20

The office closed for two weeks for the holidays. Seafood merchants occupied street corners, men in yellow bibs with ice chests full of fruits de mer—oysters, clams, shrimp that were two feet long, with orange eyeballs big as marbles. At Monoprix, sections of the floorplan were devoted to holiday gluttony, with items arranged like displays in sporting goods stores. Mountains of champagne. Pyramids of foie gras. Some crawfish with tails fourteen inches long.

One cold Saturday afternoon, the doorbell rang. It was our poissonnière’s teenage driver, one of those delivery guys with a cell phone tucked inside his helmet. He had a platter for “Monsieur Bald-ween?” A present from Pierre and Chloe, enough shellfish for twelve, including a pile of giant shrimp to be guillotined.

The next night, we went with Lindsay to an expat Christmas party in an apartment above the Luxembourg Gardens. Slippery roads, glowering clouds, cold gales. Streets around the park were deserted, flower boxes were empty. Rachel’s purse strap caught on a scooter mirror and was whipped off her arm. We wandered past a Christmas fair. There was a merchant, bundled up, filling bread bowls from a cauldron of melted cheese.

At the party, no one was smoking. No one smoking at a Paris party, even in 2007, meant no one there was French. It turned out to be true. The hostess said, “I don’t think I even know a Parisian, isn’t that appalling?”

The rooms were filled with people with very shampooed hair—Americans like us nibbling on topics of specific relevance to expats: dentists, taxes, and weren’t we dying to move to Berlin, or San Francisco?

The Picard puff pastry was delicious.

In expat conversations, the lingo tended to be from endurance sports—what could she stand; what tested her limits; how much longer could she take it before the exertion was too great. The same story played on repeat: how, when an American girl arrived in Paris, she went to Place de Furstenberg in the moonlight and kissed the stones. But when summer nights became online photo albums, and Europe’s darkness fell, she wasn’t a tourist anymore. Why were all the people she met at parties just like everyone back home? She couldn’t admit to feeling bored, but she was. Buying dessert for one: depressing. And she felt her loneliness like stomach rolls, forming over who she’d been.

I was talking to a guy from San Francisco, and we were talking about how each of us had come to Paris, and I stopped mid-sentence, realizing I’d told the same story forty times by that point, and each time the exact same way. Extremely depressing. I begged off, found Rachel and Lindsay in the kitchen, and said, We’re leaving. We thanked our hostess and ran.

“In the future,” Lindsay said, walking up the street, pulling Nicorette from inside her raincoat, “I would like a sign around my neck that says, ‘I am not interested in your complaints about employment at UNESCO.’”

*   *   *

The following morning, we found a skinny fir tree for sale on Rue Bretagne. We named him Pyotr, figuring he was from Ukraine. I brought him home on my shoulder, dressed him with ornaments from a Monoprix Christmas kit, then we went out again and bought a bottle of scotch for Asif, and left it for him with a ribbon and a note, “Bonne année, de tes Américains préférés.”

On Christmas morning, Paris was a quiet mountain village, with electric lights strung between houses. We went for a walk. The slogan could have been “Paris—It’s manageable.” At Notre Dame, tourists got off a bus wearing matching holiday sweaters.

That same week, my sister, Leslie, came for a visit. She was an ideal guest, adventuresome and eager to try new things. We took her to Bofinger for dinner—I wanted to show her French traditional, and got it: the service was atrocious—and Le Bar du Caveau for lunch, which was much cheaper, and more delicious. “Doesn’t Paris just make you feel young?” Leslie said at one point, and the way she said it—as if to no one—hit a lovely, sad note, like striking a wooden bell. Occasionally, Rachel and Leslie went out for tea, or Leslie explored the city on her own, and I stayed home and worked on my novel. Then it was done. On the second-to-last day of the year, I finished my draft, and we celebrated with a twelve-euro bottle of champagne that was probably better for degreasing a lawnmower.

On New Year’s Eve, I put on a tie and roasted a bass and heated up hors d’oeuvres from Picard. Leslie contributed macarons from Ladurée. Lindsay arrived for dinner, then a few minutes later Georgie appeared, the Small World madame, with champagne and forced cheer. She’d texted earlier, asking if we had an extra seat.

Apologizing that she might need to leave at any minute, Georgie spent the first half of the evening checking her textos. Then Rachel’s friend Olivia stopped by with a guy called Gonzalo. Olivia was lovely, a former lead at the dance company where Rachel had worked as a fund-raiser in New York. Olivia had left the company and moved to Paris to try living abroad. She was from Tennessee originally, petite, with a quiet voice, though determined: Olivia had landed in Paris with no job and no visa, but within a month she’d landed a position with a dance company, plus benefits. She introduced Gonzalo to the group. Gonzalo was twenty, handsome, a model with an afro and a gap in his teeth. He knew he was beautiful—the IPO was available to any girl who didn’t mind sharing.

Suddenly Georgie came alive. Turned out Gonzalo and Georgie knew each other, sort of, through A Small World. She sat next to him at the table and practically signaled to land a plane. At midnight, we watched a revue with cancan dancers. Around one, Olivia said she and Gonzalo had another party to visit, and Georgie said, Oh good, she’d share their cab.

The next morning, the Interior Ministry reported 144 cars torched in the suburbs—a smaller number than in previous years, but still troubling; a distress signal, reports said; a protest that was seen and heard by almost nobody in the city center.

The morning Leslie departed, taking a train to the airport, we hugged and wished each other good luck in the new year. “Not like you need it,” Leslie said. “You live in Paris, remember?”

I said, “It’s not quite like that.” Then again … the following weekend, Rachel came home on Sunday afternoon with her cheeks burning, tears on her face. I jumped up. “What happened?” Rachel said she’d been returning from the Left Bank. She’d been walking along the Seine, listening to her iPod, Renée Fleming singing Strauss; she’d stared at the golden dome of Invalides; she crossed the Alexandre III bridge with its black lampposts and gold statues; she passed a million tiny parks in the Marais. “I walked and walked,” Rachel said. “I couldn’t get over how beautiful it was. Sometimes I just really love it here.” Then she laughed at herself, wiping away tears, and put down her purse.