French Children Don't Throw Food Read online

  Simon was exactly my type: swarthy, stocky and smart. (Though he’s of average height, he later adds ‘short’ to this list, since he grew up in Holland among blond giants.) Within a few hours of meeting him, I realized that ‘love at first sight’ just means feeling immediately and extremely calm with someone. Though all I said at the time was, ‘We definitely must not sleep together.’

  I was smitten, but wary. Simon had just fled the London property market to buy a cheap apartment in Paris. I was commuting between South America and New York. A long-distance relationship with someone on a third continent seemed a stretch. After that meeting in Argentina, we exchanged occasional emails. But I didn’t let myself take him too seriously. I hoped that there were swarthy, smart men in my time zone.

  Fast-forward seven months. When Simon calls out of the blue and I tell him that I’ve been sacked, he doesn’t emote or treat me like damaged goods. On the contrary, he seems pleased that I suddenly have some free time. He says he feels that we have ‘unfinished business’, and that he’d like to come to New York.

  ‘That’s a terrible idea,’ I say. What’s the point? He can’t move to America because he writes about European football. I don’t speak French, and I’ve never considered living in Paris. Though I’m suddenly quite portable myself, I’m wary of being pulled into someone else’s orbit before I have one of my own again.

  Simon arrives in New York wearing the same beaten-up leather jacket he wore in Argentina, and carrying the bagel and smoked salmon that he’s picked up at the deli near my apartment. A month later I meet his parents in London. Six months later I sell most of my possessions and ship the rest to France. My friends all tell me that I’m being rash. I ignore them, and walk out of my fixed-rent studio apartment in New York with three giant suitcases and a box of South American coins, which I give to the Pakistani driver who takes me to the airport.

  And poof, I’m a Parisian. I move into Simon’s two-room bachelor pad, in a former carpentry district in eastern Paris. With my unemployment cheques still arriving, I ditch financial journalism and begin researching a book. Simon and I each work in one of the rooms during the day.

  The shine comes off our new romance almost immediately, mostly because of interior-design issues. I once read in a book about feng shui that having piles of stuff on the floor is a sign of depression. For Simon, it just seems to signal an aversion to shelves. He has cleverly invested in an enormous unfinished wooden table that fills most of the living room, and a primitive gas-heating system, which ensures that there’s no reliable hot water. I’m especially irked by his habit of letting spare change from his pockets spill on to the floor, where it somehow gathers in the corners of each room. ‘Get rid of the money,’ I plead.

  I don’t find much comfort outside our apartment either. Despite being in the gastronomic capital of the world, I can’t figure out what to eat. Like most Anglophone women I know, I arrive in Paris with extreme food preferences (I’m an Atkins-leaning vegetarian). Walking around, I feel besieged by all the bakeries and meat-heavy restaurant menus. For a while I subsist almost entirely on omelettes and goat’s-cheese salads. When I ask waiters for ‘dressing on the side’, they look at me like I’m nuts. I don’t understand why French supermarkets stock every American cereal except my personal favourite, Grape-Nuts, and why cafés don’t serve fat-free milk.

  I know it sounds ungrateful not to swoon over Paris. Maybe I find it shallow to fall for a city just because it’s so good-looking. The cities I’ve had love affairs with in the past were all a bit, well, swarthier: São Paulo, Mexico City, New York. They didn’t sit back and wait to be admired.

  Our part of Paris isn’t even that beautiful. And daily life is filled with small disappointments. No one mentions that ‘springtime in Paris’ is so celebrated because the preceding seven months are overcast and freezing (I arrive, conveniently, at the beginning of this seven-month stretch). And while I’m convinced that I remember my year of schoolgirl French, Parisians have another name for what I’m speaking: Spanish.

  There are many appealing things about Paris. I like it that the doors of the Métro open a few seconds before the train actually stops, suggesting that the city treats its citizens like adults. I also like it that, within six months of my arrival, practically everyone that Simon and I know in Britain and America comes to visit, including people I’d later learn to categorize as ‘Facebook friends’. We eventually develop a strict admissions policy and rating system for houseguests. (Hint: If you stay a week, leave a gift.)

