Paris Was Ours (5 page)

Meanwhile, from Paris there was little or nothing. The editor, Mort Rosenblum, himself new to the job, called from time to time to confirm the offer. But he could propose no moving expenses, nor money for a hotel or temporary apartment. One future colleague wrote a friend at the
Times
: “Whatever Wells thinks he has been offered, he should get it in writing. Promises don’t mean very much around here.”

It was in this atmosphere that Patricia and I had gone back and forth on the Paris offer. The gamble seemed greater for her—I would have a job, but she would be giving up a staff job for the uncertainty of freelance writing. Also, I had assurances that I could return to the
Times
, and whatever the shortcomings of the
Trib
, I could certainly take it for two years. And back at the
Times
, I would have “foreign experience” and experience managing a staff, not just deadlines.

But we had made the decision, and there I was, settling into the Marshalls’ tiny apartment awaiting Patricia’s arrival in mid-January.

When she got there and we unpacked, I was surprised to see that one of the items that the Marshalls had put in our Paris-bound container was a new ironing board still bearing its $29.95 price tag. We had left our own behind in the West Side apartment for the renters who were subletting it. After settling
in and looking for a Paris ironing board, we were shocked to find that the cheapest model cost 320 francs, or the equivalent then of eighty dollars. It was the kind of sticker shock we never got used to, especially not with the exchange rate of the period, which hovered around four francs to the dollar. We had given up two New York salaries for one in Paris, one that when multiplied by four sounded like a lot. But the dollar’s exceptional weakness made the math very misleading. The apartment search drove home the point. Rent would cost us more than twice as much as our two-bedroom apartment in a doorman building on Central Park West.

One of our great Paris friends, Al Shapiro, told us more than once: “If you came to Paris to save money, you bought the wrong ticket.” Like a lot of Al’s observations, it was as funny as it was right-on.

The crispest memories of those early days involve prices. Besides the eighty-dollar ironing board, there was the radio that cost us both a week’s walking-around money, one hundred dollars. It allowed us to listen to any of the stations then on the air, about a dozen of them, all blah-blah all the time. And most memorably, there was also the hundred dollars’ worth of smoked salmon that I watched friends wolf down at a Sunday brunch.

But the best thing about that brunch was the bagels. Having rejected all that we had found as not up to New York standards, Patricia made a batch from scratch, and they were delicious.

There are also the memories attached to the details of settling in, all of them unfamiliar. We got to know the appliance stores to buy a refrigerator, a clothes washer, a stove powered both by electricity and by gas. Why? Well, the salesman explained,
if ever the electricity goes out, or the gas fails. Then he added ominously, “If ever there’s a war …,” revealing a frame of reference that was totally foreign. Subsequently, we became aware of the number of times that French acquaintances would say “pendant la guerre …”

There were frequent trips to various government offices and long waits once there.
Fiche d’état civil
was a new vocabulary expression, as were
carte de séjour
and
carte de travail
. We had to go for an interview at the neighborhood
commissariat de police
, where the interviewer talked to us about our new president, Ronald Reagan, “star de série B,” and the old one, Carter, “un grand naïf.” His eyes brightened when both of us said we had been divorced. “How many times?” he wanted to know, then seemed disappointed when we said only a humdrum once apiece.

Much of the early immigrant experience was often entertaining, but it was also hard. I could have cried the Friday night I got home—I was at the office until after the paper closed at midnight—and found Patricia on a stepladder painting yet another room. I felt guilty about what I had gotten her into, and I was also not happy at seeing how I was going to spend the weekend. And we both did cry the night I came home and found Patricia already in tears. I realized how lonely she was and remember saying to her, “This is the worst mistake I have ever made and it’s the worst time of my life.”

Whatever I had gotten us into, the fantasy was under way.

