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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Not bad,” said the agent. The HR representative agreed and went close to admire the work. The agent saw my face. “Wait, we’re in Paris,” she said. “It is creative, the capital of creative. Americans love this.”

  “Je suis d’accord,” I said. “… Peut-être moins créatif?”

  Before we moved on, the HR rep said, “We thought you were creative.”

  Rue de Harlay. Sauf Accès Parc. Interdit. Honestly, even the street signs were nourishment; I was in a mood to drive around Paris all day long. First we went for lunch on Ile de la Cité, one of the islands on the Seine, where Paris had begun. The agent took us to Place Dauphine, behind Pont Neuf. We occupied a sidewalk table. The sun was so close we could have plucked it.

  Just unbelievable, the idea I’d be living there soon.

  The women required two minutes to confirm they would order different plates of charcuterie, then came wine selection:

  “You think a Sancerre?”

  “Oh no, not a Sancerre.”

  “No. Stupid of me.”

  “What about rosé?”

  “But a good rosé.”

  “Yes, yes, a good rosé, it would be perfect. From where, though?”

  “From Aix?”

  “Ah, Aix…”

  The next apartment, a loft nearby, was across the street from La Conciergerie, a fortress from the Middle Ages that once had been the “antechamber to the guillotine.” The stairs we climbed were centuries old, tacky with black mold.

  “Ah, the charm,” the agent sighed. She paused on a landing for the HR representative to agree. The HR rep nodded, breathless from the climb.

  Inside, I shielded my eyes, the loft was so bright. The apartment was wild. Windows overlooking Notre Dame’s gargoyles, showing the Seine flowing east and west. Sight loosened on Paris. The bathroom was all marble; it had a bathtub with a view and river breezes. And the rent, the agent said, was nothing.

  Unfortunately, the apartment was about the size of the agent’s car.

  “Yes, it’s too small,” she said, patrolling the room in about four steps. “You will hit your head. And you are bringing your wife. You will need space.”

  The agent stopped dead next to the bathtub. Both of us took in the view of Notre Dame’s spires. The agent tugged up her suede boots and said she had an idea.

  “Listen,” she confided, “now suppose you want to have an affair. Men in Paris … Just remember this place. It would be perfect for that.”

  The HR woman said, “The size would be just right.”

  She was sitting on the bed, patting the duvet. She smiled at me, blinked behind her glasses, and laughed. She said in English, “Nice bed, hey?”

  * * *

  My flight home was scheduled for early the next morning. Pierre and his wife, Chloe, said I shouldn’t sleep, instead they’d invite six friends for dinner—it was the Parisian thing to do.

  That night, I caught maybe 10 percent of the French spoken. Lots of talk about films and politics. Everyone knew one another from art school. Everyone smoked. Someone brought up the Minitel; I’d never heard of it. “It is a version of the Internet that the French invented,” one guy told me in English. “No one beyond France desired it, for some reason.”

  Pierre and Chloe were native Parisians. Chloe was my age, Pierre was a little older. They had two young boys who were asleep upstairs, who were accustomed to their parents throwing noisy dinner parties. Pierre was big and tall, dark-haired, with glasses. Gregarious, upbeat, always laughing. Chloe was very pretty, slender, with short black hair and a tiny beauty mark. Both were Parisian from two hundred feet: careless, chic, self-possessed; bon vivant in dress and manner; cigarettes, turtlenecks, et cetera.

  Around midnight, we were finishing off the wine when one of Pierre’s friends told a story about his grandmother, who lived in the countryside outside Paris, and how she recently had gone to the market in her village and bought a piece of cheese. When she brought it home, she realized the cheese was bad, and this made her furious, so she threw the cheese out the window and hit a cow.

  People laughed. Pierre said to me in English, “Did you follow that?”

  “Of course,” I said. “About the cheese?”

  “The cheese? What cheese?”

  I recounted the whole story in English, which most of them understood: the grandmother, the cow. People exploded, laughing like a section of trombones. Pierre, who was crying he was laughing so hard, persevered to say that the story actually had been about his friend’s mother. She’d been hiking and had been trampled by a runaway horse, breaking her leg. Ghastly news. The only funny bit had been something her doctor said to her in the hospital, how she should go back and break the horse’s leg for revenge.

