The husband, a Brit, with a blue apron around his neck, was carving salmon into thin slabs, like bars of pink soap. His Parisian wife, Claudine, hovered at his neck. She told him she would probably do it thinner.
“Would you like to do it yourself?” he said. Gradually Claudine allowed herself, against her own protests, to be convinced to take over.
Claudine was fun and argumentative. She wore a low-scooped dress and white espadrilles. During the meal, she roused her guests with provocations, then retreated into disagreement. By the couscous, she was drunk. By the cheese, she’d retired.
Which was unfortunate. Rachel and I liked Claudine and her husband, but their friends were snippy expats originally from London. They had in common a feeling of blah toward Paris. They found it lacking—it wasn’t New York or Rome—and they said they were always on the verge of going home.
“You’ve only been here a year, well, you wouldn’t know,” one woman said to Rachel. She spiked a knob of couscous on her fork. “It’s sad, of course. But Paris wears off. And it’s frightfully hard to make friends. Never mind the culture differences.”
“Love Paris, can’t stand Parisians. God, they’re combustible,” another woman said.
“Parisians just won’t let you in,” the first woman’s husband said.
The first woman agreed, nodding: “People say Parisians are rude by default, and to be fair they aren’t—but they are. It’s their world, we just live here. Personally, we’ve been thinking about going home for ages, haven’t we?”
Her husband asked me in a confiding whisper: “Hey, have you discovered Picard?”
The hostess, Claudine, turned up again around midnight. By that point, half the guests had gone home; the rest were leaving. Claudine was mildly offended and said she needed cigarettes. She vaulted herself into high heels. Rachel was chatting with Claudine’s husband, the host, so I volunteered to carry Claudine’s umbrella, and we set out on Montorgueil. Cafés were full. Water trickled down the street. Rain came down lightly while Claudine told me about her mother; she wept over some argument they’d had recently. Then she said in English, “Stop.” She smelled something wonderful. She couldn’t quite place it. We started walking again. “My poor shoes,” she said—they were soaked. Five minutes later, the rain was done, the night was hot and muggy, the lamplight was full of steam. Claudine quit crying to turn philosophical, eager to discuss French culture versus American culture, Paris versus Anywhere Else, and the tragedy that was Amy Winehouse. We bought cigarettes and did a second lap. We were thirty feet from the courtyard when it smelled again of something great. This time we nailed it: seafood cooked in wine.
Claudine said, “Oh, I love Paris, don’t you?” She added, “The beauty of Paris is very forceful, I’ve always thought so. You know,” she said, as if this was all part of the same idea, “I think your wife’s shoes are incredible.”
An hour later, Rachel and I went home on the Métro. The train was prompt, clean, and quiet. It rounded corners with great whooshing sucks. At our station, we came up between Art Déco lampposts, into a city silent except for cars hissing through puddles. The statue of Marianne stood ahead of us, a glimmering guide.
* * *
Most of the top American TV shows were known to my colleagues. That summer, The Wire was a regular topic of discussion. Something this good, people said, could not be made in France. Its dramatic scope was too broad, there were too many different races and levels of society, and how surprisingly subtle it was for an American drama!
When The Wire box-set turned up at FNAC for the first time with French subtitles, coworkers rushed out to purchase it. Until then, the show’s Baltimore accents had been incomprehensible for most.
“Worse than The Sopranos,” Pierre said, “which was tough for us at first.”
“Oh, I couldn’t watch this,” Chloe said. “It gave me headaches. So what is Wire—about technology?”
“No,” Pierre said. “That show in Baltimore. We watched it last night. You went to sleep.”
“Oh, yeah, this is terrible,” Chloe said, laughing. “I am certain the show is good, but come on, these people are not speaking English.”
“It’s a unique accent,” I said.
Rachel said, “It’s like Québecois.”
Chloe said, “You know, for me, I really love Grey’s Anatomy. How do you call it: a guilty pleasure.”
“Like pornography,” Pierre said, laughing.
“Yes,” Chloe said, “but for girls.”
