I turned to poetry, mentored first by the poet Forest Gander
who supported my self-absorbed poems about sex and boyfriends and quirky things
like Snow Cones, and then by Michael Harper, a Poet Laureate who did not.
Professor Harper didn’t select me for his advanced poetry class, even though
I’d already taken the pre-requisite class with Professor Gander. I heard from
older students that Professor Harper liked people to beg, which I did, I doubt
very humbly, in his third story office in the creative writing department on Waterman
Street.
An African
American historian and a social force, Professor Harper tried to impress upon
us the importance of context, meaning, research. For me, at that time, his
words fell on deaf ears. I fell squarely into the other camp: the verbal school
of impressionists who write when the mood passed through them. I know now that
this is an intolerable, naïve and unrealistic school to be a part of it you
have ambitions that include a readership beyond your local bar. But I didn’t
know that then. In his review of my poetry thesis
before the end of the school year, he said he didn’t want to see
anything published by me for twenty years. When I asked him why, he said,
“Because you won’t have anything to say.”
At the
time, his comment both saddened and enraged me, but years later when my
rejections from editors and agents started to include notes of encouragement, I
took solace in what Professor Harper had said. It gave me the courage to be
patient, or at least, to try. After all, it wasn’t like I was trying to be a
ballerina. After all, to be a good writer, to write about other people’s lives,
you have to spend some time in your own.
At the time
of graduation, I was dating my French teaching assistant; an Adonis of a man named Jean Houdent An exchange student
himself, his Visa had run out a year before I graduated, and so, with no
request on my part for such a gesture, he sold all of his furniture and books
upon his return home in order to afford a one-way plane ticket back to
Providence to live with me until I graduated.
This
unexpected news was both flattering and horrifying, but I didn’t protest
because the fiction lover in me wanted to see how the whole thing would unfold.
My three
female roommates were less interested in living through the next chapters with
my unemployed, pot smoking, reggae loving Frenchman. The request that he live
elsewhere came with Jean installed a periodic table of cocktails poster in the
living room next to a framed poster of the black animated infant hero, Kirikou,
which had absolutely no context if you weren’t a comic book aficionado, and
French.
As Jean was
dead broke, I got him a job at the French creperie where I’d started working
after I quit Starbucks, after having an hour docked off my timecard one day
when I showed up with a little piping on the sleeves of my white shirt. My
protests that it was a vintage bowling shirt went unconsidered, and I decided
that a place that didn’t respect vintage athletic wear was not a place for me.
Anyway—we
made it through that year together and I moved to Paris with him a week after
graduation, two suitcases stuffed indecently to bursting, determined to never
come back.
Upon arrival
to his childhood apartment in the seventh arrondissement, I found that he
hadn’t sold all of his belongings—just one or two things—and after several
weeks of cohabitation with his doting, single mom it became apparent that he’d
probably go the money for his plane ticket from her.
That summer
was a terrible one. The Jean I’d known in Providence had been a poetic
capitalism hater with a boundless appreciation for literature and tennis. He
liked sweet cocktails, camel lights and pot, but beyond his been-there-done-that
stories of licking coke off of friends’ nipples, rolling on ecstasy at his
grandfather’s foie gras farm and the like, he’d never given me any reason to
suspect the three hundred and sixty degree personality turnaround that hit
him—and us—in Paris.
In an move
incongruous with his personality, he pulled family strings, and then pulled
them harder when he botched up the first interview but finally snagged a job as
an analyst at Ernst & Young. He worked the long hours that such positions
are known for while I stayed home in the apartment in a charmless street
surrounded by postcard vendors and men in dashikis selling bottled water and
Eiffel Tower key chains.
I made
sandwiches at home and took them to the nearby Champ de Mars where I perused
the expat magazines for jobs that would let me keep my clothes on. Such jobs
were hard to find. It was becoming resolutely clear to me that Jean Ralphaeo
had been wrong—you did need a Visa as
a foreign job applicant—it wasn’t something the French government just handed
out at the Charles de Gaulle airport to little white girls who spoke French.
