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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  37

  An old coworker of Rachel’s named Alex visited Paris with his friend Caroline and crashed in our living room. Saturday night, Alex wanted to hit a famous gay bar he’d heard about in the Marais, but Rachel and Caroline were too tired from sightseeing to go out, so Alex and I went by ourselves—Alex to cruise guys and me to drink. Inside, the bar was full of hundreds of men. In fact, there were gay Parisians. Techno pumped the room to nearly popping. Alex pointed out the bar’s main attraction, a shower booth installed above the liquor bottles where a beefy guy, lathered up, was playing with his penis. Semierect, it was the length of my forearm.

  Alex bought us Coronas. “Pretty butch scene, don’t you think?” he said. Some polished chests were revealed, but mostly it was bobo guys in office clothes or Lacoste shirts, a number of them with sweaters draped around their shoulders like any guy in Paris.

  “The thing is,” Alex said, “I was walking around today and I swear, in Paris you can’t tell who’s gay and who’s straight.”

  “Your radar’s messed up?” I said.

  Alex laughed. “It’s like they’re homophobic and extremely gay at the same time. Seriously, either every man in Paris is gay or no one is.”

  It sounded right to me: straight Parisians tended to dress like gay Americans. But then what did gay Parisians dress like?

  It came to me: Italians.

  On Sunday, after Alex and Caroline had left for the airport, I finished writing my novel. I reread the last chapter and knew it was done. Rachel finished the whole thing by the following weekend and said I’d figured it out, it worked, it breathed the oxygen of its own little world.

  38

  Prague, it turned out, belonged to English stag parties: beery guys who marched in columns, carrying their dead—the doomed-to-marriage—on their shoulders. By day they caroused and turned pink in the sun. By night they stumbled around the city in matching shirts, hoisting neon beer bongs like rifles.

  We went to Prague for a weekend because Rachel’s parents were visiting for an academic conference, and they’d invited us to join them, on their tab. The castle city appeared to be under siege. There was plenty that was remarkable to be found in Prague, but mainly it was the British guys who interested me. At night, in the old city’s dank noir, you’d see studs pinball between the alleys’ walls and bank into corners to vomit.

  Scottish Keith had told me what to expect. Ever since the rise of EasyJet and Ryanair, airlines that charged almost nothing for tickets, eastern Europe had begun catering to the stag-party industry. Brothels, artillery ranges, and beer halls with fine dining flourished near its smaller airports. I read ads from a Czech magazine in our hotel room: Walk-in humidors! Huge TVs! Escorts! Three floors with DJs spinning house/jungle/acid-rave!

  There also seemed to be a lot of doubling- or tripling-up on services. For example, offering a wine cellar and an underground shooting gallery, in adjacent rooms. I found one establishment that offered strippers you could shoot with paintguns while they danced, and I was proud to say I didn’t know anyone who would find that sort of thing desirable.

  Rachel and I were standing in a blackened archway on our final night, waiting for a tram to pass—an empty streetcar, lit up all white, went by—when a drunk guy bumped into me, almost knocking me onto the tracks. He was wearing a rugby shirt with name and number, and was politely stricken in the way of a lost child. He wanted to know if we’d seen his mates, and tilted toward me his beer bong.

  Around the time we returned to Paris, there was an article about tourism on the BBC’s website that Keith e-mailed me. European hoteliers had been interviewed about their favorite guests. The Japanese placed first for being tidy and polite. Americans ranked in the middle—we were badly dressed, but eager to eat the local food. Brits ranked lower, for boorishness. However, the worst in the world, for being rude, cheap, and reluctant to speak the local tongue, were the French.

  In an act of solidarity, Keith and I forwarded it to everyone.

  * * *

  Lindsay and Olivia visited our apartment for dinner during the last week of May. It had been a while since we’d seen them. Both needed to leave Paris every three months, since they didn’t have papers, so Olivia traveled with her dance company and Lindsay went to Argentina, to see if Buenos Aires was a better place to live.

  “You know they call it the Paris of South America,” Lindsay said.

  “Well, was it?” Rachel asked.

