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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Shellfish,” Bruno said. “Parisians eat shellfish.”

  “This is also not bad with champagne,” he added.

  Several times in those eighteen months, over coffee, at lunch, Bruno explained to me that native Parisians were disappointed by default. “We say pas mal before we say très bien. Look where we live. If you have Paris, what lives up to it? The strikes—you know, the fathers went on strike, so the sons follow. But it’s theater now. Everything changes.”

  At the office, Bruno put in enormous effort. Despite his dissatisfactions, he was never late that I saw. He was good at his job whether or not it went recognized. Creative, sensible, Bruno worked hard, the same way he smoked and tracked photography exhibits. He had imagination. There were features of dreams thick on the ground, and Bruno absorbed what Paris had to inspire him. But he seemed aware to the bone that he was stuck, and that hell was relative to where you stood.

  20

  The office closed for two weeks for the holidays. Seafood merchants occupied street corners, men in yellow bibs with ice chests full of fruits de mer—oysters, clams, shrimp that were two feet long, with orange eyeballs big as marbles. At Monoprix, sections of the floorplan were devoted to holiday gluttony, with items arranged like displays in sporting goods stores. Mountains of champagne. Pyramids of foie gras. Some crawfish with tails fourteen inches long.

  One cold Saturday afternoon, the doorbell rang. It was our poissonnière’s teenage driver, one of those delivery guys with a cell phone tucked inside his helmet. He had a platter for “Monsieur Bald-ween?” A present from Pierre and Chloe, enough shellfish for twelve, including a pile of giant shrimp to be guillotined.

  The next night, we went with Lindsay to an expat Christmas party in an apartment above the Luxembourg Gardens. Slippery roads, glowering clouds, cold gales. Streets around the park were deserted, flower boxes were empty. Rachel’s purse strap caught on a scooter mirror and was whipped off her arm. We wandered past a Christmas fair. There was a merchant, bundled up, filling bread bowls from a cauldron of melted cheese.

  At the party, no one was smoking. No one smoking at a Paris party, even in 2007, meant no one there was French. It turned out to be true. The hostess said, “I don’t think I even know a Parisian, isn’t that appalling?”

  The rooms were filled with people with very shampooed hair—Americans like us nibbling on topics of specific relevance to expats: dentists, taxes, and weren’t we dying to move to Berlin, or San Francisco?

  The Picard puff pastry was delicious.

  In expat conversations, the lingo tended to be from endurance sports—what could she stand; what tested her limits; how much longer could she take it before the exertion was too great. The same story played on repeat: how, when an American girl arrived in Paris, she went to Place de Furstenberg in the moonlight and kissed the stones. But when summer nights became online photo albums, and Europe’s darkness fell, she wasn’t a tourist anymore. Why were all the people she met at parties just like everyone back home? She couldn’t admit to feeling bored, but she was. Buying dessert for one: depressing. And she felt her loneliness like stomach rolls, forming over who she’d been.

  I was talking to a guy from San Francisco, and we were talking about how each of us had come to Paris, and I stopped mid-sentence, realizing I’d told the same story forty times by that point, and each time the exact same way. Extremely depressing. I begged off, found Rachel and Lindsay in the kitchen, and said, We’re leaving. We thanked our hostess and ran.

  “In the future,” Lindsay said, walking up the street, pulling Nicorette from inside her raincoat, “I would like a sign around my neck that says, ‘I am not interested in your complaints about employment at UNESCO.’”

  * * *

  The following morning, we found a skinny fir tree for sale on Rue Bretagne. We named him Pyotr, figuring he was from Ukraine. I brought him home on my shoulder, dressed him with ornaments from a Monoprix Christmas kit, then we went out again and bought a bottle of scotch for Asif, and left it for him with a ribbon and a note, “Bonne année, de tes Américains préférés.”

  On Christmas morning, Paris was a quiet mountain village, with electric lights strung between houses. We went for a walk. The slogan could have been “Paris—It’s manageable.” At Notre Dame, tourists got off a bus wearing matching holiday sweaters.

