27

We received telemarketing calls at all hours from snappy Frenchwomen, whom I held in high regard. I named them Marianne. All the ones I spoke to sounded very French, and I made a rule to engage them.

For example, Marianne might call at breakfast. “Hello, this is Orange, your cellular communications company—”

“Yes, hello,” I’d say brightly.

Marianne wasn’t surprised to be interrupted. “Good morning, sir. This is Orange—”

“Please,” I said, “for one moment, slowly?”

“Hello?”

Sometimes Marianne was patient with me, sometimes she was confused.

“Yes, hello,” I said.

“Okay,” said Marianne.

I said, “My French is not very good.”

“Oh no,” Marianne said, “it’s quite good.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“I can speak slowly,” she said.

“That would be super,” I said.

“So,” she said, “today I am calling with an exercise of marketing.”

“Can you repeat that, please?”

“An exercise of marketing?” Marianne said.

“Thank you.”

“No, it’s all right,” she said, laughing, “thank you.”

Sometimes, though, Marianne called when it was inconvenient. During dinner or when I was in a rush to leave the house. Then I’d say something confrontational, like “Where are you calling from?”

“Excuse me? Sir, that is privileged information.”

“But I live in Paris, and you know this,” I said. “Is my information not privileged?”

“Excuse me?”

“It is,” I explained, “the same concept.”

“Sir,” she said, “I will arrange for someone to call you back.”

“Will it be you?” I said.

“Sir, Orange will solicit your participation when a time is more convenient.”

Marianne was always pawning me off.

*   *   *

As March became visible, I’d stretch my hour at lunch to ninety minutes, occasionally two hours, and work on my book. I also started devising an advertising campaign in case Paris slipped in global popularity and the Hôtel de Ville needed slogans.

Paris—Sex without the messy stuff.

Paris—Where refinement meets retirement.

Paris—Society’s life raft has room for YOU.

At work, the task of advertising was to make new the mundane. To find the perfect metaphor. Each week, in addition to my scripts, there’d be half a dozen small Louis Vuitton projects to complete, for which Pierre would hand me a brief, I’d go to a conference room, and an account manager would say, “We’ve got a purse to advertise. Here’s what’s new about it. Can you have a slogan done by tonight, tomorrow lunch at the latest?”

Most of the time a purse was just a purse. But the challenge was not unenjoyable.

Paris—End zone of Western civilization.

Other days, when no one was looking, I’d open the file for my novel on my computer and work on it furtively, pretending it was a client’s copy deck. Since February, I’d been doing it more and more. I was back at my first job, age twenty-two, hiding my writing behind a Netscape window when a boss came nearby. As though I were committing a crime, getting high on my own supply.

*   *   *

Lindsay and her new boyfriend, Christian, the guy with eating issues, finally visited. Christian was a men’s fashion designer who’d learned English in Cape Town and spoke with a South African accent. He arrived smoking—Lindsay had told us he smoked four packs a day. Didn’t drink alcohol, didn’t eat food, didn’t bathe either, though he didn’t look worse for it. Christian had a pudgy, friendly face and wore a green military jacket over a blue collared shirt, plus jeans and boots, with sticky hair. He could have been a Spanish poet, I thought.

Christian and I talked about bunkers. He was interested in them, he said, as suitable second homes. They spoke to him romantically; he said he was all for barricading oneself in. Christian explained that he often went on scouting trips looking for a bunker he could fix up for a summer home, even swap it for his big apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

“It could be gorgeous,” he said. “You put in, how do you say, aprons?”

“Curtains,” Lindsay said. “But please, Christian, your apartment here is amazing, you could not give it up.”

“Maybe I prefer a bunker,” Christian said, and laughed, hugging Lindsay while he chewed on her neck.

“Well, count me out,” Lindsay said, pushing him away. “Oh yeah, a couple of concrete walls, slits for windows, what could be more romantic?”

According to Lindsay, Christian was from a Bordeaux wine family ancienne—he wasn’t in line to the British throne, but he was suitably impoverished. At twenty, Christian had been wealthy from an inheritance, but he’d burned through all his money during the nineties, and now he had zip. He subsisted on an allowance from his grandmother while he tried to sell French workmen’s jackets reconstructed as blue blazers.

We talked about Paris, having that in common.

“You know, Paris is tough,” Christian said in English. “I would not want to live here if I could choose a different history.”

He said Paris was probably the worst European city after London. “London is the worst. Weather is shitty. You cannot walk around. People are closed off, and they hate Jews. None of this will change.” But Paris was too expensive, he said, too conservative, too self-protective. “Paris had, like, the nineteenth century. But look, we are all very lucky at this table—we’re white, you see? Paris is the most hard on immigrants. And immigrants are really important, I think, to the life of a city.”

The sunset put a purple glow into the courtyard. Rachel asked Christian where he would prefer to live. He said Berlin, for the art and music, or back in Cape Town.

