Paris Letters (16 page)

Still, it can be a drag learning a new language, especially when it’s motivated by something other than the joy of learning the language. French is so not Italian. The Italian language is like Italian food. A feast for the tongue. Every word a spicy meatball. Every intonation a perfectly prepared noodle. Every expression a full-flavored sauce. I loved the Italian language for the sake of it. It wouldn’t get me much further than directions to a great meal in Rome, but I didn’t care because I love it unconditionally. I loved it because it was so easy to love. They pronounce all the letters in a word. Bliss!

So while my motivation for learning Italian stems from a love of the language, my motivation to learn French stemmed from loving a man. I didn’t study French for the love of it. I studied it because I wanted to know what my boyfriend said to me. It was all love, but one was more indirect than the other, which made sitting down to a podcast or language CD challenging, especially when I could be outside discovering the delicacies of Paris.

But I pulled on my big girl pants and sat myself down to listen to my French language CDs and to wrap my tongue around new words. I listened to each language lesson twice. The first time through, I wanted to cry. I just didn’t understand anything. The second time through, I started to get the hang of it, which encouraged me to move on to the lesson, which I listened to and went back to not understanding anything again. It was a vicious little cycle. Each day I would furrow my brow and make funny faces as I tried to pronounce the multisyllabic words.

Every time I wanted to give up, I thought of my nieces. They were learning all the time. They could learn new words, how to run the DVD player, and how to take photos with the camera apps on smartphones. And all in one day. I couldn’t even cobble a sentence together with confidence. I could take a class but I still had residual trauma from office life. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to sign up for anything that required that I sit in one desk for a specified amount of time.

Some days, when my brain was a tangled ball of yarn, trying to unravel the mysteries of the passé composé and the conditional, I got tense and looked over at my dusty suitcase in the corner. I could just go.

One evening, after a particularly grueling language lesson, I joined Christophe at the bar. I finished my beer while he was nursing his.

“Are you almost ready to go?” I asked.

“Not yet.” He took a small sip.

This grimy bar was filled with smelly men. I was tired and on the verge of needing la toilette though I knew that the bathroom was wretched, as most of them are in Paris. The bar was loud that night too. I sat in silence next to Christophe, who was quite happily listening to music and taking in the scene around him. I thought back to Ben and how it would have been so easy to make a move on him that night in London. We talked so well together. In English! I could have just kissed the guy, fired off a Dear Christophe email, and figured out how to be the Early Show and live harmoniously with Late Night. Life could have been easier. Or even Marco or Sandro? I could have tried harder. I could have won them over. They all spoke English. Why was I with someone I couldn’t even talk with in this dark, dank, loud bar? What have I done to get here, and how could I get out?

My inner escape artist pursed her lips and slanted her eyes. Game on?

No, non. Non.

“Okay. Ready?” Christophe was done with his beer.

We walked home. I brushed my teeth and crawled into bed to brood in silence. He sat on the stairs outside, smoking a cigarette.

“Baby! You sleep?” he yelled.

“No, not yet.”

My phone rang. It was Christophe calling from the stairs. I picked up, and he started singing in his best Stevie Wonder that he just called to say he loved me. He just called to say how much he cared. He just called to say he loved me and he meant it from the bottom of his heart.

I laughed.

It was enough.

The escape artist drifted off.

He sang the song from the stairs to the bedroom and crawled into bed. I looked over at him and told him I saw Stevie Wonder at a grocery store in Los Angeles once.

“Really?” he asked.

“Yes. But he didn’t see me.”

It was the first time I fell asleep to the sound of him giggling.

Dear Áine,

The weather doesn’t know what to do with itself at this time of the year in Paris. One day it’s hot and humid, the next it’s cold and wet—and some days it’s both. But that doesn’t keep me from exploring—as long as I dress in layers and have my umbrella handy. A scarf is also key, and très French!

