After only three months in the city, I was dangerously low on funds. But the magazine had authorized $1,000 spending money—a thousand dollars for two days!—which made me feel like I was standing in one of those game-show booths where $20 bills swirl like a tornado around you.
I was nervous about the plane ride. I’m a clutcher of armrests, a spinner of catastrophes. I have terrible control issues when it comes to letting someone pilot me across a vast and churning ocean. A point arrives in every flight when I fight the urge to bolt into the aisle and scream, “We’re in the clouds, people! This can’t last!” But I popped my sleeping pill and drank two vials of wine. Drinking on a plane is a line-item veto in the “never drink alone” rule book. Everyone drinks alone on a plane. We drink alone, together.
MY FIRST DAY in Paris went off without a hitch. I was staying at a hotel in the 14th arrondissement, in a residential area on the Left Bank not far from Luxembourg Gardens. It was a nice place: a bright foyer with high ceilings and marbled columns strung up with Christmas lights. The arrangements had been made by the magazine. All I had to do was show up.
“Your key, mademoiselle,” said the man at the reception desk, handing me a plastic card.
I played tourist for the afternoon. Took the Metro to the Eiffel Tower, got my hands gooey with a chocolate crêpe, and walked across the park, feeling like a girl trailing ribbons in her wake. I found a cozy café tucked away on a quiet street and ordered a glass of bordeaux. It was cheaper than coffee. Two euros. Another one of the line-item vetoes in the “never drink alone” rule book is that you’re allowed to drink alone while traveling. Who else could possibly join you? I loved drinking alone in distant bars, staying on speaking terms with my own solitude.
The wine was good. Sustaining. I sometimes wonder if I’d grown up in a culture lacking the padlocks of Puritan restrictions, then maybe I wouldn’t have fetishized it so much. America, land of shot specials and beer bongs. No sense of moderation.
I read once that a famous magazine editor had a glass of champagne with every lunch. One glass. And I thought it was the classiest thing ever. I wanted that. The crystal flute, with its feminine curves and ding-ding-ding. The bubbles reaching up to kiss my nose as my lips approached the glass.
And so I sipped my one glass of red wine. Just one. And I let it roll along the sandpaper of my tongue. And the wine was better this way. Tiny sips. And it floated through my bloodstream like a warm front. And it would not be an overstatement to say this felt like the very point of existence. To savor each moment.
Then I ordered another glass.
I MET THE reality show host and his wife that night in a crowded square on the Right Bank. They had a toddler and an adorable baby, and they struggled to maneuver the stroller over the cobbled streets, even as we remarked how charming it was. The magazine profile was supposed to show how awesome it was to bring your kids to Paris, but I suspected the host and his wife would give an arm for a Babies “R” Us and a minivan.
The host was small and good-looking in a generic way. I expected to dislike him. In fact, I wanted to dislike him, because he was in charge of the world’s dumbest social experiment. But he and his wife were quite lovely. Years later, when the tabloids reported their split, I actually thought: But they seemed so happy. As if I knew anything.
We took a seat at an Italian restaurant, ordered a bottle of red wine, and began the interview. My questions were not what you would call probing.
“Why did you decide to film this season in Paris?”
He cleared his throat. He smiled.
They had chosen Paris because it is the world’s most romantic city. Anyone could fall in love in Paris. Everyone did! As the host spoke, I watched the season’s sizzle reel unfold in my mind: candlelit dinners along the Champs-élysée, helicopters flying above the Arc de Triomphe set to the swelling sounds of a power ballad, the corny accordion music leading us to commercial break.
I loved to rant about that show back when it debuted in 2002. Those brainless women with their dripping bikini bodies and their Stepford smiles, scheming to marry a man they’d only just met. What kind of self-loathing idiot would watch this tripe?
The answer, it turned out, was me. Because a few years later, I flipped it on one evening and realized such vapid entertainment was a great way to unplug my mind. Anna started watching it, too, and we called each other afterward to complain. Untangling the mysteries of desire can be a terrific past time. Why did he choose her? What was she thinking? We might have talked more about those dopey bachelors than Anna’s actual boyfriend, who became her husband that year.
After the interview, the TV host invited me back to their apartment. They had a bottle of wine they’d been meaning to open, and he and I drained it as his wife put the kids to bed. How many nights had I spent like this, sinking into some conversation with a man who was not my husband while his wife washed the dinner dishes, tended to the kids, and shushed us when our voices got too loud?