Wanderlust (40 page)

chapter thirty-one

W
e're stunned when Dominic
is assigned to Paris for his first tour. Our realistic expectation was somewhere like Tunisia or Paraguay, some developing country off the beaten path. To me Paris is unimaginative. I see it as elegant and stodgy, like someone's well-dressed great-aunt. As we enter the whirlwind of preparation, supervising movers and packing bags, a little part of me wants to dig in my heels. I ask myself why: I'm a freelance writer; I should be able to work anywhere. I know how to move; it's been my life's MO. I know how to settle in, find the nearest grocery store, meet new people. I speak French, solidly if not expertly, from the French immersion school I attended until the ninth grade. In the first, second, and third grades, I was banned from speaking English in class, which left me with a lasting confidence.

I know that my life sounds enviable, not least to my twenty-one-year-old self. Choosing has never been my strong suit, but if I'd had to, this might have been the exact life I envisioned for myself back then. I'm countryless and frictionless, moving on to another place. I have qualms, but there are many reasons I've decided to go ahead and go. For one I can't leave Dominic. I've been telling myself that a person can be a home base just as well as a place. Whether he's
up to it or not, I'm fashioning him into my rock. The disruption that leaving him would cause in my life seems greater than the disruption of moving to Paris.

For another, my self-image is as a person who would go. I'm the kind of person who would do this, and therefore I have to. Even if I don't love the reality, I love the story of following my diplomat boyfriend to Paris, and of being a writer there. I want to have the enviable life just because it's enviable.

And, of course, it's a new place. You build up momentum and it's hard to slow down.

Our apartment in Paris, which is provided by the embassy, has twelve-foot-high ceilings, parquet floors, and French doors in every room, which open onto little wrought-iron balconies. There are two bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus two rooms meant for living or dining. The fireplace is marble and there's wainscoting throughout. We have not only a garage off the courtyard, but down under the building, in a low-ceilinged warren with hard-packed dirt floors and numbered wooden doors, our very own
cave,
a cool damp room meant for storing wine.

Gerard Depardieu's daughter lives in our building, so we occasionally spot him hulking in the driveway. The Plaza Athénée, where a single cocktail in the lobby bar can cost twenty-four euro, or around thirty dollars, is at the other end of Avenue Montaigne from our apartment. It decorates its balconies with flowers and bunting, as though the majestic facade weren't pretty enough. One day on our street we see a yellow Lamborghini with license plates from Qatar; on another a flock of paparazzi case the Chanel boutique across the road. We have regular celebrity sightings—major and minor movie
stars plus the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. He looks exactly like he does in the magazines, and Dominic says that being him must be like being a superhero, having to put on the same outfit every day.

In short, we've stumbled into some absurd American fantasy of Paris come to life, and neither of us can quite get over it all. In fact Dominic, who's been broke on and off since childhood, plunges into sullen silence when we first move in. He struggles to express why, and my interpretation is that his conception of himself—as an unlucky boy grown into an edgy man—is crashing violently into our new reality. I have a more minor identity crisis: I think I'm tough and adventurous, and now this? But mostly I find it comical. We're living in a Disneyland for rich people who are too dull to think of anything else.

As we get to know the area, we like it less and less. We're just off the retail end of the Champs Élysées, which is lined with monster stores selling music and electronics, and the middle-of-the-road chains that dot every city in Europe. The smaller residential streets between our apartment and the Seine become prettier the farther you get from the Champs Élysées, but I wonder where all the people are. I wonder if they're all in their country homes, or if their apartments are so big they can spend most of their time inside. There are at least a dozen plastic surgery clinics in the immediate vicinity of our place, identified with discreet brass plaques. The customers roam the sidewalks like zombies in the aftermath of their procedures, skin stretched taut and lips plumped, alike and unnatural. Their off-kilter, double-take looks seem like the work of a B-moviemaker. The faceliftees scare me, because becoming them is one possible outcome of a life spent trading on sex appeal, and I know that I've dabbled that way. It's just so hard not to walk through that door. I remember Mark, in Australia, joking that I was “living on pure charisma.” Even now I sometimes wonder
about myself. I have great affection for Dominic; we're attached, we're very much companions. We say we love each other and we mean it; how different, after all, is
wanting
to love from loving? And yet there's a current flowing underground, our personal
cave.
I know that if I hadn't so desperately wanted to get back on my feet, we might not be together. I don't—and didn't—have the crazed passion I did for Justin or the Englishman. I know those passions were unstable, but I still think of them as pure. The fact that I couldn't resist makes them somehow more honest. In my head, a trade lurks in my relationship with Dominic, sullying the waters.

