I left the store and finally I allowed myself to walk out over a bridge into the middle of the water. The limestone buildings turned rose-gold as the sun set and shards of color scattered across the Seine. But as I sat, hugging my knees in one of the bridge’s stone alcoves, all I smelled was urine, all I saw were the flashing cameras that imperfectly captured the night. My mood did not lift. And I felt Parisian at last, still sad in the face of all that beauty.
—
SHORTLY AFTER I moved to France, my mother came to visit. It was prearranged, a business trip whose timing she couldn’t control, and while I might have been annoyed at this push-pull freedom (my dramatic departure, our tearful good-byes, seemed ludicrous now), I was relieved to see her. I ran to the bakery before her arrival and prepared a spread of croissants and fruit and cheese. I made her a cappuccino and then, when I saw how her eyes drifted shut, coaxed her into taking a nap in my bed. I felt peaceful, working in the early-morning light while she slept. It brought me a deep pleasure to coddle my mother—la chouchouter, as they said in France. Whenever I managed to slow my mother down long enough to indulge in sleeping or eating, it alleviated my guilt at my own slow pace.
With my mother by my side, there were no obstacles. Everything sped up. Each day she spent in Paris was filled to the brim. Time was no longer quicksand, it was an ice pick with which to dismantle the world. On the first day of her visit, she gave a radio interview, bought me a coffee machine, saw a friend for lunch, met with an artist about his New Yorker covers, gave another interview to a print journalist, called the mayor’s office about the brothel our neighbor was opening on the ground floor, negotiated the details of the ceremony later in the week where she would be given the French Legion of Honor, showed me how to scrub the toilet bowl white and oil the wood counters, then sent proofs of the latest children’s book she was publishing to the printer in China. Each night I fell gratefully into the bed we shared and slept soundly.
One afternoon, we briefly parted ways. I went into a shop, intending to buy a gift for a friend. The male shopkeeper followed me to the back of the store. He hovered near, commenting on my body, his hands almost touching, then touching, my shoulder. I left empty-handed, blushing and upset. When I told my mother later that day, she listened with a sympathy she’d rarely shown before.
“I know it’s hard,” she said. “But you have to find a strategy. Tell yourself that this is what you wanted, even if it isn’t true. Tell yourself you make yourself pretty for a reason. Tell yourself you win each time, because otherwise it feels like losing—and I never want you to feel that way.” I heard her advice, and it was useful. It marked a turning point for me. Now when I walked through groups of men who had watched me coming from half a block away, I did not bow my head. I looked them in the eyes. I dared them to speak. I wanted them to. They never did.
On the eve of her birthday, my mother visited Josée alone. She told me she needed a moment with her mother. She spent the night on the houseboat and came back looking soft and vulnerable.
As we walked through Paris the next day, she insisted on avoiding the main boulevards. We ducked instead through small streets and covered passageways, winding our way toward each destination. It seemed to me she was avoiding the streets she knew too well, the streets where time stood still.
The alleyway we had taken dead-ended into a private courtyard. I sighed with annoyance. My mother said softly, “I feel like a piece of paper when I’m in Paris.” As we turned around, she looped her arm through mine.
“I have no weight here,” she said. “I could blow away at any moment. Everything in this city, it’s . . . it’s as they say in English, it’s ‘heavy’ here.”
We cut down another small street and came across a small Korean restaurant bustling with customers. “I don’t think I’ve had Korean food before,” she said as she pushed open the door. The restaurant was loud, and yet, as usual when we were just the two of us, my mother and I slipped easily into intimate conversation.
“Last night,” she said, “Josée asked me if my father had ever . . .” She paused. I waited. “What was the word she used?” my mother asked herself. “It was very specific. Inconsiderate . . . immodest . . . indiscreet! She asked if my father had ever made indiscreet gestures toward me.”
“As in . . . sexually?” I asked, trying to make sense of this.
“Yes. I told her no. But she didn’t seem to believe me.”
“Why would she ask?” I said. My mother shrugged. She seemed more perplexed than perturbed.
“I told her that, well, it had made me very uncomfortable that he used to walk around our house naked. But Josée said she used to walk around our house naked, too, which is true. Both my parents have always been nudists.” In fact, as they’d been having this conversation, Josée had been naked in the Jacuzzi. My mother was getting undressed. Josée remarked that Françoise had developed a gut and warned her that at her age any pounds she gained she would never lose. My mother seemed more upset by this comment than by Josée’s earlier question.
“But what did she mean about your father?” I said, steering her back.
There had been some moments of awkwardness with her father, my mother said. Though nothing like what Josée was hinting at. When my mother was nineteen, Paul brought her to St. Barths for a vacation. My mother remembered standing in the doorway of the hotel room. There was only one room, only one bed. Paul slept naked.
“Papa, I don’t want to share a bed with you,” she’d said. He’d asked why.
“I don’t know,” she’d said. “It just makes me very uncomfortable.”
“But it doesn’t bother me at all!” he’d said magnanimously, as if he were excusing her for something.
My mother laughed. It was on that same vacation that the two of them had been seen together by a friend of Josée’s. The friend later reported to Josée that she’d seen Paul with a very young girlfriend.
