Paris Adieu

by Rozsa Gaston

  Suspiciously, I eyed him. He had to be kidding. But the food for thought he’d given me stuck in my craw like half-swallowed chewing gum.

  One week later, strolling in the Tuileries gardens on a late March day, Jean-Michel alerted me to a woman who had just passed.

  “C’est une jolie laide. It’s a pretty-ugly one.”

  Huh?

  I turned to catch the back of the woman’s henna’d reddish purple hair and bony legs. He motioned to continue walking around the pond until we passed her again.

  This time, I pretended to look at some children playing behind the smallish woman as we approached. Her sharp, vixenish face had a pleased-with-herself expression on it. Its most prominent feature was a long nose with a definite bump. Her bony legs were nothing to write home about. No textbook from any country would have categorized her as a beauty.

  “She is beautiful, no?” Jean-Michel murmured to me, once out of earshot.

  “Um, she’s got something going on, for sure,” I replied truthfully, a little envious. What woman, with any sense of how crooked and short her legs were would dress them up in designer tights and stiletto boots? Yet, she’d looked undeniably hot. Apparently Jean-Michel thought so too.

  Instead of giving in to my preconceptions, I opened my mind to his. I had so much to learn from him, and besides, I was working on becoming comfortable in my own skin these days, wasn’t I? I could at least fake it till I make it, I told myself.

  “A jolie laide is a woman who is beautiful even though she is not. She has something that is considered ugly, but on her, it’s not. It’s part of her charm,” he explained.

  I was all ears. We circled the pond again, hoping the woman would do the same. She did. As she approached, I pretended to spot something on the ground while I studied the suede, stiletto-heeled black boots she wore over gray and black striped tights covering slim short, legs with knobby knees. The content wasn’t amazing, but the presentation certainly was. Brava, I silently complimented her as we walked by.

  What the heck could a pretty-ugly woman have that a just plain pretty woman didn’t have over her? Apparently, plenty. I searched my mind to think of a jolie laide I might have known somewhere in my past. I’d never contemplated the concept before, but as soon as Jean-Michel explained it to me, I understood. Something niggled at me, reminding me there’d been a woman like that in my own short past.

  In a minute, I had it. Voilà.

  Joelle. She had been a waitress I’d worked with back in Hartford, Connecticut, the summer before music college at a French restaurant called La Crêpe. It was a chain of restaurants that served crêpes in the style of Brittany, the region next to the Atlantic Coast of France, west of Paris, where Celts had settled in the fifth and sixth centuries – probably because the food was better there than back in the British Isles. The waitresses wore cute blue dirndl skirts with suspenders, white lace blouses, and enormous white Breton head-dresses. They’d looked sexy in a sweet sort of way. I’d applied for the job, because I knew in an outfit like that I’d meet guys.

  Joelle had been short, bony, and chic with a bump in her nose, just like the woman we’d passed in the park. The other waitresses were in awe of her. Her boyfriend picked her up every day after work. During her shift, she flirted with any male customer she found interesting, regardless of whether they were in female company or not. She had been in total command of herself. Not surprisingly, she was French.

  I’d soaked up every move she made, marveling to myself that she was not even mildly attractive, but her perception of herself announced to the world she was a knockout. The men appeared to buy it. To me, it didn’t matter if she was beautiful or not. She was powerful.

  Joelle had been a jolie laide.

  “I know what you mean,” I whispered back. “Like maybe a bump in a certain woman’s nose isn’t just a bump on her? It’s a beauty feature?”

  “Précisément,” Jean-Michel agreed. “It’s precisely the feature about her that a man falls in love with.”

  Whoa. Another reference point clicked in my brain. The year before – avoiding piano practice – I’d picked up a novel by a Japanese author in the literature section of the music college library. It had been a contemporary story about a husband and wife who lived in Osaka in the post-World War II years. At the time of the story, the early sixties, images of the West had invaded Japan. Many Japanese women emulated Western styles, wearing short skirts and high heels. Yet the wife in this story chose to wear kimonos instead of Western dress.

