Blame It on Paris Read online

  Blame It

  on Paris

  Blame It

  on Paris

  LAURA FLORAND

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book New York

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  TO SÉBASTIEN

  And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house.

  —O. HENRY

  AND TO OUR FAMILIES

  Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

  —O. HENRY

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  BLAME IT ON PARIS

  Copyright © 2006 by Laura Florand

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-5409-9

  First Edition: October 2006

  First Mass Market Edition: May 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am not good at showing people how much I value them, so I wrote this book instead. I hope that my sense of humor doesn’t disguise my very sincere thanks to all the people involved in this story. This whole book can only give the smallest inkling of all the love and support and enthusiasm our two families offered us. Grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, friends adopted into the family, nieces, one nephew (we only have one!) . . . thank you, thank you, thank you.

  Just as we would never have made it without our families, we also would never have made it without our friends. A big, huge thank-you to all of you who people these pages!

  I have to name the “church ladies,” who get only a glancing reference in the story. These real-life people volunteered to cook and cater the wedding of a girl they had not seen since she was a teenager; out of friendship for her parents, friendship for each other, and kindness and generosity to me. And they were not just ladies, husbands got involved, too. So sincere thanks to Betty and Frank Miller, Dan and Vicki Jones, Bernice Bishop, and Lee Strazay—truly astonishing, wonderful people.

  In the writing of the book; thank you to my best readers and editors: Dai, Anna, and Grace McNamara. A group of writers led by Charisse Coleman also gave me invaluable advice on some of the chapters. Thank you, also, to Ted Weinstein, for pulling my book out of his slush pile and making me rewrite, rewrite, rewrite; to my agent Kimberley Cameron, for taking on the book and my writing career with such enthusiasm; and to Natalia Aponte and all the editors at Tor/Forge who worked on it. But this book would have been impossible without MY PARENTS, who have supported my writing in every way possible ever since I was nine years old and started filling notebooks.

  And, of course, I want to thank Sébastien. It is the wonder of my life that I should have met him.

  One

  Eleven o’clock on a Friday night. The seamy, sex-obsessed center of Paris. I balanced over a Turkish toilet in a tiny bistro, one stiletto heel propped against the wall to make some kind of writing table out of my knee, trying desperately not to touch anything around me as I wrote an invitation to my dorm’s next student party. And I used to imagine a life of foreign adventure as so romantic.

  Okay, so it’s not that this wasn’t romantic, in its way; but heretofore, tottering over a reeking hole in the floor of a two-foot-square room had not been part of my vision of romance. Before I moved to Paris as a graduate student, it had not even been part of my vision of possible ends to the digestive process. In my hometown, in Georgia, women didn’t have a digestive process; we only used the ladies’ room to freshen up. Highly refined women used the “little girls’ room,” but that was why I had fled the country. The mind could only take so much before it cracked.

  How, with this upbringing, had I sunk to writing an invitation to a strange man while trying to avoid falling into merde? Two possible explanations offered themselves: either I was desperate, or it was all somebody else’s fault. I couldn’t possibly be desperate, so I figured I should blame it on Paris.

  Paris and I, well, we just weren’t hitting it off. Maybe she’d been oversold, or my attitude had been affected by my first month, during which I cried myself to sleep every night over a necessary breakup the move to Paris had facilitated.

  “Maybe I’m just not meant for a big city full of French,” I told my sister Anna on the phone.

  “You have to like Paris,” she said. “Everybody loves Paris. You have a moral responsibility to love Paris. What is wrong with you?” It’s amazing how many conversations I have where that question comes up.

  “It’s got an awful lot of French people in it. A disconcerting amount, really. I read about that in Mark Twain, but you don’t really appreciate the impact until you’re here. Do you know I scare people?”

  My sister choked. At five-foot-three, I rarely evoke terror until people get to know me better. “Well, you scare me,” she said, proving my point. “But I’m kind of surprised you’re having this effect at first sight. What do you do? Wear white tennis shoes?”

  Okay, I just want to point out here that my sister thinks white Keds are stylish. Any comments from her to a woman who had just bought a pair of black stiletto boots were way out of line. True, I’d only bought black stiletto boots because I couldn’t find any other kind of boots in Paris, but at least I owned some. “I smile.”

  She burst out laughing.

  “I’m not kidding! Today an older woman actually jumped back and put up her umbrella to ward me off. I was just being friendly.” Not being raised in a barn, I tended to nod and smile at anyone whose path I crossed. This provoked surprisingly panicked reactions in Parisians, as if they thought I was insane.

