I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, page 9
“I miss lockdown,” she says. “There were a few months where it felt like the neighborhood came together and you could figure out who actually lived there.” She pauses. “And at least I could sleep.”
“Why don’t you move?”
“I can’t afford it.”
I think of this generation of career media people who got on the roller coaster back in the late nineties when the ride looked like a steep one to the top, at which point you’d get the office and the title and then be propelled onward by a great swoosh of expense accounts and town cars and underwritten mortgages all the way through to the end of a respected career. Instead, by the time the ride we were on got to the top, the rails ran out and now everyone is just hanging on by their thumbs waiting for some structure to appear, but it never does. I still make the same word rate, or less, than I did when I started out, while every other expense has quadrupled.
“Didn’t rent prices fall here too?” I ask. New York had been so abandoned I’d managed to get my rent lowered by $200 a month. Unheard of.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I recognize that tone. It’s the tone of a savings account that is close to being emptied with no sure prospect of being refilled. I fill in the space.
“I will never get over not having a down payment to take advantage of those six weeks last spring when everyone really ran for it,” I say.
And this immediately opens the door to what has become the eternal math equation. If my thirties were all about calculating marriage and fertility, my forties are all about calculating down payments. Mortgages. And, because I live in New York, maintenance fees. The monthly fee you pay on top of your mortgage to the building to maintain it. In Manhattan co-ops this number is often the equivalent of rent, which means by buying, you are doubling your monthly payment, one half of which will continue in perpetuity. And then there are health insurance premiums. It’s all part of the larger question: How to remain in the partnership I’ve struck with a city instead of a person? Some of my most enjoyable conversations in Paris involve my explaining this financial torture device, along with health insurance deductibles, to European dinner companions if only because the looks of horror I elicit somehow placate me. It really is that awful, they say.
“Could you have bought?” asks Ellie. As though we are talking about a computer or even a car. Something in the realm of practical reality.
“Probably not as a freelancer,” I say. “I’d need to show consistent pay stubs and savings in my bank account to pass the co-op board interview. Then with the maintenance plus the mortgage, I’d be paying nearly $5K a month. But I like to think about it.”
“$5K a month for what?!”
“My 450-square-foot studio.”
And we’re off. Ellie paid €230,000 for her three-hundred-square-foot apartment just outside the Périph two years ago. No down payment required.
“None?!”
“No. I have a CDI and as a first-time buyer they give you that option.”
A CDI is basically a guarantee when you sign the contract to be hired full time that you can’t get fired. There are no credit cards in France. Not as Americans understand them.
Ellie is on the fence about selling her place. She wants something bigger and will go farther out, but the drop in prices is hitting her as a seller.
Sandra looks deflated. “I’ll never be able to buy.”
Aarti pays €1,000 a month for her one-bedroom in the 11th. She’s on the hunt for a place to purchase; as a foreign hire who was scouted here by her company she’s eligible for a tax reduction of some sort. But she’s waiting to see if her boyfriend will go in on it with her.
“The only way an apartment purchase will work for me is if I can do an all-cash purchase,” I say.
“How much would that be?” asks Ellie with the natural-born face of a problem solver.
“I’d say a million.”
“A million?!”
“At least.” I break it down: “I’d need $800,000 to purchase. Then the remainder to cover fees and repairs. If it was a co-op I’d need twice that to show I have enough in the bank to cover the monthly expenses.”
“That is absolutely fucking insane.”
“So $2 million?” says Aarti, wide-eyed.
“Yes, $2 million would solve a lot of things for me.”
In New York, I find, we all—we being women without outside support of partner or family—have our number. There’s an episode of Sex and the City (is there a way to age as a woman without thinking of some episode of that show?) where Miranda says her “scary age” is forty-three and Carrie says hers is forty-five. They are both in their late thirties and they’re talking babies and marriage (what else). Having hurtled past both those numbers, I’ve come to think of my forties as the age where the mortgage math takes over. What is the number that will make it possible to get the tests the doctor orders without having to worry about bankruptcy? What is the number that means you don’t approach every rent renewal wondering if the $10,000 you’ve finally scrounged together for savings will be spent on a broker’s fee and down payment looking for a new apartment? What is the number that will make it okay that there is no one to ask for help? What is the number that spells a modicum of safety?
For me, that number is $2 million.
I’m lowballing my number, according to my friends in New York. They all say $5 million. But my number is based on the practical expectation that I will keep working. Somehow having an actual number makes it more plausible to me. A concrete destination. The possibility of my ever coming into $2 million is slim to never. And yet, the distance also brings me a perverse comfort: How can I possibly expect security when I’m this far away from it? Still, I think, should it ever happen, I will know what to do with it.
Of course, I could get a full-time job. Become a copywriter for a corporation. Take the benefits. And the two weeks of vacation a year. But I won’t. That there is no longer a way to make a reasonable living doing the thing I’m good at is not yet enough to entice me away from the cliff’s edge I walk.
