Without consulting me, Jenna had scheduled her arrival in Paris after mine, stranding me in a city where I knew no one. The woman I was meeting, my temporary chaperone, was a friend of a friend of a friend. I had only a name, but still I strained to look for her, which was stupid because I had no idea what she looked like.
Then I saw her: birdlike in her smallness, not chic like the Sirens I had seen just beyond the gate, but quirkier, with lank brown hair falling over an aubergine linen vest paired with a cream-colored, knee-length skirt and black leather high heels worn without stockings. In her hand was a sign with my name on it, written in the flowery French hand, the first letter drawn out so that it resembled a curving line of poetry.
I walked up to her and with a small cough said I believed I was the person she was looking for.
“Enchantée,” she responded and held out a fragile arm. “Je suis Yolande Thiolat.”
She didn’t so much speak the words as sing them. The first part was low register, the second part high and melodic, like the ringing of bells. She smiled and with her thin hand shook mine. In an instant she made me feel not a burden but a guest.
She escorted me to her car, a minuscule egglike structure just perfect for a birdwoman like her. It was bent and scratched beyond the ken of a North American like me used to large buffed cars, and it was littered with old newspapers and magazines, for which she didn’t apologize. When she turned the key in the ignition, the radio wailed an exotic tune. She lit a cigarette and asked if I’d like one. “Non, merci,” I said, as I craned my neck left and right so as not to miss a single detail on the A3 expressway to Paris.
Yolande, I could see, was as shy as I was. She didn’t know any English, so I was forced to push through my self-consciousness to communicate with her. My first name she found impossible to pronounce. Deer-a-la? Drew-dree? I told her to call me DiDi instead, if that would help. “Bon!” She looked relieved. She asked me about the woman who had brought us together, someone I didn’t know at all, an acquaintance of Jenna’s back in Toronto. But to spare her the complicated rehashing of how I ended up, a stranger, in her car, I just said, “Elle est ça va, er, très bien. J’espère.” She was fine, I hoped.
Then suddenly, there it was: the Eiffel Tower. It didn’t need translating. I had seen this image—a skirted triangle crisscrossed with steel, a towering interjection, Paris stretched between heaven and earth—a million times before in pictures, on television, in travel books. But to be confronted with the real thing? I couldn’t believe it! Yolande felt my enthusiasm and smiled generously as she emphatically pronounced the obvious, “Ah, oui! La Tour Eiffel!”
She lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, a cozy nest of a place, in the 19th Arrondissement. The neighborhood on the northern outreach of Paris had the feel of a village.
Her building had at its doorstep a small café, a grocery store, a boulangerie, and a mechanics shop on the corner. There, men in blue overalls aired themselves out with talk and cigarettes and coffee drunk out of dainty white demitasse cups that shone against their blackened hands. Everyone greeted each other with a solemn bonjour and a nod of the head. These Old World manners had a certain archaic quality that immediately charmed me and made me feel I had broken through the looking glass. I was now dreamily on the other side, in a world made exotic by all these little differences between home and here.
Yolande had unrolled a mattress for me on the floor. I would sleep in her living room, which was about as big as a baby’s carriage. The telephone was next to my head. French doors closed off the room from the hallway leading to her room. The closetlike toilet and a kitchen barely accommodating a round table lay just beyond my feet. Paris might sit big in the imagination, but in reality it is small, a city in which space is at a premium. I was taking it all in, my mind swimming in new thoughts and sensations.
Yolande asked if I was tired. I was. It was barely noon, but I was ready for bed. She left me alone, and I thought of my mother. In spite of everything, I loved her. Her face was before me as I blinked my eyes and fell asleep.
I DIDN’T WAKE up until almost twenty-four hours later. Rising the next day—my first Parisian morning!—I was greeted by Yolande, who had prepared a steaming bowl of café au lait for me, along with a wedge of leftover baguette that she had grilled in her oven and that she served with dollops of raspberry jam and butter. It was delicious. I reminded myself to wake like this every day, from now until death, amen.
