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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Our riad, a private hotel inside a home, was located within the old city’s fortress. Our driver parked and led us down an alley—left, right, left—until he banged on a door set into a nondescript wall. The heavy door swung open to reveal a courtyard. Inside was silence, a fountain burbling, roses clambering toward the sun.

  A teenage girl took us up to our little room on the roof, with views of the minaret and five mosques, thousands of rooftop antennas, and the Atlas Mountains in the distance.

  The muezzins called in succession, like car alarms triggering one another.

  All of it was blissful to me.

  That evening, there were no streetlights, only moped headlamps. But it was very calm on the street, still hot, a dense black. But nothing sinister. We set out to find dinner, turning one corner, then another. There weren’t any street signs. The air was dry. A man passed us wearing a yoke, towing a two-wheeled wooden cart of pastries. People were out talking, eating in the dark. Not a Westerner in sight, but many boys sitting on bicycles, illuminated by a store’s single lightbulb. Three or four women here or there.

  Eventually we found a bistro recommended by a coworker (our directions from the riad were “second left, third right, then your fourth left, second right…”), and inside were thirty white people wearing formal outfits, in a garden under lemon trees strung with lights.

  It was the most exotic aspect of the trip so far—real colonials in the wild.

  For three days, I was thrilled by the minute. Inside red-clay towers, we found three-star restaurants. Teenage boys hung their arms around each other’s hips, and older men held hands. Businesswomen wore shawls with blue jeans. We were fluid in traffic and tutored by our foreignness. That a family of five could share a single moped was proved multiple times.

  And judging by the amount of people who texted while driving mopeds, you’d think cell phones were moped remote controls. In the souk, shielded by threadbare ceiling cloths, were European ladies dragging their daughters behind them in a hunt for bargains. Both fat mothers and skinny daughters bare-armed and pink in an extremely visible desecration of the local culture’s preference for women to cover skin; but Moroccans ignored them, as if they were ghosts.

  And when we got lost, or didn’t move for half a minute, a boy would appear and request we follow him, to who knows where. Marrakech was a tourist city just like Paris—snake charmers in lieu of accordion players, but still the same, if not more purely about its business. Mercantile, abrasive, and more welcoming. Please, come into my stall, sit, have some tea, now buy something.

  If cities like Paris and Marrakech had realized tourism was their most profitable enterprise, why should they resist? Why not play up the image, act the part the visitors wanted, cater to their whims and pocket the cash?

  My Parisian friends might counter, Well, to play a part may look like an act of preservation, but it also can be self-annihilating.

  Anyway, I found myself very comfortable in the heat, in Marrakech. I told Rachel, “For no good reason I feel like I’m home.” Sunday, I turned thirty-one, and for dinner we ate a delicious meal of chicken and lemons that our housekeeper cooked for eight hours in the laundry room. We drank expensive French wine for cheap, breathing air that smelled like a spice market. From the roof, we saw several falling stars.

  The next afternoon, we flew back to Paris and arrived after dark. It must have just rained—the city was black and slick, paved with gold reflections. Our cabdriver from the airport sang along to the radio playing a live recording of a punk band. The band was singing in English:

  Fire, fire, fire,

  Paris is burning

  30

  A new neighbor joined my desk group at work: a contemplative Parisian art director named Chaya who wanted to improve his English in exchange for helping me with my French.

  By that point, my fluency had gained turf. But I still had trouble. Proper nouns were pains in the ass; I’d think someone had conjugated a verb in the subjunctive, but they’d simply mentioned an eighties French sitcom I didn’t know. And slang went right over my head. Chaya and I decided on a system where I’d post words or phrases I didn’t recognize, and Chaya would attempt to translate them into English.

  Une bouffe—a meal.

  Pourri—nasty, rotten.

  J’ai le spleen—I’m bummed out.

  We soon covered the wall behind my desk with sticky notes. When I put up “Faut pas pousser mémé dans les orties,” Chaya had trouble. He said in English, “This means, I think, Do not push the grandmother into the garden.” He consulted his French-English dictionary. “Sorry, not garden, ‘nettles.’ What is this, nettles?”

