La Coquette

I think that I know my métier

Last weekend, I was riding my sister’s bicycle to the bookstore and if I had written that sentence three and a half years ago, when I was still a student in the American university school system, I would have laughed.

Only dorky foreign exchange students ride bicycles, silly. 

Ding, ding!  Attention!  Passing on zee left!   

People, riding a bicycle is SO ROCK. Oh, the pleasure I derive, wheeling down the rue de Rivoli, the wind in my hair (you do NOT wear a helmet in Paris, that is something only dorky Americans do, and if my friend’s father reads this-- Frank Christy, a.k.a. Mr. Safety who, concerned with his college-aged daughter's solitary drive to Jacksonville, FL once convinced her to make the trek WITH A FAKE DOG IN HER BACKSEAT-- Mr. Christy, you are flipping out about the helmet thing; that is very kind, and it is going to be okay.  Meanwhile, my own parents are probably shrugging and saying, “No helmet?  Eh!  We've got a couple more where that one came from.”)

But yes, scarf ‘round neck, trench coat of cuteness, hair unencumbered of helmet.  But the best, THE BEST, JERRY is when the leaves crunch under your wheels.  Or maybe the best is the gabump, gabump, gabump of riding over wooden walking bridges.  Yee gads, it’s a tossup.  Because life is candy and the sun is a bowl of butter when I’m riding my bicycle and you’d better not kill my buzz or I will pluck your toe-hairs slowly.

Which is pretty painful, fyi. 

So I’m feeling downright kicky as I park my bicycle (ding! ding!) behind the bookstore W.H. Smith last weekend.

ENTER STAGE LEFT:  bloodless mouth breather in blue uniform

“C’est interdit de se garer ici, Madame.”

Having seen bicycles parked on all the surrounding streets, I find this a bit curious and express this, genuinely. “Oh?  Why?”

“Because I am a policeman and I say so, that’s why.”

Blinking, I give him a moment to add some sort of ADULT explanation-- “Midgets in orange jumpsuits will beat the baby squirrels if you park your bike on rue du Mont Thabor, Miss” would have been an improvement-- but instead he just adjusts his little blue hat and says, “I think that I know my métier.” 

I think. that I know. my métier. 

Sir, you are wearing the hat of a bellboy. 

“Can I park it on rue Cambon?”
“Of course.”
”Rue de Rivoli?”
“But yes.”
“Rue Saint-Honoré?”
“Obviously.”

I rattle off a few more surrounding streets waiting for some explanation befitting a man over thirteen, even if it was, “I don’t make the laws ma’am.”  Anything but I THINK THAT I KNOW MY METIER. 

“So it’s just rue du Mont Thabor that’s forbidden?”  Because 'you say so' you bloodless prick, spawn of Satan, thank you very much for ruining my bicycle buzz now would you please mind burning in hell?

He gives an affirmative nod of his little pillbox hatted-head and all I can think to say is, “Oh.”

Then I turn around, wheeling my bicycle in shock, wondering, did that just happen?  Did I just go from being stoned on life to popping a blood vessel in 30 seconds?  Will living in France cause me permanent neurological damage?  Did Adam Gopnick pay him to say that “métier” thing?  Can we get a team from Johns Hopkins to take some DNA samples of this perfect specimen of a functionary alien prick, BECAUSE I’M PRETTY SURE EVEN NASA WOULD WANT TO KNOW WHAT MAKES THIS GUY TICK.

Confucious say, Man who watches dog for living wind up with wet duvet

I know it must be hard to be a dog in France.  Riding the escalator at the Bon Marché, being cooed at and groped by the staff of my bank, having me carry you through the grocery store, like some wise and knowing koala bear deity. 

But you’re so good at not letting it go to your head, I think.  Sitting quietly on the cafe floor while I give my English conversation lessons, riding the bus like a big boy.  Let’s try an experiment: Will you mind if I leave you alone for a couple of hours?  Yes, I can see that you want to come, but you understand that sometimes in life, you don’t always get to do what you’d like to do.  Hey! This is so not a dog issue!  I am not trying to bring you down!  How can you say that?  Look!  It's Mr. Potato!  *throws toy, slams door*

When I returned to my apartment last night, the place looked like it had been ransacked by a herd of Oompaloompas.  Everything at waist level was on the floor.  And, what was that smell?

