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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Anyway, happy or threatened, Bruno laughed like a puppet, unblinking, alert to whichever disappointing thing would come next. I got all of this from conversation, that Bruno had the perfect life all figured out, a basic French model, but it seemed increasingly beyond his reach. History had screwed his generation, and no striking would restore a dying way of life. Basically, Bruno was fucked on all sides, by bosses, coworkers, and society at large. During his smoke-break confessions, Bruno acknowledged irony, but he did not employ it; instead he was earnest, vexed, and his motives were fathomable, his emotions intense—he was STUCK in Paris, in a job where he was GOING NOWHERE, indeed his life was GOING NOWHERE and this was a SERIOUS PROBLEM, after all he ONLY HAD ONE LIFE and it was FROZEN, which was HOW THINGS ARE IN FRANCE for most people at the moment, and yet, and yet, Bruno remained Parisian, surrounded by SO MUCH BEAUTY, and anyway IT DOESN’T PAY TO BE BITTER, he knew—after all it was QUITE PARISIAN to bear luck in mind and also remember WE ALL MAY DIE TOMORROW—thus he needed to LIVE IN THE MOMENT and RIDE HIS SCOOTER and BE HAPPY with his lot. All of this to explain why Bruno sounded SAD when he LAUGHED.

  If Bruno was a pure strain of Frenchman, that strain was in touch with the depth of its feelings. Bruno ventured bravely across a sierra of emotions every day. So did most Parisian men, in my experience. They were constantly self-justifying. Only no one had told Bruno he wore the wrong sneakers. No one told Bruno he could be cloying, too familiar. Bruno did not know the bourgeoisie’s discreet charms.

  One cold day in late September, Bruno wore a new coat to the office. It was a black bomber jacket, trim at the waist. It had a fur collar. Not a fuzzy collar, but something svelte. Givenchy might have designed it to match a pillbox hat. By the way Bruno delicately hung up his new jacket, I could tell he loved it. At ten a.m., however, he left it behind when he went downstairs for a cigarette, and two bobos—French for hipster + yuppie—took the opportunity to mock Bruno’s jacket behind his back. They rubbed the fur between their fingers like it was cash.

  I said I thought it was beautiful.

  Around that time, President Sarkozy was attacked in the newspapers for wearing stacked heels. Bruno was taller than Sarkozy, but not by much. In the morning, my eye would linger that extra second at the newsstand when I bought my papers, where, each day, Sarkozy turned browner, as if tanning on the front page, his family around him bunched together like a clutch of toffee lollipops. Sarkozy’s bronzage was the armor of confidence. It gave the Paris newspapers their radiance—his smugness their hydrogen, his expressions their helioscope.

  Chalk it up to a blindness for all things French, but I found Sarkozy beguiling. Whereas my coworkers told me he was a pig, un vrai con.

  12

  Pierre needed me to work one Saturday, so Rachel spent the day with Lindsay, a new friend. Lindsay and Rachel had recently become acquainted through a mutual friend in the States. Lindsay was new to Paris, too, and she had what we had: the big France love.

  Lindsay was a pretty, snappy Wisconsin blonde who stood six-three or six-four. She’d played Division One basketball in college and then moved to Chicago, where she’d worked as a paralegal. Now Lindsay was in Paris for adventures. “I got to that stage where I’m wondering, what the hell am I doing?” she told Rachel. “And why Chicago while I’m working it out? Why not Paris?” Now in Paris, Lindsay freelanced from an attic room she was subletting in the eleventh arrondissement, doing research online for Chicago defense attornies.

  Rachel called that evening from a bar near the Louvre, Le Fumoir. She and Lindsay had just arrived for a cocktail event, for something called A Small World—an invitation-only social network for the world’s wealthy and/or connected classes. Thirty minutes after I got there, a man wearing a hunting cap told me he was the Left Bank’s only gardener for hire, and its best, absolument. Also, he liked my head.

  Since arriving at the bar, I’d talked to a number of strangers, but none had been so complimentary; I wondered if this was some type of Small World initiation. The guy’s business card said “Thierry le Jardinier.” Thierry was substantial in the glow. A handsome dude, hyperbistre, mustached with a shag beard that bulled down into his shirt. He had freckles across his nose and a green scarf around his neck. His French had a ducky twang, a Provençal accent.