  “Oh, no,” Lindsay said. “I thought I was going to be shot. The lady next door was mugged on our stoop the second day I got there. I mean, they say the steaks are great, the boulevards are beautiful, but chrissakes, I’m a vegetarian, I don’t drive.”

  Lindsay said she’d begun dating a new guy, a good one. No more fetishist chocolate-eaters who preferred bunkers to Saint-Germain, no more wannabe drug dealers or their friends. This guy, Lindsay said, had a daughter, and maybe he wasn’t completely separated from the girl’s mother, but he was handsome and he had a good job.

  He also kept a bag of green apples under the seat of his scooter.

  “So that’s one quirk,” Lindsay said. “He’s eating constantly. Cracking into them. I asked him, While you’re driving? He said, What’s the problem? Anyway, it makes him gassy. But at least this one eats food.”

  Lindsay went home after dessert, but Olivia lingered. She took a discerning bite of pear tart, then pushed it away. We offered her a cognac and she accepted, which was unusual because she rarely drank more than a sip of wine. We found out why: after a few minutes she revealed she’d been broken up with that afternoon by her most recent boyfriend, a Parisian dancer she’d been seeing for the past two months. Dumped par texto.

  Olivia read us part of the guy’s message, translating from the French: You know I was always serious about you. I’m really saddened by this. It’s very hard.

  “Like I’m the one dumping him,” Olivia said. “I mean, who cares how sad he is? What’s wrong with these guys?”

  In the courtyard, Asif was laughing loudly, proposing a toast to friends who were drinking rum with him, sitting at a plastic table outside his door. I thought, Do you never tire?

  * * *

  The first of June arrived and Yves Saint Laurent died. From every newspaper, every affiche, his glory was proclaimed, and Paris mourned.

  A photograph in many papers showed Pierre Bergé, the designer’s longtime partner, holding the arm of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy at the funeral. Bruni, a former Yves Saint Laurent model, looked to be braless in the picture, wearing a gray top under a black jacket, with one nipple hard.

  Everyone in Paris by then had seen Bruni naked. As François had shown in the office, much was available on the Web. But this was different. It was classier, an accident. I couldn’t imagine Michelle Obama or Jackie Kennedy going so confidently, fashionably defiant into the public eye.

  France perhaps was a conservative society, but it wasn’t necessarily a fearful one.

  39

  New York City was gigantic and noisy. Where was the fire? During a brief visit in June, every cliché that had ever been lodged against New York percolated inside me, and my acquired French radar went bananas. Staying at my sister’s apartment, I saw a commercial for Pizza Hut that advertised a meal offering “three whole pounds of food.” Three pounds of food?! And New York smelled fried where Paris smelled baked. It was a totality, an expression of many cities. Paris, on the other hand, was a village. So perhaps I’d become a village person.

  My agent met me for breakfast. He’d drawn up a list of editors he thought might like my book. He’d begin sending the manuscript around the following week, if that was okay.

  I asked, Had he seen that Pizza Hut commercial promising three whole pounds of food?

  He said, Oh, so you’re Parisian now?

  When we parted, I was extremely happy. That lasted three minutes, to the benches on the corner of Fifth Avenue and West Sixteenth Street. Then the idea of my book going around made my nervousness en
large—not nervousness, but the fear I remembered, fear like lampreys in the blood.

  If this book was rejected, could I wade into the next novel’s sea?

  Anyway, those were my thoughts on the flight from New York City to San Francisco the following day, or those were the thoughts of several of the people who lived inside my head. The rest of us, who weren’t thinking about publishing, could not believe how absorbed we were by this episode of The Real Housewives of New York City, which in fact had a lot to commend it.

  * * *

  In San Francisco, Lucas the composer panicked because Air France had lost his boom. I won’t mention the cool-out music playing in the lobby of our hotel, or the potted boulders, or the scents spritzed into the air of the hotel’s public spaces to help us chill, because Lucas was grieved. Without a boom, how would he carry his microphone? Why couldn’t he make himself understood?

  Ostensibly, Air France telephone support had no French-speaking representatives if you called them from within the United States.

