It reminded me of the scene in Charade when Audrey Hepburn visits Walter Matthau at the American embassy, and he likewise serves her sandwiches from a basket—“liverwurst, liverwurst, chicken and liverwurst.”
Jean-Paul was offering chicken, liverwurst, or grilled vegetables on ciabatta.
“Pierre tells me you are new to Paris, to advertising,” Jean-Paul said in French. He had a friendly smile. “You’re from New York, which neighborhood again?”
“Brooklyn,” I said.
“Of course,” Jean-Paul said. “I’ve heard that all the artists live in Brooklyn. I’ve been meaning to visit Brooklyn, specifically one neighborhood, where you find the painters now, how do you call it?”
“Williamsburg,” Pierre said.
Jean-Paul relished the word: “Williamsburg … fantastique.” He turned to me. “So, do you like advertising? Living here in France?”
I suppose I decided to test my French a little. Truthfully, I never really knew what I was going to say in those interviewish moments; I tended to find my head after the fact. “So, this weekend,” I said, “in the Métro, I saw an advertisement for a video game. For girls. It was interesting. An electronic game, but for a girl. You see?”
“Really?” Jean-Paul said.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “This was my first advertisement that I see for a video game. For girls. About horses.”
“Ah…,” Jean-Paul said. He looked at Pierre. Pierre shrugged. Jean-Paul said, “Perhaps I don’t understand. Do girls not play video games?”
“So, in the Métro, on a poster,” I continued, “I thought it was very good. Also, very French. So, in a good fashion.”
To be clear, the reason I said “so” a lot was because I loved the way the word sounded in French, donc, and how the French used it. Donc was pronounced with a hard “c.” It sounded like a rock being chucked into a creek. Parisians were always using it to begin a sentence, Donc…, and they’d pause afterward, and let the ripples flow.
“Please explain,” Jean-Paul said.
“Because it was egalitarian,” I said. “So, in the United States, you do not see advertisements that offer technology for girls. It is progressive, and I like that. So, I like the promise of the advertisement. You must understand the game,” I said, leaning forward toward Jean-Paul. “Imagine you are a girl. You have a horse in your pocket. Not a true horse, a digital horse. But this is the dream of a girl, to have a horse. So she is happy. And because she adores her horse, the game gives her a way to care for it. To give her horse something to eat. Carrots, I believe.”
“Yes, but what is the promise on the poster?” Jean-Paul asked. “What is the ad?”
“So, on the poster,” I said slowly, “the promise is: Your horse. Your boyfriend. Your mushroom.”
Jean-Paul waited for me to explain further. He said after a moment, “Your mushroom?”
I conferred with Pierre. The difference, it seemed, between champignon and champion was too much for my embouchure. Pierre said, “He means your champion. And friend, not boyfriend. ‘Your horse, your friend, your champion.’”
“Ah,” Jean-Paul said, and Pierre and Jean-Paul both laughed. Pierre added, “Yeah, he was confused. Look, I promise, he will be good for this account.”
After that, Pierre and Jean-Paul did most of the talking, telling me things about luxury. I sank in my chair and listened to the differences between une marque de luxe, a luxury brand, and a plain old marque, a brand like the kind that sold infant formula. Infant formula was not luxe, Pierre said, and Jean-Paul gasped and nodded in horror. That someone might think such a thing!
I ate my pâté sandwich. I tried to remember the scene I’d struggled with in my novel that morning, but couldn’t recall a thing. My brain was a moth. And outside the windows, Paris was a unicorn. Old-hat magic, a mythological creature. Beautiful, but not exactly real. And its image was bought and sold like a mass-market toy. I jotted in my notebook, “Paris = My Little Pony.”
On our way out, Jean-Paul said in English, “It was nice to meet you. And I like your mushroom, this was funny.”
* * *
The evening after I met Jean-Paul, Rachel called to say she was going out with Lindsay, some party they’d heard about, she wouldn’t be too late. By ten p.m. at my desk, I was dead tired, but I decided to walk home to kill time.
Men had draped the trees on the Champs-Elysées with twinkling purple lights that blinked in sequence. Like two rows of neon saline drips, as if the avenue were a hospital ward.
A Ferris wheel had been erected in Place de la Concorde, une grande roue, spinning with lights. Very beautiful in the cold black, like a setting moon. I considered riding it. I didn’t, though I couldn’t say why.
A line from Camus: There were but few people on the quays …
On my walk home, each streetlamp had its own heavens, thanks to the dark and the fog. By day, the coloring in Paris was all contrast—as compared, say, with Rome’s haze—but wet nights in Paris were simply black and tinsel.
Rain started to fall. Les Halles was closed; a Starbucks was lit.
