Paris To The Moon

by Adam Gopnik

  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.

  When we go out to eat—at the Balzar or at a nice French-American place called the Cafe Parisien—we play the game of Imaginary Restaurants, making up places we would like to open. (My best so far is a Franco-American inn specializing in game, called Les Fauves.) He has invented a restaurant that will be called the Toy Store Restaurant, and will serve an eclectic menu, French and American: baked chicken—fresh from the oven, hamburgers—fresh from the oven! And something everyone likes (dramatic pause): fruit salad! He has intuited his way toward a New York coffee shop.

  But: "No French people," he says decisively. "No French people!" I say, with genuine shock; increasing his French-bashing was not the reason we came here.

  "No," he says. "I'm the owner, and it would be too nervous." He sees himself as the next Toots Shor, and wants to feel relaxed, ready to put an arm around his clients and pound their backs, without worrying if he remembers the word, which language he is speaking.

  In other, unconscious ways he is thoroughly French and will, I fear, be lost in New York when we go back. He ate a hamburger for the first time on July 4. He took three bites, pushed it away, had some ice cream, his normal routine, but the next morning he said, "I liked the hamburger"—decisively—"but I did not like that sauce you served with it."

  "What sauce?" I said, puzzled. I hadn't made a sauce. "That red sauce," he said, disdainfully, with exactly the expression I have seen on the face of Jean-Pierre Quelin, the food critic of Le Monde, when he gets a corked glass of wine. "I did not like that red sauce." He means, of course, the Heinz ketchup, bought at La Grande Epicerie, in the American specialties section.

  ***

  When he went back to New York, his one trip, to interview at a New York nursery school, where you have to go a year and a half before you enter, he was asked what he liked to eat for breakfast, and he said, "Croissants and confiture." Everybody laughed, thought it was cute, though he was being serious as hell. It is, perhaps, a truth of expatriate children that rather than grow up with two civilizations, they grow up with less than one, unable somehow to plug in the civilization at home with the big one around. They grow up, we have noticed with other kids, achingly polite, and watchful and skilled, "adult," and guarded.

  His one island of calm and certainty remains the Luxembourg Gardens. He is master there, and he has his itinerary nearly perfectly arranged: first the playground, then the carousel, then the ponies, if there's time, and then a crepe from the crepe man. He rides the horses now, upright, and I feel sure that any day now he will ask for a stick.

  Nothing stops the wheel, though, and now even the puppet shows have been revolutionized: Las Vegasized, Americanized, globalized. At God knows what expense, and rolling dice of a size I can only imagine, this Christmas M. Desarthis discarded the reliable run of Cochons and Tresors and launched an entirely new kind of spectacular called La Valise Enchantee, complete with an original recorded score, with drums and organs, and black backgrounds and animated fluorescent fish and squirrels. In terms of his little park theater this is a ratchet up of enormous dimensions—and all very well done by a staff of four new puppeteers, though with the slight tang of the lounge act.

  I can only imagine that M. Desarthis, in the French manner, decided that he was slipping behind the times and thought of this as a way to modernize. It couldn't be a bigger hit with Luca, who plays the cassette we bought of the show and has committed it to memory, racing over the French word he doesn't know with suave Sid Caesar inventions: "Quand il etait tres petit, sa maman s'amusait. . . hunsta whoosta weestsa. ..." I like the new show, but I am worried about what is going to happen to the Cochons.

  On Christmas Eve we saw a department-store Santa at Hediard, shopping for champagne. We stood in line behind him; Luke was not a bit shaken. When we got home, he said to his mother:

  "We saw Santa at Hediard. I think he was just getting a little cheap wine for his elves."

  ***

  The lyceens, the high school students, are on strike this Christmas, and we see them march by the windows of our new apartment along the boulevard Raspail. Like the protesters in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno who march with the banner "Less Bread! More Taxes!" the lyceens are, officially, striking for more classes and harder teachers. But their strike has nearly universal support: The government is for it; the opposition is for it; the press is for it.

  What is startling and instructive to an outsider is how earnest the French lyceens look as they march; they have a worn-out, exhausted, genuinely oppressed look that is miles away from the overfed, ironic complacency that American kids of the same age have. This is the consequence of the school system. The lyceens normal, nonstriking day begins at eight-thirty in the morning and often runs to six o'clock in the evening and, for all the reforms that have been attempted in the last twenty years, is still conducted in an atmosphere of rote-learning, reflexive authoritarianism. (You see even ten- and eleven-year-olds emerging from school at the end of the day pale as veal, clutching for a pain aux raisins, starved for a little pleasure.)

  ***

  Outside the Galeries Lafayette are stationed official city guards in uniform and a store surveillant, telling everyone how to get up to the windows and which way to walk once you're there, directing traffic, with no appeal. Everyone meekly obeys. The authoritarian impulses shapes everything, even the traffic by the windows.

