Paris To The Moon

by Adam Gopnik

  When I got home, I sought Luke out right away. "Hey, you've made quite a score with Cressida," I said. "She was just broken up because you weren't there today." "What did she say?" he asked.

  "She said, 'Where's Luca? I miss Luca, I wish Luca were here to swim.' Like that. Nothing would cheer her up." He seemed to take it only half in.

  The next Wednesday came, and I stopped work early and went to collect the bathing trunks and towels.

  "Hey, come on, let's hustle up," I said to Luke when he came home after a half day of school. "We have to go to the pool today to meet Ada and Cressida."

  He shrugged. "Daddy, I don't really feel like going."

  I was dumbfounded, really struck dumb.

  "You don't?" I said at last. "Why not?"

  "I just don't feel like it," he said, and went into his room to play.

  Fifteen minutes later I tried again. "C'mon," I said, "the sublime Ada and the divine Cressida are expecting us."

  "I just don't feel like going," he repeated. Then he looked up at me, a strange half-smile that I had never seen before on his face. "Daddy," he said, "what will Cressida say if I'm not there?"

  "She'll say she's sad," I said, not sure where we were going.

  "No, but what will she say exactly^ What exactly will she say?"

  Then I got it. "I don't know. I guess, 'Where's Luca? I wish Luca were here? I miss Luca so much.' "

  "What else?"

  "I don't know. Just like that."

  "No, say exactly what she would say Tell me exactly what she would say." His face was shining.

  "You know." I groped. " 'I miss Luca. I wish he would come swimming with me.'" I felt vaguely as if I were reciting pornography.

  "I'm not going," he repeated.

  The eternal, painful truth of love had struck. Proust wasn't exaggerating, I realized. Five was fifteen, five slipped into fifteen— or thirty-five, or fifty for that matter, I suppose—seamlessly He was struggling with the oldest romantic-erotic question. Was there more pleasure to be found in sharing Cressida's company or in feeling the power that he held by making her suffer from his absence? More pleasure to be found in sharing joy or in denying joy, in knowing that he now possessed the power to make her miserable, change her entire emotional state, simply by his absence?

  I was already at the door, and was already turning the handle to leave, when he popped out of his room at last.

  "OK," he said, "I'll go." I was glad, of course. We went to the pool, and they had a good time, though I noticed that now Cressida, ever so slightly, swam toward him, I bought a lot of hot chocolate, and everybody drank it.

  I told Martha the story that night, and she seemed somehow stirred. She wanted to know what Cressida had said, too.

  "Well, what exactly did she say?" she said. "What exactly did she say when she saw him?" His absence was alive in her too.

  Was it an accident or not that we shared a bottle of champagne, our own chocolat chaud, that night for the first time since she had become big with Olivia, right in the living room, with Tony Bennett singing the English lyrics of our favorite old Michel Legrand song, one of the songs that had gotten us here onto the boulevard Saint-Germain, "You Must Believe in Spring"? Could it have been that her son's first thrill of sadism with a woman had reawakened her own sense of the fragility of desire, of the urge to renewal that runs through the eternal possibility that Wednesday will come and someone will not be at the pool, no matter how many wet Wednesdays there have been before? I don't know. There was at least for a moment present again between us the central elements of love: buoyancy, seminudity, and uncertainty, that mixture of imperfect faith and intoxicating drink that is desire.

  ***

  Our abonnement was running out that next week. From now on, I knew, we would have to cadge invitations to swim on Wednesday from Cressida and Ada and couldn't just show up as equals. But I didn't have the heart, the courage to explain to Luke that we were rubes, just visiting, trespassers of a kind. I just told Luke that we wouldn't be swimming there anymore. It didn't seem to bother him any more than our going there together had impressed him. In childhood, I suppose, you are always a little lighter than your circumstances and just keep floating. He worried more about getting his pleasures than about keeping them. He would make me promise him things, in precise order: "First we'll go to the pool, then we'll have hot chocolate, then we'll have dinner, then we'll play a game, then we'll have the Rookie story...." He knew that if he didn't get a contract written down in advance, you could lose any part of it, and that worried him. On the other hand, he didn't worry that the pleasures would ever run out. Life was full of good stuff. The budget of pleasures is tighter in childhood, but the economy of pleasure at least is always in surplus.

