This is Paris. It's a feeling of vague familiarity, but to be true, it's entirely foreign. I didn't remember Paris like this, and it had just been a few months over a year since Max, Mike, Grant, and I had bid "Au 'voir" to Marie on a mid-summer morning and snuck away on the metro to Gare du Nord. It feels like the same city - the symmetry, the architecture, the language - but this is different. It's not a holiday. It's not a free-form wild romp like before, no great adventure.
No, this is just living. An attempt to focus. To put pencil to paper and slave away at a keyboard. I came here to write. LA's too wrought with diversions. Too many things to do, too many people to see. Too many girls. It's only Fall, but it already feels like it'll soon be too cold to get into anything real mischievous. Plus, I don't know anyone out here - save for Marie. And of course, Lili.
"Oh, hey there," I hear over the vague undertone of French flying around the steps of the Opera. I pull the camera from my eye and my eye from the skyline to the sidewalk below, and there she is on a silly bicycle all covered in taupe plastic. I hear the color's very soothing. It's Lili.
"Oh, hey yourself," I say looking serious, and I try not to smile. She's just how I remembered her, sassy and shoulder-groovin' and animated behind a pair of Raybans, and for a second the city turns to LA and I never really left. But I think that's just the jet-lag. My heavy eyes blink, and when they open again, I'm in gay ole' Paris.
Lili's looking at me hard. "I can't believe you're actually here."
"Yeah. I don't think I believe I'm here either," I say. "Not yet, anyways."
She laughs, "Yeah? Rough flight? You look like hell."
"Gee, thanks." My skin's sticky from the processed airplane-air, and all my joints hurt, and I feel high off delirium. "What time is it by the way?" I ask.
Lili flicks her wrist and consults a classy little timepiece on a worn leather band. "It's just past nine."
"Good Lord! I'm about to pass out. How far's your place?"
[stop]
"It's a quick ride on the Velib," she says looking down at the bike between legs. It's a wonderful city service, the Velib. There's tens of cheap taupe bikes locked up at tiny stations every other block or so, and they're available with the simple swipe of a Velib card. But each card can only take one bike every thirty minutes. It's like a metro pass without being able to cheat your friends through too.
"But I don't have a Velib," I say frowning.
She looks at me sourly. "I know. You suck." Lili's always been a little tart, ever since high school. Pretty and secretive and sarcastically tart. That's Lili. She's a wild one. She's charmingly seductive. I might have loved her once. Maybe, but if I did, if that's even what it was, it was a long time ago. Before college. We're nothing but old friends now. She's always intrigued me though, and for that I've since learned to be wary. I saw beauty in her the way one sees it in a pack of wild mustangs running at a cliff's edge. It's not something you want to find yourself in the midst of. But from afar, it's a rare and beautiful thing to witness. She's untamed and together and always flirting with a dangerous unknown it seems. "It's not that far," she says. "We can walk."
It's pretty fucking far actually. Especially with fifty pounds of backpack and luggage digging into my shoulders. We head southwest through the city for a spell and turn left on Avenue de Marigny. A solid walk. It takes us twenty minutes to get to the Seine, and as we cross at Pont Alexandre III, Napoleon's tomb in the distance, a young scruffy Parisian walking the other way picks a ring up off the ground and holds it up to me saying something in French.
"He's trying to hustle you, ignore him," Lili says to me. Then she turns to him with a wave of her hand and sneers, "Non, merci." And we keep walking.
"What was that about?"
"He was gonna try to get you to give him ten dollars for that shitty ring. He dropped it there earlier. It's a thing they do."
"Who do?"
"The gypsies. Then they'll try to rob you. Look out for them."
So I look out for them. "Are we there yet?"
"Almost. Kinda. It's through this park and just past Invalides," she says, and does a double-take. "You wanna take a break?"
I let a deep sigh out, "That would be awesome." And we sit on a green wood bench lined up even with a row a trimmed trees.
