Chapter Text
When Vince stops to investigate how it is she came about to where she is now, she eventually comes to the same conclusion she always does, and always will, that the whole lot of it began when she met Isla Taylor.
Or rather, when she saw her.
Vincent had never met Miss Isla Taylor in person. Truly, she had only ever seen her once—at eleven at night on a Tuesday, when both Maman and Papa had already been asleep for hours. She had still been in lycée then, so young and impressionable and so, so naïve.
It had not yet occurred to her that women like Isla Taylor (women from New England, of all strange places) existed at all, let alone anywhere near France. When Maman took the shopping basket in one hand from the market stalls and Vince’s wrist in the other as they passed the glowing windmill of the Moulin Rouge, Vince straining against her mother’s grip to hear the show music spilling out into the street, it seemed clear enough to her what sort of women were allowed in that world.
Perhaps others existed somewhere, but heavens forbid Vince ever see them. She would not have expected Maman to understand it anyway.
But Isla did.
Vince first happened upon the Brit after a long day of doing positively nothing at school, which she followed by doing a little more of nothing at home while Maman cooked dinner and Papa returned from work and, eventually, both of them went to bed.
Television was still a small miracle then. Their little télé sat in the living room on a polished wooden stand that matched the rest of their good furniture, its screen glowing dimly in the dark of the room like something alive. There were only a handful of programs the antenna could catch, most of them French state broadcasts, though sometimes Papa managed to tune the set to stranger signals drifting in from across the Channel.
On Tuesdays, Vince could watch a late foreign broadcast Papa managed to pull in from New England. A stout, pudgy man named Robert Baker appeared, as he always did: with his thin, severe mustache matched by equally severe eyebrows. The picture was always a little snowy, but it was clear enough for Vince to sit cross-legged on the carpet and at the very least listen, if not watch.
For years, every Tuesday night from the time Vincent is thirteen until she is seventeen and two months, Robert Baker delivers English news to the handful of invisible viewers who manage to catch the signal.
That night feels exciting to reminisce, Vince thinks. Perhaps not exciting, nothing about the broadcast itself is thrilling, not particularly, but it gives her an answer. Quite a few, actually.
And the answers begin when Vince sees what—whoappears beside the man on the screen: a woman with dark hair and the sort of confidence Vince has never seen before in a woman, not even her mother.
Miss Isla Taylor.
What a thing, Vincent considers, tucked into herself on the chair, that a homosexual could come and sit in the presence of a man and speak about it plainly—be confident about it.
Looking back on it now, Vince is fairly certain that is where the whole debacle begins.
“What is lesbianism? What causes it… and can it be cured? This episode of ITV’s long-running current affairs strand This Week attempts to answer these questions. More on Britain on Film.”
Baker’s voice is annoying and grating, as is every masculine voice she has ever had to listen to, but Vince’s attention is captured easily enough.
“Women homosexuals are often known as lesbians—again, from the Greek island of Lesbos, where in ancient times the great poetess Sappho and a number of other homosexual women are said to have lived. Tonight we divert our program to the other half of this subject: female homosexuality, or lesbianism. In some ways this is easier for us to discuss because, whereas male homosexuality is a crime in Britain, female homosexuality is perfectly legal.”
Britain is certainly a place, Vince thinks to herself, and she sits up straighter on the loveseat.
“Lesbians can be open about it. As we shall see, the great majority are not. But a few are—for instance, this secretary from the North Midlands.”
Miss Isla appears on the snowy screen.
She has a short brown bob, neatly waved, and although Vince can hardly understand the woman’s accent at first, the years of Britain-adjacent programming give her just enough tools to follow the basic English.
Isla does, in fact, have something to say.
“Well, it’s really,” Isla says, “I want to love and be loved by another woman.”
Vince stares at the screen like that for a moment. She has gone from absently worrying the strand of hair beside her ear to holding both hands stiffly at her sides. Her nightgown is pale white, stark against the deep olive of her skin. For a moment she looks down at herself and thinks of a ghost, illuminated there by the glow of the télé.
Only for a moment, because then Vince is studying Isla’s face, intensely.
What is it that needs curing? No physical ailment, surely. With the way Taylor speaks about love, it is hard to think she is any different from Maman and Papa sleeping upstairs. Vince knows what love is supposed to look like, at least in practice—Maman leaning into Papa at the kitchen table, Papa kissing the side of her head before work, his hand settling on the small of her back when he passes her in the hallway, little things like that which Vince has seen often enough to remember clearly, little gestures she could list if she wanted to.
But she has no notion of what it is meant to feel like—or does she? How would she know if she did? How is she meant to know? Is she? Certainly this can’t be right.
Is this woman in love right now?
Vince watches the crinkle of Taylor’s nose when she smiles and the way her eyes narrow slightly when Baker speaks, how long Isla pauses before answering, how her shoulders shift in the chair, the small tilt of her head when she says the word love,and Vince finds herself observing these things very closely without entirely meaning to, noticing them one after another and then again, the timing of the pauses, the movement of her mouth when she forms certain words, the way her hands sit together in her lap, as though there might be something in the pattern of it that explains what she means, what she feels.
Vince keeps documenting—in a way, going back over the same details again while Isla continues speaking, paying attention to the same movements of her face and shoulders and the way she reacts when Baker asks a question, trying to see if anything changes when she says love compared to when she says anything else.
The image flickers, all black and white and yet still colorful, in a way. The telé has never felt more vibrant.
Vincent begins to wonder if Isla has already had lovers, wonders if there had been a time before she knew she wanted the company of women, and she thinks about what Isla’s face might look like when she speaks about them when the men and the cameras are not there, if she speaks about them at all, wondering also what she looks like speaking to the women themselves, whether she keeps the same careful way of talking or if something about her face or her posture changes when there is no one there to ask questions about it.
