Greg was a partner at a New York advertising firm. I’d called him to ask if he knew of any copywriters who’d be interested in moving to France.
“Look, how did you even get this job?” Greg said. “I mean, I’m tempted to take it. You realize accounts like this don’t exist. Right now I need to oversee some antacid copy, we’re hung up with the client’s legal team—that’s advertising. I really have no idea what you’ve been doing over there.”
I explained how, on the previous evening, Louis Vuitton had sent our team to Asnières, outside Paris, where the luggage was still hand-sewn, so that we would better understand their luxury DNA. We’d been shown Karl Lagerfeld’s custom trunk, designed to store his iPods—he traveled with dozens of them—and afterward we drank champagne where Kanye West had sat two weeks earlier while discussing his plans to intern and learn the fashion/luggage craft.
A Louis Vuitton boss told me, “Mr. West is nice, you know. A true gentleman. Very creative. He’s someone who is building brands right now.”
After my call with Greg, I got stuck trying to devise a tagline to sell some new belts. I told Niki, the copywriter from Quebec, that I could really use her help; I asked if I could have some of her time.
She said she wasn’t sure she understood.
I said loudly in French, “I said I need your time.”
Tomaso whispered, “Oh yeah.”
Olivier said, “Me, too, please.”
Someone shouted, “In his mouth.”
Tes temps—your time. Tétons—nipples. My final note for the wall.
50
We ate last dinners throughout October. We went to Chateaubriand and ate the foam. Pierre and Chloe took us for cocktails to Chez Janou, a tiny cottage in the third arrondissement, not far from Place des Vosges. Chloe was astounded we hadn’t been there before. “But this is where all the Americans hang out, like La Perle for hipsters. How do you live here all this time and not know Chez Janou?”
For dinner afterward, we went to Les Côtelettes, a new traditional French restaurant nearby where we ate andouillettes and boudin noir, then afterward we hopped in Pierre’s car and drove to a new club called Cha-Cha, near the Seine. Techno blared, people texted, dancers danced. Due to the ban on cigarettes, the owners had built a glass box inside where people could smoke, into which Chloe disappeared, introducing herself to people with swooping bises. On the top floor was a private party. Floating down the stairs, the music sounded much better, so Rachel tried to sneak in, but the bouncer told her he needed a password. She spent ten minutes testing different pieces of her vocabulary. The bouncer humored her, but he wouldn’t allow her passage. Whatever the password was, we did not find out.
At the office, Marc the project manager returned from a week in California relaxed and happy, no longer burnt out by la stresse. He showed around a photograph of him eating a cheeseburger the size of his head; it was the only thing he would talk about from his trip.
In Paris, October was extremely fine. The next week I called in sick with a gastro—I lied—and Rachel and I spent two days roaming Paris, reliving our first week, before I began work. We went for long walks and said goodbye to our favorite markets, garden stores, the Village Voice bookstore, the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore, and WH Smith. It smelled like toasted spices on the street. The light on the riverbank was one long glaze down Ile St. Louis, and the light was constant and stationary, like Paris itself.
I’d been wrong with my “city of clouds” idea. Paris was the city of light, like people said, but its light was the kind that was kindled internally.
End of October, Rachel’s birthday fell right before we flew home. We went out for dinner and dancing on the Champs-Elysées. Christmas lights were being strung up, but they weren’t lit yet. Around midnight we ended up at Regine’s, a nightclub where Lindsay knew the owner, tucked into a street behind where I went to work every morning.
At the same club, back in February, I’d almost been turned away one night for wearing sneakers and jeans. Luckily, that evening, for Rachel’s birthday, I had on a suit.
The bouncer let in the girls, but stopped me.
“Sorry,” he said. “Too formal.”
“He’s with me,” Lindsay said. “I’m friends with Regine. What is the problem?”
“There’s been changes,” the bouncer said. He waved his hand over me like it was a security wand. “The club’s got a new look.”
