Free Breathless by Nancy K. Miller Page A

requested my bankbook from the New York branch to be sent to Paris. When it didn’t arrive, I asked my father to inquire. I thought he’d be pleased that I was taking care of money matters on my own. The officer had just mailed the bankbook, he told my father, in care of Bernard Alvarez, as per my instructions.
    Not a very clever fly, after all.
    The evidence unleashed my father’s patriarchal zeal: I had “shacked up” with Bernard, and in a dangerous neighborhood (near Pigalle) to boot. The appearance of disgrace (my father pretended to give me the benefit of the doubt) was horrifying, enough to raise “suspicions which would scare even a liberal French father to say nothing of an English, German, North African, or any other kind of father.” Looking to rise above our own particular relationship, he located thedrama on an international stage, turning up the volume, in case I missed the point: “I will quit moralizing if you can get me a single expression of approval from any father of any nationality whatever who will condone in his daughter what you are doing in Paris,” “doing in Paris” having been crossed out and replaced by “what you seem to have let yourself in for.”
    As usual, my father was both right and wrong. I had more or less “shacked up” with Bernard. Little by little, without quite intending to, I found myself spending more and more time at the cousins’ apartment, only going to my room for the mail. It seemed lonely and pointless to heat up my dinner on the little Butagaz stove in my maid’s room. True, the apartment was in a seedy neighborhood. But what his daughter had “let herself in for” was less timeless international epic than early 1960s student domestic.
    The cousins’ apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up without an elevator, was a warren of once separate small rooms that had been hurriedly assembled. This layout guaranteed a minimum of privacy, or a maximum of sharing, depending on your view of communal life. You could shut the bedroom doors, but to go anywhere in the apartment you were obliged to pass through a common room that someone always seemed to occupy. The toilet was located in a chilly cupboard-like space between the kitchen and the front door. No sooner did you sit down on the wooden seat and slide the bolt into the lock than a fight about how long to cook the pasta would break out in the kitchen, or the front doorbell would ring and five more cousins would joyously announce their arrival in time for dinner. Compared to the elegant duplex the French movie cousins enjoyed, we were living in a slum. But compared to the run-down hotel rooms of the Latin Quarter and the overpriced maids’ rooms Monique and I had managed to find in much nicer neighborhoods, this five-room apartment was luxury and a piece of luck. The government had requisitioned all available apartments for the French citizens returning from Algeria; without a political connection there was little chance of finding anything at all.
    The apartment’s centerpiece was the green-tiled bathroom, a hint that the original owners had had dreams of grandeur for theiruncertain future. They had designed a salle de bains with a double sink, a long tub, and a bidet. But the plans for remodeling had been interrupted when the owners ran out of cash. There was no running water in the tub, and only cold water in the sinks and bidet. The North African cousins were not deterred by this minor drawback. Adept at the système D (the art of improvisation), they installed extra-long hoses, which ran from the kitchen sink, where a gas-driven chauffe-eau produced hot water, to the bathroom; the hoses snaked their way through the living room and down a small hallway, finally reaching the tub. Of course, you couldn’t be in any kind of hurry for your bath, and the hot water had a way of cooling off by the time it had filled the tub, but still, the bathroom was inside the apartment, and that was a thrill in itself. How many people