by Dan Peres
I knew I wasn’t chic. Anyone—everyone—who knew me knew I wasn’t chic. In fact, when I finally moved to Paris in the fall of 1997 to run W magazine’s office there, I was decidedly unchic. My predecessors, on the other hand, had all been incredibly poised and refined women and men. And of course they had all spoken French. At twenty-five, in my Levi’s, sneakers, and burgundy North Face fleece and with a knowledge of the language limited to what I’d gleaned from watching Pepé Le Pew reruns on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, I came across more like a hostel-dwelling college student with a Eurail Pass and a dog-eared copy of Let’s Go Europe than a fashion journalist.
My first few weeks in Paris were as lonely as they were exciting. During the week, when I wasn’t at the magazine’s well-appointed offices on the rue Royale, I was having lunch with designers from some of the biggest fashion houses in the world. Weeknights were spent attending events and store openings and cocktail parties.
Weekends, however, were quiet. I sometimes hung out with a few other Fairchild transplants from New York, but for the most part I was on my own, wandering around like the new kid in school searching for a seat in the cafeteria—unsure where to go or who to talk to. Cigarettes were my friends, and wontons and General Tso’s chicken at a small Chinese place on the rue Saint-Honoré around the corner from the Hôtel Regina, where I was living until I rented an apartment, were dinner most Saturday and Sunday nights. By my third week in Paris, the waitstaff at Café Chinois put my order in the moment I walked through the door.
My favorite waiter was Michel, though I suspected that wasn’t his given name. Michel was Chinese but spoke near perfect English thanks to a love of American movies and a Filipino girlfriend who didn’t speak French or Mandarin. He went nuts every time I made a sugar cube disappear, using a chopstick as a magic wand, and he was absolutely obsessed with Geena Davis’s character, Samantha Caine, in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Whenever he would come by to bring me a beer or refill my water glass, he’d ask if I’d seen any pretty girls lately.
“No one as pretty as Samantha Caine,” he’d say before I could even answer.
That was debatable. Paris was teeming with beautiful women. Even the women I didn’t find attractive seemed to ooze sex appeal just by virtue of their Frenchness. They smoked and drove mopeds and sat outside under heat lamps on chilly evenings sipping wine and speaking . . . French, which, despite its obviousness, I found incredibly sexy. Sometimes, on the way back to my hotel after dinner, I would stop at a café and have a quick drink. I kept waiting for some sophisticated older woman to hit on me the way Linda Fiorentino did with Anthony Edwards at a Parisian café in Gotcha!, which I’d seen at least a dozen times when I was a teenager.
In the end, thankfully, I didn’t need to wait long. In fact, by the time I showed up at Sabine’s housewarming party the following spring, my social life had picked up considerably. I had settled into a small one-bedroom apartment on the rue de Bourgogne in the 7th arrondissement, where several women had already spent the night. I had, as always, just gotten off to a late start.
Remarkably, it turned out that my arrival in Paris was met with unexpected enthusiasm by a number of young European women, particularly junior to midlevel fashion publicists. By my second month there, many of them had invited me out for drinks and to non–work-related dinner parties. One Italian woman, Claudia, who worked in the communications department at Yves Saint Laurent, even took me on a tour through the streets of Saint-Germain on the back of her Vespa. I held on for dear life trying not to shriek like a little girl as she zipped in and out of traffic pointing out the sights.
I was something of a novelty. I was a young—and despite my mother’s ongoing suspicions—straight man working in an industry largely devoid of young straight men. I spoke no French, even though a tutor came to the office twice a week. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think I had this almost pathetic lost-puppy quality that somehow made me desirable. Was this my default setting? Had I been trying so hard and for so long that I’d never considered simply not trying at all? Could it have been that simple? This was unfamiliar territory for me in every possible way and I was mystified by my newfound success with women. So was Adam, whom I called after each date.
“What is going on over there?” he asked after I told him about my night with Amélie, who had a tousled pixie cut and a small tattoo of a rosary on her hip.
