The sun above Paris was a mid-July clementine. I bought copies of _Le Monde _and the _Herald Tribune _at a kiosk and climbed the stairs to my new office on the Champs-Elysées. For three hours, I mugged at a laptop, trying to figure out how the e-mail system worked. My fingers were chattering. I spent long, spacey minutes trying to find the @ key. They'd given me a keyboard mapped for French speakers, with the letters switched around.

For the rest of the day, strangers approached and handed me folders, speaking to me in French while I panicked inside. A sentence would begin slow, with watery syncopation, then accelerate, gurgling until it slammed into an ennnnnnh, or an urrrrrrrr, and I'd be expected to respond.

What did they want from me?

Why was every question a confrontation?

First day on the job, my French was not super. I'd sort of misled them about that.

The advertising agency occupied three floors of a building located a few blocks east of the Arc de Triomphe, next to a McDonald's. Our floor might have been a wing from Versailles. Chandeliers everywhere. Gold-flaked moldings. Long rooms walled by spotty mirrors. There were fireplaces like cave mouths, and high ceilings painted with frescoes. A cherub's little white gut mooned my desk.

For a long time I'd thought Paris had the world's best everything. Girls, food, the crumble-down buildings. Even the dust was arousing. Coming out of the Métro that morning, I'd been so full up my throat constricted.

Basically, I'd been anaphylactic about France since I was ten.

So I was trying to seem cool and unruffled.

My new boss, Pierre, was an old friend. We knew each other from New York, where Pierre and his wife had lived before returning to Paris, their hometown. In March, I'd received an e-mail that Pierre had sent around looking for someone to join his agency who could attend meetings in French but write English copy.

We spoke the next day. Pierre said, "You're good in French . . ."

I said, "How good in French?"

Around lunchtime, Pierre introduced me to André, his co–creative director. They shared an office. André was stocky, long-haired, orthodontic. He grinned like Animal from the Muppets. I liked him right away. Probably ate scissors for lunch.

"André doesn't speak English," Pierre said.

"Fuck that," André said in English, staring at me. He added, smiling, "But no, do not."