Paris To The Moon Read online

  "You can't run away from (a) reality, (b) American culture, (c) yourself," our friends all said, compositely. "But you can run away," we said under our breaths, and we did. We thought we might stay for good, but we knew that we would certainly stay for the last five years of the century; "We'll stay till the millennium," we could say grandly, and mean it cautiously. The New Yorker, where I worked, was ready to hear what I had to say about Parisian scenes and, more important, was willing to keep sending non-Parisian subjects, from Groucho Marx to the Starr Report, my way too, which let us pay Parisian rates. Martha, for her part, had become a filmmaker, and she had the great portable occupation of the late twentieth century, a screenplay to write (and rewrite and rewrite again). So we went.

  The New Yorker has had lots of good writers in place in Paris, but it was James Thurber, whose blind eyes in a photograph on my desk stare at me every morning, whose writing moved me most. Thurber, though he hardly spoke a word of French, wrote once that the surface of manners in France seemed to him the most beautiful in the world, and he was right. The romance of Paris was my subject, and if it is a moony or even a loony one, it is at least the one I get, a little.

  This was a hard romance to sustain in most of the last five years, when almost everybody else thought that Paris was going straight to hell. When we first started dreaming of coming to Paris, around 1989, long-termist, infrastructure-building Europe, many people said, owned the future. One only had to compare JFK and Charles de Gaulle airports, the one named after the vital young internationalist and the other after the old reactionary, to catch the irony JFK was decrepit, dangerous, and almost unpoliced; you stumbled off your plane into, of all bizarre things, a linoleum staircase, with a sign above warning you of illegal livery drivers (whose complexions, delicately, had been made neither black nor white but swarthy, like Barbary Coast pirates). You took a taxi over roads so potholed that the infrastructure was visibly rusted out, ruined. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, on the other hand, you came to a breathtakingly modern terminal, full of odd glass corridors and long, radiating, covered walkways, and exited onto a highway so up-to-date that regular announcements of upcoming traffic were posted along with the waiting time for a reservation at the Brasserie Lipp. No one will believe this now, but that is how it seemed then. (Popular memory may be short, but it is nothing compared with the amnesia of experts.)

  By 1995 all that had changed, and Paris and France seemed left out of the new all-American dispensation. London, of all places, had become the town where people went to see new art and taste new cooking. For the first time in modern history it was actually possible to live in Paris for comfort and bourgeois security and travel to London for food and sex. (My cousin Philippe had, like so many ambitious Frenchmen of his generation, actually fled Paris for London, where he had made a small fortune in banking and was about to finance his own restaurant.)

  The failure of the French model and the triumph of the Anglo-American one is by now a sorry, often repeated fact. For five years hardly anyone wrote about Paris and the French except in a tone of diagnosis: how sick they were, when they got so sick, why they denied that they were sick, and if there was any chance that they would ever get better. (No.) Many journalistic tours d'horizons have been written in the last few years—"Whither France?" and "Whether France ..." and "Weathering France," and "France: How It Withers" and "Withering France." We surf the waves of capitalism, from crest to trough and back again, but the funny thing is that no matter how often we ride the wave, nobody notices that it's wet. When we are on the crest, we believe that we have climbed a mountain through our own virtuous efforts, and when we are in the trough, we believe that we have fallen into a pit through our own vice.

  Whatever else might be true, though, in the last five years of the century, as the world became, by popular report, more "globalized" than it had ever been before, France became more different. "They order these matters better in France," Sterne's opening line for his sentimental journey in France, had a new ring, now. For most of two centuries, after all, what had been so different about France was how central and cosmopolitan it was. Americans had been going to Paris for a couple of centuries to learn a universal diplomatic language and the central artistic culture and even the most influential manner of cooking. Yet in the time we were there Paris seemed to pass from the place where you learned how to do it to the place where you learned how not to do it—how not to do it in the ordinary American imperial way, the place where you learned how to do it, as the French like to say, autrement, otherly. From the kind of sympathy that labor unions get from their public to the length of time you take to eat lunch, the way it's done in Paris now is not the way it's done in Adelaide or Toronto or Los Angeles or Tempe or Hong Kong or any of the studs on the broad belt of the English-speaking imperium that now encircles the world, with New York as its buckle. Americans still learn about differences in Paris, but now we learn about them not because we are so much closer to the center of things but because we are so much farther away. The light of Paris still shows Americans things as they are (if not as they really are) by showing us how things can look different in a different light, but the light it shows them with now is more mysterious and singular, a kind of moral moonlight, a little bit harder to see by.

