Lunch in Paris (29 page)

She kissed me on both cheeks and sat down. “Have you been to the
préfecture
yet?” Asking whether you’ve been to the police station to deal with your
carte de séjour
is the most basic form of expat small talk, like commenting on the weather.

“No, I have an appointment for July.”

“Go early, and make sure you bring the photocopy
and
the original.” For all that she could be frolicking on the beach in a Bain de Soleil ad, I have a feeling that Katherine
is, like me, comfortingly pragmatic, bordering on anal.

She ordered a
blanche
and I ordered a glass of Muscat. The conversation was easy, fluid, without halts for translation or searching for words.
I love Gwendal, but sometimes you just need to wake up in the morning and talk to an American. I discovered that Katherine
is from Pennsylvania, and that she went to college with her identical twin sister. There was a brief pause as I imagined the
two of them tag-teaming at a Friday-night party, holding a beer by the neck of the bottle, trailed by scores of baggy-jeaned
boys determined to have sex in a Doublemint commercial. I also discovered that her French boyfriend is actually her French
husband, though she doesn’t wear a ring and introduces him as her
copain
.

“I didn’t even tell my parents we were getting married. I mean, we decided to do it, for the papers, but Syl doesn’t believe
in marriage.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. Several of Gwendal’s friends had been living together for years, were having children
even, with no intention of getting married. “It was a really simple ceremony, just the two of us and two witnesses at the
mairie
. I told my parents afterward.”

“Wow,” I said, “that must have been hard.” I imagined my mother, chin held up at an impossible angle, refusing to speak to
me ever again, tearing her clothes like the guy in
The Jazz Singer
. I couldn’t wait to get home and call her. At least I didn’t do
that
.

Katherine and I left with a promise to get together for dinner in the coming weeks. A second date. Very promising. Very promising
indeed.

O
NE PRAGMATIC PERFECT
10 does not a social circle make, so I finally agreed to do what I’d been dreading and began exploring the more formalized
American expat community.

Why doesn’t she try to make some French friends? you say. She is, after all, living in Paris. If only it were that simple.
Americans are used to meeting people. It’s how we expand our horizons, create opportunities—personal, professional, romantic.
I found that, for whatever reason, people in Europe don’t need more friends. They have their families, the people they grew
up with, the people they went to university with, colleagues to talk to on a cigarette break. Their social world is made up
of tiny circles, closed but overlapping like those Chinese ring toys you can never untangle from one another. In Paris, it
is not unusual to walk into a room of thirty-five-year-olds and find out everyone has known each other since high school.
A new sexual partner—
le mec
of the moment—seems to be the only revolving door.

I had already banged my head against this wall in London. Thank God I went to school there, or I might have spent several
years of Saturday nights alone with a spoon in a jar of lemon curd, watching
EastEnders
. I would go to a party, spend the evening talking to someone, and, naturally for me anyway, before I left I would look for
a way to follow up. My mistake was impatience. An English acquaintance was once drunk enough to explain it to me. We would
have to meet at at least
three
events, he said, before I could even
consider
suggesting that we see each other outside a group context. His assumption was, if I was at
this
party, then surely we knew someone in common, and therefore I would be at the
next
party (or dinner or play or rugby match) in six months’ time. After a couple of these mutual-friend events, all spaced at
appropriate intervals, maybe,
maybe
there would be an exchange of salient contact details or a vague plan to meet at the pub after work. Call me crazy, but life
is short, and I just don’t have that kind of time. I come from a city of eight million people. If you meet someone you like
at a party, you’d better get something down on paper, or chances are you’ll never see them again. “But what if there was no
other group context?” I said. He shrugged. “Well, then we don’t come from the same world and there is no reason for us to
be friends anyway.”

There is no way to make European friends overnight (unless you sleep with them). But Americans, particularly abroad, travel
in packs, and they will talk to anyone. I had to start somewhere.

I found a group called Forever in France, a club for American women married to Frenchmen or other species of European. Gwendal
calls it my Stuck Here meeting, where women with multiple graduate degrees who cannot find gainful employment complain about
their underpaid husbands and swap the phone numbers of ob-gyns. We are the ladies who can’t afford to lunch.

That’s where I picked up Kelda.

This month’s meeting was at the home of a woman named Nancy from South Carolina. When I exited the metro with
my map I did a double take to make sure I hadn’t gotten off in Versailles by mistake. I was surrounded by huge Haussmannian
buildings of pale limestone, punctuated with stately wrought-iron balconies. Way up top, against the starless sky, were rows
of tiny round dormer windows, lit like unblinking eyes. At the corner, overlooking a small park, was a particularly curvy
specimen, the portico draped with reclining nudes and topped with a marshmallow dome. It was seven p.m. and there was not
a soul in sight. I walked up to a set of varnished doors and tapped in the entry code I’d been given.

Forever in France was a renegade operation. It had recently broken away from one of the larger women’s groups at the American
Church—Wives of American Oil Executives with Expense Accounts etc. Nancy was a little bit of a cheat—she was married to another
American, a lawyer—but they were here for the long haul and she wanted to make some friends who weren’t leaving next week
for a posting in Abu Dhabi. When she opened the door, blond hair tucked behind her ears, I smiled sweetly and immediately
asked for the powder room. She pointed me to a hallway that looked as if it went on for miles. There was a choice of doors,
four or five of them. I didn’t know anyone in Paris with a choice of doors.