Though the air seems confused, the earth knows exactly what to do with autumn. Squash is the super star at the market these days. I am happy to report that the vendors use the English word for butternut squash. So that’s one less word I need to worry about. Learning the French language is coming along—slower than I’d prefer, but steady. Some days I feel like I’ve got it, and other days I feel like I’ll never get it. Just as the weather volleys between summer and autumn, I volley between comprehension and confusion. But as each day gets shorter, my vocabulary list gets longer. I hope to understand all of it someday—or even most of it. In the meantime, I’m taking a break from studying and making butternut squash soup instead. The weather may not know what to do with itself in autumn, but I’ve got a few ideas on how to get through the season.

À bientôt!

Janice

22

Haunted by Hemingway

I was sitting outside the Louvre, eating les macarons from the famous patisserie Ladurée. When I first told people I was living in Paris, those that had been insisted I get a macaron. I wondered why all the fuss, but I stopped by the store to appease my Paris-loving friends. Plus, I reasoned, if the macaron was a bust, there was a plaque just down the street from Ladurée that showed the building where Oscar Wilde lived and died so I could cross it off my tourist checklist, which was getting shorter the longer I stayed in Paris.

Ages ago, a pastry chef named Pierre Desfontaines (and grandson of the founder Louis-Ernest Ladurée) came up with the brilliant notion of taking two cookies and gluing them together with a ganache filling. The result was a delicate meringue cake on the outside with a gooey jam, icing, or chocolate on the inside. The original Oreo, if you will. When eaten, the combination of their texture and flavor does a little dance in your mouth. Desfontaines also opened a tearoom for ladies. Up until then, cafés were the domain of men. Can you imagine? Now women could meet at a fancy tearoom rather than at their homes. Generations have been re-creating his culinary masterpiece ever since, and Ladurée tearooms have popped up around the city (and at Harrod’s in London). I stopped by the location on corner rue Bonaparte and rue Jacob in the 6e arrondissement. The window display was a storybook theme with rainbows and topiary trees of macaron, a veritable fantasyland that lured me in as it would for Hansel and Gretel. Once inside, the busy well-coifed worker bees behind the counter buzzed around, gathering a macaron for patrons shouting flavors. Vanille! Pistache! Chocolat!

I bought myself a collection of six to take home for dessert with Christophe.

With the afternoon free, I walked over the bridge and through the courtyard of the Louvre. Sitting on a bench, I gazed over at I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid, and I gazed down at my petite package of sweet cookies. I gazed back at the pyramid. I gazed back down at my cookies. I ripped open the package and chose the salted caramel first. The delicate meringue shell was barely able to hold itself together, which was exactly how I felt on my first bite. The sweet caramel mingled perfectly with hints of salt crystals to create a party on my palate. Dance in my mouth? Indeed.

The next was pistachio. I was starting to understand why people get more than one. They were so light and fluffy that after I ate the first, I thought I just imagined it. Before I realized it, my six macarons were gone. Christophe didn’t have much of a sweet tooth anyway.

I pulled out my map, my constant companion, and with my finger, traced a route back to my neighborhood. A man approached me and asked me something in French. I looked up and uttered “ummm…ahhh,” which is the universal language for “I speak English and not French.” I know this because he immediately changed languages and said, “You speak English?”

Relieved to not be forced into trying to converse in or understand French, I said yes. He had asked if I needed directions. Since I was sitting outside the Louvre with my map in hand and a Ladurée bag at my side, I had the typical tourist look. His name was Frederic and wouldn’t you know it, he and I were going in the same direction and he’d be happy to accompany me part of the way. Later, I wondered about this moment. I wondered if Frederic walked by the Louvre every night after work to look for a girl holding a map, then accompanied her to wherever she happened to be going.

He looked to be about my age and spoke English. He asked me if I knew anything about California as he was traveling there on vacation. Did I ever. So I looked around at the crowded street and decided to accept his invitation to walk halfway home. We took a circuitous route, which set off alarm bells, but he assured me that it was to show me the blue door at the house on rue du Cardinal-Lemoine where Hemingway lived.

