22

At the end of January, our shower basin leaked. Asif turned up at eight a.m. because our downstairs neighbor had knocked on his door, Asif said, after the guy’s ceiling began raining when I showered.

Asif lit a cigarette and squeezed into our bathroom. He tapped on the drain. He took a breather from contemplating the situation to brush his shag in the mirror.

The previous week, drunk one night, Asif had told me about his women problems. “Ach, it’s difficult, man, but what can I do?” Those words summed up his whole regime. Asif said he was keeping several chicks on the line. One was a widow who lived near Versailles. She was wealthy, she called him “pet,” and while he slept she stuffed euros into his jeans, rolls of bills in rubber bands. None of which he minded. “I love her, you know? And not just for the money.” Recently, though, he’d begun seeing a new girl, and the widow was upset. She’d said to Asif, it was her or nothing, and if nothing then no more fat money rolls.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But my new girl, waouh. From Marseille, you know Marseille? The real France.”

Unable to repair the bathroom, Asif dropped his cigarette in the toilet and said he’d telephone for a plumber. I left for work with an apologetic look while Rachel reorganized her plans.

The doorbell rang at eleven. Plumber: handsome, young, big-armed. He said quietly, Bonjour, and Rachel said back to him, Bonjour.

I had to interrupt at that point: “Give me a break.” Rachel was telling me the story later that evening over dinner. “Hey,” she said, “when do you know me to exaggerate?” Anyway, Rachel said, the plumber didn’t speak English, so they’d relied on her French.

The plumber brought in his tool bag. She showed him the bathroom. He removed his jacket. Rachel returned to the dining table to resume writing. Twenty minutes later, the plumber came back out—he was down to his undershirt by that point—and began speaking in French.

“I’m sorry, excuse me,” Rachel interrupted him, also in French. “I telephone my husband? He speaks French, please wait.”

But when she called, I was in a meeting. It would be hours before I got her voice mail saying she needed help translating Le Colin Farrell.

Rachel had hung up the phone and returned to the bathroom.

“My husband is not there,” Rachel told the plumber. “But, okay, you explain to me. I’m sorry, but my French is bad.”

The plumber nodded. He added bashfully, “I will go slow.” The plumber explained there was a leak behind the tub, beneath the outer layer of molding, and he needed to make a hole—

“Make a hole in the wall of tiles?” Rachel asked in French.

“Yes,” the plumber said.

“But not big?”

“No, a small one. But first I need to turn off the electricity.”

“Why the electricity?” Rachel said.

“Well, I do not want to be injured,” he said.

“Oh no,” my wife said. “No, of course not.”

Soon they were crouching on their knees, shoulder to shoulder in our cramped, hot bathroom with only a flashlight between them, while the shy, sexy plumber explained what was happening in front of their noses.

I said, Do I want to know how this story ends?

“He fixed the tub,” Rachel said.

*   *   *

Due to the number of hours I was working, Rachel and I didn’t see much of each other after the holidays. One Saturday we took a field trip to Père Lachaise, the graveyard established by Napoleon, where Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison were buried. At noon, the sun was low. There was ice on the roads, frost on the walls where buildings were in shadow. The cemetery had a pleasantly countryish landscape, rolling with crypts. We sat on a bench in the sun while Rachel explained that her writing was going well; she enjoyed working on it. The only trouble was that construction now had expanded to include four sides of our apartment. From three to four sides in a few short weeks: all-day racket that penetrated two-thirds of our apartment’s planar surfaces. Rachel hadn’t wanted to complain, but it was becoming unbearable. Drill sounds, hammering, beams being cut. To the point that Rachel now heard the sounds inside her head when they weren’t occurring. Not just intolerable noise, but interior.

“You could try working in a café,” I said. Didn’t everyone in Paris work in cafés? Wasn’t that the expat thing to do?

“You know that’s not me,” Rachel said.

“What about that library we found?”

“You mean in the children’s room?”

Libraries in Paris tended to be reserved for licensed students, or they charged admission. We’d found a free branch near our apartment, but the study carrels turned out to be part of a day-care zone.

Across the street from Père Lachaise, we found a café for lunch, and sat by a glass wall. Outside, Parisians went about their Saturday business, pushing carts of groceries home. In the afternoon we went down to the Seine, where the river was chopped up white and blue. We huddled on Pont de Sully in the wind, in view of Notre Dame, and absorbed the cathedral and island buildings at dusk, then ran to a café to drink.

