Lynx Jacket

This is from a 1983 diary excerpt written in a Clairefontaine notebook in aqua fountain pen ink, the handwriting tiny and crabbed. I have 53 years’ worth of these volumes that I’m slowly skimming and purging.

Yesterday Mme. came home with a lynx and mink jacket. Since she has been complaining of money problems, I naturally assumed it was an imitation and asked if it was rabbit. She gave me a withering look. Subconsciously, I suppose I did it on purpose.

At the time in 1983, I was Madame’s servant, taking care of her 3-year-old daughter while she worked every day at the Banque Nationale de Paris, and cleaning her apartment in the 12^th arrondissement. I didn’t do a very good job of the cleaning, but I was good at telling the little girl fairy tales, even in my fractured French and my honking American accent.

I called her Madame in my diary even though she was only 2 years older than I and insisted that I call her by her first name, as if we were copines, which we were not. Sometimes she would be rude, even cruel to me, telling me that my French should be better by now, that drinking Coke causes boutons, and when the child came down with a cold, blaming me for not dressing her warmly enough the day before.

She and her husband didn’t really have the money or the accommodations for a servant, but there I was as their au pair. They wanted to try to look more successful and yuppieish – that was a real term in 1983 – and I needed a job and a place to live, like thousands of people living in Paris without papiers.

I slept on a fold-out canape in the living room. In the morning I folded it up and the room looked like no one had been there. I erased myself every day.

What would I have known from lynx jackets, me with my puffy midwestern down jacket, not a foulard in sight, and a pastel wraparound skirt from LL Bean that, Madame hastened to inform me, had a stain on the back? I had fled to Paris thinking I’d refashion my life, but all I did was shatter it even further.

Forty years hence I remember that I’d been adrift and lonely, but until reading these desperate diary entries again, I’d blocked out just how bad it had been. I realize how self-indulgent that sounds – oh, I was living in Paris, anyone’s dream, but I managed to make it awful.

There were lessons in Paris. If you try to wear a down jacket to the opera on a cold night, an imperious Frenchwoman will take it off of you and insist that you wear her pearl gray wool coat, cut too slim for you. You will descend in the ascenseur and emerge in the rue Claude de Caen, crying with rage and humiliation. The French word for pimples is the same word as for buttons. Moving a continent away in a dramatic flourish changes nothing – your heartbreak will be crouched there, waiting for you.