by Rozsa Gaston
One evening, a customer requested Stand by Me and to my amazement, people began to clap to the beat and sing along as soon as I played the opening lines. By the end of the song, the entire room was singing the chorus along with me. With the crowd hooked, I launched into Peggy Lee’s Fever, motioning to the audience to snap their fingers to the beat of the single-note bass-line introduction. My listeners responded enthusiastically, fingers snapping, feet stomping, and wildly applauding at the end. The next night, I played the same two songs back to back with equally spirited audience participation.
“Play Stand by Me will you?” a man at the bar shouted out the following week. I recognized him from the Thursday before. This time, he was back with a friend.
“Play the finger snapping tune – the one you played last week,” his companion added.
I lifted the wine glass on the piano top, shaking it at them. On its side, I’d handwritten a sign that said, “Tips welcomed – not drinks.” The month before, someone had told me about a Nina Simone-type performer at a small club off the Champs-Élysées. Arnaud and I had gone to catch her performance, and I’d been dismayed to see what years of performing success had done to the older, female American performer. She played well, her singing style soothing, mellow and sensual. Fans in the audience sent over a steady supply of drinks to accompany their requests for favorite songs. An excellent, professional performer, her glassy eyes, wasted physique and remote air told me she was also a full-fledged alcoholic. I’d seen what downing free drinks did to house musicians as the years went by, and I vowed to myself that night I would never again accept another free drink from an admiring fan.
The man from the week before came over and put some money in my tip glass. I smiled and launched into Stand By Me. Then I played Love Potion No. 9, directing the audience to join me in shouting out the title of the song when it came up in the refrain. They responded with gusto.
The following evening, I brought in a clipboard with a piece of paper on it that asked “What songs do you like to sing along to most?” With a magic marker on a string attached, I sent it circulating along the bar, with instructions to the bartender to keep it going around the room. Sure enough, before the evening ended, the clipboard had made the rounds, with ten song titles added. My professional skills were now expanding into market research.
Over the next few weeks, I worked on adding new repertoire to get my audience more engaged. You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling by the Righteous Brothers took over the room the first time I played it. Maudlin and sentimental, it was an instant hit with the largely British Isles crowd. The Beatles’ Hey Jude worked well, and Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville gave everyone in the bar a chance to roar “Wasting away again in Margaritaville” then order margaritas from the bartender. In mid-October, when Teddy offered a regular Tuesday night spot in addition to Wednesdays and Thursdays, I was pleased to accept.
No longer was I a lonely, misunderstood performer playing for a disinterested audience. At Teddy’s, we were in this together – a roomful of lonely ex-pats with a scattering of French customers who like to hang around with ex-pats. (In Paris there were many, due to the fact that many Parisians find hanging around with each other too socially draining.) Teddy’s patrons were becoming my patrons, too. We were bonding over hackneyed, overplayed songs that weren’t likely to score me a recording contract, but were at least gaining me a following.
I was becoming a sing-along, pub performer, someone I didn’t really recognize myself as. How had Laurie Anderson or Annie Lennox gotten started in the music business? I couldn’t imagine either artist pandering to pub audiences, churning out sing-along tunes. But I was finally getting noticed, and it felt a lot better than being ignored, the way I had been at the Gramercy Park Hotel lounge or The Blue Cactus. A not insignificant number of my fans were gay males, invited from Larry’s parties. But the ones I secretly studied were the smattering of French women who accompanied their husbands or boyfriends to Teddy’s. They dressed simply but superbly for the most part – unlike me in my “notice-me” New York performer’s wardrobe.
“Ava, your turban is DEE VINE!” One of my gay fans gushed as he took a photo one evening, while I crooned Fever into the mic, my audience finger-snapping along with me.
The following week, he stuffed a ten-franc note into my tip jar along with the photo. I glanced at it during my break. Who was that over-the-top character in the black and white turban?