  On the other end of the line came lots of choking sounds, as if my sister were coughing up a hairball. This is possible. She has lots of long curly blond hair, and when we were little one of our brother’s friends mistook her for a poodle. Really. I wouldn’t mention it, but she was mocking my pain. “Sorry,” she said, finally spitting out the fur. “I really shouldn’t talk to you while I’m eating. Any other woes you want to tell me about today besides terrifying old ladies?”

  I pulled the phone far enough away from my ear to glare at it, my phone card clicked down to its last unit, and we lost the connection. I stepped out of the phone booth, past a waiting fellow student who gave me an intolerant look for talking so long, and looked around at the Cité U, my home sweet home. The Cité Universitaire is a giant collection of student dorms on the south side of Paris, across from the Parc Montsouris, the only park in all of Paris
that rambles instead of following classical geometry. Evening was settling in, and students traipsed to and from their various houses and the main building, where our student status qualified us to eat very bad food for very little money. I had a credit card and planned to win the lottery in a few years to pay it off, so I didn’t take advantage of this privilege nearly as much as I should have.

  Aside from the food, I loved the Cité Universitaire, with its vast parklike grounds and its thirty-seven different houses sponsored by thirty-seven different countries. I liked to walk past the fields of students playing soccer, the students chatting each other up, the men pretending they were students to try to hit on young women, and study the houses each country had built. We had everything from a sedate neo-Gothic to something that strongly resembled a bomb shelter. As the architecture suggested, the place hosted a lot of oddball cultures: French, Moroccan, Danish, Canadian. There were even some Americans who, taken out of their element, are about the strangest creatures on the globe. I tried to hang out with them at first, but when they caught me speaking French with the natives, they considered me a snob and a traitor to class, country, and above all, language, and pelted me with the half-eaten pastries they always had in one hand. Okay, I made that up about being pelted with pastries. Still, no Europeans ever nibbled on delicious pastries in the Métro. How come I was the only American who noticed, realized eating in public was considered barbaric here, and stopped doing it? I’m rarely considered a paragon of perception and sensitivity to others, so come on, how hard could it be?

  Anyway, rumors of roaches surrounded the Fondation des États-Unis, so I ended up living in the Maison du Canada. There, students also tended to hang out in large groups dissing the French, but at least we did it in French, so those obnoxious Frenchmen could understand us. The Canadian house made me pay extra rent to live there, though, which was downright rude. Did they have any idea how much of my tax money went to pay for their nuclear shield or to subsidize businesses that destroyed their ozone layer?

  I hadn’t figured out how to make calls from my room yet, mostly because it involved putting down a hard cash deposit, and I had spent my last bit of cash at a really nice chocolate shop that didn’t take credit cards. My sister could call in, though, and a week or so later she caught me, huddled under my rough, orange, dorm-issue blanket, clutching my teddy bear for warmth. The dorm hadn’t turned the radiators on yet; for some reason they thought it didn’t get cold enough until November. “Where have you been?” she said. “Did some old lady stab you with an umbrella? I was starting to worry.”

  “No! I’ve been trying to enjoy this stupid city. Do you know I’ve got an art history professor card that lets me go into the Louvre anytime I want? For free! Three-hour lines of tourists circling around the Pyramide, and I just wave my card at a guard in the Cardinal Richelieu gallery and waltz right in. It’s like having my own secret entrance to the Bat Cave, only better because there is cooler stuff inside.”

  “But you’re not an art history professor,” Anna pointed out. “You don’t know anything about art.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t get caught up in the details. Valérie gave it to me. She’s at the study abroad program where I work. I can get into the Musée d’Orsay and all the other public museums that way, too.”

  “I wish I were in Paris,” Anna said. “I would love to be able to do that. And I wouldn’t spend all my time whining about it like you.”

  “Yes, you would, too. It’s freezing here, it hasn’t stopped raining for the past three weeks, and guys keep coming up to me talking about my breasts.”

  A pause. We had both grown up in the same small, polite Southern town. “Eww,” she said. “I thought Frenchmen were romantic.”

  “Yeah, well, welcome to the non-Disney version. They also seem to think I’m a blonde.”

  My sister snorted. Possessed of long, wavy chestnut hair, I had given her a hard time with the blond jokes while we were growing up. “So is the Louvre open late at night? Because I’ve been calling at, like, ten there.” Ten is late in Georgia.

  “No, let’s see, last night I went to see Molière with a friend, and then two nights ago, we went to see a play by Marivaux.” A fellow graduate student was doing her dissertation on Marivaux, and I loved his dialogue and his hilarious send-ups of early eighteenth-century society. “Friday night I went out to a restaurant and then dancing with some new students I met here. Oh, and Tuesday, my program had tickets to the opera.”

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s too bad you hate Paris. Otherwise, you might be able to have fun there.”