Lili crosses her legs, pulls a pouch of Lucky Strike tobacco from her shoulder bag and opens it. There's a single rolled cigarette inside. She didn't really smoke at all in the States, and she looks me sharp in the eyes, "Don't judge me."
"I won't if you roll me one," I snap back.
[stop]
"Fine," she sighs. And she tosses me the one she'd been fiddling with in her fingers. Then she rolls another and we smoke. The ground's covered with leaves, brown-orange and trampled, but the trees still have some life in them, in the greens speckled yellow.
I catch my breath with a puff of tobacco smoke. It's crisp and sends my skin into bumps. Lili sees a close leaf falling and looks at me. "You picked a good time to come," she says. "It's not usually as nice as it is this time in November."
I blow a puff out. "How nice is it usually?"
"It should be colder, but it isn't."
"Lucky me." There's no emphasis in it. I have none to spare. Paris is bustling by through morning rush hour, and the clocks in my head don't think that sounds right and they're whining up a fuss. It's a little past midnight back in LA. What the hell am I doing here. Each blink comes with a throb and a shake and I feel my eyes sink into my skull now as my cigarette burns low.
"C'mon," says Lili picking up one of my bags. "It's just around the corner. I've got another class to go to so you can take a nap up there or whatever when I'm gone."
"Oh-kay," I say. And I pick up the other bag.
Before we trek off again, she takes one last mean drag from her cigarette and flicks it at me with a smile. "I can't believe you're actually here."
[stop]
Lili lives in a little servants' quarters room just below the roof of a lavish Parisian apartment block in the 7th Arrondissement. There's no elevator and she takes me through to the back where there's a servants' staircase that spirals up six flights to the top. The steps are steep and always twisting up. They never straighten out, and a tiny landing and a servants' door marks each floor until there's no more steps and we're walking down a tall skinny hallway with doors on either side and battered floorboards. They look recently stripped, but Lili says they've been like that since she moved in a year ago. She's panting when she says it, and I'm panting while I listen because fucking hell, those stairs were no joke.
When Lili opens the door, we both drop the bags not so softly on the hardwood floors, and I grab my knees taking in deep breaths. "Wow. Really Lil? That was fucking miserable," I say. "I didn't think I was in this bad of shape."
"Yeah, dude. Tell me about it. I do that at least twice a day." She pours two glasses of water, and hands me one, and we sit a her table. It's a tiny thing against the wall opposite the door, barely big enough for two people to eat comfortably. The place is a box, and a closet juts out to the middle from the door wall and opens both ways. Her bed hugs one wall, and the bathroom and kitchen hug the other. "You must be starving," she says. She breaks a baguette in half and digs through the mini fridge under the kitchen counter. "You have to try this butter I have... It's to die for, muahaha!"
"Is it now." I spread some on some bread and take a bite. Then another. And another and another until it's gone, and I finally begin to catch my breath. It's damned good butter if I do say so myself. "What is that?" I ask still licking my pallet.
"That's butter, man. Real butter," she says. "French butter."
I take the bar of it in my hand and inspect it. "Is that salt?"
"Yup. Crystal-y sea salt. It's so good." Then she reaches into the fridge again and pulls out another bar, or more a sliced rock of butter. "Here, try this one."
"What's this one?"
"Ouzo," she says. It's altogether different, in flavor and sweetness and saltiness, and it's equally amazing. I never pegged Lili for a fine butter connoisseur, but it doesn't surprise me. She's accustomed to fine tastes. After all, her parents are both Italian so her's was a savory household back in LA. Or at least it was whenever I came over for dinner. She's lived up a hill and just a few blocks west of me.
"Your butters are divine," I tell her.
"Why, thank you," she says with a curtsy. "Oh! I gotta go to class right now, and you look like you need some shut-eye, so I guess you can sleep in my bed for now." She takes a step towards me and leans in and sniffs. "Yeah, that's fine. I'll be back in three hours or so."
"Haha, spanks. I don't smell that bad."
