A Long Way from Houston: Law Student in Paris

A Long Way from Houston: Law Student in Paris 

(aka "Chick-lit")

(Houston) Part I

A gray, opaque blanket of clouds obscured the blue-white sky like a lamp shade, not blocking but dulling the light. Reflections off shiny office towers sometimes shot a bright laser across my eyes as I powered up the highway that bisected Houston, US Interstate Ten.

It was the kind of weekend when parents with children took their turns car-pooling to a game or practice; and single folks were lazily waiting in the Starbucks drive-thru, scrolling through Twitter®. Regardless, thousands of cars emitted enough ozone to make moist Gulf air smell just like summer.

The powerful southeast breeze was damp; saturating the atmosphere, exposing Houstonians to a stifling heat not yet oppressive, but that’d put the average American into heat stroke. You get used to it I guess, “it’s the humidity not the heat,” the old saying goes; the sky has a neutral, azure quality which burns off in the afternoon into searing yellow fire.

This Saturday, I hovered somewhere in the middle. Not a soccer mom, but not “single” enough to be waking up tangled in sheets, late after a binge-Friday night. Too poor to live in a luxury condo, and poaching off the local CrownPlaza, I sunbathed in the peace and quiet of an empty corporate hotel pool, diligently studying for the upcoming bar exam. 

I’d saved an old plastic access “key” entry card from a legal conference a year ago. So much for hotel security. At least the lecherous old men wouldn’t ogle my 70's style white diamond crochet-islet "micro-bikini".

The well-maintained pool had no bartenders to take my order, so I snuck an Evian bottle with my law books; sporting a pink canvas beach bag containing highlighters, power-bars, sunblock, and aviator Ray-Bans. Tools of the trade.

   

As a release valve, I toted a steamy novel I’d borrowed from the library. Sometimes there’s just so much Torts a girl can take before she reverts to the bleach blonde mentality of summer-reading: if the sun fries your brain, don’t use it on anything substantive. Besides, lately the pressure of thinking about the job market and the upcoming bar exam weighed too much; fiction was a way of coping with the real world.

Saving money during law school, I chose to "splurge" and leave Houston to travel abroad in Paris, the quiet city of lights. Having French classes in high school made it easier to survive. I’d never left Houston, but I was sure about Paris. The legal aspects of my stay merely provided tasks and subject matter; the surface, raison de mon émigration. But the real motivation of Paris? To fly. Escape. By soaring above my apparent direction, I wanted a perspective of life’s thoroughfare, before I took it. I needed more than a vacation in France; my time served a higher purpose.

My sojourner spirit grew out of the need to flourish and test my traditional upbringing, and the confining nature of legal studies. Reading in a café suited my taste better than studying in the law library, teaching myself guitar or meditating in my flat were more enlightening than staying after class to debate cases. The capitalist, puritan bromide my mother taught me: work hard, get a good job, quietly grow successful in the suburbs, fell off of me like a second skin; scales coming off my eyes as I discovered an authentic purpose.

Not readily apparent, the conversion came only through meditation and experimentation. I considered contrary paths: maybe I would be better working in a foreign country, helping develop a nation’s government? Returning to an American corporate legal department seemed like the least attractive option, and in Paris these questions hounded me. They still do.

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Transition to Part II:

As much as “chick-lit” novels occupied me when not concentrating on common law and the upcoming multi-state exam; nothing could tear my subconscious from the love I’d found during the last semester of law school, studying in France. The opportunity to achieve a Master de droit in one-year studying abroad, morphed into a difficult academic experience surrounded by the passion of a genius artist, as different from me as possible.

I mastered the skill of sitting at sidewalk cafés, because that is the best place to absorb Paris. With a hard piece of sourdough and French roast coffee, I’d spend hours listening to other conversations, people watching. Different corners or plazas, depending on the neighborhood, traffic, and time of day, gave variable atmospheres. I had my favorite cafés, but my reasoning never considered where to meet the fellows. That’s because trolling Frenchmen are everywhere. I got to the point where I just reacted blithely, saying, “I don’t speak French?” One day, however, I watched an artist sketching what looked like the most compulsive doodle I’d ever seen. Gabriel attracted me like a subtle magnet, or maybe it was his art.

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Fiction ©Mark H. Pillsbury (2015)