Me Talk Pretty One Day (21 page)

I’m so grateful such theaters still exist that I’d gladly tip the projectionist as well. Like the restaurants with only three
tables, I wonder how some of these places manage to stay open. In America the theaters make most of their money at the concession
stand, but here, at least in the smaller places, you’ll find nothing but an ice-cream machine tucked away between the bathroom
and the fire exit. The larger theaters offer a bit more, but it’s still mainly candy and ice cream sold by a vendor with a
tray around his neck. American theaters have begun issuing enormous cardboard trays, and it’s only a matter of time before
the marquees read
TRY OUR BARBECUED RIBS! OR COMPLIMENTARY BAKED POTATO WITH EVERY THIRTY-TWO-OUNCE SIRLOIN
. When they started selling nachos, I knew that chicken wings couldn’t be far behind. Today’s hot dogs are only clearing the
way for tomorrow’s hamburgers, and from there it’s only a short leap to the distribution of cutlery.

I’ve never considered myself an across-the-board apologist for the French, but there’s a lot to be said for an entire population
that never, under any circumstances, talks during the picture. I’ve sat through Saturday-night slasher movies with audiences
of teenagers and even then nobody has said a word. I can’t remember the last time I’ve enjoyed silence in an American theater.
It’s easy to believe that our audiences spend the day saying nothing, actually saving their voices for the moment the picture
begins. At an average New York screening I once tapped the shoulder of the man in front of me, interrupting his spot review
to ask if he planned on talking through the entire movie.

“Well… yeah. What about it?” He said this with no trace of shame or apology. It was as if I’d asked if he planned to circulate
his blood or draw air into his lungs. “Gee, why wouldn’t I?” I moved away from the critic and found myself sitting beside
a clairvoyant who loudly predicted the fates of the various characters seen moving their lips up on the screen. Next came
an elderly couple constantly convinced they were missing something. A stranger would knock on the door, and they’d ask, “Who’s
he?” I wanted to assure them that all their questions would be answered in due time, but I don’t believe in talking during
movies, so I moved again, hoping I might be lucky enough to find a seat between two people who had either fallen asleep or
died.

At a theater in Chicago I once sat beside a man who watched the movie while listening to a Cubs game on his transistor radio.
When the usher was called, the sports fan announced that this was a free country and that he wanted to listen to the goddamn
game. “Is there a law against doing both things at once?” he asked. “Is there a law? Show me the law, and I’ll turn off my
radio.”

Sitting in Paris and watching my American movies, I think of the man with the transistor radio and feel the exact opposite
of homesick. The camera glides over the cities of my past, capturing their energetic skylines just before they’re destroyed
by the terrorist’s bomb or advancing alien warship. New York, Chicago, San Francisco: it’s like seeing pictures of people
I know I could still sleep with if I wanted to. When the high-speed chases and mandatory shoot-outs become too repetitive,
I head over to the revival houses and watch gentler movies in which the couples sleep in separate beds and everyone wears
a hat. As my ticket is ripped I’ll briefly consider all the constructive things I could be doing. I think of the parks and
the restaurants, of the pleasantries I’ll never use on the friends I am failing to make. I think of the great city teeming
on the other side of that curtain, and then the lights go down, and I love Paris.

O
NE OF THE DRAWBACKS
to living in Paris is that people often refer to you as an expatriate, occasionally shortening the word to an even more irritating
“ex-pat.” It is implied that anything might take you to London or Saint Kitts, but if you live in Paris, it must be because
you hate the United States. What can I say? There may be bands of turncoats secretly plotting to overthrow their former government,
but I certainly haven’t run across them. I guess we don’t shop at the same boutiques. The Americans I’ve befriended don’t
hate the United States, they simply prefer France for one reason or another. Some of them married French people or came here
for work, but none of them viewed the move as a political act.

Like me, my American friends are sometimes called upon to defend their country, usually at dinner parties where everyone’s
had a bit too much to drink. The United States will have done something the French don’t like, and people will behave as though
it’s all my fault. I’m always taken off guard when a hostess accuses me of unfairly taxing her beef.
Wait a minute
, I think.
Did I do that
? Whenever my government refuses to sign a treaty or decides to throw its weight around in NATO, I become not an American
citizen but, rather, America itself, all fifty states and Puerto Rico sitting at the table with gravy on my chin.

During Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, my French teacher would often single me out, saying, “You Americans, you’re all
such puritans.” Citizens of Europe and Asia, my fellow class members would agree with her, while I’d wonder, Are we? I’m sure
the reputation isn’t entirely undeserved, but how prudish can we be when almost everyone I know has engaged in a three-way?

I’d never thought much about how Americans were viewed overseas until I came to France and was expected to look and behave
in a certain way. “You’re not supposed to be smoking,” my classmates would tell me. “You’re from the United States.” Europeans
expected me to regularly wash my hands with prepackaged towelettes and to automatically reject all unpasteurized dairy products.
If I was thin, it must be because I’d recently lost the extra fifty pounds traditionally cushioning the standard American
ass. If I was pushy, it was typical; and if I wasn’t, it was probably due to Prozac.

Where did people get these ideas, and how valid are they? I asked myself these questions when, after spending nine months
in France, I returned to the United States for a five-week trip to twenty cities. The plane hadn’t even left Paris when the
New Yorker seated beside me turned to ask how much I’d paid for my round-trip ticket. Americans are famous for talking about
money, and I do everything possible to keep our reputation alive. “Guess how much I spent on your birthday present?” I ask.
“Tell me, how much rent do you pay?” “What did it cost you to have that lung removed?” I horrify the French every time I open
my mouth. They seem to view such questions as prying or boastful, but to me they’re perfectly normal. You have to talk about
something, and money seems to have filled the conversational niche made available when people stopped discussing the Constitutional
Convention of 1787.

