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  PARIS WAS OURS

  PARIS WAS OURS

  THIRTY-TWO WRITERS REFLECT

  ON THE CITY OF LIGHT

  EDITED BY

  Penelope Rowlands

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2011 by Penelope Rowlands. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by April Leidig-Higgins.

  For permission to reprint some of the essays included

  in this book, grateful acknowledgment is made to the holders of

  copyright, publishers, and representatives named on pages 277–78,

  which constitute an extension of the copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Paris was ours : thirty-two writers reflect on the city of light /

  edited by Penelope Rowlands.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-953-5

  1. Paris (France) — Description and travel. 2. Paris (France) —

  Social life and customs. 3. Visitors, Foreign—France — Paris —

  Biography. 4. City life—France — Paris. I. Rowlands, Penelope.

  DC707.P256 2011

  944′.36100922 — dc22 2010030560

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  For Julian,

  filius et lux

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: L’Arrivée

  Véronique Vienne, L’Argent Is No Object

  Diane Johnson, Learning French Ways

  Walter Wells, Becoming a Parisian

  Caroline Weber, Love without Reason

  Samuel Shimon, Keep Your Distance

  Joe Queenan, Friends of My Youth

  Valerie Steiker, Fledgling Days

  David Sedaris, The Tapeworm Is In

  Jeremy Mercer, My Bookstore High

  Mark Gaito, Chantal’s Gift

  Alice Kaplan, My Day with Mr. D.

  Janine di Giovanni, Parenting, French-Style

  Patric Kuh, Deal With It

  C. K. Williams, Two Paris Poems

  Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Understanding Chic

  Julie Lacoste, It’s My Home, That’s All

  Janet McDonald, Just Another American

  Judith Warner, Toward a Politics of Quality of Life

  Roxane Farmanfarmaian, Out of the Revolution

  Lily Tuck, My Literary Paris

  Zoé Valdés, The Tribulations of a Cuban Girl in Paris

  Richard Armstrong, Montparnasse and Beyond

  Judith Thurman, Guillaume à Paris

  Karen Schur, Ma Vie Bohème

  Edmund White, A Mild Hell

  Alicia Drake, The Sky Is Metallic

  Stacy Schiff, In Franklin’s Footsteps

  Brigid Dorsey, Litost

  Noelle Oxenhandler, La Bourdonneuse

  Marcelle Clements, Paris Is Gone, All Gone

  David Lebovitz, Enfin

  Penelope Rowlands, Le Départ

  Contributors

  Credits and Permissions

  INTRODUCTION

  L’Arrivée

  I’M A PARISIAN of the recurrent, revolving-door kind. I first moved to the French capital in my early twenties with my then boyfriend, sailing grandly on the Queen Elizabeth II, which, thanks to a miraculous marketing gimmick known as Youth Fare, allowed us to take the six-day voyage to Cherbourg with all the luggage we could stash for the appealing sum of $125 each. It was late November—the last Atlantic crossing of the season—and the waves seemed as gray and menacing as sharks; the air, as we circumnavigated the upper deck each afternoon, felt embalming.

  But we were past feeling. Finding ourselves in the middle of the ocean only reminded us that we’d taken a step that couldn’t be undone. We were heading off to live in a city that we knew only glancingly but were sure that we would love, if only because of all the French movies that we had seen together at the hippie college we’d attended in upstate New York. We were major cinephiles, drawn, particularly, to the films of the director Jacques Rivette, whose spaced-out, chain-smoking young protagonists wore tight jeans and indulged in long nocturnal monologues. Just like us. One Rivette masterpiece, in particular, held us in its thrall: Paris nous appartient, which we translated, loosely, as Paris Is Ours. Soon, we knew, it would belong to us, too.

