Lunch in Paris (4 page)

“The battle,” he said, looking at me like maybe I was speaking Russian. “When Stalin defeated Hitler on the Eastern Front.”

Duh
. It was only the moment that turned the tide of the entire Second World War, saving France from permanent occupation and
humiliation by Nazi Germany. There was no metro station named D-day.

It wasn’t just what we knew, it was what we wanted. Everyone I knew back home had a similar checklist, and the first item
(underlined, with an exclamation point) was
success
. Like most of my friends, at twenty-five, I considered myself to be in the slog-it-out stage—doing whatever we had to do
to become the people
we wanted to be. If that meant working hundred-hour weeks at banks, law firms, tech start-ups, or news magazines, so be it.
We were on the straight and narrow path toward partnerships, IPOs, Pulitzers, whatever would prove to us—and the world—that
we had arrived.

Gwendal didn’t seem to have a checklist. In fact, it was easy to get him to talk about anything but. Like that pig foraging
in the woods, Gwendal seemed to have only one consideration when making a decision: does this make me happy, does this give
me pleasure? Frankly, it struck me as a little odd.

The
porc noir de Bigorre
turned out to be a simple grilled pork chop served with sautéed potatoes and brussels sprouts. Under the toasted breadcrumbs,
my cassoulet was a small hill of white beans, cooked to unctuous perfection with a piece of
confit de canard,
a nice hunk of sausage, and a hint of tomato. Somehow, I felt no particular need to know the hair color of the animals that
had sacrificed themselves for my meal.

We were both yawning a bit over our empty espresso cups as we pushed back our chairs from the table. Thankfully, these leisurely
winter lunches were usually followed by a nap. Gwendal had introduced me to the concept of
le cinq à sept
. Literally, it means “the five to seven,” that hard-to-account-for time after work when lovers meet for a quick tryst before
going home to their families for dinner.
Vive la France.

As we put on our coats to go, I noticed a framed picture on the table just beside the door. It was the famous black pig, a
long dark Tootsie Roll, lolling around on the hay in his pen. He
did
look happy. All the same, I’m glad I didn’t see him before we sat down to lunch.

O
ver the next few months our weekends in Paris took on a lazy routine. Like any proper affair, the first challenge was getting
out of bed. There was a backstage tour of the Opera House at twelve thirty every Saturday. With the best intentions, we just
kept missing it.

I’d come to cherish waking up in this small room: the futon mattress on the floor, the sunny yellow sheets, the tiny Italian
coffeepot that, by some mystery of physics, started with boiling water in its bottom and finished with coffee in its top.
The textures and objects in this space began to feel like details in a recurring dream. Gwendal and I had created a little
glass bubble, precious and fragile, completely separate from our everyday lives. There was no thinking ahead, no questions.
For some people, that might have been normal; for me, it was a small miracle. It might have been the first time in my life
that I lived entirely in the present.

While I was still facedown on the pillow, Gwendal bravely pulled on a pair of jeans to go “hunting” for breakfast. He returned
from the Tunisian bakery around the corner, not with the head of a freshly killed mastodon, but with a waxed paper bag, neatly
crimped at the corners. It was filled with
chouquettes,
nothing more than empty cream puffs sprinkled with tiny pebbles of sugar—like biting into a sweet breeze.

Now that the weather had warmed up slightly and there was less fear for my numb and soggy toes, we spent our days outside,
hopping from one café terrace to the next. Paris in the springtime is a different city—every mild day could be just a break
in the endless November rain or the true beginning of summer. It was on one of these rambles that I got what I consider to
be a glimpse of Gwendal’s true character.

There are many things that will tell you the true measure of a man—the way he kisses, the way he holds a fork, the way he
talks to his mother on the phone. For me it was something else: we’ll call it the infamous bird-pooing incident.

We were on our way down to Bastille to go to a flea market. It was sunny, warm enough for me to be wearing Gwendal’s favorite
of my summer dresses—blue-and-white gingham with spaghetti straps—that, thanks to some clever engineering, didn’t require
a bra. He had on his favorite white linen shirt, the one from Australia with the baggy sleeves. We were walking along the
boulevard Richard-Lenoir in the shade of the plane trees, when I heard a distinct
ploop,
and saw an enormous green-gray puddle spread across his biceps.

I burst out laughing—no polite pause, no nod of sympathy. It’s a reflex. I once pulled a radio alarm clock down on a boyfriend’s
head in the middle of the night, like the anvil in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. As soon as I saw he wasn’t bleeding, the hysterics
began—giant tears of laughter rolling down my face. That’s what I’m like in a certain kind of crisis. Once the fear of concussion
is past, there’s just no stopping me.

“Ah,
merde,
” said Gwendal, looking up at the tree. “I see you!” he shouted, shaking a finger toward the sky, as if he knew the pigeon
personally. “It’s a vendetta,” he whispered. “Like the Corsican Mafia. They
know
me.” There are so many people in this world who can’t laugh at themselves; even fewer who can stomach a girl they are still
trying to impress laughing very much in their general direction. I’ve dated men… this would have ruined their entire day.
We would have had to go straight home to change, or straight to a pharmacy to buy some Handi Wipes. There might have been
a half-hour tirade on the immediate extermination of all rats-of-the-skies. Gwendal just looked at me, still doubled over
on the sidewalk, with a sheepish grin. We went to the café across the street, he washed the sleeve of his shirt in the bathroom
sink and let it dry in the Parisian sunshine, and we continued on with our walk.