on the phone in that case, and find a resolution man to man. Instead, my father wrote my grandfather a letter. I never read it, but I know my father’s anger when it turns into words. He faxed it from New York. A few weeks later, one of my aunts called. My grandfather was very wounded. He couldn’t understand why I’d invented such outrageous accusations. I must be crazy, he’d concluded. Which was no surprise, considering.

  We sat on my mother’s bed as she told me about my grandfather’s reply. That my grandfather had accused me of inventing the story disturbed me deeply. Ever since the disappearing food in high school—those weeks when I’d allowed myself to become convinced that I was doing something I had no memory of having done—my hold on my own past had felt tenuous. When we watched the film Gaslight in a college course, my whole body trembled. Later, in seminar, I had blurted out, “My mother used to accuse me of willfully throwing away all her spoons,” which was true. “I did not throw the spoons away,” I continued forcefully, though we were talking about Barthes and no one had appeared to doubt my innocence. I did not know then that the film had been powerful enough to become a verb.

  “I’m so glad it happened in front of you,” I said now to my mother with a huge exhale of relief, because I still felt a nagging worry as to whether anything had happened at all.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “Well.” She pulled her earrings from her ears and gazed at them in her hand. The circles under her eyes were deep and she looked infinitely sad.

  “It’s not easy for me, all this, you know,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, though I hadn’t until then.

  “He’s still my father,” she said. “The only one I have. And he’s dying.”

  “I’m really sorry that I’ve made it so complicated for you,” I said with genuine remorse, though I knew in a textbook way that it was considered incorrect for victims to blame themselves.

  “It’s not you,” she said. “It’s your father. If only he had called him instead of sending that letter.”

  —

  WE DIDN’T TALK about it much after that. I suppose we no longer had Christmas lunch with my grandfather, though getting out of it must have raised considerable tensions within the family. I do know that I never saw him again. When we were in Paris, my mother saw him on her own. I stayed behind with my father and brother. I felt as I had on the rare days when a thermometer had miraculously displayed a temperature high enough to keep me home from school.

  Two years later, my mother called me sobbing to tell me that Paul had died. I was working as a counselor in a summer camp for people with developmental disabilities, as a way of trying to push my extreme and somewhat debilitating desire to be of service to others to its breaking point. I was nearing it.

  My father was not going to Paul’s funeral, of course, my mother told me on the phone. I sensed that she didn’t want to face it alone. I offered to leave the camp a week early and go with her.

  The funeral was held in Paris. Though my grandfather had never been a religious man, he had hedged his bets at the end and called a priest. The service was Catholic, with Latin chants and a censer that spewed aromatic smoke. The church was filled with women I had never seen before, women of all ages in pearls and flamboyant black designer dresses.

  “I loved your grandfather so much,” they came one by one to tell me afterward, “so much.” Their voices wavered, but their faces were so taut they could barely shed a tear.

  Later, a much smaller party went to the internment in Ussel. My memories of that trip are all tinged gray, though it was July. I’d been curious to visit the town where my mother had spent her summers and boarding school years, imagining folkloric country cottages, but it was all grim, short buildings of a claustrophobic sameness. My mother told me several times how grateful she was to have me by her side. At the cemetery, the coffin was pushed into a mausoleum. My mother squeezed my hand tightly. I cried along with her, though less for the grandfather I had known and more for the grandfather I wished I’d had.

  —

  IT SEEMED TO ME now suddenly possible that they were the same person. I was learning that adults look very different through the eyes of the young. My mother had mentioned, over the years, her great grief that she had never had a moment of reconciliation with her father. My aunts had. They loved him now, with a simplicity they could not manage before. “He was a different person at the end of his life,” Sylvie said. “We talked honestly, about a great many things.” They did not hide this from my mother. It was their prize, for having changed his diapers, and her punishment, for living in New York with her crazy lying daughter. I knew that my mother didn’t blame me for this, and yet guilt weighed on me all the same. It was one of the many reasons I’d come to Paris. It was why I’d called her so breathlessly to tell her about Josée’s photo of the pillow.

  I went to a shelf of the studio apartment that was lined with my grandfather’s collection of old medical books. They were mostly from the 1700s, their spines golden and red, and they crumbled to the touch. I opened one. A photograph slipped out and fluttered to the floor. My breath caught. I bent to pick it up. But it was only a glossy color snapshot of my grandfather and some other old men in a banquet hall, wearing name tags. A surgeon’s conference, sometime in the 1990s. This wasn’t a fairy tale, I reprimanded myself. The books didn’t contain answers.

