Emi In Paris
Another personal essay. Studying abroad, giving up, being in community. What's new?
Dr. Wagner1 was my American Literature professor. His classes, which examined our Puritan roots and rebellions, were on Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:00 AM — a time he told us was best suited for students on their way home from a night out. I was no such case.
In the spring, he invited us to his home to dine on smoked salmon and watch the sunset over Lake Washington. This was a lost art, the convening of professors and their pupils. I remember tracing my fingers over a worn copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses on his bookshelf––which was grand enough to warrant the title library. Dr. Wagner regaled us with tales of his past: a charmed adolescence on the cape, a storybook picture of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in his 20s. I sipped red wine, swirling the glass the way I imagined adults did.
That summer, he took 20 of us to Paris to study modernism and impressionism. We read James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway. I dreamt of bulls with long horns every night for a week before we left.
I was a bad traveller. Nineteen years old and lost in the Charles De Gaulle Airport. My weak command of the French language failed almost immediately. My classmates, whom I had spotted briefly in customs, had smartly cut their losses and hailed a cab. I called my parents so frantically, they must have thought Notre Dame had resurrected and burnt again.
After a wrong train and several laps around a station that could’ve been Mars, I emerged into cold sunlight. Cars sped over cobbled streets, an Elton John FINAL TOUR poster glowered from a bus stop. I resigned myself to failure, turning my suitcase on its side and plopping down on the sidewalk. I would die there, it seemed.
Just as I thought all hope was lost, I heard it: English. My heroes were southern, with anti-pickpocket phone chains slung around their necks and international SIM cards. They let me route to my hostel via Google Maps, which we discovered was two blocks away.
I arrived moments before our first cohort meeting, my peers had already congregated in the lobby. Soccer, which was not called soccer there, blared from a dinosaur television in the corner.
I felt victimized: by the transit system, by my lack of worldlyliness, by the airport staff, and by the British tourists in front of me in baggage claim. I cursed my classmates, who, by all accounts, had abandoned me. I hated Hemingway for making it seem like the biggest problem a person could have in Paris was war-related PTSD.
Dr. Wagner handed out the itineraries.
We would visit 26 museums in the span of 14 days. We would walk hundreds of miles. There would be quizzes on impressionist painters I’d never heard of. And, there was a heat wave ripping through Paris.
I was the most miserable girl in all of France.
After the meeting, I perused a selection of flaky pastries while the other students got ready for the day. Dr. Wagner approached.
“You know, this is the best time to travel, when you’re young,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Everyone sees themselves in you,” he said, biting into a croissant. “They remember being your age, feeling how you felt. Everyone wants you to enjoy yourself; they’re all rooting for you.”
“Right,” I said.
That night, a group of us went for drinks at a Green Bay Packers-themed bar in the 11th Arrondissement. Something to remind us of home, we thought. I was shaking. Another professor had warned that bartenders would respect the law of our home country. I stowed away behind a tall, tattooed senior who had brought her copy of The Sun Also Rises, a very mature thing to do in a bar, I thought.
“Can I see your IDs?” asked the bartender in near-perfect English. I was sunk.
I handed my ID. I tried to stutter out some excuse, only one drink, only beer, I thought of offering. The bartender shook her head and laughed.
“No,” she said, handing the card back, “your school ID, student discount.”
Paris began to warm.
On the way home, we encountered a group of high school students; they were tipsy, sharing a pint, stumbling in the twilight. I remembered being like them, if not a little less chic. They heard our accents and stopped.
“Americans!” one of them called, “listen to this!” He pressed a button on his phone, and Old Town Road warbled over the speaker. We paused for a minute, letting Lil Nas X transcend the language barrier in song.
Dr. Wagner’s words rule that trip. Everybody was rooting for me. I smiled at old people and they smiled back. I didn’t mind slow walkers, imagining them relishing the beauty of a slow day in Paris just like me. French deli workers made me practice my orders in French, and I took the lesson in stride. Somebody took the time to teach me the words, after all. I listened to David Bowie’s Young Americans, hearing just the one half line: “all the way from Washington.”
A city-wide party broke out in the middle of our trip. It was July, and all the students hadn’t fled south yet. Everyone was there. Paris felt like the center of the universe.
From our hostel window, we spied on a group of middle-aged women who owned a flower shop. They shuttered their doors at noon to celebrate, dragging an enormous speaker to the storefront. I watched as they arranged a rainbow of cheese, wine, and flowers. When we returned to the hostel that night, they were dancing to ABBA, taking long puffs on a single cigarette. They twirled each other like little girls.
I wondered what their lives were like: did they see their younger selves in us? Beleaguered, delirious, broke from daydrinking and gallery hopping? I imagined myself like them, with bouncy curls and off-the-shoulder tops. Maybe they had children whom they had set free to roam the city for the afternoon. Maybe they were languishing in the last days before an August excursion to Nice. Maybe they were old friends. Maybe they’d traveled to America as young people and created an unbreakable bond. Maybe this was the life they’d always imagined for themselves.
Modern advice is diametrically opposed to Dr. Wagner’s philosophy. Do whatever you want, nobody cares! Encourages the internet. I worry this is too cynical. It’s only comforting to think that nobody sees when you stumble when you assume everyone is laughing at you. But what if they’re not? What if we see ourselves in other people?
A few years ago, I posted my acceptance to the New School’s creative writing program on Instagram. I felt a little silly doing it. Some of my classmates were studying to be doctors, others were several rungs up the corporate ladder. I was surprised that I was inundated with support. Followers from my hometown, whom I had spoken to only in passing, congratulated me heartily. I felt guilty, almost, while I was busy comparing myself; I had a whole community ready to uplift me if only I asked.
Between Paris and grad school, COVID struck. It made us retreat from the social world. We learned to see each other as obstacles. The best thing we could be to other people was invisible. But a return to community is possible, inevitable, even.
On the last day in Paris, we met in Luxembourg Garden. A little boy did handstands in the grass while his father sketched the outlines of the trees on a picnic blanket. My skin was tan, my legs aching. We sipped wine and Smirnoff Ices, a cultural marriage of sorts.
I sat next to Helen, Dr. Wagner’s wife, who was 17 years his junior. A woman whose life, at 58, was just beginning. She wore big, round sunglasses and a red headscarf wrapped neatly around her bobbed hair. I hoped I would be like her one day. She told stories about being a young woman, meeting her husband’s children who were preteens while she was in her 20s. She encouraged me to see the world, to leave Seattle if I could.
“I think you’ll have a great adventure,” she said.
The best part of Dr. Wagner’s prophecy is that it didn’t have to be true. The people of France might have been snickering behind our backs, calling us silly Americans. It was enough to speak it out loud. Besides, I like my version better anyway. Everyone is rooting for me. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Names have been changed for privacy in case I become a famous Substacker
I love you so much this made me laugh and cry at the same time. Keep writing we are all in your corner cheering you on
loved this! nothing more relatable than getting lost at CDG. thank you for sharing :)