Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  The other cup went down the front of Philippe’s suit pants, filling one cuff with a moat.

  Philippe stared at me. Incredibly, some water had gotten trapped in his trouser pleats, so when he bent over to look at his shoes, even more water splashed out. For a dramatic conclusion. I didn’t know what to do. What could I say? Some part of me decided to make a joke. It was my gut reaction whenever shame fluttered around my head. I stammered in French, “Well, when I come, I guess I come hard, too.”

  It wasn’t until that afternoon when I wrote Rachel an e-mail that I realized what I’d said. Rachel replied, “I think you crossed a line in the workplace that even Parisians respect.”

  SEND IN THE CLOUDS

  FALL

  —Kiss and tell me how—I help the agency lose millions of euros—The art of communicating breasts—Parisian office workers eat McDonald’s differently—Most days Bruno is SAD and ANGRY—Rachel meets her new best friend—Sarkozy gets divorced—A day of instruction in French history and genital piercing—Our “cartes d’identité” arrive—Thanksgiving is for Italy; Christmas is for France—Do the Bruno—

  7

  At the end of summer, la morte saison finished and le rentrée commenced, when Parisians came home from their vacations brimming with satisfaction. All my coworkers turned up eight shades nuttier; they tanned splendidly well. Their first day back, I’d watch them step out of the elevator like so many show ponies, glistening brown stallions, frosted bronze mares.

  The best French word I found for the most prevalent tone was bistre, same spelling in English: “A brownish-yellowish pigment made from the soot of burned wood.”

  One lunchtime, an HR woman who was tanned to a Kit Kat told me that, when it came to sunbathing, she preferred the natural look. We were standing on a balcony while she smoked a cigarette—every étage of our building featured balconies overlooking the Champs-Elysées, where people would go to eat lunch or take smoke breaks. Some guys would ogle cleavage below, calling out like mountaineers when they spotted a deep crevasse.

  “You see?” the HR woman said, indicating a girl below us on the sidewalk. “Around the eyes, how ugly she seems?”

  Proper tanning was less a class issue, she suggested, and more a question of aesthetic commitment. The HR woman pointed out that fake tanning produced a Creamsicle glow. The bone she had to pick, between deep breaths, wasn’t whether to tan, but if a person tanned outdoors—in Provence, for a hide of crackling; in Brittany, where the ocean bestowed a speckled salt crust—or applied self-tanner, or spray-tanned, or visited a tanning salon.

  The lesson being that fake tanners didn’t properly enjoy life.

  In the beginning, people were always trying to give me lessons.

  * * *

  The creative department, all we créatifs—copywriters, art directors, graphic designers, illustrators, information architects, video editors, Web-animation mathematicians—sat in clumps. My unit had five desks pushed together, where I was one of two expatriates, me and Tomaso, the Italian, and the rest were French. My art director, Bruno, worked down the hall.

  To start, I didn’t understand four-fifths of what was said. It was a bitch. But the problem ran both ways, which made it worse. Two neighbors of mine, Julie and Françoise, both Parisiennes, would peer at my lips whenever I spoke in French, then explain they hadn’t understood a word I’d said.

  Julie was a twentysomething copywriter, wide-eyed and attractive, a romantic poet outside of the office. A poem of hers I found on the Internet was about flowers, the beauty of stars, and how she, any evening, might die in bed.

  Julie asked one afternoon, “You said you live on Rue Béranger, is that correct?” She spoke perfect, if slightly formal English. “Béranger was a famous poet, you know,” Julie said. “In Madame Bovary, Flaubert made Charles read Béranger so he would seem of his era. Béranger is forgotten now. But that is life.”

  Many days, Julie’s style was low-cut trousers with a visible, high-riding thong. All men in the office were Julie’s property to tease. She sang cheerily while she worked, except when her computer crashed, then she cursed—her computer being among the few things that Julie could not bend to her will.

  But Julie was very nice. Frequently she helped me translate my electric bill.

