Ava Fodor, a slightly plump, frizzy-haired nineteen-year-old American au pair in Paris struggles with being less than perfect. Jean-Michel is Ava's fussy, exacting first French boyfriend whose provincialism drives her up the wall yet who educates he...
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Working for the Griffiths turned out to be a dream job. Mrs. Griffith was not only gorgeous, but nice, and fond of wearing Laura Ashley dresses. She taught pottery classes. Mr. Griffith was a Yale grad, now president of the AmericanCollege in Paris. He was tall, athletic, and pleasantly attractive in that "hail fellow well met" sort of way I'd come to France to escape. He was the only adult male I ever saw, in our neighborhood of École Militaire, who carried a gym bag to and from work with a squash racket sticking out of it instead of a porte-documents, or briefcase.
Then there were the two stunning blond boys, Winston and Cole, ages eight and six who appeared to have stepped off the pages of a Ralph Lauren catalogue. Their less ethereal eleven-year old sister, Reid, was a gangly brunette whose imperfections I could better relate to.
Mr. and Mrs. Griffith were hip, relatively young, and very rich. Their guidelines for my job would have made any other au pair drool with envy. I was to show up twice a week in the evenings to look after the children while they went out; no weekends, no trips to their country home unless I wanted to come, no cleaning because they employed a full-time Portuguese housekeeper, no cooking. Mrs. Griffith did all that and left dinner for us in her own handmade pottery containers in the fridge. No plastic Tupperware for this family. The salary was measly, but so were my duties.
I spent babysitting evenings on the couch with the two oldest children telling me stories in clipped British-inflected tones about the international school they attended, while the youngest cuddled in my lap as I stroked his curly, platinum-blond hair and rubbed his back. A glutton for affection, he was my favorite of the three.
Given the choice of taking the spare room in their seventh arrondissement flat (translation – very good neighborhood) or living on the top floor of the building in the maid's quarters, a room the size of a postage stamp with a Turkish toilet (that's a hole in the floor with a pull-chain – it was 1977) in the hall and a sink outside the wash closet with only one cold water tap, I took the maid's room.
Privacy, it's all about privacy when you're nineteen years old and have only been post-virginal for a matter of months. To hell with weekends in the countryside with the family. Paris was my oyster, my aphrodisiac.
I hoped the Griffiths' family would forgive me for my appalling lack of interest in hanging out with them. They were the most well-appointed, genetically enhanced family I had ever met, precisely the reason I had no desire to spend more time with them. A big, bad, dirty, dark world awaited – the world of my newfound womanhood. And where better to explore it than the sexy, smelly City of Light?
* * *
I'd been in Paris for four months. Men pursued me relentlessly on the street: Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians. Then there were the sub-Saharan Africans from Senegal or Cote d'Ivoire. The names of the countries appealed to my sense of exoticism, but not the type. I was looking for a Frenchman. What was the point of spending a year in Paris if not to meet an actual Frenchman? I didn't want to get tied up with another foreigner who was in the city for reasons similar to my own.
