Read an Excerpt

Foreign Tongue
A Novel of Life and Love in Paris

Chapter One

Il n'y a pas de malheur pire que celui qu'on a.
—Arab Proverb

I could start like this, third-person omniscient: "She chucked it all and moved to Paris." I like "chucked it all," as if you could shove chunks of your life out the door of a moving vehicle, say a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro, newly restored on fat tires, vintage Beastie Boys playing in the background. Or how about "She picked up and left," with its faux-folksiness, a hair away from "she jes' plum picked up and left, Jed." As if one could pack one's possessions in a skirt and hoist it up, hoops and crinoline, and take off. Then there's that slightly perplexing "picked up." It reminds me of my childhood jackstraws game. All those plastic, bone-colored pieces. A hoe jimmied up by a rake or a sword or a trowel. The first few rounds are always carefree, reckless. It's only near the end when precision and silence rule the game. When everything hinges on the last move.

Or no dodge-and-weave, no embroidery, no third-person, no all-knowing voice: I left. It was easy for me to move to Paris, and I had to leave.

Like that. One day, my life became unbearable: straw, camel, back, and the unmistakable sound of splinters, or whatever a broken heart sounds like to the possessor (for the record: shattering glass, snapping tennis racket strings, the braying of world-weary donkeys, the high-pitched, internal bat-squeak of air being forced through congested sinuses, to name a few). I called my gabby travel agent. Many minutes and credit card numbers later, I had a ticketand a week to pack and get my life in order.

It wasn't as wacky as it sounds. I had dual citizenship and some mad money stashed away; my copywriting gig for an entertainment PR firm was portable; and, in a neat trick, I sublet my apartment to my landlady's son. I let my parents know I needed a change of pace. I knew better than to tell them the real reason I was leaving town. If I told my mother, she'd worry the entire time I was gone, and I couldn't tell my father. He was so unnerved by any display of emotional distress that he invariably shut down, his eyes either glazing over or darting back and forth in search of the nearest possible exit. All of my friends figured a change would do me good. Except Lindsay.

"Anna, you're running away," she said, point-blank on the phone. As if the accusation, like a bullet, would stop me in my tracks. I could picture her in her stainless-steel kitchen, baby Ethan balanced on her hip, while she edited a movie trailer on three iMacs and puréed organic bok choy. Ever since she'd become a mother, she'd had no time for anyone's bullshit, least of all mine.

Figuring there was no point in arguing, I trilled, "Yes, I am," nearly like a country singer. I felt giddy. "And righteous about it," I added. I emptied a box of chewy caramel calcium supplements into a Ziploc bag and listened to her exhale long and impatiently. Surveying the somber piles of clothing around me, I thought of something Hank Williams Jr. had said about black being good for funerals and everything else.

"Remember when I was having a rough time? How I wanted to get in a boat and take off? But I knew that once I got in the boat and put out to sea, all my problems would crawl out of the woodwork, I knew they'd find a way onboard as stowaways." She was relentless, a Sherman tank of run-on sentences. My nose twitched. There was a prettier way of telling it, and she'd butchered the metaphor. "You have obligations, responsibilities," she added.

"Actually, I don't," I uttered, a tad bit waspishly. "I don't have any commitments, and being in this city has become unbearable. I can't stay here." The last sentence came out like a low howl, barely restrained from being frightening. I could have used the word "keening." It would have been right.

She was quiet. Remarshaling forces. "What, you think they don't have People magazine in Paris?" she countered.

"Don't."

"I bet they even have Entertainment Tonight. Dubbed, but still."

"Now you're being mean," I tried.

"Just move on! Deal with it!" she yelled. "You're not the first person in the world this has happened to!" Very, very gently, as if in slow motion, I put the phone back in its cradle and tiptoed away.

It was going to be a while before she forgave me; we weren't hang-up-acceptable sorts of friends. I was setting fire to lots of bridges. I mulled this over as I stuffed socks into shoes. It was probably simplistic, but I had a notion that the universe worked in a few key ways and I wasn't ready to give up on them. I believed most people were supposed to find each other and, if they were so inclined, have kids; that is, people who wanted to do that sort of thing. Not that it was supposed to be perfect. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes someone died, or they broke up, or random tragedy struck (though I could get paranoid about driving on the freeway, I tended to confine this line of thinking to natural disasters and times of war). I was a late bloomer, but I'd finally figured out that I wanted to be part of that world.

So, when I met and fell in love with Timothy, I thought I was following the master plan, the great scheme. ("Yay!" the lemmings cry as they rush the cliff en masse.) And I fell hard: I thought Timothy was The One. But the relationship conjugated itself differently: I met Timothy, I fell in love with Timothy, I had my heart broken by Timothy. Amo, amas, amok. It took less than six months.