12

Pierre needed me to work one Saturday, so Rachel spent the day with Lindsay, a new friend. Lindsay and Rachel had recently become acquainted through a mutual friend in the States. Lindsay was new to Paris, too, and she had what we had: the big France love.

Lindsay was a pretty, snappy Wisconsin blonde who stood six-three or six-four. She’d played Division One basketball in college and then moved to Chicago, where she’d worked as a paralegal. Now Lindsay was in Paris for adventures. “I got to that stage where I’m wondering, what the hell am I doing?” she told Rachel. “And why Chicago while I’m working it out? Why not Paris?” Now in Paris, Lindsay freelanced from an attic room she was subletting in the eleventh arrondissement, doing research online for Chicago defense attornies.

Rachel called that evening from a bar near the Louvre, Le Fumoir. She and Lindsay had just arrived for a cocktail event, for something called A Small World—an invitation-only social network for the world’s wealthy and/or connected classes. Thirty minutes after I got there, a man wearing a hunting cap told me he was the Left Bank’s only gardener for hire, and its best, absolument. Also, he liked my head.

Since arriving at the bar, I’d talked to a number of strangers, but none had been so complimentary; I wondered if this was some type of Small World initiation. The guy’s business card said “Thierry le Jardinier.” Thierry was substantial in the glow. A handsome dude, hyperbistre, mustached with a shag beard that bulled down into his shirt. He had freckles across his nose and a green scarf around his neck. His French had a ducky twang, a Provençal accent.

I asked him what kind of gardening he did.

“Private clients,” Thierry said dismissively. “The rich, the bastards. Look, seriously, your head. There are a lot of good heads in here—” He took another look at mine, all the way around. “Honestly, your head is very good. What form, this head,” he added quietly. Then he whistled at it. By that point it was the fifth way he’d complimented my head: stroking it, circling it, eyeballing it, chatting it up.

Rachel was sitting behind me with Lindsay and a girl named Dana, an acquaintance of Lindsay’s, a young woman from Melbourne, Australia. Dana had an expectant air—a real fun girl in the wool. Dana was in Paris, she’d said when we were introduced, “for the hell of it. To meet men. Find a man. Whatever.”

“Oh, she found one. An aristocrat,” Lindsay said. “With any luck, he’ll be the king of England someday.”

Dana explained that if two hundred people died in the correct order, her boyfriend would inherit the British throne. “But he’s very bashful about it,” Dana said.

Thierry the gardener now had his eye on Dana. He played his wineglass left and right. He said to me, “You also have a good nose. I study noses. The size to me says a lot. Now, hey, look at that—” The gardener turned me around by the shoulder and pointed at Dana, and said loudly in French, “Regard her nose. Excuse me, miss, but your nose is incredible. It has character. It’s beautiful. Please?”

Dana shook her head. She meant it. She was a good-looking girl, but her nose was a dorsal fin.

“I insist,” the gardener said, switching to English, tilting toward Dana from the hips, “that you accept your beautiful nose. For me. Please.”

And it looked like Thierry wanted to impregnate her by leaning. It reminded me how, at work that week, there’d been a meeting when a client visited, a woman, and after she’d left the conference room, the first task had been to evaluate her aesthetically, to weigh in on her breasts and legs, the make and quality of her handbag. Sabine, one of the project managers, had said to me, “Don’t be a prude, what did you think? You don’t like breasts, is that what it is?”

“Tell me,” the gardener said softly to the Australian, “you hate your nose?”

“It’s okay,” Dana said. She was uncomfortable. Thierry began staring at her funny. Something was wrong.

“Wait,” the gardener said. “This nose—we know each other!”

Dana laughed nervously. “I don’t think so.”

“Please, I’m sure.” Thierry pushed up his hat. “I don’t forget a nose. What is your name? I must have your telephone number.”

“Honey,” Rachel said to me, leaning in to cut off the gardener’s path to Dana, “excuse me, but would you mind getting us the check?”

Tons more people were pressing in. At a table near the front, I recognized several Dartmouth bankers from the secret restaurant; sometimes Paris was about as big as a sandwich bag. The event’s organizer turned up. Her name was Georgie—a little over five feet of sequins, a Hungarian-Parisian of twenty-six. She was escorted by a redheaded American boy wearing a fluffy fur collar. The two of them arrived with ceremony, kissing everyone. The guy’s name was Richard. Wealthy from a trust fund, someone said. He looked twelve, with hair a mother had brushed. Richard told me he was studying at the Sorbonne “for, like, forever, whatever, I should get a job, I know.” I asked Richard about the city. Oh, absolutely sick of Paris, he said, sipping a Perrier. Then Richard dropped his pen. I stooped to pick it up and he patted my head, giggling. Georgie, watching from a stool, squished my fingers between her hands and vowed to make me a Small World member. “Now, darling,” she said in a grand-dame voice, “don’t make me regret it.”