“Holy shit! What are you doing differently?” he demanded to know when I told him about Francesca, an Italian aristocrat living in Paris who took me as a date to a friend’s wedding after knowing me for only a week, and once we were there, insisted we sneak into the hotel’s indoor pool for my first ever skinny-dip.
“Are you dressing like a Euro dude? Please tell me you’re not dressing like a Euro dude,” he said when I told him that Sophie unexpectedly pushed me into a darkened banquette at the back of the Hôtel Costes bar, kissed me, and bit my bottom lip so hard I was sure she broke the skin.
But I wasn’t doing anything differently, and I certainly wasn’t dressing like a Euro dude—no pointy shoes, no painted-on jeans, no slicked back hair. I wore what I always wore: jeans, shirt, Chucks, sometimes even a baseball hat. I had been told more than once that I was très Américain, which I knew wasn’t necessarily a compliment, but I was très comfortable that way and no one seemed to mind.
Most of the time, that is.
That crowd at Sabine’s had swelled to about forty people by nine p.m. It was a mix of well-heeled couture clients and their courtly husbands, assorted socialites, and a small handful of Sabine’s coworkers. The couture ladies were my favorite. Despite their taut faces and unusually perky breasts, they were what polite society referred to as “women of a certain age.” And while spending tens of thousands of dollars on a single dress was serious business, these ladies knew how to have fun. They threw fabulous parties and hung out with rock stars and they welcomed me into their rarefied fold—sneakers and all.
Their husbands, on the other hand, seemed considerably less appreciative of my laid-back sartorial choices. They were captains of industry and the scions of some of Europe’s most prominent families. They were, many of them, born with gold-plated poles up their asses and wore arrogance as a facial expression like they were perpetually sucking on lemon wedges. So that evening, after getting more than a few disapproving glances from them, which I assumed were related to my casualness, I retreated to the relative quiet of Sabine’s kitchen, where I snacked on puff pastry hors d’oeuvres and did my best to surreptitiously ogle Gabrielle.
I was about to head home when Barbara Walters walked in and started talking about a story in W magazine that she’d read on her flight over from New York. There were ten or so people in the room. Thankfully, everyone was speaking English.
“This article about Marion Lambert was riveting,” said Walters. “What a tragedy.”
Marion Lambert was a Swiss socialite and the wife of Philippe Lambert, a member of one of Europe’s oldest banking families and a cousin of the Rothschilds. Marion’s only daughter, Philippine, had committed suicide a few months earlier at the age of twenty, leaving a note accusing an old family friend, a man in his forties with an equally impressive pedigree, of sexually abusing her from the time she was thirteen. He denied the charges. Still mourning, Marion was determined to bring her daughter’s alleged rapist to justice, and it sent ripples through the upper echelons of Geneva society. There were many people who felt that Marion was unfairly going after an innocent family man, smearing his name as she blindly crusaded for justice. She had committed the greatest of societal sins—she had aired dirty laundry, and in the process, became a pariah.
“It’s tragic, of course, but she doesn’t have any proof,” one of the couture ladies said to Walters. “She is ruining this man’s life.”
“Her life has been destroyed,” I said from the other side of the room. “And she truly believes that this man abused her daughter.”
“Come now,” the couture l
ady said. “How could you possibly know what she truly believes?”
“Because I spent time with her at her house in Geneva,” I replied. “I wrote that story.”
The room fell silent and all eyes were suddenly on me. Gabrielle’s included.
The Marion Lambert article in W was one of the first big pieces I did after arriving in Paris. Patrick called me from New York one afternoon and gave me her phone number and backstory and told me to call her. He had never met Marion, but they had a mutual friend who had gotten in touch with him asking for Dominick Dunne’s contact information. Marion Lambert was finally ready to break her silence, he was told, and wanted to give an exclusive to Dunne, who had been writing about crime for years at Vanity Fair. Patrick did what any good editor would have done. He grabbed the story.
“Dominick Dunne?” he said to his friend. “How about Dan Peres?”
