Lunch in Paris (3 page)

I
am leading a double life. By day I read about Victorian insane asylums in the British Library; by night I decipher X-rated
e-mails with a French-English dictionary. Every few weeks I bring my overnight bag to work on Friday, hop on the Eurostar,
and by dinnertime I am in Paris.

It is only a fifteen-minute walk from the Gare du Nord back to Gwendal’s flat, but that’s all the time it takes to shed my
London life. I feel lighter; I empty my pockets of business cards and deadlines and to-do lists. My purposeful steps slow
in front of darkened store windows and blackboard menus begging to be considered for our next meal.

Any weekend in Paris begins with dinner, and Gwendal and I quickly find our local. The Bistro Sainte Marthe is not the kind
of place you just happen into. It’s like a scene out of a fifties detective novel:
at the end of a narrow one-way street, tucked in the corner of a small square, under the burgundy awning, behind the velvet
curtain, ask for Jacques
. When these buildings went up at the turn of the twentieth century, they would have housed blue-collar Paris, maybe the families
of the men who worked at the old print
warehouses down by the canal. Now they are full of immigrant families; fluorescent light glows harshly from the windows, illegal
electricity cables creep up the sides of the buildings like vines. There’s a Chinese revivalist church across the square,
and one or two brightly painted facades—evidence of artists in residence, in search of cheap real estate and “authenticity.”
A pack of boys kick a soccer ball, barely avoiding the terrace tables where women with increasingly expensive handbags come
to dine. I’m the last person in the world anyone would call a hipster, but I recognize a hipster hangout when I see one. Just
as well my pearls are in a drawer in London. It’s like Avenue C meets Beirut.

Inside is one narrow room with bloodred walls and eight or nine tables nestled around the bar. The high ceiling is covered
with mismatched chandeliers. While we are waiting to be seated, I tuck my cold nose into the warmth of Gwendal’s neck. There’s
always a moment after we sit down at the cramped wooden table, face-to-face after weeks apart. An awkward silence or too much
talking before we fall back into the easy intimacy sparked by a long look or his hand in my hair. When I was a teenager I
would have called this “twinkle toes”—the long-awaited touch you can feel from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.
Though everyone (my mother, my best friends, my boss) knows where I’m off to, these weekends in Paris feel like a preciously
guarded secret.
An affair
. All I need now is a trench coat and a cigarette holder.

Thinking ahead is a reflex for me, so before I order dinner I’m already doing strategic planning for dessert. Even as Gwendal
translates our choices, I’m distracted by the smell of melting chocolate. Plate after plate leaves the kitchen, held aloft
by waiters as they inch past the bar. I strain my neck to see which way the chocolate wind is blowing. The plates land at
a table in the corner, crowded with scruffy young men and the women who love them. My view is obscured by a haze of smoke.

When
le dessert
finally arrives, it looks like an innocent upside-down chocolate cupcake, accompanied by a small cloud of freshly whipped
cream. But when my spoon breaks the surface, the chocolate center flows like dark lava onto the whiteness of the plate. The
last ounce of stress drains from my body. I feel my spine soften in the chair. The menu says
Moelleux au Chocolat
“
Kitu.
”

“ ‘
Kitu
’ is a pun,” says Gwendal, with his best Humphrey Bogart squint. “It means ‘which kills.’ ”

I have discovered the French version of “Death by Chocolate.”

I
LIKE TO
think I was born in the wrong century. I’m sure I would have done very well with a hoop skirt, a fan, and a drawing master.
(My mother likes to remind me that, more likely, I would have been a very nearsighted scullery maid.) Paris is the perfect
city for my kind of mental time travel. There are very few streets that don’t bear some small imprint of a grander, more gracious
time—the swooping curve of a wrought-iron balcony or a fading stencil above the window of a
boulangerie
.

I’ve been playing this particular game for as long as I can remember. Like many only children, I spent a fair amount of time
entertaining myself. I never had an imaginary friend, but I did have an imaginary life, many of them, in fact. My favorite
toy was my dress-up box, an old clothes hamper filled with tutus, floppy hats bedecked with polyester flowers, and my auntie
Lynn’s wedding dress, dyed a garish pink and trimmed with rug tassels for a Chiquita Banana Halloween costume. I played princess,
bride, teacher, queen. There was a turquoise sequined tube top that probably made me look like a very convincing streetwalker.

My mother was a special education teacher, my father a salesman. Just after I was born they moved from Brooklyn to a Tudor
in suburban New Jersey. I went to a redbrick sixties elementary
school a few blocks away. My worst fear, even then, was to be ordinary.

From the time I was very young, extraordinary was somehow linked to long ago and far away. While my kindergarten friends dreamed
of becoming ballerinas or astronauts, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I had a picture book of famous digs that my father
and I read over and over again, until the cardboard cover was nearly in shreds. I imagined myself opening up King Tut’s tomb,
gently lifting a gold bracelet or a wine urn undisturbed for thousands of years. I liked the musty smell of old books, the
satin sheen of Sargent’s portraits, and the glimmer of amethyst crystals in the darkened gem hall of the Museum of Natural
History. When the age for dress-up was over, I immersed myself in novels, diving into other people’s imaginary worlds. The
streets of Dickens’s London were much easier for me to get my head around than fractions. In high school I acted in plays
by Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Molière; I felt more comfortable in a whalebone corset than in the ripped cutoff jeans I
wore to class. By the time I graduated from college, where I’d switched from a very practical psychology major to an English
Literature thesis on
Paradise Lost
and
Peter Pan,
I was truly out of sync. I saw no choice but to cultivate it. My friends made fun of me. Kurt Cobain is the one in the plaid
shirt, right?

