There was such a weird finality to being truly gone from Paris.
I had lived and worked there for 16 years. It’s not that I had a lot of bright lights big city FOMO weighing on me during that fucked up car ride to Le Perche. I was barely socializing with anyone even before the pandemic, camped out in this big nice house in a complicated couple. Then after the breakup, I desperately projected myself to Le Perche, in a random and abstract fashion. And then, just like that, very real Paris and all its people and noise and stunning buildings and choices were suddenly gone.
With them went—if you want to be really gross and awful about it—my brand, both as a journalist and sometimes as a human. To my editors, being in Paris meant I had a line on Frenchie trends that would get Americans sweaty. I was always available to cover a new hotel or restaurant, and bring many years of context to it. It was easy, from eastern Paris, to jump onto one of 20 daily flights to Milan to tour someone’s knitwear factory in exchange for an interview and a surprisingly excellent lunch in the company cafeteria. (The Italians really do have lunch dialed.)
Even if that kind of writing was taking up less of my time, in saying goodbye to Paris, I was cutting myself off from convenient access that translated into money at a time when I would most wisely have said yes to whatever crossed my narrowing professional path.
Plus to my friends and family back home I was the Paris answer person. Everyone wants to come to Paris. I get it, I moved there. And when you love someone and they have a sense of adventure, you can absolutely rock Paris for them. My favorite cousins and uncles and old teenage friends, it is my pleasure to give you the E ticket of exactly which roast chicken to get in the 5th or 18th, and which room to ask for if you’re coming in a big group, and who has the best marinière t shirts for kids. (Monoprix, obviously.) But then more often than not it was your best friend’s daughter in law whom I didn’t know and the whole thing was a bitchy hair shirt. Whatever. Whether beloved or indifferent, they’d all now have to look elsewhere because I really didn’t want to stay up on Paris news from an ambivalent distance.
She was my ex-girlfriend now, like I was my ex’s ex-girlfriend. It’s not a cute status. There was a significant loss of cache in walking away. Being from Paris is sexy and profitable. Being from some forest nobody’s heard of, no matter how pretty the pictures, is either completely surreal to your interlocutor, or extremely idyllic in a removed, impossible way. When you tell people where you live now, you often hear, “I’d love to do that.” Except you know they would never do that, so it’s just a distant and fuzzy feeling, and they sort of admire you except they also think you must have lost your mind. (If you’ve read the last 12 chapters of this tale, well, you tell me.)
Anyway this was a big death. But I didn’t want to mourn Paris, I wanted to turn my entire attention to this new place, to try to crack its nut and soldier forth into building a new life. Unfortunately, the demands of mourning will be addressed whether you want them to or not.
For me it took the form of extreme emotional lability, exhaustion and a very thin skin. If I was already barely fit for human consumption back in Paris, the person who showed up on the doorstep of Samira and Claude, the owners of the mill house, felt like an exceptionally touchy wild beast with not one spare molecule of chipper. Hi, nice to meet you.
Claude was considerably older than 40-something Samira, with a thick mop of luscious white hair and a slight, ropy form. He was an accountant by trade, though he spent much of his time maintaining their large piece of land and garden, which straddled a rushing brook. In addition to clearing brush and chopping wood, he worked, sometimes with hired help, to renovate more and more of the mill house, with an eye to accommodating a growing number of guests he wasn’t sure he was really ready to handle. (I feel you, Claude.)
Samira was of Kurdish origin, and used to work in hospitality in Paris and Bordeaux. She met Claude at a Vipassana silent meditation retreat, which isn’t always the best way to understand how someone operates in the normal world, but they have held strong. It turned out that of the two, Samira was the more obvious people person. And indeed she was a chatterbox, breezily dispensing very deep thoughts on pain and healing, forgiveness and letting go, and the importance of nature, while Claude, if within ear shot, smiled beatifically but maybe didn’t hear everything.
While I love a reasonable number of my fellow humans, and I’m good at getting strangers to open up to me in interviews, I am nobody’s idea of a people person. Far less so in my current state. So Samira’s well-meaning knocks on the door to see if I wanted some leftover curried something or a slice of apple tart weren’t received with the warmth they deserved. I was also immune to Fifi’s barky charms. She was always at Samira’s side, hopping and wiggling with excitement to meet the cats, who wanted absolutely nothing to do with her. I squeezed through the plate glass front door to pet her and tried to smile, but I knew gave off the same odor as Fred and Penelope. (Not literally. Despite all the moves, they were still observing correct litterbox usage.)
I was hyper-conscious of being seen as a malcontent: I knew only too well how general “negativity” equals poison to many people of New Age disposition, and I didn’t know Samira and Claude well enough to start unburdening myself and explaining why I was so cross and shitty. They just saw me arrive under a dark cloud, with a lot of requests.
