* * *
Our weekday routine quickly fell into place. At night, I’d leave the office around seven or seven-thirty, then have dinner with Rachel before putting in an hour or two on the online magazine that I helped edit. Around eleven, we’d unwind with some TV. In New York, Rachel had worked for nonprofits while writing on the side, but she wasn’t allowed to work in Paris without a visa, so she was taking French classes five days a week and working on a screenplay. She also did all the household shopping, cooking, and cleaning—playing the part of femme au foyer (housewife).
Our budget allowed for two dinners out each month. I heard from a journalist friend in the States about a “secret” restaurant located near our apartment, where two young Americans served gourmet food in their dining room, without permits. We obtained reservations via e-mail and set out for dinner on a Saturday night. The sun was setting. Dusk bloomed on otherwise plain streets. The shadows were oblong, bowing into Place de la République, and the wind blowing north from the Seine came in gusts, scattering dust and leaves. I took Rachel’s hand, we zigzagged through alleys, and our evening seemed terrifically Parisian: going down Rue Turbigo at that hour with the smells of autumn, out for a dinner party like the rest of Paris.
So we didn’t want anything to spoil the mood.
Rachel and I were seated in the chefs’ dining room with six American investment bankers who mostly knew one another from Dartmouth; two retired college professors from Lewiston, Maine; and a young Polish woman who was visiting Paris with her mother, who’d never left Poland before and spoke neither French nor English. Aside from one of the bankers’ girlfriends, who was Canadian, there wasn’t a single French-speaker in the room. For several hours we ate a menu of American gourmet comfort food—courses like miniature grilled cheese sandwiches floating in tomato soup—while the bankers talked about working too hard to have any time to spend all their money.
“The thing about the French is, they’re death eaters for hours worked. I mean, go home, be French already.”
“It’s true, Parisians work crazy hard.”
“My boss is a monster.”
“It’s not like I don’t try to speak French? But, you know, screw you very much.”
“Parisians don’t like English-speakers.”
“So I had, like, my mother visiting? And we went to Boulevard Saint-Germain? I mean, she didn’t recognize anything.”
“Paris is a morgue, architecturally, they all say it.”
“The food’s in San Francisco now.”
“I don’t know. I kind of like Paris. The bread.”
“Well, yeah, the bread.”
“So did you go undergrad, or business school?”
“We should picnic this weekend.”
“There’s a Small World picnic on Saturday, I think.”
“You hear Berlin, but everyone I know’s in London.”
“The money in London is incredible right now.”
“Well, you should see the Arabs they have.”
To give them credit, the professors were nice, but I didn’t talk to them much. Sitting across from the Polish girl, Lilli, I was constantly needed. Lilli wore a red cotton dress and had flat blond hair. Frequently, she’d grab my wrist and stare at me, as if she had state secrets she needed me to smuggle out of the country.
Her mother looked like a pile of gym towels.
Early on, Lilli began by proposing three toasts: to Paris; to her new business; and to Eli and “the beautiful Jessie,” our chefs. Then she took my hand and taught me a Polish tongue twister: W Szczebrzeszynie chrzszcz brzmi w trzcinie. It meant, she said, “In the town of Szczebrzeszyn, a beetle buzzes in the reeds.”
Lilli got tipsy fast, too fast. There were a lot of sudden declarations, whispered or shouted. She confided in me, “Mama is a farmer’s bride; my father is a pig farmer. To make more money, you see, I have convinced them to turn the farm into a hotel. In Warsaw, I am a travel agent. The bed-and-breakfast, it’s the trend now, you know, people staying to work on the farm and eat from the land.”
Lilli shouted at me, “Attention! This is why we are in Paris. To study.”
To study hotels? I said.
“Perfectly,” she said. She beat my arm with a fork. One bottle of wine down, another opened. “To exhaust Paris,” Lilli said, refilling our glasses. “Café de Flore we did yesterday. You know this: amazing. L’Opéra, Printemps, Le Louvre, amazing. Le Lipp, you know it? Of course.”
