“No,” Rachel said, “not now.”
“Hmm, maybe bad,” he said.
The doctor did some more tests, then filled out Rachel’s dossier while she sat up on the table and tried to regain her balance. “All right, come down from there,” the doctor chided after a minute.
Really he was probably six-four, but he looked even bigger. He wore a sport coat with shoulder pads that protruded like epaulettes.
The doctor rubbed his hair and sat down at his desk. He said he wasn’t sure what type of vertigo Rachel had, but she had it, and she’d feel better soon if she adopted a daily routine of balance exercises. He passed me a sheet of drawings: stick figures engaged in tumbling.
“So that is all,” the doctor said abruptly, and stood up. He extended a long arm to shake hands. “But do not be afraid. This is not,” he said, “you know, a thing forever.”
* * *
One Sunday, under ivy on Rue de Beauce, in the Marais, Rachel and I discovered an art gallery specializing in novelists. Each painting in the window was of an American writer popular in France. Rachel waited while I gawked at a hangdog Paul Auster; a gouty Jim Harrison; a famished Joyce Carol Oates; T. C. Boyle and his emergency pull-cord lock of hair.
Inside me was a volcano, and on top of it, six thousand trivial feelings.
I’d begun writing my novel again, starting over from page one, but I wasn’t hopeful about it.
Work at the agency, however, was going much more smoothly. Me speaking French sufficiently, me brainstorming, me presenting in my French-English hash. And no longer was I writing about how to care for your baby; now I wrote scripts for little movies that were purportedly advertising, yet in which neither brand nor product was mentioned. Was it so bad? Wasn’t it actually rather fun?
But was my dream now to rise in French advertising?
I didn’t know how long it would last. I didn’t know how long I wanted it to.
Every day was an improvisation.
I was so tired.
A few days later, I saw a gastroenterologist for a stomach bug. His office was around the corner from the agency, high above the eighth arrondissement, on a tony street. The rooms were white, accented in camel, furnished with black modern chairs. Very luxe, but expensively grungy. The doctor himself wore Joey Ramone hair to the collar of a black leather jacket. He was half gnome, half roadie; he was probably Johnny Hallyday’s personal physician. The doctor smirked to begin our appointment, expecting it to disappoint him. I told him about my stomach bug. Hearing my accent, the doctor asked where I was from. He sat up when I said New York City. He said, You moved from New York to Paris? Isn’t it better to go the other way around? I said, Yes, I’ve heard that opinion. For ten minutes he made himself plain: Paris was done; oh, how he hated it. He wanted to know, didn’t I find Parisians to be so conservative and snobby? He had a doctor friend, he said, with a practice in Miami, who was constantly bragging about his great American life. Did I know the East Village? For example, what a loft cost there nowadays?
The gastroenterologist asked what I did. I said I was a writer. He asked if I’d published a book he could read. I sighed and explained that I worked in advertising. Ah, but this is not writing, the doctor said, swishing his finger. Then he also sighed. He leaned back, his chair creaking, and asked me if I knew the work of William Styron.
26
Long ago I joined Morrissey’s fan club to be alerted whenever Morrissey modified his touring schedule. It wasn’t for me; I didn’t hear my first Smiths song until 1999. During Rachel’s and my courting period, when we told everything on ourselves, Rachel had said she needed to see Morrissey before she died. She was a fan. A big one. She’d already seen Al Green in concert, her other musical obsession, and he’d thrown her a rose. Now what remained was to see Morrissey onstage.
About a week later I’d joined his e-mail list.
Morrissey, the e-mail said, would play the Olympia theater in Paris very soon.
When tickets went on sale, I set the alarm for 4:25 a.m.
The night of the concert, we paused outside. “I don’t want to rush this,” Rachel said. I took her picture under the marquee. The Olympia was a famous Paris theater where Édith Piaf had performed. Rachel bought a T-shirt at the concession stand before going inside. During the show, everyone sang along. Rachel was relaxed. She was happy. Just like her, people around us knew the words to every song. Afterward, I offered to splurge on a cab, but Rachel said we’d spent enough money that evening; the T-shirt had cost more than I spent on lunch for a week.
