Paris Journal #1: Last Apartment in Paris; Or, A Warning
By Summer Block

The first in an occasional series . . .

I was twenty-four, two years out of college, and my life was turning out a bit differently than I had planned. After having dutifully slogged through all sixteen French tenses in college, including those used to demarcate actions intended, actions completed, and fleeting actions long anticipated whose ultimate execution leaves you feeling only strangely hollow, I had found myself at last in Paris. Homeless.

Every morning I combed the classifieds atop my tiny hotel bed and called every listing, consistently confusing l'annonce (an advertisement) with l'avertissement (a warning). This would come to seem fateful.

Only one apartment was still available:

5th, M. Jussieu. Flexible availability. 2 rooms, 26m2 furnished flat w/ bathtub, American kitchen, 800 €/m. 5-6 months.

(The "American kitchen" is local terminology for a studio-sized kitchen nook without proper counter space or an oven. In other words, small, like America.)

I called the landlord immediately.

"Bonjour, j'appelle au sujet de l'avertissement de immobiliers."

"HELLO?! DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? PARLEZ ANGLAIS? HELLO?"

"Oh, yes, hello, I speak English."

"SO, YOU DO SPEAK ENGLISH? DO YOU? SPEAK ENGLISH? GOOD."

(It's important to note that while I will shortly abandon the practice of writing her words in all capital letters for reasons of readability and convenience, Ms. Marguerite Deluca will in fact continue to speak in all capital letters.)

Only a few hours later, I came face to face with Ms. Marguerite Deluca. (Or Margaret, as she called herself both names indifferently.) Marguerite was a mustachioed American woman of Armenian extraction, 70 years old, divorced. She had lived in Paris many years, but retained homes in the States and elsewhere. She was a "feminist," by her own frequent labeling, and a "liberal," though her political opinions seemed more like an amalgamation of personal grievances against celebrities (she loathed Madeleine Dietrich) and vague, incontrovertible assertions (she liked women, and the poor).

Marguerite had decided to sublet her apartment in Paris for six months while she returned to the United States for a minor surgery. She had placed the warning months before, but when I arrived that afternoon, she had not packed a single item or even booked a plane ticket—and she was still not sure she was going. In the meantime, she was planning to go to Nice to "decompress." (Marguerite spoke with a strange slang, combining the worst of many decades with her own irrepressible gusto and grating Armenian-cum-Bostonian accent. She might speak of something being "plastic," then end a sentence with an enthusiastic "baby!" as in "We're just working one day at a time, baby!")

The coveted apartment had a front living room, a small bathroom, an incredibly small kitchen, and a separate bedroom. The building was graceful, lovely, and old. All the apartments had charming French windows with charming French shutters that made you feel like you were in that one Egoïste commercial. However -

Marguerite had saved every single item she had ever laid her hands on in the last twenty years. The filthy apartment was crammed with filthier garbage—spoiled food, mildew and mold, soiled underwear. It reeked of dust, urine, rotting wood, and that inexpressible but instantly recognizable smell of old person.

Despite having lived all her life in the major urban centers of large industrial nations, Marguerite acted as if she had never lived indoors before. The whole apartment was like a "Beverly Hillbillies" episode. She washed all her dishes in the bathtub. The bathtub was therefore encrusted not only with mold and grime, but with pieces of food. The bathroom shelf contained a Smithsonian exhibit on turn-of-the-century cosmetics: witch hazel languished next to lipstick still made with real whale blubber, while nail polish silently atrophied alongside safety razors that predated plastic and weighed 1.5 pounds each. Underneath the wretched sink, tubs of dirty dishes floated in their filmy water, propped up by a broken stool, a sopping wet piece of foam rubber, and two plastic tubs of assorted crap, all topped with the aforementioned soiled underwear. Mold climbed the walls, especially behind the toilet, where it was growing into an advanced civilization.

The kitchen was a moldering closet piled high with unimaginable garbage. She had saved every food wrapper, every lid and jar. Piles of margarine tub lids—just lids—rubber-banded together. Half a dinner plate. Vile bits of things best not investigated. The rest of the house was stuffed with magazines, newspaper clippings, clothing and shoes, linens, hats, plastic and paper bags, and just about every imaginable item, piled high on every surface, everywhere. There was an unwrapped bar of soap in the bed sheets and a jagged pane of broken glass between the boxsprings; there were three conical piles of salt in the middle of the rug.

This rug was encrusted with every possible pollution. By her own admission, she never vacuumed it, preferring instead to sweep at it with an old dust broom. Once, she declared proudly, she scrubbed the rug with hair shampoo from the bathroom. "Sometimes I put hair shampoo on it, to clean it. Instead of going to get carpet shampoo—`cuz how do you do that?" She many times suggested "dyeing" the rug by pouring coffee on it.

Marguerite originally promised that I could move in on Sunday, then switched it to Wednesday. As Wednesday dawned, the new move-in date became Friday. And so it went, for weeks on end.

My budget depleted, I was forced to give up my hotel room and spend the interim days in a youth hostel, an experience like living in a homeless shelter, but without the free soup.

I spent my mornings assisting Marguerite with her excavations, running her errands, buying her croissants, carrying her packages, and taking her phone calls. Her dedicated pack of friends visited daily, crowding the apartment with boxes, trunks, and conflicting bits of advice. All the while Marguerite fanned herself from her ragged folding chair, imparting bits of wisdom like, "Be careful what you drink. The other day I drank some soap, I thought it was olive oil."

My evenings were spent out roaming the streets, buying time away from the insufferable backpackers with whom fate had bound me, half a dozen not-so-young world travelers wrapped in filthy North Face polar fleece, ambling through one of the world's most fashionable cities looking like it was laundry day at forestry school.

Weeks passed; at last I was installed in the apartment, paying regular rent, and still the recipient of regular visits from Marguerite. We had exchanged places, and now it was she who was staying at the Young and Happy youth hostel. She still came over in the mornings, always without a call or invitation, to "pack." She would plop down in her broken wicker chair and tell me, "You can just start the water for some tea, and there are tea bags in the kitchen." And then, with a lordly gesture, "You can just take these suitcases next door." And what did Marguerite pack in these suitcases for her excursion to the hostel? A duffel bag full of instant soup and moldy tangerines she dug out of her own trash can. ("They'll be alright if you peel them.")

Her last night in Paris, Marguerite arrived with a confused-looking young man in tow. This handsome German boy was staying at Young and Happy when Marguerite bullied him into carrying some boxes to my apartment for her. He came in, set down the boxes with the utmost care, and stood awkwardly in the corner, trying to figure out how long he was obligated to stay.

It was time for l'avertissement. I led him quickly down the stairs and whispered, "Whatever you do, avoid Marguerite. Really, flee from her."

He replied, "I think she is crazy."

At that point, Marguerite threw a pair of boots down three flights of stairs. One landed within inches of my head.

"Jesus!" I shouted. "Why did you agree to follow her here?"

He replied honestly and a little sadly, with his halting accent, "I didn't know where I was going."

I escorted him back through the cobbled courtyard.

"Why do you stay here?" he asked.

"Because this is the only apartment left in Paris."

——

Summer Block isn't the first comedian to get some mileage out of France and she won't be the last.

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