  I was struck with a visceral childhood memory of how much I had once wanted to touch all the forbidden objects on my grandfather’s shelves. I ran my fingers along the books gratuitously, touching for the sake of touching, and picked out another. It was a small book, with the words DICTIONARY OF MEDICINE barely visible on the spine. It was stuck to the three books beside it, their spines fused. I pulled all four out together and something rattled. The books were a box. The top two opened away from the bottom two. Inside, set into a leather-colored compartment, was a small crystal decanter and three shot glasses. There was a hole for a fourth glass, but it was missing. Was this from the 1700s as well, or only designed to look so? I had no way of knowing. I opened it, closed it,
opened it, removed the shot glasses and decanter and lined them up on a shelf. It was exactly the sort of object I had always loved, with its hint of the untoward. I had had a book that contained a flask, far less elegant than this one, in my Brooklyn apartment. I twisted the stopper out of the decanter and smelled it: a faint whiff of alcohol. Sillage, I thought. It was a French word I had recently learned. It had a beautiful sound, see-yaj. In its first definition it meant the wake left behind by a boat in the water. But it could also describe the perfume that lingered in the air after its wearer had left the room. I sniffed the decanter again but the smell had dissipated. There was little of my grandfather left to forgive, and perhaps, I thought, this was all I would ever find: the ripples in the water, the lingering smell.

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, my grandmother called. “Do you like Hopper?” she asked. The Edward Hopper show was the event of the season. Two-hour lines snaked outside the Grand Palais even on weekday afternoons, and the young people I knew all talked about how they were going or had been. Hopper’s work had been relatively unknown in France until then. I loved him like he belonged to me. It was in front of a Hopper painting at the Museum of Modern Art, my father talking to me quietly about how the image worked—the lines that guided your eye, the way light entered the room like a person—that I had first felt moved by a painting.

  “Yes,” I said. I had a sense that interactions with my grandmother were as strategic as chess games. When she was a ghostwriter, she picked her subjects up at the airport, brought them straight to her boat, interviewed them for two or three weeks straight, and only later let them leave to see the Eiffel Tower. I wished I could do the same to her now, but Paris wasn’t my city.

  “I’ve reserved two places for us,” she said. My grandmother belonged to an association of ex–airline stewardesses, the Broken Wings, which organized group outings and cultural events. Usually she placed Sylvie and Andrée in competition for the tickets, doling them out as rewards for cleaning her Jacuzzi or helping her winterize her boat.

  I met Josée at the houseboat for lunch, and we took her car to the museum. As she drove, she told me about how she’d been pulled over the day before.

  “This young cop signaled at me to buckle my seat belt and I just . . .” Josée wagged her finger no with a coquettish smile. “He tried two more times, then shrugged his shoulders—You’re asking for it—and pulled me over. I showed him my doctor’s dispensation—he’d never seen anything like it!” she said. “I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head. He called his friend over to show it to him.” She laughed gleefully. Her seat belt was buckled around the back of the driver’s seat so that the car’s warning mechanism wouldn’t chime. It didn’t actually hurt her to wear it; she just didn’t like being constrained. Her doctor’s dispensation was her grand prize for surviving breast cancer, ages ago.

  “I’ll use my cripple card to get us past the line,” she told me, getting out of the car. “We’ll have to pretend so that nobody causes a fuss.” As we approached the museum, Josée’s walk became a limp.

  “Give me your arm,” she said, leaning her weight on me and coughing pitifully as she shuffled forward. As we walked past the line of people who stood in the rain, a smile broke across the feigned concern on my face. I’d always been a terrible actress.

  I was surprised to discover that we were early. The rest of our group hadn’t yet arrived. This never happened with my mother. I left Josée on a bench in a window and went off to find the bathrooms. I passed the museum cafeteria and considered buying Josée an espresso. She usually had a coffee after lunch, but today she had said we didn’t have the time. You’re only opening yourself up to punishment, I scolded myself silently as I washed my hands. But as I walked back past the cafeteria, I got on line.

  I came back balancing two plastic espresso cups in hand.

  “What a genius idea,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Quel amour!”

  She sipped. “I think this is the best coffee I’ve ever had.” Very little brought me more pleasure than having somebody appreciate a gift or a gesture. Those were the moments I held on to, turning them over in my mind like sun-warmed stones. Could Josée know me so well already?

  “Do you know the happiest moment in my life?” she said into the comfortable silence between us.

  “No, when?” I asked.

  “When you and your mother were pulling me through the ocean a few years ago, each of you on one arm. I just floated on my back and you were like my two dolphins, my two mermaids. I had such a feeling of comfort and well-being. I could have died happily right then.”

  Yes, I thought, better even than I know myself.

  The airline stewardesses were easy to spot, even among the many other older women gathering for tours. They were slender and elegant, with fur coats and impeccably coiffed hair and face-lifts. Josée introduced me as her granddaughter from New York, pride in her voice.

