When I was 20 I left the crowded, incestuous gut of New York and headed due east, across the humbling ink blot of the Atlantic, to Paris, the City of Light.
I had been there once before during the summer following my high school graduation. Freshly separated from my boyfriend, struggling to emotionally adapt to my father’s remarriage and about to embark on my freshman year at NYU, I could not find it in me to muster the touristy spirit necessary for European travel. My attraction to Paris during that trip seemed both strangely visceral and as if I’d experienced it from afar, like I could see through both ends of the telescope. I was too ruined by introspection to appreciate my fondness for the city then, but I’d always known that some day I would study abroad in Paris.
The chance came during the fall of my junior year at NYU. I loved living abroad, but it was also one of the loneliest times in my life. It made me behave in extremely out of character ways. I was brash and brazen like I had never been in New York. I guess I became less shy while I was there, mostly because as an American abroad you are constantly embarrassing yourself and eventually it just stops bothering you. Every time you open your mouth, or make some minor cultural faux pas like bringing a coffee on the Metro, you are embarrassing yourself. After a while you just get used to it, and being shy starts to feel like a luxury.
NYU didn’t have any dorms in Paris, so they matched us with a roommate based on a survey about living and studying habits, and placed us in apartments scattered throughout the city. I was placed with a girl named Rachel, who eventually became my best friend abroad, but for some reason in the beginning we barely spoke at all. We were assigned to a well-lived-in two bedroom in the deep recesses of Paris’s Chinatown in the 13th arrondissement. It took three Metros and over an hour to get from our apartment to school. My room had a twin bed with a canopy. The toilet was separate from the shower, which I found odd but eventually convenient. There was an old piano in the living room, but neither of us knew how to play.
One night during my first week abroad I was coming home a little after 12am on the Metro when a man exposed himself to me on the train. I was alone, but it wasn’t very late, and I would be home in one or two stops. The Metro was not packed but it was full enough, with about 10 people scattered around the car. When I looked up, I saw a dude leering at me, and shortly thereafter noticed that he was jerking off in full view of everyone. I said, “Oh my god!” very loudly and people looked and it was my first week in Paris so I wasn’t very comfortable using my French and everyone just kept staring at me like I was crazy. I moved to the other side of the car and the guy kept grinning at me with his dick flopping around and then finally at the next stop he got off.
I freaked out. I was alone in a foreign city with no friends, my family 3,000 miles away and 8 hours ahead, and I had just been the victim of a lewd public act. I ran home to Rachel and told her about it, and she and her parents promptly convinced NYU to let us move into a place in another area of town. After much pushback from the university, they placed us in a servants’ quarters loft in the 6th arrondissement. It was tiny, with a sofa bed in the living room and a loft above it, a tight kitchen and one bathroom. But it had a small balcony that overlooked Le Jardin Du Luxembourg and it was close to all of the good bars and restaurants and we had to get out of French Chinatown anyway, so we took it.
***
Most of what happened in Paris I remember in fond snapshots, clips of memory salvaged from the haze of my newly bilingual world. I remember the first time I dreamt in French: the events in the dream were innocuous, but the fact that I was beginning to not only think but dream in another language gave me pause. It felt like a whole new person was being born inside of me, like I had unearthed a fresh personality that was always there but needed coaxing to rise to the surface.
In the beginning, my French was terrible. But as a single 20-year-old American girl in a city known for its romance, most men I met found my linguistic struggles endearing. On one date in a tiny wine bar near the Pompidou, my gentleman friend asked, “Tu aimes ce vin?,” a polite phrase easily translated to “Do you like this wine?” But I heard “Tu aimes souvent?” instead, which, embarrassingly enough, translates into “Do you love often?” I assumed he was asking if I dated a lot of men, or had sex a lot, so I got really red and embarrassed and sputtered and eventually he realized my misunderstanding and was very kind about it. I couldn’t bring myself to go out with him again, though. My embarrassment over that linguistic mix-up loomed over us like a sour cloud.
But in Paris I did love often, or at least with the abandon of a naïve schoolgirl. On the night of the 2008 election, I attended the Democrats Abroad party with Rachel. There I met someone who would alter the arc of my entire time abroad and begin to reorganize my core beliefs about sexuality. Naturally, he was 17 years older.
Eric was a gorgeous, sophisticated British doctor and professor working for Doctors Without Borders, and I could not believe my luck. Everything about him seemed ripped from my childhood fantasies of what form I believed a Parisian lover should take. Like me, he was only in Paris for a short time, brushing up on his French before taking up his doctor post in the Sudan.
On election night we kissed for the first time, right as CNN announced that Obama had won, amongst the backdrop of red, white and blue confetti and a drunk, gangly French girl shouting, “Il a gagné! Obama has won!”
The next day I tried to explain what had happened to my friends but everything about him made me feel like I was making it all up: in short, he was too good to be true.
Because our relationship had an expiration date, there were few feelings, just lots of kissing and a stern palm on my thigh in dark, dark restaurants. He would take me to amazing bars and cafes all over the city and we would retire to his apartment in Montmartre. In the morning he would walk me to the Metro and there, with matted hair and reddened cheeks, him holding an umbrella above both our heads, I felt like a grownup for the first time. Like drinking a lot of wine or smoking cigarettes on rickety bridges cast over the Seine, being with him felt exactly like what I was supposed to be doing while abroad.
I did other things, too, like sang with a street performer in front of a crowd by the Seine, and traveled to Prague and Barcelona and Amsterdam, and spent whole days in bookstores writing and people watching. I got a cushy magazine writing gig that paid $3/word (!), then folded after my first column was published. I barely talked to anyone back home; I studied and read and drank cheap wine and stayed up late telling ghost stories with Rachel. I smoked so many cigarettes on our balcony I got a nasty note from our downstairs neighbor scolding in French, “My balcony is not an ashtray!” I kept the stubs and threw them away in our trashcan after that.
***
In October I will go back to Paris for a Google conference my boyfriend is attending. We will spend a week in Rome for the conference, then take the train up to Paris and stay there for a few nights.
Steve has never been to Paris, and I haven’t been back since Christmas 2008. While we are there I will take him to my favorite places: Shakespeare & Co., Le Pompidou, Le Jardin Du Luxembourg, Chez George. I will make him trek all the way to Montmartre just so we can eat at a café that serves my favorite salad. I will make him go thrifting in the Marais and drink screw cap wine at Pont Neuf. We will take photos with our necks craned awkwardly in front of the Eiffel Tower or next to Notre Dame. The city will be the same but the way I experience it will be different. In my former haunts we will weave new memories. It’s been three years, and I am a different person now, anyway. For one, I’m not lonely anymore.
Ahhh, I love this, obviously. You totally won the balls list for singing by the Seine, just sayin’. Do you remember how much we cried in the beginning, after I found out that we had to live in Chinatown and after you had that bad metro ride? We never did figure out the story behind “Maman!” which is kind of creepy, now that I think about it. Ah I could keep writing forever but I think you captured the whole experience so well. Oh and “being shy starts to feel like a luxury” is exactlyyyy how I started to feel this past year in France. Tu me manques, chérie!!!
That salad in Montmartre is so fucking good. There is no other salad like it on this planet. FRIED POTATOES + SALAD…how come no one else has thought of this?