Paris Was Ours (26 page)

Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That’s
something like living in Paris for years, even decades. It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven. The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living. Paris intimidates its visitors when it doesn’t infuriate them, but behind both sentiments dwells a sneaking suspicion that maybe the French have got it right, that they have located the
juste milieu
, and that their particular blend of artistic modishness and cultural conservatism, of welfare-statism and intense individualism, of clear-eyed realism and sappy romanticism—that these proportions are wise, time-tested, and as indisputable as they are subtle.

If so, then why is the flâneur so lonely? So sad? Why is there such an elegiac feeling hanging over this city with the gilded cupola gleaming above the Emperor’s Tomb and the foaming, wild horses prancing out of a sea of verdigris on the roof of the Grand Palais? This city with the geometric tidiness of its glass pyramid, Arch of Triumph, and the chilly portal imprinted by the Grande Arche on a cloudy sky? Why is he unhappy, this foreign flâneur, even when he strolls past the barnacled towers of Notre-Dame soaring above the Seine and a steep wall so dense with ivy it looks like the side of a galleon sinking under moss-laden chains?

WHEN I ARRIVED
in Paris I was a fairly young-looking forty-three and when I left I was nearly sixty, snowy-haired and jowly.
In the beginning I’d cruise along the Seine near the Austerlitz train station under a building that was cantilevered out over the shore on pylons. Or I’d hop over the fence and cruise the pocket park at the end of the Île Saint-Louis, where I lived. There I’d either clatter through the bushes or descend the steps to the quay that wrapped around the prow of the island like the lower deck of a sinking ship. Garlands of ivy dangled down the white walls from the deck above. I kept thinking of those lines in Ezra Pound’s Second Canto where a Greek ship is immobilized at sea and transformed by the gods:

And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk,

And tenthril where cordage had been,
grape-leaves on the rowlocks,

Heavy vine on the oarshafts,

And, out of nothing, a breathing,
hot breath on my ankles,

Beasts like shadows in glass,
a furred tail upon nothingness.

I had to step over the giant rusting rings on the quayside to which boats could be roped—though I never saw a boat moored there. When the
bateaux-mouches
would swing round the island, their klieg lights were so stage-set bright that we’d all break apart and try to rearrange our clothing. I kept hoping I’d run once more into an ardent, muscular lad who came home with me several times but never told me his name or gave me his number; all this boy would admit to was that he was kept in great style, in a town house in the Marais, by a German businessman who greatly resembled … me. (Busman’s holiday, apparently.)

Of course most people, straight and gay, think that cruising is pathetic or sordid —
but for me, at least, some of my hap
piest moments have been spent making love to a stranger beside dark, swiftly moving water below a glowing city. If you’re a history buff, you can look at men (but don’t touch them) in the late afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens up and down the gravel walkway behind the Orangerie. At night the whole place rocks—or did, at least, when I was still motivated to jump over fences and prowl (illegally) the moonlit pathways between ancient and modern statues or circle the mammoth round pond in which prehistoric carp doze in the ooze and surface in a feeding frenzy only when someone scatters breadcrumbs.

I CAN REMEMBER
the heady days of 1981, when I paid a long visit to friends in Paris. When I moved to France in 1983, the euphoria was still in the air. I’d been conditioned by three decades of gay life in America to be in a permanent state of alert about possible police raids of bars, baths, and cruising places; equally feared were roving gangs of queer-bashers. But in Paris the streets and parks and saunas and back rooms seemed positively tranquil by contrast.

Socially, gays were treated differently as well. In New York, at least in the 1960s and 1970s, gays seldom ventured to gatherings out of the ghetto, whereas in Paris my American lover and I were invited everywhere and received as a couple, even if sometimes we were the only gay males present. In New York, liberal straights would have found a way to reassure us that we were really, truly welcome, whereas in Paris (at least among the well-heeled, sophisticated, arty people we were meeting) no one ever mentioned our sexuality. Or if someone did, it was in
a general spirit of ribaldry, which so often presided over those worldly, lighthearted conversations.

