40

A week after I returned from San Francisco, in July, we were invited to a dinner party near Rue Montorgueil. It was one of Paris’s most charming streets—of shops and bistros, people dining outside and catching up with friends. The hosts’ building, collapsing, had a deep courtyard hidden from the street, with fenced bouquets of trees in each corner.

The husband, a Brit, with a blue apron around his neck, was carving salmon into thin slabs, like bars of pink soap. His Parisian wife, Claudine, hovered at his neck. She told him she would probably do it thinner.

“Would you like to do it yourself?” he said. Gradually Claudine allowed herself, against her own protests, to be convinced to take over.

Claudine was fun and argumentative. She wore a low-scooped dress and white espadrilles. During the meal, she roused her guests with provocations, then retreated into disagreement. By the couscous, she was drunk. By the cheese, she’d retired.

Which was unfortunate. Rachel and I liked Claudine and her husband, but their friends were snippy expats originally from London. They had in common a feeling of blah toward Paris. They found it lacking—it wasn’t New York or Rome—and they said they were always on the verge of going home.

“You’ve only been here a year, well, you wouldn’t know,” one woman said to Rachel. She spiked a knob of couscous on her fork. “It’s sad, of course. But Paris wears off. And it’s frightfully hard to make friends. Never mind the culture differences.”

“Love Paris, can’t stand Parisians. God, they’re combustible,” another woman said.

“Parisians just won’t let you in,” the first woman’s husband said.

The first woman agreed, nodding: “People say Parisians are rude by default, and to be fair they aren’t—but they are. It’s their world, we just live here. Personally, we’ve been thinking about going home for ages, haven’t we?”

Her husband asked me in a confiding whisper: “Hey, have you discovered Picard?”

The hostess, Claudine, turned up again around midnight. By that point, half the guests had gone home; the rest were leaving. Claudine was mildly offended and said she needed cigarettes. She vaulted herself into high heels. Rachel was chatting with Claudine’s husband, the host, so I volunteered to carry Claudine’s umbrella, and we set out on Montorgueil. Cafés were full. Water trickled down the street. Rain came down lightly while Claudine told me about her mother; she wept over some argument they’d had recently. Then she said in English, “Stop.” She smelled something wonderful. She couldn’t quite place it. We started walking again. “My poor shoes,” she said—they were soaked. Five minutes later, the rain was done, the night was hot and muggy, the lamplight was full of steam. Claudine quit crying to turn philosophical, eager to discuss French culture versus American culture, Paris versus Anywhere Else, and the tragedy that was Amy Winehouse. We bought cigarettes and did a second lap. We were thirty feet from the courtyard when it smelled again of something great. This time we nailed it: seafood cooked in wine.

Claudine said, “Oh, I love Paris, don’t you?” She added, “The beauty of Paris is very forceful, I’ve always thought so. You know,” she said, as if this was all part of the same idea, “I think your wife’s shoes are incredible.”

An hour later, Rachel and I went home on the Métro. The train was prompt, clean, and quiet. It rounded corners with great whooshing sucks. At our station, we came up between Art Déco lampposts, into a city silent except for cars hissing through puddles. The statue of Marianne stood ahead of us, a glimmering guide.

*   *   *

Most of the top American TV shows were known to my colleagues. That summer, The Wire was a regular topic of discussion. Something this good, people said, could not be made in France. Its dramatic scope was too broad, there were too many different races and levels of society, and how surprisingly subtle it was for an American drama!

When The Wire box-set turned up at FNAC for the first time with French subtitles, coworkers rushed out to purchase it. Until then, the show’s Baltimore accents had been incomprehensible for most.

“Worse than The Sopranos,” Pierre said, “which was tough for us at first.”

“Oh, I couldn’t watch this,” Chloe said. “It gave me headaches. So what is Wire—about technology?”

“No,” Pierre said. “That show in Baltimore. We watched it last night. You went to sleep.”

“Oh, yeah, this is terrible,” Chloe said, laughing. “I am certain the show is good, but come on, these people are not speaking English.”

“It’s a unique accent,” I said.

Rachel said, “It’s like Québecois.”

Chloe said, “You know, for me, I really love Grey’s Anatomy. How do you call it: a guilty pleasure.”

“Like pornography,” Pierre said, laughing.

“Yes,” Chloe said, “but for girls.”

That same week, I gave Pierre my notice. André was out that day; it was just the two of us in their office. Pierre was shocked and hurt. He’d seen it coming, he said, but still …

Pierre said, “I understand. You’re working too much. Rachel’s under construction—I mean, she’s working at home, there’s construction all around. How long will you give me?”

I said, “I was thinking three months.”

“Okay, so through October,” Pierre said.

