How Did You Get This Number (19 page)

I didn’t do any of those things to Paris. I loved Paris. Which is why it’s especially painful knowing that, like a boarding school reject, I will not be “asked back” anytime soon. Though I was not formally banished, Paris has made it clear that it would prefer to continue on in its Frenchness
sans moi.
To sweat me out. Imagine what it is to be rejected by the most sophisticated and casually stunning place in the world. A place filled with the highest percentage of women on the planet able to pull off chinchilla wraps with jeans. To not be welcome in the City of Love is tantamount to being rejected by love itself. Why couldn’t I have gotten thrown out of Akron, Ohio? City of Rubber.

 

 

 

 

MY FRIEND LOUISE HAD SUBLET AN APARTMENT IN Paris for a month, so I found the cheapest red-eye possible and booked my flight. Because this is what you do when your friend calls from Paris to tell you how wonderful the very worst of everything is over there. You go out and buy an international adapter plug kit, lay the plug heads on your bed, and stare at the beveled prongs. You feel the sudden urge to travel sixteen hours to Fiji just to plug something in. A toaster, maybe. But Fiji, she will have to wait. Paris is calling! The entire city is spinning with sophistication, like a child’s top. The Eiffel Tower is the handle.

Having just successfully deplaned, I was already trying on the Parisian version of myself. This version of my personhood was distinctly laid-back. Sometimes forcefully, if the situation required it.
What? No, honestly, take this taxi. You were here first in spirit.
Laid-back Me was sewn to my heels, a shadow with its own motivations and interests. A silhouette with a joint in one hand, a package of Ding Dongs in the other, and bunny slippers on its feet. Not that the shadow wasn’t adaptable. That was part of the deal. If I had gone to Montana, I would have been laid-back and prone to liking horses. If I had gone to Tokyo, I would have been laid-back and unfazed by pornographic comic books and confounding soft-drink packaging. If I had gone to Rome, I would have done as they do. Now I had returned to Paris to be laid-back and—who knew what?
The shadow knows
. Consume unseemly quantities of macaroons, maybe.

This laid-back version of me decided to surprise Louise by navigating public transport from the airport to her apartment. Having been to Paris once before, I had a vague sense of its layout. In New York, I couldn’t find my way out of a paper bag. Or, more accurately, a used paper bag. I forgot the paths to the same locations no sooner than I had found them. But the Parisian streets were generous with me, rewarding my instinct to veer left or turn right with the correct street names drilled to the walls of each corner. When I located Louise’s address, I realized she was right: the worst of the worst here looks a lot like the best of our best. Everything about the building was perfect, right down to the doors—sturdy but worn wooden twins that earned their distress. Like a great pair of jeans. I exchanged grins with a woman who entered the building ahead of me. This would be a double surprise. Any closer and Louise would wake up with me sitting creepily at the end of her bed, watching her sleep.

“Bonjour,
Louise,” I’d say, all
Hello, Clarice.

Maybe just inside the door was far enough.

The woman held the door. I was still mute with embarrassment, my tongue like the neck of a turtle retracted in the shell of my face. I speak “get by” French. Also known as
“bicyclette rouge
French” to anyone who’s ever cracked open a blue, white, and red textbook.
Est-ce que vous avez une bicyclette rouge? Oui, ici est ma bicyclette rouge.
If McGraw-Hill is to be believed, red bicycles are government-issued in France. Also, everyone in France is
très fatigué
all the time, likely from their late nights buttering bread and sending telegrams.

The woman allowed me to follow her, rolling my suitcase clumsily over the cobblestone of the courtyard. When she slid a key into a door on the first floor, she glanced back over her shoulder and smiled again, this time more furtively, which I translated to mean “You gonna be okay out here?” but which probably meant something along the lines of “Please don’t kill my family with whatever’s in that bag.” I sat on my suitcase and called Louise, somewhat horrified by the expensive trip the signal took, ricocheting between hemispheres.

