A long, torpid summer followed that semester. Sophie went away to coach volleyball at the resort where she always spent her summers, and I stayed home working at the same drive-through Starbucks where I’d been three summers running. I was long past caring if the men who came by in their pickups looked down my shirt when I handed them their change, especially if it meant a bigger tip.
Sophie called me often, as though she had already decided we were best friends. It seemed as if she were watching every movie ever set in France, reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Anaïs Nin—in other words, giving herself over completely to the fantasy of what our trip would be like. I, on the other hand, was somehow too afraid to do this. I was worried about being disappointed, I was afraid to hope too hard.
Sophie even came for dinner one night, after my mother had invited her spontaneously when she’d called and I’d been in the shower. I didn’t say anything for fear of hurting my mother’s feelings, but I was ashamed for Sophie to come out to Chino. But if she’d found it vile, she hadn’t shown it, as she charmed my mother, complimenting everything from her cooking to her skin to her taste in dishware.
My mother was deliriously excited for me, though it was a bittersweet happiness, as I could plainly see her longing to be in my place. Well, not in my place precisely, but to have once been in my place. At least once a week she would mutter apropos of nothing, “I always wanted to go to France . . . ” and then trail off dreamily, with the eyes of someone watching a ship they wished to be on recede into the distance. She had taken French lessons long ago with a friend of hers at the local community center, and she seized upon this opportunity to make up decks of flash cards to quiz my vocabulary. My mother and I switched off cooking dinner each night, and as soon as the trip was planned, she dug out her old but completely untouched volume of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the idea that we would make dinner from it every night, but after a few days of the strenuous recipes we retreated back to our old basics of meatballs and marinara and store-bought roast chicken. During these long evenings together I often wondered what might have happened if my mother had found out about Regan, and it hit me how much I’d had at stake, that it would have killed me to see her as disappointed as I knew she would be.
“Are you going to be okay without me for a whole year?” I asked her cautiously one night while I was standing at the sink rinsing our dinner dishes.
“Of course I will. I did manage to survive before you were born, you know.” She poked me lightly in the ribs as she went by.
“I just don’t want you to get too lonely.”
“That’s sweet, honey, but I’ll manage. I hope you don’t get too lonely over there. You know the French can be a bit prickly.”
“I’ll be fine.” Finishing the dishes, I wiped my hand on a towel. “Besides, there will be other Americans there. Sophie is going.”
“I like Sophie. She will be good for you.”
“Yeah, she’s great.” I rinsed the last remnants of food into the drain and paused to let our ancient disposal do its worst. “Wait, what does that mean exactly? That she’ll be good for me?” I poured myself tap water and followed my mother out to the porch, where she liked to sit and drink a glass of chardonnay on warm evenings.
“She just seems very friendly is all. Very . . . healthy.”
“And I’m not?”
“You withdraw sometimes.” My mom looked at her fingernails in apparent consternation. “I just worry. It’s not a criticism,” she continued when I was silent in response, “it’s probably my fault.”
“No, Mom”—I curled my legs underneath me and stared out into the street that was still half-lit with waning sunlight—“it’s not your fault.”
I left on a Saturday and arrived in Paris after the twelve-hour flight disoriented and disheveled, my every nerve ending frayed from excitement and stress. I wished that Sophie had been able to make the trip with me, but she was meeting some girls from the volleyball team who were also studying abroad for a week in Greece before the school year started. I knew from class that her French was better than mine, and she tended to walk decisively, she wouldn’t dither from one terminal to the next looking like a dazed newborn animal the way I did.
