Paris Was Ours Page 2
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.
When I tried to curb my money talk, though, I realized how much it dominated my thoughts. My dollar dependency was so ingrained, it tricked my brain. I’d confused not talking about money with talking about having no money. I’d assume that saying “I don’t think that I can afford a three-hundred-thousand-dollar studio in Paris” was a show of restraint. I didn’t understand why this comment only got me a glassy-eyed response from my French friends. They’d mark just a pause, but it was enough of a reprimand to fill me with shame. My blunders revealed to me how much I had been conditioned to rely on money as a universal system of reference. So I tried again, remarking in all earnestness that “I got the Epson Stylus printer because it was the cheapest option.” Wrong again! Only after the fact was I able to figure out that I should not quote a price, bring up a cost, or mention an expense. How about, “It’s either a small studio in Paris or three Cartier diamond necklaces. The Epson Stylus is neat, but no faster than a golf cart”?
“If you don’t talk about money, what’s left to talk about?” asked a Los Angeles friend who thinks that you’d have to be insane not to go crazy over the rising cost of everything.
What’s left to talk about? The asparagus season, the Tour de France, Japanese art, the films of Jean-Luc Godard, photojournalism, Yoko Ono, how to silence creaky floorboards, women’s sports, the wonders of foot surgery, Cartier-Bresson, revisionist history, great radio programs, the latest Grand Palais contemporary art exhibition, and, last but not least, best recipes for beef bourguignon.
Not talking about money is what cultural life in Paris is all about.
DURING MY FIRST year in Paris I didn’t just learn not to mention the content of my wallet, my bank account, or my retirement investment portfolio; I also familiarized myself with the body language of monetary moderation. The new gestures associated with the distribution of funds were strangely exacting. Tipping waiters and cabdrivers demanded that I dole out small change with homeopathic precision. An overgenerous contribution to the cash economy could be construed as a criticism of people’s hard-won, union-negotiated salaries. God help me if I tried to grab the check at the end of a meal with good friends. They felt insulted. I’d embarrassed my dinner companions whenever I waved my credit card in the direction of the waitress, to attract her attention and let her know that I wanted the check. When it came at long last, I was chastised for not studying it carefully to make sure that the amount was right. “Don’t look like you are throwing your money around,” I was told.
No one seems in a rush to make the cash register ring. To postpone as long as possible the moment when money will have to change hands, a lot of verbal reciprocity takes place across oak-veneered checkout counters or on either side of zinc-covered bar tops. In Paris, small talk with shopkeepers and waiters rates high as a health and longevity factor, as high as being happily married, exercising regularly, or eating at least three vegetables a day.
When finally it’s time to close a deal, the transaction takes place on a downbeat, with merchants taking your cash or credit card almost reluctantly. Instructed to look away as customers type in their PIN, cashiers and waiters glance at the ceiling or examine their shoes to give you a moment of privacy. There is a hush, a strange stillness in the air, one that confers a delicious surreptitiousness to the act of spending.
PARISIANS APPROACH PARTING with money as they do foreplay: with plenty of time to spare. On more than one occasion I have stared in disbelief as French friends couldn’t figure out whether to pay for their sandwich with a personal check or a credit card. Apparently,
they enjoyed the suspense. Rushing the proceeding would have been crass. Standing by as they waffled, patiently waiting for them to make up their minds, was not unlike watching an excruciatingly slow sex scene in a foreign film.
In Paris, before possessing an object of desire, one tries to covet it for as long as one can. Yearning for something is believed to be more enjoyable than buying it. Monetary or amatory, preliminaries are savored leisurely. The same man who takes his sweet time deliberating over the best method of payment for an eight-euro tab will win you over by creating equally awkward diversions d’amour as he attempts to lead you from the bistro table to the bedroom. On the way, he will probably manage to get his car towed away, buy you flowers, ask you to tag along as he retrieves a package from the post office, and take you to visit his aunt in Neuilly. You are an emotional wreck by the time he decides to kiss you as you ride up in his creaky elevator. Alone with you at last, he might forget, in the heat of the action, to remove his black socks, step out of his trousers scrunched up around his ankles, or mention that he has a wife and two kids. He will most likely choose the moment when you are on all fours on his Oriental rug, looking for your lost earring, to declare that you are the most beautiful woman on earth.