I fixed my hair and tried to psych myself up to walk out into a room of perfect strangers. It was the same feeling of dread
that used to come over me when I was dragged to Jewish singles events in New York. Why would anyone assume I had something
in common with these people just because they’re American?

I spotted her as soon as I walked into the living room. She was talking with a group of women in cashmere twin sets the color
of tree bark. She was wearing a turquoise tunic and carrying a boxy black vintage handbag—a tropical parrot among the sparrows.
She was pale and platinum blond, with the perfectly outlined red
lips of a forties starlet. If Kelda looked like Veronica Lake, she sounded more like Andrew Dice Clay. Were I to put our meeting
in a movie (and Kelda deserves to be in movies) she would be at the center of an expectant crowd. You wouldn’t see her face,
you would simply hear her voice, hard like rock candy, and see the glass of white wine raised above her head. She was—she
always is—in the middle of a good story. In her best homegirl jive, and at a volume significantly louder than the polite hum
of conversation around us, she burst out: “I
told
my husband. I said: ‘Listen
up,
mother
fucker
. I left my
home,
I left my
family
for you. I want a PUPPY.’ When I saw little Starsky in the window—
man,
it was like a fucking
meeting of the minds
.” She flicked her hands back and forth between our foreheads like a hypnotist. Then her face went all soft and her voice
went all Barbra Streisand. “We had a moment,” she said, as she pinched two imaginary cheeks in front of her. ‘Who’s your mommy?’
” she cooed, puckering up her lips like someone’s dangerous great-aunt Shirley who spits. “Whoosoomommy. Whoosoomommy.” Suddenly
the homegirl reappeared. “ ‘I
get
you baby. You mine. You
mine
.’ ”

In fact, the truth was considerably more embarrassing. I followed her into the elevator. I knew it was a bold move, but we’d
had a nice conversation, she was a singer, married to a French jazz musician, and I saw her roll her eyes when the hostess
clinked a teaspoon against her glass to make an announcement. It wasn’t much, but I’d encouraged guys in bars for less.

“Hold the door,” I said, slipping in after her. It was one of those old-fashioned elevators, shiny hardwood with gumdrop-sized
green buttons and a brass accordion grille instead of a door. Parisian elevators are famously cramped, made for trysts rather
than transportation.

I let out a sigh of relief as I wedged myself in beside her. She smiled. “Hey, you weren’t here last month. You missed the
PowerPoint presentation:
Scrapbooking: This Is Not a Joke
. I thought I was going to put a bullet through my skull.”

I wanted to kiss her. Instead I said, “Do you want to have coffee sometime?”

Outside on the deserted street, I tapped her number into my cell phone and descended into the metro.

When I got home, Gwendal was reading a book on the couch, waiting up for me.

“So?”

God, this really
is
like dating.

Apparently, Kelda went home flapping her wings. She whooshed in the door and announced to Nico: “
I
have a new friend. And she’s so
normal
.”

I’
VE HAD A
breakthrough. I think there is a French woman in my life. Gwendal’s friend Axelle wants to meet me for a coffee this afternoon—without
Gwendal. I’ve been courting her slowly. Like approaching a deer in the woods, I make no sudden movements. I’m afraid to scare
her away.

Gwendal met Axelle at tap class. When he first introduced us, she seemed smiley, so I tried to do a little reconnaissance.
Gwendal was no help at all.

“What does she do?” I said, while popping the laundry in one night.

“I don’t know exactly.”

“You don’t
know?
” I said, looking at him in bewildered astonishment. “You’ve known her for over a year. She was at our wedding. How is it
that you don’t know what she does for a living?”

“I don’t think it is very important to her.” I was no closer to understanding this very French answer. “She is involved in
many
other things. I think she is the elected official for culture in her hometown. She organizes a music festival.”

Despite this blank in the job department, I was drawn to her. She seemed open and curious. She also loves to travel. I don’t
know where she gets the money, but she is always away: Jordan, Burma, Benin—and she brings back weird stuff.

She loves animals, but not cute and cuddly animals: big, meat-bearing, transportation-providing animals, particularly cows
and camels. She came back from her most recent vacation, a hiking trip in the desert, with a present for us: red sand from
the Sahara. Her own prize was a dried camel turd, supposedly laid by the mount of a famous explorer.

I knew I was getting somewhere when she offered to take me to some of her favorite boutiques during the January sales. It’s
not nothing when a French woman asks you to go shopping with her. She is choosing to let you in on some of her secret chic
spots. And there are no two women in the world who can’t bond over a beautiful pair of shoes.

Axelle is about my height, though smaller on top, with short brown hair. She is
chic
in a very original way. She wears more color than most French women; instead of a fitted jacket in gray or black, she’ll
have one in stoplight red or canary yellow. She often wears asymmetrical cuts; one side of a skirt will be shorter than the
other, or there might be a strap or a buckle leading over her shoulder to nowhere.