Lunch in Paris (30 page)

This afternoon’s coffee seemed urgent, and she clearly didn’t want Gwendal around. I soon learned the source of the hullabaloo.
Among Axelle’s many enthusiasms is a love of Radio France—French public radio. She had met an older radio producer. He was
in Saint-Malo for the weekend and suggested she join him.

“His latest text said”—she scrolled through her messages—“ ‘Do you like sex on the beach?’ ” She bit her lip shyly. “Should
I go?”

“
Je ne sais pas,
” I said. “Where I come from, Sex on the Beach is a drink. Is it capitalized?” I said, leaning over the phone to take a look.
“Or in quotes?”

But no, in France, sex on the beach is apparently just that: sex on the beach.

Was I imagining it? Or was a French girl asking me for dating advice? I felt giddy. Weightless. Like the guy I’d had a crush
on since junior high just asked me to the senior prom. I’d been invited into the private world of a French person. We each
ordered a second
café noisette
and commiserated until the sun went down.

I
know I’m not a tourist anymore, because I have started to play mean games with Americans on the metro.

When you live abroad for a certain amount of time, you develop a special brand of disdain for the bumblings of your fellow
countrymen. You despise them for all the things they don’t know and can’t say, which are the same things you didn’t know and
couldn’t say only a few months ago. Why must they consistently block the escalators on both sides? Are they really making
a dinner reservation for six thirty p.m.? You’re sure you want that steak
well done?

The cultural short circuit that amazes me the most is that Americans in Paris still think no one can understand them when
they speak. Packed like sardines on the metro they will talk as if they are in an empty room—the man next to them smells terrible,
the flush mechanism on the hotel toilet is
completely inadequate
to deal with their recent bout of diarrhea. Yet they’re not speaking Finnish, or Swahili. They are standing toe to toe with
a generation of Parisians brought up on MTV. So my new game is to sit down next to some Americans, chat with Gwendal in French
until they say something truly
gauche,
then switch to English and watch them turn purple with shame.

Sometimes it gets downright kinky. The seats on the metro are arranged in snug blocks of four, so it’s no work at all to hear
the nuances of other people’s conversations. One Saturday afternoon Gwendal and I sat down across from an older American couple.
They were your classic conspicuous tourists: sixty-somethings with fanny packs, white sneakers, pleated khaki pants and elastic-waist
jeans. At the beginning it was sweet. They were in town for their fortieth wedding anniversary. “Just wait till I get you
back to the hotel,” said the husband, putting his hand on his wife’s knee, centimeters from my own. This,
à la limite,
was normal; I’m used to couples groping each other on the metro. Suddenly things took a turn toward the cringe-worthy. In
the tone he might have used to ask for extra peanuts on the airplane, he looked over at her: “Did you pack the K-Y?”

Gwendal and I stood up at the next stop. “Let’s go,” I said, louder than necessary, catching the husband’s eye as I inched
my pelvis past his wire-rimmed glasses toward the door. He looked stricken, like he’d watched his IRA plummet or lost a very
important round of golf.

I’
M ON THE
metro more often these days, because I’m on my way to work. I hate to prove my mother right so much of the time, but I recently
started giving private tours at the Louvre.

One of my editors at an art magazine in New York had a friend who was finishing up a PhD in Paris and had starting giving
high-end art tours. With
Da Vinci Code
mania in full swing, she was suddenly overwhelmed and looking for help. I knew myself well enough to anticipate the upcoming
identity crisis about being an Ivy League tour guide, but I pushed it aside. My mother was
right; if I didn’t get away from my computer soon, I was going to turn into a space bar.

It was perfect. Back in the world of museums, I felt like a caged animal released into my natural habitat. Walking under the
limestone arcades, past the spray of the fountains, and down into the cool marble atrium beneath I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid,
I was my old self again. Speaking English, I was once again smiling and articulate, capable of transmitting something that
was deeply important to me. How I’d missed that, being able to grab hold of language, mold it, and use it to put myself into
the world.

Taking people around the Louvre is a seduction. Every object has a tale to tell—and once people get past the overwhelming
size of the place, they just look at you like kids expecting a bedtime story.

Of course I didn’t do all the talking. If you can get them started, almost everyone has a strong opinion on the works of art
they see, and they approach them in light of their own expertise. The doctors in particular have a lot to say. There was an
orthopedic surgeon who had his wife, two daughters, and me in front of the sculpture of the Venus de Milo for ten minutes,
trying to imitate her pose. Apparently her hip rotation is physically impossible without breaking something that he would
then have to fix.

Even the
Mona Lisa
is not immune to diagnosis. A makeup artist once told me she looks much more feminine from the left side because of the way
her hair is parted. Who knew? Then there was the chiropractor. “She has a ganglion cyst. See that lump, on her thumb.” And
for the first time, I did. “We should write a paper together,” I said. “I bet no one has ever published that before.”

The greatest days are when I convert someone. Particularly to a work as overexposed and bastardized as the
Mona Lisa
. It’s difficult to get someone to look past the reproduction they’ve seen a thousand times to the woman that Leonardo brought
to life.

My most recent visit was with a couple from Berlin, a French girl and her German boyfriend. She had booked it as a surprise.
He had never been to the Louvre, and she hadn’t been since she was a child.

There’s always a moment when you walk in to see her. She is in a room the size of a basketball court, filled at any given
moment with three hundred people, and just as many cameras snapping away. She remains serene, unperturbed by her celebrity.

The boyfriend started to walk up to her and promptly turned around. He had decided he was more interested in the colorful
fifty-foot painting of the
Marriage at Cana
on the wall behind us.

I knew I had to get us a little closer. “This is where it pays to have played a little college football,” I said. “Just follow
my elbows.” We snuck up around the side, not more than four or five feet from the glass. He stared for a moment, pursed his
lips, and shook his head, like a man sizing up a girl at a party. He didn’t say it out loud, but I could hear his thoughts:
She’s not all that
. “Personally,” I began, “I think they should hang the
Mona Lisa
in a different spot in the Louvre every day.” He smiled (he looked like the scavenger-hunt type). “If you just came upon
her in an empty room, next to that painting—I pointed to a pouting Venus on the wall next to us—“or that one”—a dull-eyed
courtier—“I think you would turn around as if you met
someone
you knew. Not a painting of someone, but an actual person. She’s so
present
.”