Lunch in Paris (5 page)

“Never on a first date,” he said, grabbing my hand.

“Never on a first date,” I repeated solemnly, still threatening to break into the giggles.

I should have known it right then. A man of grace and humor. A keeper.

O
UR WALKS OFTEN
took us across the river, past the towering facade of Notre-Dame and into the flower market on the Ile de la Cité. We stopped
at the Mosquée de Paris, sipping tea in the shade of their giant oak tree, and lounged in the Arènes de Lutèce, a second-century
Roman amphitheater where kids play tag and students study for exams on the terraced stone steps. Much of Paris is actually
hidden behind the street, so we followed residents with their two-wheeled shopping trolleys into flowered courtyards and secret
gardens. We often spent the whole day doing nothing but walking and talking.

We talked a lot about the future. Not necessarily our future (why burst the bubble?) but the things we wanted, the things
we dreamed about.

Gwendal never really wanted to be a computer scientist. He wanted to make movies. He was always inventing stories about people
we passed on the street.

“See that man on the bicycle, the way he leans his body forward. He used to ride a Harley-Davidson. All the girls were crazy
for him. They promised him his own show on television. Now he dyes his hair and runs a bowling alley.”

In fact, Gwendal had just finished a script about a clown named Max who rides around Paris on a bicycle, observing all the
strange pieces of stage business that make up life in a big city.

“OK,” I said. “When will you film it? How? What’s the next step?”

At first he thought these questions were a polite reflex, like laughing at a lover’s bad jokes. Now he knows better. This
American optimism cheered and puzzled him. He didn’t understand my certainty. I didn’t understand his hesitation.

I told Gwendal all about my plan to be a museum curator. I would spend my life surrounded by beautiful and precious things.
I had it all worked out: master’s, PhD, office full of leather-bound books at the Morgan Library. He didn’t elaborate on my
plan. I made it clear that there was little room for improvement. Instead, he said, “I want to show you the dinosaurs.”

All of Paris’s natural history museums are in the Jardin des Plantes, a prim flower garden near the mosque. In the foyer of
the Paleontology Museum there’s a sculpture of a female gorilla, teeth bared, huge hands stretched toward the ceiling. Under
her feet is the limp body of a hunter. There’s something grand and absurd and slightly comic about it. Is this what we look
like when passion gets the best of us?

Gwendal saw me staring. “That’s evolution for you,” he said. “Survival of the fittest.”

Stepping through the turnstile into the great hall was like stepping into a time machine. The place was absolutely silent
except for the sharp creak of our steps on the parquet floor.
There were no kids, no educational videos, no interactive computer terminals—just rows and rows of skeletons on wooden stands.
The fading paper labels were handwritten in elaborate cursive, slipped into brass frames. The air was completely still, dusty
and close, like an attic full of treasures.

I
BLINKED BACK
the strongest memory. My father died several years ago, and when I need to talk to him, I go to a museum. Wherever I’ve been
in the world, museums have been my second homes. The Museum of Natural History in New York was the first building outside
my house that I have a conscious memory of knowing my way around. I was proud to lead my parents through the impossibly long
corridors toward the
Tyrannosaurus rex
or the giant squid.
Down the stairs, to the left, under the belly of the great blue whale
. When my parents divorced and my father receded into depression, museums were our weekend activity. Dollhouses and mummies
and finally paintings filling the blank space where my father used to be.

I was never comfortable with the term “bipolar disorder.” My father was diagnosed when it was still “manic depression,” and
that always seemed to me a better description. It described the years when he would barely speak, wiry thin and smoking menthol
cigarettes as we walked the streets of Manhattan. It described the impossible highs, when he would flirt raucously with waitresses,
scream at salesclerks, and sue doctors in a desperate attempt to make the world conform to his own grandiose self-image.

