The Thong Also Rises (12 page)

But was it a charm?

T
HIS WOULD BE MY THIRD TRIP TO
P
ARIS.
T
HE FIRST
time, my father escorted me on a trip organized by my eighth-grade French teacher. We stayed in a two-star hotel near the Gare du Nord. Every night, we ate omelettes,
frites
, and
mousse au chocolat
in noisy bistros, where the regulars discredited the myth of Parisian hauteur by engaging us in as much friendly conversation as our Midwestern-accented, academic French—mine current, Daddy's creaking with decades of rust—permitted. I had been given some early birthday presents to use on the trip: a straw purse, a high-collared trench coat that I considered far more feminine than the classic Burberry model, and some wood-soled sandals that attached via cream-colored, canvas ankle straps the width of fettuccine. I was, in a word, gorgeous: an eighth-grade woman of mystery in thick bangs cut to emulate
Mork and Mindy
's Pam Dawber. The shop windows were bright with jonquils and chocolate molded into lambs, rabbits, and chickens. Unfortunately, the weather did not share
the merchants' sunny Easter vision, treating me to my first taste of travelers' bane, the cold rain that pisses down from a pewter-colored sky for days on end. Freezing in my insubstantial off-brand trench coat, I clip-clopped from Notre Dame to Sacré Cœur, nearly breaking my tightly strapped ankles whenever my wooden soles hydroplaned on the wet cobblestones. I had a wonderful time, despite bunking with two ninth-graders who awarded themselves the choicest bathroom mirror time and both twin beds. I wheeled my rollaway cot next to our French (!) windows, dreaming of a not-too-distant future when I would return to this most romantic of cities with a handsome, artistically inclined man, temporarily played by whatever unsuspecting eighth-grade boy I felt like tapping for the fantasy. On my fourteenth birthday, the ninth-graders and I dressed up like French hookers and photographed each other posed seductively on my cot with Monsieur J. J., a worldly ten-year-old whose wealthy parents had sent him on the school-sponsored trip sans chaperone.

As I had predicted, the next time I saw Paris, I was in the company of a handsome, artistically inclined man, but, as shoestring travelers with only public facilities at our disposal, Nate and I were rank as goats. No doubt Paris has suffered its share of stenchy lovers. Napoleon and Joséphine come to mind. Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis had access to modern plumbing, but I'll bet they reeked of the bars in which they frisked. But with our constant stink further augmented by our poor diet, financial anxiety, and sleep deprivation, my libido didn't stand a chance of measuring up to the eighth-grade ideal.

This trip to Paris was different. Our digs in an old hotel off the Rue de Rivoli were fairly plush, food was plentiful,
and this time I was wildly in love, flush with an infatuation as delicious and short-lived as the lone bead of nectar squeezed from a honeysuckle blossom. Unfortunately for my mother, she, not my lover, was my traveling companion. As soon as the Star gave her the green light, Mom invited me along, envisioning a fun mother-daughter escapade. We would arrive a week before Fashion Week, rent a car, and tour Normandy and the Loire Valley. At Giverny, we would picnic within spitting distance of Monet's infernal water lilies. Having glutted ourselves on the picturesque, we would roll into Paris, where we had a vague notion that I might tag along as a sort of barely fluent translator as Mom covered the collections.

Poor Mom. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and wake up in the cramped candlelit bedroom of the apartment my new boyfriend Wylie shared with two other architecture majors from the Illinois Institute of Technology. If Satan had materialized on the wrought-iron balcony, I would have swapped my mother and my soul for Wylie in a nanosecond. Mom knew it, but tried to keep a brave face. Just before we rendezvoused with our rental car, we were loading butter and marmalade onto uninspired croissants in our Paris hotel's basement breakfast room. A young couple seated themselves at the next table. The woman was pretty and blond, and the man, a tall Asian guy with a long ponytail hanging down his back, looked just like Wylie. I thought I would swoon. If only I could squat beside his chair, lay my palm on his back, and feel him breathing through the thin cotton of his shirt.That was all I wanted, just a crumb, a little morsel to tide me over for the next twelve days, the hundreds of hours I would be spending with my mother instead of Wylie. We watched the couple intently over the rims of our giant coffee bowls. Their voices were pitched too low
for us to hear, but they held hands and smiled at each other frequently from inside their happy love bubble. “I'll bet you miss Wylie,” Mom ventured, giggling uncertainly. Only 288 hours to go, I thought, not counting the return flight. I tore my eyes away from our neighbors, grunting an affirmative to my mother's question as I nonchalantly shook a Gauloise out of my pack. If I couldn't be with my lover, at least I could pretend to be French.

Under the cover of jet lag, I caught up on the many hours of sleep I had foregone since taking up with Wylie six weeks earlier. The humming of the rental car's wheels lulled me into unconsciousness, even as Mom freaked out from the pressure of confusing rotary exits and mileage signs posted in a language she didn't understand. These afternoon naps also served to transport me temporarily from the frenzied itching of a sudden-onset yeast infection, which, if nothing else, was expertly timed, given my transcontinental divide. Yeah, I was a real dud in the company department. Instead of lavishing me with admission to museums and gardens, and treating me to three provincial squares a day, my mother should have invited one of her friends, like Diney, her standing date for the Indiana Repertory Theater, or Ellen, a free spirit who painted watercolors of cows and Labrador retrievers. Either of those ladies would have been a livelier choice than I was, pining for Wylie's clove cigarettes and the red curtain he kept drawn across his bedroom window at all times.

