Lunch in Paris (11 page)

I’ll be on the phone with Amanda in California, gossiping about an old friend. “I don’t know what
she
thought of him, but clearly
he
thinks he’s the cat’s pajamas.”

“The cat pajamas,” said Gwendal later that night. “Can I use that?”

“Not unless you want to get your ass kicked.”

N
OW THAT I
was a full-time resident in Paris, it had become a ritual for
me
to get up on Saturday mornings and go to the bakery. Gwendal, as most men would, chose his
boulangerie
by which one was the fewest number of steps from his bed. Turns out, another hundred paces in the opposite direction, there
is an infinitely better
boulangerie
. The kind of
boulangerie
dreams are made of, with a big glass window displaying neat rows of lemon tarts and chocolate éclairs, and an open kitchen
door, so you can smell the
pains aux chocolats
even before you turn the corner. They also make what I consider to be the perfect croissant.

She just got there, you say. How would she know? The glorious thing about France is that it takes no time at all to become
a snob about these things. Falling deeply in love with a pastry is easy.

Where croissants are concerned, I’ve found two principal schools of thought. Some prefer a brioche-like model, with a golden
hue, a little spring, and an eggy chew. Not I. I like flake, a croissant with an outer layer so fine and brittle that you
get crumbs all over yourself from the very first bite. When you pull it apart there should be some empty space, pockets of
air between the buttery layers of dough. When you finally do rip off a hunk to dip in your coffee, it stretches a little before
it breaks. More crumbs, but utterly, completely worth the mess. I’ve abandoned my
chouquettes
. Pastry love is fickle that way.

My first trips to the
boulangerie
are not all ogling. I have to keep my head about me as I place my order. First there is the gender issue; every French noun
is assigned a sex, masculine or feminine. Personally, I think my croissant is a woman, as tender and fragile as a Brontë heroine.
But apparently, the Académie Française, the guys who make the dictionary, have decided that “croissant” is masculine,
un croissant
. I have been outvoted.

Along with his croissant, Gwendal usually requests a
financier
. These mini almond cakes were traditionally made in the form of a gold ingot. Here they are round, like an oversized Monopoly
coin. Gwendal always gives me a piece of the crisp exterior and keeps the humid center for himself. I strain to hear the amount
I owe as I take my bag. There is no time for repeats. There’s a line out the door and three women weaving behind the counter
to avoid a collision.

“
Bonne journée,
” I say to no one in particular as I walk out the door.

I
F I’D BEEN
able to read the paper those first few weeks in Paris, I would have been more aware than I actually was that the world was
coming to an end. I had landed in France in the middle of a
heated presidential election. The Left couldn’t seem to get its act together, and in the confusion the extreme Right candidate
Jean-Marie Le Pen had made it past the primaries to face the sitting president Jacques Chirac in the final runoff for the
presidency. Paris was up in arms. Saturday morning was May Day—French Labor Day—and I was about to be initiated into a national
sport:
la manif
.

With a fervor left over from the heated strikes and student protests of 1968, the French like nothing better than to take
to the streets. Doesn’t much matter what for; one thing you learn quickly in France, there’s always something to be against:
the new government, the old government, the European Union, fewer teachers, fewer holidays, regulations about how much bacteria
you can put in your cheese or how much wax you can put in your chocolate. You name it, someone thinks it’s a terrible idea.
Nobody is offering a viable solution. That, presumably, is next week’s job. Today it is just the joyful frenzy of a collective
“
non!
”

Suddenly everyone had become a political activist. You couldn’t pass a café table without hearing the rustle of a newspaper
and the shaking of heads. “
C’est la vraie merde
”—we’re in the shits. That much I understood.

The place de la République is a five-minute walk from the house. When we arrived at the base of the giant bronze statue representing
the Republic of France (a toga-clad damsel holding an olive branch), there were already thousands of people grouped around
brightly printed banners as music blared from flatbed trucks. There were students in tank tops and sunglasses, women in veils,
and older lefties with rounded shoulders and light jackets (clearly those who had done these protests the first time around),
their graying hair stuck upright on their heads as they smoked a last cigarette under the banner of their local union.

The atmosphere was casual, even upbeat. Maybe this is just what they do on Saturdays, like we go to the movies or get our
nails done.

As the dragon’s tail of people began its descent down the boulevard toward Bastille, the crush was overwhelming. By the end
of the day more than a million people throughout France would be marching.

There was a man in front of me holding a sign:
PLUTôT ESCROC QUE FACHO
. “What does that mean?” I said, pointing up at the hand-painted letters; my French slang was very limited.

“ ‘
Escroc
’ means ‘crook,’ ” said Gwendal, “and ‘
facho
’ is short for ‘fascist.’ ”

“Better a crook than a fascist.” Talk about the lesser of two evils.

