To My Parisian Gynecologist
“Marie-Laure” is a name that I’ve made up for you. Your real name is lost somewhere in an attic folder that should be marked “Courtney-Medical,” but due to my poor filing habits is probably marked “Courtney-Miscellaneous” or—more likely—isn’t marked at all. Sensitive medical documents, sybaritic grocery lists (blue cheese, strawberry yogurt drinks, dark bread), poem fragments bemoaning the wintering of trees; I can almost smell the disparate, nostalgic scribblings from my years in France.
Technically you were not a stranger to me, as your gynecological profession creates an intimacy between the prodder and the prodded, but you were foreign to me emotionally: someone I admired and feared during my six years abroad. Your Paris office was light-filled and patrician with high-pile, oriental rugs on chevron flooring. Across the street, there was a park where narrow-waisted French women watched their children toddle, influencing your patients to either reproduce, or not. You wore a yellow gold Cartier love bracelet when you practiced, and you abhorred small talk. You winced each time you asked me about the regularity of my periods. I held my breath while I wrote out the French check for your services, your fingers drumming on an open ledger while I put the month in the wrong place. If you could have practiced gynecology by osmosis, I think you would have.
I haven’t forgotten the pain of our visits: I was twenty-two and twenty-three, learning what it felt like to live life as a sexually active woman. There was the pain of the gynecological procedures that I agreed to have performed: the perverse searching of the pap smear brush, the brutish harpooning of a copper IUD finding its mark. But more than physical discomfort, when I think back on our time together, I think of subterfuge. In the state of Connecticut where I live now, gynecological professionals are required by law to inquire whether “everything is okay at home” or “if anyone is hurting us.” Aside from the guttural cluck-clucks that are a vocal hallmark of the French (usually deployed when I confirmed I was there to see you about yet another UTI), you took my “everything’s fine” answers at face value. Marie-Laure, you didn’t press.
It was the summer of 2001 and I had come to Paris to live with the French teaching assistant I’d studied with at Brown University, an older man I’ll call Landis. Tasked with teaching us the Frenchest French possible, he enlisted the steamy, sleepy stylings of Serge Gainsbourg, the illustrated romances of the sailor Corto Maltese, and the explicit lyrics of the hip hop group NTM, which stands for “Fuck Your Mother.” After graduation, when I agreed to join him in Paris, we lived in the seventh arrondissement with his mother, a discreet, bourgeois woman who wore highly textured shawls. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary until we found our own apartment, but only a month into our cohabitation, I realized it would be a mistake to live alone with Landis. In my French boyfriend, I had chosen passion and theatrics over sense and sensibility, had become intoxicated by his Dionysian body and his eccentric teachings. In Rhode Island, where we’d met, Landis had been a merrymaker, his friends a gentle group of computer scientists whom he’d turned into potheads. In Paris, he returned to his native stomping grounds of rum bars and techno parties, where pot was discarded for the speed and coke he’d apparently always preferred. Landis’ mercurial nature, which I’d previously experienced as “passion,” became barometric in its potential for physical violence, like a storm you can feel coming in the connective tissue of your joints.
“I needed a lot of things in that white hot, frightening summer, and one of them was you.”
I needed a lot of things in that white hot, frightening summer, and one of them was you. I was having pain “down there,” was suffering a series of urinary infections I didn’t know how to identify because I’d never had one before. God knows how I summoned the courage to discuss them with Landis’ mother, a woman I disdained for slipping her unemployed man-child 200 Francs anytime he asked. But at some point, I shared the pain that I was feeling with her. She made a phone call, and you entered my life.
Why was I having so many urinary infections? What was I doing with my hygiene? What were my sexual relationships like with my “petit ami”? You were too clean of a person to ask me dirty questions. Your linen shirts were ironed. You kept your heeled street shoes on a tray by an umbrella stand; you worked in driving shoes. Your manner was high-born and supercilious, and because of these two things, I felt that you were embarrassed for the eager American I was: the untapped emotion powering my run-on sentences, the cheap clothes I wore that always smelled of sweat. I didn’t want to tell you the truth about “what was going on at home” because I didn’t want to cry in front of you. I said that I’d had sex on sandy sheets during a vacation, and maybe some of the sand had “gotten up there” and “eroded things”? You made the cluck-cluck dismissive noise, ticked something off a document, and told me to urinate more frequently after sex. I’d leave those appointments with a stomachache of longing, desperate to teleport somewhere I was loved and was protected. I missed the sleigh bed in my mother’s Connecticut two-bedroom near the railroad. Missed her hollering from the bottom of the stairs that there were bagels in the refrigerator; cream cheese there, as well.
