Paris Was Ours (29 page)

So much of this story is incredible, who could have imagined it? Even more so because I did not have any great Fran-cophilia in my heart. I grew up with a sort of split-screen idea of the French, with a father who came of age on a dairy farm in Depression-era Georgia but graduated at the top of his high school class and made it to the Naval Academy, studying, among other things, French; he was posted to Saigon in the early 1960s, within a decade of the French departure, and conducted intelligence there. From him I acquired a sense of France as a place of culture and fine things in life. My mother, on the other hand, is an Anglo-Canadian who grew up in Halifax. Her father was twice premier of Nova Scotia and minister of the Canadian Navy during World War II. For my Canadian side, the French represented a threat to their country’s unity and to the well-being of the impoverished Maritime Provinces, which would be cut off from the rest of Canada should Quebec ever succeed in seceding. Our summers in Halifax had included mutterings about the rabble-rousing French, oaths against bilingual road signs and cereal boxes, and ridicule of de Gaulle and his call to arms for the Québecois.

So I had conflicted feelings about going to Paris, and about France, but surely I could put up with anything to reach my dream of understanding the language that created this amazing word,
litost
. How bad could it be?

I arrived in Paris loaded down with books and an antique Royal typewriter. I’d been delayed two months while Langues O’ came back from vacation and sent me the necessary papers.
The friend of my friend who’d arranged my apartment was to pick me up at Charles de Gaulle Airport, so after my plane landed, I gathered my luggage onto a
chariot
and waited. And waited. When he finally appeared, tall and handsome and close to an hour late, his first words were, “Where were you?” I was speechless. If I’d known the role lateness would come to play for us, I might have grabbed my
chariot
and run the other way. But late as he was, he
was
handsome, with the suggestion of great charm, and, crucially, I’d been told he had a great mind. He also had the keys to my apartment, and so when words returned to me, I replied that I’d been there all along, and where was he?

We got into his big, beautiful old Mercedes sedan and headed to his office, a town house off the Champs-Élysées, and had lunch, prepared by the in-house chef, with his charming but somewhat geeky—though geeky in French was really pretty adorable—fellow
polytechnicien
colleagues. He had been born the same year as I but seemed older and had already started a successful business. If
Sex and the City
had been around back then, I might have called him Mr. Big. Or in this case, Monsieur Grand.

Paris is beautiful in the autumn, at least until the rains come, when you want to sit in a café reading and nursing a cognac. I had several weeks until classes began and so I familiarized myself with my neighborhood, a sort of nice middle-class suburb immediately south of Paris, and with the city itself. And all the little details of life in
la belle France
. That everything closes between noon and 2:00. Or 1:00 and 3:00. Or thereabouts—you had to pay attention. No grocery shopping at 11:00 p.m. — everything closed by 7:30. The pharmacies were one of my favorite discoveries. They were beautiful emporiums
of fine soaps, baby food, even beautiful Band-Aids, and housed homeopathic and naturopathic remedies as well as being places to have your prescriptions filled. You could go to your pharmacist as you would your doctor, just about.

Sure enough, the Eiffel Tower was a giant nightlight in the distance from my studio balcony, blinking off at 1:00 a.m. Having left a complicated relationship behind, I was in no rush to start up something new, but M. Grand was a great tour guide. Among other things, he taught me the difference between
savoir
and
connaître
, because of course the French have two verbs for “to know,” and he shared with me the highly useful and consolatory fact that stepping in dog poo in France is considered a stroke of luck. He was hoping for a more elevated status than guide, but this time, he was waiting for me.

I remember a lot of walking on my own and a lot of language shock—my high school French was like another language altogether. I also remember going into a patisserie and ordering “un Napoléon, s’il vous plaît,” and the girl looked at me as if I had two heads. (The rich, layered pastries known in the United States by the name of the famous French general and emperor are known in France as mille-feuilles — “a thousand leaves,” appropriate to the many layers of puff pastry therein.)

