In 1997, I took a leave from work and went to live in Paris for six weeks.
The bank where I worked had a generous leave policy, at least in terms of job security: you could take an unpaid leave of up to four weeks for “educational purposes,” and they had to give you your job back when you returned. With a bit of a stretch, the half-day French-language program for foreigners in which I enrolled in Paris counted as “educational.” I tacked on two weeks’ vacation, found an apartment online to rent in the 1st arrondissement, and was set to go. Our ad agency hosted a going-away party for me where everyone wore a beret.
In my mind, my Paris sabbatical was a trial balloon of sorts. I already knew continuing my career in advertising and marketing communications at the bank long-term was of no interest to me. In terms of next steps, one direction that intrigued me was to work abroad, where my lifelong interest in foreign languages and cultures would be nourished.
I had studied French at university, taken classes at FIAF (the French Institute Alliance Française) in New York, and studied privately with a French guy named Thierry, who would come to my apartment once a week for an hour and coach me in conversation and grammar. I’d even taken an exam through FIAF, given by the French government, which certified I’d reached a certain level of proficiency in the language.
I’d visited Paris briefly the year before, while on a massive boondoggle with one of the local radio stations on which we advertised. A photo from that trip still hangs in my apartment. Taken from the rooftop café of the now-defunct department store Samaritaine, it captures a couple Left Bank monuments – Notre Dame and Le Panthéon – within the huge letters of the store’s name crowning its façade. Until my sabbatical, it hung in my office: an inspiration and reminder of mes petits rêves, my little dreams for myself.
Du toit de Samaritaine, Paris, May 1996
I expected to arrive in Paris and step into a life I’d fantasized. It would be sophisticated and European, cultured and refined, literary and intellectual – like the lives of people living in Paris I’d read about in novels by Sartre, Hemingway and Cortázar when I was in college. I would pass for French; after all, I was one-quarter French by ancestry, olive-skinned and dark-haired. I had a good accent when I spoke. I would come into my own. It would be incroyable.
My first day there set the tone. I went directly from the airport to the rental office, which was near the Eiffel Tower. My apartment was still being cleaned, so I killed a few hours going to the top of the Tower and catching the 360° views of the city.
After settling into the apartment on the rue St. Germain L’Auxerrois, I slept for a few hours. It was almost 10 p.m. when I decided to take a walk in the neighborhood. “Steps from the Seine” could have been a real estate agent’s marketing blurb for the flat, except for the fact it was true. I walked a couple blocks along the Quai de la Méssigerie and crossed to the center of the Pont Neuf, ironically the oldest bridge in the city.
It was already June, and the days were now quite long this far north, so that at 10 p.m. the sun was still setting behind the western edge of Paris. I stopped in the middle of the bridge. The Pont des Arts, the buildings on both banks, and the Tour Eiffel in the distance were silhouetted by the fading light. The clouds in the sky and the water of the river were brushed in mauves, deep purples and gold. A Bateau Mouche, one of the tourist boats that ply the Seine, slid below me into view.
The Seine from Pont Neuf, June 1997
I had some wonderful moments in Paris. In the afternoons, I ran all over the city like a crazed tourist, seeing everything there was to see. I hung out with a few of the other students from my class: Ralph, a young German who’d been posted to Paris by his company; Berta, another young German, who always wanted to have lunch at Pizza Hut (she pronounced it “huht” as in “hoof”) instead of the French restaurant across from our school where the locals ate and where we tried out our French; and Christine, a Brazilian woman who was closer to my age, just passing some time in Paris.
I also became friends with one of my teachers, Janine, a wonderful woman who reminded me of my first acting teacher. We went to the theatre and to a lecture together. She was intelligent, charming, and engagée as the French say – something like politically committed. We still exchange greetings at Christmas.
I shopped for my food. Made my meals at home most nights. Did some low-cost decorating in the apartment. As my French friend Jérémy used to say, je vivais ma petite vie – I was living my little life.
However, everything was not always so romantic and contented.
In truth, I was horribly lonely the entire six weeks. I recall a later conversation with a guy from my university, who was single like me and had lived and worked in Paris for several years at one point in his career. He said the first year, until he finally made friends outside of work, was the loneliest year of his life, particularly on Sundays with no office to go to and everyone spending time with family.
Other than my schoolmates, it was hard to meet people. It’s not something I do easily anyway. I joined a gym and occasionally spoke to some of the other habitués there, but nothing went beyond those pleasantries. My excursions to the gay bars of Paris were not particularly fruitful either.
