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Year-round in Paris, though especially during summer, posters went up in the Métro for what I called the country-idyll picture. There was Le cœur des hommes 2; Trois amis; Je déteste les enfants des autres. Different films, but the posters were the same: French people in the countryside sitting at a table outdoors. Dipping their legs in a pool. Fishing the river Tarn from a chair. The light would be full of shadows, and nearby was a bottle of rosé, above was the sun—there would be a walnut cutting board and some cornichons. People outdoors laughing, eating, pursuing a kiss. The posters were everywhere, pervasive in all seasons. Down in the Métro, below the drumming rain and the city’s dead-end jobs, its bureaucracy and shopping malls, these posters were a reminder that to lose touch with the rustic table was to lose, to some degree, one’s French soul.

The posters were interchangeable, but the idea did not change.

Then again, what did I know?

In an interview I read somewhere around that time, John le Carré said the only way to write about a place was after visiting it for a day, or after a long life once you’d moved there. Because a day’s visit gave you notes: smells, colors, advertisements new and advertisements peeling, and the writer could play naïf.

Or, if a writer moved to a place permanently, he’d be granted perspective, assuming he kept his eyes open for many years.

But time between those two lengths didn’t lend more certainty, just detail.

Summer wound down. Dinner parties became dance parties. Rachel and I cooked ensemble, and we shopped at Picard. From the market, we brought home flowers that we arranged the way people store umbrellas. We roasted chickens. We hit dive bars. We hit clubs. We hit bars “installed” as exercises of marketing, where champagne was €140, but for that price two people could sit in a pink plastic love seat designed by Karim Rashid—we watched this occur but did not experience it for ourselves. Outside his rooms, Asif grew peppers, tomato plants, bushels on latticework, herbs in barrels. In the evenings the smell of mint came in through all our windows. Slowly the light went out. We played gin. We played Feist on the stereo for guests, and Alain Bashung, and Ladyhawke’s “Paris Is Burning,” which was a hit that summer at the office, where parties were organized on the terrace at night. Some were going-away parties for coworkers; some were parties because we had a view from a roof overlooking the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the view wrapping from Montmartre to La Défense.

The first verse to “Paris Is Burning” said: “Tell me the truth / Is it love / Or just Paris.”

Also popular was the Friendly Fires’ single “Paris,” remixed by Aeroplane, with vocals redone by the Brooklyn band Au Revoir Simone, to sound spacier and, oddly, more French, if still with an American’s outsider touch: “One day we’re going to live in Paris / I promise, I’m on it / When I’m bringing in the money.”

One night there was a party in the glass-roofed Grand Palais, and it looked to us on the terrace like fireworks were being shot off indoors, it looked like terrorists were blowing up a flower shop.

*   *   *

One week before Bruno took his summer vacation, he invited me out to lunch. The two of us had steaks and plenty of wine—champagne followed by Burgundy—all Bruno’s choice, Bruno insisting on sharing the wine so I wouldn’t namby out.

Breast-feeding, Bruno said, was in roughly the same place as when I’d left it. His baby-food job had gone well, however, and he’d been commended for his work. But work and life were both dull and discouraging.

“And what I hear,” he said in English, “is you going to California, London, making movies?”

Bruno laughed, then continued in French: “I don’t say it’s fair or not fair. It’s not your fault, but you have an advantage. You know this, right? The advantage is coming from outside. You’re not Parisian, not French. You get to bypass the system. And you know Pierre from before—you’re on Pierre’s special team. Listen, you think if I said to André, ‘Hey, dude, I’ve got this idea for a big chicken,’ you think he’d listen to me? Come on.”

We talked for twenty minutes about troubles Bruno was having with a woman on his team, who’d reported him for arriving late and blowing off meetings. Bruno said, “You know me, when am I late? I work hard.”

I asked him if he’d be satisfied living forever in Paris.

Bruno took a moment to think about it, then gestured with his cigarette at the Arc de Triomphe and the grand buildings of the eleventh arrondissement. “Look where we are,” he said. “Old families. Rich people. In Paris, if you’re not rich, not from an old family, you’re stuck. So of course you’re not satisfied. Who wants to be stuck? But at least I’m stuck in Paris.

“Hey, now,” he said, “it’s dessert time, get something, let’s eat.”

We ate some kind of savory ice cream with herbs and salt, a wonder in every bite.