Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  Powerlessness, a writer’s vanity. A useless book, like all books. The writer is like the cavalry, always arriving too late. The Maine-Montparnasse tower is wider on the Rue du Départ side: if you wanted to fly a plane into it, you should aim for that side. I’m beginning to fall in love with this building that everyone loathes. I love it at night as much as I loathe it in daylight. Darkness is good for its complexion. In daylight, it is grayish, sad, hulking; only the night makes it brilliant, electric, with the little lights at each corner like a lighthouse in Paris. At night, the tower makes me think of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey: the tall, black rectangular slab which is supposed to symbolize eternity. Last night, I took my fiancee to the nightclub in the basement of the tower. The club used to be call Inferno, but they’ve just renamed it Red Light. There was a twenty-fifth anniversary party for VSD magazine: the place was heaving, queues for the coat check, sponsors, DJs, a couple of VIPs, nothing special. I hugged my darling to me and kissed her at the French equivalent of Ground Zero. I’d quite happily have had her in the restroom, but she refused. “Sorry, tonight my pussy is observing Ramadan!”

  I’d like to apologize to the Muslim authorities in advance for the preceding joke. I know perfectly well that it is permitted to eat at night during Ramadan. Be magnanimous. There’s no need for a fatwa: I’m famous enough already. The year 2002 was a pretty complicated one for me. I had a great time and made a complete fool of myself. Let’s not add to that in 2003, if you don’t mind. Apparently, the Tour Montparnasse is in no danger of an attack by Islamic fundamentalists because it houses the French offices of al-Jazeera. I focus on this lightning rod as I dip my toast into my coffee.

  The Tour Montparnasse is 656 feet high. To get an idea of the size of the World Trade Center, stack one Tour Montparnasse on top of another and it would still be smaller than the World Trade Center. Every morning, the elevator takes thirty-five seconds to take me to Le Ciel de Paris (fifty-sixth floor); I’ve timed it. In the elevator my feet feel heavy and my ears pop. The rapid elevator creates the same sensation as a plane in an air pocket—without the safety belt. Le Ciel de Paris is all that remains of the Windows on the World: an idea. The preposterous and pretentious idea of a restaurant at the top of a tower which dominates the skyline. Here, the decor is black with a ceiling mimicking a starry sky. There aren’t many people this morning because the weather is miserable. People cancel their reservations when visibility is poor. Le Ciel de Paris is in a sea of fog. You can see nothing but white smoke from the windows. Pressing my nose up against the glass, I can make out the adjoining streets. When I was little, people often told me off for having my head in the clouds; nothing’s changed. The Parker Knoll chairs probably date from the seventies; they’ll be back in fashion soon, the black-and-tan carpet looks like something out of a no-budget indie movie. There is a continual background noise: the air conditioning purrs like a nuclear reactor. I press my face to the glass: a layer of mist shrouds the Rue de Rennes. I’m sitting in a booth padded with brown leather like the ones in the Drugstore Publicis in Saint-Germain (a place which, like Windows on the World, has also disappeared), I’ve ordered freshly squeezed orange juice and some “viennoiseries” (three shriveled mini chocolate croissants), the waitress wears an orange uniform (she’ll come back into fashion too). She brings me the croissants wrapped in a beige napkin. Maybe the al-Qaeda terrorists are simply sick to death of beige, orange uniforms and the businesslike smile of the waitresses.

  I feel like shit, sitting here all alone in Le Ciel de Paris at 8:38 AM, a long way above the motorists honking their horns in front of the cinemas in Montparnasse, high above the employees of the Banque National de Paris, 656 feet more stratospheric than ordinary mortals. My life is a disaster, but nobody notices, because I’m too polite—I smile constantly. I smile because I think that if you hide your suffering, it disappears. And it’s true, in a sense: it is invisible, and therefore it does not exist, since we live in a world that worships what is visible, demonstrable, material. My suffering is not material; it is hidden. I am my own revisionist.