On the first day, upon finally seeing the place in person, finally with some context for the cute pictures that sold me on Airbnb, I asked them to get rid of the giant bunk beds that took up most of the only spare room downstairs. I was supposed to stay for two months and would need a place to work. Claude got out his toolbox and hauled heavy lacquered solid wood frames onto his sylphlike shoulders. He did the needful, leaving behind two twin beds that became sofas of a sort, and I noted that neither he nor Samira were used to making adjustments for people with a vague sense of being late for an inconvenient destiny.
The other immediately apparent problem was the kitchen, which was basically two ancient régime electric burners under a staircase, with only a bathroom sink in the actual bathroom for washing up.
Cooking is one of the most deeply ingrained ways I find equilibrium. When my father was being tested for prostate cancer in 2004, I had flown out to be with him for the diagnosis. In the doctor’s antiseptic office inside a giant Boulder hospital, we learned that it was terminal, and extremely aggressive. The nice bald doctor cooed and handed my still-groovy father a pamphlet for fishing trips for men with terminal illnesses. The first thing I did when we walked back through the front door of his apartment, the wind knocked out of us both, was to make a lamb stew. My father was my best cooking teacher. He was deeply sophisticated culinarily, had a ton of skills and ate with tooth-gnashing intensity. “You are a lusty eater,” one strange boyfriend once told me. Well I learned from the best.
There would be no lamb stew forthcoming here, as I had only a tiny bar refrigerator to stock everything perishable, and only my 20cm cocotte to cook it in. The 20cm is the divorced dad size par excellence; I recommend it to anyone cooking for one or two people who likes slow heat. But it's a restrained, not generous, size. I had no place here to put something bigger, but I really needed generous.
I guess this is when it finally really hit me that I was no longer routinely cooking for at least four people. I know so many empty nesters who still buy value sized toilet paper at Costco. It’s hard to rework those grooves. I had only spent two weeks in the divorced dad studio, and there I was still in an urban cornucopia. There was a lot of nature and green around me at the mill house, but the tininess of my new actual daily life finally hit home here.
Then there was the internet, which was not wireless, because Claude didn’t trust that. I hooked up my computer to an ethernet cable that stretched taut across the ground floor twin bed office room to the router wired into the opposite wall, and my entire soul collapsed when I saw the speed. Cell phone service was also extremely dicey.
Then there was the wood-burning stove. “How charming! A cozy room to work in warmed by a grate! It’s like the Brontë sisters come to life!” I’ll remind you that they mostly wrote tragedies.
I knew nothing about building fires, but it was early March and, like every other house in the general vicinity, the mill house was not well insulated. If I didn’t want to sit around in a puffer jacket and blow on my numb hands, I’d need to fire that little guy up every morning. But it took me hours and so many matches to get it going. I was so ashamed of how many matches it took, each one a carbonized accusation that tapered into the shape of a little spent sperm.
(I told you I was not in a great headspace.)
Half the time I’d have to ask Claude to help out, stuffing the thing with precious actual newspaper. The medium that no longer paid me enough to live my old life was a precious commodity here, for all the wrong reasons. Part of the problem was the stove’s small size. It’s just not easy to get a flame going inside a metal cereal box.
I spent my first few days working on a short list of activities:
1) Trying to find a driving school to finish the driving test, one that could take me on immediately. “Immediate” is not a word with a lot of purchase in France, doubly so in the countryside.
2) Wandering the aisles of the most massive supermarkets I’d ever seen. I am American, from Los Angeles, so this is saying a lot. I settled on prepared food, normally not my bag, though when I discovered the aisle that had Breton buckwheat cookies, I lightened up some.
3) Crying more hot salty tears into Freddy’s neck.
4) Fending off well-meaning conversation with Samira, who was branching out into healing work. I was the most ideal candidate for her ministrations but I was basically covered in psychic metal scales.
5) Interviewing the subject of a ghost writing project that ended up absolutely saving my mental health. It turns out that dialing down onto someone else’s problems and making narrative sense of out them is a good way to regain a feeling of control over your own total chaos. It sounds vampiric when I describe it this way. It wasn’t, or at least I hope not. To me it was a shared mission to explore a life that came with an extra turbo boost on my part of curiosity and motivation to understand displacement and its consequences. This came on very slowly, and it was a light in a dark place.
I had a couple months to go before I’d close on the house. I had time on my hands and was surrounded by an absolutely magical forest, which abutted Claude and Samira’s place, with multiple paths in. I avoided it like the plague until finally I didn’t.
We’ll get to that next week.