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from view. I wished that I could.
    Eventually Jenna barely spoke to me at all except to issue orders. I had beds to make, floors to sweep, dishes to wash, baguettes to buy—before she woke up in the morning. One day she wrote the house rules on a piece of paper. I had a half-day off during the week to EXPLORE PARIS ON YOUR OWN . Those were her capital letters, not mine. I cleaned in desultory silence. I didn’t know what I had done wrong. But I wanted desperately to make things right.
    I went out later that day, alone, a copy of A Moveable Feast in hand (Jenna had dismissed Anaïs Nin as being all wrong for my Paris education), feeling very lonely as I attempted to retrace Hemingway’s steps through the city. I had no one my age to talk to. My mother was an expensive long-distance call away, and, anyway, what would she say other than I told you so? She hated Jenna, hated her for taking me away from her—which was how she put it, but it was more that my mother had driven me into the arms of another mother, one who was more cultured.
    For a long while I sat by the Medici fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The waters were as deep and dark as my mood. It was quickly becoming become my favorite place in Paris—away from the crowds, the laughing faces, that now seemed to mock my ineptitude.
    The fountain was in a long shallow pool that stretched out before a sculpture showing Polyphemus, a cyclops in Greek mythology, spying from an overhead perch on the young lovers Actis and Galatea. It was tucked into a corner of the gardens, bordered by elegant stone urns containing brightly colored flowers whose reflection danced on the water. No one ever seemed to go there. It was hidden, romantic, soothing, its beauty heavy and melancholy. It felt perfect for the person I was that summer in Paris. What I really wanted was to be accepted for myself, but I didn’t have that insight, yet. I spied a fleuriste and bought some paperwhites, or white narcissi, for Jenna. I had always bought presents for my own mother, even when (or was it because?) she behaved callously toward me.
    When I arrived back at the apartment, I knocked at the door instead of walking straight in. Jenna answered and I pushed the flowers toward her and said, “Ça ne fait rien” (it doesn’t matter), a phrase I had learned in high school and had rehearsed that day in my mind, thinking it would endear me to her. I hoped she would think me clever. She listened to me, looking at me as if I were daft. She had that perfect hostess face on, the one with the magnanimous smile and the blank eyes. Her prolonged silence said to me, “You are a complete imbecile.”
    Looking bemused at the proffered bouquet, Jenna purred, “Oh, they’re lovely.” She flashed a smile like scissors, little white teeth cutting a look of irony into her face. I felt so defeated. I had never understood sophistication to be mean, but it is. If you look up the origin of the word (something Jenna would have approved of), there you find it—a hardening of innocence. My own process of becoming sophisticated could not have happened in a more appropriate place than Paris. A center of enlightenment for centuries, it was where countless people before me had come to get the bumpkin kicked out of them. Paris was my salon, with Jenna playing hostess. She was exacting, reproving me every time I fell short of the Paris ideal of the smart, refined, artfully cunning female.
    Under such stress, much of it self-imposed, an anxiety born of the need to be more than perfect around such apparently faultless people as Jenna and Nigel, every corner of Paris seemed to taunt me with images of sublime perfection—the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Élysées, Napoleon’s tomb ensconced under the golden cupola of Les Invalides, the futuristic Centre Pompidou with its building’s guts hanging on the outside. Even the art began to weigh me down, as I discovered