21

On a cold day in January, Claudia Schiffer was sitting outside our office wearing only her bra and underpants. She didn’t look cold; she looked expensive. Ten assistants surrounded her, squeezing radios or holding up silver shields to reflect the sun’s light toward her face.

I watched an assistant pass Claudia Schiffer a cup of tea. Some agency, not ours, was shooting a lingerie ad, and they’d convinced Claudia Schiffer to pose seminaked below our balcony.

“Dude, imagine her day rate,” a designer said.

Paris winters were freezing cold and fragged with wind. What light there was was ice-gray. But the cold was bearable if a person was braced with tea or coffee, or a coffee with calvados, the French apple brandy. I took to buying rounds of espresso for my tablemates. I wanted to show not only goodwill, but participation in culture. At un pot, an office party, one evening late that month, Doo-Doo and Gabriel were drinking pastis by a massive empty fireplace, and Doo-Doo said to me, nodding at the pastis bottle, “You want one?”

Absolutely, I said. I added, “But no water.”

“No water?” Gabriel said. He looked like I’d ordered beef broth. No water with pastis?

But I never drank scotch with water, so why start here?

“Never,” I said. “No water.”

Gabriel laughed nervously. “Seriously, are you sure?”

“No water!” I ordered, gulped it down, and asked for another. I said, Donnes-moi la France. At least that got a laugh. Later, I’d learn that Doo-Doo had told one of the project managers from upstairs that “the American” drank pastis neat. He’d never seen it before. (For good reason; it tasted like licorice crossed with sap.) The manager agreed, the American was strange in multiple ways.

After the holidays, a lot of conversation took place about foie gras. How much foie gras people had consumed during break, and in what varieties. There were arguments about proper preparation. Olivier, Doo-Doo, François, and Nico fought over who knew foie gras best—eaten cold, or sautéed in a pan, or stuffed in tiny ravioli. François won by saying he’d eaten not only numerous special preparations, but also multiple types of foie gras, from several regions, while he’d driven around France visiting different sects of his wife’s family.

François rolled his eyes at the memory, clucking his tongue, and clutched Olivier’s shoulder, with Olivier cooing and hooting, “Oh, mais François, mon pauvre François…”

Our first day back, Keith and I met for coffee. He’d just returned from holidays in Scotland, wearing a sweater his mother had knitted for him, thick as a sandwich board. He also had on new patent-leather, Day-Glo Reeboks. I shared my observation with him about the popularity of foie gras talk, and Keith nodded emphatically.

“But they’re contrarian by nature, that’s why they’re fighting over it,” Keith said. “When it comes to foie gras, each Frenchman knows it best.” Keith fiddled with his glasses, polishing them. “It’s not just that every man is entitled to his opinion, it’s that every man believes he is right, is what it is.”

Keith said a minute later, “Listen, here’s why working in France dans la pub, in advertising, blows. You do the pitch avec ton idée, yeah? And they say no automatically. They say, absolument fucking pas. Because they say ‘no’ all the fucking time, it’s become a natural response. The national response. The French are on a team, see: the bloody team of refusal. Only they don’t know they’ve signed up en masse. So each Frenchman thinks he’s unique in refusing to ride on the conformity train. He just doesn’t realize he’s one of millions on the even bigger train of ‘No.’”

Keith’s theory held that since Parisians maintained convictions passionately, they ran the risk—even the requirement—of being misunderstood, and so had evolved the French mastery of repartée, the kitchen-drawer bottom lip, and dinner parties that lasted eight hours.

Keith nipped my sleeve. “Hey, so have you read much John Fante then?”

That afternoon, Bruno bragged about his own goose-liver consumption. He pulled up his sweater to show me where his belly had become engorged from too much paté. He invited me to slap it. Bruno laughed and laughed, with his eyes semiclosed, and I knew something was wrong.

Bruno always liked to preface confrontation with bonhomie. He suggested a coffee, his treat. We sat down in the canteen, and Bruno’s jaw and mouth drooped. What was this, he said in a whisper, about me leaving infant nutrition, leaving him behind? He’d just been told, Bruno said, but he hadn’t been told much. Where was I going? Would he be going, too? And why hadn’t I told him before?

To Louis Vuitton, I said. Going alone. Very soon. Pierre’s decision.

Bruno stared over my shoulder. “That’s not how it is supposed to work,” Bruno said.

We talked about breast-feeding for a little bit, then Bruno said, “Are you sure there’s no room for me on the team?” Bruno raked my arm with two fingers. “I’ve done plenty of luxury, you can show them my portfolio.” Another minute, when I tried to change the conversation, Bruno said loudly, “This is bullshit. You know this is bullshit. Will you at least ask Pierre?”

I said I would ask Pierre. I didn’t know if I’d ever seen Bruno more dejected.

*   *   *

Three brief Paris stories that, to me, seemed connected by bigger trends. One: I was assigned a new neighbor at the office, a young designer named Sébastien. Sébastien took Julie’s spot. Julie had been moved to the agency’s other building after a blowup occurred in December between her and André. One day Julie was shouting and crying, her cheeks swollen. The next day she was morose, like she’d been medicated. A week later she was gone, transferred across the street.

We weren’t told why, and no one discussed it out loud, not even Olivier or Françoise.

