French Toast (12 page)

At the train station, I furiously asked the name of the person in charge. “Just write to the station chief,” the man behind the computer console told me. “He doesn't have a name?” I queried incredulously, knowing I would never get it in any case. This ability to hide behind anonymity
makes people perfectly irresponsible, and you, the customer, end up paying for their errors.

In line with this is the personalization of the salesperson-client relationship. There is none of this “Business is business—I'll serve anyone who will give me his money” attitude. It is much more a question of “Do I like her face?” If you're on the right side of this equation, this has its distinct advantages.

One cold winter morning, I was going to give a class way out in the southern Paris suburb of Massy Palaiseau. As I was driving along, my little vehicle began stopping, to the tune of honks and gesticulations from the people behind me. After a few more stops and starts, I managed to get off the road and made a beeline for the nearest garage. In the first garage, I asked for the owner, who came out, diagnosed the problem, told me he couldn't help, and directed me to a neighboring garage. There I found a young mechanic to whom I explained that I was on the way to a class and was probably going to lose my job if I didn't show up, and couldn't he please do something for me?

Was it the sincerity of my tone? Was it my American accent? Was it that I was putting my destiny into his hands? Whatever it was, he instantly took an interest in my case, jumped in a truck to go find the parts he didn't have on hand, rushed back within five minutes, installed the broken piece of machinery, and had me ready to go in record time.

The point is that if you can get someone personally interested in your predicament, you will often get amazing results. No one had scheduled me into that mechanic's day, but he took off the time to do my job because he got involved in it. It even became a matter of honor for him to get my car repaired fast and get me on my way.

And while we're on the subject, I can report that I just got back from an exhausting stint of Christmas shopping. Every single salesperson I met was charming, amiable, courteous, wrapping my gifts with the utmost ease and taste. (The whole thing was expensive as all get-out, but that's a fact of life in France; you finally get used to it and bid your hard-earned money good-bye with nary a thought.) It's easy to focus on the negative, but the positive also exists, and as usual, when things go well in France, they go exquisitely well (which is why I have a theory of “magic days” that can only happen in France).

The deal is, I realized, that in France standardized sales behavior does not exist. This results in highly unpredictable situations, but I can think of one distinct advantage. You don't get the “Hi, my name is Joan and I'll be your waitress for the evening” treatment. You may have an adorable waiter (I've had many more professional, well-trained, pleasant waiters than the opposite), a snotty waiter, or something between the two, but at least he'll be himself.

So now that I have figured all this out, I know that
all I need to do is count my change in every store on the street where I live, inure myself to the idea that the customer is
not
always right, and, last but not least, remember never, but never, to
talk
about money. It's dirty, you know.

Interview with Philippe

HARRIET
:
French people are always saying that Americans are materialistic. What does that mean? Why don't the French think that they're materialistic?

PHILIPPE
:
The difference is that in France, it's vulgar to talk about money. Talking about money is much worse than talking about sex
.

HARRIET
:
As a Frenchman, doesn't it irritate you to be prey to the petty cheating of little shopkeepers? How can you explain this cheating on a small scale?

PHILIPPE
:
You're American. For them, you're supposed to be rich
.

HARRIET
:
How about you? You're French, and I've seen you get the same treatment
.

PHILIPPE
:
You just yell. That's the end of it
.

HARRIET
:
So that doesn't shock you?

PHILIPPE
:
Shopkeepers are made to steal from other people. Otherwise, they would be professors of ancient Sanskrit at the Sorbonne
.

HARRIET
:
Oh Lord, the caste system . . . okay, why do people cheat on their taxes?

PHILIPPE
:
Screwing the state doesn't count
.

After attacking (some might say literally) the subjects of food, sex, the Frenchwoman, and French attitudes toward money, how about a subject that fascinates everyone who visits Paris: the Parisians. The five subjects have one thing in common: They're all hard for a foreigner to figure out.

It was one of those wonderful Parisian evenings when the air is soft and it's perfect to sit outside on the terrace of a restaurant and watch the world go by. My husband and I and an American friend of ours were savoring the food and the evening when suddenly my husband, irritated by a fox terrier who was getting too close for comfort, turned to its owner and, wearing his most disagreeable expression, ordered her, “Take your dog and
put him as far away from me as you can.” Answer of dog owner: “You could ask in a nicer tone of voice.” My husband: “I'm not nice.” The dog owner: “
Grossier personnage
” (this is a standard insult, which means something like “boor” or “vulgar person”).

I don't like them, but I'm used to these little restaurant scenes (there are so many dogs in restaurants that it's hard to avoid a clash). Nonetheless, I could see that our friend was getting a bit embarrassed. “Would you see a scene like this in the States?” my husband asked him, much more relaxed once he had bawled the lady out and the dog was no longer a problem. “No,” replied our friend. “First of all, you wouldn't see a dog in a restaurant and, second of all, you'd probably get a knife pulled on you the way you were talking to her.”

My husband, a true Parisian, was perfectly satisfied, even delighted. He had attained his goal, which was to get rid of the dumb dog which was ruining his dinner. He didn't care if the dog's owner hated him.

