In the end, it was an American company, H?agen-Dazs, that was willing to pay me au noir; perhaps that was just their way. My new job title was scoopeuse.
All the aping of French writing and reading of French comic strips and chatting with the Mathieus had by this point led to a certain level of fluency. This was the first foreign language I’d successfully learned, and it went straight to my head. Once installed behind the counter, I adopted the singsongy cadence and snide attitude of the most Parisian of shop clerks. I greeted each customer with ferocity.
“Bonjour! Qu’est-ce que vous désirez?”
“Oui! Vous voulez en cornet ou en pot?”
All this with a rapid-fire Parisian delivery and a refusal to downshift into English for baffled tourists, which at the time I rationalized as far less condescending than the remedial English most shopkeepers reverted to when faced with the Obviously Not French. Even flavor titles like Peanut Butter Burst were rendered in a decisive French accent. The Americans who patronized our shop expressed open confusion at their silly scoopeuse. “What the hell are pepites?” they’d ask each other while I stared back in resolute French silence. What were they doing getting American ice cream in Paris anyway?
On busy days, the manager thrust a popsicle stand out into the square, which one of us had to man at our peril. A hardy band of Roma considered the square theirs and attacked whoever occupied that cart. Roma mothers would point us out to their children, demonstrating how to throw stray litter at our uniforms and accosting us with disagreeable shouts. Who knows what H?agen-Dazs had done to inspire the vitriol but, as the company’s Place des Fontaines representative, I wanted to avoid getting garbage on the apron I was responsible for perfecting each morning. (Later, in an attempt to understand the Roma, I read Isabel Fonseca’s devastating book Bury Me Standing, which explained the hardships the Roma have long endured. The title comes from a Roma expression, “Bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all my life.”) Even in August, nearly emptied of Parisians, the city was my refuge. My H?agen-Dazs was near an enormous subterranean mall with one of the best branches of FNAC, a mega-multimedia store along the lines of Barnes & Noble. After work, I’d head into FNAC, where I’d rummage through the BDs and stare at the glossy white covers of the livres de poche, curious to see which American authors merited translation. I’d walk across to the Left Bank and explore the tiny bookshops of the rue des écoles and the movie houses of the 6th arrondissement. The city devoted so much space to the things I cared about, I wanted to kiss the sidewalk in gratitude.
Paris became my regular escape hatch, the place I’d run off to whenever the cultural and intellectual and gut-level need arose. Over the next fifteen years, I would go to Paris more than a dozen times. (This isn’t as obnoxious as it sounds: flights cost three hundred dollars round-trip and I slept on spare mattresses; it was a relatively cheap vacation.) And it was deeply therapeutic. I went there after a failed relationship; I went there after a failed job. I’d stay with the Mathieus, my thoughts paralleled in Claire Bretécher’s Les Frustrés comic strips, marveling at how fully she captured the vicissitudes of my life, like a Frenchified Roz Chast. One summer, I read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror at the Mathieus’ house outside Paris, from which I could visit the actual Chateau de Coucy, only a few towns away; this was life as it should be.
It was in Paris that I finally felt distant enough from the person I was in New York, the one who spent her twenties hustling away at marketing jobs while really wanting to be a writer, and comfortable enough to admit to anyone that maybe I actually was a writer. If there’s any place on the planet where you can feel comfortable articulating an artistic or intellectual desire without feeling like a pretentious idiot (or at least more of a pretentious idiot than anyone else), surely it is Paris.
By the year 2000, I’d been freelancing for the Economist for several years, but the magazine had no bylines. Without my name inked permanently onto a piece of circulating paper, I didn’t feel legit. I’d just quit my job at a media conglomerate to work on my first book; I was trying to write full-time for the first time in my life and I was nervous about the entire enterprise. One afternoon, my adoptive French sister, Juliette, and French brother, Paul, had friends over for lunch and we were crowded around the kitchen table. A friend of Paul’s asked what I did for a living.
“Je suis écrivain,” I ventured in a tentative voice. I had never said it before. In French, you don’t say “I am a writer,” you say, “I am writer,” which gives the statement an even more boastful and pompous air. Writer, like poet or philosopher, isn’t one of those job titles that rolls off the tongue in any language. The essayist Phillip Lopate once described the trepidation of declaring himself a writer for the first time. “I felt as though I were feigning a part, but what I would come to learn was that bluffing is an integral part of becoming a writer: you bluff and you bluff, until one day the world starts to treat you like a writer and you think (you are the last one to think it), ‘Well maybe I actually am one,’ still feeling mentally puny.”
I did feel dangerously small, but under the veil of translation and with the distance from home and the immediate embrace of the Mathieus as a layer of protection, it was possible I had a case. Nobody knew that back home I wasn’t really a writer, not yet. Nobody here in Paris thought I was obsessed with words. It was okay to devote hours to considering which book to read next, and to have the audacity to try writing one. Perhaps here I could pass.
“Oh, là, là, Paméla est écrivain!” Paul repeated in a mock haute Parisian accent when his friend looked impressed. But it was brotherly and affectionate, and Paul’s eyes twinkled. He may have been making fun of me, but he was also proud. Most important, he believed me when I said it, which made it seem like it might even be true. I felt only slightly idiotic, but that may be the smartest, or at least safest, way to feel when you’re starting out as a writer in this world.
CHAPTER 8
A Journey of One’s Own
Books That Change Your Life