Paris to the Moon (33 page)

In April the knock we had been fearing came on the door. The owners of our apartment were coming back from Tokyo. The Asian banking crisis had sent them back to Paris a year early, History leaping its track to knock Experience cold. It came as a shock. Three months and we would have to leave, be gone from 16 rue du Pre-aux-Clercs.

The phone call came, exasperatingly, in the French manner, the way the apartment had come: your whole life thrown upside down in an aside. "Oh, the owners are coming home and will need the apartment in July," the real estate woman said; no apology or even a "sorry for the inconvenience." We stayed up all night debating, in the way you do with big news: avoiding, digressing, suddenly feeling sick in the pit of the stomach at the thought of leaving. When we lost the apartment, we thought of going home early, and so we asked ourselves what were the things we loved in Paris, really loved, not just officially appreciated or chose to be amused at? Well, the places our child went. The Luxembourg Gardens at three in the afternoon. The Guignols, and Luke saying, "I'm so excited" before the curtain went up.

The curious thing was that with the loss of Paris threatening, we became more Parisian. The same thing, I had noted, had happened in our last few months in New York. The city, which had become increasingly difficult, suddenly seemed like a playground—people eating outside, in T-shirts and shorts and sneakers in the Italian restaurants in SoHo; the open-all-nightness of New York; the sweet funkiness—registered as it hadn't in years. When we left the loft for the last time, without trouble, with tears, the music box on Luke Auden's stroller played "Manhattan."

Now after the knock on the door, it happened to Paris. I began to cook Parisianly. I bought the chef's cookbook from Le Grand Vefour and began to make the buttery, three- and four-part dishes that I had been exasperated by before:
supremes de volaille,
with mint, that sort of thing. I even made souffles again. We put Trenet back on the CD player; strangely the clarity of his French had improved enormously over three years, so that now one could understand the meaning of nearly everything he sang. Or maybe it was just a better record player.

Is this simply the unique perversity of the human heart that wants (and wants and wants) what it doesn't have—Italian food in Paris, American jazz in Saint-Germain—and, only when it is about to lose it, returns to the things that drew it to the desire in the first place? Or was there a kind of peace in it too? We would now never be Parisians or integrate; we might not even stay in town more than another eight weeks. Loss, like distance, gives permission for romance. In a better-ordered Verona, Romeo and Juliet would have grown up to be just another couple at dinner.

Finally we went for a long walk, down to see the boats, by the river, and thought, No, we're not ready to leave yet, haven't yet found a good-bye. So we moved. To a bigger, actually nicer apartment. A slight, permanent overhang of depression lifted; the new place was so bright, and it was connected to the street, the life of the city. One by one our stuff came over, three blocks from one apartment to the other.

In every move, I've noticed, there is always
something—
a roll of Christmas wrapping paper, a boxful of hangers from the dry cleaners, a metal extender whose use no one can recall—that is left over in the apartment you're leaving, which you step around in curiosity and then, on the last trip, take with you. In this case it was an antenna that belonged with something—a shortwave radio? a portable television?—which we could no longer recall, a plastic dagger, with a "Kings and Knights" sticker on it, and a hardcover of
Nabokov's
Pnin
,
which came from nowhere and I could never remember reading in Paris. Leaving 16 rue du Preaux-Clercs for the last time, I opened
Pnin
at random, to a bit about a boy's imaginary father, a king: " 'Abdication! One third of the alphabet!' coldly quipped the King, with the trace of an accent. 'The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of Exile.' "

***

Just after the move, for my birthday, Luke and Martha gave me a wonderful toy.
La Machine a Dessiner le Monde,
a machine to draw the world. Really, all it is is a camera lucida, but nicely done in plastic, with a viewing stand on top. You put a piece of vellum on it, and if the light's bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you're looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it.

