Who is ever ready for Paris? We’re all fools when we arrive. If we don’t know that about ourselves already, Paris is happy to teach us.
On your first day, age nineteen, a poet steps into your path. He’s wearing a neat grey suit and wild curls: dressed for paradox. He comes so close you feel his heat, smell fresh perspiration and stale cigarettes. He speaks, low and melodic: Vous sentez le jasmin c’est un compliment, vous sentez le jasmin c’est un compliment. Just like that, punctuated like that. You smell of jasmine that is a compliment. His eyes are wide, his pupils enormous. Vous sentez le jasmin c’est un compliment …
You’re transfixed. He’s transfixed. He must be under some kind of influence (of jasmine?) but you have no experience for guessing what. He repeats his one line; he does not try to push anything further. You don’t like jasmine. You always smell rot under the sweetness. Still, transfixed. He would say it a few times more if a girl passing by didn’t pull you away … and into an unsanitary spot on the street (Trottoir pas crottoir, dog walkers), but that isn’t the Paris we love, so it’s a Paris that we will forget.
Paris wants us naked and vulnerable. It wants to tell us who we are. So we shiver along with a royal bride of 1769 (you know her; she’s part of the legend) as she stands stripped in front of her ladies, covering herself while they try to work out which one owns the honour of sliding the chemise over the new girl’s white flesh. All of which actually did happen, unlike the suggestion that the starving populace should simply eat cake.
Your Paris has been a jumble of panic, jasmine, a headachey smell of mothballs. You come back to dig for the poetry, the poetic legend, the romance that coats the city like pollen in spring (even though you scoff). The Paris you crave is the catacombs, la Sainte Chapelle, Colette, Rachilde, le ménagier, François I and Mary, Queen of Scots; Josephine Baker and the Lost Generation and Napoléon and Sainte Geneviève and Montmartre and Kiki de Montparnasse, the sewers, Schiaparelli v. Chanel (Schiaparelli!), les Années Folles. You and your friend Hélène, a future museum curator, sitting on an embankment outside the Rothschilds’ Hôtel Lambert on the Ile Saint-Louis, eating a glace Berthillon and concluding that if you ever have so much money that you can afford all your dreams, there is no way you will be happy. It feels very worldly to say that happiness is always off on the horizon, receding a bit further every time you take a step in its direction, and that money would only push it further, faster.
You hope you’re wrong. You intend to run toward happiness.
*****
Other people quote that ridiculous line We’ll always have Paris as if it’s possible ever to have Paris, at least that one — the fantasy of surrender to romance, time out of time, the dream that expires as soon as they say the words. Paris is the city that teases and fades, that snaps its fan open and shut, then draws the pleats across its crimson right cheek.
In the language of the fan, Paris has just said that it loves you. How are you to believe?
*****
Paris is a flirt. It might seem to surrender in the face of your desire, but it always holds a bit of itself in reserve.
Marie Antoinette never made love to Count Axel von Fersen; she only hinted that she might in her letters.
*****
You are a serious person. You haven’t said yes yet, not to legendary decadence, absinthe and opium; you leave that to the poets who wander the streets talking to young tourists. We’re not going to mention the Eiffel Tower or the Moulin Rouge, Versailles or, god help us, Euro Disney. You’ll take Madame de Sévigné, Madame d’Aulnoy, Proust (though you’ve read only the first one), Perrault, pâtisserie, couture, Notre-Dame, le Louvre, d’Orsay, Père Lachaise, Cocteau, Huis Clos, Choderlos de Laclos, La Princesse de Clèves, Camille Claudel; sunsets, sunrises, and the way even the cheapest hotel room in the Marais might belong to an Haussmann building with a narrow iron balcony where you can stand as night falls and just be, for the price of ten dollars and a mildew-stained carpet.
Maybe you’ll look across the glutted cafés and market stalls below and there will be another woman, just your age, who also paid less than ten dollars for her room and who also knows how special this is. You smile; it’s a moment. It is the moment of Paris in curated memory, but you’ll have to work to get back there.
That ten-dollar balcony is what you’ve been reaching for all along. The pink light, the sense that the grotty place you are in augurs good things for the future. You will spend the rest of your life trying to return to that balcony. And the woman across the way will always be there, waiting for you both to be. This is your always have Paris.
It is different from that first day of Vous sentez le jasmin. Very different from the February afternoon when a man follows you through the empty park at the Tuileries and you tell him to leave you alone and he calls you a whore. You try to forget that. Also the night that follows in the ancient hotel on the Left Bank, where a hulking muscleman is too deaf to hear what you ask for but gives you a room for just four dollars a night, toilet midway up the staircase in a place you had no idea a toilet could be.
