TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM / APRIL 2018 59
My reentry was also a
homecoming. When I was 19, I
abruptly dropped out of college and
ran away to Paris. I left the U.S. in
January with little more than a one-
way ticket, six years of public school
French and US$700 to my name. I
couch-surfed a bit, first with the
baroness grandmother of a friend,
then with a distant acquaintance.
Finally, nearly broke, I checked into a
Protestant youth hostel in the Sixth
Arrondissement, renting a narrow
b u n k t h a t I s h a r e d w i t h E l i s e , a
Scottish redhead. We ventured out
daily to look for work and mostly
came back empty-handed. For
breakfast, the hostel put out long
baguettes and butter and strawberry
j a m , a s w e l l a s b o w l s of s t e a m i n g
milk and coffee. Every day for weeks
this was my only full meal, and each
morning it was a delicious miracle—
in memory, still the best coffee I’ve
ever had. Nights, we raish hostel
dwellers sometimes slunk into the
building’s basement, a dark medieval
cave where we lit candles and drank
cheap red wine.
Living in Paris was heady, a bit
stressful, and somewhat improbable.
But over the weeks, my French
improved. I landed a job as a
translator at the Hôtel Ritz Escoier
École, where I learned to cook poulet
à l’estragon and crumbly chestnut
gâteau. A stage-set life assembled
around me. I’d while away cold winter
hours at Shakespeare & Co., the
legendary Left Bank bookshop,
reading poetry—Pound, Baudelaire,
Beckett, Stein. I made friends with a
Swedish watchmaker and a Norman
duke. Eventually, a former boyfriend
showed up, and we rented a narrow
apartment near St. Eustache, on a
white-cobblestoned street I adored
the second I saw it.
All the while I worked and read
and explored new quartiers. My walk
to the Ritz took me past the Louvre,
and I would pop in most afternoons
using my student card. On each visit
I’d sit with a single painting, teaching
myself to see what it was I loved in
art. One day it was a Neoclassical
David; another day a delicate,
shadowy Vermeer.
It wasn’t all perfect—the
boyfriend and I fought, and money
was wildly tight. But it was
remarkable, absorbing this world
week after week; learning to joke in
French, to taste and wander like a
proud flaneuse. By the time I left in
the summer, I had cheap espadrilles,
a short Jean Seberg haircut and a
1970s-style belted blue leather coat I’d
picked up at the Marché aux Puces. I
felt ready to face down my adulthood.
L a st yea r I ret u r ned to g ive a
lecture about poetry to some
American students. I couldn’t help
glimpsing myself in them, recalling
my life in the city as a young
would-be poet. I’d turn a corner to see
a flash of my own self 20 years
earlier, dashing down an alley after
art or bread. I was taking in not just
the Pompidou but the memory of first
entering the Pompidou; running
along the quays below the Pont des
Arts, I was also running after my
headstrong former self. In the Jardin
du Luxembourg I had a vivid memory
of sharing warm ham crêpes on acold evening with Elise before
heading to that hostel basement to
play guitars and flirt in all the
languages we knew. “The shape of a
city changes more quickly than a
mortal’s heart,” said Baudelaire in a
famous poem about Paris, but this
isn’t quite true. Paris, when you’ve
loved it, also seems to save a bit of you
waiting, unchanged, in its crevices. It
is as if the city holds within its knotty
streets not only the ghosts of artists
and lovers, but your own ghost, too.
This trip, we stayed in the Seventh
Arrondissement, in a tall crumbling
building mere blocks from the hostel
I lived in decades ago. One night my
husband and I slunk out to La Vénus
Noire, another venerable basement
speakeasy, to spend the night
listening to jazz. Walking home that
evening, after passing the stone lions
in the fountains at the Place St.-
Sulpice, I led us back through a
f a m i l i a r a l l e y, a s i f t o w a r d m y ol d
hostel. I found the wall now inscribed
with “Le Bateau Ivre,” Rimbaud’s
poem about the seasickness of travel
and longing. I stopped to savor it,
dizzy between worlds.
The next day, I made a pilgrimage
to Shakespeare & Co. In the cluttered
stacks of a second-floor room was a
copy of the book of poems I’d recently
published. With wonder, I saluted
the brazen, wayward young woman
I’d been. Looking at the Seine that
night, I thought how the self is a
series of refractions, sticky with
place. The pieces flash back, like light
on the river. There are our hearts,
fluttering in the world, glittering,
waiting to be rediscovered.It was remarkable, absorbing this
wor ld ; lear nin g to jok e in F rench , to
taste and wander like a proud flaneuse