  Françoise, a graphic designer, sat across from Julie. Like Julie, she found my name ridiculous, all those “R”s to roll. When someone said my name in the office, Françoise would parrot it by clearing her throat.

  Next to Françoise was Olivier. Olivier was a jovial, bitter art director in his fifties, who’d worked at the agency for twenty-plus years. All day long, Olivier listened to electronica through headphones to scare away project managers should they fancy him to work faster. He was tall, bald, and droll. His laugh went hohoho, and to the rest of the office, Olivier was Father Christmas. Beautiful women—the building was full of them—constantly stopped by to visit and flirt and kiss Olivier’s cheeks.

  For some reason, Olivier hated me from the start.

  Tomaso was a handsome Italian from Venice who loved Paul McCartney and the Police. He had curly black hair and got along with everyone. In addition to French and Italian, Tomaso was fluent in English (he did a good Sting: “Rooooooooxanne”) and would help me when I couldn’t follow the gossip at our desks. For example, Julie was upset one afternoon, shouting in high-speed French, it having something to do with André and a new account she’d been assigned. I poked Tomaso, whispering, “What did Julie just say?”

  “Ah, my poor Rosecrans,” Tomaso said loudly. He shook his head. “Julie say you are one sexy motherfucker.”

  I repeated my question. Tomaso repeated his translation. Julie was fuming, blushing underneath her tan.

  “Come, it’s a nice thing,” Tomaso said, patting my shoulder. “A compliment for a beautiful gentleman. You know, maybe she will sleep with you this evening.”

  “Tomaso,” Julie yelled, “please shut up!”

  * * *

  In a new office, you tried to play it clean. You kept your head down and went about your work while attempting to fit into the groove, pure and cool. Except here in Paris there were rituals beyond my understanding.

  First off, I did not know whom to kiss.

  Each day I’d wake up at five a.m. to work on my novel, eat a small breakfast with Rachel at seven, and be out the door in order to arrive at my desk by eight-thirty and be ready, fretting with low-lying dread, to give and to receive les bises (kisses).

  Office culture in Paris held that it was each person’s responsibility, upon arrival, to visit other people’s desks and wish them good morning, and often kiss each person once on each cheek, depending on the parties’ personal relationship, genders, and respective positions in the corporate hierarchy. Then you moved on to the next desk.

  Not everyone did it, but those who did not were noticed and remarked upon.

  So first a polite bonjour, walking through the room and repeating it at each chair, bonjour, bonjour, salut, bonjour. If someone arrived late and needed to get straight into a meeting, they might let out a big bonjour for the group. For example, André did this a lot, blazing through the office at ten a.m. with his collar popped, shouting a giant, angry BON-JOUR, like a battle cry. And the room would reply in one voice, BON-JOUR, at the same time that he slammed shut his door.

  But then there were the bises, which were conditional.

  In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. In kissing, some people were ripe, others were not. Whole groups could be off-limits. It definitely wasn’t appropriate to kiss your boss, except when it was, though it was correct to kiss your underlings, except when it wasn’t. Young men generally didn’t kiss other young men, unless they were friends outside work. But older men did, sometimes. You never knew. Also, these kisses were intended
not to touch the cheek but to glance it. People kept their eyes locked on the middle distance and seemed, while kissing or being kissed, very bored.

  Honestly, I had no idea how it worked. There was one woman, an Italian down the hall, who visited us at ten-fifteen each morning, making loud smooching sounds even before she entered the room; then she’d deliver long-drawn, suction-fueled bises all around: on Julie’s cheeks, Françoise’s cheeks, Tomaso’s cheeks, Olivier’s cheeks. Even my cheeks, once we were introduced. But it wasn’t always done. Maybe four days out of five, but that fifth day …

  September found me frequently biseing inappropriately. Male clients, IT support workers, freelance temps. Any female who came within ten feet. They’d return my weird kisses reluctantly, or else back away and attempt to ignore the gaffe. I asked Pierre how he knew whom to kiss, whom not. Pierre said there was no way of knowing this unless you’d grown up in France, then you just knew. He himself preferred to shake hands.

