There is an odd, seemingly purposeful looking-glass quality to a lot of the things we have to buy. The Braun coffeemaker with a thermos that we had in New York is available here, but oddly only in black, whereas the one in New York was available only in white.
Luke loves BHV for the music. All day long it plays excited, taped Christmas shopping announcements, backed with appropriate tunes. Some of the tunes we recognize—it plays the Looney Tunes theme, for instance—and some seem vaguely familiar but are hard to name, so we give our own names to them: “The Love Theme from BHV,” “BHV’s Victory at Sea,” and the “BHV Christmas Anthem.” His ears undimmed by fifteen years of the IRT, he can hear them all even over the din of appliance shopping, and when he notices a favorite, he rises from his stroller, a cobra in mittens, and sways solemnly back and forth.
About five days before Christmas, BHV was decked out for the holidays, though, with the strikes shutting down transportation, there was hardly a soul in sight. Twenty years ago there was no Christmas in Paris. Oh, there was a holiday, of course, and even the gaunt, Gaullist figure of Pere Noel, an ascetic and intellectualized version of Santa. But the great American department store potlatch was unknown. All that’s changed beyond recognition now. That central ritual of bountiful capitalism, the department store Christmas, is in late but absurdly full bloom here, and with an American flavor so pronounced that it hardly seems American anymore, just part of an international style. The dome of Printemps, on the boulevard Haussmann, for instance, is this year decorated with stylized Stars and Stripes and life-size figures of Jimmy Dean and Marilyn and dark and Bogie and even Babe Ruth. Now at BHV there are artificial evergreens, and tree decoration departments, and a Santa—get your picture with the old guy—and boughs of evergreen hung everywhere, and artificial snow, even though it never snows in Paris at all. On this afternoon, the “BHV Christmas Anthem” began to rise from every loudspeaker on every floor. Only now, as Luke swayed in his stroller, I could hear it clearly for the first time, loud and ringing through the almost empty store, and I understood at last why it had sounded so oddly familiar. It was the theme from Entertainment Tonight. Maybe there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere after all.
DISTANT ERRORS
(Emisration becomes expatriation, confusion reigns, and serenity Is sought in the Luxembourg Gardens.)
The Rules of the Sport
Late last year the French government assembled a committee to choose a name for the vast new stadium that’s being built in a Paris suburb. The committee included an actor, an “artiste,” some functionaries, and even a few athletes. It took a long time deliberating over its choice. Names were submitted: Some people liked the idea of naming the stadium after Verlaine or Saint-Exupery, and lots of others liked the idea of calling it Le Stade Platini, after Michel Platini, the great French soccer player. At last, in December, the committee announced that it had come to a decision, and the government decided to broadcast the verdict on television. The scene was a little like the end of the Simpson triaclass="underline" the worried-looking jurors filing to their seats, the pause as the envelope was handed to the minister of youth and sports, the minister clearing his throat to read the decision to the nation. The stadium that would represent France to the world, he announced, would be called (long, dramatic pause) Le Stade de France. The French Stadium. “Banal and beautiful at the same time,” one journalist wrote. “Obvious and seductive. Timeless and unalterable.”
It wasn’t hard to detect, beneath the sturdy, patriotic surface of the new name, an undercurrent of ironic, derisory minimalism. The French are prepared to be formally enthusiastic about American-style stadiums and American-style sports, but they are not going to get carried away by it all. This realization first came home to me when I joined a pioneer health club on the Left Bank and spent four months unsuccessfully trying to get some exercise there.
“An American gym?” Parisians asked when I said that I was looking for someplace to work out, and at first I didn’t know what to say. What would a French gym be like? Someone suggested that my wife and I join the Health Club at the Ritz; that was about as French as a gym could get. This sounded like a nice, glamorous thing to do, so we went for a trial visit. I ran out of the locker room and dived into the pool. White legs were dangling all around me—crowded to the edges, as though their owners were clinging to the sides of the pool in fear—and only after I rose to the surface did I see that the owners were all hanging from the edge of the pool, eating tea sandwiches off silver platters. Finally, after we’d done a lot of asking around, someone suggested a newly opening “New York-style” gym, which I’ll call the Regiment Rouge. One afternoon Martha and I walked over to see what it was like and found it down at the end of a long, winding street. The gym was wedged into the bottom two floors of an institutional-looking Haussmann-era building. We went in and found ourselves surrounded by the virtuous sounds of Activity—sawing and hammering and other plaster dust-producing noises. The bruit seemed to be rising from a cavernlike area in the basement. At the top of a grand opera-style staircase that led to the basement were three or four fabulously chic young women in red tracksuits—the Regiment Rouge!—that still managed to be fairly form-clinging. The women all had ravishing long hair and lightly applied makeup. When we told them that we wanted to abonner—subscribe—one of them whisked us off to her office and gave us the full spiel on the Regiment Rouge. It was going to bring the rigorous, uncompromising spirit of the New York health club to Paris: its discipline, its toughness, its regimental quality. They were just in the middle of having the work done—one could hear this downstairs—and it would all be finished by the end of the month. The locker rooms, the appareils Nautilus, the stationary bicycles with electronic displays, the steam baths, the massage tables—everything would be not just a l’americaine but tres New Yorkais. Best of all, she went on, they had organized a special “high-intensity” program in which, for the annual sum of about two thousand francs (four hundred dollars), you could make an inexorable New York—style commitment to your physique and visit the gym as often as once a week.
It was obvious that the once-a-week deal was the winner—the closer, in Mamet language—and that though she had a million arguments ready for people who thought that when it came to forme, once a week might be going overboard, she had nothing at all ready for people who thought once a week might not be forme enough. We asked her if we could possibly come more often than that, and she cautiously asked us what we meant by “often.” Well, three, perhaps four times a week, we said. It was not unknown, we added quickly, apologetically, for New Yorkers to visit a gym on an impulse, almost daily. Some New Yorkers, for that matter, arranged to go to their health club every morning before work. She echoed this cautiously too: They rise from their beds and exercise vigorously before breakfast? Yes, we said weakly. That must be a wearing regimen, she commented politely.