Caroline in Paris

If you flip to maybe the seventh or eighth page of my passport today, you will see a huge, official-looking sticker with my photo on it.

I have my visa, and so I am now, finally, ready to write about what happened at the French consulate back in June.

So Here Goes

I really thought that it would be all better once I had the lawyer on my side. She was all decisive: she picked the type of visa I should apply for, told me I had gone about the applications all wrong, suggested what I should wear. She took charge. It was perfect.

She decided–my lawyer, that is, whose name I still don’t know–that she would rewrite our various letters of intent based on our drafts (a polite way of saying that our French sucked), and make suggestion notes on my application, and send all of this back to me in New Canaan in plenty of time for my Tuesday appointment. “Friday morning,” she promised.

What she did not say was that she apparently had only the loosest of grasps on American geography, and had in fact sent my precious package (containing, in addition, all of the original documents that Nick had compiled to document his status and ability to support me in Paris) to “New Canaan Avenue, Washington, DC,” complete with the (correct) Connecticut zip code.

FedEx, ever helpful, swore to us on Friday afternoon that it would get to me by 9am on Monday. At 10am on Monday, they explained that that isn’t even a thing that they do, and swore that it would be there by 10am on Tuesday.

Did I mention that my appointment was at noon, an hour away barring mishaps?

Which is how I found myself jumping up and down impatiently outside of the nearest FedEx office just before they opened (9am) on Tuesday morning, prepared to go seriously postal (no pun intended) should it turn out that they had sent out the package anyway after I repeated a million times that they should hold it for me.

“Oh, it’s probably on the truck already,” the zombie behind the counter (seriously: who doesn’t open their mouth when they talk??) droned. “I’ll see if they’ve left yet.”

Fortunately for me–and for her–they had not.

I ripped into the envelope in the car. There, indeed, were all of Nick’s documents–gas bill, lease, pay stubs, bank statements, and everything else. Just one copy, which, since I needed four of each, would have been a nice thing for the lawyer to fix before sending them, but at least all there.

Except.

The application. Which is not such a big deal, since it was all short-answer at most anyway, and mine was probably fine to start with, and the main thing was really the letters.

Which were also not there.

I spent the car ride setting the phone chain (me to Nick, Nick to Gwen, Gwen to the lawyer, and back again) into motion, then ran to the attic to start photocopying, and printing out the four blank applications that all had to be filled out by hand, because the French consulate hates people.

When the word came back, it was…unexpected. “The lawyer sent the letters and application to me by email a week ago,” Nick explained hollowly. “Except that they never actually came through.”

Well.

Anyway, that’s how I found myself with twelve application pages to fill out by hand, twelve letters to print and sign, and about a million photocopies left to make on my parents’ antique three-in-one that prints about a page per hour, with one hour left before I absolutely had to leave to make the appointment for which I had already waited three weeks for in the first place.

Which is about when I noticed the big “Notary Stamp Here” box on the application annex. And I remembered the thing that the lawyer said when I first asked about where the website said “notarized application annex,” about how that’s just a poor translation, and…. Maybe I could make it to the bank; I had ten minutes and just the four annex copies left.

The annexes took fifteen minutes.

There are no words for how I drove…especially when you consider that I was visually impaired for most of it, since the mere thought of being pulled over for my extremely reckless behavior was enough to set off one crying jag after another. And then I would remember the un-notarized annex and it started this spiral thing that really just wasn’t conducive to watching the road.

Parking in New York sucks, but driving is worse. I still don’t know why I didn’t take the first spot I saw–an easy cab ride across the park from the consulate, and I still had fifteen minutes. Sure, it was restricted for street cleaning for another 45 minutes, but there was a decent chance that I wouldn’t have even gotten a ticket, and so what if I did? Fifty dollars or whatever for peace of mind?

I still have nightmares about climbing back into the driver’s seat. About turning the key in the ignition.

Oh, and by the way: the announcement on the consulate’s website, that the visa section had been moved to another address? Mixed up the two addresses in question. I’m just saying.

I got there with about ten seconds to spare, to find a short but angry-looking line of people who were shortly confronted by a security guard on a major power trip. And really–he was still there today, and was so beyond rude to me for the heinous crime of saying “Excuse me?” that the whole crowd was staring at me as the door closed in my face, apparently wondering how many of his children I had murdered. When I left, he was grinning as he ignored some kid who was banging on the door. I guess it’s good to like your work.

Anyway.

“Noon appointments,” he announced, and the first two people shuffled inside. The sight of the third man enraged the guard. “I told you: without the confirmation email, you are not getting into this building.” And then there were some variations on that theme, ending when the poor man set out for his office at a sprint after the guard promised that, if the man made it back with the email before 1:00, he wouldn’t be blacklisted, appointment-wise.

Now there was just one person ahead of me in line, and I hesitated, unsure of what her appointment time was. And during that half-second, the guard slammed the door shut.

Right.

When he came back again for the 12:15 appointments, I was ready. “Hi; I had a noon appointment–” I began as deferentially as possible.

“Weren’t here at noon, though,” he snapped.

Luckily for me, I had nearly perfect recall of his tirade against the email-less man, and that got me in the door.

Once I did get in the door, for the record, everyone was really nice. And it turned out that they didn’t need the application annex at all, notarized or otherwise, which was crazy-making, but could have been worse. And while I thought that I might pass out on the spot when it turned out that Nick’s gas bill had been scanned inadequately and that I needed to add a few words to one of my letters (take that, Lawyer!), the very nice agent assured me that I didn’t need a new appointment; I could just come back with the replacement pieces the next day.

And then there was the thing where, in replacing the old gas bill with the new copy, I accidentally threw out Nick’s apartment lease, and the hour I spent making frantic phone calls from Kinko’s until Nick ended up having to leave work–in Paris–drive home, scan the lease, and email it to me so that I could print it from there and run back to the consulate for yet a third time (the door guard’s less-surly counterpart had really warmed up to me by then), at which point the agent told me the two main things:

1) He saw no reason why my application should be rejected, and

2) I could wait for the final answer in Paris. And since he very deliberately made no attempt to find out how long I had already been there before he told me this, I say that I wasn’t really there all that illegally at all.

And now you know.