“How about he loses the tie?” Lindsay said.
I took off my tie and untucked my shirt.
“Next time,” the bouncer told me, “wear sneakers.”
Downstairs, the club was packed with guys in sneakers, girls in hoodies. After twenty minutes, Lindsay and I went outside to split a cigarette. A line of hopefuls stretched down the block. One young guy, handsome and cool, ducked under the velvet rope and asked us for a light.
“Wait a second,” he said in French after a puff, “the two of you are together? That’s a paradox.”
“Why a paradox?” Lindsay said.
“Well, you’re beautiful and tall. Then you,” he said, turning to me and contemplating, throwing back his hair, “you’re not very tall.”
Lindsay said, “Is he beautiful?”
“He’s wearing a suit,” the guy said. “He’s proper. Like if you’re visiting Granny on Sunday. But you,” the guy said to Lindsay, “you’re one of us, you know?”
Harsh but true. The guy was dressed in skintight lumberjack clothes, and Lindsay was wearing a green plaid shirt she’d bought that afternoon at H&M.
Then he said to me, “Look, I’m sorry. You’re beautiful. Please, can I see your teeth?”
I opened my mouth.
“Waouh, man, honestly? You have great teeth.” He took his time, peering in, apparently oblivious to my fillings. “Really beautiful.” After I closed my mouth, he said, “Now I can see you guys together. It is the contrast, very subtle.”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so I said, “You have a good head.”
“Thank you,” he said, smiling. “Look, do you mind if I come downstairs with you?”
No problem, I said. I told the bouncer that the guy avec la bonne tête was with us. The bouncer didn’t like it, but he allowed him in anyway; after all, he was wearing the right clothes.
51
The truth was, we snuck out. There was no honest way to say goodbye. We inventoried our apartment, packed our duffel bags, and walked Paris from end to end. We ate another dinner with Lindsay at a little restaurant near Montmartre. We read French newspapers. We closed accounts and left forwarding addresses.
Vincent the film director e-mailed me: “See you in Obama land.”
Three nights before leaving, the agency threw me a goodbye party. There were four cases of champagne, a case of liquor, and four platters of charcuterie. People gave me goodbye bises. They said they’d heard from Pierre that I was having a novel published—the idea was met with disbelief. Where had I lived my secret life?
They also asked where I’d be moving. I explained that we were returning to the United States, to the woods of Caroline du Nord. No one could grasp this—me with cows and pigs, “with a big truck and a big gun?”
I explained it was more like we were moving to the countryside, la campagne.
“Ah bon,” people said reverently, nodding, “la campagne.”
Around two, when the party was still loud, I told people I was going out to find more champagne. Instead I rode the Métro home and crawled into bed. At four a.m., a text message woke me up, Pierre writing to say that he and some people were going out to find something to eat, did I want to join them?
That same day, prior to the party, Bruno had taken me out for lunch. “Please,” he’d said, “you should at least see my neighborhood one time before you go.”
“Of course,” I said. “Avec plaisir.”
Bruno drove us on his scooter up to the seventeenth arrondissement. We ate on Rue Jacquemont at La Tête de Goinfre, a restauran
t dedicated to pork. Bruno did all the ordering. First came an amuse-bouche of sausages and pickles, plus champagne. Next, a charcuterie platter meant for four people that we split, of more sausages, hams, pâtés. Then a 1.5-kilo steak to share, plus pommes sautées and a green salad, with two bottles of Côtes du Rhône. One hour, two hours. We talked about office politics a little, not much. Dessert we skipped, but we ordered calvados and coffee. Mostly Bruno wanted to talk about his family, his girlfriend, a recent fishing trip, some upcoming plans to visit Lisbon.
He asked me, Don’t you like the restaurant? Isn’t the food exceptional?
I did, I said. It was.
This is true Paris, Bruno said. Family Paris. Shame it had taken me so long to see it.
I agreed, I apologized, we toasted.
