rumble on the 52

A little more ethnographie from the world of the Paris bus.

We just came back on the bus from meeting some friends at Parc Monceau, a nineteenth-century era park so well-groomed that all the ladies match their little dogs. Our crowd was slightly less elegant, and peanut-butter-stained, but G and the love of his life, Amelie, were so adorable walking everywhere hand-in-hand that a Frenchwoman stopped to take their picture. Points to us. We sat down in the sun next to a sweet elderly lady who warned that her small dog was “trés méchant” on account of having been hit it its youth, but that she would be watching carefully and we should not worry about our children being bitten. Said dog was lying on the ground, asleep. After that comforting bit of dialogue, she added, somewhat mysteriously, that you should never lend your dog to anyone, it’s a bad bargain. We tried to absorb this advice with all the seriousness with which it had been given, and moved a little further to the end of the bench. She was true to her word, though, and we didn’t hear a peep from her King Charles.

Tooth and claw were a little more evident on the ride home. The bus was packed with the post-prandial crowd – there were three strollers, which is technically not allowed, but they let us get away with it. At the Étoile, an elderly fat man lumbered aboard and planted himself in the middle of the aisle with a look that dared anyone to challenge him. At the next stop, even more people got on, and the bus driver switched on the canned announcement advising everyone to move to the back of the bus. An old woman wearing blue mascara and a fusty chignon poked the man in the shoulder. “Go ahead, sir,” she said (in French), “move to the back of the bus.”

“Move it yourself, b***.” (The French word he used was connasse, which is not very nice at all).

There was a pregnant pause, marked by the collective stopping of breath from everyone within hearing distance.

“I would,” she said clearly, drawing herself up to her full height, “but your fat ass is taking up all the space.”

The collective breath released with a grateful sigh. Touché.

“Shut up, you old hag,” he said.

“You shut it,” she said, shoving her way past him.

“Looks like you could use a diet, too,” he said, to her back, but his heart wasn’t in it.

When she got to the back of the bus, she grabbed the door rail. “My god, what an annoying old shit,” she said.

The woman standing next to me and I couldn’t help it – we burst into a fit of giggles. Old people. Cursing. On a French bus. (The only even remotely similar situation that has happened to me here was when I was pushing G around the grocery store with a full cast on his leg, and an older woman in a Chanel suit said, “Oh la la, ça c’est la merde, ça.”)

In English, I am known to appreciate a well-placed “gros mot,” but I would never dream of attempting it in French. Someone gave us a dictionary of French argot before we left that has carefully placed stars next to the words that have the most, er, shock value, but I’m still playing it safe, trying to make sure my subjects and verbs agree. I’m embarrassed to admit, however, that after more than a year and a half here, I’m more proud of being able to understand that conversation on the bus than of being able to read Molière. Vive L’Academie Française.

here comes everybody

I just saw this review of a new book by Clay Shirky, which is basically about why everyone should learn to stop worrying and love the internets (I do, I do). I love that the title is Here Comes Everybody, since it’s what G shouts every morning when he wakes up and heads for the kitchen. And then there’s the reference to James Joyce and HCE, the hero of Finnegan’s Wake. I love that, too, as the Wake makes a great cheeky metaphor for the web – vast and incomprehensible on the surface, but with a little faith and luck, when you dive in you’ll probably find what you’re looking for.