Love without Reason

B
Y ANY RATIONAL
measure, I shouldn’t like Frenchmen. Allow me just a few generalities—albeit gross ones, as generalities tend to be—and you’ll see what I mean. I am tall; Frenchmen are short. Most of the time, I am attractive, with glossy hair, gym-toned muscles, and white, straight American teeth (a Crest user’s smile). Most of the time, they are funny looking, with greasy hair, flaccid muscles, and yellow, crooked European teeth (a Gitane smoker’s smile). Whereas I approve of feminism and even, to some extent, of capitalism, the Frenchmen I know class them disdainfully alongside those two other dread American offenses: fatness and fake butter. And while I don’t think that the philosopher Louis Althusser was right to kill his wife, nor that the film director Roman Polanski should go unpunished for having raped a thirteen-year-old girl,
mes français
celebrate both of these individuals as brave nonconformists—Nietzschean superheroes unbound by the shackles of moral convention.

None of this, then, would seem to add up to a history of love connections between me and the Frenchmen whom—during my first, fateful year as an American in Paris—I was quite powerless to avoid. But in the immortal words of Blaise Pascal,
“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” (“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”). And just as Pascal’s unfortunate humpback has had no bearing on my admiration for his work, so, too, have the Gallic male’s dubious charms failed to deter me from dating him … in more than one incarnation. “I shouldn’t like Frenchmen,” declares reason. “Yet haven’t I loved them?” asks the heart. The fact that “to like” and “to love” share the same verb in French (
aimer
) only highlights the conundrum that underpinned my earliest romantic choices in the City of Light. The conundrum according to which it is somehow possible to “love” people you don’t even really like.

As it so happens, today’s idiomatic French proposes a clear answer to this question, one that rivals even Pascal’s famous quip for irrefutability and economy alike:
C’est comme ça
. More than its literal translation (“It’s like that”), this phrase is best rendered as “That’s just how it is” and refers to such varied Parisian phenomena as bureaucratic deadlocks (for example, a France Télécom employee informs you that you can’t apply for phone service without having a bank account, after a Crédit Lyonnais functionary has told you that you can’t open a bank account without having a phone) and perverse dining protocol (a favorite restaurant of mine serves its
amuse-bouche
course in a miniature shot glass, but with a soup spoon too wide to access the glass’s contents; request a teaspoon or try to drink straight from the glass, and you receive the same scolding answer: “Cela ne se fait pas” — “That isn’t done”). Wherever there is a mystery with no solution, this catchphrase is meant to pierce the fog of befuddlement, like the Eiffel Tower looming above the Champ-de-Mars on an overcast day.

That includes befuddlement of a romantic nature, for the confusion that attends most affairs of the heart is generally, in Paris, taken to be as inexplicable and incontrovertible as the weather. Indeed, it has always surprised me that the American TV series
Sex and the City
should enjoy such popularity among
parisiennes
, who are not given to the kind of anguished relationship dissection in which the show’s lead female characters endlessly indulge. In real life, as in
Sex and the City
, a New Yorker asking “Why hasn’t he called me?” or “How could he leave me?” is entitled to at least a few solid hours of thoughtful analysis (of the relationship’s ups and downs), soothing compliments (for herself), and righteous indignation (against the man in question) from her girlfriend. In Paris, such a response is as hard to come by as, well, fat people or fake butter. There, a woman’s interlocutor will merely offer her a blasé “C’est comme ça” — accompanied by a slight shrug that says, “In the face of such existential absurdity,
chérie
, calm acceptance is the only way. Now let’s hit the
thalasso
spa and see what we can do about your cellulite.”

But in Paris, whenever female confidences let you down, psychoanalysis can fortunately be counted upon to pick up the slack. The first time I moved there was in 1991, after graduating from Harvard with an undergraduate degree in French literature. Taken as I still was with the romance of that curriculum, I decided I could live nowhere but in Saint-Germain, among the ghosts (as I announced pretentiously to anyone who would listen) of Paris’s most celebrated writers. Accordingly, I found a tiny apartment right on the border between the sixth and the seventh, around the corner from the erstwhile home of the late Jacques Lacan, aka “the father of French psychoanalysis.” I still
remember announcing the news to my senior thesis adviser on tissue-thin blue paper, marked
PAR AVION
in big red letters: “Dear Professor J ——, Greetings from the Left Bank! Every morning I jog from my apartment on the rue des Saints-Pères (such a
formidable
location,
n’est-ce pas
?) to the Eiffel Tower and back … You’d be proud of me—my run takes me past Lacan’s old house in the seventh, and whenever I pass it, I think about your lectures on his ‘return to Freud’!” The earnest self-absorption of youth meets the brainy grandiosity of the Harvard kid, all for the price of an airmail postage stamp.