  That same week, my sister, Leslie, came for a visit. She was an ideal guest, adventuresome and eager to try new things. We took her to Bofinger for dinner—I wanted to show her French traditional, and got it: the service was atrocious—and Le Bar du Caveau for lunch, which was much cheaper, and more delicious. “Doesn’t Paris just make you feel young?” Leslie said at one point, and the way she said it—as if to no one—hit a lovely, sad note, like striking a wooden bell. Occasionally, Rachel and Leslie went out for tea, or Leslie explored the city on her own, and I stayed home and worked on my novel. Then it was done. On the second-to-last day of the year, I finished my draft, and we celebrated with a twelve-euro bottle of champagne that was probably better for degreasing a lawnmower.

  On New Year’s Eve, I put on a tie and roasted a bass and heated up hors d’oeuvres from Picard. Leslie contributed macarons from Ladurée. Lindsay arrived for dinner, then a few minutes later Georgie appeared, the Small World madame, with champagne and forced cheer. She’d texted earlier, asking if we had an extra seat.

  Apologizing that she might need to leave at any minute, Georgie spent the first half of the evening checking her textos. Then Rachel’s friend Olivia stopped by with a guy called Gonzalo. Olivia was lovely, a former lead at the dance company where Rachel had worked as a fund-raiser in New York. Olivia had left the company and moved to Paris to try living abroad. She was from Tennessee originally, petite, with a quiet voice, though determined: Olivia had landed in Paris with no job and no visa, but within a month she’d landed a position with a dance company, plus benefits. She introduced Gonzalo to the group. Gonzalo was twenty, handsome, a model with an afro and a gap in his teeth. He knew he was beautiful—the IPO was available to any girl who didn’t mind sharing.

  Suddenly Georgie came alive. Turned out Gonzalo and Georgie knew each other, sort of, through A Small World. She sat next to him at the table and practically signaled to land a plane. At midnight, we watched a revue with cancan dancers. Around one, Olivia said she and Gonzalo had another party to visit, and Georgie said, Oh good, she’d share their cab.

  The next morning, the Interior Ministry reported 144 cars torched in the suburbs—a smaller number than in previous years, but still troubling; a distress signal, reports said; a protest that was seen and heard by almost nobody in the city center.

  The morning Leslie departed, taking a train to the airport, we hugged and wished each other good luck in the new year. “Not like you need it,” Leslie said. “You live in Paris, remember?”

  I said, “It’s not quite like that.” Then again … the following weekend, Rachel came home on Sunday afternoon with her cheeks burning, tears on her face. I jumped up. “What happened?” Rachel said she’d been returning from the Left Bank. She’d been walking along the Seine, listening to her iPod, Renée Fleming singing Strauss; she’d stared at the golden dome of Invalides; she crossed the Alexandre III bridge with its black lampposts and gold statues; she passed a million tiny parks in the Marais. “I walked and walked,” Rachel said. “I couldn’t get over how beautiful it was. Sometimes I just really love it here.” Then she laughed at herself, wiping away tears, and put down her purse.

  EGO TOURISM

  WINTER

  —Young people in the twenty-first century are confused—Rachel and a plumber share a moment—Political correctness still kills—What Parisians desire in a mate—Mikhail Gorbachev packs his own shirts—Sarkozy gets married—Vertigo is not “a thing forever”—We drink champagne with Karl Lagerfeld—In Paris, an aristocrat eats chocolate only in bed—The women of Keef Richards prove difficult to capture—

  21

  On a cold day
in January, Claudia Schiffer was sitting outside our office wearing only her bra and underpants. She didn’t look cold; she looked expensive. Ten assistants surrounded her, squeezing radios or holding up silver shields to reflect the sun’s light toward her face.

  I watched an assistant pass Claudia Schiffer a cup of tea. Some agency, not ours, was shooting a lingerie ad, and they’d convinced Claudia Schiffer to pose seminaked below our balcony.

  “Dude, imagine her day rate,” a designer said.

  Paris winters were freezing cold and fragged with wind. What light there was was ice-gray. But the cold was bearable if a person was braced with tea or coffee, or a coffee with calvados, the French apple brandy. I took to buying rounds of espresso for my tablemates. I wanted to show not only goodwill, but participation in culture. At un pot, an office party, one evening late that month, Doo-Doo and Gabriel were drinking pastis by a massive empty fireplace, and Doo-Doo said to me, nodding at the pastis bottle, “You want one?”

