Eleven o’clock on a Friday night. The seamy, sex-obsessed center of Paris. I balanced over a Turkish toilet in a tiny bistro, one stiletto heel propped against the wall to make some kind of writing table out of my knee, trying desperately not to touch anything around me as I wrote an invitation to my dorm’s next student party. And I used to imagine a life of foreign adventure as so romantic.

Okay, so it’s not that this wasn’t romantic, in its way; but heretofore, tottering over a reeking hole in the floor of a two-foot-square room had not been part of my vision of romance. Before I moved to Paris as a graduate student, it had not even been part of my vision of possible ends to the digestive process. In my hometown, in Georgia, women didn’t have a digestive process; we only used the ladies’ room to freshen up. Highly refined women used the “little girls’ room,” but that was why I had fled the country. The mind could only take so much before it cracked.

How, with this upbringing, had I sunk to writing an invitation to a strange man while trying to avoid falling into merde? Two possible explanations offered themselves: either I was desperate, or it was all somebody else’s fault. I couldn’t possibly be desperate, so I figured I should blame it on Paris.

Paris and I, well, we just weren’t hitting it off. Maybe she’d been oversold, or my attitude had been affected by my first month, during which I cried myself to sleep every night over a necessary breakup the move to Paris had facilitated.

“Maybe I’m just not meant for a big city full of French,” I told my sister Anna on the phone.

“You have to like Paris,” she said. “Everybody loves Paris. You have a moral responsibility to love Paris. What is wrong with you?” It’s amazing how many conversations I have where that question comes up.

“It’s got an awful lot of French people in it. A disconcerting amount, really. I read about that in Mark Twain, but you don’t really appreciate the impact until you’re here. Do you know I scare people?”

My sister choked. At five-foot-three, I rarely evoke terror until people get to know me better. “Well, you scare me,” she said, proving my point. “But I’m kind of surprised you’re having this effect at first sight. What do you do? Wear white tennis shoes?”

Okay, I just want to point out here that my sister thinks white Keds are stylish. Any comments from her to a woman who had just bought a pair of black stiletto boots were way out of line. True, I’d only bought black stiletto boots because I couldn’t find any other kind of boots in Paris, but at least I owned some. “I smile.”

She burst out laughing.