  I found comfort in Hopper’s paintings of New York, the glimpses of familiar architecture out the windows, the bright rays of sunlight that I craved in that gray Parisian winter. But it was a painting of Paris that held me longest. The title was Soir Bleu, always in French even when it hung in America. I’d never seen it before. It was different from everything else. Hopper’s paintings were often of empty rooms and empty streets. But here, the painting was of a crowded cafe terrace: a sailor, a prostitute, a bourgeois couple, a sad clown all in white. The space itself was only barely described—two strips of blue, light and dark, defined land and sky—and the Chinese lanterns that dotted the top of the painting cast no light. I was surprised by its lack of emotional depth. Hopper painted it in New York, four years after his return from Paris, the tour guide told us, and then I understood the painting differently: perhaps, I thought, it was of the exaggerated archetypes people become in your memory, and how large and flat they then loom.

  “There you are,” Josée said, having left the group to find me. She glanced at the painting. “You like this one?” There was some skepticism in her voice.

  “It’s not the most beautiful one,” I said cheerily, and I slipped my arm through hers.

  The afternoon went by quickly. Josée made me laugh with her asides about the other museumgoers. Her commentary on the paintings was reserved but invariably astute. She dropped me off at home and gave me a hug, her blue eyes warmer than I’d ever seen them before.

  “It’s so good to have you in Paris, my little dear,” she said.

  chapter eight

  How is it going with your grandmother?” my new Parisian friends asked me. I didn’t know how to answer. Things were going well. They were going almost too well. I had had a script in mind—she would be cruel to me, I would persevere. After hours and hours together, I would eventually uncover the sweet doting grandmother I had always wanted. But here she was already, that woman I’d longed for, taking me to museums, showing me off, praising me. It was almost too easy.

  My first months in Paris unfolded in a haze. There were days when I did nothing, all of my energy consumed by navigating the city. I had fluency in the language, but I was surprised to find how much of the culture evaded my grasp. I did not know then that I must say “bonjour” before asking for directions, when entering a store, to each cashier, that not to do so was as inexcusable as not saying “thank you.” Cashiers slammed my items into shopping bags, people turned away from me without a word. My differentness radiated off me, profoundly irritating to others, my French too fluid to excuse it. There was a special harshness older French women reserved for younger women who did not meet their expectations. Rarely a day went by when I did not find myself scolded by a stranger. I braced myself and yet still often found myself fighting back the sting of tears.

  “I’m going to forget all this. I need to write it down,” I wrote in a notebook I kept during those months, but I wrote little else. I let days blend into nights and back into days, sunri
se hitting me like a racing pulse. When I tried to remember the day before, it was only streaks, like a watercolor caught in the rain.

  My whole life, I’d lived in a city that reinvented itself as constantly as I did. New York was a blur of rising skyscrapers and changing storefronts. But Paris held time like a lake. It piled on like sediment, in geographical layers, invisible striations up the unchanging façades. I visited all the places my mother had once lived. On Rue Dauphine, in the heart of the Left Bank, I slipped into the interior courtyard of the building where she and Jean-Michel had once shared a studio apartment. I counted up to find her windows, half expecting to see the ghost of her young self peering out from behind the curtains.

  I was often lonely, and to be so in Paris felt new. One afternoon, my mood heavy, I wandered the city tentatively. I longed to see the water and so I denied myself that. I went into an artist’s squat on Rue de Rivoli, its doors thrown open to tourists, and climbed the graffiti-covered stairs. I found myself in a corner that had been piled thick with scavenged objects: a plaster cast of a hand, a taxidermied monkey, empty birdcages filled with spray-painted plastic bottles. Handwritten signs dangled from the ceiling on strings. YOU KNOW YOU’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO FEED THEM, SO WHY DO YOU HAVE CHILDREN? one read. I snuck out again, ignoring the artists who beckoned to me from behind their drafting tables. I walked a few more blocks toward the Seine.

  Almost there, I ducked into one of the many pet stores on the Right Bank. Perfect puppies and kittens pawed at the Plexiglas of their small cages. A young girl Rollerbladed down a corridor of fish tanks. At the back of the store, where there were fewer children, I stopped to look at a fat golden hamster. She stood slowly and beneath her I saw a mass of babies, pink and larval, their eyes still hidden beneath bulges of gray. The hamster scratched at the straw lining of her cage, burying the babies deeper, pushing them into place, then sat again. Only a few small pink limbs escaped. An American boy near me screamed, “Look, Mom, the mouse is using his wheel!” I knew I should share this with him, or with his mother who smiled serenely at her son’s manic joy. But I did not. I kept the secret for myself.