by Adam Gopnik
The two little girls were excellent swimmers, veterans of the Ritz pool, I supposed. They splashed back and forth easily, and Luke manfully struggled after them, head up, losing it, swallowing water and coming up exhausted and clinging to the side and spitting out, his face scrunched up in misery, but then shaking his head violently ("I'm fine! I'm fine!") when I came up and, a little too paternal, a little too obvious, pounded him on the back and asked him if he was OK. Then he shot back out to the girls in the middle of the pool. Pretty quickly he worked out a good method of getting around; first clinging to the side of the pool, then shooting out in backstroke, and then going into a quick three-stroke combined breaststroke-doggy paddle over to the girls—a wonderful simulacrum of a guy who is just an easy, varied swimmer. (He swam, I realized, exactly the way that after five years I spoke French, which also involved a lot of clinging to the side of the pool and sudden bravura dashes out to the deep end to impress the girls, or listeners.)
I hovered around him, worried—I was snob enough to be tickled that he had learned to swim at the Ritz pool in Paris but insecure enough to worry about what his mother would say if I lost him at the Ritz pool; after all, it was, at its deep end, effectively as deep as the ocean, three times over the head of a small boy— only to have him shake me off, again and again.
I didn't mind, really I have never seen a human being before in a state of pure liquid unadulterated joy. The little girls, to my surprise, for I had had more bitter experiences at his age, seemed to accept him absolutely as an equal and fellow diver and Ritz habitue, a bee-fin of this damp beau monde, albeit one with a bit of water in his lungs from time to time. And if his lungs were filling up with water, swallow by swallow, he didn't care. He just followed the red bathing suit and the blond braid, wherever they led him.
The Australian au pair and I huddled around the edges of the pool and made conversation. She had been in Paris for only a couple of weeks, she explained, had flown right over from Sydney. She seemed unperturbed, not even much interested in her surroundings, Australians being like that, I suppose: From the Sydney beach to the Ritz pool, all just water, isn't it?
After about half an hour Ada paddled over. "I want a chocolat chaud," she said, imperiously. She looked at me just the way that Lorelei Lee must have looked at her sugar daddy at the Paris Ritz, so I gathered up the children—Luke could barely speak, he was so filled with water—and we went up to the cafe on the terrace overlooking the pool. I strode up as boldly as I could manage to the white-shirted attendant behind the counter and ordered three hot chocolates and three cakes for the children and then a cafe creme for me and a Badoit for the Australian girl. I shuddered inside, imagining what it was all going to cost. As I say, I am hedonistic but not heedless, and like Luke, only with less fortitude, I knew that I was out of my depth and swallowing water.
After a mysterious fifteen-minute wait the attendant reemerged with the chocolate in silver pitchers and the cake— simple pound cake with lemon glaze—on silver plates and served them to the children. Ada looked bored and indifferent and demanded some more lait chaud for her chocolate, after she had tasted it. She soon had a chocolate mustache, but it didn't make her look like a child. She looked more like Aramis, the youngest and most imperious of the musketeers.
Luke, never a big eater, watched Cressida. I saw what there was to watch: She sipped her chocolate, daintily but not as one making a big deal about daintiness. She was just a naturally elegant sipper. I drank my coffee, gulped it, really, and thought, gracelessly enough, about the bill running up. The two girls chatted in the way children do, effortlessly and seamlessly and in this case in two languages but without actually seeming to exchange information. ("You know what? You're a Looney Tunes." Laughter. "No, Oscar is a Looney Tunes." More laughter, in which Luke joined.)
After the first hot chocolate had been dispensed with, Ada summoned over the waiter with a wave of her hand and said, "Encore un chocolat chaud"—that is, "Another hot chocolate." "Say please," I said instantly. She gave me a steady, opaque, not-only-are-you-not-my-father-but-you-couldn't-begin-to-afford-to-be-my-father look. But then she said please. We all went for a second round, hot chocolate and cake and bottled water, and I felt like Charlie Chaplin in The Immigrant—it had been Luke's favorite movie, back when he would stay home all day and watch Chaplin videos while I worked—when Edna Purviance starts ordering beans and he reaches into his pocket to count his change and finds the quarter he had picked up on the sidewalk isn't there anymore. A third round of cake followed the second round of hot chocolate—Luke left his untouched, leaving three cakes on the plate in all, which I eventually ate—and then I told Luke it was time to go.
"No," he said definitely. And the children ran back down the stairs to the pool and played some more, dodging in and out among the chaise longues. I went over to the attendant, asked for the check, and signed it, trying to feign the nonchalance of Hem ordering another bottle of Dom Perignon for Sister Dietrich, of Dodi Fayed before his last journey.