  We collected Vincent and went to the Mission District, where our hired crew worked out of a warehouse. Their production chiefs were Craig and Robin. That afternoon, Craig was showing Vincent how to use a new model of RED camera when Lucas showed up, having just woken from a nap.

  “Be careful,” Lucas whispered to Vincent, pointing at the camera, “it’s a trap.”

  Craig said to Vincent, “I’m sorry?”

  Lucas snapped at him, “Be gentle with my friend.”

  Vincent told Lucas to be quiet and apologized to Craig. “He means ‘nice,’ not gentle. Gentil in French is ‘nice,’ please excuse him, he is crazy from the plane.”

  “I am not crazy,” Lucas said, sulking.

  Craig squared up to Lucas. Lucas was about six inches taller.

  “Lucas,” Craig said, “will you be gentle with me?”

  Lucas said after a moment, “I will be gentle, comme un lapin.”

  That evening, on Lucas’s behalf, I called Air France. They said they would need a day to look around Aéroport Charles de Gaulle for his boom, and they’d call us back.

  * * *

  In our interview, Francis Ford Coppola said he admired today’s youth culture in San Francisco—the dot-com kids, the laptop vagrants. So we found a coffee shop in the Mission District popular with bloggers, and asked the manager to provide us with a hipster we could shoot.

  The girl he chose, a tattooed barista with a one-gear bicycle—“your typical pixie with a fixie,” Craig said—flipped out when she learned the name of our client. She couldn’t believe it—oh, she couldn’t breathe from excitement! “Look, look,” she said, showing Vincent how she’d emblazoned the Louis Vuitton logo on the stump of her tamper, to render it more luxurious.

  Day two, Air France informed us they’d located Lucas’s boom, but now we needed to prove that Lucas was its owner. I said we possessed a luggage-claim ticket and a reference number—wasn’t that enough? This was not enough, they said, because they needed to open a dossier, which meant Lucas needed to fax copies of his boarding pass, claim ticket, and passport to the luggage-claims office at Charles de Gaulle.

  Unfortunately, the woman said, she did not have the fax number at hand, so I’d need to call back the next day.

  The next day, I got the number and faxed the documents. They called back to say that the fax had been received and we would be informed when Lucas’s dossier had been assembled, at which point they’d proceed returning the boom to Lucas’s possession, assuming it was his.

  Lucas said he was about ready to renounce his French citizenship.

  * * *

  Day four, driving up to Coppola’s winery in Napa Valley: Craig the production boss driving, Lucas in shotgun, me and Vincent in the back. Vincent was frowning out the window, trying to nap, while I took notes as Craig and Lucas got to know each other.

  Craig, pointing to cows in the distance: “These are?”

  Lucas: “Les vaches.”

  Craig: “Well, in English, we say ‘dogs.’”

  Lucas: “Dogs?”

  Craig: “Dogs make milk. Milk makes cheese.”

  Lucas: “Fromage.”

  Craig: “Fromage.”

  Lucas: “The dogs, they are agile?”

  Craig: “Small dogs, agile. Big dogs, no.”

  Lucas: “You fuck with me?”

  Craig: “Actually, you want to say, ‘You fucking with me? You fucking with me?’”

  Lucas: “Ah … ‘Craig, you fuck my wife? You fuck my wife?’”

  Craig: “DeNiro.”

  Lucas: “DeNiro. Craig, tell me, my English is not too ‘fade’ for you?”

  Craig: “The fade is just right.”

  Five minutes later

  Lucas, pointing out the window at cows: “Dogs are gentle.”

  Craig: “Not boy dogs. Bulls. Danger. Stay away.”

  Lucas: “Ah … Danger. Not gentle.”

  Craig: “Lady dogs, gentle.”

  Lucas: “What is, ‘Stay away’?”

  Craig: “It means, ‘Do not touch.’”

  Lucas, screaming out the window: “Dogs, stay away!’”

  Five minutes later

  Lucas: “Craig, you tell me.”

  Craig: “What should I tell you?”

  Lucas: “About Robin. Robin is beautiful. Why you … stay away?”

  Craig: “What did you say?”

  Lucas: “Uh-oh! Danger?”