That same week, I gave Pierre my notice. André was out that day; it was just the two of us in their office. Pierre was shocked and hurt. He’d seen it coming, he said, but still …
Pierre said, “I understand. You’re working too much. Rachel’s under construction—I mean, she’s working at home, there’s construction all around. How long will you give me?”
I said, “I was thinking three months.”
“Okay, so through October,” Pierre said.
The next morning, Louise the art director and I visited brandy headquarters for a new product launch. Something about a flask. The brandy boss met us in a conference room, with several of his coworkers. He was happy to see us, he said; his bosses, particularly those in China, were pleased with how our global campaign had turned out.
“Now, I think you’ll like this,” he said to me. “It’s for the States. Very sexy.”
“It’s a sleeve!” a woman announced suddenly, like it was my birthday. “A sleeve for your brandy!”
“It’s so cool,” another woman said, from the end of the table.
Louise and I were each handed a bulky wedge of plastic molded like a flask of liquor. Then one of the women walked us through a PowerPoint presentation. The idea, she explained, was to cater to the inner-city “urban market” in America—those African Americans who tended to buy their brandy in corner liquor stores. Finally they could have some “bling bling” of their own—she actually said this—the company’s new brandy-carrying case in lieu of the rather nonluxurious, traditional paper bag.
Brown bags being not French at all.
Also, she said, the sleeve would be manufactured in colors to match fitted baseball caps and special-edition sneakers.
“This is horrible,” I whispered to Louise.
“I don’t understand it,” Louise said.
Twenty minutes later, Louise and I were given some bling-bling of our own, plus fifths of brandy to slip inside. We returned to the office, threw away the sleeves, and shared the brandy with our fellow creatives, who’d been planning on having un pot after work anyway. Oscar went out and got some cheese; Olivier contributed “a nice little white” from the Loire; Niki supplied a box of pastries. We snacked on the terrace while the sun set behind the Arc de Triomphe—just another typical worknight in Paris, impossible to export or replicate.
In the distance, the Eiffel Tower looked like an enormous sprinkler.
* * *
The following week, Louise got sick and stayed home with a cold. She updated her Facebook status: “Super weekend … le chat et moi sous antibio!!!”
Many coworkers wrote good wishes on her Facebook wall.
André’s comment: “Quel cochon cet antibio.”
* * *
Another week after that, Chaya and I were working together, listening to Led Zeppelin over speakers plugged into my laptop, when my cell phone buzzed.
The caller ID said New York.
“There’s an offer,” my agent said.
I asked him to hold the phone. I went downstairs to the Champs-Elysées and stood next to a magazine stand where I bought my newspapers every morning, and I asked him to start again. He explained that of the five editors, two were interested in my novel, including the one I liked best.
The hand of mine not holding the phone seized into a fist.
When we hung up, I did it, I screamed.
I composed myself and called Rachel and asked her if she’d done that day’s grocery shopping yet. Rach
el said no, she was doing laundry at the moment; did I need something in particular? I said she should pick up some champagne. This was our code if the book received an offer to be published, that I’d tell her to purchase champagne and she’d know what I meant.
Rachel said slowly, “You want me to…”
“There’s an offer,” I said.
Rachel yelped and began weeping. Me, too. Once we’d calmed down, I made her promise not to tell anyone; I didn’t want our families to know until the contract was signed, I said, in case the deal fell through somehow.
When I got home, after opening the champagne, Rachel explained that she’d told someone anyway: “Oh, I had to, please don’t be mad. I was exploding with the news. I thought, Who can I tell who doesn’t know anybody? So I went out to the wineshop, you know the one on Bretagne? It was that young guy who doesn’t speak English, the nice one. Anyway, he asked me what I was looking for. I said, J’ai besoin du champagne. He showed me the champagnes, the twenty-euro bottles. Then he said, What’s your price range? I said, Cher, très cher. So now he’s excited, he took me over to the ‘expensive champagne’ section. He’s going on about this one and that one, I didn’t follow, I just told him we wanted a bottle très sec, so he picked out a bottle and it was a hundred and thirty euros.”
