French Like Me (Parts 2 & 3)

2.

The first time I ever thought twice about France was at fifteen, watching Prince on the French Riviera in his Nice-based movie Under the Cherry Moon. The Paris-situated Sting concert documentary Bring on the Night came to my attention at roughly the same time, around 1986. I was hardly raised in a household taking summertime vacations to Europe. Dad never owned a passport; Mom’s had long expired by my teenage years.

My mother is from a Southern family in Virginia. Though born in Harlem, she was taken back down South and reared by her grandparents and aunts in the countryside Halifax County community of Clover till elementary school age. Her grandfather Tom had been a sharecropper, selling his own tobacco at local markets. His petite wife Emma bore ten of their children on the farm. By the time my mother, Brenda, was five years old, her household chores included pitching in to shovel firewood into the kitchen stove, helping uncles at the water sprig fill barrels for a house without plumbing, and feeding livestock. Paris was the last place on anyone’s mind. New York City was the city of dreams for my grandparents’ generation.

Bessie, my grandmother, lit out for Harlem in the late 1940s in search of the city life. She soon fell in love with Earl, a young Amsterdam Avenue numbers runner originally from the bucolic Georgia city of Baxley. The day would finally arrive when my grandfather borrowed a Cadillac, drove two hours to Clover, and reclaimed Brenda from her classes in a one-room schoolhouse. Culture shock set in for my mom from the moment of her Harlem arrival: traffic lights, running water, subways, supermarkets stocked with prepackaged poultry. On these city streets of uptown Manhattan, my mother first encountered her friend, lover, spouse, and eventual ex-husband, Darryl.

Neighbors on 145th Street, my parents met as children, my dad locally infamous for zipping down Convent Avenue like the Flash of his beloved comics. Like his future wife, Darryl was also reared by grandparents while his young mother managed an AT&T secretarial job downtown, hustling against race and sex discrimination. My grandma, Juanita, settled herself in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx while my dad remained uptown with my great-grandparents. After briefly marrying a man not Darryl’s biological father, Juanita divorced, met Frank Lewis—who would later adopt my dad—married him, gave birth to two more children, and divorced again. Jacques, the true father of my own father, never factored into our family history, and I was twenty-one before finding out anything about his Louisiana roots and French Cajun heritage.

African-American family trees splinter off into untraceable branches a lot and a missing link to my ancestry starts not even two generations back, with Jacques. A light-skinned teenage boy whose parents migrated to Harlem from Louisiana, Jacques went steady with Juanita just out of high school. A month before turning nineteen, she gave birth to Darryl as a single mom. Our family name is Lewis because of the man Juanita married and divorced before I was born, a man I don’t recognize in pictures and can’t recall having ever met. Despite adopting my dad at the start of their marriage, Frank Lewis never bonded paternally with Darryl. Effectively, my father’s grandparents were his parents, another fairly regular thing in black America.

France is in my blood. But this knowledge was far from drummed into my head growing up in the Bronx. My father’s genealogy was kept secret until I turned sixteen, something we discussed after an Oprah episode on long-lost family ties. He was born Darryl Plummer in the same Washington Heights hospital I’d be born at twenty years later, carrying the surname of a biological father he’d known merely by name most of his life. Only six years afterwards would Juanita’s second husband adopt Darryl and make him a Lewis.

Silence is the most common method for avoiding embarrassing family history swept under the rug. I broke this unspoken policy of don’t ask, don’t tell one afternoon on a rare visit with my great-grandfather, together in his South Bronx apartment in the early nineties. My curiosity set off a snowballing chain of events to locate Jacques Plummer: calls placed to a distant cousin; an unearthed New Jersey township address; photos arriving in the mail; and a meeting at the Hotel Penta in downtown Manhattan. Over drinks at the Globetrotter restaurant, my father and I both learned of this unknown family line of Plummers. Originally from Grand Coteau, Louisiana, (population: 2,000), Jacques explained that his lineage—still a bit sketchy to me, since it was only explained once over tequilas and orange juice—stemmed from Louisiana Cajuns, revealing a French heritage to our bloodline.

Diluted French family blood had nothing to do with my moving to Paris; I credit that mainly to a condition of the heart—historically the source of a lot of Parisian decision-making, no doubt.

3.

Sixteen years ago, with money borrowed from a school loan, I bought a roundtrip ticket to visit a girl I was hung up over studying abroad. The whole story involves a four-year pursuit, cheating on my girlfriend, and fictionalizing it all years later for the soon-to-be-published ebook novel, Irrésistible. Simone, the girl in question, scooped me from Charles de Gaulle airport that chilly Saturday in 1994 with her best friend.

