10

Parisians love Paris more than anybody does. I heard it all the time from Parisian coworkers, how much they loved their city’s charms. Leaves on the grand boulevards changing color, window displays adjusting to the season. In late September, somehow all of Paris seemed more French for being in flux.

Pierre had two sisters. One of them, Monique, an economics lecturer at the Sorbonne, invited Rachel and me to a party. “I have a marvelous view this time of year, you must come see.” Monique and her husband lived close to us, four floors above the Canal Saint-Martin, in a trendy district on the Right Bank, north of Place de la République.

We walked over from our apartment, going up along the canal. At nine p.m., hundreds of twentysomethings were having picnics along the banks, throwing tiny impromptu dinner parties under a purpling sky. Normally the canal is a working waterway, but at that hour no boats were moving. Fishermen lined the banks, homeless and otherwise. At Monique’s apartment overlooking the canal, sixty people, young and old, were dancing to a remix of “Toxic” by Britney Spears. We met Monique’s husband, Jérôme, a mathematician, at the door. He was tan, sharp, all eyes. Jérôme had appeal off the charts, yet an aura of no bullshit. He had a way of talking while smoothing back his hair that said he’d obtain your secrets.

“You’re the writer,” Jérôme told me in French, after he fetched us champagne. “The guy working with Pierre. You speak French?”

“Not a lot,” I said, in French, pas beaucoup.

“Okay,” he said, “but I won’t speak English with you!”

“No problem,” I said.

“Fuck English,” Jérôme yelled at me in English.

“Fuck English,” I repeated.

Jérôme had plump lips. He licked them a lot. Jérôme pulled me in close to say in French, “I love this, this word ‘fuck.’ But I agree, it’s not good for you to stay protected inside English.”

He said something else in French that I didn’t follow. At the end of the room, behind the dancers and through the hanging smoke, was an enormous plate window. There you could see the depth of western Paris in blues and grays, its Gothic buildings staggered like rows of folding chairs. Finally I heard Jérôme say, “This city, you must embrace it. Learn something, or you’re lost.”

“Oui,” I said. “C’est ma stratégie.”

“Ha! Good, be strategic,” Jérôme said, laughing. He added in English, “You will make an army.”

By midnight, the air was speared with cold. I told Rachel during our walk home that I was pleased to have snuck stratégie into conversation. It was a new word I’d learned that week from Olivier. I’d also learned the French for “stapler”—agrafeuse—because Olivier hadn’t understood me when I’d asked to borrow “la stapler,” so he taught me its gorgeous name, which sounded to me more like an expensive motorcycle.

Later, I’d have trouble remembering agrafeuse. I never figured out why. Even as my fluency increased, I couldn’t latch on to it. At the office, I’d say, “Pardon, Olivier, est-ce que je peux emprunter…” and when I couldn’t remember agrafeuse, I’d mimic clenching my hand, as if squeezing a stapler, or a hand exerciser. Which confused Olivier. The first time it happened, he pulled out a hand exerciser from his bottom-left drawer and told me to keep it.

*   *   *

Our weekday routine quickly fell into place. At night, I’d leave the office around seven or seven-thirty, then have dinner with Rachel before putting in an hour or two on the online magazine that I helped edit. Around eleven, we’d unwind with some TV. In New York, Rachel had worked for nonprofits while writing on the side, but she wasn’t allowed to work in Paris without a visa, so she was taking French classes five days a week and working on a screenplay. She also did all the household shopping, cooking, and cleaning—playing the part of femme au foyer (housewife).

Our budget allowed for two dinners out each month. I heard from a journalist friend in the States about a “secret” restaurant located near our apartment, where two young Americans served gourmet food in their dining room, without permits. We obtained reservations via e-mail and set out for dinner on a Saturday night. The sun was setting. Dusk bloomed on otherwise plain streets. The shadows were oblong, bowing into Place de la République, and the wind blowing north from the Seine came in gusts, scattering dust and leaves. I took Rachel’s hand, we zigzagged through alleys, and our evening seemed terrifically Parisian: going down Rue Turbigo at that hour with the smells of autumn, out for a dinner party like the rest of Paris.

So we didn’t want anything to spoil the mood.

Rachel and I were seated in the chefs’ dining room with six American investment bankers who mostly knew one another from Dartmouth; two retired college professors from Lewiston, Maine; and a young Polish woman who was visiting Paris with her mother, who’d never left Poland before and spoke neither French nor English. Aside from one of the bankers’ girlfriends, who was Canadian, there wasn’t a single French-speaker in the room. For several hours we ate a menu of American gourmet comfort food—courses like miniature grilled cheese sandwiches floating in tomato soup—while the bankers talked about working too hard to have any time to spend all their money.

“The thing about the French is, they’re death eaters for hours worked. I mean, go home, be French already.”

“It’s true, Parisians work crazy hard.”

“My boss is a monster.”

“It’s not like I don’t try to speak French? But, you know, screw you very much.”

“Parisians don’t like English-speakers.”