The truth was that Landis scared me. He screamed a lot and broke things, had taken my wet clothes from the washing machine and thrown them on the street, five floors below. I didn’t feel safe in a car with him; I stopped breathing when he got in bed. Due to a naïve vote of faith in Landis’ assurance that I could “get a visa when I got to Paris,” I’d come to France without legal working papers, and realized only when I wanted to leave him that I couldn’t do so without losing the roof over my head. In fact, all roofs were out of reach for me: without significant savings and a work visa, I had to rely on a French “guarantor” to front apartment rent: an impossibility as I didn’t have any French friends of my own and was thwarted in my efforts to make any by Landis’ jealousy.
What lie did I offer when you slipped off your plastic gloves and asked me methodical questions about my health and poor sleep each time I saw you? Probably something about the noise in Paris: the wailing ambulances, a neighbor with yappy dogs. I didn’t talk about what my body wanted; what my body didn’t want. I didn’t have the courage to admit that whenever Landis came for me, my vagina was dry and closed, and that was one of the reasons I was having vaginal pain. What had I thought in coming to France with such a person? And without the legal paperwork to boot? That “everything would work out” because of what, exactly? My whiteness? My fancy college degree? That this would be an experience “worth writing about”?
A gynecologist sees what a woman’s words can’t hide. Marie-Laure, you had a Japanese shoji screen around your examination table and a chandelier above it. Though your job was to look inside me, you probably saw through me: I blush when I lie, and I lied a lot to you. All these decades later, I don’t see your standoffishness as disinterest: I see that reserve as grace. I think you knew that there were fathoms I wasn’t willing to explore yet. That there were conclusions that would only service me if I reached them by myself.
“A gynecologist sees what a woman’s words can’t hide.”
I would leave Landis eventually. Not as quickly as I would have liked to, but when he hurt me physically for the first and final time, I walked out into the night and called a taxi from a doorway I hoped was dark enough to hide me, and then phoned an old friend from high school who had recently moved to Paris. I admitted that I needed her, I needed her apartment. I needed her English sentences and the rickety cabinet that she kept stuffed with herbal tea.
In the dependable quiet of my friend’s studio, no longer mind-jangled from the “after-after” parties that Landis used to drag me to, I was able to think clearly and apply for the right jobs. I found one that offered me a work visa and secured an apartment share. I started building a legal life for myself in Paris. I kept you as my gynecologist.
No longer did I dread our visits, which were annual now, instead of far too often. No longer was I scared about the options open to me as a single woman in a metropolis. I felt large and open. I was free to go out into the city and optimistic about the connections I might make there, knowing I would be spared the two-hour screaming match with Landis because he couldn’t bear me having friends, was always paranoid that I would leave him for the waiter, for the job interviewer, for the total stranger who passed us on the street. I could have sex that wasn’t dry and painful, or I could stay in and go to sleep at a normal hour and wake up on my own.
Even when I moved back to the United States, I kept you as my gynecologist until I could afford health care in America. The calm and caring French man I married liked to travel home each year to see his family—and that’s when I’d see you. I had become an honest person by that point, a person ardent about honesty. It shocked you when I said I didn’t want to have children. It did not shock you when I became pregnant two years after saying that. When I told you that I wanted to give birth naturally without painkillers but wanted your opinion, you told me this was a question for a psychologist and not a gynecologist. Looking back at how I came of age into my body, I realize that the same can be said for all the questions I kept stuffed inside my throat when I was a lost young person in a foreign land. Whether or not you were complicit in this lesson, you pushed me to see the place where I’d let myself disappear and said, no. Come back.
About the Author
Courtney Maum is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking publishing guide Before and After the Book Deal and the memoir The Year of the Horses, chosen by The Today Show as the best read for mental health awareness. A writing coach and educator, Courtney's mission is to help people hold on to the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. You can sign up for her publishing tips newsletter and online masterclasses at CourtneyMaum.com.
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Header photo by John Towner.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
