My Ex-boyfriend Works at the Boulangerie On My Corner

Think about it.  You look up from your menu, ready to order, and all of a sudden your eyes fall on his or her face, standing there, as if magically appeared right out of your memory.  And the muscles in your face react too quickly for your mind, which desperately tries to block them with pride, disdain, reserve or a mixture therein. It’s a classic situation.  In America, you would give your order casually and briskly, like pulling off a band-aid, and perhaps afterward would you comfort yourself with something along the lines of, “Well, at least he’s serving me right now in this greasy spoon!”  Or the friend you’re with might make some similar, pithy comment, to cover up the awkwardness now oozing from all sides.

Last week I was walking down the street on a sunny Sunday, and I popped into the fancy boulangerie just down the street from where I live with my boyfriend.  This is the ‘chic’ bakery, a place we don’t visit often due to the high prices, but sometimes we like to treat ourselves.  About halfway down the line I became aware of the fact that my ex-boyfriend, someone with whom I had a rather turbulent and short-lived affair about a year ago, was jovially taking peoples’ orders behind the comptoir.  I had only a few moments to gather myself, to think of how I would act/what I would say, and then my turn was up.  I managed to speed to the point of not caring, and acted rather blasé as we stiffly traded our greetings.  I think I zoomed out from the personal aspect of the situation, wondering what it looked like from outside, as if in a film; it seemed funny to me that my fellow patrons were completely unaware of the fact that I had been in compromising positions with this friendly, communal vendor.

Afterward, my thoughts raced, as they often do following a trying exchange.  Just like when you think of the perfect response or catty ‘comeback’ hours after a dispute, a particular thought came to me that I am not very proud of.  But at the time it gave me a small measure of comfort to think that he was there, slaving away with bread and croissants, working in the lowly ‘food-service’ industry.  Granted, this was a status-oriented and exceedingly snobby notion, but I needed something!  

A few minutes later, I walked by a brasserie, and gazed through the window at the young garçon happily arranging the chairs in the sunny salle.  It was an exquisite day, completely unexpected for October here, and I reminisced on how even I enjoyed working in that ‘heinous and lowly’ industry myself on days like this (I am a veteran of the English pub scene here in Paris).  That was when I was struck by yet another thought, one which nullified the perverse comfort I was clutching to regarding my ex.  I realized that here in Paris, there is nothing wrong with working in the bakery!  There is nothing wrong with it elsewhere, but still…there is a certain stigma that you can employ, if necessary, to a situation where someone you know is serving you, moreover someone you no longer speak to or sleep with.  Suddenly the situation sat less well with me, and the childish and competitive little voice inside my head (we all have one) said pridefully, “You didn’t win that one.”
 
Cultural traditions run rampant in this historic and ornate city, including the tradition of your local baker, butcher, fromager (cheese man?), etc.  It’s part of that unmistakable Paris charm.  I have a friend in the 18th who, upon moving here from the states, spent the first three months forging daily connections with his boulanger and pharmacien.  They were, it must be said, his first French friends.  As we all know, Paris is a village, more so surely than most American capitols.  These mercantile customs are the bread and butter of that difference.  But I didn’t sign up for this.  I wanted to reserve my right as a snobby, capitalist American foreigner to look down on him.  Alas, that’s not the way it works here.

It was the only time I’d ever seen him not morose.  He was…into his work!  I barely recognized his behavior, communing with his customers, even bordering on the sing-song greeting and exchange that takes place throughout this city, especially in its bakeries.  I was flabbergasted.  I embarked on a mad daydream, in which he had dropped everything, school, his internship, and fallen in love with this place and the tradition, and was now pursuing fulltime a life in the ‘baking arts’.  Of course, I knew that was out of the question, but this possibility sat just a little closer to reality than it would have back home in New York.

In my bartending days (as stuffy as it sounds), I did experience the other end of this situation.  And for me the result was near fatal.  I was completely in crush-mode on a certain young theater director I had recently met, and on the one morning shift of my entire week, in he walks, into my bar, out of all the bars of Paris.  I immediately launched into ‘what will he think of me?!’, tirelessly comparing my status in the situation with his.  I pulled out all the stops, even running into the bathroom in hopes that he would miss me.  Of course others might not have felt this way at all, and I congratulate them on their being so secure.  But for most of us, this would have been an exceedingly awkward situation.  I suppose I am just surprised that I couldn’t partake in the feeling of superiority that I thought was due from the flipside in the boulangerie.