  After we arrived at Cherbourg, we drove—inexplicably, it seems to me now—all through the night, through one dusky Norman village after another, with their narrow streets, looming, charcoal-colored houses, and apparent absence of life. Paris, at dawn, felt even grayer. The French postal system had been on strike for weeks; as a result, we’d set sail from New York without knowing the actual address of the apartment we’d rented, sight unseen. We parked the car in the first place we found, utterly lost, killing time until it was late enough to call the friend of a friend who’d found the apartment for us in the first place. I remember stumbling, exhausted, through the square Saint-Médard while Jamie—who spoke French, unlike me—asked a stranger if we were in the Latin Quarter. “You’re in its suburbs,” the man joked.

  The apartment, when we found it, was even farther out than that—positively exurban, in an infinitely depressing quartier populaire. Still, we stayed there for the first half of that year, working at all manner of strange jobs, hating the city, resisting it, loving it, falling in with it. I learned the language, it seems, through sheer humiliation. I can still recall the needling: The waiter, for example, who refused to bring me a hard-boiled egg—that classic French worker’s breakfast—in a café because I couldn’t pronounce the malevolent short u that sits dead center in the word dur, meaning “hard.” He was unabashedly gleeful as he made me repeat it, shrugging his shoulders, delightedly, in faux incomprehension each time. The more I stumbled, the happier he became. I settled for a croissant instead.

  That same maddening vowel—the bane of many an English speaker—wedged itself between me and a prickly, middle-aged Frenchwoman (there seemed to be no end of these), my boss at one of the numerous peculiar jobs I held that year. My task, as I recall it, was to recite numbers from a long list—I can’t imagine why—as this forbidding creature glowered at me from across her cluttered living room. It was late winter by then and the afternoons seemed cruelly short, the Parisian sky leaching of color, turning inky black far earlier than I thought it should.

  “Au-dessus ou au-dessous?” ma patronne thundered at one point, with her pitiless regard, asking me to delineate exactly how one number stood in relation to another. Her question meant simply “Above or below?” but we both knew it was about much more than that. (The two words look alike, but their pronunciation, to the French ear, is not at all the same.) My foreignness—my pale English looks, my halting French—was, visibly, as irksome to her as it had been to the waiter; she’d seemed inclined to get rid of me since I’d first stepped through her porte cochere.

  I knew the right answer, the one I needed to express, but it was the one with the evil u at its heart and therefore, as Madame herself knew all too well, hopeless. (It would be months before I could manage the short, breathy, almost whistling sound the vowel requires.) I plowed ahead anyway, but what came out, of course, meant “below,” not “above.” “Mademoiselle,” she responded fiercely. There was nothing further to say. I left that afternoon knowing that I needn’t bother to return. I remember walking by the river—her ground-floor apartment was just step
s from the Seine—feeling entirely, thunkingly, lost.

  And so it went, a year of highs and lows, mastering a language, scrambling for money, suffering the scorn of waiters and bus drivers, making friends. At one point we were so poor that we took the Métro to Fauchon, the luxury food shop off the place de la Madeleine, one of the few places that would accept the American Express card that Jamie’s father had given us for emergencies. (Strange as it seems these days, credit cards were then rare.) We charged foie gras and fancy jams in quantity, then lived off them, unhealthily, for days.

  We hated Paris and loved it all at once, and when we headed back to New York on the last transatlantic crossing the following winter, we did so reluctantly—and forever changed. I wore scarves—foulards, I called them—around my neck in a way that must have seemed ridiculous to my American friends, along with too-tight blouses more suited to (typically flat-chested) Frenchwomen than to me. Speaking English in public felt impossibly weird. I remember being astonished in Bloomingdale’s, just after we returned, to find that I could speak to a salesperson in my native tongue and be understood. I knew what it was to think in another language by then, to tailor my thoughts to another world. Jamie and I even had a clutch of native friends. It was only later that I learned how rare this was: the French make few friends, as a rule, and keep them forever. (And so it has proved for me.)

  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

  VÉRONIQUE VIENNE

  L’Argent Is No Object

  IINTERRUPTED 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.