Eat your breakfast at Café de Flore. Bring your expensive Italian notebook. Order oefs coque with the little toast soldiers. Drink two café noir. Put your copy of Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch” on the table in front of you. It’s a hardcover from 1966. You bought it online before you left London and carried it with you on the Eurostar — that is how much you love “Hopscotch.” Do not read it, though. Write a short story on your computer instead, until the battery dies.
Wear your sunglasses everywhere, even on the gloomy, rainy days. Wear your sunglasses in the evening, too. When your friend Andrew asks you, “Why are you wearing your sunglasses?” tell him, “They’re prescription!” Then tell him, “I forgot to bring my normal ones.” Do not tell him you forgot to bring the plug for your computer.
Tell your mother and your friends you are in Paris finishing your book. Get depressed that it’s not going well. Do almost no work. Spend entire afternoons writing twelve-page letters on hotel stationery. Look at pictures in the windows of real estate offices and develop elaborate fantasies of where you will live when you move to Paris. Pass by Habitat and decide you’ll buy the Scala sectional in beige.
Walk through the Tuileries as if you have someplace important to go. When it starts to rain, clutch your manuscript close to your chest. Realize that you have run out of Euros and can’t buy an umbrella off the street. Get quite soaked by the downpour, so that your new bob is straggly and tangled. Your hairdresser warned you that you were too lazy to maintain a bob. Quietly blame him for letting you cut your long, easy hair.
Become increasingly alarmed at the exchange rate. Quip, “The dollar is the new peso!” Think this is fall-down-laughing hilarious. Include this joke in all letters and any emails that you write during your stay. Repeat this joke to Andrew twice, though he doesn’t laugh the first time.
Eat a little pâté tartine at lunch, but pick out the disgusting pâté. Drink two glasses of sour Chablis. Notice once you have your food that they are painting the other side of the restaurant. Except for the painters and waiters, this place is completely empty. Feel dizzy from the fumes of the paint. It’s the sort of restaurant that looks nice at first but, in fact, has formica tabletops. Mildly hate yourself for managing to have found a bad meal in Paris. Endure a brief wave of anxiety and panic that this is an indication of your life as a failure on a much larger level.
Meet Andrew back at the hotel room for dinner. He is finishing his book, too, and his work has gone well. For lunch he had a delicious salmon tartine and perfectly chilled vodka martini at Le Meurice, where they wear beautiful uniforms designed by Givenchy and where for upwards of two hours he observed with horror a large-breasted Texan housewife playing solitaire on her computer. “Don’t these people realize there are books to read? Why can’t she get a deck of cards?” Andrew doesn’t like Southerners anyway. Before he asks how your day was, start to kiss him and do not stop. If you kiss him, if you bite his lips, maybe his success will rub off on you. He’ll say, “I’ve been wanting to kiss you for a long time,” and you’ll say, “You taste good.” Help him when he fumbles with your bra, and wonder why a 42-year-old man is still fumbling with bras. Afterwards, lie on the damp sheets and notice little else but that you can hear the people in the next room having a conversation.
Part Two
Eat dinner at Aux Fins Gourmets on Boulevard Saint Germain. You will be brought nearly to tears over the delicate, crumbling, discolored paper inside the leather menus. Tenderly, across the table, in a lilting and intimate voice, remind Andrew that you two are just friends. When he agrees with enthusiasm, feel a bit sad and rejected. Wonder what that sex was all about. Start to notice over the candlelight and the yellow lamps of the brasserie and the blue light of late evening coming through the windows that he has the loveliest cheekbones and that he has worn his green sweater, the sweater he knows you like. Notice that your hand shakes when you lift your wine glass. Laugh when he says, “Have you been exerting yourself?” Eat an entire slab of melty foie gras and then the whole sole meuniere, a dish so fresh and lovely that it nearly dissolves before you can fork it into your mouth. Give Andrew the crispy tail. Enjoy how much he enjoys the crispy tail. Enjoy that he eats off your plate. Feel uncomfortable and sick that he always pays for dinner, but let him pay for dinner.
