by Rozsa Gaston
“Uhh – not ready to reveal you to my friends. You’d overwhelm them.”
His laugh was hearty. “I do that, I know. Am I overwhelming you?”
“No. At least, not yet.”
“Do you want to be overwhelmed?” Another good question.
“I want to be heard.” Somehow I’d managed to retain a thimbleful of self-possession in the face of Arnaud’s crackling male spirit.
“Of course you do. You’re a performer. You want someone to hear what you have to say.”
“Sometimes overwhelming personalities don’t hear quieter melodies.” I didn’t mean to worry, but would a man with such an outsized personality drown out everything and everyone around him?
“I do when they’re sung by Rhine maidens from New York.”
“Très bien, Monsieur.” No answer could have pleased me more.
We got off the phone, and I went to bed, imagining myself a Lorelei combing her hair on a rock in the river on a moonlit night. Poseidon would come along and pull me into the water with him. We would frolic, swim, and do other things.
Lots of other things.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Huitres à Volonté (All-You-Can-Eat Oysters)
Huitres à volonté, or as many oysters as you can eat, washed down with Sancerre, a dry white wine made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape from France’s Loire Valley, was one of my favorite summertime meals in Paris. It was all protein and booze – two of my favorite food groups.
I’d changed over the past ten years. Smoked salmon, pâté, deviled eggs, and other savory delicacies had taken the place of pastries in my heart. My new food choices didn’t lead me down the road of overindulgence. I was learning to eat like a French person – well, but in small quantities.
A breeze rustled our hair as Arnaud and I stood on the sidewalk outside Café de la Bastille. Sunday evening had arrived, seemingly a split second after we’d parted early Saturday morning.
“Do you like oysters?” Arnaud asked, kissing me carefully once on each cheek. He stared at my mouth as if reminding me not to forget where else we’d recently kissed.
“I like all seafood. My family’s from Maine,” I told him. Oysters didn’t come from Maine, but eating all types of shellfish was practically a requirement for living there. You weren’t a true Down Easter if you didn’t.
“From Maine? Is that where your Mayflower ancestors ended up?”
I nodded. I’d told him a bit about my mother’s side of the family over dinner two nights earlier. He seemed to know a lot about American culture. I’d bet he’d spent time there, but I wasn’t going to ask. It interested me more to let Arnaud set the pace for revealing himself to me. “What do you eat them with?” I asked.
“Lemon juice. That’s it.”
“Sounds delicious.” Nothing could resemble a classic WASP summer dish more – something simple that required minimal fuss, other than shucking the oysters out of their shells, which someone else would do.
“I want to watch you eat oysters,” he said, setting off butterflies in my stomach.
“Then Allons-y. Let’s go,” I replied, making a note to eat oysters the way Catherine Deneuve would, not like a girl from New England.
We made our way to the seafood restaurant and sat outside. Arnaud ordered a bottle of Gerard Boulay Sancerre Chavignol, commanding the waiter’s instant respect. His deference gave me pause. It occurred to me Arnaud was bien-élevé, well raised. With a last name that included a “de,” was he well born or as the French put it, de bonne famille? While I ruminated I watched the small, dark man shucking oysters at a station tucked under the restaurant terrace’s dark green and white canopy.
In a minute, our plates arrived. I sampled my first oyster, followed by a sip of light, crisp Sancerre. Heaven. Not for the first time, I applauded the French obsession with correct food and drink combinations.
“I’d like to ask you something,” Arnaud said, his expression serious.
“What?” My spine tingled.
“I’m going to my country house next weekend. Would you join me?”
I felt my eyes widen, his gaze dissolving my will to say anything but yes. Yes, yes, and yes. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud. Finally, I spoke.
“I’ll have to think about it,” the Queen of Cool responded.
Not.
Sweat pooled under my arms as I considered the ramifications of an overnight stay with Arnaud.
“You do that.”
