Paris by Night

...or, Charles de Gaulle airport at the cadaverous hour of 6 am.

Paul Theroux famously saw the world by train, I will apparently see the world's most magnificent cities through airports.  I arrived in France at 5:50 in the morning clutching a half-empty suitcase and a sheaf of outdated and romantic notions.  Paris, I've heard, is the city of love; its airport, however, is more love's antechamber, or perhaps, love's waiting room, last decorated in the eighties and in need of an update.

I speak exactly six phrases of French, all of which I learned from a perverse French roommate who might have lifted them straight out of the best-selling "Cinquante Nuances de Grey," long before it was published.  Most charmingly, I was at the tail end of a terrible cold, which meant that my voice was about as suave as that of Frankenstein's monster.

Hemingway spent years wandering the bylanes and cafes of Paris, I spent hours wheeling my suitcase between identical duty free shops, staring sadly through the closed grilles at the racks of tax-free liquor and chocolate.  I observed an ingenious French water fountain from which, unfortunately, no water actually emerged.

Traversing the entire length of the gates took me about thirty minutes; I did many, many rounds.  I eventually stopped in a bookstore to read the back cover of the French translation of "Fifty Shades of Grey."  This is when I was accosted by a tall, dark and handsome stranger.

"Excuse me, is that coffee?" he asked, looking longingly at the styrofoam cup in my hand, as I tried to hide my choice of literature.

"Yes," I said.  And then, to further the plot, "I got it from the coffee shop at the far end."

"Thank God," he said, and trundled away in the direction I'd indicated.  There were only three or four people in the airport but he didn't return.  

I settled myself in a dingy gray seat, next to a guy in headphones.  A girl nearby was skype-ing on her iPad, and I felt unreasonably jealous that I was sitting alone and unloved and iPad-less in an airport, instead of off on vacation in the city of light, trendy technology firmly in hand.

By this point the sun had started to come up, yielding an uninspired view of airplanes and runways.  Most of the airport stores were open, offering such uniquely French things as the UK editions of American magazines.  I considered buying the single French magazine on display, but the model on the cover had the protruding cheekbones and unhappy look of a refugee or a socialite, which put me off.

"Hello," said the guy sitting next to me, removing his headphones. 

"Hello," I said.

Then he unleashed a string of phrases in French.  I decided not to reply with one of my choice obscenities - guaranteed by my former roommate to make me a hit in any restaurant in Paris - and instead shrugged sadly.

"No French," I said.

"Oh," he said, and put his headphones back in.  

I may have slept, or at least gone into some kind of unseeing reverie, by the time I woke up hours had passed and yet nothing had changed.  I began to feel that I was, in fact, in a French film - but of the more arthouse variety, the kind where all dialogue is conducted via gesture and the actors are made up to look like they just fought on the losing side of a noble and doomed revolution.

To stem the rising tide of self-pity, I went to the (now open) duty free shop and bought several bottles of French wine, which I then tried to arrange unobtrusively in my suitcase so that the guards at the gate wouldn't think I was fleeing to the US to open a basement winery.

Eventually the gate opened and I was admitted, to pass into the aircraft and onto the United States.  Perhaps, someday, I'll have the vacation I've always dreamed of in Paris, but in the meantime I will have to settle for this.