The last time I lived in Europe, a hundred million years ago, I was part of a Finnegan’s Wake reading group in Budapest. The entrance fee was a bottle of Bull’s Blood red wine (67 cents at the corner store) or a bag of snacks, and we discussed a page every week. We were all poor English teachers – I think the total of my possessions was four black sweaters, a coat, two pairs of pants, and a stack of old New Yorkers that came with the apartment I shared with two other book group members – but we were multi-national, with Hungarians, Americans, English, and a few real Irish among the regulars. I was the impostor, since I was the only group member who had never read past Dubliners before joining, and who went on to study medieval, instead of modernist, literature. But no one ever seemed to blame me, and we had a lot of fun getting tipsy over etymologies and wild speculations. One member played ringmaster/discussion leader each week, and I remember spending the afternoon before my session holed up at the British Council Library, which was housed in a gorgeous nineteenth-century pile on one of the city’s most beautiful avenues, poring over a key to mythology and a couple of old books of literary criticism (a prefiguration of graduate school, sadly, it wasn’t). That year was the longest, coldest winter Central Europe had seen in decades. I remember crossing the Petofi Bridge one night on the way to a group meeting and seeing ice chunks floating down the Danube. Another night I slipped on a patch of black ice outside a group member’s apartment and probably cracked a bone in my elbow – but not the bottle of Bull’s Blood I was carrying.

Joining the group – though I’ve never been much of a joiner – was the little wedge that opened up my life in Budapest, creating a little community for me there, and it’s still the lens through which I view that year. Budapest was beautiful, scarred and strange; still near enough to the Communist collapse that the shiniest, best-renovated buildings all housed fast-food restaurants. The young people I hung out with had been part of underground democratic political groups while I was filling out applications to university. The day I called the number on the flier I saw in the café behind the law university, I was having a fit of loneliness inspired by the lack of cognates. From there I moved on to Joyce, a couple of great roommates, singing in a symphony chorale directed by Kodaly’s last music student, bunking six to a sofa on a weekend trip to Lake Balaton, visiting the Turkish baths, and teaching English to the defense attaché for the Greek government, who asked me if I might consider a sideline job as his mistress. And all this in the days before Facebook.

I don’t feel nostalgic for that time – a high speed connection and craigslist would have made remarkable enhancements to my time abroad, and S and I would be able to seed a college fund on that year’s investment in long-distance phone calls, which we now make for free across a DSL cable. Although I will be able to tell my children, without lying, that I had to walk a mile (well, a kilometer, anyway) uphill and across a bridge in order to have access to email. But sitting here in another magnificent old apartment building at an easy walk from a different river, the past suddenly seems like, well, a long time ago. And I feel fond of it, those early steps that started me down this road before I even knew I was on it. Here comes everybody, indeed. I wonder if it’s even possible to buy Bull’s Blood in France.

bus stop butterflies

I just looked out the window to the bus stop, and lo, a couple of butterflies have drifted into our neighborhood, in spite of the rain. Normally we are a very beige, brown and black quartier – it’s all about tailoring, not color (well, tailoring and fur). But the two women standing at the bus stop, both lovely, both d’un certain age, apparently did not get the memo. The one on the left is wearing a bottle-green twill raincoat with – can it be? – gaucho pants made of some kind of stiff black taffeta, plus knee-length snakeskin boots with a small heel. The one on the right (sadly, they do not seem to be traveling together) is wearing an orange velveteen belted trenchcoat that matches her sweater and her hair. I could die happy.

This morning we went back to the Luxembourg Gardens for a pony ride, before the rain, and we ran into a group – a bridge club? a chorus? a community orchestra? – having some kind of organized meeting next to the orangerie for which they had commandeered a number of green metal chairs and laid in refreshments in plastic containers of ascending sizes. In the smallest container, macarons of multiple flavors. In the medium sized container, petits fours. And in the largest, enough chouquettes (like small beignets) to feed an army of ponies. I did not see the coffee but I know there were smart aluminum thermoses lurking somewhere.

I realize that I have not yet written much about the baby, or, by corollary, the experience of giving birth to him in France, in a French hospital. It seems like having one of each in America and in France would be ripe circumstances for comparison, but every time I try to write about it I either run straight into cliché (oh, the French!) or sentimentality (oh, the baby!). But there is still a lot to say. I’ll try again soon.

dirt and other pleasures

I promise to write something soon about something other than my two-year-old – what I’ve been reading (just finished No Country for Old Men, getting ready to start a new Penelope Lively); further progress on figuring out whether the man with the Dalmatian and the Jack Russell and the man who gets a manicure with his chow are actually the same person; the cheese shop; and sweet baby B, who is smiling at everyone these days and seems halfway to turning over. But living with a two-year-old like G and not writing about it is like living in South Florida and not writing about the weather. It defines your life even when it isn’t blowing the roof off.