I felt tongue-tied, but I had to speak; she was being so kind to me. I asked her about her work. She said she worked with a charitable organization, giving aid to people in Africa. She travelled sometimes, she said, rubbing her belly, which is how she met the father of her unborn child, an American whom she was supposed to marry in time for the baby’s birth. I was taken aback. I hadn’t realized.
They had met in some far-flung airport, both of them waiting for connecting flights: she to Paris, he to California, where he was from, and where she was expecting to move in a few months’ time. She needed a visa first. He was going to call her today; would I help her, as her English was terrible?
I was overwhelmed by her story. I imagined her, fragile yet quirkily sexy, standing aloof in an airport lounge. I saw the locking of eyes with a complete stranger, the eruption of passion, the desire growing despite the distances. Wow. How French. She was not my guardian anymore. She was canvassing to be a friend. She took me by the arm and walked me around the quarter, talking all the time of “amour.” She said we should take coffee, and I followed her through the doors of the neighborhood café.
Our café had a pinball machine in the corner, which irked me because it played the theme song from Rocky and I wanted to hear Édith Piaf. The coffee, however, lived up to my expectations. Black with a chocolate-brown foam on top, the aroma of old trees after a rain, the taste of a dark kiss of caramel—seductively addictive.
On the stroll back to her apartment I took in the lace curtains sashed like dresses, wooden shutters on every window, red geraniums in terra-cotta pots languishing in the sun, handbags worn crossed over the shoulder to rest on the opposite hip. I felt very happy.
Yolande’s American lover called a few days later. I knew it was him when I heard Yolande gush into the phone, “Ah, mon amour!” I felt a certain thrill when I heard those words. It was like watching a French movie, but without subtitles. I was living a French love story vicariously. Yolande never stopped moaning and sounding kisses for her lover. The experience felt like a fur coat in July: very heavy, very hot, not a little suffocating. Suddenly Yolande grabbed me by the arm to take the receiver. She needed a translator. She really couldn’t understand a word. And she was having his baby.
“I can’t stop thinking of you,” he said. His name was Dennis. I wanted to interrupt him, to let him know that I was on the line, but he kept going.
“Je rêve de toi—des rêves très sexy, bien sûr.” He spoke terrible French.
“J’aime ton corps, tes yeux. Est-ce que tu rêves de moi?”
I tried giving the phone back to Yolande, but she pushed it back on me. I pushed it toward her again, and there we were, having a tug-of-war in her small apartment while her long-distance lover droned on.
She was mouthing for me to say something, and so I said, in a high-pitched voice that I thought sounded like Yolande’s, “Oui, je rêve de toi aussi.” Yes, I also dream of you.
There was silence on the other end.
“Yolande? Yolande?”
I panicked. I broke into English and said that Yolande was here and that I was her friend and that she loved him and that she was glad to be having his baby. “Allô? Allô?”
He thought that the transatlantic line had broken up and that he was now listening in on someone else’s conversation. “Yolande, c’est une mauvaise ligne,” he said.
I told Yolande to say good-bye. She erupted into an aria of au revoirs and sent him countless air kisses that sounded like the broken chirps of a hungry bird. And then she hung up on
him as he was still talking. We both sat on her living room floor looking at each other and at the phone, now silent, lifeless. She bit her lower lip, trying not to cry. She asked me if I wanted some tea. I nodded my head and got up to help. We moved without talking, bumping into each other in the confined space, both of us electrified by this long-distance love affair. I wondered if the baby was kicking yet.
A FEW DAYS later Yolande took me to Boulevard Saint-Germain, where Left Bank intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were then still living and working. We sat at one of their hangouts, Les Deux Magots, to watch the passersby. I knew of Les Deux Magots. It had also been the stomping ground of the American expats between the wars. Yolande reeled off their names: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound. She had brought me there on purpose because she knew I would enjoy soaking up the ambience. We ordered white wine. She watered hers down with a Perrier. “À cause du bébé.” I drank to that.
