“Ah,” the banker said, pleased now, “you would like to arrange a loan!”
“Yes, but no,” I said. “I want a card. A card that gives a loan.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand, what kind of card again?” the clerk said.
“Its name is ‘credit card,’” I said.
The clerk looked at me closely to make sure this wasn’t all one big joke.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I do not think we have this in France.”
* * *
Toward the end of our first week, Rachel and I were sneezing, dizzy, exhausted, light-headed, almost fainting, lacking jet fuel, and coughing up sea-green mucus.
“The Paris Flu,” expats said. A persistent chest cold caused by French germs. “Everyone gets it,” I was told over a drink in Beaubourg, by an editor at the Herald Tribune, a friend of a friend. “Trick is,” he said, “you gotta eat the local honey. Go to that farmer’s market near you, Enfants Rouges. Introduce antibodies to your system from the Paris bees. Make sure you look for the sticker that says the bees are from Paris, that’s important.”
The next day, after a morning rain, there was a huff of good weather, and Rachel and I went out and purchased the honey of local bees. Then our stove broke. I was eating honey off a Kit Kat when the repairman rang the buzzer.
The repairman looked at our stove and drew squiggles on a ticket. He made to leave, so I handed the ticket back to him and attempted to explain that I couldn’t read his handwriting.
He wrote in block letters, CRÈME POUR LA PLAQUE.
So for lack of a creamy topping …
“The stove has plaque?” Rachel said from the doorway. She sniffled and went back into our living room, a cavern with dark beams.
I said quietly to the repairman, “Where do I find the cream for the plaque?”
But he’d already walked out. He was kind of a bastard.
In the hallway, he stopped in front of our neighbor’s door. There were buzz-saw sounds, and sawdust pouring in through an open window from the apartment upstairs. The repairman snatched the paper back from me and scrawled in carpenter pencil, “BHV,” then stomped downstairs, just avoiding a pregnant girl and her boyfriend.
“BHV,” I announced, closing the door. “What’s that?”
“Oh, the hardware store,” Rachel said, “near Hôtel de Ville. Bay-ash-vay. It’s the one with the lingerie section. I heard about it, I’ll take you later.”
* * *
Several letters arrived that week from the government. One said Rachel and I needed to be weighed, measured, and scanned for tuberculosis, immediately. Also, I’d be asked to pass a language test, since I’d be the one taking a job that could have gone to a French person.
Our appointment was the same day as the repairman’s visit. The health clinic was located near Place de la Bastille, not far away. We were in that paunch of Paris summer when the heat ballooned at one p.m., and the weather was lovely in a vehement way, glares everywhere.
At the clinic, Rachel and I were assigned to different waiting areas. After X-rays and measurements, I was directed to a language examiner’s office, for my French quiz.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I work in advertising.”
“What do you do in advertising?”
“I write.”
“What do you write?”
“I write for babies. Milk for babies.”
“Where are you from?”
“New York City.”
The examiner sat forward and said in English, “Wow, you are?” For five minutes she described to me how she was planning to visit Manhattan soon, it was a long-standing dream. “But isn’t it very dangerous?” she asked in English, her consonants sharp as thorns. “Do blacks and whites really get along?”
We stopped for a bite to eat on the way home, in a café on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. We ordered some white wine and frites, which came served with awful ketchup—and here I’d thought Heinz was universal.
“So,” Rachel said, “a lot of scientists have now seen me topless.”
“Oh, I know the feeling,” I said. I was holding my tuberculosis X-ray up to the window.
“Trust me, no, you don’t,” Rachel said.
She cinched her jacket, a green coat she’d bought especially for our move to France, and explained that things for women in Paris were quite different. “So the doctor is asking me questions. I have no idea what she’s saying. I think she tells me to remove my top. I’m pointing—This, my bra, she wants off? Yes, she wants off. Then I’m instructed to leave. Now that you’re topless, please go out that door. Only it’s a door for a closet with a yellow bulb inside, and at the other end there’s another door. I’m to go into the closet and wait for the other door to open.”
