The Arrival
L.A. Young
Word Count 1486
I had forgotten what Jocelin smelled like until she kissed my right cheek, and Christian Dior's L’Eau Sauvage enveloped me. She murmured my name in my ear, her perspiration trickling onto my earlobe.
“Ça va?” Her blue eyes looked at me as I stood frozen in the arrivals hall of Paris’ Orly Airport.
I nodded and smiled, but my stomach hopped about and triggered a sickening aftertaste in my mouth. Was crossing the Atlantic the right choice? It was August 1980, and I had given up my flat in San Francisco and left behind all my friends in the City's thriving lesbian community, not to mention my family in Southern California. I had only taken a year of French in college, and no job awaited me in this new country. On top of that, I had put total trust in someone I had known for only a couple of months in the States, and now she was at the airport, waiting to take me to her home in a small town in the center of France. Did I even know Jocelin, other than that she was a 34-year-old French divorcee and mother coming out as a lesbian for the first time, and I was a 23-year-old American wannabe writer who had come out only the year before?
“It’s the Air France butter and jam from the plane ride. It made me feel sick.”
Nerves, I thought. What had I done?
Jocelin looked at me sympathetically, then firmly led me down the escalator to the stifling underground parking lot. She stopped at the end of a row of cars where a bright red Ford van with a delicate hand-painted black ladybug on the upper-rear left side was parked in front of us.
“I buy this for you. For us. For the kids. I name her Cocinelle. How do you say it in anglais? Ladybug, I think. She fly away, just like us.” And with that, her lips pressed against my skin again, this time on my neck. As she slid open the side door, I caught a glimpse of the interior. Jocelin had arranged everything like a small cottage away from home: cupboards, closet, propane stove, and a mattress atop a wooden frame.
My eyes welled up. This was an example of why I first fell in love with Jocelin in the City by the Bay: she never wavered when it came to professing her love for me. My lesbian roommates in San Francisco, on the other hand, would make fun of Jocelin behind her back, claiming she was just “really hot” to fall for any woman, and lucky me, I was going to be the one to bring her out. But those remarks ignored the courage of Jocelin’s decision. We would have to spend a year apart for her to get a divorce in her home country of France. Jocelin’s husband had threatened to take their two children away after learning that she was leaving him for me. She had met too many mothers in San Francisco who had lost custody just because they had fallen in love with another woman. As the mother of a five- and seven-year-old, Jocelin was determined to prevent a French judge from making the same blunder.
Jocelin hopped into the back of the van, pushed my suitcase under the wooden mattress frame, and offered her outstretched hand. I took it and climbed in to join her even though my stomach still felt queasy. Once inside, I understood why her clothes were full of creases: she had slept overnight in this underground lot, anxiously awaiting my early morning arrival.
I checked to see that she had drawn the curtains. She unbuttoned her blouse, and I did the same. We helped each other pull off our pants. I hadn't imagined our reunion in a suffocating concrete parking structure beneath a major Parisian airport. But once Jocelin’s skin passed over mine, I was back in her blue Oldsmobile station wagon parked outside my rented flat in San Francisco the first night she had kissed me, the shimmering lights of the city applauding.
We pushed each other onto the mattress in the back of Cocinelle, alternating whose body pressed the other's further down into the foam as though we couldn't quite get enough. Our entire bodies were drenched in sweat: Every detail came into view when I closed my eyes: my body sailing above Jocelin's and riding the incoming waves. When the waves subsided, and I reopened my eyes, Jocelin's cobalt eyes welcomed me.
As we lay there, having inaugurated the interior of Cocinelle, I remembered how many times I had gone over this reunion in my imagination. After all, Jocelin was joyfully in love with a woman for the first time, and I was sa petite Américaine. For me, Jocelin wasn't just anyone: she was a strong-willed, beautiful woman who had rendered the San Francisco women’s writers’ community speechless with her powerful poetry. Even more appealing to me, she lived in France. I had dreamed of coming to live here ever since I visited Paris as a poor college student. Yet deep down, I was terrified, for I was no longer totally in charge of my destiny. My new life had suddenly expanded into a family with another woman and her two children in an unfamiliar country. As Jocelin and I slipped back into our clothes and clambered into the front of the van, I realized I couldn’t even drive the vehicle in an emergency. I didn't know how to operate a stick shift.
With Jocelin at the wheel, Cocinelle edged her way out of the pit of Orly and onto the autoroute where the monotone license plates with their black backgrounds and white code combinations whizzed past us, reminders that I had been dropped onto foreign soil. The midday summer sunlight burst out of the sapphire sky, brashly forcing its way between the perfect row of poplar trees lining the main highway while the hay, rolled into graceful bales of golden carpet, were placed in odd-numbered clusters in the corner of the fields. A trajectory of smoke led to a stout man in his work clothes poking his backyard bonfire of dead leaves with a pitchfork, followed by the faded advertisement of a bottle of Dubonnet hand-painted on the side of a stone dwelling.
All this beauty intoxicated me as much as the smooth touch of Jocelin’s bronzed arm, my fingers stroking it as she drove us through the countryside.
As the van came out of the next turn, two towering Gothic steeples attached to a pale green roof jutted out of a wheat field. “Welcome to Chartres, ma belle,” Jocelin announced as she parked. “Now you will see why everyone in the world wants to come here.”
We joined the endless line of sunburnt tourists who gradually disappeared behind the worn leatherbound doors to the sanctuary. Once inside, the hushed voices and echoed footsteps amid the lowered temperature and dim interior sealed us off from the world outside. Jocelin pressed her body close to mine, wrapped her arm around my waist, and led me to the choir entrance, where she lifted her eyes toward a cascade of brilliant colors.I followed her gaze: another world lived high above us, immortalized in tones of reds, browns, but most of all, blues. Jocelin whispered in my ear, “There are 152 magnifique windows in Chartres, but this one – from the 13th century - is the most beautiful.” A woman with a crown dressed in a bright, luminous blue garment was seated on a throne upheld by four angels. Her hands lay on the shoulders of a miniature adult sitting on her lap, his right hand raised in the sign of a blessing.
“Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière. Our Lady of the Beautiful Window. How you call it in English? The Blue Virgin window.” Jocelin pulled me closer to her warm body. “During the Second World War, priests remove the Virgin and hide her in the countryside, away from the Germans. It was a miracle she survive.”
This glorious Blue Virgin astonished me like the exquisite scenes I had witnessed along the road that day. Just as people for centuries had expressed their love for this woman, then found their lives forever changed, I was falling in love with Jocelin again – this time on her soil - and embarking on a life I could never have imagined in San Francisco.
What would my former roommates say now?
“Je t’aime,” Jocelin murmured, turning my body to face hers, the musky scent of L’Eau Sauvage filling my nostrils. The Wild Water - that was it. That was how you would translate the name of Jocelin’s perfume into English. I glanced up one more time at the Blue Virgin, the sunlight streaming through her panes, bathing her in a turbulent outburst of water crashing onto Jocelin and me and the cathedral’s stone floor.
*
Leslie (L.A.) lives in Southern California with her wife and miniature poodle. She was a public school educator for 27 years and upon retirement, has returned to her other love –writing –as well as training the next generation of educators. She is a bonafide Francophile and lived in France in the 1980s. She has published autobiographical narratives in Orange Coast magazine, the California Educator, Between Ourselves: Letters Between Mothers and Daughters, and Liaison, and is currently writing a memoir about her life in France. She is thrilled to see her work in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.