Lunch in Paris (13 page)

“Thanks sooo much!” She looked at the box like a bomb that was about to explode in her hands and hastily dumped it on a side
table.

The house was the kind of country chic you find only in the city, with a long wooden table and armoires bigger than my bathroom.
Presumably Wendy was still upstairs getting dressed. These are the kind of (nauseating) people who don’t even need a room
at the Ritz, because whatever city they happen to be in, they always have somewhere fabulous to “crash.” We had been there
for a half hour (we were an hour and a half late) when she finally appeared from her bedroom in white tights, Marc Jacobs
sandals, and a skirt whose circumference rivaled my mother’s prom dress. “Hiii. It’s
so
great you came.” She kissed me on both cheeks (at least I had that down) and promptly disappeared.

After that no one spoke to us—in French or in English—and I made one too many trips back to the dimly lit kitchen to refill
my glass. As we milled around, doing our best to look casual, the
thought occurred to me more than once:
What in the name of Karl Lagerfeld am I doing here?
I was wearing the same clothes, holding the same drink, as a night out in New York, but everything felt wrong. I didn’t belong
to this amped-up jet set. Certainly Gwendal would think these people were shallow and ridiculous. Only three months out of
Manhattan, and my sense of destiny, of arrogant momentum, was beginning to desert me. I was trailing my old life into my new
life like toilet paper stuck to the bottom of my black lizard heels. I was trying too hard. It was conspicuous and embarrassing,
and I wasn’t having any fun.

W
E MANAGED TO
find a taxi back to the canal, taking off our shoes for the final flight of spiral stairs. In less than twenty-four hours,
Courtney and I had transformed the apartment into a college dorm room. There were clothes strewn over chairs and overstuffed
cosmetic bags balancing on the ledge above our fishbowl-sized bathroom sink. The futon frame in the living room was broken,
so once the bed was open it was just easier to leave it that way. Since the mattress took up most of the room, we ended up
walking back and forth across the pillows to get from the bathroom to the hall.

I could tell that Courtney was a little surprised by the apartment. Just as I had my vision of her as Roving Reporter, Next
Great American Novelist, she had this thing about me as Glamour Girl—vintage coats, pearls, and opera tickets. The last time
she’d seen me I was sharing a cavernous house in Islington with double-height ceilings and a
sitting room.
Sure, a love nest in Paris sounded glamorous as well—very
La Bohème
—but I don’t think she was expecting the mattress on the floor or a metal coatrack for a closet. How could I explain that
curled up on the broken futon, inches from the matted blue carpet, I was more at home than I’d ever been
in London. That on the two-burner electric hot plate I’d made some of the best meals of my life. As Courtney wedged herself
past the toilet to step up and into our Lilliputian shower, I saw her glance at Gwendal’s tatty green robe on the back of
the bathroom door. I had adopted it, my equivalent of a high school letterman’s jacket.

“That’s the great thing about living with somebody,” I said. “You only need one bathrobe.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I took Courtney up to Belleville. Summer is showing-off season at the market. Pyramids of apricots and peaches are piled
high like the treasures in Ali Baba’s cave. Boxes of tiny
fraises des bois
—wild strawberries—glow like edible rubies, and teardrop-shaped figs are nestled in pallets of straw. We weren’t really awake;
after hanging out with the fashionistas, getting up before noon seemed a bit of a stretch. The market packs up at one p.m.,
so we were late enough to be in competition with the Asian grannies, shopping at the last minute in hopes of reduced prices.
When they steal, which I’d witnessed more than once—one peach in the plastic bag, one in their purse—the vendors shout at
them in mock Chinese gibberish and hit them on the hands with cardboard fruit cartons.

After three months in France, I still hadn’t quite mastered the numbers—or the quantities. Still foggy from one too many
kir royal,
the language came at my head like a hail of bullets
doekillo, doekillo dekillohewnhurosankant, deux kilos, deux kilos, deux kilos un euro cinquante, 2 kg, 1.50 €.
Fractions were always a problem for me… is a kilo half a pound, or double? We stood mute in front of the mountain of fruit.
The man behind the counter was itching to unload his stock. Before I could protest, he filled up a hefty bag:
dekillohewnhurosankant.

It is in this manner that Courtney and I ended up with a hangover
and
four and a half pounds of overripe figs.

We ate them for breakfast and as a midnight snack—three days in a row. On the fourth day we still had an entire paper bag
full of figs, and the bottom was starting to get soggy.

I remember a wholesale market my mother used to take me to in Paterson, New Jersey. She would buy trays of overripe peaches
and plums and we would go home and make compote. How hard could it be? Eager to give it a French twist, and in keeping with
the booze-infused tone of the week, I decided we should add some alcohol. We went to the supermarket and found some Sauternes.
Did I read that in a magazine? We soaked the fruit and added honey; a vanilla bean may have fallen into the mix. We stewed
and stirred and waited for the juices to thicken. Never quite happened. It wasn’t what you’d call a raging success, but spooned
over vanilla ice cream it wasn’t half bad.

