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.”
Once she was sure I wasn’t about to ship her back to France, she pulled at my still warm hair and said, “Actually, Papa asked me to fetch you. I was fetching, you see. He wants to see you on the terrace. We didn’t have a terrace in Paris,” she added, rightly. “Now we do.”
“Come,” I said, taking her hand as soon as Trieu dismissed me from my chair. “Let’s go together.” Lucie held my fingers tightly as we walked down the wide corridor with its twenty-foot ceilings. In the upper foyer, where the tiles were a patterned black-and-white ceramic, she tried to hop from one square to the other. She gave up to descend the grand, half-spiral staircase, jumping from step to step.
“It’s this way, maman,” she said at the bottom, leading me to the double glass terrace doors with brass handles curled like figure eights.
“I remember,” I responded, letting her drag me to Victor.
When he saw us emerge from the house, Victor folded his newspaper in four and said, “Merci, chérie,” to Lucie. She sat next to him on his chaise longue and let him kiss her head. “For your hard labor, I present you with this cake.” He lifted a blue porcelain plate with a pink pastry on it in the shape of a flower and handed it to her. “It’s a mung-bean-and-rice pastry called banh com.