“Bien sûr! Voulez-vous un verre?” He looks at my bottle. “I can’t drink all of this.” I say.
“She just had two martinis!” says Bob. Why did I tell him that?
“Oui, merci!”
“Philippe!” I shout as he walks by. “Un autre verre s’il te plaît”. Philippe dances over with an empty glass and I pour Daniele a glass.
“Merci.” his dark eyes are sparkling.
Bob and Cindy are so close that they join in the conversation, telling Daniele that they are big fans. Because he sits with me they assume that Daniele and I are friends. I guess we are now. They went to Pop Up Du Label last night and tell him so. He didn’t see them there and was surprised. He looks at me admonishingly. I blush and tell him “It’s so far.” He just shakes his head.
Then he tells Bob and Cindy about a drive he made across the US. LA to San Francisco to Yellowstone to… what’s that place with the faces of the Presidents carved on the front of the mountain? Mount Rushmore. Yes!
I don’t remember what it was I said when Bob said “You have to watch this one!”
“Yes, I’m learning that.” says Daniele. He gives me le regarde.
“Oh darn! I have to go back and play.”
In the meantime I am getting texts from Renard. He’s “remembering our night.”
The musical portion of the night ends and Daniele sits in the seat next to me, where Bob and Cindy have just left to make a dinner reservation nearby. Texts are pinging in from Renard. It’s time for me to go. I call an Uber. When it arrives Philippe comes to say goodnight. I planted a big kiss on both of his cheeks and then shock him with one smack on his lips. I turn and go out to my Uber.
Hallelujah, it’s truly raining men!
Aftermath of the aftermath
Stephanie has returned from ten days in Bali. She arrives with the new cleaner, Sol, to go over the basics of what needs to be done and to see where things may be hidden; the Holiday decorations, extra towels and blankets and pillows. I spent a good hour to make sure nothing would popup, evidence of Renard’s presence. Except the flowers. But she either didn’t notice or didn’t choose to ask.
I had spent a terribly restless night, sending Renard a text in the early evening to try to tempt him to come over. He responded that he was in Boulogne “far away from me”. I googled it and saw it was a concert/sports center. OK, I went to bed with my book and pouted. What was it I had warned myself? - not to sabotage this. At 6 am I woke, having only fallen asleep at 3:30 and looked at my phone. Late at night, when I was on a social media strike, he posted pictures of a Cool and the Gang concert. Well he told me that he liked 70s music. And evidently he went with the same guy who he had gone to a Beaujolais Nouveau tasting the night before. Why does he get two nights in a row? There I went, down the sabotage myself spiral. This is not good.
I got up, fixed breakfast and watched a Netflix movie. Then I cleaned my apartment before the cleaners came. I still had some time before they arrived and was looking at myself critically in the mirror. My hair definitely could use some care. It had been over two months since my last appointment at the salon in California and it did the thing it does; suddenly needing a color job in the worst way.
Before I could talk myself out of it I put on my coat and headed out to see the salon down the street. On the way I saw Raphael, the owner of Les Loups. He greeted me warmly with la bise and I told him “J’ai besoin de trouver une coiffeuse! He pointed to the shop next to his restaurant. “Elles sont gentilles.” He suggested. So I walked into the shop.
“Bonjour!” I said to the two women working. There were no customers in the shop. “J’habite ici maintenant et j’ai besoin de trouver une nouvelle coiffeuse!” I said quickly followed by “Parlez vous anglais?”
“Non.”
But that didn’t stop them from trying to help me help them understand what I wanted. Fortunately my SF stylist had given me the formula for my color which was easy to tell them. And I didn’t think they would have that much trouble figuring out the cut. I was just deathly afraid that I would turn out orange. There are plenty of women around here with hair color not found in nature. I want to look a little French. But mostly I want to still look like me, Renard’s California girl.
So I ended up with an appointment for 2:00 pm that afternoon.
