Paris Was Ours (4 page)

It almost seems that Frenchmen like women better than English or American men do. Frenchmen seem to admire what women do, and will participate in discussions about curtains and recipes. You see them looking at fashions in store windows and even reading women’s magazines, whereas, as has often been remarked, Anglo-Saxon men seem to prefer the company of one another. It was fun to see
The Voysey Inheritance
at the National Theatre in London a few years back, but the status of the women in the big Voysey family of prosperous Victorians made clear a set of attitudes, condescending and protective, that may not have changed that much. All the important scenes take place with the mother and sisters out of the room.

My basic point is, Frenchmen are pretty uniformly gallant and approving of female appearance, and the result is more important than one might think. Since Frenchwomen are as capable as any of us, and maybe more capable, of getting themselves into misjudged outfits, it’s necessary to look more deeply into the secrets of their chic, and looking more deeply one
finds that the secret is confidence. Their men are cooperative and supportive. Tact, maybe even genuine goodwill, seems to prevail and give them the confidence never even to think they might look “wrong.”

French compatibility between the sexes has even broader implications. An Englishman friend—a BBC filmmaker—whom I asked what he noticed that was different in Frenchwomen, said, “Well, they look right at you. English girls never do, they’re so mousy and meek.” Ah, I thought, that’s because they don’t want to be accused of being hussies or asking to be harassed. The concept of the “loose woman” doesn’t seem to exist in France, though that of the femme fatale does and is altogether approved of. The higher status of women in France, including old women, becomes clear in French restaurants, where it’s common to see an elderly woman in chic clothes dining by herself at a good table, with a good bottle of wine and the attention of waiters; elderly women in the United States or England are somewhat abject and tend to stay out of the way or stick together.

Because of confidence, a Frenchwoman wouldn’t assume that a male colleague is harassing her when he says, “You look great today.” Think of the recent case in Africa, where a houseguest was raped by a government minister who said he misread her signals because she crossed her legs. In some parts of America, it’s unfortunately still true that a rape victim can be said to have been “asking for it” if she was wearing a low-cut dress or had ever had intercourse before.

Frenchwomen seem to have more confidence as mothers, bolstered by the approval of society if they work, helped out by the fine crèches and nursery schools—unlike in the United
States or England, where we are victims of the covertly Germanic
Kinder, Kirche, Küche
ethic, however this attitude is concealed, bolstered by hectoring, guilt-producing “experts” who foster the idea that an Anglo-Saxon mother dare not leave her child for ten seconds. The result: French children are civil, equable, and pleasant to have around, no complexes.

Frenchwomen don’t have a better take on everything, certainly not. There’s the matter of the red hair, for instance. Why do they dye their hair a red that has never been seen in nature? (And certainly never seen in the English-speaking world. I imagine there’s an explanation obscured by the mists of time—perhaps it was the admired hair color of a royal mistress of the seventeenth century, or Edith Piaf or someone.) It probably isn’t the influence of a current movie star, for the French seem relatively indifferent to celebrities (their most famous rock star, Johnny Hallyday, is now in his sixties), as if it is easier to designate someone and just keep him, instead of doing as we do: constantly dumping famous person A in favor of the new person B, to be dumped in her turn. When I travel to the United States or to England, I’m always baffled by the change in celebrities: Who is Brangelina? Who is Katie? The people in the headlines always seem new from a few weeks before.

Anyhow, some generalizations are possible: The famous English skin really is better (and in all ethnic groups), which must be from the relative lack of sun; French women still broil themselves on beaches and in tanning salons. (Nobody seems to have told them cigarettes confer wrinkles.) Mostly, French hair is short, much shorter than ours. In America, lots
of people don’t dye their hair, and turn white early; in France, hardly anybody turns gray that you can see, and everyone over forty is a blond. Weight: Yes, the French aren’t as fat, certainly not as fat as Americans, and not being fat affects everything else—for instance, wardrobe. When you have a girlish figure you can wear girlish clothes. My own theory is that the French diet has far fewer carbohydrates in it—but it also has smaller portions. The French walk more (but not more than in London, I wouldn’t think), and they certainly don’t eat between meals. But also, their attitude toward food is different from ours. It’s not a reward; it’s a subject of study and appreciation. Coming from a culture dedicated to keeping sweets away from children, I was horrified at the way some English mothers actually offer candy to their kids as bribes to be good. French children are given dessert because it’s the proper conclusion to a meal. My little French grandson rebuked me once for mentioning a fish course out of order. “Pas de poisson avant l’entrée,” he said.

The French seem to have overtaken us as gum chewers, though. The polite Americans I know in Paris would never chew gum or, for that matter, go to McDonald’s. Why have the French begun doing this? If only we could save other nations from our cultural mistakes. (I would have forbidden the Chinese to get cars; they could have skipped that phase and gone right to some marvelous advanced form of public transport, but no—and now they have more pollution and congestion even than we.) I’d forbid the French to smoke, which they almost seem to do as an expression of anti-Americanism—on the street, now that they can’t smoke in restaurants.

But mostly, in sum, I’d give them a thumbs-up for doing a lot of things right, and if they seem smug, which they certainly do, they’ve earned a right to it. Overall, I wish as Americans we would generally feel freer than we seem to be to adopt foreign customs that we admire or that work better than our native ones. Can’t we have trains? Health care? Why not?

