Paris to the Moon (22 page)

We went to a lot of parks and rode a lot of carousels. In the Luxembourg Gardens is a completely unsupervised playground that's run on lines inspired by the last chapter
of Lord of the Flies.
There is a spinning red platter onto which little children are thrown by bigger ones, who whip it around, with the terrified little ones kept from flying off by sheer centripetal force. There is a weird ski lift-style conveyance that kids cling to with their fingers, dangling ten feet in the air over nothing but hard pavement. There are jungle gyms the kids climb on, to be knocked off the top bars by informal gangs of larger kids. There is not a safety belt, a padded surface, or a liability lawyer anywhere to be found. (Twenty years ago my wife and I, on our first date, saw Truffaut's
Small Change.
We loved the sequence in which a child falls out of a sixth-story window and walks away unhurt. In our early Francophile moments we saw this as charming French fantasy In fact, it was pure cinema verite. Luke attends a weekly gym class for two-year-olds, along with heart breakingly exquisite little girls named Amandine and Jolie and Neige. The children are routinely sent leaping from high, splintery boards onto low, uncushioned ones.)

At dusk, however, a uniformed surveillant emerges from a windowless shed at the center of the gardens and blows a whistle, and everyone goes home. The child who has his hands around your child's throat lets go, helps him up, dusts off his
tablier,
takes his mother's hand, and trudges toward the gates. The vicious big kids help the terrified small kids off the spinning red platter. The play routine at the gardens explains French history: The restrictive Old Regime, represented by the carousel, leads to the anarchy of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, represented by the playground; then Napoleon emerges in uniform to blow his whistle and call everybody to order. (Or it could be the occupation, the Fourth Republic, and de Gaulle emerging in uniform.) Between the carousels and the circuses and a wealth of Charlie Chaplin movies, to which Luke developed a deep, sober attachment, we seemed, blessedly, to have skipped right past the
B
's.

***

Then, last Christmas, we went back to New York for three days. A friend brought a pile of tapes for a jet-lagged Luke to watch in the bedroom while we had dinner. I should have guessed from the ominous, atypical silence coming from the bedroom that something was off. Scooping up my exhausted little boy at the end of the evening, I noticed that he was looking unusually withdrawn. Then, right there in the backseat of a New York City taxicab, he suddenly looked up and said quietly, "Daddy, I like Barney."

"You like
what
?" I said.

"I like Barney," he said, and he turned over and went to sleep. The next morning we broke down and let him watch the video again—we were pretty jet-lagged too—and that was enough. It was like what they used to tell you about heroin: One taste, and you're hooked for good.

"I want Barney," he would announce early in the morning. He began
to whine
for Barney: "I want Barney, I want Barney." When we got back to Paris (the tapes somehow got into our bags), the need for Barney went right on. It even got worse. We'd be trying to watch one of the long, thoughtful French things that are good for your soul and your French—
Bouillon de Culture
or
Droit d'Auteurs,
or even just the dubbed version of
NYPD Blue
("
Ah, c'est un houlot difficile, ce travail de policier, Inspecteur Sipowicz
")
-—
and Luke would appear with a Barney tape. We had fled to Paris to escape our appointment with Barney, and Barney had come to meet us there.

Not wanting to be a bad or unduly coercive parent, I thought, Well, he has a right to his pleasures, but I too have a right—indeed a duty—to tell him what I think of them. We began to have a regular daily exchange.

"Daddy, I
like
Barney," he would say with elaborately feigned nonchalance, coming into my office first thing in the morning.

"Well, I don't like Barney," I would say, frankly

"You like B.J.?" he would ask, tauntingly. B.J. is one of Barney's even more inane and adenoidal sidekicks.

"I love Ernie and Bert," I would say, trying to put a positive spin on my position. "I love the carousel. I love the circus. I love Charlie Chaplin."

"I
like Barney," he would begin again, and it would go on.

Naturally it occurred to us that the pro-Barney campaign was a resourceful and in many ways courageous and admirable show of independence on the part of a two-and-a-half-year-old who might otherwise have been smothered by his parents' overbearing enthusiasms. We put up minimal Barney resistance. More tapes arrived from America; more tapes got popped in and played.

