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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  35

  As summer arrived, the air was pollen-saturated. Buds cracked, flowers bloomed. People at the office carried around tissue packets, sniffling in the elevator. Paris was incandescent, alternating between sudden rains and bursts of sun. Each evening the light stretched later.

  One Sunday morning, Rachel and I went for a walk in our neighborhood. People were strolling around carrying food to one another’s homes. A furniture market was being set up on Rue Bretagne. We turned down an alley and found a two-man marching band serenading the block—an old man playing cornet and a young guy carrying a bass drum with a local politician’s name written on its face. Then on Rue de Saintonge we saw Audrey Tautou, the actress from Amélie, going around a corner. She was wearing sunglasses, accompanied by a tall man in an undershirt and scarf.

  Rachel said, “Funny how much smaller she is in real life. She was already tiny on the screen.”

  The next week, dozens of teenagers stopped traffic on the Champs-Elysées. They were screaming, singing, and carrying homemade flags. They wore tight pants and fabric flowers pinned to their chests, and were followed by sixty police officers on skates in riot gear—elbow, knee, and shoulder pads—like a Roman formation of Rollerbladers.

  I asked François what the kids were protesting. We were standing on the balcony. He squinted, staring at me, then looked into the sun. “That it’s May,” François said. “They’re celebrating being French, that they’re young.

  “You will never understand, I’m sorry,” François said, laughing.

  A new regular joined the lunchtime group. She was probably in her mid-eighties, slightly taller than Sarkozy. And formal: she wore pearls to lunch. Her hair was a winter garden. Each day, she read a newspaper at her nose for an hour. Before that, however, she’d lay down an orange napkin on the lawn, and on top of it she’d leave a salad of red pepper, haricots verts, and some greens, and next to it she’d place her pet tortoise.

  Her tortoise was the size of a five-pound chicken.

  The first time I saw Madame Tortoise, the tortoise ate its lunch, then went for a walk. There weren’t many people around, so it was easy for him to cross the park uninterrupted and climb one of the hills to the base of a big tree. Total voyage took fifteen minutes. Under the tree, he turned a slow circle, stopped, and took a nap—just another one of the park’s natural features.

  The next week, I got to the park a little late, and Madame’s tortoise had already gone on his walkabout. This time, though, some businesspeople were sitting under his tree. The tortoise wasn’t bothered. He was a punk, a mean little dinosaur. He pushed in and nudged a lady’s rump, and she looked back and screamed when she saw his beak crank open.

  Madame Tortoise heard the noise and slowly rose to reclaim her pet.

  That took doing: Madame Tortoise wasn’t much faster than a tortoise. It took her almost two minutes to reach the tree with her cane. When she’d arrived, Madame removed her glasses and peered down, paying no mind to the businesspeople—all of them had stood up—and made sure her pet was fine, then returned to her bench empty-handed.

  Twenty minutes later, when the tortoise woke from his nap, the office workers moved their lunch bags so he could pass, and he clomped his way home. There, at the napkin, he ate some apple slices and went to sleep.

  The everyday reality of Paris always trumped for le plaisir.

  * * *

  Despite or because of his marriage to Carla Bruni, Sarkozy’s approval ratings were down. People didn’t like how conveniently the wedding had played to his image, nor how he’d courted Bruni while also wooing the media. One of the weeklies, behind the plastic wall of every newspaper stand, ran a cover with a large headline: “Four More Years, Whore.”

  Lindsay said, “So I walked into a government office the other day to get a form notarized, okay? Three French policemen were standing inside, at a security table—”

  “Cute policemen?” Rachel asked.

  “Cute,” Lindsay said.

  “I love a uniform,” Rachel said.

  “Who doesn’t? So the first one looks at me. He’s smiling, he shouts at me, ‘You’re arrested!’”

  We were eating sandwiches in Buttes-Chaumont on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on a bench overlooking a stand of flowering trees. Joggers ran past us; young families pushed strollers. Many teenagers wrestled each other on the grass. Lindsay continued, “So I said to him, ‘Oh, good, I always wanted to go to a French jail.’ The other cops start giggling. Then the first officer digs through my purse for a security check. And he takes out all of my lipsticks and lines them up in a row.”

