Chapter 7

The Paris Posse

IT’S A FUNNY THING moving to a city where you don’t know a soul. It’s simultaneously liberating and terrifying. Liberating, because you are completely free. You have no family commitments to honor, no sprawling networks of disparate friends to maintain. And because no one knows you, there are no widely held expectations, built up over years of familiarity, of who you are and what you do. Terrifying because you are essentially alone. Sure, you have countless friends and family at the end of a phone line, but at the end of the day, when the lights go out and you pull up the bedcovers, you are all by yourself.

Almost four months had passed since I had arrived in Paris. I had a job that looked like it was going to be a breeze, and an apartment that was slowly becoming a home. Now all I needed was a troupe of cohorts with whom to infiltrate the city’s seedy underbelly.

With the same misguided optimism I would see reflected in countless other fresh-faced expats after me, I reasoned that the best way to develop a circle of friends and get under the skin of the City of Light was to ingratiate myself with the Frenchies. Through contacts at work and a relatively well-established expatriate network, a variety of social opportunities began to present themselves, and Project Assimilate was officially launched.

As a result, on any given night of the week, and especially on precious Friday and Saturday nights, I would find myself standing in a room half full of Frenchies and half full of expats. The expat department usually contained a smattering of American princesses on Daddy-funded six-month study tours, Swiss banking nerds who had been transferred to their private bank’s Paris office, and German government-employed energy experts “on mission” at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD as it was known in the local lingo. Dismissing out of hand the conversational potential of this most rich sample space of fellow expats, I would invariably concentrate on getting to know the Frenchies—determined to improve my grasp of the language, develop some friendships with the locals and deepen my appreciation of this remarkable culture I had come to live in.

As someone who loves to talk, I quickly learned to appreciate the awful frustration of being party to a group conversation and having something intelligent or witty to contribute to it but possessing neither the vocab nor the requisite facility with the language to express it. In pretty much every situation, the scene would play out as follows: I would keep up with a group conversation delivered in rapid-fire French, nod enthusiastically, and think of something erudite or funny to contribute, and by the time I conjugated the verb, decided whether the subject was masculine or feminine, and worked out whether to use the familiar tu or the more formal vous, the conversation had moved on.

Where in my own language I was the life and soul of a party, in French I became a conversational wallflower. Eventually someone would take pity on me, notice my pathetic earnestness, and throw a question in my direction. It was invariably a mercy query, motivated more by a desire to draw me into the proceedings and put me out of my misery than by any actual interest in the answer. But as it turned out, being obliged to repeat their inquiry three times before I actually understood it, or worse, receiving an answer that had nothing to do with the question they had posed, did little to encourage them to further extend the tentative hand of new friendship.

And it wasn’t as if I could take refuge in the bottle. French parties, I soon learned, were among the driest affairs on the planet. Everyone brought a bottle, and everyone placed their bottle on a large table in the corner that was straining under the weight of painstakingly prepared finger food, but no one, it seemed, was allowed to actually open those bottles. Convinced that fluency in French lay only four swift drinks away, I used to shift nervously from foot to foot, eyeing the alcohol and willing someone, anyone to open it up and offer it around. But French social etiquette stipulates that under no circumstances do you ever pour yourself a drink. Rather, you wait patiently until someone notices your empty glass and offers to refill it. However, as my party pariah status was growing with every passing minute, there was no way I was prepared to stand on ceremony. Trample all over it, more like.

And so it was that I would eventually risk social death and march over to the drinks table and help myself. Ignoring the sharp intake of collective breath from shocked fellow revelers, I would then proceed to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible.

Once suitably steeled by the numbing effect of two glasses of Bordeaux in quick succession, I was just about able to cope with another half-hour discussion of the volatility of oil markets with the German energy geek, before making my excuses and leaving. To say that I prematurely abandoned Project Assimilate would be an understatement. Perhaps with persistence I would have found a group of slow-talking, alcoholic French friends, but it was patently going to take a lot of fruitless air-kissing and tedious conversation before I found my social saviors. This French social lark was all well and good, I finally decided, but if it meant standing around a silent room (would it have killed them to put some music on?) and boring one another to death, then it probably wasn’t for me. Besides, my Australian upbringing had taught me to be naturally suspicious of any party at which there was more food than alcohol.