*sniff sniff*

Yes, in retrospect, I can see that you were offended when I left you alone for a couple of hours, because the harsh truth about dogs is: you cannot open the door to roam the streets and sniff cigarette butts freely.  I thought you would bear your cross of not being able to open doors while sleeping in my bed and playing with your furry potato toy, but I was wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Isn't it always the pretty ones that pee all over your life, then kiss you and look adorable while you scrub the mattress?

Somewhere between airhead and Alzheimer's...

Things are a little wonky this week.  For one thing, I’m sitting for the (very sweet) blind dog that lives up yonder in the 17th arrondissement, so I’m not staying at my place.  Oh yeah, and my sister Aimee arrived yesterday.  Have I seen her yet?  Nope!  Did I pick her up at the airport?  Hell no!  Betwixt various important commitments like administering doggie eyedrops, I’ve spent the last three business days in blind terror trying to track down an item that went missing from the photo shoot.  It costs more than your average American automobile, but that’s irrelevant.  What is relevant?  Another magazine wants to shoot it in New York at the end of the week.  Lost publicity!  Now that's something that has relevance!  The PR people would like my head with a side order of pomme frites and the whole ordeal has shaved five years off my life.  In a nutshell.

What else?  Oh, when my sister arrived, I asked her to call me from the apartment so I knew she got in okay, only...turns out my lines had been cut off.  Ha ha!  I forgot to pay France Telecom, silly me!  You think I can be bothered with paying dumb bills when I’ve got pricey designer press samples to lose?  As if! 

Well, at least she has a place to sleep, right?  I mean, I didn’t manage to supply fresh bedsheets or, hell, even leave a note explaining how anything works, but I had a brand new bar of Dove lying around, which I laid carefully on a folded towel beside the bed.  Welcome to Paris, Aimee!  Here’s a bar of soap!  Have fun with my dirty dishes!  Careful not to nick the parquet whilst heaving your valise up those five flights of stairs!

Speaking of rolling out the welcome mat, there's no spare key for the second downstairs door to my building, so before she could even access my dirty, phoneless apartment, she had to loiter until some random stranger let her in.  “Hi!  I’m cold and jet lagged and can’t really speak French, let me in, okay?  Want some soap?”

Can I tell you another funny thing?  Today’s her birthday.  What do I look like, Santa Claus?  Of course I don’t have a present.  I think I’m going to buy macaroons from Laduree on my way to the apartment tonight.  A food gift!  Originale, non?  Nothing like waiting till the last minute to ensure that you overspend on something entirely inappropriate!

In summary:  Welcome to Paris, sister!  Now massage my feet!

21:50 and peachy

I don’t have anything against sunsets, per se.  I've just never been the type to actually stop and look at one.  Especially living in Paris, land where everyone you pass is surgically conjoined at the lips, and amazingly, they’re all standing on bridges at sunset. 

It’s like, suspension of disbelief.  Where are all the fighting couples?  Where are they hiding the troubled?  The bleak?  The upshot is, I don’t pine for being part of a couple.  Nosiree, not in Paris I don't.  I’ve got news for you: these happy people are robots. Bo-ring!  That's why I pretty much walk past bridges at the clip of an Olympic trainee in a leprosy ward.  Hope you can't catch it just by looking at 'em. 

But I had to take this sunset picture for you Wednesday night.  This picture would be totally trite except for one key fact:  it was taken at 10:00 pm, well, 9:50 pm to be exact.  I always walk from giving an English lesson near Place de la Bastille to my Latin Quarter home--I do this every Wednesday--and normally it’s pretty dark by the time I approach Notre Dame.  So when I saw this pink business I said, Well that’s new. 

I had to ask a man passing by what time it was precisely, so to be sure and get it right for the internet.  It takes a lot of finesse to ask for the hour (in a manner that doesn't sound loaded), as a girl standing alone on a bridge, watching the sunset, so I did the only natural thing which was to be brusque and avoid eye contact.  I swear I thanked him, but he walked away saying, “Vous avez au moins compris?” 

Guess he more or less got the picture. 

You know what interests me way more than sunsets or interpersonal communication?  Spying.  And look at what I spied when I looked down.  Now these are some people I’d like to party with.

Don't they look like they're having fun?  From what I could tell, none of them were part of a stinking couple.  And they didn’t pay any attention to the dipping globe of egg yolk cheesiness in the sky.   

