Lunch in Paris (16 page)

M
y parents came to Paris in March to meet their future in-laws and help us look for an apartment. Mom wasn’t buying my bullshit
about
La Bohème
. An apartment without heat is an apartment without heat.

I call them my parents, but in fact I mean Mom and Paul. Paul is what most people would call my stepfather, but I call him
my fairy godfather, because he sort of fell out of the sky one day and lots of wonderful things happened.

If we’re comparing first dates, in many ways my parents’ story is more of a whirlwind romance than Gwendal’s and mine. They
were introduced by mutual friends at the end of my sophomore year in college. Paul was recently widowed with two grown children.
My mother had just returned from a six-week trip to Tibet, a lifelong dream. Her suitcases were still lying half-unpacked
on the living room floor when he came to pick her up on a Friday evening. Paul’s grandson Lucas was born that night, and while
Paul was at the hospital on Saturday morning my mother called me, a little too early, in my Ithaca studio: “If this man is
still around on Monday, I’m going to
marry him.” He moved in on Wednesday, and has been with us ever since.

As my grandmother never hesitated to remind her, Paul was the kind of man my mother should have married the first time around:
smart and kind, stable and successful. Jewish, but not too Jewish. A born techie who worked for IBM in the 1960s before starting
his own business, Paul now spends most of his time researching mother-daughter long-distance calling plans.

Nicole and Yanig’s first date was a product of the high hippie days. They met not during the “Summer of Love” but during the
“summer of strikes”—the student protests of 1968. They met through a mutual friend, one evening at the local cinema. She thought,
in case of a riot, it would be a good idea to be going out with someone tall. Their wedding picture is telling: Nicole in
a flowered micromini, Yanig with a long beard and a short tie. (He kept the beard, lost the tie.) He looks as though he came
straight from one of his meetings of the anarcho-syndicalists. (It’s hard to explain. In France, even the anarchists want
a union.) There are wonderful photos of toddler Gwendal and his parents walking in the woods, Yanig smoking a pipe, Nicole
with her waist-length blond hair flowing over a particularly shaggy sheepskin coat.

Now these two couples were coming together for the most important first date since their own.

If Gwendal and I had been the producers of a reality TV show, we couldn’t have rigged the setting more carefully. In a narrow
passage in the residential 12th arrondissement, Le Picotin spills over warmth from the moment you walk in the door: bright
yellow walls and red checkered curtains, the only music is the animated clinking of silverware and glasses. We called ahead
for the restaurant’s specialty,
épaule d’agneau confit,
slow-roasted shoulder of lamb. Real estate agents will tell you to bake cookies when you
are trying to sell your house. It makes buyers feel as though they are already home. Le Picotin smelled like a farmhouse before
a big holiday dinner. If you can conjure up the feeling of “home,” why not “family”?

As on any first date, everyone had dressed carefully, my mother in black with one of her vintage pins, Nicole with a brightly
colored scarf slung just so over her shoulders. The contrast was striking: Nicole, tiny and blond, capable of sitting in silence
with a volume of Lacan and a pot of herbal tea for hours at a time; my mother, tall, with jet-black hair and hands always
in motion, the kind of person who talks to strangers on planes and trains.

We sat down at the narrow table against the warm leather banquettes, one couple on each side, Gwendal and I in the center.
I imagined a Bedouin tent, two families from different clans coming together to negotiate a dowry. Gwendal and I are both
only children, so it was clear that each side was offering up their most prized possession, hoping the others knew what a
precious gift they were receiving.

When introducing future in-laws, a language barrier can be a very useful thing indeed. No one can say anything insulting,
on purpose or otherwise, and everyone has time to warm up to one another gradually. Gwendal and I began the slow work—a life’s
work, it turns out—of translating back and forth.

In the year I had been in France, I had learned first to detest, and then to appreciate a certain amount of awkward silence.
All this translation was wearying, but I knew it was better that they couldn’t fully engage right away. I was sure that they
would come to like one another, but not if my parents stormed the ramparts like typical Americans, loud and laughing and talking
about very personal things. It would take time for my parents to absorb Nicole’s intellectual formulations and Yanig’s reserve.

One thing everyone could actively participate in was the food. The lamb had been cooked for hours, till it fell apart with
the touch of a knife. Generally speaking, the French do two things to meat: eat it raw or bloody, or cook it for so long it
begins to melt, turning into an unctuous, fragrant, childhood memory-inducing stew.
Saignant,
the word for “rare,” literally means “bleeding.” “Medium” or “well done” smacks of indecision, or worse, disrespect for the
animal. Why would you kill an innocent creature just to eat it ashy and gray? At Le Picotin, the tender lamb is served on
a wooden carving board, surrounded by sautéed potatoes and mushrooms.

Normally, I would be against an all-brown meal. A meal of a single color usually signals “school cafeteria,” but in this case
there was something festive, medieval, abundant, about the homogeneous palette of meat, starch, and vegetable. Portions here
were generous—we were easing my parents in slowly, trying not to shock them with the comparative restraint and expense of
a French dinner plate.

Except for approving ums and ahs, conversation ceased. Gwendal and I were glad to take a break from the translation.

