Chapter 39

Rive Too Gauche

THERE IS A BIRD in Australia called the bowerbird. The male of the species is renowned in bird-watching circles for its propensity to collect shiny objects that it uses to decorate its nest, or bower, in the hope of attracting a mate.

As I sorted through the two distinct piles of boxes in the living room I now shared with the Showgirl—one pile containing all of her worldly goods, the other containing mine—it struck me that the male of the human species is not so far removed from its shiny-object-obssessed flighted friend. Brushed-steel appliances, alloy-accented furniture, and high-tech boys’ toys—all in varying grades of gray, brown, and silver—sat in one corner of the room, defying integration with the Showgirl’s lilac cushions, purple tulle curtains, and pink pebble lamp. Moving in together was clearly going to take some heavy-duty compromising. She would have to accept my stinky Afghan rug, I would need to agree to occasionally sleep on Laura Ashley sheets. She would have to create room in our shared closet for my enormous collection of T-shirts, and I would have to agree to share living space with Willy.

Willy had the appetite of an ox and the personality of a shrew. I’ve never been much for cats. If people can be divided into those who prefer dogs and those who prefer cats, I have always fallen on the side of the canines.

Ever since we had first set eyes on each other, Willy and I had enjoyed a fairly prickly relationship. I didn’t much like him, and he pricked me regularly with his claws. But Willy had been a fixture in the Showgirl’s life longer than I had been, and hence he had to be afforded a modicum of grudging respect. In fairness, Willy was probably no more excited about moving in with me than I was about moving in with him. During the year of my relationship with the Showgirl, Willy had been a dispassionate observer. As long as he was fed twice a day, had somewhere warm to sleep in between meals, and wasn’t dragged outside on excursions to the park, he really could have cared less who was dating his mistress.

But once he was thrown into the same permanent living arrangement with that person, he apparently decided the lines needed a definite redrawing. It was claws at midnight. During the daylight hours, when the Showgirl was around, Willy and I would give the impression of being happy housemates. He would walk past me without hissing, and I would occasionally reach out to stroke him without giving him a backhander. The minute she walked out the door for work, though, the claws were sharpened and the gloves came off. Willy would purposefully seek out the armchair I liked to sit in and would move only when forcibly extracted—and even then, with a fit of hissing and spitting that would have made Linda Blair proud. For my part, and largely because my inner brat remains part of my personality I have never successfully grown out of, I would never fail to pass him in the living room without pulling his tail, holding him upside down, or chasing him with the dust-buster, of which he was unnaturally terrified. The minute the Showgirl returned from work, hostilities would immediately cease and an uneasy truce would reign. Until we were left alone again. It was a most unorthodox arrangement, but it seemed to work for us.

Thankfully, soon after we moved in together, the Showgirl and I took in another lodger: a little white fluffy dog called Polar. As in bear. It was not, it should be pointed out, a name we had selected. Polar belonged to one of the Showgirl’s dancing colleagues, a fellow Aussie who had come to Paris for a one-year Lido contract and immediately purchased a dog. Apparently there was logic in there, but I was never able to see it. When said colleague then decided London was a better place to tread the boards, she hatched a plan to ply her furry friend with paracetamol, stick him in a box in the trunk of a car, and sneak him onto the ferry and into England. Wedded to reality as we rather boringly were, the Showgirl and I intervened and offered to puppy-sit Polar until his mom sorted out her shit.

Polar’s passport (yes, like all dogs in France, Polar was in possession of a passport) clearly stated that he was a bichon maltais. Anyone who spent more than five minutes in his company would know that he was more Muppet than actual dog. He had a black button for a nose, two black currants for eyes, and a trotting gait that made it physically impossible for him to move without looking like a wind-up dog. And as if to max out the cute factor, the unruly mop of white shaggy hair that fell over his eyes gave him the look of a permanently disheveled, cheeky little schoolboy. Polar and Willy got on famously, provided Polar accepted Willy’s rules of engagement: namely that the relationship was conducted entirely on Willy’s terms, that Polar would be recognized only when Willy chose to acknowledge him, and that Polar would be thwacked roughly in the head twice a day when Willy was in the mood for a wrestle. Again, it was a most unorthodox arrangement, but it seemed to work for them.