Gwendal saw Paris the same way I did, a different century around every corner. He was still a student and he didn’t have much
money, so we spent many of our first weekends together simply walking around. Although he’d lived in Paris for ten years,
he’d never quite lost the provincial boy’s fascination with the big city. He was still open to the magic of this place. I
didn’t know a lot of people who were open to magic at all.

Everyone talks about Paris in the springtime. Maybe it’s because my own Paris romance started in December, but I prefer the
City of Light in the winter.

Paris in the winter is damp and close, so unlike the blinding sunshine and razor-sharp air of New York. In fact, the weather
in Paris is exactly the same as the weather in London—Paris just has nicer places to hide. There is always a brasserie awning
to hover under or an ornate doorway to duck into. I love the way the rain melts the colors together, like a chalk drawing
on the sidewalk. There is a moment, just after sunset, when the shops turn on their lights and steam starts to fog up the
windows of the cafés. In French, this twilight time implies a hint of danger. It’s called
entre chien et loup,
between the dog and the wolf.

It was just beginning to get dark as we walked through the small garden of the Palais Royal. We watched as carefully dressed
children in toggled peacoats and striped woolen mittens finished the same game of improvised soccer we had seen in the Place
Sainte Marthe.

Behind the Palais Royal the wide avenues around the Louvre gave way to narrow streets, small boutiques, and bistros. It started
to drizzle. Gwendal turned a corner, and tucked in between two storefronts, barely wider than a set of double doors, I found
myself staring down a corridor of fairy lights. A series of arches stretched into the distance, topped with panes of glass,
like a greenhouse, that echoed the plip-plop of the rain. It was as if we’d stepped through the witch’s wardrobe, the phantom
tollbooth, what have you, into another era.

The Passage Vivienne was nineteenth-century Paris’s answer to a shopping mall, a small interior street lined with boutiques
and tearooms where ladies could browse at their leisure without wetting the bustles of their long dresses or the plumes of
their new hats.

It was certainly a far cry from the shopping malls of my youth, with their piped-in Muzak and neon food courts. Plaster reliefs
of Greek goddesses in diaphanous tunics lined the walls. Three-pronged brass lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains.

About halfway down, there was an antique store selling nothing but old kitchenware—ridged ceramic bowls for hot chocolate,
burnished copper molds in the shape of fish, and a pewter mold for madeleines, so worn around the edges it might have belonged
to Proust himself. At the end of the gallery, underneath a clock held aloft by two busty angels, was a bookstore. There were
gold stencils on the glass door.
Maison fondée en 1826
.

I pushed past a sagging stand of postcards: lovers in front of the Eiffel Tower, a child running with a baguette under his
arm, a nude woman squatting over a bidet. A ruddy brass bell tinkled on a chain from the doorknob as we walked in. The smell
of dust and beeswax came from the carefully polished shelves, the color of dark chocolate, which lined the walls. In one corner
there was a spiral staircase, so small a fat cat would have trouble climbing it. I could almost feel the bustle of my dress
sweeping the floor. Clearly this city was not going to do any good for my already tenuous hold on the twenty-first century.

A
FTER A HALF-HOUR
wait over a dish of green olives and a glass of the house
apéritif,
the waitress came to take our order. We were having a late lunch at L’Hermès, a small restaurant in the 19th arrondissement,
up the hill from Gwendal’s apartment.

“
Eh, alors,
” began the waitress, describing the day’s specials. “We have duck with braised cabbage and apples, cassoulet, and very special”—she
nodded for emphasis—“
du porc noir de Bigorre.
”

“What is special about this pig?” asked Gwendal, launching her into the grandest of explanations.

“Well,” she said, putting down her pad on the counter. “He has short black hair. He’s about this big.” She stretched her arms
wide enough to take in the length of our table and the one next to us. “He is very particular, very difficult to raise
en captivité
. You
see, he likes to eat in the forest, whatever he wants.” And stopping to consider the charmed life of this truffle-hunting,
free-roaming raven-haired beast, she finished with a flourish. “
Il est heureux, quoi.
He’s happy!”

I could see it on his face, Gwendal was more than convinced. What could be more salubrious than a luncheon of happy pig? I
ordered the cassoulet.

I found that getting to know Gwendal was a bit like befriending a very personable (and sexy) alien. He looked like the people
I knew, and spoke (sort of) like the people I knew, but he was clearly wired differently. Of course I’d had to get to know
previous boyfriends—but I’d never had to get to know someone in quite this way. The boys I’d been out with before went to
the same schools, came from the same towns. I could assume what they’d be thinking about a whole lot of things. I could never
assume what Gwendal would be thinking about anything. Although we were roughly the same age, we didn’t have the same cultural
references. I didn’t know anything about Serge Gainsbourg, he had never seen
The Breakfast Club
or eaten a Twinkie. On our way to the restaurant, we passed the Stalingrad metro station. “Why is there a metro in Paris
named after a city in Communist Russia?” I asked.