Back in my apartment I waited for Stephanie and Sol and after they arrived I asked Stephanie if she wanted to meet me at Cépage. I was going to go there to write. I’d love to hear about her trip to Bali.
I wasn’t there long before she arrived just at the same time as the carafe of wine.
Bali was great, very relaxing. She booked another three weeks in February, following her two weeks in St Martin and two weeks in Thailand in January. This woman never seems to work. And she sure isn’t around when I need something. She had Bob in tow. He was his misbehaving self. I reminded her that I still don’t have heat. It snowed last week and I still don’t have heat.
“Yes, I will call Magalie on Monday and ask her to have the handyman come look.”
The handyman who is Gareth? It seems Gareth never found the fashion job he was looking for but has been making do as a handyman for Magalie’s company. He showed up unexpectedly when I asked to have my smoke alarm moved from the kitchen to the hall where it wouldn’t go off every time I turned on my oven, or made toast, or boiled water! But certainly Gareth won’t be able to fix my heat. And Monday is two days away. And it snowed last week!
“I’m pretty sure that the building has central heating and they don’t turn it on until the end of November. That’s what happened last year.” I lamented.
“But you don’t know that for sure.”
Well, no, I don’t. But I still don’t have heat.
Stephanie left for another appointment and I tackled the task of eating another hundred moules and writing another thousand words. At two o’clock I braced myself and headed to the salon.
If you want to get a feel for a neighborhood, a couple of hours in the local hair salon is the perfect place. Madame Claudia greeted me and sat me in a seat in front of the mirror. She fastened the gown around my shoulders and started to pluck at my hair. She was whippet thin wearing tight leather pants and a white knit sweater. Her own hair (red!) was pulled back into a severe small ponytail. But she had a kind and reassuring way about her. I decided I was in good hands.
“Oui, entre neuf et dix.” she confirmed, repeating the formula I gave her earlier.
“Et coupez juste une petit peu.” I instructed. And cut just a little.
Her assistant mixed the hair coloring agent and started to apply it while Madame Claudia went outside for a cigarette.
I have always found the hair salon experience distasteful. Hair plastered to my head with a smelly paste, bare face looking directly into a wall size mirror is not my best look. As the years have gone by it has just gotten worse; more saggy, more jowly, more droopy. I focused on the comings and goings around me.
An elderly man came in for a cut. He took the seat next to me while his daughter sat on a seat across the room and read a fashion magazine. Our eyes met in the mirror and he smiled at me. A well dressed redheaded woman in a wheelchair was brought in by a slightly younger woman. After many bisous and much ado about removing and folding coats and scarves, Madame Claudia and her assistant joined with the helper to manoeuver the woman into the chair at the sink.
Presently it was my turn at the sink. While I may not enjoy the salon experience in general, the hair washing part is at least something I find a little bit enjoyable. Evidently, it’s extra nice in Paris. Or at least in the salon of Madame Claudia! Whatever stress I had, admittedly not much since moving to Paris, immediately evaporated with the long and luxurious scalp massage. The water that circled the drain took with it all of my negative feelings, my self doubts, my wrinkles, sags, droops.
I moved back to the chair by the mirror an
d snuck a peak at the hair color. Not terrible. Of course wet it’s not possible to know what it will look like when it’s finished. But how was it that I looked better? Somehow less of those things that offended me just fifteen minutes earlier. Madame Claudia started to comb and cut. I was more optimistic by the minute.
Suddenly into the shop burst a very good looking man with a pup. “I speak perfect English!” he declared. Evidently someone had called him and asked him to come translate for me.
“A little late!” I giggled. Did I actually giggle?
He laughed and all the ladies in the shop nuzzled the pup. Madame continued to cut and with every snip I became more confident that she knew exactly what she was doing.
By the time I was blown out I was delighted with the results. Enough to take a selfie on the way home and post it on my Facebook page. Perfect color. Perfect cut. Perfect style. I think it was the first time I didn’t go home and wash my hair and restyle it myself.
The first comment on the Facebook picture was from Renard.
“My California girl!”
Girl indeed.