  I’m not bothered by the famous Parisian rudeness. At least that’s interactive. What gets me is the indifference. No one but Simon seems to care that I’m there. And he’s often off nursing his own Parisian fantasy, which is so uncomplicated it has managed to endure. As far as I can tell, Simon has never visited a museum. But he describes reading the newspaper in a café as an almost transcendent experience. One night at a neighbourhood restaurant, he swoons when the waiter sets down a cheese plate in front of him.

  ‘This is why I live in Paris!’ he declares. I realize that, by the transitive property of love and cheese, I must live in Paris for that smelly plate of cheese too.

  To be fair, I’m starting to think that it’s not Paris: it’s me. New York likes its women a bit neurotic. They’re encouraged to create a brainy, adorable, conflicted bustle around themselves – à la Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, or Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Despite having nothing more serious than man troubles, many of my friends in New York were spending more on therapy than on rent.

  That persona doesn’t fly in Paris. The French do like Woody Allen’s movies. But in real life, the ideal Parisienne is calm, discreet, a bit remote and extremely decisive. She orders from the menu. She doesn’t blather on about her childhood or her diet. If New York is about the woman who’s ruminating about her past screw-ups and fumbling to find herself, Paris is about the one who – at least outwardly – regrets nothing. In France ‘neurotic’ isn’t a self-deprecating half-boast; it’s a clinical condition.

  Even Simon, who’s merely British, is perplexed by my self-doubt, and my frequent need to discuss our relationship.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ I ask him periodically, usually when he’s reading a newspaper.

  ‘Dutch football,’ he invariably says.

  I can’t tell if he’s serious. I’ve realized that Simon is in a state of perpetual irony. He says everything, including ‘I love you’, with a little smirk. And yet he almost never actually laughs, even when I’m attempting a joke. (Some close friends don’t know that he has dimples.) Simon insists that not smiling is a British habit. But I’m sure I’ve seen Englishmen laugh. And anyway, it’s demoralizing that when I finally get to speak English with someone, he doesn’t seem to be listening.

  This not-laughing also points to a wider cultural gulf between us. As an American, I need things to be spelled out. On the train back to Paris after a weekend with Simon’s parents, I ask him whether they liked me.

  ‘Of course they liked you, couldn’t you tell?’ he asks.

  ‘But did they say they liked me?’ I demand to know.

  In search of other company, I trek across town on a series of ‘friend blind dates’, with friends of friends from back home. Most are expatriates too. None seems thrilled to hear from a clueless new arrival. Quite a few seem to have made ‘living in Paris’ a kind of job in itself, and an all-purpose answer to the question, ‘What do you do?’ Many show up late, as if to prove that they’ve gone native. (I later learn that French people are typically on time for one-to-one meetings. They’re only fashionably late for group events, including children’s birthday parties.)

  My initial attempts to make French friends are even less successful. At a party, I hit it off reasonably well with an art historian who’s about my age, and who speaks excellent English. But when we meet again for tea at her house, it’s clear that we observe vastly different female bonding rituals. I’m prepared to follow the Anglo-Ameri
can model of confession and mirroring, with lots of comforting ‘me too’s. She pokes daintily at her pastry and discusses theories of art. I leave hungry, and not even knowing whether she has a boyfriend.

  The only mirroring I get is in a book by Edmund White,1 an American writer who lived in France in the 1980s. He’s the first person who affirms that feeling depressed and adrift is a rational response to living in Paris. ‘Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That’s something like living in Paris for years, even decades. It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.’

  Despite my doubts about Paris, I’m still pretty sure about Simon. I’ve become resigned to the fact that ‘swarthy’ inevitably comes with ‘messy’. And I’ve got better at reading his micro-expressions. A flicker of a smile means that he’s got the joke. The rare full smile suggests high praise. He even occasionally says ‘that was funny’ in a monotone.