All this culinary creativity was exhausting. We went back to bed.

I
HAD AN
itinerary all planned out. We made a good faith effort to go to the decorative arts museum—only to find that it was closed
for renovations. The semi-annual sales were on, so we did a little shopping. I’m a tallish size ten, but the disparaging look
from the bitty-breasted salesgirl seated behind the counter (on what I can only imagine was her concave ass) was enough to
tell us that the sweaters would strain across our chests and the pants would barely get past our knees. After that, we concentrated
on food.

I wanted Courtney to taste everything I’d tasted these past few months, and although I didn’t have the city entirely figured
out, I had a number of culinary landmarks on my mental map that I could display with the authority of a native.

Our first destination was Berthillon on the Ile Saint-Louis. Berthillon is France’s most celebrated ice cream maker. Although
it was the middle of July, the owners were on vacation. They sell their stock to other shops and restaurants and, in the true
measure of French success, take the entire summer off. There are a number of Berthillon stands to chose from; avoiding the
hordes of tourists while maintaining a broad selection of flavors requires insider savvy. I walked us to the other side of
the island, as far as possible from the gardens behind Notre-Dame. There was still a line, but a bit of waiting is a good
thing; you need time to choose between pink grapefruit and raspberry sorbet or cinnamon and honey nougat ice cream. They serve
golf ball–sized scoops, so you have to be a real purist to walk away with just one
boule
. Courtney and I both got doubles—pear and
cacao amer
(bitter chocolate) for her, peach and rhubarb for me.

You don’t have to give women ice cream to get them to talk, but it helps. Down at the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, our feet
dangling over the Seine, we started one of those endless conversations, like two ten-year-olds at a sleepover. Ah, girl talk.
We would sit there until every morsel of information had been observed and chewed over and observed again, the carcass picked
dry by a couple of lipsticked vultures. It felt so good to be speaking English, I could have gone on for a month.

A year’s worth of details came tumbling out. Courtney was trying to decide if an almost-kiss at a London bus stop constituted
a seduction attempt by one of her editors. “We were both so drunk, it was hard to tell. Was it leaning, or
leaning
leaning.”

She didn’t know much about Gwendal. Until very recently, he was referred to in e-mails as “The Frenchman,” the kind of anonymous
nickname we gave to the passing men in our lives: Dumb Dave, Patrick the Pathological PhD Student, Stubble Boy. It felt good
to be breaking down my relationship with Gwendal as
if it were just another first date instead of the rest of my life, the analysis of minutiae covering for the real questions.

Minutia: He doesn’t even own a suit. How did he survive thirty-one years on this planet without a suit?

Real question: How is it possible that a man this smart, this cultivated, never went anywhere—a wedding, a funeral, a job
interview—that required a tie?

Minutia: Paris is amazing, but the whole city feels a little bit like a museum. Everything seems a bit stuck—and everyone
seems to think that’s normal.

Real question: Do I really want my children to grow up in a country where the first answer to every question seems to be “no”?

Minutia (OK, not really): Isn’t marriage the last great way to change your life?

Real question: Is this the change I want?

The fact is, Gwendal was simply not who I’d been expecting (and I’d been expecting who I’d been expecting for quite some time).
Like most women I know, I was born with a Prince Charming checklist: Is he tall enough, smart enough, rich enough? Has he
been places? Is he going places? The list goes on and on. I am fully aware that this kind of musing grinds the feminist movement
back to the Stone Age. Though I was raised by an independent single mother, I always fantasized that my husband would be some
practical banker type who would earn enough for me to pursue my artistic interests and still send the kids to a decent college.

“How are we supposed to be two creative people in a couple? We’ll starve to death,” I continued, crunching into the tip of
my cone.

“He has a job. And a PhD.” Courtney stood up, crumpling her napkin.

“He’s practically a Communist.”

“You’d prefer a Republican?”

“He tap-dances.”

She shrugged, as if to say, That one, you’re on your own.

All these things whirring around in my head didn’t quite get to the bottom of it. There was something else about Gwendal that
made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Yes I could.

“He’s just so fucking happy all the time. It’s weird.”

It was as simple as that. He’s a happy person and I am fundamentally suspicious of happy people. In the America I grew up
in, little kids don’t say, “When I grow up, I want to be happy.” That’s not the appropriate end to that sentence. We say,
“When I grow up, I want to be a doctor, an astronaut, a fighter pilot.” Happiness to me was something very abstract, the end
of a long equation: initial self-worth multiplied by
x
accomplishments, divided by
y
dollars,
z
loans, minus
f
hours worked, plus
g
respect earned. Happiness, I assumed, would be the end result of a whole list of things I hadn’t gotten around to yet.