A Dangerous Dress (6 page)

She leaned down toward me again. “I don’t mean to bother you,” she said. “But I just had to say, I
loved
you in
Lost in Translation.
Working with Bill Murray must have been so much fun.”

“Oh,” I said. My brain hadn’t fully caught up to what she just said. But I said “Thank you” anyway. Because I knew she had paid me a compliment.

Before I could figure out what else to say, or not say, the man in the seat next to me woke up. He looked up at the woman, who was hovering about four inches over his nose, and made a huge noise clearing his throat,
arrrrrughh-ughh.
Which in any language plainly meant,
Please move before you fall on me.
So the woman just said “Bye,” gave me a little wave with her fingertips, and walked back to her seat.

Now the man sitting next to me was looking at me. “I am
not
Scarlett Johansson,” I said.

I have no idea if he understood me or not. He just closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

Notwithstanding what that lady said, I do not look like Scarlett Johansson. I mean, maybe a teeny tiny bit. She and I are probably about the same height, maybe even around the same weight. And we are both blonde. At least, I am. She changes her hair so much now, it’s hard to tell. And I guess the shape of my face is kind of like hers. But that’s it. If you had three or four Boilermakers, you might look at me and say, “You look a little like Scarlett Johansson.” Then after you sobered up, if you remembered saying it at all, you’d say, “No, you don’t.”

But that’s what she said. Maybe she had a few Boilermakers before boarding. Anyway that was the best thing that happened on the flight, which tells you it was a pretty rotten flight.

After what seemed like forever, we landed in Atlanta. I had to change to an Air France flight, but I didn’t care. Because I got to get out of that terrible seat.

My flight came in at Terminal T. My Air France flight was leaving in half an hour from Terminal E. And by the way, Terminals A, B, C, and D are between Terminal T and Terminal E. So I ran the whole way. But I did get there in time. And no, I did not have the middle seat again.

I had the seat next to the middle seat. In the same back row.

T
he flight from Atlanta to Paris was long. But in spite of my excruciating seat, the awful food, and the overpriced screw-top wine, it was okay, because I was so excited. About going to Paris, and about my new movie job, of course. But also about seeing Celestine. Who is my best friend, who lives in Paris, and who becomes extremely relevant. So it is high time I told you about her.

For reasons that are not very interesting, there was nobody from my freshman year at Purdue that I particularly wanted to room with. When I put in my housing request for sophomore year, I figured I’d take my chances. And taking my chances, I got Samantha.

She was much shorter than me, so we would not be able to share clothes, which was too bad. She was an Engineering major, pretty, and Asian. And oh, by the way, Samantha was a lesbian. She told me so in about the first five minutes. She said, “I should probably tell you, I’m a lesbian.” Which, by the way, was fine with me. Although please don’t go getting any ideas. Because I didn’t. It just didn’t bother me.

It bothered
her.

She immediately decided we were not going to have a good healthy roommate relationship. She asked for a transfer, and they gave it to her in two seconds flat.

Leaving me without a roommate. Which could be a problem. If I waited for the housing office to assign me somebody, I was at severe risk of getting a person with major issues. So I took matters into my own hands. If I was going to get a bad roommate, at least let her be a bad roommate I picked for myself.

But I didn’t get a bad roommate at all: I got a best friend. I got Celestine. Here’s how.

In my desperate search for a roommate without major issues, I combed the virtual message boards on the university’s web site. But I also looked at physical bulletin boards, the old-fashioned kind with cork and thumbtacks. On one board there was a pale lavender piece of paper. It was handwritten in writing different from any I had ever seen.

The notice was Celestine’s. The handwriting was different because Celestine is from Paris, France. Even though people in Europe are writing the same letters and numbers as us, they write very differently. I didn’t know that then. I only knew I’d never seen handwriting like that.

The only thing the notice said was:
Who is my roommate?
Plus a cell phone number.

I called. I don’t know why. She could have been awful.

But she was Celestine.

