C’est classe

by Rachel Kesselman

The following is an excerpt from a longer work of narrative nonfiction.

The Montparnasse Tower is an eyesore. A lone, black rectangle rising from the limestone masterpieces of Haussmann, it looms over Paris like the awkward chaperone of a party. At its base is a nearly abandoned shopping center, its tinted windows unsuccessfully concealing piles of ripped cardboard boxes and old filing folders. A faded cobalt sign at the entrance reads 80 Boutiques in sans serif lettering, a rare urban remnant of the 1970s. Beige pillars supporting the roof of its outdoor space dot the area like graffitied Jenga blocks, and the smell of chlorine wafts upwards from metal grates on the ground. The public swimming pool in the basement is still open, though in my dozen years of living here, I’ve never seen anyone enter or exit. 

Around the corner from this monumentally ugly complex are the cafés where some of America’s most famous writers once gathered: La Coupole, La Rotonde, Le Dôme. In the evenings, their beautiful script signs light up in red and white, hiding their half-empty dining rooms, and a line of cinemas shines bright lights on medium-sized posters of the world’s latest movies. The Boulevard du Montparnasse is so wide that there is enough room for trees to line most of its length, a rarity for Paris.

There is a sense of has-been here. A neighborhood once at the center of the action, today it shares the sleepy rhythm of the neighboring Jardin du Luxembourg. Because it is still in Paris, it waits patiently, knowing it will have another turn soon enough. But for me, this duality—the City of Light and a spot of decline—is home sweet home.

In a few minutes’ walking, I’ll be facing our apartment building with its 1901 inscription, the exact moment when Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania was the epicenter of America’s anthracite industry. I grew up there a century later, learning first-hand how quickly the world can forget—or refuse to see—certain places and certain people. 

*

Twelve years ago, I was sitting in a Dunkin Donuts in rural Pennsylvania. The location had just opened a few months earlier, offering an unusually clean and modern donut shop: Rust Belt luxury. From the window I could see the strip mall across the highway housing decades-old family businesses. They survived on the dwindling members of a generation who still believed in repairing things like grandfather clocks, shoes, and lawnmowers. A hill stretched upwards behind the beige structure, dotted with cemetery tombstones that rose like rotted teeth from the dead winter earth.

I had driven there from my parents’ house, where I was spending my final winter break from college. The Dunkin Donuts was so new that it had Wi-Fi, and because most patrons were drive-thru customers, its speed was not weighed down by shared usage. Despite my father’s many attempts to restore a connection to the Internet at our house, I couldn’t stay and waste any more time. The application for the Teaching Assistantship Program in France was due in twelve hours.

Already in this story there is privilege: a college degree nearly finished, access to a car and a computer, a family, a house.

Yet all of it was supported by debt.

On the teaching assistant application form was a map of France and all its départements. I was asked to rank my top three choices of academies where I would like to work if selected. There was an asterisk next to the question, signaling a reminder that the Académie de Paris-Versailles-Créteil had a significantly higher cost of living than all the others. Despite this difference, the salary of the assistantship would remain the same. Teaching assistants who voluntarily chose this academy were to have supplemental funding to support their stay.

I logged into my online banking account. $114. After the half-tank of gas I’d just bought, it would soon be $99. 

A year earlier, terrified of not finding employment after graduation, I stopped my study abroad program in Paris a semester short. I’d convinced myself I could not pursue the insecure path of literature: I had to get serious and prepare the Law School Admission Test. Humanities majors could only make money as lawyers, and I had bills to pay, bills that were, with every passing minute, hour, and day, getting closer and closer, their amounts growing in interest.

But the year I left Paris was the year I learned what regret felt like. Leaving Paris was like leaving life: I was holding my breath, desperate to live again.

In about two hours’ time, the teenage baristas at the Dunkin Donuts started to shut down the coffee machines.

“We’re closing in ten minutes!” one yelled. They laughed and spoke in low tones, dividing the unsold donuts and bagels amongst themselves.

I clicked on Académie de Paris-Versailles-Créteil.

Knowing the competition, I reasoned, there was a good chance I wouldn’t even be selected.

*

New Yorkers have the American monopoly on Paris. They have brought over their own prestigious university at Reid Hall, they occupy Shakespeare and Company every summer for a $70,000 creative writing program, they review restaurants and bistros in their home newspaper as if the locations were just over a footbridge.

I pass their Macbook fortresses on the café tables of the Marais where they convene, accepting afternoon conference calls in their native tongue, collecting American salaries three times the average French person’s—three times mine. Among their wealthy, English-speaking compatriots, Paris is reduced to a mere physical location, chosen for its aesthetic beauty and label. Thanks to the capitalism they claim to disparage, the City of Light is effortlessly divorced from its language, culture, and history: they live in New Paris.