  We had one last thing to do, of course. We had tried to kiss the mermaid so many times, and we had always failed, because he was too short and I was too scared.

  "Let's just touch the mermaid," he said wisely, this time, and we held our breaths together, and then we did.

  When we were getting ready to leave Paris, I found several hundred shower caps, pristine in their gold and blue boxes, hidden in his bottom drawer.

  One Last Ride

  Paris won the century, against all odds. At least we won the party, which is the next best thing to dominating the period. In London they had built a giant wheel and a giant dome and a great big rhetoric of newness to greet the next thousand years. In New York, unduly jumpy despite all the money and power, our friends' major millennial ambition seemed to be to keep out of midtown. One couple we knew had decided to drive down from the country, where they were hunkering down in Y2K alert, park on Ninety-sixth Street, go to a midtown party, and then get back in the car and get home, before the lightning struck, keeping Times Square at a safe and wary distance.

  But that was New York, where everything was happening anyway, one millennial party more or less hardly mattered, everybody there was probably on to the next millennium anyway. London was more annoying. We would arrive at Waterloo Station on the Eurostar—transplanted Americans, of course, but still patriotic Parisians—and feel vaguely ashamed, cheesed off, even sort of country cousinish. Where did London come by this feeling of confidence, this sense of entitlement, all this girder and vinyl construction? My cousin Philippe, who had once wandered with me through the outer arrondissements of Paris in search of von Stroheim festivals and Dominique Sanda memorabilia, had moved to London now too and was dropping me E-mails about the progress of his fish restaurant, disparaging the provincial cooking in the country he had left behind.

  Yet on the night, Paris shone, scored a clear and beautiful triumph. It had, to be sure, been a weird run-up through Christmas week. A siege of flu had struck Europe. It hit our family right in the kisser. Everyone was sick. I had been banished to the sofa, in fear that my flu would spread to the baby (It did anyway) I shook with the chills on the sofa all night, only to find a fevered Luke sympathetically jumping in every night alongside me. (Sympathetic? Or just so satisfied by the idea that Daddy had at last been banished from the marriage bed that he wanted to make sure that he didn't stray back?) Anyway, there is nothing so strangely comforting in sickness as the feeling of an all-elbows-and-knees five-year-old with a 103 fever, shaking alongside you on a narrow velvet sofa.

  It was Christmas Eve by the time we had all recovered, and Martha and I had to crowd all our shopping into that single day, rushing from Au Nain Bleu for a two-wheeler with training wheels for Luke up to Bonpoint for a sea green tulle first dress for Olivia, and then quickly into line at Laduree for our bucize de Noel. (We actually got summoned out of line, as people who had wisely ordered in advance, and got our buche from an efficient but unprepossessing-looking Laduree bakery truck, parked at the curb on the rue Royale.) Parisians are efficient Christmas shoppers, I suppose, or maybe everybody else was home sick with the flu. Anyway, the rue Royale was pretty much empty by five o'clock, and Martha and I, walking out into the pure violet and gray light of the pla
ce de la Concorde at twilight in December, had it to ourselves. The Concorde at Christmas at five o'clock has as many subtly distinguished shades of gray as a pair of flannel pants painted by Manet.

  Christmas was nice. Luke liked his two-wheeler enough to want to try it out right away (with training wheels) in the little park down the rue du Bac, and after a single fall, he went right around the bust of Chateaubriand on it. The flower store on the commercial part of the street was, to our surprise, open, although there was no one minding the store. We searched a little and found the entire flower family having Christmas lunch in the little shed behind the flowers. The madame wiped her mouth and sold us some tulips and threw in some of the painted white twigs as a gift. Everyone came out to admire Luke's red and chrome two-wheeler.