With a man like this—a typical Parisian artist—the topic of money simply never comes up. At least not until you decide, as I did, to acquire one of his paintings. The occasion was an open-studio event, with all his friends milling around, munching on cheese and crackers and drinking champagne. A monumental canvas was beckoning me. I could not reasonably afford to squander rent money on such a frivolous purchase, but even in Paris, being broke is seldom an incentive to thrift. There was no price list, and so I could not evaluate what it would cost for me to buy this particularly handsome piece. However, trying to handle the situation like a pro was a challenge I could not resist.
“Would you part with it?” I asked him, motioning in the direction of the painting. He was surprised. “Is there a wall in your apartment large enough for it?”
Now, the sex had been pretty good, but this turned out to be even better. I bought the painting from him without either of us ever having mentioned a price or negotiated an amount. The exercise presented itself as an equation in which not only was x an unknown, but so were all the other letters of the seduction alphabet. I finessed it by writing a series of random checks, which I mailed to him in envelopes containing other unrelated information regarding various art shows. When he called me, we talked over the phone about his recipe for rabbit stew. He e-mailed me pictures of his daughters taken that summer in Normandy. We made plans to go to New York to visit the Dia:Beacon museum. And then one day he rang my bell and showed up with the huge canvas wrapped in crisp paper the color of candied chestnuts. Our affair had been over long before, with no repeat performance scheduled anytime soon, but suddenly we were in love.
AT LONG LAST, I am getting the hang of it. Paris is becoming my personal tax haven, my Liechtenstein, my Gibraltar, my Aruba, my state of Delaware. Here I can evade greed, find respite from acquisitiveness, dodge my self-aggrandizing ambitions. I no longer feel the urge to rage against the hidden costs of banking operations, the abysmal exchange rates, or the extra charges on my phone bills. Give me a couple of months and I will stop fretting when the stock market takes yet another plunge. I may not even notice when it goes back up again. I can almost see the day when being broke will bother me about as much as breaking a fingernail.
Only last month I met a young Frenchwoman who had spent six years as a successful artists’ representative in Los Angeles and had recently moved back to Paris, her hometown. Reentry was proving so grueling that she was exhibiting symptoms usually associated with road rage. She became incoherent as she tried to convey to me her vexation at being turned down by a local bank that had refused to let her open a checking account. I was not unsympathetic: that morning I had received a threatening letter from URSSAF, one of many organizations that levy heavy taxes on individuals to offset the cost of paying for the French government’s generous social services. So I understood what she was going through—I understood, yet I refused to feel sorry for her. I knew that she would soon appreciate the irony of it all. Living in Paris is “priceless,” but it will cost you. It ain’t cheap, yet it is one of the greatest bargains on earth. In our day and age, there are only two ways to get free of money worries: either accumulate wealth, lots of it, or move to Paris.
DIANE JOHNSON
Learning French Ways
WHEN WE MOVED to Paris, fifteen years ago, I trusted that all I had heard about Frenchwomen—their perfect clothes, dedicated cookery, and elaborate wiles—would turn out on closer inspection to be untrue, and I would find they were just like the rest of us. Instead I learned that there’s a lot to these stereotypes. I was sure of it with the first recipe I tried from the Sunday newspaper magazine, marked “Très facile”: you began by removing the fish’s backbone, rinsing the fish for twenty minutes, then boiling it for twenty minutes with leek, laurel, and thyme, then cooling, straining, and reducing the broth for twenty minutes—all this before you began cooking the fish. It was then that I knew there were some serious lessons ahead of me. Americans at their foodiest don’t employ fourteen ingredients to make stuffed courgettes.
Much is expected of a French hostess, who presents an exquisite dinner—notice I don’t say “cooks” it. When I gave my first Parisian dinner parties, I would buy poulet masala from Marks and Spencer (there was one here then), on the theory that no Frenchwoman would have heard of it, or none would use preprepared food, but I was wrong about that, too. They are not complexées (their word) about making things from scratch, and whereas we might cheat but conceal it, they blatantly use frozen food and the microwave with no sense of transgression. Their object is, after all, a delicious repas, not competition. My game was up when, therefore, French hostesses also began to serve dishes from Marks and Spencer, to great enthusiasm.