  “I do hate it! It’s cold, it’s gray, and people are hateful. They’ve got no call to be that rude, really they don’t. But I’ve got a contract to stay here for a year, so I can’t waste it, can I? I’ve got to try and enjoy it.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you do. Every time I turn on the radio these days, there’s some Lucy Jordan woman singing about how her life has been wasted because she never rode through Paris with the top down and the wind blowing in her hair. You are in Paris right now! You’ll look back on this moment when you’re fifty and gloat because you haven’t wasted your life!”

  Well, I’d look back on living in Tahiti and Spain and gloat at not having wasted my life. Paris I wasn’t so sure about. “You can’t joyride through Paris with the top down. It’s too cold, it’s usually raining, and you wouldn’t have the wind running through your hair, you’d be stuck in a traffic jam with dozens of angry drivers honking all around you.”

  “You’re violating the myth of Paris with a little bit too much reality for me,” Anna said. “Do you want me to come visit you in the spring or not?”

  I sighed. It’s not like I wasn’t trying. As a graduate student, I should have been spending my time in classrooms and the library, but I was afraid to let my sister down. I had a moral obligation to love Paris and to enjoy every minute of it, and I couldn’t do that in a classroom or in a library. So I went to the theater and saw Marivaux acted in the centuries-old Hôtel de la Monnaie that could have been the real setting for his comedy of manners. Period-dressed actors greeted us at the door as if we were house-guests along with the characters in the play, and a period-dressed chamber orchestra played Lully as we climbed the wide stone steps to the room in which the play would take place. The next night, I heard Corneille declaimed in grandiose alexandrins in a tiny stale theater with an audience of a dozen and one actor who smelled so bad we knew whenever he was waiting in the wings. I got off work afternoons and said, “Hey, I haven’t seen Monet’s Rouen cathedrals in days,” and strolled into the Musée d’Orsay, installed myself in a chair, and just stared for an hour at those extraordinary paintings and all the heads that kept blocking my view of them. Before, I had only ever seen Monet on greeting cards and as a poster on my dentist’s bathroom wall. Bless Valérie for my art historian card. I lived in fear that one day some security guard would look at the card, squint at me suspiciously, and ask some trick question. “What’s the point of such-and-such in the Pompidou?” he would ask. I’d try to stammer out something logical, which would be a dead giveaway, and the jig would be up. I wouldn’t be imprisoned, but when Parisians sniff at you the humiliation scars you for life.

  Still, I braved it, waltzing past security guards with increasingly aloof confidence and grinning giddily every time it worked. Emboldened, and showing great discipline in my determination to enjoy Paris, I set out to explore every chocolate shop in the city.

  “Wow,” my sister said, “you’re so gutsy.”

  “Well, I am. Do you know how many chocolate shops there are in this city? It’s the chocolate capital of the world!”

  “Just shut up already. Although I did figure out what’s wrong with that city. It’s the Eiffel Tower. I was reading a feng shui book.”

  “Bless you.”

  “No, it’s—don’t you keep up with U.S. fads? It’s about the way the space you’re living in is arranged and how that affects you. The author said having
that great rusty arrow pointing up above the city bleeds all its hope out of it.”

  “It’s got a great big lighthouse beacon beaming from the top of it, too,” I said. “It circles over the whole city. The government said the beacon was to symbolize how Paris was the center of the world and everyone should come to it, or something like that. But lighthouses really are supposed to warn people away from dangerous rocks.” How like the Parisian government to warn people away with their attempts at hospitality.

  She was growing on me, though, the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t want to admit it, but at night when the lights came on, that daytime rusty metal look changed to a warm copper glow. There was something so glamorous and romantic about her, there above the city.

  Sensing weakness, my colleague and only Parisian friend Valérie convinced me to give Ladurée a try. This took some doing because every time she mentioned Ladurée’s legendary macaroons, I got unpleasant visions of coconut. When I finally ducked through the velvet curtains on rue Royale into this nineteenth-century salon de thé, I discovered instead macarons, concoctions made of lightly crusty air and luscious ganache. As I sat on a park bench eating a chocolate one that could have been served in heaven, a couple passed by, and the older man grinned at me, the first unsalacious grin I had ever received from a strange Parisian: “They’re the best in the world, aren’t they?”

  I hated to confirm a Parisian in any conviction of superiority, but I had to give him that one. Okay, I said to myself. A city that can produce macarons like that has to be survivable. Keep at it, girl.

  Still, when I went home for Christmas, I thought I had died and gone, if not to heaven—which might be a little sophisticated for me—at least back where I belonged. I drove down that long country road, where a farmer still had a tractor upended in a ditch from an accident twenty years ago, and when I saw the sign, PIGS 4 SALE, I about had tears in my eyes.