Paris Was Ours (30 page)

Only recently, M. Grand used the term “irreconcilable differences” to describe what happened to us. It’s an expression that has long made me queasy, but it’s entirely apt in our case. So, not a year into our beautiful apartment with
cheminées
in every room, parquet floors, exquisitely carved ceilings, Habitat kitchen, and Bellini crib for
le petit
, I left it all and fled, toddler in his Maclaren, back to the United States. It was not a definitive break—there would be some years of back and forth—but something in me knew there was an end here. I felt an unbearable, deep piercing sorrow as I pulled away from this man, this home, this city, this country. I was pulling away our child, as well, and that was an enormous piece of my broken heart. But I had to go.

When people ask why, even if I had to leave M. Grand, I didn’t remain in Paris with the boy, I have a hard time explaining. I felt profoundly that it was not home. As an expat, you are never completely
chez vous
, anywhere, again. However long you remain in your adopted country, you are always at least a little
étranger
. Returning home, you no longer quite belong, either.

Now let’s revisit that word,
litost
. The second sense Kundera speaks of is one that involves resentment, “a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self …
Litost
works like a two-stroke motor. First comes a feeling of torment, then the desire for revenge.”

This second sense, from what I have come to understand, refers to a set of emotions usually limited to one’s youth. In full maturity, the
litost
that operates is that of the first, broader meaning. This word that led me to Paris, to study, fall in love, have a child, also describes the continuing arc of my departure. The resentment for what I lost—though it was I who chose to leave—evolved through the cycles of grief, remorse, longing, ebbing away into inflected memory. I don’t feel any pull to return to the city that remains an important part of who I am. Our son has grown into a young man who is his French father and his American mother in equal measure and, along with two passports, carries two cultures and two very different families within. And he will have his own Paris.

It may have been Gertrude Stein who wrote that to lead a life of any interest, one must first spend time in Paris. It is a place that defines and shapes like no other; its Aphroditic nature can overwhelm or inspire, but it can’t leave you indifferent. Nearly twenty years after leaving, I still feel the deep rivulets Paris made in my heart and in my mind, and they flow on.

La Bourdonneuse

T
WENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
this month, I watched the streets of Paris erupt on the television screen. I was lying on a living room floor in California, but as I watched the fires burn and the cobblestones fly I felt an extraordinarily intimate connection with it all, as though I were seeing the meaning of my own dream.

Only it was not a dream but, rather, a symptom that I suddenly understood. The year before—my fifteenth—I had spent in a girls’ school in Paris, and what came back when I thought of that year was a strange sensation at the base of my throat.

People said it was a lycée in decline, but it was in a fairly elegant neighborhood and it certainly looked impressive. It had a high stone wall with an immense wooden door. If you were as much as a minute late, you had to ring a buzzer, which echoed through the inner court, and then a scowling man opened the door. He was the only male in the building, and this made his presence all the more fearsome. Recently, I saw again the French film
The Red Balloon
. When the boy, Pascal, gets to school, he has to let his balloon go. That’s exactly how it felt when you got to that door—you had to let something go. You hoped that it would still be there when you came out.

Once inside, we sat for hours, mute as stones, in drafty, high-ceilinged rooms. The teachers spoke endlessly, and as they spoke we wrote down what they said word for word on graph paper in small plaid notebooks. We wrote in our “Sunday handwriting,” with a pen in one hand and a ruler in the other, and every now and again, when a teacher felt she’d made an important point, she’d say, “Underline and make a box around it.” The only times we spoke were fraught with terror.

“Lamontier!” a teacher might call out. “Stand up! Button your smock! To the blackboard!”

“Yes, madame.”

“The Jura Mountains are composed of what kind of rock?”

“Boulders, madame.”

“
What?
”

“
Large
boulders, madame.”

If you shamed yourself in front of the class, you might try to make up for it by keeping your notebooks impeccable. At the dime store, the Monoprix, you could buy small packets of pictures to paste in at the relevant points: “View of the Jura Mountains,” or “Crowd Storms the Bastille.”

I still remember how we were assigned our first composition that year: “‘The love of risk has its advantages and its disadvantages.’ Begin by folding your paper in two. At the top of one column, write ‘Advantages.’ Underline and put a box around it. At the top of the next column …”

In science class, we never touched a plant or stirred a solution or peered at an insect through a microscope. We sat silent in the dark, watching slides of plankton, Louis Pasteur, and cowpox projected onto brown peeling plaster walls that made everything look like fried chicken. The teacher droned on in
the background, but all I’ve retained is a single sentence, perhaps because it struck me as oddly heroic: “Drop by drop, the urine forms itself in perpetuity.”

In sewing class, we made gray wool jumpers for nonexistent babies; it must have been a way of saving cloth. The teacher said we could bring our own fabric, but I was the only one who did. She hated me for my small piece of blue-flowered flannel, because it meant she had to change the thread on the one machine. Each time I came up, trembling, to have her sew a seam, she stooped and made runs in my stockings with her needle.

In art class, we had two projects the entire year. We had to draw a stuffed bird “feather by feather” and a moth-eaten corncob “kernel by kernel.” “But, mademoiselle,” the teacher cried one day, seizing my pencil. “You must be more free!”