  “Something British,” I said. “Anyway, what the hell? Why would I do this?”

  “You do not do this,” Chaya said. “It is … to illustrate an idea. It means you push your chance.”

  “Your luck?”

  “Your luck? Ah, okay. Faut pas pousser mémé dans les orties: Do not push your luck.”

  “Or your grandmother,” I said.

  Five minutes later, Marc stopped by with a suggestion for the board: Chier dans la colle.

  “It means,” Marc said, “‘to shit in the glue.’ But you do not want to do this.”

  I asked Chaya to explain. He thought about it for a moment. “You know when a project here goes slowly? This is the glue. Then when some people—” He looked around, then whispered: “When some people is asking stupid questions, and it goes more slowly in meetings? This is the shit.”

  “It’s a metaphor,” Marc said. “The glue is the scenario—it’s life. So when the scenario is already, how do you say, sticky?”

  Chaya nodded. “Then you make life worse when you put your shit in it.”

  We all dwelt on this wisdom.

  “Okay, next,” I said. “BCBG—the clothing chain?”

  “Ah, no,” Marc said. “BCBG, it means ‘classy.’ Sort of. You would say ‘preppy,’ maybe? Bon chic, bon genre. It’s kind of passé.”

  Soon, according to Chaya and Marc, I was much more Parisian for using my new lingo. Sort of a tough guy now, Chaya said, me telling people where not to shit, pushing their grandmothers around. In two weeks, we’d added:

  Ta gueule! Shut up!

  Qu’est-ce que tu racontes? What the hell are you talking about?

  Quel con. What an ass.

  Laisse tomber. Leave it alone.

  Ça arrache la gueule! That burns my mouth!

  J’ai les dents du fond qui baignent! My teeth are soaking in something liquid, and it might be vomit!

  Among other things to learn: when entering an elevator in a Paris office building, it was customary to say hello, even if you didn’t know the other people. Then perhaps you’d mention the weather. When exiting, you wished the other passengers good day.

  I explained to coworkers that this behavior did not occur in the United States. One girl said, “That is because Americans are very cold.”

  In our office, it was also obvious that men were in charge. Well, no surprise. But French businessmen were different from American businessmen—and not just when it came to black cocks and Jews. French businessmen, at least in advertising, were uniquely moody; conniving men who were easily wounded, doing deals or not. They fell in love constantly—with women, with objects—and they did it with their bodies and souls. Perhaps it was a balance exclusive to our one office, but the attitude was, boys will be boys—boys will be spoiled, indulgent, grabby garçons. As Julie would say, men in our office got to play both Doctor and Madame Bovary. And meanwhile the women held careers, cooked dinner, raised the children, and dressed like the world’s best, and still they trotted around Paris unrecognized, exhausted, losing out to their inherited rapport de force.

  During a meeting in early April, I called one of our bosses a stupid ass. He wasn’t in the room and he was a stupid ass, but Pierre was shocked; he was also impressed by my fluency. In the hallway afterward, Sabine asked, “Where is this coming from?” Sabine was anoth
er project manager on Louis Vuitton. I told her about Chaya’s sticky notes and slang lessons. Sabine frowned. She said she didn’t like the new me very much; I was becoming obnoxious, “just another one of the boys”—another man she was required to coddle. Sabine said she’d speak to Chaya about tempering my instruction.

  Basically, Paris office life was an old boys’ club with female lifeguards.

  31

  At the beginning of April, a new American Apparel store opened around the corner from Rue Béranger. Parisians lined up for the ribbon-cutting. No matter that there was another American Apparel branch ten minutes away, and several already in Paris. Such was the rapture that season for American cotton.

  Same week, at a birthday party for one of Pierre and Chloe’s sons, Rachel asked Pierre’s teenage niece about her T-shirt, “C’est American Apparel, non?”

  “Ah oui!” the girl gushed. “Moi, j’adore American Apparel. Mais pour moi, c’est trop cher.”

