Lunch in Paris (35 page)

A
S GWENDAL’S CONFIDENCE
grew, mine disintegrated. His American dreamer, with all her big plans, was stalled like a rusty Dodge on the side of I-95.
As Gwendal continued to refine his plans, mine became more vague, even nonexistent. I started to disappear.

Here it was, right on schedule: my mini existential crisis. Yes, the writing was still coming in dribs and drabs. But it was
so
slow
. Yup, the tours were great. I felt like I was doing something really valuable—sharing the love of museums my father had given
me. But it wasn’t
mine
. Once again, I was a charming cog in someone else’s wheel. I was once again forced to confront (with the accompanying self-loathing)
the fact that I had the goods, but not the discipline or perseverance to create something for myself. How could anyone so
ambitious be so inert?

While Gwendal was mining the American dream for all it was worth, I was forced to come to terms with the flip side of my American
optimism. Implicit in the American dream is the idea of self-determination. The result of our just-do-it attitude is that
anything you
don’t
do is your fault. This ethic of personal responsibility informs American attitudes on everything from obesity to college
admissions to welfare reform. In the end, our level of expectation—and the accompanying fear of failure—can be just as paralyzing
as the French notion that nothing is possible in the first place.

Take, for example, my weekly rants to Amanda in California. Most Sundays, we sit on the phone for an hour, hooting with laughter
at the depth of our collective failure. It helps if there is some timely comparison. A classmate of hers from Yale
Law School just published a Pulitzer-nominated book of short stories. Amanda just turned thirty, and still no contract with
HBO. What were all those $15 martinis at the Four Seasons for, anyway? We were supposed to be famous, or at least rich by
now. What the fuck have we been doing with our time?

Part of me knows it’s perverse, but I find this kind of self-flagellation comforting. Somehow these conversations leave me
refreshed, buoyant, ready for another week of precisely phrased e-mails, unreturned phone calls, and unpaid invoices. Gwendal
finds them ridiculous, a waste of useful time and energy.

It is clear that I have created a monster.

Now that Gwendal has doubled his salary and seen the deer at Skywalker Ranch, he’s the one counseling me on my career. He
asks me questions straight off the Harvard MBA application. “What is your passion?” he says, as if this should be enough to
get me out of bed in the morning. “Where do you see yourself in five years? What do you really
want?
” It’s psychological torture, having my own weapons used against me.

The fact is, I don’t have an answer for him anymore. What I
want
is to go to lots of cocktail parties with famous writers—peers, mind you—sign books, and eat tuna carpaccio on wasabi flat
bread, all while never having to sit down at my computer ever again. Bless him, he just doesn’t get it.

All of a sudden, my French husband is better at the American dream than I am. He has latched on to endless possibility, and
all the hard work it entails—without the arrogance or impatience that can cause us native Yanks to think we have it coming
to us. Strangely enough, any time we start to talk about where my life is going, I’ve always got an excuse—and for every suggestion
he makes, I start to throw out the standard French answer:
pas possible
.

W
HILE GWENDAL WAS
driving through the lot at Warner Brothers, parking his rented car next to the set where James Dean met Natalie Wood, I was
at the butcher. A hotel room with a view of the Hollywood sign may have been his idea of arriving; these days mine was successfully
ordering a leg of lamb. It may not sound like much, but of all the rites of passage I’ve experienced in France, none has given
me greater satisfaction than flying solo at our local butcher. These outings were part of an ongoing battle between my French
and American selves. The
Parisienne
in me said I was making progress—it felt good to be a habitué of the neighborhood, integrated into the French rhythm. The
American in me was scared that I was turning into a 1950s housewife.

I found a book recently, called
The Goodman of Paris: A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris, c. 1393
. It was written by a husband for his young wife, to instruct her on all she would need to know to run a harmonious household.
There are chapters on God and gardening, on hiring servants and curing a toothache. There are also extensive instructions
for the butcher:

“The fourth article is that you, as sovereign mistress of your house, know how to order dinners, suppers, dishes, and courses,
and must be wise in that which concerns the butcher and the poulterer, and have knowledge of spices.”

I’ve only been on this earth since 1974, and in France since 2002. You see my dilemma. I had centuries of catching up to do.

The Boucherie Saint-Jacques on the corner of the avenue Parmentier and the rue du Faubourg-du-Temple is not for wimps. These
butchers are serious men. They wear white coats and ties and, like a team of surgeons, wield knives with a casual precision,
never looking down as cleavers descend millimeters from their fingers. There is something of the operating theater about the
place: bright white light, spotless metal, and exposed flesh. The opening hours alone require enough extra planning to scare
away
the casual customer: closed on Mondays, open Tuesday through Saturday but closed for lunch from one to three thirty, open
Sunday mornings but closed Thursday afternoons.

