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about our new president, Ronald Reagan, “star de série B,” and the old one, Carter, “un grand naïf.” His eyes brightened when both of us said we had been divorced. “How many times?” he wanted to know, then seemed disappointed when we said only a humdrum once apiece.
    Much of the early immigrant experience was often entertaining, but it was also hard. I could have cried the Friday night I got home—I was at the office until after the paper closed at midnight—and found Patricia on a stepladder painting yet another room. I felt guilty about what I had gotten her into, and I was also not happy at seeing how I was going to spend the weekend. And we both did cry the night I came home and found Patricia already in tears. I realized how lonely she was and remember saying to her, “This is the worst mistake I have ever made and it’s the worst time of my life.”
    Whatever I had gotten us into, the fantasy was under way.

CAROLINE WEBER

    Love without Reason
    B Y ANY RATIONAL measure, I shouldn’t like Frenchmen. Allow me just a few generalities—albeit gross ones, as generalities tend to be—and you’ll see what I mean. I am tall; Frenchmen are short. Most of the time, I am attractive, with glossy hair, gym-toned muscles, and white, straight American teeth (a Crest user’s smile). Most of the time, they are funny looking, with greasy hair, flaccid muscles, and yellow, crooked European teeth (a Gitane smoker’s smile). Whereas I approve of feminism and even, to some extent, of capitalism, the Frenchmen I know class them disdainfully alongside those two other dread American offenses: fatness and fake butter. And while I don’t think that the philosopher Louis Althusser was right to kill his wife, nor that the film director Roman Polanski should go unpunished for having raped a thirteen-year-old girl,
mes français
celebrate both of these individuals as brave nonconformists—Nietzschean superheroes unbound by the shackles of moral convention.
    None of this, then, would seem to add up to a history of love connections between me and the Frenchmen whom—during my first, fateful year as an American in Paris—I was quite powerless to avoid. But in the immortal words of Blaise Pascal,“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” (“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”). And just as Pascal’s unfortunate humpback has had no bearing on my admiration for his work, so, too, have the Gallic male’s dubious charms failed to deter me from dating him … in more than one incarnation. “I shouldn’t like Frenchmen,” declares reason. “Yet haven’t I loved them?” asks the heart. The fact that “to like” and “to love” share the same verb in French (
aimer
) only highlights the conundrum that underpinned my earliest romantic choices in the City of Light. The conundrum according to which it is somehow possible to “love” people you don’t even really like.
    As it so happens, today’s idiomatic French proposes a clear answer to this question, one that rivals even Pascal’s famous quip for irrefutability and economy alike:
C’est comme ça
. More than its literal translation (“It’s like that”), this phrase is best rendered as “That’s just how it is” and refers to such varied Parisian phenomena as bureaucratic deadlocks (for example, a France Télécom employee informs you that you can’t apply for phone service without having a bank account, after a Crédit Lyonnais functionary has told you that you can’t open a bank account without having a phone) and perverse dining protocol (a favorite restaurant of mine serves its
amuse-bouche
course in a miniature shot glass, but with a soup spoon too wide to access the glass’s contents; request a teaspoon or try to drink straight from the glass, and you receive the same scolding answer: “Cela ne se fait pas” — “That isn’t done”). Wherever there is a mystery with no solution, this catchphrase is meant to