Once again, and reliably, the Christmas lights got themselves tangled, and this time, since the ceilings in the new apartment are higher, and the tree we bought taller, I had to go out and get even more new ones. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars have now been spent by this family on French Christmas tree lights, which will have absolutely no use when we go home. I had to get on a really high ladder this year to toss them onto the tree and felt like something between Will Rogers and one of those people on the old Don Ameche circus show. Luke followed me up the ladder, “helping,” and I could sense in him this year not so much admiration as sheer impatience, an almost unbeatable Oedipal urge. I can do that as well as the next guy, as well as you can.
Our Parisian friends Agnes and Richard came over this year for the tree trimming and laughed as they saw me lassoing the tree. “No, no,” Agnes explained, “the idea is to hold them up in two strands and drape them on like an apron, and then they tie in the back.”
“I can’t believe he never thought of that,” Martha said. The real Christmas story is not about Jesus and/or Mary, or the Wise Men, but about poor Joseph, sound asleep under the stable, glad that this first time, at least, everyone is busy, and no one is counting on him to put up the lights.
All I can do is trace something, flip open the red plastic lid of the machine to draw little bits of Paris. Luke’s school, for instance, is on the rue Saint-Dominique. You take the 69 bus to get there, and it goes down the rue du Bac, and then along the rue de Grenelle, narrow and twisting, with the high walls and plastered fronts of other schools for older children and government buildings alongside, broken now and then by a lace curtain front on a bistro where no one ever seems to go. Often, the 69 can’t make the turn onto the rue de Grenelle because someone has parked on the sidewalk, half on the street. Then the bus driver just stops, blows his horn, and folds his arms. We’ll wait it out, like a war. In a rush, a high, the bus breaks out after three minutes into the esplanade des Invalides, the huge, flat, officially forbidden lawn—though, on a Wednesday afternoon, I once did see two brave and determined Americans playing Frisbee there (you could tell they were Americans because they looked thirty and were dressed like six-year-olds). The golden covered dome of the church stands straight up behind, not looming but preening, and the Invalides itself sits below, an old military hospital with the two horses incised on its front, combining splendor with the odd barrackslike solidity, the bureaucratic confidence of the architecture of the grand siecle.
The bus whizzes across, witness to this old beauty too many times, and pushes along to the real heart of the Seventh, and Grenelle warms up. The rue Cler, which breaks off it, is one of the nicest shopping and marche streets in Paris, and it acts as a heart for the neighborhood, warming even the chilly great avenues of Tour Maubourg and Rapp. They are lined with chestnuts and planes, and there is more art nouveau architecture there than perhaps anywhere else in Paris save the Sixteenth.
Luke’s school is a block up, on the rue Saint-Dominique; Grenelle is one of those sandwiched streets, between the truly busy Saint-Dominique and the rue Cler, where there are two lingerie stores to a block (how can women wear so much underwear?). Luke’s school has an archway for an entrance and is set back in a deep courtyard, with geraniums and ivy tumbling over the courtyard walls. On warm days the single classroom window is open, and you see the (overregimented) kindergarten children, already in their rows. Since we still feel that eight-thirty to four-thirty is just too long a day for a four-year-old, we have arranged for me to pick up Luke every day at three.
I catch Luke’s eye, and we wave. He is breaking out, free, and sometimes we have an omelet and a grenadine in the café down the street, where Luke likes to pull the lace curtains and the old lady who is always there has an old black cocker. Then, by now four o’clock, violet twilight falling, watching that sky that looks as though it were ready to snow though it never does, we get the bus back home. Going home, it goes down Saint-Dominique, gently, formally, perfectly curving across the Left Bank, rather than snaking, as Grenelle does. Saint-Dominique is lined with wonderful shops: butchers with fat-wrapped noisettes d’agneau and bakers with various-sized tartes Tatins, all caramel-colored, and children’s clothing stores, their windows filled with violet coats for small girls. They believe in blitz advertising in Paris; usually all the poster columns and the sides of all the buses are covered with the same image of the same single thing: Julia Roberts’s teeth; or a girl, seen from shoulder to knee in black and white, perfectly lit, sculpted lit, lingerie, snapping her garters; or Johnny Hallyday’s face on a new issue of Paris Match. Once there were a thousand images of a woman behind a gold yellow champagne glass, Le Moment Taittinger. That time I remember that I looked up the rue Jean Nicot and could see lights twinkling, like fireflies, right across the Seine, filling the trees. I went to investigate another day and found out that they were just lights strung in the trees to draw tourists to the bateaux-mouches.
The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they’re your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o’clock when you’re walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river—only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still… —you feel as if you’ve escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they’re transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven’t seen before, either.
It’s true that you can’t run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away.
I brined the turkey for Christmas dinner in a big white pasta pot that Martha and I bought years ago on lower Broadway. I put it out on our tiny terrace overlooking the boulevard Saint-Germain, covered with foil—all night long a shiny white ceramic and silver foil American beacon on the boulevard.
And a Christmas surprise! We’re going to have another kid, a small French child! The big Machine to Draw the World, which traces from two objects at once and makes something of the superimposition, is drawing a new one, down in Martha’s belly. Stow the elegies, pal; we can’t leave, not quite yet.
A Handful of Cherries
Quite a few people have asked me to tell them what happened at the Brasserie Balzar, after its friends occupied it in order to protest its purchase by M. Jean-Paul Bucher, the owner of a large and (we thought) unfeeling and soulless chain of brasseries and restaurants. I’ve wanted to write about it for several reasons: because it sheds some light on the French struggle with change;
because it touches on the differences between French and American attitudes to food, which have been filling the papers a lot lately; and because it presented me with the one moment when for a brief moment—seconds, really—I actually felt fully French. But I’ve also been reluctant to write about it because in the end it was a sad, typical story about the struggle for small values during a fin de siecle dominated by big money.
In plain English, we fought, and we lost. Not miserably, though, and perhaps not entirely. We saved something, if only our own amour-propre, and the solidarity of our organization, so that there is a conceivable, half-plausible sense in which, in ornamental French, we won.