  The husband knew why. She was self-conscious about her thick, short calves, a section of the legs that tends to be shorter on Asians than other races. What the wife didn’t know is her husband secretly found her most hated point charming. He loved her short, well-developed calves but most of all, he loved her more for her self-consciousness regarding that part of her body.

  In the Japanese story, the husband is charmed by his wife’s modesty over her perceived flaw. A French modification of this uxoriousness would be that the husband is charmed by his wife’s utter chutzpah in playing up her weak points as assets. If the hair tended to frizz, why not display it in a mass of wild curls haloing the face? If the legs were short and crooked, why not dress them up in designer tights and high-heeled ankle boots? It was a way to say to the world, “Here I am, and if you don’t like this particular part of me, je m’en fou. I could care less. Let me just flap it in your face.”

  It was almost the outlook of a teenage boy. I laughed inside, thinking how freeing it might be for an adult woman to exercise her inner teenage boy on a regular basis.

  Frenchwomen were encouraged to be in command of themselves, comfortable in their skins, bien dans ses peau. I wanted to be like that too. But how could I, with my twenty pounds of puppy fat, frizzy hair, and less than knockout chest-size? The jolie laide’s physical attributes were even less appealing than mine. Yet apparently, she didn’t think so. And because she thought she was smoking hot so did everyone she came in contact with. I burned with jealousy.

  Straightening my posture next to Jean-Michel, I stuck out my apple breasts and tossed a thick lock of frizzy blonde hair over my shoulder. Then, I bunched it up with both hands to make it stick out even more on either side of my head. I would no longer be taken for an inconsequential American girl with no sense of herself. Those days were over.

  We exited the park and began to walk along the enormous traffic circle of the Place de la Concorde. At the next street crossing, a woman waiting next to me gave me a surreptitious once-over. Out of the corner of my eye, I searched for her expression.

  It was scornful, dismissive.

  Deflating like a balloon, I scolded myself for seeking approval from a complete stranger. If I’d been the jolie laide, I wouldn’t have given a fig what the woman thought of me.

  The light changed, but I didn’t. I had a lot of work ahead of me.

  Spring began to break through the long, gray gloom of winter, just as so many new insights were breaking through the hard shell of my low self-image. Cracks were appearing everywhere. Jean-Michel’s lectures, attention, and obvious predilections forced me to question my preconceived notions again and again. I was an Easter chick about to hatch.

  It was glorious to have my ideas of what was beautiful, what was not, what combinations went together, which ones did not, all blown away in the soft, fragrant air of a Paris spring. By the time I left France, I’d be transformed into a Picasso-like rearrangement of myself, only far more put together.

  Jean-Michel and I had gone to view the Picasso collection at the Jeu de Paume (literally “game of palms,” a seventeenth century court-game that was a precursor to tennis) museum in the Tuileries Gardens. I’d wondered at the artist’s depictions of some of his girlfriends, especially Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar. Parts of their bodies were rearranged in surrealistic ways, with sometimes peaceful and sometimes disturbing results. Had this been what having an affair with the short, fiery painter had done to them? Marie-Thér�
�se Walter looked more or less serene in most of his paintings, but Dora Maar’s images were anguished and angry. I took them in as I thought about what Jean-Michel’s effect on me would ultimately be.

  “What kind of man was Picasso? Was he nice to his wife?” I asked.

  “Wife? Which wife? He had wives, girlfriends, lovers all at the same time. You should read his biography by Françoise Gilot,” Jean-Michel advised as we strolled from room to room.

  “Who’s she?”

  “The only woman who left him. For another man,” he responded.

  “Really?” I liked her immediately. “Where’s her painting? Which one is she?”

  “He didn’t paint her; only a few sketches. He was too angry.”

  “Because she left him?”

  “For a younger man.” Jean-Michel looked at me wryly.

  “Did she leave him first or had he been fooling around while they were together?”After several minutes of explaining what fooling around meant, Jean-Michel laughed.

  “Of course, he was fooling around. He was Picasso. Women loved him. He loved them. It was natural, Minouche.”

