Finally I got a spot. Everyone was pressed together, but no one spoke. At night, Paris swayed home in silence, all of us leaning on one another. At worst, people got hooked on each other’s earbud cables, and they’d apologize while they helped one another unwind.
* * *
The big book on the Métro that season was Millénium, a trio of crime novels by the Swedish author Stieg Larsson. At that point, the books were still unknown in America, but they were everywhere in France. Coworkers lugged their copies to the office each morning, walking through the front door with their noses buried deep.
I wasn’t feeling very hopeful about the future of books. The novel I was writing appeared to be going unhurriedly backward, sliding toward the trash. I’d sit at the kitchen table in the morning, stare at the laptop screen, and think, Maybe I should do a sidebar in the second booklet about mother-child bonding at feeding time.
Everyone knew Paris was where artists moved to pursue art. But I was only writing in stitches, having journeyed to Paris to pursue ad sales. And meanwhile some people, the trust-funders we met through A Small World, had all the time in the world to write the shittiest novels imaginable.
These were my thoughts on the Métro.
Autumn arrived in wools, cool and gray. At dusk, the Grand Palais looked just as golden-orange as the surrounding trees, and every Parisian man wore a scarf. Some even wore coats. The benches at my park, where I ate lunch, were often empty. Our crowd thinned to a few regulars, whom I nicknamed:
Stephen King, late fifties, every day reading a Stephen King book, wearing a shapeless jacket, black glasses, and a mustache that defined his face.
The Puzzlers, a man and a woman about the same age as Stephen King, who’d curl up on a bench, him with a cigar and her with cigarettes, smoking together while they did a puzzle in the newspaper.
Two crazies: ATC and Louis XIV. ATC was Air Traffic Controller, because he wore plastic shopping bags over his hands to conduct park visitors in through the gate. When there weren’t visitors to conduct, he conducted birds. When there weren’t birds, he talked loudly to himself.
Louis XIV was the sun king, lord of bronzage, a fat brown man who wore orange surf trunks even in cold weather. No shirt, no shoes. By the time I arrived for lunch, he’d be in position, depending on whichever part of him needed to improve its color.
One afternoon, we had the park to ourselves. A dark sky swirled above us like a wind-blown lake. Rain started to fall. I ran for cover. Louis XIV was lying facedown on the lawn and didn’t stir. Then, after a minute in the rain, he got up slowly, staring angrily at the sky. He treaded slowly toward me across the lawn, and we stood there a good ten minutes while I ate my pasta and he watched the clouds. We didn’t exchange a word.
15
La grève crippled Paris: a strike. To protest Sarkozy’s new reform plans, transit workers walked off the job—meaning no trains ran in Paris, no buses and no Métro—and other unions soon followed suit.
Paris became a throng of vehicles, all the boulevards jammed.
The agency instructed us to bicycle, skate, or walk. Cyclists wore reflective vests and carried knapsacks, bringing changes of clothes to work. Some of my coworkers faced two-hour hikes each way, up and down Montmartre. But few complained. Paris for the most part was on the strikers’ side, at least in the beginning.
Some mornings, Pierre gave me a ride on his scooter. I’d resist holding on to him while we threaded our way between trucks and cars, with a half-inch of clearance on either side. I expected to have my fingers rubbed off. Some days, if Pierre couldn’t pick me up, I walked the hour to work through the highlights of Paris—along the Seine to the Tuileries, past the fountains and windblown chairs; past chauffeurs idling outside the Ritz; up the Champs-Elysées to my desk—and it was the world’s most pleasant commute.
