I said I knew many people in New York who were stuck in the rat race, too, but also many people who had switched careers. Marc said this was impossible in France. “Stability is the most important thing,” Marc said, his fingers trembling; he’d been stressé for months. “It’s the Great French Dream: save money, get a good watch, find a partner, have babies, buy a country house, then retire.”
Well, I said, the Great French Dream didn’t sound much different from the Great American Dream, only with More Vacation Days.
“No, seriously,” Marc said, “the French dream? It’s dead.”
And Marc was cuckolded by that death. Because Marc wanted all of those things he’d named, only he didn’t see how he could obtain them and still be happy. These days, wasn’t “happiness” a hollow word? The dream was cheating Marc; behind every grin, he was dispirited. By early winter he’d developed a fluttering-eye tic. And when Pierre fired Sébastien, my neighbor, not only for not doing shit but for personally insulting another employee in front of Pierre (Pierre was extremely loyal to his employees), Sébastien was confounded. He was furious, distraught. Fâché, morose. He knew he’d done wrong; now he felt he’d been done wrong. Why would Pierre go for maximum punishment? Fired, as in fired-fired?
About half the office, who had despised working with Sébastien and had said so out loud while Sébastien listened to electroclash in his peony headphones, still didn’t see why Pierre had needed to purge him. André never would have fired Sébastien, people said. Perhaps he would have relocated Sébastien like he did Julie, but never fired him, no. In gossip at the coffee machine, fetching macchiatos or double-cafés, people made Pierre out to be the villain. He’d broken an unspoken trust. The same people attributed Pierre’s firing Sébastien to the influence of Pierre’s years working in New York.
22
At the end of January, our shower basin leaked. Asif turned up at eight a.m. because our downstairs neighbor had knocked on his door, Asif said, after the guy’s ceiling began raining when I showered.
Asif lit a cigarette and squeezed into our bathroom. He tapped on the drain. He took a breather from contemplating the situation to brush his shag in the mirror.
The previous week, drunk one night, Asif had told me about his women problems. “Ach, it’s difficult, man, but what can I do?” Those words summed up his whole regime. Asif said he was keeping several chicks on the line. One was a widow who lived near Versailles. She was wealthy, she called him “pet,” and while he slept she stuffed euros into his jeans, rolls of bills in rubber bands. None of which he minded. “I love her, you know? And not just for the money.” Recently, though, he’d begun seeing a new girl, and the widow was upset. She’d said to Asif, it was her or nothing, and if nothing then no more fat money rolls.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But my new girl, waouh. From Marseille, you know Marseille? The real France.”
Unable to repair the bathroom, Asif dropped his cigarette in the toilet and said he’d telephone for a plumber. I left for work with an apologetic look while Rachel reorganized her plans.
The doorbell rang at eleven. Plumber: handsome, young, big-armed. He said quietly, Bonjour, and Rachel said back to him, Bonjour.
I had to interrupt at that point: “Give me a break.” Rachel was telling me the story later that evening over dinner. “Hey,” she said, “when do you know me to exaggerate?” Anyway, Rachel said, the plumber didn’t speak English, so they’d relied on her French.
The plumber brought in his tool bag. She showed him the bathroom. He removed his jacket. Rachel returned to the dining table to resume writing. Twenty minutes later, the plumber came back out—he was down to his undershirt by that point—and began speaking in French.
“I’m sorry, excuse me,” Rachel interrupted him, also in French. “I telephone my husband? He speaks French, please wait.”
But when she called, I was in a meeting. It would be hours before I got her voice mail saying she needed help translating Le Colin Farrell.
Rachel had hung up the phone and returned to the bathroom.
“My husband is not there,” Rachel told the plumber. “But, okay, you explain to me. I’m sorry, but my French is bad.”
The plumber nodded. He added bashfully, “I will go slow.” The plumber explained there was a leak behind the tub, beneath the outer layer of molding, and he needed to make a hole—
“Make a hole in the wall of tiles?” Rachel asked in French.
“Yes,” the plumber said.
“But not big?”
“No, a small one. But first I need to turn off the electricity.”
