Les mecs

I’m not a huge party-goer, but when in Paris, do as the Parisians do. And do they ever.

The métro here closes at midnight. When I mentioned to a friend, who had studied in Paris a year ago, that I thought this was surprisingly early, she looked confused. “Well,” she said, frowning slightly, “it opens again at 5 so … is there a problem?”

Uh, yes.

Nevertheless, after a week my host mother was asking me every night, with a hopeful expression, if I was planning to soirée somewhere, and I felt that my French was passable enough to make conversation with people other than the American students in my program. I met some of them at a café in the 5ème and we headed out.

Strangely, one of the most popular nightlife spots in Paris is a row of British-themed bars on rue Princesse, all preciously named things like “The Frog and the Princess” or “The Little Temple Bar.” We headed into one whose blue-and-white striped façade was clearly intended to evoke a rugby uniform. After heading downstairs, we ordered a round of shots, and found a table.

There we were. Out. It quickly became apparent, however, that being out was one of those things that’s more about the journey than the destination. Exactly what does one do at a bar, once there, besides the obvious: drink? And that gets old fast, unless it happens fast enough.

Providentially, a group of French boys sat at the other side of our table with what looked like one of those wooden things that hold chemistry pipettes, only inside of phosphoric acid they held flavored vodka, infinitely better-tasting and only slightly less toxic. The boys weren’t particularly alluring, but they were novelties, and ones with whom we could practice our new language skills. Eye contact abounded. Then one of them looked at me, raised his eyebrows, smiled alluringly and said:

“…..”

Oh no.

I had been confident enough in my knowledge of French that I was sure I could understand pathetic bar-talk. But I hadn’t counted on the bar-atmosphere, in particular the incredibly loud bar-music. Familiar to anyone who has frequented Rudy’s on a night when some scruffy band is inevitably playing metal, bar-music inspires the oft-encountered bar-conversation:

“…..”

“What?”

“…..”

“WHAT?”

Apparently, it’s the same in Paris.

“…..”

“Comment?”

“…..”

“COMMENT?”

Unfortunately, because my accent marks me as a foreigner, my incomprehension wasn’t attributed to the music, but my inability to comprehend a word of French. The boy looked at his friend, who inexplicably was wearing a knit hat with a huge cloth ampersand embroidered on it.

“He says, ‘You are very beautiful.’”

Shit. SHIT. I missed that? Not that I was at all interested, but what girl doesn’t imagine some guy telling her she’s beautiful in French? Conversation resumed, and I found myself catching a few words and nodding a lot. Finally, the music allowed an entire sentence to emerge unscathed.

“So, we’re all coming to your apartment?”

What? No. NO. I recalled telling them that I lived and was studying in Paris, but I couldn’t make out anything else that had transpired. When had this happened?

“Uh, tonight? No, I don’t think so.”

The ampersand boy shrugged it off, but the other was indignant. “Mais elle a fait signe!” he said. “But she nodded!”

My friend caught my eye and looked toward the door, and despite the music, I recognized the universal sign indicating a very imminent departure.

Les cimetières

Père-Lachaise, the biggest cemetery in Paris, is also one of its most-frequented tourist attractions. I used to think that it was odd that a place so personal and relatively sacred could be co-opted for such a banal purpose, but I’m definitely not above going to see all my favorite dead celebrities. Although there are many better ways to get to know them, there certainly isn’t an easier way to get close to them physically. And while I’d much prefer to stand next to Oscar Wilde than stand on top of him, I’ll take what I can get. Plus, cemeteries are generally pretty. I love a good cemetery.

Still, their double purpose can be really awkward.

This week I went to Cimetière Montparnasse, conveniently located close to my study-abroad center where I’ve been taking crash French courses for the past week. A map by the gate pointed out the sites of various famed corpses: Baudelaire, Brancusi, Sartre, Saint-Säens. I mentally noted their placements and began to search, attempting to look like someone with a lot of respect for the dead who happened to be holding a camera.

Immediately, I encountered some problems. As soon as I stepped away from the map, I forgot where anything was. I went back to the map. I memorized. I walked five feet away. I forgot. At that point, I thought I would just walk around and look at all the gravestones until I found ones I was looking for. Forget that: there appeared to be no organizational principle to the cemetery system, and many of the graves weren’t visible from the paths, meaning I would have to climb over various tombstones to see all the names. Even I’m not that gauche.