At one point, the bankers got loud, and Lilli glowered down the table. “TO THE CITY OF LIGHTS,” she yelled, pointing her empty wineglass at them like a flashlight.
“We are also here to eat,” Lilli confided in me. “My mother, she loves French food. But in my opinion? It is mostly terrible. Like this tacos. This is hell!”
We’d just been served fish tacos. Personally, I thought they’d do San Diego proud.
Next, Lilli’s mother said something in Polish, which were her first words of the evening. One of the professors asked Lilli what her mother had said, and Lilli frowned. Lilli said, “I shouldn’t tell you. It is stupid.” She snapped at her mother in Polish, and her mother went back to eating. “Well, okay,” Lilli said, in the tone of a guilty five-year-old, “Mama says she likes the tacos very much.”
She laughed: “Whatever!”
By course four, Lilli had finished all the wine. She shouted for Eli—“that bastard Eli”—to bring us more. The other chef, Jessie, appeared. Jessie said quietly to Lilli, “Eli is plating the next course. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“We need wine,” Lilli said, pouting. “But I want Eli to do it!”
“Well, like I said, he’s busy right now.” Jessie tried to escape. Lilli snatched her arm. “It’s not fair,” Lilli said, pulling Jessie, “him being chef all night when you play servant. What happened to us, what happened about women having power?”
A minute later, Eli appeared in the doorway to introduce the final course: “So here we’ve got a small portion—”
“Eli,” Lilli interrupted loudly, “stop talking, please. We would like to hear from Jessie now.” Lilli tried grabbing Eli by the belt and fell out of her chair. “Why do you,” she stammered, getting up, “get all the credit, because Jessie is your slave? Women are not slaves. Women are chefs, too, didn’t you know this?”
We walked home in a daze, down a quiet street of shuttered chain stores, Métro stations, and cafés closing for the night. Somewhere, surely, I thought, French people in Paris were doing French things, but how to find them? At home, Rachel propped up my laptop on the bottom of the bed while I threw open the windows. We watched a DVD we’d started the night before, from the Ric Burns documentary New York, a history of New York City. Since our move, we’d gone through the whole series twice, Rachel pointed out.
I said, “We have?”
Rachel said, with a kind of sadness I hadn’t heard in her voice since we’d moved, “I miss knowing what people are saying. Being part of what’s going on around me.”
“Oh, the bankers?”
“No no,” Rachel said. “I’m not superinterested in knowing what’s new at Goldman Sachs. But people at the grocery store, on the street. I really wish my French classes were better, for what we’re spending.”
Rachel had said before that her teacher was good, but the class was a struggle. Students cycled in and out so frequently, it was hard for the instructor to make headway. Plus, since few of Rachel’s classmates shared a language—her classes were truly global: students from Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia—the only common tongue in class was French, which none of them spoke. But Rachel did her homework, practiced conversation. And when she wasn’t being une femme au foyer, she loved her time at home writing and saw progress in her creative work.
Outside, inside, the night was us alone, with zero noise. Nothing but a chill. We were amateurs at everything.
11
Carlos, a Parisian senior Web developer at the agency, took to calling me his nigger. Sometim
es his Negro, but mostly his nigger. Shouting me out in a corridor, thumping me on the back, “What’s up, my nigger?”
The second time it happened, I told him it could not continue. Carlos was crestfallen. He’d thought it was okay; he said he thought it was our little thing. After all, it was what I’d called him the first time we met.
That is impossible, I said.
“You don’t remember? I don’t believe you,” Carlos said in English. Then, raising his eyebrows, “… my nigger?”
Evidently my French was so bad, it produced slurs.
At work, my desk was papered with breasts. I didn’t think anyone would mind, cleavage in Paris being everywhere—décolletage on the street and in the office revealing a lot more than found in the States. There were sexy girls on the sides of newspaper huts and buses, and on TV channels during lingerie advertisements (ba bum bum bum ba ba…). Only a few years earlier in France, busts of the Victoria’s Secret model Laetitia Casta had been installed—busts of her bust—in municipal buildings across the country after Casta had been elected by France’s mayors to embody Marianne, symbol of the French Republic. Each statue’s bra, of course, covered just one breast.
