Paris Adieu #featured #Wattys2017

Chapter 6 - Paris Four Years Later

It was a dream come true. We would have time to get to know each other in comfortable circumstances. No one would be worrying about money. Even my grandmother approved of the plan, probably because it was a traditional graduation gift she herself offered my mother when she'd graduated from U Cal Berkeley twenty-four years earlier.

I couldn't believe my good fortune. Many of my colleagues were entering law, medical, or business school in the fall, or working for their father's or father's friends Wall Street firms. But I was determined to live life for a few years before getting swallowed alive by academia again or the corporate world. My rebel streak was alive and kicking – perhaps an inheritance from my mother. It had lain dormant the past four years, buried under a steady stream of exams, papers, deadlines, and structure. YaleCollege was nothing if not structured. I had played the game well enough to earn my degree and now I wanted to kick up my heels.

* * *

Three weeks later, I was back in Paris, alone. I had to fly before the start of the summer travel season in order to use my father's employee pass. He had gotten a job at Pan Am airlines years earlier, and when we finally got back in touch when I turned eighteen, he let me know that I could fly free on Pan Am twice a year as his family member. My mother and half sister would arrive around the first of July. I'd contacted the Griffiths around graduation time to alert them to my plans and ask if my old room was by chance available in mid-June. It was. By the time I arrived, they would be in Renwick, but would leave the key to the top-floor maid's chambers with the concierge. I wouldn't be lonely, I'd be alone. In a city I more or less knew my way around and wholeheartedly adored, this wasn't a bad way to begin my post-college life.

It was strangely thrilling to be back in my old room with time and privacy to assess what had changed in the four years I'd been gone. Jean-Michel and I hadn't kept in touch, but I still had his number. I thought about calling him, but then I thought better of that plan. It was entirely possible he was no longer at that number or now was a family man with a child or two. Why not let sleeping dogs lie?

I went out to explore my old neighborhood. Entering the pastry shop, I was relieved that no one behind the counter recognized me. I perused the wares, bought a demi-baguette, and left. No longer a slave to sugar and fat, I could window shop, salivate madly then say no. If Yale taught me anything, I now knew "fake it till you make it" really worked. And if you're still faking it after you make it, does the world really need to know?

Mais non – of course not.

I decided to visit my old haunting ground, Shakespeare and Company in the Latin Quarter. The English-language bookstore was located behind the student quarter of Saint Michel, next to the Seine. It was run by a stylishly eccentric older man named George, who either liked you or didn't, just the way my grandmother did. He'd known James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and others who'd spent time at Shakespeare and Company either throwing book launches or sleeping on one of the couches upstairs from the bookstore during down periods of their writing careers. I myself had passed a night in George's informal pension – when I'd spent one spring break from Yale on a ten-day Eurail Youthpass tour of Europe and neglected to find out if the Griffith's were home before my arrival in Paris with no place to stay. They were off on a ski trip to Austria, the substitute concierge informed me – someone I didn't recognize at all.

Instead of wasting my limited francs on a hotel room, I'd wandered over to Shakespeare and Company and chatted up George while petting his cat. He took note of the heavy backpack I'd parked just inside the shop entrance and ended our conversation with the suggestion I take it upstairs and stay the night if I had nowhere else to go. I did, gladly.

If George was still around, he'd let me know what, if any, literary-set parties might be taking place over the next few weeks within the Anglo-American community. They were usually hosted by older, expatriate English, American or Australian men, who had lots of younger male friends with literary aspirations as well as ones to meet footloose and fancy-free females traveling abroad.