  André overheard Pierre saying this and suggested, in that case, Pierre should move “the fuck” back to New York.

  Gradually I learned to bise in the local mode. There weren’t any guidelines, just intuition. It required months of calibration. I mimicked Pierre and Chloe, the way other young people around Paris went into kissing each other: regretfully, with a forced, resigned air, as if playing out an obsolete ritual. The procedure by which teenage atheletes in America lined up to shake hands: nice game, kiss kiss, whatever.

  8

  Tactics to learn French via shock immersion: Accept and make telephone calls. Do this despite a crippling fear of conducting phone calls in French, terror so real you begin to experience it in nightmares about speaking French on the phone—your daily life repeated at night with no embellishment. Still, do it, call strangers. Answer telemarketing calls and delay the person on the line. Or book your wife, as she requests, un shampooing avec une styliste qui parle anglais. Which is not easy to find in Paris. Nor easy to explain to hairstylists who do not speak English why they should desire to do so for your wife’s sake.

  Keep a notebook in your pocket for words or phrases you don’t recognize, so later you can ask your boss or other friendly Parisians to define them for you. For example, Ça m’énerve. (That annoys me.) C’est classe. (That’s classy.) Dégueulasse! (Vomit!)

  At the coffee machine, entrance coworkers with descriptions of your apartment when you say things like, “There is a kitchen,” or “There is a table for the time to eat,” or “There is a bedroom.” You can also try rendering American idioms into French. Coworkers will stand flamingo-still when you so casually drop Moi, je ne donne pas une merde (I don’t give a shit). Because other people might pass along feces as gifts, but never you, cool you.

  Finally, when you are unable to indicate what you want, explain what you do not. For example, say you desire a Coke. Specifically a can of Coke, because the can version is colder than the bottle, in your opinion. But the vendor, from his booth near the Luxembourg Gardens, is selling Coke by the bottle and the can. And you don’t know the French word for “can.” So, request un Coca, but specifically un Coca qui n’est pas dans une bouteille. Or not the sandwich that is made of ham, nor its neighbor of tuna, but oui, that one, what? Ah, you call it dinde, which means turkey? Super.

  Soon I hoped I could express what I wanted, not merely its negation. Until then I had migraines. The sun rose and I woke up feeling raw. Living in Paris while barely speaking French was like drinking coffee through a veil. Within a month, I blew three projects’ deadlines due to miscommunication. Account supervisors frowned at me with their whole bodies, leaning forward while exhaling poofs of air. What had they done to deserve this American?

  One morning during my commute, a squad of police officers blocked the exit when I got off the Métro. Two cops in blue uniforms waved me over. Behind them, in the sky, clouds with gray snouts were materializing like an armada.

  “Where is your identity?” the first cop said.

  I showed her my New York driver’s license. At that point, Rachel and I were still waiting for our residency papers to arrive.

  “No,” cop number two chided, “your identity for the Métro.”

  The first one said, “If you buy a monthly pass, you must also construct an identity. It is the rule.” Then she said something I couldn’t follow—“Père framboise, Day-Glo glass, Narragansett Bay.”

  I interrupted, “What? Why?”

  “It is the law,” the second cop said, with exhaustion. I said, What law? Quelle loi? Though, really, who knows what I said? All of us were aware that, in French, we belonged to different armies, perhaps weren’t even engaged in the same battle.

  “You’re getting a ticket,” the first cop said.

  “But the machine, the machine that sold me the ticket,” I said, “the machine did not tell me about my identity to construct.”

  I believe I was saying “car” in lieu of “machine.” It probably didn’t make a difference.

  “There was an office in the station,” said cop number one, staring me down. “There you would have received an identity card after the completion of your dossier. This you must have in order to use a monthly Métro pass.”

  “A dossier?” I said.

  She didn’t even reply to that, as if I’d said, The sky is blue?

  “But me,” I said, “how do I know to ask about an identity card and a dossier I do not know to construct, when there are not directions that say I should construct the card and dossier?”

