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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Walking home across the Seine, feeling conspicuous in our sweatpants and T-shirts, we passed a group of teenagers lounging around the Saint-Jacques Tower dressed like punk mimes, in black cargo pants and striped shirts. One shouted at me, “Hey, here come the athletes!”

  I shouted back, “Yeah!”

  That made them laugh. The guy yelled, “Keep going! You’re winning!”

  Only in Paris did Goths bully the jocks.

  According to my computer, the song I listened to most while running that fall was “North American Scum,” by LCD Soundsystem. I didn’t realize the irony until about the fourth time I heard it, while running around the lake at Buttes-Chaumont:

  I hate the feeling when you’re looking at me that way ’cause we’re North Americans …

  But if we act all shy, it’ll make it okay, makes it go away.

  * * *

  Among the créatifs, the only other native English-speaker was Scottish Keith. Keith was my age, tall and shaggy, very outgoing and kind. He’d lived in Paris for several years and had worked as a copywriter for multiple French ad agencies. He was an autodidact—Keith spoke fluent French, Italian, and German, some Swedish and a little Japanese, almost all of it self-taught—and had a fund of quotations, particularly from works by French authors whom even the French overlooked. Keith also collected fluorescent sneakers. Prior to working in advertising, he’d been a professional skateboarder. He’d once skated in Tehran, for the ayatollah.

  One lunchtime, I showed Keith a 2006 article from The Guardian about Japanese tourists in Paris suffering a condition called “Paris syndrome.” It occured when a Japanese visitor was so disappointed by Paris—by the city not living up to her romantic expectations—that she suffered a psychological breakdown. The Japanese embassy in Paris said it reported a dozen cases each year. Most patients were women in their thirties, with extremely tender ideas about Paris and France, who collapsed at a waiter’s first bark and were repatriated to Japan, accompanied by a doctor. A psychologist was quoted saying, “Fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover, it can provoke a crisis.”

  Imagine, Keith said, what those fantasy Parises must look like, if the disappointment of the real thing—because surely Paris was still pretty great—put women in the hospital.

  One afternoon, Keith visited my desk to tell a joke. “What do you call someone who speaks three languages?”

  “Trilingual,” I said.

  “Right,” he said, “and what do you call someone who speaks two languages?”

  “Bilingual.”

  “And what,” Keith said, relishing it, “do you call someone who only speaks one language?”

  I said I gave up.

  “American!” Keith said, and laughed. At which point Olivier pulled off his headphones and asked Keith to translate the joke into French. It became Olivier’s favorite joke for a month.

  No French person could resist a good joke about Americans, especially an easy joke. And vice versa. Witness: freedom fries. But I never heard a joke in Paris about the Brits. Londoners and Parisians were too comingled by history and business. Whole strips of northwest France were occupied by Britons’ summer homes, and French kids learned their English with London accents. America and France, however, were separated by an ocean, not a channel. Only the most hardened jokes could survive a transatlantic journey.

  One coworker after another told me how much he or she longed to see New York or San Francisco. To drive west across the plains—several had done it—to Arizona, California, “the big sky” of Montana. One guy, who’d watched Badlands too many times, talked about the Dakotas like they were Tahiti. Another, Yassine, asked me for travel tips for Detroit. Detroit? I said. Yassine longed to photograph the auto factories and hard streets—“The ‘grit,’ you say in English?” He told me he was planning a family vacation there soon, he’d take his wife and children. I said I’d never been to Detroit. Yassine only had pity for me. He looked past me the way addicts do, with far-seeing eyes, as though I couldn’t appreciate what he sought.

  * * *

  A letter from the government arrived. Rachel’s and my cartes de séjour were ready, our residency papers. We’d officially been made Parisians.

  I met Rachel at lunch under the awning of the Brasserie Les Deux Palais on the Ile de la Cité, under Gothic spires and charming steeples. It was a bright gray morning, with wind blowing from all directions, leaves spun in twisters or magnetized to building corners. Both of us were thrilled. Chestnut roasters had begun appearing around Paris, and there was a charred smell citywide. We entered a municipal building, a colossal fortress of heavy stone—formerly a garrison, it now protected bureaucrats—and waited ten minutes on a bench. Summoned, we handed over our paperwork and received laminated permits from a filing cabinet.