  There was no big story in France at the end of the century, but there were a lot of littler ones, and the littlest ones of all seemed to say the most about what makes Paris still Paris. Princesses died and prime ministers fell and intellectuals argued, gravely, about genuinely grave questions, and I wrote about all these things, but I have left most of that writing out of this book. They are important things, but the things that interested me most, in a time of plenty, were the minute variations, what a professor would call the significant absences, between living a family life in one place and living the same kind of life somewhere else. This is a story of the private life of a lucky American family living in Paris in the last five years of the century, less a tour of any horizon than just a walk around the park. To the personal essays about life in Paris, I have added some private journals I wrote every Christmas. These journals, I see in rereading them, are more pensive and even pessimistic in tone than the stories, perhaps because they are notes sent inward rather than letters sent out. (I have also included a long report on the trial of Maurice Papon because it is about the occupation and collaboration, still the great, unignorable black hole at the center of French life, still sucking in the light even of everyday pleasure.)

  Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm—up too early, asleep too soon—to place you on a margin, and to the essential joy—just the three of us!—was added the essential loneliness, just the three of us. What I find is left, after the politics have been removed, are mostly stories about raising a kid in foreign parts. Yet since raising a kid is the one nearly universal thing people do, and since doing it in foreign parts is the one time when you get to see most clearly all the bits of doing it that aren't universal— that are inflected and shaped by the local geography and mood and playground equipment—it is in its way, I hope, still a not entirely interior subject.

  These stories are also, willy-nilly, about bringing up a kid in foreign parts in a funny time. What made the time funny was that there was as much peace and prosperity in the world as there has ever been and at the same time a lot of resentment directed at the United States, the country where the peace and prosperity, like the kid, came from, or which at least was taking credit for it. Paris, which in the first five years of the century seemed the capital of modern life, spent the last five years on the sidelines, brooding on what had happened. Our son's first five years, and the modern century's last five, five years to the end of the millennium and five to grade one in New York, a small subject and a large one, juxtaposed: These stories take one stretch of time and, as they used to demand in exam papers, contrast and compare.

  T
he stories are mostly about the life spent at home and include a lot—some will think too much—about the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping. Yet life is mostly lived by timid bodies at home, and since we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains, we see the differences in lives as deeply there too. The real differences among people shine most brightly in two bedrooms and one building, with a clock ticking, five years to find out how and why. Not just how and why and in what way Paris is different from New York, but how a North American liberal, with the normal "universalist," antinationalist reflexes of the kind, might end up feeling about the idea of difference itself—about the existence of minute variations among peoples: which ones really matter and which ones really don't. (By the end of the decade, a new image of Paris, as a multicultural metropolis with a thriving entrepreneurial culture, was coming into place. This existed—it always had—but it seemed a little too easily pleasing to Americans, perhaps because it was so familiar, not so different after all, and looked to America for inspiration. The young soccer players on the champion French national team carefully imitated Sammy Sosa's finger-kissing when they scored their goals, and French rap, striking though it was, seemed more distinctive from its American sources than really different from them, in the same way that American impressionism in the nineteenth century was distinctive rather than different from its models. Anyway, while I greatly enjoyed the Sosa finger-kissing, as I enjoyed French rap, I admired even more the way that the great Zinedine Zidane, when asked about a perfect free kick he had taken, calmly said, "I am at the summit of my art.")

  I looked for the large in the small, the macro in the micro, the figure in the carpet, and if some big truths passed by, I hope some significant small ones got caught. If there is a fault in reporting, after all, it is not that it is too ephemeral but that it is not ephemeral enough, too quickly concerned with what seems big at the time to see what is small and more likely to linger. It is, I think, the journalists' vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: ("Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of ch6meurs ...") just as it is the scholar's vice to believe that all experience can be reduced to history ("The new world capitalist order produced a new class of ch6meurs, of whom Pierre, a pipe fitter, was a typical case ...").

  What then, the journalist and scholar ask tetchily, what then is exactly the vice of the comic-sentimental essayist? It is of course to believe that all experience and history can be reduced to him, or his near relations, and the only apology I can make is that for him in this case experience and history and life were not so much reduced as all mixed up, and scrambled together, they at least become a subject. The essayist dreams of being a prism, through which other light passes, and fears ending up merely as a mirror, showing the same old face. He has only his Self to show and only himself to blame if it doesn't show up well.

  Even if experience shows no more than itself, it is still worth showing. Experience and history, I think, are actually like the two trains in that Keaton movie where Buster struggles to keep up with the big engine by pumping furiously on a handcar on the adjoining track. It looks as if the little handcar of experience and the big train of history are headed for the same place at the same speed; but in fact the big train is going where it is headed, and those of us in the handcar keep up only by working very hard, for a little while.

  There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished—so that he quite literally sometimes can't see what's coming at him from the suburbs of the place he looks at—his struggle to adjust the country he looks at to the country he has inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye. My head was filled with pictures of Paris, mostly black and white, and I wanted to be in them.