  8:39

  As I finish my cappuccino, I look at the other customers, who do not look at me. A lot of sporty redheads. There’s a table of Japanese tourists taking photos of each other. There’s the adulterous stockbrokers. There are American tourists like me, nouveau riche rednecks and proud of it, WASPs wearing suspenders, yuppies with brilliant-white teeth. Boys in striped shirts. Women with ultra blow-dried hair, their pretty hands sporting long manicured nails. Most of them look like Britney Spears twenty years from now. There are Arabs, Englishmen, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Italians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, all of them fat. What the customers of Windows on the World have in common is their paunches. I wonder whether I wouldn’t have been better off taking the kids to the Rainbow Room, on the sixty-fifth floor of the NBC building. The Rainbow Room: twenty-four windows in the heart of the city. The architects of the Rockefeller Center wanted to call it the Stratosphere. But my kids wouldn’t have appreciated the thirties mirrors, the reflections of Manhattan, the legacy of jazz big bands, the whiff of the roaring twenties. All Jerry and David want is to stuff themselves with sausage and muffins in the highest restaurant in New York. Luckily for my wallet, the Toys Us in the lobby was closed otherwise they’d have cleaned the place out. My kids are tyrants and I have to follow their orders to the letter. As I bolt my breakfast, I look down: from this height it’s impossible to make out people. The only moving things in Lower Manhattan are the cars coming and going across the Brooklyn Bridge, tourist helicopters over the East River, and the boats passing each other under the suspension bridges. I’d copied a quote from Kafka into the guidebook: “The bridge connecting New York with Brooklyn hung delicately over the East River, and if one half-shut one’s eyes it seemed to tremble. It appeared to be quite bare of traffic, and beneath it stretched a smooth empty tongue of water.” Amazing how he can so accurately describe something he never saw. Directly in front of me, I can see the Chase Manhattan building, to the left Manhattan Bridge, and to the right, at the end of Fulton Street, South Street Seaport, but I would be incapable of describing them. And I realize that I love this crazy country of mine, the fucked-up times we live in, my annoying kids. A surge of affection overwhelms me—probably last night’s vodka catching up with me. Candace took me to Pravda, and we kind of overdid it on the cherry vodka. Candace did a photo shoot for Victoria’s Secret, I mention it just to give you an idea of how hot she is. But things aren’t going too well between us: she wants us to get married, have a baby, live together, and these are precisely the three mistakes that I want to avoid making again. To punish me for wanting to stay single, she doesn’t come anymore when we fuck. They say some women say no when they mean yes, Candace is the opposite: when she says yes, she means no.

  “Why are you so bullish about the NASDAQ?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “You can’t lose now the Internet bubble’s burst,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren, “pretty much anything’s gonna run up three sticks, the stocks have completely crunched.”

  “Yeah, but look at the cash flows, it’s all off-balance-sheet transactions,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “I’d be worried about getting jigged out.”

  “I bought some stock in Enron,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “The company’s a scalper’s dream. Have you seen their earnings?”

  “I’m with you there, almost worth holding a position on. WorldCom, too. Their EBITDA is sweet as a million-dollar bill,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “Otherwise I don’t fancy being a bottom fisher in that market.”

  “Yeah, well, one way or the other, 2001 is gonna be shit, all the bonuses are going to be slashed,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “You can kiss your villa in Hawaii goodbye.”

  “I think it’s pretty simple: fuck the Porsche, I’m holding liquid,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “But 2002 has got to be better, we just have to wait and see what Greenspan does on rates.”

  “I
love you,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “God, I want to launch a hostile takeover bid on you,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “Leave your fucking wife,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “Okay, okay, I promise I’ll dump her tonight, soon as I get in from the gym,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  And they launch into a pretty hot kiss, all tongues and spit like a good California porn movie or a perfume ad.

  8:40

  The guidebooks all gave Windows on the World glowing reviews. Here at the top of the Tour Montparnasse on a September morning in 2002, I leaf through them. A year after the tragedy, they take on a strange resonance. For example, the Michelin Green Guide 2000 writes:

  Windows on the World, One World Trade Center (107th floor). This elegant restaurant bar boasts the most stunning panoramic views of New York. Since the infamous bombing attempt in 1993, considerable renovation has allowed it to reinvent itself with a sumptuous new interior.