And now one of the most important figures in journalism was talking to me about my story.
“Let’s hear from this young man,” Walters said. “He’s the one who was with her. The one who did the reporting.”
While I had Barbara Walters seemingly hanging on my every word and I felt the need to advocate for Marion, whom I had become close with since our interview, all that really mattered in that moment was the fact that Gabrielle was paying attention to me.
I did my best to stay focused on the conversation, which went on for another ten minutes or so, before we were interrupted by a waiter asking that we move to the living room, where one of the sour-faced husbands was about to toast our hostess. It wasn’t long after that when I went over to thank Sabine for including me and ask if she wouldn’t mind calling me a taxi.
“I can drive you home,” I heard someone behind me say. “I’m leaving now also.”
It was Gabrielle.
Stay calm. Keep your cool. Close your mouth.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” I asked.
“As long as you don’t judge me if my car is messy,” she said with a huge smile.
She could have had a corpse in the back seat and I wouldn’t have cared. But as luck would have it, I’m not even sure there was a back seat. It was the tiniest car I’d ever seen—a vintage silver Fiat 500, easily as old as I was. As we climbed in, she cleared the passenger seat of a pack of Marlboro Lights, a hairbrush, and one of those cloth drawstring dust bags that come in the box when you buy a nice pair of shoes.
“Sorry, but I can’t drive in these heels,” she said, as she gently pulled her navy blue silk dress above her knees and effortlessly slipped off her Manolos before pulling a pair of white Chuck Taylors out of the drawstring bag. “We have the same shoes.”
Stay calm. Keep your cool. Close your mouth.
We each lit a cigarette as she made her way around the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées toward the Place de la Concorde. When I had envisioned my time in Paris before moving there, this is what I had in mind. Beautiful woman. Cool car. Full moon. If my sixteen-year-old self could have seen me, he wouldn’t have believed it. My twenty-five-year-old self was barely accepting it as reality.
“Do you speak French?” she asked.
“Working on it,” I replied, “but it’s not easy.”
“I will teach you,” she said. “You can be my student.”
Say something smart. Don’t fuck this up.
“Okay,” I said. That’s all I could come up with in the moment. My sixteen-year-old self would have slapped me across the face.
“Have you been to Kinugawa?” she asked, pulling up in front of my apartment. “It’s the best sushi in Paris.”
I had actually had lunch a few weeks earlier with Karl Lagerfeld at his house in the 7th, and one of the chefs from Kinugawa had come to prepare the meal for us.
“Don’t know it,” I said.
“Great. Let’s have dinner there this weekend,” she said. “I’ll book the table.”
Gabrielle leaned over to me in the passenger seat and gave me a soft kiss on the lips before saying something in French.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You’ll find out,” she said.
At first Adam was convinced I was lying.
“Really? The hottest woman you’ve ever seen?” he said. “Come on. I know you’re on a roll over there, but it’s me you’re talking to.”
“Truth,” I said.
“Okay,” said Adam. “I’ve been thinking about this and there’s really only one possible explanation for what’s been happening to you. You, my friend, have the Kavorka.”
The Kavorka was Latvian for “the lure of the animal.” Kramer had the Kavorka in the episode of Seinfeld where George converts to Latvian Orthodox for the love of a woman. Kramer shows up at the church one day to pick up George, who is there preparing for the conversion, and one of the Latvian Orthodox nuns falls instantly in love with him and wants to leave the faith so she can be with him. The Latvian Orthodox high priest learns of this and tells Kramer that he has the Kavorka.
“Women are drawn to you,” the priest explains. “They would give anything to be possessed by you.”
Adam and I used to joke about how amazing it would be to have the Kavorka.
And now, at least according to my best friend, I had it.
Maybe he was right.
Gabrielle and I quietly dated for several months, keeping things discreet because she said she didn’t want Paris society gossiping about her more than they already were. I didn’t mind. I was fine with Gabrielle coming over after a late dinner or meeting her for a drink in dimly lit hotel bars for what she coquettishly referred to as “one last sip before bed.”
