(The following is an excerpt from my book We’ll Always Have Paris)
“My phone is missing!” Adi said as we exited Notre Dame.
We were now officially into hour two of knowing each other, and Adi had become the victim of a time-honored tradition when visiting Paris. She was pickpocketed—faster, maybe, than anyone in the history of modern civilization.
“Are you sure?” I asked, trying to remain calm.
“I just had it back at Notre Dame. I know I had it because I sent a text to my sister telling her that I had arrived. It was right here in my coat pocket.”
I knew that now was not the time to ask if she had buttoned her jacket as I suggested. These things are better left unsaid, especially in hour two of a first date in Paris. As we began replaying our time in Notre Dame, we were interrupted by one of Paris’ finest purveyors of the hard luck story.
“Excuse me; I’m so sorry to bother you, but is there any way you could give me a few Euros so that I can get on the Metro to go back home? I lost my wallet and I need to get back to my family.”
This is all part of the tableau in all large cities around the world. The outstretched hand of a person with a hard luck story, hoping beyond hope that they could convince even one empathetic tourist to part with a few coins or, if they were really lucky, paper money. More times than not, I am one of those sappy tourists who will shower them with a few euros to make them feel better and give me enough breathing room to escape a long down-on-my-luck story
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Since Adi and I had a crime to solve, I quickly reached into my front pocket, pulled out a few euros, and I handed them over to the man, hoping that this would placate him. Adi and I were busy with detective work and couldn’t undertake a humanitarian mission at that moment.
“Thank you so much. I’m going to repay you for this,” the man said, extending the conversation.
This was a first. Generally, once the transaction is complete, no other interaction is necessary. This gentleman was going the extra step by saying he wanted to repay us for our kindness.
“I am going to have my wife cook you a meal!”
Admittedly, Paris is a magical city, but this one was new to me. Never had I been offered a free cooked meal. Our new friend was hell-bent and he had a plan. He was going to go home and instruct his wife to make us a traditional Pakistani meal, and then deliver it back to this very spot the following day. When we told him that was absolutely not necessary, he was insistent.
“Do you like spicy food?”
Adi and I looked at each other. Honestly, I had no idea what kind of food she liked. At this point, we had never even shared a meal, yet this guy was talking to us as if we had been together forever. This was something I noticed early in our relationship; people thought we had been together forever.
“I don’t really like spicy food,” Adi said.
Check! Adi doesn’t like spicy food. I just chalked up a new fact that I didn’t know about her.
“No spicy food,” I replied to the man.
“Very good! No spicy food! I will tell my wife not to add a hint of spice to the food,” he said, continuing the rouse.
He then decided to nail down all the details on when and where we would meet. Apparently, we had all decided to pretend like this transaction was actually going to take place. Adi and I did our best to play along with the man, and we all agreed we would meet the following day at 4 p.m. to get our “not a hint of spice” soup. The man excitedly lied and told us he would be there; we lied and said that we looked forward to our next encounter. What a perfectly beautiful friendship, I thought, formed completely around lies. And then, like the French say, voila! He was off.
As soon as he left, Adi and I regrouped and decided to go to a café to formulate a game plan regarding her stolen phone. We ventured back to the left side of the river and picked a café that screamed tourist trap. It was located right off of the Seine which screams, “Get ready to get gouged.”
We sat at a very small table next to a man sitting all alone, drinking in the spring air while sipping an espresso and eating a pastry. Adi and I began retracing her steps in Notre Dame.
“I had the phone as we were lighting the candles and then when I went to the restroom. I know I had it because I sent a text to my sister Katie that I was safe.”
“Safe? Did she think I was going to abduct you?” I asked.
This is when Adi came clean about the “code word” system that she and Katie devised in case I turned out to be a raving, mad lunatic. As we were talking, our very French waiter approached us and asked what we would like to drink.
I am a simple man, and knowing that the French have perfected the art of making wine I ordered a house red. The house red wine in Paris is better than most red wine in America. For five euros you can get a glass of red wine that will make your heart melt. Adi, I would learn, was not much of a drinker. Check! No spicy food, very little alcohol. I felt like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, remembering the small details for future use.
“Do you have a sweet white wine?” Adi innocently asked.
French waiters, especially those working in a tourist trap, can spot a mark when they see one—American, white jacket, knows nothing about wine—welcome to Paris, Mademoiselle.
“I know just the wine for you, Mademoiselle. I will take care of you,” he responded.
Had I not been in crisis mode, I may have paused before sending this waiter off in the middle of tourist town to seek out the “perfect wine” for my blonde American counterpart. But again, this was a first date, only two hours in. I thought that the time to become a cheat must come later—much later.
