Paris to the Moon (3 page)

The 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. The 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.

Juppe has been prime minister for just under six months. He is a long-fingered, elegant man of fifty, with the kind of enviable, aerodynamic baldness that in America only tycoons seem able to carry off—the Barry Diller, Larry Tisch style of baldness. Juppe comes from a simple family down in the Landes country. He did well in school and was eventually admitted to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, in Paris, the tiny institution that produces nearly the entire French political elite. He came to the attention of an older fellow
enarque,
Jacques Chirac, and when Chirac was mayor of Paris, in the 1980s, Juppe became his "financial adjoint"—more or less the city comptroller. Then, when the conservative parties won the legislative elections two years ago, Chirac, though he had prudently decided not to seek the office of prime minister, arranged for Juppe to be named the minister of foreign affairs, in which position, Bosnia aside, he was thought to have done well. So when Chirac was elected president this May, it seemed inevitable that he would make Juppe his prime minister.

Like all ambitious French politicians, Juppe chooses to present himself as a literary man. He has actually written a book of reflections titled
La Tentation de Venise—
"The Venetian Temptation." Juppe's Venetian temptation was to retire to a house there, where he could escape from political life, admire Giorgione's
Tempesta,
drink Bellinis in the twilight, and think long, deep thoughts. La
Tentation
was regarded as a fighting campaign manifesto, since it is as necessary for an ambitious French politician to write a book explaining why he never likes to think of politics as it is for an ambitious American politician to write a book explaining why he never thinks of anything else. Juppe, ahead of the pack, had written a book asserting not only that he would rather be doing something else but that he would like to be doing it in a completely different country. The romance of retirement is still extremely powerful in France, descending, as it does, from Montaigne, who remains the model here of pensive, high-minded reclusion, even though he spent an important chunk of his life as the boss of a tough town. In Juppe's case, the descent from Montaigne, who supplies the epigraph for
La Tentation,
is easy to show: Juppe is the mayor of Bordeaux, as Montaigne was. (French politicians often hold more than one office at once, just in case.) Among French politicians, in fact, ostentatious displays of detachment are something of a competitive sport. After being succeeded as president by Chirac, Francois Mitterrand gave an interview to Christine Ockrent, the editor of L'Express, simply to announce that he was now taking long walks in Paris and looking at the sky. It was understood as his way of keeping his hand in. Not long ago the former prime minister
E
douard Balladur, who had been so busy looking detached from politics that he forgot to campaign for the presidency this time around, sneaked an item into
L'Express
announcing that he too was taking walks and looking at the sky. It was the start of his comeback.

Then, at the beginning of June, the weekly comic paper
Le Canard Enchaine
revealed that Juppe, when he was the financial adjoint to Chirac, had taken the lease on an apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement that belonged to the
domaine prive
of the City of Paris. The
domaine 'prive
is a peculiarly Parisian establishment, although even after four months of scandal, no one knows exactly what it is, how the City of Paris came to possess it, or how you get into it. At first many Parisians confused the
domaine •prive
with the general stock of public housing that the City of Paris has built since the First World War; most of that housing is on the periphery, and a lot of it is in the less desirable neighborhoods of the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Arrondissements. It turns out, however, that the City of Paris also owns a small, semisecret group of apartments and apartment buildings that are given out at the discretion of whoever happens to be running Paris. These
domaine 'prive
apartments came into the hands of the Parisian government in all kinds of interesting ways. Many of them are on the beautiful old streets of the Left Bank, near the river, because of various failed city plans that left Paris with a lot of property, which the city fathers eventually started renting to one another. Until 1977 the prefects of the Paris arrondissements controlled the
domaine prive,
but then the system was reformed, which, as often happens in France, managed to make the mechanics of it even murkier. Today no one seems to know exactly how many
domaine prive
apartments there are. One estimate puts the number at about thirteen hundred; another puts it at about fifteen hundred; still another says that there are more than four thousand.