That night I went to bed at 8:30. It was the only place I could be warm. My glass of wine sat on my dresser, just out of arm’s reach if I dared to take my arm out from under the duvet.
A kissing emoticon pops up from Renard. I quickly pull my phone under the duvet.
“I’m freezing!” I whine. I sneak a picture of my wine glass, out of reach on the dresser and send it. “I can’t reach my wine.”
“My poor California girl.”
At least he’s sympathetic. But he doesn’t come to keep me warm.
The Spin Plate
Growing up my family always ate dinner together at the kitchen table at precisely six o’clock. The five girls had the rotating responsibility to set the table. Our dishes were mostly green with a colonial motif, dishes that we had gotten a week at a time at Safeway, with minimum purchase. One of the plates didn’t sit quite right on the table. When you tried to cut your food, the plate would spin. It was very important that whomever’s job it was to set the table that week never ever gave the spin plate to our dad.
When it was my turn, I always made sure that I gave myself the spin plate. And the fork that didn’t match. And the heel from the loaf of bread.
After a lifetime of choosing the spin plate for myself, I chose Paris. And I after a lifetime of not thinking I deserve the best, I choose to let this lovely French man, twenty years my junior, love me.
Rev 2
Another Monday night and Renard has suggested he come for dinner. He will bring take away. I will get wine and cheese.
I wonder if Monday nights will be our thing. I kind of hope not because nothing is open on Mondays! I considered surprising him with oysters. He loves oysters. But the oyster bar at Cépage is not open on Mondays. Neither is the cheese shop, the wine shop, the boucherie. Fortunately the boulangerie is open and tarte au citron becomes his surprise. As well as grocery store wine and cheese. My wine rack is distressingly empty!
He arrived with another big bouquet of flowers. Last week’s bouquet was still quite nice. My apartment was beginning to look like a florist shop! Or a funeral parlor. I opened a bottle of wine and we sat side by side on the sofa. He looked deeply into my eyes and stroked my cheek.
“I love your soul” he almost breathed the words rather than spoke them. I don’t know which I like better; when he speaks French or his mangled English with that accent. I am hypnotically regressed to my twenty something year old self…
Again, I will leave the intimate details to the reader’s imagination. Suffice it to say it was tres tres bon! But we also talked. About anything and everything. There is nothing like the special feeling of a new relationship; two people peeling back the layers of their minds, their hearts, their souls. Feeling as if nobody has ever gotten you quite like this person. Talking between kisses. Talking between touches. Talking between exploring. Not only exploring each others bodies but each other’s psyches.
I discovered two Renards; the one who spoke a pretty mangled English. And the one who spoke French. In English he giggled and joked and shared his dreams. In French he became far more serious. He smiled less. And he never giggled. Here I sit, only a year into my living in French and I find myself different in French; not clever, not funny, not interesting. I blame it all on the struggle to communicate in a language I’m not comfortable with. Maybe it’s not just that. Maybe the French are not ever funny!
I like both Renards. But I’m glad there are two.
He left and went back to his normal life; the one he had before he met me. Granted he sends texts throughout the day. He posts pictures to his Facebook page that I know are messages to me; him in a park standing in front of the statue of naked couple wrapped in each other’s arms, a wolf staring at a lighted window, looking up into the leafy bower of a tree. He told me one night that he wanted to make love to me outside, under a tree.
He left and I stayed. I stayed in my Renard cloud. I didn’t write. I didn’t read. I didn’t eat. When I had to go out because I had to shop and cook a Thanksgiving dinner for the friends I had invited, because I had to meet a friend for lunch because I had committed to bring a cheese board to Siobhan’s new house-warming party, I carried my phone with me at all times, looking for a text, wondering what he was doing, wondering when he would be coming back. He went back to living the life that I found so attractive. I forgot how to be the person he found attractive.