During my five weeks in the United States, I spent a lot of time on planes and waiting around in airports, where the image
of Americans as hard workers was clearly up for grabs. Most passengers were in favor of the stereotype, while the majority
of airport employees seemed dead set against it. Standing in long lines, I could easily see how we earned our reputation as
a friendly and talkative people. Conversations tended to revolve around the incompetence of the person standing behind the
cash register or computer terminal, but even when pressed for time, I found most travelers to be tolerant and good-natured,
much more willing to laugh than to cause a stink. People expressed the hope that they might catch their plane, that they might
leave on time, and that their luggage might eventually join them once they reached their destination. Once considered relentlessly
positive, we seem to have substantially lowered our expectations.

I thought a lot about American optimism when, on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, I watched one of those video magazines
stitched together from a week’s worth of soft network news reports. There was the standard “just how safe are they?” report
focusing on chopsticks or cardboard boxes, followed by the latest study proving that people who wear socks to bed are likely
to live five hours longer than the rest of us. Then came a human-interest story about a New York City program designed to
expose the homeless to great works of art. The segment opened with a genteel docent standing before a Rembrandt painting and
addressing a group of unshaven men dressed in ragged clothing. The woman lectured on the play of light and shadow. She addressed
the emotions provoked by the artist’s somber choice of colors, and her eyes glittered as she spoke. Interviewed later, one
of the men conceded that the painting was nice, saying, “Sure, I liked it okay.” Then the camera cut back to the docent, who
explained that art appreciation was a form of therapy that would hopefully help get these men back on their feet. Here was
an example of insane optimism coupled with the naive popular belief that a few hours of therapy can cure everything from chronic
obesity to a lifetime of poverty. It’s always nice to get out of the cold, but I think this woman was fooling herself in believing
that these men would prefer a Rembrandt to a couple of reubens.

For all our earnest recycling, America is still seen as a terribly wasteful country. It’s a stigma we’ve earned and are trying
to overcome with our own unique blend of guilt and hypocrisy. On the first night of my trip, while brushing my teeth in the
bathroom of my $270-a-night hotel, I noticed a little sign reading
SAVE THE PLANET
!

Okay, I thought, but how?

The card reported the amount of water used every year in hotel laundry rooms and suggested that, in having my sheets and towels
changed on a daily basis, I was taking this precious water directly from the cupped hands of a dehydrated child. I noticed
there was no similar plea encouraging me to conserve the hot water that came with my fifteen-dollar pot of room-service tea,
but that apparently was a different kind of water. I found an identical
SAVE THE PLANET
card in each of my subsequent hotel rooms, and it got on my nerves in no time. I don’t mind reusing a towel, but if they’re
charging that much for a hotel, I want my sheets changed every day. If I’d felt like sharing my bed with trillions of dead
skin cells, I would have stayed at home or spent the night with friends. I was never the one paying for the room, but still,
I resent being made to feel guilty for requesting a service an expensive hotel is generally expected to perform.

Pandas and rain forests are never mentioned when it comes to the millions of people taking joyrides in their Range Rovers.
Rather, it’s the little things we’re strong-armed into conserving. At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near
the cream counter that read
NAPKINS COME FROM TREES — CONSERVE
! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading
YOU WASTE NAPKINS
— you
WASTE TREES
!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there’s no mention of the mighty redwood when you order your four-dollar
coffee. The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free. Were they to charge you ten cents per napkin,
they would undoubtedly make them much thinner so you’d need to waste even more in order to fight back the piping hot geyser
forever spouting from the little hole conveniently located in the lid of your cup.

Traveling across the United States, it’s easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right
near the primate habitats, there’s a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is
a sign reading
CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT
. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated.
CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END
. To people who don’t run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence. Place bronze statues
beneath the southern California sun, and of course they’re going to get hot. Cannons are supposed to be loud, that’s their
claim to fame, and — like it or not — the moving sidewalk is bound to end sooner or later. It’s hard trying to explain a country
whose motto has become You can’t claim I didn’t warn you. What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after
their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks? Trains don’t normally sneak up on people. Unless they’ve derailed, you pretty
much know where to find them. The young man wasn’t deaf and blind. No one had tied him to the tracks, so what’s there to sue
about?

While at a loss to explain some things, I take great joy in explaining others. After returning from my trip, I went to my
regular place to have my hair cut. They’d given me a shampoo and I was sitting with a towel on my head when Pascal, the shop
owner, handed me a popular French gossip magazine featuring a story on Jodie Foster and her new baby. Pascal, who speaks English,
is “aped over Jodie Foster” and owns all her movies on videotape. His dream is to frost her tips while asking behind-the-scenes
questions about Sommersby.

“I’ve been looking at this one photo,” he said, “but there is something here that I am not making out.”

He pointed to a picture of the actress walking down a California beach with an unidentified friend who held the baby against
her chest. A large dog ran just ahead of the women and splashed in the surf.

“I can see that Jodie Foster is holding in one hand a leash,” Pascal said. “But what is it she is carrying in the other hand?
I have asked many people, but nobody knows for sure.”

I brought the magazine close to my face and studied it for a moment. “Well,” I said, “she appears to be carrying a plastic
bag of dog shit.”

“Go out of here, you nut.” He seemed almost angry. “Jodie Foster is the biggest star. She won an Academy Award two times,
so why would she like to carry a bag that is full of shit? Nobody would do that but a crazy person.” He called to his four
employees. “Get over here and listen to what he’s saying, the crazy nut.”