On my desk, though, these were not Victoria’s Secret breasts. These were breasts busy feeding. Breasts like soda fountains. I’d never associated breasts with nutrition before. In fact, not doing so was one of my favorite parts about being married without children. But for Bruno’s and my infant-nutrition work, my desk had become a slush pile of topless pics that coworkers found unpleasant for their lack of sexiness. Olivier even made a tower of books to block them from his view.
One day after lunch, I found André fiddling with my laptop.
“You left your music on,” André said. “You made the office sound like a sushi restaurant.”
I pointed out that Air was a French band, in fact. André shrugged. He was wearing a magenta Lacoste, showing wooly cleavage.
In eighteen months, there would be, at most, ten instances when I’d see André in a non-Lacoste shirt. He owned them in two dozen hues and fades—André the office crocodile, grinning or snapping, pooped or hungry.
“So, please explain this … cleavage,” André said doubtfully, picking up a book from around my desk. “Look, it’s okay to have pictures of naked girls at work, but this—”
He lifted up an illustration showing a nipple in cross-section.
André said, sighing, “You’ve ruined it.”
Bruno, my morose art director, was lurking behind André’s shoulder, clutching his laptop. That week, he was working in a room upstairs; for some reason, André and Pierre couldn’t settle on where to seat him permanently. He burst out laughing, huk huk huk. André ignored him and went back to his office, and Bruno resumed his permanent frown.
Bruno’s and my work together involved me writing, and Bruno designing, a series of booklets to be distributed in third-world hospitals to teach new mothers how to feed their babies. It was something I knew nothing about, yet our first booklet was due in two weeks.
I’d asked during my first meeting, Where does the information come from on how to feed babies? No, the managers said, the important question is, how will you “message” the information? Okay, I said, but where do I obtain the information to message? Ah, they said, but you can use the information that has already been created by previous writers on this account. (Which I’d reviewed and found to be wrong.) Or you can make up more. (Which terrified me.) Or use the Internet. (Which made me start laughing.)
The style of the thing is the challenge, one manager said; less what is said than how.
They wanted to know how would We, the royal We that was our team, the editorial We that was the client’s brand, how would We convince new mothers that We were their most valuable resource? I said, “Well, aren’t We a little worried about Me from a Legal Standpoint?”
“You see, you can’t talk to them,” Bruno told me afterward, chain-smoking on the street. “It is a war, the difference between managers and artists. They really are different people.”
Similar meetings went on for a week. I told our managers I would figure out their style problem once they’d figured out my information problem. Seeking détente, they offered to hire two experts, a British nutritionist and an Austrian pediatrician, who would provide the factual information I could “craft” into proper “brand messages.” To facilitate the job, I was advised to read a number of maternity guides: the French and British equivalents of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
Doing my homework on the Métro, I found Frenchwomen giving me friendly, flirty looks.
An e-mail came from a friend in the States, asking how I was holding up. I told him that after two months in France, I had breast fatigue. Oh, I can imagine, he said. I said, No, you can’t.
* * *
Everyone in the office took an hour’s lunch. It was the midday reflex, but it was also required: professionals in France were docked lunch money from their salaries, then reimbursed through little booklets of meal tickets they were expected to use in nearby restaurants.
Typically, coworkers preferred to get takeout, bringing food back to the canteen, where they ate in groups. Almost no one ate alone. The only people I saw eat at their desks besides me were Pierre, who’d worked in New York, and Keith, the Scottish copywriter, who liked to watch Jon Stewart clips on his computer while he ate his jambon beurre.
But eating at your desk was not cool. The third time I tried it was my last. Olivier complained: Why couldn’t I eat in the canteen like a normal person?