  “How many lipsticks?” Rachel said.

  “Like four lipsticks,” Lindsay said. “Whatever, it’s a lot. Anyway, the policeman looks at me now. He’s smiling, he says dryly, ‘You have a lot of lipstick.’ I said, ‘Well, lipstick is important.’ He said he agreed that it was. ‘It is very important,’ he stressed, ‘to me.’ So he put all of them in a plastic baggie, pretending to confiscate them and keep them for himself. I said, ‘Excuse me, am I not allowed to wear lipstick in here?’ I mean, seriously, by that point one of the other cops is about to try some on. But a line of people had formed behind me.”

  A few seconds later, Lindsay said, “I mean, can you imagine that happening in the States? They’d shoot you. I swear, I love this flirtatious country.”

  On the Métro ride home from the park, Rachel and I composed a list of what we loved about living in Paris: Loved living within walking distance of most everything that made Paris great. Loved Parisians’ way of lingering, and how commonplace sensuality was a habit in exchanges. Men reading in public. Women hogging their merchants’ attention. We loved the Parisians’ ways of saying exactly what they wanted, and also how this trait, combined with their anti-P.C. conceit, forced them to put too much of themselves on the table.

  We loved the everyday beauty of Paris, its tidy deterioration. Loved our new friends, our few friends.

  What we hated: stores closed on Sundays, the Métro shutting down at midnight; how people often settled for celebrating the city’s blandest features; most of all, living in Paris without time to actually live there.

  “And construction noise,” Rachel said. “That I could do without.”

  * * *

  At work, my friend Yassine asked for help understanding American stomachs. Yassine, who resembled Richard Ashcroft on a crash diet, was an illustrator who’d just returned from a business trip to Miami, where he’d seen much that needed explanation.

  We were standing on the balcony during un pot, an office party, around nine p.m. The lights of restaurants leached color from the sky. Cars were idling, penned in by traffic—so many expensive black coupes brought to heel.

  “The day I arrive,” Yassine said, “I arrive early, and they took me out for breakfast.”

  “You know, it’s smart to eat when you’re jet-lagged,” said Cédric.

  “Yes, thank you,” Yassine said. “So I was saying…”

  Cédric was Yassine’s buddy in the office. They’d grown mustaches together. Cédric had newly joined the company. Previously he’d been an architect. He quit architecture, Cédric had said, because architecture in Paris was too depressing, Paris being a movie set where nothing new was allowed.

  Graphic design was the only artistic field in France that remained truly cutting-edge, Cédric said.

  “So, I’m looking at the menu,” Yassine said, “and there’s two thousand options. They took me to a diner. Real vintage America, I mean, fantastic. They had seats like—how do you say, boofs?”

  “Booths,” I said in English.

  “So I’m thinking, hey, this is the real USA. You know, like Twin Peaks?”

  I thought, That sums up exactly how many Parisians perceive the United States.

  “Anyway,” Yassine continued, “I was too tired to read English. So on the menu I saw something called the ‘French omelet.’ Fine. After ten minutes out comes … listen, I can’t describe it. It was an
omelet. In theory. Ham, cheese, and herbs. Only it probably had five eggs in it, it was this big”—Yassine spread his hands apart twelve inches—“and look: it was served inside a croissant. Inside the goddamn thing! A croissant as big as a loaf of bread!”

  Cédric needed Yassine to explain it again, it was too confusing.

  Boof, Yassine said, pouting out his lips.

  In addition to Cédric, a new woman was added to our section, a copywriter from Quebec named Niki. For her first two weeks, Niki was the laughingstock. Nothing tweaked a Parisian ear quite like the Québecois accent. Niki could say anything and there’d be snickers, much worse than what I suffered when I’d first arrived.

  Chaya said that during his first meeting with Niki, he caught only about ten sentences. “Honestly, Rosecrans,” Chaya said, laughing, “your French is much better than this.” Pierre explained that people in Quebec were complimented by Parisians for speaking a French that was generally more grammatically correct, “but the accent is so bad, it doesn’t matter.”

  At the end of a day, if Niki called out à demain—see you tomorrow—her accent made it sound like “ah du-mayne,” and people would burst out laughing after the door closed.