Rachel drank some wine. “So I’m asking myself, do I cover up, or go out full-frontal? Because I want to do it right. Do it the French way. What would Chloe do? I figured, probably a Frenchwoman would just walk out, you know, breasts on parade.”
“And?” I said.
“I went out French. The door opened, I checked my posture. It’s a big room, like an operating theater, with three male technicians. But they barely notice me. I’m like, You’re not even going to look? What does that say? Then I’m instructed to smoosh my chest against an upright X-ray machine, which was freezing, and they’re saying, Do it again, it’s not quite right. I mean, they’re wearing lab coats, but they’re also wearing jeans. How was I to know it wasn’t some crazy French reality TV show?”
* * *
Friday evening of the weekend before my first day at work, Pierre and Chloe invited us over for dinner. In the same room where I’d slept during my interview weekend, we drank tequila and listened to Charles Trenet and Wu-Tang Clan until about three a.m., when Pierre and Chloe’s downstairs neighbor complained about the noise.
Outside, the black sky combined Paris, summer, and the oncoming morning. Noises floated over our heads, but on Pierre and Chloe’s street it was quiet enough to hear the traffic signals buzzing. To get home, we rented Vélibs. These were the new bicycles that Paris had installed in a bikes-for-rent program. They’d become the latest badge of chic. Misty mornings, columns of riders pedaled beside the river, and pictures were everywhere of bare-legged women cycling around town in Chanel. Columnists filed reports on Vélib trends, Vélib crime especially—how the city’s bright young things rode Vélibs home after partying and crashed them into the Seine.
On the map, one street, the Boulevard de Magenta, appeared to run straight to our apartment. We looked down the hill, and there it was: four empty lanes plunging into blackness, flanked by gracefully decaying Haussmann slabs brambly with iron balconies. Rachel went first, her dress flapping in the wind. There was neon in her hair, then she was eaten up by the dark. I took off after her, twenty feet behind. Fifty feet behind. Soon she was gone. The boulevard flattened out, but for all my pedaling I was slowing down.
Rachel reappeared and found me gliding, kicking with my toes. The chain had come off my bicycle and was grinding on the road. There was no one around.
“We shouldn’t have had the tequila,” Rachel said, pedaling a circle around me.
“No, no,” I said, stopping, “not the tequila.”
We stood next to a bus stop and stared around. A Vélib stand was nearby. We parked the bikes and walked home. It was one of those moments when nothing could go wrong.
* * *
The next morning I tried to take out the garbage, but the shed door wouldn’t budge. I yanked it, banged on it, was about to quit when Asif, the gardien, our building manager, whose rooms abutted the shed, rattled his shutters and yelled at me to shut up.
Asif came out, smoking. He wore an unbuttoned paisley shirt and blue jeans with embroidery on the seat. Asif appraised me and said something in French. I didn’t understand and attempted a retreat. That just pissed him off more. He whipped back his hair and snatched my trash, unlocked the shed, and tossed the ba
g inside.
His hair had the slow-motion buoyancy of a mermaid’s.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I do not have a key.”
“Give me your keys,” Asif snapped in French, with a destabilizing Pakistani accent. I could barely understand him. He was tall and lank, posing like a model. He pinched the neck of a four-inch key on my key ring and handed it back to me with two fingers, like a silver snake.
“You’re American?”
“From New York,” I said. “My wife,” I said, pointing at our bedroom window, just above his head.
“I love New York,” Asif said. “I’m going soon. You’ll tell me where your family lives?”
He pulled me inside his rooms. They smelled of sex. A cute brunette in a bathrobe was sautéeing peppers and chicken. She smiled at me. Asif downed some whiskey from a glass on top of a trash can, and poured us shots. We did a toast to New York City. He gripped my arms, beaming. When I explained I needed to go run errands (faire les courses), Asif went slack. “Fine, then leave!” he shouted, frowning, and disappeared into the bedroom.
Over time, I’d learn that Asif gained and lost euphoria faster than anyone I’d ever met.