And some days, if I left home early enough and found one available, I rented a Vélib. Vélibs were hot commodities during the strike. Rumors circulated that people were hoarding them, storing them at home rather than returning them to their stations. When I was lucky enough to nab one, I’d bike along Rue de Rivoli, Paris’s equator, and fly past the Louvre’s arcades, where scooters zipped out like birds from a birdhouse. Next came Place de la Concorde, an enormous, bewildering traffic circle where I almost died several times. There weren’t any marked lanes for traffic—there wouldn’t have been in the eighteenth century, when Concorde was constructed—yet there were four or five lanes full of speeding vehicles that I was expected to enter. One time, my coat got stuck in the back wheel and I flipped over in front of a truck. Twice I cut off cars and made them stop. Why couldn’t everybody cooperate to avoid my slaughter? Later, André explained why I hadn’t had the right-of-way, and he suggested that visitors who came from countries where people preferred four wheels to two shouldn’t be allowed to rent bicycles.
But I continued cycling, and I also learned from Tomaso some proper French insults, like Enculé de ta mère! (Goddamn motherfucker!).
Anyway, I switched to riding on the sidewalk around Concorde. It was illegal, but much less dangerous—for me and for France. I’d ring my bell and pedal up the long rise of the Champs-Elysées until I reached the office, hung up my coat, bonjoured the room and chose a few people to kiss, and got to work.
* * *
Julie, my desk neighbor, invited me out for pizza. She’d never invited me anywhere before. She said, whispering, while Françoise and Olivier discussed some layout problems with a project manager, that she needed someone to talk to who wasn’t French.
On the sidewalk Julie explained why: she didn’t want to stir up trouble, but she was sick of the strikers—she drew a finger across her neck—as well as those coworkers who couldn’t stop talking about sympathizing with them.
“Françoise wanted to get lunch, that’s why I asked you instead,” Julie said in English at the restaurant. “Françoise is one of them,” she added darkly.
“It is not very cool to be my age and prefer Sarkozy,” Julie said, after we’d ordered pizzas. “Françoise, for example, hates Sarkozy. She’s traditional, a socialist—she’s like all French people who drive me crazy, who live in dreamworlds. Dreams are fine for poets, and I am a poet, you know, but come on, this is not reality.”
Julie started getting worked up, gaining volume: “Françoise looks at society and says it should be this particular way—traditional France, what she’s known. Why? Because that’s how life should be, she says. The French mode. Then I explain to her that with globalization and the EU, with world trade, we cannot expect to preserve our ‘beautiful way’ and not pay for it. And she returns to, Oh, but you see, it should be this way. If we just wait, the rest of the world will adapt to us.”
I was going to say something, but Julie wasn’t done: “Look, it would be nice to live in Françoise’s dream. Believe me. But that is not the world today. Ancient Europe … it’s corrupt. But you can’t tell that to Françoise. The Left in France—which is all of Paris, mostly—they say they’re liberal, but in fact they are extremely conservative. They want to cut us off from other countries, from sharing, trading. And then what?”
After ten minutes of this, our lunches arrived. Julie ripped open a packet of red-pepper oil and squirted it all over her pizza, as the French do. Julie said in English, “We need to live in the world and look after our interests—that is my position. But, come on, you need to look at reality once in a while to come to this opinion.”
I was about to tell her that I appreciated her sharing her perspective with me, but at that moment Françoise and Olivier, and some other people—François, Scottish Keith—came up the stairs, and Julie gripped my arm and swore me to keep her capitalist confession.
* * *
Back in the summer, a story had appeared in my morning papers that the president was in really good shape. Sarkozy, already known as a jogger, one so badass he wore NYPD T-shirts and state-trooper glasses to look tough when he exercised, had come under suspicion for b
eing too fit.
Now that he was no longer running for president, the papers wondered, wasn’t there something despotic about his desire to run more?
A trainer told L’Equipe, the sports newspaper, that Sarkozy was, in fact, running wrong. His stride was off. His feet hit the ground with inefficient strokes. During a television program that ran on the subject, which I didn’t catch but read about later in the London Times, a French philosopher said, “Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade. Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body. The jogger says I am in control. It has nothing to do with meditation.”
A French media critic also told the Times that images of Sarkozy going running were “a major weapon” of “manipulation.”