  I’m also encouraged by the fact that, for a curmudgeon, Simon has dozens of devoted, long-time friends. Perhaps it’s that, behind the layers of irony, he is charmingly helpless. He can’t drive a car, blow up a balloon or fold clothes without using his teeth. He fills our refrigerator with unopened tins of food. For expediency’s sake, he cooks everything at the highest temperature. (University friends later tell me he was known for serving drumsticks that were charred on the outside and still frozen on the inside.) When I show him how to make salad dressing using oil and vinegar, he writes down the recipe, and still pulls it out years later whenever he makes dinner.

  Also to Simon’s credit, nothing about France ever bothers him. He’s in his element being a foreigner. His parents are anthropologists who brought him up all over the world and trained him from birth to delight in local customs. He’d lived in six countries (including a year in America) by the time he was ten. He acquires languages the way I acquire shoes.

  I decide that, for Simon’s sake, I’ll give France a real go. We get married outside Paris at a thirteenth-century chateau, which is surrounded by a moat (I ignore the symbolism). In the name of marital harmony, we rent a larger apartment. I place a massive order with Ikea for bookshelves, and position spare-change bowls in every room. I try to channel my inner pragmatist instead of my inner neurotic. In restaurants, I start ordering straight from the menu, and nibbling at the occasional hunk of foie gras. My French starts to sound less like excellent Spanish and more like very bad French. Before long I’m almost settled: I have a home office, a book deadline, and even a few new friends.

  Simon and I have talked about babies. We both want one. I’d like three, in fact. And I like the idea of having them in Paris, where they’ll be effortlessly bilingual and authentically international. Even if they grow up to be geeks, they can mention ‘growing up in Paris’ and be instantly cool.

  I’m worried about getting pregnant. I’ve spent much of my adult life trying, very successfully, not to, so I have no idea whether I’m any good at the reverse. This turns out to be as whirlwind as our courtship. One day I’m Googling ‘How to get pregnant’. The next, it seems, I’m looking at two pink lines on a French pregnancy test.

  I’m ecstatic. But alongside my joy comes a surge of anxiety. My resolve to become less Carrie Bradshaw and more Catherine Deneuve immediately collapses. This doesn’t seem like the moment to go native. I’m possessed by the idea that I’ve got to oversee my pregnancy, and do it exactly right. Hours after telling Simon the good news, I go online to scour English-language pregnancy websites. Then I rush to buy some pregnancy guides, at an English bookstore near the Louvre. I want to know, in plain English, exactly what to worry about.

  Within days I’m on prenatal vitamins and addicted to BabyCentre’s ‘Is it safe?’ column. Is it safe to eat non-organic produce while pregnant? Is it safe to be around computers all day? Is it safe to wear high heels, binge on sweets at Halloween, or holiday at high altitudes?

  What makes ‘Is it safe?’ so compulsive is that it creates new anxieties (Is it safe to make photocopies? Is it safe to swallow semen?) but then refuses to allay them with a simple yes or no. Instead, expert respondents disagree with each other and equivocate. ‘Is it safe to get a manicure while I’m pregnant?’ Well yes, but chronic exposure to the solvents used in salons isn’t good for you. Is it safe to go bowling? Well, yes and no.

  The Anglophones I know also believe that pregnancy – and then motherhood – come with homework. The first assignment is choosing from among myriad parenting styles. Everyone I speak to swears by a different book. I buy many of them. But instead of making me feel more prepared, having so much conflicting advice makes babies themselves seem enigmatic and unknowable. Who they are, and what they need, seems to depend on which book you read.

  Another consequence of this independent study is that we Anglophone mothers-to-be become experts in everything that can go wrong. A pregnant Englishwoman who’s visiting Paris declares, over lunch, that there’s a five in one thousand chance her baby will be stillborn. She says she knows that saying this is gruesome and pointless, but she can’t help herself. A Londoner I know, who unfortunately has a doctorate in public health, spends much of her first trimester cataloguing the baby’s risks of contracting every possible malady.