  However, Niki was forgiven once she turned out to be great at her job, plus she started bringing in desserts. Her fiancé was a pastry chef; they’d moved to Paris so he could finish his training. Soon leftovers from his homework assignments began to appear regularly in the canteen, with extra napkins.

  Basically, good pastry was the most fluent French.

  I liked Niki a lot. Like me, she was a Paris freak. We’d talk about museums, sharing tips on which to visit; which café was best if you were thirsty on Rue Soufflot. Sometimes I could tell that Olivier and Chaya and Françoise felt excluded from Niki’s and my Paris, us with our ardor and knowledge of new restos, and them peering in.

  36

  During summer—our second summer in Paris, our last—it became easy to identify tourists’ nationalities on the street.

  Italian women wore red eyeglasses and could match numerous shades of brown.

  London men shaved daily and traveled in groups.

  Russians wore, along with Arab women, the biggest sunglasses.

  Australians were usually midway through travels; someday, they’d all get home.

  South American teenagers, boys in beards, behaved hesitantly, posed artistically. You’d see one on a bench with a dark, blank air, like a television someone had left on the sidewalk.

  Germans and Scandinavians walked Paris up and down, up and down, wearing trousers that cinched at mid-calf. Between them, in my experience, the Scandinavians were the more isolationist, the Germans were more eager to please.

  And all non-American males were cool to carry purses, at the very least a petite shoulder bag, polygonally fashioned, that rested on the hip.

  And the only thing Americans talked about was going home.

  From the French side of my heart, I would say no one roamed Paris with more talk of home fires than us Americans. We missed our familiar conveniences. In urban lands, you knew us as the ones in bone-fishing shirts, hiking shoes, and trousers with many pockets. Even our sunhats had pockets. Should we pause, we’d rid our hands of foreign bacteria with gel. The world outside America was a jungle. We adopted a sagelike carriage and clasped our sanitized hands behind our backs—for our pockets were stuffed full of incredible resources: a camera, an audio guide, a Fodor’s guide, a map, an iPod, and two cell phones, one smart enough to handle GPS. We knew how to travel. We would wear your goddamn city out. And possibly we did shrink from being bumped on public transportation, but we rode it. After all, when in Rome. Though have no doubt, we would be cautious. Our impermeability was vouchsafed by Gore-Tex, and we would not be fooled by your gratuity scams, Monsieur, so be forewarned: any refusal to serve us bread or water prior to notre déjeuner would be noted on TripAdvisor.com.

  We’d conquered the world, we just wanted to see it unmolested. Not that we asked permission. Our m.o. was: you will not find grounds to say we are impolite before you’ve given us cause to be so. In fact, since we were leaving tomorrow anyway, might we try a little French with you, Mademoiselle Parisienne behind the bakery case? Excusez-moi, où est la bibliothèque? Oh haha—no, that was a joke, sorry, yes I’ll have—Sorry?—No, I was—No I’ll have, oh Jesus, THE CROISSANT, PLEASE—LE CROISSANT—Oh, for—WHAT—Thank you, no, excuse me, merci—Ah, no, nothing, NOTHING MORE—Hey, where’s my wallet?—No, you—my chest pocket?—Is this a pocket?—Oh, it’s Velcro—Okay, here we go—EXCUSE ME MISS HERE IS THE MONEY THANK YOU GOODBYE.

  * * *

  Sofia Coppola went AWOL, and geez, what a headache. The bosses panicked. Pierre was constantly on the phone. For several days, during a meeting an urgent texto might explode inside several BlackBerrys simultaneously, and Pierre, Marc, Marcel, or Sabine would need to go running out into the corridor.

  Sofia Coppola had told the chiefs at Louis Vuitton she wanted Marrakech as her city for the campaign. Then, unannounced, she flew there with a photographer friend. From Morocco, we learned she’d be doing the campaign herself, on Louis Vuitton’s dime for a week’s vacation, take it or leave it in so many words.

  Of course they took it, but no one was happy. It was a moment for people to say they thought her film Marie Antoinette had been a turd.

