Paris, My Sweet (8 page)

One day, I was trying to explain to her how excited I was to be in Paris—
excited
about my apartment,
excited
about my neighborhood,
excited
about my job and the city and traveling—when I learned an important lesson. “Je suis très excitant,” I declared. She started laughing uncontrollably and then stopped abruptly, concerned that I might think she was laughing
at
me. “When you say, ‘I'm excited,' it has very sexual connotations in French,” she explained, searching for an alternative. “You can say,
j'ai hâte
,” she enunciated the phrase as I blushed. “It means…I'm pressed.”

“
J'ai hâte
,” I repeated. Pressed, indeed, I was to stop making a fool of myself.

But Isa was one of the few people with whom I never felt embarrassed practicing—and, sadly, butchering—the language. For some reason, through my elementary French and her stunted English, we understood each other. We communicated with our eyes and our hearts. It was just one of those connections that felt easy and comfortable and natural—emotions that had been conspicuously absent since my family and friends had visited. I relished this budding new friendship. Each exchange, both tender and intrepid with our mishmash of cultural and language backgrounds, made me feel more connected, more normal.
Tu
vois?
I said to Milo one perfect evening in the tree house after Isa had invited me to join her and a group of colleagues for lunch.
Making
friends
in
Paris
is
a
walk
in
le
parc!

In June, Ogilvy threw a grand rooftop party for
fête de la musique
, a national holiday created for the sole purpose of celebrating music. It was an annual tradition for the agency to open its exquisite double-decker terrace high above the Champs-Élysées and hire DJs for the raucous holiday that falls on the summer solstice. It had been cloudy all day but the sun broke through around eight o'clock and people started filling up one terrace, and then the other. I psyched myself up to mingle with the agency VIPs, and I even managed to talk to the one cute colleague I had seen around the office.

I stumbled through French but defaulted to English, still surprised at how eager everyone was to practice their own foreign language skills. The French attitude to language had changed so dramatically since my college days in the '90s. Back then, most everyone all but refused to utter a word of English, even if they could. Now, they knew speaking English was essential to getting ahead in the workplace. Though some of them still resisted out of pride or self-consciousness, put a drink in them and their lips loosened right up.

The party had gorgeous cheese spreads, unlimited wine, fresh fruit, and,
hmmm
, hot dogs? I looked around for someone who might also think this was hilarious, but, in fact, everyone was devouring the American barbecue staples, ketchup, mustard, and all. It reminded me how half the workers on the Champs-Élysées toted bags from McDonalds or Quick every day at lunch. For all their panache, the Frenchies could be shockingly lowbrow.

As if the backdrop wasn't stunning enough—the Champs-Élysées buzzing below and the Vuitton flagship winking from across the street, the Grand Palais and Place de la Concorde down the boulevard, the Louvre and Notre Dame further off in the distance, and even Sacré-Coeur sitting placidly like dollops of
crème Chantilly
up on its hill in Montmartre—the Eiffel Tower did its strobe light spectacular on the hour, every hour. That night, there were also fireworks over Place de la Concorde to honor Charles de Gaulle's historic call to resist the Nazis back in 1940. I couldn't get over it. It was like a movie set, except it was my life, in Paris.

Finally, a fun party at work!
I thought, watching everyone laugh and mingle, the red tips of their cigarettes like little party favors twinkling in the air as they gesticulated in lively conversations. The bottles of wine were disappearing and everyone was cutting loose. As the summer sky turned from pink to dusty purple to black, the rooftop became a pulsing dance floor.

I was in high spirits too. In addition to Isa, I had recently befriended an American expat with whom I instantly clicked, Melissa. She and I had been “set up” by my good friend from high school, Ben. When you move to a foreign city, all of your friends want to introduce you to their friends, friends of friends, or anyone they know who's remotely sane and English-speaking in the same city. Usually these friend-dates are train wrecks as you have nothing in common with the other person aside from both being sane Anglophones. Lucky for me, Ben knew better.

The first time Melissa and I got together, we poured our souls out to one another over Belgian beers on a café terrace. Not long after, we went slumming it to the Les Halles Cineplex to see Tom Hanks in
Angels
& Demons
, a movie I would never have seen in New York but which brought me a strange sense of comfort and patriotism abroad. After that, I knew I had my partner in crime in all things cheesy, dorky, and American. Between Melissa and Isa, I felt like I had hit the friend jackpot in too-cool-for-school Paris.

Then Isa, who had been making the rounds (she was loved by everyone, not just me), gave me her news. “Tu connais Alexi et moi retournons à Canada?” she asked over the blaring techno, which was being spun by a guy I worked with on the Vuitton team on a daily basis. Rocking his head to the beat, headphones held up to one ear, I saw a totally different side to his cerebral explanations of a proper website user experience.

