I’d started to see the signs before we even sat down for breakfast. Glass-encased newsstands with fold-away shutters, graffiti-strewn streetlamps, pewter-green archways that spanned a canal the color of rusted pennies—like the Gowanus of my youth. Compared to Union Square, the only thing that felt out of place at the open-air farmer’s market in Bellevue was a man dragging a watermelon behind him in a milkcrate. The café where we had pistachio pastries—protein, naturally—featured a décor that would have made Williamsburg blush: Street Fighter II Turbo booted up on a battered Minolta monitor, a French cookbook composed entirely of recipes for preparing tofu.
The similarities didn’t stop there. We took the blue line to Montmartre, a neighborhood in Paris renowned as an artistic mecca at the turn of the 20th-century. It was an all-too familiar story: Montmartre had once attracted artists with its cheap rent and tax-free alcohol outside of the city limits. It wasn’t long before bars and nightclubs flourished, and Montmartre played host to some of the most famous luminaries of the avant-garde: Degas, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Van Gogh. But despite its cobblestone streets and breathtaking views, the neighborhood had lost most of its charm to luxury apartments and tourist schlock.
A tour guide weaved down the street, speaking to a group in accented English. “Artists each had their own bars in those days,” she said through a headset. “The cubists drank at one bar, the impressionists at another.” Naturally. I thought of the bars in Greenwich Village, where Beat writers lived and drank in the ‘50s, across town from the “Round Table” of the Algonquin or the musicians at the Hotel Chelsea. Everyone striving to be an original.
“I hate to state the obvious,” I said, whispering just out of the tour guide’s earshot, “but this reminds me a lot of—”
“New York reminds you of Paris,” Courtney said, cutting me off. “Paris came first, not the other way around.” She was right, of course, though I had never considered it before. From the Art Deco street signs to the French-style bistros; even the pigeons had an air of sage sophistication. It was no wonder that Paris felt so familiar to me; the charming New York of my birth had been reduced to a bad imitation. Had everything I loved all along just been a product of somewhere else?
We went for a pre-dinner drink at Piment Café where, to my surprise, the featured dish was a hot dog on a brioche bun. Topped with mayo and fried onions, it didn’t exactly resemble the recession special at Gray’s Papaya. And yet, it tasted divine—crunchy and tangy enough to rival the original—like Paris was paying its own small homage to the culture it helped spawn. The way the best art doesn’t have to compete for singularity but can be mutually enhancing, benefiting from a mélange of perspectives.
For dinner, we stopped by a falafel stand that billed itself as “Best of the Street,” after our top-pick (a Lonely Planet recommendation with an endorsement from Lenny Kravitz) had temporarily closed due to a burst pipe. The shawarma was nothing to write home about, but perhaps they had earned the distinction by default. When the waiter came with our check, he asked us where we were from. “New York or California?” he said, sporting a wide grin. I was no stranger to these binaries, the way we boil a culture down to its lowest-common denominator. We lose the nuance, the influences that defy categorization, in the way we experience a place. I wanted to tell him something that would validate a different kind of American experience, to give him a new way of seeing the country. But I couldn’t.
“Both,” I said, somewhat defeatedly. The fact that I was from one place and moving to the other was an irony evident to no one more than me.