I smiled. What a sexy guy. Then, a practical thought jumped into my brain. The first one I’d had in a week, since the Sunday evening before when we’d met.
“But I have my gig next weekend,” I told him.
“Which day?”
“Friday night.”
“No problem. I’ll pick you up around ten Saturday morning. It’s about a two and a half-hour drive,” he explained. “We’ll return Sunday evening.”
I nodded, mute. It was a lot to think about.
After three plates of oysters, I’d had my fill. When the check came, Arnaud paid. I didn’t try to chip in this time. We rose from our seats, and as we made our way to the sidewalk, he took my arm.
“Are you happy?” I asked, nestling into his side.
For a response, he backed me into the wall at the corner of Boul’ Saint Michel and a small side street and kissed me hard.
I rested my forearms on each of his shoulders to steady myself. Thoughts of the coming weekend swirled in my head.
“What about you?” His voice was muffled by my neck, which he was tasting.
“Yes.” The smell of his sweat intoxicated me. It was pungent – worthy of a Frenchman, undisguised by any grooming products.
“Would you like to come to my place for a digestif?” he asked.
“I would, but not tonight.”
“And why not tonight, chère Mademoiselle?”
“Because it is too soon, and I know too little about you, cher Monsieur,” I shot back, my head trumping my heart.
“Shall we walk then?” His eyes flickered with either disappointment or approval, I couldn’t tell which.
“Avec plaisir. With pleasure.”
We strolled slowly back to my neighborhood, the lights from Bastille’s nightspots twinkling up ahead. As we approached, the streetlamp outlined a woman coming toward us, her walk unhurried, swaying. She looked to be in her forties – her face remote, mysterious. Arnaud’s eyes followed her, then flickered back to me. Annoyed with myself for noticing, I pretended not to care. It was France, after all. I could hardly expect a heterosexual Frenchman not to notice another female. It was a national pastime.
In another minute, we were outside Henri and Marceline’s apartment building.
“Goodnight,” I said simply, turning to him.
“I’ll see you Friday evening at your ‘gig’ as you call it.” He pronounced it ‘geeg’, making me giggle.
“My geeg?” My what? Wasn’t a gigue some sort of ancient French dance from pre-Revolutionary days?
“Your performance.”
Mon Dieu. I’d forgotten all about my gig. The reason I’d come to Paris.
“Oh sure,” I recovered myself. “Do you know where it is?”
“Yes. We passed the street on our way here, non?”
“Yes.” Had he known The Blue Cactus was on the Rue de Lappe, a side street off Rue de la Roquette? He must have done some research over the past week since we first met.
“Your photo in the window there looks nothing like you,” he said with a low chuckle.
“I know,” I agreed ruefully. Show business had its ridiculous side.
“You are more beautiful in person, but I liked your beeg hair in the photo,” he remarked, embracing me.
“Thank you,” I whispered back, at a loss to respond. We were in the same boat, betwixt and between the real me and the show-biz me. The man holding me apparently liked both.
“Until Friday then.” His eyes seared me. This time, he was first to turn, w
alking quickly away.
I ran upstairs, anticipation wrapped around me like fairy wings.
Around four on Thursday afternoon, Henri and I went over to The Blue Cactus for a final run-through before my opening performance the following evening. The owner had assured Henri the night manager would be there to turn on the P.A. system and perform a sound check. Instead, no one was about, other than the cleaning staff and a bartender setting up for the evening – who didn’t know anything about the sound system. Henri got the night manager’s telephone number from him and called.
Something had come up. The night manager couldn’t get there until after the restaurant opened for business, too late to do a sound check. He assured Henri he would be on site the following evening to help me set up. Henri got off and reassured me heartily that there was no problem.
The sloppy preparation didn’t please me. I knew all too well what happened when musicians relying on electronic equipment performed in a new venue.