Walking beneath the Pompidou Center’s white foghorns, I got an itch for company, so I stopped in a bar on the Boulevard Sébastopol and watched snippets of a dog race while drinking two beers and reading from Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth. How did he create such fathomable worlds? Why, tonight, when Paris normally consoled me, did the city make me feel so empty? In the front of the bar, a man was bitching out a woman. She said she hadn’t done it: cheated on him. Her makeup was sliding down tectonically. She said through tears that she was true. The guy shouted, How can you lie? The bartender turned off the TV. Everyone watched the woman go out. After a few seconds, the bartender switched the TV back on, then the guy threw his beer bottle through a window, shattering the glass, which fell all at once, like a sheet whisked off a prize. He ran. The bartender and two men gave chase, and many of the rest of us left, presumably, like me, to go home to an empty house.
But it wasn’t empty. When I walked through the door, Rachel had just arrived. She was hanging up her umbrella. She smiled. I grabbed her. She pinched the lapel of my coat and laughed, saying I’d need to replace it soon, it had lost its water repellency. I know, I know, I said.
19
The first time I was bum-rushed, I was in the Place de la République Métro station. It was during my normal morning commute. I’d just waved my Navigo pass over the turnstile when a small woman humped me from behind. She shushed in my ear, “S’il vous plaît, monsieur,” then jimmied us through the gate.
On the other side, she waved at me and jogged away.
Second time it happened, a guy shoved me at eight a.m., with zero politeness. And he looked affronted once we were through, when I showed my surprise. The prick. After that, approaching a Métro turnstile, I’d watch out for assault, because I knew what to expect. A Parisian bum-rusher was easy to spot. He stood near the ticket machines looking for marks, ready to move forward.
One afternoon, after a cold day’s jog, I spotted a shabby bald guy idling near a map. He set himself in motion once he saw me pull out my Métro pass.
Four feet from the turnstile, he was behind me.
Three feet, I could hear the whisking of his windbreaker.
Two feet, I stopped, and his momentum shoved him into me. I turned around and said nothing. The guy swore; maybe he was expecting a scene. But I was happy to step aside. Confused, he made to go through the turnstile and came up short, slapping his pockets as if he’d forgotten his ticket. He rode the escalator back up to street level while eyeing me hatefully.
At the office, I told this story to deaf ears.
“Perhaps he did forget his pass,” Olivier said. “It happens to everyone.”
“You know, this is not an easy city if you are not rich,” Françoise said, chastising me. She said I needed to learn to be more sympathetic—people should make sacrifices to improve society’s lot, and let us not forget, she said, the Christmas spirit.
The bigger world so valued by Julie, my colleague who’d endorsed Sarkozy’s policies over lunch, was a lot more likely to sleep five to a room in Clichy-sous-Bois than in a studio overlooking Montparnasse.
But in central Paris, the most visibly poor were street people. Drunks and punks with neck tattoos and dogs. Or Algerian and Moroccan beggars, and the Gypsies who pleaded for coins from the foot of ATMs. Olivier hated the drunks and punks the most; he railed against how they occupied the sidewalks in camps. Coworkers alleged the police couldn’t jail them because in Paris if a person had a dog he or she was considered a caretaker, and it was illegal to separate a caretaker overnight from his or her ward.
I never found out if that was true. For two weeks in December, though, an encampment of street kids took over Rue Béranger. I’d pass them on the way to and from work, and sometimes be jeered at. They were always drunk or high, on the brink of survival, but they kept their dogs in beautiful shape, and fed them bones passed along by employees at Monoprix, the fancy supermarket around the corner.
* * *
Third week in December, I risked my life and rented a Vélib to ride to work. Face-smacking loveliness of a day, and while I navigated around Place de la Concorde and began climbing up the Champs-Elysées, I heard a loud rushing RRRrrriiiiiipppppppp. Whence cometh hell.
It had sounded like a scooter revving its engine. In fact, my crotch was gone. I’d pedaled too hard, and the seat had been ripped out from my jeans. So I made a diaper of my trench coat, attended a meeting, and rode the Métro home to change my pants.
Around the same time, the president became enviable. “Bling-bling” Sarkozy had a new squeeze: Carla Bruni, ex-model, successful musician. And where did Sarko l’Américain take his new girlfriend for the weekend? Disneyland Paris. Sarkozy was in love—same for the newspapers, with the spectacle. Especially because Bruni was the ex of Donald Trump and Mick Jagger, and she confirmed the papers’ worst suspicions about Sarkozy’s lust for celebrity, especially non-French celebrity (never mind Bruni’s thing for powerful men).
“Power crazy, this girl,” Julie said, confirming much of what Paris thought, “but it’s true, she can sing.”
According to reports, also attending the Disneyland Paris weekend were Bruni’s mother, a concert pianist, and Bruni’s son, whom she’d had with Raphaël Enthoven, a philosopher whom The New York Times reported Ms. Bruni had stolen away from an author named Justine Levy, who was the daughter of the philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, and who’d gone on to write a novel about Bruni’s romantic poaching.
Sometimes the French were so incredibly French—so cultured, so reliably contradictory—it thrilled me. There was nothing else to say. What a wonderful place.
* * *
I tried, but no, I could not articulate my frustration at discovering that our Christmas presents to America had been quarantined in a hangar near Brest, in western France.