  “But not for Françoise.” I liked it when he called me Minouche, meaning pussy cat or darling, but I didn’t like the fact that Picasso had fooled around on Françoise.

  My French boyfriend gave the classic Gallic shrug. The concept of fooling around while in a relationship was not foreign to the French male sensibility. However, it tended to irritate French females, just like any others. I was eager to know what kind of revenge Françoise had extracted on Picasso for straying.

  I put Gilot’s biography of the short, ugly, bald painter at the top of my list for my next visit to the library at Beaubourg.

  Jean-Michel didn’t seem the type to stray. He was too fond of order, too fastidious in his appearance – I’d noted how carefully he brushed and polished his shoes before setting off the day after a night I’d stayed over.

  Sneakers were not a part of his wardrobe. When I asked if he had any, he sniffed and explained les baskets, French for sneakers, are for le sport only. They are not meant to be worn in public on the street.

  I was in awe, thinking of how completely my grandmother would have agreed with him.

  Within weeks, my theory of Jean-Michel’s faithfulness was put to test. April had written to say she was coming for a visit mid-way through her namesake month. I would have a chance to meet her.

  Jean-Michel hadn’t mentioned where she was staying so I asked. He reassured me that she would stay with the family she had worked for two years earlier when she lived in Paris. By then, I’d read Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso, and I wondered if April’s visit would spell the beginning of the end for Jean-Michel and me.

  Picasso had been a master of bringing a new woman onto the scene as a way of letting the present woman know her days were numbered. This had driven most of his women crazy except for two. There was Françoise Gilot, who stayed calm then did the same thing to him. And then there was the remarkable Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had proven an exception to the rest of his relationships, remaining serene and unruffled through just about everything Picasso did or did not do to her, including never marrying her. She seemed one mellow female to me, beyond comprehension. I was a novice in the world of jealous passion, clueless as to what kind of rage a woman might feel to be sexually betrayed. All the books and women’s magazines said it was something not to be tolerated, so I knew I’d walk if it turned out April was about to re-enter Jean-Michel’s life.

  My relative calm over April’s arrival was based on a few factors, some to do with Jean-Michel, most to do with myself. Firstly, being pre-orgasmic, I had no idea what all the fuss was about sex. Relations were pleasantly sensual between us, but the oxytocin that might have bound me to him like crazy glue hadn’t yet been produced in my brain. I was still riding the clueless train, which wasn’t taking me to any particular destination other than on a pleasant journey I knew would end soon.

  By the time April left, I’d know which colleges I’d gotten into. I’d accept admission to one – my grandparents would be either delighted or not – and my summer plans would evolve quickly from that point on. I’d probably go back to the States around the same time the Griffiths did in mid-June. My escape plan from Jean-Michel was in place should the occasion warrant it.

  Despite my overall sangfroid in the face of April’s visit, my nerves began to fray the day before her flight was due. Would I know if Jean-Michel had slept with her after her arrival and before I was introduced? Would I meet her in his apartment or on the street? If in his apartment, would the place smell skanky with obvious clues of sexual activity all over the place: an unmade bed, bits of lingerie in the bathroom, and knowing smiles on their faces? Is this what Jean-Michel wanted to happen? If it was, I was prepared. I would take the Françoise Gilot approach, not the Marie-Thérèse Walter one.

  Above all, I wanted to look good for the meeting with April. In her photo, I’d seen she was pretty, but undoubtedly plump. I was pretty too, but not so plump. I was also younger. At age twenty, this was a decided disadvantage in meeting a rival female. I looked through my wardrobe for something to wear that would provide psychological armor. Deciding on a periwinkle knit top and peg-legged black jeans, I kicked my clogs scornfully into a corner. It was time to wear something on my feet that Frenchwomen wore. That meant pointy, spiky heels, the kind I could barely walk in. I didn’t have any.

  I went shoe shopping the next day, all the while wondering if Jean-Michel had gone to the airport to greet April and if she’d end up staying with him that night.