We talk of cities these days the way we used to talk about partners. How do we get them to commit? How do we convince them to let us stay permanently? Satisfy us emotionally and financially. To want us. To give us a safe haven. Of course, there is no guarantee a partner will give you this either. They could suck you dry too. I have watched it happen again and again. Forget bicoastal, I want to say. I’m in a throuple with Paris and New York.
I often feel I can only understand discussions about long-term relationships in terms of cities: What I love, what I loathe, and what I’m willing to tolerate because it’s better than anywhere else. And how, after such a long time, it’s sometimes the history that keeps you coming back. I wonder sometimes if I even see New York as it is these days or if I’m walking around in a city that now only exists in my head. Before lockdown, I was spending less and less time there. I’d been with New York for nearly a quarter of a century, but the longer I’m there the more impossible it becomes for me to love it unless I’m away from it for long periods of time. It’s always waiting for me when I come back. But without Paris it’s no longer enough. Like married couples who, once the kids have left, spend more time at greater distances. Remaining together by remaining apart for longer stretches.
Finally, we finish eating. The sky has become overcast. Everyone has a different place they want to be. Aarti is going up to the flea. Sandra home to wait for a delivery.
“I think I will en Vélib’,” I say.
Ellie guffaws at my butchered French. “En Vélib’!”
“I’m a Vélib’er, I couldn’t leave her if I tried,” I sing to the tune of the old Monkees song.
More laughs.
“Fine, I will too, then,” says Ellie.
“Do you bike?” I ask.
“Of course.”
Over brunch Ellie had mentioned someone she’d connected with on one of the apps. He is a pompier (firefighter). She saw a photo of him lifting weights at the firehouse and said, “Yes please.”
“I’m not sure I’d want anyone to see me naked at this point,” says Sandra, feeding Marcel, who is now on her lap, bits of croissant.
“Oh well, he’ll get what he gets, and he’ll like it” is Ellie’s reply.
In the short time we’ve known each other, I’ve come to think this is Ellie’s approach to most people. She is a strong dose of life. Unfiltered. We are all—me, Nina, Sandra, Aarti—a strong dose in our own ways, but Ellie leads with it as though there is a flag perpetually raised in her hand as she storms the world. I’d eventually come to learn she’d been in Paris for eight years. An engagement had ended when her fiancé died. She was a live interpreter for a mostly male tech company. The five languages she spoke, in addition to French, she learned as an adult. The trick, she tells me, is to watch foreign films and put the subtitles on in the language the actors are actually speaking. Even in the short amount of time we’ve spent together, more than a few Parisians have reflected on her lack of accent when she speaks French.
I tell Ellie I’ll go with her to the Vélib’ stand. Assuming we’ll go our separate ways once we get there. She says there’s one below the Sacré Coeur at the Métro.
Aarti shakes her head. “I could just never do it. It’s insane, the Vélib’.”
“I love it,” I say.
“It’s the only way,” says Ellie.
Liberator
There is really only one person who I would consider biking around a city with: my friend Maddy. A native New Yorker, she gave me my first New York bike not long after September 11, when taking the train proved too wearing on the nerves. We’d ride into our waitressing shift in Greenwich Village through 5:00 p.m. rush hour traffic, and then home again at 5:00 a.m. through the empty downtown canyons.
Biking in a city has almost nothing to do with understanding—or even necessarily liking—bikes. You couldn’t pay me to go on some sort of biking travel tour in, say, the Loire. Or to casually roll down a leisurely city bike path along a river. Instead, it has everything to do with understanding, and respecting, the city you are biking. It requires you to pay attention. To everything. To want to fly up and down the city’s arteries, zip across from limb to limb. To be willing to be extremely alive. As I wrote once about biking New York, “To know a city by bike is to know it intimately in a way not possible by foot or car…like being thrust into the bloodstream of a great beast, privy to its every pulse…you learn the beats and melody of the streets the way you learn any song.”
To immediately understand the mood of its day.
It’s a shortcut into the daily human condition. And it can be a drug.
To do that with another person requires a particular intimacy and trust that’s not easy to come by.
Ellie and I drop Aarti off at the Métro, and then I follow Ellie around the corner to a long stand of Vélib’s. She is peering at her phone.
“We don’t really need an electric, do we? It’s all downhill from here. Number seventeen is good.” She taps the seat, still looking at her phone. “Number eleven.” Hand shoots to further down the line. “Oh! Number thirty-three, take that!”
I’m already standing beside the bike whose seat is the highest. I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“What do you mean?”
“On the app. They’re all rated.” She is testing the pedals and tapping the wheels of a bike as she says this. Like a practiced mechanic.
I look at the app. I notice, for the first time, all the bikes are rated by stars. Three is the best. It also lets you know how recently they’ve been rated. The one I’m standing beside has one star. I move to thirty-three.