  I asked him what kind of gardening he did.

  “Private clients,” Thierry said dismissively. “The rich, the bastards. Look, seriously, your head. There are a lot of good heads in here—” He took another look at mine, all the way around. “Honestly, your head is very good. What form, this head,” he added quietly. Then he whistled at it. By that point it was the fifth way he’d complimented my head: stroking it, circling it, eyeballing it, chatting it up.

  Rachel was sitting behind me with Lindsay and a girl named Dana, an acquaintance of Lindsay’s, a young woman from Melbourne, Australia. Dana had an expectant air—a real fun girl in the wool. Dana was in Paris, she’d said when we were introduced, “for the hell of it. To meet men. Find a man. Whatever.”

  “Oh, she found one. An aristocrat,” Lindsay said. “With any luck, he’ll be the king of England someday.”

  Dana explained that if two hundred people died in the correct order, her boyfriend would inherit the British throne. “But he’s very bashful about it,” Dana said.

  Thierry the gardener now had his eye on Dana. He played his wineglass left and right. He said to me, “You also have a good nose. I study noses. The size to me says a lot. Now, hey, look at that—” The gardener turned me around by the shoulder and pointed at Dana, and said loudly in French, “Regard her nose. Excuse me, miss, but your nose is incredible. It has character. It’s beautiful. Please?”

  Dana shook her head. She meant it. She was a good-looking girl, but her nose was a dorsal fin.

  “I insist,” the gardener said, switching to English, tilting toward Dana from the hips, “that you accept your beautiful nose. For me. Please.”

  And it looked like Thierry wanted to impregnate her by leaning. It reminded me how, at work that week, there’d been a meeting when a client visited, a woman, and after she’d left the conference room, the first task had been to evaluate her aesthetically, to weigh in on her breasts and legs, the make and quality of her handbag. Sabine, one of the project managers, had said to me, “Don’t be a prude, what did you think? You don’t like breasts, is that what it is?”

  “Tell me,” the gardener said softly to the Australian, “you hate your nose?”

  “It’s okay,” Dana said. She was uncomfortable. Thierry began staring at her funny. Something was wrong.

  “Wait,” the gardener said. “This nose—we know each other!”

  Dana laughed nervously. “I don’t think so.”

  “Please, I’m sure.” Thierry pushed up his hat. “I don’t forget a nose. What is your name? I must have your telephone number.”

  “Honey,” Rachel said to me, leaning in to cut off the gardener’s path to Dana, “excuse me, but would you mind getting us the check?”

  Tons more people were pressing in. At a table near the front, I recognized several Dartmouth bankers from the secret restaurant; sometimes Paris was about as big as a sandwich bag. The event’s organizer turned up. Her name was Georgie—a little over five feet of sequins, a Hungarian-Parisian of twenty-six. She was escorted by a redheaded American boy wearing a fluffy fur collar. The two of them arrived with ceremony, kissing everyone. The guy’s name was Richard. Wealthy from a trust fund, someone said. He looked twelve, with hair a mother had brushed. Richard told me he was studying at the Sorbonne “for, like, forever, whatever, I should get a job, I know.” I asked Richard about the city. Oh, absolutely sick of Paris, he said, sipping a Perrier. Then Richard dropped his pen. I stooped to pick it up and he patted my head, giggling. Georgie, watching from a stool, squished my fingers between her hands and vowed to make me a Small World member. “Now, darling,” she said in a grand-dame voice, “don’t make me regret it.”

  On our way ou
t, Rachel was approached by a Frenchman the size of an Oscar statue. He wore a blue T-shirt with a penis on it jutting from a banana peel.

  “You’re exactly my type!” he shouted at Rachel over the noise.

  “I’m married!” Rachel said.

  He said, “This is it! My type exactly!”

  At that hour, downtown Paris was deserted. We all shrugged on our coats. Across the street was the Louvre. I’d forgotten it was there. It was massive in the dark—the Pentagon of Western Civilization. At that moment, a security guard was probably shimmying toward the Poussins. Meanwhile, for the past hour I’d been drinking beer with rich assholes across the street.

  The cobblestones were glimmering with rain. Lindsay pointed out a dead bird in the gutter. We all walked to the Métro station, hungry for dinner and completely smoked out.

  “What’s creepy is, I did know him,” Dana said.

  “The gardener? How?” Lindsay said.