Becoming a Parisian

L
IKE ANY FANTASY
, it was supposed to be ephemeral. It was also supposed to be transcendent. But here I was, stuck in airport traffic, and the only question in my head on that dismal January morning was, “What have I gotten Patricia and me into?” The taxi was nudging its way into the bumper-locked queue of cars snaking toward Paris, snuffed or so it seemed by the smoky pea soup that often passes as wintertime air, and my abs and glutes knotted in involuntary acknowledgment that our gamble of moving to Paris could be a really bad bet.

A colleague who had also recently left the
Times
had spent months making his decision, with neat lists of pros and cons and extensive conversations with various newsroom counselors. Far less methodical than he—also younger, with no children and more blitheness of spirit—I had done none of that. My lists were all in my head and consisted mostly of people in New York I would miss and things in Paris I wouldn’t have to miss anymore. My colleague was looking for a career opportunity, and my interest was mostly in a little adventure—a couple of years at the
International Herald Tribune
. My friend ended up staying away from the
Times
for about two years; then he went back. I never did.

Slumped in a battered taxi that was barely moving and blind in the fog, I had just begun learning Paris’s best-kept secret: its gray, damp weather. January’s short, sunless days are especially depressing. All Frenchmen who can afford it (and they save up so they can) seek a sunny antidote to winter’s depths either on an Alpine ski slope or on some Club Med beach. Not me. I was headed in the other direction, swept along by what I counted on being adventure and what I now feared might just be naïveté.

Ironically, the fog reinforced one bit of clarity. I knew already that living in Paris would not be like visiting Paris, but I hadn’t appreciated what that really meant. My previous trips to France had lasted days or weeks and had been marked by an epiphany at some museum or cathedral and a lot of feel-good time at sidewalk cafés or strolls in the long summer twilight. Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive. You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the contented, stress-free person you really are. There’s a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris.

And now, fog or not, traffic jam or not, I was about to become a Parisian. And in two weeks, when Patricia had closed up the New York apartment, she would join me. The magic of that idea was powerful. Paris was the ultimate destination in my map of the universe. Even more than New York, Paris offered glamour and excitement as a place to be. And it was exotic. After eight years in New York—and still considering it my true home—I wanted an overseas adventure.

Exoticism aside, the immediate requirement, shelter, had been temporarily solved by Lydie and Wayne Marshall, New York friends who were generously lending us their apartment
for several weeks in exchange for fitting some of their furniture into the small shipping container that Patricia had stayed behind to fill with clothes and other basic needs. We left everything else behind to be there when we returned. The Marshalls’ little apartment, on the rue des Entrepreneurs in the fifteenth arrondissement, provided a place to sleep plus the experience of a quiet working-class neighborhood. When I had described the neighborhood to a colleague at the
Times
, I had called it “not very interesting.” “There is no such thing as an uninteresting quartier in Paris,” he corrected me. Maybe not, but it did seem remote from Paris’s chic, mythic center.

And so did my next stop, the
Herald Tribune
offices. After the taxi finally crawled to the fifteenth and I dropped off my bags, I got onto the Métro and headed for Neuilly. The paper had moved several years earlier from rue de Berri off the Champs-Élysées. Its new offices, in a plush suburb on the western edge of Paris, are only four Métro stops beyond the Arc de Triomphe, so it wasn’t geography that made it feel remote.

I had visited the
Trib
for the first time four months earlier and had left the job interview feeling very dubious about giving up my staff job at the
New York Times
for this. Patricia and I were also in love with the idea of being New Yorkers. When I was growing up in the Carolina Piedmont, television had just begun the great cultural leveling that over time washed away a lot of America’s regionalism. The excitement and sophistication flowing down the coaxial cable all emanated from New York. I had wanted to be at the wellspring for a long time before I got there.

Another southerner, Willie Morris, wrote a book in those years called
North toward Home
, and the title described a path
that had beaconed to me since third grade. Miss Frances Love, our teacher at the little school in McConnells, South Carolina, talked to her unwashed, barefoot charges about her trips to Manhattan. One day she got so excited as she talked of that place far, far from our Faulknerian hamlet that she turned to her blackboard and sketched the three most noteworthy skyscrapers of our day. Her chalk drawings did little credit to the Old World angles of the Flatiron Building, or the elegant symmetry of the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building’s art deco froufrou. But the crude chalkboard images stuck in at least one young mind eager for impressions from the outside, and I recalled my early teacher’s drawings when I moved to New York and began directly sharing her enthusiasm for the city.

Yet thoughts of working in Paris had grown, and I persuaded myself that it would be tantamount to a temporary reassignment, since the
Times
was one of the
Trib
’s owners. I also encouraged myself to believe that I would be moving from one legendary news operation to another. But the legends were made of different stuff—it was clear from the first instant that the
Trib
’s mythic reputation was much bigger than the tiny, impecunious reality.

So those were the pulls and the tugs as I had tried to reach my part of the decision about accepting the offer. Meanwhile, my
Times
bosses’ principal strategy for trying to keep me was to make dismissive judgments about the
Trib
. You can
visit
Paris, said one, emphasizing the obvious. It’s boutique journalism, said another. “Going to Paris is a lifestyle choice, but staying here is a career choice.”

“I know,” I replied, with far more callow smugness than smarts.

I was hardly on Abe Rosenthal’s scope. The crusty executive editor had little time for production editors—he regarded us as necessary technicians, but not of the Brahmin class. But I felt a bizarre pride when he took enough notice to call me “shithead” in front of a large group of my peers. He told me that if I was considering leaving the
Times
, it probably meant that I should.