  Absolutely, I said. I added, “But no water.”

  “No water?” Gabriel said. He looked like I’d ordered beef broth. No water with pastis?

  But I never drank scotch with water, so why start here?

  “Never,” I said. “No water.”

  Gabriel laughed nervously. “Seriously, are you sure?”

  “No water!” I ordered, gulped it down, and asked for another. I said, Donnes-moi la France. At least that got a laugh. Later, I’d learn that Doo-Doo had told one of the project managers from upstairs that “the American” drank pastis neat. He’d never seen it before. (For good reason; it tasted like licorice crossed with sap.) The manager agreed, the American was strange in multiple ways.

  After the holidays, a lot of conversation took place about foie gras. How much foie gras people had consumed during break, and in what varieties. There were arguments about proper preparation. Olivier, Doo-Doo, François, and Nico fought over who knew foie gras best—eaten cold, or sautéed in a pan, or stuffed in tiny ravioli. François won by saying he’d eaten not only numerous special preparations, but also multiple types of foie gras, from several regions, while he’d driven around France visiting different sects of his wife’s family.

  François rolled his eyes at the memory, clucking his tongue, and clutched Olivier’s shoulder, with Olivier cooing and hooting, “Oh, mais François, mon pauvre François…”

  Our first day back, Keith and I met for coffee. He’d just returned from holidays in Scotland, wearing a sweater his mother had knitted for him, thick as a sandwich board. He also had on new patent-leather, Day-Glo Reeboks. I shared my observation with him about the popularity of foie gras talk, and Keith nodded emphatically.

  “But they’re contrarian by nature, that’s why they’re fighting over it,” Keith said. “When it comes to foie gras, each Frenchman knows it best.” Keith fiddled with his glasses, polishing them. “It’s not just that every man is entitled to his opinion, it’s that every man believes he is right, is what it is.”

  Keith said a minute later, “Listen, here’s why working in France dans la pub, in advertising, blows. You do the pitch avec ton idée, yeah? And they say no automatically. They say, absolument fucking pas. Because they say ‘no’ all the fucking time, it’s become a natural response. The national response. The French are on a team, see: the bloody team of refusal. Only they don’t know they’ve signed up en masse. So each Frenchman thinks he’s unique in refusing to ride on the conformity train. He just doesn’t realize he’s one of millions on the even bigger train of ‘No.’”

  Keith’s theory held that since Parisians maintained convictions passionately, they ran the risk—even the requirement—of being misunderstood, and so had evolved the French mastery of repartée, the kitchen-drawer bottom lip, and dinner parties that lasted eight hours.

  Keith nipped my sleeve. “Hey, so have you read much John Fante then?”

  That afternoon, Bruno bragged about his own goose-liver consumption. He pulled up his sweater to show me where his belly had become engorged from too much paté. He invited me to slap it. Bruno laughed and laughed, with his eyes semiclosed, and I knew something was wrong.

  Bruno always liked to preface confrontation with bonhomie. He suggested a coffee, his treat. We sat down in the canteen, and Bruno’s jaw and mouth drooped. What was this, he said in a whisper, about me leaving infant nutrition, leaving him behind? He’d just been told, Bruno said, but he hadn’t been told much. Where was I going? Would he be going, too? And why hadn’t I told him before?

  To Louis Vuitton, I said. Going alone. Very soon. Pierre’s decision.

  Bruno stared over my shoulder. “That’s not how it is supposed to work,” Bruno said.

  We talked about breast-feeding for a little bit, then Bruno said, “Are you sure there’s no room for me on the team?” Bruno raked my arm with two fingers. “I’ve done plenty of luxury, you can show them my portfolio.” Another minute, when I tried to change the conversation, Bruno said loudly, “This is bullshit. You know this is bullshit. Will you at least ask Pierre?”

  I said I would ask Pierre. I didn’t know if I’d ever seen Bruno more dejected.