Yesterday we went back to story hour at the American Library (a mild success), and then went to the playground on the Champ de Mars afterwards with my friend H and her two daughters, Amelie and Rose, who are just a little bit older than the boys. We all had a crepe and then set the ambulatory children loose on the playground. For the first time G. and Amelie actually played with each other instead of staring at each other balefully over peanut butter and jelly. They climbed up the ladder on the monkey bars several times; they got on the seesaw and rocked maniacally; and then they finished up the hour with G introducing Amelie to the pleasures of stomping in mud puddles and then trying to fill them up with sand.

As we were leaving the park with everyone strapped back in the strollers, H said to me, by way of wondering observation, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Amelie this dirty.” I looked over at Amelie, in her navy coat and cotton leggings, and try as I might, I couldn’t see a speck. Then we both looked at G. He was encrusted in mud and sand all the way up to his thighs, and his hair was clumpy with sand and even a little bit of blood where he had bashed a glancing blow off the monkey bars. As we looked, he was trying and failing to stuff a very large rock in his pocket. Without saying another word, H and I just burst out laughing.

adventures in appliances

On Monday morning G woke up before the rest of us and decided, considerately, to make his own breakfast. S discovered the evidence shortly after G wandered into our room about 8:30 with a diaper in need of attention. He dumped G straight into the bath and then passed into the kitchen to get a drink. It was a bit like it must feel to walk into a house after a robbery. The refrigerator door was open, and on the floor in front of it were two wheels of Camembert in their open boxes, each with a healthy chunk bitten out. The two loaves of spice bread I had made the previous afternoon had been torn from their foil wrappings and the tops raked off, as if scavenged by wild dogs. And the carafe from our coffee maker lay on the floor, in pieces. All in all, a nice morning’s work.

So instead of walking down to the Eiffel Tower to see the Petit Village de Paques (bunnies! A six foot tall Easter egg!), we made our way to Darty – the French equivalent of Best Buy or Circuit City – on the off chance it would be open, in search of a replacement carafe.

The fleet of gated and locked storefronts all along the way dimmed our hopes, but when we got to Darty the automatic doors parted – oh happy day – and we strolled into an empty store staffed by half a dozen employees all wearing the expression you would have on your face if you had drawn the lot to work on a public holiday. And we had walked in with a two-year-old who promptly ran into the middle of the flat screen television display.

Nevertheless, we made our way down the escalator to the petit électromenager, where, upon scanning the wall of coffeemakers, we saw that our model was not on display. It was our first inkling that this would not be so easy. The attendant assured us that replacing the carafe – which is called a verseuse, or pourer, in French, to differentiate from the vessel you would use for water or wine – would still not be a problem, but he wondered what model it was we had in our house, chez vous. I said that it was the purple one, just like the electric teakettle on the shelf above his head.

Well then, he said, you just need to go upstairs to the cashier and tell them you need a replacement verseuse for the Philips Cucina coffemaker, in lilac (yes, we have a lilac coffemaker. And a matching electric teakettle, too). Just like that. And he waved us away with a smile. Or me, anyway – I had to go locate S and G over by the washing machines before we could go upstairs to the cashier station.

When we got upstairs, our reception by the two men manning the station was much less friendly. “There are a lot of Philips coffeemakers,” said the first. “Do you have the réference (model number)?

“The man downstairs told me to tell you it was the one in lilac,” I said.

“That doesn’t help me,” said the other man, who was looking at the computer screen. “I need the réference.”

“I don’t have it,” I said, “but I could show you the model.”

“Couldn’t you just order it on the website?” said man number one. (I did not ask him why it was not possible to check the website, in the store, for the reference. Such things are futile.)

