11

Carlos, a Parisian senior Web developer at the agency, took to calling me his nigger. Sometimes his Negro, but mostly his nigger. Shouting me out in a corridor, thumping me on the back, “What’s up, my nigger?”

The second time it happened, I told him it could not continue. Carlos was crestfallen. He’d thought it was okay; he said he thought it was our little thing. After all, it was what I’d called him the first time we met.

That is impossible, I said.

“You don’t remember? I don’t believe you,” Carlos said in English. Then, raising his eyebrows, “… my nigger?”

Evidently my French was so bad, it produced slurs.

At work, my desk was papered with breasts. I didn’t think anyone would mind, cleavage in Paris being everywhere—décolletage on the street and in the office revealing a lot more than found in the States. There were sexy girls on the sides of newspaper huts and buses, and on TV channels during lingerie advertisements (ba bum bum bum ba ba…). Only a few years earlier in France, busts of the Victoria’s Secret model Laetitia Casta had been installed—busts of her bust—in municipal buildings across the country after Casta had been elected by France’s mayors to embody Marianne, symbol of the French Republic. Each statue’s bra, of course, covered just one breast.

On my desk, though, these were not Victoria’s Secret breasts. These were breasts busy feeding. Breasts like soda fountains. I’d never associated breasts with nutrition before. In fact, not doing so was one of my favorite parts about being married without children. But for Bruno’s and my infant-nutrition work, my desk had become a slush pile of topless pics that coworkers found unpleasant for their lack of sexiness. Olivier even made a tower of books to block them from his view.

One day after lunch, I found André fiddling with my laptop.

“You left your music on,” André said. “You made the office sound like a sushi restaurant.”

I pointed out that Air was a French band, in fact. André shrugged. He was wearing a magenta Lacoste, showing wooly cleavage.

In eighteen months, there would be, at most, ten instances when I’d see André in a non-Lacoste shirt. He owned them in two dozen hues and fades—André the office crocodile, grinning or snapping, pooped or hungry.

“So, please explain this … cleavage,” André said doubtfully, picking up a book from around my desk. “Look, it’s okay to have pictures of naked girls at work, but this—”

He lifted up an illustration showing a nipple in cross-section.

André said, sighing, “You’ve ruined it.”

Bruno, my morose art director, was lurking behind André’s shoulder, clutching his laptop. That week, he was working in a room upstairs; for some reason, André and Pierre couldn’t settle on where to seat him permanently. He burst out laughing, huk huk huk. André ignored him and went back to his office, and Bruno resumed his permanent frown.

Bruno’s and my work together involved me writing, and Bruno designing, a series of booklets to be distributed in third-world hospitals to teach new mothers how to feed their babies. It was something I knew nothing about, yet our first booklet was due in two weeks.

I’d asked during my first meeting, Where does the information come from on how to feed babies? No, the managers said, the important question is, how will you “message” the information? Okay, I said, but where do I obtain the information to message? Ah, they said, but you can use the information that has already been created by previous writers on this account. (Which I’d reviewed and found to be wrong.) Or you can make up more. (Which terrified me.) Or use the Internet. (Which made me start laughing.)

The style of the thing is the challenge, one manager said; less what is said than how.

They wanted to know how would We, the royal We that was our team, the editorial We that was the client’s brand, how would We convince new mothers that We were their most valuable resource? I said, “Well, aren’t We a little worried about Me from a Legal Standpoint?”

“You see, you can’t talk to them,” Bruno told me afterward, chain-smoking on the street. “It is a war, the difference between managers and artists. They really are different people.”

Similar meetings went on for a week. I told our managers I would figure out their style problem once they’d figured out my information problem. Seeking détente, they offered to hire two experts, a British nutritionist and an Austrian pediatrician, who would provide the factual information I could “craft” into proper “brand messages.” To facilitate the job, I was advised to read a number of maternity guides: the French and British equivalents of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

Doing my homework on the Métro, I found Frenchwomen giving me friendly, flirty looks.

An e-mail came from a friend in the States, asking how I was holding up. I told him that after two months in France, I had breast fatigue. Oh, I can imagine, he said. I said, No, you can’t.

*   *   *

Everyone in the office took an hour’s lunch. It was the midday reflex, but it was also required: professionals in France were docked lunch money from their salaries, then reimbursed through little booklets of meal tickets they were expected to use in nearby restaurants.

Typically, coworkers preferred to get takeout, bringing food back to the canteen, where they ate in groups. Almost no one ate alone. The only people I saw eat at their desks besides me were Pierre, who’d worked in New York, and Keith, the Scottish copywriter, who liked to watch Jon Stewart clips on his computer while he ate his jambon beurre.

But eating at your desk was not cool. The third time I tried it was my last. Olivier complained: Why couldn’t I eat in the canteen like a normal person?

“I am sorry,” Olivier said, his voice rising, “I am sorry, but this is not the United States.” Olivier turned and said to Françoise, “This is an office, a communal office!”

Julie whispered to me in English from the corner of her mouth, “You should go.”

Olivier’s face was reddening.

“And now it smells terrible!” Olivier shouted. He walloped his desk with his fist. I made my exit while he raged, “How am I supposed to work when it smells in here like a burger shop? Do we all work in a burger shop now that the American is here?”

In fact, we did work in a burger shop most days. At least in the canteen. Two-thirds of people’s takeout food came from the McDonald’s next door. My fellow advertising employees, including Olivier, loved McDonald’s. After lunch, the trash cans would be full of bags with golden arches.

There were plenty of fast-food outlets on the Champs-Elysées, but McDonald’s was considered by my coworkers to be classier, more delicious. “It’s for families,” a guy named François told me. He said, surprised, “You don’t go to McDonald’s in the States?”