“Why the electricity?” Rachel said.
“Well, I do not want to be injured,” he said.
“Oh no,” my wife said. “No, of course not.”
Soon they were crouching on their knees, shoulder to shoulder in our cramped, hot bathroom with only a flashlight between them, while the shy, sexy plumber explained what was happening in front of their noses.
I said, Do I want to know how this story ends?
“He fixed the tub,” Rachel said.
* * *
Due to the number of hours I was working, Rachel and I didn’t see much of each other after the holidays. One Saturday we took a field trip to Père Lachaise, the graveyard established by Napoleon, where Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison were buried. At noon, the sun was low. There was ice on the roads, frost on the walls where buildings were in shadow. The cemetery had a pleasantly countryish landscape, rolling with crypts. We sat on a bench in the sun while Rachel explained that her writing was going well; she enjoyed working on it. The only trouble was that construction now had expanded to include four sides of our apartment. From three to four sides in a few short weeks: all-day racket that penetrated two-thirds of our apartment’s planar surfaces. Rachel hadn’t wanted to complain, but it was becoming unbearable. Drill sounds, hammering, beams being cut. To the point that Rachel now heard the sounds inside her head when they weren’t occurring. Not just intolerable noise, but interior.
“You could try working in a café,” I said. Didn’t everyone in Paris work in cafés? Wasn’t that the expat thing to do?
“You know that’s not me,” Rachel said.
“What about that library we found?”
“You mean in the children’s room?”
Libraries in Paris tended to be reserved for licensed students, or they charged admission. We’d found a free branch near our apartment, but the study carrels turned out to be part of a day-care zone.
Across the street from Père Lachaise, we found a café for lunch, and sat by a glass wall. Outside, Parisians went about their Saturday business, pushing carts of groceries home. In the afternoon we went down to the Seine, where the river was chopped up white and blue. We huddled on Pont de Sully in the wind, in view of Notre Dame, and absorbed the cathedral and island buildings at dusk, then ran to a café to drink.
That night, Lindsay and Olivia visited for dinner. Olivia told us she’d gone on two dates with Gonzalo, the model-boy from New Year’s, but she’d called things off after she found out he was seeing other women. In fact, he liked to see them all at once.
“I swear,” Olivia said, “this boy believes he is God’s gift. Do you know what he does? We went out for lunch last weekend, and he invited another girl to join us. He had two dates in one, me and this skinny little…”
“Maybe he’s a multitasker,” Lindsay said.
Olivia said after a minute, “He thinks every girl wants to kiss on him. He’s like, ‘Baby, I am in love with you, but by the way, I’m in love with her, too, and that one over there, and that one.’”
Olivia explained that she’d recently gone on a date with a different guy, this time an air-traffic controller. They’d met through the French equivalent of Match.com. He didn’t speak English, so they’d subsisted on her French. When they ran out of words, they ate sorbet.
“That’s sweet,” Rachel said.
“You know, it was,” Oliv
ia said. “And at least I was the only girl on the date. He drove me home, and I thought, okay, this is nice. We parked on my street. And you know what? If he wants to kiss me, I was thinking, I’ll kiss him. So we’re sitting in the car. We sat some more. In silence. Like we’re meditating together. Finally I said, Uh, ciao, à bientôt, and that was it. Me getting out of the car, end of date. I was like, aren’t you supposed to be French?
“Oh, and by the way? He has a kid,” Olivia said.
“Well, that’s how you know he’s French,” Lindsay said.
The rule held that if a contemporary Parisian man was single after thirty, it meant either he had a child somewhere or he was gay. But since no Parisian men were gay, at least not openly, most likely there was a kid somewhere, plus an ex-partner with great legs to whom the man eventually would return. And the ex-partner usually was that killer combo that Parisian men found irresistible, of Certified Lunatic and Really Good Cook.