I got him home at last, around six o'clock. Martha was mildly irascible, nursing the baby on a chaise longue near the window, all by herself all afternoon, but she melted a little when I told her the story. "You won't believe who we met at the pool today," I began. Luke seemed quietly happy, nonchalant. The improbability of the encounter simply hadn't struck him. That Cressida Taylor would be swimming in a red one-piece at the Ritz pool on the same Wednesday afternoon that we were there ... He had no sense of the size of the world or even of Paris. His haunts were the world's haunts; his world was the world. This is an emotion shared, I suppose, only by children and aristocrats; everyone goes where we go. Where else would you expect to meet people? (I have none of it and in my heart always expect to be alone, the one man sitting awkwardly at a table in the wrong restaurant after everyone else has left it. When I see my wife and children coming down the boulevard to meet me, I am dazzled. The baby, Olivia, was, I could see, a little like me, constantly pulling away from her mother's breast to give me the same anxious, reassuring smile: You of all people! Here of all places!)
For the next four weeks we went every Wednesday to the pool at the Ritz, to meet Ada and Cressida and their nanny and to swim and treat to hot chocolate and cake. Although Ada was a constant presence ("I don't think I shall swim today," she would say. "She's a bit moody," Cressida would explain, unemotionally), I could sense that a bond, a romance had begun between Luke and Cressida, in the simple sense that the unstated had emerged from the informal. I recognized the signs: It lay not in their having fun together but in their not needing to have fun together, in a quiet, you-here-me-there, however-deep-you-can-go-in-the-deep-end-I'll-go-deeper understanding. I remembered the words that Gilberte had said to Marcel, somewhere in Proust, I think in that beautiful section titled "Place-Names: The Name," where the two children—if they are children; I can never really figure out in Proust if they are eight or eighteen—meet at the Champs-Elysees. "Now we can begin," Gilberte says. "You are on my side." The two of them were on the same side too.
You are on my side. Martha and I had once always been on the same side too, and without thinking about it at all. Now, here in the city that a notion of romance, a need for one last romantic adventure, had led us to, we found that we didn't care for each other less, yet loved each other differently. Our moving to Paris, which was intended, almost too self-consciously, I suppose, to extend that feeling—to keep each other on each other's side without the fretfulness and noise of New York life, without dinner parties and gallery openings and Burmese takeout and the number 6 uptown for life—had had the unexpected effect of plopping us down in the same pool with the same hot chocolate to sip day after day after day, and this at a time when we both were already, so to speak, practiced swimmers. We began to take almost too much pleasure, I suppose, almost too much delight, in the passage of our son's first romance because it recalled to us the landscape of limitations that surround all romance, the way that romance is a thing always best allie
d to difficulty: the water pouring into your lungs; the trombone-playing Australian looking over your shoulder and calling you into a towel; the encumbering presence of a moody hot chocolate—addicted best friend. Martha and I had always been so close; but now we were so near, and that is different.
We had run away to Paris that first time, twenty years earlier, back when we had known each other for six months, and even though it would be possible to say that that first time we were merely playing at running away, since we had families and houses waiting safely for us back in Montreal, the truth is that the existence of the families and houses was what made it, weirdly, not play at all. There really was someone back there waiting for you with a towel and calling you out of the pool, and we had decided not to listen. This time running away was a kind of play, since there was no one to run away from save ourselves, and your self always catches up.
Perhaps in the end this is why Paris is "romantic." It marries both the voluptuous and restricted. It is not the yeses but the noes of Paris, not the licenses it offers love but the prohibitions it puts in its way, that makes it powerful. All the noes of French life, the way that each gate to each park is bounded by that endless ten-thousand-word fine-print announcement from the government announcing all the things you are absolutely not allowed to do in the park, contribute in some odd way to the romance of Paris. Strictness, rules, disciplines, boundaries dam the libido, as Freud knew, even when you are five, and make it overflow backward. It is the knowledge of how awkward your splashing feet will look to the rich women on the chaises that prevents you, tantalizingly, from kissing the mermaid's invisible nipple.
Sometimes now, watching Martha—watching her nurse the new baby, or just lying beside her at night and watching her sleep, practically gobbling up sleep, her brow furrowed, in her new mother exhaustion—I thought that though I knew her better than I had ever known anyone, I didn't know her now nearly as well as I had when our days were broken with the thousand small distractions of life in New York. She had been my Cressida, unique in a pool, and in Paris had had to evolve from a fantasy figure into a reality principle for a chaotic husband and a small boy and then a baby. In New York we would meet at dinner and spill out the day's discontents, and they were always discontents with other people. Our discontents now crystallized not so much around each other—we hadn't come to that quite yet—as around tiny things that we held each other responsible for and that each of us pursued with silent, independent fury. Instead of rebelling together against our common prohibitions, we nursed our little exasperations.
I, for instance, had become absolutely furious about the long hallway in our apartment, which ran all the way from the kitchen, where I cooked, way in the back, to the dining room up in front, a constant jostling corridor of plates, forgotten Evian water, and spilled spices, like a trade route in the Byzantine Empire. Back and forth we went, again and again, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (Kitchens in Parisian apartments are always off at the back, at the end of a long corridor, since there were originally no kitchens, or else because they were for servants, who were expected to be Out There in Back.) I didn't exactly blame Martha for the length of time it took to get dinner to the table, cold, but I didn't exactly forgive her for it either.
