My Paris "Office"

“Are you in your office,” my sister asked in her half-mocking tone.

“I am,” I replied, acknowledging the vague olive branch she was extending. I’ve always taken personal calls, sometimes even professional ones, while in the bathroom and she’s teased me about it since we were kids. That’s all she ever did, tease me.

We weren’t currently on speaking terms. But family teaches it’s possible to love someone you don’t like. I had landed safely in Paris and was simply letting her know. She disapproved of my French escapade. Surprise, surprise.

I could never do anything to please her or my parents when they were still alive. I had desperately failed at the conforming game and here I was, happier than ever: divorced, unemployed, and living in the maid’s quarters of a historic Parisian building. Not a great pitch to her Goop subscribing yoga-mom friends whose diamonds burnt through your iris in the California sun, watching their Coppertone children run out of the Pacific holding surfboards. Was their life even real? Meanwhile, my very last savings were being spent on this trip, banking on the promise of the book I would finally write. With my early mid-life crisis in full effect, I braced myself by sitting on a toilet in Paris.

“Well listen, I’ve got some paperwork to do,” I said, continuing our inside joke while cutting the conversation short. She let out a quick chuckle and we hung up.

The lady from the rental agency had explained that my toilet had once been for the use of the entire floor but now, most of the rooms had been joined together to form small apartments, their own commodes now inside. Only one other person had legal access to mine, but the tenant never used it. I was to keep it locked at all times. But every time I went to the “office”, I thought I heard my neighbor’s door open. I understood why no one else wanted to use it; the place hadn’t been remodeled in decades.

Despite not having a toilet, I loved my studio. Its two windows gave on to the Sacré-Coeur, framing it like a postcard. How much more Parisian could I get? After a dinner of crunchy baguette, goat’s cheese, and some velvety red wine to acclimate, I slept. A great idea would surely come. I would show everyone I could write a book, including my sister.

But at two A.M., I awoke to a horrible scream. In heavy jet-lagged sleep, it took me a minute to get my bearings. I quickly sat up in bed, my heart beating a mile a minute. I waited in silence, holding my breath. Nothing. My mind was racing: was someone being kidnapped? Was there a burglary? What if…another blood curling scream came from the wall right next to my bed. A woman’s voice. I jumped out of bed and before evaluating the possible danger, I was in the hallway pounding on the adjacent door. As footsteps approached, I prepared myself, ready to scream to alert more neighbors and possibly punch the intruder in the face. The doorknob turned slowly and only then did I realize how far from home I was, with no phone to call the police, I didn’t even speak the language well enough and perhaps I was going to…

The door opened, it was too late.

In front of me stood an old woman, barely five feet tall, wearing a long flannel nightgown, despite the summer heat. With disheveled grey hair, she stared at me with deep grey eyes. That was the first time I met Esther. She said nothing and closed the door in my face.

Stunned, I retreated to my room. But the screams continued the next night, and the one after that, and for the rest of the week. The agency kindly reminded of the contract: no reimbursement possible.

I finally took it upon myself to knock at Esther’s door one afternoon. I hadn’t slept properly in five days and needed to explain to her I had come here to write. I hadn’t put a word on the page, blaming my sleepless nights.

Esther cracked the door. I spoke a mish-mash of broken French explaining how an editor friend had accepted to look at a manuscript at the end of August and it was a one shot deal.

After my incomprehensible, victimizing monologue, Esther reluctantly opened the door and pointed me to one of the two carved wooden chairs around the table. She boiled water and didn’t utter a word. She pulled out thin porcelain cups with delicate pink roses painted on them and poured a smokey smelling tea.

When she sat down, she finally looked at me. In a thick accent Esther said:

“My dear, I am afraid you will never work here.”

And before I opened my mouth to reply, she continued:

“The screams, they come out of me at night. I cannot control them. They control me.”

Great. I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. And I would certainly NOT ask my sister for money. She’d tell me to come back and then she would win. I had to find another solution. Being angry at Esther served no purpose. I sat in my bathroom “office” crying tears of frustration, biting my own fists to keep from yelling back at Esther. But nothing changed. Every night, the screams returned and racked her body, releasing emotions I didn’t suspect. So I shifted my schedule to accommodate the screams. Then it was as if Esther, myself, and the screams all began to cohabit. I slept during the day and waited for the screams to punctuate my working nights. Esther invited me for more tea. She was lonely and in all honesty, so was I. She sat there, listening to me go on and on about myself, what I wanted, why I had left my husband, the tensions with my sister. When I look back, I am embarrassed at my self-centeredness. Certain days no more than five words came out of her mouth. And there I was rambling on and on, trying to fill the space between us with words I wasn’t even sure she understood. And then, on June 23rd, preparing to go into a complaint about the rude woman at the boulangerie who pretended not to recognize me every day, Esther put her small hand on mine. I fell silent and she began her tale.

