Paris to the Moon (7 page)

We have been trying to furnish our place—we had minimal furniture in the New York loft, really, chairs and rugs and rattraps— and on Sundays we go up to the Marche aux Puces, the flea market, which remains a wonder, though the only fleas in it all have Platinum American Express cards. (It isn't cheap.) The Metro ride up to the porte de Clignancourt is a joy, though, just for the names of the stations in northern Paris: Chateau Rouge, Chateau d'Eau—what
-was
the Red Castle? what was the
Water
Tower?—Poissonniers, Gare du Nord, with its lovely, thirties, Gabinish overtones. We come up, back home, at Odeon, under the statue of Danton, and a single limb of a chestnut tree hangs over the Metro stairs. It's dark already at five o'clock, the limb silhouetted against the moonlit sky while the crowd presses against you on the stairs. What an old place France is, the attic bursting with old caned chairs and zinc bars and peeling dressers and varnished settees. The feeling is totally different from an antiques fair in America; this is the attic of a civilization.

Today we stop at Le Biron for lunch; the restaurants up at the flea market—Le Biron, Le Voltaire—are among the few real bistros left, in the sense of simple places with some culinary pretension that maintain an air of joie de vivre. The poor madame is terribly overworked, and we feel for her, but lunch, simple chicken, takes an hour and a half. The
tarte tatin
is very good, though. After lunch, on this freezing cold day, faint light raking through the stalls, Luke and I stop at the little bar with a Django-style swing band: two gypsy guitarists with ancient electrics with f-holes, joined by a good-looking blonde with an alto sax. There's a couple smoking endless Gauloises next to us. I ordered, with a thrilling automatic feeling, a cafe-calva and a grenadine for Luke. They played the old American songs—"All of Me," "There Will Never Be Another You"—some Jobim too, really swinging it. Martha was off shopping at Vernaison for a plain old table. A perfect half hour.

Martha insisted on taking a cab home, declaring it too cold to get on the Metro. The cabbie, observing Luke, began a disquisition on children. Only children—we explained in French that he won't be, or we hoped he wouldn't be—are, he explained, the cause of the high modern divorce rate: The boy arrives, and the man feels jealous; there is another man in his wife's life (well, another being), and this leads to jealousy, a lover; and the whole cycle over again. (Why a second child would cure this ...) This is why women must have three children and stay home. "The school instructs," he explained, "but the family educates." I couldn't decide whether to give him a large or small tip.

It is odd to think that for so long people came to Paris mostly for the sex. "City of the naughty spree," Auden wrote disdainfully in the twenties, "La Vie Parisienne, Les Folies-Berg
e
re, Mademoiselle Fifi, bedroom mirrors and bidets, lingerie and adultery." These days the city's reputation for naughtiness has pretty much diminished away to nothing. Now the dirty movies get made in Amsterdam; the dirty drawings get sent in from Tokyo; and Oriental and even German towns, of all places, are the places you go for sexual experiment. (Even the bidets are gone from Paris, mostly converted into bizarre plug-in electric toilets, which roar as they chew up human waste, in a frenzy of sanitary appetite, and then send it out, chastened, down the ordinary water pipes.)

Things have become so run-down, or cleaned up, sexually here that France has even reached the point where it is running a bimbo deficit and has to import its sex objects. Just last week Sharon Stone was flown in to Paris to be made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture, M. Philippe Douste-Blazy. The award struck many Parisians as ridiculous, but it was, in its crude way, a logical part of a consistent cultural policy. Despite their reputation, the French are not really cultural chauvinists at all. They remain chauvinists about their judgment, a different thing; increasingly their judgment
is
their culture. They want to be free to continue to reinvent American culture in their own image, finding art forms where back home we saw only hackwork and actresses where we saw only bimbos. (The award to Sharon Stone was for "her services to world culture.") They don't mind if the Americans make the movies so long as they get to pass out the medals. Pinning a decoration on Sharon Stone is the perfect way of looking down your nose at U.S. cultural imperialism while simultaneously fondling its chest.