  We examined each other’s photo: two hard-faced Parisians, properly unsmiling.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said when we were outside again, standing on the riverbank next to the quai.

  “We’re Parisian,” Rachel said.

  “But look, it’s going to pour.” Clouds were flexing above us, as usual. Paris wasn’t the city of light—it was the city of clouds. But beautiful clouds normally, clouds colored and shaped like almond cakes. Clouds at arm’s length, thin as ribbons, detailed as monuments. Leonine clouds with shoulders and tails.

  At that moment, they were black, rippling with purple and yellow veins.

  “Let’s go celebrate,” I said. There was a café downstream, tucked under a wall of ancient homes. The sky opened up and we fled the rain. I knew what I’d order: two coupes of champagne to celebrate, plus a café for me and a citron pressé for Rachel, and with the proper words not only to demand those items, but to do so breezily, to demonstrate my Parisianness.

  We reached the café. A man held open the door and smiled. He grabbed two menus, with gargantuan Union Jacks on the covers, and announced in English, “Hello! Today will we be drinking or eating?”

  17

  Before we enjoyed a late Thanksgiving in Italy—more on that in a moment—I took a train with Pierre and Marcel, an account director, to Belgium. For several weeks, we’d been working nights and weekends, Pierre the hardest, for a chance to redo the Levi’s website. Pierre wasn’t sleeping. His smoking had doubled. To reduce nerves on the train, I made a bet: How many times could I insert the word “boom” into my presentation, like Steve Jobs did during his Apple speeches, in order for them to buy me dinner at Taillevent?

  Taillevent was a famous Paris restaurant where dinner was about three hundred euros a head.

  “How many times do you think you can do?” Marcel asked.

  “Maybe five,” I said.

  “Do six,” he said, “and if we win the account, I’ll buy dinner. Bon courage,” Marcel added, which meant “good luck,” though it also meant “be bold, do not fear.”

  Levi’s European operations were based in Brussels, a mournful city. To me, it looked like Boston if Boston had lived through the Dark Ages. The sky wore a gray armband where the sun was obscured by clouds. A cab took us to an office park outside the city, past marshes of faceless blocks. Was the city always swamplike? For a panel of businessmen dressed like Lou Reed, we presented our designs, and during the presentation I said four “booms.” They loved it. They offered us free jeans. We left in high spirits and got drunk in the bar car on the train ride home, and Marcel told me four “booms” were good enough for dinner, assuming we won.

  Except we didn’t win. The Levi’s chief reported that they’d liked our ideas, just not the IT infrastructure our technical director had proposed afterward. I must have shown disappointment. Well, I was pissed. The next day, Pierre told me not to be depressed. I said, Of course not, don’t be ridiculous, depressed? Depressed about advertising?

  “It’s only one pitch,” Pierre said, seeing through me. Or perhaps it wasn’t him saying it, it was André, showing me his teeth. Th
e two of them had looked up simultaneously from their computers when I’d interrupted them, barging into their office, to hear what I’d assumed would be good news.

  Riding home on the Métro, I had visions of working in French advertising until death. I heard myself pitching diaper campaigns at ninety—myself in a pair of Ça Dépend undergarments to demonstrate their pliancy.

  Since August, I’d told myself not to care about work; only my fiction mattered, and the job sufficed to provide our cartes de séjour, that was it.

  But I’ve never been as hard as I’d like.

  Some lunches in the park, sitting next to Stephen King, I’d be finishing my pasta when memories would pass by in a convoy. Faces from New York, or smells I knew. I’d find myself crazy homesick—tasting bitterness. I was constantly an inch off normal.

  * * *

  More lessons from work: a traditional Thanksgiving dinner was not well understood, never mind easy to assemble in Europe. This Tomaso said smoothly, with authority. He asked me, How would I transport my dinde to Venice, by train?

  “Yes,” Olivier wondered, “in a dinde-shaped attaché?”

  Ohohoho, ahahaha, they both laughed.

  My father had a business meeting coming up in Venice, over the Thanksgiving holiday. My family, including several aunts and uncles and cousins, had decided to join him. It would be a Thanksgiving overseas, a destination Thanksgiving.

