41

At the end of summer, Paris purged. Pierre and his family went south, Lindsay visited friends in la campagne, and Olivia left for a dance tour of western France. Days went by without a single cloud in the sky.

Bruno stopped by my desk and told me to join him downstairs while he smoked. Outside, he complained for ten minutes about some account planner who had it in for him. Then again, everyone had it in for him. Did no one in his new office listen to his problems, was I the only one? Bruno confided he had a new vision of the future: forget Paris, it was time for Brazil. Brazilian women? Besides, entrepreneurship was impossible in France, Bruno said, everyone knew this, but in South America … His eyebrows hitched up. He had a friend who’d moved to São Paulo two years ago, now the guy owned a dry cleaner, a video rental shop, a photography studio, a modeling agency.

“You get a loan instantly,” Bruno said. “France has no room for entrepreneurs, but down there? Come on, a modeling studio?”

He said, “Hey, so is there room on Louis Vuitton for me?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But it’s not my decision.”

He nodded. “See you,” he said a moment later, and clapped me on the back of the arm.

One night, Rachel found an ad in a magazine for a hip-hop party near République. We arrived early, at eleven, and the club was empty. I ordered a beer that advertised itself as tasting like lager combined with tequila, and it tasted like Sprite with pickles; I should have known better. Then within twenty minutes a hundred teenagers appeared, and many young twentysomethings. At least two guys were wearing the same sweater that was featured that week in the windows of H&M. The music started up: nineties Diddy hits and early Wu-Tang Clan. At the same time, a B-boy crew arrived and opened up the floor. The headliners were two boys, identical twins, dancing in liquid ways to mesmerize the crowd; a few years later, they’d emerge as dance stars in France, going by “Les Twins.” But for that moment they held the floor for only twenty minutes, until finally the music got too good, everyone started dancing, and the DJ threaded his way to that summer’s big Kanye West hit, and we all flipped out.

Perhaps when by all appearances I shouldn’t fit in, I was at my most comfortable.

I dreaded it ending.

A few days later, an e-mail came from Pierre inviting us to visit him and Chloe in Provence. I was happy to receive it, and not just for the obvious reasons: quitting the agency, I’d worried about damaging my friendship with Pierre. Rachel and I took a high-speed train south from Gare de Lyon, riding in the upstairs cabin, with a shaded lamp at our table. Farms and forests, villages and cows. A few hours later we were having dinner outdoors at a giant table at Pierre’s parents’ house in the country. A half moon rose behind the roof, like a pearl in black underwear. The breeze was soupy warm. A swimming pool rippled where some teenagers had gone swimming while coffee was being served, at midnight.

Pierre’s parents owned a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Margerie, near Montélimar, a stone house with enough space to sleep thirty. There were landscaped gardens, a terraced courtyard, and handmade toys left around aging in the sun. The kind of place you drooled over imagining, that turned out to be real.

That weekend, twenty-six people were visiting, the whole family plus friends and neighbors, everyone contented and bronzed. It was Pierre’s sister Monique’s birthday, and lights had been rented for a dance party: an outdoor nightclub with a cheese course.

After the coffee, Pierre put on Britney Spears, a remix of “Toxic.” It seemed to be the family anthem. And even the teenagers weren’t sullen for a moment, amid the olive trees and dark shrubs and the smell of hash (from the teenagers). Monique opened her husband’s birthday present, a purple box of lingerie. She ran inside to change. Jérôme got out his camera. He bossed the children around to adjust lights—those children that weren’t by that point sleeping on benches—and Monique returned to dance. It seemed like it might go all the way, but it did not. It was perfectly tasteful, if a little more exotic than we’d anticipated, and everyone agreed, old and young, that we should be lucky to turn thirty-seven and be so toned.

Margerie, the town, was not exotic, we saw the next morning. It had a church and a few stop signs; otherwise it looked abandoned. Rachel and I were among the first awake on Saturday, with Pierre’s father and his friend Antoine. When we’d retired the night before, the two of them had been drinking scotch at four a.m. Now they were fresh, impatient, ready to go.

