bright lights, big city

Since we slid past the winter solstice over a week ago, the days have been getting longer, but I don’t think anyone has noticed yet. It’s still dark when we wake up and dark again by a few minutes past naptime. Paris really pulls out all the stops on holiday lighting – the Champs-Elysées is a corridor of blue lights and icicles, and I’ve recently learned that even my beloved electric light trees in our local fountain are the product of a city-sponsored contest, “Paris Illuminates Paris,” which has invited lighting designers to unleash their imaginations on city streets since 2004. The spangly tree-of-lights display at Place Victor Hugo actually has a title – “Sapin Féerique” – though come to think of it I’m not sure if that refers to the metal trees G and I watched get hoisted in the fountain with a crane, or the lights in the real, bare trees surrounding the place. Frankly, these look flung up a bit too casually for a “lighting designer” (it’s what I like about them), but maybe they are going for a total effect.

The whole “by design” nature of the lights is a testament to a well-administered modern city, but it kind of puts a kink in my romanticized imagining of Paris as having organically evolved over the centuries to feed the felt needs of the human psyche, boiled down to a longing for light, especially in winter. And yet, what makes it less magical that this patient illusion of beauty is planned and worked for (and who did I think put up the lights? Elves?)? After all, other than the benefit of a river running through, Paris is short on beauties of geographical accident and long on those that are the cumulative effort of human imagination, carefully tended over time. And when you add to that how far north we actually are, and the vagaries of Parisian weather – let’s just say it isn’t the quality of the eternal sunshine that gives us the “city of light.” Instead, even without the holiday extravagances to carry us through the dead zone of the shortest days, there are streetlights and river lights and the most beautifully lit monuments known to man. At night the decorative statuary on the Grand Palais actually looks as if it is on the verge of rising into the heavens. The crown jewel, for me, anyway, is the Eiffel Tower, which, in addition to being lit constantly with the usual dramatic monument fare, twinkles for absolutely no reason at all, every hour on the hour, for ten minutes. The effect is just glorious – almost enough to make me believe in god, and certainly enough to earn my undying gratitude to Mayor Bertrand Delanöe, who caved to public demand and extended the twinkles indefinitely past their splashy debut for the millennium. When our little neighborhood darkens the holiday lights in mid-January, I’ll depend on the Eiffel Tower to get me through – February, particularly.

And then…we’ll have a new baby in a few weeks, and it’s prompted us to start having conversations about what our life might look like when we go home to the states, as ultimately we must. We talk about it as “going back” even though physics and experience tell us there is no such thing. My life here in Paris still feels so new that I expect things to be different every day – when I called to make an appointment at the salon where I last had my hair cut, oh, nine months ago, I was utterly surprised that the same person who cut it before was still there, would still be able to cut it again. While it seems normal, expected even, that two or three small storefronts across from us have already closed and reopened as new entities – the suspicious video shop is now a real estate agent; the unfriendly toy store is, as of tomorrow, a lighting supply. Yet somehow my vision of home, like any place left behind, is frozen in amber. When we left the states I was barely a mother; we’ll return with two little boys, not babies, even. So I don’t know if it will be more disconcerting for things to seem completely familiar or completely changed. Stranger still, I’m sure, is the huge place Paris will occupy in our imagination once we’re gone, in inverse proportion to the faint blip we’ll leave on the register of the city. “Our” Paris will be its own reflection, no deeper or truer than any, giving the lie to the faint sense of ownership or belonging that we feel over the average tourist. The specific memories that, to us, belong to Paris forever – G’s first steps, nighttime visits to Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter, the action of lifting a stroller onto a thousand Paris buses – will simply close over without a ripple into Paris’ collective consciousness. Which is fine; they’re our memories, not Paris’.

We’ve been getting the annual check-ins with friends and loved ones, cataloguing a year in which, again, we’ve failed to keep in touch the way we might have or wanted to. Mostly blessedly ordinary lives and passages, moreso because of the few wrenching changes we’ve heard about, which leave me sad for days. Even if a calendar is no more significant than a way for humans to keep tally, some people we love are coming into 2008 with too much left behind and too heavy a load to carry forward. I’ll be thinking of them when we pop a clandestine bottle of champagne and, weather willing, wake our son to let the tiny lights on the Eiffel Tower illuminate the first few minutes of our new year.

Bonne année, everyone.

early mornings

It’s been a long, hard pull this month, and we’ve been up a lot in the wee hours, not just contemplating our existential condition. Almost exactly one month ago today, we were having a quiet post-bedtime dinner with friends when G appeared in the doorway, blinking a little against the bright lights. It seems that in one lightning flash all the strategic engineering for not only climbing out of his crib but also for opening the bedroom door had fallen into place. No wonder he looked a little shocked. None of us has been able to recover equilibrium since.

At first, G just seemed bewildered that a couple of simple physical acts could so thoroughly displace his world. We moved his mattress to the floor of his room, and for the first two nights he reluctantly went to sleep there, albeit with many interruptions and a final relocation to our bed. Then he just became enraged.

