Chapter VIII. Salut, Bordeaux! #2
“Vraiment?! Oh, I love her!” Clément pipes up. “She was incredible in Salut, Bordeaux! Formidable! She should have won the César.”
“Yes,” I say. I do not mention it’s my husband’s movie. Or that he was nominated as well. I have learned that doing so changes the arc of the conversation. “She’s quite lovely.”
“Where are you from?” he asks. He has a splendid bald head and a chartreuse scarf jauntily knotted at his neck. “You look familiar. And you’re not French.”
He says this, like everything else that has been spoken tonight, in French.
And it amuses me that after eighteen years in this country, I still come across as an outsider.
The lengths I’ve gone to lose all semblance of an accent, to look and dress the part, to acquire that perfect mélange of haughty and insouciant, to master all the subtleties, right down to the messy chignon—and still I’d failed.
“How did you know?”
“You smile a lot. And you have pretty American teeth.”
“Ha!”
In actuality, they were Chinese teeth. So said the dentist who removed four wisdoms in one sitting. I was twenty-seven and rushing to get them pulled before moving to France.
“Are you Asian?” the dentist had asked, two teeth in.
I’d nodded. My jaw plied wide with a device I can only describe as a mouth speculum. “My grandfather. On my dad’s side.”
“I could tell. You have Asian teeth. Big crowns, small roots. You typically only see that in Asian people.”
In that moment, I tried to picture my father’s teeth.
My aunts’. My cousins’. Were their crowns larger than usual?
And then, randomly, the image of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s came to mind.
Stereotypical and offensive, and in possession of a set of oversized prosthetic teeth.
Is that how the Western world saw us? Or just Hollywood circa 1961?
“American orthodontist. Jamaican-Chinese mouth.”
He smiles then, wide, like an American. “It works for you.”
“You missed a fantastic show this morning,” Anouk says, once our orders have been taken.
“Louis Vuitton?”
“Yes. They held it at their new fondation in Bois de Boulogne, and it is incredible. The building is like … wow. Have you seen it yet?”
“Yes, it’s genius. I’d love to spend a day inside Frank Gehry’s mind. The curved glass, the sails…”
“All of that,” Anouk continues. “And they installed these huge glass spheres in the garden.”
“Geodesic domes,” Alain adds definitively.
He and Sophie, a striking redhead, are seated to my left, at the adjoining corner table.
They are doing that thing newish couples do: unable to physically separate.
Her fingers in his hair, his hand on her knee, her lips buzzing his temple.
I try to remember when I last felt the need to be touching my partner, but I cannot. It’s been too long.
“Domes, yes. And inside they constructed a runway and bleachers,” Anouk continues. “It was like being in a space station.”
She turns to me and smiles then. And something about her face takes me back to Cabo. Her youthful energy, her darling French overbite. That night at the shore.
“What?” she says, soft. Evidently, I’m not terribly good at hiding my emotions.
“Nothing.”
“I wish you’d been there. I was thinking about your project, on beauty and how we consume it, and I thought, Cecilia should be here. Next time, yes?”
“Do you miss it?” Clément directs to Anouk. “Doing the shows?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t miss the shows.
The catwalk, the lights, the attention, yes.
But not the craziness. The rushing, the constant changing of hair and makeup, people demanding things of you, prodding you, jabbing you, squeezing and zipping and tying you into clothes, rearranging your breasts …
I don’t miss that. And the crowds backstage.
Everyone gawking and staring and watching you change.
So many cameras and little privacy. It’s why we were all buzzed out of our minds, on champagne and coke.
… Okay, not all of us. But some. And then to go and do five or six of those a day.
Five days a week. Three, four cities in a row. It was hell.”
“But there must be a high, no?” Sophie speaks up from her corner.
Her eyes a deep violet. Her skin like porcelain.
A leather motorcycle jacket is draped over her shoulders, a black silk dress kisses her curves beneath.
I wonder if she has an actual job, or just “muses” for a living. I wonder what musing entails.
“There is a high. But like with everything else, it doesn’t last.”
Our dinner arrives shortly after, the tiny tables overflowing with sumptuous platters of roasted duck with green olives, sole meunière, and traditional cassoulet. Everything tastes sublime, rich, flavorful. The wine, the bread, the butter. We are far, far from the Land of Avocado Toast.