“This has been a powerful love affair,” she said on our last night together. The French even had a way of making breaking up seem sexy.
My two and a half years in France turned out to be one of the most amazing—and truly anomalous—times in my life. There were flings and girlfriends and even the occasional broken heart, but my time in Paris gave me, however briefly, a tenuous sense of confidence—belonging, even—that I had been desperately craving since I was a young boy practicing sleight of hand in my basement in Pikesville. It was as if being desired by women had managed to make me whole—that the Kavorka was somehow the solution to what had eluded me my entire life.
Reunion
When it comes to air conditioning and painkillers, the French suck.
They do many things exceptionally well. Better than anyone else, they’ll tell you. Like cheese and wine and fashion. They’re also rather proud of their philosophers. There are men living in Paris who are philosophers. Not philosophy professors or students or buffs, but actual philosophers. I’ve met them. And of course the French will insist that their bread is unrivaled—to say nothing of their butter.
They can be forgiven for the air conditioning, which they really seem to be trying to get right—even if everyone isn’t fully on board. I know French people who would complain that it was too cold when the AC was on its lightest setting—no joke, like, 80 degrees—and would wrap scarves around their necks and exhale through clenched fists as if they were deckhands on a polar icebreaker.
But when it comes to painkillers, the French truly disappoint.
I discovered this not long before my two and a half years in Paris came to an end.
“You should go to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital,” Claudio was saying. “It’s the best in Paris. It’s where they took Princess Diana.”
“Yeah, but didn’t she die?” I asked.
“Ayy. What’s that have to do with anything?” he said.
“I’m just saying, you’re trying to convince someone that a hospital is the best in Paris and you make your case by using one of the most famous deaths in the world as an example of their good work,” I said. “Not the strongest marketing strategy, no?”
“It’s not like they killed her,” he said. “Go wherever you want. What do I care?”
We were stoned.
It was a Sunday afternoo
n and we were sitting outside at Les Deux Magots on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés having lunch and watching tourists, all of whom seemed to be carrying money and passports in clear plastic pouches hanging around their necks like oversize tacky necklaces, a fact that made Claudio—with his crisp white shirt, sharply creased slacks, and polished Gucci horsebit loafers—cringe.
He asked if I wanted to smoke a joint first, so I met him at the small, well-appointed Left Bank apartment he shared with his longtime boyfriend, Jean-Yves, who worked as a studio manager for an interior designer favored by Parisian socialites. I watched as Claudio carefully warmed an acorn-sized piece of hash with a lighter before mixing it with tobacco and rolling a thin, perfect joint, complete with a filter he fashioned from a piece torn off of his Marlboro Lights flip-top box.
He was Italian but had been living in Paris for twelve years, where he worked for a global fashion house running communications in France. I met him shortly after I moved to Paris and we would get together once a month to catch up and gossip. We almost always smoked a joint and went to Les Deux Magots, where the famously grumpy, tuxedoed waiters wove through the maze of small round tables and wicker-backed chairs with a noticeable air of disdain for everyone. I could relate.
I’d been telling Claudio over lunch that my back was bothering me and that I was thinking about seeing a doctor. This was only half true. My back was fine, but I’d been fantasizing about Vicodin for the past few weeks and was hoping my friend might be able to recommend a doctor who could help me out.
It had been months since I’d taken my last Vicodin. In fact, since arriving in Paris, I’d used them only periodically, feeding off prescriptions I managed to get from my back surgeon or my longtime physician when I flew to New York a few times a year. Occasional tastes of the buzz I’d fallen in love with before moving, but hardly enough for daily use, which I wasn’t craving.
I discovered new kinds of highs while I was in Paris, and I suppose the need to cloak myself in an opiate haze had been replaced by the excitement of the Kavorka and access to—and the acceptance of—people like Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Lacroix and Emanuel Ungaro. For the first time, maybe, I felt wanted. The thrill of my Parisian life had become my drug of choice. That high was enough.