  * * *

  Three brief Paris stories that, to me, seemed connected by bigger trends. One: I was assigned a new neighbor at the office, a young designer named Sébastien. Sébastien took Julie’s spot. Julie had been moved to the agency’s other building after a blowup occurred in December between her and André. One day Julie was shouting and crying, her cheeks swollen. The next day she was morose, like she’d been medicated. A week later she was gone, transferred across the street.

  We weren’t told why, and no one discussed it out loud, not even Olivier or Françoise.

  Sébastien, her replacement, was oily, maybe twenty-two. His default mode was louche. He wore a leather jacket and black jeans that were tight and unwashed. He needed to sweep his hair from his eyes on the two-minute mark if he wasn’t wearing headphones, but mostly Sébastien wore headphones, big ones shaped like fist-size flowers.

  The day we met, Sébastien showed me how his iPod rang an alarm whenever his girlfriend had her period, so he’d know when not to initiate a fuck. Then he brushed the hair out of his eyes and resumed Web surfing.

  Sébastien was an expert Web surfer. It appeared to be what he did in lieu of working. It was simple, Sébastien’s approach to work, even audacious: he did not work. Did not meet deadlines. Didn’t acknowledge being assigned accounts. Gradually, he refused to read his business e-mail or attend meetings, and he’d arrive at noon and leave at three, after an hour’s lunch. Occasionally he’d work for a week, and work hard. But then he’d disappear for several days, whereabouts unknown. Sébastien’s project managers vented their frustration to us because they were reluctant to confront him. Instead, they stopped assigning him work. Then Pierre found out. He summoned Sébastien to his office. After that, Sébastien worked hard for a couple of weeks, but then he stopped again and went back to his position of Je refuse.

  One day when Sébastien was at lunch, I asked everyone why he still had a desk.

  You can’t fire someone in France, Olivier explained.

  It’s too difficult, Tomaso said.

  “You simply stop giving them things to do,” Françoise said, “and they sit in a corner for a few years, and you hope they quit. That’s how it works.”

  Story number two: Around the same time Sébastien arrived, I received an espresso machine as a belated Christmas gift from my parents, a great big machine from Nespresso. I was ecstatic about it; I became emotionally involved with a kitchen appliance. The truth was, Paris was a fantastic place to drink coffee, but the coffee in Paris was mostly awful. Anyone but the French would tell you. Tomaso and other Italian coworkers would get in arguments about Parisians even calling their coffee espresso, when it was too watery and tasted like mulch. Perhaps that explained why Nespresso’s home systems were so popular in France. The coffee quality was better than what was served in most Paris cafés. People in
the hallways at work discussed the “latest seasonal blend” from Nespresso like it was a new Beaujolais.

  What set Nespresso apart for me, though, wasn’t how good the espresso was—there were plenty of decent home espresso systems—but its value as a symbol of bobo ranking and elitism. Nespresso machines made coffee from Nespresso pods only, tiny capsules that cost thirty cents each and were available only online or from Nespresso stores. No other coffee company had a two-floor boutique on the Champs-Elysées; few stores on the Champs-Elysées were so crowded. And to purchase those pods a person was required to join the Nespresso Club.

  Membership included a black identity card embedded with a personalized smart chip. I was reminded of writing luxury humor in New York, for the magazine published for American Express black-card holders. With this coffeemaker, had I crossed over? Pierre told me he’d been a Nespresso member for several years. His father had been a member for much longer. In fact, due to how much espresso he bought—“he drinks a lot of espresso,” Pierre said—his dad had achieved some kind of elite status within Nespresso. The more coffee he drank, the more frequently he received special treatment and gifts in the mail.

  Story number three: In early January, one of the Louis Vuitton account managers, Marc, invited me out to lunch. Marc was dorky, smart, ambitious. He was a Nespresso member, plus he owned a Mont Blanc pen. At the start of meetings, he’d withdraw his pen and lay its felt case next to his cell phone on the table. At lunch on a sunny day, sitting outside on Rue de Valois across from the Louvre’s glass pyramid, Marc wanted to know what it was like to work in New York. He explained that he felt locked into his career in Paris, no way out. Marc was on track to be an account director, but at heart he longed to be a creative. During un brainstorm, Marc would often contribute ideas that were more creative than what some “creatives” suggested, but they went ignored, and Marc’s superiors would mock him for breaking rank.