From De Gaulle I took a train to Gare Montparnasse, where I was to board a train bound directly for Nantes. Dazzled and terrified, I arrived at the train station, my eyes still dry from the stale, recycled plane air and blinking at the massive departure board, which looked delicate and antique compared to the one at LAX. One of the wheels on my large, cumbersome rolling suitcase broke, and I was forced to drag, instead of roll, it through the crowded tunnels. I was reminded of my inferior language skills upon being nearly robbed when I took several moments too long to understand that a man next to me was telling me that the two teenagers behind me had their hands in my backpack. Sophie would have fended them off, I thought, and she would have done so using the subjonctif, and everyone whom she’d have asked for directions would have understood and obliged. A small twinge of jealousy was followed by a wave of relief that she would be with me soon and that we were going to be in France together.
I was not completely shy, but people could exhaust me quickly, and sometimes I got so caught up in observing that I forgot to actually interact. I was comfortable with this. I felt it gave me a secret sort of upper hand to absorb the details of people’s lives without having to offer any of my own.
Shaking with exhaustion, I emerged aboveground from the station in Nantes. I could feel tears swelling under my lids and thought if even one more person looked at me with that mix of sympathy and disgust that I had seen on the faces of strangers all day, I would definitely cry. I was relieved by the complete indifference of the cabdriver who awaited me outside the station, the sole cab waiting at the stand. During the short drive, I tried to compose myself. Soon I would have to meet new people, many new people, some who spoke no English. I felt as though I would lapse into a coma if I lay down that moment, and I tentatively leaned my head back on the seat and closed my eyes for a blissful second, only to be jolted back into the present as we hit a pothole hard while careening down a narrow alley.
“C’est par là,” the taxi driver said, pulling up beside a narrow drive that ran between two buildings. The streets had a surreal, anonymous feel to them, like a movie set, and street signs were plastered obscurely to the sides of buildings. No entrance was visible nor any sign indicating the school was here.
“Ici?” I asked incredulously. My voice sounded weak, as though I were talking to the driver through a drainpipe.
“Oui, oui. Six rue de Cadiniers.” He gestured to a small plaque affixed to the side of the brick building as he got out of the cab to help with my bag. I scrambled out onto the sidewalk and handed him the fare I was clutching tightly in my sweaty palm.
“Merci.” He flipped through the bills, never quite making actual eye contact. He grunted as he settled back into the driver’s seat, then he was gone and I found myself alone on the empty street. I looked at the sign more closely, getting increasingly nervous. What would I do if I discovered I had been abandoned on the wrong street? I had no cell phone. I would have to walk along the street until I found somewhere with people and a phone, dragging my gigantic suitcase along with me.
I stood on the sidewalk next to my massive case that had been brand-new when I left but already looked beat-up after the long journey. My mother and I had found the navy-blue canvas suitcase with cream piping on sale at Marshalls, and we’d both thought it looked pretty chic. I dragged it behind me toward the foyer of the ground floor. Peering into the breezeway that led to the entrance, I finally spotted a small handwritten sign that read L’INSTITUT FRANCO-AMÉRICAIN TROISIÈME ÉTAGE and felt a great flood of relief, as if I’d just stepped out of the way of an oncoming bus.
“Oh, thank God,” I said aloud, and my voice seemed to echo throughout the street. Pulling back the screen of the ancient elevator, a new problem presented itself. The
elevator was tiny, not at all equipped for a vulgar American with her supersize suitcase. Either I was going up to the third floor or my luggage was, but not both, not simultaneously. I heard the slamming of a car door behind me in the street and turned around to the welcome sight of a face, obscured by blond hair, leaning down to a driver, that I recognized in an instant.
“Sophie!”
Her head snapped up and her hair fell away. She smiled and pulled her sunglasses off, despite the bright glare in the alley.
“Brooke!” Leaning back down to the open window of the cab, she quickly addressed the driver and handed over money.
She had a monogrammed carryall with telltale brown and tan Louis Vuitton squares slung around her shoulder and a matching suitcase that had already been deposited on the street—both bags looked broken in and well loved. She left her luggage on the sidewalk to run over and throw her arms around me.
We hugged each other, jumping up and down.
“Let me get that.” I relieved her of the carryall.