Whenever I managed to drag myself away from this rooftop menagerie, I was fast discovering the joys of living in a real Parisian neighborhood. Only by moving away from the Marais did I become aware of how surreal it really was. Though I had been wholly seduced by its many charms when I first arrived in Paris, I had recently come to think of it as the most Disneyland-esque of Paris’s twenty arrondissements. It was the prototypical Paris neighborhood you could imagine a Disney animator might dream up, all cobbled streets and quaintness. The Marais was so picture-postcard pretty, it sometimes felt like you were living in the Paris diorama in the It’s a Small World attraction: a boiled-down, perfectly formed, so-authentic-it-must-bea-film-set quartier of the French capital. Compounding the unreal nature of the Marais was the fact that it was almost exclusively populated by moneyed young French and expatriate professionals. It seemed to exist solely as a preening quartier for the city’s gays and as a mustering point for “lifestyle stores” that did a roaring trade selling cheap, gimmicky homewares to people who found it amusing to spend forty euros on a cheese grater shaped like a Kewpie doll.

Oberkampf, by comparison, felt like a little pocket of real Paris. It had a much more diverse demographic makeup than that of the Marais. It had rich young professionals in recently converted warehouses, young families in large if dilapidated Haussmannian apartments, and a healthy smattering of old folk. There were blue-collar, white-collar, and no-collar workers. There were even black people and Arabs—somewhat of a revelation to me after the monocultural Marais.

Our new street proved in time to be a marked improvement over my old rue for its diverse range of shops. Rue Oberkampf was lined on either side with fresh food stores. A fromagerie, two boucheries, three boulangeries, two pâtisseries, and a fresh fruit épicerie covered all possible variations on the French-food-shop-erie. An Italian deli, a Greek deli, and a massive fresh food market, held every Tuesday and Friday at the end of the street, complemented the onstreet offerings and meant we wanted for nothing in the food department. By stark comparison, Rue Sainte Croix in the Marais was great if you were in the market for a tight T-shirt or suddenly found you had run out of amyl nitrate, but if you wanted a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread, it was useless.

The Showgirl and I soon became fixtures in our new arrondissement, helped largely by the presence of the Muppet-on-a-leash. I was amazed to discover, almost six years into my Paris stay, that the secret to getting Parisians to acknowledge you in the street was ownership of a cute dog. You could wander naked down a Parisian rue handing out fifty-euro notes, and no one would look twice. Step onto the street with a fluffy white dog in tow, however, and you had to beat them off with a stick. It explained why so many Parisians owned dogs. Without them, they would never actually interact with one another. The social fabric of the entire city was held together by a profusion of perpetually pooping pooches.

We soon became faithful customers of the various purveyors of fine foods in our rue and got to know the unique cast of characters that manned them. There was the Virgo fruit shop, as the Showgirl and I named it, because of the owners’ habit of displaying all the produce in anally retentive rows. So perfectly was the fruit arranged, woe betide any man or woman who presumed to wander up and pluck an orange from the tray. A swift rebuke and sometimes a slap on the hand would ensure that the fruit was left undisturbed. Across the road was the Butchery We Never Visited. It was owned and operated by a dour, sallow-faced husband-and-wife duo. Despite several attempts to engage them in conversation, it was all we could do to extract a smirk out of them when ordering our entrecôte.

We therefore took our custom to the boucherie a little farther down the street. It was a large shop filled with all manner of exotic meat stuffs, manned by a group of jovial, mustachioed men with not a full set of fingers between them. My favorite feature of the shop was its rotund elderly female cashier, who sat behind her cash register and directed traffic in the store. She only ever moved to chase off the local homeless men who would occasionally help themselves to the potatoes roasting at the bottom of the chicken rotisserie outside on the street.