Mealtimes were the hardest. In the car, I could sleep or twitch in my seat, trying to subdue the pernicious demons of my infection. Tourist attractions offered partial distraction from my Wylie-less state with their informational plaques, often helpfully translated into English. I learned quite a bit about the landing at Omaha Beach, the Bayeux Tapestry, Monet's love of Japanese woodcuts, and the monk-designed
formal vegetable garden at the Château de Villandry. Sometimes I got pissy, like when Mom whispered to watch my bag as we passed through a street market en route to the famous cathedral in Chartres. When one is suffering from the pangs of lovesickness, the pragmatic comments of a mother cannot go unpunished. Only lovers think that they are immune from harm, that the whole world, even the tiniest forest creatures and most hardened criminals, wishes them well.

If I couldn't have Wylie, I longed for something to take my mind off him. As it was, I was afraid Mom and I were on the verge of turning into one of those long-married and almost universally feared elderly couples who dine silently in restaurants. After so long an acquaintance, what could we possibly say to each other over roast chicken and
vin ordinaire?
It didn't occur to me to ask Mom the same questions I had posed to Wylie in the breathless recent past, or that she, too, had plenty of anecdotes relating to a time before our paths crossed.

Back at our Right Bank hotel, we found our box overflowing with invitations to the designers' shows. My mother let me play with the stack, much as she used to let me do with the bridal announcements when I was nine years old, accompanying her to the Star on school vacations. My “job” was to stuff the posed studio portraits that had run with the Sunday bridal announcements into self-addressed stamped envelopes the young ladies had provided when submitting their nuptial information. (I don't want to alarm any soon-to-be-marrieds, but the staff had a long-running dog-of-the-week contest, which was both cruel and almost always easy to call.) In this spirit, I pawed through the designers' invitations, ridiculing the unestablished talents' attempts to
lure the press with announcements printed on t-shirts, candy bars, and oversized, brightly colored cards that the hotel maid must have hated, since they leaked metallic confetti everywhere. My mother wasn't interested in these ploys. She raked through the pile, plucking out envelopes from the real players. Not every journalist who ventures to Paris makes the cut for the hottest shows' guest lists, so every big name came as a relief. “Oh, good, here's Ralphie,” she said, pushing her red glasses higher on the bridge of her nose. (To the best of my knowledge, my mother's relationship with Ralphie does not extend beyond the labels in her denim shirtwaists and her approving opinions expressed in the
Indianapolis Star.
But there's an insider-speak that goes with the territory, and my mother is fluent in it.)

The invitations were for my mother only, but she had promised to try to secure a seat for me at a few shows, so I could check out the gibbering photographers screaming the top models' names in hopes of eye contact, the celebs seated ringside and the outlandish wedding gowns that are the grand finale of each designer's spring collection. “Oh, here's one at the Ritz,” she mused, picking up a large square card edged in lipstick pink. “‘The Paris Lip.' I have no idea who that is. Oh, look, it says Lauren Bacall is going to make some sort of presentation. I'll see if I can get you into that.”

When I checked for mail, as I did several times a day, I wasn't hoping for late-arriving invitations. Every day thus far, I had sent at least one postcard to Wylie, covering it in tiny writing and kisses before slipping it into a yellow France Poste box. I calculated that mail between Paris and Chicago should have taken approximately a week. I grew increasingly despondent as each inquiry met with a courteous “Non, mademoiselle.” My mother discreetly pretended not to notice. Why wasn't he writing? If he had written me the day I
left, I would have had that letter upon our return from Normandy.

Our second night back in Paris, we woke to the unmistakable sound of enthusiastic, extended copulation. The acoustics of the airshaft were such that our neighbors' every gasp and groan reverberated with crystal clarity. We lay rigid in our beds, my mother and I, unable to ignore what was happening so bright, early, and close at hand. Wishing with all my might that the lovers would achieve a speedy, muffled climax, I couldn't help observing that at least someone was getting her money's worth out of a Paris hotel room. No doubt she was on her knees in an expertly hand-laundered garter belt and heels, expensively moisturized and maquillaged. She vocalized without inhibition, as people do when their mothers aren't within earshot. I wondered if she was a pro. “Sounds like a chicken,” Mom observed grimly, staring at the ceiling.

Ayun Halliday is the sole staff member of the quarterly zine
, The East Village Inky
and the author of
Job Hopper, No Touch Monkey!,
and
The Big Rumpus: A Mother's Tale from the Trenches.
She is
BUST
magazine's Mother Superior columnist and has contributed to NPR
, Hipmama, Bitch, Penthouse,
and more anthologies than you can shake a stick at without dangling a participle. Ayun lives in Brooklyn where she's allegedly “hard at work” on
Dirty Sugar Cookies,
a food memoir. Dare to be heinie and visit
www.ayunhalliday.com

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O WHAT
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