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

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “No,” I said, “we go back soon.”

  Jérôme started laughing, assuming I was joking. Then he turned serious. “Listen, don’t be stupid. Are you crazy? Look at what we have.”

  Jérôme’s looseness was noticeably different from the afternoon, when he’d told me, with gloom in his voice, how stressed he was, stressed out au maximum. “I am working like crazy,” he’d said. “This is what life has become. You get it? Don’t ask me about work, not on vacation. When I’m in the country, I am not in Paris, I leave it behind—I eat, I sleep, I screw, okay? Do not talk about work to me.

  “Anyway,” he said, goosing my arm, “before you leave, you’ll have to come to Marseille.”

  He started a Marseille booster’s song. From various points in the dark other voices sang along. Later in the evening, early in the morning, we were blasting Sanseverino’s cigarette song through the loudspeakers, and Jérôme got me by both shoulders, shouting, “Listen, Paris, it’s all assholes.” He got my eyes to make sure I would remember this forever: “I’m telling you, Marseille, listen, beautiful beaches, and the women? The world tells you we’re criminals, okay, and it’s true, but that doesn’t change the rest.

  “It’s a crime,” he said morosely, “if you think France is just Paris.”

  True enough.

  God, I’d miss them.

  42

  Year-round in Paris, though especially during summer, posters went up in the Métro for what I called the country-idyll picture. There was Le cœur des hommes 2; Trois amis; Je déteste les enfants des autres. Different films, but the posters were the same: French people in the countryside sitting at a table outdoors. Dipping their legs in a pool. Fishing the river Tarn from a chair. The light would be full of shadows, and nearby was a bottle of rosé, above was the sun—there would be a walnut cutting board and some cornichons. People outdoors laughing, eating, pursuing a kiss. The posters were everywhere, pervasive in all seasons. Down in the Métro, below the drumming rain and the city’s dead-end jobs, its bureaucracy and shopping malls, these posters were a reminder that to lose touch with the rustic table was to lose, to some degree, one’s French soul.

  The posters were interchangeable, but the idea did not change.

  Then again, what did I know?

  In an interview I read somewhere around that time, John le Carré said the only way to write about a place was after visiting it for a day, or after a long life once you’d moved there. Because a day’s visit gave you notes: smells, colors, advertisements new and advertisements peeling, and the writer could play naïf.

  Or, if a writer moved to a place permanently, he’d be granted perspective, assuming he kept his eyes open for many years.

  But time between those two lengths didn’t lend more certainty, just detail.

  Summer wound down. Dinner parties became dance parties. Rachel and I cooked ensemble, and we shopped at Picard. From the market, we brought home flowers that we arranged the way people store umbrellas. We roasted chickens. We hit dive bars. We hit clubs. We hit bars “installed” as exercises of marketing, where champagne was €140, but for that price two people could sit in a pink plastic love seat designed by Karim Rashid—we watched this occur but did not experience it for ourselves. Outside his rooms, Asif grew peppers, tomato plants, bushels on latticework, herbs in barrels. In the evenings the smell of mint came in through all our windows. Slowly the light went out. We played gin. We played Feist on the stereo for guests, and Alain Bashung, and Ladyhawke’s “Paris Is Burning,” which was a hit that summer at the office, where parties were organized on the terrace at night. Some were going-away parties for coworkers; some were parties because we had a view from a roof overlooking the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the view wrapping from Montmartre to La Défense.

  The first verse to “Paris Is Burning” said: “Tell me the truth / Is it love / Or just Paris.”

  Also popular was the Friendly Fires’ single “Paris,” remixed by Aeroplane, with vocals redone by the Brooklyn band Au Revoir Simone, to sound spacier and, oddly, more French, if still with an American’s outsider touch: “One day we’re going to live in Paris / I promise, I’m on it / When I’m bringing in the money.”

  One night there was a party in the glass-roofed Grand Palais, and it looked to us on the terrace like fireworks were being shot off indoors, it looked like terrorists were blowing up a flower shop.

