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haughty, so conceited, and quite so irresistible. Why did I love Paris so? I wondered. Maybe because it never gave in to me. It hovered enticingly close, yet it let me know my place. The American. I’d always be the American. L’Américaine.
    I knew I wanted to be a journalist when I was Zoë’s age. I first started writing for the high-school newspaper and had never stopped since. I came to live in Paris when I was a little over twenty, after graduating from Boston University with an English major. My first job was as a junior assistant for an American fashion magazine I soon left. I was looking for meatier topics than skirt lengths or spring colors.
    I took the first job that came up. Rewriting press releases for an American TV network. It wasn’t fantastically paid, but it was enough for me to stay on, living in the eighteenth arrondissement, sharing a place with two French gay men, Hervé and Christophe, who became long-lasting friends.
    That week I had a dinner date with them at the rue Berthe, where I’d lived before meeting Bertrand. Bertrand rarely accompanied me. I sometimes wondered why he was so uninterested in Hervé and Christophe. “Because your dear husband, like most French bourgeois, well-to-do gentlemen, prefers women to homosexuals, cocotte !” I could almost hear my friend Isabelle’s languid voice, her sly chuckle. Yes, she was right. Bertrand was definitely into women. Big time, as Charla would say.
    Hervé and Christophe still lived in the same place I had shared with them. Except that my small bedroom was now a walk-in closet. Christophe was a fashion victim and proud of it. I enjoyed their dinners; there was always an interesting mix of people—a famous model or singer, a controversial writer, a cute, gay neighbor, another American or Canadian journalist, or some young editor just starting out. Hervé worked as a lawyer for an international firm, and Christophe was a yoga teacher.
    They were my true, dear friends. I did have other friends here, American expats—Holly, Susannah, and Jan—met through the magazine or the American college where I often went to put up ads for babysitters. I even had a couple of close French girlfriends—like Isabelle, garnered through Zoë’s ballet class at the Salle Pleyel—but Hervé and Christophe were the ones I called at one in the morning when Bertrand had been difficult. The ones who came to the hospital when Zoë broke her ankle falling off her scooter. The ones who never forgot my birthday. The ones who knew which films to see, which records to buy. Their meals were invariably a delight, candlelit and exquisite.
    I arrived with a chilled bottle of champagne. Christophe was still in the shower, explained Hervé, greeting me at the door. In his mid-forties, Hervé was slim, mustachioed, and genial. He smoked like a chimney. It was impossible to get him to stop. So we had all given up.
    “That’s a nice jacket,” he commented, putting down his cigarette to open the champagne.
    Hervé and Christophe always noticed what I was wearing, if I sported new perfume, new makeup, a new hair style. When I was with them, I never felt like l’Américaine desperately trying to keep up with Parisian chic. I felt myself. And I loved that about them.
    “That blue-green suits you, goes divinely with your eyes. Where did you buy it?” Hervé asked.
    “H&M, on the rue de Rennes.”
    “You look superb. So, how’s the apartment coming along?” he asked, handing me a glass and some warm toast spread with pink tarama.
    “There’s a hell of a lot to be done,” I sighed. “It will take months.”
    “And I imagine the architect of a husband is thrilled at the whole thing?”
    I winced.
    “You mean he’s indefatigable.”
    “Ah,” said Hervé. “And therefore a pain in the ass for you.”
    “You got it,” I said, sipping champagne.
    Hervé looked at me closely through his tiny, rimless glasses. He had pale gray eyes and ridiculously long eyelashes.
    “Say,