Paris to Manhattan: A Romance Lost and Found

A man I met once asked me, “Can one only have Paris in Paris?”

Meaning: can we not have the romance of Europe elsewhere? Can we not, in a sense, import it?

His email seemed a cruel joke read from the dingy screen of my computer, within the confines of my cubicle, as I trudged through a ten-hour day. How far freedom seemed from this, and romance of course, as romance relies first on the esprit du libertin.  Think of the Marquis de Sade. Think of Roland Barthes. Only those who risk abandoning the rules find romance.

I came seeking a love affair, whether I knew it or not, when I first moved to France as a 19-year old girl. A romance not merely as a child of our media generation comes to learn it – the heavily stylized gestures between men and women I witnessed in movies, the act of sex always symbolically infused to mean something so much more than it is – but romance as the call to adventure.  Where on my native ground would I ever find the anonymity and freedom that France allowed? Whatever route I traveled in Paris, I was a stranger, unrecognizable to others. I had a mystique.

My love affair with France began as a love affair with myself.  Renouncing any sense of community, I reveled in my own humility, in the almost delectable dread that I might be “found out” as a foreigner.  I rode the subways and walked the streets anticipating the moment when a stranger would ask a question, and I would answer, my foreign tongue betraying me, my accent rich with American ineptitude.

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The day I actually was discovered as “inauthentic” is a day I will always remember. It was my last day in Paris, and I shamelessly licked a cone of glace Bertillon in the Carré du Mouffetard, exhilarated by the fact that I could eat, as Europeans do, in so public a place as the street and not be ill-regarded.   Suddenly I noticed an attractive young man dressed in a New York Yankees tee-shirt and sandals I recognized to be an American brand. It wasn’t uncommon, standing in the Carré du Mouffetard, to spot tourists. But this character had bewildered me, as he appeared so American, and at the same time so franco-phied, with the dark demeanor of a brooding philosopher. At that moment, I caught myself evaluating the “otherness” of a stranger much in the same way I felt myself scrutinized as an object of “otherness” – the paradox! The stranger made eye contact with me several times, catching me in the act of observing him. When I finished my ice cream and began walking away from the square, I felt him follow. I didn’t know whether to walk faster or slower. Then suddenly, he was beside me, asking a question:

“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle, mais ou est-ce qu’on peut trouver des timbres dans le quartier?” [Excuse me miss, but where does one find stamps in the area?”]

I recognized instantly, the moment the words escaped from his lips, that this was no Frenchman. Answering in my non-native French, he exposed me at the very moment I was exposing him.

“Pardon mademoiselle, mais d’ou-viens-tu? T’es pas francaise.” [Sorry miss, but where are you from? You’re not French.”]

Ouch, the revelation all Americans in France live in fear of.

“New York,” I responded timidly. “Et toi je peux ajouter?” [“And you, I might add?”]

“Get out of here!” He exclaimed, at full volume, adding with an unabashed and exaggerated accent. “I’m from Brooklyn!”

How happily I spent that last (it wouldn’t actually be my last) day in Paris, in the company of a familiar stranger, comparing our encounters with the oddities of European life, and strolling down the cobblestone streets of the fifth arrondissement as if, in fact, the city belonged to us.  In New York, I am rarely overjoyed or even mildly pleased to spot a familiar face on a crowded street. It seems unromantic, unoriginal, even commonplace to run into a high school friend, (gasp, as I feign surprise). Had I really grown so jaded? Must “home,” – for me, Manhattan – always be condemned to the routine and unexciting? Does the taste of something new exist only in escapism, at the limits of surrealism, as I wrote once in a poem, “dream[ing] of a person I had not met, of a place I had not known?”

In New York, I spent a lot of time in French restaurants and cafes, revisiting my nostalgia for France with American friends, who also, at one point or another, spent time in Europe. We drink coffee and discuss how radically different it would be if we were drinking coffee in France. I bite into an overpriced croissant at Payard, or an overly buttery quiche at l’Express and inwardly scoff. “Have you ever tried the croissants at Gerard Moulot?” I ask, betraying my antipathy.  “What about the quiche at Café Luxembourg? Mmm…”  It is a typically New York thing to do – eat one’s food and discuss the superiority of the food elsewhere. How spoiled we’ve become, I realize; given so much, we are perpetually dissatisfied, ever searching for the next best thing.

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Last Saturday, I walked through Central Park in the wintry sunlight, holding the glove of a near stranger. I revealed to him, for the first time, things that everyone around me already knew, in fact, had even memorized. But his attention remained fixed, fascinated as I spoke of my travels and childhood, just as I was when he shared stories of his own. New blood on cold days, I thought.  There’s something warming in this.

I had left my cell phone at home, a fated accident, and was unaware of the time of day, or the needs and obligations of others as we walked through the galleries of the MoMA, now striking in its architectural resemblance to the Pompidou, and drank cappuccinos that I could not discern as tasting either European or American, or anything else that could be so clearly categorized.

Romance had always felt entirely foreign on my own soil, even perhaps, non-existent. But to recognize the very flaw of that argument, to understand “romance” as a spirit, a quality and not a place, entirely relative and transferable, is to have it once again.  Unwittingly, I had embarked on a different kind of love affair that only had half to do with me this time.

I return to this day now, reminiscent of my time in Paris, on dreary, bleary-eyed days at he office. It reminds me of a certain qualité de vie – French, but also quite un-French, if you think about it.

Copyright © Lucinda Barr