“So I had, like, my mother visiting? And we went to Boulevard Saint-Germain? I mean, she didn’t recognize anything.”

“Paris is a morgue, architecturally, they all say it.”

“The food’s in San Francisco now.”

“I don’t know. I kind of like Paris. The bread.”

“Well, yeah, the bread.”

“So did you go undergrad, or business school?”

“We should picnic this weekend.”

“There’s a Small World picnic on Saturday, I think.”

“You hear Berlin, but everyone I know’s in London.”

“The money in London is incredible right now.”

“Well, you should see the Arabs they have.”

To give them credit, the professors were nice, but I didn’t talk to them much. Sitting across from the Polish girl, Lilli, I was constantly needed. Lilli wore a red cotton dress and had flat blond hair. Frequently, she’d grab my wrist and stare at me, as if she had state secrets she needed me to smuggle out of the country.

Her mother looked like a pile of gym towels.

Early on, Lilli began by proposing three toasts: to Paris; to her new business; and to Eli and “the beautiful Jessie,” our chefs. Then she took my hand and taught me a Polish tongue twister: W Szczebrzeszynie chrzszcz brzmi w trzcinie. It meant, she said, “In the town of Szczebrzeszyn, a beetle buzzes in the reeds.”

Lilli got tipsy fast, too fast. There were a lot of sudden declarations, whispered or shouted. She confided in me, “Mama is a farmer’s bride; my father is a pig farmer. To make more money, you see, I have convinced them to turn the farm into a hotel. In Warsaw, I am a travel agent. The bed-and-breakfast, it’s the trend now, you know, people staying to work on the farm and eat from the land.”

Lilli shouted at me, “Attention! This is why we are in Paris. To study.”

To study hotels? I said.

“Perfectly,” she said. She beat my arm with a fork. One bottle of wine down, another opened. “To exhaust Paris,” Lilli said, refilling our glasses. “Café de Flore we did yesterday. You know this: amazing. L’Opéra, Printemps, Le Louvre, amazing. Le Lipp, you know it? Of course.”

At one point, the bankers got loud, and Lilli glowered down the table. “TO THE CITY OF LIGHTS,” she yelled, pointing her empty wineglass at them like a flashlight.

“We are also here to eat,” Lilli confided in me. “My mother, she loves French food. But in my opinion? It is mostly terrible. Like this tacos. This is hell!”

We’d just been served fish tacos. Personally, I thought they’d do San Diego proud.

Next, Lilli’s mother said something in Polish, which were her first words of the evening. One of the professors asked Lilli what her mother had said, and Lilli frowned. Lilli said, “I shouldn’t tell you. It is stupid.” She snapped at her mother in Polish, and her mother went back to eating. “Well, okay,” Lilli said, in the tone of a guilty five-year-old, “Mama says she likes the tacos very much.”

She laughed: “Whatever!”

By course four, Lilli had finished all the wine. She shouted for Eli—“that bastard Eli”—to bring us more. The other chef, Jessie, appeared. Jessie said quietly to Lilli, “Eli is plating the next course. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“We need wine,” Lilli said, pouting. “But I want Eli to do it!”

“Well, like I said, he’s busy right now.” Jessie tried to escape. Lilli snatched her arm. “It’s not fair,” Lilli said, pulling Jessie, “him being chef all night when you play servant. What happened to us, what happened about women having power?”

A minute later, Eli appeared in the doorway to introduce the final course: “So here we’ve got a small portion—”

“Eli,” Lilli interrupted loudly, “stop talking, please. We would like to hear from Jessie now.” Lilli tried grabbing Eli by the belt and fell out of her chair. “Why do you,” she stammered, getting up, “get all the credit, because Jessie is your slave? Women are not slaves. Women are chefs, too, didn’t you know this?”

We walked home in a daze, down a quiet street of shuttered chain stores, Métro stations, and cafés closing for the night. Somewhere, surely, I thought, French people in Paris were doing French things, but how to find them? At home, Rachel propped up my laptop on the bottom of the bed while I threw open the windows. We watched a DVD we’d started the night before, from the Ric Burns documentary New York, a history of New York City. Since our move, we’d gone through the whole series twice, Rachel pointed out.

I said, “We have?”

Rachel said, with a kind of sadness I hadn’t heard in her voice since we’d moved, “I miss knowing what people are saying. Being part of what’s going on around me.”

“Oh, the bankers?”

“No no,” Rachel said. “I’m not superinterested in knowing what’s new at Goldman Sachs. But people at the grocery store, on the street. I really wish my French classes were better, for what we’re spending.”

Rachel had said before that her teacher was good, but the class was a struggle. Students cycled in and out so frequently, it was hard for the instructor to make headway. Plus, since few of Rachel’s classmates shared a language—her classes were truly global: students from Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia—the only common tongue in class was French, which none of them spoke. But Rachel did her homework, practiced conversation. And when she wasn’t being une femme au foyer, she loved her time at home writing and saw progress in her creative work.

Outside, inside, the night was us alone, with zero noise. Nothing but a chill. We were amateurs at everything.