  ***

  The weird thing is that by taking tracing on as an ambition, I've become more in tune with the fundamental French temperament. The will toward contemplative observation is the keynote of French sensibility and tied, in ways both beautiful and horrible, to French indifference. My favorite French writers when I arrived were, dutifully, Proust and Camus and Stendhal, who generalize, brilliantly; now my favorites are Colette, Antoine Blondin, and Maupassant, who above all look, who are part of the great French Machine to Draw the World.

  The greatness of Colette and Maupassant, who is the real father of modern writing, have leaked out back home (though I think Maupassant is still known as the father of the trick ending), but I
think Blondin is just about completely unknown in America. He was a French newspaperman and essayist, thriving in the 1950s and 1960s, who wrote novels and reportage and essays for the French papers. He is most famous for writing a kind of all-purpose column in the French sports daily L'Equipe.

  Blondin is a wonderful, easy writer, and what I admire most about him is the fluency, the particularizations of his language. Everything seeks a joke, but nothing misses a point. He captures tiny moments of reality: a rainy day in the stadium where someone is listening to the radio of the rugby game below, and the crackling broadcast is more real than the game it is describing, which takes you back outside the stadium, is more real than the game it describes. His most emphatic aphorism was simple:

  "The only duty of the writer is not to have one."

  ***

  Against the official French culture of the academy, the French empirical tradition has to keep itself alive in the oddest corners, like Blondin in L'Equipe. Manet's lemons and asparagus are its best emblems. It produces an atmosphere of calm. The calm of Manet's flowers, the calm of Colettes dialogue, the precious, life-enhancing calm of the Palais Royal at three in the afternoon, the last coffee on the table, the light slanting in, French calm. Has anyone ever thought how incongruous and touching the use of that word is in the Baudelaire poem, the Matisse title? "Luxe, Caime and Volupte"? Luxury, Calm and Voluptuousness. Calm and Voluptuousness? Not hot and voluptuous or funky and voluptuous? We have grown accustomed to it by familiarity, but really, Calm—it is as if one put some other flat, bourgeois word in there: Luxury: nice and voluptuous? Luxury: comfy and voluptuous. And yet it works. It is the essence of the French vision. Everybody calm down. (Luke Auden about the excitable little boy in his class: "He was nervous, but Sonia calmed him up.") Matisse, Manet, calm us up.

  ***

  In France private life still turns on the closed seventeenth-century model of ce pays ici, this little country here. The crucial unit of social life in France is the Cohort, rather than the social Class, as in England, or the Clan, as in Italy (or the Company, as back home in America). These Parisian cohorts—loosely defined working alliances of people in politics and art and literature, who draw together in youth for one purpose or another and then remain linked, if only in mutual hatred, for life—get drawn from a lot of different social classes and clans and therefore need neutral places to inhabit. This has produced the unique Parisian commonplace civilization of parks and cafes and salons, which give the illusion of democratic entry.

  It is only an illusion, though. What looks like a cafe is really a kind of club, and you can no more really enter it than you can enter White's or Boodle's in St. James's just by walking in there. The cohorts of Paris—the impressionist group is a perfect example of the kind—look open but remain essentially closed to anyone not in at their formation. Pressed beyond a polite point, they clam up as firmly as an Italian family.

  John Singer Sargent's relations with the impressionists are a perfect example of how this works. Throughout the 1870s he stood right on the friendly edges of the impressionist cohort, knocking politely on the door again and again. They looked him over, but they never let him in. All that's left to the outsider is the beautiful surface. The two favorite sites of Sargent—the Luxembourg Gardens and the Winter Circus—strike a guilty chord;

  parks and circuses are open and seem to offer the illusion of assimilation. You end up by walking around and around the Luxembourg Gardens. French life just goes on, with its enormous insular indifference. Americans and Frenchmen always agree that they share something, something deeper than anything they share with any other people—the love of happiness, perhaps, or of social pleasures. Really it is this insularity that they share, as they discover sadly in the end. Americans welcome everyone with open arms and forced smiles, and in the end the immigrant-expatriates discover that that's the problem; the next man off the next boat is just as welcome too. Paris is open to anyone, but what is open isn't entirely Paris. It is another, simulacra Paris, which wraps around the real one and is there to be looked at, to be seen. About all you can do is paint it, and Sargent did that about as well as it could be done for about as long as it could be done. It was a great subject, but never Home, and Americans want home.