“I’ll just go downstairs and see if the other guy knows the réference,” I said, not entirely politely. This time S and G had migrated to the telephone display, so I fetched them again and said to S, “I think you’re going to have to handle this one from now on. I haven’t had my coffee yet, and I can’t be held responsible if I say something grumpy.”

“No problem,” he answered. G was thrilled to ride the escalator again.

Downstairs, I corralled the same attendant who had helped us before, in passing, and said that upstairs they had asked me for the réference.

“Really?” he said. “And you told them it was the one in lilac?”

Indeed.

“Well, then, just tell them it’s the soixante-quinze-quatre-vingt-deux.” (I write out the numbers here because to my American ear that sounds like sixty-fifteen-four-twenty-two, while the number we needed eventually to transfer to the cashier was 7582. And still. No. Coffee. Because we were there to replace the coffee pot. I make my point.)

S confirmed the number and went back to the cashier, while I took Gus to the TV display, where approximately one hundred television were showing the trailer for the Lord of The Rings. The battle scene was probably too much for a two-year-old, but the horses had him riveted in his tracks and so I decided to let it rest.

Five minutes later, S arrived carrying a small cardboard box. We opened it with trembling fingers, but alas, it was not the carafe that goes with our coffee maker.

I went back to the cashier. “This is not a match for our coffee pot,” I said.

“It is not the coffee pot you have chez vous?”

“No, it is not,” I said.

“But that is the soixante-quinze-quatre-vingt-deux.”

“But it is not my coffee-pot.”

“Then you will have to go home and get the réference.” He made the little French gesture, usually so charming, that is a small shrug with the palms lifted up, that means ‘there is nothing else I can do.’

S had noticed downstairs in the appliance display a shelf of orphaned coffee carafes of various shapes and sizes. “There’s one that looks kind of like ours,” he said. “It’s four euros. Let’s grab it and get out of here.”

And so we did, with only ten more minutes and one bloody nose on the escalator to show for our pain. We walked home in growing sunshine and G sat on S’s shoulders and sang the itsy-bitsy spider at the top of his lungs. The plane trees along the Allée Maria Callas were beginning to bud. I gave the baby his pacifier and decided it was warm enough to take off my scarf.

At home, I settled into an arm chair with last week’s New Yorker while S went back into the kitchen. Thirty seconds later, he appeared at my side and kissed me on the top of the head.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked.

“Yes, much,” I answered.

“Not so grumpy?”

“I think I’m over it.”

He smiled. “Because the coffee carafe doesn’t fit.”

13 ways of looking at a blackbird

One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was a book S gave me called Trente-six vues de la Tour Eiffel. The reference is, of course, Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji, but it’s also an homage to a late-nineteenth century series of lithographs also called 36 views of the Eiffel Tower, commissioned when the tower was first built. Patience with the double references is well worth it (if you’re not lost already, imagine holding a mirror up to a mirror and trying to check your hair in the reflection of the reflection) – it’s an almost painfully wonderful book. It describes visually what I can never get at, exactly, in words about the Eiffel Tower – a structure that has become emblematic of Paris everywhere else in the world is also actually visible from almost everywhere in Paris. So it becomes a way of locating yourself within the city, in the same way that Paris, for many, is a way of locating themselves within the world (“We’ll always have Paris.”). And then a structure that was built with no other purpose than to be tall and beautiful and impressive becomes laden – but not heavy, not ever heavy -- with all kinds of meaning. A reference point.

The book’s author, André Juillard, is most famous as an artist of the bandes dessinés (BD in France, graphic novel or comic art in the US, variously), and the pictures profit from his gifts of minor shading and economies of expression. My favorite is view 17, “dans un grenier.” In the eaves of an old attic, a jumble of forgotten stuff piled around a desk. One dimly lit window. Among the stuff: broken chairs, andirons, a cracked washbasin, photo albums, tourist paraphernalia – the flotsam of life. On the far corner of the desk, a lamp in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, with a cockeyed shade. The author’s comment reads: “Between a model of the bateau-mouche and some old Lombard albums, the heart can, with some strain, balance. But the Eiffel tower-lamp, alas….” There’s a dissertation somewhere on the relationship between desire, loss, and kitsch.