I arranged to meet her in one of the lounges. As soon as she walked in I thought,
Oh please let that be her.
I admit, my immediate reaction was selfish. Because I could see right away that Celestine is the type of girl who attracts a lot of boys, and high-caliber boys at that. And they can’t all get her, so that would give me a shot at one or two.

Celestine is the second-prettiest girl I have ever known. In fact, she is almost beautiful. But only almost. It’s as if she was born with an absolutely perfect face. Only then somebody gave her nose the tiniest twist while everything was still soft, and it stayed that way. She is very sensitive about it, which I have tried forever to convince her is nonsense. And I am right. I have known a girl who is even prettier than Celestine. Movie-star-perfect gorgeous, in fact. But in my view, no guy who qualifies as a human being would date her. Because girls like that know they are movie-star gorgeous, which gives them an attitude that, to say the least, is not lovable.

Celestine is exactly the opposite. Because she’s so ridiculously insecure about her looks, she is totally approachable and lovable, and she does not intimidate boys. So she has more dates than she knows what to do with, and she always will. At least until she settles down, which she swears she will, but I’ll believe that when I see it.

When we first met, Celestine told me she was from Paris. She said her mother was a poet. I never met anybody whose mother was a poet before. I asked what her father did. She said he was a cad, and that was all she ever told me about him. Then she said she was a student at the Sorbonne. I didn’t know then what the Sorbonne was, but it sounded so sophisticated it made me wish I was a student there myself. Just as I was starting to wonder what this amazing sophisticated French girl was doing at Purdue, she explained that there was an exchange program between the Sorbonne and Purdue, and she was here for the year.

I am going to let you in on a little secret. First, the not-secret part: Americans have a thing for Europeans. American men melt if a woman has a French accent, and American women melt if a man has a French accent. Italian, too. And British. And Spanish. German, not so much. Anyway, here is the secret:
Europeans—including Celestine—have that same thing with Americans.
That was why she decided to come to the United States for a year and immerse herself in, well, Americans. If she ever does settle down, I guarantee you it’ll be with some white-bread Boilermaker boy from Indiana or Ohio or Wisconsin.

Anyway, Celestine and I went straight to the housing office and told them we had done their work for them. We instantly became best friends, and we still are. Thank goodness for e-mail and the occasional very expensive phone call, because even though she lives in a time zone far far away, I would be lost without her. And did I mention that we are almost exactly the same size? Which girl roommates should absolutely always be. Celestine got to wear my sturdy nondescript middle-America wardrobe from Marshall Field’s in Chicago, which she loved, for reasons I cannot fathom. And I got to wear her fabulous European designer clothes with labels like agnes b and Versace, which I loved wearing, for reasons I trust are obvious. At the end of the year, after we cried and hugged and cried and she finally flew back to Paris, I opened the closet and found she had left me a fabulous little black Dolce & Gabbana top and skirt, and a gorgeous but fiercely painful pair of Stephane Kélian pumps. Which is how those things ended up in my mom’s pink carpet-bag suitcase.

I left for Paris in such a hurry, I didn’t even have time to e-mail Celestine to tell her I was coming. So it would be a big surprise. Although maybe not. When I wrote my “Dangerous Dress” paper, she had already moved back to Paris. I sent her a copy because I was very proud of it, and because, in a way, it was about Paris. After she read it she called me. I told her I thought it was a funny coincidence that she was from Paris, and now, out of the blue, I ended up writing this whole long paper about Paris.

“But it’s not a coincidence at all,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The dress called to your Grandma. It made her come all the way to Paris to get it. Now she has given the dress to you, and it is telling you to go to Paris, just like your Grandma did. Someday it will bring you here.”

I laughed. Celestine didn’t. “You’re serious,” I said.

“I’m a mystic,” she said. Then she laughed, too.

I had forgotten all about that conversation. I only remembered it sitting on the plane. The plane to Paris.

Maybe Celestine actually was a mystic—because Grandma’s dress really was bringing me to Paris.