The one exception to the erotic milding of Paris are the lingerie ads, which still fill the boulevards and billboards. The ads—particularly the ones for Aubade—are sharply, unsettlingly erotic, to a male viewer, and differ from their American counterparts in not seeming particularly modern. Women are, as we would say, reduced to body parts; the Aubade ads isolate breasts or thighs or legs as relentlessly as a prep chef at KFC, each part dressed up in a somewhat rococo bit of underwear, lace and thong, in sculpted-lit black and white, very Hurrell, with a mocking "rule" underneath it—i.e., "Rule Twenty-four: Feign Indifference."

There is something stimulating but old-fashioned about these posters (which, for a week or two at a time, are everywhere, on every bus stop, on every bus). They are
coquettish, a
word I had never associated with a feeling before. For all the complaints about a new puritanism, the truth is that feminism in America has, by restoring an edge of unpredictability and danger to the way women behave and the way men react to that behavior, added to the total of tension on which desire depends. The edgy, complicated, reverse-spin coding of New York life— this skintight dress is not a come-on but its opposite, a declaration of independence meant not for you but for me—is unknown here. Here, the intellectuals wear black, and the models wear Alaia.

The other evening, for instance, we went to a dinner party where the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy appeared with his wife, the amazing-looking Arielle Dombasle (who wore a bathing suit in one of those philosophical-erotic-talky French films, from the time when philosophical-erotic-talky French films were the delight of the Upper West Side). She wore a skintight lame dress. We saw her a week or so later and she was wearing another clinging lame dress, as though out of obligation to her own image, her own invention.
Desir
in Paris is surreptitious but not ironic; everyone has affairs, but no one has reverse-spin coding. In New York the woman in the clinging dress is probably a professor at Hunter, while the girl in all black with no makeup reading the French papers may be Sharon Stone. You could tell by the medal, I suppose.

Mostly, we shop at BHV, the department store on the rue de Rivoli, which has become our home, our Luxembourg Gardens. BHV—the Bazar de 1'Hotel de Ville, the City Hall Bazaar—is always called by its initials (bay-aish-vay), and it is an old store, one of the great nineteenth-century department stores on the Right Bank that are the children of the Galeries Lafayette. As I say, it is on the rue de Rivoli; in fact that famous Robert Doisneau photograph of the two lovers kissing is set on the rue de Rivoli just outside BHV. This is doubly ironic: first, because the narrow strip of the rue de Rivoli in front of BHV is about the last place in the world that you would want to share a passionate kiss—it would be a bit like kissing at the entrance to the BMT near Macy's—and of course, it explains why they did it anyway. They are not sundered lovers but a young couple who have managed to buy an electric oven and emerged alive. Anyone who has spent time at BHV knows that they are kissing not from an onset of passion but from gratitude at having gotten out again.

BHV, in its current form, seems to have been invented by a Frenchman who visited an E. J. Korvette's in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, sometime in the early 1960s and, maddened with love, decided to reproduce it down to the least detail. There's the same smell of popcorn, the same cheery help, the same discount appliances stretching as far as the eye can see. It is the Parisian tradition that the landlord does not supply appliances. They must all be bought, and you take them with you when you leave. We had a whole run of things to buy, none of which, as lifelong Manhattan renters, we had ever had to buy before: a refrigerator, an oven, a stove. We
had,
oddly enough, once bought a wonderful French dishwasher, a Miele, silent as a Greek oracle, to add to our old loft. But we couldn't use even this since most of the old appliances run on American 110 volts, and France uses 220 volts. You either have to get the insides of the machine changed or else buy something new.

We became hypnotized, bewitched by the curious selling rhythms of BHV: a mixture of confidence, arrogance, and an American-style straightforwardness, with the odd difference that here the customer is always, entirely wrong. We bought a toaster, which promptly shorted out the first time we used it. We brought it back. "What did you toast in it?" the return man asked, haughty for all that he was wearing a regulation oversize checked vest, the uniform of BHV. "Raisin brioche," we answered honestly. He looked shocked, disgusted, appalled, though not surprised. "What do you expect if you put bread with raisins in it?" he asked. But he let us have a new one anyway.