My eyes bulged.
“I know, we can’t possibly! But how often is your first novel published?” Rachel was tearing up again, but she talked her way through it: “Anyway, we’re at the cash register and the guy asked, What’s the special occasion? I didn’t really know how to explain it. It’s a celebration, I said, C’est une célébration du business. He said, Ah bon? And I said, Mon mari, my husband, il a vendu un roman, he sold a novel. But the guy didn’t follow. I tried to be more clear: Il a vendu son premier roman—he sold his first novel. I repeated it a couple of times, but now he’s giving me this weird look. Anyway, I kept saying it, then I tried adding that you’re a writer, you wrote a book, un livre. Once I said that, he started laughing, and we cleared everything up.”
Rachel added, “Because he thought you were involved in human trafficking. I wasn’t pronouncing roman right, so he thought you were a slave trader, selling Romans. I was saying it like, ‘A Roman, you sold a Roman, your first Italian from Rome.’”
That evening we celebrated by playing pool with Lindsay in a billiards club near our apartment, we three and some Asian teenagers. The felt on the tables was torn. Hot dogs spun in a wheel beneath a heat lamp. The joy was both microscopic and enormous. I was loose and light. I felt found.
41
At the end of summer, Paris purged. Pierre and his family went south, Lindsay visited friends in la campagne, and Olivia left for a dance tour of western France. Days went by without a single cloud in the sky.
Bruno stopped by my desk and told me to join him downstairs while he smoked. Outside, he complained for ten minutes about some account planner who had it in for him. Then again, everyone had it in for him. Did no one in his new office listen to his problems, was I the only one? Bruno confided he had a new vision of the future: forget Paris, it was time for Brazil. Brazilian women? Besides, entrepreneurship was impossible in France, Bruno said, everyone knew this, but in South America … His eyebrows hitched up. He had a friend who’d moved to São Paulo two years ago, now the guy owned a dry cleaner, a video rental shop, a photography studio, a modeling agency.
“You get a loan instantly,” Bruno said. “France has no room for entrepreneurs, but down there? Come on, a modeling studio?”
He said, “Hey, so is there room on Louis Vuitton for me?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But it’s not my decision.”
He nodded. “See you,” he said a moment later, and clapped me on the back of the arm.
One night, Rachel found an ad in a magazine for a hip-hop party near République. We arrived early, at eleven, and the club was empty. I ordered a beer that advertised itself as tasting like lager combined with tequila, and it tasted like Sprite with pickles; I should have known better. Then within twenty minutes a hundred teenagers appeared, and many young twentysomethings. At least two guys were wearing the same sweater that was featured that week in the windows of H&M. The music started up: nineties Diddy hits and early Wu-Tang Clan. At the same time, a B-boy crew arrived and opened up the floor. The headliners were two boys, identical twins, dancing in liquid ways to mesmerize the crowd; a few years later, they’d emerge as dance stars in France, going by “Les Twins.” But for that moment they held the floor for only twenty minutes, until finally the music got too good, everyone started dancing, and the DJ threaded his way to that summer’s big Kanye West hit, and we all flipped out.
Perhaps when by all appearances I shouldn’t fit in, I was at my most comfortable.
I dreaded it ending.
A few days later, an e-mail came from Pierre inviting us to visit him and Chloe in Provence. I was happy to receive it, and not just for the obvious reasons: quitting the agency, I’d worried about damaging my friendship with Pierre. Rachel and I took a high-speed train south from Gare de Lyon, riding in the upstairs cabin, with a shaded lamp at our table. Farms and forests, villages and cows. A few hours later we were having dinner outdoors at a giant table at Pierre’s parents’ house in the country. A half moon rose behind the roof, like a pearl in black underwear. The breeze was soupy warm. A swimming pool rippled where some teenagers had gone swimming while coffee was being served, at midnight.
Pierre’s parents owned a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Margerie, near Montélimar, a stone house with enough space to sleep thirty. There were landscaped gardens, a terraced courtyard, and handmade toys left around aging in the sun. The kind of place you drooled over imagining, that turned out to be real.