"Sure you don't, hehe. Smell ya later." She's a mischievous giggler as she leaves, and she cuts a slim fit figure in the doorway. It's got to be the stairs. Six flights twice or thrice a day will give anyone body karate.
The blood's still pumping from those damned stairs and tired as I am, my sunken eyes don't feel like closing yet so I write. In a mixed-up open-eyed unconscious daydream delirium I write. Sitting on the single loveseat below the tiny servant's quarters window.
[stop]
For dinner we go out. The night's sweater cold and cozy in this green knitted thing I picked up in LA just before leaving. It's got little leather elbow pads, and it zips down the middle, and it's a little heavy for autumn in LA, but in Paris it's just right. We walk arm in arm, Lili and I, chatting fast with jibs back and forth like little kids playing tag, and and she drags from a cigarette in her right hand, and I drag from one in my left. And when the sidewalk thins, we split seamlessly and walk single-file. She's a quick walker, Lili, and I keep pace. "What do you want?" she asks.
"I want to eat something French," I say with a wave of the Lucky Strike she rolled me.
"Hmm... French you say? I know just the place." She steers us to a corner restaurant nearby. Café Constant. The place isn't open for dinner yet, but there's already a line waiting. It's mostly an older crowd, and to my surprise there's a lot of English being thrown around. Lili tells me the 7th is the arrondissement that most Americans move to when they move to Paris. "This place is an American favorite," she says. "Last time the 'rents came out we ate here."
Lovely. We'll fit right in. And when they finally open the doors and let us sit, we do. We slide right in at a table by the door. It's not a big place on the ground floor. There's a line of tables pushed up against the floor-to-ceiling windows, facing the bar, with just enough space for servers to rush by in between the two. I take the seat up against the window because I get to look at bar and all the bottles behind it, and I like that. Almost as much as Lili likes sitting in the aisle. She's quite adamant about it really, and I don't mind the close quarters so it all works out. Our server's sharp and gives us the English menus, and I sigh easy relief. "Merci," I say. "Merci beaucoup."
Lili gets the roasted chicken plate, and I get a hearty steak and potatoes. She orders a glass of white French wine, and I ask her to order me a decent red because as I look at the list I realize that all the wines are different out here, and I don't know which to choose. I'm starving, and it's been forever since I've had a proper steak dinner. I want to do it right. Luckily, Lili likes her wine, and she picks an ace.
The dinner's everything I wanted. The steak's savory in a sauce with a sharp bite, and the chef hit the medium-well nail on the head. To know me is to know I love steak. Fucking love it. And the taters weren't bad either. Especially mixed about in the steak juice.
[stop]
We take the meal at a slow trot, with my trot being just a bit slower. To hold onto the taste for as long as I can, and to make sure, as always, that there's a little bit of wine still left to wash it all down with after. Lili watches me after she's done and tuts and laughs and talks of all the sneaky things she's been up to in Paris, and I listen. "And don't you tell anyone," she says.
"Me?" says I with my mouth half full. "I would never. Who would I tell?"
She eyes me with suspicion for the vaguest second, then dismisses it. "So two months, huh? What are you going to do here for two months?"
"Write, I guess." And I gulp it down.
"That's it?"
"That's the idea."
"Well... You can't crash at my place for two months. I won't allow it."
"Oh, of course not," I say flatteringly. "I've got some other friends I can stay with. And I might go down to Barcelona too."
"Really? Cool. A week here and a week there's fine then. That I don't mind at all," she says finishing her wine. "And oh! So my Romanian wants to take me to the countryside this weekend for his friend's birthday party. Should I go with him?"
"To where?"
"To this little village towards the coast."
I nod with an impressed face. "Sounds intriguing," I say. "And exciting. This guy's your boyfriend?"
"He's a boy," she says matter-of-factly. "He's fun."
"Well then, I say do it. Why not? When's the next time you think someone's going to take you to Deauville or wherever the hell this place is. I would definitely go if I were you."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. Do it."