I said, “Why not New York?”

“Same people who live in Paris live in New York,” Christian said dismissively. “Manhattan is for shopping now, same as here.”

“But you can still love it,” Lindsay said. “I happen to love Paris.”

“Yeah, of course, baby, it depends,” Christian said. “You can be happy in Paris. And me, I’m happy that you’re in Paris. And sometimes I am happy when I think about Paris.” He thought about that for a moment. “Now see,” Christian said, “if you’re connected to reality, then no. But some people are not. I know a guy, he lives here eight years. Australian guy, absolutely mad about Paris. Barely speaks French, but he’s completely in love. C’est normal. He’s happy. You can do that if you’re disconnected, walking around all day, staring at buildings, living in the fantasy. But reality is, it’s a tough city to live in. For people who actually live and don’t have money. It’s not like the movies.”

After midnight, Rachel and Lindsay watched dance videos on YouTube, and Christian and I talked more about bunkers while he smoked out the window. The sky was black and pearly—a bowl set to dry upside down. I told Christian I’d received a good book in the mail about bunkers, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology. I’d lend him my copy.

“You know,” Christian said, “what people do not realize, you can find really good real estate near nuclear facilities. Big discounts, like les soldes, all year. No one realizes this. We should go together sometime, we can go for a drive.”

That night, Rachel and I agreed in bed that it had been a successful dinner party, even if one guest (Christian) hadn’t eaten dinner. But there was news on that front: Lindsay had informed Rachel that Christian did eat, except he ate only chocolate, and ate it only in bed, alone. However, he’d recently taken his first bite of chocolate in front of her, and Lindsay thought it was a good sign for their relationship.

*   *   *

The next morning, I was taking out the garbage when Asif pulled me into his kitchen. His ten-year-old daughter was doing homework at a folding table next to the stove.

“Nadira,” Asif said, “please say hello.”

Nadira kissed me on both cheeks. Then she frowned while her father explained that I was from New York City. She said she thought New York was very beautiful from some pictures she’d seen.

I said, “Is it more beautiful than Paris?”

“Je crois—” she started, but Asif told her to speak English. Nadira coughed and covered her mouth. She said in English through her fingers, “I think New York is more big than Paris? And more dirty. But I think I like that.”

Asif asked Nadira what she’d said, and she translated it into French while turning in a circle. “You see how smart she is?” Asif said to me. “She is learning English and German in school. They’re good, Paris schools, really good. She will be a doctor someday.”

His comment upset Nadira. She yanked on her father’s arm and bugged her eyes, reprimanding him in French faster than I could understand. Asif laughed. “She says she does not want to be a doctor. I said, what is wrong with being a doctor?”

“What do you want to be?” I asked Nadira.

“I want … to fly a plane!” Then her dress irritated her because it was too stiff to swing properly, and she tore at it. “Or maybe a doctor,” Nadira said. She shouted with exasperation, “I am too young right now!”

We went outside. In the courtyard, the walls were warm. Spring was coming. Around Asif’s door was a sector of plants. Asif pulled cigarettes from his pocket. I could see that someone had carefully ironed his shirt. Nadira kicked a soccer ball, using garbage cans for goalposts.

“She lives with her mother,” Asif said. “Not close by.”

He watched his daughter pensively. He made a play for the soccer ball, but Nadira slipped around him. Asif came back to me and smoked, standing with one of his legs thrust forward, heel quarter-turned like a fashion model in pose.

“She is my treasure,” Asif said. “She’s all I have on this earth.”

Asif stared hard at me. Tears sprang up in his eyes.

“You don’t have children, you don’t know,” he stated. He took my hand a moment later, as if we were going for a walk, and clenched it. He accused me, “But don’t you see?”

*   *   *

When it was sixty degrees in March, I sent e-mails to friends in Chicago, “Hot and sunny here in Paris, how are you?”

One morning, it was at least fifty degrees at breakfast. But then the temperature dove. The air hardened, and people chipped their steps. Clouds filled the sky like they were blown in from a horn. By the time I was halfway finished with my lunch at the park, I looked up and saw that it was snowing, huge flakes falling on my nose, whitening the benches.

I glanced at Stephen King, but he didn’t notice anything. He had his headphones on, and I noticed he’d outgrown my moniker: now he was reading Stieg Larsson, like everybody else. Five minutes later, gone were clouds, gone was snow. Back to a blue-gray Paris sky and warm breezes. At the office, people didn’t believe my story. None of them had seen the snow. Only Tomaso believed me, though he said I was très mignon (very cute), “toi et tes rêves de neige.”

Olivier scoffed: “This is only in the movies.”

I’d heard Parisians say it never snowed in Paris. But they were wrong, and Olivier was wrong, and now I could prove it. It just snowed very quickly, and a person needed to pay attention.