Esther lived in this same building with her family until the Second World War. Before being sent to a concentration camp, her mother asked their maid to hide her daughter. She trusted Esther with a small leather pouch to hide until their return. But her parents never returned. After the war, the recurring dream of being torn from her mother began, wringing her insides until visceral howls escaped her lungs night after night. I said given her small frame, it was hard to imagine she was the one making such a raucous. That made her laugh. It was the first time I had seen her smile. She handed me a black leather notebook and said:

“Write my story. Tell them so they know. So it doesn’t happen again.”

I had vaguely started another project but for the remaining weeks of the summer, I jotted all of Esther’s memories in the pages of that black notebook. Some days, as I would be coming back up the six flights of stairs, her door would open slowly:

“Josephine, you want to come in for a cigarette?”

I basically had taken up smoking in Paris to spend time with Esther. In my room, I transcribed my notes. Some details were excruciating and the tears I had swallowed in her presence poured out as I imagined seven-year old Esther, abandoned in this life, so that she may live. Whenever I stepped out with my key to use the bathroom, she would mock me and say:

“Going to the office again? You must have a lot of work!” And I would hear her laughing at her own joke. Every time.

As soon as the sun set on Paris, I worked away on our project until dawn; until Esther’s last scream subsided and my penance was done. I crawled into bed until the mid-afternoon when we met for a meal or a cigarette. Despite the gravitas of her existence, her humor was witty and quick. She had been a spitfire of a girl, broken by man. But when she turned it on, she had me in stitches with all the neighborhood gossip she got from the “concierge” of our building, the one who never bothered to make eye contact with me.

Convinced my editor friend would love Esther’s story, I sent it early and ran out to buy the nicest bottle of champagne I could afford. Headed home, I saw two firetrucks were in front of our building. My stomach sank as I ran up the stairs two by two, holding the bottle tight. Her door was opened and a flock of young men were strapping her into a gurney. Running over, I took her hand:

“Esther, what happened? Where are they taking you?”

Esther looked at the men and smiled. In a weak whisper she joked:

“Handsome ones aren’t they. You should try calling the fire department. Dial 18 on your phone Josephine.”

The firemen, good-looking as they were, had to take her away. But before they did, she looked me dead in the eye and squeezed my hand.

“You have the key to the treasure. It is yours. Take it.”

And with that, Esther was carried down in her open casket by the most good-looking pallbearers. I couldn’t let her go alone. Not after everything we’d shared. Leaving the champagne on her table, I ran after them and made it to the ambulance right before they closed the doors. I jumped in and took my friend’s hand.

“I’m here Esther. I won’t leave you.”

We drove in silence to Hotel Dieu, the hospital near Notre Dame. For the first time, she slept and didn’t scream. She only woke up once to look at me and say:

“In your office.”

She sighed her last breath at dawn. I walked the early morning hours along the Seine River, deflated, disarmed by the injustice of life. Adding insult to injury, the editor refused my story. Our story. The one I had vowed to make known.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I waited for Esther’s cries, but they never came. I would never hear them again. I turned her metaphorical phrase over an over in my head. I sat in her room, looking at the bottle of champagne on the table. Hanging on a nail against the wall was her key to our bathroom, to my “office." I took it and headed to where I did my best thinking.

As I sat there peeing, I examined the aged wooden floorboards, the paint peeling off the walls, the vintage light switch. I ran my hands alongside the bottom of the toilet bowl, praying it had recently been cleaned. Nothing. I got down on all fours in this tiny bathroom and scanned every inch until I came to a looser board. Wiggling it back and forth, using Esther's key as a lever, I pried it open. There lay a small leather pouch. Esther’s treasure: dozens of old gold coins. At that very moment the phone rang, it was my sister.

“Listen, Eric told me he didn’t pick up your book. You tried. Now come home and I’ll help you find a real job.”

In the palm of my hand laid what must have been at least $20,000 worth of gold.

“Thanks. The Paris office gave me an advance for the book. I got this,” I answered, smiling.