  * * *

  One week before Bruno took his summer vacation, he invited me out to lunch. The two of us had steaks and plenty of wine—champagne followed by Burgundy—all Bruno’s choice, Bruno insisting on sharing the wine so I wouldn’t namby out.

  Breast-feeding, Bruno said, was in roughly the same place as when I’d left it. His baby-food job had gone well, however, and he’d been commended for his work. But work and life were both dull and discouraging.

  “And what I hear,” he said in English, “is you going to California, London, making movies?”

  Bruno laughed, then continued in French: “I don’t say it’s fair or not fair. It’s not your fault, but you have an advantage. You know this, right? The advantage is coming from outside. You’re not Parisian, not French. You get to bypass the system. And you know Pierre from before—you’re on Pierre’s special team. Listen, you think if I said to André, ‘Hey, dude, I’ve got this idea for a big chicken,’ you think he’d listen to me? Come on.”

  We talked for twenty minutes about troubles Bruno was having with a woman on his team, who’d reported him for arriving late and blowing off meetings. Bruno said, “You know me, when am I late? I work hard.”

  I asked him if he’d be satisfied living forever in Paris.

  Bruno took a moment to think about it, then gestured with his cigarette at the Arc de Triomphe and the grand buildings of the eleventh arrondissement. “Look where we are,” he said. “Old families. Rich people. In Paris, if you’re not rich, not from an old family, you’re stuck. So of course you’re not satisfied. Who wants to be stuck? But at least I’m stuck in Paris.

  “Hey, now,” he said, “it’s dessert time, get something, let’s eat.”

  We ate some kind of savory ice cream with herbs and salt, a wonder in every bite.

  43

  Rachel’s and my friend Charles from New York visited Paris to see us and also to see a Brazilian guy. Charles and the Brazilian had met in New York, where Charles fell for him hard. But the Brazilian told him he wasn’t interested. Still, the Brazilian told Charles that he was moving to Paris soon, and if ever he was in town …

  “So I’m reading the signals right, yeah?” Charles asked me when I met him at his hotel. “Seriously, there’s a chance here? This isn’t just a lark?”

  Charles was six-four, his hotel room was five-eight. In the lobby, he said bonsoir enthusiastically to the landlord, who did not look up from his newspaper. We went out for dinner with Rachel, then home for a nightcap, until finally Charles left to go meet the Brazilian at a gay bar.

  The next morning, I offered Charles pain au raisin from my favorite boulanger around the corner, but he was too miserable and heartbroken to enjoy it.

  “I should have known what to expect. He lives in Paris, he’s got a goddamn scooter, of course I’m going to fall for him. Anyway…”

  Charles let out a mournful sigh.

  “We had great conversation. At the end, he says he has to get up early in the morning for work, so he says, Can I give you a lift? Just really nonchalant. I’m like, Uh, I came all the way to Paris to see you, of course I’ll take a lift. So we’re bopping around Paris on his Vespa—I mean, kill me now—afterward he drops me off at my hotel. I’m like, let’s stop pussying around. So I said to him, ‘You know I’ve got a crush on you, right?’ And he says—he’s still sitting on his scooter at this point, only now he’s got a big look of disappointment on his face—he says, ‘Uh, I thought we worked that out in New York.’”

  Charles got up, put on his jacket, and said, “But you know what? I’m totally over
it, let’s just go be in Paris.”

  Charles remained crusty for half an hour, until we were stopped by a woman who said she was a photographer from GQ. She said she wanted to shoot Charles for an upcoming issue of Paris street style. It wasn’t exactly a Singer Sargent portrait, but it would do, and Charles cheered up. In the République Métro station, buying tickets, he was cut twice in line, but he didn’t care in the least.

  I explained that queuing rules were a bit looser in France than in the States.

  “No, believe me, I get it,” Charles said. “It’s like black people in a Chinese restaurant in Bed-Stuy.”

  “You can’t say that,” I said.

  “The hell I can’t,” Charles said. “I’m black, I live in Bed-Stuy, I love wontons, what’s your problem?

  “Hey, is it me,” he added, “or did Parisians ditch berets for Yankees hats?”