  “From the street,” Dana said. “He came up to me last week. I was sitting at a café on Saint-Germain. Honestly, he used that same line on me, about my nose?” She laughed. “You know, I think he’s famous for it. He cruises the Left Bank for expat girls and hands out his little business cards.”

  “Seriously, though?” Dana said a moment later. “Of all the things to compliment me on? He told me I had the most beautiful nose in the world.”

  * * *

  Asif threw a party in our courtyard in the middle of the week. I went downstairs. He pulled me into a big embrace and poured shots of whiskey for the two of us, calling me his American brother, demanding to know when he and his daughter should visit New York, which dates exactly.

  The next morning, our oven baked our dishwasher. They were both the size of VCRs, stacked on top of each other, mysteriously connected in the manner of a television and a cable box: turning on one device might shut down the other. While Asif tried to repair our dishwasher—he said it was a wiring problem—I asked him about all the construction noise in the building, la bruit de toute la construction, when would it cease?

  Lying on the floor, Asif snorted and assured me the noise would be over soon. I wasn’t so sure. Every day, from nine until six, with a one-hour break for lunch, construction noise rang from three sides of our apartment. When I’d signed the lease, our landlord somehow failed to mention that the apartments below, above, and next to ours would be undergoing renovation.

  Rachel began to experience visions of drills going into her head.

  * * *

  A Small World opened Paris a crack. They seemed to hold events every night: parties in Left Bank clubs; parties near Colette, the fashion boutique; parties in Colette. We went to a few and met consultants and tech-sector moguls, artists and aspiring artists, copywriters and aspiring copywriters; an American author my age living off a trust fund, who, among other Americans, spoke only French, despite having a Parisian accent by way of Seattle.

  But mostly it was Parisians and expats speaking the universal language of hedge fund. We met American financial types who cultivated saying what was passé—“Well, first off, La Prune, and Chateaubriand”—being masters of Le Fooding and Cityvox, websites for tracking the new. We saw fashion models attached to Small World members, and models who were members themselves—girls who were shoddy just-so, their hair teased to nests, while playing a game of how audaciously, how open-shirted they could dress and not care what men saw.

  Where for most of the guys in attendance, the rich Parisian dragueurs in tight jeans and popped Lacostes, style was meant to demonstrate an interest in sex. Dig my undershirt, which I fashion to be a shirt. Or white Repetto shoes worn for dancing, to honor Serge.

  At our third Small World event, Rachel saw the penis-banana guy again. We were attending the opening of a new restaurant, which wasn’t unlike other new restaurants around Paris—there was a cheeseburger on the menu—and the guy had on a shirt this time that said “This Thing Isn’t Going To Suck Itself.”

  “Rachel, don’t you love it?” he said, grasping both her hands. “Oh, Rachel, I was so afraid of you the night we met. You hated me!”

  He said he collected shirts with English messages to help him strike up conversation with American girls. “I get them on Bleecker Street. You know Greenwich Village?”

  At that moment, I was talking to a young British banker. He said he hated Paris. He was desperate to return to “the real wild,” Southeast Asia, and resume his life there where downtime was marvelously complicated by bonuses, drugs, and pussy. Paris was a museum, he said. Whereas doing finance in “the East” still proffered fresh adventures and clean whores, and had I read Alex Garland’s The Beach?

  I hated everyone in the room—myself most of all. Rachel said afterward, “That guy with the T-shirt? When we were leaving, I saw him with a very hot chick. They were aggressively making out.”

  13

  On the weekends, we went to the farmer’s market on Rue Bretagne to admire produce. We gazed on rotisserie birds that butchers displayed on the sidewalk, and sniffed melons like we saw old women do, at the stem. We admired men walking around with bags on their shoulders, like enormous straw purses, with leeks poking out of their armpits.

  Unfortunately, those leeks were out of our price range. Like many in Paris, we did the majority of our shopping at chain grocery stores.

  Then we discovered Picard. Shazam! Picard was a French chain that had only freezers, that sold only frozen food, though it was frozen food of very high quality. Lovely meats, vegetables, fish. Tagliatelle with white truffles, or lamb confit. Rabbit in olive sauce.

  Once you knew what to look for, Picard was everywhere; no Paris dinner party was complete without a tray of Picard hors d’oeuvres.