  On Christmas night the wind, following the viruses, socked it to Paris all over again. We woke up at five in the morning, thinking that someone was trying to push open our front door. Nobody there. It was just the wind, blowing away inside the building— blowing so strongly even in the corridors that it pressed against every door. Then we went to look out the windows and saw it blowing so hard that you felt, at least, as if you could see it, as streaking lines of force, like the pen streaks behind Superman's cape. A hundred-plus-miles-an-hour wind blew for an hour. It lifted up the awning on the cafe across the way, tore wooden shutters off old buildings, and even made the outer walls of our building shake—really shake, stone shaking, a scary sound. The winds lifted all the Christmas trees that lined the street right up and sent them blowing like tumbleweeds down the boulevard Saint-Germain. One of them still had its lights on, plugged in on a long cord, writhing and blinking.

  There was a lot of damage outside Paris—the park at Versailles may be a century returning to what it was—and even in Paris most of the parks, including the little one where Luke had taken his first bike ride, were closed for a few days. But the city was more or less patched up by New Year's Eve, or Saint Silvestre, as the French more often call it. We went out for a walk at six and went back to the Concorde with the children, the baby sleeping in her poussette. There were wheels, small Ferris wheels, set up all along the Champs-Elysees, and then one big Ferris wheel, covered with white lights, at the Concorde—a big wheel, sure, but the same wheel they put up there every Christmas, no big London-type deal.

  It was a winter evening like every other winter evening in Paris: the temperature somewhere in the forties, with a little damp mist and a white-gray sky. The whole place had a nice, easy, almost small-town flavor. People strolled. A guy climbed up the face of the obelisk in the center of the place and then climbed back down. The police grabbed him, and the crowd booed. We went home, bedtime for the kids, thinking, only a little ruefully, that with two children, the night of the millennium in Paris wouldn't be a lot different from Arbor Day in Kalamazoo: Bedtimes (and bedtime stories and bedtime stalls and bedtime nursing) rule all, even a fete that came once a thousand years. Millennial time is public time, history time; children's bedtimes are experience time, the real clock that ticks in life.

  Then, at midnight, we opened our living-room windows and stepped out onto the tiny balcony outside. We had the TV on, CNN bringing the millennium from around the world. The London party, for all its buildup, seemed, we thought from watching it—and even heard from a few English friends who had called— actually a bit of a dud, with long lines and damp squibs and a nonworking Ferris wheel (our wheels were smaller, but they spun like crazy). We felt meanly, smugly glad.

  Then we heard bangs from away down left down the boulevard, over by the Invalides, and a muffled roar. We looked at the television screen and saw the Eiffel Tower, all lit up. They had set up fireworks so that they began at the base of the tower, exploding in gold and violet around its piers, and then dramatically in gold bursts and haloes, working their way up to the top. As the fireworks reached the top, the entire tower turned on; twenty thousand or so small flashbulbs that had been wired to the tower went off at once, blinking hyperfast. The tiny constant explosions of the little bulbs made the tower look as though it had been carbonated, injected with seltzer bubbles. It was a beautiful sight. I thought of going out to see it firsthand, like a responsible reporter, but it was late—hey, come to think of it, it was after midnight—and anyway, the children were asleep. So we watched the whole thing on TV, and were proud anyway, one last virtual CNN experience, but with a living room window open, and the cold air coming in, and one ear at least hearing the muffled bangs of the real thing taking place a few blocks away.

  I was still kicking myself for missing the show when about a week later Luke and I went to the big Ferris wheel for an after-school ride and stopped to buy a crepe creme de marrons—still his favorite Paris treat—and then decided (I decided; Luke accepted) to walk home across the Concorde bridge. We stopped to admire the searchlight that had also been placed on the top of the tower, sweeping around Paris, when suddenly the whole damn thing exploded all over again, the thousands of little flashing lights sparkling and shooting off and raising hell, just the way they had on New Year's Eve. I looked at my watch; it was five forty-seven on an ordinary Wednesday. Either an haut fonctionnaire in the mayor's office, following an inscrutable but precise schedule, had set the whole thing off again on the minute, maybe in honor of some visiting dignitary, or some elevator operator or janitor working in the base of the tower had thrown the switch again, just for the hell of it. Either some official in a big building had set it off, or else it was just some little guy with a taste for mischief—culture or civilization, one or the other, and you would never know which just by looking.