With a
miserable amount of savings and no friends to speak of, I started to sink into
a depression that was worsened by my inability to find an even semi-dignified
job. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Jean was cohabiting with two women who
had a vested interest in taking tabs on him, he started staying away from home
for entire days at a time, building a double life as a rising analyst by day
and a clubbing coke fanatic by night. He would come back on Fridays,
sallow-skinned and skeletal with a bag full of the Jekyll and Hyde outfits he’d
kept in his car and sleep until Sunday night. On July 14th, as Jean
was sleeping off the aftermath of a particularly long MDMA trip, his mother
went with me to the Eiffel Tower to watch the Bastille Day fireworks. As the
displays became grander, brighter, more outrageous, I began to cry. No, this
wasn’t Paris as I imagined it. Lonely, friendless and illegal, standing in a
drunken crowd with my boyfriend’s mom. Jean had been doing so much coke, he’d
actually lost a tooth.
There was
one more event that took place before I made the desperate call to the French
chapter of Brown University that I’ve already described. One Sunday, out of nowhere,
Jean became obsessed with the idea that I was cheating on him. While I sat on
our bed wishing that it was true, he stormed around the apartment gathering all
of my belongings while intermittingly updating travel websites to see when he
could get me a one way flight back to New York.
When I
announced that I wasn’t going anywhere—or rather, that I wasn’t leaving
Paris—he screamed that he was going to drive me to my lovers’ and threw
everything I owned out of the fourth story window in preparation for our trip.
When he realized that I had been doing laundry before he’d woken up from one of
his drug naps, he stopped the spinning washer and threw my wet and sudded
clothing out onto the pavement as well.
By that
time, I had an awful undocumented job at a place called “Paris International
VIP Services” that promoted itself as a boutique guide and tour agency and
translation center, run by an Indian man who exclusively wore leather overalls
and worked on the side as an online shrink. He made me work with pseudonyms
that expressed his brand values, so for four mornings a week, I was Earnest,
Prudence, or Claire. I also had to read the emails from his online psychiatry
patients in order to tell him who needed to be seen most (a.k.a., replied to).
It was a horrid, horrid position, but because I worked the early shift there, I
had the office key, so with all of my belongings in the back of the car
stinking intermittingly of dog shit and laundry detergent, I told Jean to take
me to my “lovers” place at sixteen Rue Pascal, the domicile of Dr. Nagpal
Singh.
Because I
was still at an age where I confused drama with romance, Jean Ralphaeo made
cameo appearances through the next three years of my life, with the dramatic
curtain call taking place on my twenty-forth birthday in the city of Lyon where
I was managing two weeks worth of parties in the next iteration of my
professional life: party promoter and Coronamobile driver for Corona Extra.
Diego had
come with me on my “business trip” and we were actually lying in bed together
when I got a text message from the maniac I hadn’t heard from in four months, a
man whom I finally—truly—wanted out of my life, saying that he had driven three
hours from Paris and was right outside my hotel. I gasped when I looked out the
window from my eleventh story room and spotted his shitty Peugeot, and saw that
he was.
I made
Diego come down to the lobby to act as a witness in case Jean stabbed or shot
me. (Diego offered to walk out with me but I didn’t want him to get stabbed or
shot, too.)
With no
explanation as to how he knew where I was or why he thought it was okay to come
there, Jean produced a set of Japanese dishes and a tremendous ficus plant as
birthday presents and said he’d made a reservation at the finest restaurant in
Lyon. The epicurean in me took over—my first comment was, which one?—before
launching into a diatribe informing him that he had no right to be there, that
our relationship was over, that he couldn’t keep making unexpected appearances
in my life and P.S I’d met somebody else and I loved him. Jean absorbed this
information while I held onto the huge plant and then he asked me to marry him,
an offer which the last name on my French passport will assure you I declined.
Weirdly enough, my husband and I still have those bowls.