She's excited and bubbly when we leave Cafe Constant, and she says she'll see if I can come too, which I'm all for. I really want to see something over here. Something grand and inspiring. Some adventure. Some something special that I hadn't seen before. A countryside birthday bash sounds like just the ticket, and sure enough, the polite Romanian - an ambassador's son - invites me as well when he meets us that night in the grass on the Champs de Mars.
Lili and I had picked up a bottle of wine after dinner, and sat to the side so that the Tour looked down on us over the trees. In the level grass that's not that dry. It's not quite wet either though. It's moist. So that when I lean back on my hands the feel of the soft dampness leans back, and it reminds me of a towel that's been left out to dry but hasn't quite finished yet. The guy's a gentleman though, so I wipe my hands quick with one swipe on my pants as I stand to greet him, "Bonjour."
"Bonjour, it's nice to meet you," he says holding out his hand. His English is spot on. He looks the way clean-cut native Parisians look with a sharp haircut and long-sleeved stripes and a scarf, but his accent isn't French. It's something more easterly. "I'm Andrei, and this is Boris."
"Hello," says Boris. The accent throws me. I can't quite place it, and it's definitely not French. But it's not exactly the same as Andre's either.
"It's a pleasure," I say, and I shake both their hands. We drink the wine casually as Andrei tells us about his friend's house in the Normandy near Deauville. It's in a small farming village about three hours out of Paris. With a small stone church and a cemetery, and green autumn fields and old bombs from the War in the ancient backyard barn.
They're leaving tonight they tell us, and we'll be going with another friend tomorrow afternoon. That sounds just swell to me, and it's exciting to think that my first weekend in France is going to be spend in the country. The next day we wake late and the morning turns to afternoon in a flash of scrambled eggs and french bread with salted butter. I pry about grad school and Lili gives and talks papers and Parisian friends until it's time to meet Andre's friend Mircea. We take the metro and rendezvous with Mircea above ground at the Montparnasse station. He picks us up in his BMW chain-smoking Marlboro Reds, and tells us there's going to be one more passenger.
"Fine," she sighs. And she tosses me the one she'd been fiddling with in her fingers. Then she rolls another and we smoke. The ground's covered with leaves, brown-orange and trampled, but the trees still have some life in them, in the greens speckled yellow.
I catch my breath with a puff of tobacco smoke. It's crisp and sends my skin into bumps. Lili sees a close leaf falling and looks at me. "You picked a good time to come," she says. "It's not usually as nice as it is this time in November."
I blow a puff out. "How nice is it usually?"
"It should be colder, but it isn't."
"Lucky me." There's no emphasis in it. I have none to spare. Paris is bustling by through morning rush hour, and the clocks in my head don't think that sounds right and they're whining up a fuss. It's a little past midnight back in LA. What the hell am I doing here. Each blink comes with a throb and a shake and I feel my eyes sink into my skull now as my cigarette burns low.
"C'mon," says Lili picking up one of my bags. "It's just around the corner. I've got another class to go to so you can take a nap up there or whatever when I'm gone."
"Oh-kay," I say. And I pick up the other bag.
Before we trek off again, she takes one last mean drag from her cigarette and flicks it at me with a smile. "I can't believe you're actually here."
[stop]
Lili lives in a little servants' quarters room just below the roof of a lavish Parisian apartment block in the 7th Arrondissement. There's no elevator and she takes me through to the back where there's a servants' staircase that spirals up six flights to the top. The steps are steep and always twisting up. They never straighten out, and a tiny landing and a servants' door marks each floor until there's no more steps and we're walking down a tall skinny hallway with doors on either side and battered floorboards. They look recently stripped, but Lili says they've been like that since she moved in a year ago. She's panting when she says it, and I'm panting while I listen because fucking hell, those stairs were no joke.