I know what you’re thinking and I will not get a cat.  Not over my dead body. 

The go-to joke would be: Perhaps they were filming for the Discovery Channel

Last week, I was at Day One of the Cacharel press sale.  At lunch hour.

When I stated this fact to my sister, she said “Why?” and I calmly explained that stores give formidable discounts to people with power, hoping they will wear the clothes to the right places and be seen by the right people.  Welcome to the world of marketing, little one. 

And she rolled her 18-year-old eyes and said “I know what a press sale is, but why’d they invite YOU?” 

They didn’t.  They invited my friend.  But the more important question is: since when do 18-year-olds from Florida know about press sales?

If the words "day one, press sale, at lunch hour" don’t inspire you to pop a tranquilizer, then you’ve obviously never been to a press sale. 

When I arrived, I went to say hello to my friend in the dressing rooms where it was a maelstrom of flying boobs and bras, and a women with no pants on was doing business on her cell phone, stopping only to give birth to kittens when the saleslady returned without her size.

Stepping back into the store, I nearly tripped on a camera crew and I thought, why?  For what purpose is this being documented?  And what are they doing filming on this side of the curtain?  They are so missing all the good kitten-birthing action.

As farce would have it, I soon had my own adorable little mix-up that began with a blouse that I wanted to buy.  There was but one left in my size and the saleslady informed me that someone else was currently trying it on. 

When the woman-with-the-blouse-of-my-desires emerged from her dressing room, she indicated that she would, indeed, be purchasing said blouse. 

The saleslady began walking the item to the register, and it was only when she got TO the register, on the clear other side of the store that she clarified for my benefit, “Madame, I’ve made an error!  YOU’RE waiting for the last [my size], and what we've got here is the last [twiggy french girl size, smaller even, than toddler’s clothing].”   

Now, I’ve worked in retail off and on for, oh, my entire high school and collegiate career.  I’ve seen ALL the Victoria’s Secret training videos, and if I remember correctly, they more or less indicate you will be gagged with g-strings and executed to a slow death of cheap perfume inhalation if you go around calling out sizes for THE ENTIRE STORE AND THEIR CAMERA CREW TO HEAR.  There is an etiquette for size discussion and indoor voices are fine and outdoor voices are not, am I RIGHT HERE, LADIES AND METROSEXUAL MEN?

Which is why the saleslady was very, very lucky when all I said was a playful, “Careful there, I’m American.  You might give me a complex.”

Without missing a beat, she shot back, “Oh, it’s true.  The Americans, you don’t know how to be comfortable with your bodies.”  (Bien dans votre peau, literally--“good in your skin.”)

And like a little wooden ball, my sense of humor went skittering to the farthest left-hand rung on the evolution chart, the rung where you scratch under your arms and your back is entirely swathed in monkey hair--the rung where you have no sense of humor, but you know how to TAKE OFFENSE and GRUNT and ATTACK.  Which probably explains why the first thing that came to mind was “Yes, if only we Americans could take your lead, maybe we, too, could be 'good' in our Marlboro-smoking, size zero, anorexic, sack-of-bones skin.”

When I was tripping home later, a Cacharel bag jauntily poised in the crook of my arm, I wondered, what would have happened if I’d actually said those words?  Would an onlooker have shouted, “Oh, SNAP!”  Would there have been a catfight?

And the camera crew?  Oh right, NOW their presence makes sense.

You might be a stupid foreigner if,

Noticing that your morning coffee tastes off, you check your milk's expiration date and see that what you have purchased is not your normal half-fat milk, but lait ribot--fermented milk.  (Which happens to have the same blue cap as my normal brand; merci Monoprix for placing them right next to each other.)
 
Even the 50% of my tastebuds that come from France, the part that say, "Psshaw, you call zat stinky cheese?," officially recoiled in disgust.

Urban Outfitters Intervention

The American Study Abroad Girls are everywhere suddenly.  I guess they were always lurking, but maybe wearing black J.Crew pea coats, so I didn't notice. 

Now, they've sprung forth like sparkly, beaded daffodils, their fringe-y ponchos blowing like petals in the wind.  With the headscarves and the peasant skirts, the flip flops, the crochet with sequins--everything colored, everything printed. 