“Well, hello there,” I said, anxious to surprise her with my presence not at the
metro
stop, as planned, but delivered right to her front door.
Quel service!

“Guess where I am.”

“At the metro stop?”

“Non!
In your courtyard.”

“What?”

“In your courtyard?”

I didn’t understand why she couldn’t get on board with my enthusiasm. I had saved her much clunking up metro steps with an obvious fellow tourist, and this allowed her another day of native make-believe. One’s own touristicity is easily submerged—watch what you put on your feet, lose the raincoat, try not to look up so much—but
two
tourists are a different story. It’s the same principle that allows one to dart like a pixilated frog across oncoming traffic when alone but forces one to wait for a blinking light when with a group, watching old ladies with walkers and mothers with strollers dart past. It’s why spies don’t have friends and serial killers don’t start book clubs. There is no safety in numbers.

“That’s impossible,” said Louise, waking up.

“Well”—I gave my haughtiest chuckle—“the laws of time and space would beg to differ.”

“I don’t have a courtyard.”

In a moment of temporary dyslexia, Louise had e-mailed me the wrong address. Worse, she couldn’t recall her own address.
This is not a problem!
said my laid-back-ness, as it waited for Louise to go downstairs and consult her front door. But when I went to leave I discovered that the giant doors to the street had locked behind me. The metal knobs refused to turn, despite my repeated attempts to convince them. I shook them, imagining how futile a couple of vibrating doors on a bustling Parisian avenue appeared from the other side. I went back into the courtyard, but there were no signs of life, just a few curtains blowing in the open windows above and some very annoying birds. It was nine a.m. I glanced at the door on the first floor.
This is not a problem!
said my laid-back self. Louise got back on the phone, at which point I explained that I was being held hostage by this strange building.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m coming to find you.”

I didn’t know how French blocks worked. I knew only that I was somewhere on a street as long as Broadway and the address had been botched using four digits. I had some time. The first pangs of jet lag washed over me. Sometimes the worst of the worst is actually the worst. Tired of fiddling with the lock, I stepped back and roundhouse kicked it for my own amusement. I did this at the exact right angle to set off the security alarm. Like its cousin, the ambulance siren, this alarm blared in a French accent—singsongy and oddly un-urgent. But it echoed like a bitch.

This is not a problem!
said my laid-back-ness. I needed to unstitch this slacker shadow before I punched it.

“For who are you
cherching?”
said an elderly Frenchman who appeared from absolutely nowhere. He was angry and quasi-bilingual. He spoke while charging at me and tightening his bathrobe. The rough hair springing from his ears was just long enough to allow for mobility, and it waved with his marching. I looked over his shoulder, searching for a hallway or a stairwell or a dumbwaiter. Right now I was
cherching
for any possible Crazy French Dude point of origin.

“You
frenchfrenchfrench
idiot. I get the
frenchfrenchfrench
police!”

“Zut,” I said, hands in the air. Are you even allowed to threaten to call the police in your bathrobe anymore?

“Je suis tres desole.
”

That’s another thing about
bicyclette rouge
French. No one in France ever finds himself moderately hungry or reasonably happy. They are always very everything.

“Mais,”
I continued, as he eyed my suitcase stuffed with hypothetically stolen goods,
“je pense que j‘’ai le mal
building. ”

Because I could not think of the word for “wrong,” I used the word for “bad.” Ah, influency, recipe for extremes. I had broken into this gentlemen’s building to insult it. Which, come to think of it, seemed like something a French robber would do.

Perhaps I had inadvertently stumbled on the word “cock-sucker” as well, because then came a torrent of French followed by a mercifully dry spitting gesture. The veins of French vocabulary may run thin with a low word count, but they know how to bleed. I have reason to believe I was called a squirrel at one point. But he may also have been calling me a school. I cocked my head at him. Had the use of “school” as a verb crossed continents? And would this man, with his astonishingly wiry nose hair, be familiar with it? One thing was certain: I was being schooled, run over like a half-dead squirrel. Bump, bump.