English class was the one relief. The teacher was kind, and was somewhat embarrassed to have a native speaker in the room, but I never corrected her—not even on the day she had us reciting “Negroes have crispy hair.” This was the one time we could let our voices go without restraint, and we belted out phrases like war chants: “Grandfather, won’t you have grilled kidneys for breakfast?”

Often, there were tears. That year was a crucial one for the girls: if they didn’t pass that grade, it meant they were out of the lycée and into the working class. When exams were handed back, the teachers read out names in order of declining marks. As the list went on, there were cries of “Mouchoir!” — “Handkerchief !” Since my own future was not at stake, I took to bringing a stash of handkerchiefs for the others, and handing them out soon became one of my more important functions.

At the end of the year, several girls who were being dropped were called before the class. Their faces were crimson, and they looked down at their feet.

“And what will you do, mademoiselle?”

“I will work as a baker’s assistant, madame.”

“And you?”

“I will learn to cut hair, madame.”

These were the moments of drama in a tedium so extreme that it was—for me—almost exotic. I lived for the moment, around three o’clock each day, when the man in the adjoining building leaned out the window in his undershirt and watered the plants in his window box. It was a sign that outside the high stone wall that enclosed us, living things were growing. One afternoon, he didn’t appear, and I was overcome by utter desolation. Then I became aware of a catch in my throat. It wasn’t pain but something that demanded release. With my face carefully composed and my lips closed, I made a sound. It was a strange sound, and at first I wasn’t sure whether anyone had heard it or not. But the teacher fell silent. “Qui vient de bourdonner?” she asked in an icy voice. “Who has just ——.” I didn’t know what
bourdonner
meant. I looked it up in my pocket dictionary after class and found that it meant “to hum” or “to buzz.” That’s funny, I thought. I wouldn’t have known what to call it. But I knew it was something more drastic than a hum or a buzz.

Thereafter, the sound issued from me at least once a day. It wasn’t something I planned; it had a life of its own. Though the teacher tried to remain impassive, as the weeks went on she grew increasingly enraged. “We are not going on until we find the
bourdonneuse
,” she would say, her eyes narrowed to slits
as she scanned our faces, row by row. The girls all knew that I was the guilty party, but they would never tell. After class, they teased me in an affectionate way; they were amused and somewhat awed by what they saw as a peculiar form of American bravery. I pretended that it was a kind of joke I performed for them, but it disturbed me. I’d heard of disorders where words came flying out of one’s mouth at inappropriate moments. Was this the beginning?

Lying on the living room floor in California, watching the students’ shouting faces, I had an impulse to look up
bourdonner
in the big dictionary we kept on the mantel. Under the noun,
bourdonnement
, I found “a buzz … a hum.” Then it went on: “a drone … a boom … of bells … bees … a swarm of insects … a buzz in the streets … a crowd.”

So that’s what it was. The teacher had been more right than she knew. That strange sound was the crowd in my throat—and there it was, wild in the streets of Paris.

Paris Is Gone, All Gone

S
INCE
I
BEGAN
teaching Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
, my occupational hazard has been nostalgia. Every fall, alongside my New York University freshmen, I reread Proust’s immense novel, the most potent advertisement ever devised for the concept that “the only paradise is paradise lost.” Every fall I am back there, in Proust’s Paris, not just the place of my birth, that is, but the real Paris, as I now see it, the world capital of memory and desire, the ineffably beautiful Paris of pure, eternal childhood yearning. It’s been ten years since I began to teach the Proust Freshman Honors Seminar, and every year that part of it gets more painful.

Paris’s beauty is of the heartbreaking kind. After all, so much of it was designed or ornamented by artists. In many ways, Paris itself is a work of art and, like all great art, it succeeds in drawing forth intense emotion. I’m sure that’s one important reason it acquired a reputation for romance. Romance, yes, but also tragedy, betrayal, profound disappointment. It’s true that Paris is a great place to fall in love, to eat, drink, and be merry. But it’s also the perfect city in which to be depressed or, even better, melancholy. There’s never been a better place to be lost, displaced, and bereft, and it’s always been home to
any number of soulful exiles. You don’t have to be French to smoke a Gitane and notice the falling leaves drifting by your window.

Any number of ingredients have gone into that magic and potent Parisian elixir of hedonism and loneliness. Of course, my pick for first place in creating that exquisite contradiction is the weight of the past, the city’s history. Centuries of French gallantry are compressed within Paris’s walls, but also centuries of despair and failure. You can see that contradiction expressed by the tremendous extremes of scale: everywhere you look, the picturesque tempers the sublime and vice versa, the quaint and the monumental coexist in what we have come to believe is perfect harmony. But there is something disequilibrating about Paris’s combination of discreet charm and crazy French grandeur. The French have always loved glory too well, and their penchant for excess seems to have been poured into every Paris monument, every wide avenue, every majestic site, and every noble vista, rendered all the more poignant by our knowledge that French history (like all others) has failed to deliver on its glorious promise. That failure may be what gives Paris and Parisians their irony and their poetry, making the vestigial bombast seem not so much arrogant as touching.