“Thanks! My cabdriver was so nice. He says he has a daughter our age in California. She even plays volleyball. Can you believe that?”
That the cabdriver had a daughter who was Sophie’s doppelgänger or that Sophie had befriended one of the first people she’d encountered on French soil? I wondered. “Amazing,” I said in answer to both.
It was a warm day and I was sweating from the exertion of hauling luggage. Glad for the coolness of the shaded stone foyer, I got a better look at Sophie as my eyes relaxed from the sun. “Quite a tan you’ve got there,” I said, noting with envy how brown her skin was, how blond her hair. People exposed themselves to all manner of chemicals to get this look, only to come out looking like rejects from a bodybuilding competition. Yet on Sophie it was both perfectly natural and naturally perfect.
“I worked very hard on it this summer,” she said, white teeth gleaming. “It won’t help me fit in here, though.”
“You can just pretend you spent your summer on the Côte d’Azur. No one has to know it’s an American tan.”
“And Grecian.” She checked out the elevator situation.
“You go up first and then I’ll send the bags. I don’t see how else we can get them up to the third floor.”
“Genius,” she said, stepping into the elevator, “thank God we both arrived at the same time!”
She pulled the screen closed and let out a surprised little laugh as the elevator began to lurch and groan around her.
After we finished our luggage procession, we found ourselves facing a grand doorway from behind which the faint murmur of voices could be heard. I noticed a tiny doorbell in the frame and buzzed it. After a shuffling from within, the door slowly opened with such a creak that one would have thought it had been sealed for a century. An older woman about five feet tall appeared in the threshold, her wide eyes bearing a wary and somewhat accusatory look as they darted back and forth over Sophie and me.
“Bonjour,” she said hurriedly, then mumbled something in the direction of the floor as she turned back toward the foyer, from which I gleaned that we were meant to follow her. So the two of us dragged our luggage awkwardly behind us into a foyer with a worn wooden floor and an elaborate but threadbare rug. An enormous mirror with a gilt gold frame took up the wall that faced the door. I was greeted and momentarily startled by my bedraggled reflection, my hair pulled back in a sloppy knot with errant curls sticking out all over my head, the little eye makeup that I had applied before the journey pooled in the corners of my eyes and my face flushed. I wanted desperately to shower before meeting anyone new. The tiny woman said something and gestured to a smaller room off to the side where luggage and coats were piled high, before disappearing down a hallway.
“It’s smaller than I would have thought,” Sophie remarked as we picked our way through the luggage and jostled our bags into place. Most of us would be studying primarily at the institute itself, with some of the more advanced students taking classes at the university with our French peers. I tried to discern something about our fellow Americans from the suitcases, but the rolling bags obviously borrowed from parents and the backpacks with slogans and patches sewn onto them revealed little. Sophie looked at me. “How many of us are there again?”
“I don’t know.” I glanced out a nearby window onto the street, where a man walked briskly with a baguette underneath his arm, a small dog trotting along at his feet. “Thirty maybe?”
We stood there for another minute to collect ourselves before walking back into the main room.
“Bonjour, les filles,” a bright voice came from the other direction. A middle-aged woman burst forth from the hallway, her arms opened. This must be Madame Rochet, la directrice. She had on a tight white top that offered up a modest but astonishingly perky décolletage, and a fitted black pencil skirt finished off with a smart, wide belt and four-inch heels. Her extremely youthful figure nearly excused the age-inappropriateness of the outfit. She wore her graying blond hair in a perfectly coiffed bob that evoked a sexier Anna Wintour and had luminous eyes and a bright, crooked smile. Ah, I thought, a fresh bit of delight creeping through me, how very French. There is something intimidating about a beautiful older woman that a younger version could never match. She looked at Sophie and me with a broad grin, as though we were exactly whom she had been hoping to see.
“Bonjour,” Sophie and I offered quietly in unison.
