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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Back in my garret room, I reflected on the events of the past twenty-four hours. Everything that had just happened between Jean-Michel and me was significant, because I'd just turned twenty. I was on the verge of everything. No man could have entered my life at a more impressionable moment.
It was clear he enjoyed teaching me, but he wasn't didactic about it. With everything yet to learn, I was an empty vessel waiting to be filled with French learning and culture. He provided every bit of education I'd come to France for that lectures at the Sorbonne did not. There were ways to combine certain foods with certain drinks; oysters went with Pinot Noir, paté with a good Burgundy. Every cheese had its complementary wine pairing; white wine, my favorite, was the wine of choice for alcoholics as far as Jean-Michel was concerned. There were ways to tie a scarf or to shine one's shoes with spit if on the street, if far from a water source. The French were exigeant, strict or exacting, about just about everything. Something Americans mostly were not.
It was fun to discover the French way of doing things with Jean-Michel. While he showed me how to comport myself both privately and publicly, I was continuing down my checklist of what I wished to accomplish during my year abroad.
Have an affair with a Frenchman. Check.
Get into a good college. Working on it. I'd sent my applications in on time in early January to the four colleges I'd applied to. Sometime after April fifteenth, I'd hear back. Hopefully the glamour factor of living in Paris combined with a good academic record from high school would propel me into a four-year liberal arts college where young people with broad liberal arts focuses who were also interested in having sex were a dime a dozen. I would finally find my milieu.
About whether I was meant to be a musician or a writer, I was working on it.
My exploration into a new identity as a writer consisted of reading as many books by female authors as I could get my hands on. To this end, I spent afternoons at Centre George Pompidou, also known as Beaubourg, one of Paris's largest libraries. A sizeable English-language collection located on one of its upper-level floors was available for borrowing. I devoured novels by Françoise Sagan, Simone de Beauvoir, Madame de Staël, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Jane Austen. Then, I turned my attention to novels written by men about interesting women: Nana by Emile Zola and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in particular.