  “Oh, Picard is extremely popular,” Chloe told us. “It is the family’s cook.” Everyone in Paris used it, she said, and not ashamedly, especially families where both parents worked.

  Other friends, both expats and natives, suggested that Paris had become a city of home cooks who specialized in reheating, thanks to Picard.

  A few weeks after Le Fumoir, Lindsay was sitting at our kitchen table on a chilly Saturday evening. I’d just warmed up a tray of frozen mushroom tartelettes (from Picard) in case Lindsay wanted a snack. Rachel was changing in the bedroom. That evening, Lindsay had been invited to a party nearby, and she’d asked us along.

  The sun was still out, and the air was cold but floral. There was sort of a permanent good mood, weatherwise, during a Paris October.

  Lindsay was watching Asif take a piss in the courtyard.

  Lindsay had on a black leather jacket over a dress; the rest of her was icicle white. Frenchmen found her an exotic plant, so tall and pale. “American guys, I freak out,” Lindsay had said before. “Anyway, they only want skeletons with big boobs.” In Paris, Lindsay was frequently harangued by men on the street, but it wasn’t such an awful problem: “I’m like a mountain they want to summit, so that I’ll give them tall sons.”

  We set out walking. “Now, Dmitri won’t be there,” Lindsay said. “The party’s at Pascal’s apartment, Dmitri’s friend. But Dmitri is sick of him. Pascal’s sort of an iceberg—Dmitri doesn’t think he’s right for me at all.”

  Lindsay had had her first adventure: the previous week, she’d met a fat, rich Parisian named Dmitri. Dmitri dressed like a drug lord and knew everyone in town. They met at a dinner party. Afterward, he’d shown Lindsay Paris from the back of his Vespa until two a.m. Then he proposed marriage under the Eiffel Tower. When Lindsay said no, he proposed sleeping with her. When Lindsay said no to that, Dmitri vowed to be her best friend in Paris, so long as Lindsay kept open the concept of the two of them having sex one day.

  “So Dmitri has a crush on Lindsay,” Rachel said. “But so does Pascal.”

  “Whatever, Pascal wants to scale my heights—get in line,” Lindsay said. “I wouldn’t do anything with Pascal. Dmitri already introduced the two of us; he’s super-bourgeois. This is hilarious: I told Dmitri we were going
out tonight, and Dmitri was like, ‘Baby, you are forbidden from sleeping with Pascal. He is boring and he is fat.’ I said, ‘Dmitri, one, you’re an incredible snob; two, you’re not one to talk. Besides, you said fat men make better lovers.’ Dmitri’s like, ‘This is true—fat men know what to do. But, baby, Pascal would crush you during sex. You can’t sleep with him, or I will never talk to you again, ever, you’re killing me with the idea alone.’

  “So who knows,” Lindsay added, “maybe I’ll have sex with Pascal just to torture Dmitri.”

  Lindsay had figured out Paris pretty quickly.

  We skirted Place de la Bastille and followed the houseboats down Port de l’Arsenal. But it wasn’t easy: Bastille was swarming with five thousand kids. A techno parade had begun that morning and was still going strong: where once had stood the guillotine, people were doing their best Tecktonik, a dance craze that summer all across France.

  To do the Tecktonik was a solo act: arms twirling while the knees clapped together. Mostly it was popular with teenage boys, whose hips didn’t move anyway. I knew about the Tecktonik from an art director at work named Franck. I’d asked Franck to recommend a good hip-hop club in Paris, and he laughed, saying rap was “children’s music”—music for les ados, adolescents, immigrant black kids. According to Franck, in Paris techno was king. But even Franck drew the line at the Tecktonik.

  The signature move in the Tecktonik was to brush the side of your face coquettishly while simultaneously whipping your arms. To me, it looked like boys who were trying to imitate an actress from the movies—Bernadette Lafont imagining herself seduced, eyes closed while she stroked her face to simulate a lover.

  But that’s probably not what the kids intended.

  Pascal’s apartment, down the block from Bastille, was a Paris bachelor pad as if unpacked from a carton: green poker table, dartboard, stereo with matte components. Sitting on a couch was Richard, the young redheaded American from A Small World. Richard had on a V-neck T-shirt and an ushanka, a fur hat with earflaps. “Thank you, thank you,” he gushed as we entered and everyone kissed, “we were extremely bored until now, and how are we?”