The week before Christmas I had to go out to buy Christmas tree lights at the Bon Marche, the Left Bank department store. Ours didn't work, for reasons I don't understand, since a lot of the electric lamps we brought with us
do
work. Apparently some American lights shine in Paris, and some don't, don't ask why. (Henry James wrote whole novels on this theme, after all.) Instead of coming in strands that you can wrap around the tree, though, the French Christmas tree lights come in
guirlandes—
garlands—closed circles of lights without beginnings or endings. A thin cord with a plug at the end shoots out from the middle of the garland. (They cost a fortune too: twenty-five dollars for as many lights as you can get on Canal Street for five.) These garlands are packed into the box just the way strands are—light by light in little cardboard notches in a horizontal row—so it's only when you take them out of the box that you realize that what you've got is a ring, not a rope.

This means that the only way to get the Christmas lights on the Christmas tree is to lasso it. You have to get up on a ladder, hold the lights out as a loop, and then, pitching forward a bit, throw the entire garland right over the top of the tree, rodeo style. This is harder to do than it sounds and even more dangerous than it looks. I suppose you could pick up the tree and shimmy the lights on from down below, like a pair of
calecons,
but this would require someone to pick up the tree so you could do it. I can't really see the advantages of having a garland over a string. A string is easier to use—you just start at the bottom and wrap it right around the tree, merrily ascending—and this seems to me not cultural prejudice but a practical fact. (But then all cultural prejudices seem like practical facts to the prejudiced.) Still, the garlands are all there is. Martha kept sending me back to buy more.

Even then it wasn't finished. I had had the pointed inspiration of buying blue lights for the Christmas tree this year, whereas in New York we always had white ones. Since we had moved, changed cultures, I couldn't think of a better marker, a clearer declaration of difference and a new beginning, than having blue lights on the tree instead of white ones. But when I brought them home and did my Roy Rogers bit again and we turned them on and then turned off the lights in the living room, no one liked the look of them. The blue lights looked, well, blue. I doggedly, painstakingly packed them back into the box, took them back to the Bon Marche, and tried to exchange them for white lights.

The trouble now was that the new white lights I got were white lights that were all twinkling ones. I saw the word
clignotant
on the box, and I knew that it meant blinking, but somehow I didn't associate the word
blinking
with the concept "These lights blink off and on." It was the same thing with the garlands, come to think of it. It said
guirlande
right on the box, and I knew perfectly well what
guirlande
meant; but I am not yet able to make the transposition from what things say to what they mean. I saw the word
guirlande
on the box, but I didn't quite
believe
it. In New York I believe everything I read, even if it appears in the
New York Post.
In France I am always prepared to give words the benefit of a poetic doubt. I see the word
guirlande
and shrug and think that maybe
garland
is just the French seasonal Christmas light-specific idiom for a string. The box says, "They blink," and I think they don't.

I found this out of course only after I had already put the lights on the tree, plugged them in, and watched them blinking. I liked the effect OK, but Martha was having none of it. She thought it looked horrible—
sequiny and vulgar
were her words— so back I went to Bon Marche on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, for the third time, to buy a garland of unblinking white lights. This time the saleswoman gave me a really hard time. It was bad enough not knowing what color you want, but not even knowing if you wanted shimmer or a solid glow? I got them home at last and felt unreasonably proud of the garland of lights: a closed circle, desire and fulfillment meeting in a neat French ring, and just shining.

For all the talk about globalization, the unification of the world through technology, etc., the truth is that
only
information is being globalized (and then only for people who speak English). There
is
a Regulon in the Semiosphere. It is called a plug. The necessities of life—plugs and voltages and battery types and ... —are
more
compartmentalized, more provincialized, more exhaustingly different now from country to country from what they were a century or even two centuries ago. A chamber pot, after all, was always a chamber pot in whatever country you happened to be sitting; a pen was a pen since a feather was a feather. But to plug in your computer now takes a range of plugs and adapters—three prongs and two prongs and two small prongs with a big prong and three tiny prongs in a row—that look like sexual aids for jaded courtesans in de Sade. We are unified by our machines and divided up by the outlets we use to
brancher
them.