  An American invasion! Olivier said.

  My mother, I explained to Tomaso, said that she’d found a Venetian restaurant that could roast us a turkey; it was a restaurant that was known for not even serving fish. Tomaso, who was Venetian, laughed, then he looked offended and alarmed.

  “In Venice?” Tomaso said. “This is impossible. Seriously, my friend, be careful with your digestion. Venice is not about having turkeys.”

  We flew to Venice on a Friday evening, nous avons voyagé de nuit, and from the airport we took a vaporetto, a public transport boat, across the lagoon, toward buildings ahead of us wavering in the dark. There were bleak harbor sounds, and a wind that smelled of moss and gasoline. No foghorns, though there was plenty of fog. The boat docked. We tried to get our sea legs and carried our luggage down a path beside a canal, and found our hotel set into a blackened stone wall. Inside, past the empty front desk, in a sitting room decorated with Greek statues, my parents were eating bar snacks and reading newspapers. It was fun to see them, and we all caught up.

  The next morning, emergency sirens struck at breakfast to announce acqua alta, high water due to the lagoon’s rising. Venice was flooded. Outside, Venetians knew what to do and wore knee-high rubber boots, while the rest of us explored in our sneakers from trembling wooden planks that had been laid out across the piazzas. The talk at lunch among my dad’s Venetian colleagues, who all wore rubber boots, was of a cruise ship docking that afternoon that would squeeze thousands of tourists “out from the bowels,” disgorge them into the city “with their plastic water bottles.”

  For Thanksgiving, our restaurant was in the Dorsoduro, a residential neighborhood distant from most tourist spots. The chef had indeed roasted a turkey, even prepared mashed sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. Our family tradition required each person at the table to name something they were thankful for. Rachel and I said we were thankful to live in Paris and to see everyone at the holiday. We also toasted Jeremy Irons—the owner of the restaurant had confided that Irons had eaten in her restaurant most evenings during the recent filming of Casanova.

  At night, Paris was quiet, but Venice was a tomb. Deserted, but magical. Late the previous evening, after we’d checked into our hotel, one of my dad’s coworkers had taken us for a boat ride. He’d poled us across the Grand Canal, into a system of narrow waterways. It was like a night canoe ride across a lake. Only here a thousand-year-old city had been pushed up through the water’s surface, and its homes were also islands, so a person paddling around was level with his front door. People in their apartments were washing dishes, watching TV—oblivious to us as if they had no idea other cities weren’t also submerged.

  After twenty minutes, we arrived at a bend where our gondolier stopped poling and turned on his flashlight. On the wall beside us was a shimmering painting, a fresco of a woman praying. We didn’t say anything.

  * * *

  On the way to Venice, at Charles de Gaulle, we had seen several Parisians in tooled boots, Wrangler jeans, and white Stetson hats—way more cowboy than cowboys—getting on a plane bound for Dallas. I was flabbergasted, though I shouldn’t have been. Earlier that fall, we’d joined Pierre and Chloe for a picnic in Parc Saint-Cloud, a massive forest on the outskirts of Paris. In the parking lot, there’d been a man and woman in full cowboy gear. Pierre had explained that in France there was still a wide affection for the myth of cowboys and Indians.

  Parisians and cowboys, of course, having many common interests, like tight blue jeans and cocaine.

  After lunch, Chloe had disappeared into the forest, then returned after twenty minutes with a plastic tray of espressos. No big deal. In Europe, the normal wasn’t abnormal, just differently fashioned. The accoutrements changed. Espresso oozed like sap if you knew which trees to spike.

  18

  One December morning, two gorgeous girls in lingerie opened the door for me at work. Their high heels were aeronautical. I could almost hear them shivering. Was this normal in Paris? Did a branch of the government send underwear models outdoors during the holidays, to promote spending on lingerie?

  Turns out a newspaper had hired them to stand outside our building’s entrance, to open the door and pass out Christmas flyers. In the lobby, Doo-Doo the intern was erecting our office Christmas tree. It was a red metal fir tree, fifteen feet tall. It creaked.

  Olivier walked in behind me. “Not bad,” he said. “Last year’s tree was much worse. Good job, Doo-Doo.”

