I met Philippe on the heels of my disastrous divorce. I imagine most divorces are disastrous, but mine was the kind where your husband moves out, you lose your house, your dog dies, your business falls apart, your money disappears, you’re forced to file for bankruptcy, and you find yourself, shell-shocked, unpacking boxes in a shoebox apartment, all within a matter of months—this while trying to raise two young kids in Los Angeles. Life got real hard, real fast. My door was wide open for the devil to walk in.
Enter Philippe. He was handsome, French, tan, and, most of all, fun. He came bounding into my house of cards full of a kind of reckless joie de vivre that I’d forgotten all about as a busy wife and mother. A welcome distraction from my newly up-in-flames world, gorgeous Philippe chain-smoked cigarettes, guzzled end- less bottles of rosé, and rudely yelled things like “Merde!” and “Putain!” from his white Porsche convertible as he sped down Abbot Kinney Boulevard to his bachelor pad in Venice. He flirted with the boho-chic neighbors, squeezed the baguettes at Gjusta’s artisanal bakery with a self-assured grin, and knew his way around the kitchen almost as well as he did around the bedroom. Philippe was loud and offensive, sexy and intoxicating. Everything about the man felt wrong. Except for his heart. Which is perhaps why I fell so hard for him.
In the beginning, my relationship with Philippe was a divorcée’s dream. Happy to abandon reality and embrace as much freedom as I could when my ex had the kids, I picked up smoking, drank more bottles of wine than I ever thought possible, and discovered the true definition of the best sex of my life. To my surprise, our fever-pitch affair grew into a full-blown love story. We might have been on American soil, but Philippe was all French, and it was just what I needed. We went to wine tastings, rode bikes, and had picnics in the park. We enjoyed salad niçoise and rosé for lunch, cocktails on the roof at sunset, steak frites with a few bottles of Bordeaux or côtes du Rhône for dinner, and frozen vodka and caviar as a midnight snack. I felt like a different person.The old me knew nothing about fancy French wine or how seriously some people take their omelets.
Philippe and I danced in the kitchen until dawn, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights and losing ourselves in the music of Al Green,Van Morrison, and Nina Simone, especially her rendition of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” We held hands in the street, dunked croissants into our Blue Bottle lattes as the sun rose over the Venice canals. I rubbed lotion on his back at the beach, and he read French poetry to me in bed. We had mad, passionate sex at every hour of the day in every room of his beach loft. I even invited him to my high-school reunion so I could impress my old classmates with my perfect French boyfriend. We had undeniable chemistry. Before I knew it, we were a thing. One night turned into one month, one month turned into one year, and one year turned into half a decade. But Philippe and I weren’t only about our whirlwind lovescapade.
We synced schedules with our exes so his three teenagers, Josephine, Theo, and Charlie, and my two kids could all spend time together. Philippe taught Dash about the Monaco Grand Prix and helped Margot with math homework. Charlie and Margot became confidantes, as close as sisters. Dash and Theo, despite the difference in their ages, bonded over video games and golf. Philippe would take all five kids to the grocery store and tell them to choose the craziest-looking food they could find—lychee fruit, Spam, horned melon, and bone marrow—and then bring it all home for a Chopped-style mystery-basket challenge. Philippe somehow made a delicious meal out of nonsense every time. We had a ball. A beautiful, messy ball. I liked to think of it as a practice run. Wouldn’t it be great if this was our always?
I thought I’d found the love of my life. Philippe never failed to walk me to my car, to open a door. He made sure I had quiet time to study for my real estate exams. He often put a sweater over my shoulders moments before I felt cold. But most important, he lifted me up when I did not have the strength to rise after my marriage and business collapsed. He encouraged me not only to stand up for myself and my future but to stand tall. He refused to call me “Tash” or “Tasha” like almost everyone else did. “Natasha,” he would whisper in my ear with his romantic French accent, urging me to step into the strong name my parents had bestowed on me in homage to my dad’s Slavic roots, a name that had intimidated me my whole life.“Own your name,” he would tell me. “You are Natasha. You’ve lost a lot, but you can never lose that.” Philippe saw my insecurities and my well-intentioned mistakes but opened his arms without judgment. He was recently divorced himself, and we spent hours discussing loss, heartache, and pain. Well, mostly I talked and Philippe curated our post-divorce playlist and danced around the kitchen, cigarette in one hand, glass of wine in the other. “Chérie,” he would say, tipping my chin up and kissing me on the lips, “what we have is perfect. I don’t ever want things to change.”
And it kind of was perfect. Until it wasn’t.
Though I loved Philippe madly, I was silently drowning in a sea of increasing disappointment and frustration, knowing that I craved a tame, more conventional future that Philippe didn’t seem interested in providing.
“I just don’t see it yet,” Philippe would tell me when I asked him about blending our families and moving in together.“What’s the rush, anyway? We’ve both done the marriage thing, and how did that work out?”
Perhaps he was right. Was I craving something just because society told me it was the ultimate goal of a relationship?
But with a life to rebuild and my children to raise, I couldn’t help questioning the perfection of it all. When we both had our kids, I had to pack up my family of three and lug mountains of stuff to Philippe’s just-big-enough loft (my tiny apartment was a nonstarter) and then back again. The shuffle drained us all. When Philippe and I were alone, the long nights of cigarettes, booze, and wild sex began to wear on me.The casual smoking turned into an awful addiction that I had to hide from my family and friends. The fun nights of drinking meant I was too hungover too much of the time to keep up with my demanding new career in real estate (not to mention the demands of motherhood).The best sex of my life resulted in a recurring UTI that I chased with antibiotics and then an unexpected pregnancy that neither of us was remotely prepared for. That news shattered me and, later, us, in a way. And my high-school reunion? We got caught having sex in the bath- room while waiting for AAA to tow his car, which had somehow managed to dangle itself precariously off a cliff. We were out of control.
I found myself at a crossroads, deeply in love with un beau gosse— that’s French for “the hottest guy I ever knew”—but daydreaming about a happy home and a stable future where I wasn’t constantly smelling like an ashtray, fighting a hangover, and living part-time out of a suitcase on the floor. As wonderful as our affair was when it began, given Philippe’s carefree, joie de vivre lifestyle, it simply wasn’t sustainable. After one too many disagreements about where our relationship was heading, I packed my bag and said goodbye. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
I hoped that Philippe would come after me, but he didn’t. Not in any meaningful way, that is.
Excerpted from ALL SIGNS POINT TO PARIS (c) 2022 by Natasha Sizlo. Reproduced by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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