* * *
At the agency, among men, references to sex as a form of punishment were part of business. It was a daily aspect of conversation, ten times more frequently invoked than I’d heard in American offices. Either the women rolled their eyes, or they didn’t notice; mostly they didn’t notice. How our clients were fucking us in the ass. Ramming it down our throats. Bending us over, or fucking us in the face. I heard it from coworkers, bosses, consultants. Whenever there were two or more Parisian men in a room, someone would likely invoke something done to an ass or penis. Maybe the agency’s collective ass, our team’s penis. It would be phrased in a way that seemed humdrum and mildly annoying, like waiting in line. Such as sucking dick. We sucked our clients’ dicks a lot. Which wasn’t terrible. Because the guy making the joke could imply, Hey, sucking this dick isn’t so bad. I could suck it one more financial quarter if necessary, sure. Let’s all try and meet our deadlines, okay, guys? Just suck this dick a little bit longer and we’ll be great.
But when we were doing well? If a manager got his client to approve a big new budget, or, better still, if we won a new account? Then they were sucking our dicks, and that was super.
Less frequently told were black jokes, though they weren’t uncommon. Maybe two or three a month. Mostly they concerned the size of black men’s penises. What’s the problem? Hey, I’m saying a good thing about blacks. I wish I had a black dick! Though guys were careful not to tell those sorts of jokes in front of our black colleagues. Then there were the Jew jokes. It wasn’t a big deal if you let one fly in front of a Jewish coworker; frequently it was your Jewish coworker telling the joke. For example, about clients being stingy like Jews. Or when someone, being generous, boasted he wasn’t “acting like a Jew.” In fact, Jew jokes were looked down upon as cliché. Bad form: they weren’t good enough as comedy. Because though all of the joking was performed lightly as farce—white boys making noise—it symbolized a serious purpose: taking a stand against the grand evil that was political correctness.
Tolerance was high for sucking black dicks like a Jew, but there was no room in the office for political correctness. Never. None. It needed to be fought actively, and if that required telling anti-Semitic jokes while pretending to gag on a client’s cock … However, should you seem uncomfortable, or protest the appearance in conversation of a black dick, a stingy Jew, or a thump on fags, well, watch out. By doing so, you were curtailing that joke teller’s personal freedom to be open-minded about causing offense, and the freedom to offend needed protection.
Either Murphy Brown never aired in France, or Paris was stuck in the early nineties. I hadn’t heard the term used in maybe ten years, but in our office politically correct came up twice a week. In meetings, if someone called your idea P.C., pay-say, there was no possible recovery. The label was nuclear. Anyone accused of pay-say during un brainstorming would be shouted down—Don’t be so American!—to sit shamefaced in his seat, excluded from the rest of the session.
23
There was a lot to observe in Paris about seduction, about the Parisian manner of seduction. If only because seduction was the base syrup of most exchanges, business or otherwise, along with confrontation.
I found more lessons in my coworkers’ social-media updates than in watching lovers make out along the Seine—most of those lovers being tourists. Of course, plenty of French people still made out along the Seine; they simply had more company these days, Paris having so many goldfish in the privacy of their bowls … Anyway, my French coworkers used the Web pretty much the same as Americans did, but with greater respect for individual privacy—I never saw photos of any coworkers shotgunning beers, though perhaps shotgunning beers wasn’t the best test case—and, in almost all exchanges, with flirtation.
There was also greater tolerance for sexy material. Men, and plenty of women, would get up from their desks to cluster around whatever nude flesh was trending on the Web. Of course, it was excused as a business exercise; we worked in an ad agency, and we required inspiration. And French advertising didn’t lack for nudity. Like one condom TV spot that got passed around. Six of us clustered around Josette’s computer. The video showed a woman’s face and bare breasts responding to something being done to her offscreen—a lot of tickling, perhaps, during an earthquake.
“What I like is the music,” Josette said. The sound track had a young Wayne Newton saying thanks in German. “That and the joy that is presented by the contrast, rather than anything nasty.”
The men chimed in, Ah oui, la musique …
Josette was a designer. She had pestered me for weeks about wanting dinner at our house, to meet Rachel and enjoy some girl chat. Finally, we booked a date. The promised evening, I arrived home early with champagne and flowers, and found Rachel just cooking dinner, wearing a blue apron over her dress.