Perhaps all of that was true and made some media-academic types feel better about their lack of fitness. But it didn’t account for the thousands of joggers in Paris. During the worst week of the strike, Rachel and I attended an art gallery opening in the Marais with Pierre and Chloe, and Pierre’s sister Monique, the economics professor. Sipping champagne, Monique told me all this worrying about le jogging was out of date. Running was chic these days; the media were simply stirring up old clichés. You’d see Parisians running everywhere now, she said; it was simply another form of sport.
And it’s true, we had seen them. At Buttes-Chaumont or the Tuileries Gardens, the parks where Rachel and I jogged, there were plenty of Parisian runners, and many much more serious than we: timing laps, interval training, wearing Lycra tights and ventilated shirts. Their enthusiasm wasn’t just for conditioning or weight loss, but running-as-sport, which was Monique’s point and which seemed to be the distinction the Sarkozy watchers were worried about. In France, sport was considered good—soccer, rugby, tennis, martial arts—but running for running’s sake? Pure body management.
Being trim today was important for appearances, Parisians confirmed, but probably best achieved—if you didn’t play a sport—through means other than huffing and puffing. My coworkers said the best thing to do if you wanted to lose weight was catch une gastro, an intestinal bug. They were only half joking. Une gastro was a mysterious wind that sporadically blew through Paris, attacking half the city. Locals knew a gastro was circulating when the streets were painted with vomit.
During one week in November, almost one-third of the office called in sick with a gastro. I would swear all of them had lost ten kilos by the time they returned, beaming with a glow.
As the weather cooled, Rachel decided to join a gym in our neighborhood. It belonged to the Club Med corporation, which operated more than twenty gyms in Paris; it had taken a company known for islands of pleasure to succeed in selling the gym concept to France. Rachel took a tour before she signed up. The manager was proud to show her his new pool. It was about the size of a large aquarium, Rachel said. “I would guess a lap requires two kicks.” A woman in a black bikini had been floating in the pool under purple lights, listening to ambient techno music.
The gym offered two levels of membership. The basic package included use of the facility, but for an additional thirty euros a month, Rachel would receive a towel, plus a comprehensive accident-insurance package in case she was harmed by a Nautilus machine. For a little extra cash each month, you, too, can wipe away any signs of body management, and rest assured you will not be injured by exercising. Rachel told the manager she’d take the basic level. Excellent, he replied, now all he needed was for Rachel to fill out an application and supply two photographs; a photocopy of her passport; a photocopy of a recent bill; a photocopy of our apartment’s lease; a photocopy of our residency application; a notarized document translated into French that proved Rachel had internationally covered health insurance, since our residency papers still hadn’t come through; et cetera.
Bureaucracy being France’s first sport.
* * *
Bruno and I had our first fight at work. We were sitting in the canteen when he slammed down his espresso cup. His shoulders tilted toward me. I began to stare out the window.
We were at odds over my productivity. According to Bruno, I’d churned out the first drafts of our baby books too quickly. He insisted I slow down. “You can’t let them do this to you.” He was disgusted. Obviously I hadn’t learned anything about business in Paris, at least not from Bruno. “What are you, a slave? This schedule is bullshit. I thought we were agreed.”
My argument was that the faster we finished, the sooner we’d be done. Wiser to play monkey among the monkeys. But Bruno said I didn’t have the right perspective, I was being too American again.
Behind us, coworkers were battling at Tekken 5 on PlayStation.
“This is hell,” Bruno said, stabbing some printouts with his finger, “you agree?”
“Comme-çi, comme-ça,” I said. I stared at the scar on Bruno’s ear. I said, We’re wasting our lives on work, yes, but no, this wasn’t exactly hell—typing, chatting, having coffee, and when there was leisure time we played video games in a converted ballroom under frescoes?
“It is hell, listen to me,” Bruno said sharply. “You do not understand hell. You think hell is something that stops. You pass through hell and at the end you think there is something new. This is what I’m saying: there is no end to this project. Only more hell. We must stop together, you and me.”
I realized: he was asking me to go on strike.