All! For just tracing turns out to be the hardest thing of all. All the cliches and exasperating French abstractions about the insuperable difficulties of realism turn out to be plain truth when you have your machine to draw the world pointed out the window at the plane trees on the boulevard Saint-Germain, your pencil poised, and then you try to decide where to make the first mark. The world
moves
so much—shimmers and shakes like a nautch dancer, more than you can ever know when you're in it rather than looking at it. You bless any leaf that holds still long enough for you to get it. Hold still, you tell the tree, the light leaping up and down on the balustrade, as though you were talking to a small child as you try to get on its galoshes. Just
hold still.
Where you finally make the mark is mostly a question of when you finally get fed up.

Tracing becomes a deep, knotty problem, a thing to solve, and I am completely absorbed in it. I take the Machine to Draw the World to the Palais Royal or the Luxembourg Gardens and just watch the screen, pencil poised, at the translation of Paris into this single flat layer of translucent, lucid shimmer. I no longer try to circus it, or mourn it, or even learn from it, since just drawing it is enough. What you really need from the world in order to draw it is a lot of light and for everything to just stand still.

Martha and I went for our Christmas lunch together at Le Grand Vefour. The Palais Royal in December: undecorated
sapins
line the arcades, and Monet smokiness hangs over the gardens. Christian David, the maitre d', is suave and perfect and has been
utterly
worn out, in the five years we have lunched there twice a year, by the experience of having kids. One of his kids, Antoine, has swallowed a peanut, and he has spent six nights in a hospital; the other is having trouble at school, so David has, beneath a crackle of suave, the hollow, thousand-yard stare of the Parent.

He insisted that next time, next spring we bring Luke Auden, and I told Luke (or Luca, as he now likes to be known) about the invitation when we got home. "Is it Chinese food?" Luke asked, eyes alight with faint hope. "Or regular Paris food?" Regular Paris food, I told him. His eyes became doleful. He loves Chinese food.

One of our accomplishments of the year has been to invent Chinese takeout in Paris. There is a Chinese restaurant in the
rez-de-chaussee
of our new building, Le Coq d'Or or something, and we asked them if we could sometimes simply call them up and have them prepare the food in the kitchen and then let us come down and pick it up. They looked at us dubiously: We would call in advance and have prepared food awaiting us? Yes, we said. They could even, if it were convenient, have someone run upstairs with it; we would be glad to give this messenger a little something extra for his trouble. We now have this system worked out, and it is regarded as very piquant and original.

We were so proud that we tried to extend it to the Mexican place around the corner. This was a new place that had just opened on the little street around the corner called, of all odd things, Spicy Dinners. There is a new, depressingly Japanese-Third World—style enthusiasm in Paris for "American"-style names. Some, like Buffalo Grill, are ordinary enough. Others are alarming: Speed Rabbit Pizza, for instance, a chain that is beginning to blanket the city, with a very up-to-date image of a racing hare. I don't think that you can actually get a rabbit pizza from them, a
pizza au lapin,
but they think it looks streamlined, late century, thrillingly global. A speedy rabbit, delivering speedy food. Anyway, Spicy Dinners really did have spicy dinners, and I miss them terribly, spicy dinners. It serves Mexican food basically, though with various West Indian accents. The owner seems to be East Indian, though. We proposed that we try the same system of calling up and coming over to take out, and the owner, after a few unconvinced looks, said fine, that would be good. Around six o'clock we called in our order—burritos and chili and enchiladas—and, eyes alight with expectation (man, at last some spicy food), went around a few minutes later. He had prepared all the dinner on normal plates—big, restauranty white china plates—and had it waiting for us. It was Parisian takeout;

he trusted us with his plates. I held out my arms, and he carefully put one heavy plate after another in them, placing a second plate upside down on the first, to keep everything warm, so that I had six plates and three dinners all in my hands. I felt like a circus juggler. Luke delicately guided me home and, since I didn't have the use of my hands, had to punch out the code and push open the big courtyard door himself, while I balanced the plates and spicy food as best I could, with visions of crashing china and spilled burritos all over the boulevard. It was quite a weight. "Please bring back the plates," he had called out as we left the premises. But we ran them through the dishwasher that night, and then Nisha put them away, and we forgot all about them. A month later, when we remembered, the little spicy restaurant had gone out of business. We feel very guilty about the whole thing.