Inside the café many people sat alone nursing their café crèmes and quietly scowling at the day’s newspaper headlines. Others hunched together in pairs or in groups of three or more—laughing and talking, exchanging ideas and sharing intimacies—people doing exactly as I had imagined people do in Paris, living life in the open, with passion and intensity. The chatter filled my ears as if it were a glorious symphony. A spoon clattered against the terrazzo floor. An old waiter tutted under his breath as he stopped to pick it up. A young couple was necking hungrily in a booth, their ardor reflected in the large wall mirrors that made the café perfect for people-watching. I took it all in, this throbbing spectacle of Parisian life. I understood why books had been conceived here, why the expats had made this their social club. Every character, every plot line was here. All you had to do was sit and look and engage.
A male friend of Yolande’s waved to her as he walked past. It was a chance encounter, and Yolande, offering a chair for him to join us, introduced me as “une amie.” That felt nice. I wasn’t used to being called a friend. In Toronto I had been more of a loner, forced by necessity, by an inner imperative to succeed, not to bog myself down in intimate relationships. But in Paris I saw how enriching close, spontaneous encounters could be. And so we got talking, discussing the recent election of Margaret Thatcher, the right to strike, and the Americanization of French culture. I didn’t notice at first how much I was talking and, to my astonishment, talking rapidly, in French, until we started walking, the three of us, him close to me, brushing against my arm—flirting? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I liked the sensation, liked the effect these days in Paris were already having on me, making me feel confident, more alive than before. Proudly feminine. I was laughing and, incredible to me, they were laughing with me, at something amusing I had just said, and in a foreign language no less. A new me was being born, kicking free of her shell.
THAT FEELING OF spontaneous joy was short-lived. Jenna and Nigel and their children arrived two days later, and as I bade farewell to Yolande, who kissed me on both cheeks, I said good-bye to my burgeoning independence. I knew it the second I walked into their rooms, located in a rather dowdy hotel near the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette metro station, but within walking distance of the grand Boulevard Haussmann and its art nouveau department stores, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette. I had been buoyant, uplifted by un bel esprit. They were tired, cranky, not disposed to talking. Jenna said, “Nigel and I need to rest. You stay with the children.” Then, “Here,” as she threw me a towel. “Wash Edward. He’s soiled himself.” She went into a room across the hall and shut the door. I was disappointed at hearing English again—and English telling me to clean a little boy’s bottom. I hoped it would get better. I was back at the beck and call of a mom. I didn’t know if the children had eaten. I tapped lightly on her door.
“Yes?”
Entering the dimly lit room, I saw Jenna curled up like a cat in a chair. She had been reading a book and was wearing a white nightgown that fell over her scrawny frame, accentuating its bony thrusts and edges. With her large saucerlike eyes she looked at me expectantly.
“Yes?” she repeated.
I asked about dinner and she batted her thick black lashes. She had forgotten completely about it.
“Do be a darling,” she said in that plummy English accent, more Oxonian than East London, where she had grown up as an Eastern European immigrant after the war, an upper-crust inflection acquired when her scientist husband had had a year-long sabbatical in Oxford around the time their first child had been born. “Go to the corner and buy us some salads.”
Out in the Parisian streets in search of a charcuterie, I realized that Jenna had failed to give me any money. I worried that I might not have enough. But it was too late to go back now, empty-handed. I imagined her purr turning to a hiss, underscoring my incompetence. I thought it better to just get her fed, and so spent my last change on shaved carrots with mayonnaise, celery hearts with olives. When I returned, she had the kids gorging on crackers and chocolate bars shored up in her purse. She called that kind of eating “grazing” and thought it very anti-bourgeois, as she liked to tell me. She prided herself as a beautiful rebel. I stood with my beautifully wrapped takeout and gaped. I had been in Paris long enough to have forgotten how complicated and inscrutable she was.