In my earlier years, I’d meet these people at expat events. They’d tell me that they loved French values: they believed in universal health care, access to free education, and beauty for all. They did not, however, pay the high taxes that supported these systems nor accept the compromises they implied. They’d roll their eyes recounting their mishaps at the prefecture, bewildered that their credit cards could not overpower an inability to speak French. Studying at a French university, they would not understand why their professor would not respond to their email about which citation style to use, would be shocked to learn that there were neither office hours nor social events, and that everyone was on a full name, vouvoiement basis.

When I’d challenge these complaints, I was met with a stubborn resistance. Get real, they’d say, assuming I was posturing to appear “more French” than them. I eventually understood our irreconcilable points of view: most of the nuanced differences between France and the United States made their lives harder, while it made mine infinitely better. France did not care about how much money I had or who my parents were, but it did care about my impeccable French and my willingness to embrace its values as I became a certified, tax-paying high school teacher.

Desperate to preserve the image of Living in Paris, the New Yorkers always ultimately ignored their frustrations. They’d keep their New Paris apartments even if they slept in them for less than two months a year. As time went on, I spent less and less time around them. To begin with, none of them lived in Paris despite their saying so, making it impossible to find a time to meet in their two-week stay windows. But more importantly, I simply did not live in New Paris.

On the rare occasions I find myself back there, I see them just as they were years ago, sitting comfortably at café terraces. Ever expressive, I hear their voices long after I’ve advanced elsewhere.

Paris is so affordable! I’d never get that in New York. I’m never going back.

But, I think to myself, You never left.

*

Leaving home was something that had always come naturally to me.

Growing up, school was my domain: sheltered from the bullying of my older sibling, exposed to the celebration of language and communication lacking at home, I received straight As my entire academic career. When I was accepted to Bryn Mawr, an elite, liberal arts women’s college, I finally left home full-time. But the cost of this move, both financially and emotionally, would haunt me for years to come.

Senior year of college, my lifelong difficulty of falling asleep turned into a veritable insomnia. The threat of my high five-figure student debt etched closer and closer as I approached graduation, and while my peers were applying to graduate school and planning summers in Europe, I was petrified, drinking alone at night to try to get to sleep. I’d punish myself with self-criticisms. How could I have ever thought that I belonged there? Why hadn’t I gone to a state college, one I’d have surely gotten a full scholarship to attend? No matter how well I succeeded academically, I did not have the background necessary to support the lifestyle such an education led to. A descendant of Polish Catholic coal miners, I harbored a guilt many members of my family found legitimate.

“You can’t do it all,” my mother would say, angry to have lost her docile little girl in a tidal wave of ambition.

Yet while my debilitating anxiety barred me from physical and mental health, my dream persisted.

The foundation of debt upon which I have built my life goes beyond the financial: I will forever be indebted to my father. Dad was the quintessential hard-working, sacrifice-making, outsider-turned-successful-local American dreamer, chock-full of the contradictions, determination, and mercilessness that came along with it. Without his foresight to move our family a mere 8.5 miles, I would not be sitting at my desk in Paris writing these words.

When I was a child, my father bought a plot of land in a more affluent area of our county. It was a steep incline of mountain, fully forested, and since it was thought impossible to build anything on it, its price was low. For the entirety of my childhood, Dad would go out to “the property” after work and cut down trees, returning home covered in sawdust and sweat. My mother would give him a glass of ice water that he would drink in three swift gulps. We were not to disturb him those evenings, brushing our teeth quietly as he sat with his eyes closed at the kitchen table. A construction worker, when Dad had finally finished removing enough trees, he had a friend with an excavator level out the platform upon which he would build our family a new house, one that would enable my sister and me to go to a better school district, begin the downfall of my parents’ marriage, and forever change the course of my life.

Like my father, I, too, had big dreams. When I left Paris early junior year, I was consumed with regret, and its pull was stronger than my insomnia-inducing depression. When I returned to America, I never prepared the LSAT. I decided that if given the chance, I would allow myself one full year back in Paris. I was banking on my loans’ six-month grace period and the new income-based repayment plans the government was proposing. I could let the interest accrue for six months—could even pay those small interest amounts to not get behind—while I gave Paris one final go.  

*

When I received my acceptance letter to teach in the Académie de Versailles, ecstasy and panic pumped through my veins. The only way I could afford to go would be to find a second job as an au pair that included free housing.

After two sleepless nights in a hostel on the Canal d’Ourcq, I accepted a position on la rue de Babylone. From my nine-square-meter chambre de bonne, I could see the Eiffel Tower and Invalides when I placed my entire head out of its small, ship-like window.