I ate a lot of cheese, discovering some of the hundreds of varieties of which France is so proud, and bread, so excellent and cheap, and washed it down with good wine that was cheap as well. I discovered how delicious French pizza is, and even canned French vegetables (I was pretty poor). I read a lot of
journaux
to bolster my vocabulary and watched some fairly bad French TV. I kept trying to hold M. Grand at bay, but it seemed clear that it would be only a matter of time before he
wore me down. I didn’t really know how I felt about him—he was so easy to be with, charming and smart. For a variety of reasons I thought love had to be hard—but I liked how much he liked me. And he was on a mission to take care of me.

One of the anthropologist Raymonde Carroll’s American subjects described her relationship with a Frenchman thus: “If I had wanted to have a child, I would have liked to have it with him, but never in a million years would I have wanted him to be the father of my child.” This paradoxical statement came to make perfect sense to me. The brilliance of the graduates of the
grandes écoles
, the savoir faire inculcated from birth, the near-suffocating sense of history, legacy, and birthright that Americans, in comparison, lack—all this is entirely seductive, something you would want to pass on to your child. The deeper you dig, however, the more those subtle, charming differences take on a different cast … But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Revenons à nos moutons …

I had found out that my image of Langues O’ as a beautiful gothic building in the center of Paris—I knew that their offices were on the rue de Lille, in the seventh—was just a hopeful fantasy, and that each language was taught in some peripheral cluster, usually in university buildings around the edge of the city, built in the sixties. They were probably already somewhat grim then; now they were outright bleak. Czech was taught in Clichy, a working-class northern suburb. Bare-bones does not begin to describe the facilities. Having come from the aesthetically beautiful American university system, especially my alma mater, which could define the term
ivy-covered halls
, this was a shock. Also, the location could not have been farther from where I lived, south of the city.

I soldiered on, meeting interesting young French students who were intrigued by this
américaine
who’d come all the way to Clichy, God forbid, to learn Czech, of all things. They loved the literary reason behind it, and I loved that they loved it—I was used to things literary being treated at best like a dalliance or at worst like a waste of time, and here I was in a country that held literature up on a pedestal, where the publication of a new literary work was treated with reverence, and where there was a prime-time, must-see weekly talk show dedicated to recent books and their authors. It blew my mind. Truly, this was the land of milk and honey. And mille-feuilles.

Six months later, I had stopped going to classes and had moved in with M. Grand. I rented a small studio from an American painter near the Bastille in order to write. One day, my work of several years disappeared—my work-in-progress, poems typed and in longhand, journals, Czech dictionaries and books—stolen by an unstable acquaintance of the painter’s. He took them, and later admitted he had, but couldn’t tell us where. We never understood why.

Then I learned that I was pregnant, and everything else in my life seemed to stop. I did not know if I could be both poet and mother. Here, in a foreign land, these two realities strained my sanity.

The gendarmes called just as we were leaving to drive to the south to visit M. Grand’s parents. Some of my papers and books had been found on a train near Lyon; they would hold them for us to claim. Driving to pick them up was a surreal and symbolic experience, mimicking so much else of my life in France, where I was continually challenged to stake and claim my identity in situations of cultural divide, emotional
stress, personal turmoil. Retrieving some of my poems—there were many I would never get back—I realized, standing in the
gendarmerie lyonnaise
, M. Grand by my side, our Franco-American child on the way, that it was entirely up to me which of these pieces of my identity I wanted to continue holding in my hand, and which I should set free.

Our baby boy was born the following New Year’s Day. He was a magical baby, sweet tempered and beautiful—a family friend joked that he was
une fille manquée
—a near-miss girl. He was born in the States but flew back with us to France at three months. Life there with a baby was an entirely new chapter of
la vie française
. The beautiful clothes (but no snaps between the legs!), the beautiful parks (but children not allowed on the grass!), the wonderful restaurants for tired parents to dine (dogs, OK; kids, no thanks!). On the plus side, good health care, childcare immediately, paid time off, and the most beautiful baby food: puréed
artichauts, petits pois
, the tenderest spring vegetables, and, at the appropriate age, delicate cuts of meat (the French take palate development quite seriously).