Off we go.
I know the basics of Paris on a bike. The main boulevards. I no longer need to stop and start and check my maps. I’ve also learned the hard way not to take shortcuts. Not to assume that when I get to one of the large places, the huge roundabouts that have multiple roads shooting off them, that I can guess which one to take. One innocent left-hand turn on your way to the 8th, one exit too early—only fifteen feet between this corner and that!—and suddenly you find yourself in the 20th. But Ellie knows the roads. Soon we are flying. Into the bowels of the city. Down narrow streets where the even narrower bike lanes run against the direction of traffic. Sailing through intersections. Paris has slipped into the August slowdown, but there are still plenty of cars on the road. I’ve never been good with the traffic lights here. I find them small, and strangely placed off to the side. I’m never sure where to look for them. But Ellie is not slowing down. It’s keep up or go your own way. I want to learn to bike the city like this. This is the Parisian fluency I’m after.
I take the intersections on faith that Ellie knows what she’s doing. Her right arm shoots out to indicate we’re turning right. We swing out onto a large boulevard, merging with the traffic. Don’t blink, I think. This is one of those instances where you have to commit and not second-guess. I do and I don’t. We cross four lanes of cars and line up with the traffic to make a left onto a wide, sweeping roundabout. I have only the vaguest sense of where we are now. I keep my eyes focused on Ellie. She’s in a short flowery dress (which I’ve come to recognize as her staple look), her long blonde hair untied, wearing white sneakers. The light changes and onto the roundabout we go. I’m about fifteen feet behind her and I watch the cars slow for her as they take in the blonde hair and the long tan legs. Bike or no bike, she is an entire language that demands right of way. Her right arm shoots out again to signal our exit.
To my amazement the cars really defer to bikes as though we have a right to be on the road. I love this formality. In New York, you’re liable to get run down, indication or not. You must defer to traffic. Not here. Here we have a right to the road.
I can hear Ellie’s voice above the traffic, repeating the joke I made earlier.
“I’m a Vélib’er, I couldn’t leave her if I tried.”
I burst out laughing. If I could throw my arms up in celebration, I would. But these bikes are at least fifteen pounds and my balance is not what it once was. But it is hard to think of another way to express the joy of finding a person who is made to feel the most alive by the very thing that makes you feel most alive. It is one of the great gifts. One that transcends even language. Or is its own language. The gift of not having to translate yourself.
At the next major intersection Ellie stops even though the light is green, and turns back to look at me for the first time since we set off.
“You go left here.” She points down the wide boulevard.
I look around and realize we’re at Rivoli, and ahead of us is the Louvre.
“Which way do you go?”
“Straight across.”
The lights change and she’s off, disappearing across Rivoli and through the arch. I make a left and head home. It’s a straight shot from here.
EIGHT
Skin Hunger
Everyone on Fruitz is interested in spanking me.
At least this is how it feels when I dive into my messages.
It’s not the first thing they tell me. Though I’m realizing at the bottom of many of the profiles there are often a series of letters, and I’ve started to wonder whether they signify something I should be aware of.
I ask Ellie what MMM means.
“Oh, it’s one of those bullshit things, like sapiosexual. They basically just want you to know they’ll go down on you. Orgasms as Olympic sport.”
“Mine or theirs?”
“Yours. The French take female pleasure seriously. Getting women off makes them feel like men.”
“Excellent! But then what is sapiosexual?”
“It means they’re turned on by your mind.”
“Is that a real thing?”
“No.”
Exactly nothing about my mind is on display right now, beyond the fact I don’t want to use it. My messages, however, have gone from Penthouse Letters to full erotica. They contain, if not entire novels, long descriptive passages that need only be loosely stitched together by the briefest of plotlines to be made a narrative. Shades of Fruitz.
This is of my own doing. I’ve begun pressing for more details. Like anything else that feels good, I want more. The initial rush of so much attention has, if not exactly worn off, simply made me want to maintain it, which means I need to turn it up a notch. After a week of swiping I’m now more surprised when people don’t immediately match with me. When I open the app and don’t find four or five crush notes waiting for me, I will close and restart it assuming the issue is that the app hasn’t refreshed, not that the crush notes have run out. I’m usually right.
That the notes are almost always the same—some variation on tes yeux, les cheveux—hasn’t yet lost its allure, but I understand that if I want to get to the next level, I’m going to have to be the one to make it possible. Now, even if they don’t ask me what I’m looking for here, I respond to their initial volley by telling them I’m très bien and I’m here to enjoy myself. The shift to English is notable, and I’m asked if I prefer it. I’m stronger in English, I say. Which is both true, and also saves me the delay in having to plug everything into Google Translate, to make sure I’m understanding correctly, and then wait for my international plan to load the result.
“I’d like to help you enjoy yourself.”