  Two French guys were going by in fitted New Era caps.

  “Look what Jay-Z hath wrought,” Charles said.

  That night, outdoors at Café Crème for dinner, we told Charles about our big plan: returning to the States and moving to the woods, assuming we could swing it. Of course, Charles said. “This is obviously what you should do.”

  For Charles’s last day in Paris, we took him to the Palais de Tokyo museum, where the main exhibit was an installation where visitors could shoot paintballs at the artist. Better than shooting strippers, I thought. But the exhibit wasn’t running; the sign said the artist could be shot only on weekdays. So we decided to leave, though first we’d get something to drink from the museum café.

  I was waiting in line, two people away from the register, when a woman cut to the front. She apologized loudly, but she needed to ask the cashier a question. Specifically: What was the secret ingredient in her salad? Because the sauce, she said, had been extraordinary.

  The cashier said, Which salad?

  The woman grabbed one from the refrigerated case. “Was it dill? Oregano? Something spicy? Or were the tomatoes dried rather than fresh?”

  She apologized to the six of us in line. “It really is a tremendous salad,” she said.

  The cashier said she didn’t know.

  “Well, do you think we might inspect it?” the woman asked.

  So the two of them picked through the salad. Lettuce, haricots verts, croutons, red onion, cheese. They tasted each thing, each time the woman saying, “No, no, that’s good but that’s not it.”

  The cashier excused herself to the kitchen and returned with a chef, a tall man in a short toque. The woman put it to him: “I’m really sorry, excuse me, but what is in your magical salad? Not the lettuce, not the onion, there’s something else, something in the sauce. I’m dying to know what it is.”

  The chef tasted the salad. He said he agreed, it was a good salad, but he was sorry, he hadn’t been the one to prepare it, he mostly did sandwiches.

  “For me, it’s the sauce,” he said. “There’s a really nice kick to it. Is it pimento?”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” the woman said, turning to smile at us all.

  The chef suggested the woman try calling the manager. This led to the cashier finding the manager’s mobile number on a note taped to one of the refrigerators. She dialed the number and handed over the phone.

  “Hello, I am in your café at the Palais de Tokyo,” said the inquiring woman. “Thank you, yes, it’s a very nice café.” Gradually, she explained her question. A moment later she smacked her forehead and started laughing, “Pepper oil, of course!”

  “Ah, pepper oil,” the chef said, nodding, and thumped his fist into his hand.

  The woman in front of me said to the cashier, That makes a lot of sense, and she got one of the salads for herself. The woman on the phone sighed with relief, apologized again for the interruption, and thanked us all.

  We said no problem, we were glad to know the truth ourselves.

  After fifteen minutes in line, I returned with Charles’s bottled water and explained why it had taken me so long.

  “Dude, Paris,” Charles said. “Honestly, nothing comes close.”

  44

  Final week of August, Rachel and I took two of my allotted five weeks of vacation and went to the North Carolina coast with Rachel’s parents. We sat on the beach and read books, drank vodka on the rocks, and ate fried clams. I rented a surfboard and rode slush. One night, we were drinking at a bar, just the two of us plus two sunburned white guys, one skinny, one fat, and a black woman with dreadlocks wearing sunglasses on a thin lanyard, drinking a brown cocktail with an orange slice. The skinny guy said to the fat guy, “Hey, what do you call someone who speaks three languages?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Trilingual. Now what do you call someone who speaks two languages?”

  “Bilingual,” the woman said.

  “Exactly,” the skinny guy said. “So what do you call somebody who speaks only one language?”

  “Monolingual?”

  “Nope.” The skinny guy was already laughing at his punch line: “English.”

  The bartender said, “What?”

  “Shit. I meant—”

  “You meant British,” the woman said, tapping her chin.

  “No, no,” the skinny guy said, “here’s what I’m saying.” He took his time: “What do you call a guy who only speaks English? Wait. So you’ve got someone who just speaks their own language, except—”

  The bartender interrupted, “This joke sucks.”

  The fat man said, “You barely speak English yourself.”

  “I said hold on!” the skinny guy shouted. His face became red. “Now, if you’ll let me find my place.”