T
HERE WERE QUIETER
times. Chirac won the election with eighty-two percent of the vote, and instead of ranting about a political apocalypse,
people could get back to grumbling about the status quo. As the weather warmed up, the café terraces filled with girls in
dark glasses and flowered dresses. I felt the pace of the city slacken as workers and tourists and children seemed to ease
into summer vacation.

While the rest of France was starting to think about going on holiday, I was trying to get back to work. Just before I left
London, I’d been named new media editor of a small arts magazine. They needed someone to cover emerging trends—art projects
on the Web, that sort of thing. I was an art historian who had worked for an Internet start-up and presumably knew how to
use a computer—that seemed to be enough to make me an expert in this nascent field. The pay was wooden nickels, but it meant
I would have my name on the masthead and some shiny new clips
to show around. Plus it was an ideal beat for my new location. While I explored the art scene in Paris, I could surf the Net
for international artists. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning.

I had bought Gwendal a picnic basket for his thirtieth birthday, wicker with a leather shoulder strap, real glasses, and (very
practically, I thought) plates in heavy blue plastic of the kind I imagine they sell only at Bed Bath & Beyond. We were about
to give it its first outing.

A picnic is about as far back to nature as I go. When I was growing up, my auntie Lynn had a house on a lake near Danbury,
Connecticut. With her two sons we would stage “Pirates’ Picnics,” complete with a map hastily sketched on the back of a brown
paper bag. There was a toadstool of an island in the middle of the lake, but to me we may as well have been in Nam. My mother
planted soda cans and key chains for a scavenger hunt. We ate bologna sandwiches and potato chips and drank juice out of cardboard
boxes poked with a plastic straw. As an adult, I progressed to the Jane Austen version—plaid blanket, long flowered dress,
and somebody else to carry the overstuffed basket.

We walked up to the Buttes Chaumont, my new favorite park in Paris, sculpted from the ruins of one of Napoleon III’s old gypsum
quarries. In that uniquely nineteenth-century attempt to do nature one better, the park is filled with stucco rocks, fake
rolling hills, an artificial waterfall, and a man-made lake stocked with swans and topped with a Grecian temple. Paris from
up here looks like a toy village, jagged rooftops and the dome of Sacré-Coeur peeking over the trees. In addition to the theatrics,
it has a unique advantage over all the other parks in Paris: you can sit on the grass.

We put down our blanket (a flowered flannel sheet, but hey, give me a little time) and started to unpack.

A picnic basket in Paris is like a treasure chest—untold riches in a limited space. The first apricots had appeared at the
market, their skins fading from speckled red to glowing orange to burnished gold, like the sun-bleached walls of an Italian
villa. There were tiny cucumbers, as thick as my thumb and curled like a ribbon. I’d become obsessed with a new fruit called
a
pêche plat,
a flat peach. Imagine a perfectly ripe white peach that someone has sat on. Gwendal picked up a tomato and bit into it like
an apple. I did the same.

At the bottom of the basket was a carefully folded square of waxed paper. Inside was a small mound of
rillettes,
shredded pork cooked in its own fat until meltingly smooth. Gwendal ripped off a piece of bread; I dusted the remains off
his shirt. I’ve started calling him
le roi des miettes,
the king of crumbs.

I watched the couples walking around the lake. “Maybe it’s the New Yorker in me. I’m too used to rushing around. But everyone
here is so relaxed, it’s like they’re moving in slow motion.”

“Why should they rush? They’re not going to get anywhere.”

Sometimes I really have no idea what he is talking about.

“You will never understand. You come from a place where everything is possible.” We lay side by side on the grass, our eyes
half closed.

“It’s Henry Miller that said, ‘In America, every man is potentially president. Here, every man is potentially a zero.’ ”

And then he told me a story.

“When I was sixteen it was time to decide what kind of studies I would pursue. I was the best in the class in Math and Physics,
but also the best in Literature. I went to the school library and the woman behind the desk gave me a book. It was called
All the Jobs in the World
. I looked through it. I found two things I liked: scientific researcher and film director. I brought the book to the front
and showed her my choices. ‘
Ah, non,
’ she said. ‘You forgot to look at
the key.’ And she pointed to the top of the page. Next to each job there were dollar signs—three dollars signs if the job
paid a lot of money, one dollar sign if it paid very little. Next to the dollar sign was a door. If the door was wide open
it was very easy to get this job, if the door was open just a little bit, it was very hard. ‘
Regarde,
’ she said. ‘You have picked only jobs with no dollar signs and a closed door. ‘
Tu n’y arriveras jamais.
’ You will never get there.’

“ ‘You should become an engineer,’ she said. My parents had never met anyone who did these other things. We don’t come from
that world. They had no friends they could call to get me a job. They were afraid I would fail and they couldn’t help me.
They were afraid I would have no place in the society. And I didn’t have the force to do it myself. I didn’t want to disappoint
them. So I became an engineer.”