  “You will pay forty euros,” the first cop said, and handed me a summons.

  At the office, Bruno and I had a meeting with our infant-nutrition project managers. Afterward, he translated my Métro ticket during his second morning smoke break. We stood in a sunny patch on the Champs-Elysées. The long allées of chestnut trees reverberated in the breeze. Bruno said I would need to give the Métropolitan Police my checking account number and routing codes, and afterward they’d siphon off my fine.

  I said it sounded like Big Brother. Couldn’t I just write them a check?

  That’s how it’s done, Bruno said. But why hadn’t I assembled an identity in the first place?

  I said in French, “I try forever to construct my Parisian identity.”

  It was the first time I’d made Bruno laugh. Which was nice, but a little sad, actually, considering how lame the joke was.

  * * *

  Same evening I got my transit fine, there was un pot, an office party, organized for an employee who was leaving us, a tall man named Guy who wore flip-flops. Around seven p.m., about forty people assembled in the canteen around the cube of toilets. There were towers of salmon sandwiches, and terrines, and small cakes. Plus champagne from the office champagne refrigerator. I hadn’t seen it yet, but a refrigerator just for champagne was kept upstairs, in a small room off the agency’s terrasse. Anyway, André was standing at a counter, grinning at me while he squeezed a lime wedge into a cocktail, his smile a bank robber’s bandanna. I saw Keith, a Scottish copywriter I’d come to know, across the room and started threading my way toward him. Then I slipped in a puddle and went down in a split, and knocked a small cake off a bench while my drink shot out of my hand and exploded rum on the feet of Guy, the guy in whose honor we’d gathered, the one in flip-flops.

  I picked myself up and shrugged. I knew just what to say to him, because nothing else fit: “C’est la vie.” There you have it, that’s life in Paris for us bumblers, what could we do?

  No reply from Guy.

  For months, I’d feel like an infant wandering into rooms that filled with tension the moment I appeared: What is the giant baby doing here?

  That weekend, I purchased a cell phone. I followed the instructions to set up voice mail. A computer voice, in French, implored me to taper dièse. I was confused. Taper sounded like “to tap,” but what should I tap? I knew the names for numbers 0 –9. Star was étoile. Perhaps dièse meant pound? I tapped pound. There were more commands. A question this time? Wh
at do you want from me? I pressed another button, and the voice said something about voice mail, something about cinq. So I pressed five, cinq. The voice said, “Jacques Cousteau château trois, en flâneur, mettez deux.”

  I pressed deux, two. Nothing happened. I pressed two again, another time—and that turned out to confirm that yes, I did want to operate my cell phone solely by voice command, no buttons, in fluent French.

  The next day I needed Pierre to unlock it.

  9

  The joke began with Claude—account supervisor, of the orange arms—and his main client, a London-based Internet portal. Basically, Claude’s account was in trouble. Europe wasn’t satisfied with his client’s product, and his client wasn’t satisfied with us, so the client had asked Claude to create a “revolutionary brand-awareness campaign.” Should it not move them, they threatened to move elsewhere.

  Somehow Claude convinced André to pull a third of the creative department off other jobs for a one-week effort. The total group was me and two other copywriters; two senior art directors; three graphic designers; a business strategist; an information architect; several programmers; and a battery of project managers to shepherd us and refill easel paper.

  Bruno wasn’t invited for some reason, and didn’t like it. Our infant-nutrition project would be further delayed, he complained to me by e-mail, and it wasn’t fair—another setback in a line of many.

  Once again, Bruno had been left to feed the babies by himself.

  For the rest of the week, morning to night, we were locked away in conference rooms while Claude tried to inspire us to greatness. On the first morning, Claude made a big speech, flanked by his project managers. This campaign would be our legacy, Claude said. A world changer. The next “Just Do It.” Our mission, he said, was to “think outside the box”—English-language business jargon being universal—and produce an advertising campaign “that makes them say, like, fucking wow, guys!”