one
They say I have no accent and that this is a gift. Sometimes, people can detect a lilt in my voice, which makes them wonder which rural part of France I come from, or maybe which Scandinavian country. But no one can hear that I’m American. And yet, because I am not French, I show almost no signs of belonging to any group or class. In Paris, I am virtually transparent. A gift, perhaps. Un don, so to speak, voilà. But, when you feel invisible, there is no end to the trouble you can get into.
My trouble began in 1989, on a wet September morning at Charles de Gaulle Airport, when I decided to splurge on a taxi into town. The worn smells of leather and tobacco were deeply reassuring, the precise blend of odors I craved at the edge of the unknown.
But I probably shouldn’t have taken that taxi. Mom claimed that you had a much higher chance of dying on the way to or from the airport than you did on the plane. However, you had more say about how you traveled on the ground. You could go by car, bus or subway. You could slow down, look both ways, watch your back. On the ground, you could take responsibility. In the air, worry was nothing but a production.
I had just graduated from college, and was trying to ignore most of what Mom said, but I was secretly proud of her, pretending to be as callous as she would have been to any signs of fear in myself as my plane flew to Paris.
The driver asked me where I was returning from. Where had I been on my vacances?
I told him I hadn’t been on vacation anywhere. I had been a waitress in New Haven all summer. That was a town on the East Coast, near New York.
Ah, New York!
But I was returning to Paris for the first time in ten years. Though I wasn’t French, my grandfather was, and I lived here once, for two years, with cousins, in the Nineteenth Arrondissement.
He laughed. Today, he wasn’t driving me to the Nineteenth but to the Sixth. A much more chic quartier. More central. Mademoiselle was moving up in the world!
We glided through the industrial ring around the city. We had just permeated its first layer when the taxi was rear-ended at a stoplight. There was a shock, a screech, swearing.
I felt so vindicated for Mom that I was strangely overjoyed by this accident, proof-positive of her theories of relative danger. I sidelined the fact that she would have told me to take the Métro because it was cheaper, and safer. I had wanted a driver to be my own personal shepherd into my new life.
This was my moment in the sun. So what if it was drizzling? Experience was going to transform all.
The driver punched the steering wheel—“Merde!”—as I flew into his headrest.
“Ça va?” he asked, rubbing his own forehead. “Are you hurt?”
No, no, I was not hurt, and I would wait uncomplainingly on the sidewalk of this outer arrondissement for him to exchange the necessary information with the woman who had hit us.
We were by a news kiosk. I had forgotten that the news kiosks here were green and suppository-shaped, that the newsprint was denser than ours, that there were Chupa Chups lollipops and Hollywood gum for sale, a magazine called Figaro Madame, headlines about a pop star named Johnny Hallyday, erotic ads for coffee and chocolate, small posters for chamber music concerts in Ste-Chapelle, dog shit. It was all coming back.
Looking hard at the familiar candies and magazine covers, I saw their colors and meanings bleed into lines and shapes. I pulled a sketchbook and pencil from my bag, keeping half an ear to the words between my driver and the offending woman. He wrote down her details. She lit a cigarette.
Because I sensed the conversation wrapping up, I did not put pencil to paper. There was too much to draw in a few moments, and I hated resorting to quick symbols and tricks. I was uncannily good at reproducing what I saw, but only in the fulness of time. If I couldn’t do it right, I would rather simply stare. I slipped my sketchbook away.
The drizzle was lightening into the gray gauze I recalled well but hadn’t thought of in years.
In Germany, the Berlin Wall was about to come down. A photo on the front page of Le Monde showed a rock band playing a concert in front of big bright graffiti on the West Berlin side. I looked into the crowd that filled out the Le Monde photo. People were dancing ecstatically, sensing the coming demolition, except for the photographers, who were still, their flashes going off.
I scanned the photo for my new boss, Lydia Schell, the woman I had come here to work for. She was a photographer, a famous one. Mom had not heard of her, but once I was able to prove her credentials, Mom was impressed that I would have the opportunity to be the Paris impresario to someone with such a name. “Impresario” was Mom’s term. When I had interviewed with her in her Manhattan town house a few weeks ago, Lydia had called me her assistant.
Now she was in Germany capturing the momentous happenings. There was a chance, wasn’t there, that she was in that crowd, peeking through her lens at me in welcome?
“You made it,” she would say, if only I could spot her. “Bien-venue!”
two
My dented taxi stopped on a beautiful street that flowed toward the Luxembourg Gardens, stonework giving way to rich green. This was a new angle on Paris for me. Le Sixième. Even the cigarette smoke was elegant here, twirling above well-groomed bodies in a velvet calligraphy quite foreign to the noxious haze of my youthful memory. There was no confusing this cigarette smoke with car exhaust just as there was no confusing the clatter of high heels on this pavement with the street sounds outside my cousins’ subsidized building. What had those sounds been again? I couldn’t remember. They were muffled now by the luxurious revving of a Citroën’s engine, by the calm rustle of nearby leaves, by the voluptuous exhale of an impossibly petite woman in two-toned heels, which even I knew were Chanel, her shoulder pads broad enough to soften any blow.
The taxi was gone. I was outside No. 60 with my suitcase, forgetting the exorbitant fare as I looked down my new street, repeating the building code, 67FS, which I would have to punch in order to open the door to the interior courtyard, “a hidden gem,” according to Lydia, “although my husband Clarence likes to complain that it’s dark and depressing.” As I was preparing to punch the keys that would work this magical door, it opened by itself.
“Ah, c’est mademoiselle Katherine?”
“Madame Fidelio, je vous reconnais de votre photo!” It was true. I recognized her overhanging brow from a photograph of Lydia’s. Her plumpness did nothing to soften her sculptural face. I knew that skull, those imposing eyebrows. She was an intimate, the Portuguese concierge who also helped with Lydia’s housework. “C’est vous, non?”
“Oui, c’est moi. Enchantée, Mademoiselle.” She gave a short laugh, overshadowed and outlasted by the suspicion in her eyes. Was I going to be a slut like so many of Madame’s other assistants? Was that what she was looking to know from my brown ponytail, pale pink lip gloss, jeans, leg warmers, t-shirt frayed and ripped to reveal one shoulder?
I wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about. I was a serious young woman who could not afford to be careless. I needed this job. I still wasn’t quite sure what it entailed, but whatever Lydia’s “little bit of everything” was, it would become my mission because Lydia was my first step into a real future. I had no intention of being a disaster, of dragging strange men up to my maid’s room or coming to work hungover. This wasn’t throwaway time for me like it had been for the other, more privileged girls. This time was real, Madame Fidelio.
“You