Lunch in Paris (32 page)

A dark-haired boy got on at the next stop; he couldn’t have been more than eight, wearing navy track pants and an oversized
T-shirt. He had a big set of keys around his neck that hung almost to his knees. He had to fight to hoist himself up onto
the flip-down booster seat next to the door. I watched as he held it steady with both hands and, looking over his shoulder,
inched his bottom toward the back. Then he took out a comic book and started reading. He nibbled on a fingernail and turned
the page. We were fellow passengers now. Just a couple of Parisians passing the time on our daily commute.

I got off the train hugging the book to my chest.

I can really do this, I can make this work.

P
astry aside, I hate this country and everything it stands for.

One sunny day in June, on impulse, I bought two pairs of sandals. They weren’t perfect, but black is always useful and silver
is in, so I figured, What the heck. Later that week I went to the doctor for a backache; she said I shouldn’t be wearing flat
shoes, so I decided to return them.

Clearly this was hubris. Folly. I unleashed the floodgates, and now the deluge was upon me.

I passed by the store on my way home the next day. I didn’t know the word for “refund.” I didn’t want an exchange. The salesman
asked me what was wrong with the shoes. “Nothing is wrong with them,” I said. “I just don’t want them anymore.”
Free markets, free will, goddamn it
.

“We don’t just take things back,
comme ça,
” he said, snapping his fingers in the air. His disdain was so complete, his tone so withering, that I stepped back as if
I’d been struck. I opened my mouth to explain, but he stared me down like a six-headed Hydra, like I had worn the shoes to
a muddy rave and was now trying to put one over on him, like I was a criminal: a wasteful, horrid,
annoying creature, a shoe hound, a shrill and irresponsible taker of his time. The story about the doctor evaporated like
the dog that ate my homework. My French grammar retreated to the farthest corner of my brain. My vocabulary dwindled to a
series of helpless shrugs. By the time I left the shop, trailing my shopping bag behind me, I was almost in tears. I was too
weak for indignation and too disgusted with myself to go back in. That was the moment things hit rock bottom. The girl who
was going to set the world on fire couldn’t even return a pair of shoes.

There is only one antidote for a day like that: chocolate. I needed comfort food and I needed it fast. For me, comfort food
is the kind of thing you can make in your sleep—you’ve memorized the recipe, and you usually have all the ingredients lying
around the house. You can do it with one hand, or one ear cocked to the phone. It’s not going to fall apart if a few tears
or a trail of snot end up in the batter. My new comfort food of choice, now that I’ve left the land of Pillsbury ready-made
cookie dough, is Gwendal’s quick and dirty chocolate soufflé.

I know it sounds terribly ambitious—making chocolate soufflé with snot coming out of my nose. That’s the beautiful thing:
at the time I didn’t
know
I was making soufflé, I thought I was making the world’s easiest chocolate cake. It was one of Gwendal’s standard recipes.
He knew it by heart, but at my request he’d printed a version off the Internet. In a tart pan, it puffed up in the oven and
immediately fell back down again (I knew exactly how it felt). But poured into small buttered soufflé dishes, it immediately
took on a more elegant guise (this gave me hope).

While I was melting the chocolate, I dialed my mother. Despite recent evidence to the contrary, she is pretty good in a crisis.
I’ve been away from home since I was fifteen, so this was hardly the first long-distance phone call she’d received from her
daughter in hysterical tears.

My first year in London, I went out on a date with a Norwegian banker. He had come to interview for my spot in a shared apartment,
and before he left we agreed to meet for a drink. “A” drink in London is a radical misnomer. My favorite pub was having its
five-year anniversary bash, and by ten p.m. I had seen the bottom of more glasses of wine than I have toenails and it seemed
like a good idea to get up and dance on our pedestal table. The evening ended in a crescendo of shattered glass and blood
dripping from my arm onto my white silk blouse. The bartender whisked us into the kitchen, washed us off, and shoved us out
the door.

Mr. Norway took me back to his flat, and instead of stripping off my bloody clothes, taking me in his arms, and licking my
wounds like an adoring panther, he sent me home. On the bus. Bastard didn’t even put me in a cab. As soon as I found my keys
(after the miracle of finding my apartment), I called my mother, drunk and hyperventilating. With the five-hour time difference,
I no doubt interrupted her in the middle of dinner.

“Elizabeth?”

“Mom,” I gasped. I was crying so hard I could barely breathe. “How’d you get blood out of a white silk shirt?” I paused to
suck in some air. “He sent (gulp). He sent. He sent me. Home. On on on. On the
buuuus
.” By this point I was lying on the kitchen floor, the ceiling tiles spinning above my head.

My mother, on the other side of the world, not knowing if I’d been raped or drugged or had recently escaped from the trunk
of somebody’s car, summoned all her wisdom and Zen-like composure and said: “Put the blouse in a big pot of cold water and
call me in the morning.”

That, my friends, is the definition of a good parent.

Needless to say, she was not surprised to hear that the world was ending yet again, this time over a pair of shoes.

I was spitting into the phone as I shouted over the eggbeater. “How could anyone
choose
to live in this pathetic excuse for a country? Is individual liberty really such a dangerous thing? What about a little professionalism,
service? How about basic human kindness?” I looked at the puddle of chocolate in the top of the double boiler. I wanted to
dive in and swim away. “I feel like I’ve been here forever, and I can’t even take on a snotty salesclerk. I just don’t know
if this is ever going to get any easier.”

I stopped short, as I always did, of saying “I want to come home.” I was at my classic impasse. I had one foot on either side
of the ocean, and my knees were beginning to wobble.

The cake takes only twenty minutes to bake, which is as close to instant gratification as homemade gets. In deference to my
mother-in-law, I tried cutting a small piece, which I ate off an actual plate. But by the end of the afternoon I was just
standing at the counter, licking the knife. By the time Gwendal got home from work the worst had passed. I didn’t feel like
telling the story twice, so he listened while I called Kelda and reiterated the whole thing over the phone.

“FWA, baby.” I could see her shaking her head on the other end of the line. “FWA.”

France wins again.

I
WOULDN’T HAVE
thought it was possible, but the summer went downhill from there.

In February, Gwendal had quit his job at the cinema archive to become the technical director of a digital cinema start-up.
In May, his salary was two weeks late, and his boss refused to give him his promised shares of the company. In June, his salary
failed to appear at all. Gwendal wrote a letter citing breach of contract and left. His boss accused him of quitting and refused
to give him the
papers necessary for his unemployment benefits. We were going to have to take them to court.

Once again, I was stranded without my network. In the United States, everyone I know is a lawyer. I feel like I took torts
by osmosis. Gwendal didn’t know anyone. When we finally did find a lawyer, her office had a lot of dusty molding, and when
she appeared for our court date three months later, she was wearing a black polyester robe like the one I wore to my high
school graduation. The event itself was a farce. We showed up in the morning, not knowing in what order we would be called.
There was a list taped to the door, but as the day wore on it became clear that the list was purely decorative. It was like
Monty Python court: a guy came out (he might as well have been dressed as a court jester) and called number 5, then number
14, then number 9.

It was five thirty by the time we made our way into the wood-paneled chamber. In France this kind of workplace arbitration
is overseen by one representative of the labor unions and one representative of the management lobby. When Mr. Management
heard the level of Gwendal’s salary (relatively elevated for France), he cut our lawyer off midsentence and turned to Gwendal’s
boss. “I’m sure you had noble reasons for not paying your employee.”