  People started laughing all over again.

  For the rest of the night, until two a.m., I sat next to Pierre and Chloe’s stereo and didn’t speak, pretending to be too stoned. Songs by the American rapper Young Jeezy were playing. He was “The Realest,” and he could laugh about life’s ups and downs with his trademark Ahaaaaa. Meanwhile I was counting my drinks, plunging into a long stare.

  I thought: Jeezy, I don’t know what it’s like to have my phone tapped by the feds, but I hear what you’re saying. Literally: I understand every word. And I acknowledge that if we met in real life we’d have nothing in common. But right now you’re all I’ve got.

  Or maybe I wasn’t pretending to be too stoned.

  Three-thirty in the morning, after Pierre and Chloe’s friends had gone, I went out to the balcony. Paris below me was an empty chapel. No one was out. The big train station, Gare du Nord, was in sight, with tracks and cables like vines on the ground. Each neighboring building had a terrace for a headdress, and curved blue rooftops like hulls of ships upside down—and they’d stood there how long? Had stood above how many Americans in Paris passing through? I experienced a dizzy spell and clutched the railing. Below me, two girls floated home on bicycles cooing to each other. The sound of a scooter came around a corner, followed by its little dark sentry. No stores were open, the city was shut at that hour, and the air smelled of laundry that hadn’t dried.

  O Paris dawns …

  That morning, sneaking out of Pierre and Chloe’s apartment, hoisting my black travel bag on my shoulder, I knew again that I wanted all of it. No matter how many conversations I misunderstood. I couldn’t imagine loving Paris less, only more.

  4

  The advertising agency paid for me to take three hours of French lessons before we moved, to acquaint myself with contemporary business vocabulary. I found an instructor, Gabrielle, who taught from a room overlooking a Manhattan parking garage. At the beginning of my first lesson, Gabrielle gave me a booklet of business vocabulary: la souris, the mouse; l’ordinateur, the computer; le Mac, the Macintosh computer. Gabrielle said this last term would be helpful, since I’d be working in advertising with les créatifs, creative people. Mostly we talked about Gabrielle. She was a frizzy-haired Belgian who wore a vest and a silk scarf in a manner of attempted, botched fashion. Gabrielle said she’d never worked in an office, she herself preferred to be mobile, mobile.

  “Ah,” I said, “mais est-ce que vous avez une mobile?”

  Gabrielle took this as an affront. “Of course I do,” she said, showing me her cell phone. “Don’t you?”

  At the end of our first lesson, Gabrielle said in English, “My boyfriend lives in Paris.” When I asked what he did, where he lived in Paris, she said, “He is an Internet boyfriend.”

  During lesson two, Gabrielle told me she was tired of being a French-teaching mercenary. She’d taught in China and Romania. Now she lived with two other Belgians in a walk-up in Queens. Advertising could be a little break, she wondered. After all, she, too, had dreamed of living in Paris since she was little. If I could do it, why not she?

  “Do you know,” Gabrielle said, “if they are hiring more? Here is my personal e-mail,” she said, scribbling it on her business card.

  To finan
ce the move, Rachel and I sold our bed, mattress, dresser, dining table, and stereo. We packed ten duffel bags, each weighing the maximum amount allowed on the plane, containing clothes, books, a nonstick frying pan, my tennis racquets, and a quarter of Rachel’s shoes. At the airport, the check-in clerk said ohnonononononono. We’d been told wrong, she said, ten huge bags were too many, we’d need to leave at least two behind. After ten minutes and a phone call to her boss, she said okayfinefinefinefinefine, as long as we paid a bunch of fees, which were nearly the equivalent of a third ticket.

  In Paris, when we landed, our luggage filled three carts. The horizon at five a.m., beyond the lights of Charles de Gaulle Airport, was densely black. Outside baggage claim, a man approached me holding a pair of cell phones. He wore two Bluetooth dongles: a plastic oyster squashed into each ear.