I had met Jenna when I was fifteen, the night of her thirtieth birthday. Nigel, her sister, and her brother-in-law were waiting in the living room to take her to dinner. I had been hired to babysit Christopher, then six, and Edward, not yet one. Jenna had kept everyone waiting. Then she descended the staircase in flowing black velvet pants and a white silk blouse, tasteful and elegant. She relished the admiration of the audience gazing up at her from the bottom step. I soon learned that she always needed to be the center of attention. I certainly didn’t deny her that; I thought she was wonderful, a woman of real sophistication. I had lived with her the first time I wanted to be away from my mother. My mother resented her for it and told me that Jenna was taking advantage of me, exploiting me as her domestic help—free housecleaning, free babysitting. But I didn’t mind. I was Eliza Doolittle to her Henry Higgins.
“I’ve never had a daughter, and you can be her,” she had said.
After that night, Jenna embarked on a mission to bring me up to her standard. A female Svengali, she brought me books that I had never heard of but that she was sure would help me become sophisticated. “You must introduce yourself to Justine,” she would say, for instance. She meant the main female character in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet.
“After reading about her you will understand that if I had a daughter, I would name her Justine. In fact, you remind me of her, my darling DiDi.” I strained to see myself in that dusky woman’s quest for sexual liberation. The notion was quite stirring, since I was then just a pimply-faced adolescent.
Jenna’s first line of business was to turn me into an aesthete. She told me my model would be Oscar Wilde and gave me his book of epigrams. I had never read anything like it. I had never before known intelligence to be so playful. Jenna pressed me to enjoy nuance and elliptical wit. Perhaps to please her, I became a Wilde devotee. I studied everything he wrote and read his biographies. I gave a presentation at my high school, addressing the class with a green carnation tucked into a red, vintage-store sweater. When I told my classmates the only thing separating me from art was a buttonhole—I was paraphrasing Wilde himself—they sat at their desks with their jaws open. One girl even cried. My highly flamboyant teacher rose in his chair, staring. He gave me the highest grade in the class.
In true Wildean fashion I became anticonformist. I wore men’s ties to school. I bought vintage before it was cool—fluttery white camisoles, which I wore with a Laura Ashley skirt (bought on sale). I toyed with smoking after Jenna introduced me to colored cocktail cigarettes. I took them to Susan’s house, and in her family’s basement we took turns puffing on Turkish tobacco wrapped in paper-stained chartreuse and fuchsia, peacock and saffron. They had gold tips. God, we were swank.
She and Nigel went on dates to listen to chamber ensembles. I used to think that was boring. Nigel said, “You only say that because you don’t know.” He was right. My musical taste until then included just about everything but classical music. I listened to Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Genesis, the Beatles (in grade 7 I had changed my middle name from Lynne to Lennon), Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, Supertramp, Queen, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Rick Derringer, and Bruce Springsteen. I embraced anything with a rebel yell.
Part of my rehabilitation at the book-lined Toronto home of Jenna and her behind-the-scenes husband was a steady exposure to classical music, in particular Dvorák’s New World Symphony. Its lush orchestration resonated within me, inducing me, indeed, to enter a new world of aural stimulation. I was obviously an eager convert: within a few months I hawked my copy of Ziggy Stardust to younger students in our high school library. I dove into Stravinsky next. Jenna urged me to comment on what I heard.
If what I said sounded facile to her, she would say, “Oh, don’t be so stupid. Think before you talk!” I accepted all her put-downs because I thought I needed to be pushed beyond the borders of my intellectually limited upbringing. I wanted sophistication and believed that she would give it to me.
I believed this even more strongly in Paris. Our ultimate destination in the city was a sprawling apartment on the Left Bank situated at number 26 Rue de l’Université, a stone’s throw from the Louvre. I didn’t realize it then, but it was a posh address, the domicile of aristocrats with no money. They went away for the summer, as all good Parisians do, but instead of leaving their place empty, they rented it out in order to afford their lifestyle in the south of France. It came furnished in a frumpy ancien régime style—sea-foam love seats with curlicue arms, ebony side tables with lion’s feet, a marble fireplace strewn with ash and desiccated orange peels. But the one accessory none of us had expected was Luc, the family’s heir, a skinny, earringed, blue-jeaned, hypercoifed would-be Baudelaire who for the first week or so could barely allow himself a terse bonjour when he strode, seminaked, into the kitchen to grill himself some toast.
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