That weekend, twenty-six people were visiting, the whole family plus friends and neighbors, everyone contented and bronzed. It was Pierre’s sister Monique’s birthday, and lights had been rented for a dance party: an outdoor nightclub with a cheese course.
After the coffee, Pierre put on Britney Spears, a remix of “Toxic.” It seemed to be the family anthem. And even the teenagers weren’t sullen for a moment, amid the olive trees and dark shrubs and the smell of hash (from the teenagers). Monique opened her husband’s birthday present, a purple box of lingerie. She ran inside to change. Jérôme got out his camera. He bossed the children around to adjust lights—those children that weren’t by that point sleeping on benches—and Monique returned to dance. It seemed like it might go all the way, but it did not. It was perfectly tasteful, if a little more exotic than we’d anticipated, and everyone agreed, old and young, that we should be lucky to turn thirty-seven and be so toned.
Margerie, the town, was not exotic, we saw the next morning. It had a church and a few stop signs; otherwise it looked abandoned. Rachel and I were among the first awake on Saturday, with Pierre’s father and his friend Antoine. When we’d retired the night before, the two of them had been drinking scotch at four a.m. Now they were fresh, impatient, ready to go.
First Pierre’s dad made us espresso from a machine in the kitchen that could have been a tractor engine. He was regally patrician: a chemical engineer with flowing white hair and a round brown stomach. He asked how we felt about helping with the shopping. No problem, Rachel said.
“Antoine is also coming,” Pierre’s dad said, laughing, “but Antoine is no help.”
Antoine appeared to be wearing the same outfit as the night before, though a freshly laundered version: white linen shirt, pressed jeans, black sunglasses, bracelets and rings. He looked eternally Mediterranean—tan, rakish, retired. He was a former musician, part of a seventies French pop band that had charted a number-one single. Now, Pierre told us, he was a professional gambler, working the casinos of Marseille.
At the market, we strolled under blue and white tents, past basket merchants and charcuterie displays. The air was hot. The area’s lavender had been cut recently and the breeze was sticky with it, like purple pollen. Th
e whole market appeared to know Pierre’s dad; they called him “the city guy.” For each stall, there was a period of negotiation, a discussion of produce, gossip, and weather.
“They love him,” Antoine said to Rachel, “because they love his money.”
“Come,” Antoine said, pulling us away, “let’s go get something to drink.”
We went to a sandy café next to an old church. The sun hit us full in the face. Men in T-shirts were drinking coffee or white wine. Antoine suggested glasses of Ricard and some fried cod nuggets to fix our hangovers. For ten minutes, we sat and baked in silence. No word would have improved the impression.
Back at the house, Antoine disappeared to nap. We didn’t see him again until around eleven o’clock that evening, when he showed up, still in sunglasses, with his guitar. He passed Rachel a binder full of sheet music. She asked him what he knew. Everything, Antoine said.
“How about Al Green?”
He’d been strumming something by the Beatles. “Who is Al Green?”
“Come on,” I said, “‘Let’s Stay Together’? How about Marvin Gaye?”
“Do you know Elvis?” Rachel asked.
Antoine pulled down his sunglasses. “Do you know Elvis?” he said. “Americans don’t know Elvis.”
“Try me,” Rachel said. “How about Steely Dan?”
And that was how you unlocked Antoine’s heart. He and Rachel stayed up until three a.m. singing “Treat Me Like a Fool” and “Hey Nineteen.” I watched them sing, hearing their voices rise over plates being cleared, over Antoine’s guitar, over our friends nearby in conversation.
Jérôme, Monique’s husband, the mathematician, sought me out.
“So you’re getting along,” he said. “You speak French. You love Paris.”
“I love it,” I said.
“You like the work you do with Pierre?”
“It’s good.”
“The luggage, the babies.”
“I don’t love the babies.”
“No, no, not the babies,” Jérôme said. He was watching his wife, who had started to sing. He said, “So what, you live here forever, in France?”
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