Sébastien, her replacement, was oily, maybe twenty-two. His default mode was louche. He wore a leather jacket and black jeans that were tight and unwashed. He needed to sweep his hair from his eyes on the two-minute mark if he wasn’t wearing headphones, but mostly Sébastien wore headphones, big ones shaped like fist-size flowers.

The day we met, Sébastien showed me how his iPod rang an alarm whenever his girlfriend had her period, so he’d know when not to initiate a fuck. Then he brushed the hair out of his eyes and resumed Web surfing.

Sébastien was an expert Web surfer. It appeared to be what he did in lieu of working. It was simple, Sébastien’s approach to work, even audacious: he did not work. Did not meet deadlines. Didn’t acknowledge being assigned accounts. Gradually, he refused to read his business e-mail or attend meetings, and he’d arrive at noon and leave at three, after an hour’s lunch. Occasionally he’d work for a week, and work hard. But then he’d disappear for several days, whereabouts unknown. Sébastien’s project managers vented their frustration to us because they were reluctant to confront him. Instead, they stopped assigning him work. Then Pierre found out. He summoned Sébastien to his office. After that, Sébastien worked hard for a couple of weeks, but then he stopped again and went back to his position of Je refuse.

One day when Sébastien was at lunch, I asked everyone why he still had a desk.

You can’t fire someone in France, Olivier explained.

It’s too difficult, Tomaso said.

“You simply stop giving them things to do,” Françoise said, “and they sit in a corner for a few years, and you hope they quit. That’s how it works.”

Story number two: Around the same time Sébastien arrived, I received an espresso machine as a belated Christmas gift from my parents, a great big machine from Nespresso. I was ecstatic about it; I became emotionally involved with a kitchen appliance. The truth was, Paris was a fantastic place to drink coffee, but the coffee in Paris was mostly awful. Anyone but the French would tell you. Tomaso and other Italian coworkers would get in arguments about Parisians even calling their coffee espresso, when it was too watery and tasted like mulch. Perhaps that explained why Nespresso’s home systems were so popular in France. The coffee quality was better than what was served in most Paris cafés. People in the hallways at work discussed the “latest seasonal blend” from Nespresso like it was a new Beaujolais.

What set Nespresso apart for me, though, wasn’t how good the espresso was—there were plenty of decent home espresso systems—but its value as a symbol of bobo ranking and elitism. Nespresso machines made coffee from Nespresso pods only, tiny capsules that cost thirty cents each and were available only online or from Nespresso stores. No other coffee company had a two-floor boutique on the Champs-Elysées; few stores on the Champs-Elysées were so crowded. And to purchase those pods a person was required to join the Nespresso Club.

Membership included a black identity card embedded with a personalized smart chip. I was reminded of writing luxury humor in New York, for the magazine published for American Express black-card holders. With this coffeemaker, had I crossed over? Pierre told me he’d been a Nespresso member for several years. His father had been a member for much longer. In fact, due to how much espresso he bought—“he drinks a lot of espresso,” Pierre said—his dad had achieved some kind of elite status within Nespresso. The more coffee he drank, the more frequently he received special treatment and gifts in the mail.

Story number three: In early January, one of the Louis Vuitton account managers, Marc, invited me out to lunch. Marc was dorky, smart, ambitious. He was a Nespresso member, plus he owned a Mont Blanc pen. At the start of meetings, he’d withdraw his pen and lay its felt case next to his cell phone on the table. At lunch on a sunny day, sitting outside on Rue de Valois across from the Louvre’s glass pyramid, Marc wanted to know what it was like to work in New York. He explained that he felt locked into his career in Paris, no way out. Marc was on track to be an account director, but at heart he longed to be a creative. During un brainstorm, Marc would often contribute ideas that were more creative than what some “creatives” suggested, but they went ignored, and Marc’s superiors would mock him for breaking rank.

I said I knew many people in New York who were stuck in the rat race, too, but also many people who had switched careers. Marc said this was impossible in France. “Stability is the most important thing,” Marc said, his fingers trembling; he’d been stressé for months. “It’s the Great French Dream: save money, get a good watch, find a partner, have babies, buy a country house, then retire.”

Well, I said, the Great French Dream didn’t sound much different from the Great American Dream, only with More Vacation Days.

“No, seriously,” Marc said, “the French dream? It’s dead.”

And Marc was cuckolded by that death. Because Marc wanted all of those things he’d named, only he didn’t see how he could obtain them and still be happy. These days, wasn’t “happiness” a hollow word? The dream was cheating Marc; behind every grin, he was dispirited. By early winter he’d developed a fluttering-eye tic. And when Pierre fired Sébastien, my neighbor, not only for not doing shit but for personally insulting another employee in front of Pierre (Pierre was extremely loyal to his employees), Sébastien was confounded. He was furious, distraught. Fâché, morose. He knew he’d done wrong; now he felt he’d been done wrong. Why would Pierre go for maximum punishment? Fired, as in fired-fired?

About half the office, who had despised working with Sébastien and had said so out loud while Sébastien listened to electroclash in his peony headphones, still didn’t see why Pierre had needed to purge him. André never would have fired Sébastien, people said. Perhaps he would have relocated Sébastien like he did Julie, but never fired him, no. In gossip at the coffee machine, fetching macchiatos or double-cafés, people made Pierre out to be the villain. He’d broken an unspoken trust. The same people attributed Pierre’s firing Sébastien to the influence of Pierre’s years working in New York.