On our way back to the office, Bruno proposed billiards. Fantastic! I yelled into his helmet. Now time had no influence. In Paris, the past was all around you, but from the back of Bruno’s scooter, the present was boisterous and pulsing. We buzzed past markets I didn’t recognize. Down streets I’d never seen. For eighteen months, people had told me Paris was finished, a city fading, cauterized by tourism and a reluctance to change. But I hadn’t seen it. I knew too many Parisians now—passionate, self-aware Parisians. The day that Parisians stopped being so Parisian, then maybe. But the Parisians I knew were nowhere near done.
What my friend Bruno taught me about being Parisian: never let the heart languish.
Bruno drove us to the Académie de Billard Clichy-Montmartre. Bruno shouted at a stoplight that he had wanted to show it to me for some time. It was an architectural wonder inside, Bruno said, with a glass ceiling and ancient tables. And it was beautiful, from what I saw, though I got to see it only through the window. Bruno went inside to book a table, but a clerk said the hall was members-only.
We stood outside and Bruno smoked.
“Imagine if the Germans had bombed everything,” Bruno said. “Maybe no one would like Paris.” We shivered from the cold. “Next time you’re in Paris, we go,” he said, nodding to the billiards hall. Then Bruno remounted his Yamaha, tiptoed it backward into the street, and waited for me to board.
That night at the party, Bruno found me late and stubbed his thick fingers into my chest, shouting over the music, “Hey, you remember the billiards from today? So beautiful. Look, from lunch?” Bruno pulled up his shirt to show me his brown gut. He laughed. He shouted, pointing, “I gotta start a diet soon!”
Then he clenched my arm. He had something he wanted to tell me. He said, “Wait, I’ll get us more to drink, I’ll be right back, okay?”
Bruno disappeared into the crowd. I ducked out the entrance. I told people on the staircase I was going out to find more champagne. From the bottom of the stairwell I heard Sabine’s voice above me: “Where does he expect to find champagne at this hour? Hey, did he say goodbye to any of you?”
But that was the thing. I couldn’t figure out how to say goodbye. I would not—not to Bruno or any of them. Saying goodbye to Paris was something a person did when he knew he was dying. Otherwise, Paris was forever one day soon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is grateful to Sean McDonald and PJ Mark, without whom this tale might not have come to the telling; Frederic Bonn and Zoe Deleu, who opened the door; Marilyn and Michael Knowles, who opened their home; and the MacDowell Colony, for its generosity.
The author also wishes to thank Emily Bell and everybody else at FSG, everybody at Janklow & Nesbit, Jennifer Murphy, Asha Thomas, Geoff Kloske, Megan Lynch, Kate Lee, Frédéric Guelaff, Mathieu Baillot, Leslie Baldwin, Andrew and Melissa Cotton Womack, Jonathan S. Paul, LCD Soundsystem, Katherine Ortega and the Mafiosos, and Jim Coudal.
Above all, Rachel Knowles, my love.
To everyone the author encountered in Paris, especially his colleagues who didn’t imagine winding up in a book, a mountain of gratitude.
ALSO BY ROSECRANS BALDWIN
You Lost Me There
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by Rosecrans Baldwin
All rights reserved
Portions of this book have previously been published in substantially different form in The Morning News.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baldwin, Rosecrans.
Paris, I love you but you’re bringing me down / Rosecrans Baldwin — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-14668-9 (alk. paper)
1. Baldwin, Rosecrans. 2. Baldwin, Rosecrans—Homes and haunts—France—Paris. 3. Americans—France—Paris—Biography. 4. Couples—France—Paris—Biography. 5. Paris (France)—Biography. 6. Paris (France)—Description and travel. 7. Paris (France)—Social life and customs. I. Title.
DC718.A44 B35 2012
944'.36108412092—dc23
[B]
2011045886
eISBN 9781429942737
First edition, 2012
www.fsgbooks.com
Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down Page 24