“I am sorry,” Olivier said, his voice rising, “I am sorry, but this is not the United States.” Olivier turned and said to Françoise, “This is an office, a communal office!”
Julie whispered to me in English from the corner of her mouth, “You should go.”
Olivier’s face was reddening.
“And now it smells terrible!” Olivier shouted. He walloped his desk with his fist. I made my exit while he raged, “How am I supposed to work when it smells in here like a burger shop? Do we all work in a burger shop now that the American is here?”
In fact, we did work in a burger shop most days. At least in the canteen. Two-thirds of people’s takeout food came from the McDonald’s next door. My fellow advertising employees, including Olivier, loved McDonald’s. After lunch, the trash cans would be full of bags with golden arches.
There were plenty of fast-food outlets on the Champs-Elysées, but McDonald’s was considered by my coworkers to be classier, more delicious. “It’s for families,” a guy named François told me. He said, surprised, “You don’t go to McDonald’s in the States?”
The McDonald’s next door was thoroughly French: spacious, handsome, clean. It featured a McCafé up front, which sold McDonald’s espresso and McDonald’s croissants and McDonald’s macarons, and in the back were the registers that sold burgers, fries, and also beer. Some coworkers, I learned, would walk all the way to a McDonald’s on Rue Troyon, ten minutes away, “because the sandwiches are better.” But either way, most people stuck to what I found a very French way of enjoying McDonald’s: in multiple courses. Chicken nuggets first, then fries and a burger (a Royale Deluxe, or a Big Tasty), frequently two burgers for the men, followed by a salad, and finished with a chocolate muffin or a shake or a hot-fudge sundae. No matter if the ice cream melted by the time they’d finished courses one through three over a span of forty-five minutes.
According to The New York Times, an average visitor to McDonald’s in France spent fifteen dollars, versus four in the United States.
Bruno, on the other hand, never ate at McDonald’s. Bruno was a gourmand. He spent thirty euros on lunch, dining in nice brasseries or at a sushi restaurant if he could rope someone into joining him. Most days I refused, and he’d drive his scooter back to his neighborhood for a steak and some wine with friends. Like everyone else, Bruno did not eat alone. The fact that I preferred to eat alone was considered weird.
Bruno wo
uld say, “Fine, go ahead, go do work even at lunchtime.”
Lunch, however, was how I stayed on track, I could have explained to Bruno—but I didn’t know the French for “on track.” Advertising did weird things to writers, I would have told him. In New York, I’d seen it water down friends’ ambitions and force them to collect mid-century furniture. So I’d flee the office at noon, buy some Italian takeout, and walk to a park on Rue Balzac. There I’d grab a bench and employ a red pen on whatever progress I’d made that morning on my novel, and afterward take a nap and daydream my muddled fantasies, smelling Paris, hearing the universe remind me that it didn’t owe me crap.
Early autumn in Paris was temperate and dry. My lunch park, a rolling grassy lawn in the eighth arrondissement, was about an acre in size, engraved by gravel paths. Paris was dotted with tiny parks such as that one, and lunchtimes were crowded with office workers picnicking, students smoking and chatting, and college girls who would undress down to bikinis and sunbathe on the lawn while men gazed from their benches, eating their sandwiches with two hands.
Not me, though. I was married. Plus I was fed up with breasts. I’d think, Oh, cover up your functionality already.
* * *
But I spent a lot of time in the park thinking about Bruno, not my novel. Bruno was mentally difficult to resist. I’d decided Bruno was a lover, not a fighter. As a lover, he was never satisfied. Especially at work. Bruno felt neglected. He was abused by middle managers and overlooked by higher-ups. We talked about it a lot: how Bruno fought daily against the idea of quitting, even leaving Paris, his hometown.
Bruno was one of the least theoretical people I’d ever met. Maybe it was specific only to Bruno, not all Parisians, the way his eyes dipped, how his spirit battled with the status quo. Perhaps the chip on his shoulder was in some ways a cushion. Or maybe it was a leftover trait from thousands of years of Parisian evolution.
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