  Rachel explained to her that, in the States, their clothes were cheap. The niece went wide-eyed. Vraiment? The niece touched Rachel’s arm. She said, Do you know anyone, oh please, who could ship me some jeans?

  The next celebrities for Louis Vuitton were Sofia and Francis Ford Coppola. To make Francis more comfortable during his interview, we’d hired Harold Pinter’s stepdaughter, a magazine editor, supposedly an old friend of the Coppolas, to visit Francis on the set of his latest film. One night, strategizing together, Harold Pinter’s stepdaughter reached out and pinched the sleeve of my T-shirt. She said, “Oh, I love this, this is gorgeous, is it American Apparel?”

  “J. Crew,” I said.

  “Oh, is it really,” she said, making a note.

  On the whole, Pierre was the man of the hour at the agency. And healthier, too: smoking less, working until three a.m. less frequently. His Louis Vuitton work had won several big awards. The client was so pleased, Pierre was being fêted. The client had even begun recommending him and his team to other companies, which led to us winning a big campaign for one of France’s premier brandy makers, because, they said, Pierre knew how to market French luxury better than anyone; he’d mastered telling “the story of French luxury’s DNA.”

  The brandy marketing boss visited our office to introduce his project. He was a young guy in an old man’s sport coat. He was maybe twenty-five—but an old twenty-five. Very grave. His chief dilemma, he explained, was to reconvince the world to love France.

  For centuries, the brandy boss said, the country’s essence—its way of living, language, and la vie de bohème—was the best. France’s perspective, fashion and flesh, books and cuisine, had all been coveted, with earth trusting Paris “to export the true meaning of luxury.”

  But times had changed.

  Sure, the boss said, in some sectors—for example, bespoke clothes and fashion-label perfumes, high-end wine and some liquors—France still ruled. For the most part, however, what the market deemed luxurious was being determined elsewhere. “Frequently in Chinese knock-off shops,” he added.

  His present dilemma, the boss said, mostly had to do with consumers. And it wasn’t so bad. The world thought differently about Paris, fine. At the same time new markets were emerging. Traditionally, he said, brandy was considered “something old Frenchmen drink by the fire in their slippers.” The room nodded. Of course, he said, old Frenchmen in slippers still drank brandy—the room laughed—but there was a newer, bigger customer base. Specifically, “the blacks of America,” both those economically rising and economically struggling, as well as “China’s nouveau riche.”

  The room looked surprised.

  Both groups were challenges, the boss said. Regarding the former, surely, he said, we’d heard this from other clients? Seen other luxury businesses struggle with unsought fans? “The rappers and their champagne?” The room recognized the reference: the previous year, Louis Roederer’s managing director had caused a scandal by saying in The Economist, about some rappers’ fondness for his wine, “What can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it.”

  “My point of view is that customers are customers,” the brandy boss said. His team was, at that moment, devising new products “preferred by American blacks,” that is, fruity cocktails. Meanwhile, Chinese businessmen drank brandy straight like wine.

  A collective gasp.

  “That’s a joke,” someone said.

  “But that’s not normal,” someone said.

  “No, trust me, it’s true!” the brandy man said. “You’ve never seen anything like it.” For example, he described how a businessman in Guangzhou might plonk down ten bottles of expensive brandy if he was hosting a big dinner, to demonstrate his wealth, and everyone would hit it hard while they ate.

  Around the table, there were many little puffs of incredulity.

  At the end of the meeting, the brandy boss invited us down to an ancient village where his brandies were still distilled—“so you can understand our DNA even better.” Well, why not, Pierre said. A week later, Pierre, an art director named Louise, and I traveled by high-speed train to appreciate brandy better. We tried our best. On a gorgeous day, as the sun shone down especially for us (it felt that way), we drank two brandy cocktails in the morning in a rustic bar, three or four glasses of wine at lunch in a fancy dining room, and about ten varieties of brandy during a long tour of a scientific-looking tasting room, two musty wine cellars, and an appointed château in a landscaped vale, with a ride in the afternoon on a river boat.