Frederic had a kind look about him. Well-coifed blond hair and a little pudgy around the middle. His face looked too small for his head, but he had that look of a boy whose mother says, “I don’t know why he’s not married yet. He’s so handsome.” And whoever she is talking to sits in silence, knowing exactly why he’s not married yet: his face-to-head ratio. But no one wants to say that because he takes after his mother. Still, Frederic seemed harmless, and I was trying to put out of my mind how this scene could have the makings of an ABC Afterschool Special. Hesitant, but intrigued by the promise of an interesting tourist site, I continued my walk with Frederic up to Hemingway’s door, which was indeed blue and sported the typical sign that states he lived here. These signs were scattered throughout the city. It seems anybody who was anybody carved out time to do something brilliant in Paris.

Hemingway claimed that the best years in his life were those in Paris. He famously stated, “There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.” I hoped he was right about that.

True to Frederic’s promise of walking halfway home, he bid me farewell, thanked me for the information about Los Angeles, and dropped me just up the street from Hemingway’s famous front door in a roundabout courtyard called Place de la Contrescarpe. Hemingway called this place “the cesspool of rue Mouffetard,” but that was in the 1920s when this area was considered the dodgy side of town. Now it’s one of the most coveted areas to live in Paris.

I lingered at a Café Delmas and ordered a beer. A giant beer arrived, costing 8 euro. How did one order the little beers that everyone else was drinking? I didn’t realize at the time that demi was the magic word. Asking for a demi beer meant you didn’t get a giant beer that sloshed about in your belly on your walk home, threatening the strength of your bladder.

I sat and tried to imagine Hemingway’s point of view. In the middle of this courtyard was a fountain where a homeless man sat, murmuring loudly to himself or his imaginary friend. On the other side of the fountain, pigeons flocked in a manic uprising. Someone had tossed them a croissant, and they were tearing it to shreds. A group of teenagers in skinny jeans stood nearby puffing cigarettes and checking their phones. And a man leaned against a wall, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” with his recorder.

In the coming days, I purchased Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at Shakespeare & Company, a memoir of his days in Paris during the 1920s. He was married to his first wife, Hadley, and it was here where they had their son, Bumby. The book was written with excerpts of journals found in a Louis Vuitton trunk he had left and forgotten in the basement of the Ritz Hotel in Paris years before. What a magical moment that must have been. To find his daily musings from the time in his life he loved most, like lost love letters from a bygone day. He described his daily life of trying to write importantly. He also ran in a circle of influential American expats. After World War I, the French franc plunged, making the U.S. dollar stronger. Thousands of Americans flocked to Paris, including heavy hitters of the 1920s literary scene such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.

He opened the book with, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” I thought back to my macaron picnic at the Louvre.

He had arrived in Paris after World War I, along with his new bride Hadley. He spent much of his time in Paris haunted by his desire to write important prose. He had come here as a journalist for the Toronto Star, but really wanted to make a go of a novelist’s life. In the book, he gave many clues to live successfully as an artist in Paris, which just so happened to be what I was trying to do.

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits.” He spoke of the dangers of overindulging with drink while writing and of his frustrations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who seemed to be doing just that. Perhaps Fitzgerald didn’t know the word demi.

When it came to putting in a good day of work, Hemingway always stopped when he had a little something more to add for the next day. “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.” And when nothing came, he walked. There seems to be a bar or café made famous by his patronage about a thirty-minute walk from his front door in multiple directions. Why? I’m guessing that he left the house, walked for half an hour to get the creative juices flowing, sat at a café with a pencil and paper to write, then he zipped home to type it all up. “I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.” Still, when nothing came, he had conversations with himself just as I had with Mr. Miyagi. “I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.” Good to know. Thanks for the tips, Hemingway.