Treading Perrier

by Isabel Ortiz

Three-Hour Tour.

I was recently introduced to the mysterious world of the long-term expat, something that each of you should think about, because it could happen to you without you even realizing it.  You come over for a job or a boyfriend and then you wake up one day and realize that you just inadvertently spent your entire adult life in another country, without ever having planned it that way.

At the office, I was assigned to a new project for a group of seven American investors who have been living in Paris for anywhere from two decades to over fifty years.  When my boss gave me their information, I saw that the main client’s first name was Georges, with an S at the end, but his last name was clearly English, not French.  That piqued my curiosity; I wondered whether it would turn out that he was French, American or something else.  Meeting him completely opened my eyes to a world I didn’t even know existed.

Georges, it turns out, is an American.  He is so American that his adult life actually started in the U.S. military.  He was a liaison officer between the U.S. Army and the French Army during the Korean War, stationed in Paris.  But within a month of arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with the Frenchwoman who changed his life forever.

Not only did Georges stay in Paris and marry his girlfriend, but he, without ever really thinking about it, settled here and stayed for decades.  Over the years, he found that the locals surrounding him, including his own in-laws, consistently spelled his first name wrong.  So when it came time for him to receive French citizenship through his wife, he took the opportunity to make a break from the past.  And he’s been Georges ever since.

Each member of the group has his or her own unique story.  There are several who, like Georges, either moved here or remained here for love.  But several came for intellectual or artistic purposes—one is an actress, another a professor and several are at least part-time painters.  Most came over thinking they would be here for a few months or a few years at most, but got “trapped” for one reason or another—generally very happy reasons, but sometimes a mixture of good fortune and bad.

As I got to know them, it sounded more and more familiar to me.  These people are the cast of Gilligan’s Island, I finally realized.  They went on a three-hour tour, were hit by a tropical storm and ended up stranded in paradise.

Georges is clearly the Skipper, in charge of this band of castaways alternating between playing while pretending to work and working while pretending to play on a desert island.  He is fun-loving and slapstick and yet still a voice of reason and authority, respected by his cohorts.

The rest of the characters are just as easy to recognize.  There’s the professor, the movie star, the farm girl, the millionaires and of course Gilligan himself.

The Professor is in his early fifties and teaches engineering.  He first came here to work on the TGV project in the 1970s and has kept tinkering in Paris ever since.  Just like his TV double on Gilligan’s Island, he has been known to fashion crude technology out of local materials.

Just like his TV double on Gilligan’s Island, he has been known to fashion crude technology out of local materials.

The movie star (“Ginger”) first came to France for the Cannes Film Festival thirty years ago.  During what was supposed to be a brief stop-over in Paris on her way back to Los Angeles, she fell in love with Paris and then moved here full-time three months later.  She can now be spotted in cameos in a long string of French films from the 1990s.  She can also be spotted once or twice a week in the shadows of the péniche nightclub scene along the quais near Bibliothèque François Mitterrand.

The farm girl (“Mary Ann”) is the youngest cast member.  Just as her senior year of high school was coming to a close, her hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska, was hit by a series of tornados that wiped out a large part of the area, including the family business.  When the family then scattered across the state and the region looking for work, she knew that she would never be coming back to Grand Island.  So she scrapped her plans to attend the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and came to Paris as a college student at the Sorbonne.  Innocent and naïve as she was, she fell into the trap set by a French college professor only eight years her senior and has been doing his laundry ever since.

The only couple in the group is clearly the real-world version of the Howells.  They are both the product of Ivy League education and retired here twenty years ago on the proceeds of his decades of corporate executive ladder-climbing.  In addition to these two millionaires, the western suburbs of Paris are full of other carbon copies of the Howells.  They are present in particularly large numbers in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Last and most stunningly similar to his on-air alter ego is “Gilligan”.  He is very much the innocent, harmlessly dopey companion of Georges, the Skipper.  One simple fact will illustrate his Gilligan-like witlessness: he has been in Paris for thirty-five years and doesn’t speak a word of French.

The now-Parisian castaways, however, don’t spend every episode in search of a way to get home.  They have settled into a routine that they enjoy.  They have all either found a way to make a living or they live off of past generations’ accumulated wealth and they make the best of it, roughing it here in paradise.  Once or twice a year, they head back to the real world—the world that most of the people on the other side of the TV were in during the three years that Gilligan’s Island was on the air—for a wedding, bar mitzvah or funeral.

As they tell it, each time they go back, they stay for a week.  And that is just long enough to remember that Paris is home.