  It didn’t occur to me to lay down ground rules for this visit from his ex. I preferred to stay on the sidelines, watch the play unfold, then take action if it unfolded in a way I couldn’t accept. I knew the term ménage a trois hadn’t originated in France for nothing; something about the idea made me feel very all-American, a rare occurrence. If something rekindled between Jean-Michel and April, I was out of there.

  After visiting five shoe stores and being made embarrassingly aware that I took one of the largest shoe sizes available in France, I found some ankle boots similar to the ones the jolie laide had worn in Tuileries Gardens the month before. I could barely walk in them, as 1978 was the tail end of the first wave of feminism to hit the United States so stiletto heels were politically incorrect back home. But it felt nice to suddenly be two inches taller. Granted, clogs made me look taller too, but when Frenchwomen glanced at them with disdain, I immediately shrank back down to size.

  I practiced walking home in my new boots. Their sleekness caused me to tap assuredly right past my regular pastry shop at the corner of the Griffiths’ building. I decided to have a coffee instead with the five francs I had allotted for my usual dose of creamy Bretons or melt-in-your mouth millefeuilles, literally, ‘a thousand leaves’ of the most paper-thin pastry, topped with a white dusting of powdered sugar. In a minute, I was installed at a table on the terrace of the corner café, enjoying the soft breeze of the April afternoon.

  Someone small and blonde hurried by.

  “Elizabeth,” I shouted out. What good luck to bump into my Polish-English au pair friend in my hour of need.

  She turned at the sound of my voice, putting a hand up to her mouth as if she didn’t want to be recognized. Why was she acting funny?

  “Elizabeth. Over here.” I waved, pulling out the seat next to me.

  Something about her eyes was opaque. I could tell she was hiding something. When she took her hand away from her face, I knew what it was. Telltale signs of white powdered crumbs framed the sides of her mouth. I guessed she’d stopped at the same pastry shop I was addicted to and had her own fix for the day. We were peas in a pod, one of the reasons I liked her so much.

  “Ava, hallo! I’ve got to get home,” she called out. “Mrs. Brown is going out tonight, and I need to fix dinner.” She’d slowed down, but was still walking past me.

  I knew Elizabeth too well. She struggled with
her weight, as I did mine, and I had caught her at the wrong moment in her cycle of feast or fast. She was an avid dieter, which I was not, and although she looked as petite as any Frenchwoman, I knew from our conversations on dieting she thought of herself as the size of a wild boar. I was far closer to wild boar size, and it wasn’t the right size to be in Paris, where women were mostly svelte or at least small-framed. Come to think of it, it hadn’t been the right size to be Stateside either, where images of Barbie-clones ruled advertising and zaftig teenage girls with occasional breakouts weren’t featured in print media at all, except as losers in coming-of-age movies.

  “Come on, have a coffee. My treat.” I caught up with her, putting my hand on her shoulder, hoping she’d receive my unspoken thoughts of understanding and sympathy for her secret struggles with the crazy cycle of dieting and feasting she was caught up in.

  “Listen, I really need your help on something.” I lowered my voice to a whisper, hoping to coax her out of her embarrassment from being caught eating something on her absolute no-no list and move on to her second favorite topic: men and relationships. “Jean-Michel’s ex is coming today, and I’m going to meet her tomorrow. I don’t know how to handle it. You’ve got to help me.”

  Her eyes rounded. I had her.

  “What? You’re letting him introduce you to his ex? Why are you doing that?”

  “Because – because – I don’t know why, that’s why I need your advice. Come sit down. You look like you need a coffee.” I grabbed her shopping bag and led her back to my table.

  “When did he tell you his ex was coming to visit?” Elizabeth’s eyes became bluer as they rounded in indignation. She was a study in primary colors – yellow hair, cornflower blue eyes, and doll-like red lips – her coloring similar to Marie Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s most serene mistress. I visualized what Elizabeth might have done to the likes of Picasso the first time he stepped out on her. Unlike the cow-like Marie Thérèse, she’d have unleashed hell’s furies on him then walked away after stomping over his testicles in shoes similar to my new stiletto boots. Elizabeth was no pushover. She was a five foot tall Polish spitfire, armed with rapier-sharp British wit.