An American Dream Come True!
One of my American dreams was to
live as an expat for a while. My dream came true! I did a one-year creative
writing sabbatical in Paris, and three months in Barcelona.
Another American dream of mine
came true: I capitalized on the experience and wrote a novel!
You can
read a sample below.
Here’s the blurb:
"A café table in Paris. Four expat
writers begin meeting to eat and to critique their work. At first they’re
suspicious of each other, distrustful, secretive, envious, hyper-critical,
resentful. Then their personal lives blow up—and they get to know each
other… "
Read a sample on Amazon at http://amzn.to/2iqGEnv.
Or read a sample below.
Chapter
1
“I’ll give him the message, sir.” Anjali dropped the receiver
into its slot with a clatter of black plastic.
That had been Monsieur Chaigne, rich as Croesus, her boss
John had said. She must let him know about this call. But first she’d check the
post. What was this official-looking envelope? Internal Revenue Service? What
was that? Part of the United States Department of Treasury. Okay, trés importante—she knew that much
rudimentary French. Her eyes ran over the document. She’d better tell her boss
fast.
As she stood, her stomach rumbled. It would be lunchtime
soon. After a month in Paris, she had begun to crave Indian food. She had been
so disappointed in the Indian restaurants she’d visited so far in her new city.
Aasha had told her that they dialed back on the spices for French tastes, but
that there was a great place at Metro La Chapelle, on the north side of the
Tenth arrondissement, in the heart of
Little India. They’d go there this weekend, and she couldn’t wait for authentic
flavors from home. Home…her mother’s homemade curry…
She jumped guiltily from her rêverie when the intercom blared.
“Anjali, come in with my calendar, please.”
Anjali fluffed up her fringe of bangs and grabbed the
calendar, covered in high-grade leather and trimmed with brass. She left her
desk, in a room with no window, with gray carpeting on the floor. The first
time she’d seen it, it had seemed quite luxurious. Until she’d seen her boss’s
office.
She entered John Germaine’s corner office in the
Montparnasse Tower, with its view north and west of the city spread below. The
Tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine, and Basilique de Sacré Cœur, all
gleamed in the summer sun. She felt her feet sink into the deep pile of the
beige carpet, and then she tripped over the edge of the red and blue Persian
rug lain over it. As she approached his vast mahogany desk, she blinked at the
light pouring in the windows. The view thrilled her—the first part of her dream
had come true, she was in Paris.
In one hand, she held the calendar. With her free hand, she
tugged the edge of her cotton blouse. New job, new country, new culture, new
life—it was nervewracking. She’d lucked into a good position, but this man was
impossible. Nice, but a bit loony.
She watched as John Germaine sat back, the leather of his
huge chair creaking. He pulled at the white French cuffs of his French blue
shirt. He wasn’t going to like her news.
“Sir, the Internal Revenue—”
“What’s on the calendar for tomorrow night?” John asked
blithely.
Things had to be done in his order of events, she was
learning.
Anjali checked the page for the second week of July. He
refused to do this by computer. Worse, he refused to work with shared documents
online. Version control between his five offices was Anjali’s constant
nightmare.
“You’re taking your daughter to dinner, sir.”
“Oh, too bad.” John thought a minute. “Call Emily and tell
her I can’t make it. Emily won’t mind. She can go out with her mother. Then
book me at the Jules Verne. It’s up in the Eiffel Tower, you knew that, right?
Potential client.”
He added, “Gotta keep my kid in private school, you know.”
Then he winked.
“Okay, Mr. Germaine,” Anjali said reluctantly. She thought
he should go out with his teen daughter. Anjali’s father had done that for her.
“I know you’re new, but please call me John.”
“Okay, thank you.”
“How’s life treating you? Big change from Mumbai, isn’t it?”
“I’m settling in, sir.” She knew he didn’t want details
about her condescending aristocrat landlady, the pressure from her parents to
go back to India, and how dire the Indian food situation was in Paris. Dire!
“Very good. By the way, how was your new writing group last
night?
Anjali wondered why he was asking, but she smiled anyway.
“Fun. All kinds of writers. We may never be published, but—”
“—Oh, I can do that. My Ph.D. dissertation in economics at
Yale was published, you know. Maybe next time I’ll go with you.”
