Paris Was Ours (2 page)

From that point on,
la belle France
was a touchstone. Or perhaps it had always been. Born a dual national, I’d grown up between two cultures—England and the United States—and two cities, London and New York. My parents had separated, dramatically and transatlantically, when I was five. France became my middle ground. My Francophile father had taken me
to Normandy from his home in London when I was sixteen. When, a few years later, I left his place to travel to Paris for the first time, he marked the occasion with a photograph of me wearing a trench coat, a green BOAC airline bag slung unchicly over my shoulder. Below it, he’d captioned the image, touchingly, in ink: “Penelope on her first visit to Paris.” I’d grown up with his stories of black-tie dinners on the
Liberté
and other French ocean liners; I’d been lulled to sleep to the sound of “Au clair de la lune.” Is it any wonder that I’d come alive in the capital of France?

Almost twenty years after the morning when I arrived by car in Paris with my long-ago boyfriend, I moved back there again—that’s where the revolving door comes in. This time I came from farther away. Jamie had died, abruptly and tragically, in Manhattan six years after we’d returned from Europe; in the grim aftermath I’d fled to California to escape. When I next moved to Paris it was by plane from San Francisco, with a small child in tow. And although I circled back to America to live a few years afterward, I kept up with Parisian life by returning to France each summer to work. To this day, I still have a French cell phone and a checking account at the Banque Nationale de Paris, its contents tiny but its symbolism enormous. And I firmly believe that one day I’ll spin through that enticing glass revolving door again, into the heart of Paris life.

Paris is the place where, more than anywhere else, I became who I am today. Although I’ve lived in a handful of other cities, this one left the deepest mark. Its effect on me, as on the other writers in this volume, was outsize: it’s where we came into ourselves. As a group, we were typically young when we moved there, typically open, and the experience typically changed our
lives. Which isn’t to say that we were Francophiles then, or are to this day; at times the French capital, in all of its cold unyieldingness, felt like something to work against. But it impressed itself upon us with an almost mystical force.

Few places can draw in as many diverse souls, then mark them as profoundly, as this city—called “that siren, Paris” by the writer Francine du Plessix Gray—seems to do. Ask a casual tourist what brought him or her there in the first place and he or she is apt to mention style, beauty,
savoir vivre
, and the like. But for a long-term visitor the picture is, of course, more complex, the city’s contradictory nature more clear. To actually live within the confines of the
périphérique
is to be brought face-to-face, on a daily basis, with the tough reality beneath the city’s surface appeal.

Parisians of a certain milieu judge relentlessly, opine, weigh in. The words “Je crois que …” (“I believe that …”), delivered with flinty assurance, fill the air. This critical appraisal, of themselves and the world around them, is a constant. Parisian standards are high, even unforgiving. They’re also double edged, explaining at once why the city’s inhabitants look as good as they do, seem as cold as they can be, and have accomplished so much in art, music, literature, and more. There’s a taut discipline beneath their seemingly effortless finesse, their knack for displaying almost anything—whether it’s a plate of
moules
, a bouquet of wildflowers, or their own physical selves—to advantage.

For a foreigner living and working in Paris, the bar the city sets can feel impossibly high: to clear it is to feel as if you’ve conquered the world. The thirty-two writers in the following pages have done exactly that. They’ve entered a sophisticated,
exacting, near-impenetrable society and been transformed by the experience. Some trajectories have been unlikely. Take Zoé Valdés, the omnitalented Cuban novelist, painter, and filmmaker, whose spirited essay here documents her arrival from her impoverished native island—wearing a strange homemade coat that caused even the unflappable French to take notice—and her subsequent transformation on the Paris art scene.

Just as Indians under British colonial rule entered a new social category after studying in the British Isles—becoming categorized ever afterward as “England-returned” — Valdés and the rest of us who have spent time in Paris, succeeding there in spite of cultural differences we’d hardly known existed before, were deeply, permanently changed by the experience. We, the Paris-returned,
are
different, in ways large and small. We may have—mercifully! — stopped talking about foulards at some point, but we still knotted our scarves differently in the end. (And that’s just the part of us that you can see …)

These gossamer bits of fabric trail through several of the essays in the following pages, actually; a few (female) writers even allude to scarves as a kind of rite of passage, describing how women arriving in the city, finding themselves surrounded by
parisiennes
in artfully tied
carrés
or foulards, begin to emulate them (or at least try). As Diane Johnson puts it so memorably here, fashion consciousness, in the French capital, “steals in on you like fog.”

Certain experiences are universal: The Métro runs, strangers are rude, the
minuterie
clicks the lights on and off. The great Samuel Beckett strolls through two of the essays, including one by an exuberant Iraqi novelist and editor, Samuel Shimon (here
making his American debut). Even the bawdy cross-dressers of the Bois de Boulogne turn up, inspiring one writer, Stacy Schiff, to change her jogging route when her children are in tow. And Judith Thurman evokes another perennial fixture of Paris life, its ubiquitous lovers, as they entwine, eternally, on every bench, in every doorway.

In the following pages, some wondrously diverse writers parse their Paris moments, describing, in some cases, why they went there, in others what they found. All have spent serious time in the city or are living there still. Some are well known, others decidedly not. And one, a homeless French blogger named Julie Lacoste, hardly considers herself to be a writer at all, although hers is one of the more plaintive voices in the collection. Together, their words add up to one picture, a multi-faceted one that, in the way of a cubist painting, is all the more descriptive for the disparate elements it contains. It’s an indelible portrait of an entrancing, at times exasperating, yet always fascinating place to live. The siren that is this city speaks to us insistently even after we’ve moved away. She belongs to us, truly, and to each in a different way.
Paris nous appartient
.