Bruno quavered, “Sometimes you forget we are a team.”
I said I’d think about it, and left him sitting there on a red vinyl couch.
Truthfully, after hearing many opinions floated around the office, I found the public-sector strikes in Paris a little ridiculous—more pantomime than struggle—never mind a pain in the ass. And I didn’t agree with Bruno’s logic. But I had a secret. Pierre had told me he was going to switch me off infant nutrition to another account in January, “something more ‘luxe,’” he said, meaning Louis Vuitton, the firm’s big fashion/luggage client, one of France’s most storied brands. Pierre’s plan was that I’d train Keith, the Scottish copywriter, to take over my breast-feeding work, then switch. But Pierre didn’t want Bruno knowing any of this yet, because he didn’t plan to bring Bruno onto fashion/luggage, too.
Traditionally, art directors and copywriters moved within agencies as couples, never splitting. But Pierre wanted me and Bruno divorced. For the moment, I needed to keep the plan secret.
I walked away and Bruno called in English after me, “Hey, don’t forget, when you go speed, I forced to go speed, too.”
* * *
By early November, I understood more than half of what I heard. I no longer returned home each night with headaches. I still needed to squint at my coworkers to read their lips; telephone calls remained misery. But my life in French was improving.
Rachel had it harder. Because our budget was tight, she’d quit her French classes that month when we couldn’t afford them anymore. Now she was trying to learn on her own from her old schoolbooks, if not osmosis.
“The stupidest things will drive you crazy,” she said. “Like I went to the grocery store yesterday, I didn’t tell you this, that Franprix on Bretagne? So I filled up a cart of groceries and brought it to the cashier. She’d rung up almost everything when I reached into my purse and realized I’d left my wallet at home. But what could I say? There’s a line of people behind me. I tried to communicate, but I didn’t even know how to say ‘wallet.’ It was awful. I’m miming, I’ll be right back. So I sprinted home, grabbed my wallet, and ran back to the store. Of course they were very pleasant about it, they’d kept my bags for me to the side. They even seemed surprised to see me back so quickly. Like, Madame, it’s okay, no big rush.”
Living in a country that had been loaned to you, there were plenty of moments when you were grateful. Bridges sparkled. Cashiers smiled. The girl at the pâtisserie took an extra minute to wrap up your éclair like it was a present for the king. But when you didn’t know the words for “Shit, I forgot my wal
let,” any moment could implode.
16
In the media dustup around Sarkozy’s running habit, a journalist in Libération commented, “Jogging is, of course, about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the Right.”
Observed during one morning’s run in Buttes-Chaumont:
A man in a white collared shirt, khaki trousers, loafers, no socks, with the cuffs of his pants rolled to mid-calf. His running companion wore black tights, a black cashmere sweater, ballet flats, enormous black Chanel sunglasses, makeup, and a gold pendant necklace. Both of them were chatting while jogging a ten-minute mile.
An elderly man running in sweatpants, T-shirt, headband, sneakers, and a green houndstooth blazer.
A beautiful woman jogging in jeans and suede loafers, while swinging an oversize handbag.
Buttes-Chaumont is located in the nineteenth arrondissement, a mixed neighborhood of whites and blacks and Arabs. The Herald Tribune reported gang fights occurring in Buttes-Chaumont, but I only saw groups keeping to themselves: teenage boys chasing teenage girls; teenage girls glomming together. On Saturdays, Orthodox Jews strolled around the lake. Above the lake, a Greek temple sits atop a crag, surrounded by cliffs. On sunny days, the hills would be dotted with picnickers, women tanning in bikinis. Firemen, les pompiers, staged rappelling exercises down a waterfall.
One Sunday, for variety, we went running in the Luxembourg Gardens. The whole city was out, including dozens of people running in fancy workout gear. But how they’d gotten to the park was a mystery. No one outside the gates wore exercise clothes, not a single person. Did the runners change into their Lycra in a phone booth? Did they arrive by pneumatic tube?
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