  By nightfall, I understood the genetics of brandy a little better. But really what I knew was that I liked to pass out on high-speed trains.

  * * *

  Vincent and Lucas telephoned Pierre to let us know they were ready to show their London films. Titles finished, music composed, and the knife of value applied to their editing. We rode over on Pierre’s scooter, with me borrowing a spare helmet from André, a pink mushroom cap he kept beside his desk for whenever a cute girl needed a lift.

  “Très mignon,” André said when I put it on.

  Vincent and Lucas’s office was above a park in the eleventh arrondissement, in a family neighborhood of old white buildings and iron fences. Pierre and I climbed some battered stairs and rang the bell. Angry shouting from inside: Vincent yelling for Lucas to get the door, Lucas screaming he wasn’t ready.

  After a minute, Vincent appeared.

  “Listen,” Vincent said, “Lucas…” He shook his head. “Don’t test him.” Pierre laughed, but Vincent put his hand on his chest and said, “No joke, be careful.”

  Their studio was clogged with movie and photography equipment. Paint flaked off the walls. There was a room of computer monitors and gear, with windows overlooking the park, and posters from Vincent’s movies. At the end of a hallway was the room where Lucas composed. He was just coming out, frowning and smoking. Lucas waggled a finger at us. His room was not for public viewing. Pierre chided him and tried to push past, but Lucas shoved him back, saying, No, fuck off.

  While Vincent loaded the films we joked around, talking about deadlines. But I couldn’t help my curiosity. I ambled back and pushed open Lucas’s door.

  “Guy,” Lucas shouted behind me, “what are you doing?”

  “Don’t do that!” Vincent shouted from the other room.

  “Oh, come on,” Pierre said behind me, and pushed past. We got a glimpse of some keyboards in the dark, then Lucas came running and slammed the door.

  His face was red. He stammered, “I told you no, and what do you do?”

  Pierre and I backed up, hands in the air.

  Lucas shouted, “What did I ask? What one thing? Do I come into your office and touch your shit? I asked you not to. This is how you treat me?”

  Vincent hushed him, but Lucas didn’t hear. He kicked a wooden chair so hard it smashed against the wall.

  “Lucas!” Vincent shouted.

  Lucas left and slammed the door behind him.

  “Hey, he told you not to go in,” Vincent said. “Where is
the respect?”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  We spent half an hour watching their films. They were beautiful, especially the music. Lucas didn’t return. I sent him an e-mail that afternoon to apologize. He wrote back late that evening to say there were no hard feelings. After we presented the movies to Louis Vuitton, who loved them, Lucas and Pierre visited for a debriefing and to begin planning our Coppola work. Everyone embraced with bises, and Lucas called me a Fucking Guy, then he told me I looked fatter.

  * * *

  That weekend, a friend of ours from New York visited Paris. Danny was in town for a wedding, and we took him shopping because he’d forgotten to pack his suit jacket. In one boutique, when he came out of the dressing room, Rachel told Danny he was looking great, very slim. He said thanks, that he’d been trying to lose weight, and had recently begun tracking his body mass index in a spreadsheet on his laptop.

  I asked if that meant he was exercising more. Danny said no, he didn’t associate exercise with weight loss. Good for health, sure, but exercise didn’t necessarily help the pounds fall off.

  “You realize how Parisian that sounds,” Rachel said.

  “Well, you don’t have to live in Paris to be Parisian,” Danny said.

  Rachel said a minute later, “You know, I locked a woman in a machine yesterday.”

  I said, “What the hell?”

  “I was trying to help her,” Rachel said. “An old woman at the gym. I’d seen her there before. She didn’t know how to use a leg-lift machine. So I helped clamp down her thighs. Ten minutes later, I’m going to change and she’s still there, locked in place, humming to herself. She didn’t know how to get out. She was just sitting there, watching the world go by.”

  “Now, that’s very Parisian,” Danny said.