Place de Clichy

It’s difficult to say when Paris ended because for me it seemed over just as it began. I moved there at twenty-one, intending to stay for a year, but I lasted only six months. It was my first time in a real city, my first time being somewhere that felt, even as I lived there, like a place of any consequence. I’d come from Mississippi, from a very small town on the coast, but I was suddenly as unhappy as I’d ever been. Mornings in Paris would arrive with a shade of copper-tinted blue that I’d never seen, curling through my bedroom. It was the color of morning and pollution, as it turned out, though I didn’t know this at the time. It only seemed a kind of supernatural warning.

When I arrived it was already winter. I’d lived almost my entire life beside the beach. I had a thin coat and a matching scarf that I’d bought without much thought before I left, but I had trouble understanding how I could still be so spectacularly cold, shivering and wind-swept on my morning walks to the conservatory. It took a month and a half for me to learn to layer my clothes. What I didn’t know is that the cold is persistent, like loneliness. I didn’t know that it was something I’d never get better at. I only thought I was bad at being in Paris.

I’d wake in the mornings—to that shade of copper-tinted blue—and hurry to the conservatory for my piano lesson. My assignment was Bach, as often as not. I practiced what I considered a reasonable amount, but my teacher let me know early on that it wouldn’t do. He also let me know that I had no future in music. He mocked me openly, in front of the other students, in a Greek-accented French I struggled to comprehend. Piano lessons in European conservatories are basically a master class: you play in front of a motivated crowd, in this case, other students. The American “private” style to which I was accustomed had prepared me poorly for this system. All of the other students in attendance are competitors because only a set number of diplomas are awarded per year, irrespective of the number of pupils. A final competition, at year’s end, determines the recipients.

My teacher would sit at his own piano, a Steinway, next to mine, and show me how the Bach should be played, talking to me all the while. Listen for the inner voices, he said, speaking in harmonic terms. The idea of inner voices plagued me, though. The voices might seem to be competing, he said, his foot holding down the pedal to keep the chord resonant in the room. But with Bach they always work together. The voices were united, it was true, until I forgot the key signature of the last movement of the first Partita. Then I held the pedal too long, smearing the chords together. This sent him to a place of sputtering outrage. He shouted at me in a way no teacher ever had. It drives me crazy when you do that, he screamed, his spit falling openly onto the keys. I kept on, listening for the inner voices, but by then the other students were too loud. They talked to each other, whispering and laughing. I hope this isn’t your best, he said, waving his hand in dismissal. They all hoped the same. He sent me away early.

I’d scheduled all my classes for the same day of the week, with the goal of giving myself more time to experience Paris. The effect, though, was that the nervous tension from a full day of derision and failure made me unwell for about three days after each lesson. I’d recover in time to practice and study, only to grow desperate and anxious in preparation for the next meeting.

These days when I tell people I lived in Paris, the reaction is invariably positive. The most common question...