“I’m always nice,” Lucie had chimed in, which was mostly true.
“And I always pay well,” Victor added. “I’m paying them all a quarter piastre more a day than the van Dampierres were. That’s what people expect from the Michelins. Even in a global depression.”
“What is the Officers’ Club like?” I asked Trieu now, thinking that she already seemed so different from the person I’d stared at as we pulled through the iron gate. “Is it really so important that we go on our first night? Doesn’t that seem a bit rushed?”
“I’ve never been inside,” she said. “It’s only for the French. But Madame van Dampierre seemed to care about it very much. It is where all the French go, especially the women, even though it was built for the men, I think. You will go there often with your husband, and nightly when your husband is away. You’ll see.”
“There are no Annamites there at all?” I asked, surprised. Victor told me that the French had created their own world inside a world, but from what I’d observed on our drive in, Indochine and its people seemed difficult to ignore.
“There are Annamites working inside,” she clarified. “My cousin cleans dishes there. And a boy who worked here for the last family now serves drinks in the bar. But that is all they are allowed to do. Serve.”
“What do the French women do at the clubhouse then?” I asked, imagining one of the beach clubs Victor and I had frequented on the Riviera.
“The club, never the clubhouse,” she corrected me. “And they eat and drink too much. I think there are several tennis courts and a large swimming pool. They never bring children, even though their children would like to swim there, I think. There are rules against it. No children, no dogs, no Annamites.”
“That seems a rather outdated policy,” I said, holding my breath as the curling wand approached my ear. “I’m sure Lucie would love a swimming pool in this heat.” I would ask Cam to find her one elsewhere.
As Trieu continued waving my hair, I tried to inhale the scent of the milk flowers the way she did, moving my hands slowly when the breeze came in. But after a few breaths I realized that what I was enjoying as much as the fragrant scent was the city’s humidity. It was upward of 80 degrees outside, even in the late afternoon, and the air was thick with moisture. It was a dampness that was very familiar and never failed to remind me of being young. It felt like the summers of my childhood, like home.
Not Paris. If I closed my eyes, I was breathing the air of the small town of Blacksburg, Virginia. In that hilly southwestern corner of the state, where mountain laurel and black huckleberry bloom in the shadows of the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, there wasn’t much to do but get lost in the wilderness and daydream about a bigger version of yourself.
I was never going to see Blacksburg again, and perhaps because I was so certain of that, I clung to little reminders of Virginia whenever I encountered them. Humidity was one of those memory triggers. On this evening, eight thousand miles away, I felt closer to my birthplace than I had in years.
By the time I was thirteen years old and the oldest of seven children, I knew I’d never stay in the South. Two years later, seven became eight when another girl was born. Girls were about as valuable as stray dogs to my parents. Another mouth to feed that would never be enough help on the farm. The house was crowded when we were three; when we were ten, closets had to be turned into bedrooms.
We were no different from the families we grew up around, all with too many children and not enough money. Except for one thing: our language. My mother was originally from Quebec, though she had spent most of her life in Virginia, having moved south with her father so he could work the tobacco farms. She had not passed on much to us, but she had given us French, spoken with a strong Québécois accent. She preferred to do her shouting in French, and the only reason we learned was because she was almost always shouting. Perhaps she would have restrained herself if she’d known that in the end it would greatly help to hasten my departure.
As soon as I could leave, I did, running down a path I’d carved using nothing but willpower and a fierce hatred of my circumstances. After I turned twenty, an age that felt like the true mark of adulthood, and had finished studying at the small teachers’ college one town away, I traveled to Manhattan, a city that immediately started feeding my hungry soul. I spent two years teaching French in a high school above Central Park, too far north to be fashionable, and then used my savings to travel to Paris. In New York, I had lived in a boardinghouse for women near Grand Central Station, which allowed me to put aside enough money for my passage, as well as enough to survive on in Paris for exactly three months.
Just as I expected, New York helped me start shedding my skin, but I still felt too close to home there. Paris allowed me to embrace a new version of myself. It was the city that my dreams were made of. Before I sailed, one of my fellow teachers had gifted me a small leather writing journal and on the first page had written, in her beautiful looping hand, “Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes,” a quote from her favorite writer, Henry James. I didn’t have enough money for material joys, but how right James was about lust of the eyes. Everything in Paris was beautiful. The people, the clothes, the food, but mostly just the city itself. The limestone buildings sitting tightly together along the Seine, the cathedrals commanding entire city blocks, and the river that you could walk along for miles, which seemed to exert a gravitational pull for the two banks it commanded. If Blacksburg, Virginia, had a complete opposite, it was Paris, France.
I went for a summer trip, I stayed for eight years, and now it was all oceans away. I had a new world to find myself in. Indochine.
I watched as Trieu worked magic on my hair, the soft waves she was creating, and had to admit she was right. It did look more polished. Fuller, too. I was going to say so when I caught a glimpse of Lucie’s reflection in the vanity mirror. She was peeking in the scarcely ajar bedroom door with her beloved porcelain doll, Odile, in her arms and Cam right behind her.
“It’s too bad we will have to send Lucie to boarding school now that we’re in Hanoi,” I said in a loud voice. “It’s the only way she’ll learn to be a proper French girl.”
“No, maman!” Lucie cried, pushing open the heavy door and revealing her hiding place. “Don’t send me away! Please let me stay!” Her little face contorted in panic, she threw Odile to the ground, causing the doll’s big brown eyes to close. I laughed, motioning her over.
“Oh, Lucie, I’m kidding. I just wanted to see how accomplished you are as a spy. Turns out, very.”
“Don’t make me leave, maman. Please don’t send me away,” she begged.
“Don’t cry, chou. I would never send you away,” I said, opening my arms for her to run into. “You can be a wild little animal for all I care, play in the garden until nightfall and never read a thing, in French or any other language, as long as you’re near me.”
“I want to stay here,” Lucie said, throwing her arms around my neck. She rubbed her face against my dress and hugged me. “I won’t spy anymore,” she promised.
“You can stay here,” I whispered in her ear. “And you can spy all you want. But try spying on your papa next time. He’s less observant than I am.”