On our way out, Rachel was approached by a Frenchman the size of an Oscar statue. He wore a blue T-shirt with a penis on it jutting from a banana peel.

“You’re exactly my type!” he shouted at Rachel over the noise.

“I’m married!” Rachel said.

He said, “This is it! My type exactly!”

At that hour, downtown Paris was deserted. We all shrugged on our coats. Across the street was the Louvre. I’d forgotten it was there. It was massive in the dark—the Pentagon of Western Civilization. At that moment, a security guard was probably shimmying toward the Poussins. Meanwhile, for the past hour I’d been drinking beer with rich assholes across the street.

The cobblestones were glimmering with rain. Lindsay pointed out a dead bird in the gutter. We all walked to the Métro station, hungry for dinner and completely smoked out.

“What’s creepy is, I did know him,” Dana said.

“The gardener? How?” Lindsay said.

“From the street,” Dana said. “He came up to me last week. I was sitting at a café on Saint-Germain. Honestly, he used that same line on me, about my nose?” She laughed. “You know, I think he’s famous for it. He cruises the Left Bank for expat girls and hands out his little business cards.”

“Seriously, though?” Dana said a moment later. “Of all the things to compliment me on? He told me I had the most beautiful nose in the world.”

*   *   *

Asif threw a party in our courtyard in the middle of the week. I went downstairs. He pulled me into a big embrace and poured shots of whiskey for the two of us, calling me his American brother, demanding to know when he and his daughter should visit New York, which dates exactly.

The next morning, our oven baked our dishwasher. They were both the size of VCRs, stacked on top of each other, mysteriously connected in the manner of a television and a cable box: turning on one device might shut down the other. While Asif tried to repair our dishwasher—he said it was a wiring problem—I asked him about all the construction noise in the building, la bruit de toute la construction, when would it cease?

Lying on the floor, Asif snorted and assured me the noise would be over soon. I wasn’t so sure. Every day, from nine until six, with a one-hour break for lunch, construction noise rang from three sides of our apartment. When I’d signed the lease, our landlord somehow failed to mention that the apartments below, above, and next to ours would be undergoing renovation.

Rachel began to experience visions of drills going into her head.

*   *   *

A Small World opened Paris a crack. They seemed to hold events every night: parties in Left Bank clubs; parties near Colette, the fashion boutique; parties in Colette. We went to a few and met consultants and tech-sector moguls, artists and aspiring artists, copywriters and aspiring copywriters; an American author my age living off a trust fund, who, among other Americans, spoke only French, despite having a Parisian accent by way of Seattle.

But mostly it was Parisians and expats speaking the universal language of hedge fund. We met American financial types who cultivated saying what was passé—“Well, first off, La Prune, and Chateaubriand”—being masters of Le Fooding and Cityvox, websites for tracking the new. We saw fashion models attached to Small World members, and models who were members themselves—girls who were shoddy just-so, their hair teased to nests, while playing a game of how audaciously, how open-shirted they could dress and not care what men saw.

Where for most of the guys in attendance, the rich Parisian dragueurs in tight jeans and popped Lacostes, style was meant to demonstrate an interest in sex. Dig my undershirt, which I fashion to be a shirt. Or white Repetto shoes worn for dancing, to honor Serge.

At our third Small World event, Rachel saw the penis-banana guy again. We were attending the opening of a new restaurant, which wasn’t unlike other new restaurants around Paris—there was a cheeseburger on the menu—and the guy had on a shirt this time that said “This Thing Isn’t Going To Suck Itself.”

“Rachel, don’t you love it?” he said, grasping both her hands. “Oh, Rachel, I was so afraid of you the night we met. You hated me!”

He said he collected shirts with English messages to help him strike up conversation with American girls. “I get them on Bleecker Street. You know Greenwich Village?”

At that moment, I was talking to a young British banker. He said he hated Paris. He was desperate to return to “the real wild,” Southeast Asia, and resume his life there where downtime was marvelously complicated by bonuses, drugs, and pussy. Paris was a museum, he said. Whereas doing finance in “the East” still proffered fresh adventures and clean whores, and had I read Alex Garland’s The Beach?

I hated everyone in the room—myself most of all. Rachel said afterward, “That guy with the T-shirt? When we were leaving, I saw him with a very hot chick. They were aggressively making out.”