I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, page 3
But now, standing here in the doorway of this unchanged space—which, were it to appear on a rental app, could reasonably be described as a quaint, classic, Parisian flat—what the identical backdrop suddenly allows me to see are past versions of myself at that table. The me who arrived here with a book deal five years ago, terrified of the task before me. The one who came in the aftermath of my mother’s death. The paradox of all time-travel stories: What happens to us if, when we leave our own timeline, we slam into another version of ourselves? Does the universe implode? Is history irrevocably altered? But lately when I encounter past versions of myself, all I feel is sympathy and admiration. Good job, kid, I want to say. You did your best. Keep going.
I pull back the dark drapes and swing the tall windows all the way out. The smells from the street slide into the apartment. Onions. Garlic. Butter. A preview of French lunches being prepped. There is no breakfast in Paris. You can find a few brunches if you want, but the breakfast hour, the diner, the 6:00 a.m. coffee cart that launches New York into its day, does not really exist here. From past experience, I know that by the time it’s time for me to fly home, this will be the thing I crave most. An 8:00 a.m. omelet with greasy hash browns. An egg sandwich from the deli. A large bodega coffee, sweet and white.
From my vantage at the open window, I can hear the thump of music. There are no air conditioners here. In the summer months you live with the noise of your own life and the lives of everyone else—sneezes, sex, cigarettes, phone calls, yelling. “In Paris we fight and fuck together,” my friend Nina likes to say.
Standing at the window, it’s hard for me to tell if the music is coming from the corner or from below. The sound bounces off the buildings and down the narrow streets, making it difficult to trace. In another week these places will shutter up for the remainder of the month. En Vacances. I wonder if empty Paris will have the same mesmerizing effect it’s had in the past after so much emptiness. If the sense of being granted a rare gift, the illusion of ownership, will persist.
The bells of the church begin to ring. I count them. It’s 9:00 a.m. The first Monday of August. I am in Paris.
THREE
Prized Control, Yearned After Momentum
I’m overcome with a sense of wonder. If I had to turn around right now and go home, I would still be satisfied with this brief excursion. I came, I saw, I touched. It’s still here.
But I don’t have to leave.
Instead, I drag the monstrosity containing all the me’s into the bedroom and throw it open.
Now that I can take in its contents, my suitcase strikes me as extremely reasonable.
I’ve brought five vintage caftans; two dresses; two jumpsuits, one of which is vintage; six T-shirts; three tank tops; four blouses; three pairs of pants; three black leggings; two pairs of jeans; two long-sleeved shirts; one sweater; a vintage Issey Miyake wind coat in camel; a proper raincoat in leopard that I bought at Merci two years ago when I got caught in a rainstorm; a black blazer from H&M that is the exact one Natasha Lyonne wears in Russian Doll; two silk scarves; one cashmere scarf; my running clothes; three swimsuits, one the closest approximation I could find to the one Romy Schneider wears in La Piscine, which I’d seen six times at Film Forum before leaving New York. In the insert are fifteen pairs of underwear, unnecessary as there is a washing machine in the apartment; five pairs of socks; my yoga shorts and tank top; and a trucker cap in camouflage with the word JAWS written in silver lettering across it.
In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote down her packing list, radical at the time—Tampax!—and revealing in its intimacy and simplicity. As a storytelling device, it was admirable in what it told the reader about the writer, about her life, and about what it meant to be a woman in the world, without seeming to say much.
Didion wrote the list in 1979, but it has gained new life in the last ten years, surpassing, at times, the popularity of her “Goodbye to All That” essay about leaving New York, which has seemingly been redone by every writer leaving the city ever since. Less mentioned is the fact she returned twenty-five years later and made it her permanent home. (Does any other city require a defense of departure? Did people feel the need to declare why they were leaving Paris? Was it that New York was an identity and other cities were just places to live, or does New York simply attract a higher concentration of narcissists?)
Didion’s packing list, however, is perfectly suited to our social media times, which strives to reduce all life to small performances of intimacy. And at the same time add credence to the daily activities of women. There is a similar vibe in Nora Ephron’s essay “On Maintenance,” from the collection I Feel Bad About My Neck. In it, Ephron writes at length about upkeep: “There’s a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye.” Between Ephron and Didion (who were apparently friends for half a century—I would have liked an invite to that dinner party), an entire corner of the internet finds its source. Whenever someone needs a reliable traffic generator for their website or follow count, they can turn to Didion’s list and lean on her “bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil.” So easy. So succinct! So serious. So worthy. It gives gravitas to minutiae. So much of women’s lives are considered minutiae, the appeal in this sense is understandable.
But if you go back and read the full essay, it goes beyond the list. Didion spends the following three hundred–odd words or so telling the reader what to notice. “Notice the deliberate anonymity,” she says. “Notice the mohair throw…for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off…. Notice the typewriter for the airport.” She wanted the reader to understand that that this was a list “made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum,…determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative.”
Needless to say, judging by the explosion of clothes I have just sorted, I have none of these things. No script. No role.