She sincerely hoped he would not. She had a character in one
of her screenplays based on John. What if he spotted it? Nah, he was too
self-absorbed. Seemed that way. But what if he wasn’t?
“I’ve been tossing
around a few ideas—want to run them by people,” John continued with his total
self-confidence. “Novels—my buddy told me he’s writing one. Can’t let him
one-up me.” John considered himself a Renaissance man, good at everything.
Besides, how hard could it be? “Well, anything else?”
“Here’s a message
from Mr. Chaigne.” She handed him the slip. “And the IRS sent a letter.” Anjali
said. “I tried to tell you—”
“What do they want?”
Anjali watched warily as John leaned even further back. It
seemed there was something about being successful that made men want to lean
way back in chairs. If he toppled over and became a paraplegic, she’d have to
find a new job—not easy in Paris. She might have to go back to Mumbai without
the second part of her dream fulfilled. To be so close and yet not see it
happen would kill her.
John poised his chair on the edge of destruction and ran his
thumbs up and down under the discrete paisley suspenders that strapped his
broad shoulders.
“Sir, they want to talk about the company’s U.S. books.”
“No time. Just tell them we haven’t had a chance to do our
tax return yet. They’ll understand.”
“But—”
“—They’ll understand.” John waved his hand, unconcerned.
“Okay, sir, I’ll tell them what you said.”
Anjali turned from his desk, then rolled her eyes.
Chapter
2
On the north side of Paris, in a former warehouse converted
into a soundstage, in the depths of a conference room, Carol, a Brit, sat in a
brainstorming meeting. Her brain was not storming. She’d been dry of ideas
lately, except for the thought that she would be sacked if she didn’t speak up
soon. Everyone else on the Trapèze creative staff was confidently shooting off
characters, settings, and plots for films. But she had nothing.
“A Parisienne—scarf tied just so, stiletto heels,
mini-skirt, tights—who wants, who’d die for, her next lover to appear tonight.”
That was Amandine, Parisienne, who sat relaxed yet
commanding in décolletage,
mini-skirt, thighs bursting forth in sheer black hose, and stilletos on her
feet.
Carol looked at all the flesh that Amandine had on display,
and she heard her mother quoting Coco Chanel: “Modesty—what elegance!”
Carol herself was wearing a cream silk Armani suit with a
deeper cream silk blouse. Skirt fashionably short, but not cut up to her
crotch. To be able to afford clothes like these ever again, she just had to
come up with ideas. Ones that worked.
“A Louis Jordan type.”
That was Frédéric, with bulging blue eyes and adam’s apple.
He was always eyeing the women.
“He’s debonair,” Frédéric said, “wants to keep his péniche afloat on the Seine. He’s
desperate for money—the boat is a black hole. He cheats at cards, on his income
tax, he beguiles rich women and tries to dupe them for money. It all backfires.
In the end, in a storm, he watches the péniche
sink into the Seine.”
Frédéric looked like a Bretagne boater himself in a
horizontal blue-and-white-striped, long-sleeved tee shirt.
Carol coached herself, desperate to contribute. Come on, old
girl, you just have to come up with something.
She felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her silk jacket.
She checked it as discretely as she could. It was her six-year-old texting her.
“Mummy, when will you be home?”
Oh, my baby! Now she really couldn’t think.
“Carol, what do you think?”
That was Gregoire, the production company’s executive
director. His character could be summed up in two words: tight suits.
Carol’s underarms itched against the silk. She crossed and
recrossed her legs and tugged her skirt down, aware of Frédéric’s gaze. She
knew she shouldn’t, and that if she did she would feel like an escargot, a garden-variety snail, but
she couldn’t help herself—she looked at Amandine. As Carol could expect of an
attractive Parisienne, Amandine was staring at her triumphantly, like a diner
seated before an array of escargots
roasted in their own shells with garlic and beurre
doux.
Damn! She shouldn’t have looked. Why was she so bonkers as
to do that to herself?
Gregoire crossed his arms. The room was silent. And Carol
had a thought! It felt weak, it would be booed, but it was all she could think
of.
