Paris, My Sweet (23 page)

If a good wedding can be judged by how much your feet throb the next day, then AJ's wedding was a roaring success. As I stretched back in my seat on the flight back to Paris, achy, blistered feet released from the captivity of my leather boots, I was feeling downright giddy. It was everything and nothing: the dancing, the goofiness, the howling-in-laughter jokes, and the tender moments. The previous few days with my best friends in New York had given me the surge of love and reassurance I needed as I went back to Paris to embrace six more months of the unknown.

As the language and cultural barriers began to feel ever so less foreign to me a year into my Parisian stint, another feeling emerged that was almost as disconcerting: Suddenly, I loved my job.

This was totally new to me. Sure, I've enjoyed my advertising career well enough. But it's mostly been the people and atmosphere that I've liked. I've had amazingly kind and talented creative directors (they do exist!), fun and collaborative art directors for partners, and I've made genuine and lasting friendships. Then, of course, there are the perks of being in a creative industry—things like boozy happy hours that yield salacious gossip; decadent client dinners at which you order way too many courses and bottles of wine because someone else is footing the bill; and platters of cookies left over in the conference room after meetings. But advertising never
moved
me. It was something I did to pay the bills (and my imported chocolate habit). Until now. With the Louis Vuitton relaunch project underway, I was doing some of the most exciting work of my career.

A lot had changed since my breakdown six months ago. There were no more strategy decks or award show scripts fobbed off on me. No more Friday night standoffs with my account team. Over time, my colleagues and I had come to an understanding of our roles. We had developed a rhythm and a rapport. They respected what I did as a writer and I, in turn, was a little less righteous and a little more flexible. We even had fun together now. There was also a new creative director and another writer, which helped lighten the workload and pressure. And with the growing team came—I wouldn't exactly call it “process”—but we figured out a way to get things done. It wasn't perfect, but it was easier than fighting. After all, what did we really need printed schedules, internal reviews, and project managers for? Things weren't
that
important. Things
would
get done. And at the end of the day, they miraculously did. Or maybe a little of that
laissez-faire
attitude was just rubbing off on me.

Meanwhile, all my friends kept asking, “What kind of discount do you get?” The glamour of working on such an esteemed brand must have some sweet perks, right? No one was more sorely disappointed than me to hear
rien
. With my newfound love for the brand, I really wanted a Louis Vuitton bag—the caramel-colored Antheia Hobo, made from sublimely soft lambskin, to be exact. The monogram pattern was hand-quilted, and I knew it would be the most sophisticated ode to my time in Paris I could ever imagine. I
really
wanted that bag. But with no discount, and without an extra $3200 tucked in my panty drawer, I settled for the
Paris
City
Guide
, Vuitton's slender travel book, which was the only thing I could afford in the Champs-Élysées flagship.

But at least the job came with other perks. Things like presenting my work to Antoine Arnault, the luxury conglomerate president's lanky, blue-eyed son, at the hushed Pont Neuf headquarters that gave me a bird's-eye view of the Bateaux Mouches chugging up and down the Seine. Or sipping tea from heirloom china in the afternoon, and brandy from crystal tumblers in the evening, at the Vuitton family home in Asnières, a chichi suburb northwest of the city. Or peeking into Marc Jacobs's atelier from across the courtyard and sometimes seeing him at work there on his newest collection. I even got to breathe his creative genius one day when he got in the elevator with me at Pont Neuf, wearing his signature black kilt.
Oui, oui
, I was becoming quite comfortable working for this legendary fashion house in Paris.

Every day was spent sitting at my desk—which had been in the Vuitton offices since winning the relaunch—researching the storied company's 155-year-old-history. I knew that Gaston, Louis's great-grandson, was a huge bibliophile with serious wanderlust and had laid the groundwork for the company's foray into publishing. I could now recognize the work of the power photography duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott as they had shot some of the company's sexiest ads. I could tell the difference between a Speedy, Keepall, and Neverfull, and knew the teal Vernis Alma was from the 2009 autumn collection, whereas the eclectic black Epi Alma came that following winter. Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, Ruben Toledo, Peter Marino—they were all names that never would have meant much to me otherwise, but I was now intimately familiar with as it was my job to know every last detail of the story of the House of Louis Vuitton.

Okay, so I didn't get a discount, and I shamelessly coveted that Antheia bag. But I was hooked. Someone had snuck me the Kool-Aid and I found myself nearly as excited to go to work as I was to discover that Pierre Hermé had a new macaron flavor to sink my teeth into.

It had been eighteen months since that sunny summer when I took my Tour du Chocolat. On one evening during that visit, I had fortified myself from all the Vélib' riding and chocolate sampling with a flat
omelette
des
herbes
at Café Select in Montparnasse. I was so content sitting on the terrace, not so much with the food, which was pretty mediocre, but just with the moment. It was
l'heure bleu
, that magical twilight time when the light, suspended between day and night, is just otherworldly. I was laughing at the antics of Sally Jay Gorce, my new favorite American-in-Paris heroine from Elaine Dundy's fun and funny novel
The
Dud
Avocado
. I kept gazing across the busy boulevard to La Coupole, the famous brasserie where Josephine Baker had danced and Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald had dined, dreaming of the occasion to go. Now, a year and half later, I finally had it: I was invited to the Art Director's Club Awards Ceremony to receive a trophy for one of our Louis Vuitton websites.

Advertising is as self-congratulatory an industry as Hollywood. It's all about who works where, on what accounts, and what awards you've won. And it's thanks to these ceremonies that you can keep tabs on who's who. It's hardly the Oscars, but it's still a total schmoozefest.