That same morning, Rachel and I walked down to BHV, the home-and-hardware store with a lingerie section—it also had a jewelry section, and cabinets of designer handbags, and a lumberyard in the basement, and a kitchen-items section with space for cooking classes—where we bought cream for our stove. Turns out the cream worked. Our coils didn’t conduct electricity when they lacked moisturizer; apparently they’d gone dairy-free too long. And the same day, just when we couldn’t face one more spoonful of honey, our flu vanished.
We lived in Paris, Paris being not only the city of milk and honey, but also the city where milk and honey were solutions.
No one wonders, because who needs to ask?
That afternoon, we walked halfway across the city and rode a bus home, and collapsed in bed. Lying there on top of the comforter, staring at the dark beams crossing the white plaster ceiling, suddenly I was anxious and out of breath, overpowered by homesickness.
I wanted out of that apartment, out of Paris, as fast as possible.
Rachel said something into her pillow about being hungry. Ice cream, I said, I’ll go get ice cream.
I don’t even like ice cream that much.
I ran outside, le monde à mes pieds, to Place de la République, the large traffic circle behind our apartment. République was a racetrack with four lanes of vehicles whipping around two parks. No square in America looked so majestic, yet in Paris République was considered a retail zone—hardly special except for being where protesters gathered whenever the government threatened to raise the retirement age. In the center was a statue of a robed woman. She was Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, proud and tall, perhaps unaware that her robe was slipping. In several ways, she reminded me of Mireille. I stood on an island in the middle of the Boulevard Saint-Martin, which flowed into République, and waited through several traffic lights, just watching. New, new, new, I was thinking. Our previous life would be reversed within twenty-four hours: me working in an office, in a language I barely spoke, and Rachel at home writing when she wasn’t attending French lessons. Was this a good idea? Was it the right thing to do?
It seemed like a colossal mistake.
But would I really prefer to be anywhere else? Hadn’t Rachel’s breasts passed inspection by Parisian experts? As long as no one talked to me about topics other than New York, wouldn’t I be fine?
I was scared. Well, so what?
I got the ice cream. We ate it in bed. Through the windows came fragrances from the trees outside and Asif’s vegetable garden. We heard only birdsong. I remembered a letter Edith Wharton wrote about Paris in 1907 that I’d seen excerpted in a magazine back in the States: “The tranquil majesty of the architectural lines, the wonderful blurred winter lights, the long lines of lamps garlanding the avenues & the quays—je l’ai dans mon sang!” (“I have it in my blood!”)
At the time, I’d thought I knew what she meant. But now I knew.
6
At the end of my first day at work, around seven p.m., Pierre introduced me to my new wife, Bruno. In advertising, copywriters and art directors work in pairs. Bruno and I would be overseeing an infant-nutrition account together, Pierre said.
Bruno approached me with a chuckling grimace. I tried to kiss him. No doing. For months I’d get that wrong. All day, I’d watched coworkers greet each other with a peck, the kissing version of Hey, what’s up. But Bruno backed away. Instead we shook hands and grunted hello, bonjour, the way children do when one is new and the other has been asked to show him around school.
Still, Bruno offered me some madeleines he’d just bought from the vending machine.
No matter what happened, Bruno always meant well.
Bruno was a late-thirties Parisian, stocky and morose. Year-round, he was reddishly tan, with a rosy flush that became a glower the more he drank. Bruno was roughly good-looking. His lips were plump, and one ear was scarred from rugby. There was a good deal in Bruno—his sad confidence, his ponderous horniness—for women to get hooked on. Over time, we’d talk a lot about girls. Bruno liked a good time. He liked wine, photography, gourmet food, the sea, and the hours he spent on Sundays repairing antique furniture. For Bruno, cigarettes were life itself. Same for his Yamaha scooter.
In the beginning, Bruno’s English was even worse than my French. Pierre left the room, and Bruno tried to explain the project we’d be working on together. We didn’t get far. Finally he said something like, Drinks? You like a glass? Glass of wine?
