In Which I Further Explain My Decision to Live with Bruce
Between meeting Bruce and agreeing to live with him, I had spent a week looking at a number of apartments around town.
The first place I saw would have been ideal: a room in a large haussmannien apartment with three twenty-four-year-old French girls. Unfortunately, during the interview, which was conducted entirely en français, my less-than-perfect lingual talents apparently gave them the impression that I was either financially insolvent or a potential pervert, or both.
The second place I looked at had a lovely view of the Gare du Nord. For those of you who have never seen the Gare du Nord, this is called “irony.” It was inhabited by two smokers who, though in their thirties, had decided to decorate the place in an adolescent theme: posters and papers pinned to the walls, ashtrays blossoming with butts, and a recycling bin that had not been emptied of Kronenbourg bottles since the mid-1990s. It also had the intriguing feature of requiring one to pass through the shower to arrive at the toilet.
The third place was with four Spanish girls. This apartment was not in the 4e arrondissement so much as it was on the outskirts of heaven. (I have a thing for Spanish girls.) The room being offered, tucked under the eaves of an Escheresque building that I expect should fall over into the Seine any day now, was the size of a small cupboard. I could only stand upright in the center of the room, and the bed looked as if it was on loan from a kennel. Naturally, I would have taken it in an instant, but the Spanish girls never called me back. I tried to use the fact that the shower was reportedly stopped up as a means to console myself. The last place I had looked at, a large but windowless room in the 10e, was perfectly fine except for the stopped-up German in the second bedroom.
With regard to Bruce’s apartment, the deciding factor for me was the kitchen. Given that a meal at a Paris restaurant can easily run 20€ (that’s 26 bucks to you, Uncle Sam), eating in is imperative if you don’t want to end up living in a tent along the canal. In all the other places I saw, there was at best a hotplate. Cabinet space was a rarity, and you were lucky to find a toaster or microwave or, for that matter, a fridge larger than the one you kept beer in at college.
Bruce’s apartment, on the other hand, has a four-top range with a large oven underneath. It’s electric, sure, but we can’t ask for miracles… There’s even a bit of counter between the range and the large refrigerator/freezer. All of this allows Bruce and me to cook together almost daily. And dining with Bruce has proven to be one of the most interesting aspects of living in Paris, for reasons I will doubtless recount at a later date.