The next morning, Louise the art director and I visited brandy headquarters for a new product launch. Something about a flask. The brandy boss met us in a conference room, with several of his coworkers. He was happy to see us, he said; his bosses, particularly those in China, were pleased with how our global campaign had turned out.

“Now, I think you’ll like this,” he said to me. “It’s for the States. Very sexy.”

“It’s a sleeve!” a woman announced suddenly, like it was my birthday. “A sleeve for your brandy!”

“It’s so cool,” another woman said, from the end of the table.

Louise and I were each handed a bulky wedge of plastic molded like a flask of liquor. Then one of the women walked us through a PowerPoint presentation. The idea, she explained, was to cater to the inner-city “urban market” in America—those African Americans who tended to buy their brandy in corner liquor stores. Finally they could have some “bling bling” of their own—she actually said this—the company’s new brandy-carrying case in lieu of the rather nonluxurious, traditional paper bag.

Brown bags being not French at all.

Also, she said, the sleeve would be manufactured in colors to match fitted baseball caps and special-edition sneakers.

“This is horrible,” I whispered to Louise.

“I don’t understand it,” Louise said.

Twenty minutes later, Louise and I were given some bling-bling of our own, plus fifths of brandy to slip inside. We returned to the office, threw away the sleeves, and shared the brandy with our fellow creatives, who’d been planning on having un pot after work anyway. Oscar went out and got some cheese; Olivier contributed “a nice little white” from the Loire; Niki supplied a box of pastries. We snacked on the terrace while the sun set behind the Arc de Triomphe—just another typical worknight in Paris, impossible to export or replicate.

In the distance, the Eiffel Tower looked like an enormous sprinkler.

*   *   *

The following week, Louise got sick and stayed home with a cold. She updated her Facebook status: “Super weekend … le chat et moi sous antibio!!!”

Many coworkers wrote good wishes on her Facebook wall.

André’s comment: “Quel cochon cet antibio.”

*   *   *

Another week after that, Chaya and I were working together, listening to Led Zeppelin over speakers plugged into my laptop, when my cell phone buzzed.

The caller ID said New York.

“There’s an offer,” my agent said.

I asked him to hold the phone. I went downstairs to the Champs-Elysées and stood next to a magazine stand where I bought my newspapers every morning, and I asked him to start again. He explained that of the five editors, two were interested in my novel, including the one I liked best.

The hand of mine not holding the phone seized into a fist.

When we hung up, I did it, I screamed.

I composed myself and called Rachel and asked her if she’d done that day’s grocery shopping yet. Rachel said no, she was doing laundry at the moment; did I need something in particular? I said she should pick up some champagne. This was our code if the book received an offer to be published, that I’d tell her to purchase champagne and she’d know what I meant.

Rachel said slowly, “You want me to…”

“There’s an offer,” I said.

Rachel yelped and began weeping. Me, too. Once we’d calmed down, I made her promise not to tell anyone; I didn’t want our families to know until the contract was signed, I said, in case the deal fell through somehow.

When I got home, after opening the champagne, Rachel explained that she’d told someone anyway: “Oh, I had to, please don’t be mad. I was exploding with the news. I thought, Who can I tell who doesn’t know anybody? So I went out to the wineshop, you know the one on Bretagne? It was that young guy who doesn’t speak English, the nice one. Anyway, he asked me what I was looking for. I said, J’ai besoin du champagne. He showed me the champagnes, the twenty-euro bottles. Then he said, What’s your price range? I said, Cher, très cher. So now he’s excited, he took me over to the ‘expensive champagne’ section. He’s going on about this one and that one, I didn’t follow, I just told him we wanted a bottle très sec, so he picked out a bottle and it was a hundred and thirty euros.”

My eyes bulged.

“I know, we can’t possibly! But how often is your first novel published?” Rachel was tearing up again, but she talked her way through it: “Anyway, we’re at the cash register and the guy asked, What’s the special occasion? I didn’t really know how to explain it. It’s a celebration, I said, C’est une célébration du business. He said, Ah bon? And I said, Mon mari, my husband, il a vendu un roman, he sold a novel. But the guy didn’t follow. I tried to be more clear: Il a vendu son premier roman—he sold his first novel. I repeated it a couple of times, but now he’s giving me this weird look. Anyway, I kept saying it, then I tried adding that you’re a writer, you wrote a book, un livre. Once I said that, he started laughing, and we cleared everything up.”

Rachel added, “Because he thought you were involved in human trafficking. I wasn’t pronouncing roman right, so he thought you were a slave trader, selling Romans. I was saying it like, ‘A Roman, you sold a Roman, your first Italian from Rome.’”

That evening we celebrated by playing pool with Lindsay in a billiards club near our apartment, we three and some Asian teenagers. The felt on the tables was torn. Hot dogs spun in a wheel beneath a heat lamp. The joy was both microscopic and enormous. I was loose and light. I felt found.