At that moment the doorbell buzzed. Madame Rochet strode with admirable dexterity in her high, high heels to the door and opened it, issuing another warm welcome to a boy and a girl as they walked through the door with their luggage. The boy was tall with fair hair cut close to his scalp; he had broad shoulders and a wide, friendly face. He smiled at us as he glided by in long strides. His carriage, slightly prim expression, and somewhat showy gestures when he spoke to his companion were recognizable as those of someone who is newly inhabiting their sexuality, who has turned up the volume of a recently discovered self. The girl was shorter and a bit stocky; she had shoulder-length blond hair and an ordinary face that was not unattractive save for its beleaguered expression.
The four of us reconvened in the main salon and Madame Rochet came in with a list. “Alors, nous avons Brooke Thompson, Adam McNeil, Lindsay Adams et Sophie Martin, n’est-ce pas?” Madame Rochet spoke slowly with careful, deliberate enunciation. I marveled at the sound of my name from the mouth of a native French speaker, the b and the r nearly buried beneath the melodious double o and the definitive, emphatic k. I never wanted to hear it said any other way.
She explained to us in painfully slow French that our respective host families would be coming by in a few hours to pick us up. In the meantime, a number of cafés were right next to the institute if we would like to pass a little time there. After Madame Rochet left, Sophie introduced me to the new twosome and suggested that we go find coffee.
We settled for the small, dingy café across from the institute. I could tell Sophie wanted to venture farther and find something better but acquiesced when Lindsay started to sigh impatiently. Since it was so pleasant out, we sat at one of the sidewalk tables.
“You two know each other already?” Lindsay asked after the waiter took our orders.
“Yes,” I said.
“We’re good friends from school,” Sophie added. Mortifyingly, I felt myself blush to hear Sophie describe us as good friends.
“Oh, yes?” Adam asked in a light, utterly disarming drawl. “We’re boyfriend-girlfriend.”
A pronounced moment of silence descended on the table before Lindsay and Adam simultaneously burst out laughing. “I’m messing with you, les filles. Je suis gay.”
“Good thing,” Lindsay said as the waiter brought out coffees. “I wouldn’t date you anyway.”
Adam lit up a cigarette and took a deep drag. “Be nice, Lindsay, or I’ll tell all the boys in the program you have back hair.”
“All ten of them? I don’t have back hair, by the way.”
&nb
sp; “As opposed to how many girls?” I asked.
“Twenty? Twenty-five, I think?” Adam said. “Not good odds, ladies, and even less so for lonely little old me.”
“You’re not old,” I said, “and I’m sure you won’t end up lonely.”
“Past my prime already, twenty-two! Why, it was just yesterday I was a young fag and Lindsay here a young hag.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” Lindsay said, scrunching up her face.
“What are the chances, though,” Sophie said, sidestepping the awkward moment, after the rest of her cappuccino disappeared in her mouth, leaving only foam in her cup, “that no other guy here in a French program will be gay? I think you have luck on your side, mon chéri.”
“Thank you, lovely Sophie, but it doesn’t matter. Je cherche un homme français; il faut faire comme les Français—if you know what I mean.” His accent was not as perfect as Sophie’s, and the words came forth a bit laboriously, but he was competent and spoke with an enviable self-assurance. My fears were renewed that I would be the worst speaker here.
“You’d like to do as the French do? As in you’d like to do the French?” Sophie asked.
I laughed and Lindsay rolled her eyes.
“Why, yes,” he said, affecting his best Southern-belle imitation. “But really we all have to have French boyfriends. Our grandchildren will be so disappointed if we can’t tell them stories about the French boyfriends we had long before we met their grandfathers.”
“You’ve come with big plans,” I said.
“I’m here to work on my French,” Lindsay said with a sniff, “and, you know, actually learn something about the world.”
“Lindsay”—Adam rolled his eyes—“will you please stop acting like a surly virgin!”
“I’m not a—”
“I said acting. No one needs a little amour français more than you. Just saying.”
Losing the Light Page 4