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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Only Simon would also print out three other orgasmic moments, and paste their cut-up squares onto the wooden blocks’ other sides, and make the blocks rotate in unison. So as the blocks turned, one of four orgasms was always coming into view, so to speak.

  Around one in the morning, the liquor ran out. Pierre called a delivery service to send over more tequila, but everybody was short on cash, so Pierre and I, and some guy named Nicolas, whom I hadn’t met before, went out to find an ATM.

  During the walk, Nicolas said he was curious about Americans’ ideas regarding anal sex. Was I actively pursuing it with my wife? Was I the type of American man who could discuss this?

  “I used to be hung up about it,” Nicolas said. “You know, too nervous to ask. This is a big crisis for men today: being men. Even in France, men are scared to say, Here is what I want. I met a woman years ago. She really liked it in the ass. So, I’m a gentleman, I wasn’t going to ignore her desires. Once she introduced me to it, my life changed. What I’m saying is, if you like it and she likes it, what’s wrong?”

  Pierre got some money from an ATM while Nicolas was putting on a sweater, speaking through the fabric when it passed over his head: “It’s just sex, it’s natural, sex is good. Like I said, if she likes it—now this is paramount, of course. But why not?

  “A woman wants a man,” Nicolas said, squeezing my shoulder. “Believe me, if you want to be a man of the world, you need to try this,” he told me brightly.

  The following Monday, I was sitting outside my lunchtime park, not with Stephen King but with the smoking man, one half of the Puzzlers, when I overheard two twentysomethings discover the newspaper article pinned to the gate.

  “Shit. Well, now that our park’s closed—”

  “What? It’s not true!”

  “Oh, and look, someone has already put up a manifesto.”

  “Oh good, the revolt of the bobos.”

  That month, manifestos were all around us. One weekend, near Montparnasse, Rachel and I were having lunch outdoors on the Boulevard Raspail when several fashion models came marching down the street, dressed like guerrillas in camouflage, passing out leaflets on behalf of Yves Saint Laurent. They were newsprint bundles with erotic photos of Naomi Campbell accompanied by the following in English:

  Fashion manifested. Fashion decontextualized, its net widened, the access great. Images for the world. Making connections, relations, associations. Giving beauty, prompting desire, inspiring change. Identities questioned, forged, explored, reforged … A contemporary spirit, a transnational dialogue, cultural hybrids. The new aesthetic of globalism.

  After a year of advertising in Paris, I found it harder to tell the difference between bullshit and poetry. Sex fashioned as art, pornography, or manifesto. The next week, Rachel found the Naomi Campbell pamphlet on the bookshelf. “What’s this?” I was about to say I thought it was important somehow, then realized what I was thinking and tossed it in the garbage.

  46

  The dress code for interviewing Sir Sean Connery arrived at the last minute by fax. Sir Sean lived in Lyford Cay, a massive gated community on an island in the Bahamas—white beaches, black staff, private school, private marina. The pamphlet said men in the compound were required to wear collared shirts at all times, tucked in at all times. Belts were mandatory. No denim, ever, no cutoff anything, and no visible logos of any type. Jackets would be worn for meals, ties with dinner. Sportswear was reserved for playing sports, no exceptions.

  Vincent called to ask me if it was a joke. He said, “I have one nonjean.”

  I told him I had a pair of suit pants, that was it.

  “Ah, mister, this is how you know you’re a true Parisian,” Vincent said. “But what is this about no sneakers, are we going to his wedding?”

  Connery was Louis Vuitton’s next star. Two weeks earlier, Pierre had asked me, “Would you mind going to the Bahamas before you quit?” Vincent and I arrived in Nassau at twilight. The air smelled tropical. From the airport, Lyford Cay was a twenty-minute drive, on a road lined with palm trees and chain fences. A hurricane looked to have wiped out hundreds of surrounding acres—there was little new growth or much to see aside from shrubs or the occasional cinder-block home half-finished, a cement mixer overturned in a yard.

  We stopped the car after a mile and changed into our shoes, and tucked our collared shirts into our belted pants. Vincent wandered away to photograph a shank of rebar, and I tried calling Rachel to let her know we’d landed, but my cell phone was out of range.