Neither did it look like me, nor did I want it to. I’d picked up the black and white turban at a boutique in Alphabet-land in the easternmost fringe of the East Village back in Manhattan. It took a lot of guts to wear it well, as it twisted into what appeared to be a super-chic antennae on top of my head, supported by a wire framework covered with boldly striped fabric.
My grandmother had always said, “When in doubt, and navy blue is out, wear black and white.” The more time I spent in France, the more it occurred to me my grandmother should have been French. Although she’d never mentioned the name of Coco Chanel in my presence, she had absorbed much of the iconic French designer’s sensibility – namely that less is more, and that black and white is always chic. When I’d been small, I’d watch her get dressed for an evening or afternoon event. Her signature perfume had been Chanel No. 5 and her signature accessory a scarf.
After she put on her dress, she would open her scarf drawer, whereupon out would waft the most heavenly scent of Chanel No. 5. A panoply of silk scarves in all colors and sizes would fill my eyes and imagination.
She’d try on one scarf after another, until she finally decided on one that would set off her outfit, most frequently a simple A-line dress in navy, black, or black and white. Not only her choice of scarf, but the way she wore it, would make her entire ensemble come alive. Satisfied with the tying on of the scarf, she’d spray one final spritz in the air around her neck. “A woman should never overdo her perfume. When in doubt, spray the air around you, not on yourself directly,” was one of her dictums. Then she would sail downstairs.
I’d follow, transfixed.
Her final ritual before leaving the house would occur in the front hall before the large mirror that hung on the wall next to the front door.
“Ava, whenever you’re about to go out, look in the mirror one last time, then take off one thing,” she’d advise.
“But why, Nana? You’re wearing so many nice things.”
“That’s the point. I’m probably wearing one too many. So I’m going to take a look then remove one of them.”
“But you spent so much time choosing what to wear,” I’d remonstrate.
“Yes. And now I’m going to spend a bit more time choosing something to take off.”
“But why?” I couldn’t figure it out. We’d just spent forty-five minutes in her bedroom going over her final look in painstaking detail. “Are you changing your mind?”
“No, darling. Just making a final adjustment.” My grandmother rarely called me darling.
After cocking her head, pirouetting in the mirror then smoothing her already smooth dress down over her iron-flat stomach (thanks to the full-support girdle she wore every day of her life), she’d take off a single bangle bracelet, brooch, belt, or rhinestone hair comb. Whatever item she removed, she’d hand to me.
“Here, darling, take this upstairs for me, will you?”
I’d rush upstairs, holding the accessory as if it were a bag of gold bullion. Depositing it carefully wherever it belonged (“a place for everything and everything in its place,” was another of her dictums), I’d inhale one final whiff of Chanel No. 5, then rush downstairs again, where I’d receive a Chanel-bathed kiss and hug. If I was accompanying her, I’d grab my coat and follow her out the door, imitating the way she sailed when she walked on occasions she knew she was being noticed. She would be in a rare good mood and so would I, because she was getting out of the house and away from whatever it was that drove her up the wall about her own life.
Secretly studying the French women
who came into Teddy’s, I could see my grandmother’s mantras put into action. “Less is more” appeared to be Parisian women’s guiding fashion principal. Knowing how to wear a scarf was another. In the personal style arena, my grandmother could easily have held a candle to just about any Frenchwoman on the streets of Paris. How many American women could say that? Not me – although I was working on it.
Meanwhile, my outré gay friends loved me in my turban, and I didn’t love me in it at all. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t interested in being outré. I was interested to one day become a quietly stylish woman like the ones I saw everywhere in Paris; someone who carried herself like my grandmother.
There was something about the performing lifestyle that was turning me into someone I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t sure if I needed to catch up with the performing artist I was becoming or if I needed to rethink the whole idea of being one. Although I was flattered when my new fans made a fuss over me, deep inside I cringed. It didn’t seem particularly me – especially the private, songwriting side of me. It also didn’t seem particularly French. That ruled out both who I was and who I was interested in becoming. The kind of woman I admired was quietly elegant, a sort of toned down version of Holly-go-Lightly – if she’d belonged to a club and hadn’t earned a living accepting fifty dollar bills to go powder her nose. Shouldn’t I try to become the sort of woman I looked up to?