“How about robbing the classics? Chaucer’s Alewife, and the
sleek, elegant Wife of Bath, and the Knight, all updated?” Then she remembered,
there was no Alewife in Canterbury Tales. Hopefully no one had read it.
“They’re on a pilgrimage of some sort—in the Sahara desert!—to a remote shrine
nearly covered in windblown sand?” Her imagination failed her at that point. She
despised herself for ending her sentence in a question, like an American.
Again, the room was silent. People were looking at her.
Carol felt so vulnerable that she couldn’t help it, she looked at Amandine.
Carol understood the message she saw in those eyes. Escargot!
Within a heartbeat of sending Carol her Parisienne deathray,
Amandine was sending Gregoire an admiring look full of Bourgogne wine and
roses.
“How about an older woman, Catherine Deneuve in her 40s,”
Amandine said, and the brainstorming swept on.
They didn’t like my idea, Carol said to herself. I’m so sick
of my ideas not being on target, out of step, ridiculous. They’re going to sack
me if I don’t produce. What am I going to do?
When Gregoire decided he liked the idea of Louis Jordan on a
péniche, with a Catherine Deneuve
type for a love interest, the meeting ended, to be resumed in a week.
Carol felt as though she were staggering as she fled to her
office—could anybody, especially Amandine, tell? She just had to learn not to
look at that Parisienne, just like all the rest—with entirely too much
self-esteem. Otherwise known as arrogance. She had to learn not to look at half
the women in Paris, who cultivated a superior attitude and sent it like a
deathray into other women’s hearts. She packed up her handbag, texted her
daughter that she was leaving, and left.
The French who weren’t born in Paris were quite lovely, she
thought. It was the Parisians….
She dragged herself back to her apartment in Le Marais, the
trendiest neighborhood, in the Fourth arrondissement. Every
footstep ached with self-condemnation. You’re not present for your daughter,
you’re not good enough at your job, your ideas have dried up, and they’ll fire
you soon. But I’m working so hard to provide for Louise, she countered weakly.
Her inner critic said, “Humph!”
She punched in the door code and opened the massive, old
wooden door to the courtyard. The palms standing in the corners in their huge
stone pots looked relaxed, the red geraniums in first floor window boxes looked
perky. Not at all how she felt. The scene was pretty, very French. This will
all disappear if you can’t come up with ideas, Carol’s inner critic reminded
her with satisfaction.
When she walked into the apartment, she heard Jeffrey’s
voice speaking quietly. They’d lived together for two years. Jeffrey was a Brit
expat, too, who repaired people’s computers in the offices of Orange, the telecom.
And he minded Louise for hours at a time. She trusted him with Louise
implicitly. She wished she could be with her little girl more herself.
Carol eased down the hall. Jeffrey and the child were
sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, pillows and stuffed animals
bolstering them, reading a picture book.
“That word is ‘c-a-t,’” Louise said to Jeffrey. They looked
so ideal and cozy together.
“Very good, you got it, you clever girl!” Jeffrey ruffled
her curly blonde hair, and they both looked up and saw Carol. Jeffrey’s face
darkened.
Louise scrambled off the bed, her strawberry blonde curls
bouncing.
“Mummy, Jeffrey and I are reading books! A fairy tells a
princess, who has a cat, and, and—you’re home!”
Carol swept her into her arms and kissed her warm, sticky
neck. Then she lifted her face to accept a peck on the lips from Jeffrey.
“Where’ve you been? She’s been anxious for you,” Jeffrey
said.
“It’s seven, not that late.”
“Well, are you making dinner or am I?”
“Let’s order in.”
“No surprise, what you always say.”
His disparagement, a long-term feature of their
relationship, upset her.
“Why can’t you be pleasant to me? You were home since five,
you cook something.”
“Your daughter kept me busy.”
“Then order something in.”
“Mummy, come see my book.”
“Jeffrey, would you order?”
“Yeah, the usual, sure,” he grumbled and pulled out his cell
phone.
Later, after Louise was asleep, Carol went online and
Googled “writing group in English Paris” in hopes that being with a creative
group, far away from her colleagues, would get her brain storming again. She
wrote down the address and the time, closed her computer, stood with a sigh,
stretched her back in her Armani suit, and went to bed.
Read the rest of this ebook -- and steep yourself in Paris --
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