  To prepare for the interview, I’d been reading Sir Sean Connery’s—we’d been informed to always remember the “Sir”—new autobiography, Being a Scot. Highlights included learning that he’d placed third in the 1950 Mister Universe Pageant. I wanted to ask him about that, though I feared he’d slap me. Vincent told me he’d have my back.

  Next morning, the temperature was eighty-six degrees at breakfast. The sun broiled the grass. Vincent and I arrived at the shoot location early: a beautiful white house hidden in a leafy grove. We’d heard it was the former vacation home of Bill Paley, the broadcasting executive who built CBS. In the main house, no one but me and Vincent had on collared shirts, and few people wore shoes—they were too busy running in and out of the ocean to set up Annie Leibovitz’s portrait, to be shot in an hour.

  We found a team customizing a dock on a long white beach. There were a dozen assistants for the cameras, lights, and rigging. There were people for makeup, wardrobe, and hair. What “Annie” did or did not want was constantly being asked—“Annie” being said in a tone of anxious menace. “Did Annie say that?” “Did you hear that from Annie or from who exactly?” “Has anyone seen Annie please?”

  A producer introduced Vincent and me to Annie at the catering table, explaining we were there to film Sir Sean once she was done with her shoot. Annie shook our hands and said, “So you guys don’t need to be here right now, right?” and walked away, and her producer showed us to a guest bedroom where we might wait.

  The shoot seemed to go well, from what we overheard on people’s radios. But it was tense. Annie did not want people peering at Sir Sean. Annie wanted the RED camera. Annie did not want the RED camera. Annie needed more lenses brought down immediately.

  The worst was when Annie was losing light. Her assistants looked like they were trying not to scream. Annie’s producers, many long-haired women who appeared to have grown up riding horses, born to multitask in heavy winds, would command everyone to speed up, to pay attention. Radios beeped and crackled, antennas wobbling while the women walked quickly to and from the beach while tying up their hair. “Annie’s losing light!” “We’re losing it, people!” “Light’s going now, people, let’s go!” “We’re losing the light!”

  Sir Sean came to see us after lunch, after his nap. He was seventy-eight, a total charmer. He laughed and apologized for being late. Posing all morning in the heat, in outfits such as a wool tuxedo, had worn him out, he said. He asked for a glass of water, then vodka, then back to water. He was tall and grandfatherly, wearing a white shirt and ascot—skinnier than when he’d played a Russian submarine captain, but still handsome, unbowed.

  And yet, I’ll say this: Sir Sean appeared more nervous than me. Unlikely, considering my digestive response that day. But he answered fluffball question after fluffball question with first-class grace. For example, if I said, “If Edinburgh were an actress, who would she be?” he said, “Edinburgh, I think, would be an actor, and he would be me.”

  At one point, Sir Sean pointed at Vincent behind the camera. “Your man there,” he said to me, “he’s signaling something.”

  Vincent was waving a drinking glass in front of the lens, to get a wobbly look.

  I said, “That’s just for effect.”

  Vincent said, stammering, “Sorry, Sir Sean, it is an artistic effect, please.”

  “Oh, French, is he…” Sir Sean said. He laughed and leaned toward me. Our knees were suddenly three inches from touching. His musta
che, I noticed, had a million legs. “My wife’s French, you know,” Sir Sean stage-whispered. “She’s an artist, a painter. You’ve got to love the French. I know I do,” he said, leaning back, “always have.”

  Afterward, when Sir Sean went home, Vincent and I packed up our gear and wandered onto the beach. Annie Leibovitz and her shoot had disappeared. Wardrobe was gone, catering was gone. The dock was being towed away by an antique Chris-Craft boat. Annie and her producers were already on a plane, someone mentioned, back to New York for a Vanity Fair shoot in the morning. So Vincent and I spent the afternoon reading books on Bill Paley’s beach, swimming in his ocean, and drinking his Kaliks—I’d found an unlocked minifridge full of beer beneath a picture of Truman Capote visiting the house, wearing tropical patterns.