It didn’t take long replaying the last hour for us to understand that the phone was gone forever, never to return. I have to give Adi credit; she took it completely in stride as she realized her phone was now a relic of the past. Most people would have melted down; she did just the opposite. She fully accepted it.
“You know, it’s gone and I’m not getting it back. Let’s not let that ruin the rest of the trip,” she said.
I think this is when I fell in love with Adi. I realized how much she rolls with whatever happens and doesn’t lament about things that she can’t control. Many people would have completely melted down. She let it all wash over her.
Paris: A City of Angels
In hindsight, with many years behind the incident, Adi and I look at the person who stole the phone as an angel who really did us an amazing service. Because Adi lost her phone, she didn’t have it to distract her while we traversed the city and fell in love. And because Adi wasn’t on her phone, I wasn’t on mine, and we engaged with each other instead of other people that were somewhere out in the ether.
The waiter returned with our wine. He placed my house wine in front of me, and then put the smallest glass of white wine I have ever seen in front of Adi. It was the size of a shot glass, and the contents were hardly enough to wet the lips. I sipped my perfectly delightful house wine while Adi moved her glass to her lips and recoiled at the taste.
“Oh, that’s not sweet at all,” she said.
She apologetically said she wasn’t going to be able to drink the wine and offered it to me.
“I’m not a fan of white wine,” I told her. The glass would remain in the same spot for the rest of our stay.
As I sipped my wine, I mentioned to Adi that she may want to contact her family on my phone to let them know that her phone was stolen. I mentioned that she could use my phone if she needed to contact anyone for any reason. I offered her my phone to text her sister and said she could just delete it when she was finished.
Adi smiled and thanked me. She took my phone and began texting what I hoped was, “We may never come back!”
As she was updating her sister, I looked around as the passersby milled about the city and eventually my gaze landed on the young gentleman sitting alone to my left. I could tell he had casually sized up our situation, so I smiled at him as if to say, “What are you going to do? Just another day in Paris.”
I could see Adi typing away on my phone as she gave her sister the 411. After a short while, she handed my phone back to me, and I polished off my five-euro glass of red wine.
Moments later, the waiter dropped our check and, after surveying it, I discovered that we were part of the second heist of the day. When selecting Adi’s “sweet white wine,” the waiter decided on a glass that was 60 euros! Adi and I had fallen face first into the tourist trap.
“Your wine was 60 euros,” I told Adi. “That’s like $75 in American currency!”
We had been swindled. As I looked at Adi, I saw her calculating something in her mind. If I hadn’t officially fallen in love with Adi by this point, I was about to:
“I say we pay for your glass of wine and then just…”
“Run?” I responded.
“I think so. The language barrier. It will be too hard to explain, and he will see that we didn’t drink it. I feel like he intentionally took advantage of us. He heard that I just got my phone stolen.”
Say no more, Lady. You are my kind of girl. Bonnie to my Clyde. Adi, I would later learn, can be very mischievous—generally not in a law-breaking way, but in a rule-breaking way. She doesn’t really like to be told what to do, and doesn’t like to be taken advantage of. She would tell me later that she was surprised I would so quickly agree to bolting from our table that day.
Ordinarily I would never drink and dash on a bill, but this situation was completely different. The waiter approached us at the beginning knowing that Adi just had her phone lifted in Notre Dame, and now was throwing salt on the wound by gouging us for a glass of wine that tastes like Nyquill. He also looked down his nose at us when our French was less than fluent. Yes, the language barrier, I rationalized.
I peeled off a 10 euro note, and then Adi and I did the only thing that two people who had only known each other for three hours could ever do—we made a run for it. We darted away from our table and into the busy streets of Paris. In the first three hours, Adi and I committed our first crime. Neither of us were proud of it, but this was war. Stolen phone, overpriced wine and a code word that said, “We could stay here forever.”
We ran as fast as we could and…we laughed. Laughed more than I had in a long time. I realize that what we did was “technically” wrong—okay, it was wrong, but as Bing Crosby once said in the Christmas classic White Christmas, “Everyone has a little larceny in them.” Generally it isn’t revealed on a first date, but this wasn’t your average date. This was past life stuff. This was two souls reconnecting, and it felt like old times—it was fun.
Three hours in, one stolen phone, one partially paid wine tab and the date was just getting started. I had found the girl of my dreams.
“You will meet a woman in Paris.” The words echoed in my ears, and I knew that somewhere up in heaven my father was smiling.