“Welcome to Paris,” I told my friend.

As a WASP, and a Midwesterner to boot, I view fights as things to be avoided. What I realized after two decades of living with my French husband is that for a Parisian, a day is no fun if there's no dispute. There would be nothing to talk about over the dinner table at night. If you have a knock-down-drag-out with someone—another driver, a salesperson—you have fuel for a story in which you emerge the victor and the audience
is wowed. This has been going on since the Gauls in Caesar's time; it's really nothing new. (Surely, French writer Jean Cocteau was thinking of a Parisian when he described a Frenchman as “an Italian in a bad mood.”)

There's no lack of occasions for getting into arguments in Paris. Dogs are high on the list, either because they have pooped in your path, or because they are going to poop in your path, or because they are licking your leg as you try to digest a meal. On the other hand, a dog can be a man or woman's best pal in Paris. One woman told me that her world changed the day she bought her fox terrier. Before, she had been invisible, even with her two young children in tow. With the dog, people stopped her in the streets, asked her what kind it was, how old it was, told her how cute it was. (They ignored her kids.)

Parisians may be slobs when it comes to letting their dogs poop all over the pavement, but, paradoxically, they are very interested in the cleanliness of their city, forking out one thousand dollars per head per year for it. Hence, some six thousand city employees clean the city in one way or another twenty-four hours a day. And, a friend told me, this includes Christmas Day, when she was astonished to hear the clatter of the garbage truck.

Many quarrels, I have noticed, revolve around the car, one of the primary reasons for the bad humor of
Parisians. Before I started driving, I thought of Paris as an almost gentle place to live, a place of radiant beauty. I walked on a cloud, with my head in the air, admiring centuries-old buildings and penthouse apartments (not a good idea, I found, after slipping in dog doo). After I got up the nerve to drive, though, I discovered a whole new world, and all the various possibilities for disputes arising from the possession of a vehicle. Paris must be a lovely place to live in if you have a chauffeur.

Of course, a real Parisian, like my husband, thrives on the thrill of driving in Paris. He heads into the nolane traffic mess around the Arc de Triomphe with glee. Whenever I can, I avoid the “Circle from Hell.” When I can't, well, I've learned to fend for myself and actually enjoy watching the Parisians as they both drive
and
chat on car phones, file their nails, smoke big fat cigars, and flirt with one another. Why not?

I discovered that, among other things, there seems to be an unwritten rule stating that a Parisian puts his car where he wants to when he wants to. It can block a garage or another car or an entry reserved for ambulances. None of these obstacles pose a problem for the Parisian. On one typical morning, my husband discovered that his car was blocked by an inconsiderate soul who had double-parked his van, locked the doors, and totally vanished. What can one do? My husband got his revenge by taking out a tube of greasy lipstick (which he keeps with him for this purpose) and scrawling
something unprintable on the person's windshield. He then proceeded to go to work . . . on the Métro.

As I live in a neighborhood of nouveaux riches, this means that not only do the people have all the Parisian characteristics of aggressivity and hostility and general impoliteness but, on top of that, since they are newly rich, they think that anything worth having can be bought. Manners not being a commodity, there's no reason to have any!

On one rainy day shortly before Christmas, an elderly lady in our building went out to get into her red Renault 5 but couldn't leave because she was blocked by another car. That's par for the course around here, but infuriating all the same. After a good half hour, she finally spied the offender coming toward her. I thought in my naïveté that the guilty party would profusely apologize. Wrong. This made my neighbor even more furious. So she hauled off and belted the culprit. You may think this is the end of the story and that they were even. No!

The Hateful Guilty One grabbed one of my neighbor's windshield wipers, ripped it out, and yelled, “That'll teach you to lay your hands on me!” (Remember, all this is taking place in a neighborhood that is the French equivalent of Westchester, Winnetka, or Knightsbridge.) She then trounced off to the astonishment of the little group that by this time had gathered around to witness the brawl. But she didn't get far. A gallant Frenchman, yelling and shouting, dashed to the car of
the offender as she was about to drive off . . . and gave a healthy kick to her rear lights, breaking them.

These kinds of incidents happen
often
.

There seems to be another unwritten rule among Parisians: Always get even with the appropriate response. By that, I mean something rather elegant that you just throw off, such as
“Je vous emmerde, madame!” (“F --- you, madam.”)
Even when they are rude, even when they are driving, the French stick to form.

Getting your car into a parking place is also fun and games. In Paris, the method is to bang the car in back of you and then bang the one in front as you maneuver in (or out). If you're lucky, the driver of one or the other will have left his emergency brake off, which facilitates the easing in or out. I tried this in the States. Unfortunately for me, the owner of the car I bumped into was standing right in front of his Chinese restaurant. I thought I was going to end up as chop suey. In France, everyone yells and screams and gesticulates and threatens, but you never FEAR FOR YOUR LIFE OR THINK YOU'LL END UP WITH A BULLET IN YOU. I surmised from the reactions of my fellow Americans that we need some lessons in Parisian creative driving.