That night, Lindsay and Olivia visited for dinner. Olivia told us she’d gone on two dates with Gonzalo, the model-boy from New Year’s, but she’d called things off after she found out he was seeing other women. In fact, he liked to see them all at once.

“I swear,” Olivia said, “this boy believes he is God’s gift. Do you know what he does? We went out for lunch last weekend, and he invited another girl to join us. He had two dates in one, me and this skinny little…”

“Maybe he’s a multitasker,” Lindsay said.

Olivia said after a minute, “He thinks every girl wants to kiss on him. He’s like, ‘Baby, I am in love with you, but by the way, I’m in love with her, too, and that one over there, and that one.’”

Olivia explained that she’d recently gone on a date with a different guy, this time an air-traffic controller. They’d met through the French equivalent of Match.com. He didn’t speak English, so they’d subsisted on her French. When they ran out of words, they ate sorbet.

“That’s sweet,” Rachel said.

“You know, it was,” Olivia said. “And at least I was the only girl on the date. He drove me home, and I thought, okay, this is nice. We parked on my street. And you know what? If he wants to kiss me, I was thinking, I’ll kiss him. So we’re sitting in the car. We sat some more. In silence. Like we’re meditating together. Finally I said, Uh, ciao, à bientôt, and that was it. Me getting out of the car, end of date. I was like, aren’t you supposed to be French?

“Oh, and by the way? He has a kid,” Olivia said.

“Well, that’s how you know he’s French,” Lindsay said.

The rule held that if a contemporary Parisian man was single after thirty, it meant either he had a child somewhere or he was gay. But since no Parisian men were gay, at least not openly, most likely there was a kid somewhere, plus an ex-partner with great legs to whom the man eventually would return. And the ex-partner usually was that killer combo that Parisian men found irresistible, of Certified Lunatic and Really Good Cook.

*   *   *

At the agency, among men, references to sex as a form of punishment were part of business. It was a daily aspect of conversation, ten times more frequently invoked than I’d heard in American offices. Either the women rolled their eyes, or they didn’t notice; mostly they didn’t notice. How our clients were fucking us in the ass. Ramming it down our throats. Bending us over, or fucking us in the face. I heard it from coworkers, bosses, consultants. Whenever there were two or more Parisian men in a room, someone would likely invoke something done to an ass or penis. Maybe the agency’s collective ass, our team’s penis. It would be phrased in a way that seemed humdrum and mildly annoying, like waiting in line. Such as sucking dick. We sucked our clients’ dicks a lot. Which wasn’t terrible. Because the guy making the joke could imply, Hey, sucking this dick isn’t so bad. I could suck it one more financial quarter if necessary, sure. Let’s all try and meet our deadlines, okay, guys? Just suck this dick a little bit longer and we’ll be great.

But when we were doing well? If a manager got his client to approve a big new budget, or, better still, if we won a new account? Then they were sucking our dicks, and that was super.

Less frequently told were black jokes, though they weren’t uncommon. Maybe two or three a month. Mostly they concerned the size of black men’s penises. What’s the problem? Hey, I’m saying a good thing about blacks. I wish I had a black dick! Though guys were careful not to tell those sorts of jokes in front of our black colleagues. Then there were the Jew jokes. It wasn’t a big deal if you let one fly in front of a Jewish coworker; frequently it was your Jewish coworker telling the joke. For example, about clients being stingy like Jews. Or when someone, being generous, boasted he wasn’t “acting like a Jew.” In fact, Jew jokes were looked down upon as cliché. Bad form: they weren’t good enough as comedy. Because though all of the joking was performed lightly as farce—white boys making noise—it symbolized a serious purpose: taking a stand against the grand evil that was political correctness.

Tolerance was high for sucking black dicks like a Jew, but there was no room in the office for political correctness. Never. None. It needed to be fought actively, and if that required telling anti-Semitic jokes while pretending to gag on a client’s cock … However, should you seem uncomfortable, or protest the appearance in conversation of a black dick, a stingy Jew, or a thump on fags, well, watch out. By doing so, you were curtailing that joke teller’s personal freedom to be open-minded about causing offense, and the freedom to offend needed protection.

Either Murphy Brown never aired in France, or Paris was stuck in the early nineties. I hadn’t heard the term used in maybe ten years, but in our office politically correct came up twice a week. In meetings, if someone called your idea P.C., pay-say, there was no possible recovery. The label was nuclear. Anyone accused of pay-say during un brainstorming would be shouted down—Don’t be so American!—to sit shamefaced in his seat, excluded from the rest of the session.