My next strategy was to look for graves with lots of stuff on them. I had read that Serge Gainsbourg’s grave was covered in mementos from admirers; that can’t be hard to spot, I figured. I looked for graves with heaps of flowers; other people milling around it was a plus. Upon seeing one, I eagerly ran up to it.

The thing is, unlike Père Lachaise, Montparnasse is an active cemetery. This means if a grave has a lot of flowers on it, it might be because someone famous is buried there. However, it might also mean that the person just died and the people milling around are mourning their recent loss. After crashing quite a few wakes in my blissful search for Guy de Maupassant, I abandoned this technique. I hated myself. I was disillusioned with people. Who did we think we were? How dare we turn such a personal locale into a place for our perverse desires to run wild?

Upon leaving, I finally found one of the graves I had been looking for: Satre and Simone de Beauvoir, who are buried together (it was right next to the map where I had been standing for so long). I approached it and saw all the trinkets people had left on the grave, from the romantic (heaps of flowers, candles) to the trivial (metro tickets) to the inexplicable (multiple plastic mugs shaped in the hollowed-out head of Pluto the cartoon dog). Then there were the notes.

Sartre, Je t’aime et je suis née 10 ans après ta mort. –Chloe et Livia. Simone, je ne t’ai pas encore lu, mais il me reste toute la vie pour le faire.

(Sartre, I love you and I was born 10 years after you died. – Chloe and Livia. Simone, I haven’t read you yet, but I have the rest of my life to do it.)

Seeing them made me realize: there are tourists and there are mourners. But there are other visitors in the cemetery: the inspired.

L’Électricité

I don’t know whether I’m assimilating to France or it is assimilating to us, but while I’m sitting in class I often forget I’m in another country despite, you know, the fact that we’re speaking another language (or trying to). It’s only when I’m bored by crash French courses and look around the room that I realize – those electrical outlets are so weird.

Les Schubertiades contemporains

In my opinion, there is only one accurate barometer for measuring how native one looks in a certain city or country : how many people ask you for directions. When I moved to New York for the summer, after a month or so someone asked me how to get to Wall Street. I wasn’t sure how she thought I would know, as I don’t strike many people as the investment banker-type; in fact, according to my directions, she ended up somewhere in Turtle Bay. However, I had fooled her into thinking I knew, and that gave me no small amount of pleasure. I was a real New Yorker.

Imagine my surprise when someone asked me, after I had spent all of three days in France, where the nearest Métro station was. I was startled, but blurted the answer in almost-coherent French, then scampered away lest he call me out for the American I was. How did this mistake occur? I was wearing what I like to think of as a Parisian outfit, so that’s my current theory. The coat I borrowed from Danielle simply screams chic.

However, following this exchange, I stopped in “Le Phone Shack” to buy a cell phone. Seeing as I know nothing about cell phones in my own country, I was prepared for an ordeal. I had brought all my papers, addresses, telephone numbers, meticulously labeled in the best French I could muster. I figured that these would not be needed, however, as it is widely known that the French will quickly switch to English if they detect a hint of the étranger. I entered the Shack, greeted the two men at the counter, and looked for phones with prepaid-by-the-minute SIM cards. In less than 15 minutes, I had my new phone after an exchange completely in French. It may be my proudest moment to date.

It still might have been the coat, though. That thing can unite the world through fashion.

* * *

Sunday, my mere d’accueil brought me to the apartment of her friend, who was hosting a musical fête of sorts. Pascale had hired two well-known professional pianists from the area, and encouraged the musical amateurs in the group to play, sing, chaque à son métier. After listening to Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Mozart, and Offenbach, popular song lyrics appeared at each table with champagne and desserts. The room rang with the sound of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet.

I turned to the man next to me, engrossed in “Au Champs-Elysées,” and attempted to grace him with my music major knowledge. “You know,” I reported in French, “Schubert’s contemporaries had evenings kind of like this, with not just professionals but everyone participating. It was the rise of the musical amateur.”

The man responded with a look of kind acknowledgement. “Of course,” he said in English. “Here we call those people Schubertiades.”

In retrospect, I should have known how common such an idea would be here. Music and art inundates peoples’ lives as if it were still the 19^th century. However, there are still moments that jar me into the present. This morning, a musician, clearly a popular regular from the immediate response he garnered, boarded the Métro. “Normally, I sing the classics,” he said. “But today I felt like something different.” Then he began “Angels.” The Jessica Simpson version.

