The one exception to the erotic milding of Paris are the lingerie ads, which still fill the boulevards and billboards. The ads—particularly the ones for Aubade—are sharply, unsettlingly erotic, to a male viewer, and differ from their American counterparts in not seeming particularly modern. Women are, as we would say, reduced to body parts; the Aubade ads isolate breasts or thighs or legs as relentlessly as a prep chef at KFC, each part dressed up in a somewhat rococo bit of underwear, lace and thong, in sculpted-lit black and white, very Hurrell, with a mocking “rule” underneath it—i.e., “Rule Twenty-four: Feign Indifference.”
There is something stimulating but old-fashioned about these posters (which, for a week or two at a time, are everywhere, on every bus stop, on every bus). They are coquettish, a word I had never associated with a feeling before. For all the complaints about a new puritanism, the truth is that feminism in America has, by restoring an edge of unpredictability and danger to the way women behave and the way men react to that behavior, added to the total of tension on which desire depends. The edgy, complicated, reverse-spin coding of New York life—this skintight dress is not a come-on but its opposite, a declaration of independence meant not for you but for me—is unknown here. Here, the intellectuals wear black, and the models wear Alaia.
The other evening, for instance, we went to a dinner party where the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy appeared with his wife, the amazing-looking Arielle Dombasle (who wore a bathing suit in one of those philosophical-erotic-talky French films, from the time when philosophical-erotic-talky French films were the delight of the Upper West Side). She wore a skintight lame dress. We saw her a week or so later and she was wearing another clinging lame dress, as though out of obligation to her own image, her own invention. Desir in Paris is surreptitious but not ironic; everyone has affairs, but no one has reverse-spin coding. In New York the woman in the clinging dress is probably a professor at Hunter, while the girl in all black with no makeup reading the
French papers may be Sharon Stone. You could tell by the medal, I suppose.
Mostly, we shop at BHV, the department store on the rue de Rivoli, which has become our home, our Luxembourg Gardens. BHV—the Bazar de 1’Hotel de Ville, the City Hall Bazaar—is always called by its initials (bay-aish-vay), and it is an old store, one of the great nineteenth-century department stores on the Right Bank that are the children of the Galeries Lafayette. As I say, it is on the rue de Rivoli; in fact that famous Robert Doisneau photograph of the two lovers kissing is set on the rue de Rivoli just outside BHV. This is doubly ironic: first, because the narrow strip of the rue de Rivoli in front of BHV is about the last place in the world that you would want to share a passionate kiss—it would be a bit like kissing at the entrance to the BMT near Macy’s—and of course, it explains why they did it anyway. They are not sundered lovers but a young couple who have managed to buy an electric oven and emerged alive. Anyone who has spent time at BHV knows that they are kissing not from an onset of passion but from gratitude at having gotten out again.
BHV, in its current form, seems to have been invented by a Frenchman who visited an E. J. Korvette’s in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, sometime in the early 1960s and, maddened with love, decided to reproduce it down to the least detail. There’s the same smell of popcorn, the same cheery help, the same discount appliances stretching as far as the eye can see. It is the Parisian tradition that the landlord does not supply appliances. They must all be bought, and you take them with you when you leave. We had a whole run of things to buy, none of which, as lifelong Manhattan renters, we had ever had to buy before: a refrigerator, an oven, a stove. We had, oddly enough, once bought a wonderful French dishwasher, a Miele, silent as a Greek oracle, to add to our old loft. But we couldn’t use even this since most of the old appliances run on American 110 volts, and France uses 220 volts. You either have to get the insides of the machine changed or else buy something new.
We became hypnotized, bewitched by the curious selling rhythms of BHV: a mixture of confidence, arrogance, and an American-style straightforwardness, with the odd difference that here the customer is always, entirely wrong. We bought a toaster, which promptly shorted out the first time we used it. We brought it back. “What did you toast in it?” the return man asked, haughty for all that he was wearing a regulation oversize checked vest, the uniform of BHV. “Raisin brioche,” we answered honestly. He looked shocked, disgusted, appalled, though not surprised. “What do you expect if you put bread with raisins in it?” he asked. But he let us have a new one anyway.
The week before Christmas I had to go out to buy Christmas tree lights at the Bon Marche, the Left Bank department store. Ours didn’t work, for reasons I don’t understand, since a lot of the electric lamps we brought with us do work. Apparently some American lights shine in Paris, and some don’t, don’t ask why. (Henry James wrote whole novels on this theme, after all.) Instead of coming in strands that you can wrap around the tree, though, the French Christmas tree lights come in guirlandes—garlands—closed circles of lights without beginnings or endings. A thin cord with a plug at the end shoots out from the middle of the garland. (They cost a fortune too: twenty-five dollars for as many lights as you can get on Canal Street for five.) These garlands are packed into the box just the way strands are—light by light in little cardboard notches in a horizontal row—so it’s only when you take them out of the box that you realize that what you’ve got is a ring, not a rope.
This means that the only way to get the Christmas lights on the Christmas tree is to lasso it. You have to get up on a ladder, hold the lights out as a loop, and then, pitching forward a bit, throw the entire garland right over the top of the tree, rodeo style. This is harder to do than it sounds and even more dangerous than it looks. I suppose you could pick up the tree and shimmy the lights on from down below, like a pair of calecons, but this would require someone to pick up the tree so you could do it. I can’t really see the advantages of having a garland over a string. A string is easier to use—you just start at the bottom and wrap it right around the tree, merrily ascending—and this seems to me not cultural prejudice but a practical fact. (But then all cultural prejudices seem like practical facts to the prejudiced.) Still, the garlands are all there is. Martha kept sending me back to buy more.
Even then it wasn’t finished. I had had the pointed inspiration of buying blue lights for the Christmas tree this year, whereas in New York we always had white ones. Since we had moved, changed cultures, I couldn’t think of a better marker, a clearer declaration of difference and a new beginning, than having blue lights on the tree instead of white ones. But when I brought them home and did my Roy Rogers bit again and we turned them on and then turned off the lights in the living room, no one liked the look of them. The blue lights looked, well, blue. I doggedly, painstakingly packed them back into the box, took them back to the Bon Marche, and tried to exchange them for white lights.
The trouble now was that the new white lights I got were white lights that were all twinkling ones. I saw the word clignotant on the box, and I knew that it meant blinking, but somehow I didn’t associate the word blinking with the concept “These lights blink off and on.” It was the same thing with the garlands, come to think of it. It said guirlande right on the box, and I knew perfectly well what guirlande meant; but I am not yet able to make the transposition from what things say to what they mean. I saw the word guirlande on the box, but I didn’t quite believe it. In New York I believe everything I read, even if it appears in the New York Post. In France I am always prepared to give words the benefit of a poetic doubt. I see the word guirlande and shrug and think that maybe garland is just the French seasonal Christmas light-specific idiom for a string. The box says, “They blink,” and I think they don’t.