A Midnight Kiss in Paris

Mille-neuf-cent-quatre-vingt-douze. 1992.

I’d practiced saying it over and over, until I tamed my tongue-twisted American mouth.

Across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower, the marble plaza of the Palais de Chaillot was slick from rain. A crowd of bundled and happy drunks in knit caps and woolen scarves swayed and swigged champagne, waiting to bid adieu to auld lang syne and herald in a new year. I was one of them.

A month earlier, my roommate, let’s call her Mary, had invited me to join her in Paris for two weeks over the holidays. We would stay with her friend, Christophe. Not her boyfriend (she’d be leaving him at home), but her “je ne sais quoi,” she’d actually called him. Whatever! A free place to stay in Paris is what I heard. I’d dreamed of visiting the French capital since first pinning a poster of the Eiffel Tower to my closet door in second grade. I called my family, canceled my Christmas plans, and drained my savings account for the plane ticket.

Christophe’s third-floor walk-up apartment near the Porte de Clichy was dingy even in daylight. My socks snagged on the rough wood floor, and a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling cast a garish glow over the flaking paint of the tiny living room.

There were no pictures or paintings on the walls, nor were there any curtains on the windows. From where I slept on a cracked black vinyl sofa, I could watch the neighbors across the courtyard smoke cigarettes, the burnt orange ash glowing in the winter darkness like Parisian fireflies. Sometimes I’d hear Marie and Christophe making love in the bedroom.

It was not the flowerbox-appointed French pied-à-terre I’d watercolored in my mind. Outside the apartment, however, Paris was every cliché I imagined, and more.

Each morning, Christophe took us to his favorite café where we warmed our hands around large fluted bowls of café au lait and gorged on croissants whose buttery confetti fluttered into my hair. We trailed him down into the Metro tubes, with their stale oily odor, where we followed pink, blue, and yellow lines to stops whose names sounded like hamlets in fables: Chatelet Les Halles. Cluny La Sorbonne. Strasbourg St. Denis.

Along the Seine, we massaged the gold lettering on antique books stacked in the green lockers of the bouquinistes. Sometimes we huddled under our winter coats in the Luxembourg Garden, watching couples, hooked arm-in-arm, stroll the gravel paths, their speech bubbles billowing into the icy air. Come dusk, when shop windows twinkled with white lights, we pressed our red noses against the glass to admire jewel-tone macarons and Christmas packages looped with satin ribbon.

At the end of the week, on the only table in Christophe’s apartment, I opened a map and asked him to point to where we’d been. His index finger retraced our routes, and his hand briefly touched mine at the location of the Rodin Museum where we’d stood the day before, staring at the sculptor’s sensual white statue, “The Kiss.” Heat rippled up my arm, along with a tinge of guilt that Christophe, Mary’s casual I-don’t-know-what, felt like something more to me.

Christophe owned two cassette tapes, one of which was Peter Gabriel’s Shaking the Tree album, and he played the first track, Solsbury Hill, over and over. Sometimes he’d sing the lyrics as he shaved in the petit-four-sized bathroom mirror.

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill,

I could see ze city light,

Wind was blowing, time stood still,

Eagle flew out of ze night.

I giggled at his accented chant, but when he came to the line, My heart going boom, boom, boom, my loins thumped in unison.

Christophe’s corner kitchen had a stout fridge, a minuscule oven, and a flimsy cabinet filled with a hodgepodge of glasses and one pot. Before heading out on New Year’s Eve, Mary and I managed to roast a chicken and potatoes using a pan we’d fashioned from tin foil. We served our feast on mismatched plates and drank cheap red wine, which, I noticed, stained Christophe’s two front overlapping teeth. After dinner, he disappeared into the bedroom and came out wearing a cowboy hat atop his mass of chocolate brown curls.

“Howdy, “ he smiled, a little drunk.

His smile was more intoxicating than the booze, and I had to look away, lest my lust reveal my true feelings. We raised a glass to mille-neuf-cent-quartre-vingt-douze.

 The three of us arrived at the Palais de Chaillot a little after 11 p.m., but in the crowd’s persistent push and pull, I got separated from Marie and Christophe. A few minutes before the night’s climax, I found myself alone with thousands, counting down in front of Paris’s famed landmark. Three, two, one …Pop! Crack! Pshew! 

“Bonne Année!” we yelled. Strangers pecked both my cheeks, and I pecked theirs. “Happy New Year!”

Fireworks bloomed above the Parisian symbol. As I craned my neck skyward, I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned. It was Christophe, sans Mary. Without uttering a word, he pulled me tight into his arms, my heart going boom, boom, boom, and kissed me. It was slow and tender at first, then deep and determined, his tongue rolling around my mouth like French candy. The encounter lasted less than 10 seconds. He squeezed my hands and retreated back into the sea of people, back to Mary.

I watched him until his single silhouette smeared into the mass of others. I knew then that I was in love. Not with Christophe, but with the moment, with Paris, with future wanderlust yet to be experienced.

The clandestine rendezvous at midnight with my roommate’s je ne sais quoi was added kindling, but it was the City of Light that had swept me off my feet, leaving me with souvenirs of a not-so-innocent kiss, a lifetime love affair with France, and the ability to say mille-neuf-cent-quatre-vingt-douze like a pro.