Martha's exasperation, for which she didn't exactly blame me, but which she thought I might have done something about if I were a more efficient person than I am, was the absence of a decent copy shop. She looked after the bills and the dry cleaning and the rent—all the small logistics of life—and she couldn't find places where you could just go in, hand in a manuscript, and have them copy and collate it, one, two, three, just like that. They had instead machines where you had to feed in two-franc pieces, page by page. (The government discourages video rental stores in Paris, in order to protect the little repertory cinemas whose business, its quite true, would otherwise be destroyed. I don't know who's being protected by the discouragement of Kinko-style copy shops; the remaining scriveners and clerks and copyists, I suppose.) The absence of napkins drove her crazy, too. She loved order and cleanliness, and the refusal of a French take-out shop to give more than one napkin per sandwich made her wild. "They hoard napkins," she would complain. "It's as though it's still wartime." New York, America, where paper napkins shower down like confetti on New Year's Eve, had become, in her memory, napkin heaven, napkin world.
One day, when I was working in my little office on the latest subject that the office at home had sent in, Martha came storming into my office.
"What's this?" she said, angry as I had ever seen her, waving a sheaf of envelopes and paper with a blue and gold crest on it.
"What's what?" I asked, though I knew, or thought I knew.
"These bills," she said, waving white paper with a blue and gold crest on it. "What is this all/or?" she cried.
"Hot chocolate," I said weakly.
"Hot chocolate," she repeated scornfully.
"And cake," I added.
"Do you know how much this costs?" she said.
"Of course I know. But what can I do? It's Cressida."
"Say no." She looked at me darkly. "That's a lot of hot chocolate," she added suspiciously.
"It's Ada too," I explained. "She has a habit."
She walked away. I wondered if she really thought I might be having an affair at the Ritz and if, in some secret way, she wished I were.
Three weeks, and then four went by, and I depended on the children's happiness to support, to float my own. Luke and I, in the vestiaire, would always have the same two conversations or variations on them. First we would have a sharp, pointed exchange about the nature of buoyancy. What makes people float in water? Well, people are lighter than water, I explained. If you were made of water yourself or well, metal, or something, you would sink. He thought this sounded weird, and I thought so too, actually. People certainly don't seem lighter than water. They seem just the opposite. People seem heavy as can be compared with water. People are obviously heavier than water; just touch them and then touch water. I knew it was the right answer, but it seemed as unconvincing to me as it did to him. Then we would discuss the conventions of nudity. Why was it OK to be nude in the vestiaire but not in the pool or around the pool? It was a matter of custom and convention, I explained, or tried to. The metaphysics of modesty was even harder to explain than the physics of floating.
I joked with him about the little girls. The sublime Ada and the glorious Cressida, I called them, and those became their names. "What means sublime?' he demanded, and I gave some more examples of things, besides Ada, that were scary but irresistible (though I will say right here that I have never met anyone quite as sublime as Ada).
(What does make things float, by the way? That they are lighter than the thing they float in sounds fine when you say it— I know it is the right answer—but it is not a convincing answer because things, however much lighter they may be than the thing they float in, are still so heavy, too heavy to keep up.)
Finally, after about four weeks of joy, Luke had to miss a Wednesday session, I forget precisely why: His class was going on a trip to a goat farm to see how chevre is made or off to an apple farm to help press cider. They were always doing things like that. Anyway, I went to the Ritz myself, as always, feeling the eyes of al Fayed on me, in the person of the sunglassed security men who hid discreetly at the entrance. I got into my swimming suit, my body tensed for the contest to get Luke's suit on and get him pointed in the right direction, down toward the pool, and I was a little disconcerted when I found I didn't have to do it.
The girls were already in the pool.
"Where's Luca?" Cressida cried when she saw me. "Where's Luca?" She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: "Where's Loo-ka?,"just like Audrey Hepburn saying, "Take the pic-ture," in Funny Face.
He couldn't come, I explained; his school was doing something that day.
"I'm so sad," she said,
and made a face. "I'm so very sad. I wanted to swim with Luca." And she swam away, inconsolable. I swam a little myself, and then I slipped away before I could buy hot chocolate for the rich little girls, half expecting to be expelled from the Ritz, a child masher, buying hot chocolate only to serve his son's romance.
I enjoyed having the Ritz to myself, for once, though, before we had to leave it. I went down to the hammam—that's what the French call a steam bath—and read the instructions. There were nearly as many prohibitions as those posted on the gates to the public park, although these were more varied. Translated, they read:
1. The shower is obligatory before using the installations.
2. It is forbidden to shave in the sauna.
3. Reading of newspapers is strongly discouraged in the hammam and sauna.
4. Children of less than twelve years are not authorized to use the installations.
"Obligatory," "forbidden," "strongly discouraged," and "not authorized": four ways of saying "not allowed," each slightly different, each implying slightly different penalties. Such elegant variations on the theme of No! And these intended for the rich too. You can't do that here, the French taste for order reaching even into the rich man's locker room. Who would want to read a newspaper in the steam bath? The ink would get all over your hand. It was like the warnings on the park gates. Who aside from a French functionary would think so encyclopedically about all the things you can't do in a park? But then only if you can't, do you want to. If you can, you don't.