  I told Vincent that the day I met Pierre had been one of extraordinary good luck. He said same for him. For parting gifts, I stole an ashtray from the guesthouse, and Vincent bought a cap from the golf club, to give to his father. “He will not believe I was here unless I have something to show.”

  47

  On the afternoon Vincent and I returned to Paris, Rachel learned her grandmother had died, her father’s mother. More than a year earlier, right after we’d moved to Paris, Rachel’s grandparents on her mother’s side had passed away within a day of each other, and she hadn’t been able to return for the funeral, to her regret. The evening I got back, Rachel talked to her family on the phone. After she hung up, she said the distance between them and Paris was acutely painful. She didn’t know where she was, only where she wasn’t.

  Rachel flew back to the States for a week, and I worked later than normal and took long walks at night. I didn’t want to be in the apartment alone because I couldn’t focus with Rachel gone; I’d be going to brush my teeth and wind up taking out the garbage in my underwear.

  We spoke at length on the telephone. I told her how much I wished I was there in North Carolina. This was true, though not complete; I wanted to be there, but I also didn’t want to be by myself. When a person felt marvelous in Paris, the city amplified his feelings and fed him full. But when a person was lousy, the city shut down. He belonged underground, at best.

  Which perhaps explained all the women crying on the Métro—many more than I’d seen in New York. No one bothered them underground. If anything, crying in public in Paris seemed to be the best way to guarantee you’d be left alone.

  One night, I ate dinner at a restaurant on the Champs-Elysées by myself, and finished a bottle of red wine. Afterward, stumbling a bit, I went next door to see a Pixar movie. I thought it would cheer me up: a film for kids that was billed as adult-friendly.

  The “adult-friendly” part at least explained the ads that played first.

  Advertisement number one was for Magnum ice-cream bars: women in bathing suits worshipping an ice-cream god while sunlight beamed out from their vaginas. The second ad was for Häagen-Dazs, in which a woman, who sounded like a phone-sex operator, told us about the passion we’d feel for their new dark-chocolate ice cream; we heard this while half-naked black people blew kisses at each other. The third ad was for M&Ms—it was one big setup for a crotch-fondling joke. Finally, in an ad for Orangina, animals dressed like strippers did pole dances.

  I was temporarily much cheered up.

  In a changing world, count on France.

  48

  In the middle of September, Lindsay got a new apartment, a studio around the corner from Buttes-Chaumont. We visited and afterward took a walk around the park at nightfall, all of us wearing light jackets. Fireplaces burned. There were joggers zipping by, with reflective strips on their shirts briefly catching the light. For dinner we tried going to Le Faitout, one of our favorite cafés, where they served a breathtaking chicken with morels, but it was closed.

  Open instead was a restaurant none of us had tried before, decorated like an American diner. It had booths, even a glass case for desserts, with rotating plates. Lindsay said once we sat down, “This could be the last dinner we share—I mean, in a diner, guys, really?”

  Lindsay started crying, laughing at herself. She said, “I saw a friend recently from Chicago, this girl Sarah. She just moved here. I’m breaking her in. Her accent is horrendous. And her fashion—awful. I mean, God bless her, I love the girl, but we go to a party and she’s wearing a yellow felt hat, a pink skirt, fishnet stockings. The French just tear her to shreds.”

  Toward the end of dinner, the waiter tried to clear our plates, but Rachel held him off, saying in French that she wasn’t quite done, she needed another minute, though she’d love to hear about dessert if that was all right. He said, Of course, Madame. He described a molten chocolate cake. Rachel asked him about the preparation, was it really molten in the center? He assured her that it was. Well, Rachel said, she’d pass, but she’d have an herbal tea, did they have herbal tea?

  She was glowing with fluency while I ordered coffee.

  Lindsay said, “Hey, do you guys know my friend Gilles? He got in an awful motorcycle wreck last week. All his friends came over to help with his convalescence. I made grilled cheese sandwiches. Well, I swear, the French were awestruck. They were all, ‘Waouh, Lindsay, what a wonderful sandwich, now tell us, how did you make this? There is egg in here, is that right? Is there cream in the sauce? What exactly did you put into the sauce?’ I was like, ‘What sauce? What are you talking about, people, it’s a grilled cheese!’ But they made me go, step by step, in detail, through the preparation of this ‘wonderful sandwich.’”

