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On the north side of Paris, in a former warehouse converted into a soundstage, in the depths of a conference room, Carol, a Brit, sat in a brainstorming meeting. Her brain was not storming. She’d been dry of ideas lately, except for the thought that she would be sacked if she didn’t speak up soon. Everyone else on the Trapèze creative staff was confidently shooting off characters, settings, and plots for films. But she had nothing.
“A Parisienne—scarf tied just so, stiletto heels, mini-skirt, tights—who wants, who’d die for, her next lover to appear tonight.”
That was Amandine, Parisienne, who sat relaxed yet commanding, very décolletée, wearing a mini-skirt with thighs bursting forth in sheer black hose, and stilletos on her feet.
Carol looked at all the flesh that Amandine had on display, and she heard her mother quoting Coco Chanel: “Modesty—what elegance!”
Carol herself was wearing a cream silk Armani suit with a deeper cream silk blouse. Skirt fashionably short, but not cut up to her crotch. To be able to afford clothes like these ever again, she just had to come up with ideas. Ones that worked.
“A Louis Jordan type.”
That was Frédéric, with bulging blue eyes and adam’s apple. He was always eyeing the women.
“He’s debonair,” Frédéric said, “wants to keep his péniche afloat on the Seine. He’s desperate for money—the boat is a black hole. He cheats at cards, on his income tax, he beguiles rich women and tries to dupe them for money. It all backfires. In the end, in a storm, he watches the péniche sink into the Seine.”
Frédéric looked like a Bretagne boater himself in a horizontal blue-and-white-striped, long-sleeved tee shirt.
Carol coached herself, desperate to contribute. Come on, old girl, you just have to come up with something.
She felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her silk jacket. She checked it as discreetly as she could. It was her six-year-old texting her. “Mummy, when will you be home?”
Oh, my baby! Now she really couldn’t think.
“Carol, what do you think?”
That was Gregoire, the production company’s executive director. His character could be summed up in two words: tight suits.
Carol’s underarms itched against the silk. She crossed and recrossed her legs and tugged her skirt down, aware of Frédéric’s gaze. She knew she shouldn’t, and that if she did she would feel like an escargot, a garden-variety snail, but she couldn’t help herself—she looked at Amandine. As Carol could expect of an attractive Parisienne, Amandine was staring at her triumphantly, like a diner seated before an array of escargots roasted in their own shells with garlic and beurre doux.
Damn! She shouldn’t have looked. Why was she so bonkers as to do that to herself?
Gregoire crossed his arms. The room was silent. And Carol had a thought! It felt weak, it would be booed, but it was all she could think of.
“How about robbing the classics? Chaucer’s Alewife, and the sleek, elegant Wife of Bath, and the Knight, all updated?” Then she remembered, there was no Alewife in Canterbury Tales. Hopefully no one had read it. “They’re on a pilgrimage of some sort—in the Sahara desert!—to a remote shrine nearly covered in windblown sand?” Her imagination failed her at that point. She despised herself for ending her sentence in a question, like an American.
Again, the room was silent. People were looking at her. Carol felt so vulnerable that she couldn’t help it, she looked at Amandine. Carol understood the message she saw in those eyes. Escargot!
Within a heartbeat of sending Carol her Parisienne deathray, Amandine was sending Gregoire an admiring look full of Bourgogne wine and roses.
“How about an older woman, Catherine Deneuve in her 40s,” Amandine said, and the brainstorming swept on.
They didn’t like my idea, Carol said to herself. I’m so sick of my ideas not being on target, out of step, ridiculous. They’re going to sack me if I don’t produce. What am I going to do?
When Gregoire decided he liked the idea of Louis Jordan on a péniche, with a Catherine Deneuve type for a love interest, the meeting ended, to be resumed in a week.
Carol felt as though she were staggering as she fled to her office—could anybody, especially Amandine, tell? She just had to learn not to look at that Parisienne, just like all the rest—with entirely too much self-esteem. Otherwise known as arrogance. She had to learn not to look at half the women in Paris, who cultivated a superior attitude and sent it like a deathray into other women’s hearts. She packed up her handbag, texted her daughter that she was leaving, and left.
On the Metro, she thought, France is only the size of Texas, yet its people have brought great beauty into the world, in art, literature, music, film, architecture. The French who weren’t born in Paris were quite lovely. It was the Parisians....
She dragged herself back to her apartment in Le Marais, the trendiest neighborhood, in the Fourth arrondissement. Every footstep ached with self-condemnation. You’re not present for your daughter, you’re not good enough at your job, your ideas have dried up, and they’ll fire you soon. But I’m working so hard to provide for Louise, she countered weakly. Her inner critic said, “Humph!”
She punched in the door code and opened the massive, old wooden door to the courtyard. The palms standing in the corners in their huge stone pots looked relaxed, the red geraniums in first floor window boxes looked perky. Not at all how she felt. The scene was pretty, very French. This will all disappear if you can’t come up with ideas, Carol’s inner critic reminded her with satisfaction.
When she walked into the apartment, she heard Jeffrey’s voice speaking quietly. They’d lived together for two years. Jeffrey was a Brit expat, too, who repaired people’s computers in the offices of Orange, the telecom. And he minded Louise for hours at a time. She trusted him with Louise implicitly. She wished she could be with her little girl more herself.
Carol eased down the hall. Jeffrey and the child were sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, pillows and stuffed animals bolstering them, reading a picture book.
“That word is ‘c-a-t,’” Louise said to Jeffrey. They looked so ideal and cozy together.
“Very good, you got it, you clever girl!” Jeffrey ruffled her hair, and they both looked up and saw Carol. Jeffrey’s face darkened.
Louise scrambled off the bed, her strawberry blonde curls bouncing.
“Mummy, Jeffrey and I are reading books! A fairy tells a princess, who has a cat, and, and—you’re home!”
Carol swept her into her arms and kissed her warm, sticky neck. Then she lifted her face to accept a peck on the lips from Jeffrey.
“Where’ve you been? She’s been anxious for you,” Jeffrey said.
“It’s seven, not that late.”
“Well, are you making dinner or am I?”
“Let’s order in.”
“No surprise, what you always say.”
His disparagement, a long-term feature of their relationship, upset her.
“Why can’t you be pleasant to me? You were home since five, you cook something.”
“Your daughter kept me busy.”
“Then order something in.”
“Mummy, come see my book.”
“Jeffrey, would you order?”
“Yeah, the usual, sure,” he grumbled and pulled out his cell phone.
Later, after Louise was asleep, Carol went online and Googled “writing group in English Paris” in hopes that being with a creative group, far away from her colleagues, would get her brain storming again. She wrote down the address and the time, closed her computer, stood with a sigh, stretched her back in her Armani suit, and went to bed.