I was looking forward to the night with anticipation, not so much for the pomp and fanfare but in nostalgic celebration of that summer evening I had spent across the street at Café Select. Back then, I'd had no idea that, one day, I'd not only be living in the City of Light, but I'd be enmeshed in a community there. It wasn't anything like the Lost Generation, but at least I belonged to
something
.

I idolized the Lost Generation, that wildly talented, free-spirited, financially struggling, and emotionally cantankerous group of writers, artists, and philosophizers from the 1920s and '30s who would stay up all night, smoking, drinking, and having intellectual spars.
A
Moveable
Feast
,
Girl
before
a
Mirror
,
The
Second
Sex
—they had produced some of the most significant art and literature in my mind. They were the real deal. I knew Don Draper was giving ad folks a degree of coolness back home, but, as excited as I was for the evening, I was also a little sheepish to be going to the famed brasserie for an advertising trophy in the shadows of such artistic greatness. But fuck it, I was excited nonetheless.

Both Lionel, my macaron-loving partner with a super-sharp sense of design, and I were claiming victory, so we were allowed to bring dates. He naturally brought his wife, a large and lovely Mexican who, with perfectly lined eyelids and a flower in her hair, had successfully picked up that French
je
ne
sais
quoi
. Jo, ever the good friend, was my date. The four of us met in front of the restaurant and entered the Art Deco splendor together.

The sprawling dining room, the size of about three tennis courts, buzzed with hundreds of people air-kissing and clinking champagne glasses. Waiters in black vests and bowties moved around briskly, setting pepper mills and bottles of Perrier on the tables, which were dressed in white linen. Cauldron-sized vases with knobby sticks of cherry blossoms decorated the backs of the brown velour banquettes. A fleet of green columns shot up to the ceiling, each adorned with a unique painting done by artists from the '20s, like Brancusi and Chagall. I breathed it all in. Such rich and artistic history. And there we were—a French-Vietnamese with a mohawk, a five-foot-ten Mexican with flowers in her hair, an Aussie with a sly grin and funky eyeglasses, and me. We were a motley crew mingling with the
bon
chic
mucky-mucks.

The scene cracked me up: men were decked out in tailored jackets and
baskets
; women wore billowy blouses and jeans—advertising hipsters with studiously disheveled hair, one and all. It could have been New York if not for all the scooter helmets that were toted around as proudly as the season's must-have fashion accessory from Colette. I cast my eye, trying to guess everyone's side talents and secret ambitions. The curse of being an advertising creative is you always dream of bigger things; every writer, art director, and producer has a half-written screenplay, shopped-around book proposal, music demo, or DJ gig. I looked at one woman with a chic Louise Brooks bob and matching strand of pearls, and imagined she crooned Ella and Edith at some subterranean jazz bar on the weekends. A guy nearby, stroking his salt and pepper stubble, rocking back and forth as he listened to his peers, I took for a budding director. Jo rescued me before serious self-loathing could kick in. “Should we mingle?”

“Sure. Except with whom?” I asked. “I don't know any of these people or understand a word of what they're saying.”

“Eh, me either. Let's fake it. I think we've gotten good enough at it by now.” She and I still commiserated about how being an expat in Paris was like living inside a bubble. We could be seated at a dinner party, witnessing a confrontation on the Métro, shopping at a crowded street market—doing anything in the middle of this huge, international city—and remain utterly alone, trapped inside our heads. In your head, you could understand the voices; in the real world, words and conversations were just indecipherable background noise—beautiful, but meaningless all the same. But we made our way around the room in a valiant effort to look like we belonged. Like we
owned
that party. We watched the networking, flirting, and Gallic gesticulating—the things that translated quite easily into English—until we were asked to take our seats. The ceremony was about to begin.

The MC for the night was Ariel Wizman, a popular voice on French radio who was also one half of an electronic pop band. Accompanied by a waif in a cocktail dress (so original), he introduced a couple of creative directors who were brought up to the stage for brief speeches to tepid applause. Meanwhile, the dinner table was becoming laden with French goodies: bottles of champagne, then white, then red. Platters of mixed salad, then french fries, then sliced meat. The breadbaskets were regularly replenished, as were the bottles of still and sparkling water. My French skills had progressed, but not to the point of understanding phrases like, “And the trophy for best use of video in a corporate website goes to…,” so I tuned out, eschewing the meat but enjoying the free-flowing champagne and
frites
. I wondered where Ezra Pound might have sat decades ago, supping on the brasserie's famed lamb curry. Or where Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre might have simmered, side by side, in their and others' curls of cigarette smoke. I was thinking that Hemingway or Picasso had maybe even been in the very seat where I was, just to the left of the bar, when Jo started nudging me.

“That's you, that's you!” Lionel was standing next to the table, waiting for me. Ariel had just announced our award. I shook myself from my sentimental reveries and, together, Lionel and I stormed the stage.

Through a blinding spotlight, I could see hundreds of bored eyes sizing us up while this skinny, coiffed Frenchman in his chocolate-brown bespoke suit, worn sans tie, oozed game show enthusiasm with the voice like molten chocolate. He was gushing into the microphone, doing his job for the night, which was to make us feel
très important
. He presented each of us with a trophy, shook our hands, and then directed us to exit, stage left. That was it—over in a flash and quite underwhelming. Until Melissa, my biggest fan in Paris, put it in perspective after seeing my blog posting and photo the next day: “Um, can we just take a moment…you are standing under spotlights, getting an award, on a circular stage, next to Ariel Wizman at La Coupole…way to make Paris your bitch, girl!”