“Oh, no,” Josée had corrected her. “He was with Françoise. That’s his daughter.”
“No,” the friend had insisted. “The way they were together, the two of them, the way he touched her . . . I don’t believe that that was his daughter.”
It was this last that Josée had told my mother in the Jacuzzi, this that had led her to ask about the indiscreet gestures.
I said, “But it wasn’t? . . . it wasn’t . . . the way he was with you . . . it wasn’t disturbing to you?”
No, my mother told me. What disturbed her were his very young girlfriends. That, she said, made her very uncomfortable.
“Was that all that made Josée suspicious?” I asked. “That her friend had mistaken you for your father’s girlfriend?”
No, she said. Around the same period, in her early twenties, my mother told me, she had spent some time assisting her father at the hospital. His secretary had later reported to Josée that the two kissed on the lips in the break room.
“Was that true?” I asked.
“I don’t remember it,” my mother said. “We might have kissed on the lips, but it wasn’t in a way that should have made anyone uncomfortable.” What she remembered of that time, she said, was fainting over and over at the sight of blood and her father forcing her to keep trying. She resented that.
We’d finished our drinks. She suggested another round. I suggested that we go home, drink wine, and continue the conversation privately.
At the apartment, my mother lay down on the couch with her feet on my lap. She closed her eyes, wineglass aloft.
“We don’t have to keep talking,” I said softly.
“No, no,” she said. “I’m just resting my eyes. I’m not going to fall asleep. What were we talking about?”
“Les gestes indiscrets,” I said.
“Right. Well yes, then Josée said that when I was living in my father’s apartment, I’d slept with him in his bed. I told her no, I slept in Andrée’s room
. But she insisted, she said, the suicide, she said, I found you naked in his bed.” My mother sighed and propped herself up to drink.
That was only for the suicide attempt, my mother told me now. And it was true, she acknowledged, that perhaps there had been something strange about this, about how she had lain down on her father’s side of the bed that morning. But she didn’t want to die in Andrée’s bed, where she had often been miserable.
“And you think it was only that?” I asked in a small voice.
“Well of course Freud would tell you otherwise,” my mother said.
She was silent a moment. Her lips twitched. She looked scared. She put her fingers to her mouth and pulled out a shard of glass. She looked at it, glistening between her fingers, and stood up to throw it away. She rinsed out her glass and poured herself more wine.
“You want the same bottle?” I asked. I let myself hope that the shard had somehow come from the bottle; that it hadn’t been, from the start, in the wineglass I had handed her.
“No point opening a new one,” she said. “But you shouldn’t buy this brand anymore.”
She sat back down by me on the couch, her arm over my shoulder as I leaned against her chest.
“No, clearly there was something . . . something strange,” she continued. “But I remember what was in my head at the time. It had nothing to do with my father. I got very close to throwing myself off the balcony. I was just too scared.” She turned to me with an apologetic grimace, as if embarrassed by this cowardice.
“Of course,” I said reassuringly. “But—the decision to be in your underwear . . . ?”
“My last moments were precious to me. I thought, Well, merde, this act is for myself. I might as well be as comfortable as possible.”
“So you took off your clothes?” I asked.
“I slept in my father’s bed when he wasn’t there. And I slept in my underwear. And my . . . I didn’t really have pajamas. I did when he was there, and not when he wasn’t. And it was . . . it was May, and the windows looked out over the Seine.”
“Okay,” I said, “okay.” We lapsed into silence. At last I said, “But so, Josée, she found you like this, and so she thought . . . ?”
When my mother spoke next, she mimicked Josée’s accusing tone. “‘Because you were always his favorite,’ she said. ‘Because he loved you so much and you were always his favorite.’”
“Oof,” I said. “She has a way with words.”
My mother laughed.
I said, “Do you think that Josée ever thought, Oh god, I need to protect my daughter from this?”
“It didn’t even occur to her,” my mother said immediately. “No.”
I sighed.
“Then why? Why did she wait to talk to you about this? Why did she bring it up now?” I asked.
“She’s brought it up a few times, recently, on the phone,” my mother said.
“A few times? Recently?” I asked. “Because you’ve gotten closer?” But their closeness wasn’t recent. They’d been speaking on the phone every Sunday for years now. What was recent was my presence in France.
“No,” my mother said. “I think she’d like to bury, somewhere in this story that she’s creating . . . ‘In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, what a great thing I did by divorcing that old pervert. Oh how I suffered.’ If my father raped me, then no one can accuse her of being a bad mother.”
I exhaled sharply, in shock.
“And then, of course, I mentioned you,” my mother continued, and I sat up, pulling myself away. “I said, ‘Paul did act very inappropriately with Nadja.’ And Josée said, ‘Oh, but he just groped her a bit, he was a plastic surgeon, that’s just how he was with women.’ Can you believe it? She just dismissed it like that . . .” My mother snapped her fingers, incredulous. I let a beat of silence pass before I spoke.
“Maybe,” I said lightly, “it’s just par for the course in France? Maybe there’s a trope of the dirty old grandfather here and they consider it normal.”
This launched my mother into another story, and though I was still reeling, here it came.