I said I’d noticed in the courtyard there were cones and machinery that hadn’t been there in the morning.
Rachel said, “Well, as of today we now have construction on five sides of the apartment. Five. That’s five of six surfaces now.” She explained: “They have to tear out the water main in the courtyard and install a new pipe—anyway, I think that’s what the guy said. It should take two months.” She paused. “I almost threw a can of soup through the window today.”
When Josette arrived in a thick winter coat, we were halfway done with the champagne, cursing our landlord. Luckily, Josette had brought more champagne, plus a plant.
Josette spoke perfect English from living in Los Angeles for two years. Over dinner, Rachel quizzed her about the men in the office—who was hot, who was charming, who interested Josette?
“How about that guy you work with, what’s his name, Bruno?” Rachel said.
“Oh, Bruno did chat me up once,” Josette said, “for a pull.”
“Get out,” I said.
“Sorry?” she said.
“It’s an expression. I mean, when?”
“Oh, during a fête,” Josette said. “We were having a dance, and Bruno asked if I wanted to go off with him. He said there were lots of empty rooms. I mean, he was rather direct. He was pissed, too—drunk, I mean,” she said, laughing.
Like a lot of Parisians, Josette learned her initial English from a British instructor, so she was always going on about getting pissed and feeling knackered afterward.
“And did you?” Rachel said.
“Well, no. For a second, part of me thought, Why not? He’s attractive, you know. But the rest of me thought, Hey, look, I’m not just some tart who has sex on the copy machine.”
Josette went on to say that Parisian women, by and large, were unfortunately tempted by their Frenchness to be weak. To give in. To let men do whatever they wanted. Herself included, Josette said. At the office one coworker frequently grabbed a breast when he gave her her morning bises, but she didn’t complain; she probably never would. What Parisian men ultimately wanted, Josette explained, was the coquette, the brainless cutie who plays at being a little girl until gradually she yields to his wolfishness, then bears him sons. Joset
te named several women in the office who fit this archetype. Ah, I said.
Rachel asked, “So what do Parisian women want?”
“Oh, romance, of course,” Josette said. “Power, charm. And force, it’s true.” She continued that Parisian women rarely desired a visitor or expat. Definitely no visitors who didn’t have their own apartments—too unstable. Parisian women were like Parisian men; they wanted the big love, and for the right guy they’d do anything. But unlike male Parisians, Josette said, the girls didn’t spread it around. We wouldn’t find many prudes among Parisian girls, nor many sluts.
“And please,” Josette added, “don’t give me your artists in love with Paris. These are the worst, the guys who go all franco-français. You keep your poets,” she said, laughing. “I hate the poets. Put him in a leather jacket. Give me a rough chap. You know, French women love a criminal.”
After midnight, when we were past drunk and I was making coffee, Josette said sadly, “You know, French men can be difficult to bear. If you’re the one breaking up with them? It’s impossible. God, they’re emotional.” She was playing with the foil wrapper on the plant she’d brought. “They’re womanish, you know? French women, I don’t think we fall in love so easily as the men. Not just like that.”
The next day, at work, Scottish Keith confirmed Josette’s findings.
“I tell friends coming over, do not attempt to date proper Parisian girls,” Keith said. “Big mistake. First, there’s no sex in it, am I right?”
Tomaso nodded that Keith was right.
“Second, Parisian girls want to see a lease on the first date,” Keith said. “You don’t stand a chance if you’re not French. Being rich helps, if you have a banana-colored Ferrari or what the fuck.”
“Or if you are a sexy motherfucker,” Tomaso added.
“Or that,” Keith said.
* * *
The newspapers showed President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni sightseeing during a trip to Egypt. The president wore jeans and a black turtleneck, and stood hunched against the wind. Bruni was beside him in jeans and a purple top, with a sweater around her shoulders. Two pyramids for background symbolized their pasts; perhaps they contained the mummies of previous lovers. Anyway, no matter that France knew its president to be several inches shorter than his girlfriend, in the Egypt pictures he appeared her equal. And the two of them looked happy. They were in love.
Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down Page 13