We tried to be tolerant, but Barney takes his toll: the braying voice, the crude direction, the inane mummery of the dancing, the witlessness of the writing. Our dreamed-of Parisian life was becoming unendurable. One afternoon around four-thirty I wandered into the bedroom, where the television is. My wife was, uncharacteristically, drinking a glass of red wine. On the little screen Barney was leading all the kids in one more rousing chorus of "I love you/you love me." We finished the bottle of Burgundy together. On the screen Barney sang, and our son moved his lips in time.

***

What puzzled me of course was why. Loving Barney in Paris was partly a way of teasing his parents, but it was not
simply a
way of teasing his parents; it was too deep, too emotional for that. Nor had Barney yet crossed the ocean, so it wasn't any kind of peer pressure from the French kids he played with in class and in the courtyard every day. In Paris, in fact, almost all the childhood icons are those that have been in place for forty years: stuffy, bourgeois Babar; conniving, witty Asterix and Obelix; and imperturbable Lucky Luke, the Franco-American cowboy in perpetual battle with the four Dalton brothers. Although these characters from time to time appear in cartoons, they remain locked in their little worlds of satire and storytelling. There is no Barney in France, and there is no French Barney. Whatever spell was working on my son, it was entirely, residually American.

There are certain insights that can come to an American only when he is abroad, because only there does the endless ribbon of American television become segmented enough so that you can pay attention to its parts, instead of just being overwhelmed by the relentlessness of its presence. In the middle of the winter I happened to see, during some stray roundup of the year's events on CNN International, a clip of another familiar American figure, his arms around his wife and child, swaying and humming as he watched fireworks going off. Suddenly I got it. The nose; the rocking motion; above all, the squinty-eyed, aw-shucks, just-a-big-lug smile: Barney is Bill Clinton for three-year-olds. Or, rather, Bill Clinton is Barney for adults. He serves the same role for jumpy American liberals that Barney does for their children: He reassures without actually instructing. The physical resemblance alone is eerie. There's the odd combination of
hauteur
and
rondeur
(both are very tall without really being imposing), the perpetually swaying body, the unvarying smile, even the disconcerting chubby thighs—everything but the purple skin. Barney and Bill are not amiable authority figures, like the Friendly Giant and Ronald Reagan. They are, instead, representations of pure need: Wanting to be hugged, they hug.

For the first time, I also understood Clinton hating, of the violent irrational kind that, when I left America, was being practiced on the editorial page of the
Times
and in the New
Republic
and had always seemed incomprehensible, directed, as it was, at so anodyne a character. Suddenly I saw that the psychology of the Clinton hater was exactly that of the Barney basher; the objections were not moral but peevishly aesthetic. Like Barney, Bill stripped away our pet illusions by showing just how much we could do without. We had persuaded ourselves that the modern child needed irony, wit, humor, parody to be reached and affected;
Sesame Street
and
Bullwinkle
were our exhibits in this argument. Barney showed that this was not the case. At the same time, we had persuaded ourselves that the modern citizen, similarly wary (he is, after all, merely the
Bullwinkle
viewer grown old), could be recalled to liberalism only through a heightened, self-conscious, soul-searching high-mindedness. Bill showed that
this
was not the case. Both dinosaur and Arkansas governor had discovered that the way to win the hearts of their countrymen was to reduce their occupation to its most primitive form. Where Kermit the Frog, on
Sesame Street,
had sung the principle of brotherhood to children through the poetic metaphor of his own greenness, Barney just grabbed the kids and told them that he loved them and that they loved him too, damn it. Where Mario Cuomo had orated about Lincoln and the immigrants and the metaphor of family, Bill Clinton just held out his arms and watched people leap into them. It turns out that you don't need to be especially witty or wise to entertain children, just as you don't need to believe in anything much to be an extremely effective president. All you need is to know your audience's insecurities and how to keep swaying in time to them forever.