When Lili opens the door, we both drop the bags not so softly on the hardwood floors, and I grab my knees taking in deep breaths. "Wow. Really Lil? That was fucking miserable," I say. "I didn't think I was in this bad of shape."
"Yeah, dude. Tell me about it. I do that at least twice a day." She pours two glasses of water, and hands me one, and we sit a her table. It's a tiny thing against the wall opposite the door, barely big enough for two people to eat comfortably. The place is a box, and a closet juts out to the middle from the door wall and opens both ways. Her bed hugs one wall, and the bathroom and kitchen hug the other. "You must be starving," she says. She breaks a baguette in half and digs through the mini fridge under the kitchen counter. "You have to try this butter I have... It's to die for, muahaha!"
"Is it now." I spread some on some bread and take a bite. Then another. And another and another until it's gone, and I finally begin to catch my breath. It's damned good butter if I do say so myself. "What is that?" I ask still licking my pallet.
"That's butter, man. Real butter," she says. "French butter."
I take the bar of it in my hand and inspect it. "Is that salt?"
"Yup. Crystal-y sea salt. It's so good." Then she reaches into the fridge again and pulls out another bar, or more a sliced rock of butter. "Here, try this one."
"What's this one?"
"Ouzo," she says. It's altogether different, in flavor and sweetness and saltiness, and it's equally amazing. I never pegged Lili for a fine butter connoisseur, but it doesn't surprise me. She's accustomed to fine tastes. After all, her parents are both Italian so her's was a savory household back in LA. Or at least it was whenever I came over for dinner. She's lived up a hill and just a few blocks west of me.
"Your butters are divine," I tell her.
"Why, thank you," she says with a curtsy. "Oh! I gotta go to class right now, and you look like you need some shut-eye, so I guess you can sleep in my bed for now." She takes a step towards me and leans in and sniffs. "Yeah, that's fine. I'll be back in three hours or so."
"Haha, spanks. I don't smell that bad."
"Sure you don't, hehe. Smell ya later." She's a mischievous giggler as she leaves, and she cuts a slim fit figure in the doorway. It's got to be the stairs. Six flights twice or thrice a day will give anyone body karate.
The blood's still pumping from those damned stairs and tired as I am, my sunken eyes don't feel like closing yet so I write. In a mixed-up open-eyed unconscious daydream delirium I write. Sitting on the single loveseat below the tiny servant's quarters window.
[stop]
For dinner we go out. The night's sweater cold and cozy in this green knitted thing I picked up in LA just before leaving. It's got little leather elbow pads, and it zips down the middle, and it's a little heavy for autumn in LA, but in Paris it's just right. We walk arm in arm, Lili and I, chatting fast with jibs back and forth like little kids playing tag, and and she drags from a cigarette in her right hand, and I drag from one in my left. And when the sidewalk thins, we split seamlessly and walk single-file. She's a quick walker, Lili, and I keep pace. "What do you want?" she asks.
"I want to eat something French," I say with a wave of the Lucky Strike she rolled me.
"Hmm... French you say? I know just the place." She steers us to a corner restaurant nearby. Café Constant. The place isn't open for dinner yet, but there's already a line waiting. It's mostly an older crowd, and to my surprise there's a lot of English being thrown around. Lili tells me the 7th is the arrondissement that most Americans move to when they move to Paris. "This place is an American favorite," she says. "Last time the 'rents came out we ate here."
Lovely. We'll fit right in. And when they finally open the doors and let us sit, we do. We slide right in at a table by the door. It's not a big place on the ground floor. There's a line of tables pushed up against the floor-to-ceiling windows, facing the bar, with just enough space for servers to rush by in between the two. I take the seat up against the window because I get to look at bar and all the bottles behind it, and I like that. Almost as much as Lili likes sitting in the aisle. She's quite adamant about it really, and I don't mind the close quarters so it all works out. Our server's sharp and gives us the English menus, and I sigh easy relief. "Merci," I say. "Merci beaucoup."