Two years earlier I’d had a New Years’ Eve gig at a Chinese restaurant in Glen Cove, Long Island, a wealthy town on Long Island’s north shore, not far from Queens. I’d gotten there at eight, set up my DX-7 synthesizer, drum machine, and reverb unit, ran through everything, and satisfied myself the sound was good. The food and beverage manager let me know that they didn’t care what I played as long as I broke into Auld Lang Syne at the stroke of midnight. It was standard procedure for a New Years’ Eve performance, the highest paying gig of the year for most musicians.
The first three sets passed uneventfully. Then, just before the stroke of midnight, after an uproarious countdown with the crowd going wild, someone on the restaurant staff hit the circuit breaker to turn out all the lights for dramatic effect, then on again the second the new year was rung in.
The effect on my synthesizer was devastating. Cutting the power mid-program meant it needed to be reset again. The process took several minutes, similar to a computer booting up. As I fiddled with the instrument panel, several hundred impatient guests all stared at me expectantly.
“Play Auld Lang Syne,” an impatient voice shouted out.
“Hit the music,” another seconded. The energy of the crowd turning against me was as palpable as a wave.
The food and beverage manager came over and hissed at me to launch into Auld Lang Syne immediately as discussed. His frown told me he wasn’t happy.
Desperately, I fiddled with my equipment until it had warmed up and was functioning again. By the time I launched into the opening bars of Auld Lang Syne, it was too late. The momentum was gone, and the crowd angry. In show business, timing is everything, and mine had failed. Never mind the reason. When a performer screws up, it’s always his or her fault.
I crept out of the restaurant the minute my gig ended at one A.M. No one asked for an encore. Unsmiling, the manager handed me an envelope containing the exact amount contracted for the evening. No bonus was included, even though a large tip was customary for a New Year’s Eve gig. I was never asked to play there again.
Something similar could happen at The Blue Cactus Friday evening. But I didn’t really care. If my performance was a smash success, Henri would negotiate to increase the number of weekly performances and extend my engagement beyond the end of August. Then, I’d be stuck with him managing my career over the next few months. What I really wanted to do was get away from him and Marceline, leaving them to have their baby in peace without a stranger in their household. A stranger Henri was drawing sketches of without clothes on. Ugh.
“Let’s decide what you’re going to wear when we get back,” Henri said on the way back to the apartment.
“I’ve already decided.”
“The dress with the cut-outs?”
“No, another one, I said curtly. “Trust me – it’ll be perfect.” There was no way I was giving Henri a sneak preview.
“Why don’t I take a look at it?” he pressed.
“Non. C’est déjà decidé et c’est ça, It’s decided already and that’s that,” I parroted a line I’d heard Marceline use, in exactly her tone of voice.
He turned on the car radio. I’d won my point.
I no longer wished to cultivate a following, encouraging adoring fans to fall in love with the woman they saw on stage. Instead, I wanted to discover the real Arnaud de Saint Cyr and have him discover me. Privately.
The next day, I dressed for my performance. More accurately, I dressed for Arnaud, who’d said he’d be there. The black and white dress I’d worn for our first evening together would do the trick.
To go the extra kilowatt show business distance, I added a black and white turban I had picked up in Manhattan’s East Village that made me look like a cross between Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. The effect was edgy, downtown. Using black eyeliner, I drew upward curves at the corners of my eyelids to emphasize the slight slant of my Hungarian eyes, passed down from Attila the Hun and his crew when they’d arrived in Europe from the Central Asian steppes some twelve hundred years earlier.
Henri’s eyes widened, when I came into the kitchen, but he said nothing. We went downstairs, where he loaded my synthesizer into his Citroën, then drove the five minutes to the restaurant.
The night manager hadn’t yet arrived. With no one to help me sync my synthesizer to the sound system, I asked Henri, sitting near one speaker, if the reverb was on.
“What do you mean, ‘reverb’?” he asked back.
“You know – the delay, the echo,” I explained.
“The delay?” he repeated, shrugging his shoulders.