The absolute best of the Eiffel Tower tourist trash, in my opinion, is a small glass model about four inches high, that comes equipped with a battery powered base that shines multicolored lights through the model in a repeated pattern, like tiny, spangly searchlights. You can buy these models from any of the touts around the Chaillot Palace for 2 euros, if you are very firm. Each comes with its own red velveteen case. I have given one to my mother and one to Mme. Marron in the south, and if S cannot stoop so low I will buy one for myself before it’s all over. Doubtless to end up in a corner of our attic one day, hélas.

The image is of a motion lamp of the Eiffel Tower. I can only dream.

passeport

The other day I took B to have his passport photos snapped. After seven – no, eight - weeks we’re finally beginning the process of establishing B’s bona fides as a person filling up his own space in the world; in his case he needs a US passport, a social security card, and a piece of paper called a Consular Report of Overseas Birth. As always, there is a circular and dependent relationship between these pieces of paper and the data needed to procure them, but we have a form for all that and I’ll worry about it later.

The photo studio is just off the fancy shopping street that runs behind the embassy. It’s really a glorified copy shop staffed by a couple of bored teenagers in pegged pants; the “photo studio”, complete with flash umbrella, is an open closet in the back of the shop exactly one steep and dangerous step down from the main level (using a baby carrier puts me in a constant state of vertigo; it seems that the only thing that keeps me from feeling like I’m about to teeter off the steady plane is being able to see my feet. It’s like constantly living in a funhouse of wobbly bridges and receding staircases, only not that fun).

Anyway, I unstrapped B, hung my coat on the peg, and followed one of the teenagers into the studio, where the idea was to hold B up high enough to be seen in front of the backdrop by bracing him against my leg, which was meant to be propped on a rickety barstool complete with a rotating seat. How we managed this without complete disaster is beyond me, but it at least accomplished the necessary goal of having B photographed awake and with his eyes open. The look of surprise is not feigned. It’s a sweet picture, while looking not at all like B now and most definitely not like the B of five years in the future, when this passport will finally expire and we will be living somewhere far from Paris, probably. Becoming a parent is pre-loaded with the application software for nostalgia, but I do think about this large piece of my children’s early lives, and my early life with children, being left behind here.

While waiting for the photos to develop, I rifled through a display of postcards on a rack, in a series called Paris Poeme – classic photos of the city inscribed with a quotation from a French writer (though not necessarily a poet). They were clearly not a popular item – though not vintage, most of the cards had warping edges and were beginning to lose their shine. One card had a cheesy picture of old-school Parisian waiters standing in front of a café and popping the corks off bottles of champagne. The Appollinaire quote below read “Ecoutez-moi je suis le gosier de Paris/Et je boirai encore s’il me plait l’univers” – “Listen to me, I am the gullet of Paris/ And if it pleases me I will drink the universe.” I don’t know what Appollinaire would have thought of the postcards, but that scrappier, blowsier personification of Paris made me smile, living in these more polite and organized times. I liked the Whitmanesque flair. And it reminded me why I like living a city with children – one can take the stance of drinking in the universe even when it’s more like drinking from a firehose…

We’ve had a number of visits lately from old friends from various parts of our lives, all of whom have been gracious enough to roll with the flow of our unpredictable yet not exactly exciting life. M was here over the weekend, and it was great to be reminded again of why she is one of my all-time favorite whipsmacking conversation partners. Her account of the visit, posted here, puts it better than I ever could. And I don’t think anyone will ever accuse me again of exaggerating. Thanks, friend.

Meanwhile I bought another set of plane tickets for a trip south. The triumph of hope over experience, no doubt, but we are sure looking forward to it. I imagine the famille Marron are nailing things down as we speak.