Kiosk - Paris Chez Moi (page 2)

After spending the first few months avoiding Americans and checking off landmarks, I began to feel the sting of anonymity in a big city and pined for company. I categorically despised all Anglophones who were not already my friends. West was the exception. His first name is actually Robert, the name he gives to French people since they can pronounce it. But everyone else knew him as West. He was more standoffish than the rest, not as easily excited about pastries and bar hopping as the girls in my program (there are about four girls to every guy in almost all Paris study-abroad programs). West had a camera, too—a better one than mine—and a photographer’s instinct. We would wander the parks and squares of Paris, taking pictures of old men and young women smoking with grave, unusual beauty. I invented stories for West’s images, drawing from books I lent to him, books like Colette’s The Vagabond and Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June. He devoured them. During the day, we’d take long walks down the Rue de Rivoli during which we’d sometimes talk about Colette and Henry Miller, speaking only in French or not speaking at all. He liked to think of us as Bonnie and Clyde but all I could think about were Serge Gainsbourg’s duet with Brigitte Bardot and their short-lived affair afterwards—we were in no way dating. I liked to think of him as a male muse, tall, dark-haired, fashionable. Our only enduring romance was never with each other but with Paris, and we were the two mistresses, plotting against our cheating lover.

            “Look at that,” I said, pointing towards the Eiffel Tower from the café atop Centre Pompidou. It had been another dreary day in November, but the sun just broke through the clouds in time for it to set behind the tower.
            “I think this is my favorite view of Paris,” I said.
            “Why is that?” West asked.
            “Because you can see it.”
We were standing right up against the glass, barely shielded from the icy wind blustering across the open-air café.
            “Look at all those people down there… And there, is that the Sacré- Coeur?” I asked, pointing at the glowing white silhouette floating ominously above the city.
            “Yeah, I think so,” said West, looking through the lens of his camera.
            “Up here, you can see the other monuments that people view all of Paris from, like us. But you can also see people directly below, or across the way at those windows over there,” I said, watching a group of people drinking wine around a living room.

            West zoomed in with his camera.
            “What are they doing?” I asked, begging for a made-up story about their lives. We ignored how creepy it seemed to be spying through someone’s window. But they knew the Centre Pompidou was there, full of sightseers, and they occasionally glanced out the window, too.
            “I’ve always imagined what was going on inside people’s apartments,” I said. “Every time someone opens one of those heavy French doors, I look inside. I imagine entire lives growing up in one of those vast apartments with its creaky wooden floors and weird, crooked doorknobs. Have you noticed those doorknobs?”
            West looked up from his camera and then at me, laughing. We left the dinner party across the way and descended the escalator to find our own.

            One night a friend of mine brought me to Le Motel, a bar near my apartment, but tucked away in the 11th arrondissement away from the trashy Bastille bars. I agreed to go even though we would be seeing an American DJ. I was surprised at how close this little bar was, a ten-minute walk. Inside, Le Motel was only marginally larger than my studette, and its small size made it seem like a living room, with the same jumbled medley of posters and stickers that were in mine. The bar could miraculously accommodate a DJ booth, an impressive wrap-around bar in the middle, and the regulars, close to dying of laughter as they drank and danced to the American music spinning. Sometimes the door would open and a rush of cool air would temporarily relieve the foggy windows, while the noise of our festivities would flood the quiet neighborhood. Around here, residential buildings towered no higher than three or four floors, and bedrooms and kitchens seemed to extend out onto the street where you could hear entire arguments for hours. There was a bouncer outside Le Motel, responsible for keeping loud and intoxicated smokers down a block to the main cross-street, avenue Ledru-Rollin, where cars and motorcycles were louder, though he never asked for I.D.
            At the bar, it was our accents that gave us away. One of the proprietors Djavid, whose Indian parents lived in the UK and in France, spoke first in English, smiling as he did, in a velvety British-Indian accent that I was more accustomed to hearing. But when he spoke French, after I insisted on speaking French when in France, his dark features transformed, at once becoming charming and transparent. He spoke lower in French, rounding out each guttural sound and he immediately resembled any François or Jean-Pierre out there in a t-shirt. Usually I’d have been embarrassed at being found out, but he was sincere and less intimidating to talk to than other French people. I made my first French friend that night.
            We frequented the bar at least three times a week, dropping by for a cheap glass of wine or beer, putting those hours of French grammar to use. Mostly it was the barmen we got to know—most of them not ethnically French—and the barmen we kept coming back for. Le Motel became the usual spot, a living room in the middle of the city, where Djavid introduced me to other English-speaking French kids, who then introduced me to a new Paris. Le ventre was not as grave or sordid as I had imagined. I found a version of my city—tangible, comely, and most importantly, believable—the way all Parisians have their arrondissements, their cafés, their bars and restaurants. For the most part, I stopped wandering in search of a bygone city, and stopped stripping it for pieces of a palimpsest that were a part, only a part, of a dream.