T
hinking about that conversation, and Grandma’s dress, gave me goose bumps.

Although perhaps they just had the air-conditioning in Coach turned up too high.

Once my goose bumps went down, I unzipped my little duffel baggy carry-on and took out the screenplay.
The Importance of Beating Ernest.
Since Elliot Schiffter and Reliable Pictures were flying me all the way to Paris to help them find a dress for this movie, I figured I’d better at least read the script.

The Ernest in the title is Ernest Hemingway.

I don’t know about you. But when I was a junior in high school, I had to read some book by Ernest Hemingway. I don’t remember which one. All I remember is that I hated it, hated having to read it, hated everything about it. So when I saw that the screenplay had to do with Ernest Hemingway, I thought,
Uh-oh.

Silly me. I
loved
the screenplay.

Maybe because it’s actually not mostly about Hemingway. The main character is this old college professor named Harold Klein. He teaches literature, and he’s an expert on Hemingway. Which is really ironic, because when Harold was a very young man he went to Paris and fell in love with a beautiful French girl named Catherine. She fell in love with him, too. Only rat bastard Hemingway stole her away, even though he was married at the time.

So you see, Ernest Hemingway is the
villain.
Maybe that’s why I liked it so much.

Anyway, old Harold Klein is dying. And a young student convinces him to go back to Paris. To try to find Catherine, who was the love of his life. He goes, and he sees an old woman who is maybe Catherine. Only before he can find out, Harold gets run over by a guy on a Vespa.

This is not a sad story.

Because Harold wakes up, it’s 1928, and he’s nineteen again. Only this time he knows everything he learned in his whole life. He and Catherine fall in love all over again. And here comes rat bastard Ernest Hemingway all over again. But this time Harold has the chance to get it right. Of course it’s not easy. If love came easy, it would be a very short movie. Harold has run-ins with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who apparently were pretty funny in real life, although probably not intentionally. Even though Harold should know better, having lived through it all before, he does something stupid and Catherine gets really mad at him. So in swoops Hemingway. He invites Catherine to a glamorous soiree
and buys her a dangerous dress,
which she wears to the party. Only Hemingway’s wife sneaks Harold in, and Harold steals Catherine right back.

But Hemingway chases them down. There is a big fight, where scrappy little Harold actually beats up big drunk thug Ernest Hemingway. Only Harold takes a terrible beating too, and he passes out, and we don’t know if he’s alive or dead.

Wait, it’s happy.

He’s alive. But when he wakes up, he’s old again, and he’s in a hospital in Paris. The old lady at his bedside
is
Catherine, who has never fallen out of love with him. And the best part is, Harold is
not
dying after all. Which the doctor can’t explain, but hey, it’s a movie. Harold and Catherine get married in the same Paris café where they first met. They dance, they kiss, and—

“I
love
this!”

Then I realized I had said it out loud.

Fortunately the people sitting on both sides of me were asleep. I don’t usually rave out loud about things I read. But I
did
love it. It was so romantic. Funny, too. But mostly romantic.

I put the screenplay back in my duffel baggy. Then I looked at my watch. I still had another four and a half hours till Paris. So I decided to take a nap.

I guess what with all the rushing around and the excitement I was pretty tired, because in just a few seconds I felt myself drifting off. Before I fell asleep, though, I thought,
Look where I was only twenty-four hours ago. Look where I am right this minute. And just imagine where I could be twenty-four hours from now.

Only I didn’t have to imagine. I was going to Paris. Paris,
France.

Where absolutely anything could happen.

F
inally we landed at Charles de Gaulle airport. I was one of the last people off the plane. I looked around, but there was no one waiting to greet me. I followed everybody to passport control. Where there was no line. I do not mean there was nobody waiting. On the contrary: There were about six thousand people waiting. There was just no line. So it took quite a while until the passport control guy scanned my passport and let me into the country. Actually he was very handsome, but there was only one of him. Then it was off to baggage claim.