The Bistro

When I was 27, as I am now, I missed an opportunity to write about the French in Williamsburg. So I will write about them now, while there’s still time.

A French mother will walk her baby carriage in the middle of the sidewalk. Usually, she walks with a friend. They walk slowly and talk loosely. They don’t hear you coming, so when you pass them, only then do they begin to move to the side. Always wearing sunglasses, even when it’s cloudy.

French men are loud. Many times, they walk in threes. They laugh a lot and don't seem to shut up. Tight pants, always.

Next to my apartment building, on the corner, is a French bistro. When I first moved in, four years ago, the building was empty. There was a patio, adjacent to my building, that looks out onto the street through an old rusty gorgeous fence higher than my head. Vines wound around the fence and hung off and covered the walls around the patio. Between the patio and my building was a small old garage. Squeezed in, but there before both buildings. It may have housed horses back in the day. The windows and door glass were opaque and it was a stout building. Back on the patio, there was a chalk board. A set list for an open mic, maybe one that happened before the pandemic, was smudged.

Soon after I moved in, maybe after a few months, I began to see a woman with a shining face, a purposeful walk, and a steady gaze surveying the premises. She would come around every couple days. I think I said hi to her once or twice because she was beautiful and I was new. I quickly realized from her accent that she was French. As the months went by, I saw her talking to different men wearing different working clothes. Before long, the vines were being torn down, tables and chairs began to fill the patio, and the chalk board disappeared.

The bistro had been open for a year or two before I went in, with an ex-girlfriend. The food was nothing special and the drinks were weak, but there was one waiter who was charming. The back patio was heated and the old garage was turned into a sort of club. The bow of a big old row boat jutted out from the wall and was the bar. I wondered if it was a remnant from the old business or if it was new. White American couples sat around us. We ate mussels and escargots. There was a sign outside advertising a happy hour. I ordered one of the happy hour drinks. The waiter—he remained charming—told me that the drink wasn’t on the happy hour menu. I told him I just saw it written out there on the board and that he could take a look for himself. He said it’s not supposed to be. So I paid full price.

Something kept me from going to the bistro regularly. In fact, I only ever went maybe three times. Part of it was because I thought the owner should have been nicer to me. I lived right there, and I must have been one of the first people she met on the block. I felt entitled to some sort of good humor or invitation. But none came. So I chalked it up to her Frenchness. The other reason I never became a regular is because I never become a regular.

I started hearing them on the street. All down Bedford Avenue. On the waterfront, promenading, walking their dogs, walking their children, talking. Always talking. Looking like they knew where to go. Like they were born here. An instinctual sense of direction. Something about French innovation. Did they invent the compass? I would come home and tell my roommates something is going on. They’re infecting the place. The great thing about white European transplants from colonialist countries is you can say that kind of stuff about them: infecting, infesting, infuriating, anything but invigorating the scenery and atmosphere around us. A stain on the name of the City of Churches. A stain on its street. A mosquito in my ear.

But why? I don’t flinch or flame when I hear them in Central Park, that is, when they stay between 59th Street and 81st Street. Lower or higher—no good. West and East, both, that’s okay. But here? I thought, back then, Brooklyn was supposed to be real. We are the skeleton of the city. We have spines. We’re ossified, and that’s what makes us indispensable. The French are a mirage. Maybe the most idealized people. Paris is certainly the most idealized city, before or after New York. The language: one big joke. A sound where there shouldn’t be; silence where there must be, simply must be. Some silence, somewhere, please. Invisible sounds. Unlearnable inflections. Speak it perfectly, they still don’t care. They live in cocoons of speech but don’t begin as caterpillars. The French are, unlike Brooklynites, always butterflies.

I have this feeling that I’d never be able to laugh at a French joke, either because I wouldn’t understand it or I wouldn’t let myself laugh.

My roommate matches with a French girl on Hinge. I’ve been complaining about the French around here for years, so he asks her, since she lives in Williamsburg, why there are so many French here. She tells him all her friends who moved from Paris moved to Williamsburg.

I think to go up to a French couple and ask they why they’re here. But I haven’t, because I can’t figure out if this would be something a tourist would do, something a xenophobic New Yorker would do, something a wanna-be writer who thinks he notices a trend no one has picked up on would do, or if it’s something—God help me—another French person would do. But then I remember a French person would never do that.

I went to Paris a year after I moved to New York. I happened to be there for Bastille Day. I was there for four or five nights. The first day and night, I cried. I was jet-lagged, depressed, anxious, and confused. I had just met a girl back in New York who I really liked and I was worried my time away (two weeks, after all was said and done) would be too long. She would forget about me or find someone else. But I picked myself up and ate beef carpaccio at a restaurant across the street. I also downloaded Bumble. I clicked Bumble BFF. Maybe I could just find someone to show me around.

I matched with a girl from Morocco who lived in Paris. Nouhaila. She posted inspirational literary quotes as captions on Instagram and wore earth tones. She was adorable and seemed warm and had a disarming smile. Forcing myself to be reasonable, I figured I might as well not get attached to someone in New York while I was there. So I asked her if she wanted to hang out that week. The only day she was available was Bastille Day.

We decided to have a picnic together. She would bring a friend and we would camp out on the Champ de Mars, where the festivities were. We’d get there early to get a spot on grass, in front of the Eiffel Tower, so we could see the orchestra and have enough space to lie down and watch the fireworks when it got dark. I was staying close by, at an Airbnb in the 7th arrondissement. I left my room, went to the grocery store, bought a six-pack of beer, a sandwich, and some snacks, and made my way to the lawn.