On the Métro home, Rachel said, “That was probably one of the best nights in my life. Not just Morrissey, but the whole thing. Doing it here.”
Paris, too, loved Morrissey. The initial applause, when he’d appeared onstage, was a wild, long-lasting roar. Morrissey addressed the crowd in French. He’d always loved France, loved Paris; then again, who didn’t? Ecstatic applause from all of us who agreed. Then Morrissey announced a new song, one he’d never performed before, the lead single off his new album—he hoped we’d like it.
It was called, “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris.”
Sometimes, some blips in time, the world seems extremely synchronized.
* * *
Days of winter were short. Thankfully, they were nearly done. Many people, including me, still wore scarves around the office. Cold in Paris was both a physical and a mental state. It explained why Parisians wore scarves in June, because winter haunted them. Still, sometimes women’s legs would flash bare on the crosswalks. And a few flowers burst early in sidewalk planters.
A friend who was an editor at The New York Times, Sam, flew into town for Fashion Week. Sam was very tall, Ivy League, handsome in the bones, with a long face and wide shoulders. He invited us to a party thrown by the Times’s style magazine at a building adjoining the Grand Palais. When we arrived, Sam looked wrung out. He said he’d drunk too much wine the night before with some girls from Elle or some other magazine, girls in their twenties who were bunking at the Ritz, partying between shows—and could they drink, Sam said, wobbling his head.
We went into the party, following Jarvis Cocker from Pulp through coat check. Inside, we stood in an enormous, crowded ballroom with a soaring ceiling; above our heads was air and smoke for thirty feet. The scene was wild and homogeneous. Loud music, and many recognizable faces—a hundred takes on the same beautiful. People wafted into embraces, smoking cigarettes despite the recent ban.
So many uneasy women, I thought, for so much champagne.
We stood near Suzy Menkes, fashion critic at the Herald Tribune, who was talking to Karl Lagerfeld, boss of Chanel, for about five minutes. They occupied the room’s only pool of empty space, which their assistants had carved out for them by ringing them like guards.
I shouted over the noise, “Is it me, or does Suzy Menkes look a little like Charlie Chan?”
“Shhh, she’s very powerful,” Rachel said darkly.
The room was crammed with fashionable Paris society: editors, models, designers, and their help. It was very noisy. Rachel and Sam talked about life in Paris; meanwhile, I couldn’t take my eyes off Karl Lagerfeld. He resembled a short, dead Iggy Pop.
“Karl Lagerfeld looks like Beethoven,” I shouted.
Rachel said, “Who’s that kid from Peanuts with the statue on his piano?”
Sam snapped, “The fuck you guys talking about?”
“Exactly, a bust,” I yelled, “Karl Lagerfeld is a bust.”
A few minutes later, we were sitting on low leather cubes, which put us at supermodel knee level. Girls wandered by in colored tights, their legs the hues of different ice creams.
Rachel whispered, gazing, “This could only happen in Paris.”
Sam asked me about my job. I explained how between my novel, my job, and my work editing the Web magazine, I was busy from about five in the morning until ten p.m., at which point we had dinner, something Rachel had cooked or takeout sushi. I told Sam how, at our nearb
y sushi restaurant, I’d become friends with the manager, a Moroccan guy my age who now gave me free beer when I ordered.
Aside from weekends, I said, I might as well have been living in Minneapolis.
Sam laughed. “But you’re kidding. You do hear yourself, right? Wait—you’re not joking? Dude,” he said.
Sam folded up his legs so a supermodel could walk by. She had on purple tights and a doll-size leather jacket. We knew her face from magazines; in real life she looked just as haunted. Did the fashion industry get them prestarved from orphanages?
Then again, who’d ever let Karl Lagerfeld near children?
“Listen to me: what the fucking ever,” Sam said. He was watching the supermodel diminish. “You’re in Paris,” he shouted, standing up; “life is wonderful. Quit being a bitch and let me know when I can have your job, okay?”