Before we’d all been sent inside, I’d been in rooms with professionals, all women, who were extremely excited by the idea of adapting a memoir I’d written about turning forty, without children or a partner, for the screen. They’d read it and seen themselves in it—sometimes for the first time—and were thrilled. At times, a note of possessiveness crept in. As if I’d nailed the details so correctly, it felt as if I were telling their story. Which I came to realize was just one of the dangers of having so few stories about women outside the narrow ones our culture celebrates about marriage and motherhood—the perverse comfort it can bring by allowing you to think you are unique. When in fact, the uniqueness, if it can be called that, was simply in the telling, not the living. (And so much of the ability to tell was a function of where I lived, and who I knew, and, to paraphrase another internet favorite, the dresses I wore and where I went and what I did in them.)
The trick to getting this all on the screen was figuring out what the narrative was. “What is the problem she is trying to solve?” I was asked over and over. “What is the story?” “The narrative,” I would say, “is that there is no narrative.” “The story,” I would say, “is figuring out how to live when there was no role you could determine to play, or script to follow, or cues to hear.” You are all the dresses, and none.
This was an insurmountable problem in the end. At least for me. It’s possible a better, more seasoned television writer could have sorted it out. But I was left with the impression that the only female problems we understood women to have, and subsequently know how to solve, were love and children. Repeat. No one could figure out how to put another problem on the screen, because what other problem could there really be? What exactly was our heroine supposed to be working toward? Eve Babitz wrote that women are not prepared to have everything, “not when the ‘everything’ isn’t about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there’s at least a precedent).”
We tried lots of different ideas: The inciting incident was that our heroine lost her job, but then what? She got another one? So what. The inciting incident was that her boyfriend broke up with her and she had to figure out how to live alone. But then what? The inciting incident was that her rent was doubled, but then she moved in with her oldest friend in New York and her family (this is a true story), but then what? In a moment of true desperation, we tried to make her a worker in an Amazon depot in the middle of the country. But then what? How were we supposed to know she was okay. That she was successful.
After the book came out, I would hear from some readers who wanted to know if I thought I was the first woman who had not been married or not had children. Which, lol (the only appropriate answer to that question is, truly, lol). They all seemed to have a happy aunt in the attic they wanted me to know about. Point me to the movie, the book, the show that depicts this, I wanted to say (but didn’t; at the very least, years on the internet had taught me the art of the nonresponse). The only example I could think of (and possibly because of this, the one I refer to in so much of what I write) was the film An Unmarried Woman, starring Jill Clayburgh. In it, Clayburgh, who was thirty-three years old during filming, plays an—I think we are supposed to understand her as middle-aged—educated, presumably happily married woman who has a teenage daughter (sixteen or seventeen) and lives on a high floor in the East Sixties, with an extraordinary view of Second Avenue stretching all the way downtown. During the day she works at an art gallery on West Broadway in pre–Dean & DeLuca SoHo. One day her husband meets her for lunch and tells her he’s fallen in love and is leaving her for a younger woman. The rest of the film is about her falling apart and then putting her life back together. Including a passionate love affair with a bearded, tempestuous artist. When her husband comes begging for her back, she turns him away. She also spurns the artist’s offer for her to come live with him upstate. Instead, she decamps, by herself (her daughter is off to college), to a Brooklyn brownstone with a bay window and a backyard (I think—this movie is not available to stream anywhere so I must go off memory). The final shot is of her weaving her way up West Broadway trying to navigate her way while holding a huge painting given to her by her artist lover. It looks like a great sail on a ship she barely has control over as she sets out on her unmarried woman odyssey. Tell me the story of a complicated woman.
After some extensive lockdown googling, I sourced the painter—Paul Jenkins—and the title of the actual painting—Phenomena Rain Palace—and then found a copy of it online. It sits framed in my apartment directly across from the original theater card for An Unmarried Woman that I subsequently tracked down on eBay, which depicts Clayburgh leaping about in her underwear. I slid this card over an original poster for Lolita given to me by a friend who left New York for Los Angeles years ago and couldn’t manage the heavy gilt frame in her luggage.
In the end there was no TV show. It’s easier to write divorce and widowhood it turns out. Only young women, with plenty of runway ahead to come to their senses, get to have messy challenges.
I close the suitcase and look around, still amazed it was all so heavy. Unpacked, it really doesn’t look like that much, let alone too much. It certainly doesn’t look like the weight of another body. It looks like the closet of a person with a full life. “Dress for the life you want” is a quote I also attribute to Diana Vreeland, though it sounds too basic for D.V. and is likely just something I read on Instagram. To me, all these now unpacked items simply say that I am ready for anything. To be anyone. How this will be accomplished is less clear to me. I’ve only thought as far ahead as getting here.
Finally, I unpack the books from the reusable shopping bag I’ve wrapped them in. I’ve brought Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror with me, her history of the bubonic plague, known as the Black Death, with the intention of getting a sense of what we might expect in the coming years. In the opening pages she states she has not chosen a woman through which to tell the story because “any medieval woman whose life was adequately documented would be atypical.” (The choice “is thus narrowed to a male member of the Second Estate.”) I put it on the small metal desk that sits beside the bed, along with a copy of Save the Cat!, a popular guide on how to write a novel. The author posits that there are fifteen plot points or “beats” every successful story follows, such as the “Inciting Incident,” the “Midpoint,” or “All Is Lost.” The author also argues that every book ever written fits into ten genres.
