Wait a Second — What Happened?

I just looked at the calendar and was jolted into reality. May 1st was our 18th anniversary of living in France. I would have been the last person to predict I’d become an expatriate. It happened without my being fully aware of the passage. This seems to be a common thread. Pass the seven year mark and it’s a real possibility you won’t go “home” again. According to a survey conducted of Bonjour Paris readers who are French residents, more than 25% of them came to France for business and stayed. No one ever accused me of being the foot-loose and fancy free type. Except for some forays into academia when I left my hometown, I was born in Washington, D.C. and always lived there until I moved to Boston to join my now husband. I assumed it would be a matter of time before the two of us would return to D.C., and I’d die there. Now Paris! My husband had been offered a six-month-long assignment to do a feasibility study for a multi-national company that wanted to establish investment management operations throughout Europe.  It was the opportunity of a lifetime. He was perfectly willing to pack a suitcase and stay in a hotel until we rented an apartment. That’s where I put my foot down.  There was no way I was going to pull up hook, line and sinker to move to a city I didn’t know without a forwarding address. Since Victor’s employer was paying the rent, we snagged spectacular digs on the Place des Vosges.  Living on Paris’s oldest square was a dream come true. Each morning, I’d walk under the arcade and have a café at Ma Bourgogne, a place that is famous for attracting intellectuals – not that I had any idea what they were saying.  The square, located in the Marais (which was nowhere as chic then as it is today), consists of 39 buildings – each constructed between 1605 and 1612 in red brick with stone facings during Henri IV’s tenure. The site was originally occupied by the Hôtel des Tournelles and went on to have a history that has been the subject of many books. When it came to moving to Paris, I went kicking and screaming, stating that I wasn’t slated to be the ideal trailing spouse. I’d always worked – didn’t want to be anyone’s appendage – and was convinced I’d never get back to the U.S.  I suspected I was being kidnapped because Victor, a naturalized American citizen, was born and raised in Italy and lived there subsequent times as an adult. He felt so comfortable in Europe while I felt like someone who was deaf and dumb. I didn’t speak French, knew no one and was accustomed to being my business card. What Victor was proposing (even though he phrased it as being a “vacation,”) held zero appeal. I was too young (not to mention, too poor) to retire and felt that period in my career was pivotal.  Out of sight, out of mind – or so it goes. This wasn’t my first time visiting Paris. I’d grown up on Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Madeline” books and had visited the City of Light on a youth tour when I was 13 years old. I swooned over the Eiffel Tower which I saw from a ride a on the Bateau Mouche. Even at that age, I sensed Paris was the quintessential romantic city. My first six months in Paris were miserable. There was a metro strike, a mail strike (this was pre-Internet) and our phone bills looked like the national debt.  France Telecom had a monopoly and charged for every five seconds of phone time – even if they were local calls.  Then there was the revolving door of house guests and my needing to learn things such as if you ever touch the fruits or vegetables at an outdoor produce stand, you were as good as dead. I wasn’t accustomed to supplying my own grocery bags and after I got into the habit, I was incapable of packing them quickly enough. Wherever I shopped, a line followed me and my French wasn’t up to snuff to tell people to get off my derriere. My first August was the coldest ever and I wore a heavy sweater the entire month. Victor was working harder than ever and racking up frequent flyer points as he parachuted in and out of different countries in his role as consultant. I went with him a lot of the time but was left to my own devices since a consultant is on-call from breakfast until after dinner. In Spain, that meant well past midnight. And even though in my former life I had been an executive in a financial services firm, not one man with whom Victor was working was pleased when I was around. Hey – it was macho Spain in the old days of machismo. Then –Victor’s contract was extended and that was the beginning of my addiction to France. …to be continued. © Karen Fawcett