We watched Sam set out to go hunting. First he had to stop and kiss hello to some girls just arriving, whom he knew from the previous night—none older than twenty-two, each wearing a skirt and stilettos, and all seeming at home, each girl inclined to her BlackBerry or iPhone, her face illuminated by a message.
* * *
Of course, Sam was right. No one heard you when you said you were sick of Paris. “Sick of Paris” meant your mind was rotten. You were a bitch. To paraphrase the Simpsons episode when a “Yahoo Serious Festival” came to town, “sick,” “of,” and “Paris” were three words that made sense alone, but not in sequence.
Besides, what did I have against champagne for sale in gas stations? Or chocolates from Patrick Roger? What about Parisian construction workers’ way with sandbags? What about the solace of Place de l’Estrapade? What about the Arts et Métiers Métro station, and André’s Lacoste rotation, and how excitable Parisians became about charcuterie?
Tecktonik kids, I couldn’t forgive myself to ignore Tecktonik kids.
The weekend following the Times party, we walked by some teenagers standing outside a post office in the Marais, brooding in T-shirts, sweatshirts, and tight black jeans. All of them were busy texting until one boy put his phone down on top of a mailbox. He pressed some buttons and the phone bleated out a song. Suddenly, all of them were dancing, twirling their arms like West Side Story re-created—the toughs revealing their Martha Graham training—only here it was set in Paris, with android moves.
During winter, I learned that exiting a Métro station in the morning sounded different when there weren’t tourists around. At the staircase at Rennes, or Rue du Bac, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, the person in front would hold open the door for you to exit, bracing it against the wind from the street. You thanked them, Merci, Madame, merci. Next, you held it open for the person behind you, who’d rush forward to grab it, Merci, Monsieur, merci, and so on, so that each morning during winter, for maybe an hour before nine a.m., there was a continuous murmur of people giving thanks.
27
We received telemarketing calls at all hours from snappy Frenchwomen, whom I held in high regard. I named them Marianne. All the ones I spoke to sounded very French, and I made a rule to engage them.
For example, Marianne might call at breakfast. “Hello, this is Orange, your cellular communications company—”
“Yes, hello,” I’d say brightly.
Marianne wasn’t surprised to be interrupted. “Good morning, sir. This is Orange—”
“Please,” I said, “for one moment, slowly?”
“Hello?”
Sometimes Marianne was patient with me, sometimes she was confused.
“Yes, hello,” I said.
“Okay,” said Marianne.
I said, “My French is not very good.”
“Oh no,” Marianne said, “it’s quite good.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“I can speak slowly,” she said.
“That would be super,” I said.
“So,” she said, “today I am calling with an exercise of marketing.”
“Can you repeat that, please?”
“An exercise of marketing?” Marianne said.
“Thank you.”
“No, it’s all right,” she said, laughing, “thank you.”
Sometimes, though, Marianne called when it was inconvenient. During dinner or when I was in a rush to leave the house. Then I’d say something confrontational, like “Where are you calling from?”
“Excuse me? Sir, that is privileged information.”
“But I live in Paris, and you know this,” I said. “Is my information not privileged?”
“Excuse me?”
“It is,” I explained, “the same concept.”
“Sir,” she said, “I will arrange for someone to call you back.”
“Will it be you?” I said.
“Sir, Orange will solicit your participation when a time is more convenient.”
Marianne was always pawning me off.
* * *
As March became visible, I’d stretch my hour at lunch to ninety minutes, occasionally two hours, and work on my book. I also started devising an advertising campaign in case Paris slipped in global popularity and the Hôtel de Ville needed slogans.
Paris—Sex without the messy stuff.
Paris—Where refinement meets retirement.
Paris—Society’s life raft has room for YOU.
At work, the task of advertising was to make new the mundane. To find the perfect metaphor. Each week, in addition to my scripts, there’d be half a dozen small Louis Vuitton projects to complete, for which Pierre would hand me a brief, I’d go to a conference room, and an account manager would say, “We’ve got a purse to advertise. Here’s what’s new about it. Can you have a slogan done by tonight, tomorrow lunch at the latest?”
Most of the time a purse was just a purse. But the challenge was not unenjoyable.
Paris—End zone of Western civilization.
Other days, when no one was looking, I’d open the file for my novel on my computer and work on it furtively, pretending it was a client’s copy deck. Since February, I’d been doing it more and more. I was back at my first job, age twenty-two, hiding my writing behind a Netscape window when a boss came nearby. As though I were committing a crime, getting high on my own supply.
* * *
Lindsay and her new boyfriend, Christian, the guy with eating issues, finally visited. Christian was a men’s fashion designer who’d learned English in Cape Town and spoke with a South African accent. He arrived smoking—Lindsay had told us he smoked four packs a day. Didn’t drink alcohol, didn’t eat food, didn’t bathe either, though he didn’t look worse for it. Christian had a pudgy, friendly face and wore a green military jacket over a blue collared shirt, plus jeans and boots, with sticky hair. He could have been a Spanish poet, I thought.
Christian and I talked about bunkers. He was interested in them, he said, as suitable second homes. They spoke to him romantically; he said he was all for barricading oneself in. Christian explained that he often went on scouting trips looking for a bunker he could fix up for a summer home, even swap it for his big apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
“It could be gorgeous,” he said. “You put in, how do you say, aprons?”
“Curtains,” Lindsay said. “But please, Christian, your apartment here is amazing, you could not give it up.”
“Maybe I prefer a bunker,” Christian said, and laughed, hugging Lindsay while he chewed on her neck.
“Well, count me out,” Lindsay said, pushing him away. “Oh yeah, a couple of concrete walls, slits for windows, what could be more romantic?”
According to Lindsay, Christian was from a Bordeaux wine family ancienne—he wasn’t in line to the British throne, but he was suitably impoverished. At twenty, Christian had been wealthy from an inheritance, but he’d burned through all his money during the nineties, and now he had zip. He subsisted on an allowance from his grandmother while he tried to sell French workmen’s jackets reconstructed as blue blazers.
We talked about Paris, havin
g that in common.
“You know, Paris is tough,” Christian said in English. “I would not want to live here if I could choose a different history.”
He said Paris was probably the worst European city after London. “London is the worst. Weather is shitty. You cannot walk around. People are closed off, and they hate Jews. None of this will change.” But Paris was too expensive, he said, too conservative, too self-protective. “Paris had, like, the nineteenth century. But look, we are all very lucky at this table—we’re white, you see? Paris is the most hard on immigrants. And immigrants are really important, I think, to the life of a city.”
The sunset put a purple glow into the courtyard. Rachel asked Christian where he would prefer to live. He said Berlin, for the art and music, or back in Cape Town.
I said, “Why not New York?”
“Same people who live in Paris live in New York,” Christian said dismissively. “Manhattan is for shopping now, same as here.”
“But you can still love it,” Lindsay said. “I happen to love Paris.”
“Yeah, of course, baby, it depends,” Christian said. “You can be happy in Paris. And me, I’m happy that you’re in Paris. And sometimes I am happy when I think about Paris.” He thought about that for a moment. “Now see,” Christian said, “if you’re connected to reality, then no. But some people are not. I know a guy, he lives here eight years. Australian guy, absolutely mad about Paris. Barely speaks French, but he’s completely in love. C’est normal. He’s happy. You can do that if you’re disconnected, walking around all day, staring at buildings, living in the fantasy. But reality is, it’s a tough city to live in. For people who actually live and don’t have money. It’s not like the movies.”
After midnight, Rachel and Lindsay watched dance videos on YouTube, and Christian and I talked more about bunkers while he smoked out the window. The sky was black and pearly—a bowl set to dry upside down. I told Christian I’d received a good book in the mail about bunkers, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology. I’d lend him my copy.
“You know,” Christian said, “what people do not realize, you can find really good real estate near nuclear facilities. Big discounts, like les soldes, all year. No one realizes this. We should go together sometime, we can go for a drive.”
Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down Page 15