  Craig: “You want to know why I stay away from Robin.”

  Lucas: “Be gentle.”

  Craig: “Well, I’m married.”

  Lucas: “Yes. But you do not say Robin is beautiful?”

  Craig: “Robin is beautiful.”

  Lucas: “Robin … stay a lady.”

  Craig: “Yes, Robin remains a lady.”

  Lucas: “Craig, tell me, you fuck your wife?”

  Craig: “This has gone far enough.”

  Lucas: “Danger?”

  Craig: “Les vaches manger les fromages.”

  Lucas: “What? No, this is not making sense.”

  * * *

  Close to our final night in San Francisco, Craig’s friend Robb invited us over for dinner; he’d heard the French visitors were amusing. Robb made us pizzas by hand—with dough he’d prepared that evening; herbs he’d grown on his deck; sauce from tomatoes he’d plucked from his garden. There was his own beer to drink, home-brewed, and after that espresso, which Robb admitted was derived from coffee beans he’d roasted himself the previous weekend.

  Vincent and Lucas were amazed.

  That week, I’d spent a lot of time battling winds with a Lastolite EZ Balance Collapsible Light Balancing Disk, or squatting in a harness strapped to the outside of a camera truck, and I’d had some time to think. Basically, San Francisco was beginning to appeal to me. Back in New York, I’d always hated San Francisco. Most of the San Franciscans I knew were too contented, devoting their lives to their lifestyles; they all had terrific accessories and zero self-doubt. But from the truck, San Francisco seemed much more like Paris than New York did: neighborhoods crumbed over land. Rather than one big meal, a buffet.

  In Paris, a great similitude prevailed—every roof a constant blue-gray—in the same way that unruliness governed New York City. I found myself wanting more time in San Francisco to figure out its organizing principle—was it bliss between quakes?

  Though, to be honest, all I could think about was my novel sitting on five editors’ desks.

  “This is how to live,” Vincent said after dinner, patting his gut. He was staring at some Victorian houses on a hill, at the fog combed over their foreheads. Vincent fumbled the door to the patio, lit a cigarette outside; then thunder boomed and he came scuttling back, just as the view became curtained with rain.

  “In Paris,” Vincent said, pointing down at his cup, “no one has coffee like this. This is incredible. Hey, what is this grocery store we visited today?”

  “Whole Foods,” Craig said.

&nbs
p; “Unbelievable. So beautiful. We have nothing like Whole Foods.”

  I said, “What about Monoprix?”

  Vincent laughed. “Whole Foods, the fruit, comment tu dis, they are like jewels. Show me where in Paris food is sold like art.”

  “Bon Marché? Mais non,” Lucas said, “trop bobo.”

  “Yeah, trop bobo, trop luxe,” Vincent said. He told Craig that Bon Marché was a “luxury grocery store,” which made Lucas shout at Craig: “Guy, art is not a luxury—never!”

  But what about Picard? I said. Vincent conceded the point. He explained to the group the idea of a store selling high-quality frozen food. “Conceptually, it’s strong. And in execution. I am surprised someone is not bringing Picard to the States.”

  * * *

  Air France called the next morning to say they’d finished assembling Lucas’s dossier and planned to put Lucas’s boom on the next plane to San Francisco.

  Unfortunately, a week had gone by and this was on our last day in San Francisco, as we were leaving for the airport. I suggested to Air France that they should hold it, since Lucas would be able to pick up his boom in Paris the next morning.

  Air France said that this would also be a satisfactory conclusion.

  Back in Paris, after a twelve-hour flight, Vincent, Lucas, and I went through customs together. On the way to baggage claim, a gorgeous woman walked out in front of us, wearing a flimsy white dress and a visible black thong.

  “See,” Vincent said, smiling, enlivened, “this is how in Paris we say, bienvenue.”

  40

  A week after I returned from San Francisco, in July, we were invited to a dinner party near Rue Montorgueil. It was one of Paris’s most charming streets—of shops and bistros, people dining outside and catching up with friends. The hosts’ building, collapsing, had a deep courtyard hidden from the street, with fenced bouquets of trees in each corner.