“Maybe!” my mother said. “Who knows how they are in France! Because of course there was that whole thing with you and Vinchon . . .”
“Who’s Vinchon?” I asked.
“Your father didn’t talk to you about this?” she said, surprised. “Well then, maybe I shouldn’t either. Vinchon was an acquaintance of ours, whom you met in the South of France one summer . . .”
“You had many strange friends,” I said, “who often acted inappropriately with me.” I tried to check the note of accusation that crept into my tone.
But my mother said simply, “It’s true. You were never particularly well protected by your father, or your mother either, for that matter . . .” The admission was unexpected and gave me pause. I felt myself begin to relax, albeit uneasily.
After meeting our family, Vinchon had sent my father an email. My mother forgot the exact wording, but the email said how nice it had been to meet my father, and wasn’t his daughter sexy and wouldn’t it be great to fuck her. It was something along those lines, rather explicit. It was a French joke, perhaps, but a strange one.
“I can’t believe Papa never talked to you about this,” my mother interrupted herself to say. I mmhmmed, but it seemed rather clear to me why he hadn’t.
My father had shown the email to my mother, amused and perplexed. My mother had been furious. “How dare Vinchon put you in the same group as himself!” she’d said to him. “Because what are you supposed to respond? ‘Yeah, I’d like to fuck her, too’?” But my father didn’t react, my mother told me. He didn’t threaten to break the man’s jaw, like he had with my grandfather. He just never wrote back.
Later, my mother had talked about the email with one of her closest friends, an Italian woman who lived in France. “But it’s just a joke,” the friend had assured her in her heavy accent. “It’s just male bonding. You know how they are in France!”
“No, tell me how they are in France!” my mother had said, this being the punch line to her story. She laughed. I forced myself to join in.
“Your father didn’t even defend you,” she repeated. “He never even had a discussion about it with you!”
—
“THAT’S HOW A REAL MAN shucks oysters,” my grandmother said to me over her shoulder. “I bet your father doesn’t know how to do that.”
Thierry tossed the empty half shells out the porthole above her sink. He was a handsome man who lived a few houseboats over. Josée used a mixture of her charms and lavish lunches to entice him into fixing her television or setting up her new smartphone. She leaned over him as he worked, sucking the scraps of flesh still stuck to the shells and playfully scolding him for letting them go to waste. The day before, Josée had called me to verify that I liked oysters. I was touched—she’d never asked me what I liked to eat before. Now, when she told me to set the table, I tried to find my way around the ancient Japanese cabinet that housed her plates, not asking where anything was, trying to preserve our new intimacy.
“Oh no!” she said, when she looked over at the table. “Oh la la, we need oyster forks, Nadja, not regular forks. And steak knives for later, not regular knives! And we use small plates for the appetizer, and the big plates for the main courses. Americans! Did your mother never teach you any of this?”
Over lunch, the etiquette lessons flowed into a lecture on which seasons to drink which wines. Such lectures had seemed hopelessly irrelevant to me as a teenager, back when I would happily drink any wine available. But now I felt I’d found precious arcane knowledge with which to amuse my American friends at dinner parties. “One must only drink Pinot Noir between February and June,” I would tell them, and we would marvel at the old rules of the Old World.
A plate of six oysters was placed before me. After the third, my stomach
locked tight as a fist. I wanted to finish them all—I always finished what was on my plate, more from pathology than politeness—and I had, some time ago, convinced myself to like oysters. But my body was actively refusing now. I fought my way through a fourth, then distributed the remaining two to Thierry and Josée.
Lunch poured its way through a full bottle of wine and the beginning of another. My grandmother served a beef stew. Thierry told me about his psychic connection with animals. My grandmother served cheese. As the meal wound down, I tried to clear our plates. “But really, they’re barbaric these Americans,” Josée exclaimed. “Don’t you know it’s rude to clean while the guest is still here?” I sat back down, blushing.
When Thierry left, I tried again, but my grandmother insisted we both go lie down. A nap in the late afternoon! It was a luxury I wouldn’t have dared suggest to my mother.
The rental unit in the front of the boat was currently vacant, and I occasionally spent long weekends at Josée’s, sleeping there. I slid shut the Japanese paper doors and lay on the mattress on the floor. Light streamed in through the round windows and I could hear the splash of oars as rowers passed. The book I was reading was very boring and I had it open on my chest as I drifted off.
I felt a pang of nausea. I knew my grandmother’s boat was too big to rock, and the Seine too calm to rock it, but I was thinking of a memory. I was very young, on a small boat on the ocean, wearing a big straw sun hat. I had been sick. I had been carried down into the captain’s cabin belowdecks to lie down. That was all I remembered. But just a few days before, my mother had mentioned a trip my grandfather had taken us on. She’d been telling me how he tried to buy affection, how it always ended badly. He’d chartered a small motorboat to take us out over the Mediterranean. I’d thrown up and he’d been furious at me and my mother, his gift unappreciated. She’d taken me belowdecks, away from his anger. I asked how old I’d been. Three, said my mother, and it felt reassuring, solid, to be able to point to the exact place in time where my first memory lay.
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