I don't hate Paris. I find friends. It turns out that a college friend of Kristin's, Nicole, lives here with her boyfriend, Toby. She's a Vancouverite who ended up in Paris by way of Singapore and San Francisco. I look her up and immediately understand why she drew Kristin in. She and Toby are warm and smart and some of the best cooks I've ever met, and I accept every invitation they extend. Through them I meet others, German and English and French, and they help me feel at home. We have Dominic's colleagues too, but I like being able to step outside of the embassy circle.

It's hard to find an unbeautiful place. While so many American cities have urban blight at their centers, Paris has reversed the equation. The poor have been banished to dystopian apartment blocks on the outer fringe. The well-to-do live in the center, in certain
arrondissements
more than others. The architecture is splendid, from the stone Haussmannian facades of our neighborhood, to Gothic cathedrals, to the narrow medieval streets of the Marais. These last are my favorite. The Marais—the “swamp”—is the only part of the city that wasn't overhauled in the nineteenth century, in the name of sanitation and
modernization. I love the way that, on the narrowest streets, the buildings are so close they seem to almost meet overhead.

Beauty seems to be municipal policy. Window displays are detailed dioramas. The garbage men and women wear matching bright green uniforms. It's considered rude to go around in sloppy clothes. At first I think it's tiresome to have to dress up to run out for a coffee, and be looked at askance for walking around with a coffee in the first place. I start to appreciate the obsession with aesthetics, though, because I get to enjoy it too. It pleases me to see a man in a fur coat and fedora, or a slim middle-aged woman walking her dog in the early morning mist, in lavender suede high heels. The philosophy is that things should be nice to look at, and they are.

Dominic has an ear for languages. He speaks Arabic better than I ever will, from the military's hardcore language training and the semester he spent in Tunisia. The State Department rates Arabic a three on its language scale, the most difficult category, whereas French is a breezy one. But Dominic started studying French just months before departure, and his natural reserve compounds his fear of making mistakes. He resents what he sees as my superior skill, and this becomes the basis of one of our recurring fights. He sinks into despondency one night because I crack a simple joke at a dinner party, and people laugh. We leave right away, and I try to console him as we walk home, through the Place de la Concorde, past its great Egyptian obelisk. Dominic wraps my French-speaking into his notion that I've had more experience than him. As our fight proceeds through its usual steps, he points out that I've been to more countries than he has, which while technically true is misleading as far as life experience goes: He served in the Army; rode an Internet
start-up to highs and lows during the first dot-com boom; spent time in Tunisia, Yemen, Kuwait, and Iraq. But he still talks about the country count, the way he talked about the sex count, and sometimes brings them both up in the same conversation. He says he'll be unhappy until he has more experience too, and I think he's telling me that he wants to do things without me before he can really be with me, like travel alone and fuck other women. This makes me unhappy and insecure, and I constantly find myself playing down my past to reassure him and convince him that we should be together. As I try to twist my life into something he'll find more palatable, I'm becoming a person I don't like. Inside the cavern of our relationship, I begin to see my past as negative. All this experience I've sought, all the places I've been, count against me.

We don't own any wine worth storing in
a cave,
and our belongings don't begin to fill the apartment. The embassy provides a few pieces of loaner furniture to tide us over until our shipment arrives: a love seat, a small table, and a few chairs made of cheap pine. We hang on to it all even after we get our own stuff. I take over one room as my office, and Dominic takes over another, where he keeps his computers and guitars. He wants to use the little pine table to store his record collection, but I insist that we make it a dining table. Dominic would almost always rather eat out than in, even if it's just at the pizza place around the corner. But I cook and encourage meals at home. When we're not eating, the table becomes a repository for all kinds of things—paperwork and books and stereo parts—so it feels makeshift. I want us to buy a real dining room table, which I think will make this feel like a real home, and us like people at the center of one. I think back: I've never had a dining room table of my very
own. Even with Stu we only had a little kitchen table that usually ended up piled with tools, though I never objected back then. I fixate on the idea of getting a table. But when we go out to buy furniture, we end up getting a matching love seat and armchair. They're spectacular in a certain way, very of-the-moment. The designer Philippe Starck, who's tricked out restaurants and hotels around Paris, also has a furniture line. Our new pieces have Lucite legs and bright white upholstery and are wildly out of our price range. They are more square than soft, and completely impractical. We live in fear that one of us will spill food or wine on them, and friends with children make us nervous. Our home looks better than it feels.