Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

My grade’s dean in high school was also a French teacher, and he took an interest in me, reading aloud from my papers during class, gifting me with books that were not on the syllabus. During the first months of my senior year, girls whom I recall (impossibly) wearing nothing but khaki pants and pastel sweaters, jumped up and down in the hallways, hugging each other and shrieking, “I got in! I got in!” Mr. Samuels invited me to his office to talk about my college plans. I had nearly perfect scores on my SATs. I had straight As. I’d sent away for applications from schools I’d heard of — Yale, Stanford, UPenn, New York University, Haverford. I completed the applications quickly, carelessly, alone: a silly word game. One by one, I received envelopes stuffed with one sheet of paper regretting to inform me. Haverford put me on their waiting list, but I’d decided by then that the very idea of college was morally reprehensible. I was going to live in Paris. I’d googled “boardinghouse Bastille,” since that was the only neighborhood I knew, and found a place where I could have my own room and take my meals. My father would support me until I “figured things out.” He was proud of me for doing what I wanted to do instead of what everyone else was doing. When I told my mother the plan over the phone, she said, “Have you ever actually met a French person? They’re the worst.” But she didn’t try to dissuade me. She was busy with her new family by then.

When I explained my plan to Mr. Samuels, he came out from behind his desk and took the armchair next to mine. He was short and handsome. There were two photos on his desk in thin silver frames, one of Mr. Samuels and his wife hiking through fiery foliage, another of his wife in a hospital gown, beaming at the newborn in her arms. I imagined Mr. Samuels greeting his family when he got off work — giving his wife a long, close-mouthed kiss, opening his arms wide so his daughter could run into his embrace — while he talked about my potential and options and the faulty bureaucracy of college admissions offices. “I would be more than happy to write to Haverford on your behalf,” he said. “I have a friend in the French department there.” Did Mr. Samuels have many lovers before his wife, or was she his first? He was so small and pretty and good-natured that it was impossible to imagine his desire existing outside the careful circle of home. Was he grateful for his wife’s presence every day — her mothering, her knowledge of his tastes, the constant accessibility of her body? Or did this accessibility disgust him in a way he couldn’t acknowledge even to himself? “I think it’s a blessing in disguise,” he was saying, “that you didn’t get into any of the Ivies. I can really see you at Haverford.”

His office was too warm. I pressed my arms against my sides to hide the sweat marking my sweater. I had thought it through, I told Mr. Samuels. Now was the perfect time to travel. I could reapply to college next year. My voice grew loud. I would go to Paris and learn a skill and a way of life with ancient, eternal roots, not sit around trying to say smart things about Hegel to a roomful of students trying to say smart things about Hegel. As I was about to leave his office, Mr. Samuels said, “You should probably go ahead and get yourself a good French dictionary. Larousse is the best. Start using it now when you read instead of your French-English one. That’s one of the best ways to really know a language.” He gave me a quick, close-mouthed smile.

—

I got to Paris in December. A constant cold drizzle fell on the sea of fitted black peacoats that clothed the city’s stern residents. The room I was renting turned out to be the maid’s quarters in the attic of a boardinghouse run by the only fat woman with a mullet I saw the whole time I was in France. I never found out whether her appearance had made her bitter or if bitterness had destroyed her appearance. The room was just big enough for a twin bed and a plywood board sitting upon four sticks. The only window was a small skylight. Anytime I thought I saw a ray of light, I would climb on the desk and squeeze my shoulders through the hole in the skylight, moving my face around and hoping for the feeling of warmth to fall on it.

A few weeks after I moved in, the mildly retarded Spanish housekeeper threw away my dirty clothes because she thought they were trash. I never mentioned the incident to the boardinghouse owner and I did not replace my socks and underwear until I returned to the States. I started wearing my remaining underwear right side out one day, wrong side out the next. I couldn’t face the stylish department store clerks sneering at my pronunciation — or, far worse, responding in English — when I asked where to find the sous-vêtements .

For the first time, my love of Baudelaire and Maupassant was made to coexist with mundane communication, and I watched, helpless, as the words that had buoyed my private self rejected me in public. I could never have imagined how terrible it would feel to be unable to communicate in a language I thought I knew. When I couldn’t conjure a word or tripped over my pronunciation so that a waiter or salesclerk responded in English, I was overcome by my own worthlessness; the entire world was wearied by my presence. Waiters left my table and never returned when I insisted, with the dreadful aggressiveness that tries to mask despair, on speaking my poorly accented French instead of resorting to the English culinary phrases they had mastered. Bouncers turned me away from clubs because I didn’t have the right clothes. The U.S. started bombing Iraq and eating freedom fries with their hamburgers, and the métro was filled with anti-American graffiti that pained me all the more because I agreed with it. A man on the street grabbed my breast, then spit in my face when I gave him the finger. I ran into him again a few days later, his arm around a pretty girl’s waist.

I had repeated nightmares that a naked, drooling, elfish, old man was chasing me through the boardinghouse with a knife and fork. I would make it into my bedroom and frantically shimmy up through the skylight. When I was halfway free, the cannibal caught up to me and grabbed my waist. I always woke up as he was dragging me back into my attic room, where I would be eaten alive.

The longest sustained conversation I had that year was with a lanky video-store clerk whom I met one night while drinking alone at a touristy bar in the Bastille. He asked where I was from, said he’d been to Boston once, stuck his fingers down my pants as I stood at the bar, ordering my fourth drink. The bartender poured my beer with a half smile, aware of the connection between the man pressed against my ass and the involuntary widening of my eyes. I was the slutty American girl they expected me to be. The man guided me outside and asked where I lived. It was all right to go home with him because I was drunk enough that French was easy; I’d finally be able to practice speaking. On the ride to my boardinghouse, he stared at my chest and ran his pulpy hands up and down my legs. I had no desire to have sex with him, but that didn’t seem to matter particularly. There was nothing I could do with another person that would be worse than what I was doing all by myself. I clenched my jaw and blinked at the taxi’s rain-streaked window. Soon afterward I was tiptoeing to my shared bathroom to wash semen off my back.

I found Fifi at a used bookstall along the Seine a few days later — long, lovely sentences written in a lovely foreign language, and I consumed all eight-hundred pages of them in three days without consulting a dictionary. Fifi was a monologue of unrequited love for cats, narrated by a forty-year-old bachelor who strolls the Parisian streets seeking out and caring for strays. The narrator’s attentiveness to the vagaries of his obsession is tedious, but I found the tediousness moving. The narrator has nothing to cleave to but his feelings for small creatures who flit in and out of his life, concerned with the narrator only insofar as he furthers their survival, offering no hope of mutual understanding. It is not the cats but his feelings for them that are the narrator’s only companions.