So it was that I dug out the one Parisian telephone number with which I had arrived. I had been keeping it to one side, vowing only to use it in an emergency. It was the number of an English girl named Fiona who had recently moved to Paris. She had once taken a salsa class with one of the TV reporters with whom I’d worked in London. As contacts went, it was about as tenuous as you could possibly get. But the nights weren’t getting any less lonely, and I was damned if I was going to spend another evening listening to the relative merits of the Swiss private banking code.

I picked up the phone, dialed the number, and made a date to meet up the next night. The Paris Posse was officially conceived.

 

NOW, AS A GENERAL RULE, I’m not a great believer in fate. I believe most things can be explained as a result of circumstance, planning, or good old-fashioned coincidence. But meeting Fiona set in motion a random chain of events and chance encounters that would irrevocably change my Parisian life and lead me to consider if perhaps there wasn’t some heavenly ordination at work.

The event itself was ordinary enough. Two relative strangers meet in the 7 Lézards jazz bar on the Rue des Rosiers, share a few drinks, establish a rapport, and silently—separately—decide that this is a friendship with definite potential. Fiona was a lawyer, transferred to Paris by her large London-based corporate law firm. Petite, vivacious, and possessed of a set of dazzling baby-blue eyes, she made a very good first impression. Law, as is often the case with lawyers, was not her thing. Like thousands before her and thousands to come after her, she had simply got the grades to study law and figured she was therefore obliged to do it. Her real passion was photography. And dancing. And rather fortunately for me and our budding friendship, drinking and smoking. Within half an hour of our sitting down and engaging in effortless conversation, she ordered a second carafe of Sauvignon Blanc with nary a bat of an eyelid. I knew we were destined to get on like a house on fire.

Fiona had been in Paris for only four months. By virtue of the fact that she had lived in France as a child, she had pitch-perfect French and a budding network of French friends. But she too had stood sober at enough French soirées to know that if she was going to survive—and indeed enjoy—her time in Paris, she needed to develop a reserve of like-minded expats. In her wanderings Fiona had crossed paths with another lawyer, Sylvie, who was also from England and had been relocated to Paris by her mega–law firm. Among her myriad other talents, Sylvie was somewhat of a prodigy in the specialized field of international arbitration law. She was also of Spanish-Iranian extraction, a combination that gave her striking beauty and, as I would later discover, the ability to salsa dance with the best of them. By day she worked with governments and industry chiefs prosecuting cases in international courts of arbitration; by night she liked nothing more than to down a few glasses of white wine, take to the dance floor, and work up a sweat. I decided I could get to like her too.

Sylvie knew of another young English corporate lawyer, Gavin, who was doing a six-month stint in the City of Light. Lawyerly transfers to Paris from firms in London, I quickly learned, were not only common but highly sought after for the opportunity they provided the next generation of legal eagles to let down their hair before being sucked into the great gray vortex of corporate law.

Gavin was dashingly good-looking in a kind of James Bond, terribly proper English fashion. He was debonair in a way that seemed almost to belong to a bygone, more elegant era, as if he had been plucked straight from a P.G. Wodehouse novel and plonked down in modern-day Paris. A raconteur par excellence with a razor-sharp wit, Gavin could enthrall a dinner table with an endless supply of anecdotes and comedy routines.

During one sunny spring Sunday afternoon of Bloody Mary–quaffing on the Left Bank, Sylvie, Gavin, and Fiona had been distracted from their boozing by the sight of a Vespa spontaneously combusting on the sidewalk opposite their Saint Germain outdoor café. Not an event, it should probably be pointed out, that was all that common. Sitting two tables away at the same café was a similarly gobsmacked expat, Eric the Canadian, who had just arrived in Paris on assignment from the Zurich-based Swiss bank for which he worked. As the Vespa burned, jokes were swapped and numbers duly exchanged.

Eric was a fresh-faced twenty-three-year-old from Toronto, three years out of university and hell-bent on having a no-holds-barred Paris experience. Like many of his countryfolk, he was partial to the odd bit of polar fleece clothing. Like every one of his countryfolk I have ever met, he was also warm, genuine, and funny. His enthusiasm for life and thirst for experience were infectious, and his habit of staring wide-eyed while you spoke was endearing—though whether it was because he was genuinely amazed at what you were saying or simply because he couldn’t decipher your accent, it was never easy to say.

