(Read Rock Chick Goes Rogue, part 1 here)
ROCK CHICK GOES ROGUE: PART 2
(I am sorry for any confusion here! I’ve broken my initial Rock Chick Goes Rogue post into smaller parts. I realised it was MEGA long! Sorry.)
HOW I MET MY HUSBAND
Before going to America, I’d temped as a secretary in a law firm for several months and, as weird as it may sound, it had been a fun working environment. Everyone was friendly, and the atmosphere was pretty laid back.
In late August, I flew back to Geneva and stopped by the law firm to see if they might hire me again. They agreed, and I started a few days later. This time I worked for a team of young legal interns, most of whom I’d met before. But there were a couple of new recruits.
Patrick - whom I already knew - a lovely, fun, sporty guy a year or two older than me, took me to meet the newbies. He knocked on a door.
“Come in,” said a male voice.
So, we did. “This is Cedric. Cedric Bossert,” said Patrick, as my heart began doing a series of crazy circus tricks at the sight of this gorgeous young guy with thick, wiry, jet black hair and navy-blue eyes. But it wasn’t his good looks that particularly affected me. It was his quiet, kind, grounded energy. Oblivious, Patrick continued, “Cedric, this is Francesca. She’s going to be working with us. Just so you know; she tends to be late for work, and doesn’t always show up on Mondays because she says she’s sick, but she’s too tired or in London. Oh, and she likes to leave early most days. But she’s really nice, and her English is perfect, so we put up with her.”
(Cedric, and Patrick, at our wedding!)
I’m pretty sure Patrick said something along those lines, and all of it was true. Nevertheless, although I wasn’t the most reliable secretary in the firm, I was the only one who was perfectly bilingual, with English mother-tongue, which meant I could correct all the lawyers’ grammatical and spelling mistakes. Back then most letters were still typed on those IBM typewriters with the funny spinny-ball thing, and we had to use that horrible slimy carbon paper that turned our fingers black to make copies. There were a few word-processors available, but they tended to be reserved for typing out multi-paged legal briefs. We still used telex, too!
Anyway, Cedric says his heart also got funky when he saw me, but at the time he was in a long term-relationship and living with his girlfriend. Also, – officially at least - I was still with Blaze. Nevertheless, Cedric and I made plenty of slinky, sideways eye contact at the coffee machine, and somehow his stuff always got typed first, much to Patrick’s frustration, particularly when I overslept one morning and rocked up circa nine-thirty, having promised to come in early to deal with an emergency something-or-other that needed to be typed and filed in court before nine a.m.. Which probably wouldn’t have happened if Cedric had been the one who’d asked me!
My head was all over the place. Sure, I needed to make money to pay my rent, and buy food, and new clothes, etc. But I also suddenly discovered I’d brought sexy back from America! I was stealing hearts all over town.
I literally couldn’t keep up with myself!
I was having so much fun! I’d never been particularly popular at high school, had never considered myself particularly pretty, so when suddenly my ego became supercharged I got a little high on my powers of seduction! On Saturday nights you’d find me and my girlfriends dancing to Wang Chung’s ‘Dance Hall Days’, and Billy Idol’s ‘Rebel Yell’, and Chaka Khan’s ‘Ain’t Nobody’ over at the Moulin à Danses in Carouge, Geneva’s trendy. Or we might be at the Graffiti, sipping champagne and working up a sweat to Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’, or Cock Robin’s ‘The Promise You Made’. On Thursday nights we’d probably be dancing at Midnight Rambler in Geneva old town, or at trendy bar, sipping vodka tonics and flicking our hair. Basically, I was always out.
I dated other boys, including one of Blaze’s good friends for whom I fell pretty hard during those tumultuous months. Seriously, it’s all a bit of a romantic, hot and steamy blur. I remember it as a time of heightened senses, of sensuality, of self-discovery, of fabulousness, of giggling with girlfriends as we got ready to go out. It was a time of sampling different versions of myself to discover which version suited me best.
I wish I could say I immediately became confident enough to break-up with Blaze, because it would have saved me a lot of heartache and confusion. It would also have spared my parents a lot of anxiety. But Blaze kept on writing and sending me cassette tapes with romantic songs he’d composed. And then Isaak, the guitar player of the band Blaze played with in Geneva, flew out to play a couple of gigs with him, and I suppose I began to feel like I might be about to miss out on something. So, in the early spring of 1986, I flew back to California.
Blaze and his friend Isaak had rented a small, hellhole of an apartment in the San Francisco Tenderloin, an area where I never felt safe. I still saw Shandy occasionally, but she was busy with her real estate business in San José. Once again, I felt anxious and insecure. Deep down I knew I didn’t belong there.