Next door to the butchery was the gay fishmonger. We knew he was gay because he loudly proclaimed his sexual orientation via a series of photos, posters, and flyers at the front of his store. Exactly what impact sexual orientation has on one’s ability to monger fish—and therefore why he felt the need to profess his so loudly—I was never able to fathom. Then there was the cheese shop, a veritable shrine to dairy products and bacteria. The place was packed to its stinky rafters with cheeses of every hue and consistency. The stench that emanated from the store was formidable. Prerequisites for a career in cheese shop ownership, I concluded, included a completely dysfunctional sense of smell and a willingness to toil every day in the small-business equivalent of an armpit.

As different as our motley crew of commerçants were, common to all of them was a passion for their trade. Every day we would experience firsthand the joy of interacting with shop assistants who were passionate about their produce. More than simply running a bar code over a scanner, they performed each sale with a flourish. Each customer was a potential convert to the religion they had discovered in their produce—and they would willingly take time, no matter how long the line in their store, to explain the unique qualities of a certain cut of meat, bottle of wine, or variety of cheese.

It wasn’t just the plentiful foodstuffs that made our new arrondissement so livable. Barely a ten-minute walk from our apartment lay the Canal Saint Martin. To the untrained eye, the Canal Saint Martin appeared to be nothing more spectacular than a concrete-lined puddle of stagnant water, along which canal boats would occasionally pass. If you happened to be in possession of a canal boat, and got your kicks out of traveling long distances at a snail’s pace, you could navigate your way from the Seine (into which the Canal Saint Martin emptied) along a vast network of canals and locks all the way across the country to the Mediterranean. I was never tempted to take the trip myself and was instead content to use the canal for its infinitely more practical purpose: a scenic backdrop for eating, drinking, and late-night carousing.

Now, it may well be difficult to imagine a fetid stretch of algae-ridden water as scenic, but surrounded as it was by typically Parisian apartment facades, lined with trees, and featured as it had been in a key scene from the internationally successful Amélie movie, the Canal Saint Martin was the trendiest pocket of all Paree. In the midst of a wholesale gentrification, the quartiers surrounding the canal had recently proven fertile ground for a proliferation of groovy cafés, grungy-but-cool bars, and fashionable restaurants and boutiques. Hovering on the wrong side of respectability, the canal and its surrounds enjoyed the distinct honor of being the kind of place bourgeois Parisians from the sixteenth arrondissement would rather die than venture into—and by default, it was eminently cool. On warm summer nights barely a patch of concrete canal ledge wasn’t populated by picnicking Parisian youth. Bottles of rosé, wheels of cheese, and long sticks of baguette were bandied about with abandon. Guitars were strummed, hash was openly smoked, and beer was bought in plastic cups from any of the bars lining the canal, ensuring that by ten o’clock on most summer evenings, the four-hundred-yard stretch of canal from Rue Faubourg du Temple to Rue de Lancry was heaving.

Smack bang in the middle of all the action, and doing a roaring trade because of its prime position, was Chez Prune. The café, like the canal it sat next to, was nothing special to look at. But thanks to its location and relaxed ambience, it was packed every night of the week. Across the canal was the Hôtel du Nord (immortalized in the eponymous 1938 film by Marcel Carné), whose dining room had recently been taken over by a celebrated set of Parisian restaurateur brothers and hence had been rendered überfashionable. Le Sporting, another chic eatery a little farther up the canal, the café-bar L’Atmosphere, the Chilean restaurant Santa Sed, and the sleek Italian pizzeria Maria et Luisa helped ensure that there was always a lively buzz to the area after dark.

Happily ensconced in the new neighborhood, and having found an interior design compromise that somehow incorporated both my Afghan rug and the Showgirl’s collection of floral bed linen, we set about establishing a cohabitational rhythm. I was working from home, making occasional visits to clients or trips across town to conduct interviews for stories I had been commissioned to write. Shay was working nights, leaving home at 7:30 p.m. and returning at two a.m. It was, on the whole, a very sweet setup. With most days to ourselves, we spent a lot of time in each other’s company. She would rise around eleven a.m., by which time I had done a couple of hours’ work. We would run errands together, visit shops, or grab lunch at a café, all the while relishing being in Paris and loving falling in love. Studio 54 was spacious and comfortable enough that we could sometimes spend entire days indoors, slothing about in our pajamas, content to look down on Paris from our aerie built for two, rather than actually getting down amongst it. At night a key turning in the lock at two a.m. would herald the Showgirl’s return from work. She would come bouncing through the door, her hair wet from her postperformance shower, still buzzing from the adrenaline of having performed two shows. I would pour a couple of glasses of red wine, and we would debrief her night at the Lido. It was unconventional, but it worked perfectly well for us.

