After returning from six months of study in Spain in June of 2000, I had a layover in Paris.  At Charles de Gaulle airport, I asked an Air France clerk if he could put me on an earlier flight back to New York, to avoid a six-hour wait in the terminal.  The clerks face, already frozen into a perennial non-smile, was overcome by a grimace.  "Non," he barked.  "It isn't possible."  He acted as though I had asked him for the last francs to his name.  I was struck by the marked difference between the jovial countrymen of southern Spain and the eternally grumpy functionaries of France.

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I had laughed.  After all, he was the one who was going to give himself a hernia, and die an early, stress-related death.  I would only spend one afternoon attempting to nap in a plastic airport chair -- a few hours of lost sleep that I would make up in no time once I was back home.  I remembered the advice I always gave to American tourists coming to France on a visit, often petrified about the nightmare tales they have heard about the Parisian attitude: Don't take it personally.  What often seems like hostility is nothing more than French matter- of-factness.  It means nothing, although Americans seem compelled to invent some significance for it.  Like the language in which our thoughts are encapsulated, the Parisian attitude is totally ingrained and unconscious, something over which most have little control.  The best a foreigner can do is to appreciate this edginess, often unintentional, as an authentic slice of the Parisian experience.

This week, it has been my turn to navigate the labyrinth of French relationships, with all its rules and mores, and to avoid the lurking corners where one can easily lose ones way.  I have had to remind my own self to laugh off the peculiarities of this place, so as not to get trapped inside the labyrinths walls.

I had come from New York, the beacon of capitalism and conquest; a city where ones paycheck is often the most common way to sum individual worth at social gatherings, and men and women constantly scramble to stay afloat and get ahead in a rat race that is often man-eat-man.  I was, therefore, bound to lose my footing upon landing in a country where family still maintains primary importance and an extensive social welfare net eliminates the frenzies bred in America.  After a month living in my friends apartment, supplied with all the physical comforts I could dream of, how could I explain to Nathalie that what I really wanted -- needed -- was my independence?  How could I explain -- in a country with a nationally embargoed 35-hour work week, where many shops still close for the siesta, and shopping malls are ghost towns on Sunday -- that I was beginning to hate the hours devoid of any real responsibility that piled up on many days, like dirty laundry that can no longer be ignored?  After all, couldnt I just consider myself on vacation like all the other Parisians, who leave the city behind for four full weeks in July or August.  And how, without seeming ungracious and greedy, could I explain that my mind has been programmed to see time as money, and that every idle hour was like a speed bump in my road to success?  Finally, despite the worries that were weighing down on me, I was crippled by my American inability to state frankly but politely that I was unhappy.

One afternoon we were having lunch at Nathalies sisters house, in a suburb accessible only by car.  Nathalie was busy working.  Her older sister went about preparing the cream for her neighbors eyebrows, and her younger sister cared for the baby -- who fulfilled her own infantine responsibilities by drifting in and out of sleep.  I was overcome by a sensation of suffocation, and the desire to run from the apartment.  But I couldn't go anywhere because I didnt have a car.  Despite my efforts to remain calm, I noticed the edge in my voice every time Nathalie asked me a question.

At the lunch table, I felt the need to explain my distance, as a sort of apology or peace-offering.  I told Nathalie that it was frustrating to feel completely dependent on her, as if I was always waiting around for somebody to need me.  I also made the near-fatal mistake of saying my feelings had been hurt when she told me her boyfriend was too busy to accompany me to the Tax Center so I could begin to get my papers in order.  I had been dreading the foray into French bureaucracy -- already being fearful of the American system, which functions, at least, in my native language -- and had felt abandoned and unimportant when Nathalie told me I would have to go alone.

Now, at her sisters, I tried to open a discussion about feelings and understanding, in typical American form.  I tried to make her understand my frustrations, softening my grievances by making a positive observation for each concern.  I took special care to make "I" statements.  At the end, despite all my sidestepping and attempts at diplomacy, all Nathalie took from my poorly-timed confessional was the fact that I had violated the rule forbidding this type of discourse in the presence of others.  She stated flatly that I should not have said what I had in front of her sisters.  The sisters, she added, had thought I had a lot of nerve.

The following Monday, I went to her office to pick up some documents I needed.  I asked if everything was okay between us, seeking a heart-to-heart, an affirmation of our friendship.  Instead, I was reminded I should never speak as I had in front of her sisters.  But, Nathalie also shrugged off my concern, as if she had already forgotten all about our disagreement.  Its the past, she told me.  And I could see that she meant it, even as she started sorting out the papers on her desk and moving onto the next order of business.  There was no need to harp on our little argument, or to kiss and make up, which my American instincts wanted badly to do.  < /p>

The next day, in what may have been the final proof of reconciliation, Nathalie called me to comment on the resume I had asked her to look over.  It clearly would not do, she told me.  It would have to be completely reworked if I seriously wanted to send it out.  As Nathalie critiqued the resume, I felt as though she was tearing apart the entire validity of my past experience.  I felt the stinging of tears at the back of my eyes, before I snapped myself back with a realization.  In fact, it was quite the opposite.  Nathalie would not have offered to send out a resume for me in the first place, if she didn't value my capabilities.  But this piece of paper was badly drawn up, and did not represent the experience she felt it was necessary to highlight.  In her Parisian manner, Nathalie was only trying to help me by being honest, and there was no point wasting time by trying to soften the truth.  That, I remembered, would have been purely American.

It was in this moment that I remembered my own advice about the French, and caught myself.  I had allowed myself to fall into the trap of American hypersensitivity over the previous days by ignoring it.  Now, I was able to laugh.  I thanked Nathalie for advising me on what I needed to be fixed.  I would go home, I promised, and send her the revised resume that afternoon.  Despite her cursory manner, or perhaps precisely because of it, I had gotten the information I needed to write a resume that worked, and I was going to use it to my advantage.  I was going to play by the the French rules.  After all, as I always tell tourists, if I am in their country, I might as well learn to make their system work for me.  If I try to fight it, and get upset every time someone is matter-of-fact, every time someone forgets to soften "constructive feedback" with a positive word of encouragement, I will never survive in this place.

As a light rain began to fall and the cars switched on their windshield wipers, I smiled to myself.  I felt a spring in my step as I hurried to the metro station in the Gare du Nord.  I had been lost for a moment, but I had finally found my way out of the labyrinth.

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