LA en vie

Paris hometown

"America is my country, but Paris is my hometown." A character in a movie we were watching quoted Gertrude Stein, and I felt a pang.

"That's us, isn't it?" said D.  The others nodded.

We just rented out our Paris apartment for two years.

La tablée

La tablée is one of those French words you can translate easily into English, but that English doesn't use. That kind of word usually means a cultural difference.

It means a tableful of people.

At this time of year, Paris is softer, slower. The city empties out, and the children vanish. Everyone is at the beach, in the mountains, or at the maison de famille in the countryside, sometimes a large house shared by generations of the same family.

Lunch is outside whenever possible, and everyone eats together. In France, summer is a time for cousins to meet, brothers and sisters to catch up, little children to joke with their great-aunts and great-uncles.

Do you detect a nostalgic tone to my voice?

Here in L.A., no one does this. The summer is work-work-work as usual.

When people here take their one or two weeks a year, they have to choose between seeing their families, usually far-flung, or going on vacation.

Americans have no time off.

A Tale of Two Maids

At the risk of sounding richer than I really am-- I have two maids.

A "real" one  in France, and one here in L.A. for my rented house.

Nadia, the one in France, is someone I have known for many years. I hired her soon after my youngest child was born, and she has worked for me ever since.

She was working for a Kuwaiti employer who treated her like a slave, confiscated her wages, kept her passport and made her work seven days a week. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, her Kuwaiti employers took their jewelry and servants and fled to  a hotel in the French Riviera. Nadia discovered that servants in France were not treated like that. She sneaked out of the hotel at night and escaped on her own to Paris, where her embassy helped her. I met her shortly afterwards.

Eventually she got her carte de séjour [French equivalent of a U.S. green card], met a wonderful man, and had two children in France. She bought her parents a house back in the old country, and bought her brother a taxi business.

Nadia is never late except when there is a wildcat strike in the Paris transportation system (i.e. all too often....). She is kind, honest, does things without being asked, and sings when she thinks no one is listening. I  admire her more than she knows.

Nadia is paid legally and her children go to a good French public school. They are headed for university and the whole family is solidly middle-class-- the high wages I pay go into the French system, so Nadia and her husband each get six weeks vacation a year, health care and retirement. The French government makes it easy to pay her with something called a Chèque Emploi Service. I write a check to her each month and send a  form off at the same time to the government. All the social costs are deducted automatically from my bank account. It's quite expensive but I have to say it soothes my conscience.

Here in Los Angeles... like everyone else in this part of town, I have Mexicans working for me. Rosa, who worked for a friend of mine here, is Mexican and I feel sure she's not here legally. She doesn't speak English and I'm not sure she can read; but she is intelligent and hardworking and ambitious for her children-- one of them is in a magnet school.  She gets here after an endless ride on two or three buses. The other night her sixteen-year-old daughter did not come home. Rosa says the girl's boyfriend is a cholo (gang member).

"You can only help them so much," said my friend who referred her-- who herself is paying for her daughter's ghetto boyfriend to take college tours and go to summer camp. "The kids fall through the cracks."

No standing

Attending another performance in L.A., with its standard standing ovation afterwards (yawn), I was reminded of a different experience three weeks ago in Paris. I went to see James Conlon direct the French National Orchestra in a program of three rather short pieces, including (I believe) the European premiere of Erwin Schulhoff's Ogelala, as well as a Prokofiev concerto and Roussel's Bacchus et Ariane. The evening included a piano solo performance with the orchestra by a brilliant young pianist of 20, Lise de la Salle, glittering in a golden gown, with long blond hair, against the orchestra all in black.

The audience was wildly enthusiastic. There were repeated encores. No one stood up.

Books about Paris

A local bookstore is having readings from several books about Paris, and it makes me wonder why I have never wanted to write one. Every other foreigner who spends a year there seems to.

My young visitors are American

Paris

They're so nice. Really. But.... so American!

1) They leave all the lights on, all the time (that reminds me that one of our babysitters, when we first moved to France, asked me, "C'est obligé de laisser tout allumé?" I thought she was weird to want to turn off all the lights when we were just in the next room. That was before I saw the electricity bill.

2) I bought two big cartons of fresh orange juice for their first day. They poured themselves glass after glass because they were thirsty. What happened to drinking water when you're thirsty? Is it me? Maybe it is....Today I bought two small, one-litre versions and each one cost €4,95 (about $7.62).