Hot summer evening outside, brightly yellow. A very windy Paris twilight, with dust pluming from cars going around the Arc de Triomphe. Bruno led us away from the Champs-Elysées to nearby Boulevard Haussmann, a regal side avenue of shops, restaurants, and white limestone buildings. We took seats at a sidewalk café. Gorgeous people walked by, going home, talking on their mobiles. Bruno sat under a machine shaped like a palm tree that sucked up smoke. He lit a cigarette, unpopped a shirt button nonchalantly, ordered Sancerre, and began talking over my head. After fifteen minutes, I understood that he’d worked on the infant-nutrition project for eleven months, ever since he’d joined the agency. They’d gone through four copywriters in the same amount of time; I was number five.
Bruno said, Reservoir Dogs, did I know this film?
“Bien sûr,” I said, adding, “Mr. Pink?”
“Okay, good,” Bruno said in English. “Then, Mr. Pink … do not be this. Do not be saying in the office, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’”
Evidently Bruno had overheard me swearing. He wanted me to know that cursing wasn’t cool in Parisian office culture. It seemed to weigh on Bruno, speaking English like that, correcting my behavior. As though envisioning trials to come.
Bruno paid the bill in coins and wiggled out his cigarette.
Back in République, the day’s heat was trembling, about to drop. Just like me. After nine hours of French, all I wanted was to snort some Excedrin, eat a meal gargantuesque, and sleep for two months.
Rachel and I decided on a café around the corner from our apartment, Café Crème on Rue Dupetit-Thouars. We managed to snag an outside table with a view of the blue market. But what a marvelous evening to be outside in Paris! Never-ending light. The buzz of apéritifs. Cafés full of disheveled girls smoking cigarettes and their boyfriends fluffing their hair once they’d set down their helmets. So many hello kisses—just another night in northern Europe. Back in the day, it might have been Le Dôme, or Deux Magots, only here everyone was twenty-first-century Parisian: dining on the Right Bank, and before they stacked their Camels and lighters on the table, first they laid down their Nokias.
After twenty minutes, a waitress turned up and propped a menu on the table. The day’s dishes, in addition to traditional fare, included three types of cheeseburger.
Afterward, at home, a neighbor across the courtyard waved at me wh
ile he smoked a cigarette on his balcony. In the next window, a woman was preparing dinner in their kitchen. Two weeks later, I’d see him screwing her there while they both watched a news show on TV, and I’d be reminded of a Joan Rivers joke about the benefits of sex like that, how a woman’s in a position to be productive and accomplish other things, like read a magazine.
Rachel and I both collapsed on top of the covers. I was asleep in two minutes.
* * *
A pattern emerged: whenever, wherever, I would glue my foot to the roof of my mouth.
Third day at the office, I was visiting the canteen to get two cups of water, one for me, one for Tomaso, who had the desk next to mine. The canteen wasn’t so much a cafeteria as a Beaux-Arts salon with an enormous white cube in the middle, a sleek modern design structure that puzzlingly contained restrooms and a kitchen. From a distance it looked more like a contemporary art installation. Basically it was a nine-foot-tall white Rubik’s Cube with secret toilets, situated in the middle of a ballroom. Anyway, it was where people got coffee and ate lunch.
“You must be delicate,” Tomaso had warned me; “the pressure from the water fountain in the kitchen is very strong.” So I slid into the kitchen—it was about the size of a closet—and carefully filled my two cups. I turned to find a man blocking my way out. We’d met that morning. He was senior VP of something. Systems administration? His name was Philippe. Philippe lurched past me into the closet, our chests scrubbing together while I said bonjour. Philippe grunted. Then he held out a cup and smashed the button—I guess he hadn’t talked to Tomaso—and the water fountain blasted his cup out of the closet, across the room.
“Wow,” I said. A second later, I said in French, “The water, it comes very hard.”
Philippe didn’t hear me. He asked me to repeat myself.
“The water,” I said, “it comes forcefully?”
Philippe still didn’t understand, so I tried louder, with my embouchure resembling a puckered “o,” per Pierre’s instructions—to sound more Parisian. I also gestured by waving my arms, which made one of my cups spill its contents on the floor.
Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down Page 3