I messaged her and asked her where she was. She said she was going to be late. A line was already forming before the entrance to the camp and it was getting long. I played it cool and replied no problem. I found a street corner, put down my provisions, and looked around. It was hot, upwards of ninety degrees. There didn’t seem to be any trees in Paris except in the parks. I noticed almost no one else was alone.

Finally, after I had waited an hour or more, leaning on the side of a colossal mansion or government building, she messaged me. She was coming from the other side of the Seine, across from the Eiffel Tower. She said they had closed off the bridges. They also closed down the trains under the river. No one was allowed to cross the Seine. She sent me a voice note, in broken English, and I was too nervous to send one back. It feels too intimate to reveal your voice to someone who you haven’t met. She said she didn’t think she could figure out a way to cross. So I messaged her asking if she couldn’t just find a way around. Some minutes went by and she sent me a sad face emoticon. We agreed we didn’t think we’d be able to meet up. Then she sent me a picture of her and her friend’s legs dangling off the bank of the river, camera facing in my direction, toward the Champ de Mars. I didn’t send her a picture back, and I never did meet her.

I was sad. I considered going back to the Airbnb. But I had a whole six-pack and no one to share it with. So I walked into the line and waited. Maybe a half hour went by. Finally, I approached the security guard who screened people as they entered the grounds. Some people were before me. But he shouted something that made me realize he was telling me I couldn’t bring alcohol onto the lawn. A pang of fury went through me. My American defiance welled up. But with everyone around looking at me like I was an alien—the security guard having drawn attention to me—I didn't dare disturb the order of things. So I took one out, cracked it open, took a few sips, then heard what sounded like a friendly French family behind me. I turned around and smiled and gestured toward the beers, asking if they wanted any. They laughed and I thought that meant they didn’t understand. So I repeated myself. They were refusing. Then I looked back at some younger guys behind them. Did they want some? Nope. So I turned back around, the sun beating down on my forehead, chugged one, started to guzzle the next one, and chucked the whole pack once I got to the security guard. I was left with sandwich and snacks and no place to sit on the grounds littered with patriots.

Why in the world, I asked myself, did these people not take my beers? They were so standoffish. This was the most celebratory day of the year in France. On July Fourth, on a main street in some rural town in America, if someone offered me a beer as we watched the parade, we would have cheersed and drank. Here, I had to throw away the fun. I later heard from many other Americans who had been to Paris that Parisians keep to themselves. It is, apparently, not common practice to mix with strangers, especially in the daylight. In the hot hot daylight. A daylight whose heat perhaps only a beer could dim. A daylight who disappointment could only be surpassed by the fireworks that lit up the night sky as I leaned out of my Airbnb window and thought, this is better than the Fourth of July, before I glanced to my right, made awkward eye contact with my host, who was leaning out her window, and finally shut the shades and retired to my cot. All fireworks, I realize now, promise everything and deliver on nothing.

So if I walked up to a French couple on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and asked why they were here, I definitely would not be French. And that, for them, would be the worst thing.

Even if I did work up the balls to ask, the answer would probably be similar to any number of answers another New Yorker or person living in New York would give: For work. It’s New York. I’m just visiting. Come to think of it, it’s hard to even be convinced that “I had to get away from where I came from” could even be a possible response anymore. It’s too expensive here, too. I’m reminded of this movie I almost watched about orphan children on the streets of Manhattan in the 1970s. They ran away from home. They were poor. Today, they may be your neighbors. Or they may be dead. I can’t imagine a Parisian telling me they came to New York because they wanted to leave Paris.

Now, if I walk by the bistro on a Wednesday evening, I see a sign on the sidewalk for “Gypsy Music.” I always think of my grandfather when I see or hear that word. Djadju, we call him. He says it frequently, passionately. A family story holds that when my mom was a teenager, she got her ear pierced a second time, and when she came home, Djadju screamed at her and called her a “saganka”—a gypsy, but really closer to a dirty bitch or a slut. Which, genealogically, Djadju had some second-hand experience with. On my great-grandfather’s farm in Poland—this must have been in the 1890s or 19-aughts—some gypsies stole a cow. A buried cow. They dug it up. Another time, in the New World of the 1920s, less than a decade after coming to America, a gypsy stole my great-grandmother’s Korale beads—a treasured heirloom in Polish households—from her home in Taunton, Massachusetts. The Polacks love to assume. We don’t listen to reason; we listen to resentment. Maybe it wasn’t gypsies who stole the cow and the necklace. But a gypsy is the easiest scapegoat to hold a grudge against in rural Poland. And I say “we” because who am I to question a hundred years of oral tradition? A bigot, maybe. A keeper of the flame, certainly, disconcertingly. But at least I’m not the one who wrote “Gypsy Music” on the sidewalk sign.

It’s nighttime. The three players sit in a circle on the patio with their guitars on their laps. Soft orange exposed bulb light bathes their ensemble. One or two have their eyes closed. They are smiling. No sheet music. Song. I want to say, “I feel like I’m in Paris.” Usually, few people attend their performances. Sometimes, it’s just them. I hear the music from my bedroom. My window is open. Between the sounds of speeding cars fitted with gun-shot mufflers, lovers yelling, and doorman greetings across the street, the piercing language of their lyrics suddenly doesn’t sound as piercing. I wonder why it only seems to ever last for a few minutes. But then I remember, it’s just because I wasn’t listening.