Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands Read Free Book Online Page A

where the city’s grandest dames would deposit the Chanel suits, Hermès scarves, and Lacroix party dresses they had abandoned after a season. This shopping strategy was not without its risks: I lived in fear that at one of the
fêtes mondaines
I attended on François’s arm, a glamorous female guest would recognize my ensemble and cry: “
Mais tenez
! That looks
exactly
like the dress I just gave the maid to sell at Réciproque! In fact, I think it
is
the dress!” But luckily, this never came to pass, and François himself never seemed to wonder how my label of choice had come to change, almost overnight, from J. Crew to Chanel.
    In retrospect, though, I’m reasonably sure that Françoisnever even noticed; for as long as I was projecting back to him the image he expected to see, he didn’t look too closely at me at all. Only when I deviated from the codes that, through him, I had learned to try to follow did he appear to recall that I was not what I was trying to be. In these moments, François did not treat me with kindness: he would viciously attack my “vulgarity,” for instance, when I used such colloquialisms as “appart,” “par contre,” “mince alors!” and “bisous.” (The first, in case you’re wondering, should be replaced with the unabbreviated “appartement”; the second, with “en revanche”; and the third, a mild swear word, with “flûte alors!” The fourth, a common sign-off in both speech and writing, should never be used at all.)
    At the time, I tried to excuse his behavior by comparing myself to the American newcomer to French high society whom Proust introduces in
Le temps retrouvé
: “Dinner parties and
fêtes mondaines
were, for the American girl, a sort of Berlitz language school. She heard [words] and repeated them without always knowing their value, their exact significance.” But the comfort I found here was cold at best. Having embarked upon a mission to be loved, I realized from François’s unalloyed disgust that whomever he had loved all along had not, in fact, been me.
    As it turned out, the same held true for my other French boyfriends. Pierre-Yves never got over the fact that I hadn’t, as I felt compelled to admit some months into our relationship, demonstrated against Operation Desert Storm back in the States. Étienne was shocked that
I
was shocked to learn—again, some months into our relationship—that he had a wife who lived in Brittany but visited him every other weekend inthe Marais. Looking back at my calendar, I saw that those visits corresponded with Étienne’s and my Saturday afternoon assignations in the Hôtel de Crillon: rendezvous that I had taken to be wildly sexy deviations from our usual stay-at-home routine, but that my lover had arranged for much tawdrier reasons. (Predictably enough, Étienne countered my chagrin with a philosophical argument: “But why does this bother you,
mon coeur
? Does Sade not remind us that Nature, which alone issues the laws that men are compelled to follow, abhors marriage and indeed all monogamy for the limits they place on Her transcendental
will to pleasure
?”) Still another boyfriend, Charles, too often referred to me as an impersonal
quelqu’un
, as in, “It’s nice to hold somebody in my arms like this,” or in a raunchier vein, “I like it when somebody gives me a blow job.” In both cases, it was clear that my place in his life was purely structural and could be filled by any old
quelqu’un
who came along.
    When I was honest with myself, these incidents were more than demoralizing: they were devastating and left a permanent knot in the pit of my stomach. As a result, I more or less stopped eating, a development that all my lovers welcomed because it gave me the wiry, emaciated look of the archetypal
parisienne
. But of course, I wasn’t a
parisienne
, archetypal or otherwise. Yet I had sought to win and retain my lovers’ desire on that entirely fictitious basis: I had molded myself, time and