“Quoi?” I shouted back, thinking I hadn't heard her correctly. She couldn't be moving back to Canada—she was such an integral part to the Vuitton team and Ogilvy office. Her eyes were welling up with tears.
Had
I heard her correctly? If so, for better or worse, my French was really coming along.

Isa guided me over to the quieter edge of the terrace. “Oui. Nous partons.” She went on to explain that she and her boyfriend were going to get married, and they wanted to be close to their families back in Québec. That as soon as Alexi was done with his baking apprenticeship, they were leaving Paris and returning to Canada. And that she had given notice to Ogilvy. I was stunned. My girl, my one fun female friend, was leaving. Say it wasn't so! But I felt even worse for Isa. Her tears began to spill over, down her cheeks, and I could viscerally feel her torment. “Il me manque déjà,” she said, gesturing to the ridiculous 360-degree view of Paris we had.
She
already
missed
it.

It wasn't just the city's beauty, though, with the Eiffel Tower's lights dancing in the distance, of course that was a big part of it. But as we stood and talked about life and love and Paris, I understood her sadness and felt it as if it were my own. I realized how attached I was becoming to a lifestyle that ambled gracefully instead of blazing full-steam ahead. To a city where every neighborhood had not two or three, but four, five, or six
boulangeries
to choose from. To a world that valued pleasure above everything else.

Would I one day, like Isa, be welling up at the thought of leaving? For that matter, would I ever be ready to leave Paris?

My parents divorced when I was eight, and I left home at seventeen. After four years of college in Boston—including those five glorious months studying abroad in Paris—came my time in San Francisco, and then New York. All that's to say, the idea of home has changed a lot in my life. My real, honest-to-goodness roots will always be Connecticut. But I think it's important to feel at home wherever you are in the world.

Early that summer in Paris, when I Vélib'ed home from work each night, it made me happy to be pedaling along my little route from the Champs-Élysées in the eighth arrondissement to the Montorgueil quartier in the city center. It made me happy to realize that I
had
a little route, one that I loved. Then again, zipping past Lanvin, Louboutin, Costes, and Colette on rue Saint-Honoré—what
wasn't
to love? I'd arrive in my neighborhood, absorbing the buoyant energy of the cafés and shops and people. I loved how jammed the café terraces were, everyone enjoying a beer or wine before returning
chez-eux
for a home-cooked dinner. With daylight lasting forever, the sun hanging in the sky until well past 10:00 p.m., I'd have a few happy hours to myself to wander rue Montorgueil and watch the fabulous hipsters in their scarves and Wayfarers. Or I'd simply hang out in my tree house, writing about my infatuation with Paris or the day's lost-in-translation moments on my blog, which I'd started to keep in touch with family and friends back home.

I was happy that Paris was finally feeling like home. It was comforting and exciting, and both familiar and new. In a city that's a gold mine of clichés, I thought of a real gem: Paris was where my heart was.

Christophe Vasseur, meilleur boulanger de Paris en 2008.

Pas beaucoup de variété, mais de la grande qualité et des chaussons aux pommes faits avec des vraies pommes!

irrrrrrrrrrésistible!

With Isa's departure on the horizon, she suggested a special outing for our last date. Her fiancé was wrapping up an apprenticeship at Du Pain et Des Idées, one of the best
boulangeries
in the city. Did I want to go visit him and get a private tour of the kitchen?
Um, does a baby cry when you take away its candy?

So late one afternoon, we arrived at the award-winning bakery, which is wedged on a corner in Paris's greatest bobo paradise, Canal Saint-Martin. Though it's hipsterville outside, the inside of the bakery is infused with old-time charm. Antique wooden furniture, copper cookware, and giant sacks of flour add a rustic dash to the original Beaux Arts painted glass ceilings and gilded mirrors. The woman at the counter, recognizing Isa, gestured to the kitchen door, giving us the okay to go back. I felt like a rock star bypassing the customers who curiously watched us, two fair-skinned
étrangères
, go behind the closed doors.

Her boyfriend, Alexi, welcomed us into the compact kitchen, where he was making the evening baguettes. He showed us how the raw dough was shaped and placed on giant slabs of rolling canvases. He explained how the ovens were stacked, with the hottest ones at floor level. This is where the bakery's signature bread, the
pain
des
amis
, a wonderfully nutty-crusty-chewy bread that is now served at Alain Ducasse's renowned Plaza Athénée restaurant, was baked. The traditional baguettes were assigned a couple drawers above.

When it was time, we watched him yank open the oven doors and drag the baguettes onto a contraption that looked like a cross between an ambulance stretcher and grocery store conveyer belt. Some of them were
bien cuit
, cooked crisp and golden. Others were
moins cuit
, a smidge undercooked and chewier. He deftly scooped them all into cylindrical wicker baskets, which were then delivered to the front, where the line of eager customers was growing longer, now that it was later in the day.
Funny
being
on
this
side
, I thought, remembering all the times I had been one of those salivating customers, waiting for the evening's bake to appear fresh and warm from the kitchen.