Some weeks prior to the burning-Vespa incident, Sylvie had crossed Parisian paths with an English girl called Charlotte. Charlotte was an English rose with a personality that seemed either reluctant or simply incapable of being contained within her tiny frame. She had an effervesence and enthusiasm for life that were contagious—two qualities that made her extremely good at her job as an advertising sales executive in The Wall Street Journal ’s Paris bureau. Her colleague Claudio, from Italy, was also a new arrival in Paris and on the lookout for like-minded expatriate distraction. For though Claudio shared Latin roots with his French cousins, he felt much more at home in the company of similarly exuberant Anglo-Saxons than with their more staid French counterparts. Claudio was a born performer, a class clown with a richly sentimental side that was typically, effusively, adorably Italian. A set of big brown eyes and a Dolce & Gabbana wardrobe also made him a hit with the ladies.

Not long thereafter, on a random night out in the Marais, I came across an amiable English lad from Yorkshire. James had just arrived in Paris to assume the hilarious job title of “Energy Analyst—Emergency Planning and Preparations Division of the Directorate for Oil Industry, Markets and Emergency Preparedness” at the International Energy Agency. Hailing from Sheffield, in England’s working-class industrial north, James’s smarts had transported him to bourgeois Paris, where he was now busily absorbing and processing his new foreign surroundings. You could tell that a chameleonlike ability to blend with his surroundings, no matter what the social milieu, had served him well in life. A cheeky grin, brooding good looks, and more than his fair share of charm hadn’t hurt either.

Meanwhile, through a friend with whom he had briefly been at university in Aix-en-Provence, Gavin had made contact with a young French lawyer named Julien, who (undoubtedly to his undying regret) found himself drawn into the fast-evolving expatriate circle. Julien had grown up in Macon, at the edge of the Burgundy region, southeast of Paris. He appeared to take his role as token French friend seriously, ensuring that his newfound band of foreign acquaintances were daily exposed to the best his country had to offer—whether it was cheese, wine, a hidden gem of a restaurant, or the perfect spot for a midsummer Seine-side picnic.

Completing the troupe of new buddies was Will, another English lawyer with whom Sylvie had studied at Cambridge University. Tall, handsome, and with a chiseled physique from his days of playing university rugby, Will had arrived in Paris to work in the noble pursuit of international human rights law. When he added his hat to the ever-growing pile, the Paris Posse was born.

 

ALONE, EACH OF the random connections that had brought us into one another’s orbit was relatively inconsequential, but put together, they would turn out to be among the most significant coincidences in the Paris years that lay ahead of us. Thanks to a salsa class in London and a burning moped in Saint Germain, a core network of friends had been accidentally formed which would go on to have a massive influence not just on me but on all who were part of it. Over time the Posse’s numbers would swell and ebb as each of us moved on, took a partner, dumped a partner, or otherwise introduced new recruits to the circle.

We all came from different countries and different backgrounds. We each had a different level of proficiency with the French language and culture. On the face of it, we had little in common except a coincidence of geography. Our reasons for being in Paris were as diverse as our nationalities, yet common to all of us was a passion for France, a love of the French, and a fascination for their language and culture. With the exception of local lad Julien, we were all of us chancers, in that we had willingly left comfortable existences at home to travel to France, where none of us knew a soul, just to sample the fabled delights of la vie parisienne. We became very close to one another in what seemed a ridiculously short amount of time.

Far from family and friends, and dealing daily with a set of linguistic and cultural challenges that were invariably either highly amusing or utterly exasperating, we each of us needed a ready series of empathetic shoulders on which to lean. That all of us had passed through the same social filter to find ourselves in Paris (adventurous, passionate about all things French, and willing or stupid enough to throw ourselves into a new country where we had no friends) meant that we formed a network whose members immediately had plenty in common. Enough, certainly, to be the natural, easy-to-reach substitute for family members or friends who were either one too many time zones away or too far removed from the day-to-day challenges of Paris life to properly understand what we were experiencing.

In an age characterized by the sitcom Friends—where networks of independent, geographically mobile, unmarried late-twenty-somethings roamed cityscapes the world over—we had formed our very own urban tribe. Unbeknown to us then, this tribe would remain close for years to come: traveling together to exotic destinations all over the world, exulting together in times of happiness, and drawing together in a protective ring in times of distress, hardship, or sadness. It wouldn’t matter that time would eventually see some of us depart for our respective homelands or witness others move on to new horizons—the bond that was forged in these first six months of our Parisian existences was such that neither time nor distance would erode it.

But that was all years ahead of us. For now, all we knew was that Paris was our new, largely unexplored terrain and that in the Posse we had found the perfect unit in which to explore it. We were loud, we were brash, and we were all very fortunately in possession of handsomely paying jobs that required little more than our physical presence each day.

You could almost hear the city quivering in nervous anticipation.