Lili gets the roasted chicken plate, and I get a hearty steak and potatoes. She orders a glass of white French wine, and I ask her to order me a decent red because as I look at the list I realize that all the wines are different out here, and I don't know which to choose. I'm starving, and it's been forever since I've had a proper steak dinner. I want to do it right. Luckily, Lili likes her wine, and she picks an ace.
The dinner's everything I wanted. The steak's savory in a sauce with a sharp bite, and the chef hit the medium-well nail on the head. To know me is to know I love steak. Fucking love it. And the taters weren't bad either. Especially mixed about in the steak juice.
[stop]
We take the meal at a slow trot, with my trot being just a bit slower. To hold onto the taste for as long as I can, and to make sure, as always, that there's a little bit of wine still left to wash it all down with after. Lili watches me after she's done and tuts and laughs and talks of all the sneaky things she's been up to in Paris, and I listen. "And don't you tell anyone," she says.
"Me?" says I with my mouth half full. "I would never. Who would I tell?"
She eyes me with suspicion for the vaguest second, then dismisses it. "So two months, huh? What are you going to do here for two months?"
"Write, I guess." And I gulp it down.
"That's it?"
"That's the idea."
"Well... You can't crash at my place for two months. I won't allow it."
"Oh, of course not," I say flatteringly. "I've got some other friends I can stay with. And I might go down to Barcelona too."
"Really? Cool. A week here and a week there's fine then. That I don't mind at all," she says finishing her wine. "And oh! So my Romanian wants to take me to the countryside this weekend for his friend's birthday party. Should I go with him?"
"To where?"
"To this little village towards the coast."
I nod with an impressed face. "Sounds intriguing," I say. "And exciting. This guy's your boyfriend?"
"He's a boy," she says matter-of-factly. "He's fun."
"Well then, I say do it. Why not? When's the next time you think someone's going to take you to Deauville or wherever the hell this place is. I would definitely go if I were you."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. Do it."
She's excited and bubbly when we leave Cafe Constant, and she says she'll see if I can come too, which I'm all for. I really want to see something over here. Something grand and inspiring. Some adventure. Some something special that I hadn't seen before. A countryside birthday bash sounds like just the ticket, and sure enough, the polite Romanian - an ambassador's son - invites me as well when he meets us that night in the grass on the Champs de Mars.
Lili and I had picked up a bottle of wine after dinner, and sat to the side so that the Tour looked down on us over the trees. In the level grass that's not that dry. It's not quite wet either though. It's moist. So that when I lean back on my hands the feel of the soft dampness leans back, and it reminds me of a towel that's been left out to dry but hasn't quite finished yet. The guy's a gentleman though, so I wipe my hands quick with one swipe on my pants as I stand to greet him, "Bonjour."
"Bonjour, it's nice to meet you," he says holding out his hand. His English is spot on. He looks the way clean-cut native Parisians look with a sharp haircut and long-sleeved stripes and a scarf, but his accent isn't French. It's something more easterly. "I'm Andrei, and this is Boris."
"Hello," says Boris. The accent throws me. I can't quite place it, and it's definitely not French. But it's not exactly the same as Andre's either.
"It's a pleasure," I say, and I shake both their hands. We drink the wine casually as Andrei tells us about his friend's house in the Normandy near Deauville. It's in a small farming village about three hours out of Paris. With a small stone church and a cemetery, and green autumn fields and old bombs from the War in the ancient backyard barn.
They're leaving tonight they tell us, and we'll be going with another friend tomorrow afternoon. That sounds just swell to me, and it's exciting to think that my first weekend in France is going to be spend in the country. The next day we wake late and the morning turns to afternoon in a flash of scrambled eggs and french bread with salted butter. I pry about grad school and Lili gives and talks papers and Parisian friends until it's time to meet Andre's friend Mircea. We take the metro and rendezvous with Mircea above ground at the Montparnasse station. He picks us up in his BMW chain-smoking Marlboro Reds, and tells us there's going to be one more passenger.