La petite américaine

In France, I am known as “The Little American.” Inexplicably, I like this. It makes me think of unorthodox superheroes from comics in the 1950s; a small American girl, in pleated Catholic school-girl skirts, has surprising strength for her diminutive stature, and uses it to fight criminals, all thinly-veiled allegories for forces of Communism or other plagues of our nation.

My hostess and her faceless friends on her speakerphone call me this constantly. At first I thought it was because she thought I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but after she would discuss parts of the conversations with me, I realized it was because there was no reason for concealment; it was a term of endearment. I am now considering have all my friends call me this when I return.

I live in an apartment in the 19^th, in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows revealing a view of the building à côte and a tree in which huge ravens fight with each other. It has its own piano, as a result of a housing questionnaire in which I wrote that I would prefer that I would rather have a piano than not have one (who wouldn’t?); I was then informed that a piano had been moved into my room, as per my request. Oh.

I can already tell my vocabulary is improving; for example, now I know the word for cocaine (it’s the same, but pronounced co-ka-EEN). So far my hostess and I have discussed, among other things, interracial dating, pre-marital sex, agnosticism (she’s one too), and parties she attended in the 80s in which her husband tried coke. I didn’t understand the last one at first, which I’m attributing to cognitive dissonance – she couldn’t be talking about this, so I must be misunderstanding. But when she imitated doing lines, there was no mistaking it. Cocaine: the universal language.

From the subject matter, we seem like cross-generational girlfriends at a sleepover, only with more gesturing and incorrectly-conjugated verbs. But what better to create a bond by telling each other our most private stories, things I wouldn’t divulge to my parents. We both want to talk, to connect. We’ll see how long we can string these secrets out.

Le départ

When I was required, in sixth grade, to learn a language, Spanish was the natural choice.

Even in my northern California town, a good XX miles from the Mexican border, Spanish was everywhere. Spanish instructions inevitably followed English ones on any appliance; my friend Jose would shout in Spanish at the Oakland Raiders whenever they lost a game; my dental hygienist, it seemed, spoke almost entirely Spanish except for the words “wider” and “spit,” and played flamenco on the radio while I studied the pictures of different mammals’ teeth that were pasted on the ceiling.

Even my small public elementary school recognized the necessary nature of the language, and gave us Spanish classes once a week. While helpful in theory, the lessons were predominantly useless, even disregarding the fact that an hour a week does not a language teach. Course material was limited to the numbers and colors, knowledge of which was rewarded with appropriately-colored Jolly Ranchers (verde and rojo were the best). One time, the class was spent learning the words for “left,” “right” and “straight,” after which we were paired up and told to guide our blindfolded partner around the school grounds, using only verbal directions . When Scott, my partner, led me to step on a dead squirrel carcass, the lesson was over.

But somehow despite this (or maybe because of it), I chose French. As if to justify our irrational decision, our professeur played a video on our first day of class, showing students raving about how “beautiful” the language was. I took this as a point of pride. Sure, you could take Spanish and be merely “utilitarian.” I took French, purely for the aesthetics of it. I was the Romantic artiste: one who distained practicality in favor of the higher ground, the beautiful, the godly. Besides, I was French somewhere down the line. Studying the language was like the Caucasian equivalent of Roots: a reconnection with my heritage.

I became tellement française. I wore clothes with the Eiffel Tower on them. I threw in French phrases into conversation, just to show how cultured I was, how unpractical. I lined up Zola and Balzac on my bookshelf and watched The Triplets of Belleville, despite its being a terrible film. I used words like “film” rather than “movie,” constantly favoring the Latinate over the Germanic.

But despite my lofty ideals, after 10 years of study, I could barely speak the stuff; I had no one to speak with. My classes became exclusively writing papers and reading books far above my speaking level; the one time I had to speak in class, I attempted to say what page number I was on (86) and was corrected by the professor. I pretended to call non-existent amis in France, gabbing on my cell phone with no one on the other end, until my suitemates caught me and never let me live it down. Language tables were too stressful; everyone who would willingly put themselves through a meal in another language would inevitably be better than I was. I had to put myself in a situation I couldn’t get out of. So I’m going abroad.