Earlier in December Luke fell terribly sick—far sicker than I ever hope to see him again. We packed him off to his pediatrician, our wonderful Dr. Pierre Bitoun, who looks exactly like a kinder Groucho Marx. When we called him, he picked up the phone himself, as he always does, and said to get him over. Dr. Bitoun looked worried as hell and told us to get him to a surgeon right away. I picked Luke up in my arms, and we ran to the surgical hospital, where the gentle, grave-eyed surgeon, just emerging from an operation, examined him, said that he didn't have appendicitis but that he was very sick and that we ought to get him over to the Necker Hospital for an emergency workup. The Necker is the central children's hospital in Paris. We raced over, without an introduction, into the packed emergency ward, showed our
carnet de sante,
the pediatrician's record of inoculations and so forth. The girl at the desk barely glanced at it, and within an hour Luke had had a sonogram, an X ray, a barium enema, and various other tests and got examined by three doctors. Two and a half hours later we were back home with a diagnosis. (It turned out that Luke had salmonella poisoning.) It was only after we had left the hospital that we realized that not only had we not paid a penny but that no one had asked us to show our insurance, fill out a form, or do any of the other standard, humiliating things that happen to our American friends with sick children. Nor had any of the procedures had to be run by the profit-and-loss manager of an HMO. This is socialized medicine, of course, which the insurance companies have patriotically kept Americans from suffering under. There are times, as one reads about the uninsured and the armed and the executed, when French anti-Americanism begins to look extremely rational.

The Christmas windows are weird in Paris this year. Every year, in Paris as everywhere else, the American imperium of shopping opportunities continues to rage, unbanked. Yet the windows are weird, a fin de siecle note of disquiet seeping in. The Bon Marche, which usually has hordes of industrious elves and bears dancing at the end of invisible wires, this year has its windows filled with life-size human figures mechanically enacting a story of incest, bestiality, murder, and fashion narcissism. They play out an updated version of Charles Perrault's story "Peau d'Ane," in which a king in mourning for his queen threatens to force himself on his own daughter and is outwitted only by the princess's decision first to distract him with a series of overwrought holiday dresses and then by the killing of the royal donkey, whose dripping skin . . . well, it's a long story, and a strange one, and what connection it has with Christmas—or what the Parisian children, pressed toward the animated windows in their duffel coats, careful scarves bunched like packages around their throats, think of it all—is hard to imagine.

Luke and I went Christmas shopping after he recovered. He desperately believes in Santa—we have sold it hard, I don't know why—and has been trying to arrange his Christmas list to fit the dimensions of Santa's sack, which he studies in illustration. "You know what is the problem?" he says as he turns from the Bon Marche toy catalog to his Thomas Nast pictures of Santa. "I don't think that a big race set is a good idea; it won't fit." He loves the Christmas windows and a Louis Armstrong song called "Zat You, Santa Claus?"

After nearly four years in Paris he has developed a complicated, defensive sense of his own apartness, rather like his dad's.

He recognizes that his parents, his father particularly, speaks with an Accent, and this brings onto him exactly the shame that my grandfather must have felt when his Yiddish-speaking father arrived to talk to
his
teachers at a Philadelphia public school. I try to have solid, parental discussions with his teachers, but as I do, I realize, uneasily, that in his eyes I am the
alter kocker,
the comic immigrant.

"Zo, how the boy does?" he hears me saying in effect. "He is good boy, no? He is feeling out the homeworks, isn't he?" I can see his small frame shudder, just perceptibly, at his father's words. I had thought to bring him the suavity of the French gamin, and instead I have brought onto him the shame of the immigrant child.

I sense too that he is in a larger confusion: What's French, what's American, where am I? His French vocabulary is very large, but he doesn't like to use it, or show it, except in extremis. (He always seems to know the answer to the question, in even the most rapid and complicated French, "Would you like a little treat/candy/pastry?") A family is a civilization, and a language is a culture, and he is left with a sense of being doubly islanded. Watching the children at the gardens, he turns to me.
"All
children in New York speak English?" he demands. Yes, I tell him, and he imagines the unthinkable: a world of English speakers, where English is the public, not the private, language.