  “Thanks, Olivier!” Doo-Doo shouted from under the tree.

  “Why was it worse?” I said.

  “Well, it was black,” Olivier said. He unwound his scarf. “A black metal tree, with black balls. Huge balls. For décor. Very chic, of course, quite beautiful. But not for me.”

  December in Paris was gorgeous but there wasn’t much sunlight. Even midday light seemed thinner, as though the sun was retreating. On the weekends, the boulevards were madcap with visitors and locals out shopping, to get the most from their daylight hours. Since we’d be spending the holidays in Paris, we decided to send home wine—Gallic and affordable.

  I called the post office to confirm we could ship wine to the States, and the woman answering had a laugh like a shovel hitting cement.

  “Sir,” she said, “this is France.”

  Paris had plenty of Christmas spirit. The city was draped with electric bulbs. Inside Galeries Lafayette, a department store equivalent to Saks Fifth Avenue, there was a mammoth Christmas tree that climbed to a stained-glass dome. In Montmartre, on a Saturday morning, with the wind snapping our coats, we saw a green fir tree hung with black stilettos, in tribute, a sign said, to Karl Lagerfeld—Joyeux Nöel! Tourists filled the sidewalks. Women shopped together holding hands. On the walls of the Métro stations, advertising posters were hung for toys, Disneyland Paris vacations, trips to Zermatt, and lots of lingerie, too.

  Pierre said he needed me on Louis Vuitton sooner than expected. The other writers on the account were French, and there’d been complaints about their English copy sounding wrong. First, though, Pierre said, I needed to meet the account’s creative director for TV and print advertising, Jean-Paul, who worked across the street in the agency’s other building.

  “You must see the account from the big picture,” Pierre said as we darted across the Champs-Elysées. That morning, Paris was gray and frigid. We could see our breath as we puffed our way down France’s Rodeo Drive, its Avenida Presidente Masaryk—the Champs-Elysées being both a red carpet of French pride and an escalator ride through globalization’s shopping mall, Adidas to Zara. Pierre said, “This account is a b
ig deal, a very big deal. You need to understand what the brand means to the agency’s reputation. And to France’s identity. To French people, in effect.”

  Pierre was more tense than normal. For many years, he’d worked late, but Chloe had become worried about his hours and stress level. Normally, Pierre was in the mood for liking everything, but his face had grown darker recently, his beard longer.

  “Don’t worry, you can count on me,” I told Pierre. “You’ll remember, I did luxury humor.”

  “No,” Pierre said sharply. He lit another cigarette. “Look,” Pierre said, “this is about celebrities. It’s big-time. ‘Funny’ is the wrong attribute. You need to do ‘emotional’ now. ‘Inspiring,’ okay?

  “They do not do funny,” he said.

  The account revolved around celebrities posing with luggage, and Annie Leibovitz taking their picture. Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf, Catherine Deneuve, Mikhail Gorbachev. The idea, Pierre had told me, was to evoke travel and well-lived lives. Judge a man by his duffel, a woman by her clutch. Pierre handled the Web, Jean-Paul the print and TV. For his part, Pierre had convinced Louis Vuitton to let him interview each celebrity about his or her favorite city, specifically their attached emotions. Then Pierre would dispatch a movie crew, a director and a composer, to make short films about the chosen city, and he turned the results into little treasure chests of websites, memoirs made from film. Visitors would see the city portrayed in dreamlike sequences and narrated fragments, drawn from the famous person reminiscing about his or her own experiences.

  Jean-Paul’s office was huge, walled by glass. Light shot through it. Behind Jean-Paul’s desk hung a large abstract painting, and around the room were awards, more art, mid-century furniture, art books in vertical piles. Against one wall were several video-game systems that looked dusty and unused.

  Jean-Paul was in his sixties. He was cheerfully patrician. He had fleecy eyebrows that protruded winglike—either he grew them purposefully or they were long ago forgotten. Pierre told me Jean-Paul had worked at the firm for thirty years. He sat us down on tufted, cube-shaped leather chairs. He wore a brown suit, white shirt, and dark blue scarf, as if a breeze had flung it around his neck. An assistant served us sandwiches from a wicker basket.