From being a writer-in-progress I became a full-time
maman
, and I reveled in it at first. But we were living in a western suburb that first year and the loneliness and isolation took its toll.
Les beaux-parents
—I use the term for in-laws loosely, as I did not marry M. Grand, instead choosing, to the chagrin of all, to continue in the dreadfully termed state of concubinage—were wonderful, for the most part. I actually loved the
déjeuners en famille le dimanche
, which lasted till 5:00 p.m. When the baby was four months old, we drove to the Île Saint-Louis in my favorite of M. Grand’s car collection, a 1970s navy blue Jaguar with white leather interior, and baptized the baby in
the lovely Église Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. The enormous family gathering afterward at M. Grand’s parents’ house west of Paris brought American and French families together in the closest thing we would have to a wedding reception.

The summer was split between the family’s house on the Côte d’Azur and the States. We moved into Paris the following spring, somewhat controversially, as it was out of the rent-free family-owned apartment in the suburbs into a paying situation (
horreur
!). We took an apartment that had to be completely redone—it did not in fact have a bathroom—but it was lovely Belle Époque.

Part of the reason for the move was to be closer to M. Grand’s office—he continued to work long, grueling hours, having shuttered one business and started another, and family time was nonexistent. His chronologically challenged aspect, which I had seen even before we met, as I waited at the airport with my
chariot
, did not improve with the birth of our child. But otherwise, life was delightful in the seventeenth, next to the Église Suédoise with its pealing Sunday bells and beyond-charming Christmas bazaar. I joined British and other American mothers in playgroups, where we commiserated about our outsider status and traded tips on where to find the foods and other bits from life back home that we missed.

I became attached to this
vie parisienne
, getting to know my little quartier: the excellent
fromager
, the two
boulangeries
—both good, but I had my favorite—the
épicier
, the many Arabs who sold a little of everything, the Nicolas wine shop, which held an all-out spirited Beaujolais day when it arrived in November — “Le beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!” By then I’d returned to Clichy, now taking Russian, and I was on my way
out of the Métro around 6:00 p.m. when I stopped in for a glass, or two … It took me a while to get home.

I spent many happy hours pushing the little one in his lovely
poussette
, at the marché rue Poncelet or in the exquisite parc Monceau, embarrassed to be continually mistaken as his au pair. I wanted to be the sophisticated
parisienne
but instead looked as young and as English as the wonderful gap-year girls who babysat for us.

It was one of these girls, a beautiful young Irishwoman, who described to me her perception of something I’d long felt but could not yet admit about Paris: its distinctly sinister side. Something about its history—more than in London or other European cities—oozes from its Haussmannian boulevards and wedding-cake buildings and makes you feel the blood that has run in the streets, during the Commune and the Revolution and for centuries before. Dickens’s image of a peasant woman knitting the names of the condemned into her work feels all too believable once you have spent any length of time among Parisians. It is why fresh-faced Americans don’t stand a chance. To play the Parisian game, you must become sophisticated, with haste.

I was increasingly uneasy, as well, with the self-satisfied confidence of the French, which could swiftly veer to arrogance. Quick to tell the historically young Americans how to right the wrongs of racism and the like, they are quite often unable to recognize their own national shortcomings, such as the disenfranchisement and impoverishement of the ranks of Arabs and Africans segregated to the
cités
around Paris and the subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Semitism evidenced in strains of historical revisionism and the rise of the Far Right.

On the personal plane, I recognized a growing inability to
cohabit with M. Grand, whose obliviousness to time and schedules became acute with the pressures of family and a growing business. Saying he’d be home for dinner by eight could as well mean eleven or one, and it was wearing me down. We had passionate, terrible arguments, about time and space and other Kantian issues, until finally it became unbearable to stay.