The Veranda

By Susan LaDue

The Paris I knew was the most heterosexual city imaginable. It was a kind of forced indoctrination into boy-girl coupling, with people draped all over each other everywhere you went. I had no idea how to find a respectable lesbian community, or any kind of community for that matter. So, in spite of my horror of American crassness, I kept loneliness at bay by hanging out in cafes with other American students, making one coffee last an afternoon and smoking cheap Gauloises. It was a puzzle, how to make French friends.

I also dated men. It was distasteful, and unfair to both them and me. The first year I fell into a liaison with Jean-Pierre, a friend of my French hostess. He was much older and had a good job and enough money to take me to nice restaurants. I hated the sex, and I’m ashamed to admit that I stayed with Jean-Pierre because it was the only way I knew to experience Europe from the inside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan LaDue
• Release date: Aug 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476362809

Susan LaDue

Susan LaDue is an author and freelance writer living in central MA. Before becoming a professional writer, she was a tenured professor at the University of MA, then a human resources manager at a Fortune 100 company. She graduated Yale University with a Ph.D in French, and has lived and worked in Paris, New York, Boston, and San Francisco. She has published a fictionalized memoir, "The Veranda", as well as the Kristen Maroney Mysteries. All are available on amazon.com under "Books, Susan LaDue". Susan is an unrepentant dog lover. In addition to her writing, she owns The Doggie Den, a dog daycare and grooming facility in which she was the working manager for 13 years. She still lives and writes with her dogs beside her. www.susanladue.com

Book preview

Part 1

By Susan LaDue

1. Veranda

It’s odd, I can see forever, yet the world seems small. I sit here every day with my table and chair, my coffee, my laptop. When it’s cool I throw a light cover over my lap. I gaze out at the view and I neaten up the objects that are scattered on my table: pen, tablet, coffee cup, napkin, reference books. How is it that no table is ever big enough? I move things around so that what I need is within reach, but it’s never right. I constantly rearrange.

The view is spectacular. Left and right, in front of me, and overhead are cacao trees and kapoks and coconut palms. They hover like attentive friends. And like friends, they occasionally intrude and have to be pruned back. When there’s a breeze, the big leaves chatter comfortably. They provide white noise while I write.

Over the tops of the coconut palms, the foliage dips toward the sea. It’s thick with birds and monkeys. And it’s noisy, not my world at all. The monkeys are especially annoying. Like spoiled toddlers, they screech at each other over a piece of fruit or a seat in the crotch of a banyon. They make rude, offensive sounds. The birds are almost as insufferable. Their sudden outbursts jar my concentration from morning to night. Sometimes they even wake me during the night, or maybe they populate my dreams.

The sea is lovely, but distant. How to know if it’s real? I enjoy gazing at it, but it lacks warmth. A bit like being stoned when you’re depressed. I see a lush cerulean sheet, fringed with foam. Sun dances on the surface, and occasionally a surfer or two appear, like ants propped up to ride waves that will inevitably crush them. Only at night do I feel close to the sea. The shishing of the waves breaking on the sand makes a soothing, faraway back drop. Or do I imagine it?

I could go there of course, to the sea. It’s only a short drive in the jeep. I used to go often. I swam and lay on the beach, read books under an umbrella, even scuba dove out on the reef. But down there one misses the perfection of the veranda. At the beach it’s about doing things or having them happen. One has to constantly react. You don’t have a world, you’re just there and you react, like functioning appropriately at an endless cocktail party. Diving is almost perfect in its serenity, but you can’t do it alone, and there’s only so much air before you have to surface.

The sky is big. It stretches from the veranda to the horizon. You’d think it would make my world big, but it doesn’t. It’s just a cover for the veranda. The fact that some extension of it covers the foliage or the beach or the ocean, that’s nothing to me. I just know the sky over the veranda, with its dramatic shifts of light. It’s like having one’s living room constantly repainted. You have no control over the color scheme, but what you get is interesting enough.

This morning the colors are bright: blue and green and gold. Fog muted them when I awoke, but it was gone by the time I settled at my table, as it is every day. The breeze is cool, but I’ll push my lap cover aside before lunch. The thick chocolaty taste of coffee works to stir my thoughts, and I open the laptop with a sigh.

Maybe today I’ll write something worth reading. There are more than enough memories. So much has happened that there won’t be time to capture it all, not even the important things. I have to sort through what matters, which is difficult, so it’s good to have my world close-by. I know the veranda and my spot at the table and the comfort of my chair. I know these things and they’re enough. This world is just the right size.

2. Marcy

It was a time of catching up, of exploring, of repeatedly pushing myself to become someone better. The acrid smell of New York City streets alternated with the dusty funk of libraries. I’d never tasted Chinese food or eaten fresh lox. I had no idea who Dylan Thomas was and I’d never listened to Mozart.

Barely out of high school, I lived in a women’s residence run by the Salvation Army. My father could have done better, but he wasn’t so inclined. My task was to assimilate culture and sophistication at a high speed, while pretending to already have them at my fingertips. I read and read, feeling fortunate to understand some of it. I ventured into Chinatown to sample dim sum, and hated it.

I walked upper Madison Avenue to study the contents of store windows, and sat in Greenwich Village cafes eves dropping on conversations, pieces of which I memorized. But mostly I survived on Sabrett hot dogs and coffee from the Chock Full O’Nuts on the corner of Washington Square North and University Place. When I had a little money I’d scarf down a pastrami on rye from the Gristedes down the street. Once I remember splurging on a diminutive strawberry tart with a graham cracker crust that was lined with custard. I got it at a bake shop in the 8th Avenue subway. The stuff I ate alternately built up my immunity and made me deathly ill.

I was enrolled at NYU where I listened to hours of French language tapes in an old reel-to-reel lab. I repeated the sounds until I was blue in the face, after which I hung around the Maison Francaise in the Washington Mews to listen to people talk. Little by little, I ventured into the conversation. Later, when I lived in Paris, I was glad for the long hours and hard work. French has become the language I would like to speak on a daily basis. If they weren’t so stingy with visas, I’d live in French Polynesia.

When I grew tired of the library, I sat in Washington Square Park and shivered my way through assigned reading. I shall always associate both the Peloponnesian Wars and Edith Wharton with cold air stinging my neck. In those days comfy down coats and heavy scarves weren’t fashionable. Indeed, women who cared put up with near frost bite every winter. New York skyscrapers create deep canyons down which rush brutal January winds. And it was a time of short skirts and thin wool coats.

On one such cold day I was waiting in line for a Chock Full O’Nuts half ounce, premade, wax paper wrapped sandwich, when an attractive woman in a lined Burberry trench coat tapped me on the shoulder.

Those two are about to leave, why don’t you grab their seats? she asked. We were directly behind the people sitting on stools, so it seemed ok.

Shh sure, I mumbled. She was taller than I and looked very New York. Her equine print Hermes scarf was knotted just right, and the belt of her trench coat was buckled in the back. She wore a tweed skirt and a cream colored cable knit sweater, and her legs looked very shapely in high-heeled boots. I’ve never been able to sit comfortably on stools, but she crossed her legs gracefully and turned to me with a smile.

You’re a student? she asked, but it wasn’t really a question. A back pack full of notebooks dangled from my left hand.

What else? I said. She smelled like Nina Ricci and her make-up was minimally perfect.

She told me her name was Marcy and that she was a graduate student in classics, teaching and working on her dissertation. She carried a real leather briefcase rather than a backpack, and her gloves were lined with fur. I was sure her purse