Along with the fading awkwardness, I felt a sense of relief. As halting as this meeting was, it was easier than others I’d
rehearsed in my head. I had allowed myself to imagine a dinner like this only once before in my life, with the parents of
my college boyfriend, and even the imaginary version had been a disaster. Like almost every boy I’d been out with since high
school (who says I didn’t have a rebellious streak?), he was Catholic (I am Jewish). When would we discuss getting married
in church? Before the appetizer, or after? Except for the Christmas tree, Gwendal’s family was as atheist as they come.

The two couples sitting across from each other tonight were so different that there was no possible way they could pass judgment.
My mother was a bobby-socked sorority girl who saw
Elvis in concert at the Brooklyn Paramount. Paul grew up speaking Yiddish in the Bronx. Nicole was born in Casablanca when
Morocco was still a French protectorate, and Yanig was raised in a small fishing village in Brittany, where he learned to
sail on his grandfather’s boat. I tried to think of some common point of reference. Maybe they all watched Neil Armstrong
take his first steps on the moon? (It was broadcast live in France in the middle of the night.) Did they all remember where
they were when President Kennedy was shot? When the Berlin Wall fell? They had seen so few of the same things, led so little
of the same life, yet here they were, about to become family.

At least there would be no postgame wickedness. No arguing about the check (Gwendal and I took it), no spending the taxi ride
home talking about who would pay for the rehearsal dinner (“What’s that?” said Gwendal), and no haggling over how many great-aunts
each side got to invite (none). Everyone was swimming, not so much out of their depth as in a different pond. Curiously, it
made things easier.

“
Mo-re wi-ne?
” Yanig refilled Paul’s glass with Brouilly. Yanig, I’d begun to suspect, understood more English than he let on. I’d been
watching his brain work under the crease of those bushy eyebrows all evening. All those years of sailing back and forth across
the English Channel and the Irish Sea, surely he knew how to do more than competently order a beer.

The waiter came back to see about dessert. Normally dessert is a bit of a nonstarter in this place, owing to the quantity
and richness of what came before, but Paul is a committed chocoholic and the profiteroles had attracted his attention. Yanig
and Nicole ordered espresso. My mother, still searching in vain for a big mug of black decaf coffee, settled for a cappuccino.

The profiteroles arrived, three golden, lopsided puffs of choux pastry, filled with vanilla ice cream just starting to melt
from the
heat of the kitchen. The waiter poured the dark chocolate sauce from a small copper pitcher and, watching Paul’s eyes widen
in delight, left it at the table. He also brought several extra spoons. I thought back to the Bedouin tent; eating from a
shared plate is a mark of both hospitality and trust. Paul pushed the dish into the middle of the table and everyone picked
up a spoon. No more translation necessary.

The next day, we met Nicole and Yanig at a flea market. Walking was better for everyone, less conversation, lots of opportunities
to nod and point. After half an hour, we left the men at a café, sipping a beer and watching the world go by. I continued
with my mother and Nicole.

They inspected the stands at the same leisurely pace. My mother picked up a silver strawberry spoon, looked at Nicole and
smiled. Nicole picked up a teacup and a saucer, raised her eyebrows, and smiled back.

I think this might work out just fine.

W
E RENTED MY
parents an apartment for their stay, and it didn’t have cable. In the year and a half since September 11, my parents had
become politically unrecognizable news junkies. My mother, who used to watch TV only when she did the ironing on Sunday afternoons,
now kept CNN going 24/7. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might be tonight’s guests on
Larry King,
and she didn’t want to miss it.

September 11, a moment of terrible unity for most Americans, had been a moment of exile for me. I wasn’t home, and in the
months that followed it was made clear to me, I would never be entirely home again. I was living in London at the time. I
watched my home city crumble on the BBC while my parents watched the local news. They were with the widows of firefighters
and men
holding pictures of missing fiancées, I was with the evenhanded political analysts and smug pundits. I was watching history
on somebody else’s channel, and in that moment I became, for them, slightly less American.

As George Bush ordered the first bombers over Baghdad, we were waiting for the metro on our way home from dinner. My parents
kept looking around, like maybe they could get a mini Panasonic TV out of one of the vending machines. “They keep showing
this video,” said my mother, “of Saddam Hussein’s brother torturing dogs.” Gwendal didn’t say a word; he is smarter than I
am. “Which is what to do with anything?” I snapped, steam coming out of my ears. Like so many formerly reasonable people,
my parents were now convinced that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were childhood friends who sat in the sandbox together
pounding GI Joes over the head with a plastic shovel. “They have WMD. Colin Powell said so.” When my parents finally accepted,
along with millions of Americans, that Colin Powell had presented faulty intelligence to the United Nations, they reacted
as if their own perfect child had betrayed them, broken curfew, decided to get a sex change operation without telling them.
They were personally, achingly, head-shakingly disappointed.

“I just wish we could get some real news,” grumbled Paul as we stepped off the train. It was one of many times over the next
few years when I heard the American version of things described as the truth, everything else as just commentary.

T
HUS FAR THE
apartment search was yielding nothing but tired feet. My parents, unused to ambulating without a car, were now forced to
tramp up five flights of spiral stairs to dim apartments with sinks at odd angles and the occasional view of the tip of the
Eiffel Tower (if you stood on the toilet, looked left, and leaned out the window until you almost fell out).