“S’il vous plaît, ”
I reasoned with him through the sound of the siren,
“pas de polizia. Je suis normale!”

“Ish.”

“D’accord.
Go, go, go,” he said in English, shoving me aside to perform a series of doorknob twists befitting a Rubik’s Cube.

I peeked outside, hesitant as a cat to leave her cage at the vet’s office. Louise was not there yet. When she finally did arrive, I was sitting on my suitcase, ignoring the coolly revolted glares of people passing by and playing with a zipper. My arms extended, I buried my head in my elbows.

“I feel like I should give you money.” Louise bent down and hugged me.

“That’s so weird.” I looked up. “I also feel like you should give me money.”

Not being the most reliable navigator, I would get Louise lost many times in the coming days. After a while, it was as much her fault as it was mine for deciding to follow me. But I couldn’t blame her. Looking at a map requires an activation of concentration even if you don’t have spatial-relations issues, the same way cooking raw chicken requires an activation of “let’s just get through this part” even if you’re not a vegetarian. Because we were staying in the Marais, a neighborhood defined by narrow sidewalks and independent shops and very small cups of coffee, neither of us minded the winding routes home. Nothing seemed to take that long, and when it did, we didn’t care: we were in Paris. If we swung especially far off course, we’d pass the old man’s building.

“Look”—Louise would point, with a shopping bag-weighted arm—“your fake apartment building.”

We took pictures of it. It became our anti-landmark, how we knew we were headed in the wrong direction. And I’d look at the door and think of how thoroughly unappealing it seemed from the other side. I’d think of the last thing the old man said to me as he escorted me off his property. He gestured at the courtyard, then at me, then at the negative space of the open door.

“Frenchfrenchfrench,”
he said. “I do not
frenchfrench
think you should come to this place again.”

He probably meant just the apartment building. But I took it to mean all of Paris.

 

 

 

 

AFTER THAT FIRST DAY, I AWOKE TO THE VAGUE BUT identifiable smell of cheese. The kind of cheese where if you didn’t know it was cheese, you’d think someone took a crap on the metro and set it on fire. And then put it out with milk. I meandered into the kitchen to see a composition of French consumption on the table: bottles of red wine, baguettes, leeks, an entire wheel of Brie, and a jar of something that may or may not have been mayonnaise. It also may have been marshmallow fluff. I wouldn’t know. The nutritional information orbited along the outermost rings of my French vocabulary.

“I think that’s mayonnaise,” Louise said, sneaking up behind me and cracking a chocolate croissant in half. “What’s French for mayonnaise?”

“Mayonnaise.
”

“Then what’s marshmallow?”

“Presumably
marshmalleaux.”

Any word over ten letters in English is the same word in French. Fact.

“What is all this, anyway?” I said, gesturing with the jar. It was the same way I would gesture with it in a drunken stupor two nights hence, causing it to slip from my hand, fall straight out the window and onto the street, smashing into a carnage of goop and glass. Which, to our credit, the French pigeons were also at a loss to identify.

“This is the
le beauty of le sublet
,” she cried. “Cooking!”

Louise, a key-carrying subletter, had gone on a
supermarché
sweep. She opened a plastic container of creamed fish and spread it over her second cliché-stuffed pastry.

“Are you pregnant?”

“What?”

“Le knocked up. Are you?”

“No.” She laughed and explained her subletting enchantment. “I just like bringing groceries back to a house. With a house, even when you’ve powered down for the day, you’re still in a kind of cultural-immersion program.”

Who was I to argue? Without even trying to take in Paris, I had already slept in someone else’s low bed. I had touched their funny toilet paper, opened their medicine cabinet, banged on their faucets like a monkey, and then maneuvered their low-hanging showerhead, mumbling,
What is this, Thailand?
until I resigned myself to defeat and squatted to bathe, also like a monkey.