  I’m surrounded by this anxiety when we visit Simon’s family in London (I’ve decided to believe that his parents adore me). I’m sitting in a café when a well-dressed woman interrupts me to describe a new study showing that having a lot of caffeine increases the risk of miscarriage. To stress her credibility, she says she’s married to a doctor. I don’t care who her husband is. I’m just irritated by her assumption that I haven’t read that study. Of course I have; I’m trying to live on one cup a week.

  With so much studying and worrying to do, being pregnant increasingly feels like a full-time job. I spend less and less time working on my book, which I’m supposed to hand in before the baby comes. Instead, I commune with other pregnant Anglophones in due-date-cohort chat rooms. Like me, these women are used to customizing their environments, even if it’s just to get soy milk in their coffees. And like me, they find the primitive, mammalian event happening inside their bodies to be uncomfortably out of their control. Worrying – like clutching the armrest during aircraft turbulence – at least makes us feel like it’s not.

  The English-language pregnancy press, which I can easily access from Paris, seems to be lying in wait to channel this anxiety. It focuses on the one thing that pregnant women can definitely control: food. ‘As you raise fork to mouth, consider: “Is this a bite that will benefit my baby?” If it is, chew away …’ explain the authors of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the famously worrying – and bestselling – pregnancy manual.

  I’m aware that the prohibitions in my books aren’t equally important. Cigarettes and alcohol are definitely bad, whereas shellfish, cold meat, raw eggs and unpasteurized cheese are only dangerous if they’ve been contaminated with something rare like listeria or salmonella. But to be safe, I take every prohibition literally. It’s easy enough to avoid oysters and foie gras. But – since I’m in France – I’m panicked about cheese. ‘Is the Parmesan on my pasta pasteurized?’ I ask flabbergasted waiters. Simon bears the brunt of my angst. Did he scrub the chopping board after cutting up that raw chicken? Does he really love our unborn child?

  What to Expect contains something called the Pregnancy Diet, which its creators claim can ‘improve fetal brain development’, ‘reduce the risk of certain birth defects’ and ‘may even make it more likely that your child will grow to be a healthier adult’. Every morsel seems to represent potential SAT points. Never mind hunger: if I find myself short of a protein portion at the end of the day, the Pregnancy Diet says I should cram in a final serving of egg salad before bedtime.

  They had me at ‘diet’. After years of dieting to slim down, it’s thrilling
to be ‘dieting’ to gain weight. It feels like a reward for having spent years thin enough to nab a husband. My online forums are filled with women who’ve put on forty or fifty pounds over the recommended limits. Of course we’d all rather resemble those compactly pregnant celebrities in designer gowns, or the models on the cover of Fit Pregnancy. Some women I know actually do. But a competing message says that we should give ourselves a free pass. ‘Go ahead and EAT’, says the chummy author of the Best Friends’ Guide to Pregnancy, which I’ve been cuddling up with in bed. ‘What other joys are there for pregnant women?’

  Tellingly, the Pregnancy Diet says that I can ‘cheat’ with the occasional fast-food cheeseburger or glazed doughnut. In fact, pregnancy seems like one big cheat. Lists of pregnancy cravings read like a catalogue of foods that women have been denying themselves since adolescence: cheesecake, milk-shakes, macaroni and cheese and ice cream cake. I crave lemon on everything, and entire loaves of bread.

  Someone tells me that Jane Birkin says she can never remember whether it was ‘un baguette’ or ‘une baguette’, so she just orders ‘deux baguettes’. I can’t find the quote. But whenever I go to the bakery, I follow this strategy. Then – surely unlike the twiggy Birkin – I eat them both.

  I’m not just losing my figure. I’m also losing a sense of myself as someone who once went on dinner dates and worried about the Palestinians. I now spend my free time studying new-model buggies and memorizing the possible causes of colic. This evolution from ‘woman’ to ‘mum’ feels inevitable. A fashion spread in a pregnancy magazine that I pick up on a trip to New York shows big-bellied women in floppy shirts and men’s pyjama bottoms, and says that these outfits are worthy of wearing all day. Perhaps to get out of ever finishing my book, I fantasize about ditching journalism and training as a midwife.