25

Back in October, Rachel had experienced a knee injury after running in Buttes-Chaumont. In December, we’d both gotten the flu. After the flu, Rachel caught a head cold in January. After the cold, une gastro knocked us down for a long weekend.

Vertigo came last. Rachel woke up one morning, tried to sit, and fell over as if she’d been spun around in a food processor.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“I have no idea,” Rachel said. “Every time I sit up, the room spins. Not just the room, but me, too.” She squeezed my hand. “It’s scary.”

Behind the wall, a power drill screeched. There was nothing trompe l’oeil about it: as of February, we now had construction on all six sides of our apartment. Upstairs, downstairs, north, south, east, west.

I didn’t say it, but perhaps a drill had reached her inner ear.

The American embassy’s website gave us the number for an ear, nose, and throat doctor (ENT) on Rue Royale. The doctor herself answered the telephone. She said she could see us before lunch. Doctors were like that in Paris—they answered their own phones and often they’d see you within two hours, frequently in offices that were part of their own apartments.

We went through the doctor’s living room to reach her study, on wood floors smoothed down to leather. Large windows overlooked a sunny courtyard with boxed fruit trees. Rachel could barely walk. The short trip from the Métro station to the doctor’s building had been an ordeal of stops, starts, and spins. At least it’s nice out, she’d said.

That day, Paris was awash with gold light.

“And you haven’t changed your medication recently?” the doctor asked Rachel after she’d done a few tests. Birds chirped outside with full hearts.

“No,” Rachel said.

“Well, you should probably see an ENT.”

“You’re not an ENT?” I said.

The doctor typed on her glossy white laptop, all its cords neatly hidden from view.

“I can recommend one, in the eighteenth,” she said. “He knows all the treatments. And he speaks English very well.” She telephoned and obtained us an appointment for two hours later.

We took the Métro up to the eighteenth arrondissement. By that point, Rachel’s symptoms had settled down. As long as she didn’t jerk her head, she could walk. Both of us were starving. The second doctor’s street was mostly offices, but there was a chain steak restaurant on the corner, the French equivalent of Sizzler. Inside, the bar was strung with promotional St. Patrick’s Day advertisements.

“Look at that,” Rachel said, pointing out the window after we’d sat down. The sidewalk was bustling, the sky was cloudless—Paris, the all-access picnic. “This could be our perfect day.”

“What about the vertigo?” I said.

“Oh, forget the vertigo,” Rachel said. “We’re in Paris, we’re having lunch together. Imagine if this is what Paris was.”

At the ENT’s office, we sat in the waiting room with a pair of grandparents holding gossip magazines that they scanned and passed back and forth. They looked seventy, maybe eighty. I wondered if they remembered the Paris of horse slaughterers, the Paris of patrons behind aluminum bars and flowers brought home from Les Halles.

A stooping giant summoned the grandparents into his examination room, patting them in through his door. Twenty minutes later it was our turn.

“Yes, hello,” the ENT said as we walked under his arm.

We sat in chairs opposite his desk.

“You are … Rachel?” the doctor said, consulting his notes. He looked up, hesitating to smile. “And you are feeling?”

He did not speak English well. He ordered Rachel to sit on an examining table, and said things like “Good, yes?” while shoving her down until her eyes filled with water. Then he flipped her the other way. He said, “You feel sick? You make sick now?”

“No,” Rachel said, “not now.”

“Hmm, maybe bad,” he said.

The doctor did some more tests, then filled out Rachel’s dossier while she sat up on the table and tried to regain her balance. “All right, come down from there,” the doctor chided after a minute.

Really he was probably six-four, but he looked even bigger. He wore a sport coat with shoulder pads that protruded like epaulettes.

The doctor rubbed his hair and sat down at his desk. He said he wasn’t sure what type of vertigo Rachel had, but she had it, and she’d feel better soon if she adopted a daily routine of balance exercises. He passed me a sheet of drawings: stick figures engaged in tumbling.

“So that is all,” the doctor said abruptly, and stood up. He extended a long arm to shake hands. “But do not be afraid. This is not,” he said, “you know, a thing forever.”

*   *   *

One Sunday, under ivy on Rue de Beauce, in the Marais, Rachel and I discovered an art gallery specializing in novelists. Each painting in the window was of an American writer popular in France. Rachel waited while I gawked at a hangdog Paul Auster; a gouty Jim Harrison; a famished Joyce Carol Oates; T. C. Boyle and his emergency pull-cord lock of hair.

Inside me was a volcano, and on top of it, six thousand trivial feelings.

I’d begun writing my novel again, starting over from page one, but I wasn’t hopeful about it.

Work at the agency, however, was going much more smoothly. Me speaking French sufficiently, me brainstorming, me presenting in my French-English hash. And no longer was I writing about how to care for your baby; now I wrote scripts for little movies that were purportedly advertising, yet in which neither brand nor product was mentioned. Was it so bad? Wasn’t it actually rather fun?

But was my dream now to rise in French advertising?

I didn’t know how long it would last. I didn’t know how long I wanted it to.

Every day was an improvisation.

I was so tired.

A few days later, I saw a gastroenterologist for a stomach bug. His office was around the corner from the agency, high above the eighth arrondissement, on a tony street. The rooms were white, accented in camel, furnished with black modern chairs. Very luxe, but expensively grungy. The doctor himself wore Joey Ramone hair to the collar of a black leather jacket. He was half gnome, half roadie; he was probably Johnny Hallyday’s personal physician. The doctor smirked to begin our appointment, expecting it to disappoint him. I told him about my stomach bug. Hearing my accent, the doctor asked where I was from. He sat up when I said New York City. He said, You moved from New York to Paris? Isn’t it better to go the other way around? I said, Yes, I’ve heard that opinion. For ten minutes he made himself plain: Paris was done; oh, how he hated it. He wanted to know, didn’t I find Parisians to be so conservative and snobby? He had a doctor friend, he said, with a practice in Miami, who was constantly bragging about his great American life. Did I know the East Village? For example, what a loft cost there nowadays?

The gastroenterologist asked what I did. I said I was a writer. He asked if I’d published a book he could read. I sighed and explained that I worked in advertising. Ah, but this is not writing, the doctor said, swishing his finger. Then he also sighed. He leaned back, his chair creaking, and asked me if I knew the work of William Styron.