Two Men In Paris

Sometimes an egg or two (or three!) is all you need to make the perfect breakfast. I usually prefer mine in omelets and pancakes, but simple, boiled eggs are quite tasty too. Especially on the perfect crispbread.

I’m a bona fide Francophile. Wherever I go, I defend the French. Not that they need defending much; few countries are as popular with tourists as France. Few cities as loved as Paris. But there are people who have yet to discover the pleasures of the perfect Brie, the bittersweet (douce-amère) sound of the French street accordion, the impeccable style of the Parisian women, and the wonders of the French men. Oh-la-la!

The men and women in Paris are sure of themselves and seem to know who they are, which put anyone who isn’t or doesn’t at a clear disadvantage.

Someone, for instance, like myself.

I always wanted to be someone else and preferably somewhere else, too. Sweden was small and boring and being Swedish was pretty much just as lame. I just wanted to be French. I wanted to be able to call Paris my city.

I thought if I could just marry someone French, I too would be privy to the secrets of the pout and the je-ne-sais-quoi and the nonchalant shoulder shrug. Luckily, I was a serious student in college and was awarded a scholarship from the Marseille Fund. The second they put the money into my bank account, I purchased a silk blouse and a one way ticket to Paris with Air France.

Weeks later (after having moved from one cheap, roach-infested hotel to another) I put down my suitcase in the 10^th arrondissement, in a bourgeois apartment a stone’s throw away from Marcel Marceau’s theater and Folies Bergere, where the girls danced with peacock feathers in their bottoms and glitter on their nipples.

In a matter of weeks I found two men who were up for grabs.

Numéro Un was my neighbor, an Asian man who always appeared impeccably dressed in the stairway. My bedroom window faced a narrow courtyard and, at an angle, the kitchen window in the apartment below. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I saw that the light in the kitchen window below was on. I opened my window and leaned out a bit to get a better view, and there, only about six feet away from me, I saw my Asian neighbor kneeling in front of his opened fridge, and sort of shoveling food into his mouth: Marmalade, pudding, cheese, and what looked like some sort of pâté. I watched this explosion of pleasure with some concern. But then, as if he could feel my eyes on him, the man suddenly stood up and turned around, facing me in all his nakedness. For a split second we looked straight into each other’s eyes, before we quickly moved away from our windows. The next day, on my way to Boulevard Raspail and school, I ran into him in the stairways. He blushed a deep crimson, and from then on avoided me.

At about the same time Numéro Deux, the Hermès man, waltzed into my life with stars in his eyes and a bouquet of roses in his arms. He was a head shorter than me and had a funny way of clattering his teeth when he laughed. Monsieur Hermès was also a bit on the old side, but he was charming enough and I thought perhaps that if I kept him company over coffee and crème du menthe, he might give me a silk Hermès scarf. I had my heart set on one of those with horse paraphernalia on it. I went dutifully to our meetings, but when he in a fit of friendliness disclosed that he had never read Balzac, I got so disappointed that I decided to stop seeing him. I felt I had to set some sort of limits for what was acceptable.

In the end I left Paris as single as I had been when I arrived. But that too was fine. For I had come to study, and as Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris.” Perhaps it had been mine all along.

See you again on Monday!