PARIS WAS OURS

L’Argent Is No Object

I
INTERRUPTED HER:
“Tell me again. Why exactly am I supposed to put money away?” Her jaw dropped. “Excuse me?” she asked. She had managed my portfolio for more than ten years, and not once had I expressed doubts about the need to plan for the future or unhappiness regarding her long-term investment strategy. “Why not spend my capital now, while I am still in good health?” I asked. She hesitated. Was I joking? Momentarily deranged? Exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s? She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. But I made no move to get her off the hook. She groped for an answer. Opened her mouth. Forced a smile. “You are kidding, of course,” she said.

In retrospect, I remember this uncomfortable pause as the exact moment when I made up my mind to move back to Paris.

THE YEAR
2007 looked pretty good as my plane was banking over the countryside surrounding the Charles de Gaulle Airport. I had just sold my Brooklyn Heights apartment at the top of the market and was moving into a one-hundred-square-meter rental in the first arrondissement. How bad could that be? As we were approaching the runway, the snow-dusted
landscape appeared fastidiously groomed, with its meticulously mapped fields, thick hedges, and regularly spaced apple trees. The well-tempered farmland of the Île-de-France was shockingly unlike the urban sprawl surrounding JFK. The silhouette of a small village huddled around its pointy church steeple echoed that of Paris—the profile of the Eiffel Tower poking out of the fog in the distance.

The insidious power of numbers had turned my life in the United States into a system of checks and balances. I woke up every morning wondering how I could be more productive. My freelance income was no longer what it used to be. My husband would lie awake at night worrying about his bonus. He agonized about meeting his sales projections. The most fun we had as a couple was comparing notes with friends about real estate values. The fear of health care bankruptcy was paralyzing us. Only the prospect of capital gain kept us going. Going where? Eventually we found out: a divorce and Paris.

Many of my French friends, who had fallen in love with New York decades ago and immigrated to the USA, as I had, could not afford to move back home because, paradoxically, they’d become too rich. The dreaded French Wealth Tax (ISF) would have taken too large a bite out of their life’s savings. Mercifully, in spite of my portfolio manager’s efforts, I didn’t have this problem. But I could not have picked a worse time to convert my life from dollars to euros.

In Paris, no one talked about the looming international financial crisis. People read about it in the papers or heard about it on TV but somehow never discussed it. It was a presidential election year. Strikes, protest movements, and political rallies were aplenty, yet dinner table debates about how the dire state
of the economy might affect one’s pocketbook remained few and far between.

Apparently, public discontent was permissible, but not private disgruntlement.

With the Almighty Dollar in free fall, I would have loved to share my trepidations with someone, but details about my money worries were not deemed an appropriate topic of conversation. Parents, siblings, friends—no one would sit still when I tried to get their sympathy about my fiscal or financial situation. Each time I broached the subject, they would interrupt me, talk about something else, or find a pretext to leave the room. It was creepy. A couple of times I even wondered whether I was dead and only imagined that people could see me.

“You Americans talk about money all the time,” my older sister eventually told me, as only an older sister would, her frosty tone resurrecting in me long-buried childhood terrors. In France, money is dirty. Very dirty. It was as if she had caught me playing with my
merde
. Seizing the moral high ground, she instructed me to call her accountant, an international expert who happened to be one of her former lovers. I traipsed to his fancy offices near the Champs-Élysées, where I was treated to a full-blown flip-board presentation, during which he feverishly scribbled a jumble of pie charts and diagrams. None of what he explained to me made any sense, but he was so tall and handsome, I didn’t really mind.

As it turned out, he was the first of a string of expensive accountants I consulted subsequently, each one more attractive than the one before. My second attempt at elucidating my financial situation put me across the desk from a very busy yet utterly charming attorney who spoke at a breakneck speed
and never stopped to listen to my questions. Finally, he advised me to waste no time and hire his own accountant, who lived in a project in a godforsaken suburb at the northern end of a subway line. I trudged there and found him eating a sandwich at his desk in an apartment whose front door was left open on a hallway resonating with the sounds of children crying, televisions playing, and vacuum cleaners running. He, too, was movie star material, which was a welcome treat, because by that time I had been rendered numb by the stress of trying to figure out my French fiscal status.

I HAD YET
to meet someone who would listen to my story from the beginning. Even though private financial troubles are as widespread in France as they are everywhere else, they are not the stuff of narrative. For various reasons, mostly historical, tales of rags to riches are not part of the popular culture. The French bourgeoisie are notoriously tight lipped about their affairs, particularly in the provinces. Their love of secrecy is a legacy from prerevolutionary times, when tax inspectors snooped around the countryside, spying on everyone, listening to conversations, hoping to evaluate a person’s fortune and figure out how much they could collect. For Parisians, mum’s the word as well, but they deflect other people’s curiosity about their money with more élan and panache than their country cousins. They’ll wax poetic about the most modest objects in their possession but dismiss exorbitantly priced acquisitions as mere commodities.

Tourists are not expected to conform to this unspoken rule of silence. In Parisian restaurants, French patrons would never
dream of discussing the credit crunch, promising stocks, or short-term loans, but they are remarkably forgiving of those “noisy guests” (translate “Americans”) who are lamenting the cost of a six-day stay in intensive care or regaling their friends with their exploits in the stock market. In order not to be mistaken for one of those visiting Yankees (I have developed a slight American accent, and waiters still bring me the menu in English), I had to rid myself of certain habits I had picked up during my years abroad, such as pointing at merchandise and asking, “How much?” or blurting out “How’s business?” when meeting an acquaintance.