  The bartender said, “Just drop it.”

  “Oh, and how many languages do you speak?”

  “Man, I don’t speak dick.”

  The fat guy and the dreadlocked woman bumped fists and started talking about Barack Obama, who was on the TV. The fat man said he was voting for Obama, the woman said she was, too. The bartender said he didn’t want to throw his vote away if a black man was unelectable in America, which wasn’t him being racist, just realistic, he said.

  I watched the skinny guy retell the joke to himself, head down, concentrating. He got to the punch line and said under his breath, “What do you call someone who only speaks one language?”

  “American,” he whispered a few seconds later. He smiled, looking up. He tried to tell his friends, but they were watching television, so he went to the bathroom.

  * * *

  During our flight back to Paris, a man sitting across from me showed his USA Today to one of the flight attendants. The front page said something about a public-sector strike being considered in Paris.

  Man: “They’re always at it, am I right?”

  Flight attendant: “That’s their way.”

  Man: “Well, it’s a part of their culture. My kids don’t understand protesting. Not like us. Baby boomers, we knew what protest culture was. We did something.”

  Flight attendant: “The world was a different place.”

  Man: “My kids don’t march for shit. I’ll tell you what, they’d march for cheaper cell phones, is about it.”

  SOMETHING IS ADDED TO THE AIR FOREVER

  FALL

  —How to write a Parisian theoretical manifesto—Vincent and I adhere to a dress code—Count on France to sexualize children’s cinema—Rachel and I learn how to dress down Parisian women—Chez le Photographe du Business Travel—We’ll always have (a certain foamy emptiness)—Last suppers—Bruno wants to play pool—

  45

  In September, fall came early to Avenue George V, with trees turning henpecked, their leaves shedding tips. Store windows changed to autumn displays: leather coats and baskets of apples. It was the best time of year to be in Paris. We took long walks in the Tuileries and visited the Orangerie, the museum where Monet’s Water Lilies were kept. They looked alive, especially with so many trees outside turning yellow. We visited the Picasso Museum an
d sat for an hour in its garden, which by itself was worth the price of admission on an iridescent weekend morning.

  One Saturday, with an odometer, we covered seven miles and barely left the city center.

  So I was feeling extremely good the Tuesday that I picked up my pasta at noon, strolled down Rue Lamennais, and discovered, to my horror, that my lunchtime park had closed.

  A newspaper article posted on the gate said the park was shuttered until further notice. The foundation that managed the grounds needed to rework its finances before it could afford the upkeep again. One man interviewed in the article said he and his coworkers were in mourning. He said he worked at a nearby advertising agency—I jumped, reading that, though I didn’t recognize his name. He vowed to fight to reopen the park. It was a place, he said, that belonged to “old ladies and golden boys,” that made people happy.

  Next to the article hung a petition under plastic, signed already with twenty names.

  Nearby was an island of pea gravel, with four benches. I found Stephen King sitting there wearing headphones, reading a newspaper. I sat on the other side of his bench and ate my lunch.

  That afternoon, I was reading Jean Echenoz’s I’m Gone, thinking about Paris being like an airport. Echenoz wrote,

  An airport does not really exist in and of itself. It’s only a place of passage, an airlock, a fragile façade in the middle of an open field, a belvedere circled by runways where rabbits with kerosene breath leap and bound, a turntable infested by winds that carry a host of corpuscles of myriad origins: grains of sand from every desert, flecks of gold and mica from every river, volcanic or radioactive dust, pollens and viruses, rice powder and cigar ash.

  Reading that, I was rather small.

  Paris, I thought, was like a library book, something loaned.

  At a party of Pierre and Chloe’s that weekend, an artist friend announced he’d be having his first solo gallery show. Big cheers. The guy, Simon, was known for turning pornography into sculpture; he took a sex movie, paused it at the climactic moment, printed out the image, and diced up the print into squares, like pixels. Then he glued each pixel square onto a wooden block and assembled the blocks into a solid wall, so that, stacked together, they showed the frozen orgasm in a wooden-block re-creation.