“Cecilia Chen.” Clément claps his hands together suddenly, startling me. “That’s you, yes? You had that show at the Pompidou. The Fitzgerald one. The Beautiful and Damned. C’était géniale!! Tellement!”
“Thank you.” I smile. I still find it awkward when complete strangers know and compliment my work. As if they’ve seen a part of me that I’d never fully expected them to see. Like being naked in front of someone new.
How peculiar, this artist thing. To bare one’s soul, and then on some level regret it. Over and over and over again.
“And your husband is Francois Charlot! Oh là là!” Clément continues, his enthusiasm growing.
“C’est qui?” Maurice asks.
“The director?” Vivienne leans forward to catch my eye.
I nod, vaguely. A mouth full of duck.
“Ah, oui? C’est chouette,” Sophie adds.
“I didn’t get to meet you, but I was the stylist for élodie Cloutier during the press tour of L’Amour est le Miel,” Clément says, proudly.
“Oh, really? Small world.” I smile.
“Carrément!”
Sixty-one. That is the number of hours I’ve been in Paris without hearing her name or seeing her likeness.
This is not to say that I haven’t thought of her.
Them. But just that no one has brought her up to me.
Just that up until that moment I have not had to feign normalcy in a crowded room when inside I am unraveling.
He’d chosen Ph? Tài, a Vietnamese restaurant in the Asian Quarter, one brisk November evening.
Small and inconspicuous, the perfect venue to unload his burden.
In public, because he knew my proper colonial upbringing would not permit me to cause a scene.
And enough off the beaten path that we would not likely run into anyone we knew.
The fact that he’d planned it made it all the more painful.
I sat there in shock, speechless, tears streaming into my soup, while he held tightly to both my hands on the table.
So I would not flee? Pick up a knife and stab him?
I could not be sure. He’d used the words indiscretion and imprudent, and said something about it being brief and insignificant—as if that would somehow lessen his betrayal.
As if in that moment I would loathe him less.
The director and his young starlet. What a fucking cliché.
Our waiter is catering to the table in the far corner.
I attempt to catch his attention to order more wine, but fail.
For a moment I consider fleeing to the toilet, but I am on the inside banquette, and I don’t want to inconvenience three-fourths of our party to get there.
It’s a problem I have, not wanting to inconvenience others.
Not wanting to agitate or complain. But it hardly seems fair that a perfectly lovely evening should be ruined by the ghosts of my past. In truth, élodie was Francois’s ghost. But I managed to carry her with me. Like an albatross.
“Franchement, Cecilia. You didn’t tell me your husband was a big movie director!” Anouk exclaims.
“Ha. I guess it didn’t come up.”
“Maybe the concussion.” She smiles at me. She is giving me an easy way out.
“Yes,” I say. “Maybe that.”
“Maybe that,” she repeats, sipping from her drink. And then, almost too casually, she adds, “But now I can’t help but wonder what else you are hiding.”
My journals are not in the back of our bedroom closet.
The more recent ones, yes. Along with copies of the November 2013 issue of Beaux Arts featuring an exclusive on my short film, Broken, the Vanity Fair France issue with the profile claiming us as Paris’ new It couple, and the Première magazine with the extensive write-up on Fran.
But the older diaries, from my twenties and teens and elementary school, have been moved elsewhere, and I have spent the morning tearing through every random box in our apartment desperate to find them.
To unearth the details of that week in Cabo.
To separate fact from the story I’d embellished in my head.
If none of it was significant enough for Anouk to remember, then maybe it hadn’t been momentous at all.
But then what did she think might be worth hiding?
I am tempted to call Francois, but it’s two AM in California, and I know with preproduction he has not been getting enough sleep. Plus, he will not think this an emergency.
What I do find is two large archival photo boxes stashed behind his extensive, overpriced sneaker collection.
His Common Projects and Brunello Cucinelli and Prada.
When we first got together and I’d teased him about spending far too much money on shoes, he told me I wouldn’t understand because I wasn’t French. A lot had changed since then.
The boxes themselves are nondescript. And in the home of two photographers, there were plenty of their kind, but it’s the location of them that throws me.
For a moment, I consider not opening them.
I am not a wife who snoops. And yet he has given me sufficient reason to do so.
And so, before I can overthink it, I remove the lid of the first one.