“Great. Does your cell phone work here?”
“It does. I’ll text the number on your card. Then you can let me know the details.”
Nate looked pretty pleased with himself. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Yes.”
From PasadenaMeetsParis.com
Good Morning, mes petites! I’m so excited! An old friend is coming to visit and nothing but bouquets of ranunculus from the market will do to welcome her to La Maison de La Fontaine. I’m even making a dash to Bellota-Bellota for some jambon and manchego to stock the fridge with nibbles and wine. I know, Spanish food in France! I should be ashamed. No worries, PMP’ers! My friend Joan Blakely is nothing if not sophisticated. She can appreciate a little cross-cultural noshing.
Joan of Art, as I like to call her because of her très important job at the Wallace Aston Museum in Pasadena, has been a friend since elementary school days when we both wore enormous bows in our hair and the trademark pinafores of our school. We reconnected during our junior year abroad stints here in Paris. What fun we had, drinking gallons of coffee and Beaujolais, scouring Paris for secrets haunts to buy perfume and the perfect shade of red lipsticks. We walked for days, taking in the City step by step. Because of Joan, I only wear Gerbe tights and understand the Importance of Navy Blue.
Like her spectacular mother, photographer/model Suzi Clements Blakely (Trust me, even more beautiful in person, if that is possible), Joan could make sackcloth look chic. But there was no sackcloth in Joan’s closet, just clothes with simple lines, wonderful construction and heritage. While it took me years to absorb the Frenchwoman’s style, Joan got it right away. She spent the year in good shoes, Breton sweaters and a vintage Hermès coat in charcoal gray with lines like a cape. I covet it ten years later. Even French women deigned to stare at Joan as she walked down the rue de Buci.
Welcome back to Paris, mon amie!
NB, lovely readers! Where does such an on-point Pasadenan spend her nights while in Paris? At a perfect petit hotel on ?le Saint-Louis. Totally charming, totally Parisian. Tennis, anyone?
Chapter 7
Had it not been drizzling, I would have stuck my head out of the car window like a happy golden retriever as we drove through the streets of Paris. The city represented so many befores for me: before adulthood, before September 11, before Casey. Before I’d taken on the responsibilities of so many other people’s lives besides mine. How I’d missed a return visit here in the last dozen years surprised me, but that’s the way life is. My mother always said, “Travel like you’ll return someday, but understand that you may not.” In other words, don’t fill your schedule with must-sees and miss out on sitting in a café for hours or wandering aimlessly through the streets visiting tiny shops and churches far from the beaten touristy path, but make sure you see a few of the top tourist sites because you never know if you’ll really make it back. Never in a million years did I think that it would take me so long to return to Paris, but now that I was back, I wanted to breathe it all in.
I couldn’t help but think about the time my parents surprised me my junior year, showing up unannounced at the campus of College Year France in the Latin Quarter on a Wednesday in October. (As my apartment mate Polly said, “Close to the Sorbonne, but not really the Sorbonne.”) The plan was that I would be gone for the whole year, not that my famous parents would show up eight weeks into the semester and commandeer my time. I knew one thing for sure: I didn’t miss my parents. Since landing in France, I felt like I’d shed my entire skin and assumed a new identity as Experienced Expat, leaving behind the Uncertain Undergrad I’d been at Smith. But I wasn’t ready to share New Joan with my mother and father. Chatty, once-a-week emails were all I could handle. This felt like an invasion.
I was furious when I saw them ingratiating themselves with the stone-faced dean, who treated her American students with equal parts endearment and disdain. I was even more annoyed when I heard my mother rattling off my whole life story to Madame in French more fluent than mine. I could barely hide my feelings when I greeted them, “Quelle surprise.” I was awful.
“You look beautiful, dear.” My mother did the once-over. If you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t recognize that with a barely perceptible eye flick, she was completing a full inventory of my person, like a sci-fi movie cyborg. Height, weight, bust size, hair volume, neck length, prominence of clavicle, degree of ear protrusion. And, of course, a quick cataloging of clothes, shoes, bags, and accessories. (Extra points for vintage silk scarves and simple jewelry.) I’d like to say it was for informational purposes only, but there was some judgment involved. “Paris agrees with you. All the walking has been good for your cheekbones.”
Though I wanted to object on the basis of my art history/feminist studies class, Reexamining the Male Gaze in Twentieth-Century Painting, I hopped off my high horse. I was happy to pass muster in Suzi Clements Blakely’s trained eye. It would be easy to mistake my mother’s commentary as weight related, but she was really all about bone structure, once rhapsodizing about how the clavicle was a woman’s greatest accessory. She was right; the endless walking had narrowed my face and toned my legs. I’d never match my mother’s height, but I was taller than most women I knew. My straight blond hair was naturally streaked, and I was wearing it in a high ponytail. I had on the black turtleneck my mother had given me before I’d left Pasadena, assuring me that I could wear it anywhere and every day in Paris, and I had. “We walk everywhere,” I explained, less combative now.
“You always look lovely, Joan,” my father said, true to form as well.
My mother had spun a fantasy in her head that we’d all go to Fashion Week together, the highlight of which was a party in honor of Halston, the late designer, thrown by some old model pals of my mom’s, collectively known as the Halstonettes. But I had other plans because it was our midterm break. “You couldn’t have emailed? Let me know you were coming?”
“We thought it would be special this way,” my mother explained. My father raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t quite throwing her under the bus, but he was making it clear that he would have emailed, but Suzi does what Suzi wants to do. “Come on, Joanie, don’t you want to go to this party? It will be something.”
Honestly, no. I’d been to that party before, except in Hollywood and New York and once in Miami. My father, who’d been sober about two decades, was very selective about accompanying my mother to these fundraisers. But when I turned seventeen, I was deemed old enough to be my mother’s plus-one. For about two minutes, right before we got out of the car, when I looked at my mother and she squeezed my hand in anticipation, the whole scene was thrilling. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Exiting the limo. The flashes of strobes. Photographers yelling, “Suzi, over here! Suzi!” Learning from my mother to shimmy-shake my shoulders and embrace the chaos.