It was a good circus, though a little long on New Age, New Vaudeville, and Zen acrobats and a little short, absent in fact, on the lions and bears I had promised Luke. (We have a standing joke about lions in Paris; as I push his poussette, I announce that I am terrified that there may be lions in this quarter of Paris—“and I’m so scared of lions”—and he roars, lustily.) At the end, though, the troupe took its final bow and threw those little glowing green bracelets up into the audience as a favor. A few came up as high as we were. The French fathers, soccer players to a man, snatched at them from the wrist as they flew up, like men slapping futilely at mosquitoes. I stood up and with years of incompetent Central Park softball under my belt, I pounded the right fist into the left and pulled one in like a pop-up. Then I handed it to Luke. The other fathers in the row looked at me with pure hate. I shrugged and have never felt so obnoxious, so proud, so imperial, so American.
We have found Luke a baby-sitter, or I suppose I have to say a nanny. Her name is Nisha Shaw, she comes from Sri Lanka, has long hair in a beautiful braid and beautiful lilting English, and she is the wife of the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s chauffeur. She is lovely and loving, and she sings all day to Luke in a high-pitched soprano, singing songs that seem just out of focus. “Blowin’ in the Wind” and a song called “Softly Sings the Donkey/As he goes to hay/If you don’t come with him/He will go away.” Softly sings the donkey—the theme tune of the American liberal abroad. We have already, in a few weeks, become a strange island of Sri Lankan, Icelandic-Canadian, West Philadelphian, Franco-American civilization within a bigger culture. I imagine these are songs that she’s heard over the radio and in school, songs that are part of her own little monoculture, just as we have made up ours.
Every morning as Luke and I wait for Nisha to arrive before I go to work in my office, we look out from the kitchen into the courtyard. Every morning, just at eight-fifteen, a hand emerges, holding at its end a tablecloth or a sheet or something that it shakes out. She is known as the Shaky Lady, the Aurora, or Dawn Goddess, of our home. We made up a song in her honor—Oh, Shaky Lady/Oh, Shaky Lady, be good to me”—and she seems to shake with such authority, such intensity.
The odd thing in making a big move is the knowledge that your life will be composed of hundreds of small things that you will arrive at only by trial and error, and that for all the strikes and seminars you attend, the real flavor of life will be determined, shaped, by these things. The Semiosphere comes at you in little bursts. Where will your hair be cut? What kind of coffee will you buy, and where? We have been searching for the right mocha, everywhere we go: at La Vieille France, a pastry store on the rue de Buci; at Hediard, on the place de la Madeleine; at Whittard, an English coffee importer that has a counter in the Conran on the rue du Bac. Our old Dean & DeLuca blend is gone now, and we must find a new one. The Shaky Lady will preside over some kind of coffee, but even she cannot know quite which one, not just yet.
We have been trying to furnish our place—we had minimal furniture in the New York loft, really, chairs and rugs and rattraps—and on Sundays we go up to the Marche aux Puces, the flea market, which remains a wonder, though the only fleas in it all have Platinum American Express cards. (It isn’t cheap.) The Metro ride up to the porte de Clignancourt is a joy, though, just for the names of the stations in northern Paris: Chateau Rouge, Chateau d’Eau—what -was the Red Castle? what was the Water Tower?—Poissonniers, Gare du Nord, with its lovely, thirties, Gabinish overtones. We come up, back home, at Odeon, under the statue of Danton, and a single limb of a chestnut tree hangs over the Metro stairs. It’s dark already at five o’clock, the limb silhouetted against the moonlit sky while the crowd presses against you on the stairs. What an old place France is, the attic bursting with old caned chairs and zinc bars and peeling dressers and varnished settees. The feeling is totally different from an antiques fair in America; this is the attic of a civilization.
Today we stop at Le Biron for lunch; the restaurants up at the flea market—Le Biron, Le Voltaire—are among the few real bistros left, in the sense of simple places with some culinary pretension that maintain an air of joie de vivre. The poor madame is terribly overworked, and we feel for her, but lunch, simple chicken, takes an hour and a half. The tarte tatin is very good, though. After lunch, on this freezing cold day, faint light raking through the stalls, Luke and I stop at the little bar with a Django-style swing band: two gypsy guitarists with ancient electrics with f-holes, joined by a good-looking blonde with an alto sax. There’s a couple smoking endless Gauloises next to us. I ordered, with a thrilling automatic feeling, a café-calva and a grenadine for Luke. They played the old American songs—“All of Me,” “There Will Never Be Another You”—some Jobim too, really swinging it. Martha was off shopping at Vernaison for a plain old table. A perfect half hour.
Martha insisted on taking a cab home, declaring it too cold to get on the Metro. The cabbie, observing Luke, began a disquisition on children. Only children—we explained in French that he won’t be, or we hoped he wouldn’t be—are, he explained, the cause of the high modern divorce rate: The boy arrives, and the man feels jealous; there is another man in his wife’s life (well, another being), and this leads to jealousy, a lover; and the whole cycle over again. (Why a second child would cure this…) This is why women must have three children and stay home. “The school instructs,” he explained, “but the family educates.” I couldn’t decide whether to give him a large or small tip.
It is odd to think that for so long people came to Paris mostly for the sex. “City of the naughty spree,” Auden wrote disdainfully in the twenties, “La Vie Parisienne, Les Folies-Bergere, Mademoiselle Fifi, bedroom mirrors and bidets, lingerie and adultery.” These days the city’s reputation for naughtiness has pretty much diminished away to nothing. Now the dirty movies get made in Amsterdam; the dirty drawings get sent in from Tokyo; and Oriental and even German towns, of all places, are the places you go for sexual experiment. (Even the bidets are gone from Paris, mostly converted into bizarre plug-in electric toilets, which roar as they chew up human waste, in a frenzy of sanitary appetite, and then send it out, chastened, down the ordinary water pipes.)
Things have become so run-down, or cleaned up, sexually here that France has even reached the point where it is running a bimbo deficit and has to import its sex objects. Just last week Sharon Stone was flown in to Paris to be made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture, M. Philippe Douste-Blazy. The award struck many Parisians as ridiculous, but it was, in its crude way, a logical part of a consistent cultural policy. Despite their reputation, the French are not really cultural chauvinists at all. They remain chauvinists about their judgment, a different thing; increasingly their judgment is their culture. They want to be free to continue to reinvent American culture in their own image, finding art forms where back home we saw only hackwork and actresses where we saw only bimbos. (The award to Sharon Stone was for “her services to world culture.”) They don’t mind if the Americans make the movies so long as they get to pass out the medals. Pinning a decoration on Sharon Stone is the perfect way of looking down your nose at U.S. cultural imperialism while simultaneously fondling its chest.