  Sofia Coppola returned to Paris, and Pierre and I drove over to Louis Vuitton HQ to view her photo albums. We took Pierre’s scooter, me perched on the back wearing André’s pink helmet. Downtown, practically on top of Pont Neuf, a yellow sun was hovering. We were escorted to a top-floor boardroom, with panoramic views. River, churches, blue sky, white clouds. About ten people were waiting. Then Sofia Coppola arrived, trailing handlers. She and her agent sat across from Pierre and me. The agent expressed an effusive hello.

  Between Pierre and me, I think I was the more nervous. I’d spent an hour that morning trying to figure out what to wear, and had come up with nothing more than my everyday uniform of Tintin plays tennis—trench coat, sweater, jeans, and sneakers. For the duration of the meeting, only the four of us spoke—Sofia Coppola, her agent, Pierre, and me—while about fifteen people sat in chairs ringing the room as if it were an observing surgery. Mostly they were silent, except to laugh whenever Coppola laughed, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

  To start us off, the agent complimented André’s helmet and called it chic. Then he said to me, “You know, your name is very strange.”

  Next, Coppola paged through her photo albums, telling the story of her vacation. She addressed her comments to the agent. The agent found her photos and anecdotes wonderful, hilarious. Occasionally, Pierre would lean forward, point to one of the pictures and say he liked it, then sit down again. I’d lean forward and say I agreed. Then Sofia Coppola would describe to her agent what was found in the picture, for example, a trunk originally owned by Diana Vreeland.

  After about twenty minutes, Pierre and I explained how we intended to use her photos, and Coppola said it sounded fine. She was a little hesitant about the music, she said, based on the London films she’d seen, so she’d want final say on the sound track. Otherwise, all good.

  Outside, Pierre stopped for a cigarette.

  “Imagine how weird it must be,” I said, a little buzzed from the meeting, “living in a bubble like that.”

  “What bubble?”

  “The agent?” I said. “All those people?”

  Pierre shrugged. “She’s a major director. She has an Oscar. People ask her for things all day. She needs layers for protection. Maybe too much protection, okay. But did you like the photos?”

  “No,” I said, fastening the pink gumball on my head.

  “No,” Pierre said, “no one did. But everyone called them fantastic. That’s the danger of the bubble.” Pierre tossed his cigarette and nicked a parked car.

  “But who knows,” he said. “I really liked Lost in Translation.”

  * * *

  During a mee
ting the next day, Lucas worked himself into a huff about Sofia Coppola’s music comment. Lucas said he couldn’t remember liking the music in any of her movies, so perhaps he deserved final say about that.

  Lucas demanded a meeting with Sofia Coppola. He was denied.

  Since Coppola had done our Marrakech work for us, we spent the rest of the afternoon discussing San Francisco, the city her father had picked. A week later, I was at Louis Vuitton HQ again, this time doing Pierre’s job because he was out sick: presenting to their global marketing chief to sell them on our Francis Ford/California idea.

  Someone turned down the lights. “Ah, I love his little stories,” one of the marketing guys said.

  Up to that point, I’d always told my “little stories” in an English-French slurry to junior executives. Now, for the big boss, I went exclusively into French. I clicked through slides and described ideas. I made little jokes that I’d worked out beforehand. Then I got to the budget, a quarter-million euros. It was five times the size of any budget we’d previously proposed. My French faltered. The room was dark, but I could see all their faces.

  One voice in my head: You’re a cooked duck now. Another: Well, you try explaining how a Steadicam works.

  Never mind that the pitch was outlandish.

  That too much rode on my tongue.

  I sensed panic going down my back like a lemon squeezed on my neck, which meant more panic was coming. I apologized about my French being terrible, but the global chief said loudly in the dark, “No, it’s fine, please continue.”

  The guy resembled Kojak.

  I wanted to say, But I don’t know how.

  But I did, in fact.

  I slugged back into French and continued clicking. Words and sentences appeared in my hand like fish from a bag. I rode the Métro back to the office soaked to my shorts, but semiconfident. The Louis Vuitton people called that evening to say they’d buy the job. It had much less to do with my presentation and everything to do with the ideas that Pierre, Vincent, and Lucas had dreamed up, but I didn’t tell Rachel any of that.