The crib exodus happened to fall exactly in step with a nasty virus brought home from the garderie that felled both G and me, as well as a ten-day separation from S, who had to go back to the US for a conference. It’s not that G didn’t want to sleep, it’s just that it’s hard to achieve a state of steady regular breathing, let alone unconsciousness, when the world as you know it has completely shifted under your feet (and your mattress), and you’re too small to be able to blow your nose by yourself. There was a lot of screaming. We were both sick and miserable, and I alternated attempts at comfort with desperate fantasies of child abandonment. It got to a point where I would find him leaning against the wall in the hallway, eyes half closed, wailing, “Close your sleepy eyes! Close your sleepy eyes!” It’s a line from a lullaby I sing him, but it punts in well as a cri de coeur. When his eyes were open and he wasn’t wailing, he looked hard at me as if he wanted to do me extreme violence, and often did, hitting me with a force that underlined his frustration that the one person who ought to be able to do something about this was clearly falling down on the job.

Mme. Marron, who with her family graciously hosted us through the worst of the stint, put her hand on my shoulder at one point and said gently, “He’s going to be really interesting to have dinner with in eighteen years. It’s what you have to hold on to.” That and being able to drink again in about six weeks.

In the last week, we’ve achieved a tenuous balance that involves G going to sleep – s-l-o-w-l-y – in his “new” big bed (the single bed from our spare room, tarted up with some splashy IKEA textiles and a stuffed hippo), and then coming in to sleep with us at about 2 am. Our bed, she is very crowded, and no one is really getting what I would call a good night’s rest. Some nights I have taken to just giving up and getting up – it makes me much less grumpy than lying there with eyes wide open. I read, I stare out the window, I rustle around the kitchen – but mostly just enjoy the suspended silence that is the one reward of this fractured schedule.

One of the last few mornings, much to our surprise, Lucy and I actually found ourselves out on the streets at five a.m. I was up because G. was in bed with us, flinging limbs across my rapidly decreasing corner of mattress and banishing me to the study. Lucy was up because I was up; her dim sense of the circadian, whatever they may say about dogs, being completely undone by anyone being out of bed with the lights on. After I had been reading in the study for about half an hour, I heard her heave off the bed and start a restless tap-tap-tap across the bedroom and down the hallway. A couple of minutes later, she poked her head anxiously into the opposite door of the study, her eyes saying, “Hey, Vertical Human, time to get going.” So I pulled on a sweater and jacket over my pajamas and we went out.

And it was a beautiful early morning. I’m not often up at this hour, let alone outside. This time of year (or maybe every time of year, how would I know?) it’s still pitch dark, and in the mists the streetlights look like giant fireflies. You can understand why a thousand ersatz paintings have tried, and failed, to capture the same mysterious effect. At five o’clock the middle of the night is bumping elbows with the crack of dawn – while there weren’t many of us out, we were evenly divided between those just waking up and those just finishing their evening. On the first corner, a man was delivering eggs to the bakery; the next doorway spit out two men with rumpled hair and glasses, papers under their arms. They shook hands and wished each other a bonne fin de nuit.

At the end of the block, I could see a young man and a much older man walking arm in arm, with some difficulty, as if the older man were being supported as they made their way along. As Lucy and I got closer, though, and stepped aside to give them room on the sidewalk, it became clear that it was actually the older man doing the supporting, ramrod straight and impeccably dressed in a camel hair topcoat, cordovan dress shoes, and a cravat – a cravat! – at 5 a.m. The young man, in a black leather jacket, was listing hard, and singing to himself – coming off the end of a long night, I supposed. I hesitated to acknowledge them, from a combination of learned Parisian reserve and the clear the protective anonymity of that time of day. The older man kept his eyes grimly set forward and Lucy and I kept going.

But then, at the end of another turn around the block, punctuated by enthusiastic grate-sniffing and other business, we met them again, coming off the place. This time there was no way to maintain polite ignorance – we had to speak to each other. By this time the young man had stopped singing to himself and was just hanging heavily against his supporter, head down. The older man hesitated briefly, and in that moment it occurred to me that this was no one-off drunken airing out but something of a nightly ritual, the evidence of who knows what hidden sorrow. It was impossible to determine their relationship to each other – friends? lovers? father and son? – but I could feel the weight of it, and its shared sadness, pressing against us in the cold air. I held Lucy to one side and said “Bonjour, monsieur.” He glanced down at my belly and then back up at my eyes. And then, instead of saying anything, he inclined his head and tipped an imaginary hat to me – the most courtly of gestures at the strangest of moments – before walking on.

I don’t know if he was wishing me well against the cold of the morning, or against the whole future of 5 am and the things it might bring. But I hurried home to the warm apartment where my boys were just stirring, waking from a restless night that suddenly seemed easy. And for the millionth time since G was born I wondered how we ever survive, these brittle piles of bones covered with such fragile, fragile skin.