FOR ME PARIS
lives in its details—the blue windows set in the doors of the boxes at the Opéra-Comique, the only (and magical) source of illumination during that moment just after the house lights are lowered and before the stage curtain is raised. The drama with which the waiters cluster around a table in a first-class restaurant and all lift the silver bell-shaped covers at the same moment to reveal the contents of the plates—and the pedantry with which one of the waiters explains in singsong detail exactly what each dish contains. The pleasant shock of the klieg lights that suddenly turn night into day when a
bateau-mouche
glides by. The melancholy mood (worthy of an old-fashioned production of
Pelléas et Mélisande
) of an autumn day when one rows over to one of the islands in the Grand Lac of the Bois de Boulogne in order to have lunch in a deserted restaurant —
or the squalid excite
ment when one staggers through the bushes nearby at night to see the theatrical costumes and maneuvers of glamorous transvestite prostitutes from Brazil striking poses in the glare of passing headlights.

The Sky Is Metallic

T
HE SKY IS
metallic and draped over a square dome of the École Militaire. There are cobbles on the boulevard, and a Parisian in her mid-fifties walks by wearing a navy blue blazer, an imaginary crest of belonging on her breast pocket, shiny red padded ballerina shoes to offset her shiny blond padded hair. She walks with tailored yet wary purpose, as one who has spent a lifetime being what her status and looks demanded.

Four people, two male-female couples, also in their fifties, stop to look at a street map on the avenue de la Motte-Picquet. Their waistlines, their roomy shorts in September, their open-toed comfort nylon footwear, and a royal blue golfing visor propped in female hair identify them as North American. One of them, a white man wearing a knee brace, says something out loud, and all four turn to one another and laugh loudly together, on the street, showing all at once their teeth, the inside of their mouths, gray tongues, unconscious, easy pleasure, camaraderie. This communal laughter between couples, between male and female, signals tourists,
étrangers
. The sound of Paris is not laughter. But it is not only their laughter; there is a plate-glass optimism to their faces that is not from these parts.

Across the road and outside the military academy there is a plaque behind the number 82 bus stop. On it is written:

On 12 December 1941, the German military police, assisted by the French police, arrested 743 French Jewish people, the majority of whom were war veterans and
professions liberales
. They were held in the riding school of the Commandant Bossut of the École Militaire. The 743 were interned in the German camp of Royallieu in Compiègne, where some died from hunger and cold. On 24 March 1942, most of the 743 were deported on the first convoy to leave France for the destination of Auschwitz, where they were executed.

From the road you can see the green roof and concrete facade of the riding school where these French citizens were held. There are 332 plaques outside schools in Paris commemorating the eleven thousand Jewish children taken from Parisian schools during the Occupation who never returned.

There is a fault line to the city that weighs heavy. Paris and its people were occupied. They were a people that fought, fled, surrendered, resisted, rescued, collaborated, kept silent, watched, much as any occupied population does. De Gaulle’s defiant rhetoric on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville on the day of the city’s liberation could not erase the humiliation and compromise of four years of Nazi occupation. Parisians do not assume a moral zone of black and white. Nothing is unequivocal, absolute, indisputable.

Paris is grayness and fractured humanity, an acceptance of fault and frailty that is disconcerting and disorienting to the Anglo-Saxon system of beliefs. It is easy to confuse the French
propensity for doubt with moral escapism. In 2003, France objected to entering the war with Iraq; they questioned the very existence of “weapons of mass destruction,” those imaginary stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons that proved so effective in rallying public support for an immediate invasion of Iraq. For their objection and doubt, the French government was denounced by a swath of politicians and media commentators: the London
Times
predicted France’s diplomatic future in “unsplendid isolation in the anteroom occupied by history’s losers,” while the
New York Post
derided France as “the axis of weasel.”

I came to Paris fifteen years ago, aged twenty-six, with an English sense of right and wrong: self-righteous, simplistic, judgmental, puritanical, an island mentality. The English belief system has long found perfect expression in the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, in the chivalric code of honor, the valiant knight, the concepts of feudal courtesy and unquestioning courage. When Gawaine, Arthur’s well-loved knight and nephew, manages to fatally wound his own cousin Uwaine in a jousting contest and a case of mistaken identity, Uwaine forgives his cousin with the dying words, “Do not grieve, for all men must die sometime, and I could not have died by a nobler hand than yours.” When I came to Paris, I believed in queuing, apology, duty, ideals. I believed that life could be achieved by will.

I traveled recently to England for a wedding service that took place in the chapel of an Oxford college. The bride and groom, thoroughly modern media and medical professionals, chose “Jerusalem” as one of their hymns. Written by William Blake in 1808 as a prelude to his epic
Milton
, the words were set
to music some one hundred years later, in 1916, for a Fight for Right campaign meeting, in an effort to rouse toppled morale and reignite stoicism to continue fighting the First World War. The opening stanza is

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?