Arnaud returned from Vietnam in mid-October and we resumed our ménage or household together. I’d stay overnight at his place three to four times a week but return to my flat the night before work days to prepare and rehearse.
One day in late October, after we breakfasted on large cups of coffee with steaming milk into which we dipped pieces of buttered baguette, we crossed the street from his apartment to walk in Père Lachaise. Huge, ancient trees in regal fall foliage overhung the avenues and side paths crisscrossing the cemetery, laid out like a small city.
“Elle se ressemble une belle femme mûre,” Arnaud remarked. “It resembles a beautiful, older woman,” he’d said, meaning a woman in full glory, at the apex of her beauty, charm and artifice, the apple at its ripest moment before its fall from the tree.
I liked his quintessentially French attitude. Americans referred to older women as moms, teachers, businesswomen and old ladies. France turned its older women into style icons, grandes dames who ran literary salons, femmes d’une certain âge who set high standards of grace and well-appointedness for the younger women who emulated them and the men who admired them. That was the kind of older woman I wanted to become.
Our next-door neighbor, Fred Shelton, had once remarked to me about my grandmother as we’d watched her return from a daily walk on West Hill Drive, the street where we lived. “Ava, your grandmother is one fine figure of a woman. She’s like a ship in full sail. You should be proud of her.”
If my grandmother could exhibit style worthy of a Frenchwoman, down to her fingertips back in West Hartford, Connecticut, never having set foot in Europe, then I could learn how to carry myself like a Frenchwoman, too. The only problem was, I’d never be accepted as French by the French themselves.
Eureka.
It suddenly struck me, sitting at Teddy’s beat-up old upright piano playing Inchworm, while my mind raced in all directions, that the best place for me to present myself as French was back home in the United States. Back where I belonged.
I wouldn’t actually be French, but I would be Frenchified. In fact, I already was. A certain Parisian mystique had already rubbed off on me. I vowed to make it linger in the air around me for the rest of my life, like the scent over my grandmother’s open scarf drawer.
If I stayed in France, I’d forever be an ex-pat, mangling the French language, languishing in the style and savoire-faire departments, and lagging behind French women of my own age and social standing in every possible category. Or I’d learn to keep up with them in an exhausting daily competition I would more frequently lose than win.
“Do you think one day I’ll be une belle femme mûre?” I asked teasingly, as we strolled down one of the cemetery’s endless allées or paths.
Arnaud stopped and turned me to him. The branches of two tall trees on either side of the allée intermingled overhead, creating a canopy. Paris’s autumnal glory was more muted than fall in New York. The reds, yellows and oranges seemed to be team players, rather than each vying for stardom as they did back home.
“If you grow into who you are, you will,” he said, stroking the point of my chin with his thumb and index finger.
His words hit me like an arrow to the heart. It was exactly what I’d been asking myself at the keyboard over the past few months. I eyeballed the man next to me, who’d told me on the way to the countryside two months earlier that he liked women of all ages, young or ripe, depending on the moment. That was who Arnaud was.
But I wasn’t someone who wanted to be someone’s all-in-all for only a brief moment in their life. I wanted to be someone’s all-in-all forever. Was that the American in me? Or was it just who I was?