  I am aware that my Paris, which began as a cardboard construction wearing a cape and a kepi, in many respects remains one, an invention, a Bizzaro New York, abstract where New York is specific, intricate where New York is short, though not perhaps more soulful, and that my writing about Paris is very much like my writing about New York in the first five years I lived there.

  In fact it would have been a lunchtime's work for my old friend Eugenio Donato, who haunts this book as he haunts my memories of Paris, to insist that this book about Paris is actually about New York. A lunchtime's worth of work yet not perhaps a dinner's worth of truth. The images contain their little truth too, which I grasped even in remnant form in West Philadelphia. We all see our Paris as true, because it is. It is not an old or antiquated Paris that we love, but the persistent, modern material Paris carrying on in a time of postmodern immateriality, when everything seems about to dissolve into pixels. We love Paris not out of "nostalgia" but because we love the look of light on things, as opposed to the look of light from things, the world reduced to images radiating from screens. Paris was the site of the most beautiful commonplace civilization there has ever been: cafes, brasseries, parks, lemons on trays, dappled light on bourgeois boulevards, department stores with skylights, and windows like doors everywhere you look. If it is not so much wounded—all civilizations are that, since history wounds us all—as chastened, and overloud in its own defense, it nonetheless goes on. The persistence of this civilization in the sideshow of postmodern culture is my subject, and the life it continues to have my consolation. I don't go on a bus in Paris without still expecting my balloon to be barred and the authority figure who oversees it is still a cardboard policeman in a cape. I see the moon these days from Paris because I once saw Paris from the moon.

  ***

  My real life in Paris, as in New York, was spent with a few people, and, really, only with two, Martha and Luke, and when I think of Paris, I think of them: Martha and Luke in matching fur hats at the Palais Royal; waiting with Luke in the courtyard of our building for Martha to come down the stairs (in long Russian coat and Tibetan hat, cold girl, in mid-autumn); waiting with Martha in the courtyard of an odd building on the boulevard Raspail for Luke to come from his gym class, peering through the dirty windows and the cagelike grille, one child among many, and then getting a Coca-Cola, five francs from the machine. Cyril Gonnolly once achieved an unearned poetic effect by reciting the names in wartime of hotels on the Left Bank. I can sometimes achieve a similar one, even more unearned, though not less felt, by reciting to myself the names of restaurants where we ate lunch while Luke slept (or, occasionally, where we wished we could sleep, while Luke ate): Le Souffle, Le Basilic, Chez Andre, Le Petit St. Benoit, Laduree. I believe in Le Souffle, on a Saturday afternoon in December, in the back room, with Luke sleeping in his poussette, and the old couple across the neighboring banquette, who had been coming for forty years, there with their small blind dog. The waiters in white coats, the owner in a blue sports jacket, and the smell (aroma is too fancy a word) of mingled cigarettes and orange liqueurs. I am aware that this is what is called sentimental, but then we went to Paris for a sentimental reeducation—I did anyway—even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education.

  This book is theirs, and I ask them only to share a place at the dedication table with Henry Finder, my first and most patient reader, who had to take what it tasted like on trust.

  Private Domain

  A bomb went off under my bed the other morning. It was early on a gray Tuesday when I heard a flock of ambulances somewhere near my Left Bank street, making that forlorn, politely insistent two-note bleating all Paris ambulances make. I went downstairs and outside and found—nothing. T
he street sweeper with the green plastic broom was sweeping; the young woman who keeps the striped-pajama boutique across the street was reading her Paul Auster novel. ("You left New York for Paris?" she demanded incredulously when I introduced myself not long ago.) Only in the early afternoon, when Le Monde came out, did I realize that the Islamic terrorists who are now working in Paris had left a bomb in an underground train and that, give or take a few hundred yards, it had gone off beneath the second-floor refuge on the Left Bank that my wife and I had found this summer, after a long search. The ambulances were heading for the Gare d'Orsay, where the wounded were being taken.

  "Gardez votre sang-froid" is the single, self-sufficient imperative posted on the what-to-do-in-an-emergency placard in the courtyard of our building, and on this occasion people had. The bombings here, though sometimes murderous in their effects, haven't caused any panic or even much terror. Though Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right. But even if our apartment building had been officially declared the epicenter of the bombing campaign, I don't think I'd move. Terrorism is part of life, while a nice apartment in Paris is a miracle.

  For the new French prime minister, Alain Juppe, the bombing campaign has come as a vast, if unadmitted, relief, since he finally has a subject to talk about in public other than I'affaire des logements, which has dominated the news here for four months and once seemed likely to sink his government. For most of those months, in fact, Juppe has probably been the only person more preoccupied with apartments on the Left Bank than I was, though he and I approached the matter from opposite ends. I was trying to find one, while he was trying to explain to the French people why he had so many and what all his relatives were doing living in them.