I did meet a guy in the Luxembourg Gardens one afternoon, whom I saw several times – Loïc, a northern Norman French name. We were attracted to each other, but he was reluctant to get involved with someone who was going to disappear at the end of six weeks. Nonetheless, we spent some time together. My loneliness would find expression in frantic, almost desperate lovemaking. “Doucement,” he would say – “go easy.” While at other times, he would embrace my desperation with a quote that has become legend among my friends – “Continuez, continuez!”
Some of my personal encounters with the service personnel of Paris were the stuff of which clichés about France and the French are made. And I experienced them on almost every subsequent visit to Paris.
I recall a bartender in one of the trendy gay bars in the Marais, screaming in my face “VOUS DITES S’IL VOUS PLAÎT!” as I ordered my vodka tonique – “YOU SAY PLEASE!” – a demi-second before the very same words were coming out of my mouth. A predisposition on his part that Americans are rude and uncultured, no doubt born of the dissonance between American directness and French politesse.
Or the two young salesgirls at carts in front of the Galeries Lafayette who claimed to have no idea where I could find the Champs Élysées nor even to have heard of it before.
Occasionally the difficulty in communicating – despite my knowledge of French – was overwhelmingly frustrating. Emblematic is an experience that, amazingly, I had on two different occasions while visiting Paris for work years later.
On both occasions, two years apart, I was looking for directions to Hermès to buy a scarf for my friend Kay, who by now has a sizeable collection as a result of Christmas and birthday gifts from me. At two different hotels in different parts of the city, I asked the front desk for directions in my best French –“ Où se trouve la boutique Hermès? – where is the Hermès (pronounced AIR-MEZZ) shop?”
The front desk person at each hotel looked at me as if I’d asked for directions to the Washington Monument. “La boutique Hermès…,” each one repeated, as if trying to find a synapse in their brains that related to the concept. I explained further: it was a famous, international fashion brand; they specialized in brightly colored scarves. On both occasions a colleague was consulted. A baffled discussion ensued between the two. And then suddenly, in a Eureka moment, one of them said, “Aaaah! La boutique Hermès,” (pronounced AIR-MEZZ for all that I could distinguish.)
My sabbatical was the beginning of a love/hate relationship with Paris and the French that endured for years. On every subsequent visit, I would have the bipolar experience of being utterly charmed and romanced as well as maddeningly frustrated. And somehow left feeling pathetically foreign.
That is, until my most recent trip. I went to Paris two weeks ago to lead a strategy training session for our European offices with one of my French colleagues. Coincidentally, my birthday was that week, and I would spend it with my friend Jérémy who lives in Paris with his boyfriend. It had been over three and a half years since my last visit.
Strategy Training, Rooftop of BETC Euro RSCG, September 2010 (Marianne and I at center)
It’s hard to say what made the difference. Perhaps the fact that I was engaged in a familiar activity I excel in – teaching our agency’s strategy tools. Perhaps that I was leading the training with Marianne, whom I’ve known almost twelve years. We have a fondness for each other that dates back to my first days at the agency, working on the Evian brand. Perhaps because I have “family” there now: I refer to Jérémy as my “surrogate son,” a concept that Marianne delights in. He lived with me for a while in New York, and since he moved back to Paris, we see each other every time I go and wander around Paris amusing ourselves.
Or maybe in my dotage, I’ve lost the need to feel like I belong somewhere. Maybe I’ve finally grown into my own skin and find it a comfortable place to be.
Whatever the source of my ease, I discovered I can be there without succumbing to daily violent fits of miscommunication rage. (Except once at our Paris agency, when the receptionist didn’t know who Marianne was – the agency’s Chief Strategy Officer and one of their most senior people – and insisted in both French and English that no one by that name worked there. And then, when we finally got hold of Marianne’s assistant, claimed it was my spelling of the name that was wrong, as she showed me the name on her computer screen precisely as I thought I’d spelled it. See Hermès above.)
I realized when a waiter walks up to your table and babbles a string of sounds that you don’t understand ending in the word aperitif… you don’t have to panic. Given the context, he’s asking you if you want an aperitif, and you can simply respond, “Non, merci, un café allongé… s’il vous plaît.”
Brasserie, Terminus Nord, Paris, September 2010
So I ordered my food in restaurants. Shopped for things I needed. Chatted in a combination of French, English and Franglish with my colleagues at the agency. Got myself lost and found my way on the Métro. Walked the now familiar streets of Paris with and without Jérémy. And for a week, enjoyed living ma petite vie à Paris.
C’était formidable.
Les toits de Paris du troit de l’Agence BETC Euro RSCG, September 2010
Postcards from a Traveler 