  ***

  More comfort: Food here is comfort, not theater. Last night we had our good friends B. and R. over, and we had champagne (Drappier '90) and then lemon tart from Laduree, where Luke and I stood in line for half an hour. It's a beautiful Proustian store on the rue Royale with a pale green wooden front, old wooden tables, and absolutely no line discipline. We get bilches from Laduree too. Tonight, Christmas night: a brined turkey Brussels sprouts with creme fraiche, chestnut stuffing, and those buches de Noel. As always in Paris, each thing has a thing associated with it, a story: The turkey was ordered, argued over (take two small ones, I don't want two small ones, etc.).

  ***

  I was, if anything, a slightly too complacent universalist when I arrived in Paris and have become a far too melancholic particularist as we get ready to leave, someone who believes in the spirit of places, although he always expects to be outside them, and can pay them only the compliment of eternal comparison.

  Luke, once this winter, brought home the school goldfish, Swimmy, for the weekend. He got up on a chair to stare at his bowl and said hello. No answer. Then he recalled what kind of goldfish it was. "Ca va, Swimmy?" he said at last, "ca va?" speaking the goldfish's language to the goldfish.

  It is better to speak to the goldfish in their own language, and better still just to jump into the bowl and become a goldfish yourself, or try to. Without that immersion you feel a constant temptation to compare them with the nongoldfish you know back home, to say what they are like, to engage in the constant stilted game of comparison. In the end it is better just to say what goldfish do than to say what they are like, goldfish, like Parisians, in the end not being "like" anything, but just busy being, like everything else. Yet the attempt to say what the goldfish are like—they're swimming, they're gold, oh, how they shine—is in its way the sincerest tribute to their glitter.

  ***

  Once again, and reliably, the Christmas lights got themselves tangled, and this time, since the ceilings in the new apartment are higher, and the tree we bought taller, I had to go out and get even more new ones. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars have now been spent by this family on French Christmas tree lights, which will have absolutely no use when we go home. I had to get on a really high ladder this year to toss them onto the tree and felt like something between Will Rogers and one of those people on the old Don Ameche circus show. Luke followed me up the ladder, "helping," and I could sense in him this year not so much admiration as sheer impatience, an almost unbeatable Oedipal urge. I can do that as well as the next guy, as well as you can.

  Our Parisian friends Agnes and Richard came over this year for the tree trimming and laughed as they saw me lassoing the tree. "No, no," Agnes explained, "the idea is to hold them up in two strands and drape them on like an apron, and then they tie in the back."

  "I can't believe he never thought of that," Martha said. The real Christmas story is not about Jesus and/or Mary, or the Wise Men, but about poor Joseph, sound asleep under the stable, glad that this first time, at least, everyone is busy, and no one is counting on him to put up the lights.

  ***

  All I can do is trace something, flip open the red plastic lid of the machine to draw little bits of Paris. Luke's school, for instance, is on the rue Saint-Dominique. You take the 69 bus to get there, and it goes down the rue du Bac, and then along the rue de Grenelle, narrow and twisting, with the high walls and plastered fronts of other schools for older children and government buildings alongside, broken now and then by a lace curtain front on a bistro where no one ever seems to go. Often, the 69 can't make the turn onto the rue de Grenelle because someone has parked on the sidewalk, half on the street. Then the bus driver just stops, blows his horn, and folds his arms. We'l
l wait it out, like a war. In a rush, a high, the bus breaks out after three minutes into the esplanade des Invalides, the huge, flat, officially forbidden lawn—though, on a Wednesday afternoon, I once did see two brave and determined Americans playing Frisbee there (you could tell they were Americans because they looked thirty and were dressed like six-year-olds). The golden covered dome of the church stands straight up behind, not looming but preening, and the Invalides itself sits below, an old military hospital with the two horses incised on its front, combining splendor with the odd barrackslike solidity, the bureaucratic confidence of the architecture of the grand siecle.

  The bus whizzes across, witness to this old beauty too many times, and pushes along to the real heart of the Seventh, and Grenelle warms up. The rue Cler, which breaks off it, is one of the nicest shopping and marche streets in Paris, and it acts as a heart for the neighborhood, warming even the chilly great avenues of Tour Maubourg and Rapp. They are lined with chestnuts and planes, and there is more art nouveau architecture there than perhaps anywhere else in Paris save the Sixteenth.

  Luke's school is a block up, on the rue Saint-Dominique; Grenelle is one of those sandwiched streets, between the truly busy Saint-Dominique and the rue Cler, where there are two lingerie stores to a block (how can women wear so much underwear?). Luke's school has an archway for an entrance and is set back in a deep courtyard, with geraniums and ivy tumbling over the courtyard walls. On warm days the single classroom window is open, and you see the (overregimented) kindergarten children, already in their rows. Since we still feel that eight-thirty to four-thirty is just too long a day for a four-year-old, we have arranged for me to pick up Luke every day at three.