Still, I was telling the truth. The father of French psychoanalysis
was
on my mind a lot during my first year in Paris, and that preoccupation
did
have everything to do with his oft-invoked “return to Freud.” This phrase, I had learned from Professor J ——, alluded to Lacan’s lifelong engagement with that most Freudian of concerns: the nature and workings of human desire. Which, when you’re a sheltered American woman who has just moved from prudish Boston to racy Paris, and who is equal parts thrilled and terrified to live on her own in a big city for the first time ever, seems like a damn fine thing to know about. So I dutifully plunged into his collected writings, looking for insight into the behavior of the various Michels and Xaviers and Jean-Pauls who—as soon as I prevailed upon France Télécom to grant me a telephone number—began calling night and day. Surely, I told myself, with a little help from the master, I would graduate from the JV playing fields of gauche, inconsequential college dating into the major leagues of a grown-up
grand amour
.

The experiment met with mixed results. On the positive side, during that first year in Paris, I made more conquests
than I ever, given the nunlike existence I had led in college, could have imagined. And despite my Parisian girlfriends’ repeated insistence that “French people don’t date,” their male counterparts squired me around the city on a series of dizzying, dazzling adventures that consistently belied this claim. From all-day Godard film festivals in the Latin Quarter to all-night strolls along the Seine; from Berthillon ice cream cones on the rue des Deux Ponts to stolen kisses in the courtyards of the Musée Rodin, the Musée Picasso, and the Musée Carnavalet; from afternoons browsing through eighteenth-century tapestries at the Clignancourt flea market to evenings listening to Racine’s hypnotic
alexandrins
at the Comédie-Française, my boyfriends took me on dates so romantic, so memorable, so seemingly, quintessentially
French
that in retrospect I’m convinced they were all drawn from some secret handbook, issued to every Parisian man upon completion of his military service, on How to Impress and Seduce an Ignorant
Étrangère
.

In fact, though,
ignorant
is the key term here, because notwithstanding the swath I had begun to cut through the City of Light, I hadn’t made much progress with the Lacanian framework that I hoped would help me make sense of my experience. Indeed, the sad truth is that without Professor J ——’s lucid and (I now realized) drastically simplified summaries, the father of French psychoanalysis proved almost impossible for me to understand. Granted, the man was notorious for his willfully obscure, intimidating prose: “Même plus difficile que Mallarmé!” warned my “philosopher” boyfriend Étienne, who suggested that I try someone less difficult: “Roland Barthes, par exemple!”

Defying what I wrongly took to be Étienne’s unjust condescension,
I declared a two-week moratorium on seeing him and everyone else. My next move was to select a “badge of courage”: a single article of clothing that I would wear every day, both to motivate and to punish myself, until Operation Lacan was done. My choice? A black turtleneck—just perfect, I thought, for the venue I had chosen for my studies, Saint-Germain’s legendarily literary Café de Flore. There, I avoided the hordes of tourists on the glassed-in terrace and the bustling crowds of regulars on the main floor, and holed up at a corner table upstairs, where my only regular company was a hatchet-faced, unsmiling waiter who did a double take at my daily reading material (Lacan’s
Écrits
, volumes one and two) every time I called him over to order more hot chocolate. In Boston, I would have taken his stares as an invitation to small talk and asked him why my books had caught his attention. But in Paris, I knew better than to try to engage a waiter in conversation, so I kept my head down and my mind focused on the secrets of the human psyche.