  “You need a car to Paris?” He was glancing at some police officers.

  “Avez-vous une grande voiture?” I said. “Comme un camion?”

  But already he was pushing 180 pounds of our stuff toward a revolving door.

  During the drive into Paris, my nerves were fizzy, so I took the opportunity to practice my French. Where are you from? Do you own your own business? Would you recommend your cell-phone provider to me? What kind of data plan do they offer?

  “Hey,” he said, driving while texting, “bequeil.”

  Oh, I couldn’t place the word, I said.

  “Queil,” he repeated while typing, “bequeil.”

  I apologized twice in French, adding, “Je préfère que mon français est bon, mais je ne sais pas—”

  The driver put down his phone, looked at me, and touched my arm.

  “Man, be cool,” he said. “Okay?”

  Beyond the highway, the outskirts of Paris came into view. Many billboards advertising cell phones and cars. Motels built on top of shuttered stores, and train platforms teeming with ants carrying shoulder bags. Some sooty buildings from the nineteenth century, though most were from 1972. We were still miles away from Paris proper, the Pont Neuf’s splendid views; when traffic was bad, the airport could be an hour by car. Still, the deep blue dawn was somehow very French-seeming. On a billboard beside the highway, George Clooney smiled at us and held out an espresso.

  When we pulled into the courtyard of our building, I didn’t know how much to tip, so I gave the driver twenty euros. Way too much. He was about to return it, but gave me his business card instead, imprinting it into my palm. He made me promise to call him anytime for anything, day or night.

  Rachel said, “We made it. Wow, even our luggage made it.”

  In fact, we were early. Our landlord wasn’t scheduled to arrive for thirty minutes to let us in, so I moved our bags inside a ground-floor vestibule, then went out to buy cigarettes. The courtyard door buzzed and clicked, and now I was in Paris, our new home.

  Our street, Rue Béranger, was narrow, one-way. Shops on the ground floor, apartments above. Stores were opening. Men and women zigzagged to work. The city smelled terrific, of the river and boulangeries, street-cleaning crews and summer mornings. I set out down the block. The closest tabac, around the corner, was full of commuters, coffee drinkers, plus a work crew in blue overalls drinking white wine out of delicate little glasses. I knew the phrase: Un petit blanc sec. On one TV, they were watching a horse race, the news on another.

  I wore a gigantic smile and ordered un café.

  When I returned, Rachel said she’d met someone, a tradesman with a message.

  “I memorized it,” Rachel said. “He told me, ‘Je ne parle pas très bien français.’”

  I said, “Why would he tell you he didn’t speak very good French?”

  “What?” Rachel said. “No, he asked me some question in French. I had no idea, so I said what I’d memorized, Excusez-moi, je suis desolée, je ne parle pas bon français. Then he said, ‘Non, je ne parle pas—’”

  “Right,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “He was correcting you. Baby, I’m sorry, he was just telling you what you should have been saying.”

  The cigarette tasted disgusting. I squashed it underfoot and kicked it down a storm drain.

  * * *

  That night we went across the street to a glass-roofed passageway and took a table in the back of what seemed like a charming little bistro. It turned out to be an Australian bar; they served ostrich fillets in addition to gigot d’agneau. The air inside was sweltering. The walls were decorated with X-rated cartoons, with people shaped like sausages having an orgy on the beach. One table over, French office workers were crashing together beer glasses to celebrate someone’s anniversaire. Rachel and I got two orders of steak frites, and a carafe of red wine to split. The food took forever to arrive and tasted horrible, daubs of gray on greasy plates. But I was too thrilled to notice—Rachel, too, from the look on her face. We couldn’t see straight from all the smoke, but more from delight, because there we were, eating steak frites in Paris around the corner from our own apartment, ostrich meat be damned.

  I was exhausted. So much was astonishing.

  5

  Paris’s neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl—a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig’s tail, a whorling braid notched one to twenty. But if you walk from one neighborhood to the next, there is little to suggest the numbers changing. So it was confusing. Anyway, if you began in the middle of the Seine and snaked around, we lived on the Right Bank in the top of the third arrondissement, called the haut Marais, the upper Marais, on Rue Béranger, a quiet little street curling down from Place de la République.

