Like many Americans I have a love affair with Paris. However, unlike many Americans mine was completely unintentional on my part.
The first time I ever went to Paris (or Europe, for that matter) was in the Summer of 1987 between my Junior and Senior years of high school.
My parents wanted me gone for part of the Summer and my high school had a European tour they were promoting and the price was right and off I went with a bunch of classmates I never hung out with.
The itinerary included all the big names – London, Paris, Venice, Geneva, Saltzburg, etc. – but for me Paris was just a name on the list that held no attraction for me.
In fact, Paris itself made very little impression on me when I was there except for that it was beautiful and quite unlike other cities I had ever visited. What did make an impression on me when I was in Paris was what happened to me there: namely, the beginning of my first full-on sexual relationship.
We first landed in London and there we met up with a group of students from California that would be on the tour along with us. Most of them were girls, and as they were from California and it was the 1980s they were stereotypically attractive.
All of the guys from my school were making plays for them but they were uninterested in a bunch of East Coast preppies, and as I wasn’t a preppie and didn’t hang out with them I ended up hanging out with the California Girls by default.
I was young and clueless about women at that point and was honestly there to see what Europe was like. In fact, I was so blind to the advances of one of the California Girls that it took one of her friends coming over to me to tell me she thought her friend was in love with me for me to even begin to pay attention.
I stood there, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower listening to a gorgeous girl from California tell me that an even more gorgeous girl from California had the hots for me when I first felt deep in my soul that Paris was indeed a place of power for me.
(Later, the affair would truly become physical in Switzerland when she drunkenly came to my hotel room to tell me she wanted to kiss me, and I later lost my virginity to her on a beach outside Venice. Thanks Mom and Dad!)
I returned to Paris on my own following high school graduation and from then on out the City of Lights became the gravitational center of my life. I would later travel there again with my then-girlfriend (and later fiancee) when she expressed interest in seeing the city, and we both traveled back there together to study at the Sorbonne.
If I had to pick one of the Golden Ages of my life it would be the time I spent in Paris as a cold, poor student with the woman I thought was the love of my life. It was gray and damp and I was always hungry, but it was a wonderful time that we both shared even though we no longer speak.
I’ve asked two women to marry me in Paris, and they both said yes but the first one ended up changing her mind before too long and the second one is probably on the fence more often than I’d imagine.
It took me years to recover from the damage caused by the departure of the first, and I spent years trying to deny that the time in Paris had happened at all and to deny my attraction to the city. I wanted to believe that it was all a crazy dream and that there was no city called Paris that called to me so strongly from a distance.
I needed to believe that Paris was a ghost town filled with specters of a past and future I had unwittingly destroyed, but time eroded my resolve and I once again found myself on its wide, tree-lined streets.
The ghosts were there and always would be – one can’t spend so long in one place with someone you love without it permeating nearly every part of the city – but, for some reason, the mere fact of my being in Paris gave me the strength to hold them at bay. Once again, the city granted me power now that I was ready to accept it.
As I’ve grown older and now can afford to travel anywhere I’d like, I still find myself being pulled back across the Atlantic from time to time. Despite the fact that I can now stay in upscale hotels and eat at restaurants I reserve a year in advance, there’s a part of me that still feels the joy of being a cold, penniless student in love in Paris.
Hemingway was wrong about a lot of things – most things, in fact – but he was dead right about Paris. If you’re young and susceptible to its call, it stays with you forever and follows you around wherever you go and whomever you’re with.
Paris is a gift that my wife and I intend on sharing with our child when it arrives and grows old enough to enjoy it, but even now I can feel it tugging on my soul like a magnetic pole calling me and my family home.