Simone was studying at the École Normale de Musique for her junior year abroad. Her girlfriend Christine was finishing her own third year at La Sorbonne Nouvelle, and she was a vision. With all my excitement over Simone, my roving eye still caught the hot curves of her petite friend’s slender body, the chocolate-drop complexion and sexy, sleepy eyes. Her wide smile and alluring accent made her the best possible first encounter I could have had with a French woman.

And so on my first trip to Paris, my future wife picked me up from the airport.

Christine navigated her red stick shift Fiat from the outer reaches of Charles de Gaulle back to Simone’s flat in the thirteenth arrondissement. I was a law student then; I’d trimmed enough money from my tuition loan to visit Paris on a tight budget for one week only. By then I’d already been to Europe twice before, visiting an ex-girlfriend in Madrid and traipsing through London alone for a week after graduating college, but France immediately felt different. The history of Paris, the smells, the food, and the architecture overwhelmed my already romantic frame of mind.

My second night in town Simone and I went straight to the Eiffel Tower. We marched up the steps as I teased her about gnashing her teeth and farting in her sleep. Aiming for the third level, we only made it to the second due to exhaustion, but I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful view of the city. I thrilled holding her by the waist as a Parisian snapped a photo for us. We later walked the night streets hand in hand, crossing the river Seine with tiny European cars whizzing across the overpass. Strolling alongside the river, its cobblestone walkway imbedded with Heineken bottle caps, the rays of a crescent moon shimmered off the waves, illuminating the olive green hue of the canal.

Budgeting my francs carefully, we ate at relatively cheap chain restaurants I’d never bother with later—Hard Rock Café, Oh!.. Poivrier!, Le Paradis du Fruit. I ordered smoked salmon and duck accidentally at Hippopotamus, misreading the menu. Dinner went better at Chez Foufoune, a bistro popular with locals in the gay Marais district. (“Foufoune is French for pussy,” Simone delighted in explaining.) At the Louvre we skipped Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo to see an Egyptian exhibition. Fashion was heavy on my twenty-three-year-old brain; one afternoon we window-shopped at the Jean Paul Gaultier boutique, circular TV screens built into the floor replaying the designer’s latest runway shows.

The rest of my tourist trek through the city included paying respects to Richard Wright and Jim Morrison at the Père-Lachaise cemetery; shopping at the marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen flea market, where I scavenged a fitted leather jacket I’d wear for years; sampling eggplant falafels with hot sauce from L’As du Fallafel; catching Romeo Is Bleeding on the Champs-Élysées (bumping into actor Danny Aiello at the movies); searching in vain for Warhol canvases at the Pompidou Museum; and scaling the endless stairway to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica church. On my final night Simone arranged a farewell dinner at her apartment, inviting Christine and her cousin Vincent to eat with us. I boomeranged back to the Bronx scheming on how quickly I could hightail it back to Paris.

I wouldn’t return for ten years.

Twenty-one months later the ceiling mirrors of a hot sheet Bronx hotel suite reflected the naked images of Christine and I, pretzeled on a queen-size bed. A blizzard had grounded all international flights from Kennedy Airport, including Christine’s return flight to Paris.

Months after her studies were over, Simone returned to America and was soon hosting Christine’s first New York City visit. We all welcomed in 1996 together at midnight New Year’s Day, racing down the West Side Highway in my Chevy Corsica eating slices of pizza on our way to a nightclub: me, Christine, Simone and her new boyfriend. With Simone’s blessing, Christine invited me to see 12 Monkeys at a Bronx multiplex on our first date. Two hours later we were parked near the Eastchester Bay, aroused and making out in my car.

Transatlantic phone calls and international love letters followed, lasting for weeks before Christine returned to New York in the springtime. Fulfilling a longtime dream to move to the city (she studied American history and English as a dual major in Paris), she came back again for a third time in the summer to live. Subletting an apartment in downtown Manhattan from a vacationing French expat, Christine and I started a true boyfriend-girlfriend relationship down on Avenue A. Three months later she was selling lingerie at Bloomingdale’s and living in Queens; I was living in Brooklyn, freelancing for The Source and dating an entertainment journalist. Things had ended well, but they had ended. In our mid-twenties we were both too selfish and unfamiliar with the sacrificial compromises that serious relationships call for. The following year I stopped by Bloomie’s to say hello and she was gone. After a year and a half she missed her family and decided to return to France.

Three years later—November 2000—I lay with Christine in a suite at the Hôtel Violino d’Oro, exhausted after a lost weekend of sex and tourism in Venice, Italy. Planning to travel alone, I reached out to Christine in France just to tell her I’d be coming to her side of the Atlantic. Coincidentally, she was on her way to New York again on her own vacation. She arrived at my brownstone apartment for a hot and heavy reunion, and agreed to meet me days later on my solo trip to Venice. No strings attached, at the end of our passionate escapade we shook hands and parted even better friends than after our breakup years earlier. When I finally decided to move to Paris, I knew just who to call for help.