“Tu es sage. You are wise,” I murmured, my head resting against his chest. Arnaud was a match for me, the beauty of which I’d never experienced before. But the softly colored leaves that fluttered to the ground hinted at beauty’s short duration.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Je T’adore, Je T’aime
Two weeks later, Arnaud set off on his next assignment, back to Vietnam. While he was away, business picked up even more at Teddy’s. Paris’s fall season was in full swing. My performances had been expanded to a weekend night too, usually Fridays, now my Blue Cactus Friday evening gig was over. I’d begun to weave in a few original songs to my evening repertoire, not that anyone cared. The crowd still clamored for the old standbys, the more sentimental the better. My visions of being the next Laurie Anderson were in constant conflict with the only way I gained recognition at my job – giving in to requests for crowd-pleasing, tear-jerker old standards. My performing career featured endless nightly compromise, but I consoled myself that at least I was working in my field, rather than office temping or waiting on tables. Soon cloudless, warm October days gave way to iron-gray, rainy, cold November ones. The memory of Paris’s long, drab winter the year I’d turned twenty returned to me. Paris was nowhere near as cold as New York, but its skies were unrelentingly gray during the winter season, unlike the azure-blue brilliance of certain New York days in early winter. November to March in Paris was like one long month of February in New York.
Almost every day, I walked in Père Lachaise, where Arnaud and I had frequently strolled the month before. I began to notice the regulars who frequented the area: dog-walkers, couples, and lone walkers. All of us seemed shrouded in private thoughts – the cemetery a perfect backdrop for our self-reflection.
Upon entering the main gates late one gloomy, gray Friday morning I spotted a notice affixed to the lamppost next to the entrance. A print of a painting of a sharp-faced, aristocratic looking man announced an artist’s opening exhibit at a local gallery the following day, Saturday, November fifteenth. Startled, I realized almost a month had passed since Arnaud had left. Even more shocked, I realized I hadn’t thought about him very much over the past few days.
I examined the poster more closely. The man’s petulant expression was similar to the way Arnaud looked at times. Almost guiltily, I admitted to myself I didn’t like that side of him at all. It reminded me of the sharp-featured, beautiful woman in the photo in his country home. I didn’t like her either. Suddenly, it made sense to me why he’d spoken of her as his mentor. They were most likely two of a kind – all angles, questions, and sharp edges. For the first time, I gave myself permission to accept how very different Arnaud was from me. I loved learning from him. But I wasn’t like him at all. Why was I trying so hard to fit into the image of a woman he might fall in love with?
I continued on my way into the cemetery, where I passed the next hour deep in self-examination. À chacun son goût, to each his own taste,
Arnaud had said. On my own, without him around, I was free to explore what my own tastes were.
I picked my way among the monuments and gravestones, mulling over the possibility that my own choices might differ from the man I was involved with. My thoughts were subversive. My mind tingled and raced. I was falling in love with a new person.
Myself.
As I made my way down the main boulevard toward the exit, a tall, lean-faced man walked toward me. His gait was awkward, as if he was just renting space in his own body and wasn’t quite familiar with it.
As he passed, his eyes briefly made contact with mine. They were warm, strangely reassuring. Instantly, I felt a connection. Whoever he was, he wasn’t polished, smooth, one hundred per cent self-sufficient and perfectly packaged like most Parisians appeared to be, foremost among them – Arnaud. This stranger seemed a bit out of his element, interested to reach out. He hadn’t yet arrived, I’d guess. Just like me.
I shivered, hurrying on to escape my illicit thoughts. I was crazy about Arnaud’s blue-green eyes. Why had I even noticed for a moment the warm, brown eyes of a stranger? Shaking my head to clear it from conjecture’s cobwebs, I berated myself. Yet the thought remained. Arnaud’s glance didn’t reassure me. It was exciting, electrifying – but rarely reassuring. Was that what I really wanted out of a relationship with a man?
At Teddy’s that evening, I mulled over my tiny mental betrayal of my lover as I finished my first set. Arnaud had been gone too long, that was all. I was lonely and just a bit fed up with our constant separations. Everything would be fine once he got back.
“Was that a Sade song you were playing?” a voice asked.
I looked up. Startled, my stomach churned as if a ghost stood before me.
It was the man from Père Lachaise that afternoon. Speechless, I couldn’t reply.