Museums became our routine. They were appropriate; and they were cheap (my father wasn’t always working). I loved the grand
staircase and the ever blooming flower arrangements in the foyer of the Metropolitan. I relished pinning the smooth tin admission
button, a different color every weekend, to my shirt collar. My
father would plod dutifully behind me as I retraced our steps—yet again—toward the Temple of Dendur, its stones brought over
from Egypt and put back together one by one, a giant jigsaw puzzle.

These rooms became the decor of my imaginary lives. I didn’t just want to visit, I wanted to
live
here. I wanted to sleep in the eighteenth-century bed with the satin cover, beneath a ceiling of plaster cherubs. Did they
let kids have birthday parties in the American Wing? Even as my interests changed and I let myself be dragged for a few minutes
toward the old masters and vintage photographs, the museum itself remained the same. Every object in the same spot. It was
an anchor. I like to think my father knew what he was giving me. His offering of order and beauty when he had no other.

I
RAN MY
hands along the varnished wooden railing of the museum’s balcony, waving to Gwendal on the other side. For a relative newcomer
to my life, I got the feeling he knew me suspiciously well. In the space of one afternoon he had unearthed the emotional source
of my goals, the pleasure and the comfort of them.

Not the how, but the why.

T
HERE WERE ODD
moments as well. Tiny pricks of cultural dissonance. After the museum, we strolled in the shade of the neatly trimmed trees,
looking for something to drink. The only thing available was Minute Maid fruit juice.

Gwendal took out his wallet. “I hate buying Coca-Cola,” he said. “They’re everywhere; you don’t even have a choice anymore.”

I thought maybe it was a translation problem. “It’s not Coke,” I said. “It’s orange juice.”

“Yes, but it’s made by the Coca-Cola corporation.” Ah, the insidious forces of American imperialism at work. Clearly, I was
not on the side of the angels in this argument. I didn’t even know Coca-Cola made orange juice.

G
WENDAL AND
I had been dating for about a year, and one Saturday night just before Easter, he decided it was time for us to take things
to the next level: sausage. It’s one thing for an American girl to waltz into Paris every few weeks to have sex and eat chocolate,
but can she handle a really good
andouillette?

I’m not queasy in the innards department—I lived in Scotland for a year and did the obligatory haggis dinner without a fuss.
Frankly, it tasted a lot like my grandmother’s kasha.

It was nine p.m. before we turned into the Passage de la Bonne Graine. I was babbling on excitedly about my latest project,
a job at an Internet start-up that sold fine art online. Sure, it was a detour from my studies, but only a minor one, with
stock options.

“I have to structure their online magazine,” I said, listing the categories: paintings, sculpture, silver, glass. “She gave
me her little brother as an assistant.” That might have been the most exciting part: “I have an
assistant
.”

There was a florist at the corner, closed for the night. I stopped in my tracks. Along with the heavy branches of lilacs and
tangled stems of forsythia was a fluffy mound of tiny sleeping chicks—a living, breathing Easter basket. Paris continued to
surprise me; instead of the slick consumerism of a twenty-first-century world capital, it was the little things, the living
things, that made me smile.

We were greeted at the door of the restaurant by a man with a distinguished bald head, wool vest, and glasses. We slipped
into a booth. The ceiling was low, striped with seventeenth-century wooden beams. Empty magnums of wine, large as buoys, lined
the walls. I glanced at the menu, clearly a stretch for a student on a budget.

Gwendal had chosen the restaurant because their supplier carried the exclusive AAAAA rating, shorthand for approval by the
Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Andouillette Authentique, a self-appointed band of
andouillette
lovers who roam the country in search of the best makers and most authentic preparations.
Andouillette
is a peculiar sausage, roughly cut, made from the stomach and intestines of the pig. Mr. Hardouin, the producer of tonight’s
specimen, was announced on the menu as
pourfendeur de gorets,
which Gwendal translated as the porcine equivalent of “defender of the faith.” All my talk about marketing plans and angel
investors seemed slightly ridiculous. The immediate question at hand was: did I want my
andouillette
in a mustard cream sauce, or should I opt for the authentic eighteenth-century preparation, with
lardons
, mushrooms, and
ris de veau
—veal sweetbreads?