***

We had kept Barney in quarantine, for the most part, and though Neige and Jolie and Amandine passed through the house, it was mostly to sing lovely French songs—"Pomme de Reinette" and "Frere Jacques"—and play with Luke's puppet theater. Then we decided to hold a party to celebrate the coming of spring, and I went out to Mulot to get a four-part chocolate cake. When I came back to the apartment, half an hour later, the roomful of lively children whom I had left drawling in
haute
French was silent. They were all in the bedroom. I walked in—no cuckolded husband can ever have entered his own bedroom with more dread about what he would find there—and saw the three girls spread out on the bed, their crinolines beautifully plumped, their eyes wide, their mouths agape. Barney was in France, and the kids were loving him. The three perfect French children looked on, hardly able to understand the language, yet utterly transfixed. I held out cake. Nothing doing. Barney was swaying. B.J. was prancing. The kids on the show were mugging like crazy and everyone was singing.

It was too late. "How do you sing that 'I loove you, you loove me'?" Amandine asked haltingly in French, when the program ended.

"I love you, you love me," Jolie answered swiftly. "Happy family" Luke prompted. For the next week the song resounded from the street the way "La Ronde" had, long before.

***

A couple of weeks later, at breakfast, Luke made an announcement. "Daddy," he said, "I
don't
like Barney."

"You don't like Barney?" I asked, incredulous, delighted. "No, I
don't
like Barney" He paused. "I like to
watch
Barney" He had stumbled, in a Barneycentric manner, on the essential formula that could be applied to almost every American spectacle: I don't like the 0. J. Simpson trial, I like to
watch
the O. J. Simpson trial; I don't like Geraldo Rivera, I like
to watch
Geraldo Rivera. And most basic of all: I don't like television, I like to
watch
television. When he watches Barney now, it's with a look in his eye that I know too well and that I can only call the American look, the look of someone who, though he has seen right through it, still can't take his eyes away—one of us, despite it all.

Lessons from Things, Cristmas Journal 3

A French school term that I have learned to love is
lecons des choses,
lessons from things. It refers to a whole field of study, which you learn in class, or used to, that traces civilization's progress from stuff to things. The wonderful posters in Deyrolle, which Martha and I love and have collected, were made for
lecons des choses.
They show the passage of coffee from the bean to the porcelain coffeepot, of wine from the vine and soil to the bottle, of sugar from the cane to the
clafoutis.
They always show the precise costume that the beans and grapes and stuff end up in: the chateau bottling, the painted coffeepot, the label on the jam jar. The Deyrolle posters simultaneously remind you that even the best things always have some stuff leaking out their edges—a bit of the barnyard, a stain of soil—and that even the worst stuff is really OK, because it can all be civilized into things. The
choses,
the things, are what matters.

Of all the
lecons des choses
I have absorbed in Paris, the most important has come from learning to cook. I cooked a bit in New York, Thanksgiving dinner and a filet mignon or two, and summers by the grill, like every American guy. But here I cook compulsively, obsessively, waking up with a
plat
in mind, balancing it with wine and side dishes throughout the working day ("Do I dare poach a Brussels sprout?"), shopping, anticipating six o'clock, when I can start, waiting for the perfectly happy moment when I begin, as one almost always does, no matter what one is cooking, by chopping onions.

The beautiful part of cooking lies in the repetition, living the same participles, day after day: planning, shopping, chopping, roasting, eating, and then vowing, always, never again to start on something so ambitious again . . . until the dawn rises, with another dream of something else. (Hunger, I find, plays a very small role in it all.) I have learned to make fifty or sixty different dinners: roasted
poulet de Bresse, blanquette de veau a vanille; carre d'agneau; gigot de sept heures.
I can
clafoutis
an apple, poach a pear, peel a chestnut. Big dishes, big food. Much
too
big food, the old cooking. (There is a little culinary bookstore on the rue du Bac that sells menus from the turn of the century. How did people, rich people, middle-class people, eat so much? Our stomachs
must
have shrunk, an argument for the plasticity of appetite, or at least of tummies. Is it fashion, culture, though? Or is it simply central heating; is it that we need fewer calories now than then and eat like West Indians—ginger and lime and rum marinades—because our indoor climate is now West Indian?)