  The tower with all its dancing lights, seen real, looked a thousand times more beautiful than it had on television, though it also looked a little as if it had been hung with a giant garland of those vulgar, blinking Christmas lights that Martha had nixed for our tree that first Christmas, when Luke was still a baby. "It looks like champagne," Luke said, and we laughed, he with pleasure at scoring a simile, and I with pleasure that the simile he had scored was, well, so French. We stood on the Concorde bridge and watched the towering, immense spire sizzle for five minutes, and then ten.

  I thought: Here we were, at the end of the century and that's what we have to get excited, same old belle epoque, fin de siecle stuff, champagne, and the Eiffel Tower? That exhausted stuff, that dead stuff. Only it isn't dead, or even really sick or, in a certain sense, even old. It's here right now, we're looking at it right now, Luke is young in Paris right now, and in that sense, the sparkling tower is the same age he is. He's going to take it with him through life, not as part of the lost glory of the French past but as part of what happened to him when he was a kid. "It looks like champagne," he said again, meaning to please me. I recalled the other night not long before when I had been trying to read one of those knotty, dense books about evolution and consciousness that are popular now and had come across an argument about whether, as a human invention, you should value more Newton's Principia or the Eiffel Tower. The argument, surprisingly, came down in favor of Eiffel, on the grounds that the principles of physics have a permanent general existence outside ourselves and, had Newton never existed, would eventually have been discovered by Schnewton, while the tower, in all its particulars, could have been built only in Paris at Eiffel's moment by Eiffel, even though it was, after all, only a "minor piece of romantic engineering."

  ***

  We went to New York first in December and then in January, to find a place to live. The forces drawing us home were pretty strong and even pretty attractive: We wanted Luke to go to a New York school, for one thing. "We have a beautiful existence in Paris, but not a full life," Martha said, summing it up, "and in New York we have a full life and an unbeautiful existence."

  Luke had come to associate French, for us the language of romance and the exotic, with authority and order, with school. It was his German. Sometimes, at home, he would pretend to be Zeus and call out to his French teachers from the top of Mount Olympus. "Oui, ou
i, oui?" he would then say, mimicking their high, humorless accents as they turned their heads to look up at the god on the mountain. Then, zap, right between the eyes with a thunderbolt. He would produce what I believe is called a mirthless laugh, even with French administration at last.

  Martha had at least been allowed to glimpse a proper copy shop in Paris. It was down near the rue Vavin, just outside the Luxembourg Gardens. We came across it one day, on one of our last strolls, walking home from the playground. A vast glass front, pristine, humming, superfast color Xerox machines, ten or twenty of them, right in front, eager attendants in white T-shirts, ready to collate a manuscript or laser-copy a photograph: It was her Xanadu, right there where you needed it and just as we were leaving.

  When we got back, still cold February weather, we went up to the Luxembourg Gardens again, and Luke, slightly to my surprise, said that he wanted to go on the carousel. Martha sat on the little bench with Olivia, nursing discreetly. ("You can't really nurse in Paris openly," she said the other day, "the way I could in New York. I'm always putting on a scarf, and I feel people staring at me. It's not puritanical, really, more sort of the opposite. It's that baring your breast here is really meaningful and loaded.")

  Luke got up on one of the beat-up and beautiful old horses. There were a couple of other kids up there too in the cold weather—Paris winter, neither bitter nor chilly nor sunny, life under the perpetual gray skies. Luke asked for a stick when the guy offered them around and held it tight, and I recalled the near baby who had come to Paris five years before.

  The carousel started up, and Luke, back absolutely straight, brow slightly creased, watched the man holding the rings. His stick dipped to pick up the ring, and angled to let the ring with its little leather tag drop to its end. One. Once around again the second time, back straight, stick out, ring on—perfect. The carousel picked up speed, and since it has no music, the only sound you could hear was the sound of the ancient wheezing fan belt going faster and faster as it drove the horses and carriages around. Bang, bang—two more rings, picking them like cherries: