That night, Rachel and I agreed in bed that it had been a successful dinner party, even if one guest (Christian) hadn’t eaten dinner. But there was news on that front: Lindsay had informed Rachel that Christian did eat, except he ate only chocolate, and ate it only in bed, alone. However, he’d recently taken his first bite of chocolate in front of her, and Lindsay thought it was a good sign for their relationship.
* * *
The next morning, I was taking out the garbage when Asif pulled me into his kitchen. His ten-year-old daughter was doing homework at a folding table next to the stove.
“Nadira,” Asif said, “please say hello.”
Nadira kissed me on both cheeks. Then she frowned while her father explained that I was from New York City. She said she thought New York was very beautiful from some pictures she’d seen.
I said, “Is it more beautiful than Paris?”
“Je crois—” she started, but Asif told her to speak English. Nadira coughed and covered her mouth. She said in English through her fingers, “I think New York is more big than Paris? And more dirty. But I think I like that.”
Asif asked Nadira what she’d said, and she translated it into French while turning in a circle. “You see how smart she is?” Asif said to me. “She is learning English and German in school. They’re good, Paris schools, really good. She will be a doctor someday.”
His comment upset Nadira. She yanked on her father’s arm and bugged her eyes, reprimanding him in French faster than I could understand. Asif laughed. “She says she does not want to be a doctor. I said, what is wrong with being a doctor?”
“What do you want to be?” I asked Nadira.
“I want … to fly a plane!” Then her dress irritated her because it was too stiff to swing properly, and she tore at it. “Or maybe a doctor,” Nadira said. She shouted with exasperation, “I am too young right now!”
We went outside. In the courtyard, the walls were warm. Spring was coming. Around Asif’s door was a sector of plants. Asif pulled cigarettes from his pocket. I could see that someone had carefully ironed his shirt. Nadira kicked a soccer ball, using garbage cans for goalposts.
“She lives with her mother,” Asif said. “Not close by.”
He watched his daughter pensively. He made a play for the soccer ball, but Nadira slipped around him. Asif came back to me and smoked, standing with one of his legs thrust forward, heel quarter-turned like a fashion model in pose.
“She is my treasure,” Asif said. “She’s all I have on this earth.”
Asif stared hard at me. Tears sprang up in his eyes.
“You don’t have children, you don’t know,” he stated. He took my hand a moment later, as if we were going for a walk, and clenched it. He accused me, “But don’t you see?”
* * *
When it was sixty degrees in March, I sent e-mails to friends in Chicago, “Hot and sunny here in Paris, how are you?”
One morning, it was at least fifty degrees at breakfast. But then the temperature dove. The air hardened, and people chipped their steps. Clouds filled the sky like they were blown in from a horn. By the time I was halfway finished with my lunch at the park, I looked up and saw that it was snowing, huge flakes falling on my nose, whitening the benches.
I glanced at Stephen King, but he didn’t notice anything. He had his headphones on, and I noticed he’d outgrown my moniker: now he was reading Stieg Larsson, like everybody else. Five minutes later, gone were clouds, gone was snow. Back to a blue-gray Paris sky and warm breezes. At the office, people didn’t believe my story. None of them had seen the snow. Only Tomaso believed me, though he said I was très mignon (very cute), “toi et tes rêves de neige.”
Olivier scoffed: “This is only in the movies.”
I’d heard Parisians say it never snowed in Paris. But they were wrong, and Olivier was wrong, and now I could prove it. It just snowed very quickly, and a person needed to pay attention.
28
Man, I was dying for a prostitute. Just one would do it. One prostitute who wasn’t fourteen or a sex slave. We could shoot her, then go back to the hotel and get some sleep, and that would be grand.
Keef had said that back in the day, when the Rolling Stones rented a studio in Soho, he’d chat up girls who were listening through the window. Working girls, you understand. Vincent, the film director Pierre had hired for Louis Vuitton, and his collaborator, Lucas, a composer and sound engineer, both thought it was important that we capture London’s contemporary prostitutes, in Keef’s honor. But it seemed Soho had only young prostitutes, miserable girls selling their flesh from doorways, and it was depressing in fifty ways, never mind unsuitable for a global luxury brand’s ad campaign.
To reach that evening, Vincent and I had come over to London a few days earlier on an early morning train, talking the whole way about Barack Obama, whom Vincent, like many Parisians, found magical. He was interested in America, Vincent said, for its lack of self-awareness, in contrast with France’s narcissism—Parisians loved a show, and America was persistently entertaining. Probably the United States was too racist to elect Obama, Victor said, but if not, what a gesture, to elect a black! This would never happen in France, he said.
The day we arrived, we met up with Lucas at St. Pancras Station. Our location scout and driver picked us up, then we set off to film. Time gradually slowed for several days. It dragged and slurped and stopped. That’s how filming worked, Vincent said. “You wait, you wait, and you wait. You eat badly. You wait more. Then maybe you get one minute of film, if the light is good.”
Lucas said in English, “It is always catastrophe.”
Our project was to capture London in seven short films, interpreting the memories of Keith Richards. We’d already interviewed Keef, and back in Paris I’d turned the interview into a script. By the time we were searching for prostitutes, we’d been crisscrossing London for days, from Hampstead to Battersea. Mostly we sat in traffic. Winds and rain battered the car. At one point, we had a long conversation about whether London or Paris was the greater sushi restaurant, given the amount of ambient techno music piped into public spaces. London won. After that, the location scout and I played a game of battling.
“Who’d win in a fight,” he asked me, “New York or Los Angeles?”
“Los Angeles,” I said. “New Yorkers don’t have time to fight.”
Our scout was a young Welshman who’d recently graduated from film school. To meet ends, he trawled London for advertising companies in need of British settings and chauffeured their teams around town. He also worked, he said, as a concierge for an elite credit card program—meaning he fielded calls from traveling Arabs and Russians looking for prostitutes.
In America, I said, we called that luxury humor.
The Welshman was also an antiroyalist. I told him about the French guy I knew who aspired to be the burger king of Paris, since he was unlikely to assume the British throne. The scout said, “Oh yeah, there’s loads of them. They know exactly how many people have to die before they’re in court. We’ve got a bit of history with France, intermingling.”
I proposed a quiz to the Welshman: “Imagine it’s you and one hundred five-year-olds. You’re locked in a gymnasium. The children are overcome with a desire to kill you. How many could you put down?”
“Can I use one of them,” he said, “as a weapon against the others?”
“Sure,” I said. “But remember they’re a mob.”
“Right. I can’t let them get me on the ground.”
A minute later we gave the game over to the Frenchmen in the backseat.
“Who wins,” I said, “Coca-Cola or Uma Thurman?”
They were staring out the windows. Vincent, the director, said in English, “That is not a game.” He started coughing. “Okay, come on,” he said a moment later, “it is so Anglo this game. It is not a game. How do you judge this? It is a soda and a woman. How do you decide?”
“It’s simple,” I said. “One wins, one loses. Just pic
k.”
Vincent refused. He sighed. “It is nothing a French person would think is a game. It is so stupid.”
I asked him to suggest a French game that we could play instead.
“Okay, okay, here is a French game,” Vincent said. “We will talk about something for a little while. It will be about nothing. We will talk and talk and talk about it. Sometimes I will make the other side of the conversation, just to say you are wrong. And then we will stop.”
Lucas agreed, this was a classic French game.
Vincent and Lucas were business partners as well as friends. Vincent directed artsy films—I’d seen one and liked it quite a bit, about a lonely man who wandered through a forest listening to the sounds of branches snapping—but his films didn’t make much money, and to feed his family he directed commercials for fashion companies.
For his part, Lucas composed lovely ambient music—film scores for films not yet dreamed. But he didn’t make much money doing that, either, so Lucas did all the sound engineering and scoring for Vincent’s commercial work.
Both Vincent and Lucas were in their early forties. Both handsome, short-haired, and temper-driven. Vincent tended to brood, mostly on the future. He had squashed ears from playing too much rugby. He was an intellectual bruiser, a seeker, not someone who overremembered. When Vincent spoke, he barked, and when he laughed, he scrunched up his nose and raised his eyelids in gleeful surprise. His wife, a beautiful Dutch fashion designer, was the spitting image of Jean Seberg.
Lucas was the more inscrutable, mysterious—more outgoing while also holding back. He had reddish blond hair, small eyes, and a long ridgeline of a nose that drew from a prominent brow. He was constantly smoking, laughing, parrying with Vincent. But above all he seemed despondent. Prior to composing, Lucas had been a comedian.
It was around ten p.m. on our third evening, after our location scout had gone to bed, that we were searching Soho for a luxury-appropriate prostitute. Just one.
As we walked, Vincent brought up our conversation from the car.
“See, this is a thing I hate about the French,” he said in English. Both Vincent and Lucas preferred to speak English with me so they could practice. Lucas also said he found my French accent indecipherable. “The French,” Vincent said, “they are too—comment tu dis—too ‘proud.’”
At that moment, a bouncer/pimp started giving us the eye. We walked faster to mask our intentions, not that it did much good. Lucas was trailing behind us, carrying a fuzzy microphone on a pole, shouting out to Vincent whenever he found something interesting.
Vincent said, “French people have a problem being proud. If we are in public? We don’t say we like anything. We are not assholes—we are, you say, defensive. Oh, hey, look,” Vincent barked, nodding ahead. After the next intersection were some doorways we hadn’t seen yet, a few of them with women in lingerie who looked well past sixteen.
Vincent put his camera at waist level, covered by his shoulder bag, to shoot out the side. My job was to play the john. “You go before me,” Vincent said. “Not speed, be normal.”
We did three passes, me inspecting girls and Vincent filming them from the neck down. Each building had blinking neon for eyebrows. Entrances where there weren’t girls had little handwritten signs taped up inside, “Busty” or “Gorgeous BRUNETTE” or simply “Upstairs.”
Then we noticed another bouncer getting off his stool, coming toward us. Did I look too indecisive? Vincent and I sprinted down an alley. We heard Lucas clanging behind us, his equipment bag slapping his hip.
Once we’d stopped, Vincent said to me, “Donc, Parisians? When they love something, you know, interne? Most they will say is, ‘Enh, pas mal…’ Also, okay, this is what I wanted to say—” Vincent leaned against a wall fluttering with flyers. “French people? Don’t like to admit when they are wrong.”
I told him I was impressed we were still having this conversation. Lucas came running around the corner—what was the danger? Then Vincent darted away, to go film a stag party stumbling out of a club.
Lucas turned and said, “Wassup?”
“Vincent wanted to talk about Parisians,” I said.
“I understand,” Lucas said in English. “Hello.”
Lucas’s English had maybe two dozen words, culled from movies. He packed up his microphone while saying, “You two guys … are a mysterious ensemble.”
I asked him what he meant. Lucas stared at me. He said, “I do not like you.”
Yes, you do, I said.
“No,” Lucas said. “You make games of me. I will keep an eye on you.”
“Lucas, I do not—”
“Hey, guy!” Lucas shouted, backing away. “Don’t come at me. I will fuck you!”
Then Lucas ran forward to slap me a high five. At the last second, he yanked his hand back, laughing, and went off to go find Vincent.
* * *
A newspaper slipped under my door the next morning said Eliot Spitzer had been arrested for soliciting prostitution.
Been there, I thought, done that.
We were awake at five a.m. on our last day in London because Vincent wanted to re-create one of Keef’s stories, about him walking home one morning in the sixties through Hampstead Heath. Keef had said it was the most beautiful he ever saw London. A summer dawn, mist rising from the green, with Keef and the other wimpled addicts stumbling home through the Big Smoke.
We filmed on the heath, freezing in the dark. Vincent instructed me to act like Keef—stumbling—and I didn’t need to pretend. Afterward, we filmed from a boat on the Thames, to grab some final establishing images from the shot list. Then our driver took us to St. Pancras and we said goodbye while the sky blackened over with rain clouds.
Inside the train station, we sat on our bags. Suddenly Vincent flipped out. He shouted at Lucas, “We’re late! We must run if we want to make the train!”
Lucas took off sprinting. Vincent buckled over laughing. We weren’t late, of course; we still had two hours to kill. But Lucas hated traveling, and Vincent liked to play practical jokes. I didn’t think it was funny, so I ran after Lucas and told him it had been a joke, everything was fine. Lucas was furious. When he finally spoke, he said in English, “So you guys are an ensemble against me?”
“No, it was Vincent’s idea. He’s sorry,” I said.
Lucas either didn’t hear or didn’t understand me. He was enraged: “Guy, you fuck with me? You fuck with me?!”
Several people turned, including security guards. One guard came our way, hand to holster. Lucas beamed at him and clapped his hands, bowing to the guard, and held up one finger.
“Hello, mister, it’s okay!” Lucas said. “We have no problems. We are very gentle!”
The guard turned away, and Lucas wandered off to buy a snack.
On the train back to Paris, Vincent and Lucas discussed what they’d eat for dinner. A nice steak, definitely some good vegetables. In London, we’d mostly eaten pub food. Lucas said he believed he’d gained five kilos from too much shepherd’s pie.
Lucas said, pointing at me, “You look fat.” Lucas noted that the prostitutes in Soho hadn’t been fat at all, to his surprise. If anything, Soho had been a défilé.
I asked Vincent to translate.
“A fashion show,” Vincent said. “Where the girls promenade, how do you call it?”
“The catwalk?”
“You have this?” Lucas said. “A cat who walks?”
“This is not translated,” Vincent told me, then he closed his eyes and went to sleep. Lucas followed suit. The high-speed train hurtled toward Paris, toward the light. In London, the vibe had been an awareness of one’s place. In Paris, though, the feeling was exhibition, of what you had to offer.
THE REALEST
SPRING
—Moroccan muezzins call to me in a way the Eiffel Tower does not—Behaving badly can be appropriate in a Parisian office—American cotton is all the rage—African Americans interpret brandy like Chinese businessmen—Mariann
e’s inquiries—I learn to dip my morning bread—Paris loves George Clooney the best—Officially, I’m French—
29
If you wanted a nice weekend holiday, try Morocco, coworkers said. But not Casablanca. Scottish Keith cautioned, “It’s a massive business dump.” Like many, Bruno pushed for Marrakech. He told me he enjoyed going there for les tagines, but also the women. At this, three guys giggled, turning in their seats. They were Bruno’s lackeys, in Bruno’s new office. He’d recently been assigned new accounts in addition to infant nutrition and transferred across the street to the agency’s other building.
Bruno frowned when I didn’t grasp his Moroccan orgy scenario, and went back to pouting and clicking his mouse. All week he’d been acting like a lord banned from court. Of course, he had been cast out, far away from André and Pierre. Boards were stacked behind him from a new job that Bruno hated: a campaign for a machine that puréed fruits and vegetables into baby food.
“You’re really becoming a baby expert,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Bruno said. “So I hear you went to London.”
“For a few days.”
“It must be good to be Pierre’s boy,” Bruno said, and snorted.
Lots of coworkers had recommendations on where to go in Marrakech. They’d all been there before. Marrakech for Parisians was like San Juan for New Yorkers, Los Cabos for the Los Angeleno: a hop by plane to sunny digs—a former colony of sorts—that many neighbors called home, where everyone spoke your language. So why not. My birthday was coming up, and Rachel found extremely cheap round-trip tickets, plus a rooftop bedroom in a riad, in Marrakech’s old city, for next to nothing.
At the Marrakech airport, our driver, a tall guy in tight jeans with a blue Toyota van, said he had friends and family working in Paris. He dreamed about visiting them. Paris was “the most beautiful city in the world.” From the backseat, I daydreamed. The windows were full of palm trees, sand, and far-off mountains. The streets were choked with dust. We passed donkey carts and mopeds, and many people wearing blinking Bluetooth earpieces. The driver and Bruno wore the same Pumas, I noticed.
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