The McDonald’s next door was thoroughly French: spacious, handsome, clean. It featured a McCafé up front, which sold McDonald’s espresso and McDonald’s croissants and McDonald’s macarons, and in the back were the registers that sold burgers, fries, and also beer. Some coworkers, I learned, would walk all the way to a McDonald’s on Rue Troyon, ten minutes away, “because the sandwiches are better.” But either way, most people stuck to what I found a very French way of enjoying McDonald’s: in multiple courses. Chicken nuggets first, then fries and a burger (a Royale Deluxe, or a Big Tasty), frequently two burgers for the men, followed by a salad, and finished with a chocolate muffin or a shake or a hot-fudge sundae. No matter if the ice cream melted by the time they’d finished courses one through three over a span of forty-five minutes.

According to The New York Times, an average visitor to McDonald’s in France spent fifteen dollars, versus four in the United States.

Bruno, on the other hand, never ate at McDonald’s. Bruno was a gourmand. He spent thirty euros on lunch, dining in nice brasseries or at a sushi restaurant if he could rope someone into joining him. Most days I refused, and he’d drive his scooter back to his neighborhood for a steak and some wine with friends. Like everyone else, Bruno did not eat alone. The fact that I preferred to eat alone was considered weird.

Bruno would say, “Fine, go ahead, go do work even at lunchtime.”

Lunch, however, was how I stayed on track, I could have explained to Bruno—but I didn’t know the French for “on track.” Advertising did weird things to writers, I would have told him. In New York, I’d seen it water down friends’ ambitions and force them to collect mid-century furniture. So I’d flee the office at noon, buy some Italian takeout, and walk to a park on Rue Balzac. There I’d grab a bench and employ a red pen on whatever progress I’d made that morning on my novel, and afterward take a nap and daydream my muddled fantasies, smelling Paris, hearing the universe remind me that it didn’t owe me crap.

Early autumn in Paris was temperate and dry. My lunch park, a rolling grassy lawn in the eighth arrondissement, was about an acre in size, engraved by gravel paths. Paris was dotted with tiny parks such as that one, and lunchtimes were crowded with office workers picnicking, students smoking and chatting, and college girls who would undress down to bikinis and sunbathe on the lawn while men gazed from their benches, eating their sandwiches with two hands.

Not me, though. I was married. Plus I was fed up with breasts. I’d think, Oh, cover up your functionality already.

*   *   *

But I spent a lot of time in the park thinking about Bruno, not my novel. Bruno was mentally difficult to resist. I’d decided Bruno was a lover, not a fighter. As a lover, he was never satisfied. Especially at work. Bruno felt neglected. He was abused by middle managers and overlooked by higher-ups. We talked about it a lot: how Bruno fought daily against the idea of quitting, even leaving Paris, his hometown.

Bruno was one of the least theoretical people I’d ever met. Maybe it was specific only to Bruno, not all Parisians, the way his eyes dipped, how his spirit battled with the status quo. Perhaps the chip on his shoulder was in some ways a cushion. Or maybe it was a leftover trait from thousands of years of Parisian evolution.

Anyway, happy or threatened, Bruno laughed like a puppet, unblinking, alert to whichever disappointing thing would come next. I got all of this from conversation, that Bruno had the perfect life all figured out, a basic French model, but it seemed increasingly beyond his reach. History had screwed his generation, and no striking would restore a dying way of life. Basically, Bruno was fucked on all sides, by bosses, coworkers, and society at large. During his smoke-break confessions, Bruno acknowledged irony, but he did not employ it; instead he was earnest, vexed, and his motives were fathomable, his emotions intense—he was STUCK in Paris, in a job where he was GOING NOWHERE, indeed his life was GOING NOWHERE and this was a SERIOUS PROBLEM, after all he ONLY HAD ONE LIFE and it was FROZEN, which was HOW THINGS ARE IN FRANCE for most people at the moment, and yet, and yet, Bruno remained Parisian, surrounded by SO MUCH BEAUTY, and anyway IT DOESN’T PAY TO BE BITTER, he knew—after all it was QUITE PARISIAN to bear luck in mind and also remember WE ALL MAY DIE TOMORROW—thus he needed to LIVE IN THE MOMENT and RIDE HIS SCOOTER and BE HAPPY with his lot. All of this to explain why Bruno sounded SAD when he LAUGHED.

If Bruno was a pure strain of Frenchman, that strain was in touch with the depth of its feelings. Bruno ventured bravely across a sierra of emotions every day. So did most Parisian men, in my experience. They were constantly self-justifying. Only no one had told Bruno he wore the wrong sneakers. No one told Bruno he could be cloying, too familiar. Bruno did not know the bourgeoisie’s discreet charms.

One cold day in late September, Bruno wore a new coat to the office. It was a black bomber jacket, trim at the waist. It had a fur collar. Not a fuzzy collar, but something svelte. Givenchy might have designed it to match a pillbox hat. By the way Bruno delicately hung up his new jacket, I could tell he loved it. At ten a.m., however, he left it behind when he went downstairs for a cigarette, and two bobos—French for hipster + yuppie—took the opportunity to mock Bruno’s jacket behind his back. They rubbed the fur between their fingers like it was cash.

I said I thought it was beautiful.

Around that time, President Sarkozy was attacked in the newspapers for wearing stacked heels. Bruno was taller than Sarkozy, but not by much. In the morning, my eye would linger that extra second at the newsstand when I bought my papers, where, each day, Sarkozy turned browner, as if tanning on the front page, his family around him bunched together like a clutch of toffee lollipops. Sarkozy’s bronzage was the armor of confidence. It gave the Paris newspapers their radiance—his smugness their hydrogen, his expressions their helioscope.

Chalk it up to a blindness for all things French, but I found Sarkozy beguiling. Whereas my coworkers told me he was a pig, un vrai con.