Paris Shrugged

John Birdsall
Nov 7 · 3 min read

My husband and I went to Paris for the first time in 2002, for our ten-year-anniversary, the last stop in an October trip needled with rain. In London we stoked each other’s excitement over Saturday lunch and rabbit pie, ate Flemish carbonnade in Brussels, and got freaky high in Amsterdam on poppyseed space cake. I devoured stoned the whole huge chunk of crystal-shard farmhouse Gouda I’d bought to nibble on the train that would take us to our last, and we expected, our grandest stop.

But Paris was not that. We were tired, and the place we were staying — a studio apartment way out on the dog-shit fringe of the twelfth arrondissement — seemed ordinary, in a district with the grandeur all pumped out of it. We’d expected a Napoleonic capital; we got drab streets of spraypaint slash-tags, and a fifth-floor walkup in a building with a Burger King at street level, next to a Chinese takeout with a sweet-and-sour steam table up front.

Our apartment smelled like mildew and dirty disinfectant water dried in the crevices of old floorboards, but what could we expect? The place was cheap. Friends in San Francisco had introduced us to these French gays who owned an antique shop and kept this tiny reminder of Paris, renting to select acquaintances for not much more than the cost of the cleaning lady. It came with only one rule, besides the implied one about taking out the trash and recycling our wine bottles, blazoned on a taped-up sheet of paper and in English: Please do not go into the locked armoire.

That week we stood through long Metro rides to the center and its inevitable attractions, took a lonely walk through the faded trees of the Bois de Vincennes, and ate gluey boeuf bourguignonne, the meat clenched like toes. We tried a couple of times to find the bar à vin that was supposed to be one of the undeniably charming places nearby our apartment. Tried and failed.

On a night of pummeling rain we stayed in: cooked an entrecôte in a pan straddling miniscule burners, figured out the microwave, drank Beaujolais. We imagined the Parisian life of the gays who owned this place, looking at the doors of the armoire we weren’t supposed to open, the private possessions of the owners, presumably, concealed by flimsy doors. But then, moving the TV cart to try to get a broadcast signal yielding more than a couple of channels, I found on the floor a VHS tape, pushed it into the slot, and a sex scene flickered darkly on the little screen — homemade porn! But freaky: leather, fetish stuff, boots and latex, tweaky edits. It was creepy — I mean, porn is whatever you’re into, but we were sneaking. It felt illicit.

“We can never tell anybody about this,” my husband said as I watched. “Are you listening?”

That video broke something in me — a notion we’d had that Paris would be a city of, what, poise and splendor? Culturally pure? It felt more like the Outer Mission of San Francisco, the wear and sourness on buildings unwashed, not important enough for anyone to care about. I could accept more easily that the streets around us were shitty, the unremarkable produce in the barely interesting supermarket, the depressing sheen of the gourmet frozen food shop across from the apartment. In those final days we relaxed into Paris like one of those old couches at Oakland’s Parkway Theater you forget the smell of after you’ve sat there long enough, casually resting your hand on its greasy arm. I teased open the doors of the forbidden armoire and glimpsed what they concealed.

Our last night in Paris — the end of our anniversary tour — we found the bar à vin: a dozen unvarnished wines, in a room with wood floors and casks set about as high tables. I said something to my husband like This is what we’ve been looking for, why did it take us days to find it? People hanging out in their coats, not being dicks to tourists, over wine nobody had to worry much about being respectful of. A place concealed in open sight, behind baroque-swagged armoire doors that anyone who wanted to could pop open, to find the boots and poppers and 48-ounce-can of Crisco there. Paris is a city that long ago perfected the shrug. #

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