Plus, one of them looks like Matt Dillon.

It’s normal for a
Parisienne
to develop a little crush on her butcher. It’s the equivalent of an American developing a crush on her handsome young doctor.
There’s something macho and authoritative about tearing apart hunks of raw meat. It requires good hands.

Naturally, he doesn’t know I’m alive. In fact, a trip to the butcher is a lot like high school—a Darwinian feeding frenzy.
Instead of blond girls with lip gloss, the alpha females are blue-haired grannies with plaid shopping caddies, clicking their
tongues with contempt as you dither over cuts of veal or forget the French word for “deboned.” You’d better know which line
you’re in. There’s one to order, another to pay. Once you’ve picked out your whole rabbit, skinned from the tip of his head
to what was once his fluffy tail, and given the appropriate instructions for boning, chopping, or grinding, you can pass over
to the other queue. The cashier stamps your ticket with a red inky
PAYÉ
, and you sidle back to the counter to pick up your bag. Matt Dillon has already served three people in the time it takes
you to fish out the twenty centimes from the bottom of your purse (exact change is appreciated), but somehow you always end
up with your
côte de porc
and not your neighbor’s
côte de veau.
Once (very early on) I found myself in the cashier’s line by mistake and was suddenly at the register with no ticket to pay.
The woman’s face was like a stone tablet, as if the president of the chess club had wandered over to the Goth corner of the
schoolyard and asked to touch a tongue piercing.

Sometimes there will be a Matt Dillon sighting in the neighborhood. The kind of encounter that would have produced hours of
intense analysis between my fourteen-year-old self and whatever
friend was on the other end of my new cordless phone. I was at the café next to the metro one day, finishing an article. I
looked up from my typing and there he was, with his perfectly spiked black hair, leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette.
There was a slash of blood across his white smock, and a baguette tucked under his arm. I felt a flurry of butterflies in
my stomach, and just barely stopped myself from running my fingers through my hair. I looked up again, not
at
him, but,
you know,
in his general direction. He nodded.
Ohmigod
. You couldn’t call it a smile exactly, just some acknowledgment that he recognized me. I instantly dipped my gaze back down
to the computer screen, my fingers tingling as they touched the keys.

Sometimes life really is just like high school.

I
N EARLY OCTOBER
, we went to San Francisco for Afra’s wedding. I caught something on the plane, and by the time the rehearsal dinner rolled
around I was worried that I’d have barely enough voice to croak out my toast the next day.

While Gwendal slept in, I was being lectured. The morning of the wedding, Afra and Amanda staged an intervention over coffee
and carrot muffins at a local café. Afra is the big sister of our troika, a status accorded by her years and years of unwavering
devotion to her life plan. “We’re worried about you,” she said, wiping a coffee ring from our recently vacated table. “How
come every time we ask how you are, all you talk about is Gwendal’s business? What about you?”

I stared into my tissue. I just wasn’t in the mood. Over the past several months I had taken on the role of full-time woman
behind the throne. The helpmeet, the cheerleader. There was only so much
rah-rah
to go around. I took a sip from my mug of cappuccino; it was a bathtub full of coffee, at least five times what
I’d be served in Paris. I was so proud of Gwendal, but at the same time I felt hollow inside. I knew my friends hardly recognized
me. I hardly recognized myself.

I was between two worlds, and what made perfect sense for one, didn’t make any sense for the other. I could still talk a good
game—cover my empty agenda with fancy-sounding smoke and mirrors—Louvre, new media editor,
International Herald Tribune
. But alone at my desk in Paris, without anyone to perform for, I was lost. Removed from the straight and narrow path of what
I was supposed to do, far from the great expectations of my childhood and the constant striving of my New York set, I had
very little idea what I wanted. I had made and discarded so many five-year plans, all some version of who I was supposed to
be—a fantasy me.

Paris presented different questions. If no one asked me for the rest of my life what I did for a living, how much money I
made, who I knew, where I went to school—what would I want to do with my time? What if I stopped to ask myself what would
make me happy, instead of what would make me successful, respectable, worthy? If that answer had to come from the inside,
rather than the outside, what would it be?

Afra added an Equal to her latte and took a sip. “You can’t spend the rest of your life at the market.”

I blew my nose into a paper napkin. I didn’t have the courage to say it out loud just yet, but a tiny voice popped up inside
me:
why not?