And my god, the t-shirts with ironic phrases.  "Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky"?  Good for you!  But do we need to know that "Jesus Loves You," too?  IF YOU'RE STILL WEARING A TRUCKER HAT, EVERY PARISIAN IS THINKING THERE IS A DISTINCT POSSIBILITY THAT JESUS DOES NOT, IN FACT, LOVE YOU. 

Everytime I pass one of these girls, I have the urge to grab her by the arms, like the imaginary illustrator in an old Donald Duck cartoon, and erase, oh, just ELEVEN of her layers.  I know you, Study Abroad Girl.  You are my kin.  So it is with the greatest love and compassion that I say:

IF YOUR NAME BE NOT MARY KATE, WEAR YE NOT ALL THINE ACCESSORIES AT ONCE. 

In retrospect, I so wish my comment had involved the words "des connards."

Sunday afternoon, I indulged in the Death By 1,000 Calories of Molten Chocolate Experience that is chocolat chaud in France.   First of all, I love that it’s served in a porcelain pitcher.  I love that after refilling one’s empty teacup several times, there are dark chocolate streaks clinging to the side of the pristine, white porcelain, like wax drippings on a candle.   The chocolate is so thick that, as it begins cooling, it forms a pudding-like skin on top, and I love that, too.  Tilting the teacup to your lips, the pudding-skin slips away like quicksilver, leaving one no choice but to finally conquer it with a swoop of a spoon at the end.   And the taste?  Lest this delve into overtly graphic realms, (TOO LATE, I KNOW), let me just say that I challenge anyone not to moan at least once.

This particular cocoa nirvana took place at a café on Boulevard Montparnasse, with an American girl à peu près de mon age, whom we’ll call E.  After a few hours of sinning together in the form of how many Weight Watchers points I DON’T EVEN WANT TO KNOW, we decided to walk back to my neighborhood for obvious cardiovascular reasons.    This amounts to a 30 minute balade from the hustle of Montparnasse area, along the quieter Boulevard Raspail, through the chic Saint Germain des Prés and into the tourist-laden err, colorful Latin Quarter I call home.  The typically gray Parisian-winter sky even approached sunniness at several points there.  I’m telling you, it was a veritable Maxwell Coffee commercial of an afternoon.

At about the corner of Boulevard Raspail and Rue de Rennes, enter a group of four French men spewing generic come-ons in our direction, INTERRUPTING OUR COFFEE COMMERCIAL IN PARIS MOMENT.  E had mentioned to me earlier that, in situations such as this, she always deflects with, “Je suis Findlandaise.”  It cracked me up that she pretends to speak an esoteric language, not because it’s implausible (she’s tall with platinum blonde hair--you would totally buy that she's Finnish), but because it says something about French men that SHE HAS OUTLINED SUCH A POLICY IN THE FIRST PLACE. 

It wasn’t long before our deliberate silence led one man to say, “Quoi, vous ne parlez pas Francais?”  (What, you don’t speak French?)  Maybe it was the snicker on his face or the 1,000 grams of sugar coursing through my veins, but this really riled me up because:  Dude, I didn’t spend precious years memorizing assigned genders for inanimate objects, and I definitely didn’t learn how to conjugate the stupid SUBJUNCTIVE so you could interrupt my Sunday in Paris Coffee Commercial Moment and TELL ME I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK FRENCH.

“Si, on parle francais,” I blurted in one breath.  After a satisfying pause, I continued to say, “Mais on n’a pas envie de parler avec vous.”  (Yes, we speak French, we just don’t have any desire to speak with you).

Watching them scuttle away from behind, E looked at me and said, “Or, that works too.”

How To Annoy Me

Give me THAT LOOK when I ask politely, and in perfect French, when you’ll be done with the elliptical training machine. YOU KNOW 30 MINUTES IS THE LIMIT, LADY.

P.S. The snotty tissue you left in the drink holder? Not nice.

This ain't no tailgate.

It took about two seconds to figure out you were American. Shorts and Birkenstocks in late October? Polarfleece in Paris? Who DOES these things? Frat boys, that’s who. Frat boys wearing T-shirts with holes in them that say things like “Ithaca.”

The clothes I could have overlooked, but you were there holding an open wine bottle by your side and walking with THAT WALK. The cock strut. You weren’t particularly well-built, but your arms were held to the side just so, like you were.