As to that exquisitely turned-out look, Frenchwomen do shop carefully, buy two or three good things each year, and put them on to go to the store. They do indeed flirt with the butcher, which shocked me no end the first time I went marketing with my friend Charlotte: “Ooh, Monsieur Dupont, je sais que vous avez quelque chose de très, très bon pour moi,” and so forth. Daunting as this resolute charm was, I told myself that perfection ought to be decipherable and imitable. Could I, a somewhat lazy and absentminded foreigner, learn French ways?
You can almost tell how long an American or English woman has been in Paris by whether she’s wearing a scarf, only the most obvious sign that cultural reprogramming has begun. Every French person wears one, but Americans tend not to at first. Ditto the purse, a preoccupation that steals in on you like fog. You wake up one morning and find they are all wearing a sort of handbag you haven’t ever thought of having in your wardrobe. Last week I noticed that every Frenchwoman was carrying a big, brown leather, rather rustic-looking handbag with wide straps and lots of buckles and studs. The ultimate version is from Bottega Veneta and costs two thousand euros, with Dior saddlebag-shaped ones not far behind. Lancel, Longchamp, Delsey, and every other saddler had them in leather; Monoprix had them in plastic.
The question for me was, how did le tout Paris know, at the same moment, to buy a bag like this? I read Elle and Madame Figaro like everyone else, but I hadn’t noticed that my regular black leather bag was hopeless. When I go back to California for the summer, people will say “How French you look” for about two weeks, after which, I guess, I stop looking it. In France, I know I still stand out as a clueless American. At least, unlike us, they have cultural consensus. Perhaps this explains the strange predilection the French have for clothes and purses with the name or logo of the maker on them. We would never do that, or at least I wouldn’t, and I’ve never seen T-shirts reading “Isabel Toledo” or “Marc Jacobs” on a San Francisco street, either.
The French do have a different attitude toward individuality and eccentricity. They keep personal i
diosyncrasies hidden, if they exist, behind the comfortable uniform facade of fashion or, one could say, of timelessness. The Chanel suit, jeans, the trench coat, never go out of style, and such clothes form the core of everyone’s wardrobe, no matter what age. At first I had a certain Anglo-Saxon scorn for this conformity, but I eventually came to see that for them it is liberating, like school uniforms. You put on your little suit, with its knee-length skirt and fitted jacket, scarf, and midheels, and that’s the end of thinking about it.
In San Francisco, you can’t but be struck, walking down, say, Union Street, by the number of shops that are clearly intended for the young, and no one over twenty would be caught dead in a miniskirt with rhinestones and so forth. In France, women seem not to have any idea of age-appropriate clothes. Frenchwomen of all ages have the figures of their teenage daughters, and they all wear the same styles. There’s a sartorial middle ground where girls wear ladylike clothes their mothers could wear, and their mothers wear the sleeveless dresses and short skirts we have been deeply programmed to avoid after a certain age. My English friend Hilary recently remarked that she had given up wearing jeans because one of her sons had commented, “Mutton dressed as lamb.” Does this mean that jeans, in England, are only for the young, or for arty or delinquent people of any age? Anyhow, this irritating remark brought to mind still other national differences. I don’t think many Frenchmen would feel that their mothers should dress like Whistler’s mother, and I also think they would refrain from using that unfortunate figure of speech based on meat.
It almost seems that Frenchmen like women better than English or American men do. Frenchmen seem to admire what women do, and will participate in discussions about curtains and recipes. You see them looking at fashions in store windows and even reading women’s magazines, whereas, as has often been remarked, Anglo-Saxon men seem to prefer the company of one another. It was fun to see The Voysey Inheritance at the National Theatre in London a few years back, but the status of the women in the big Voysey family of prosperous Victorians made clear a set of attitudes, condescending and protective, that may not have changed that much. All the important scenes take place with the mother and sisters out of the room.