Which am I, right now, I wonder. Am I currently engaged in a “Rite of Passage”? (“A hero must endure pain and torment brought about by life’s common challenges.”) A “Fool Triumphant”? (“An underestimated, underdog hero is pitted against some kind of ‘establishment.’ ”) Maybe I’m in search of the “Golden Fleece.” (“A hero [or group] goes on a ‘road trip’ of some type [even if there’s no actual road] in search of one thing.”) What if I’m experiencing all these genres simultaneously? What if the story I’m in is about living without a recognizable story? Are there beats for that?
My only challenge right now is exhaustion. Fortunately, the solution is directly in front of me: the bed. I’ve solved my first problem, overcome my inciting incident: I’ve arrived. I can be horizontal again.
The truth is, I should stay up. I should ride out the day and get on a Paris schedule. I should not risk the insomnia that will take hold if I’m careless with my jet lag. Instead, I plunge into sleep. The kind you only get as an adult when you are jet-lagged. When I wake it’s 5:00 p.m. The music outside has disappeared and been replaced by the clink of silverware and glasses. On my phone are a series of WhatsApp messages from Nina.
“Sancerre. 6:00 p.m.”
FOUR
Fruitz
Over the years, I’ve created an entire circle of friends in Paris. I sometimes joke that they are the Paris chapter of a secret international group of unmarried women whom I seem to gather to me everywhere I travel. And they are waiting for me here now at Sancerre: Nina, Aarti, and Sandra (with her little dog, Marcel). With them also is a younger blonde woman, wearing a short flowery dress that shows off her long legs. “I’m Ellie,” she says in a crisp British accent. When I first arrive, all our greetings are amusingly muted, as though we were just here last week. The calm, familiar tone belies the constant text messages we’ve exchanged over the last weeks and months or during our lengthy weekly Zooms. The multiple exclamation points, the repeated assertions that “I can’t wait!!“” It also underscores the sense that time has somehow looped back on itself and we were all only just here. Perhaps just yesterday, having this same drink together.
We are sitting outside in the 3rd arrondissement across from the Square du Temple Elie Wiesel, a green jewel of a parc that has a pond and a playground and sweeping green trees. The sun is setting and the light is diffusing over Paris, casting everything in a pink and gold glow. I’m told the grand apartments lining the square, with their grandiose moldings depicting heavenly creatures aloft, never go on the market. They simply stay in the family for decades, more than a century in some cases. The square is usually packed and lively with sounds of children and music, but even here, in the heart of the Marais, things are quiet. Or at least muted.
On the table are the last flakes of the fries that have just been demolished. A planche, with both cheese and charcuterie, has just been ordered. It arrives on a wooden board, piled high with sliced prosciutto, rounds of salami, a mountain of sliced baguette, and chèvre so gooey it oozes into the squares of foil-wrapped butter—bread is never served here without butter, no matter that the bread in front of us is for the cheese and meats.
On the surface we are a bit of a motley crew. Arriving here from divergent paths. Nina was my first Paris friend. We were set up on a blind friend date by a mutual acquaintance five years ago at the end of my first full August in Paris. I was here trying to finish the first draft of my memoir, and she was here for a weekslong holiday following the finalization of a tough divorce from an American man she’d met at twenty-three and married not long after. Nina is from Finland but moved to Los Angeles following her marriage and had been there ever since. We have both been through the American media mines, her on the West Coast in entertainment journalism and me in New York, and that proved a common enough base to build on at first. But from there sprung a full-fledged friendship, a shared sense of fun and understanding of how we wanted to live in the world. A few months after returning to Los Angeles, she rented an apartment in Paris, and a year after that she was able to buy a small one-bedroom in the 11th. I sometimes call her Timotei because her long, silky blonde hair reminds me of the shampoo commercials that played constantly during my childhood, which featured lithe blonde women brushing their platinum hair peacefully by a waterfall. During lockdown, she met a kind, quiet American living in Helsinki on Tinder and a year later the long-distance relationship they have constructed is still going strong.
Nina is my baseline here. The foundation on which so many other relationships were built. It was through her I met Sandra, also a journalist, the following summer. Sandra is from California. She won’t tell any of us her exact age. She looks like Snow White. Pale skin, black hair, red lips. She is perfectly turned out every time she leaves the house. Where I might stumble to the corner in leggings, I’ve never seen her not exquisitely accessorized. Bangles. Impeccably tied neck scarves. Sandra is a person who can pull off capes. Without fail, every time I see her, I ask about some part of the outfit she’s wearing. Is it vintage Celine? YSL? And every time she tells me it’s Zara. Or J.Crew. Both inevitably purchased secondhand. It’s a particular person who can make mass-produced clothes look like couture. But she does.