Somewhere in the middle of this Vince realizes she is not listening to Baker anymore because she is watching Isla. Studying and cataloging and it begins to feel odd to Vince that she is paying this much attention to it, a little unpleasant even, like she is watching something that was not meant to be examined this closely, but she keeps looking anyway because there might be something in the details of it, something visible that explains what she means when she talks about love, something a person could notice and remember.
If her love is real, then surely it must show somewhere, Vincent reasons.
Without thinking much about it Vince shifts on the loveseat and glances toward the reflection in the glass of the television, letting her eyes unfocus to study herself, almost. She finds herself tilting her head the same way Isla does and tightening her eyes slightly the same way Isla does when she smiles, trying it once and then again, not entirely sure why she is doing it but repeating the same movements anyway, as if the same expression might appear on her own face if she copies it closely enough.
“How can you find such a woman?” Baker asks.
“Well—that’s the difficulty,” Isla says. “In a way, it means I have to keep making friends with people, because I can’t find out unless I make friends with them. And then, if they are lesbian, there’s hope for me. But even then, there isn’t hope for me unless they happen to take to me.”
And, well.
—
There is something to be said about things often falling right into place.
“How can you find such a woman?” Baker asks, and Vincent finds the answer is diligently.
She had hardly been looking for Rody, not exactly, though in some ways she had been when she used the Collectionneur’s piece on her as a chance to find new positions, seeing as she’d fired the poor fool who’d almost all but completely trashed La Guele de Saturne’s curated reputation in the city with his poor work ethic and disgusting customer etiquette. Americans. She hadn’t asked for Rody, but she’d answered (the job listing—but surely, in a way, Vince, too) and came to the bistro and agreed to the hours. Things have a habit of arranging themselves for Vince once she begins paying attention to them, and there is something to be said about the quiet hunger she has been nursing since hiring Rody. No tang of lemon pastries or even the fruit itself from her tree satisfies it.
“Anyone will work if they’re hungry enough,” Papa says to a younger Vincent, and she finds she feels delighted that he was right.
At first she had wondered how desperate Rody was willing to become just to hold onto this job. Even with her experience, it’s obvious she holds no real love for her position in the service industry and only happens to be bland enough at it that she can complete the basic tasks without trouble, and Vince had somehow drawn the conclusion that she was the hopeless puppy kind.
Rody seems unable to cook anything properly or fend for herself in that way, so naturally Vince assumes that Rody’s version of being self-sufficient must mean feeding herself with whatever leftovers and botched meals come out of the workplace kitchen, simply because she cannot trust her own skills to keep herself fed. A poor street dog, hungry and wanting—any empathetic person would feed it, Vince had thought. Maman would have fed it.
“Poor thing,” she imagines the woman cooing. No love for rats, certainly, but a mutt? Maman had always had a soft spot for them, Papa being proof enough.
Later she realizes that Rody is wanting, but not for food. She is hungry—starving even, and it takes one to know one.
On Tuesday evening she makes her way up to her apartment and stands in her bathroom and thinks of the things she said to Rody and the things Rody said back, going over the order of the words and the expressions that came with them, checking if she had answered correctly or if there had been another way to say it. She looks in the mirror and Miss Taylor herself stares back.
When Vincent turns fifteen, Collectionneur magazine publishes its first catalog in 1955, and Papa brings it home from the kiosques near the letterpress shop downtown, along with an issue of Elle for Maman to read over coffee.
Alone in her room, Vince becomes acquainted with Auguste Pralus, a pastry chef in Roanne who has just won the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France in pâtisserie. Vincent salivates over the photograph of Auguste wearing his veste with the MOF tricolor collar. The print itself is not colored yet—much like the sorry little telé in the living area, but she can still make out the blue, white, and red. Pralus opens his first shop in 1948 on Rue Charles de Gaulle and becomes known for elaborate sugar work and sculpted decorations.
Famous for sugar, creams, chocolate, bread. Le Payswrites about what it calls the “birth of the local superstar,” and Papa buys that issue for Vince as well, noticing how closely she studies the articles and photographs of the man. Pralus is hardly a chef—hardly deserving of the collar and the title; but surely if this mediocre man can achieve it, so can she. “Anyone will work if they’re hungry enough,”Papa says, and Vincent’s hunger only grows.
As it so happens, she is not the only being in the world nursing an appetite.
Vincent has never heard her mother curse, but it came close when the rat problem occurred, those few months before she lost her functioning taste. “We live like the Americans do, I swear it,” Maman spat the second afternoon the audacious rat found its way through their kitchen while she and Vince were preparing dinner. Papa had an earful that night over Boeuf Bourguignon—and both Maman and Papa lost their appetite for it halfway through the argument. The next day he came home with snap traps.
Perhaps the snap traps might have been more forgiving to the rodent, but unfortunately for the poor bastard, Vincent finds it first.
Before Vince leaves for culinary school, the apartment she grows up in with her parents has a bateau-style tub, deep enough that before Vince reaches 160 centimeters she can stand straight in it and the rim knocks just above her knees, and narrow enough that the first time she bathes herself in it, when she is eleven or twelve, she slips twice trying to haul herself out. That weekend she sets the traps in the bathroom instead of the kitchen, arranging them carefully along the sink and beside the tub, close enough together that anything running along the counter has nowhere else to go.
Maman seems unfazed when she learns of the rat’s fate—although Vince has fabricated some of it, most of it really, and it is better for both of them that she keeps it that way. (Still, to see someone Vince has always thought of as warm and caring speak so coldly about the life of something living is surprising to her, pest or not. Perhaps not surprising exactly, but it confuses Vincent. The fear of something will do strange things to the way a person thinks.)