After the man in the Tuileries calls you a putain and salope, you lie down on your four-dollar cot, facing an ancient armoire with a cracked mirror, and study yourself naked. What is the point of all this? In the city of so many painters, so many nudes — Renoir, David, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Moreau, Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses sœurs, L’Origine du monde — why are you a whore?
And would any of them paint you now, just as you lie there?
You are shy. You cover up. Nineteen-year-old virgin, you are still almost a child. You have no soul to sell at that point.
*****
Nine years later, a lover. Paris embraces comedy: You meet at the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes, because the castle is closed and your jet lag demands a little rest. You drink Orangina and make conversation. You say you are writing an essay about the construction of exotic space in zoological gardens, whether it is better for the animals to have small pens and “natural” décor or to live in concrete yards with more area. You think the answer is obvious, but it depends whom you ask. Marie Antoinette’s fancy-faux Hameau is the most popular spot at Versailles.
He says he has been studying the face that macaques make during an argument. Macaques are a type of monkey with pouchy cheeks, and the expression is called le shriek-face. He is not pretending. It is the face that he makes during sex, when you press too hard on the extra bones you find under his sacrum. What’s that, a tail? Why, yes it is. His father had one too; in France they are not cut off at birth, so each child has a chance to grow into it and make their own decision. His father is dead.
You find this fascinating, a primatologist with a tail. Less so when you sit together at a café and, in the midst of conversation, he starts digging into his ear and nibbling the wax. His father shared that habit too. It’s like sitting down to tea with a porcelain shepherdess and discovering she has dung under her nails.
When you walk away, then take a train south, then return to the little town in New York State where you’ve been dreaming of Paris, you will keep wondering if that imperfect coupling could ever have been something. You might wonder all of your life, until you settle into what simply is life, no more fantasy.
*****
One day you’re in Paris and the next you are not. You spend much more time not being in Paris than you spend any other way. Now it’s been forty years since ten dollars let you sleep in the Marais. The last time you stayed in Paris you rented an apartment from the friend of a friend and it smelled so badly of mothballs that you threw out your clothes afterward. But. Even there, that place, you were on the Right Bank and had a view into the courtyard of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The setup was very French-film: a home that belonged to the mistress of a minorly famous artist, with his drawings of her covering the walls. You missed being the age at which you might have been deeply impressed by all this, rather than moderately inconvenienced. Marie Antoinette did not reek of mothballs.
So what are a few mothballs — except the most lasting sensory impression of the City of Lights, the smell you will smell for the rest of your life when you hear the name. As the pendulum swings into the future and doesn’t knock the past up to meet you, you’ll have to work to remember the rest.
*****
Loving Paris is like loving your self; it has to be more than infatuation, more than a meet-cute and a pretty interior. It means you have to love the scaffolding that you now remember covered the mothball apartment’s outside, where you woke up each morning to a swarm of workmen with power tools and cigarettes. It’s fond memories of mildew and of falling downstairs when you used the muscleman’s toilet in the middle of the night. It’s finding no toilets all day long, from Paris to Chartres and back again, so that as you climb the stairs to Hélène’s apartment, you start to pee a little bit.
It’s you, reeking of imaginary jasmine and so uncertain of yourself that you need to be told those words are a compliment. Coming back months later and wondering if you might be a whore, before you decide that label means nothing. Years later, a monkey. Then, in middle age, all those boules de naphtaline. (They do sound so much more poetic in translation.)
You will always carry that idea of Paris to judge you, tell you who you are, even though you will never be able to define the place. Small tastes feed the craving.
*****
At sixty, you conjure jasmine as if it were there in the street that afternoon, not only in the mind of a poet who was on something then and is likely dead now. He still unsettles you. How will you live up to le jasmin? Your best self is always just beyond the now, and the pendulum’s swinging hard.
Either you’ve been a fool to try or else trying is the best thing you ever did, the only way you’ve ever lived. The moment you stop smelling of jasmine and embrace the mothballs, beg pardon, is the moment Paris stops teasing, and what good are your dreams without even the least hope of Paris?
Madame Guillotine has fit a new blade to her fan.
Paris touches the tip with one finger: I wish to speak with you.
Paris holds the fan behind its head: Do not forget.
Paris spreads itself wide in a generous half circle: Wait for me. Wait for me.
And you wait.