It didn’t help that I had deliveries arriving, four of them. Everyone I know in Paris agrees that this is something that the French still don’t do well; deliveries. Each delivery was to come on a different day. The email notification said La livraison est pour le moment prévu pour XX nov. 20XX, entre 09h et 18h. It will come on Friday between 9 am and 6 pm. The delivery person will buzz me when he arrives. If I am not home he will take the package back to the warehouse and I will be left to figure out how to get it. So I’m trapped at home waiting for my delivery. And thinking about Renard. I realize that I am at risk of losing myself. I’ve done it before. Every time I was in a new relationship before. My own personal sort of sabotage.
Monday came. A wine delivery due. And some hints from Renard that he may come on Monday night. I cleaned the apartment. I cleaned myself. I checked my texts. I listened to the most not helpful music. I leafed through my French cookbooks wondering what I could cook for Renard when it was my turn. I took a stab at writing from home. I pondered all of the reasons it didn’t make any sense for Renard to love me. The most not helpful music was not helpful but it didn’t drown out the tape playing in my head. “When will he get tired of me?” “What could he possibly see in me?” “I’m too old.” “I’m too fat.” “He only wants my money.” (Be quiet, Dad!)
Stop!
After all, he told me, “I love you exactly the way you are.” Why can’t I just believe him?
What would Ninon do?
Spring Again
Spring could not come soon enough to rue des Tournelles. It had been a brutal winter and Ninon felt it in her bones. This particular winter saw more snow than usual, cruelly alternating with some short but taunting sunny days, just sunny enough to melt the snow by early afternoon and see the slush freeze by sundown into a treacherous icy obstacle course for man and beast. Even the horses, usually accustomed to Paris winters were slipping and sliding, their carriages and human cargo skidding on the streets. All of this kept Ninon captive in her rooms where even the most robust fires in every room couldn’t seem to warm the stone walls and wooden floors.
Ninon’s maid kept coal bed warmers and hot water bottles on hand to take the chill off the bedcovers. She stayed wrapped in scarves and knitted gloves. She longed to throw open the windows and rid herself of all these layers of clothing. She craved those first bright green shoots and flowers and birdsong. She wanted to walk in the square, to breath fresh air, to
clean the cobwebs from her brain. She wanted to dance. Outside. In the sunshine.
So when the tiny green buds started to burst out Ninon felt warmed to her very soul. And it was this same day that two young men, Abbe Gedoyn and Abbe Franguire, came to Ninon’s salon. Both were escapees of the Jesuits and both were greener than the buds on the trees in the square, in their early thirties, well versed in their letters but novices in the way of the world, particularly in affairs of the heart.
Ninon had quietly celebrated her seventy-eighth birthday that winter. It was not lost on her how many friends and lovers had passed and while she still enjoyed undeniable beauty, perhaps at the behest of Le Noctambule some six decades before, and the same youthful heart and spirit she had when she was a twelve year old girl, on occasion her joints sang to her. Even the careful and diligent ministrations to which Ninon had prescribed all of her life did not stop the random aches and pains that the bitter cold brought on.
The young ex-Abbés entered the Grand Salon with an odd combination of cockiness and shyness, as if they thought themselves the smartest men in the room, but in their heart of hearts were aware of their inexperience in a world outside of the Church. When they spied Ninon talking with her friend, Marguerite, formally known as Madame de la Salière, all the cockiness melted away and they were profoundly impacted by this strange new world.
“Messieurs,” Ninon greeted the two warmly. “Bienvenue en notre petit salon.” Madame de la Salière stood at her elbow, taking measure of the newcomers.
If life outside of the Abbey had interfered with the gentlemen’s equilibrium, coming face to face with Ninon and Marguerite quite knocked them off their feet. They stood gaping at the two totally at a loss for words.
“Vous avez donné vos langues au chat?” coaxed Madame de la Salière, not unkindly. “Has the cat got your tongues?”
“May I offer you a small beverage?” inserted Ninon, giving the gentlemen a chance to regain their composure. “Perhaps some sherry? Or if you would prefer a cognac?”
Ninon and Me at the Grand Comptoir Page 31