  After dinner, we walked Lindsay back to her apartment. The evening was frosty. There weren’t any stars out. Trees in the park bounced and jostled under the streetlamps.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Lindsay said in her doorway. “About Sarah, my friend who just moved here? Next time we go out, I’m going to stand up for her. All those French bitches dressing her down … I’ll go up to them, I’ll say, ‘Look, bitch, wash your hair; nice shoes.’”

  * * *

  The next afternoon was hot. Sunbathers turned out to quilt Buttes-Chaumont. After a run, I was sitting on a hill, stretching amid dozens of people, when a woman lying downslope from me suddenly slid off her bikini top and hitched down her bottoms, while also lifting up her knees so that I saw her Métro ticket—what Parisians called a woman’s pubic hair when it had been trimmed to a rectangle.

  I was reminded of Chloe’s joke about women’s pubic hair getting bigger these days in Paris, now that the Métro system had switched from tickets to Navigo passes, the size of credit cards.

  Anyway, I moved and finished stretching near the Buttes-Chaumont puppet theater, a green hut covered in ivy. Then an old man started ringing a bell. Parents stirred, pushing their children toward the gate. I’d always assumed the theater to be defunct, but here was an actual Punch and Judy show. I went up to buy a ticket, then realized I didn’t have any money on me. Probably better this way, I thought. Some things were better left undone. Plus, I wouldn’t have wanted to give the wrong impression: the sweaty North American scum who, a second earlier, had been staring at a woman’s pubic hair.

  There should be a name for the syndrome that occurs when you’re in Paris and you already miss it.

  The next day our health-insurance cards arrived.

  49

  Pierre put me on a team to pitch a watchmaker in Switzerland. One final presentation, he said.

  “Oh, I get it,” Rachel said, “you’ve run through all of France’s products, now you’re expanding to the Swiss.”

  The watchmaker was headquartered near Neuchâtel, an hour from Geneva. We flew Air France. Even in economy there was free champagne and complimentary newspapers. For a snack: brown bread, herb butter, a large piece of prosciutto, two cherry tomatoes speared on bamboo, and two macarons, pink and pistachio. In Geneva, our boss Bernard rented an Audi and drove us to a three-star hotel on Neuchâtel’s lake. We had individual suites. Each was constructed on top of its own dock—docks extending like fingers into the lake—wit
h giant rooms, waffle-cloth towels, espresso machines. Holes were cut into each dock with individual fireman poles should we desire to slide down into the water. Bathrooms big enough for eight people to shower. And a television the breadth of a cow, with four channels of pornography (German, German, Czech, French), which was for some reason impossible to turn off at the moment the girl from reception arrived to deliver your complimentary toothbrush.

  “You know what,” Rachel said over the phone when I tried to calculate the horsepower of my bathtub, “just don’t.”

  The next morning we drove through long tunnels, over mountain passes, and across ravines. In the watchmakers’ boardroom, we told little stories under life-size murals of Tiger Woods, master of the global business class’s favorite pastime. At the end, we ate lemon cookies, drank Nespresso, exchanged kisses, and shook hands. Then our team drove back to Geneva, returned to Paris, flying economy again on Air France—champagne, newspapers, and this time tuna tartelettes, tomato tartare, and chocolate ganache tarts—so that we arrived back in Paris in time for cocktails. Did everyone want cocktails? Should we get cocktails? Un vers, deux vers? Where should we go for cocktails, the third, the eleventh, the ninth?

  Nothing spectacular happened in Geneva. No one commented on it. We didn’t even win the account. But no biggie. This was doing business in Europe, the ordinary business of luxury. And no one noted the extraordinary luxury of simply doing it, because they’d do it the following week, and the next.

  But I knew I’d never do it again.

  * * *

  “Listen, this is a ton of bullshit,” my friend Greg said. “What are you talking about right now?”