When the Showgirl went to work, I made good use of my evenings by exploring the neighborhood for a local bar. As luck would have it, the hip Brazilian bar-restaurant Avé Maria (which had played host to many an entertaining evening in the past) now lay just outside our door. And since its bar was regularly tended by Morgan—an Australian friend who had been in Paris some twelve years—a cold beer or shot of ginger rum was only ever a too-tempting, too-short elevator ride away. Between the myriad nightly distractions on offer farther up our street (including the ever-reliable Café Charbon, a bustling bar fashioned out of a former dance hall) and the amenities that lined the canal, I had no occasion ever to leave my quartier.

Moreover, in moving from the Marais to Oberkampf, farther north of the Seine and therefore deeper into the so-called “right bank,” I had become a card-carrying Rive Droite-ist. So much so that on the rare occasions when I crossed the river into the Rive Gauche, it all seemed dull and monochrome compared to the Technicolor explosion of vitality that was the Rive Droite. Where the Right Bank was gritty, colorful, and dynamic, the Left Bank was polished, staid, and conservative. Populated almost exclusively by rich Parisians—whose weekend wardrobe of choice included tasseled suede loafers, a business shirt, chinos, and a pastel sweater draped around the neck for guys, and jeans, pumps, tailored jacket, and pearl earrings for girls—the Rive Gauche served no practical purpose as far as I could tell beyond keeping tourists herded together in one part of the city so that real Parisians could enjoy the other, authentic parts of it.

You couldn’t walk down a street on the Left Bank without being assailed by an American accent or being nearly mown down by hordes of Hello Kitty–sporting Japanese girls making a beeline for Café Flore. Like its equally famous sister café, Les Deux Magots, Café Flore appeared to exist purely as a commercial and anthropological experiment to see just how much people would pay for a cup of coffee. At seven euros plus tip, it was always the one hit of caffeine I was willing to forgo. The Latin Quarter, once the home of artists and students and the cradle of a people’s uprising in May ’68, was now just a hoary collection of cheap restaurants offering more awful “tourist menus” than you could poke a wilted lettuce leaf at. Every night hordes of hapless tourists, clutching maps and dressed to the nines in Teva sandals and socks, would stumble into this taste-free zone. The irony of them being in one of the food capitals of the world and eating French onion soup from a can was almost too cruel to contemplate. Directed there by out-of-date guidebooks or hotel concierges, they were sucked into any one of countless identical outdoor cafés, made to sit on cheap outdoor furniture, and left to choose from a fixed menu offering lettuce with two bits of grated carrot, a greasy serving of chicken and chips, and a pallid crème caramel.

So it had come to this: almost six years into my Paris sojourn, I had become a Paris snob. The symptoms were all there. An inability to step outside the confines of my quartier, a borderline indifference to the myriad amazing cultural attractions on my doorstep, a deep and abiding dislike of tourists, and a tendency to dismiss anyone who had spent less than five years in the city as a Johnny-come-lately Paris part-timer. When had I become so jaded? It wasn’t that I was tired of Paris, but rather that I needed to look at it through fresh eyes—from a new perspective.

Racing all over the city on a hell-bent mission to spend as many consecutive nights as possible in a state of high inebriation had been fine while it lasted, but if I wasn’t careful, I was in danger of becoming a caricature. I was in danger of turning into my worst nightmare—one of those forty-year-old men who think that by wearing a tight T-shirt and moving awkwardly to the music in nightclubs, they can avoid looking tragic. The Marais was crawling with crusty old male expats who were clinging, like so many badly dressed, aging Peter Pans, to the notion that simply being in Paris allowed them to eschew responsibility, postpone indefinitely the process of growing up, and mince around bars smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

I was determined not to become one of them. I needed a change of pace. I needed a new focus. I needed—quite obviously—to make an honest woman of the Showgirl.