  The World Trade Center was a target; something even the guidebooks realized. It was no secret. On February 26, 1993, at 12:18 PM, a bomb in a pickup truck in the parking lot exploded. The basement of the World Trade Center collapsed. A deep crater, six dead and a thousand injured. The towers were refurbished and reopened within a month.

  Frommer’s Guide 2000 is more effusive:

  Windows on the World (West St between Liberty and Vesey). Main $25-35; Sunset menu (before 6 PM) $35; Brunch $32.50. Cards: VISA. Subway: C, E, World Trade Center. Valet parking on West Street, $18. The interiors are sober but pleasing. In any case, they are of little importance as, just outside the “Windows” all of New York is unfurled! The restaurant offers unassailable views of the city. And with Michael Lomonaco, former chef at Club 21, now at the helm, the Modern American cuisine is second to none. The cellar, too, is full to bursting. The sommelier is happy to point you in the right direction, whether you are a connoisseur or simply an amateur looking to perfectly complement your Char-grilled cutlets or Homard de Maine, two of Lomonaco’s specialties.

  In a magazine article, I read that two inseparable brothers worked side by side cleaning shellfish in the kitchens. Two Muslims.

  What we know now leads us to look for portents everywhere; it’s a foolish exercise which gives a restaurant review written in 2000 a prophetic significance. If we pick apart the second review word by word, the text reads like something out of Nostradamus. “Just outside the ‘Windows’“? An oncoming plane. “Unassailable views”? On the contrary, they were all too assailable. “The cellar, too, is full to bursting”? Absolutely: it will soon have 600,000 tons of rubble piled on top of it. “The sommelier is happy to point you in the right direction”? Like an air-traffic controller. “Char-grilled cutlets”? Soon to be charred at 1,500 degrees. “Homard de Maine,” you mean Omar the Mullah? I know, it’s not funny, you don’t joke about death. I’m sorry, it’s a form of self-defense: I write these jokes at the top of a tower in Paris, flicking through pages and pages of reviews for a sister site that no longer exists. It’s impossible not to see portents everywhere, coded messages from the past. The past is now the only place where you can find Windows on the World. This unique restaurant where you could enjoy haute cuisine at the top of the world; where you had to reserve a table to take your mistress to admire the view so you could leer into her low-cut blouse as she leaned down to check she had condoms in her handbag, this magnificent place, unique, unscathed, this place is called the past.

  The Hachette Guide 2000 commented, oblivious to the cruel irony that the remark would one day have:

  The restaurant operates as a sort of private club at lunchtime, but for a small consideration, will admit you even if you are not a member.

  Sic.

  The paradox of the Twin Towers is that it was an ultramodern complex in the oldest neighborhood in New York at the southernmost tip of Manhattan island: New Amsterdam. Now, the New York landscape has once more become as it was when Holden Caulfield ran away. The destruction of the Twin Towers takes the city back to 1965, the year in which I was born. It’s strange to realize that I am exactly as old as the World Trade Center. This is the Manhattan in which Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which takes place in 1949. Do you know where the title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from?

  It comes from a Robert Burns poem: “Gin a body meet a body coming thro’ the rye.” Holden Caulfield (the narrator) mishears the poem: he believes it runs “if a body catch a body coming through the rye”. He decides he is “the catcher in the rye.” This is what he would most like to do in life. On page 179, he explains his vocation to his little sister, Phoebe. He imagines himself running through the fields of rye trying to save thousands of kids. This would be his ideal profession. Darting around the field of rye, catching all the children running along the clifftop, clusters of innocent hearts tumbling into the void. Their carefree laughter whipped away on the breeze. Running through the rye in the sunshine. “Ev’rybody knows when little children play / They need a sunny day to grow straight and tall” (“The Windows of the World”). The most perfect of all possible destinies: catching them before they fall. I too would like to be the catcher.

  The Catcher in the Windows.