I didn’t have my French dictionary with me.
“Never mind,” I snapped, fed up not only with him, the missing night manager, but the entire live entertainment business in general. There was no way I could check what my voice sounded like from the P.A. system at the same time as sing into the microphone. That was the whole point of having a house sound engineer available. “Just tell the night manager when he finally shows up to check my reverb levels. Got it?”
“Sure, sure.” Henri nodded.
He had no idea what I was talking about, which pissed me off in extremis.
I began on the dot at eight P.M. Years of experience with hotel and restaurant gigs had taught me management cared about one point above all else – starting on time. Talent, choice of repertoire, musicianship – all were entirely secondary to whether the band began on time. If they did, they were professionals. If they didn’t, they were soon unemployed.
The first set I played mostly swing, with some bossa nova tunes thrown in. I loved singing in Portuguese, the sexiest language in the world. Singing bossa nova was like singing in the kitchen while mopping the floor wearing a black and white French maid’s outfit. Astrud Gilberto had gotten started that way, minus the maid’s uniform. She’d been humming one of her husband Gil’s tunes in the kitchen when he’d walked in and realized he’d found the singer who’d make him famous.
Speculating on Astrud’s royalty percentage from her first album, I executed a long instrumental riff on Wave. No one applauded at the end.
It was just like being back in New York. I could put out a tip jar, but what would be the point? The custom of tipping was almost nonexistent in France.
Satisfied with my version of Wave, I launched into the theme from the Brazilian movie Black Orpheus. It was a wistful, sensual tune. Playful yet poignant, a combination the French adored, if their movies or pop songs were anything to go by.
I sang as if I was Kit Moresby trapped in a harem in the middle of the desert in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, one of my favorite novels. My delivery was breathy, intimate. No one paid the slightest attention. The crowd dining, drinking, and chatting before me had not yet recognized my genius.
Finally, a sole pair of hands began to clap, followed by several others. I peered out, but was blinded by the bright stage lights trained on the elevated platform I was on.
Next, I chose a French tune, La Vie En Rose. Edith Piaf had made it famous. I
couldn’t sing like her, all four feet ten inches of nasal cockiness, so I sang it my own way. I hoped the audience would find my American accent exotic, much the same way I enjoyed hearing French or Brazilian singers cover an English pop tune back in New York. Satisfied with my arrangement, more of a dance tune than Piaf’s version, I ended dramatically, cutting the drum machine off with my foot pedal at the final moment. In New York, this usually elicited a round of applause. Not here.
For a moment, there was only the background hum of diners talking. Then again, a sole set of hands began to applaud. A few more joined in, all from the same direction. It was break time.
Henri was nowhere to be found, as I moved off the platform. Had Marceline called to say her water had broken or her contractions had started? So much for getting feedback on the sound mix of keyboards, drum machine, and microphone. It was the usual not-yet-discovered musician’s story: no one around to help, no one paying any attention, drinks flowing, a steady source of income not flowing.
“Ava, you were great,”
Arnaud ’s voice floated alongside me. I hadn’t seen him come in. My eyes adjusted to the darker lighting of the room, as I turned in his direction.
He smiled, his eyes boring into mine.
“You’re the only one listening, but thanks,” I laughed, relieved to see him. In the dim light, his eyes looked gray, mystical. They seemed less crystalline, more limpid tonight. I wanted to swim in them.
He motioned me over.
I followed him to his table and sat, breathing in his faint male scent.
“I liked your version of Black Orpheus,” Arnaud commented.
“You’re the only one,” I observed dryly, but pleased nevertheless. At least, he’d recognized the tune.
“Am I?” he asked, lowering his voice.
“What do you mean?” There I was playing catch-up again in response to Arnaud’s lightning fast conversational turns.
“Am I the only one?” he whispered.
I tried to think of a response as light and teasing as a kitten’s cuff. Finally, I had it.
“It’s a secret,” I purred.