  We’d chosen the apartment so we could be within walking distance of nearly everything. I’d overlooked its darkness and short ceilings for location’s sake: fifteen minutes to Notre Dame; twenty-five to the Louvre.

  Earlier generations of Americans wanted to live on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, where artists and students rambled, but the Left Bank had long ago priced out the artists and students. Now it was home to the rich of Paris, the wealthy of the retired-expat class, and Russian moguls, while the youthful and creative tended to live on the Right Bank, especially in the higher, cheaper numbers, the nineteenth or the twentieth—if not the Right Bank of Berlin, or Toronto.

  But we were very happy about our neighborhood, if not our quarters. Our apartment, located above a costume jewelry shop, was dismal and dark. The apartment above us was being renovated—I hadn’t heard the noises during my initial visit. So during our first days—we had a solid week before I was required at work—we tried to get out as much as possible.

  Behind our street was a village of elbow streets, sunny walls and filthy corners, and many tucked-away shops. A ten-minute walk south was the proper Marais, the former Jewish quarter that had become a trendy shopping zone, but our northern district was still untrafficked. There were tailors and art galleries. Cafés and butchers. A store that sold athletic trophies and one that sold model trains. A blood-samples lab, a computer-repair agency, a video rental. On a leafy corner was a brightly lit lingerie-and-sex-toy boutique.

  And where roads didn’t cross was an old covered market, the Marché du Temple, blue with a dirty glass roof. Some weekends, men trucked in what appeared to be stolen leather goods, but otherwise the market stood empty—Thursdays, maybe it was Tuesdays, a tennis league strung up nets inside—and the surrounding quadrant would be filled with people dawdling over café tables that they’d occupy for hours, chatting with friends. Then behind the market was Rue Bretagne, a picturesque street that wasn’t trendy yet. It would be soon, but not yet. Rue Bretagne had a park with a playground, two bookstores, a boutique that sold vintage radios, a booth that sold found photographs—it was the Left Bank I’d seen in picture books, preserved in time. At the center stood the oldest Paris farmer’s market still operating, Le Marché des Enfants Rouges, built in the 1600s, now ringed by food stalls that sold Moroccan tagines, h
uge piles of Turkish desserts, West African stews, even sushi.

  It was fantastic.

  Rachel and I tramped from dawn to late at night, and collapsed each evening. We also spent a lot of time having our pictures taken. Every service we signed up for in Paris—cell phones, Internet, electricity—required passport photos, with strict rules about their composure. On two separate occasions, we were asked to resubmit our photos; too much smiling. No visible happiness was allowed in official pictures—pas de sourire, visage dégagé.

  To become Parisian was business très serieux.

  Anyway, we set up home: bought dishes, stocked the larder, purchased a mop and broom. We ate cheaply so we could afford a few good meals, including an expensive lunch one day inside the Musée d’Orsay, under rows of dazzling chandeliers, where we drank too much wine. Later we got caught in a rainstorm, running for shelter alongside the Seine. That week we must have seen … we saw a lot. But there were also errands to do.

  For example, we visited a bank to open a checking account and apply for a credit card. Well, France didn’t have credit cards. Perhaps didn’t grasp them, conceptually—it wasn’t clear. The bank representative, who did not speak English, said I shouldn’t be bothered, that yes, our accounts included debit cards.

  “No,” I said in French, “I apply for a card of credit.”

  “This is what you have, a debit card,” she said.

  “No. The debit card, it takes money, when I have money,” I said, going slowly to find the words. “I want a card that does not have a need for money.”

  The banker rumbled it for a second. “Well,” she said, “we have an option where the card does not remove the money until the end of the month. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” I said. “Something different.” I smiled cheerfully and tried again. “I want the card when I do not have money.”

  “Maybe I do not understand,” she said. “What type of bank has cards like these?”

  “American banks,” I said. “For example, if I want a computer for two thousand euros, but I do not have two thousand euros? I have a card. The card buys the computer. I give money to the card. Each month, a little money. Then: two thousand euros.”