3) They're so loud that you can hear every word of the conversation two rooms away. That means the neighbors above and below can probably hear it too.

Life on hold

When I first moved to Paris, I read a lot about the expatriate experience. There were predictable steps to expect: all the books and seminars were in agreement on this.

1) Honeymoon period. Everything is charming and wonderful.

2) Disturbing realization that you are stuck in strange country, where you don't know the ropes.

3) Acceptance and realization that you are in strange, charming, wonderful country.

It takes a year. Everyone said so. You have a year or two or three, then you move again.

Lather, rinse, repeat!

My own steps were a little different.

1) Nightmare period. Everyone sick, Parisians nasty, kids get worms and lice, it rains all the time. Instead of coming by to welcome us with cookies, neighbors don't answer when we say hello and slip notes under front door to ask why we don't have curtains yet.

2) Less nightmare period. I finally figure out how to take the bus and stop taking the metro (forever). Spring arrives, the children start to make friends. I still don't have any, because I am resolved not to stay in the expat ghetto. I don't realize that it is unrealistic to make friends with French people quickly once you are over 21.

3) I get used to Paris. It's quite nice really, and I can understand the radio. I meet other expats at various places, and at the same time start to make French friends.

4) Paris is my home. The U.S. starts to seem very weird. What is the deal with "Wazzup" and "bling bling"? Why do psychos keep shooting up schools? Why don't Americans understand that universal health care is normal? And who is Nicole Ritchie?

5) I move to L.A. for a couple of years. Honeymoon period. Everything is charming and wonderful. Ocean, mountains, the English language! (sort of. For about half the population.)

6) Disturbing realization that I am stuck in a strange country, where I don't know the ropes.

The Berber

Yesterday a man came to fix the television-- he was surprised to find that a cable was corroded and we hadn't been able to get television for many months. I hadn't actually noticed, but as the Oscars are coming up this weekend, I tested the television and was horrified to see that we wouldn't be able to watch my first Oscars' ceremony in many years (not counting the aborted version last year where I watched an hour or so in a deserted bar in Colorado after making the furious bartender switch from The Simpsons).

After he fixed it, he showed me some of the stations. "Can I get foreign stations?" I asked. "French ones?"

"Vous parlez français?" he answered. He was a Berber from Marseilles. We had a nice talk. He said he came to the U.S. at age 19 and married an American. He said he was happy he hadn't stayed in France. I urged him to get French passports/ dual citizenship for his children. It gives them more choice in their lives.

"What are their names?" I asked, hoping to hear some wonderful Berber name.

"Hannah and Michael," he said.

Guess who's coming to dinner

First of all, people don't have dinner parties here much. I suspect more Americans eat in their cars than around the dinner table with their families each night.

Then, dinner is at hour so early I feel my brain threatening to explode.

"Is six-thirty too early?" I said hopefully to one couple I didn't know well.

"School night," they said. "Six or five-thirty would be better."

I puzzle over the meaning of their words. Could they possibly be planning to bring their children, who were not invited? No, of course not. That would be rude, right?

Apparently not. From the behavior of a number of acquaintances here, I have concluded that a significant percentage of Angelenos think that any invitation to them includes their children.

Very different from France, where the only time you are likely to meet the children of the family of your acquaintances at a dinner party is when they politely take your coat at the front door, or pass around the hors-d'oeuvres in their bathrobes before vanishing to the back of the house.

Murmuring under my breath in my winsome way, I set up pizza, pasta, television and other child fodder in the room which I must abandon to the unwilling visitors. But does this mean that the children  quietly go into the room where their meals and entertainment are set up, and leave the adults alone? It does not. Does it mean they sit with the grownups and take part in the conversation?  It does not.

It means they show up at the door, standing out of sight behind their parents and looking sulky, don't speak to you, and come pull on their parents' clothes at random times during the evening, muttering.  The parents so addressed, no matter who they were talking with, instantly stop the conversation and turn their entire attention to the young interruptor. After all, who is more important? They leave as soon as the child is sufficiently bored.

No, non, décidément I am still French when it comes to the dinner party.

My Country 'tis of Thee

One of the unexpected greatest pleasures about living here has been the simple joy of not being a foreigner.

It's been weeks since anyone asked me, "Where are you from?"

I'm just me now, not the American ambassador.