  8:41

  I pretend to sneer at the people at the nearby tables. It’s one of my favorite games when the kids are getting on my nerves. Look at this bunch of nonentities: they’re forgetting they’re descended from Dutch, Irish, German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish settlers who came across the Atlantic three or four centuries ago. Well Yee Ha! I hit the big time! I’ve got a house on Long Island, two rosy-cheeked kids who say “shoot” instead of “shit”! I’m not some hick off the boat anymore. Soft expensive sheets, soft expensive TP, soft expensive flower-print curtains, and enough domestic appliances to make my wife with her lacquered hair drool. The American dream: American Beauty. Sometimes I think the movie’s hero, Lester Burnham, is me. The cynical, phlegmatic guy bored shitless with his perfect family is “so me” a couple of years ago. Carthew Yorston walked out on his life from one day to the next. Actually, I arranged to have myself kicked out of my own house: I’m not sure if it was cowardice or respect for Mary. In the film, his wife wants to kill him but in the end he’s murdered by his homophobic ex-army neighbor. Let’s just say that for the moment, at least, I’m doing better than Lester. But, Jesus, I jerked off so much in the shower. And then there’s that brilliant phrase in the voice-over: “In a year, I’ll be dead, but in a way, I am dead already.” We have a lot in common, Lester Burnham and me.

  Before long, I hope, my sons will be introducing me to their girlfriends. Uh-oh, I’m not too sure I’ll be able to resist hitting on them like some dirty old man. I wonder what Jerry and David Yorston will do when they grow up. Will they be successful artists, rock stars, Hollywood actors, TV presenters? Maybe industrialists, bankers, ruthless businessmen? As a father, I hope they choose the second option, but as an American, I can’t help but fantasize about the first. And, in reality, they’re most likely to end up realtors like their father. Forty years from now when I’m incontinent and bedridden in Fort Lauderdale they’ll be changing my diapers. I’ll eat dry crackers and fritter away their inheritance in some Florida gulag! It’ll be great: I’ll have my groceries delivered, order food online and some hooker who looks like Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels will suck my cock and smile. I love this country. Oh, yes, I forgot: I’ll play golf, if I can still walk. Jerry and David will caddy for me.

  Looking down through the telescope I can see a white cube: the piazza where minuscule restaurant employees are putting chairs out on the terraces for people to lunch in the midday sunshine. I assume ice-cream sellers are putting out their blackboards, and hot-dog and pretzel vendors are setting up their carts round the WTC Plaza. That tiny cube? A stage for open-air rock concerts. That metal ball? A bronze globe sculpted by Fritz Koenig. There’s a bunch of hideous contemporary sculptures: mountains of tangled, stacked, warped m
etal girders. I have no idea what the artists were trying to say. It’s Indian summer; I hum “Autumn in New York.”

  Autumn in New York

  Why does it seem so invitiiiing?

  Glittering crowwwds and shimmering clouuuds

  In canyons of steeeel

  Autuuuum in Neeeew Yorrk

  Is often mingled wiiith pain

  Dreaaamers with empty haaands

  May sigh for exoootic lands…

  Oscar Peterson on piano; Louis Armstrong on trumpet; vocals by Ella Fitzgerald.

  I really must make an appointment to have a vasectomy. In the beginning, with Candace, everything was perfect. I met her on the Internet (on www.match.com). These days Internet dates are dime a dozen. Match.com has eight million members worldwide. If you’re visiting a foreign city, you set up a couple of dates before you arrive, it’s as easy as booking a hotel room. After dinner on our first date, I invited her up to my room for a drink so we could chat some more, and normally, that’s where she should have turned me down, because that’s the rule: never fuck on a first date. You know what she did? She looked me right in the eye and said: “If I’m coming up, it won’t be to chat.” Wow. Together, we went too far too fast: X-rated movies, a few sex toys. It was all too much. Ever since, the sex has been good, but a bit healthier. Like a merger between two lonely egomaniacs, we use each other’s bodies to get off and sometimes I think both of us are forcing ourselves. Hmm. She’s probably cheating on me. These days couples cheat on each other earlier and earlier.

  8:42

  I’ve got a problem: I don’t remember my childhood.