Deer Hunting in Paris. Paula Young Lee
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made to sit in a corner, where I was given a stick and a drum to bang slowly. This, too, was a task I failed miserably. All the other students began stumbling to my irregular beat, and my sister started glaring at me. This was not the proper flower-like expression for dancing, and it was my fault for putting a frown on her face. I was sent to another room to practice the Big Bow by myself. This involves prostrating yourself face down on the floor and staying there until you’re told you can get up. I took advantage of this unexpected quiet time to take a nap, which merely confirmed that I had once again learned the wrong lesson from my punishment.
While all the other expats in Paris were doing yoga, I was belly dancing. Back in 2002, I’d watched the French television program, Popstars, a fifteen-minutes-of-fame series that managed to hook me despite the fact that I loathe game shows. Five girls were eventually chosen for a pop music quintet fabulous enough to overcome their dismal name, “L5.” In English, this is medical shorthand for “Lumbar vertebrae no. 5.” When pronounced in French, L5 (“elle cinq”) sounds like “Hell sank.” But the real star of Popstars was the woman with the thankless job of teaching the girls to dance. Mia Frye was a half French, half American expat who had an inimitable way of expressing herself in Franglish, barking orders like a drill sergeant and muttering curses under her breath. There was such pain on her beautiful face as she watched them floundering around the dance studio, their limbs jerking stiffly like defunct windmills. Their ineptitude was wounding her very reason for being, and she regularly told the five wannabes, in no uncertain terms, how severely disappointed she was with them. The Five glowered back at her in their baggy clothes, looking tired, sullen, and hungry. Madame Frye did not care. “I cannot comprendre the laziness!” she’d declare in astonishment. “You’ve only been practicing for five hours and you are behaving as if I am ordering you to go out and milk a herd of vaches.”
In the U.S., Madame Frye would be labeled a bitch, and made to play nice in order to avoid lawsuits from their parents. In France, she was simply an artiste, and thanked for keeping up standards.
Despite my natural gifts at looking tired, sullen, and hungry, I was not interested in trying out for the next round of Popstars. Because I had watched the show many moons ago, however, I recognized a Hirschfeld-ish drawing of Madame Frye hanging in the passageway to the Café de la Gare, the Train Station Café, where it was posted along with dozens of other signs and notices for dance classes. Despite its name, the Café de la Gare is not in a train station. That is the Musée d’Orsay, which is a converted train station now full of naked nymphs, whose charming assets are such low hanging fruit that even my arms can reach them. The Café de la Gare is where people go to see warm bodies bending in mind-boggling ways, for it’s in the courtyard of the Centre de Danse, which is probably the busiest spot in G-rated Paris. Ballet classes? Upstairs! Tango classes? Downstairs! Disco? In back! In the courtyard, the clashing soundtracks collected into a furious ball of sound chased by hundreds of stamping feet. With tapping toes and bouncing legs, I danced to the Main Office where new students could register for classes, because this was the only way to learn the secret location of the bathroom. “Too much coffee,” I mumbled, as I pointed to Mia Frye’s classes on the schedule.
Unfortunately, all the classes taught by Madame Frye were booked up until the next century and beyond. “Pardon?” I blurted in surprise. Those classes will be taught by her cryogenically preserved head, the receptionist stated airily. Would I care to try one of the Oriental dance classes? A new session will be starting in ten minutes. And she blinked expectantly at me.
I honestly had no idea how to respond.
She took my hesitation as a Yes. Briskly, she signed me up for a trial lesson, took my money, and pushed me lightly off in the direction of the restrooms. She’d set me on my path.
Bemused, I gratefully did my business and then wandered in the halls, checking room numbers as I dodged returning students dashing to and from their classes. Newly released from the barre, the ballerinas swept by me like so many varnished broomsticks in leg warmers. As soon as I confirmed that I was in the correct classroom and the other students started filtering in, I realized why the receptionist had sent me here. It was a belly dancing class, and all the women had genuine bellies. I’d found my tribe! It was the highest concentration of DD cups that I’d seen in this city of supermodels, and the sight of them in costume—which is to say, in spangle bras—was mesmerizing in the manner of salt-water aquarium fish swimming around the tank in the gynecologist’s office. I had no idea what was going on, partly because the instructor, who was perhaps Egyptian, had a very heavy accent, and partly because who the hell knows the French words to directions such as “PUSH the ribcage up and back, like riding a camel, and shimmy!” In ballet, all the moves from grand jeté to plié are already in French, so the English-speaking ballerinas taking classes upstairs had no new vocabulary to learn. My brain was trying to translate orders to “ondulez, ondulez!” (undulate, undulate—arrrrrrriba! trilled the naughty Speedy Gonzalez in my head), my body was struggling to emulate the moves, and the result was belly dancing so remarkably bad it was . . . remarkably bad.
But I digress.
I had a point, and the point was this: Korma doesn’t care about your very good plans. One could say the same about karma. But some people’s karma helps them win millions in the lottery, or rise to historical importance, or fall into the kind of love that has a soft-core landing. Korma leads the gullible to find meaning in a song from a musical, to belly dancing classes instead of to church, and to a cheap dinner alone in a tiny Paris studio, as happy as a clam can be. And who knows if clams are happy, really? They have no head, no eyes, and no brain. They do have a heart, a mouth, a cerebral pleural ganglion, and an anus. So, depending on how you look at it, they’re the happiest creatures on earth.
Turns out I was only mildly allergic to my korma, which gave me the runs and a rash, like just about every other food on the planet. But, I survived to write this sentence, which is about the best I can generally hope for, my korma being what it is.
Hustle
In good cookeries, all raisins should be stoned.
—Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1796
On my way back from the Bon Marché to my studio apartment, I’d often make a detour through the Luxembourg Gardens, where children would play with the toy sailboats in the central fountain. Each child would get a short stick and a boat with a numbered sail. They’d poke their boat with the stick, and off it would float across the rippled surface of the large circular pool. Eventually, their boat would drift back to the edge, coming close enough so they could poke it again. This activity involved a lot of waiting and chasing, because it was impossible to predict when or where your boat would return to the edge. The children were always trying to poke the wrong boat, just because it had drifted close to them.
This is how I feel about romantic relationships. “We begin by coveting what we see every day,” Hannibal Lecter purred to FBI agent Clarice Starling, who’d been visiting him at a prison for the criminally insane. He was correct, but who takes romantic advice from a cannibal serial killer, even if he is a doctor with great teeth? Studies have shown that people tend to date inside a ten mile radius, because they’d rather pretend that proximity is destiny instead of fessing up to being lazy. What happens when the boys go after a girl who accidently drifted within poking range? They take a stab at her, and the girl floats away. The process repeats itself until the pokers get bored and leave.
No surprise, then, that Paris is a city of transients. A remarkable number of super-Parisians aren’t even French. From Napoléon Bonaparte, who was born in Corsica, to Carla Bruni, the Italian-born former First Lady of France, a great chunk of those folks sitting decoratively in cafés are ex-pats who, by definition, came from someplace else. As a result, nearly 80 percent of Paris is unmarried but not necessarily single. Romance thrives in Paris because the city encourages the fine art of pitching woo, not the vulgar business of weddings. Lust has been around since the beginning of time,