I said, “I was told I could put wine into the mail.”
The postal clerk said, nodding, “I understand. But you see, it is illegal to send wine to the United States.”
“But you told us we could send wine to the United States,” I said. “A woman from the postal service, by telephone. I wrote ‘wine’ on the form, before I sent it,” I said, pointing it out on the page.
“You wrote it clearly, I see. I don’t know what happened,” the clerk said. He was sympathetic to my problems, but everyone had problems. “I don’t know why they told you that you could ship wine to the States; it is absolutely forbidden.”
I said, “Can we try calling the office where the boxes are resting?”
The clerk glared at me, waiting in case I should dissolve. He got up with a sigh and went back to a room full of boxes. A long line of people waited behind me. After two minutes, he returned to his seat. “I have tried to call them,” he said, “but they are not answering.”
“Do you have a system on the Internet to look at the box?”
“I have tried this also,” he said. “Our system is down.”
I wanted to say, Of course, because, let me guess, we’re powerless in the face of bureaucracy, and you feel my pain but there’s nothing you can do, after all France in 2007 is the equivalent of Russia in 1981, isn’t that right?
Instead I said, “What else can we do?”
He considered it for a moment. “So, the recipient could try calling immigration.”
“Immigration,” I said. “In the States?”
“Immigration in Europe, for the States. Please, sir,” the clerk said, looking over my shoulder, “it is out of our control.”
“But you are La Poste,” I said.
He apologized again. He said, “I do not know why they said you could mail wine to the United States. It is truly bizarre.”
“So what happens now?”
“They will send the box to the return address you inscribed on the form, your home. You will receive it in four to six weeks.”
“I am superangry,” I said.
“I am sorry,” the clerk said. “Have a good day.”
He motioned to the next person in line.
* * *
The director of the infant-nutrition account threw us a holiday fête on Rue de Lappe near Place de la Bastille, in a Mexican restaurant/dance club. Technically, I was still on the account while Keith, the Scottish copywriter, got up to speed. Technically, according to our project managers’ deadlines, we should have completed all six booklets by that evening. Instead we were celebrating the fact that we’d nearly finished one.
That’s France for you, an Italian project manager said.
Every day I learned fourteen new things about France.
Over a dinner that was Mexican by way of Toulouse, with crêpes for tortillas and lots of crème fraîche, I tried explaining to Keith what to expect from the account, now that he’d be assuming my role. For example, why the first booklet still wasn’t done: our colleagues in Malaysia, rather than translating, had decided to replace the booklet’s words with pictures, like an airplane safety pamphlet. But the club was too loud for that sort of talk, and we decided to get drunk and watch Bruno dance with every woman.
“He’s fucking great,” Keith said in my ear.
“I know,” I said.
Now it made functional sense why Bruno’s shirt always needed to be unbuttoned: to dump heat. Women were slayed. I was proud of him, mostly envious. During a break, Bruno slung around my chair and pointed out a beautiful woman illuminated on the other side of the room, dancing alone.
“She’s gorgeous,” I said. “But you don’t have a chance.”
Meaning, were I single again and to approach that woman with the extremely long legs, I wouldn’t have a chance. Bruno laughed in my ear, frowned, then stood up. In fact, Bruno did have a chance. There were always chances. The Way of Bruno was often cynical, but never despairing. Bruno fetched champagne and did his walk—he had a walk. He held his head obliquely and snuck across invisible borders, smil
ing and laughing with his eyes half closed. One second, he was whispering in her ear, then he was laughing, she was laughing. Soon he had her whipped to castanets.
I asked Bruno the next morning if he’d gotten laid. Bruno shrugged a combination of “who cares?” and “pas mal.” He’d arrived at seven, beating me by two hours, to finish up our work for the Malaysians. He looked miserable from a hangover. We did a conference call together; afterward we fist-bumped.
I still hadn’t told Bruno about leaving infant nutrition for Louis Vuitton. I knew how betrayed he’d feel.
That evening, we were revising our Malaysian brochure on Bruno’s monitor for perhaps the forty-fifth time. Bruno’s concept of hell had expanded to include me reading him copy edits and telling him where to click. Around nine, we decided to drink some champagne left over from another office party, and for a second, I swear I almost told him. Instead I refilled our cups and asked Bruno if there was any food a Parisian wouldn’t pair with champagne.
Looking back, I think, Oh, the sum of small acts …
“Cheeseburger?” I said.
Bruno turned away from his computer. “Cheeseburger, why do you always talk about cheeseburger? But it’s not bad, sure.”
“How about sushi?”
“Sushi, beer is better,” Bruno said, “but sure, champagne.”
“That works?” I said. Ça marche?
“That works,” Bruno said. Ça marche.
Ça marche was my phrase of the month.
“What about cheese?” I said. “A platter of cheeses?”
Bruno said, “Now this is tricky.” He explained that it depended on the cheeses served and the type of champagne. Perhaps a rosé? He’d have to think about it. Next I asked him what was required for a proper French Christmas dinner.
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