First Pierre’s dad made us espresso from a machine in the kitchen that could have been a tractor engine. He was regally patrician: a chemical engineer with flowing white hair and a round brown stomach. He asked how we felt about helping with the shopping. No problem, Rachel said.

“Antoine is also coming,” Pierre’s dad said, laughing, “but Antoine is no help.”

Antoine appeared to be wearing the same outfit as the night before, though a freshly laundered version: white linen shirt, pressed jeans, black sunglasses, bracelets and rings. He looked eternally Mediterranean—tan, rakish, retired. He was a former musician, part of a seventies French pop band that had charted a number-one single. Now, Pierre told us, he was a professional gambler, working the casinos of Marseille.

At the market, we strolled under blue and white tents, past basket merchants and charcuterie displays. The air was hot. The area’s lavender had been cut recently and the breeze was sticky with it, like purple pollen. The whole market appeared to know Pierre’s dad; they called him “the city guy.” For each stall, there was a period of negotiation, a discussion of produce, gossip, and weather.

“They love him,” Antoine said to Rachel, “because they love his money.”

“Come,” Antoine said, pulling us away, “let’s go get something to drink.”

We went to a sandy café next to an old church. The sun hit us full in the face. Men in T-shirts were drinking coffee or white wine. Antoine suggested glasses of Ricard and some fried cod nuggets to fix our hangovers. For ten minutes, we sat and baked in silence. No word would have improved the impression.

Back at the house, Antoine disappeared to nap. We didn’t see him again until around eleven o’clock that evening, when he showed up, still in sunglasses, with his guitar. He passed Rachel a binder full of sheet music. She asked him what he knew. Everything, Antoine said.

“How about Al Green?”

He’d been strumming something by the Beatles. “Who is Al Green?”

“Come on,” I said, “‘Let’s Stay Together’? How about Marvin Gaye?”

“Do you know Elvis?” Rachel asked.

Antoine pulled down his sunglasses. “Do you know Elvis?” he said. “Americans don’t know Elvis.”

“Try me,” Rachel said. “How about Steely Dan?”

And that was how you unlocked Antoine’s heart. He and Rachel stayed up until three a.m. singing “Treat Me Like a Fool” and “Hey Nineteen.” I watched them sing, hearing their voices rise over plates being cleared, over Antoine’s guitar, over our friends nearby in conversation.

Jérôme, Monique’s husband, the mathematician, sought me out.

“So you’re getting along,” he said. “You speak French. You love Paris.”

“I love it,” I said.

“You like the work you do with Pierre?”

“It’s good.”

“The luggage, the babies.”

“I don’t love the babies.”

“No, no, not the babies,” Jérôme said. He was watching his wife, who had started to sing. He said, “So what, you live here forever, in France?”

“No,” I said, “we go back soon.”

Jérôme started laughing, assuming I was joking. Then he turned serious. “Listen, don’t be stupid. Are you crazy? Look at what we have.”

Jérôme’s looseness was noticeably different from the afternoon, when he’d told me, with gloom in his voice, how stressed he was, stressed out au maximum. “I am working like crazy,” he’d said. “This is what life has become. You get it? Don’t ask me about work, not on vacation. When I’m in the country, I am not in Paris, I leave it behind—I eat, I sleep, I screw, okay? Do not talk about work to me.

“Anyway,” he said, goosing my arm, “before you leave, you’ll have to come to Marseille.”

He started a Marseille booster’s song. From various points in the dark other voices sang along. Later in the evening, early in the morning, we were blasting Sanseverino’s cigarette song through the loudspeakers, and Jérôme got me by both shoulders, shouting, “Listen, Paris, it’s all assholes.” He got my eyes to make sure I would remember this forever: “I’m telling you, Marseille, listen, beautiful beaches, and the women? The world tells you we’re criminals, okay, and it’s true, but that doesn’t change the rest.

“It’s a crime,” he said morosely, “if you think France is just Paris.”

True enough.

God, I’d miss them.