The next morning at Café de Flore, do not notice someone’s black Labrador underneath your table. Accidentally kick him with your pointy boot. Gasp when you realize you have kicked a dog. He yelps and whimpers. The dog’s owner reprimands him, as if getting kicked was its own fault. Have a good laugh with the dog’s owner, who does not speak English. Giggle. Half-pretend to understand his rough southern French.
Although you spend much of your time in Paris walking, always wear your high pointy boots so that you can go into Alberta Ferretti and Hermes without feeling like a hooligan. Instead, you feel like an imposter. Get blisters. Decide that you deserve the blisters for not being able to afford Hermes and for not having finished your book.
Eat lunch at Le Meurice. Fill up on olives. Drink two Sidecars. Be considerably cheered by the Sidecars and by the unrelenting stare of the elegant white-haired man in the tweed coat with patches at the elbows. When he passes your table and nods and whispers, “Tres jolie,” let it cross your mind only briefly that he thinks you’re a prostitute. Notice that the only other woman in the bar is a plain young American in ugly jeans and a green cashmere twinset. She sits with her much older husband, who sneezes without covering his mouth. Feel vastly superior.
While napping at the hotel, have a dream that you are pregnant with your tennis partner’s baby. Wake up discombobulated and confused, trying to remember if you’ve ever had sex with your tennis partner. Wake up a little bit more and remember that you have never so much as kissed him, but continue to feel sort-of fat and pregnant.
When the sun comes out in that distinctly puffy-cloud-against-violet-sky Parisian way, see this as an auspicious sign. Crossing the Pont Alexandre, experience a surge of love for Paris so physically affecting that for a moment you lose your breath. Just then, notice the black lab you kicked at breakfast crossing the bridge with his owner, whose arms are full of orange Calla Lilies. With the unreasonable and boundless emotion of the tourist in Paris, you will try to see the deeper meaning in this, how every action and encounter are connected and together create a cosmic map of truth and verisimilitude. As you think your important Parisian-American thoughts, recall momentarily that there is no deeper meaning. The dog and his owner are just a coincidence. Step in the space between cobblestones and break the heel off your pointy high boots. Tumble face-first, nearly bashing your head on the bumper of a parked Fiat, and scratch up both your palms when you fall against the street.
Meet Andrew at Café de Flore for an aperitif. When he tells you his last chapter is a disaster, say, “I know what that feels like.” Tell him you kicked a dog at breakfast, and watch as he slowly starts to laugh. Laugh with him. Give him the small tin of Earl Grey you bought for him at Fauchon. Suggest, “Let’s have dinner again at Aux Fins Gourmets.” He’ll say, “Good. This time I’m going to order the sole.” Say, “And tonight let’s eat dessert.” Walk together through the cold March Parisian evening, and take off your sunglasses so you can see the way the pink light lands on the white stone of the buildings. Let Andrew shift his computer bag from one shoulder to the other to put his arm through yours. Walk slowly, not thinking of your work and not thinking of your blisters. When Andrew says, “Paris has been perfect,” squeeze his hand and agree. Pull him quickly back onto the curb when he nearly gets hit by a Vespa in the crosswalk. Tell him you’re glad he’s with you because you have no sense of direction and can’t remember how to get to the restaurant.
Later, back in London, when your emails to Andrew get hostile and your friendship begins to disintegrate, try to remember how you walked arm in arm to dinner that night, how you pulled him up from the curb. When you remember Paris, there will be no bad sandwich and there will be no black lab. There will never be a moment when you felt like a prostitute. In the morning, you will finish writing that short story, you will settle into an armchair and eat small flat squares of dark chocolate, you will read “Hopscotch” on the Eurostar and sleep for a long time without dreaming. You will watch the countryside change from French to English and vaguely regret not sending postcards.
